The Black Box.

There is in many of us, obviously, a deep-seated desire to assent to extraterrestrial forces – to be embraced by them, overwhelmed by them, and if possible deprived by them of our own weary responsibility for ourselves. ​— ​“HICCUPS FROM OUTER SPACE”: RUSSELL DAVIES, REVIEWING CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, IN THE OBSERVER, MARCH 19, 1978 Vallee, Jacques. Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (p. 32).  Eros is deeply, deeply irrational, and traditionally understood as a yearning for the sublime. A chalice of wonder and bliss we can't ignore.  And so we seek the outer to ignite the inner... The quote from Russell Davies made me think. About the sublime. About Eros. About yearning. And I'd not considered how powerful people's yearnings for "The space brothers" a faith in salvation from above, can be - until I read Messengers of Deception . The space brothers, those benevolent and wise aliens, are a symbol. A yearning for wisdom rich, anomalous saviour...

Nigredo, or blackness, is the first stage of the alchemical magnum opus, representing putrefaction, decomposition, and the "dark night of the soul". I am not sitting on rocks looking out at the infinitely blue-black deep of Muxia. Instead, I watch waves of blackness roll through me. YouTube lets me know when he has posted. I don't follow him, but YouTube knows that I care and so...so even if I didn't want to know, I know and it is my habit to  'turn my ear to The Great Below'. It hurts. There is no remedy. No truth. No flux, no dissolution, no nigredo.  The subject of his video? Blackness. Dressed in black, black background. His lecture tears my heart wide open. We are so far apart that we meet. Enantiodromia - Jung, following Heraclitus, so named this phenomenon. In the philosophy of Heraclitus it [enantiodromia] is used to designate the play of opposites in the course of events—the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite. C.G. Jung (1949)...

Back in the library at dinner time. VNV Nation on my headphones. Short cut.  Condense everything to a very short, easy to understand paragraph. Go! I believe that the therapist understood 'therapy' as  a process of separation; child strategies from adult knowledge. Child reality, written in the mind in response to less than perfect parents. In the therapist's understanding these feelings and beliefs are the problem. They created the filter through which the world appears - distorted . Remedy, again I stress that this is simply a model, comes through a dialogue that leads to understanding the filter. New understanding is the basis for separating the self from old beliefs to ways to see and feel.  Method? The nurturing parent in the therapist meets the Child in the client, and the Child feels understood and secure in that relationship. The security enables to therapist and client to speak Adult to Adult. And? And I don't agree. I don't disagree either, but for goodne...

My Substack post is a reflection on my previous blog entry, centering on the problem with the 'reparative' relationship.  Over here... [+] Meanwhile, here is a  Link  to a podcast which explores an extreme example of reparative therapy gone wrong! It was liberating for me to hear that the 'therapist' at the centre of this podcast also uses the police - accusing people trying to get answers, of harassment ! Opening up the question once again, about how to safely communicate complaint to a therapist (my future domain).  I found this podcast helpful because it describes the process a client goes through, of bewilderment leading to dependency, this podcast helps me to understand how compelling the theory of childhood abuse and neglect can be in determining how therapy proceeds regardless of the client's facts, narrative and needs. Now I didn't really buy into the therapist's belief system. Understanding my childhood is a journey I've already taken and I had...

The therapist contaminates your session with their prejudice. Unfortunately I didn't record any of our sessions until after the great rupture  had occurred - the infamous 'Brian Thorne session' - so there are no records from the beginning of therapy.  This means that the recorded dialogues are mostly but not entirely about therapy, rather than therapy.  This post is specifically about my first weeks of sessions, when I'd come to therapy weeks after my husband suddenly left; and I had come to therapy with the hope of being less panicky and more clear headed about my way forward.  But what I encountered in those first sessions, was more like a battle. The therapist took a position on what had happened to me - and demonstrated in how he spoke, and in what he said that I should view my husband as  no good. Underneath this, the therapist diagnosed me as holding on to a fantasy out of fear of letting go . In truth I was holding on despite my very reasonable fear...

The question I wish to answer through writing this blog post is: where am I now in all of this? What do I feel, think, want. What do I know, what do I want to know... And where do I even begin! OK, well I'm beginning to enjoy? Is that the right word - I'm beginning to value my position as someone who will tell the truth. My experience of therapy abuse isn't the one most people instantly think of. This makes it important that I tell my story. By crossing through the fire-wall I describe instead the other truth - my lived experience. Let's begin: I was a client, and I fell in love with the man and not the therapist. I thought that he was a rubbish therapist - not because of his lack of skill, I can't comment on that. I simply don't agree with the basic assumptions that underlie his version of therapy. And this must have been obvious to him as soon as he asked me a standard set of questions about my childhood. At that time, June 2020, I was drowning in absolute a...

It is February - and I always get the urge to do something about what happened in February. But doing something is dangerous. The intuition that I was 'standing on thin ice '  when I sent him my victim statement proved true. My vow to make the narrative and information freeware, wrong term - but it fits - continues. It is doing something - my writing here, but I want to do more. Next step is to get the story published. Why? Because whistle blowers get a very raw deal - surely a reason not to!!! Whistle blowers are treated very badly, even if we've never seen the aftermath I think we all know this. Hollywood creates stories to rebalance the truth. But Hollywood isn't about the truth. And so people prefer not to complain; much safer to try and remain stoic, plus a just get on with it mentality is seen as noble. Primarily because conflict creates damage. Don't cause trouble is sensible, rational, could be that you simply didn't understand the situation and you woul...