The first step in personal therapy is to get the voices of your mother and father out of your head.
You didn't know it was that simple, did you?
What is the source of the deepest disconnect between individuals and their immediate environment? I propose this construct, this trope.
The debilitating influence of parental echoes are greatest when the individual is in a situation where the nostrums and precepts of their parents are not only useless, but dangerous or overtly destructive. Consider someone raised in a parochial society that feared and reviled their neighbors. Now imagine that person is forced to move across the border and live among those feared and reviled. Obviously in order to find any peace, they would have to extirpate the bias they had been raised with. Something similar to this conflict scenario tends to be behind the pain many troubled people feel. The receipes of their youth do not match the dietary requirements of their adulthood, but until they can "get the voices of their mother and father out of their head" they cannot find peace. What a painful, but simple, dilemma.
This dilemma has been known for at least a thousand years among certain groups of people. In the 11th century, the Sufis created havens for troubled individuals who could be taken away from their immediate families and allowed to rest and clear their thinking. Jesus said you have to turn away from your parents to enter the kingdom of heaven, but he didn't mean following Charles Manson or other cult leaders as parental substitutes. He meant you literally have to evolve past the lessons that your parents inculcated with their stories and admonishment. Of course, people in trouble often revert to the atavistic comfort of parental messages. People who are deeply frightened or very angry are rarely in a position to use that emotional energy to make a forward leap of understanding or personal integration. On the other hand, Gurdjieff teaches that times of emotional turmoil are good for bootstrapping yourself to a more integrated psychological level.
The challenge for therapists is to extricate a person from the family of voices in their head until they can hear their own voice calmly and clearly again, and simplify the decision process to where it resembles sensible and safe behavior again.
There is a cost to meddling with the voices in people's heads. Any psychiatric social worker, bar bouncer, help-line volunteer, AA sponsor or school guidance counselor can tell you bluntly how difficult it is to deal with someone who is not following conscious urges and persists in the unconstructive behaviors. Change is possible, but there is always a cost. Sometimes the cost is simply the extremes of a personality. Sometimes it is a life. Sometimes it is just a protracted period of discomfort that can result in a new level of awareness. These things are too complicated to predict for any given individual, but the patterns are persistant across numbers of people. If you practice the professions named above you know what I am talking about. If you have a seriously troubled family member you know what I am talking about.
I use "voices in their head" advisedly, as I am aware that often these dynamics occur without conscious auditory phenomena, and are only experienced as deeply felt emotional urges that override reason. But in the spirit of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind I will refer to the phenomena as "voices in their heads."
(Jaynes supposes that until a few thousand years ago the voices in one's head were in fact due to a disconnect between left and right brain functions, and experienced as voices of gods. When he wrote his admittedly controversial book, "consciousness" was presumed to be unitary, exhaustive and sufficient. That means that each normal person was deemed to have one consciousness, which covered all their needs for thinking and awareness. Research since the 70's has followed many different routes, not least of which propose that there are different kinds of consciousness, or that different kinds of awareness and understanding do not always reach conscious levels before they are employed, or even that there is more than one legitimate consciousness in a healthy mind. I am not promoting Jaynes whole theory.)
But back to the voices. The first and most persistant voices are the parents, most often the mother. Now, I am not elaborating a technical construct here; only offering a kind of rule of thumb to those who might be interested in the idea.
Let's say, for the moment, that I am right.
As cultural and economic stress intensifies, people revert to the most primary level of guidance, and for most people that is their father/mother voices in their heads. When does this become a problem? When the reality of the current situation is in conflict with the values of the father/ mother voices. As cultural conflict and economic stress increase throughout society, we spend more of our conscious energy trying to figure out what we believe and whom we trust, and we spend more of our unconscious energy struggling with the gods of our ancestors who are blind to the present but very alive to the deep emotional truths of our existence.
Someone like Bush benefits superficially from our atavistic turmoil. He is accepted uncritically by a group of people who want someone who looks and acts like they could be the source of the voices in their heads.
It isn't working of course. We need the therapy of order, therapy of the social macrocosm. We need to get the voices of our parents out of our heads, while keeping their memories and love well established in our hearts. Bush can't help with that. I don't know if any politician can.
The first step in therapy is getting your parent's voices out of your head. The last step is letting them back in, without losing your own ever again.
If you have found your voice, use it.
If you have lost your voice, find it.
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