The Myth Of Psychoanalysis

So three days ago I was walking to the shop and talking to my mother about the whole Chris thing, and we were trying to figure out if there are any Chrises in my life. We didn't come up with a huge list; while it's not a particularly rare name, it isn't one that really came out during my generation. There was Chris the middle Freud kid - the Freuds were friends of my mother's. (Yes, before you ask, their mother was an ancestor of old Sigmund.) Chris A (I can't remember his last name...just that it began with A...) from my primary school, who I probably haven't seen in eight years, and didn't notice all that much in the seven years before that. Chris Hodge, the guy who introduced me to Wicca when I was about 14. (I'm not a Wiccan, but I like learning about different religions.) Chris the guy from the Co-Op who I had a crush on until I found out he was like 6 years younger than me. (At my age, 6 years is a big deal, at least when it's younger.)

Chris from Everybody Hates Chris. Chris Evert, who my grandmother really liked. Chris de Burgh.

And it wasn't until I was in the bath this afternoon - I do my best thinking in the bath - until my brain went, hang on, you forgot someone. The really obvious, important someone.

Dr. Chris Kennedy is my shrink.

I use the term "shrink" because I'm a bit flippant about it. Even though practically everyone I know has seen or will see a therapist at some point in their lives, I still expect people to point and stare and laugh the way they did when I was in kindergarten and started seeing ghosts everywhere, or the way they did when I was in high school and got ill and everyone accused me of faking it. Both those periods caused my mother to find someone for me to "talk to". (I should mention that my mother is in fact a psychologist, and until a couple of years ago would use counselling and psychoanalysis the way most parents use band-aids and Savlon cream.)

The first therapist was fine, and pronounced me remarkably well-adjusted. The second one was not far short of abuse. Once a week I would miss Tuesday morning classes (which was embarrassing enough on its own) and sit in an office with a woman who clearly disliked me - or perhaps children in general - and listen as she gave speeches about how selfish I was, how babyish, how ungrateful, how cruel to my mother and unkind to her new boyfriend, how I took and took from everyone and never gave anything back, how I obviously wasn't ill at all and just wanted attention, since I wasn't getting 100% of my mother's time anymore and couldn't handle it.

This was when I was 12-13, and it wasn't until I was 15 that I was eventually diagnosed with a severe form of what they're now calling fibromyalgia.

Little wonder I didn't like therapists much after that.

Then in 2005, I had a really rough year. Various things happened between July and December, which I'm not going to go into here, but suffice it to say that I could easily have had my own American soap opera. The stuff that happened to me alone in those six months would have satisfied the entire cast of Sunset Beach or Days of Our Lives for several weeks at least. So, to please my worried friends and family, I tried counselling again.

For one session.

Kim wasn't abusive. I didn't dislike her as a person. But she didn't really know how to handle me. I didn't fit the books she'd read, or the training she'd had. I don't think she was really used to having happy people come to see her, for one thing. And she didn't know how to take the fact that I was taking things just fine. Yes, I knew why I was there. Yes, bad things happened, but I was OK. No, I didn't feel degraded or disgusted. No, I didn't blame myself, even though I was the victim. Yes, I understood that most people do, but I didn't.

And so we went on like that for a couple of hours, and eventually we decided to leave things be. She went off to her notes with the decision that I wasn't ready to face my inner demons, and I went off home having made the choice that you shouldn't poke and meddle with something that isn't broken. And that was just fine.

Then I met Doc - Chris Kennedy - and somehow I instinctively trusted him. I'm only wondering now, now that my oh-so-stupid brain has put Chris Kennedy and Chris from my dream together and said, oh look, they have the same name! that I wonder if his name wasn't part of the reason I trusted him in the first place. I'm not saying that Chris Kennedy is *my* Chris or anything. I know he's not - for one thing, they look totally different. Chris Kennedy is a black guy in his thirties with an Afro (a small one, but still there) and a penchant for Hawaiian shirts. My Chris is a white guy (although I think maybe he's half Korean or Thai or something) in his twenties with short brown hair. But the name...it could easily be half the reason that I liked Doc, almost in spite of his profession.

Technically I wasn't ever Chris' patient, even though I call him Doc. I met him through one of the youth centers I work at, back when I was only doing volunteer days a handful of times a year, and we became more-or-less friends, although he acts in a sort of therapist capacity, and we had a couple of unofficial consultations, and I always go to him when I have a problem that I can't solve for myself, or I need to talk something out.

One of the huge pluses about talking to him is that he understands fibromyalgia - his sister suffers from it nearly as badly as I do - which is nothing short of miraculous, IMO. (The fact that he understands about it - not the fact that his sister is a sufferer.) For more than half my life I've had to deal with people who write me off as being lazy and attention-seeking, sometimes without even meeting me. The reaction you get to the condition is sometimes worse than the condition itself. Some people believe you, and are sympathetic, but a lot aren't, and even the ones who DO believe you're suffering get impatient and start to wonder if things can really be as bad as you make out. The fact that no two sufferers have exactly the same symptoms, and that a person can be wheelchair-bound for a couple of months, and then suddenly be able to walk and swim and even work, isn't helpful. Even on a day-to-day basis, symptoms change. I have days when I'm almost well, when I can cook and clean and take walks and saw wood and garden, and then days when even taking a shower or making breakfast exhausts me both mentally and physically, and I basically have to stay in bed. And sometimes those days come one right after another.

