I.
Hoy me dijeron unas cosas muy interesantes sobre la famosa Reeducación, a saber:
Si los reeducadores no conocen a fondo, o no entienden bien las filosofías o teorías de las que te vienen citando meros sound bytes, y si tú llevas en serio lo que dicen y estás pensando o sabes pensar, los vas a sorprender en una serie de contradicciones.
Si en esa coyuntura te fías mas de ti mismo que de ellos, o para decirlo de otro modo, si mantienes la objectividad y el sentido crítico como debería ser, no les darás cuerda y saldrás ileso. Pero si te fías demasiado de ellos, creerás que eres tú el que no capta las cosas, o que tiene alguna deficiencia mental o emocional.
Ahí es que caerás bajo el poder de su incoherencia, y perderás tu integridad (o por lo menos una parte importante de ella). Dudarás de tus percepciones. Las expectativas y los juicios de ellos se sobrepondrán a tu inteligencia y a tu sentir. El mundo se distorsionará en tus ojos.
II.
Esta revelación es importantísima. Quien cae en la trampa que tan bien me describieron pierde sus defensas – los anticuerpos psíquicos, las percepciones, las prioridades y los valores propios, que no deberían caer en manos de otros. Pierde, como vengo diciendo, la integridad. Porque cuestionarse no es lo mismo que dudar de todas las percepciones simplemente porque son de uno. El sujeto de la duda automática acaba dudando de sí mucho y de los demás poco.
Eso es, por supuesto, un error. Pero es un error que se representa al sujeto como una nueva ética, una nueva verdad. De ahí su peligro. Porque los raciocinios aquí descritos (si llegan a ser raciocinios, tal vez fuera mejor decir simplemente senderos del pensar) llevan inexorablemente a la enfermedad. Pero el sujeto que anda esos caminos tiene ya los ojos vendados y no ve por dónde va. Otros, frenados todavía por el instinto de la entereza, no toman el camino más directo a la perdición y se sorprenden al verse llegados a su destino.
III.
Hablando de las enfermedades: como sabemos todos, para evitarlas es bueno ser fuerte por naturaleza. También es clave cuidarse, es decir, vivir de una manera que sea consecuente con el mantenimiento e idealmente, el aumento de la salud. Para ello es importante poder controlar ciertos aspectos de la vida como la alimentación, el ejercicio, el sueño y más. Esto es tan elemental que casi da pena recordarlo por escrito, pero la salud mental o del alma, ¿no merece cuidados iguales? Claro que sí, dirán las multitudes. Pero entregar la integridad a manos ajenas no es cuidar la salud mental.
IV.
En mi caso: me dijeron que dejara de creer que podía “controlar las cosas.” Lo que no entendí fue que esta directiva no se basaba en análisis alguna: era un sound byte sin contexto. Por lo tanto dejé de controlar lo único que creía poder controlar: ciertos aspectos, principalmente cotidianos, de mi propia vida. O sea: algo que no sólo era apropiado, sino necesario controlar.
Vaya ironía. La sencillez del error es tremenda. Pero complicados fueron los senderos que llevaron a él (por su absoluta carencia de profundidad, decirles complejos sería otorgarles demasiada honra).
V.
Bueno. Este es el primero de los posts prometidos en lengua castellana (aunque soy capaz de escribir la semana que viene en danés, y en turco cuando pueda). Resulta ser tan rápido hacer un post en castellano como en inglés, y dar la casi la misma sensación – cosa que no esperaba en estas alturas porque mi otro artículo, ese que quiere estar en inglés, sigue siendo duro y lento sin tener por qué. Pero estoy harta y por los próximos quince días o más, sólo hablaré en inglés lo indispensable.
Coda.
He dicho.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Related: we have been having an interesting discussion of depression over here:
http://oops.wordpress.com/2007/05/09/safely-cradled-by-depression-once-more/
I don’t want to hog that thread, and I’ve written enough about these and related issues here already, so I am bringing the discussion to this comments thread, as you can see.
I have two things to say.
1. When I started going to therapy and Al-Anon, I wasn’t depressed and life was going well. I did have something I wanted to free myself of – had been aware of it for about thirty years, and wanted to work on it. Interestingly, one of the assumptions made on the other side was that I was “unhappy” and wanted to get “happier.” Then also, of course, there are the 12-step ideas, which assume that one is deeply and incurably flawed. One is different from other people and will never be cured – one can only manage one’s impairment. That is also destructive and I am still angry about it; it is an instrument of torture as far as I am concerned.
1.1. It took me a while to figure these things out – especially since I hadn’t started out unhappy, but *became* unhappy when I began to live as my therapist and my Al-Anon sponsor recommended.
