Constructing a New Reality Through Therapy

The objective of psychotherapy is not to provide you with a professional friend to listen to your tales of woe. It is to help you construct a new reality. While you can expect your therapist to be sympathetic when you are in crisis, a good therapist also challenges her client to question their assumptions. Therapy is hard because the answers to such questions are often painful to face.

Everyone who starts therapy hopes to get back to the good old days before they began to suffer, but that's not what therapy will do for them. Instead therapy helps you to let go of those of your beliefs, even your most cherished beliefs, that led you astray. In the end a successful therapy client may be very different than they ever were before, but if the therapist does her work well the client will ultimately be more truly themselves than they ever have been in their lives.

Therapy alone is enough to treat the neurotic individual. But as I said there is a biological component to the construction of reality. Despite all that therapy has done to help me, my brain is unable to regulate its chemistry on its own. That is why I must take medication. If I didn't, the power of my chemical imbalances would overwhelm me. Someone with a mental illness whose roots come from biology must take medicine.

But someone with a biological mental illness must have both kinds of treatment - only rarely if ever does one suffer this illness without developing a neurosis. That's why I feel it is irresponsible for general practitioners to prescribe psychiatric medicine without referring the patient to a psychiatrist or psychotherapist. Giving someone only medicine at best gives them temporary relief from their symptoms without them ever developing the insight they really need to take control of their lives.

So you can see that it is a great benefit that we construct our realities. But it can be terrible too. In Anthropology of Religion, Dr. Schlegel also discussed millenarian movements, that is the phenomenon of people believing the end of the world was at hand.

A Dangerous Mind

Sometimes a person comes along who has the dangerous combination of being both delusional and charismatic. While of course charisma comes naturally for some people, I feel it can also arise as an unusual symptom of mental illness. After all, if manic depressives can experience euphoria as a symptom, cannot the terrible neediness of the paranoid drive them to whatever lengths it takes to attract followers? These people become cult leaders.

One of the other factors in creating a cult is for the group to become isolated. The isolation contributes to the cult members losing their grip on reality. There really is no such thing as "normal" in society - at best there is only what is average, or commonly experienced by most people. If someone strays too far from the mean, their interactions with others will tend to correct them. The lack of that correction is what causes the isolation that many of the mentally ill experience to make them sicker. When a group gets isolated, that's how a charismatic but delusional leader can bend the minds of otherwise healthy people.

I was moved to write my first web page about my illness shortly after the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. When I heard about it I just freaked out and spent a couple of weeks in a seriously troubled state of mind. It was the worst off I'd been in a long time.

It wasn't simply that the incident vividly reminded me of the times I had been suicidal. It was that it made me question the very foundations of my reality. The people who "shed their vehicles" with the aid of barbiturates to go join the extraterrestrial visitors were not depressed, in fact the videotapes they left behind showed them to be apparently happy and healthy people, and intelligent ones too: the cult operated a successful web design firm! What upset me was the realization that despite my best efforts to maintain a firm grounding in reality, I knew that even perfectly sane people could be fooled into killing themselves quite enthusiastically. I knew that I could be fooled too, if I wasn't careful.

This can happen to entire nations. If international and economic conditions lay the right foundation, a single delusional and charismatic leader can incite a whole country to become a murderous cult. In For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence Alice Miller discussed the violent abuse Adolf Hitler's father subjected him to as a child and how that led to his adulthood as the pathologically violent leader of Nazi Germany.

Such pathology, while too horrible for most people to contemplate, is an expected consequence of the reaction of normal human nature to extreme circumstances. Lest you think it's not worth your concern, I want you to consider for a moment the following: If it can happen to Heaven's Gate, if it can happen in Jonestown, if it can happen in Waco, if it can happen to Cambodia, if it can happen even to a large, populous, powerful, modern and industrialized nation like Germany, then it can happen here.

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