“Everybody should know, then, that to step into the office of a psychotherapist, regardless of the latter’s persuasion, is to enter a world where great harm is possible.”
—Jeffrey Masson, Against Therapy, page 298.
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“Everybody should know, then, that to step into the office of a psychotherapist, regardless of the latter’s persuasion, is to enter a world where great harm is possible.”
—Jeffrey Masson, Against Therapy, page 298.
6 replies on ““Therapy””
I can vouch for this myself. If you remember from Consumption, I wrote at length about the result of being dragged along as a teen to my female family therapist. I actually put that experience down in my aetiological analysis as the very final straw, in all seriousness, in what drove me into full on crazy-style psychosis (delusions, hallucinations, and word salad territory, not just depressive self-harm) in the first place! Up until then, my actions came out of self-hate and despair, but my mind functioned rationally, and I hadn’t ‘lost it’ before, not to a schizo level.
I get the idea most psychotherapists in the UK are female. I’ve actually got myself down on a waiting list for it at the moment, officially recommended, with the agreement of probation, and too late to escape from (much as I consented to it to make the psych back off a bit, in the hope they’d not just rely on these endless doses of toxic drugs – it’ll hopefully embarrass them if they have to admit finally that I was badly abused as a child, and I can use the therapist’s perspective on them for leverage), but which I’m actually dreading. Not because I don’t want to open up, but because I know in advance she will be more than useless. Given over-sympathetic female (and leftist) nature, it makes me wonder, beyond psychiatric ideology even, if it’ll make her more likely to expect me to forgive my abusers, especially when she finds out one family of them were Pakis.
I actually think I’m going to have to end up educating her on matters of psychology, as I intend to name-drop the work of a lot of classic researchers and theorists to her (Arieti to Miller territory) if she tries, in any way, to lead me off point and into her warped modern frameworks.
In the initial interview alone, just as a preliminary screening, she asked me, “and what do you think are your warning signs for getting ill?” and I gave all the usual on nightmares, and repetitive shaming, and cumulative immediate family negative interactions, and flashbacks, and grief at the loss of my stepchildren and the deaths of my friends, and chronic untreated physical pain, and lack of sleep, and of course the burden of carrying all my memories themselves, and, when I had finished, she proffered “…And not taking your meds. Shall we put that too? We mustn’t forget that…” and put words in my mouth, and forced me to write that down also.
I mean to bring her up about this, seeing as I’ve been on their top legally-available dose of strong neuroleptics, by UK law, for around a year now, and have still had two serious psychotic blips, both even spaced in the year (as I knew would happen anyway, not that they ever believe you in the clinic). I wish they’d drop the addiction to trying to ‘treat’ real-world environmental impact pain with something that destroys the natural balance of your brain chemistry in the first place, as if sticking 400mg of complete arse into your complex neurotransmitter networks is somehow going to make you not implode – chronically if added for long enough – whilst all the while in the background, left, right, and centre, a slew of toxic people are blithely doing all they always have done to ensure you fail.
What an airhead! I’ll tell you how it goes (and I’m sure I’ll be provided with enough new anecdotes to report), provided this damn piss-take NHS waiting-list ever ends.
A person like that will never listen to you.
That’s something that bothers me immensely about YouTubers who talk about narcissism: they never, ever give concrete examples! (e.g., a narcissistic mother like mine, or the psychoanalyst she hired, mentioned by name in my books).
As you can see in my article about Freud in The Occidental Observer, even when the non-quack surgeon fixed Fliess’s blunder, Freud’s psychotic narcissism prevented him from seeing reality, and he blamed Emma!
That’s how almost all mental health professionals operate, so it’s impossible to communicate with them. It’s like a religious cult; say, like trying to communicate to a Scientologist the idea that his guru, L. Ron Hubbard, was wrong. Remember my quote in the TOO piece about a marble plaque with a lapidary inscription:
And this, in reference to the blunder that left poor Emma with a scar on her face! A perfect case of malignant narcissism!
If I had known what Amara was going to do to me when I was a minor, I would have been clever. I would have told him that I was confused, but thanks to his wise advice (studying at the medieval school my mother had chosen for me), I had seen the light, etc.
It’s the only way to deal with a narcissist, to stroke his/her ego, to give them what they want, the so-called “narcissistic supply”: the way I currently deal with Marco so that he continues to keep my books that didn’t get wet at his house, without charging me a penny.
But if you confront a narcissist who has power over you—like what happened to me when I was 17; like what’s happening to you now—, she’s going to destroy you.
I’ve had to stroke my Muslim psych’s ego (I think her name is something like Dr. Surahudeen – I can never spell it right, so I’ll get back to you on this). I don’t actually know the family therapist’s or the psychotherapist’s name. The latter didn’t tell me, and the former was brief but devastating, and quite a long time ago. The NHS is a bit cagey about releasing their names on their psychiatry websites. It’s like the secrecy level of an Orwellian Ministry. They can phone you (from withheld numbers), but you can’t phone them directly.
