Talk of the Town - Archetypal advice September 16 2000
‘Should I send my daughter to a therapist?’
I know you are a severe critic of psychotherapy, but I wonder where your opinion leaves people who need help. My daughter is having some problems that are beyond my understanding. She’s not sick, but she has life questions that I simply can’t discuss with her. Some of this seems to be connected to religion. Why shouldn’t I send her to a psychotherapist or even a pastoral counselor?
It is always important to me to discern between psychology and its practical application as therapy. I have great respect for “psychologizing,” as James Hillman calls it. Depth psychology, the psychology that acknowledges the unconscious, teaches us to make an inquiry beyond the obvious into ourselves and the world at large. We don’t do this for a cure but to gain insight. That is enormously valuable and is a skill you can develop inside or outside the therapy room.
If you can find a therapist who can work with your daughter without immediately pathologizing her problems as an illness in need of cure, she may benefit from therapy. Here are some things I’d look for:
If your daughter’s concerns are spiritual, you might indeed want to look for a pastoral counselor. The advantage is that such a person will be comfortable and skilled in discussing spiritual life. The worry is that the counselor may have been educated and trained in the context of a particular religious dogma. While he may not medicalize spiritual problems, he may moralize them as sin. This can be subtle. I know several religious gay men who entered therapy with pastoral counselors who turned out, after months of odd silence on the subject, to have very backward ideas about homosexuality.
These clients did not seek therapy because they were gay, but it’s easy to understand how their vague sense of discomfort made trusting the therapists difficult. Because people tend to give therapists inordinate power, it took both men months to figure out the cause of their odd feelings and confront their therapists. I also know a heterosexual couple who wanted to negotiate an open relationship. After three months of couple’s work with a counselor affiliated with their (liberal) church, they realized the therapist had a definite but unacknowledged agenda of keeping them monogamous.
None of these clients received direct confirmation of their suspicions but had to rely on their own intuitive capacity to interpret the therapists’ stammering replies. This doesn’t just happen in pastoral work. When I was 26 and newly divorced, I saw a psychiatrist assigned me at the Medical College of Georgia clinic. I always felt dismissed and unheard by him. When he went on vacation for a few weeks, I was assigned to a wonderful intern (who has since become very famous). When my regular shrink returned I told him that I was transferring to the other doctor. The psychiatrist literally stood and began shouting at me that I had burdened him with father projections. He actually followed me down the hall, shaking my file at me, lecturing me on transference. The story does have a happy ending. Two months later I learned he was fired.
While my personal preference today is for therapists with Jungian perspectives, they are rare in Atlanta. You should, at the very least, look for a therapist with a humanistic orientation. Jungians and humanistic therapists proceed on the assumption that the psyche wants to heal itself. The best ones have extensive liberal arts educations. They do not immediately pathologize every bit of weirdness of human life, like strange religious experiences. In fact, many help clients cultivate an appreciation for their eccentricity.
My difficulty with Jungians and humanists alike is their emphasis on “wholeness.” According to this belief, the psyche’s quest is for unity and integration. My own experience tells me that the psyche just as often seeks and benefits from multiplicity. We need to give voice and expression to all parts of ourselves — not in service to some fantasy of transcendence but to enrich our lives by the experience itself. Many of us live with the fantasy that we have to “become” someone valuable, heroic. All we really need to do is enter our character and live our stories. (Narrative therapy teaches people how to view themselves as characters in a variety of possible stories.)
Ask all prospective therapists their theoretical orientation. If you hear “cognitive,” don’t bother unless your daughter is suffering a specific complaint like a phobia. Cognitive therapy’s appeal is its short-term treatment but you can learn many of its techniques from a self-help book. Sorry to say, though, many of its claims are inflated.
If the therapist says she has an “eclectic” orientation, insist on knowing more. Every person engaged in a helping profession should be able to articulate a cosmology. Do not waste your money on someone who can’t or won’t talk about her philosophy in concrete detail.
Oftentimes parents don’t recognize the severity of their children’s problems. If your daughter does turn out to have a severe problem, I urge you not to rule out psychiatry and pharmaceuticals. I know that we live in an over-medicated society and that children are especially vulnerable to being controlled with drug therapy. But the truth is that many new drugs have radically improved quality of life for patients once considered hopeless.