There is a very big problem with all our attempts to create effective psychological therapies and this problem comes about because of the way in which we are entirely incapable of differentiating between ‘what our culture says is true’, and ‘what actually is true’ (and these are always going to be two totally different things. We have all these ideas regarding how ‘things should be’, and our notion of psychological therapy is that process where we compel ourselves to accord with these ideas, to conform successfully to them! This isn’t therapy, though – this is aggression…

 

 

Basically – and not to put too fine a point on it – we have confused how our culture says we should be with actual genuine mental health and so this naturally serves to compound our difficulties rather than resolving them. We’re in such a great hurry to ‘do something about it’ that we never stop to ask ourselves if we really know what we’re doing; we’re so convinced that we know how things should be that we jump straight into Controlling Mode, without ever giving the matter a second thought. We launch straight into Fixing Mode, and we never spend any time at all on reflecting on whether there is any wisdom in this. As far as we are concerned, we know exactly what the problem is and so as a result all of our efforts go into trying to manage that problem and bring it under some kind of control. We aim to bring the relevant variables back to their normative values, in other words. This is inherent in that frequently used word recovery – ‘recovery’ meaning to go back to the way things previously were.

 

 

This is what Fixing Mode is all about – it’s all about ‘making things go back to the way they were before’. Fixing Mode means therefore that the experience of being mentally unwell only exists to be corrected – it has no value in, or of, itself. Cultural values become particularly relevant in this attitude because we – which is to say, the Global Mega-Culture – don’t see that there is any sort of good to be had out of pain and suffering; our aim is that – ideally – we should have as much happiness as possible and as little sorrow and pain (the implication here being of course that there is no value in hardship, no value in sorrow and pain). Such states of mind – we believe – exist only to be medicalized out of existence, just as Ivan Illich says. They are construed to be medical problems. This is the modern view and it doesn’t come out of philosophy, or science, or psychological research, or anything like that – it comes out of a very particular mindset that we have been sold, a mindset which says that we have an absolute right to have all the nice things in life and – contrariwise – that we have an equally absolute right to not have any unpleasant or painful things happen to us.

 

 

This is the device that is used by consumer society to sell us all the stuff that it so wants to sell us, since when we do start looking at things in this way  (which is to say, when we start getting all precious and entitled about ourselves) then there’s no limit to the type of nonsense products we will buy – this whole ethos being all about ‘not denying ourselves’, after all. How could consumerism work otherwise? It suits the corporate machine very well that we should have these notions about ourselves and think therefore that we should have whatever it is we set our hearts on, with as little delay as possible. Self-gratification is what it’s all about – that’s what keeps the wheels of commerce spinning. The more needs we have the more products and services we will be in the market for and that is therefore exactly how we are exploited. On the one hand we don’t believe that we should deny ourselves any pleasures, any satisfactions, and on the other we believe – with equal conviction – that we shouldn’t ever have to experience anything disagreeable.

 

 

This is a good recipe for keeping the economy in high gear and the shops full of eager consumers, but – by the same token – it’s a bad recipe for our mental health. It’s a very bad recipe for mental health. What’s good for the machine is most definitely not good for us. Being obsessively concerned as we are with servicing our own needs (the ‘needs’ that the system has conditioned us to have) doesn’t benefit our mental health in the least. As far as ‘recipes for bad mental health’ go we could hardly come up with the worst one! If we think that life is all about chasing the easy / enjoyable things (whilst at the same time trying to avoid all the difficult / painful things) then what this means is that we are going to fall headfirst into a deep, dark pit, the deep dark pit of neurotic misery. We are going to fall immediately into the deep, dark pit of neurotic misery and we’re never going to emerge again until we drop this superficial, goal-orientated mindset. We’re not about to rid ourselves of this mindset anytime soon however – even when we do start to suffer from the unwanted consequences of our remarkably superficial way of life we don’t abandon our conditioned proclivity for seeking instant gratification and our disdain for anything in life that can’t be exploited.  Our so-called ‘psychological therapies’ are all about finding an easy answer via some kind of convenient gimmick or other, which is the very same attitude we have always had, only we’ve dressed it up here to look as if it is in some way ‘scientific’. Our therapeutic protocols are exercises in pain-avoidance that have been ‘fancied up’ to look like something else, something ‘healthy’, something that isn’t absurdly counterproductive. Pop spirituality is exactly the same – all we care about is bypassing all that crappy, unworthy, messy old stuff and skipping ahead to the good stuff, to the wonderful ‘spiritual’ stuff. We have no interest whatsoever in ourselves as we actually are – that’s just ‘a means to an end’.

 

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, the type of culture we live in is the type that encourages us to seek comfort and avoid difficulty. For us, mental health is when we don’t have any difficulty, when we don’t have any annoying ‘flies in the ointment’. We have this idea that the universe should allow us to just get on with whatever it is that we’re doing without anything obstructing us, without anything getting in our way. This isn’t ‘mental health’ though – this is pure fantasy! Our fantasy is that we should be allowed to keep on seeking comfort for ourselves without any nasty little glitches or gremlins appearing out of nowhere to spoil our fun. Or to put this another way, our fantasy is that we should be able to get away with distracting ourselves the whole time without anything happening to banjax this convenient setup (and bring us thereby face-to-face with whatever it is that we’re trying to distract ourselves from). We don’t ever state matters quite as broadly as this, but this is what we’re trying to achieve for ourselves all the same – we want to avoid the difficult thing (and thus obtain the pleasure that comes from this successful avoidance) and yet not ever have to deal with the painful consequences of this avoidance of ours. We want to ‘do the crime’ but at the same time we don’t want to ‘do the time’.

 

 

It doesn’t take too remarkably keen an intellect to see that this culturally celebrated fantasy of ours is about as lame as lame could be – there’s no way that we can say it out loud – so that everyone can hear – and yet take it seriously at the same time. The point is that we never do say it out loud, however. We say nothing about it at all – we just keep hyping up the same old escapist fantasy, which we grandly frame in terms of ‘achievement’ and ‘progress’ and ‘success’ and so on. Comfort (or pleasure) – we might say – is the initial result of the idea of who we are (i.e., the ‘conditioned identity’) getting what it wants, obtaining its goals, realizing its plans, etc. The fantasy – just to reiterate the point – is that the conditioned identity ought to be able to get its own way without anything (or anyone) interfering in this. This is of course the only fantasy that the ego ever has – trying to make this precious fantasy come true is its motivation in all things. This is precisely what it means to be an ego.

 

 

Just because the ego is motivated solely by the desire to make its fantasy of self-fulfilment or self-gratification come true doesn’t mean that this dream ever will be fulfilled, however. The conditioned self is itself a fantasy, which means that the world it exists in (and all the things in it) is also going to be ‘phantasmagorical rather than real’ – the idea that the fantasy of a fantasy might one day come true is somewhat far-fetched, to say the least. This is not something we should really be putting all our money on, not something we should really be putting all of our efforts into, and yet this is precisely what we are always doing. The source of our motivation – which is the ego or conditioned self – is completely disconnected from reality and so we can hardly expect anything wholesome to come about as a result of this. On the contrary, operating on the basis of Extrinsic Motivation is guaranteed to end up in disaster every time. ‘Trying to fix or improve the false self’ is guaranteed to end up in disaster every time. The curious thing about this therefore is that we as a culture see the projected fantasy situation where ‘the unreal conditioned self gets to have everything happen exactly the way it wants it to happen’ as being the state of supreme mental health, a splendid therapy-goal which we should all be aiming at…

 

 

 

 

 

Image credit – edwud.com