There are many ways to sabotage, blow up, completely ruin your psychotherapy before even giving it a chance to start properly. One of the best and most popular ways to do so is viewing your therapist (even before you’ve actually met him or her) as someone threatening you, threatening the status quo, threatening to destruct the core of your personality.
In other words, you tend to see your therapist as someone to be afraid of. So consciously or subconsciously, you prepare for a therapy session as for a defensive fight:
Last week, psychologist Ryan Howes wrote a nice satirical post at Psychology Today: Seven Mistakes Therapy Clients Make – How to sabotage your therapy. He suggested not just one, but seven common ways to make sure your therapy will fail:
1. Rush to Choose;
2. Don’t Ask;
3. Lie/Withhold/Downplay/Avoid/Obfuscate;
4. Communicate through hints, riddles, gestures, or tokens;
5. Triangulate;
6. Compartmentalize;
7. Vanish.
What exactly does he mean with all this? Well, I’m not going to rewrite or rephrase Howes’ thoughts here. Please do read his full post to learn more about these seven brilliant strategies to achieve total therapeutic failure!
Just let me add that the same Ryan Howes also has a post at Psychology Today that is not satirical but serious: 21 Tips for Clients in Psychotherapy – What should you talk about in therapy? I suggest you read this post by him as well. Maybe you’ll find some points there worth considering.
One important thing that Howes didn’t go into, was the obvious (but also potentially painful) question of exactly why we would sometimes want to sabotage our own therapy. There are several different answers possible here. To highlight just three of them:
One reason may be just plain conservatism or lack of energy: you’re afraid of any kind of change, or you feel not up to trying something new.
Another reason may be an irrational fear to lose your identity: if you got used to define yourself primarily as “a person suffering from depression” and a therapist would take away that depression, then what would you be left with? An empty shell?
Yet another reason, often suggested by so-called evolutionary psychologists, may be a subconscious fear that with a successful therapy you might lose not just the nasty effects of your depression, but also some perceived perks of depression (like not having to work, or having a valid excuse to withdraw from company).
I’ll get back to this in a future post about those “perks” of depression: for this is a subject that deserves a honest discussion in its own right. Anyway I feel that much of this is based on misunderstanding. Those “perks” are misunderstood by others (who sometimes may wrongly think we simulate depression as a kind of excuse, while in fact we are really and involuntarily suffering from it). But they are also often misunderstood by ourselves (when we tend to accept such “perks” while in fact we should reject them as negative, destructive temptations inherent to depression).
To get back to the question why we might feel inclined to sabotage psychotherapy: what is the best general answer? I guess the basic cause is fear: any kind of fear that successful therapy might take away something we cannot afford to lose. And if you try to think rationally about this, you’ll come to the conclusion that such fear is nonsense.
The well-known folk singer Melanie (Melanie Safka, do take a look at her official Melanie website) once sarcastically criticized old-fashioned Freudian therapy in her song Psychotherapy. Not coincidentally she borrowed her tune from the Battle Hymn of the Republic: this is indeed a battle song, fighting psychotherapy.
Sure, there is truth in some of Melanie’s biting comments. But frankly, I myself cannot help wondering: was she perhaps also singing about her own irrational fear of psychotherapy? Judge for yourself.
(click the “Play” button – if it does not work, install Flash)
• tip: It really makes no sense to sabotage your own therapy. Ask yourself if you see your therapist as someone to be afraid of, as some kind of adversary. Does your therapy feel like a fight instead of the joint effort it should be?
If the answer is yes, then something is wrong. Now ask yourself: why? Of course you may simply have chosen the wrong therapist. But maybe it’s just your own attitude? Try to see your therapist not as a threat, but as someone who’s trying to help you.
• footnote 1 : The “Training For Psychotherapy” image showing Rorona Zoro: with credits to Nemesis X at the Killermovies.com Forum.
• footnote 2 : The “Sure I want to fight” image: adapted from a 1950s Cold War poster, original text was “Sure I want to fight Communism – but how?”
So how do I feel these days? I’ll try to make this a bit interesting to you, my anonymous, invisible, undefined, but understanding reader.
In my first dream I was longing (and trying) to get back to home. My real home. The problem was, I couldn’t remember where it was: I did not even have a clue what it was supposed to look like. I had no idea. I was left with a gap, a void. I felt like an uprooted vagrant, overwhelmed by intense longing for a home that probably was imaginary but that I knew ought to be somewhere, should have been somewhere. Maybe around the next corner.
In my second dream I was visited by one of my best friends, the one who killed herself two years ago. She sailed into the room in a cheerful long-time-no-see way, and immediately got into bed next to me. We started fondling. Then she began to talk. She kept talking and talking to me, happily, about the many new things she’d been doing last year. About where she was living now, about some kind of education project, about her son and her neighbors, about some chairs she’d bought for her room.
So what to do?
So if you like it or not, here is the Argentinian singer 
There is a flood of depression-related info online, but still there are fairly common aspects of depression that only rarely get attention. One of those underexposed things is how (in some of us) depression can occasionally trigger a stream of confusing, unsettling Deja Vu experiences.
To begin with, what exactly is a Deja Vu? In French, “Déjà Vu” means “already seen” or “seen before”.
My old Facebook friend Sigmund Freud theorized a hundred years ago that such events might be caused by repressed desires or traumatic memories that people could no longer access as regular memory. He called it “paramnesia”. Modern psychiatrists are more inclined to think it has to do with some abnormal reaction in our parahippocampal gyrus: a part of our brain’s medial temporal lobe that appears to regulate what we feel as familiar and what we don’t.
