So I’ve said it before: I have a psycho-therapist. And by and large, she buys into civilization.
She has helped me with a few things (drawing my attention to co-dependent behavior, for example), but when it comes to rewilding I’ve learned I can’t rely on her.
I don’t plan on keeping her much longer. I think she’s done all she can for me.
At one point she said something to me which seemed pretty acceptible, but now I’m starting to question it. It’s an idea that I’d like to bring to the table here.
I was telling her about contradiction and paradox. How I’ve learned to live a life that is the opposite of my intention.
Her response: “That’s normal.” (Said not dismissively or off-handedly, but emphatically and supportively.)
Normal? Really? Do native people go through life doubting their intentions, then their actions, then back to their intentions again, in a demonic two-step frenzy? I really have to wonder.
(After writing this, I’m pretty damn sure I now know where I stand on the issue… but chime in anyway if you want!)
The civilized use that term alot I find. And I think that the professionals of the psyche work at putting their patients back in the norms accepted by civilization.
Their standards of normality give me the creeps…It’s normal to enslave all life, it’s normal to go against our intentions, that’s how things are, now take this and everything will be fine…trust
me…I’m a specialist…
Civilization (normality) is a joke, too bad not everyone got it !
I think Jason once referenced something about indigenous people believing rewilding to be a life-long process; being born invasive and becoming native one’s entire life.
Django, you brought up something that I feel makes a lot of sense. (Willem, can you affirm or negate Scout’s hunch?) The human mind is extremely powerful, but in order to use it wisely we must have a constant reminder, built into our culture, to use that power responsibly (so, you get cultural mores like the principle of looking ahead 7 generations before making a decision).
So it makes sense that people would be wise to view themselves as being born “invasive” – we have the potential for destructive behavior (civilization is testament to that!!) and we must constantly acknowledge that potential just so that we may keep on renouncing it.
I’m also reminded that Chellis Glendinning has a theory of “original trauma” – separation from our mother’s womb – that happens at birth. (Christian theology alters this psychological phenomenon into the idea of “original sin”–that’s why belief in “original sin” grips people’s minds so tightly.) Chellis’ theory continues with the claim that native people spend their whole lives recovering from the trauma of birth, seeking reconnection with the force that gives them life – but once outside of the womb they cannot go back, and instead the goal becomes to reconnect with the forces of nature. They’ve been alienated by their trauma and have become “invasive” beings with a deep need to reintegrate.
Misko: what you said reminds me of the time I had this conversation with my therapist:
I said, “It seems to me that a big part of your job is to help people adjust to society.”
She nodded with the whole of her aching heart.
I said, “Well, I have no intention of adjusting to this society [I pretty much spat out the words]. I want to help create a DIFFERENT society.”
At that point she looked really scared. Neither of us knew what to say next. I was afraid too, afraid that I had said too much too soon. It is so scary and difficult for me to express verbally what my intentions are when I am afraid that they will be woefully misinterpreted by a civilized mind. Since I don’t know much about this woman, I cannot know how she interprets what I say, and whether she can really support my goals. She doesn’t like to answer questions about herself, either, which gives me very little to work from in finding ways to talk to her that will help her relate to what I say.
sometimes i really feel that those professions and skills are about adapting PEOPLE to civilization…so, yes, it is domestication.
i find it focuses on the responses and ‘responsibilities’ of the individual without recognizing the root source of anything really. if it did, it would have to tear itself down first, perhaps.
edited to add: and it all smacks of abstracted, hired ‘friends and family’, the illusion of caring, loving people with whom we truly don’t have a reciprocal relationship with…sounds like masters to me.
Yeah, I’m coming to the belief that the whole structure of therapy, especially the relationship between therapist and client/patient, is one that promotes alienation rather than diminishing it.
edit (after reading your edit :)) – I have found that my therapist is not interested in reciprocity when it comes to fielding questions that I have of her. At one point, she was not willing to even listen to or consider the questions I had of her (which I didn’t feel were very invasive questions at all-- I wanted to know a few things about her experiences in various social surroundings (urban, rural, different parts of the country, etc) as well as what her interests are within the academic study of psychology (for example, what is the topic of her doctoral thesis?).
Frankly, it makes me feel that our relationship is not one that is based on trust. I should tell her that.
So, my wife is a Psychiatrist and there’s an elder in my community who is also a Psychiatrist, and I have heard both of them discuss how they believe the root of almost all of problems of all of the patients they see might be “civilization” or modern life itself.
I think they both have different ways of dealing with it and with their patients. But they both thought that less work, more time in nature, more community, more wild food, less stress would make people a lot healthier. In fact, the elder said that if everybody went and sat outside every day at a Sit Spot he would have been out of a job long ago (he’s retired now).
