The following is entirely my own opinion–however, I do believe I am correct in my opinion.

Looking for a therapist is a difficult thing. You’re looking for somebody that you can build a trust relationship with that can help you with your most difficult struggles, your most embedded thoughts, and your deepest feelings.

Knowing who to trust is really difficult if you have a history of being subject to untrustworthy people and have not been taught how to deal with such individuals.

One of the things I have noticed with some people on my facebook friends list is that they give Reasons X/Y/Z why they do not start looking for a therapist, and then say that self-therapy is the way to go.

For me, there is a considerable gap in their credibility.

The gap comes from a combination of my own experience with therapy and what I’ve observed about these people.

Throughout my adult life, I have spent considerable time and resources in therapy, looking for the right combination. All told, I have seen 6 therapists prior to finding my current therapist. They weren’t all entirely bad, but they were all more or less not very helpful in my goal of seeking healing and self-knowledge. The first 3 were sought out in my 20s and I ended up spending a lot more time and money with them before figuring out that they were not helping me (my family was also a tremendous impediment to self-knowledge). For the latter 3, I had access to FDR and was able to spend less time and resources on them because I had been doing some work on my own and had gained a little in the way of self-knowledge… but I still needed a good therapist, even after two and a half years of being around FDR.

From my own experience in therapy (almost at 10 months as of the time of this writing), I have experienced tremendous growth and am incredibly more relaxed and free to pursue my own life goals with the burdens of history lightened or removed. The depth of the work I am doing with my therapist, and the degree to which she is able to help me maintain presence in the sessions, is something that I just know I could never do on my own… and the main reason I know this is because I had not done this on my own.

Don’t believe my own self-reporting on my level of relaxation–ask my friends if I’m a better person to spend time around.

I believe that self-therapy ought to be a backup strategy if a professional therapist is not available… and by “not available,” I mean that you would be choosing between food and therapy, or you’re living in a country where finding a therapist in your native language is impossible, or some other extremity not covered here.

I also have absolutely no respect for the position that all therapists are corrupt, because this is simply not true. Either you have to explain how several people at FDR and elsewhere have found good therapists that they have found invaluable, or you have to admit that your standard of freedom from corruption is impossibly high.

Now, perhaps most therapists are corrupt… and this may well be true. Certainly the fact that I have spent significant time with 7 therapists throughout my adult life is a strong indicator of this fact, but I would hesitate to apply “corrupt” to every single one of them.

It so happens that I agree with Daniel Mackler on the point that many (if not most) therapists have unresolved issues from their own histories, but this is far from a reason to not seek out a therapist. I experienced this with 2 of the last 3 therapists that I saw prior to this one, and while it sucked, I got back on the horse eventually and found a good one.

Regarding religion and politics, the best therapist is one for which these things don’t matter. I don’t know what my therapist believes or how she votes (though I can take some educated guesses on these points), but the moral principles within the session are universal, logic and empiricism rule the day, and the art of the relationship is entirely open for exploration and discovery.

Be on the watch for absolute language which condemns everyone.

My particular absolutism was that any therapist I went to would reject me out of hand. The result of this was that I rejected all therapists out-of-hand… putting the onus on others for something I am doing myself is projection.

This is still something I struggle with, but I bring it up with my therapist, because it is a part of me that is self-rejecting, or is rejecting another part of me.

To sum up, my opinion on self-therapy is that it is a backup strategy to be employed if you are in an extremity where there are simply no other options. It is not to be relied upon as a primary strategy if you have not already spent time in therapy.

The effectiveness of self-therapy is severely limited until you have gained enough self-knowledge.

In therapy, we’ve repeatedly encountered one of my defenses–a part that engages in intellectual analysis. He usually steps in when there’s a question to another part about what their experience is or something else, and just yesterday I got the barest sense of what it was he was defending against–that is, why he has the job he has.

It’s yet to be fully explored but there is a great deal of fear beyond his analysis, almost to the point of terror. It was only when I was in the moment of experiencing the terror that I began to get a real sense of what this part feels like… because before, it didn’t feel any different. I didn’t notice when he came up, and I didn’t really feel any different when my therapist asked him to step aside for the time being (except that he did withdraw).

This makes a tremendous amount of sense, of course… if the body reaches a certain level of intense, constant pain, it will go into shock and shut down, even to the point of going into a coma. This intellectual defense is basically emotional shock.

Yesterday, on ye olde Twittere, I posted:

The process of therapy is akin to refitting a war factory for peacetime production.

Not to toot my own horn, but the more I think about this metaphor, the more I like it.

A war factory would contain all kinds of machinery for perpetuating conflict, violence, and destruction… and there always seem to be buyers.

Refitting any factory is difficult, but a war factory is particularly so–especially if you want to make sure that the factory is never again turned toward evil purposes… that you, the owner of the factory, are not responsible for perpetuating the war for yet another generation.

This metaphor was provoked by something we approached in therapy yesterday. There is a box, the contents hidden from my cognition… and those that know the contents are too afraid to speak right now.

We will uncover this, in time… after all, it’s been over 30 years of life being lived without power or knowledge, with only the past 6 months spent trying to unravel what goes on in my head.

In therapy today, a cop character appeared, with the expression, “Move along. Nothing to see here.”

