17 yo and Shame, Gays, So so Gay, spirituality, psychoanalysis and meditation.

Later there were years of celibacy cycling back to promiscuity.  It was like I could turn it off and then if I smiled young girls came and threw themselves at me. I’d find women in my bed when I came home. I’d be blamed for being charming.I was accused of seducing women. I was told I was irrisistable.  I spent years in therapy.  I didn’t masturbate. I sat cross legged for hours. I prayed. I joined with a Benedictine for meditation.  It was always like something out of Spock.  I’d mind meld with holy men and holy women. We’d watch sun rises and sun sets. Alone together in friendship.

Breathe in breathe out.

 Om mani padme sum.  

I am He. I am He. Blessed Spirit I am He. No birth ,no death ,caste have I, father mother have I none, I am He. I am he. »

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

The psychoanalysis was different. I spoke with Dr. White, the Christian psychiatrist and we talked over 6 months when he was my mentor. 

« I didn’t find it helped much. My colleague found it exciting. But then there’s always something exciting in confessional for the listener. A kind of voyeurism.  But counselors like this. With little training. Hearing people speak of their inner secrets.  But I didn’t have any secrecy’s. I share everything with Jesus. I have a wife and church and pastor and Christian friends.  We talk openly among one another. We really are a community of God. I know people talk of that. But I found it.  I’d recommend you do too. I’ve heard you talk about your church and you seem to accept a kind of anemic Christianity.  There’s much more.  Not for all but for some. I guess that’s why psychoanalysis didn’t amount to much for me.  I still think he got more out of it. But then we were more interested in technique back then. »

At times the shame was overwhelming. Shame separates one from others, from God.  They say shame means ‘you’re no good’ but that guilt is’ I did something that was no good.’  It’s really nit picking. In the tribe hundreds of thousands of years ago you did something wrong and you were told it was wrong. Any deviation from what was done was wrong. People lived by repetition of right behaviour. Don’t eat the red plant. Eat the green one.  

I loved reading « The World Until Yesterday; What We Can Learn from Traditional Societies. » by Jared Diamond. His first book Guns, Germ’s and Steel had been such a watershed book for me helping me understand the Polynesian people I was working with at the time.  Traditional Societies weren’t the myth of Hollywood and liberal politicians.  The Horror. The Horror. That famous line from Joseph’s Conrad’s Heart of Darkness would come to mind. Everyone and everything was taboo.  The stranger was shunned and killed because that’s how people survived, safely, in the familiar.  

« Freud was afraid of the unconscious.  I thought it a much more reliable and trustworthy thing.  When I fell my body would automatically attempt to save me. Freud was an intellectual in that rationalist tradition that lead to so many hundreds of thousands of men killing themselves in trench warfare  WW1. «  

I was in Phoenix at an Ericksonian Foundation conference for the second time. I was learning hypnosis from the man who did hypnosis for heart and lung surgery. 

« Some people are allergic to anaesthetics. That’s when I come in.  In the old days everyone had surgery and was just held down by their friends and family.  Now they call me. I induce a trance. It’s often days of training and preparation. Then the person is distracted really. That’s what so much of hypnosis is, distraction.  They’re focussed here and the pain is over there. It works extremely well for acute surgery, brief periods. The dentists have caught on and like it. Of course locals and blocks work just as well. There’s the control factor to. The more you use drugs and procedures the more you rely on power.  Erickson liked to let things grow, trusting the process. Describing how plants didn’t need to be told. He believed that life was an inherent pattern in a person.  He thought Freud was afraid of the unconscious.  He didn’t like children much either.  I like children.  There’s that feminine and masculine aspect of nature. Jung talked of this, anima and animus.  We all begin as female and some of us transform into men biologically. »

I’d love reading Jung and how he saw Freud as frightened of the unconscious and needing control. Jung was more interested in the mapping the unconscious.  Freud was satisfied with his seeing that there was the Superego, Ego and Id. Later Erik Erickson, not Milton, would call these the Parent, Adult and Child.  Jung expanded this map as it were to the Shadow and Face. Then the animus (masculine) and anima (feminine).  He’d go on to study the archetypes and the « collective unconscious » those spiritual moments of ‘synchronicity’ and that sense of wonder.  HE was the son of a minister and his psychology spanned the whole of the myth and theology of the Europe of his day.  Freud by contrast seemed to be presenting an idea of the universe straight out of the Jewish history, limited to that, but with God removed.  They both were so interested in science and all the learning of the day.  Freud would write about anthropology.

Ivan Illich, the great French philosopher would write a book called Gender where he’d trace the domains of dominance by male or female of all aspects of life to the gender designation given them in language.  Le Auto meant that the ‘man’ had principal responsibility for this machine but ‘la maison’ designated this as principally the ‘mother or wife’s domain’

So much of the richness of existence and the sacred was lost to the bulldozing stupidity of Cultural Marxism, that Frankfurt school of intellectual nonsense that reduced everything to binary.  Marxism could be summed up as ‘rich and poor’, ‘bourgeoisie and proletariat’ and the rich oppress the poor. The exact same reasoning of the paranoid schizophrenic. There’s ‘them and me’ and I’m their ‘victim’. A very effective revolutionary design that served as the basis of aetheist war and murder of hundreds of millions of men women and children in a mere hundred years or more. No other religion had such a killing history.  Yet sadly Jews especially and all others refuse to let go of one of their own. As if Jewish intellectuals are a Navy Seal platoon of the mind that must keep bringing their fallen colleague back.

My famous colleague, a Jewish psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz would say with disdain, « Feminism is one of the maggots crawling of the dead body of Marx and Freud. »  

« A little girls religion, » she’d say. She was friends of Gloria Steinem and said her personal life was a train wreck.  « So many of the academics write and sound good until you know them up close. ». 

I’d meet the woman who lived beside my favourite gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson.  

« He kept peacocks. Try sleeping when your neighbour has these bloody peacocks that wake at dawn and make all manner of racket. He’d be passed out after shooting his guns off in the early morning. The peacocks would shit everywhere. You know goose shit but peacock’s are a whole lot bigger. So the shits that’s much more.  Worst neighbour I ever had. All his neighbours hated him. Mostly the peacocks and the gun noinse in the middle of the night.  Otherwise he was fine. The peacocks were impossible. »

I cycle back to that night. Over and over again. Trauma does that. This is trauma.  Betrayal for sure.  Sexual so more subtle and worse in some ways than the blatant loss of a limb.  Sexual matters are like worms that burrow under the skin.  I suppose the loss of the limb is worse but the shame may be less. It’s hard to compare. I’ve not lost a limb but I have experienced what would be called rape. I agreed at first then changed my mind only to be held down and penetrated. A rapist might get off on the technicality. I’ve heard a lot of men describe that as ‘normal’. 

Indeed the sophisticated sexual older women of my youth would say ‘no’ as I penetrated them and this ‘pseudo rape’ fantasy loomed large. 

I stopped and she said,  ‘don’t stop. Don’t stop’....

« But you said’ no’ . 

« Ignore me’. »

« Just continue. Pound me. Pound me. I want you to fuck me. »   

«  But you said ‘no’. »  

« I didn’t mean it. ..  Do you want a discussion or do you want to get fucked. »

 I wanted  to fuck but I almost couldn’t because she’d said ‘get fucked’ . I found myself thinking about syntax and construction. Was she fucking me or I was I fucking her?

She was a few years older and had come on to me inviting me into the wealth and elegance she had. She was certainly more established.  She told me this was just sex. She didn’t want a relationship but wanted to fuck. Then she’d said ‘no’ and ‘yes’.  I didn’t go back after a while.  She was confusing. I was young and sex was always available but in bursts with dry periods in between.  Seasonal. With flurries. Women always told me they found me attractive.  They only got angry when I refused them or left. Then they’d be venomous. I loved Zorba the Greek. The « complete catastrophe’ he called it. « Never say no to a woman. »

But I was wondering if I was gay.  I had been that night. I’d had no food. I was hungry.  Never go out hungry if you can avoid it. I was without transportation. Boys don’t hear always have money to get a taxi home.The guys in the band had the car. They weren’t leaving. They were conspiring.  There was champagne and caviar. An exotic spread in an elegant penthouse. I loved the warmth and ambience. All the older guys. I was the youngest.  I was a poet.  I believed in diversity and learning. I didn’t want to. I said no over and over again. 

« I like girls’.  I don’t want to. I’ve never been interested. ». 

« Okay, but just come. You don’t have to do anything. He just said he liked young boys and would make the record if we brought young boys. He didn’t say you’d have to fuck. We said, we’d see. »

That was the conversation in the car. When Lonny took the gun from the glove compartment and slipped it into his pants. Meaningfully.  Manly. He did that when we went to a party. Part of his schtick. Having the pistol and showing us he had the pistol.  

We went up the elevator.  

There were others there. Mostly the old guy though. HE was very attentive. « More champagne’. « Another jay ».  

I drank and smoked.  And watched the movie he put on.

It was everything I’d never seen. I sat on the couch completely stoned.  Everyone said how powerful the dope was. Really good stuff. And the wine was so sweet. Bubbles. Went to my head.  And I saw there watching gorgeous men and naked women and orgies of men and women then the pictures would change to just women, all so beautiful, all mingling like a kaleidoscope of Kama sutra, then just men, and animals and children and I just sat and watched. Stoned. And frozen.  I was paralyzed and My brain a wet noodle.  I felt so good.

I looked down at my lap.  The old guy was down on his knees between my thighs was sucking my cock. I don’t remember him unzipping my fly. I don’t remember how long he’d been sucking my cock. All the band and the other men were standing by watch, sipping drinks, tasting jouer douerves. It felt  good then. He was taking my hand and walking me to the bed room. I was watching this happen to me.

He gave me a Playboy and I stared at a centre fold as he undressed us. Then we were naked and his hands were all over me as were his lips. Then he guided me into him but I kept going soft. 

« Look at the Playboy » he’d say  and I’d look at the Playboy centrefold on the pillow by his head. I’d stay hard then and finish.  He’d clean me up and dress me.  Then before I left I’d watch Lonny pulling out a contract and getting his signature. Lonny had been watching too. I thought that creepy.   My ‘friend’ was laughing and smiling.

« You took one for the team. Good on you. » He said, like we were in school and I’d held up the end. 

« I  wasn’t going to do it. I never could but you did. » he said and I hated him.  I knew I hated him. T.s. Elliott.s Hollow Men.

A while later an older friend at the university invited me to a faculty party her professor was throwing. I was the youngest there too.  Just out of high school. My friend was from Vincent Massey a year or two ahead of me and now studying poli sci and English.  

There were all these papers and every where bottles of wine.  A guy came in with two green garbage bags of marijuana and dumped them on newspapers  laid out in the centre of the room.  Rolling papers were thrown around.  My friend met another man and they began to kiss. I sat down with a glass of wine. She went up stairs with him .  A while later she came down. I was drinking more wine and just chain smoking dope. I was in heaven. Never had I seen so much dope.  I was l’église and everyone  was happy. I was drinking wine and smoking dope watching couples kiss then go up stairs. 