Yeah, I’ve never had any experience with psychiatrists, but their whole vocabulary makes me feel weird. The whole Freudian thing, it just feels so, I don’t know, abstracted, justifying, maybe. I actually couldn’t read the Hero with a Thousand Faces becuase it felt too Freudian. My favorite section in As the World Burns was when Kranti talks to the psychiatrist, good jokes and some much good insight on the normalization thing.
Humyn, I totally agree, it’s the whole experts thing that crops up so much in civilization. “My friends can’t help me, I can’t help myself, i need to go to an expert.” And it’s even more damaging with respect to mental health because, like you say, these are the kind of things which do help us build trusting and open relationships.
Blueheron, thanks for sharing the stories, I totally think there will always be some gap between intentions and actions, no one is perfect, but, like Willem and Django said, it’s a process.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
~Jiddu Krishnamurti
(this just arrived, tacked to the bottom of an email!)
me too!
I’ve had mixed experiences–I once (only once!) went to a marriage counselor for aid in sorting out a relationship alreading deep in the throes of death (yep, a little late), and she wouldn’t answer my question about her own marital status (found out later: divorced). I’d have preferred to work with someone whose life experiences had lent her something of value she could share with me. Why else would I pay for advice from someone I don’t know?
I’ve also worked with someone who acted as more of a facilitator, helping bring my attention to my emotional experiences in my body, and just listening to my story. Seems like sometimes, just telling it helps me sort it out. Too bad we don’t all have the people and the time already built into our life for that. Tragic, actually.
But that brings me to another point–might I humbly suggest the idea of story as therapy? Okay I won’t suggest it, just tell my story!
I recently spent a whole weekend playing an insane amount of story games. I experienced a really unexpected energy boost. I jumped into these games with total strangers, and instead of hours of torture with annoying, squirmy, judgmental, and boring small talk, we transformed ourselves into someone else and created a shared dream together. A few hours later, I “knew” these people in a really interesting, connected way, and they knew me too.
I went into each game terrified. What scared me so much? I don’t know, what if I can’t think of any story? What if people see my real stories!
Every group of people I played with supported and encouraged me. I never felt embarrassed or judged, even when my “real” stories DID come out.
What if you could retell the stories that eat you up inside, any way you want them to happen? As many times as you want? Powerful healing stuff. Little kids do this all day long, making up stories in their play to sort out what they see, how they feel.
The counselor I mentioned above liked to remind me that my most gutwrenching stories were just stories. Hm. Still not sure what I think about that.
I read a book called “100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Gotten Worse” or something like that. James Hillman took part in it. It’s a series of conversations and letters between two people on the vast shortcomings of psychotherapy. Perhaps you’d find it interesting, Blue Heron.
I have to put in to this conversation that I was a psychology major for four and a half years, in addition to my anthropology major. Months ago I gave it up, and switched the psych to a minor. I’d long ago given up on mainstream psychology, because it’s utter crap. Psychology infuriates me now. There’s a lot of good theory floating around (nobody takes anything Freudian seriously anymore, besides defense mechanisms), but for a bunch of people who are fully aware of how fucked up cultures can similarly fuck up a person’s thinking, very few people in psychology actually make an effort to break through their own mental handicaps.
Despite the large number of practicing psychologist and psychiatrists that are just trying to normalize people there are some people doing some cutting edge work. Lewis Mehl-Madrona is an MD of Lakota and Cherokee descent who has some amazing books out on Storytelling and Healing. I had the pleasure of meeting him when I lived in Tucson a few years ago. He’s a wild, busy, and very impassioned man. His books might be of interest, especially his third book, Coyote Healing.
Also, there are some psychiatrist out there who have been experimenting recently with hallucinogens in small doses combined with therapy and have had some outstanding results (again folks in Tucson where my wife went to school).
I think a lot has to do with the therapists paradigm, and while most therapists’ paradigms might not jive with members of this forum. Some of them, like Mehl-Madrona, might gel really well.
Lewis will probably come to speak here in Portland, as part of the Natural Way Speaker series that I help run. Funny you should mention him! I don’t know him very well - somebody else on the committee caught the inspiration to arrange his talk. He sounds interesting.
Umm… yeah, that has been done. In the short period after hallucinogens were “discovered” by western science and before they were declared “illegal”, phycotherapists of all kinds used them (mostly LSD) to mainly incredible healing experiences, with some reporting high cure rates from alcoholism (with positive results in follow-up studies), schitzofrenia and lots of other stuff. Thankfully, some people are finally coming arround again.
