You Just Broke Your Child

Mrs. Fraggle worked in health care for many years and had the same experience. She once worked the psych ward at night and practically all of the other staff were gay. I think the reason is that some of these jobs are not very popular so the hiring agency simply doesn't have the leeway to discriminate. They pretty much have to hire anybody who's willing to apply.

But yes, I agree that gay people as a demographic seem to have a somewhat stronger nurturing instinct. I met many of the friends she picked up at work and they were all very "people-oriented." Perhaps their own childhoods (this was 30-40 years ago, long before the dam burst on gay rights) made them promise to themselves that they'd try to make life better for others.

That's certainly fine. Having something to be proud of is obviously a great path to self esteem!

As I've said a couple of times already, you really don't have the faintest idea about how psychotherapy works. Or perhaps you've talked to a few friends who endured the ministrations of a Freudian. The focus of a Jungian is to help you figure out who you are today and decide whether that person needs to change something in his life. Sure, in some cases the past has to be analyzed in order to figure out why the present is the way it is, otherwise it's difficult to devise a realistic plan for improving it. But a good shrink will direct the sessions much more toward taking control of the present, rather than analyzing the past.

Indeed. The majority of men in U.S. prisons were abused by their fathers.

Not so much has been written about men who were abused by their mothers. Perhaps this type of abuse is less common, but it's also possible that some men feel a sense of embarrassment for putting up with it and don't talk about it. If you ask me, any adult of any gender can terrorize a child of any gender. The stigma belongs on the adult, not the child... not even decades later.

My mother wasn't quite bad enough to be formally classified as "abusive" (absolutely no physical punishment, as I noted before) but I always felt a sense of doom walking into the house. That was just from the screaming and empty threats. ("I'm going to move out of this house!" Oh how I dreamed of the day when she would fulfill that one!) Until the day she died I dreaded the ring of the phone because it might be her. Even Mrs. Fraggle picked up on that. The first time the phone rang after she died we looked at each other, slowly broke into matching smiles, and said, "We no longer fear the telephone!"

Sure. Jungian therapists/analysts understand this very well.

And therapists with diplomas are not the only people who can help. My own therapist said that the person who helped him the most when he was younger was an astrologer. He walked into her shop in desperation. She read him in five seconds and said, "It's obvious that you don't believe in astrology, so I'm not going to pull out my charts. Tell me what's bothering you and maybe we can do something about it." Half an hour later he walked out of her shop with a whole new attitude.

The reason astrologers, palmists, Tarot readers, and all the rest of the "charlatans" are still in business is that they are healers who simply present an image that their particular clientele accepts as genuine. The best of them can "read" more about a customer in two minutes from his body language and casual conversation, than he knows about himself.

Jungians are nothing more than healers whose skill is to help people who believe in anthropology rather than astrology.

 

I don't know how many times I'll have to repeat this, but once again: you don't have the vaguest idea of what therapy is or how it works, especially Jungian therapy. It's like you've seen a few "shrink's office" scenes on TV or in the movies and you assumed that they are fairly accurate renditions of what goes on there. Or perhaps you have some friends who have worked with traditional Freudian therapists.

Your therapist doesn't want to cure you, because you are not sick. He simply wants to teach you how to do things that you've never been taught. What you do with that knowledge and those skills is entirely up to you.

You obviously have heard all the buzzwords in the Freudian paradigm. Jungians just talk about our conscious mind and our unconscious mind, which are pretty well attested by anyone who's ever had a dream while sleeping.

Why do you even bring that up??? Even a Freudian would not assume that you have difficulties of that nature. You're obviously able to hold a job, take care of yourself and stay out of trouble. This is satisfactory evidence that you have no trouble making your way through the "real world" nor maintaining socially acceptable and appropriate behavior. I don't understand why you even brought that up. Is this just more bullshit you "learned" about psychiatry from Bill Cosby's character on TV? Or do you have some friends who are real losers and they recounted their therapy sessions?

You keep bringing up things that are irrelevant at best and just plain wrong at worst. It's like you're putting up a screen to distract us from the real "you," preventing us from knowing who you really are and what you really wish you could change about your life.

I never thought those things. So why are you trying so hard to put the idea into my head?

That's too bad. Introspection is a powerful tool. If you don't understand yourself, it's difficult to understand anything outside of yourself at any level beyond superficial.