The professor had done it with students and his wife had done it with students. Old people, young people. Then she took my hand. It was so soft. Her face was so round and close. Her voice sounded miles away. The music was floating through the air like staffs. I was seeing it. I followed her  up the stairs. She showed me the babies in the crib in another the room. The professors and his wife’s. 

But then she took me into the extra bedroom. The bed was big and soft with huge mirrors on the ceilings and walls. I saw she had trouble getting my jeans off.  I couldn’t seem to help. I was in that drooling staring catatonic dope state. She’d walked out of her own clothes like they were designed for rapid exit.  She was naked before me stroking me and untangling my jeans from my stocking feet. She pushed me back onto the bed and straddled me.  I supposed I consented. I could say I was raped. No clothes so no deep pockets. No fowl. No thoughts like those in those days. Today a new game of rape history for profit. 

I hadn’t  hada volitional thought. I was like Garp. She was probably merciful. Practicing charity.  I was in the flow A silly dope grin on my face. My mind a loose noodle. My erection a mind of it’s own. The only place with blood I was all vegetable. She’d hardly mounted me when I came. Not quite premature ejaculation, at best a peri-mature. coming. She was upset. I was supposed to wait. But I wasn’t home. He had a mind of his home but she rolled her eyes at me. She brusquely dressed me like a child.  

She walked me quickly down the stairs and left me by my pile of marijuana and poured me another glass of wine, immediately taking the next  man upstairs. He looked as blotti as me. I rolled another joint, had another glass of wine and wonder if that had just happened.  There’d been so many going up and down the stairs before the night was through. I thought she was wonderful. I felt wonderful. I almost took off my clothes in the living room but somehow stopped myself that time. Taking off my clothes seemed to take up a lot of thought and time. Eventually she came for me and put my parka on. We went out in the cold. She never asked me out again. I know it wasn’t anything I said because I didn’t speak. 

I was passive. Passive was great. Over the years I’d move all over the passive active spectrum. I felt I had to be active. The more active the better.m Married  for years , years later ,I’d get kinks in my neck spending my life between her legs licking an eternity as she said that’s the only way she could orgasm. 

« I don’t orgasm with intercourse, » , ‘she said. She seemed to. Come to think of it she always had a contented smile on her face. After I divorced I suspected her of lying. She didn’t reciprocate. « Good girls don’t like that. » 

Reciprocation became a theme with money and sex when I was a marriage and sex therapist..

I would sit for hours and and years and listen to couples dicker ant trade. Then the courts would talk about money like they’d talked about sex. Everyone wanted to be served but no one wanted to serve.

« He just fucks me. Never once asked what I wanted. Just fucks me. I take care of myself. I never had an orgasm till my girlfriend introduced me to her vibrator.  Never had one with him even after. I just lay back. You know that mothers told their daughters to ‘lie back and think of England’. I don’t think of England but I just think of other things.

« So here’s the joke, doctor. «  a patient told me »What’s the difference between a mistress, a prostitute and a house wife.?’

« What? I humoured him. I was seeing so many men for sexual abuse. All these macho men, leaders in society, doctors, chiefs, colonels. Coaches. First it had been the residential schools Then it had been word of mouth. You should talk to Dr. Hay about that. The newspapers made it something men could talk about. I loved the psychologists who had begun the BC Society for Sexually Abused Men. I talked to them in early days met the doctor who’d been 20 years with a male lover and 20 years with a female lover. « I love the person not the  genitals’.he told me. 

« What? ».  He was laughing. Sexual jokes were manly.

« The prostitute says, are you finished yet. »

‘The mistress says ‘more, Cherie, more’

‘The housewife says ‘beige, I think I’ll paint the ceiling beige.’

He was one of hundreds of good men who married in good faith and their wives decided they didn’t want sex anymore. Not after the kids. A myriad of excuses. They were good church women. Upstanding citizens. Withholding bitches.  Cunning conniving insensitive takers.  Stupid cows. Controlling. There were a thousand words that had come down through the ages to describe the situation. Always she said, he said. But in the end if the man slept outside of the house then  he lost the house and he  children. The women came in too and told me of lovers who were gardeners and how they were having sex with the  father or brother or best friend.  All I heard especially when I worked with the country.  I was a psychiatrist and I flew from town to town and worked in a variety of cities and different countries. But every person was telling me a sexual story of horrible sadness.

« My other doctors didn’t ask if there was anything that was bothering me, My psychiatrist says he’s just there to give me pills. He didn’t discuss sex or marriage and especially didn’t want to hear about affairs.

« He brings home men from the office to use me. Says he likes to watch. »

« If I don’t sleep with the men he doesn’t sell another car. I like it really. They say women don’t like that sort of thing but I do. I’ve always had a healthy sexual appetite. I don’t think my husband could fulfill it alone . This works. He likes money more and I make him a lot of money. »

« He was my pimp and the father of my children. »

‘The judge told me about her love of sex and role play.’

« She was a Wiccan ,’ she said. She described the orgy with the other naked white witch women and the happy young man.  

« He was in his  twenties and we asked him if he’d help us in our ceremony. Nothing painful. No one would be hurt. There were six of us. That’s the number you know. We all had a go with him. He was a really healthy boy. »

« My husband doesn’t care what I do as long as he’s got his football games.’

« If married women had sex with their husbands there would be no prostitution. Almost all my customers are upstanding men who are married, bringing home the bacon and doing their part but married to these cold bitches who simply don’t care for them. I service them and they think of me like they think of the garbage man. I fulfill my role. The women here know what goes on .  They’re not stupid. A lot of women just see their husbands as dirty little boys they use. »

« I dont know if I’m gay, I told the psychiatrist. I’ve never looked at another man and been interested in him. I’ve never dreamt of sex with a man. I’ve sometimes thought back to that older guy and his friend who fuckd me.  It wasn’t pleasant. I was hungry. I wanted dope. It was only a couple of times. I never went back.  I met Nancy after that and one girl lead to another. I loved sex with women. I masturbated to images of sex with women. I wanted women . I loved women.  But they say if even you have one time with a man it’s just a matter of time.  You’re either / or. »

« Thats’ not true,’ he said.  He discussed the spectrum.  « You’re definitely heterosexual.  My gay patients never think of women. Some men switch like women. I ‘m seeing a woman now whose husband died after 35 years and three children. She has an older lady friend and they’ve become intimate. She doesn’t know what to make of it. But it’s easier for them because no one thinks of two older women living together. Not that a lot of them aren’t lesbian but that’s what they think of men living together. Especially young men. »

I thought a lot about this.  Everything was a default pattern to the sex I knew married.  Married sex in a loving relationship with a woman was unsurpassed in my experience. I’d known years and decades of it. The hierarchy rancher than binary. 

There are many reasons for breaking up. She lost interest in sex. I found that that was what did me in. She just stopped having sex. She might have been having an affair and she said she was always tired. She turned away. She said no. I was rejected another million times by women and now it was my wife. I kept thinking of that study that showed men had been told ‘no’ a thousand times to women being told ‘once’ and how rejection saddened men in the dating world but made women angry.  The psychologist out of California who did the sexual research said, « Feminism is dead. Women simply cannot shoulder the burden of sex that men do. So the species simply can’t perpetrate with women being in charge. They simply won’t take the risk of rejection and want everything their way in the bed room. »

« Did you hear the joke about the two girlfriends at the woman’s sexual palace,’ she said.

« No. »

Freud said jokes were veiled hostility but he wasn’t a very funny man and quite insecure according to his colleagues.  He did accept that humor was a as mature a ‘defence’ or ‘coping strategy’ as ‘altruism’ . His daughter, The brilliant child psychiatrist would go on to write about lines of development.  Some of the early group who worshipped Freud still speculated about what his developmental disorders were. 

« Sometimes the paranoids are right’, he’d say fleeing the Nazi’s. He’d get cancer from smoking his cigar. Horrible mouth and throat cancer. Surgery and pain. The later somatic psychiatrists would speak of Anger and Organ susceptibility.  Those were the years when breast feeding and bottles were an issue. Then there was Abraham who said depression was anger turned inward. The somatic doctors considered much of chronic illness repressed anger . That certainly jived with a lot of stress research.

« The women are dying of breast cancer because the men aren’t fondling them. The men are dying of prostate cancer because their wives aren’t havening sex with them. »  He and his wife were both psychologists and they taught ‘energy flow’.

The facts scientifically were that much of prostate cancer was the same as cervical cancer. Herpes Simplex II STD  virus and too many sexual partners. His argument though was for much more sex with just one partner. They were very much monogamomay proponents.

So many patients told me of their involvement with the Polyamory Society.  This was different from the ‘swinger set’.

By this time I’d seen dozens of transexual assisting them in their process getting tremendous support when I kept them going forward towards surgery and then getting tremendous backlash and stigmatisation when I pointed them the other way to the door.  There was so many politicals in medicine by then. Competing factions. The drug company celebrated the ‘influencer’ and ‘leaders’ who got the most drug sales. No clear association with correct diagnosis or the increasingly criticized ‘morbidity and mortality’ concepts.  The College bureaucrats suggested a paradigm more  like Walmart . 

« Doctors are the service personnel. ». « Remember the customer is always right.’ 

« Your job is to move product. » 

I was castigated when I wouldn’t agree with a child having a sex change. I was all for adults having freedom of choice, that modern technology gave us many options. Luddites continued to criticize everything but cherry picked the clean water and efficient transportation. I wore a dress then. I liked going to church in high heels with red painted nails. We were all part of a society where women dressed as men and men dressed as women and we went out for dinner.  I felt so vulnerable in heels, so unable to run. I couldn’t understand how women had ever allowed men to take away their right to carry a purse gun.  I wore this skirt and had these thin little panties and only thought about being available for sex with my butt pushed out by my heels. 

We talked about this. « « In my lumberjack shirt and jeans and boots I want to swing an axe and mount a woman....the clothes are so defining ».

« Ive said it for years women are transvestites in modern society and men are the ones who are restrained. The man’s suit jacket was developed by the British army as part of their uniform in the 18 hundreds. I’m dressed for daily war and you’re dressed for love making. It’s so unfair.’

We all laughed over dinner and talked of sex changes and hormones. Many of the wives were there.  We played games like seeing who won the fashion contest shopping at Thrift stores without spending more than  $20. I was a wreck.

« You have to come out, » he said. He was my priest and I shared with him my confusion and frustration. 

« What’s more coming out than wearing a dress, make up and high heels. »

« But you’re gay. « 

« I like women. »

‘But gay includes that. It’s us and them. They believe in this one heterosexual myth. Strictly binary. ». 

If that’s the definition then I’m gay but I don’t think that’s very scientific. Political, maybe but not at all scientific. I liked Dr. Bea’s work out of Berkeley. She has men who’d rather die than switch and the women who were the same and that opportunistic middle group which went with the flow. I’m there. I won’t die to be straight or gay. I remember my Christian friend liking that there were other men like him who’d die rather than let anything touch their behinds. What really angered him was when I told him that there were an equal percentage of gay men and gay women who felt the same towards heterosexuality.

