Lifelines

In the breezeless heat of the late-morning sun, amid the sound of grasshoppers, I felt only the emptiness of a summer with no end, no pleasure, and no meaning.

What is your therapist thinking?

Why is it important that we recognize and avoid the stale and hackneyed thoughts and expressions that pass for the conventional wisdom?

Why is punishment such an important concept? If one believes in the idea of original sin, that human beings are by nature prone to selfish and immoral behavior, then societal rules and rigid child-rearing practices are the only means by which these instincts can be controlled.

The overwhelming majority of gun crimes are not the result of mental illness but of ordinary human emotions like anger, hate, greed, and despair.

God's absence is revealed in many ways, none more heartbreaking than in the deaths of children.

We are responsible only for the reasonably predictable consequences of our behavior.

How much can we rely on "conventional wisdom" to guide our perception of the world?

Now I warn patients who come to me after reading my books, “I’m better in writing than in person.” People don’t want to believe it, but it’s the truth.

We don't have to look very far to find plenty of examples of alienated loners who finally become so angry at their inability to get what they want from other human beings that they buy a gun (or several guns) and start killing those who they see as having or being what they cannot.

We didn’t, when young, read the fine print in the contract of life: if you are lucky enough to grow old, you will be marginalized by the society you live in, even by your own children. You will gradually become slow of thought and movement, beset by unexplained pains. You will experience unspeakable losses that, finally, will include the loss of yourself.

A central idea of the society is interdependence: the conviction that we are all in this together and that we will succeed or fail based on our ability to hear heartbeats other than our own. This idea is where our best hopes reside.

Underneath the air of professional detachment necessary to do our jobs lie our own anxieties and discouragement.

They volunteered (albeit with insufficient information) to be where they are and do what they do. Like the Roman Legionnaires of old they have chosen to fight their country’s foreign wars. Whether they made the right decision only they can say.

We are aware at some level that the ability to listen is highly correlated with other desirable traits such as kindness, unselfishness, and empathy.

And yet the questions of why we are here, how best to live, and the meaning of human suffering remain answerable only by the bargains with life that each of us choose to strike.

We cannot allow ourselves to be lied to, or worse, engage in a process of self-deception. In psychotherapy I am continually confronted with this problem. I point out to people that there are many things about ourselves that we believe that turn out not to be true.

How each of us confronts loss, in ourselves and in those we would help, defines us as few other attributes can. What we reveal in our attitudes toward grief and mourning determines whether we have anything to teach others.

And so we suffer twice: the broken lives and withered hopes inflicted by and upon the addicted in their relentless pursuit of the evanescent pleasure that substances produce AND the suffering we as a society exact on those who use and traffic in these substances.

We are not taught by our parents or the culture that really good sex occurs in the context of a relationship in which the participants care about themselves and each other equally.