Questions and Answers

How can people whos [ sic ] jobs are to care be such a [ expletive ]? Stop being an [ expletive ]; your [ sic ] a dumb [ expletive ] head.   I don’t get much hate mail, but the little I do get comes from persons whose orientation to life stands upon a seething mass of unconscious hostility and anger and who object when, in my own political incorrectness, I dare to say so. And why are you so consumed with anger and hostility? Well, your bitterness derives from the fact that your parents never cared about you—that is, as a child needs to be cared for with true love. Instead your parents manipulated you emotionally and treated you like an object, leaving you emotionally crippled, with a fear of love. And this leads right into the authentic value of your “question.” Is a psychotherapist’s job really to “care”? Well, in the technical sense, no. A psychotherapist’s job does not involve being a friend or confidant; it does not involve making you feel good about yourself; and it does not involve supporting you in pointing blame at someone or something else, either personally or politically. The psychotherapist’s job should be nothing more than helping you recognize the structure of your unconscious motivation so as to confront your pain honestly—and change your behavior in the process. To do the job well, though, the psychotherapist must be willing and able to probe into all the dark and unpleasant areas of your psyche that you, in embarrassment, would prefer to keep hidden. And here is where it gets sticky, because many psychotherapists are themselves caught up in the very social illusions that secretly conspire to deny the nature of the psyche’s dark, and often ugly, reality. So how can such persons—these bad “therapists” I often mention—have any deep healing influence? Well, in many cases, they can’t. And so, it comes to this: only those who care enough about their job to rigorously cultivate their own self-honesty will, in the end, show that they really care about you. It’s a human caring, and it cares nothing for political correctness.    Back to the list of questions

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