Do You Get Dime Store Advice from Stunted Psychologists?

On picking professional partners who encourage us forward rather than remove our agency

It’s a slightly overcast day up here in Eugene. My hostel dorm room is covered with what little I need to function as I search for a home, get my house in Colorado sold, and create a new world in this soft, green, ferny place.

I am hung between my old existence, which is fast disappearing like a tiny dot on the desert horizons, towards a new one, which is at best vague, and at worse, I have no idea. It’s great fun. Right up my alley. Equal parts terrorizing and tantalizing.

It would have been almost impossible for me to have done this thirty years ago.

I have the capabilities to work through such massive changes without losing parts of my person, largely because of the quality of people whose example has taught me those skills.

We don’t learn how to manage our way through difficult times alone. I built these skills with help. But that help largely didn’t come via the typical counselor route. Most of it came through immensely good friends, mentors and deeply courageous role models.

Rosenna Bakari is an example of that kind of person, albeit we only met recently. She wrote a piece that got me where I live in a lot of ways. She has ways of putting into words things I think about but which come out of my mouth like stale cornbread. Her words cut right to the heart of the matter. In this case, her article:

Dr. Bakari explores various aspects of how we experience trauma and what it means- or doesn’t mean- to seek help. Or not to seek help. This is one hell of a rocky road, for as I have most certainly experienced, all counselors are not created equal (howzat for an understatement?) and vastly too many of them suffer from this (Dr.B’s words):

The first time I sought therapy, I was a therapist myself. Like too many therapists who enter the helping profession, I assumed knowing about human behavior and supporting others would exonerate my wounds. (author bolded)

The very best are transparent, vulnerable, and because of that vulnerability, immensely transformational in their ability to add value to our journey. This is why I respect Dr. Bakari’s work, for she understands what it takes to move forward and through, not just to sit back and pontificate.

One of the prices of wisdom, and the arc of true personal growth, is that just knowing a thing is largely meaningless. I might point to damned near every preacher, pastor, priest I’ve ever met or read about, and there are legions, who could spout scripture on command but raped young boys, sold teenage girls for sex and had homosexual lovers on the side. I could care less about homosexual lovers; it only matters when you scream homophobic spite from the pulpit to your Family Values faithful that it rings a little raw to the ear.

Just knowing about something is nothing more than acquiring data. For my money that’s no different than the thousands of listicles and self-help articles on Medium from people who have little to no actual practical experience whatsoever. The practitioner walks the coals themselves, they do the work, they pay the prices. The bravest work is alongside their clients. They are humbled by the client’s innate wisdom. The worst separate themselves from the client with book learning, complex terminology and intimidating quack talk.

Had my share. My first psychologist sided with my family in deciding that I as a ten-year-old was wholly responsible for the entire family’s drunken dysfunction. It was impossible to speak of my brother’s sexual assaults, for that would have been turned into my doing. That experience taught me deep distrust of the couch, which was later thoroughly validated when an Army psychiatrist and senior officer used my required appointments as his own personal little rape festival.

No. Trust.

After I developed dangerous body dysmorphia from that, attempts to find a psychiatrist who had any clue or empathy about eating disorders was a decades-long running joke. I had to heal myself, which we all must do, but in that particular case I really was on my own. I taught myself one hell of a lot about human behavior. As a result, since then I have yet to find a single counselor, with the exception of Dr. Bakari, who has the chops or who has done the work. They have the degrees, and the power imbued by that piece of paper. But too many hide behind the paper, or they are done in by the need to be the savior, fixer and healer. None of which they can do.

As an industry, too many, and I have sat with my share, are degreed inepts who have no clue how to clean their own houses but are given license to help us clean ours.

They want to be the fixer, but if they really fix you, then that $200 an hour income stream disappears. What on earth is the motivation to assist you on your journey to wellness? The motivation is all too often the money stream, not helping their clients release the demons. They haven’t dealt with their own, the biggest of which is to be the hero as opposed to be the quiet counselor who offers a damp cloth when you need to wipe off the blood from your private battles.

The National Eating Disorders Association would dissolve on the spot if folks found a way to deal with their emotional distress without a White Knight to kill a dragon that was ours to defeat.