A few minutes later, the wooden top of my table made me suddenly recall again how I once stood in a museum-like chamber, in some English country house perhaps, where all the walls had been completely paneled from top to bottom with this very same brown kind of wood. A place where I’d never actually been. More such involuntary associations kept coming for about twenty, thirty minutes. Then it stopped.
This had me thinking: could it have something to do with damage caused by ECT, electroshock treatments? After all, ECT does induce epileptic fits – that’s how it works, actually. I myself never had any form of spontaneous epilepsy, but (like more serious depression patients) I did get many ECT treatments in the past. Would people who’ve had ECT treatments perhaps be much more susceptible to Deja Vu experiences? Unfortunately, as far as I know, no psychiatrist has ever researched this possible connection.
It’s the latter situation that may be important here. You probably know this effect of depression, where filtering doesn’t seem to work properly anymore. You open your curtains when you get up and the light hurts your eyes; normal household sounds begin to come in like an ongoing cacophony of pistol shots so unbearably loud you’re getting a headache and feel like driven to madness; simply touching the fabric of your couch with your hand already feels crude and painful; and so on.
Love and sexuality (the latter being a precious dimension of the first) are tricky subjects to tackle here. So let me make clear beforehand that I do not mean to provoke any kind of moral or religious debate. I hope no one will find me disrespectful or prejudiced. On the other hand, you cannot expect me to hide my own points of view.
It was all a bit like in this 1847 picture – one of the first photos ever made of a married couple. This picture was clearly meant to register, represent, and thus confirm a relationship. Today it still allows us to see those two people who one day 165 years ago, maybe a bit uneasy and nervous, together entered that newfangled photographer’s studio.
When I was a schoolboy getting close to puberty, I had not yet the slightest clue about what sexual love actually implied. But I did know fairly much of the Scriptures. If like me you grew up in an environment where all true wisdom came from daily-read religious writings, then perhaps you know those poetic lines from the apocryphal* Book of Solomon where a bride calls her beloved a tappuach: that one sweetly fragrant, shading Apple Tree that stands out to her among all the barren thorny trees of the forest.
A century ago the pioneering psychiatrist Sigmund Freud already reflected on how occurrences of deep depression might be related to our need for love. He did not know yet about all the neurological causes and dimensions of depression. But he did acknowledge (and by today’s standards even did stress too much) that depression may be triggered or worsened by unfulfilled longing for love and sex.
But if you ask me, it is Freud’s second “symbolic loss” scenario – never getting the love that somewhere deep down in your mind you are wanting and expecting and waiting for – that is far more dangerous and excruciating. This ongoing kind of deprivation can slowly and almost furtively keep eating your heart away, continually eroding your self-respect and with it your ability to love others, leading to a more permanent state of loneliness, resentment and often severe depression. Not to mention the fact that in a few men, continuous love-deprivation can also lead to sexually aggressive derailment: in essence, the violence of a rapist may stem not just from uncontrolled lust but rather from deeply resented never-ending loneliness.
Case 1: isolation. This is a fairly simple problem because it has relatively little to do with yourself: your situation does just not give you enough opportunity to get in touch with proper love candidates. This can happen when for example you are living in a very remote isolated place, or when you have a very demanding job that literally takes all your time.
Case 2: lack of awareness. You do know you feel unhappy and maybe depressed, but you are not fully aware of your own need for love. This may sound a little unlikely, but I really think there are people among us who know very well that they are in some kind of deep trouble emotionally, and who suffer from it, and who gradually sink ever further away into depression, without realizing (or daring to acknowledge) that the problem might partly be solved by finding someone to love.
Case 3: restriction. You live in a very conservative environment where strict and rigid rules (usually religious rules) severely limit any daily-life contact with potential love candidates. Your need to find, feel, express and get love might call for breaking or bending some of those rules. But in the eyes of the others, this might make you unacceptably frivolous or even a sinner. For example, this can easily be the case if you belong to some strictly Evangelical, Hasidic or Muslim community.
Case 4: paralyzing yourself. This one may sometimes (but not always) be related to the previous one. Your own firmest beliefs, feelings, norms or convictions make it impossible for you to openly seek or invite others to love you. You just know that for some uneasy reason, you would feel horribly guilty (or maybe ashamed, or disappointed in yourself) if you did so. Somehow, you are unable to come to terms with your own cravings.
Case 5: misunderstanding the nature of love. You keep striving not for a really complete loving relation, but for some not-anchored aspects of love that you might wrongly identify with love as a whole.
Case 7: insincerity. You are simply not honest and open enough about yourself when you encounter possible love candidates. Or, to put it in a different way, you are just trying too hard. You lose all spontaneity because you are toiling all the time to make sure you won’t say something stupid or wrong, make a mistake or a clumsy gesture. You keep trying to be what you hope other people will find most charming, or funny, or sexy, or smart. That nonstop performance requires quite an effort. Especially if like most of us, you are by nature not always that charming, funny, sexy, or smart.
Case 8: self-deprecation. Here we finally get to the one that is most often tormenting people who suffer from serious depression. You feel not just inadequate, but totally worthless. You are in fact sure that you do not deserve to be loved by anyone, that you have nothing of value left to offer to others, and that no one will ever come down to really love you.
May 18, 1048 –
