Thursday, October 27, 2016

Pity the Poor Therapists

How about a little sympathy for the therapists? Can’t you summon up a little empathy and even compassion for people who have been listening to patients express extreme anguish over the election?

After all, their advanced education did not have a course on how to heal Trumpophobia. And now all of their patients are suffering from it. What to do? What to do?

Somehow or other their standard fallback question-- How does that make you feel?-- seems even more vapid than usual when their patients are drowning in a sea of negative emotion.

Are you telling me that you do not feel their pain? How could you be so insensitive?

I have said it before, but why not repeat it here. Many therapists are feeling overwhelmed because their patients are, for once, getting out of their minds and into reality. We can’t have that.

All of a sudden, therapy patients want to talk about real world situations, about political realities, about the election campaign, about the Donald and the Hillary. And, when all is said and done, how many therapists know enough to have an intelligent conversation about anything other than how it makes them feel.

Truth be told, and I hope that all therapists learned this somewhere along the line, one of the best antidotes to anxiety is information. That would be, cold hard facts. Arguing about opinions and even feelings in the absence of facts throws you into a morass—one you will have serious trouble getting out of.

But, that would mean that therapists will have to do some serious work. They will have to read and study the election. They will have to spend some of their precious time with Nate Silver and Nate Cohen, with the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Being opinionated will no longer cut it. They will need to turn their attention to the real world.

Think of the indignity!

Too many therapists too often ignore the real world that their patients live in. When they try to plumb their patients’ feelings they are telling them to withdraw from the real world, the world of markets and complex political negotiation.

Therapists seem to unable to help their patients navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, to organize and plan their lives, to develop the skills needed to succeed in business or a profession. They think that it’s all about feeling and that if your mind finds its happy place you will naturally know how to negotiate a contract or even to play golf.

Lest we forget, more sophisticated therapists tend to wallow in outdated Marxist claptrap. They have a grand vision of human history and they analyze everything that goes on it terms of said vision. Whether they got it from Marx or Hegel or even the great Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger, they are happily detached from the real world and from any facts that do not confirm their bias.

Anyone who tries to deal with real world problems using that template will quickly be struck dumb.

And then there is the relationship damage. Many people have recently discovered that their opinionated selves are living with other opinionated people and that they are having serious relationship conflicts over the election. If you are seriously uninformed you are going to be opinionated. If you are opinionated you will find facts to be threatening.  Any fact that appears to contradict your beliefs will destabilize your mental and emotional equilibrium.

Truth be told, this happens when people hold to certain dogmas—those of the Church of the Liberal Pieties—because they want to belong to a group. Anything that threatens their group membership threatens their social being. And we cannot have that.

They end up not knowing how to compromise or to negotiate. In that they resemble our current president—you know, the one who decided that Republicans were an enemy with whom there was no need to compromise. And, the one who quakes in boots at the notion of fighting a war against the great unnamed foe, Islamist terrorism, but who happily declares culture war on Islamophobia and the other deadly sins recognized by the Church of the Liberal Pieties.

Negotiation is a skill. It needs to be developed. It might need to be taught. It is not your birthright. If you, like our current president, do not know how to negotiate you will create ungodly messes in your life. If you cannot negotiate everything will become conflict and drama.

I am fairly certain that if you go to the average therapist the last thing you are going to learn is how to negotiate. You will certainly not learn how to respect differences of opinion. You will probably even learn that people who think differently are sick... and sorely in need of therapy.

You will learn how to self-actualize at a level you never imagined possible. You might even find yourself achieving supernormality, becoming sui generis, one of a kind, someone who is so unique in your individuality that you are not like anyone and that no one is like you.

This will make you asocial and dysfunctional, but you can always try to capitalize on it by becoming a celebrity.

You will not learn to split differences, to respect differences of opinion or to negotiate. In that, amusingly enough, you will be a step behind Michael Moore. You know Michael Moore, the populist radical leftist demagogue who stood up for the displaced American working class, by making popular movies. Do you know that Michael Moore has just come out with a film about Donald Trump?

In it Moore returns to Michigan and faces an audience of Trump supporters. The people Moore was defending against capitalism and imperialism and class oppression have found their hero in Donald Trump.

While drooling over the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency, Moore makes clear that he understands where Trump supporters are coming from. He gets their grievance. He does not feel contempt for them and does not look down at them.

Frankly, if you are going to negotiate differences of opinion you cannot begin by treating those who oppose you as bigots or as yahoos. You cannot dismiss other people with contempt if you want to find a middle ground.