« It’s sexual addiction. » he said.  What did God want? That seemed pretty straight forward when it came to procreation but the relational part of sex was not so clear. There was a very good evolutionary argument that sex was fun far before it was functional. Monkeys don’t associate sex with procreation and many not have figured that out till animal husbandry days. But men and women have been doing it since the beginning as well as looking for love in all the wrong places. But we tend to judge others who sin differently than ourselves. 

The monk Ispent time with rejected all attachment.  The Stoics did the same but my philosopher professor friend was an epicurean.  We debated the Greeks once again.

I thought my body didn’t care whose lips were on my penis, male or female, but my mind felt differently.

That’s when I considered all the men and women I’d seen at work who had been into  bestiality. That through another log into the fires of the long discussions of ethics, morality and psychiatry.  As primitive even barbaric cultures move into the scientific modern age almost yanked out of ancient centuries they are trying as hard to pull us back into the dark ages. It is alright to fuck a goat but only if the goat consents. 

« Doctors shouldn’t talk about sex with their patients especially male doctors with female patients. If they insist there may be a reason but it’s best then to refer the patient to the same sex doctor primarily someone who is trained only to deal with sex. It doesn’t matter that there is no such person. It doesn’t matter if the wait list are years. You just must act like a doctor. Nothing is real. You just act like you care. Like I act like I care. The  jaded didn’t know they were jaded, »

A speciality in sexual medicine might be a consideration. « But it’s better not to ask questions about sex. ». No one does anymore and the children are again sexually abused and the darkness descend because the elite don’t care. The kill by neglect, murder by covert aggression. And lies 

He was a pompous fool who brought in sharia trained people to teach the students the proper medical exams . He worked for pharmaceutical companies and governments who had been caught covering up corruption so thick that the stink reeked throughout the valley. He was impervious to change.  Superior in a way that made a human chuckle.  He knew nothing about psychiatry and even less about sex. The money laundering was all he cared about the billions and billions of dirty money and dirty people. He was such a disgusting dirty little boy. Leonard Cohen said he’d be the KY Jelly. 

« Women don’t lie about sex’ his colleague said with a straight face on another occasion. Her divorce from  another physician and her sexual perversity  was common knowledge. A train wreck but always wearing white cotton panties.  The look in her eyes was vacuous. 

« They recruited women who hated men and hated sex. Communists mostly. They have peculiar ideas about sex.  Honey pots and promiscuity.  Engles and Marx were against the family. They fooled around themselves. Like the UN committee on sexual equality chaired by the Saudi Muslims, with not a woman present , and they don’t see a problem with that. They called all of this ‘superego lacunae’ when i was doing analysis.’

I was at the World Congress of Psychiatry talking with the Head of Moscow Psychiatry.  I had painted my nails red.  Men and women psychoanalysts told me how much they liked the color. Bringing the painted nails to the centre of the conversation intrigued, hoping I’d share,  but I just said ‘thank you’ .We talked about what we thought the sexual proclivities were of the present leadership of men and women . 

« We always got together and talked of them as children. « Merkel’s still Stazi ».  « What’s with all the mommy’s boys ? «  « Macron «   

« I don’t know what to make of Trump. He loves women but does he like to get spanked in the bedroom like our British leaders.’ 

 We laughed and it was good to be home among adults away from the asylum of the government and the faculty where they ‘d hired all the perverts who covered up for them.

I’d feel the gay older guy took advantage of me. He certainly drugged me and had sex with me. Just like my female friend did. I didn’t put up much resistance with either of them once my body was in play. A bit like a dog humping furniture. Date rape might be the term today but back then everyone was ‘easy’.  We drank and did drugs and even guys ended up with guys and girls with girls. We joked that if you remembered the 60’s and 70’s you simply weren’t there.  The Kavanaugh public drama was such a lie.  False accusations now running 40%. The « me too » movement as much about Weinstein being Jewish as about his being an obvious pig.  

Ugly men got positions of power and women without money or power exchanged sex for power. It’s there in the Museum of Sex I visited in New York.  I went au femme and I went drab. We read the histories on the wall. The number of species who were ambivalent. The biological record and the record of cultural history. 

I remember defending the Little Sisters costly and painful long running legal battles over censorship. I’ve always been a libertarian, hated the communist dictatorships and other dictatorships. Loved freedom. I thought it wrong that some dirty little political biddy with no sex life of her own, culturally immature, would spend countless nights alone or with her select and special boy and girl friends, perhas her family, deciding what other adults could see. The arrogance. 

I  was  the Youth Representative to Parliament and gave a speech on freedom against communism. Now the slippery slope has begun with hate speech and Islamaphobia.  Homophobia was a lie , just the binary idea of the thing not that gays aren’t persecuted, and it just snowballed .Even antisemetism back fired. A whole new victim industry. The fall of society with half the population accountable while the other half are not and claim entitlement by aneient victimship. Years ago I wrote extensively about the war between the ‘whose up and whose down’ the « one upmanship’ competition of men and the ‘one downmanship competition of women. » male bullies and female bullies.

I have had sex with a woman hundreds of thousands of time and sex with a man a dozen perhaps.  I understood her dilemma when she told me that her lesbian friends were rejecting her saying she wasn’t a lesbian anymore because she hadn’t had a girlfriend in a couple of years. She told me how boring the lesbian commercial drive society had become with who slept with who and who had the youngest. And she just hadn’t found anyone she loved. Her last partner had died after a ten year romance. I remember the lovely lesbian nurses I adored who I worked up north with and had at my home when they came down to the city.  Now here was this patient. Not lesbian ‘enough’. 

The pendulum had swung from gay being illegal in 1968. I’d dressed in a hot mini skirt and made a pilgrimage to Stonewall one night to see the drag show. It was very conservative. I was more outlandish in my space age wig.  I’d had to put together a costume at one store for under a hundred, The American I had in cash.  The young black girl had had a hoot helping me dress for the occasion.  Faces of New York wanted to photograph me. How funny was that.

But then the shift occurred. The mixed result of the Aids epidemic. My San Franciscan Anglican priest friend told me he was at a religious conference as a speaker following his Baptish friend who’d just heard that thered’ been another earthquake in San Francisco.

‘He’d then gone on to blame this on the gays and insist that their sinful life style had caused their the earthquake like it caused their Aids.. »

Hearing this I thought of all the men I’d seen when I served in the aids epidemic who’d got their disease from tainted blood the BC government and Red Cross had given them. I thought too that Aids was a heterosexual disease in the rest of the world and mostly my patients got it sharing needles.  I thought of the babies. I’d gone to courses at the conservative Regent College and the Liberal Vancouver School of Theology specifically to study « how come bad things happen to good people’ . It was what Job, the least taught book of the Bible was about. 

«  I told  my friend that I thought his friends  description of the earthquake and disease science was pretty sketchy. »

He went on to tell me, « I’d called my parish because I’d been concerned and found out everyone was alright. But I simply don’t like this old blaming and shaming holier than thou theology. »

« When I got up right after him, I shared that I was really thankful for my learned friend’s analysis and observations and that I would go back to my parish in San Francisco and Check this out immediately because I’d just called to see if everyone was alright and found out the epicentre of the earthquake was in our convent  nunnery. You can be sure  I’ll be looking into finding out if all these women are really homosexual men fornicating and spreading Aids.  I thought they were really nice and kind chaste ladies and never knew. ‘ 

« The assembly of ministers and priests had collectively not been on the side of witch hunts and blame and shame but  laughed uproariously. Even my Baptistfriend acknowledged I had a point »

« So remember a decade or so ago when if you sucked one cock the heterosexuals kicked you out and the gays took you immediately. » I asked my authoritative gay friend.  He nodded.

« I’ve got this patient who thinks she’s not gay enough so I was wondering now that gay is very much « in » how many cocks does a person have to suck to be gay?’

« None, «  he said. 

« It’s where you shop. » 

