The 130-year-old European and American approach to curing one's mental ills was born in the medical -- actually medicinal -- model, though it has morphed over time into the behavioral, cognitive and, lately, interoceptive models. Personally, I am pleased to see that.
But I am also experientially aware of how far the West lags behind the East when it comes to understanding and addressing the real issue. Which is NOT just "what happened and when," but what our usually very young minds elected to try to do about it.
That figures: Asian psychotherapy is over 2,600 years old. And -- though it has all too often been contaminated, corrupted and twisted out of shape for both fiduciary and political purposes -- when distilled back to its pre-Taoist and pre-Buddhist foundations, it's almost always effective for those who make it to the doorstep.
Which is a lot more than one can assert for Western psychiatry and psychotherapy. (And get to say that after not only having invested a bit over twenty years studying and practicing both.)
I've read All This Stuff and a LOT more. I've done All These Workbooks. I've done one-on-one and/or group work in most of the modalities listed in section seven of this article. I've sampled (at length) 15 different psychiatric medications.
That stuff does have its place. Because -- on occasion, at least -- the Western approach makes it possible to chill just enough to be able to get to the Eastern. (And I am grateful for that.)
It may well be that (you and) I had no other choice than to Take The Long Way Home because my mind (and yours?) was no less invested in the various forms of compensatory narcissism we call "personality disorders" one cobbles together to try to "manage" the affective memories of a hellish childhood in which one was some combination of repeatedly neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, scorned, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslit..., scapegoated..., emotionally blackmailed, used as a sex toy and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom one depended for survival in the first few years of life.
We have to at least get back to something like "baseline functionality" to begin the process of Re-Development along the same path we fell off of years or decades ago. Crass as it may sound right now, we really do have to find a way to "grow the f--k up." Because so many of us remain snagged in the "terrible twos" or the hormonal tsunami of 12 or 13. IMOC, I found myself in Dr. Tart's Consensus Trance and had to find a sure way OUT.
I had to find a series of "jungle guides" who knew the sure way. Tart was one. Others include the authors of all those books (and many more). Still others became my Masters of Meditation. And one of them continues to illuminate The Path. Because his immense body of published work from the late 1930s through early 1980s has provided (for me, anyway) the closest thing to having both Siddartha Gautama and Lao Tse on speed dial.
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