On Getting to Need

In the old days I used a fake telephone to have patients call their parents and tell them everything, what they needed, the pain, etc. One patient picked up the phone and then complained to me, “There’s no one home.” This was clearly a double entendre. There was never anyone home, and when they were, there was still no one home. But I used the telephone to make a point: patients were always saying, “What’s the use? They are never going to love me.” And I say, “That doesn’t matter; what matters is that you feel and express your need.” In that need lies a world of pain. We can use the left brain to rationalize, “I don’t need it or them,” but alas, the need remains unabated. It drives so much later behavior.

So we rationalize with one brain while the other is hurting terribly. It does matter whether they can love you or not because that never changes the need; that need tells the truth of our lives, or our history. We do not want to cover over that history. In it lies liberation. For unfulfilled need means pain. Why? Because we are being warned that something essential to life and survival is missing. The trouble is that it becomes an imprint that dogs us for a lifetime. We are on constant alert, agitated and stimulated by that need no matter how much we try to relax. If we successfully repress it, the tension in our muscle system can lead to all kinds of maladies. Or we just ache all of the time.

If we never get to the right brain and the deep brain we will never get to need. It is covered over by the hyperactivity of the left prefrontal brain. We need to find a way to bypass that verbal, intellectual, rationalizing brain and get back to our nature; our feelings, which are our nature. Those who are distant from that nature cannot value our environment, or animals, or anything that belongs to nature. First they have to feel what is inside of them. Not an easy task; worse, when they chose a therapy they often chose one that also bypasses nature and flees to the safety of the intellect. Ay ay ay.

It is interesting about the right and left brain. A new study found that those humans with left brain injury became more creative. (New Scientist. Dec. 18, 2010) That is, they seemed to have more access to the right brain and feelings. After all, it is feelings that allow an overview, an ability to make the connection among facts. The left brain seems more point-by-point, punctilious; seeing each fact as an entity onto itself. Feelings seem to be more global and provide a deeper understanding of events. What the study seems to show is that the left brain can smother creativity, and of course, feelings. Language is wonderful and terrible. The more intellectual, the worse you are, as odd as they may seem. And yet, where would we be without Einstein. He was certainly creative. Yet he never got onto the Heisenberg theory. It is just that intellectuality in the social sciences seems to be deadly. How else to explain the lack of interest in a feeling therapy?