Based on what you've already told us, I suspect you put these things away because they hurt.

Unfortunately, once something is part of you, there's no such thing as "putting it away." Sure, you can ignore it consciously. But all that does is push it down into your unconscious mental processes, where you have little control over what it does. Next time you get angry, or suspicious, or sad, or feel some other powerful negative emotion, your conscious control will weaken and those things will come bubbling up when you least want them.

You keep using the most awful metaphors! Why do you think about yourself this way? We believe you. You don't have to convince us that you don't need fixing. So why do you keep repeating that mantra???

"Fix" implies "repair," which implies that something is wrong. What's wrong with words like "improve, achieve, surpass, master," etc.? There's no one on this planet whose life could not be improved!

Again, why do you use such a horribly dire adjective? You can become "stronger, smarter, more successful, more patient, more helpful, more resistant." You can even use more specific words: make more friends, have a better love life, learn more, have more fun, find a more meaningful job, do more for others...

Certainly not with that attitude you keep trumpeting! You already "know" that nothing will work!

You can't find any part of you that could become stronger, any part of your life that could become more harmonious. You don't believe that you can grow! It's like you're just marking time, waiting for death.

 

Not angry, just frustrated. I meet people like you all the time, who have spent so much of their lives adapting to rather crappy conditions in their life, that they believe they're as happy as they deserve to be and so have no interest in trying to improve those conditions.

I've met people who were basket cases. With help, sympathy and hard work, they improved their lives. They haven't gone from zero to ten, but they were overjoyed with the new life they had after going from zero to one. Eventually they decided that there was no reason to stop there instead of trying to get to two.

Obviously there's spectrum of miseries and how difficult they are to overcome. Surely some cannot be overcome. But most of the people who fail to overcome their miseries do so because they haven't tried, not because the misery was unsurmountable. It's hard work and they have to face things they've been ignoring because it hurts too bad.

The attitude to which I refer is your insistence that you are virtually unique in that it would be impossible, even with help, to rise above at least some of the things that make you so miserable. The probability of that is extremely low.

You're starting to bump into the Rule of Laplace: Extraordinary assertions must be supported by extraordinary evidence before we are obliged to treat them with respect. Your assertion is indeed quite extraordinary. But the evidence you supply doesn't really support the insistence that you, of the millions of people on this planet who feel like you do, cannot be helped. With seven billion other people on this planet, you think you're unique.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

It isn't that I don't like it. It just makes me sad that you are willing to settle for a life that, by your own analysis, leaves a lot to be desired.

One of the ways you try to shut down a discussion of your life is by jumping to extremes and using the extreme as a straw man. No one is suggesting that you can be remade, much less reborn. The person who comes home after three years of therapy is the same person who went to the first session. He was neither "reborn" nor "remade." It's not much different from taking another semester of classes or moving up to a new level of responsibility at work: same person, with more content.

You're really good at this, which is to be expected since you've spent your entire life avoiding the admittedly very hard work of learning how to work around some of the crap that happened to you. You're good at using semantics to avoid uncomfortable topics.

As I already noted, no one becomes a "new person." And although they might find that their life feels better, they have not become a "better person." Just a more contented one.

Now that's just pure bullshit. You can do better than that! The little boy will always be there.

I was a little boy who had a lot of crap happen in my early life. (Selfish, incompetent parents can do that to ya even if they don't beat you up.) I managed to get through, past or over a bunch of it so my life today is quite satisfactory. But I'm still that little boy. I still fall asleep hugging my dog, because sixty years ago my dog was the only member of the family I could trust. I've learned to be more social, because they bought us a house out in the fucking desert with no neighbors. I do my best to help people because I know what it's like to have no one who wants to help you.

There's nothing wrong with accepting death; indeed that's a healthy attitude. But that's not the same thing as sitting around waiting for it.

I have no problem with those perceptions, and please forgive me if I gave that impression. My problem is that you seem to think that's the only way you can be. We all grow, and it doesn't end at any particular age.

These are words, not hands. It's hardly a slap.

Millions of people are living examples of the fact that this statement is simply not true.

The first step is to finally decide that you're completely fed up with being broken. The second step is to accept the overwhelming evidence that it is quite possible for anyone to become at least slightly less broken--with only a handful of exceptions, most of whom were simply born with flaws in their wiring. Then the final step is to find somebody you trust to help.