Bought honesty: negotiating with conscience through psychotherapy

A lawyer is called a «purchased conscience», and this is true in a certain sense, although crudely. Hardened criminals have no remorse — only moral satisfaction from how cunningly he eluded responsibility. There is a lawyer who feigns bitter realization and ardent remorse, and with some additional conditions, like a bribe, it works.

I don’t want to be rude to psychologists, but although I have a reputation as a person who regularly bursts into a mosque shouting “There is no Allah!”, But I would call a psychologist, who is now fashionable and almost mandatory, by analogy, bought honesty, or bought reason , if you like. According to my observations, a psychologist is «turned on» for one of three possible reasons: either they follow a fashion — and then it went, but it’s normal — it’s the same as reading a fashionable author or buying a meaningless but expensive rag.

The second case is a serious, real psychological problem like real, not fictional depression, anhedonia (that is, the inability to enjoy) or apathy, that is, the lack of the will to live.

This is a disease, and here the psychologist is saving: William Styron, who came to his senses only in the hospital, warned against a frivolous attitude to depression. His Visible Darkness has become one of the most eloquent autobiographies of the XNUMXth century—and perhaps the only compelling story of healing.

But the third story is the most common and, perhaps, the most dangerous, because the psychologist here acts as a palliative of the mind, its temporary replacement, I would even say — a prosthesis. This can help, but in the long run it will almost certainly lead to learned helplessness, and then, what the hell is not joking, to complete degradation. I’m talking about the so-called anxiety and suspicious disorders, which are most often referred to psychologists.

I have a fair number of friends who have been victims of such disorders and received from the psychologist heartfelt conversations and life-saving pills. There are also a number of friends among these same psychologists in Russia, Europe and the States — what’s there, my daughter Zhenya graduated from the Psychological and Pedagogical University, specialized in working with autistic people and, what is there, is in demand much more than me. I showed her this column, don’t worry, and got a scathing comment, which you will read below; do not look at the end, the whole effect will be lost.

And therefore, the absolute leadership of anxiety disorders among the complaints of a modern patient is not my fiction, it is true. And I myself, comrades, know well what Xanax is — but, fortunately, the mere presence of this magical substance in my first-aid kit soothes no worse than Xanax itself, and I do not resort to it.

Anxiety disorders, my sirs and madams, in contrast to the obsessive-compulsive disorders that affect all somewhat sensitive and talented people, are the masked, hidden voice of your conscience, and nothing more. And an attempt to cope with them with medication or with the help of a psychologist is precisely the desire to drown out this sick conscience, to stop attacks of self-awareness.

You are afraid to admit something to yourself, to call something by name, and the psychologist speaks up this pain of yours — which, in essence, is nothing but the phantom pain of an amputated soul. And it’s good if he sincerely tries to get to the bottom of the reasons. But if, like so many in cases known to me, he struggles with symptoms, he helps to hide this voice, to drown it out completely. So that the conscience completely disappeared, and there was no spirit.

Most anxiety disorders come from internal conflict, no one will argue with this, but internal conflict is very often the result of the suppression of normal human reactions. You were silent when you saw the meanness, you lied in a scientific discussion, you did not besiege the boor who publicly humiliated the weak. You clearly see that everything around you is wrong, but you pretend that it should be so. You live in two houses instead of honestly making a choice. You can’t say to your boss’s face that he’s leading the whole business of the office to nowhere.

Your country has long forgotten what law and common sense are. All human values ​​are trampled before your eyes, and you already think that they probably never existed or that trampling is their normal state. Finally, sometimes it seems to you that Russia has never lived so shamefully, but it has never been so well-fed either, and, oh horror, these things begin to connect in your mind. It seems to you that since she is better this way, then so be it. And from this million compromises — public, personal, family, intimate, even in bed — there is a constant internal discomfort, a habit of lying to yourself. And if you have learned to shut up your inner voice and there is no one to hear the truth from, the body reacts clandestinely, that is, it gives you panic attacks.

In modern Russian society, these panic attacks, sudden attacks of horror out of the blue, also happen all the time, because history is twisted and there is no law. And everyone is afraid of either mass unemployment, or a general crisis, or a nuclear war. The general state of anxiety is such that everyone desperately clings to the specter of stability and is ready to endure everything for stability — even the lack of development.

