From Chapter 2 of
"Don’t Try This at Home-The Silent Epidemic of Attachment Disorder How I accidentally regressed myself back to infancy and healed it all" at AttachmentDisorderHealing.com/book/
Last week my second therapist Dr. Rita was telling me to “heal yourself” to where I was reduced to singing Verdi arias about being doomed to live alone in a cave forever. So I just felt worse.
Yet Rita continued drumming in the isolation message. “You don’t need Dan,” she scoffed about the rebound guy. “You don’t need anyone else. What you need is, to stop trying to heal the child who’s sick, with some guy’s d–k. Just heal yourself.”
No, I may have New York potty mouth, but that did not come from me. Yes, you did see that in this polite book on brain science, because that, verbatim, was the instruction from a therapist, at my great personal financial and emotional expense.
That is a quote directly from this refined, soft-spoken, highly educated lady, right in the middle of her technical shrink-speak in my 2008 notebook – and I doubt she coined the rhyme. It must be standard trade jargon in some PhD circles.
Note the irrational but seamless segue asserting that only total isolation can work. Going to other people, anyone at all, is linked to the disgust and mortification of “going to some guy’s d—k.”
I’d never heard of different ways to “go to other people” back then, but what about Dr. Rita? Had she never heard of a middle ground somewhere between an isolation cell, and a “d—k?” Say, go to a pastor, a divorce seminar, a women’s group, or a girlfriend?
Or maybe, gasp, go to your therapist for emotional support? I sure never wouldda thunk of that at the time! By then, that would have sounded to me like a nice outing to visit Torquemada. “Why do they call him Torquemada?” asks Mel Brooks. “Because you can’t torq him outta anything!” [FN1]
While it did turn out to be true that neither sex nor romance can heal childhood emotional pain, can it be done by lying alone on a sheet covered in applesauce? (Oct. 11 blog)
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