This is now a massive industry. NEDA members lose money every time one of us heal and leaves the fold. Where is the healer in this? Nobody wins when we get well. It smacks to me of moving one’s addictions to food to an addiction to counseling. But that’s just me.

There’s a belief-which really serves NEDA’s purposes, that you never really recover. Really? After forty years, I did.

And no, I didn’t just switch it for orthorexia (yes, it’s a thing, spawned by Instagram):

…orthorexia nervosa, an obsession with eating healthily. High orthorexia nervosa prevalence has been found in populations who take an active interest in their health and body and is frequently comorbid with anorexia nervosa.

I began healing my eating disorders when I started finding them funny. It was just that simple, and just that hard. But I did it. The experts largely have no idea how to do such a thing if for no other reason than they take themselves so damned seriously. Which is why I would emphasize that the answer lies in us and us alone. The counselor who must see themselves as the healer is in fact an impediment to healing. Hard on the ego, that. You’re in the way?

Yes. You are. Because if we hand our healing to you, we rob ourselves of the work we came here to do.

What’s worse, if the counselor promptly defaults to pharma, they may do us grave harm. Not only do drugs rarely help once past the initial stages, they exacerbate many conditions through side effects (been there). Rather than anesthetize us, it might make far more sense to arm us with the skills and insight to work with our unique challenges. Drugs rob us of our agency. Skills allow us to rise. When a psychiatrist or counselor or doctor immediately defaults to drugs, they rob us of life, personal power and potential freedom. Of course, many prefer drugs to the drudgery of the real work, which is part of our challenge.

If you and I prefer the quick fix to the real work, the current treatment plan is designed just for us. The doc/counselor hands us a Magic Pill/cocktail to ease the pain. There now. Here’s your remote. There’s the easy chair. Relax. Don’t worry. Be happy. Until you are much sicker from the side effects. Then you get more drugs, then you are diagnosed with what I call medically induced rapid aging or MIRA. Yes, I made that up. Yes, it’s a thing. But that’s another article.

The real journey, however, is understanding that what you and I present as chronic physical pain (fibromyalgia, migraines, all manner of ailments) can almost invariably be tracked in one way or another to emotional trauma. Ancient healers and shamans knew this, and understood that healing the mind would lead to a healthier body. It’s a long journey after significant trauma, but true health is available. And with it, genuine strength.

One line that I want to tease out of this piece is one that I really hope Dr. Bakari develops into another article. Picking the right partner in a counseling journey is no lightweight matter. This:

It’s more like buying a gym membership to improve your health.

I love this.

It’s not just that Dr. Bakari and I share a very strong interest in physical pursuits. It’s that she nails the purpose of the process. It’s transitional, developmental, day by day, moment-to-moment choices, incremental progress. It never, ever stops. You learn different habits. You begin to eschew ways of thinking that no longer serve you. You stop being lazy in your ways of being (in this case, how and what you choose to think and believe).

Perfect analogy. Your health never stops improving. The right workout partner/trainer teaches you life habits. You ingrain them, improve on them for the rest of your life. At some point, you either no longer need your trainer, or, you only check in once in a while to validate progress. Along the way, they are wise enough to be learning from you. That takes humility. The recognition that one size doesn’t fit all. Just because a given industry can give a specific name to a mental disorder or phobia doesn’t mean that it applies to you or me, or what the industry considers “standard procedure” is going to work.

Most especially when the knee-jerk response to any kind of mental condition is pharmaceuticals. That’s not only dysfunctional, it often turns out to be deadly. It’s a cheap shortcut to avoid the real work, while pouring poison into a life that needs insight and wisdom, not chemicals.

Your body expresses the nature of the conversation your emotions are having with it. Change the conversation, change your mind, change your body, change your pain.

It really is that simple, and that hard.

Which is why there are so many counselors out there who have little more than a degree, a title, and not a whole lot of genuine hands-on transformational experience.

To say nothing of another very important point that Dr. B points out:

Every counseling program professes culturally relevant training. In reality, very few programs are equipped to train culturally relevant counselors in institutions that are overwhelmingly white and Eurocentric in population and curriculum.

