More on Self Esteem

Someone told me the other day that she wanted to see a shrink because her feeling about herself is lower than “poo poo,” as she put it. So I asked, “What do you expect her or him to do?” “I don’t know. Help me find out what’s wrong.” They can’t do that because they don’t know how. All they can do is become cheerleaders, “You are capable, you know. You are a good person and I know you can do it.” Blah blah. That kind of help lasts about four minutes because it is battling a lifetime of neglect that makes any of us feel like poo poo.

Why can’t shrinks do it? Because they cannot go deep into the unconscious, deep into history and the brain to find out. Why not? They don’t have the techniques; they don’t know how. Worse, they don’t have the theory. I will give it to them if they want. All they have to do is ask.

Let me give you an idea. A patient was born while the mother was depressed. She did not pick up and cuddle her baby right after birth. She was also depressed while carrying, another weight on the child. The baby in the crib cried but her mother didn’t come; “let her cry it out,” was the mantra. And also the father came with an angry voice and face and told the baby to shut up. In childhood there was no touch, no caring and no love. Get the idea? All this makes the baby feel unimportant, not worthy of anyone’s attention: worthless. I am only touching on a few of thousands of experiences which reinforce that worthless feeling. I will offer my own life. My parents never answered when I called. My mother was hallucinating and delusional and my father was lost in his fantasies. He read the paper at dinner while we were not allowed to talk. This was repeated night after night.

Now how can a shrink offering encouragement counter that? If we cannot delve back in history and feel what all of that did to us how can we cure it? We carry around all of that every day, and the earlier all that occurred the deeper it is in us. Just never having anyone come when he cried in the crib is devastating. The baby is just learning about trust, love and caring; and he doesn’t get it. He can only feel it is him; something is wrong with him. And later they tell him something is wrong with him, or worse, they treat him with indifference as though something is wrong with him. The point is that those feelings set in very early, beginning with no loving right after birth, which sets the prototype of “I am worthless.” It is never articulated but we act it out. We don’t recognize love when it is right in front of us because we don’t know what it is. Or we choose someone lower than us or who is bad for us without understanding that those poo poo feelings dog us and drive our choices and behavior. Imagine: it begins right at birth when we are totally innocent and naïve souls. The feeling is engraved into that innocent system and to never come out again because it is deep in the unconscious.

Now we go to a shrink who knows nothing of our history and is often not interested because his therapy is in the here and now. And it is in the here-and-now because the shrink’s psyche is wholly in the present as he too is bereft of his feeling base. That’s why he is usually a shrink. I became one to cure my mentally ill mother_symbolically. It never happened; and it won’t happen with patients; I know. I was a Freudian therapist for 17 years and cured no one. The word “cure” became an anathema, a no-no. Another wonderful syllogism: we do a therapy that cures no one, therefore “cure” is never our goal. Wonderful.