Whenever this is said in the movies, there is almost certainly something to be seen! The implications of this are two-fold:

• There is something grisly to behold and the cop is protecting innocent civilians from having to witness the horror; or
• More than likely there is something extremely important going on that citizens ought to know about but the cop, in his corruption, is engaging in a coverup.

Tonight, in discussing my thoughts and feelings about therapy today, the familiar thoughtfeeling of isolation arose. The fact that it arose within me triggered a red flag and I began to explore it in the context of therapy.

Three major fables came to mind:

• The black sheep (whose fleece is prized [this part I added but it makes sense])
• The ugly duckling (who grows into a swan)
• Cinderella (who is married by the prince)

The cop was hiding the meaning behind these fables as well as the grisly remains of the attack that brought the meaning of these fables into being, so even in the Mecosystem, he serves that dual purpose mentioned above (though I would not use the term “corruption” here in the same sense as above, but in the sense that this part is corrupted from whatever his primary purpose might be).

To me, the meaning of these fables is as such:

• You are specially hideous.
• You are deserving of abuse.
• You have or can produce great value or beauty.
• One day you will realize that through no effort of your own.

Of course, these fables are total mind-fucks. An abuser that praises you for your potential is merely setting you up so he or she can abuse you again.

Furthermore, the beauty–if it is even true–is not guaranteed.

Also, the fable instructs that you are the only one in the entire universe who is cast in this way. This is simply not true given the resonance that these fables have among people.

Finally, one of the major lessons of the fable is that good can come out of abuse, which is a blindness wrought by ignoring the awful costs.

So whenever I think about isolation, I tend to think externally… but tonight I gained a new perspective on this: it is not possible for me to not feel isolated socially if I am currently feeling isolated internally. I have certainly experienced isolation internally, whether it be a single voice or simply a feeling of a void or an emptiness.

In truth, the multiplicity has always been there but I’ve rarely–if ever–been conscious of it until relatively recently.

It was this that the cop was hiding–the grisly remains of the attack, but also the truth behind them–the “specialness” was a lie constructed to keep me isolated and alone, even within myself.

There may be more to be shown and explored but I thought I would share this much with you.

Ciao!

Mornin’

It’s been five weeks since I had surgery–so far, so good! Everything is as it should be, which is all I can really ask for.

A lot of my time has been consumed with work, but that is due to me taking an offer from my boss to make up for the time I won’t be working later this year.

Now that I have the boring bits out of the way…

I’ve made some changes to my diet. After watching a video and reading the transcript of an interview about the science behind obesity, I’ve decided to cut carbohydrates as much as I can, especially grains.

Here’s the first video by Dr. Gary Taubes:

And here’s the transcript of an interview:

Gary Taubes, interviewed by Seth Roberts November 30, 2007 from Seth’s blog

Now, there’s a part of me which says, “of course you’re going to latch onto this diet–you’re obese and desperate to lose weight!” Well… yeah, that’s true, to a point. But I did start eating this way about 7 years ago for about 5 or 6 months and my weight dropped to 240lbs, and I never felt healthier.

However, the woman I was dating at the time was a pretty cold-hearted person and pretty much undermined my food strategy, and I had no support from my friends or family.

I mean, they had to have noticed how healthy I looked as I lost the weight, and nobody said a damn thing to me when I started putting it back on.

In 2003, I was not in a stable place in life. It is pretty difficult to do anything long-term in the realm of self-improvement when the sands around you are constantly shifting, and I would remain unstable for several years.

My peak weight was probably over 310lbs in 2007/2008. I lost some weight (down to the 280s) when I cut normal soda out of my diet without making any other changes. Now, I am down to the mid-260s (I weighed in at 266lbs right before my surgery, which was probably due to an overall decrease in calories, which is part of why I needed surgery), which means I am about 25lbs from my weight in 2003, which, incidentally, was my weight when I graduated high school.

Granted, I was probably just at the level of obesity then, but how many people can say that they have returned to their high school weight more than a decade after college?

I’ve never been at a sustained healthy weight as an adult, but my feeling is that it is somewhere in the 180-200lbs range. Being 6’3″ with (I assume) a moderate-to-large frame, it might be in the upper end of that range… but of course, it’s not the number as much as how I look and feel and how my habits effect my weight that will determine the “resting zone” (so to speak) of my body weight.

And yes, Virginia, James will be exercising. I’ve been restricted in part due to the surgery (I still have stitches!) and in part due to working a lot. I do find that exercise becomes far more enjoyable the less I weigh, especially walking around, and I’m prepared to take advantage of whatever nice weather we have this winter.

Finally, the best for last: I believe I have found my therapist! I have my first therapy session this coming Monday. I found that when I approached it as me interviewing her for a job that the questions I wanted to ask came quite easily.

[edited to add] – I had my first appointment with this therapist and it was quite nice; we did some body work and I have to say that I much prefer this approach to all the other therapists I’ve encountered–we’re not discussing content but working with form.

New awarenesses:

• The distance between now and 1979
• Carrying an intergenerational burden
• The degree of tension in my back
• The imbalance of tension in my back

I won’t promise a report like this every therapy session; I just wanted to put these out there since it was so novel and so nice.

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