I’m not going to lie to you. My wife has it tough being married to me in part because I don’t have the ideal personality for getting married. I’m high-strung, I’m paranoid, I’m a bad sleeper, I have chronic nightmares, I have morbid thoughts, I’m anti-social, I’m prone to sulking, I live too much inside my head, I overthink little insignificant things until they blow up into artificially-created overwhelming catastrophes, I have a tendency to chase chimeras resulting in a lot of lost time, energy, and money; I have a tendency to retreat from the stress and anxiety of the real world by disappearing into the mansion of the mind where I become lost, disoriented, and inaccessible; I have a tendency to speak loudly and inappropriately in public settings, as if I’m convinced that the world is eager to benefit from my vociferous lectures and rants; I don’t bear pain very well, often curling into the fetal position and convincing myself that the slightest discomfort is the Grim Reaper who’s come to take me home; I am cursed with a virulent strain of neediness that gives me an insatiable craving for the world’s love, yet I behave like an abrasive jackass and then wonder why I’m the least popular banana on the banana tree; I often react to my daughters’ whining and other forms of ruckus as cause to leave the house and disappear for an indefinite period; bad odors cause me to go into a debilitating depression so that I become bedridden and can only lift myself out of my funk by listening to motivational podcasts and reading inspirational passages from the Books of Psalms.
I’m not using my personality deformities as an excuse to be a cad or a self-centered lout. I’m just stating the facts about my temperament. As David Letterman said describing his personality, “I’m no picnic at the beach.”
Having such a lamentable and woebegone personality, I find that people have advised me since I was a teenager to seek therapy. Seeing a therapist to deal with one’s “psychological issues” is the common wisdom.
Let me be clear. I know people who benefit from therapy. They swear by it. They claim they’re sober because of it. I’m happy for them. But I have to tell you the common wisdom doesn’t work for me. Not only have therapists never helped me. They’ve made my condition worse and in more cases than not I helped them to the degree that I resented paying for therapy when it was the therapist who should be paying me.
Some therapists have simply been boring. The last thing I want to do when spending time and money in a therapist’s office is be bored. I’m not paying someone to be boring. People who are boring should pay me.
I had one therapist who went out of his way to look like Sigmund Freud with the disheveled hair, mustached, black-rimmed glasses, and pipe, and if he wasn’t obvious enough already he had several volumes of Freud’s work on his bookshelves. If that wasn’t annoying enough, he was scared of me. He kept telling me that I was an angry young man who suffered from “repression” and he would try to work me up to see if I wanted to “hurt someone.” When I told him I didn’t want to commit violence, he said, “Good, I was testing you.” This same shrink wanted me to engage is some bizarre therapy where he wanted me to “let out my emotions” by striking a large pillow. His absurd request compelled me to quit immediately.
I had another therapist who recommended I be part of group therapy where he had us imagine we were in a “magic meadow” and we could be whoever we wanted to be and do whatever we wanted to do. One young woman shrieked that she had become a worm crawling through a bed leaves. I wanted to leave the room, which is what I did. That was my first and last foray into group therapy.
Another therapist had a sandbox in his office and he wanted me to play with plastic figurines, including dinosaurs, to “allow my unconcious to unfold.” He left me no choice but to exit his office.
Then there was the aforementioned Dr. Jacobson with his wasps, which drove me crazy.
Not once have I ever benefited from therapy, and I resent the thousands of dollars and hours wasted on this fool’s errand.
I also resent going to therapy because I did so, not by critically thinking about the claim that going to therapy offered me something worth the time and effort, but that I did so because I had mindlessly adopted the common wisdom on the subject.
Therapy is an industry based on “wellness,” the idea that there is a desired psychological profile that replaces the damaged personality one brings to the therapist’s office.
I’m not sure I want to be “well” if “wellness” means being blissed-out and engaging in happy talk. I’m not a Zen type of guy. My parents say I was born with a scowl on my face and that, fifty years later, I wear the same scowl. Anger is part of who I am. I’m not so sure I want to let go of it.
I’m not saying I want to be a tired crank who rants about the same thing over and over. But a healthy anger and skepticism seems appropriate enough to me.
I’m not even saying I will shun therapy forever. There are some good therapists. I have a student, a former drug addict, who told me his therapist told him that his job was to wean my student off him. “I’m not doing my job unless I help you reach a point where you don’t need me anymore.”
I respect that approach. Just because I haven’t found a therapist who suits my criteria and just because I struggle to let go of my anger more than I should doesn’t mean that I’m not open to seeing a therapist someday.
It’s not the therapy that I find off-putting. It’s the “wellness” narrative that too many people assume is story arc that they should embrace.
I’m more inclined to agree with Viktor Frankl who argues in Man’s Search for Meaning that we don’t arrive at some land of milk and honey. Rather, we embrace a higher purpose and the struggle that ensues from that purpose. That’s why Frankl coined logotherapy, which is “meaning therapy.” Finding meaning is the exit sign from the trap of spending the rest of our lives rubbing the lint in our belly buttons and staying mired in the stink of self-centeredness.
Every therapist I ever went to encouraged me to go deep into myself. It was essentially a dive into my navel, a portal into a hall of mirrors. Writing this reminds me of a Terry Gross interview with Werner Herzog I heard two decades ago. Herzog was taken aback at the very thought of therapy, an exercise that he equated with going to a carnival’s “fun house” where the mirrors distort your image to the point of insanity.
Werner Herzog, along with Viktor Frankl and George Carlin, is one of my few heroes because he rejects common wisdom and uses his critical faculties to arrive at his own hard-fought worldview.
Fighting for our beliefs is the muscular way life, a path that has no room for our Inner Fat Man.