The distressingly unique needs of, say, a battered Rohingya refugee who has been brutalized, stripped of her family and all she has isn’t going to be comprehensible to a Harvard psychiatrist who has never stepped outside the streets of Boston.

All too often caregivers do their best to force a comfortable, predictable, manageable diagnosis on someone for whom it doesn’t fit at all, if for no other reason than to give comfort to the caregiver, if not the client. It’s happened to millions already, especially women. Those of us whose rage about sexual assault are diagnosed as bipolar, and handed a raft of pills instead of exercises to strengthen the will to heal. Happened to me. I’m no more bipolar than the easy chair I’m sitting in right now. I have PTSD. But that would have taken work, wisdom and will, which are all in short supply when SSRIs are easy to access and profitable.

Depression is suppressed rage. That’s not being mentally ill. That’s often righteous anger at being brutalized, then brutalized yet again by a medical industry that would prefer to drug us to complacency than look at systemic societal violence against women in particular, kids, and many more. Drugs are an easy fix. Taking responsibility for what is sick in society is the real work.

To this I recommend this dense, but revealing piece of research which touches on my concern, about how easy it is to get misdiagnosed, given pharmaceuticals that add layers of chemicals rather than a cure, and prevent us from getting well. From:

The pharmaceutical industry seems to be directly and indirectly (possible associated symptoms of bipolarity: i.e., anger, aggression, anger management, mood disorder, and sleep problems) targeting bipolar illness. Particularly concerning is the focus on primary care doctors for “symptomatic treatment” as opposed to the FDA-approved uses for the major mental illnesses of bipolar and schizophrenia. Even though the accepted frequencies of these major disorders have not increased, antipsychotics have become the top-selling drug class in the United States in 2008, a $14.6-billion industry (IMS Health National Sales Perspectives, 2011). In 2010, major journals questioned the prescribing of antipsychotics despite serious risks (Kuehn, 2010). (author bolded)

Since I was damned near killed off by these meds which were prescribed by well-meaning but lazy counselors who had the proper degrees on their walls but none of the real experience to do the work, I speak from direct experience. To survive, I had to fire those who were assigned to my care. To thrive, I had to manage my own health, and look to the example of mentors, not mental health counselors.

I didn’t have mental illness. I’d been repeatedly raped, then told to shut the fuck up. That’ll piss anyone off. Ask anyone who writes for Fearless She Wrote, anyone who has spoken up as the result of #MeToo, the billions worldwide still suffering in silence. The ten thousand men a year raped in the US military.

Caregivers who have not/cannot do the hard, deep work, to my mind, pose a real danger to those seeking help. If you and I are in emotional distress, and we need to heal, the ONLY right path is to learn how to do it ourselves.

For me, true psychology, psychiatry are all about getting down and dirty in the weeds. With the client. Healing themselves through healing others, and letting go of needing to be able to fix. For that way leads to madness, and the highest suicide rate among the caring professions. Therapists need therapists in exactly the same way editors need editors. None of us can do this alone.

Anyone can give us “dime store” advice. Medium is full of it. Families are full of it. The problem is that too many counselors, whose credentials state that they can heal us, are also far too often, full of it. For the most part I’d do just as well writing some 23-year-old Medium writer for advice on how to heal sexual trauma. As if. I’m sure the writer would be flattered but they’d have little of value to offer. Any more than the 23-year-old psychiatrist who has the degree and the credentials but no clue.

If those who have the conceit to tell you they can heal you have never looked into their own abyss, well. As they saying goes, the abyss looks back. Most of us run for the hills. I struggle to comprehend the value of working with a counselor who doesn’t have the courage to face their own Balroc. When I skydive these days, I want a divemaster with grey hair and a limp. That SOB has been through it and he respects the sky. So do I.

The hero’s journey is our own.

I got the strength to square off with what crawled out of my abyss from being around immensely brave people who had done much the same.

The counselor who needs to be the hero is a thief. I would argue that you and I deserve the counsel of someone who has done their own work. Someone who has been through hell, come back singed, but laughing. That’s the example I followed. Worked, too.

They can’t kill off your demons. But they sure as hell can teach you how to sharpen your swords for the battle you and only you can wage. That’s not dime store advice.

That’s wisdom.