Projection, Sex and Aggression

“You want to make love to me,”  said the troll to the princess.
The princess thinks, ‘well, not really….maybe I would like to make love to somebody…but not you,"
Then the troll persists and insists and insinuates and eventually the defences of the princess break down.  Indeed, the troll might well actually  ‘rape’ the princess and later say, “you wanted that.”
But the princess never really did.
If she was drinking or smoking dope though she couldn’t know for sure because drugs and alcohol cloud one’s judgement and impair one’s sense of reality.
“You asked for it.”  says the troll.
But the princess doesn’t ‘remember’ ‘asking for it.
Worse, after the fact, she feels terrible and is sure it’s all a horrible mistake.
It is a mis-take. But whose.
Trolls are great salesmen and saleswomen.
You go into a car store and the sales man says to you as you’re admiring the Lexus, “You'd really like to be in the drivers” seat".  And yes, you might consider that but not if the cost of the experience is going to result in your children not going to university.
Projection is the experience of having my feelings attributed to another persons.  It’s the experience of having another person “attribute’  their feelings or desires to me.
In 70’s communications psychology therapists attempted to have people ‘own’ their feelings and desires.  To this end, they taught and encouraged people to use “I” statements.
“I feel you want to make love to me,” said the troll to the princess.
“Those may be your feelings but they’re not mine,” replied the princess.
On the flip side, the paranoid, says, “You want to hurt me.”  or “I feel you want to hurt me."
Freud said that fundamentally our human drives reduce to ’sex or aggression’.
As a metaphor ‘fuck or fight’ are places of discussion where one can get greater clarity because of their ‘extremes’.  It’s similar to a process of discussing “straw men”, extreme arguments to understand where the ‘middle position’ is.
The princess says to the troll, “I want to be your friend but I don’t want to have sex with you or kill you."
Projection is normally ‘unconscious’ but may actually be a conscious process when used by a psychopath or sociopath.
It’s critical to understanding this because the ‘good feelings’ people have when they are drinking or smoking marijuana or using GHB is that of being among friends.  Drugs break down our fundamental immunological sense of self and ‘other’ or self and the ‘stranger’.
Women, especially, the young in general, when they are drinking or using drugs can be ‘suckered’ by the projections of others.
“You want to kiss me."
“You want to fight me don’t you?"
When I was younger I was raped by a person who consciously utilized these techniques manipulatively.  Being older and trained specifically in these ‘boundary busting’ projective strategies and utilizing drugs to “lower my inhibitions” he took advantage of me.
We know today of girls who are ‘seduced’ but rarely do we talk about boys who are subjected to the same kinds of trauma and manipulation.
Seduction is distinct from manipulation in the underlying ‘love’ and ‘empathy’ that the seducer and seducee experiences.  In contrast the ’user’ lacks the capacity to consider truly the other persons desires or feelings. With projection I ‘dominate’ your inner world with my ‘desires’ and ‘feelings’. I over ride the possibility of your distinctness and difference.  The user and taker simply considers the other an object, like a mattress, for they can’t conceive other others having feelings and depth beyond their own shallow narcissism.
I may indeed be so psychotic, so narcissistically injured, that I truly believe that Angelina Jolie is even now just waiting for my phone call.
I have treated some ‘celebrity’ stalkers and have been ’stalked on several occasions’ by psychotic people whose depth of inner inferiority is such that they project onto others that they ‘desire’ them.  Because they falsely believe that if those people did want to have sex with them, then their self image would improve. It’s quite likely that I’d feel good if Angelina Jolie or Rita Hayworth or Nicole Kidman or Taylor Swift wanted me.  I’d feel pretty powerful too if Cassius Clay or Wayne Gretzky or Mohammed Ali  wanted to fight with me.
The key here is to understand that ‘projection’ comes out of inferiority.
A beautiful young woman actually once did try to have sex with me, at least it certainly appeared that way, when she was trying to sell me a house.  The house was rather dilapidated and not what I wanted but the saleswoman seemed so desperate and seductive that she seemed willing to throw her body into the mix to get the sale.  I don’t think the saleswoman for the Taj Mahul would be trying to the ’sweeten’ the deal with me with sex.  The Taj Mahal tends to sell itself.
The trouble with projection is that it’s tied in with another aspect of psychological development, merger.  When we are infants, we are indeed ‘merged’ with our mothers.  As a fetus  in the womb  we are de facto ‘one’, a mother child unit,  linked by the umbilical cord.  As we grow we ’separate’.  The one becomes two yet there is this desire to overcome the ‘isolation’ of existence.  Each of us has ‘boundaries’ about us. Not really boundaries but membranes for sure.
I personally don’t like this term boundaries because as  biological beings we are surrounded by membranes not boundaries ‘per se’.  Boundaries comes out of the political and social schools of thought rather than the biological. Membranes have forms of active and passive transfer and are always interconnected with their environments and their neighbours.  They are  dynamic and flows and exchanges as compared to boundaries which bring to mind the fixed, rigid static and 19th century thinking.  
Psychotic projection is about one individual wanting to become ‘one’ with another to overcome their ’sense of separateness’.  Unfortunately or fortunately the merger (sex or aggression) doesn’t solve the problem for the individual.  So they quickly move on like parasites when the host has become immune to their type of drama.
It’s been said alcoholics and addicts don’t want relationships but rather ’take hostages’.
The users and manipulators don’t really care deeply what you want because they are obsessed with their own desires and feelings.  If they are sexually aroused then ‘you made them that way’ because they ‘don’t own’ their own feelings and desires. There is nothing more immature and antiquated than a man who said “I had to rape you because you were wearing a mini skirt”.  Clearly such a deeply inferior individual or rather an individual with such deep sense of inferiority lacks personal self control and sees the environment and others as controlling them.
Melanie Klein an early child psychoanalytic theorist described the ’splitting’ we see with the projective as being the inability of the child to acknowledge that the mother has a ‘good breast’ and a “bad breast’ rather than her being ’the good breast” or “the bad breast”.  To the ‘egomaniac with and inferiority complex” ( a common description of narcissists or alcoholics or addicts) others are only good when they are serving the individuals needs. That they have a life independent of being a breast is inconceivable to the baby at an earlier developmental stage, the narcissist who has not developed empathy because of early childhood trauma, or the narcissitically regressed due to later trauma or simply the alcoholic or addict.  Alcohol and drugs of addiction cause developmental and emotional regression and retardation.
The thing about ‘projective’ individuals is that they make already complicated matters such as sexual relationships more messy.  For an adult person to have sex and share bodily fluids with another they must join membranously with another.  In the old days of boundary talk and ‘every man is a castle’ we’d say we had to ‘let down the drawbridge and drain the moat to ‘let the other person in’.  The trouble with that boundary metaphor is that indeed we are more like mollusks or amoebas in sex and the experience is fundamentally that of ‘merger’.  In the physical act of orgasm we ‘lose ourselves’ and ‘become one’.  The problem then becomes ‘separation’.
With the individual with an ‘inferiority complex’ they want to remain stuck on. They can go on to be the love addict.  Alternatively the narcissist having had their ‘sexual addiction’  “fix” just wants to move on to the next ‘host’.  Half people like narcissists are like vampires and mosquitos, they are parasitic in their relationships.  They ‘attach’ and don’t let go, not gently  as ‘loyal’ people but rather with the grip of death of ‘needy’ people.  Alternativelty  they are so superficial that they just  bash about one to the next like a pig in in a fine parlour.
Historically in ‘courtship’ and ‘community’ relationships ‘grew’ and ‘climaxed’.  My gay patient said of the alcoholic gay bar “scene” “we shook dicks before we shook hands’ and there wasn’t time ‘to learn or remember names”.  The ‘alcoholic gay bar scene’ is no longer limited to the ‘gay’ population. It’s the metaphor of any ‘night club’ or ‘alcoholic mixing scene’.  Theorists in the LGBT community described the alcoholism and lack of relationship with only raw sex and exploitative encounters as being related to the shame and hidden ‘illegal’ “illicit” nature of the sexual contacts prior to legalization of homosexuality. That ‘illicit’ nature of the sexual encounter between strangers has spilt over into the general population following ‘AIDS’ which resulted in the feeling of ‘extreme risk taking’.  When two people were attracted to each other even superficially in the gay bar coupled with copious alcohol they ‘merged’.  This was thought because they were running from their own ’shamefulness’ to be with another in ‘validating’ experience. (See the classic text Velvet Rage) .  The same holds true today with all stranger sexual encounter in the ‘bar scene’ because the dangers are explicit and there’s such ‘alienation’ in the general consumer culture.
Enough on the ‘description’ of the phenomena.  What to do about it?  Of course the 70’s gave us ‘I” statements but really, the language changes but the insanity prevails. That’s the fundamental problem of political correctness.  We change the names of things so Auschwitz,  the Nazi extermination gas chamber, was called  the “Solution”.  The word ‘abortion’ is acceptable but ‘murder’ is distasteful.  Fuck is distasteful, but ‘make love’ is acceptable.  The South African Army didn’t ‘kill’ the blacks, they ‘culled them’.
Language is important but the politically correct normally are content to ‘relabel’ gas chambers because changing the sign on things is cheap and gives the ‘appearance’ of change. Indeed they commonly call this ‘real change’ when it’s usually just more of the same with a different ‘spin’.
Obviously avoiding drugs and alcohol all together is perhaps the healthiest ways adults can avoid poor judgement in relationships.  Drugs and alcohol caused the sense of ‘false’ merger’ and are commonly associated with projection and exploitation.
But projection occurs all around us.  People ‘speak’ for others. Politicians are an especially bad lot for claiming to speak for the ‘people’ when they are as often promoting their agenda.
“Do you want to make love with me” said the prince to the princess.
“Do you want a fight?” said the princess to the prince.
At the extremes of sex and aggression we can see ‘our part in’ the relationships but this is true at all levels between.  
“You want pizza tonight?"
“No, why would you think that?"
“You always want pizza on friday night."
“But that was then, this is now, I think I want Chinese tonight."
Don’t ‘ASSUME”  Assume makes an ASS out of U and Me.
More importantly don’t get ‘angry’ or ‘lustful’ or emotionally charged at the knee jerk level in relationships in general.  Go slow.
“You want pizza tonight?"
“No, why would you think that?"
“What about Chinese?"
Now all of this said, there are indeed a whole group of people who are sexually and physically different than the mainstream.  They believe that by having sex first they avoid all the nuisance of relationship. They like to start by fighting with another person physically and getting to know them that way. I remember as an adolescent making best friends with a guy I fought with.  We’d bashed each other with our fists and feet till we came to a draw and later just began to hang out as friends. We had music in common and felt that after that fight we were somehow bonded.  A lot of military folk are that way. Ex prostitutes have told me that they liked to get the ‘sex out of the way’ so they could find out if they liked a person.
I mention this because the whole issue of merger and projection then becomes part of the ‘risk taking’ ‘fast living’ ‘carpe diem’ life style of these individuals.  As a psychiatrist I don’t approve or disapprove. I have problems when people get hurt and people who are using drugs and alcohol are likely to get hurt.  Also we see young people getting taken advantage of by older more sophisticated people. When I worked in the theatre and television the old lecherous men and women were for ever literally taking advantage of the young and naive with false promises and gross manipulation.
In retrospect I think of “Hannibal the Cannibal” saying ‘You really want me to eat your brain."
And Monty Python answering, “Not really, I was just looking for my lost parrot”.
I have written about this “projection”, ‘classic defence’, so that people can be more aware of when they are doing it but most importantly when others are doing it.  You can’t counter projection by saying “You’re projecting” because it’s either something the other person is doing unconsciously and will deny or the other person is a manipulator and will deny as well. However if you are aware of this you can recognize it.
You can say, “is this really what I want.'
You can then say to yourself, “I drove my rolls royce to the 7-11. I want some peanuts.  I didn’t want to have sex right there with the rather plain girl buying nachos beside me..  I didn’t want to share my life with her and half my assets. I think that might have been her desire."
The troll said to the princess, “You want to have sex with me."
The princess responded, “Maybe not. Give me some time to get back to you.  Let me think about that.  I’ll call you. No you give me your phone number.”

