Does Growth Have to Be Painful?

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[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.

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Ten Ways to Revamp the Mental Health System

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[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.

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Alice Miller in a Nutshell: A Brief Critique

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[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 →

An Analysis of the Limits of Alice Miller

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[Written in 2006.]

It may be considered indiscreet to open the doors of someone else’s house and rummage around in other people’s family histories.  Since so many of us still have the tendency to idealize our parents, my undertaking may even be regarded as improper.  And yet it is something that I think must be done, for the amazing knowledge that comes to light from behind those previously locked doors contributes substantially toward helping people rescue themselves from their dangerous sleep and all its grave consequences.
      –Alice Miller, The Untouched Key, preface

••• •••

Alice Miller has influenced my thinking more than any other writer in the psychology field.  She opened my eyes to the struggle of the child in the repressive family, she introduced me to the idea that an abused child will compulsively need to replicate his repressed traumas until he is able to resolve them, and she banished from my mind the idea of inherent evil in the child – or the adult.  Continue reading →

Better Late Than Never: Twelve Suggestions For Parents Seeking Enlightenment

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[Written around 2007.]

It may seem that much of the message on this website is intended for non-parents, but this is not the case. In many regards, the information I present is ten times more relevant to parents, especially parents of young children, because you are the people who most directly mold and guide – and can squelch – the fate of others. Therapists are invested with some power; parents are invested with far more.
 
I address these suggestions to you.

•••

1) Parent, heal thyself. It is easy to say “throw out your television” and “never buy soda” – both excellent pieces of advice, among the thousands I could give – but the most profoundly unhealthy variable in your child’s life is the unhealthy side of you. Continue reading →

A License To Procreate: Putting A Stop To Inappropriate Parents

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[Written January, 2007.]

To get a driver’s license you must be able to see well, pay money, pass a written road test, and perform skilled driving under pressure – and the world agrees that this is appropriate. To get a therapist’s license you have to go through years of dedicated, stressful, and often annoying education, training, and supervised work – and the world agrees that this too is appropriate. Yet to become a parent, the most intense and holy of duties known to humankind, you only have to know how to do one thing: have sex. And you don’t even have to know how do it well.

Something is clearly wrong with our world. Continue reading →

The Baby’s Manifesto

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[Written around 2007.]

Translated into adult English from the look in the baby’s eyes…

I need parents who love me fully. I need parents who understand me fully. I need parents who can adequately translate the needs behind my cries…and my coughs…and my silences.

I need parents who are open to learn all they can learn from me. Continue reading →

Imagine a World of Perfect Parents

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[Written, December, 2009]

Imagine a family where both parents had fully healed all their traumas—and as a consequence became fully loving and supportive of one another, and fully devoted to being perfect parents for their child.

Imagine the role models they would be for their child.  And imagine the type of adult their child would grow up to become. Continue reading →

Jesus Rejected His Mother

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[Written around 2005.  Commentary in 2013:  Just to be clear, I have no clue whether or not Jesus actually lived as they said he did.  I take him to be a very unusual and mythological person, and that’s how I’m writing about him…]

Jesus was a warrior, and his prime enemy was the family.  He advocates open rebellion of children against their parents.  Take Matthew 10:34:

“Think not that I have come to bring peace to the earth; it is not peace I bring but a sword.  I have come to set son against father, daughter against mother, daughter-in-law against mother-in-law; a person’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”

Jesus says reject your parents, reject the lies they raised you on, and find the honest truth within yourself.  Continue reading →

Everyone is His Own Hated Minority

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[Written in 2004.]

Everyone is a hated minority in his family of origin. Parents who are not deeply healthy cannot tolerate a child being his own full, true self, which is how every child is born, and thus they must crush his most honest and radical parts. Parents were themselves crushed by their own parents, and in accordance with their own lack of healing must similarly crush each child they produce. For this reason each successive child rightly feels like a hated alien minority, despised by all until he gives up his truth and joins the ranks of the numb. Then he feels loved – though this is not a nurturing love at all. Continue reading →

Father’s Day: Another Sick Holiday

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[Written in 2004.]

Our culture celebrates fatherhood because our culture celebrates denial. Our culture does not celebrate the individual knowing himself, nor in any way knowing the truth of his father. Our culture celebrates honoring his false self. People who study their parents’ full selves are on shaky ground in this culture. If they step too far out of line the culture treats them as enemies. And with good reason: they are enemies. Continue reading →

The Gravity of the Family System

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[Written in 2004.]

