About a week ago, a piece in Quillette by psychologist Jordan Peterson gave an interesting account of his work with a former client.
She was smart and literate, and showed me a philosophy essay she had written on the pointlessness not only of her life but life in general. She was unable to tolerate the responsibility, by all appearances, but also could not deal with the cruelty she saw everywhere around her. She was a vegan, for example, and that was directly associated with her acute physical terror of life. She was unable even to enter the aisles of a supermarket where meat was displayed. Where others saw the cuts they were going to prepare for their family, she saw rows of dead body parts. That vision only served to confirm her belief that life was, in essence, unbearable.
Peterson describes how he and his client overcame this particular fear by first visiting a local butcher.
Together, we designed an exposure-training program to help her overcome her fear of life. We first undertook to visit a nearby butcher shop. The shop owner and I had become friendly acquaintances over the years. After I explained my client’s situation to him (with her permission), I asked if I could bring her into his store, show her the meat counter, and then—when she was ready—bring her to the back to watch as his team cut up the carcasses that were delivered through the alleyway loading dock. He quickly agreed.
The whole piece is worth reading because the Evil Queen is the client's stepmother and she had to be dealt with too.
As with the Sleeping Beauty of fairy tales, my client’s family had failed to invite the Evil Queen, the terrible aspect of nature, into their child’s life. This left her completely unprepared for life’s essential harshness—the complications of sexuality and the requirement for everything that lives to devour other lives (and to be eventually subjected to the same fate). The Evil Queen made her reappearance at puberty—in the form of my client’s stepmother, whose character apparently turned 180 degrees—as well as in her own personal inability to deal with the responsibilities of maturity and stark obligations of biological survival. Like Sleeping Beauty, as well—as that tale is multistoried and deep in the way of ancient fairy tales, which can be thousands of years old—she needed to be awakened by the forces of exploration, courage, and fortitude (often represented by the redeeming prince, but which she found within herself).
I particularly like this part of Peterson's diagnosis in the final paragraph above - her own personal inability to deal with the responsibilities of maturity and stark obligations of biological survival. That's the one which stays with me because we see it all the time.
2 comments:
Yes, that's a powerful and wise essay, and thank you for linking to it. (I used to read a lot of Quillette stuff, but it went off the boil a few years ago...)
So many people seem to think that the primary goal of life is niceness. If they can't be nice about someone or something - often when that person or thing is actively working for their destruction - they think they have failed. Conversely, when they see aspects of the world that are not nice, they are bewildered and just try to blot it out. And as pointed out, this is a debilitating form of immaturity.
Sam - I rarely read Quillette these days and probably miss more than I realise. Inevitable these days perhaps.
"So many people seem to think that the primary goal of life is niceness."
This is one thing that struck me about the hysterical opposition to Trump - people appeared to be enraged that he wasn't nice enough. Not nice to the Chinese, North Koreans, illegal immigrants, EU, climate activists and so on.
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