Oxford Movement

I'm reading, "For Sinners Only", A.J. Russel, the Book of the Oxford Groups.  The Oxford Movement did have a beginning of sorts in Oxford University.  Later the university would back away from the notoriety of the Oxford Group but at first those at the university attended in Oxford and several Oxford dons wrote letters of support.  It was 'procedurally' criticized not unlike the modern day Vineyard movement.  It lacked ritual and organization.
However it was based on 4 standards of conduct that appealed to the orthodox.  It claimed to judge conduct against
1) Absolute Love to all
2) Absolute purity
3) Absolute unselfishness
4) Absolute honesty.
Later 12 step groups would pull away from the Oxford Groups, citing the difficulty with these 'absolutes".  Indeed the AA programs states frankly, "we are not saints'.  I'm not sure that is a clear understanding of the message of 'sin' that also was central to the Oxford groups.
As for 1) Absolute love to all, the definitive writing on Love from a Christian and philosophical basis had been C.S.Lewis's book "Four Loves".  These were Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity.  Lewis felt that the likes and loves known to humans were entertained but at the best when they were linked to love of God.  God's love, the highest love, was charity. Interestingly, the word 'charity' to me ties it to 'grace' and 'generosity' or 'abundance'.  Godly love is not niggardly.  (Is niggardly still an acceptable word, or politically incorrect, does it's roots precede or follow from the same root as nigger?  Writing I can so easily be distracted into the search of meaning of something so simple as this, but if  i do then I'll not write what I set out to write, something about the Oxford Groups, not about the opposite of absolute love - the miserly and measured 'political correctness'. )
Jesus said "Love your enemies" because clearly that was human as even animals loved their family and tribe.  The book, "Evolution of God", strongly suggested that the initial Biblical interpretations, especially the old testament, were 'tribal'.  As a Jew I only had to love Jews.  As a Communist I only had to love Communists.  As a Smith I only had to love Smiths.  It was in the New Testament that the debate over circumcision and genital mutilation of men occurred. It's the same debate ironically raging now, like a soap opera,  about genital mutilation of women.  Greeks being rational didn't want to circumcise themselves to join a new religion so the 'brand' wasn't making much progress outside of Israel when Paul said to the Jewish purist faction, that it's one thing for you old Jews to say circumcision is necessary since you were violated and abused by your parents when you were too young to remember. All that is left is Freuds fear of death and fixation on his mother with all manner of unconscious trauma issues culminating in Woody Allen's sex life, all because your mothers and fathers cut up your peniss as babies. We can't expect adult men to subject themselves to such insanity and brutality for 'love of God'.  It's barbaric.
What followed was a major rift in the church.  Judaism has always remained a 'minority' religion with focus on the methodology of the politics of minority factions.  By contrast the two other Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Islamic, could go onto 'universality'.
I feel sorry for those who are ignorant and don't read the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagadvagita.  Recently at a Buddhist shrine I was enjoying the presence of the monkeys fornicating and crapping all around it because 'monkey gods' were sacred to the people of the Buddha.  Reincarnation themes prevail in all aspects of that religion and the relationship to others is tied to the idea that the ant or the monkey might well be your grandmother or your grandchild.  It permeates the thinking and being of all aspects of the society.  We take so much for granted not knowing the differences that derive historically from the very fabric of the culture. The dualism of western mind, deriving from Aristotle, is not clear in the east where politically the 'god-king' remained theoretically long past the developmental phase of Britains 12th and 13th century Magna Carta movements.  Superstitiousness, i.e. 'luck' and 'fortune' run rampant through the east while they're present in the west but more like 'rabbit foots'.  They exist but are more extraneous.
Love of the other and love of self are intrinsically tied to an understanding of God and reality.  We are 'forced' to accept a 'division', self and thing, matter and mind, a 'dualism' which is 'useful' and 'functional' especially scientifically but may not have any true 'validity'.
All of this was considered in the 30's when the Oxford Movement began and the subsequent AA and 12 step programs were developing.  Spiritualism was at it's height.  Madame Blavatsky was all the rage. Marx and Lenin were "revolutionary' ideas.  Stalin hadn't killed 80 million and Mao Tse Tung hadn't killed 120 million.  The War to End all Wars had failed.  Television hadn't come along to 'dumb' down the world and fairlytales were something children read, not adults. Propaganda was just beginning with Goebbells genius as yet not fully developed to the CNN/Internet standards of today.  The people of the 30's who were involved religiously in community were highly intellectual.
Reading For Sinners Only, one sees the intellectual capability, of that brilliant generation that gave rise to the Oxford Movement and the 12 step movements.  This wasn't dumb functionalism, technician based thinking, this was the kind of philosophical genius that gave rise to the Age of Enlightenment and essentially the Revivalism movements through time.
What is love?  Are you being absolutely loving when you pay your taxes?  Is it loving to refuse sex with your wife or husband?  Is it absolute love to hunt and fish?  Is day care 'absolute love'?  Is lying loving? There's all manner of questions, all politically incorrect, mind you, but all philosophically and theologically valid, which derive from consideration of 'absolutes' and 'love'.
The very question of 'absolute' is itself a consideration since it's a 'scientific' word to my mind. The 'absolutes'  I know are those of chemistry, such as 'absolute temperature'.  In the arts they refer to something considered 'independent and unrelated to anything else", the ultimate basis", "perfect' and 'complete'.
Note that Absolute is thoroughly 'alien' to the moral relativism of our day.  Everything, especially to those who smoke marijuania, is 'sort of okay'.  It's been said the 'devil is in the detail' because  as long as everyone is being 'agreeable' we actually don't have to 'agree' on anything. That's the basis of the propaganda of 'political correctness' and the history of the lesson of 'give them cake'.   So long as we're zombies we aren't thinking and we can be manipulated, conned, but more importantly we can con ourselves.
So it's not surprising that the words 'absolute' and 'love' are tied together by these deep thinking men and women of the 30's who'd just witnessed WWI, the most brutal slaughter of horses and men by machines known.  The annihilation of the finest and brightest of the world's greatest nations with the utter stupidity and callous brutality of the leading lizard brains of the day caused everyone to rethink reality.  It's the same kind of process that so affected Jewish thinking after the Holocaust of WWII.  While the rest of society looked at having 'won' against the dastardly Germans and Japanese, the individual jew, had to consider the 'victory' had cost them near genocide.  The genius of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Martin Buber and others isn't independent of the times, any more than the Oxford Movement was or the 12 step movement.  Bill Wilson, co founder of AA had been a soldier and witnessed war. His alcoholism so understood by the eugenics thinking of the day which ultimately gave rise to 'genetics', was as much a product of the post traumatic stress disorder that permeated the soldiers of the day.
But absolute love to CS Lewis was 'charity'.  Charity refers to giving freely. This is at the human level.  Grace is the word we use for God's charity.  All we have and know in our relation with a higher power is 'grace'.  The 'covenant' of Judaism is the 'relationship' between God and Man.  The prophets of the Old Testament of the Bible refer to Israel as a nation deviating from God's will.  In the day, "individualism' didn't exit.  Alienation and Isolation were not the problems of our forefathers. These are 'modern' considerations post Camus, post Kaffka, post existentialism.  "Every man for himself" is a modern day phrase.  The nuclear bomb and the one button are today's issues. In the past , no man was alone.  Erick was even to the Vikings 'Erickson'.  Everyone was related, as the Natives of North America are rediscovering their tribal roots in the phrase 'all my relations'.
Jared Diamond, the brilliant anthropologist, has described well the nature of 'tribal' society as part of the 'nation' state and subsequent 'empires'.  We're at the evolutionary end and beginning of a old new age in the individualism which the word 'agape' or 'absolute love', charity and grace challenge.
Descartes studied the idea of self as did Carl Jung later.  Cogito Ergo Sum, "I think therefore I am" was the realization of Descartes who is considered to many the modern father of 'dualism'.  Thanks to his realization of the god like capacity of our 'thinking' we could today be considered as 'gods that shit'.  We may have all manner of great ideas but we are still attached to an animal like body.
Mario de Beauregaard, the brilliant neuroscientist, has written the book "Spritual Brain'.  In dualism , matter and spirit, there has been a functional reductionism for medicine to be an off shoot of veterinarianism.  Man is considered a monkey and doctors are merely one species vets.  The following is that the brain is not a mind. Mario Beauregaard with modern Pet Scans, ironically has shown that nothing could be so stupid.  Even the idea of the brain as merely a 'super computer', 'man as machine' is limited.
The question becomes then are we mirror or is the mirror us.
This kind of thinking isn't farcical but central to the failure of the present day legal system and the errors of the politics of the day distracted by the idea of Gaia, or earth god worship and the 'shit' of creation.  As C. S. Lewis would say, why look in the wall for the architect.
Today we create 'modern' 'myths' but myths are still myths.
Absolute love isn't Jerry Springer or even Oprah. It's a terrible idea that started a world wide movement that continues today .  It was a nuclear explosion of an idea generated solely by the combination of two words, "absolute' and 'love'.  Frank Buchman and the Oxford Groups, later Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob, thought about 'absolute love'.  It's hard to think about absolute anything when you're drunk or hung over.  It's hard to think about 'absolutes' today(period), because the propaganda is anything but the 'pale blue dot' of reality.  Our earth is not the centre of the universe.  So even considering relativism, if I am not the centre of the universe what is. What is the multiverse?
Over and over again we come back to "Grace" and "Charity" and "Pride" and "Humility".
2)  Absolute Unselfishness -  This is clearly the opposite of Neitze's master race. The Oxford Movement had it's first advocates on Fleet Street. It was a movement that appealed to the Wall Street of the day. It's no surprise that Oprah has with all her wealth and success developed a tribal school for black girls in Africa modelled on Oxford ideas.  Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are promoting "altruism'. The greatest American businessman of all times was  Carnegy who gave his wealth to charity.  So here I am trying to make it rich only to find that those who have become ultimately rich say the greatest joy is not in 'keeping' wealth but in 'giving it away'.  The great Canadian story of Duddy Kravitz was the sad tragedy of the man who walked over everyone to become wealthy only to find himself alone with his wealth.  Alone and wealthy is a far more horrible state perhaps than poor and alone because it's like a man who cried 'my kingdom for a horse'.  All the wealth in the world can't 'buy' happiness.  All the wealth in the world 'can't' 'buy' love' What money 'buys' is not 'absolute love'.  The message of television is 'facsimile'.  There is nothing 'absolute' about the 'mirror'.
The orabunga is a circle, a snake eating it's tail and one of the oldest representations of 'God'. The myth is that God alone and lonely divided self into known and unknown so today we really only have to ask am I the eater or the eaten.  The central law of all religions is the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Love your neighbour as yourself.  Ultimately if we are one and only divided into two theoretically, at the level of reality, then I'm stuck not really knowing whether I'm the fucked or the fucker.  Emerson , the great American philosopher, wrote "if the reds layer thinks he slays or the slain thinks he is slain , they know not well the ways I keep and turn and toss again".  Death is an idea 'individually'. I can't know my own death by witnessing the death of another. I assume my mortality but it's an inference not an 'absolute truth'.  I go to sleep similarly but don't 'know' I'll wake up.  There is so much about reality that I infer or deduce.
3) Absolute honesty - now there's the rub - as an animal I'm successful by deceit.  A hunter gatherer is not going to tell a bear that he's wanting to eat him. The hunter would best sneak up on either enemy or prey to kill or eat it.  But what of enlightenment. The world we know, the market world of wall street, the ridiculous laughable, materialist white collar gambling machine of wall street and the blue collar gambling machine of Vegas are both superstitious 'luck' based ideologies that live on 'dishonesty'.  Myths and hollywood and adult fairytales predominate.  The religion of love is a mirror to the war of fear.  Lovers versus terrorists. The hippies versus the police. The flower children versus the hard knocks.  Temperance movement versus the drunks. The prohibitionists versus the addicts.  It's all dichotomies and in dichotomy there is no 'absolute'.  Hegelian philosophy argued for the trinity of 'thesis, antithesis' and synthesis'.  Synthesis is beyond dichotomy and scienficially the 'synthesis' is the prevailing 'hypothesis' that becomes the starting point for the new thesis.
The key then is that 'absolute honesty' may be something that is highly dangerous to even consider in a society of hypocrisy where deceit is the norm, especially in a world of fashion, superficiality and political correctness. But what about 'absolute honesty' with oneself.  If I am a God that shits would it be wise to deny the shit or the God part?  This whole question of 'absolute honesty' was central to the failure of alcoholics to become and remain sober.  Those who failed were considered unable to be honest with themselves.  This issue of 'honesty with oneself' is central to the idea of the 'psychopath' who lacks a 'conscience' i.e. is incapable of self reflection or honesty'.
It's easy to parrot the words but the words are just keys to a plethora of welcome or unwelcome ideas.  Am I honest with my taxes? Am I absolutely honest with the boss ?  Am I honest with the children?
4) Absolute Purity - this is my personal bug bear.  I'm going to stop here because I have to go to work and frankly 'purity' is difficult for me. I am a sinner .  Sin is the word for human or 'imperfect'. It's been much abused by Hollywood and lost on the stupid. It's a powerfully important word that simply means that what I intend doesn't always happen as i intend it.  This is why we have 'outcome measures' and 'quality control' and 'target practice'.  If there was no sin in the world, I would think something and it would be as I thought it. I'd be God who doesn't shit or God who shits and thoroughly enjoys the shit and cleans up the shit or has a shit cleaner upper encoded into the shit.  There would be no shit possibly.  As a friend says, 'sin' is the second law of physics.  (period).  Entropy is sin at the cosmic level. Personally 'sin' is for me 'fat'.  If there was no 'sin' I'd be able to eat chocolate without getting diabetes or fat.  Sin is a sinfully good word that is unfortunately much maligned.   But at the level of 'sin' I've a problem with purity.
I feel 'impure'.  And that's where I'll pick up from at some point , that feeling of 'oldness' and 'wrongness' and 'jadedness' and 'bitterness' and 'soiled' and 'usedness'.  That's the issue of 'purity' and 'purification' was a whole process of the old religions. Coming back from Angkor Wat temple complex is saw the process of 'purification' ,the taking off of shoes, washing of feet, lots of water used in 'purification'.  The whole process of 'purification' How can I get that Madonna feeling of being 'just like a virgin' again. How can I make my boat 'new' and 'shiny'. How can I be 'fresh' like a douche advertisement or a mouthwash ad. What is this purification thing anyway. Isn't there something bodily and shit like inherent in this idea of purification.  Cleansing and renewing and such.
It's something to consider.
But those were the 4 absolutes - Absolute Love, Absolute Unselfishness, Absolute Honesty, Absolute Purity. Those were what I was to consider my conduct as a Christian against.  How do I measure up?  Am I being human or beast? Am I being a human or a machine?  Am I loving or politically correct?