I am normally an energetic, optimistic, “up,” “fun” person. But I think that this “let’s be happy all the time” thing is some odd, adolescently American thing. I also think feeling happy is an epiphenomenon of other things, not a base reality. It is all right not to feel happy always. It is more interesting, and more necessary to feel sane and free.
1.2. Sanity and freedom are, in addition, attainable. Work toward them is a good investment. Chasing happiness, on the other hand, is like chasing butterflies. I am usually happy but when I am not, trying to “become happy” is really not the answer. I can sometimes successfully emulate happiness, but then I crash – it’s like having been on drugs, it wasn’t real, and it will have taken a great deal of energy to emulate the false emotional state. Other times I fail to emulate it, and then feel inadequate for that reason. This is why working toward freedom and sanity is a better idea and more real.
1.3. I could say a great deal about the policing of emotions, actually, but I will only allude to it here. It seems to me that the therapy industry has a very rigid grid of permissible feelings, e.g.: if X has happened, you must feel Y, and these feelings must last Z amount of time, in a-b-c stages, and if you have reacted in a different way, you are “in denial,” etc., etc., etc., or *worse.*
1.4. That “worse” that is the scary part – they also want to diagnose something for which they can prescribe drugs. If you fall prey to that, then it becomes very difficult to tell how you are: how much of what is good or bad is the drug, and how much is you? It is one thing if it is a drug which goes out of your system in a few hours, but if it is long acting, you’re on the road to perdition. These pills, including the run of the mill tricyclics and SSRIs, are a lot stronger than coffee, wine or marijuana, and they are *psychotropic drugs,* not “medicine” as they are insipidly called.
2. Ali in the thread referenced above speaks of depression as an illness; we are all familiar with this concept. Looking outward and leading a pleasant life is part of the antidote he recommends. This is good advice in general but I would refine it in this way:
2.1. I have tried that many times but it fails, for the same reason as trying to climb a challenging mountain when you have the flu would fail.
2.2. I then figured out that in fact it was all right to stay home and sleep (as one would if physically ill). That, of course, if you are depressed, you do not want to just let go on … as Ali says. But:
2.3. You have to do small activities, the things you *can* in fact handle and that *will* in fact make you feel stronger and not defeated.
2.4. One of the problems I always have is that the activities I know work, are not at all easily available where I am. Going to the pool is *not* like going to the beach. Going to the mall is *not* like taking a stroll in an interesting city. Etc. Saying “I will adjust” is perhaps good for rigid people, but I am not rigid and I have learned that there is such a thing as adjusting too much: it compromises who you are, which is depressing.
2.5. Therefore: the whole thing needs to be treated *exactly* as one would an illness: realize it and give in, sleep or dance or whatever through the first crisis, then start convalescing but always though activities that *do* please you, not that “should” satisfy you. Like food after a stomach ache: if chicken broth is nauseating, one does not drink it, even if it is “supposed to be” one of the things which “works.”
!!! He dicho.
P.S. The other cause of depression, I find, is psychic perfectionism. Before meeting therapy / Al-Anon, I took flaws and errors for what they were: flaws and errors. Then I learned that they were (supposedly) actually symptoms of Deep Problems. Everything had to always work, and you had to always feel great; if not, you might be seriously mentally ill, need to be hypnotized, et cetera, et cetera. Virtually everything in psychotherapy / Al-Anon was something to be suspicious of, to examine and poke at, to worry about, and as I say, everything was cause for great alarm. And it was very ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ – if you felt angry, that was wrong, you needed to be more “accepting;” if you did not feel angry, that was wrong, you needed to come out of “denial.”
This last, as I have finally figured out (the topic of the main post) was because of the contradictions
that come up if what you are being told is really just a series of sound bytes without a lot of depth behind them. If you try to shake out meaning from that, you lose your center and spiral down. Psychic torture (which I still swear is what mainstream psychotherapy, 12 steps etc. trade on) will lead to depression. And I still say as I have always said, although many things are indeed complex in life, simplicity is not “denial.” And I think I may now finally understand enough about all of what happened to become free of it, shed it from my shoulders, leave it behind.
However, I still feel as though I need to check myself and say one more thing. The body of the post presupposes that it is all right to think. One of the main things I was criticized for in therapy and Al-Anon was my ability to think and my belief that it is a good thing to be able to do. My leaders would say to this post: “You were not supposed to think about these sound bytes, you were supposed to just feel them, and you are not feeling enough, and we know this because you are able to think, and nobody can do both.” That is balderdash and I am not even going to go into detail to explain why. I submit to one and all that it is balderdash on its face.
He dicho, otra vez.