When Your Therapy Feels Wrong, Do This
You’re different. You’re hyper-aware of what’s going on around you, and so you react in ways that others don’t understand. Only 20% of the population is like you. I’m like you.
When I was a kid, I was put in a special class with only a few other children. No one explained why. Something similar probably happened to you, but if you are in your twenties or thirties, as are are many of my clients, you got even worse treatment. You were so “different” that they gave you drugs to make you “normal.”
People like us have always been singled out. In the deep past, we were respected as healers and visionaries. In modern times, we have been persecuted as witches as “weirdos.”
Our sensitivities and our fearless willingness to protect others makes us extremely annoying to authority figures. They put me in a special class to get me out of the way. They gave you drugs to crush your unique abilities. In my decades as a therapist, I’ve seen institutional situations where I was disgusted to find every single patient sedated. It had nothing to do with what their mental health. It had everything to do with making life easy for the staff.
Our society is organized this way, truth be told. If you’re perceptive and fearless to the point of being a threat to the powers that be, the path to persecuting you is straightforward: They “diagnose” you with a “disorder,” and they give the disorder a name. Then they arbitrarily decide that your “disorder” is negative.
On some level, especially if this happened when you were young, and even more especially if your parents agreed with the diagnosis, you let yourself agree with it, too. You fell into their idea of who you are. You think about how awful your “disorder” is. You fight it. You consume drugs to control it. You judge yourself for anything slightly “abnormal” that you perceive or know.
But wait a minute. Why all this negativity? The psychologists’ scripture, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), once listed “homosexuality” as a disorder. For generations, unimaginable suffering was forced into queer people because of it. Then, in 1973, they came to their senses and removed it. How many “disorders,” like OCD or ADHD or any of dozens of others, will be dropped from its pages in the future? I think a lot of people’s true potential is being wasted with negative diagnosis like these.
Two Wolves
You are probably reading this because you intuitively know that there is nothing “wrong” with you; you intuitively know that you are “gifted,” not “abnormal.”
Your main mission has been to identify the thoughts that are the deepest and most authentic expression of yourself. You already know that there are many different kinds of thoughts pulling you in many different directions. You have spent your whole life trying to sort them out, and you have tried to get this “right” according to the authority figures who prescribe you drugs.
This effort is reaching a high level of intensity within you. Your intuition is pulling you out of the judgement of others, out of the judgement of society, out of the whole mental construct that drives our society. This can happen at any time in life; many of my clients are Millennials who are deeply questioning their understanding of reality while they are in their twenties and thirties. I've worked with many older people who reach this crisis after faking it at being “normal” for most of their lives.
Balance Is Wisdom
It’s highly disorienting. It’s easy to become afraid and confused. Let me give you a mental exercise that can help you find your way.
Think of it like this: there is a fight going on inside of you between the “light wolf” and the “dark wolf.” Light is optimism and love, while dark is righteousness and anger. The light wolf and the dark wolf are both part of you; you need both.
But for your whole life, you and everyone around you has focused on the dark wolf. You throw drugs at the dark wolf. You police the dark wolf. You fear the dark wolf. It’s true that sometimes the dark wolf can cause dangerous behavior, and it’s important to remember that. But just trying to eliminate the dark wolf by treating it as a “disorder” makes those dangerous behaviors more likely.
By focusing so intently on the dark wolf, it get stronger. The more you fight it, the more fierce it becomes. The dark wolf feeds on negative feelings. It also feeds on your efforts to fight those feelings, or by pretending you never have those feelings. Ignoring or denying the dark wolf feeds it. We can’t deny that we have negative experiences of mind.
At the same time, But your light wolf is thrashing around in pain and confusion. It feels neglected, and it longs for expression. The attention you focus on the dark wolf has made your light wolf feel like you don’t want it. The authority figures don’t know that the light wolf is there. Authority is all about power, which is why it provokes your righteous anger. They have focused you on your dark wolf your whole life because that way you submit to their power. You submit to their definitions, and to their definition of your “disorder.”
Therapy ought to do the opposite. It ought to guide you to the light wolf. It ought to show you how to embrace your unique perceptions and use them constructively, for yourself and for others. We want to learn how to feed the light wolf. We want to focus more on the good feelings. We want to come to a place where we accept all parts of yourself while definitely wanting to live in the positive space.
In fact, the only way you will learn to truly embody your authentic self is to realise that you will never be at peace until you embody both the light wolf and the dark wolf, with the wisdom to know the limits of each, and to know how to get them to work together.
Your subconscious mind is calling out for this balanced approach. That’s why your therapy feels wrong. Your subconscious is saying, “Don’t eliminate any of me! Let’s channel these abilities!”
When Your Therapy Feels Wrong, Do This
Think about the names of “disorders” you have been “diagnosed” with.
Drop the names, and forget the notion of “disorder” and “diagnosis.”
Wonder about the powerful abilities inherent in who you are.
Acknowledge that these powerful abilities can be dangerous to you and to others.
Wonder how you might use those abilities to give yourself power instead.
Learn techniques to tell the difference between power and danger and to find your balance.
Training Wolves
The light wolf is amazing. The light wolf can benefit from the dark wolf, but only if the dark wolf feels safe. They’re pack animals, right? They need each other, and they need you. If you try to kill either of them, you are attacking yourself, and your sub-conscious mind will never cooperate with that. It will suffer for it, but it will never cooperate.
The best path forward is to train both wolves. Get to know both wolves. When you befriend them both, you can have all the power, without worrying about the danger.
Understanding this, you can enjoy all of yourself and basically wake up to who you are inside. You don’t judge yourself, because actually those judgements come from outside of you. Those outside judgements cause your anxiety. They cause you to live inauthentically, at war with one of your wolves. Once you actually allow yourself to feel how you feel, dark and light, you gain your voice with confidence.
You will once again be the person the authority figures needed to neutralize. You will be wise enough to protect yourself while you become your authentic self. Your potential is vast.
Photo by Judeus Samson on Unsplash