If I tell her the injections aren’t working she’s just liable to try and double-dose me with another one on top, or if I tell her I’m getting side-effects she puts them down to my ‘illness’. She asked me recently, ‘what are you doing with your time, have you still got your calculus work on the go, plus the Spanish and the Russian, and everything? And your gardening, and your weightlifting and running? Oh, and it looks like you’ve lost weight too!’ and I just said something like ‘Oh, yes, yes, everything’s fine on that front, powering ahead, most of each week actually, and thank you for saying so, yes I probably have lost some weight…’
I’ve gained weight ridiculously in real-life from the neuroleptics. I try to focus on the mathematics and the foreign languages, but the drugs impede that terribly.
I think I can refer people to what I compiled below on this topic. It’s common in the literature to real that neuroleptics impede study. Just to sum it up in case the linked article I wrote is too long:
“research has found that antipsychotics typically cause a significant level of cognitive impairment, especially regarding the capacity to learn, retain information, and perform executive functions such as problem solving and planning”
Hagen et al., 2010; Keefe, Bollini, & Silva, 1999.
Consumption Addendum 3
But, of course, she’d never let herself believe any of this. Thus I just tell her what she wants to hear. It’s none of her business what I do with my day anyway, and in fact, I would be doing all that in my daily routine, if only she hadn’t added the forced chemical straightjacket that prevents me from achieving much at all. I notice she never asks me about my books (or the research materials on my website), though she’s been made aware that I’ve written a few.
What amazes me is that when my sister Genoveva and I lived for years in the house my father left behind after he died, she saw me writing every day and… she never asked me what I was writing!
Now that we live separately, and my nephew has my autobiographical trilogy in the apartment where Genoveva now lives, she still doesn’t show the slightest curiosity about what I write in it, even though the first pages of the first book of my trilogy begin with a dream I had where the first thing that appears is… Genoveva! (I’m referring to the grand dream of the Pink Cathedral, which has already been translated into English.)
These people have dead souls.
Oh, I’m sorry to read that. It’s more than frustrating!
My partner’s been the same, our entire relationship. Not once does she ever ask me what I’m writing (etc. – this applies to whatever I’m doing), or take an interest, or come over and want a brief peek, or examine it in her own time.
When I quiz her on this she says “oh, I don’t want to be nosy! I’m not a nosy person like you!” (she’s secretive in her own behaviour, and hates being quizzed or checked on, and can’t make the empathetic connection to know I’m not like her)
This might be partially true, that she doesn’t want to ‘intrude’, but to that dogmatic level… this level of disinterest… this level of sheer indifference. Nah. It’s not just politeness or reserve. She genuinely isn’t very interested in my achievements and creativity. I think that’s closer to the truth.
I’ve begged her to read bits before, to fill her in, which I think would make all the difference, but my requests consistently fall on deaf ears due to “I don’t like reading” and “it’s too long…” and “but why do I need to know?”, etc. Then again, given that nothing I say in speech makes a difference – she fundamentally doesn’t get me – I’m probably kidding myself that somehow she’d experience an unforeseen revelation just by ‘learning’ (as if!) my life history. Some people go their whole lives having never assimilated anything new. Dead souls indeed. An inhuman level of abyssal stubbornness on that… as if they have no mind-space for another.
I bet my favourite aunt from childhood hasn’t read the book I sent her either. My father has a PDF copy of Consumption. That will never be opened. He’ll just be “too busy” as a retired pensioner ,and “yes, yes, I get the gist” and whatever lame excuse he thinks up next.
To her credit, my mother read it before she died (much as I still wonder if the shock of the realisation she certainly did assimilate killed her).
You were lucky that your mother read you! Interestingly, our friend Joseph Walsh was even luckier: his mother read Alice Miller on her own and apologized to Joseph for the abuse she had inflicted on him as a teen! A true miracle for a schizogenic mother to do that!
But even that’s not enough. It’s necessary for the victim to do hard work in the psychological healing process: something I did, but Joseph didn’t.
What disheartened me most when I spent a few days in his London flat was that, seeing him suffer from akathisia, I asked him to watch a Robert Whitaker clip and even reminded him that it was at minute 52 where he should start watching (to begin his healing process). As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, he only watched a few minutes—and ignored the rest!
Joseph never had any soul surgery. He wouldn’t be in jail if he had (he would have been more cautious: coming to Mexico with his friend Chris and continuing unmolested by the Thought Police here, with their podcast). Joseph continued down with his crazy path (admiring Charles Manson, etc.), and you see what happened.
Many years ago I told another of my sisters, Silvia: “If you don’t want to read my whole book, at least read the last couple of pages of How to Murder Your Child’s Soul.”
She told me she wouldn’t even do that!!
As Scott Peck said in a secular definition of “sin,” people like Silvia and tutti quanti sacrifice the person in front of them rather than sacrifice their own ego…
Malignant narcissism, once again.