Handing your troubles over to a psychologist or psychiatrist is a dangerous way to deceive yourself and very likely get you more effed up, or at best, stalled out at a level of good enough.  The smarter you are, the more dangerous it is.  Here’s why.

• Talk therapy relies on the weakest and most recently evolved parts of our brains to untangle snags that live in some of the oldest and most basic parts of our animal selves – it’s using the wrong tool for the right job. Our cerebral cortex and higher reasoning capabilities are the newest aspects of our evolution.  These parts of us are great at logical tasks.  Math, navigation, deduction, sudoku, Powerpoint.  But anything that affects us strongly enough to keep us up at night has taken root at a much deeper and more animal level.  Indeed, most of the things that tie us in knots are happening far outside of our capacity for reason.  If they were reasonable, we would have solved them ourselves already and wouldn’t be tortured and confused by our experience of them.  Love, grief, loss, trauma, identity confusion, fear – these are human (or even animal) experiences that we can only barely logically understand. Trying to solve animal problems by thinking through them only takes us farther away from the deep and illogical place where the issue is actually hiding, disconnecting us even more from the true experience of whatever that thing is that is trying to speak to us.  And no menacing problem inside us moves along until we have heard and accepted what it is trying to tell us.
• Talk therapy, like religion, television, and anti-depressants, is designed to protect us from rock bottom, which is a state of perpetual bondage. It gives us just enough tools to keep the darkness from closing all the way in, without teaching us how to get through the darkness and into the freedom that is on the other side.  Thousands of years of human experience across cultures repeat to us the necessity of looking into the face of the demons inside ourselves and in the world around us (not just peeking safely in on them for an hour once a week, but actually bringing our whole selves to them) in order to emerge from the trap of fear and darkness.  Rock bottom is the beginning of new life.
• Western mental health modalities are grounded in ideas of normalcy, pathology, and fixing – not in optimizing the sometimes strange aspects of us that make us uniquely ourselves. Philosophically, therapists will tend to be grounded in the idea that there is some range of being that classifies someone as normal, and then there are all these other ways of being that come with diagnoses and need to be “fixed” through medication, mental reconfiguration, or both. Nobody is normal.  Thank god nobody is normal.  And one surefire way to make your weirdness into a problem is to convince yourself that it is pathological.  Anything strong enough manifest in a disruptive way is something that has a good deal of power within you.  Shutting down or squashing one of your powers is never going to work (Have you ever tried to NOT think about something?  Ok, don’t think about cheese fries.  How did you do?  You are thinking about cheese fries, right?) and is going to rob you of the source of what could be your superpower.  Nobody gets their problems “fixed” and ends up normal.  But we can learn to position our disruptive strengths to work better to our advantage, by getting cozy with them, staring them in their weird little faces, listening to them, and being willing to get a little unconventional on the path to finding what they could turn into.  And precious little of that process looks or feels like what we tend to think of as normal.
• Psychologists and psychiatrists as people overall (with some brilliant exceptions, of course) tend not to be sparkling, dynamic examples of self-actualization. Don’t take life guidance from anyone who isn’t glowing with admirable and enviable levels of life, health, and insight.  Don’t take diet advice from a fat doctor.  Don’t take financial planning advice from an insurance salesman.  Don’t take get rich advice from someone who needs your $100 to pay for a seminar.  The field of psychology tends to attract confused people looking for some tidy box to put their own confusion into.  Don’t allow anyone to guide you toward anything they aren’t themselves dedicatedly amazing at, and that goes quadruple when the topic is being a person.
• The human experience didn’t get invented with Freud. Humanity and the very challenging aspects of living life are many thousands of years old.  Freud was one (effed up and strange) cat with a bunch of theories, many of which don’t stand up to the deep and often ancient experiences of humanity, and yet his thinking acts as a launch pad for how we process everything we don’t understand about ourselves in the western world.  Not to say there’s nothing interesting in the thinking of the last hundred years, but to embrace it to the exclusion of everything else seems truly silly.
• There are simply better, faster, cheaper, and more genuine ways of navigating the challenges of being human – none of which will ever make you normal. We all need guidance and if we are up for the journey, we’ll find ourselves on a path that is always changing and always bringing new guides and tools into our sight.  Ironically, the very complex journey takes us to a destination that is very simple: it’s the place where we are connected to the genuine and clean feeling of being our weird, wonderful, and sometimes dark and broken selves, humbly intertwined with the humanity before, after, and around us.  But getting there can be painful and confusing.  And the road never ends.  We never arrive and we are never normal.  But we can become excited about the experience.  As the Buddhists say “The joyful participation in the sorrow of life”.  But that is for part 2…so stay tuned for some ideas about where to start.

This post was written in response to a reader request.  If you’d like me to rant on some specific topic, please feel free to send it to me. **Disclaimer** I am totally full of shit, so please don’t trust me to be an expert on anything.  Make your own decisions with the advice of people you trust, not crackpots on the internet. **End Disclaimer**

Disagree with this rant?  That’s what the comments are for below.  Get after it…