Homosexuality: A Chance For Human Evolution

[Written around 2005.]

Gay people who have come out of the closet have one main evolutionary advantage over straight people: they have experienced a basic pattern of breaking from the family system, and this creates in them a template for truth-telling that can apply to all other areas of life. At some level they know firsthand what it feels like to be rejected and pathologized by the worst of the family, and because they know how to define a part of their identity in spite of it, they take one step closer to enlightenment. Continue reading

If the Healthiest People Remain Celibate then What Happens to the Future of Our Species?

[Written around 2005.]

It is ironic that many people, when I speak of celibacy as an ideal, argue that following my lead would drive our species to extinction. In our overpopulated world of nearly seven billion people – who are driving us to the edge! – can we really fear celibacy and the path to enlightenment so much? Continue reading

Why Sex is Inappropriate For Most People

[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

Ten Ways to Revamp the Mental Health System

[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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Better Late Than Never: Twelve Suggestions For Parents Seeking Enlightenment

[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

[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

[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

[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

Father’s Day: Another Sick Holiday

[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 Spiritual Rights Of The Child

[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

Family: The Prototypical Cult

[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

Jesus’s The Sermon on the Mount: A Radical New Translation and Psychological Explication

[Written around 2005.]

Commentary (from 2005): The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most enlightened pieces of writing I have ever come across.  If it was Jesus who discovered these ideas, then he was incredibly advanced.  If it was someone else, then I take my hat off to him or her.  My goal for this project was to translate the spirit of this Sermon into something fresh, new, and equally enlightening.

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What Does High Functioning So Often Disguise?

[Written around 2004.]

Society considers those who function at a high level to have reached the pinnacle of success – and mental health. Many modern insurance companies won’t even reimburse for your therapy if you function at too high of a level. The irony is that most high functioning people don’t want to look deeply within anyway – be it in psychotherapy or any other form of self-reflection. They live their lives without ever really exploring why they live the way they do, why they surround themselves with their closest intimates, why they have children and raise them the way they do, and who they even are. To look too deeply inside would all too often reveal the lies beneath the façade, the pain and misery behind the comfort and numbness, the unhappiness and resignation behind the seeming success. Continue reading

Why People Are So Terrified of Death

[Written around 2005.]

People are only terrified of dying if parts of themselves have never consciously lived. They may have attained wealth, raised families, achieved fame, and earned societal respect, but this is not living. Real life is about being fully conscious, and for the fully conscious few, death is no terror. Continue reading

Self-Defense: Only Valid If You Know Your SELF

[Written around 2005.]

The only justification for killing another person is self-defense. The problem is, most people do not have the slightest clue who their “self” actually is. They were so attacked and invaded and traumatized in their childhoods by the very ones who should have been defending and nurturing them – their parents – that they grow into adulthood with a misperception of their boundaries as individuals. As a consequence much or most of their true self remains split-off from consciousness, and unless they heal they can only access their denied parts through projecting them onto others. In so doing they lose their personal boundaries. They see other people as extensions of themselves. Continue reading

The Advantages of Being Conventional

[Written around 2004.]

The world loves the conventional. No one attacks you. No one hates you. No one criticizes you. No one rejects you. No one steps on your toes while at the same time accusing you of stepping on theirs.

But the conventional are dead. They were long since routed out of the best of themselves. They were long since hated and criticized and civilized into soul-numbing defeat. They were long since divorced from the best their potential had to offer. Their now-loving parents once injected poison into their veins. Continue reading

Genetics Behind Psychopathology: A Convenient Excuse for Parents

[Written around 2007.]

By and large I do not believe genetics to be behind such psychological “disorders” known as schizophrenia, depression, autism, and bipolar. I believe that psychological trauma and other environment horrors lie at their root far more than most are willing to concede – or even imagine. And yet the psychological field so often promotes – however scientifically flimsily – genetic origins. Genetic arguments serve to protect the parents – and basically let them off the hook for their pathological, traumatizing behavior. This is convenient. Or is it? Continue reading

Eleven (Now Twelve) Situations In Which It Is Not Appropriate For You To Have Children

[Written in 2004. This essay, perhaps the most controversial on this site, appeared on the original version of iraresoul.com in 2004. I’ve gotten more emails, some of them quite angry or even hateful and threatening, regarding this essay than any other thing I’ve written. Many times I’ve considered changing this essay or taking it down, mostly because it was almost too stressful for me to stand behind, but then I’d reread it, and decide…that I still agreed with it. And so it’s stayed. Meanwhile, I’ve added a 12th situation…at the end.]

1) You are not fully enlightened.

If you are not fully enlightened it means you still repress some degree of unresolved trauma. We all have a compulsion to act out our repressed traumas on our intimates, and all the more so on our vulnerable, needy children – because they cannot refuse it or escape. Therefore, where you are not enlightened you will abuse your children to at least some degree. This is inappropriate. Continue reading

The Traumatized Are Safe

[Written in 2004.]

A traumatized child is safe to broken parents because he does not threaten their dishonest authority. Thus he earns his crumb of love. A traumatized student is safe to broken teachers because he does not question their unearned authority. Thus he earns his right to gain a false education.

A traumatized worker is safe to broken bosses because he follows their numbing orders. Thus he keeps his dead job and perpetuates a dead system. Continue reading

We Are Destroying Our Planet, and We Are Responsible

We humans are destroying our planet—and we are responsible.  We spread pollution through our industry, our overpopulation, our fertilizers, our trash, and our insecticides.  We wreak ecological havoc through our unsustainable farming, logging, mining, fishing, and exploitation of the world’s other natural resources.  We are making our home unlivable not only for ourselves but for the millions of other animal and plant species with whom we share it.

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