Paranoia

Wikipedia defines Paranoid as a "thought proces believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality."
It's as good a definition as any.  Freud stated though that a "man who does not lose his reason over certain things can have no reason to lose" (Freud 1895).
Paranoia is therefore considered a useful developmental 'defence' or 'stage'.  Fear of alieness is self protective. Discrimination is healthy and beneficial to individuals and the species.  Immunology is essentially the biological science of the 'same' and the 'other'.
In psychoanalytic psychiatry Rycroft 1968 describes paranoia as " a functional psychosis characterized by delusions of grandeur and persecution, but without intellectual deterioration. In classic cases of paranoia, the delusions are organized into a coherent internally consistent delusional system on which the patient is prepared to act."
Paranoia is seen in several modern DSMIV-tr diagnosis.
Paranoid Disorder is a specific persecutory delusional state that is relatively fixed.  Patients will say that they believe they are being followed.  They believe people are talking about them. They believe that people are watching them.  What's significant in the grandiosity involved.  A standard question is 'why would they be watching you."  Tied into the paranoia is an inferiority complex with egomania for sure. I remember a cleaning lady who believed the RCMP had invested millions of dollars in watching her, surveillance being a very costly affair.  Addressing this she expressed a sense of wonder but wasn't rational about the obvious discrepancy about her mundane life and the belief that it warranted dozens of men in uniform following her every day.
Paranoid disorders aren't usually associated with hallucinations.  If these are present we consider the diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia instead.
In Paranoid Disorder there's a often a believable thead despite the over the top character of the concern.  A person might have a specific conspiracy theory. In one case a man believed his boss was persecuting him despite his leaving the firm a year before.  Another woman believed her ex husand was spying on her in the bathroom.  A tragic man who had been in a concentration camp believed the nazis were still watching him.
Mostly these people are highly functional and capable unless their paranoid delusional state was addressed. The son of the man who'd survived the concentration camp said his father was fine so long as no one mentioned Nazi's or the news didn't focus on Germany.  If something triggered his delusional state he was convinced the neighbours were spying otherwise he was able to go about work and care of family without much evidence of this very disturbed 'corner' or 'compartment' of his mind.
Paranoid Schizophrenia is more commonly more dispersed and often coupled with hallucinations. Whereas paranoid disorders often remain constant with often poor response to medication, paranoid schizophrenia can respond well to antipsychotics such that the patient will realize and have insight into their previous pre medication insaniety.  With paranoid disorders medications have modified the level of concern but mostly the patients have felt their ideas were true but that perhaps they'd 'reacted poorly'.  'Still it's true what I said.'
Paranoid Personality Disorders are persons who don't have frank delusions or hallucinations but persist in maintaining the idea that they are the subject of persecution.  They see the world in black and white, us against them.  They do well in oppositional parties, cults and marginal church organizations.  These institutions can give them a place to 'associate'. Any group association can generally help to modify these people.  Alone they tend to maximize their bizarre ideas.   More often than not they are loners. These people insist that Jews are controlling the world. If not the Jews it's the Conservative Government of Canada, the Democrats, or the Republcians in the States. Sometimes the identified enemy is anyone that will help maintain the person's paranoid position of one downmanship. The secondary gain in paranoid personality disorders is evidenced in the power that individuals and groups who function as paranoid can bring to their cause.  Indeed media these days is often seen as promoting paranoid personality disorders.  Once drug dealers ravaged America with marijuana smokers and jazz muscians seeking the daughters of the wealthy today it's just terrorists in general.  There's always an element of truth in paranoia and the more discrete the more alluring.
One interesting paranoid disorder is 'pathological jealousy'.  This is the situation where a person will believe everyone is out to get their mate and that their mate is out to betray them with everyone else.   Again there's a combination of inferiority complex and egomania.  There's narcissism and entitlement and often some reason for the concern.
Medications are highly beneficial with paranoid schizophrenia. The original meds for this condition were Chlorpromazine and haldol.  While these medications are still used especially in institutions newer major tranquillizers have been developed with less side effects and greater specificity for the neurochemical deficit.  Dopamine channels are thought to have been overworked, defficient or imparied and the medications restore the brain chemistry to the appropriate balance. Modern research shows that different areas of the brain are 'overfiring' and the inhibitory channels aren't working appropriately.  Untreated modern scans show that the brains of paranoid schizophrenics increasingly lose matter with late stage subjects showing enlarged ventricles and decreased frontal lobe functioning.  Early psychosis units are now the mainstay of treatment with recommendations for early intervention.
A brief psychotic episode lasts weeks to months.  Schizophrenia is definitely diagnosed when a person has a year of delusional thinking especially if this persists despite medication and therapy.
Paranoid disorder is ameliorated with medication.  The newer medications for treatment of paranoia in general are much better tolerated with little or no side effects in the low dosages which are usually most beneficial.  These medications include rispiridone,olanzepine,  seroquel (quitiapine), abilify (aripiprazole) and ziprasidone.  Sometimes patients will need just the least amount of medication whereas others need a much higher dosage. Medication is titrated against an identifiable sympton.  A person who won't go out of the house because they're sure that the devil is going to get them this day may well return to work and activities and church without the extremely persecution on any of the above medications. It's as amazing to see the restoration of function of people tragically brought down by mental illness.  Medications in this sense are like insulin and digitalis in terms of the break throughs and advances they have provided individuals.
Interestingly there is a depressive disorder which is associated with paranoia.  In the above cases paranoid disorders and paranoid schizophrenia and delusional jealousy don't respond to traditional antidepressant medications.  Paranoia as noted is neurochemically seen as related to dopamine receptors whereas depression is most associated with serotonin and noradrenaline receptors.  However in psychotic depression, the particular form of depression associated with paranoia a person can indeed have essentially two overlapping disorders. The treatment is first to treat the depression but to modify depression treatment with the combination of the medications already noted. Abilify works well in this regard but if insomnia is a problem seroquel commonly is coupled with the antidepressant medications for benefit.
Paranoid personality disorders don't respond to medications generally. If they do it's usually the lowest dose of one of the atypical antipsychotics.
I've mentioned medications first because paranoia, even more severe intransigent monosymptomatic delusional disorder where the paranoia is highly specific and highly resistant to change, can respond to medication.  Medications in these group of patients often are the first step in treatment and can often allow a person to overcome their paranoia to enter into some form of therapeutic alliance.
Sadly today given the litiginous society we live in , paranoids are often the prey of unethical lawyers.  Police often have a 'frequent flyer' list of paranoids in the community who commonly call the police for help when they experience delusions.  One of my patients, well known to the police. often wakes in the night convinced that some famous actor has raped her.  She herself is very beautiful and it was a concern initially because she falsely accused a star who indeed was in town making a movie. There was no association and no consequence, the star being a mensch of the first order despite the threat and potential damage.  Shortly thereafter it was recognised that the patient was being raped by men who were clearly not in town and often not on the continet. A classic paranoid disorder medication had a limitted benefit but if she was under stress for any other reason this delusion might resurface despite the medication.  I was thankful that my treatment years back reduced her phone calls to the police from weekly to only a couple of times a year.  As a truly lovely and sophisticated lady she was deeply perplexed by these decreasing episodes and definitely remorseful about her causing trouble.  As a result she was highly compliant with medication and had a very good result last I heard.
Psychotherapies have not been particularly beneficial for paranoid disorders.  I've treated a few with one on one psychoanalytic therapy or cognitive behaviour therapy with the principle concern being, not allowing one to get caught up in the person's delusional system.  Normally the junior doctors do just this.  With paranoids you're the greatest friend as long as you thoroughly agree with them that the Conservative Party of Canada or the CIA or Catholics are malevolent and likely to be out to get this poor persecuted individual.  However once you challenge this premise you are rejected and seen to be part of the conspiracy and in fact more confirm the diagnosis.  Given this many psychopharmacologists limit therapy to focus on the brain disease with far greater benefit than inexperienced therapists who think that by exploring the person's past they will 'solve' the paranoia.  There is often 'trauma' but just addressing the trauma doesn't necessarily resolve paranoid disorders as it might resolve a ptsd or depressive disorder.  R.D. Laing who worked with schizophrenia wrote a book called 'knots'.  It was mostly poetry but the metaphor as it applied to paranoia and for him paranoid schizophrenia is that the knot is very good and very tight.
There is an attempt today with dialectic therapy, a new form of psychotherapy based broadly on the philosophical ideas of Marxism and showing some benefit in the treatment of paranoia. I confess I find this not a bit ironic since Marxism - Lennonism has been seen to be one of the greatest paranoid structures wholly reliant on the evil 'capitalist' . McCarthyism was a similar competing paranoid system.
Group therapy has been beneficial but only in the traditional low level 'supportive' way.  There is alot of 'rage hidden in the paranoia and commonly it is a a person with a quiet form of paranoid disorder that one day goes 'postal'.
My own exposure to an excessive amount of paranoid spectrum disorders is because I work in addictions.  All of the chemical addictions increase paranoid tendencies. The alcoholics are forever persecuted by usually the wife, boyfriend, government or boss or parents.  "If you were married to my wife, you'd drink like me."  There's tremendous self pity and grandiosity as every alcoholic is described as a 'legend in their mind', their depression being the greatest, their suffering monumental.  Alcoholism results in regression of defensive and coping mechanisms to an adolesecent stage with clear cut splitting of 'good guys - those who let me drink, and 'bad guys; , those who interfere with my drinking. All the pathological jealousy I've seen has been associated with alcoholism.  This might well explain the success of soap operas given the plops so often reflect the behaviour of alcoholics.  This indeed made Two and a Half Men a tremendous parody until Charlie Sheen's had his Purple Rose of Cairo meltdown.
Drug abuse is an even more associated with paranoia.  Most often this is directed at authority and specifically the police. A quote attributed to Keith Richards was "I don't have a drug problem, I have a police problem".  So again there's those who are for me and those who are agin me the early adolescent dilemna when the child is first leaving home, rejected parents for friends and struggling to resolve in group and out group association.  Marijuana smokers are especially prone to conspiracy theories.  Ask any marijuana smoker about 9-11 and it's sure to be an adventure in some mix of fantasy and reality.
Cocaine seems more specifically paranoia associated with money.  The 'harder' the drug the more of the frontal lobe or humanity of an indivdual is lost. Cocaine addiction and psychopathy go hand in hand with sex and  money the 'pac man' pursuit of the addict.
In all these cases treating the addiction is the answer.  For most people removing the substance for a year or two allows the persons brain to restore especially if there is a process of mental "decontamination' removing them from the cult paranoid thinking that helps to perpetuate addiction. 12 step communities and religious and ethnic communities and families can counteract the paranoid gang like thinking that goes hand in had with the addiciton.  Dr. Rabbi Twerki's book Addictive Thinking is a marvellous treatise on the negative effects of addiction on thought.  Insight therapies have traditionally proved very unsuccessful with addicts and the development of group therapy and motivational therapy and 12 step faciltation therapies often coupled with spiritual psychiatry approaches is now considered the treatment of choice psychotherapeutically.
Given that addictions are anxiety avoidance techniques and addicts collectively have by nature an underlying anxiety disorder most of the insight therapies and essentially therapies that result in eureka and dynamic realization and change as a consequence of new learning don't work with addicts because change causes anxiety and promotes relapse.  Supportive therapies usually are beneficail in the first three months of therapy when a patient abstinent is detoxing. Anxiety provoking therapies, psychoanalytic, relationship etc are used carefully because of the learning impairment implicit with addiction.  Addicts have rarely been able to grasp quantum changes but can learn more of the same old same old in a clever way.  Historically they were once using therapists consciously or unconsciously like psychopaths do, to improve their game with no real intention of changing.  Therapists who aren't trained in addiction more commonly are 'enablers' and on the street are called the 'addict's bitch'.   Meanwhile the therapist is either feeling warm and fuzzy or thinking of how much money they are making.
Antipsychotic medications are beneficial in the first year of treatment of addicts.
Commonly therapeutically I may agree in part but not in whole with a paranoid so that I don't so easily become caught in their black and white reality.  For example I might say 'The CIA can be concerning" in response to the patient telling me he believes the CIA have planted a chip in his tooth. I certainly wouldn't disagree with him without proof.  I watch NCIS and Insecurity on television so I know what spy agencies are capable. I will focus my attention however on 'why you'.  And what can you do to effectively not be overwhelmed by this fear.
Finally I like to remember, especially when I have my own paranoid moments, that Jesus said, "Do not be afraid."  My minister psychiatrist friend and colleague likes to say, "That wasn't a suggestion. That's a command."

