There is so much drivel, sham, smoke and mirrors out there that people needing help with emotional problems don't really know where to turn. I have worked with one woman for many years. Before me, she had seen something like five different people of various perspectives, running the gamut from a classic on-the-couch psychoanalyst to a new age guru of some ilk. One" healer" took her way up in the mountains, where he promptly had a melt-down. His disciples had to haul him down and take him home. I've told her she needs to write a book some day about her adventures with head shrinkers. It's always good to find out about a patient's previous treatment. If nothing else I learn what pitfalls to avoid.
I go to conferences and workshops where the posturing is unreal. The workshop is a vehicle to sell the speaker's new book, intensive (and expensive) week-long workshop or CD series. Many one-day-wonder courses are simply there to meet CME requirements. No one is there to teach, just to provide a service which is the selling of continuing education credits. It's a joke.
A while back I went to a one day course on grief. It was so incredibly stupid. A ridiculous amount of time was spent trying to delineate between normal and pathological grief. What bunk! Grief is grief. John Bowlby describes it best in his meaty book Loss: Sadness and Depression. Our lecturer lived and worked in a university town and described treating a college freshman who had fallen apart shortly after school started. The kid, she felt, was grieving for home. Hmm, it has been said that if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem resembles a nail.
During lunch with a couple of social workers, I casually mentioned that if I were treating that kid, I'd be considering schizophrenia. Some kids can do decently at home where there's good structure but can't make it at college on their own without the constant support from Mom and Dad. The social workers were astonished. Why yes, the kid was the perfect age for the onset of schizophrenia! These professionals work in a major university. They teach social work and treat students there. I really wondered what these people do.
The first conference I attended as a lay analyst in training was put on by a family systems institute. I met a young psychotherapist there from my neck of the woods. I invited her to join me for lunch. Waiting in line for a table, I pulled out a book I'd picked up at the conference book table. She asked about it. I explained that I bought it because it had something about children who had a brother or sister die. She was deer-in-the-headlights stunned. She said she had two brothers who had died, one when she was two and another when she was fifteen. Oh boy, I thought. This is going to be a working lunch. And it was.
She told me more about the deaths of her brothers, her mom's depression, about her work and then about her two failed marriages. With sudden insight, she asked if her difficulty with men might be connected somehow to her dead brothers. I told her most definitely it was.
I asked her if she'd been in treatment. Her training had not required students to go through analysis or psychotherapy. Hmm, that means they are just as screwed up after years of education as they were when they entered the program. She had consulted a Gestalt therapist which was interesting but I gathered not too helpful. Of course, the overwhelming tragedies of her childhood were never addressed because no one ever asked. Once again I wondered what these people do.
Chapter 2: Good Enough Mother gets attacked.
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