[Written around 2004.]
Masturbation is risky for anyone with unhealed psychological wounds – that is, all of us who are not yet fully enlightened. Although our biology plays a part in motivating us to express ourselves sexually, our unresolved emotional issues push us far more strongly. People are emotionally motivated to masturbate by a craving to play out unconscious dynamics of parental rescue in an attempt to bypass the healing process. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
People who are not fully enlightened have sex because they are on a misplaced search for the nurturance that only deep emotional healing provides. They may dress their motives for sex with societally acceptable terms such as “pleasure” and “biological drive” and “experimentation” and “need for release” and “love of intimacy” and even “recreation” and “physical exercise,” but no one who ventures deeply below the emotional surface is fooled long by these façades. Healing is the deepest human hope, and in sex we cannot help but fantasize its possibility. Continue reading
[Written in 2006.]
I was introduced to the work of Elnora Van Winkle, the originator of Redirecting Self Therapy (RST), by members of my original website’s now-defunct bulletin board.
Van Winkle, who passed away in 2001, was a scientist and psychological theorist who wrote about healing one’s traumas and mental illness through redirecting one’s buried anger back to one’s original traumatizers, primarily one’s parents. She claims to have discovered a foolproof method for recovery – which of course piqued my interest. Continue reading
[Written in 2006.]
1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Translation: I admit that I don’t have a true self within that can heal and regain control over my life, and that this is the reason – not all of my unresolved childhood traumas! – that my life has become so disturbed and dysfunctional. I admit that the root of my problem is alcohol, not all the trauma I experienced as a child and cannot acknowledge, and that’s why I come to AA. If only I can cure the symptom then everything will be okay! (So untrue!)
[Written around 2007.]
All good self-therapy needs dreamwork, because dreams provide the most basic and clearest clues to the working of our unconscious. If we wish to resolve our unconscious issues – which is the point of self-therapy, after all – we have no better tool in our armament than dream analysis.
Yet so few forms of self-therapy – including the Twelve Step Programs such as AA – even give lip service to dreamwork. No surprise. Continue reading
[Written around 2007.]
Dream analysis is a wonderful and challenging discipline – and is often a key component of deep psychotherapy and deep self-therapy. It is best to catch and write down dreams right when you wake up to them, so then the little details that tell so much about them are not lost to the unconscious. I have compiled a list of the benefits of dream analysis, from the personal to the interpersonal to the therapeutic.
[Written in 2008.]
[Written in late 2009.]
Grief is painful, but opens the door to healing and growth. If there were no grieving, we would stay stagnant—the numb, seemingly comfortable stagnancy that is the goal of the norm. When we are in the midst of grieving we might wish to have it all go away, because in a sense the pain of grief is terrifying, but this is only the terror of facing ourselves—a deeper, more vulnerable, more hidden side of ourselves that we are usually able to plug up in our daily lives. Continue reading
[Written in 2006.]
People argue that conscious celibacy in the service of the path toward enlightenment would lead our species to extinction, but in their denial they completely miss the point – and get it backwards. It is our unconsciousness which is leading us to extinction, and as the coming decades pass this will become only more obvious. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
Alcoholics Anonymous has helped millions to stop drinking, which is a vital step for everyone on the spiritual path, but its inherent limits as a program prevent its members from becoming fully enlightened. AA allows alcoholics a fellowship of peers, but it philosophy denies the full truth – and thus cannot provide fully enlightened guidance. As such, if its members go too far in expressing their true selves, they will not be loved by the group. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
Self-doubt is part of the healing process. As you progressively break from your family on the quest to become a true individual, a part of yourself remains a clone of the family in attitude and behavior. This part does not want to change. It views the world through the sick family perspective and hates that the deepest part of you desires to free your spirit and stand on your own. The weak attacks the strong, and you feel this attack as self-doubt. Continue reading
[Written in 2004.]
Honesty is the channel of truth between the soul and mind. Those who nurture it are imbued with enormous power: the power to see, the power to know, the power to differentiate, the power to reflect, the power to choose, the power to speak the truth, and ultimately the power to grow. Continue reading
[Written around 2005.]