The family system has the intense gravitational pull of a planet. It sucks everything into its orbit and shears off all rough and radical edges. If it has its way it never spits anything back into the universe. All it does is take and remold in its own image.

Those who escape the family orbit begin to form a gravitational pull all their own. Their force of character increases and their convictions grow firm. They no longer have to view the universe through the refracted lens of family distortion – and unresolved childhood trauma. Continue reading →

Adoption Is Not the Enlightened Way to Have Children

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[Written around 2006.]

People who are not fully enlightened have children to be rescued by them. This goes for parents who adopt as well as for those who procreate. Those who adopt at least are not responsible for the creation of a new perfect existence to be twisted, which is good, but this does not change the illness in the motive. And often it makes the illness more virulent, because many adoptive parents feel more justified acting out their unconscious needs in exchange for the service they’ve done. Continue reading →

Spoiling A Child Is Not Love

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[Written around 2006.]

A spoiled child is an enraged child. Children become enraged when their deepest emotional needs get neglected. Most parent advocates argue that firm limit-setting – and even punishment – is the antidote to spoiling. This is untrue, and only ignores the depth of the problem. The real antidote to spoiling is that parents find ways to meet their children’s needs. Children who get their deepest needs met never become enraged – and would never put up with being spoiled. Such children have nothing to be enraged about. And yet, most parents lack the capacity to meet their children’s deepest needs. And figuring out how to gain this capacity is simply too hard for most parents. Continue reading →

Children Own Their Parents

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[Written around 2005.]

Unconsciously most parents believe they own their children. Parents believe that because they have created their child this child is parental property. In reality, however, parents have it backwards: It is children who own their parents.

To grow strong, healthy, and fully emotionally mature, a child needs parents who are completely devoted to him. This is a parent’s primary responsibility in life. A child needs parents who care for him to the radical degree that they become essentially selfless – and yet, at the same time, have such strong and unwavering senses of who they are as individual adults that their connection with their emotional center is unwavering. Continue reading →

The Spiritual Rights Of The Child

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[Written around 2006.]

1) The child has the right to expect his parents to meet all of his needs – and it is their responsibility to live up to his expectations.

2) The child has the right to feel that he is the center of the universe – and most importantly, his parents’ universe. This is what allows him to grow optimally. Continue reading →

Why Do People Really Have Children?

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[Written in 2004.]

People procreate in an attempt to have their children rescue them from their own unresolved pain. They may couch their desire to procreate in concepts like biological drive, societal and familial expectation, and love for mothering, and these may all be partially true, but underneath these surface motives people who have not resolved all of their childhood traumas have children because they really just want to be loved. And this is not fair to the child, because no child asks to be born, and no child has the capacity to rescue his parents. Only deep healing – through the resolution of one’s own childhood traumas – can rescue people from their own buried horrors. Continue reading →

The Good-Enough Mother: NOT GOOD ENOUGH!

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[Written around 2006.]

“The good-enough mother…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure…” [D. W. Winnicott, from “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 1951]

There are few psychology concepts that repulse me more than Winnicott’s ever-popular “good-enough mother.” This concept bothers me so much because it looks so good, sounds so sweet and gentle and humane, and yet is so false – and only rationalizes abuse. Mothers do not have to reject their child to help him break away. On the contrary, children naturally and progressively break away when they get all their needs met, just as the umbilical cord dries up and falls off on its own in the days or weeks after birth. Independence is a consequence of nurturing. Continue reading →

Family: The Prototypical Cult

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[Written around 2005.]

Cults are manifestations of the worst of the family system. They adhere to the same underlying dynamics of families but replace familial depression with an alluring, grandiose face, which is why so many underdeveloped souls seeking love swim in and get ensnared in their tentacles. And uncomfortable as it is to get swallowed by the beast, it’s an old and familiar tale – an adult recreation of the child’s dilemma of needing to fit into his family at all costs in order to survive. Continue reading →

Commentary on Fromm-Reichmann Essay

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[Written in March, 2013.]

I wrote my Frieda Fromm-Reichmann essay back in the Fall of 2005.  Since then it’s had quite a profound effect on my life.   For starters, I wrote it before I’d ever met anyone who had met or even knew anything about Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.  I was working as a private practice therapist back at that time.  I was fascinated with the subject of psychosis, Continue reading →