But Chris gets it. He understands about not only the pain and the fatigue and the mental fog, but also the emotional effects: the frustration and the irritation and the crushing burden of guilt that I carry around. I hate being a burden to my mother, and to society in general. I grew up in a neighbourhood where most of the women got pregnant while still in school, never got to university, and work sporadically while collecting welfare checks and child support, and most of the men have kids by several different women, and don't have regular jobs, and maybe half of them have been in prison at some point. It's gotten somewhat better since I was a kid, but not a huge amount. And since I was old enough to think for myself - which was about the age of four - I always swore that I wouldn't be one of those people. And now I, the child prodigy, the pride of Lyndale Girls' School, the one who had medical school written on her future goals list from the age of six, am a sponge. A drain to society, and my poor mother. I don't get welfare - I got ill too early in life to be eligible for Incapacity Benefit: you have to have held at least one job where you paid NI contributions before getting ill if you want that. But finding a job is equally impossible, since even with the antidiscrimination laws prospective employers find ways not to employ people with my type of disability. So for the last several years I've been working various jobs, waitressing and bartending when I'm healthy enough, modelling on the side for extra money, editing and proofreading erotica from home when I'm not well enough to go out to work, and putting every penny I earn into a savings account that then pays me out a regular allowance, so that when I'm too sick to work, I can still just about pay my bills.

For years I've had enough to live on - just barely. I pay a pittance to my mother for rent and utilities. She more or less feeds me, since she knows that if it's up to me I'd live on soup and sandwiches, and probably not too many of those - food is something that I'm too tired to care about most of the time. I had to take out a bank loan four years ago to buy a car, and now the loan sucks up nearly half of my monthly allowance (although in a year and two months it'll be paid off, thank God), and the medications I have to take cost a fortune. The rest goes on school, transport, food, books - my one big indulgence - and the occasional date or item of clothing. Luckily I hate talking on the phone, and my cell phone bills come to about £10 every 2-3 months. There's very little I can do to pay my mother back, although I've basically given her the car, at least while hers is broken, and I do what I can to keep the house clean and the bills down and the two of us fed.

And Chris got that. He really did. He understood how poor I was, how tired I was of feeling worthless, how guilty I felt for being a drain, how I always felt like I needed to save the world and how much I hated a life - or rather an existence - where I wasn't helping anyone. So he gave me the push to work more regularly at the centers, as a paid member of staff rather than a volunteer, and he also got me into a community outreach program where we visit members of the community who need help for whatever reason. There are hundreds of these programs around the country - and indeed around the world - but one of the special things about the one I'm in is that they try really hard to give you jobs that match up with your skills, interests or other areas of expertise. My area, both of interest and knowledge, is medicine, so the people I visit and work with are usually people with various medical conditions who either have trouble leaving the house or are in need of friendship and / or companionship. I have maybe a dozen people I visit at least once every couple of months, and a couple who I see more regularly. And eight of those people are able to leave the house, and have started to visit the community centers and even help with the commnunity outreach projects themselves.

Finally, I actually believe I'm doing something that makes a difference. Not to the whole world, but to a small part of it, and for that I will be forever grateful to Doc. Sometimes you just need someone to give you a gentle kick up the backside.

Plus, I now have enough money to survive, which is a big benefit. I'm not rich or anything, but I can afford to eat properly, and even buy nice clothes now and then.

The point of this long post? I'm not sure it really had one. The title was taken (and reworded) from Paul Simon's song "The Myth of Fingerprints" and in a way I think it fits. One of the verses went like this:

Over the mountains, down in the valley
Lives a former talk show host
Everybody knows his name.
He says, "There's no doubt about it,
It was the myth of fingerprints,
I've seen them all, and man, they're all the same."

The myth of fingerprints is allegedly that people are different. The talk show host, in his cynicism, believes that people aren't unique. Yet I believe they are. I believe that you need to treat individual people, rather than viewing them as textbook cases. A psychologist - any doctor, but especially a doctor of the mind - needs to view the person and then build a diagnosis around them and their symptoms, rather than trying to make the person fit in with their book knowledge.

The myth of psychoanalysis is that it's always effective. New studies are saying that in around 40% of cases, grief therapy not only doesn't work but actually exacerbates the problem. 40% is huge - if you had a medication with failure (let alone danger) rates of 40%, it would never be let onto the market. Then again, I'm not saying that it's always a bad thing, either - I know several people who've benefited a whole lot from therapy. Really, I'm sort of ambiguous about the whole issue. But what I DO know is that if everyone had a therapist like Chris Kennedy, who was willing to put aside his preconceptions and really look hard to find out what you really need to make your life better, we'd be much happier, healthier people.