Moving forward is terrifying, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not moving forward. To move forward is to heal. To heal is to become more independent. And to become more independent is to leave one’s parents, and the worst of their patterns, behind. This feels like being an abandoned child. And there is no greater terror than feeling like a helpless, powerless, vulnerable infant at the mercy of the world. Continue reading
[Written around 2006.]
Confronting one’s parents with the truth has both advantage and disadvantage. Its two main advantages are: 1) that it allows you, the now-grown child, to finally see just how strong you really are and just what you’ve been hiding beneath your surface for so long, and 2) that it allows you to finally put your childhood history in the clear backdrop of reality and see where your parents stand: that the unhealed sides of them, which are usually a significant portion of their personalities, are selfish and not primarily out for your welfare, and never were. The disadvantage of confronting your parents is that their unhealed sides will reject you. Continue reading
[Written around 2005.]
The emotional healing process, if it goes well, risks much. At basic it risks is a person’s false self, which is all most people have. It’s how they’ve been defining themselves for their entire conscious lives – ever since they created it to fit into their childhood families. Healing attempts to help a person rid himself of this false self and to help him manifest his true self that lies underneath, dormant or partially dormant for years. Continue reading
[Written in 2004.]
Passion drives us to grow, to learn about ourselves, to be different from the expected, to face the painful consequences of our struggle and to persevere. Passion comes from deep within us. Passion pre-dates our traumas and our consciousness, our decorum and our identities. Passion tears through denial and disrespects lies. Passion is the spark of our souls, and the root of our enlightenment. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
Grieving is an intrinsic part of the healing process. Grieving is long, painful, and confusing, but richly rewarding. Life is not complete unless all traumas are unearthed, grieved, and thus resolved. Those who fail to complete this process live forever in a limbo of partial misery, stuck unconsciously in the past and unable to escape. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
Yes. Pain is a byproduct of the growth process. Emotional growth stretches the limits of the personality, and this is unpleasant. At some level personalities want to remain static and fixed, and become rigid as such, even for the most growth-oriented people. Even children. If children were not compelled to grow, motivated deeply and intensely from within – by their inner spirits, their life forces, their passion – they wouldn’t be able to put up with the pain of growth. Growing is not fun. Its consequences may feel wonderful over the long haul, but its process is awkward, uncomfortable, and anxiety-producing.
[Written in 2011.]
The mental health system in all Western countries is failing, especially when you consider the intensely poor outcomes for people with the most serious issues, such as psychosis. Having been a psychotherapist in New York City, I have given much thought to the mental health system’s failure and have come up with a new theoretical model for the system, from top to bottom. I hereby present it.
1) Abandon Diagnosis and the DSM
My experience as a therapist has taught me that diagnosing people does not further their healing. The diagnostic categories we presently use are so often arbitrary, misleading, stigmatizing, or just downright wrong (and at times all of these) that they end up doing far more harm than good. In fact, I have rarely seen cases where they definitively help anyone.
[Written in late 2009.]
Although I have already written a sixteen thousand word essay analyzing the work of Alice Miller—my favorite writer in the psychology field—over the years several people have asked that I create a shorter, more concise, easier-to-read version. I have finally done so—and have gone in a few new directions too…
Before I begin the new essay, I want to make a few background points. I wrote the longer essay in 2006. A few months after I wrote it someone passed it along to Alice Miller herself, and she read it—and criticized it harshly on her website. She labeled parts of it “highly confusing,” she argued that I was taking her words out of context, and she stated that my motivation was to confuse her readers. However, by putting my name on her website she generated a significant amount of attention for my essay, because within hours a horde of people googled my name, found the essay, and read it for themselves. (Several wrote me complimentary emails.) The next day, however, Alice Miller realized her “error” and removed my name from her website, calling me “Mr. X.” instead, presumably to make it more difficult for people to find the essay and judge my words for themselves. Continue reading