Therapists, dare I say, do not really know how to do it. You will find it hard to believe but I suspect that they do not even feel any empathy for Trump supporters. They cannot find common ground because they are foot soldiers in the war against Trump, but most especially the war against political incorrectness.

Sorry to say—and consider yourself trigger warned—but there is another hidden and repressed reason why therapists are so discombobulated about Trump.

Therapists have been at war against shame. They think that shame is bad. If it feels bad it must be bad. They keep telling people not to feel ashamed of their bodies or their actions.

Since the time of Freud they have wanted you to overcome your sense of shame, your sense of propriety, your sense of decorum. Down with decency! They do not want you to shame others for their bodies or their behavior. They want you to ignore what everyone else thinks about you or how anyone sees you. They want you to be yourself, openly, honestly and shamelessly.

One understands that therapists rarely indulge in anything that resembles coherent thought, but is it not obvious that Donald Trump embodies what they have been encouraging their patients to become—perfectly individuated, unconcerned about what others think about him, open and honest in expressing his sexuality. Trump engages in the most vulgar comments about women and feels no shame about it at all. He never apologizes!

Of course, it’s not all good news. Trump has also bragged about sexual assault. His treatment of women seems more to be about what he can get away with than about propriety and decorum. Here is the crux: we know, because Confucius told is, that if you break down the sense of shame and decorum, if we no longer want gentlemen and ladies to follow the rules of courtship, then the only way to control bad behavior is to prohibit it and to punish those who transgress.

It describes where we are at now. Trump is a product of his times. Not only in the sense that he speaks crudely and acts even more crudely and rudely. But that he keeps saying that it’s about what he can or cannot get away. When culture warriors banned courtship and dating, they did not think about the consequences. Maybe they should.

People who have been touting the gospel of shamelessness should be thrilled with Donald Trump. Now, if only he had a tad more empathy. But, I suspect that there’s a pill for that.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

I get people not liking Trump but he said those things as a private c ands was a decade ago ore more. But reality is there are only 2 candidates and when you compare the 2 Trump is easily the pick.

The people who hate Trump are on a steady diet of MSM and they are part of the Democratic party. Most people who hate Trump have been brainwashed their reality is not there

Perhaps you should read this article

http://amgreatness.com/2016/10/24/orthodox-rabbi-supports-trump/

Anonymous said...

The shrinks might want to get ready for when Trump gets elected. There is an untapped wellspring of Trump voters out there that the MSM has either ignored or has been too lazy to find and it's going to clobber the "establishment" big-time. I'm rather looking forward to it myself.

Trigger Warning said...

Yes, Trump is an embarassment to many people. Just as the American working and middle classes are an embarassment to many people - particularly the Progdolyte left and the effete right. Must we have another book written by a boy with a blue-collar background that went on to attend Yale and absorbed that culture, then turned like a rattlesnake on his homies?

I read another author this morning who observed that when Buckley made his famous claim about preferring rule by the first 2000 names in the Boston telephone book to rule by the Harvard faculty, he didn't really mean it. And of course he didn't. I lived in Boston for a decade, and Buckley would have recoiled in horror from rule by the Irish in Southie, the Italians in the North End, the Chinese in Chinatown, and the blacks in Roxbury. I am confident he did not know a single one of them. They aren't boating people.

I refer to Progressivism as Proglodism because Progs yearn for a return to the past (e.g., medieval energy generation, rule by clerisy and families, Rooseveltian government policy, etc.) as a way Forward! to the future. Proglodism is the bastard child of Marxism, replacing tyranny of the "working class" with tyranny of "institutions". But, like classical Marxism, it's just another Salvation Story minus God, prefigured in Genesis and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

I'd guess that viritually all "therapists" are Proglodytes. No wonder they are alarmed, anxious, and depressed. As the Little King once proclaimed in "The Wizard of Id" when warned "The peasants are revolting!"

You can say that again.

Trigger Warning said...

OT: Schneiderman, I'm wondering whether you've been following the Appeals Court (5th Circuit) ruling on Texas' licensing law for psychologists. It's going to be fun to watch.

https://www.cir-usa.org/2016/01/fifth-circuit-tosses-texas-psychology-licensing-law/

Stuart Schneiderman said...

Fascinating... thanks for passing it on. NY state has its own licensing laws, dating to around a decade ago. They seriously restrict anyone from claiming to be a mental health practitioner without a license.

Trigger Warning said...

