I don't trust people who spend too much time in therapy. I just don't. I have tried therapy myself, so I have a little bit of experience. I also have walked away from it, because it becomes a weekly chat session with a laundry list of problems that remain without resolution.
Which is why, years ago, I developed the shallow psychology approach to life. First, I realized that the people I knew who were heavily into therapy were not getting better. That is, week after week they spent talking talking talking and week in and week out, they remained depressed, distant or otherwise unhealthy in their own eyes.
In reality, we are all unhealthy, either in our own eyes, or those of the objective society. We are. We are fat, lazy, racist, stupid, intolerant and the list continues. We lie to ourselves, our friends, our lovers and some of us lie to our dogs. It is what many of us do, oh I am sure there are plenty of self realized people who are just peachy, but I am well over 27 years old and I have yet to meet one.
So, how does shallow psychology work? First, you have to know that you can not go back in history, your own, or the larger history of the world. If we could go back, Hitler would be dead by age 5 and that mean pedophile who lived across the street would not have been able to get cheap thrills by undressing young boys and playing with their butts.
But alas, we can not go back. Now, therapy loves to pretend like you can. Lay down, let's talk about that mean old man, the mom who did not listen, the record that keeps playing in your head. On and on. No, you can not go back and fix the damage done by any number of bad experiences. We can not go back and say "I do not" at the wedding, we can not go back and remind people of our intrinsic value, we can not go back for anything.
What shallow psychology is based on is that knowledge, since we can not go back and repair anything, the best we can do is move forward with the knowledge that we can not go back and repair anything. If you keep making the same mistakes, stop making them. If you keep trusting the wrong people, stop it. If you keep doing the same drugs that are damaging your life and your future, stop it. Oh, I know, we have been trained that things are just not that easy, we can not stop our various addictions just by saying we are stopping. We can not change terrible relationship patterns just by acknowledging that we have participated in these sorts of relationships. Why? Why is the answer always years of therapy? Why is the answer always more complicated than the problem?
That all said, the real basis of shallow psychology is the need to move on. The need to stop focusing on the negative, in fact the best way to over come obstacles is to view them as something we have dealt with, learned from and moved on from.
All THAT said, the key to shallow psychologies success is to find the positive in any situation and focus on that, instead of the pain and damage we tend to focus on. Bad things happen to everyone and everyone has a definition of what a bad thing is. Some people a bad thing is not having money in your account, or watching as your car is stolen, or your wife cheats with the mail man. I don't really think any of those things are bad, but you might. The key is to see them and focus on something good about them. Take the wife having an affair with the mail man. The good thing? You probably get your mail delivered on time. Oh sure, you could focus on betrayal and that sort of pain, and you could get a divorce, or cry or get drunk, but you could also see these sorts of life experiences as something positive, rather than negative.
That is the key, there is ALWAYS something positive to focus on. Always. You ust have to train yourself to find it.
A few years ago my ailing mother had a stroke and was in the hospital dying. I had been caring for her for a few years, I had watched her brain get lost to dementia and how she could not recover from breast cancer. First, those years could have been overwhelmingly sad, but for me, they were the opposite. Near the end of my mothers life, I got to spend hours upon hours in her company. I got to visit and find new ways to love and respect her. I did not focus on her loss of memory. I focused on how lucky I was to be in a position to visit, share meals, share stories and just be around her. When she had the stroke, I could have viewed it as a terrible moment. Instead, I knew that she was suffering, that her life was never going to be free again. While the stroke would end up killing her, I also knew that my mother was no longer the woman I knew, and I knew she was not happy in the way her body and brain were failing her. The stroke was a period at the end of a sentence. She died days after the stroke and it was not a bad day, it was a day I knew had been approaching. The positive view was I was given years of time to spend with her and the stroke was a divine way of bringing it all to an end.
Of course, I could have been sad and depressed every day, but what would that have brought?
The same is true in almost any situation in life. It's not just a door opens when another closes, because that is just not true, but when a door closes, it does allow you the chance to look for other doors.
Shallow psychology has works for years for me. I do not spend time with therapists, I do not watch Oprah in search of enlightenment. Just find a positive aspect in any situation and focus on that.
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