Eclectic Therapy -2) Hypnotherapy

I am indeed an "Eclectic Therapist' simply because of all the training and experience in a variety of psychotherapies I've formally and informally learned and applied.  Maybe if I was ever really a great therapist I'd not have to continue learning as I've had  all these years. The fact is I'm fascinated by the human mind and behaviour and the more I actually learn the more I realize how little I actually know.
Having already learned "Counselling" and "Supportive Psychotherapy"  I next learned Hypnotherapy.  I was working as a country general practitioner in southern Manitoba at the time.  I was doing deliveries every couple of weeks and doing minor surgery. I had already learned how to anesthetize every part of the body with a long needle.  The one time I was forced by an emergency to do a high forceps delivery I was very thankful for this knowledge. Otherwise I'd have had to do a caesarian section with spinal block. I hadn't done a spinal block myself though witnessed enough. I'd done countless spinal taps and the block isn't that much more technically difficult, just potentially more lethal.  Anesthetists aren't well appreciated by the public but they are the unsung heros of surgery and obstetrics.  I have thanked my lucky stars many times when I've had the benefit of an anesthetist present.
Despite my basic surgical training and training in intensive care medicine I was  frankly often alone and scared in the backwoods. If I had a competent nurse things were much better. I have the greatest respect and love for some of the old battle axes that helped me in those early years.  In contrast I've had nurses green or incompetent nurses screaming at the sight of blood or fainting in the emergency room. I even had to ask one nurse to leave in a delivery because her fear of childbirth was getting the patient all worked up. When she and her 'textbook knowledge' left this lovely country woman delivered easily a rather big boy.
It was in this context that I learned about hyposis as a therapy for doing medical and dental procedures. I thought that as I was often doing home visits and working in places without an anaesthetist including the country hospital where I was principally located, this 'skill' could be very beneficial.  The Amercan Society of Hypnosis had a 2 level training program taking a matters of weeks to obtain. I read extensively and took the time off work to attend the hands on training workshop and attend the examinations. When I finally got my certification I was amused that I could use the acronym CASH after my name as I truly had obtained a Certificate of the American Society of Hypnosis.  Unfortunately hypnosis never made me any money but it certainly was an eye opener.
ndeed I think all my colleagues should be required to observe surgery done under hypnosis.  It's one thing to know that 90% of pain is processed mentally and another thing to witness something so revolutionary as to see a person being cut open without even local anesthesia.  The fact is I went on to do it when I got back to my practice, electively.  I cut out moles and warts using hypnosis and had a marvellous old time for a while until I found that just using xylocaine 1% took a tenth of the time and was more certain.  It had cost me roughly $10,000 in training and loss of income and then this further experience to have a skill which really was never compensated by the health care system despite it's proven benefit. Nonetheless it sure was fun. Talk about feeling like a wizard.  Gandolf Doctor Hay!
I'd become a certified yogi too with years of formal training, papers from a highly recognised International and American Institution, and even later a trip to India where I studied advanced meditation.  I've even a childhood friend Kirk who I thought at one time had overdosed on yoga and definitely must be a saint. Despite the scientific double blind evidence of the benefits of meditation therapy (see Herbert Benson MD and Relaxation Therapy) and today (Mindfulness Therapy) that too was never compensated or paid for. Another $20,000 to $30,000 training and experience which was never 'supported' by the institutions despite the overwhelming 'evidence' scientifically and otherwise of healing benefit.
I mention this because I can't get over patients expecting doctors to 'learn' alternative therapies and keep up with latest developments in medicine when to do so we have to put out the time and money ourselves and very little except the narrowest areas of study are supported financially.  The cost of all the alternative practitioners even the phd's is minute compared to the expenses we accept to be healers in the modern sense. The richest, most powerful and hence most influential physicians do their basic training and then the minimal level of training to keep up with their 'niche'.  Relatively, I made the most money I ever made as a country gp and lost all my income to do advanced specialist training and never have been compensated for the training or the skills. Indeed I've not even been able to use a third to a half of my most advanced training because there is no support network for the training 25 years later despite the evidence supporting those therapies.  I trained as a psychiatrist with the promise of having hospital beds for the elective admission of patients for therapeutic treatments.  Even when I was a member of a hospital all I was ever able to admit were emergency suicidal or psychotic patietns because of lack of resources.  I'm not alone. Many of my surgical colleagues are trained in advanced surgical approaches but can't get operating room time becasue of the politics of hospitals and most importantly so much of what is proven scientifically and advanced is simply not funded.
Many of my finest colleagues have left the so called 'mainstream' and moved into private areas, some have even left medicine altogether ,to go completely private.  Most of those I knew who went to the US didn't go for money alone but rather they went so they could do procedures which required MRI's.  Canadians simplyt don't know that while Canada was at the height of world medicine 20 years ago Canadians limitted to the public care system are often getting only third world medicine.  Europeans and sometimes even Cubans are appalled by how limited our health care system is. The amount of administration and regulation that has arisen in the last 20 years is eating away all of what was once 'medical' care and now has become 'health' care.  Millions of dollars in 'advertising' are called 'health care' funding and people don't realize that. .
But I was talking about Hypnotherapy.Ooops!
Milton Erickson, MD is the psychiatrist who is the father of hypnotherapy.  He was a midwest American. He said Freud was wrong about the ID.  Jung had said Freud was afraid of the  Id and the 'irrational' as well.  It might have had something to do with Freud's  relationship his wife's sister and the experience of genital mutilation as a child.  Maybe it was just the residual effects of his cocaine abuse.  That said, Freud is still to my mind, perhaps the world's greatest psychotherapist and certainly to psychiatry what Einstein was to Physics.  He was a true adventurer.  I accept that I stand on the shoulders of those who went before and with the knowledge they gave us we can advance but we'd not be where we are were it not for them.  I sail and I see this in navigation and maps without having to listen to the petty political criticism of Columbus mistaking North America for India. If Columbus were a psychologist, boy would he be pilloried today for that. Freud unfortunately went astray when politically he got into the business of empire building.  That said, I save 'reverence' for God and tend to irreverence with myself and my  fellows, a fault that no end of therapy has been unable to eradicate. I can't help but think that Jung and Erickson would have enjoyed Monty Python and Seinfeld more than Freud despite Freud's intellectual support of laughter.  Now Anna Freud on the other hand would have loved even George Castansa and the Canadian Air Farce.
Milton Erickson said that it was the 'unconscious processes' that caused us to 'automatically' protect ourselves when we fell.  We didn't think about putting up our arms to 'block a blow'.  Milton Erickson believed in the 'child' within and felt that we had to 'free' the natural healing process of the human.  Jay Haley wrote the classic "Uncommon Therapy' describing best the work with Milton Erickson.  Though I was fortunate to know and train with Jay Haley and his wife Bianca Jenks I missed meeting Milton Erickson by a year or two when I began training in hypnosis and later in Structural and Strategic Family Therapy and Strategic Therapies in general. I even studied with the original Palo Alto group whose research gave rise to the mind body therapies that produced EMDR for instance.  "Mind Body Therapy" and other "Psychosomatic' therapies were foundational to hypnotherapy.
"Frogs into Princes' by Grinder and Bandler is a marvellous text teaching the basics of inducing a trance. These students of Milton Erickson went on to develop Neurolinguistic Programming which makes alot of Erickson's work more accessible to the lay public.   Milton Erickson was famous for saying everyone could be hypnotised. What he didn't say is that some took seconds to minutes while others could take hours to days.
I feel terribly guilty for not remembering the name of my original hypnosis teacher. He was the most extraordinary doctor whose job it was to hypnotize people for major elective surgery who were allergic to anethesia.  He told amazing stories about hypnotizing people for heart surgery and lung surgery.  Despite having learned and done extensive work using local anesthesia I was still impressed when I met a Russian doctor who'd removed a lung in the Urals because he had no anesthesetist.  This doctor who taught me hypnosis and wrote a classic book about his work   trumped us all.  I witnessed him hypnotise people stick them with needles and their showing no physical or psychological changes.   Having learned hypnosis from him I too went home and cut people under hypnosis was amazed.
Thanks to hypnosis and yoga I even learned the party trick of slowing my heart to where medical students couldn't feel it beating.  Those were halcyon days for learning about the mind and body in the early years of training before learning that the 'powers that be' were simply not interested in anything that was not 'orthodox'. Indeed the medical legal crisis was such that doctors who tried anything new were at the greatest risk for being punished royally. Adding lawyers and administrators to the healing equation guarateed mediocrity would reign.  That said, there have been major gains for all in the development of ethical research policies and advances again can be made but usually only by committee and with large financial funding.  It didn't surprise me to hear of a recent potential cure of cancer going unnoticed in Alberta because there was no likely profit from the development.  Business medicine reigns and with it comes pros and cons.
There are many ways to induce a trance. Later I'd even use amytal to do amytal interviews, injecting what has been called 'truth serum' into the veins of patients and then doing interviews and hypnotherapy with them. Most people who belittle pharmacology do so because they haven't learned it themselves, can't do it and don't have a license to do it.  It's called "cutting the heads off others to make yourself taller."  The "holistic' doctors often would be left with nothing to say if all their criticism of traditional medicine was removed from their repetoire.  And here I'm doing the same.
So hypnosis doesn't require pharmacology.  Hypnosis is done by joining with a person at their unconscious level using ritual and repetition.  It's really easy with children.  I ask a person to stare at something and this wil cause their eyes to tire and their eye lids to droop.  It's classic.  So I begin by using that 'tarot talk' , 'hypnotherapy' ' "mesmer voice' low and slow saying "I am observing you breathing, you are breathing in and out, your eye lids are fluttering and growing tired, you are breathing more slowly now, your eyes are drooping and as I count backwards from 10 to 1 your breathing will grow slower your eyes more tired and you will enter deeper and deeper into a relaxing calming pleasant thoroughly satisfied trance like state where you will be able to hear my voice and respond to my requests or commands but you may not remember anything that we say and do thereafter, I'm beginning now as I observe you breathing in and out, in and out, your eyes more and more tired, 10, 9, you are going deeper and deeper into that semiconscious realm, 8, deeper down deeper into the trance, where you will hear me and we will be able to communicate but your body will be so relaxed that you won't be able to move without my voice helping you 7, deeper now, your breathing in and......out, ....in and out....6, you are getting sleepy but not like sleep going into that twilight state, where you can hear me and respond to me but only as I ask you to where you won't remember what we have said because we will be so tired, 6 5 4 3 2 1....you are hypnotised now and your eyes are closed but your are able to hear me, can you hear me ....etc.