By the way, and sorry to hog the thread, but Pat Condell has some new samizdat that's still available on YouTube. Worth distributing, IMO:

https://youtu.be/sHCul_DIM_4

Webutante said...

Great post, Stuart. I think the art of negotiation that every thinking---as opposed to feeling----adult should have. Just sent both my adult children Ury's latest book, Getting to Yes With Yourself.

Learning to do battle and struggle with ourselves first is also a healthy part of group process.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Ares must step forward and share his brilliance about this post. I wait with bated breath.

Sam L., what will you do without Ares' soothing wisdom?

The absence of Ares' compelling prose (and cut-and-pastes) leaves me wanting -- nay, lusting -- for everything I want... Ares Olympus!

I must know.

Ares, hold me in suspense no longer!!!

Anonymous said...

The Clintons are so corrupt don't know how anyone who can read could vote for Hillary.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/10/27/wikileaked-memo-reveals-bill-clintons-cash-for-access-and-public-policy-scheme/

Ares Olympus said...

Thanks for the lead-in IAC!

I'll start with a comic by Ted Rall with a woman who states that anyone who votes for [Trump] is dead to her, etc, and finally a man asks what's she so angry about, and she says "They're intolerant."
http://rall.com/comic/intolerant

And I'm glad Stuart noted Michael Moore's film Trumpland, that attempts to validate some of the complaints that Trump supporters have about America. And Trump supporters have triumphantly shared audio and video from the film, while conveniently cutting off what follows the rally cry for Trump, warning of regret.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29xpn94_CL4

And in the meanwhile Toronto Prof Jordan Peterson is fighting the good fight against the trans-radicals who want it to be a hate crime if you use the wrong non-binary gender pronoun for trans-individuals. His argument is that society has a right to sometimes define certain speech as "hate speech" and ban it from civilized discourse. But Peterson sees something else if hate speech is not defined by what words you say, but your refusal to say made up words, like for all the new gender categories.

And here Stuart here seems to think the primary problem for therapists is their mission is to ban the experience of shame, and Trump is the personification of shamelessness.

Myself, I'm still wondering how all this works. Another phrase of interest is "toxic people", and I suppose this cultural meme might have evolved out of a convoluted path of the 1980s idea of "toxic shame", raised by John Bradshaw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q2tZa1gp8Q

So apparently the idea is that there can be good and bad shame, and the bad shame is the toxic kind, that stays with you even when you're not doing anything wrong, and it apparently drives addictive behavior, and perhaps also what makes it toxic is that "bad feelings" drive poor decisions and further shame.

So what I don't know is if some therapists are confused and think shame is always the bad kind, and are unable to help their clients work with the shame that tells them not to kick the dog or swear at the kids, or whatever.

And naming "toxic persons" seems to have moved the toxic bar further, not your own "toxic shame", but that other people can "trigger" your toxic shame. Instead of recognizing the shame you feel is in you, instead you scapegoat another person as the SOURCE of your shame, and then you can BANISH the other person from your life, or treat them badly until they go away, and convince yourself that you're a good person and just clearing out the trash. So all that sort of projection seems like trouble, and goes back to the comic I started with, and you have no idea you're a hypocrite.

I don't know if exposure of Trump's 11 year old "pussy grabbing" talk sends some women to their therapists for comfort. It does seem like people go crazy over that, and it is crazy talk, but the deeper message is even worse. Trump said "Women let you do anything" and so that's sort of "blaming the victim", but shows more why women have traditionally been responsible for "holding the line", and ultimately women will be treated as badly as they allow themselves to be treated. And probably most potential sexual assaulting men are actually hypersensitive or cowardly to negative responses, and will stop their advances as soon as a woman shows any aggression in return.

I have no idea what sexual assault stories are true about Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, but both probably had enough women who "threw themselves" at them, and not many men will turn down a little hanky panky with attractive young women. So I agree with Stuart, therapists should also consider themselves coaches, and teach women how to ward off unwanted advances, and do so in a escalating approach, that minimizes shaming. If male sexuality is categorically "toxic", then the human race is in danger of extinction.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Ares Olympus @October 27, 2016 at 5:37 PM:

Riveting.

Sam L. said...

IAC at 4:44, I will just soldier on, making up my mind as I go along my solitary way with only a crust of bread and a sip of water left to me.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

But the ascetic lifestyle you describe is really all you need as you continue along your way, subsisting on the hope that Ares Olympus will share something -- just something -- about an issue of the day. Your prayers were answered.