Stability is most precious to those who are unstable internally. For comfort and peace cling to those whose constant inner feeling is discomfort and homelessness. They learned to block all this, and it crawls out of the subconscious at an unpredictable, inopportune moment: in an elevator, in the subway, on a dark street. Life turns into an eternally trembling jelly, into a shaky swamp. And all because of the simplest fear to call a spade a spade.

A man runs to a psychologist. The psychologist is too lazy to delve into the causes of this internal instability, or it’s just that his tasks do not include the social rehabilitation of the patient: in the end, you won’t find another job for him and you won’t relocate to another country, although such a recipe in itself would be very useful to many. And it’s good to travel, and to move to a healthier environment, at least for a little while, is very pleasant. But, I repeat, there is no such recipe, and not everyone respects and knows social psychology, and in general — why get into the subtle causes of nervous disorders when you can stun the patient with a warm plush club, prescribing some mild and comfortable inhibitor of serotonin uptake?

In the States, the internal crisis has been growing for so long and hiding from it so diligently that Elizabeth Wurzel even coined the term «Prozac Nation». By the way, I drank Prozac when I was bored during a long teaching in the States. A wonderful thing. True, it was not enough, and therefore I did not get hooked. Yes, you won’t get hooked on it, it doesn’t create addiction. You get used to something else: to the fact that you can escape from internal conflict with the help of a pill. And the voice of conscience — even distorted, even ugly — will not reach you again.

A psychic attack is the cry of the body about a deep moral (and not physical!) ill-being. And drowning out this cry is a sin, because this is your chance. We must calmly talk to ourselves, and not with a psychologist, and finally call a spade a spade. Say out loud what you can’t put up with anymore. And start restoring the same order in your head, the establishment of which in an apartment insures so well against depression: after all, one of the most important factors of deprivation is a mess that all hands cannot manage to cope with.

Most have the same mess inside, and it can only be defeated by systematic cleaning. And in order for things to stand in their places, you need to know these places. By the way, if you live with a person who manages to keep the room a mess, he just feels bad for you. Be sure: when you leave, he or she will immediately put things in order, and they will be fine. And you too.

At any cost, by any effort, we are ready to refrain from the normal work of conscience, from honest introspection. And instead of agreeing with ourselves, we are given a big comforting pill — or an equally comforting conversation about how imperfect this cruel world is in comparison with us. Meanwhile, a conversation with a psychologist should take off the masks, and not put them on. It should be painful, like a conversation with conscience, and just as saving. But we are accustomed to palliatives and we get a psychologist to comfort, not save. It’s time for all of us to stop comforting ourselves, otherwise one day we risk waking up in the abyss — or not waking up at all. However, there is an opinion that we are already flying there.

I explained all this to Zhenya and heard in response that:

• very often, an anxiety disorder is the result of an ordinary biochemical failure — and nothing but chemicals will help here;
• the provocateur of an anxiety disorder can be, in particular, the usual high sugar or hypertension, which means that medications are needed again;
• the task of a psychologist, unless he is a charlatan (and among graduates, charlatans are not so widely represented), is precisely to find an internal conflict and talk it out with a patient, and he himself is most often simply not able to do this, just as it is impossible for himself — except for exceptional cases — remove the appendix;
• it is necessary to talk about anxiety and suspicious disorders after you have thoroughly studied Freud, and not popular, but special works, and then Carl Rogers, whose contribution to the problem of anxiety is very significant, at least «Person-centered therapy»;
• and finally — introspection is not available to everyone, and just as every schoolboy in the first grade learns to write and read — so the patient must learn these conversations with conscience in the company of a correct psychologist, who, by the way, will not necessarily rob him, although any psychologist knows that for free advice is followed less willingly than paid advice.

So you can continue to calmly talk about your mental pain with the help of a psychologist, suppress your conscience with pills and live exactly as before, and everything you read here is amateurish nonsense. I am sure that most of the reviews, and from non-professionals, will be just like that, since I didn’t say anything particularly pleasant to you. By the way, it’s worth reading Rogers anyway.