This 'induction of trance' is done in a whole variety of ways. It's used in marketting and advertising and commonly most adults aren't even aware when they are being manipulated and hypnotised.  Everyone should read 1984 and the Animal Farm.  These are dangerous times.  Especially with corporations like Abercrombie and Fitch marketting padded bikinis bras to baby girls.
That said any party animal should be able to hypnotise his friends to be clowns at a party.  What separates the professionals from the amateurs is if the patient lets you cut them open with a knife or tells you in horrifying detail about some memory that is frankly unbecoming and surprising.
The trouble with hypnotherapy is that alot of what one can learn using techniques such as reqression of a patient back through the ages is that for the benefit to be gained this 'unconscious' material must be 'learned' in the conscious.
Freud was probably one of the world's greatest hypnotists and hypnotherapists. His development of the technique of 'free association' and use of a couch was indeed a means of establishing a' partial trance' that faciltated the development of 'insight'.
Many is the time that I learned things about paitent's pasts in hypnotherapy but it did no good for the patient until they were subsequently 'ready' to 'learn' and 'accept' the material.
As every psychoanalyst and every psychoanalytic psychotherapist knows it's all albout the 'timing'.  Of course I know I want to go back in the womb and I want to be on another planet but telling me this is of little value and importance than if you tell me at exactly the right time I need to hear it.
Zen teachers call that the 'aha' moment and frankly amateurs are 'impatient'. I was lucky to have surgical training prior to psychotherapy training because I'd already learned to wait for an abscess to be ripe before cutting it or squeezing it.
Hypnotherapy is also all about association.  Being a poet before  learned hypnotherapy I found it easy to use allegory and metaphors in my work with patients. This allowed me to bring patients to get around 'blocks' without having to address them directly.  A famous Erickson metaphor was when he talked to a woman about growing tomatoes and her fear of sex left her. He never mentioned sex but he did talk about stroking ripe red tomatoes and the tall green stalk.
I don't think I could do hypnotherapy in another culture or as a second language.  Maybe if I was Joseph Conrad I could do hypnotherapy with English speaking people but despite my little knowledge of spanish and french I simply can't imagine doing hypnotherapy outside of my primary language of English and my culture.. I certainly couldn't see myself doing it with a translator. I've not tried but it seems foreign.
I did hypnotherapy extensively for anxiety disorders and mood disorders. Ironically people would want me to do it for quitting smoking and I'd not see it as that effective in that regard. But then in addiction psychaitry I wasn't doing forrmal hypnosis and hypnotherapy.
What I found was that I had to have a therapeutic setting for doing psychoanayltic psychotherapy and especially hypnotherapy.  It's been over a decade since I've had a practice in which I can guarantee that my sessions won't be interrupted by an emergency or in which I can guarantee silence in the room. Indeed most male psychiatrists and female psychiatrists as part of the organized destruction of the therapeutic process hardly feel safe with their door closed. Most doctors would like a lawyer in their office for all patients. And most doctors simply won't discuss sex or ask about sexual matters because of the risk of false accusation, or as is more often the case down right 'extortion'.
More pateints also have a 'secondary gain' issue when they see the doctor in a public setting. Their insurance company needs a report and often my role is 'illness recorder'.  In the mental health teams the psychiatrist is often told they're only there to prescribe and indeed if a psychiatrist does anything more than prescribe he or she will make less money.  I am paid most for recording illness and I can face severe penalties if I 'confront' a patient.  Indeed whereas 'confronting' illness was what we were trained to do in medicine, telling a person they have cancer, I found increasingly I was told that patients shouldn't be told anything they don't want to hear or they can 'sue' you.  We used to mock 'feelgood' medicine likening the valium prescriber and hand holding counsellor to the pusher and masseuse.  Now here we are terribly afraid of saying anything that might upset a patient for fear they might complain. Family physicians actually sometimes refer patients to me rather than tell them an unsavoury diagnosis for fear of retaliation.
I heard one doctor afraid of telling his patient he had cancer because he was afraid this very 'litiginous' patient would blame them.  The stress that doctors work under just going to work and making diagnosis is such that many colleagues have taken to calling everything 'bipolar II" because it's a diagnosis which actually has no clear specificity and if anyone doubts it the doctor can say its because the patient 'rapidly cycled'.  Epidemiologically there's been epidemics of 'bipolar II " diagnosis breaking out everywhere without the World Health Organization even investigating it. It's terribly infectious to say the least.  The most cowardly of doctors and lowest of doctors flee the frontlines of patient contact and hide in administrative office or worse police doctors acting out their own unresolved 'identification with the aggressors'.
The only treatment I've read for Bipolar II is pharmacalogical.
A pharmacalogical psychiatrist can see 6 to 10 patients in an hour billing for visits every 5 to 10 minutes whereas a hypnotherapist takes usually an hour and a half.  The provincial plans pay at most for 50 minutes of therapy wiht any one patient but will pay ad infinitum for 5 minute visits weekly ad infinitum. The richest most relaxed and satisfied of pscyhiatrists are the pharmacological psychiatrists.  Their frequent trips to Hawaii  providing by drug companies revive them.
Psychotherapists don't make anyone any money and the payment for psychotherapy is the least that a doctor can receive despite the fact that psychoanylitic pscyhotherapy and hypnotherapies and couple and family therapies are the most intensive of work.
So I don't do much hypnotherapy.  As I've got older I've learned that I'm stupider than alot of my colleagues. Rather than criticize them for doing those things that are remunerated I've come to realize that the 'market system' repays those things that people want.  I get great satisfaction personally from alot of the successes that I've had as a result of my training and the exdellent teachers I've had. I use the lessons of  hypnotherapy in my day to day language and in the way I talk to patients and do therapy itself.
One of my favourite hypnotherapy techniques is to 'seed' conversations and by 'story telling'.  I talk about 'irrelevant' matters and 'seed' this material with whatever it is I'm 'selling " the patient.  So I may talk about my dog and comment on how the young are constantly exercising. It's no surprise that all my obese patients have heard these stories but none of my athletic patients would hear about my dogs constant exercise.  I tell a story about a patient who recoverd from cancer giving up smoking and indirectly I'm telling my patient who I've already told to stop smoking because of her cancer, to stop smoking in another way.  I never do 'nocebos'. I never undermine a person's work on their wellness or suggest they can't.
I've dozens of students in my practice whose grades have gone any where from failing to passing or from c's to A's and I take that as evidence of the effectiveness of therapy.  Naturally I have all manner of psychiatric disorders improve or get better but take even more pleasure in seein my patients with somatic illnesses and addictions get better because these have more obvious 'markers' for the success of the interventions I'm using.  Some of my patients are just living a lot longer than their doctors predicted and I like that too. I actually take great pleasure in my patients getting better and leaving practice where I had a locally famous pharmacological psychiatrist say his patients never got better and always had to see him. He didn't see any irony in this because frankly he's a fairly stupid rich thug and gives pharmacalogical psychiatry a bad name by his barbarianism.
These days I enjoy working with addicts and take every success to heart because the life expectance of a downtown eastside addict is maybe 30 years of age or so.  I love seeing alcoholics and addicts achieve sobriety or needle users get off needles.
Alot of my work with somatic illness is to get patients otherwise dying to adhere to their medical regimen. I work with some of the finest endocrinologists, cardiologists, neurologists, gastorenterologists and internists who every once in a while phone me and tell me that they realize that their patient is alive and following medical regimen since seeing me and that before that they didn't think they were going to live out the year. I am blessed to work with some of the finest of family physicians as well and so often together with a motley team of community resources manage the most difficult of patients watching them go from the dregs of life to whatever passes for normal living.
I had alot of fun working with a pediatric endocrinologist getting teen agers to accept their diabetes and take their insulin. She was great to work with and together we had tremendous succes with this really tough crowd.  Overdoses and diabetic catastrophes literally stopped the year we worked together.
Trauma interests me now. When I worked with the military and police what  I learned in hypnotherapy helped me walk people through the trauma that had given rise to often chronic ptsd.  It's one thing to remember but remembering can re traumatize. So how one does this is really tricky and I enjoyed honing my skills with these amazing heros of our society.  I loved having them tell me their nightmares were gone but mostly I had a great deal of fun working with a military captain and his secretary who truly loved the vets who had been in the front lines. Often these were the ones who were most stoic and least likely to talk about their experinces. This beautiful captain doctor would send these amazing men to me and over time they'd tell me stories that I was truly priviledged to hear, often stories that had never been told.  Not only would Veteran Affairs be able to help these individuals then but also we could get psychologists trained specifically in the treatment of ptds to help these folk regain their lost lives.
Oh well, that's about all I'm going to say about hypnotherapy.  I did regress a guy in hypnotherapy once by saying "I want you to go back to when you were happy' and he told me he was surrounded by blue and felt warm and there was this loud comforting drum beating.  He was back in the womb.  He had chronic depression and never had a happy day in his life as far as I could see so my task went from restoring a sick man to health to teaching a blind man to see. All the failed therapies he'd had hadn't taken into acount that he simply had nothing to build on.  Hypnotherapy certainly helped him.  His telling me he actually felt what he understood to be happy one day, really did make my day.