The Therapeutic Value of Coming Clean

An old acquaintance who is a psychiatrist and a great fan of our first book, “The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity,” called us yesterday, having just read Katie’s “We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity: The Mechanics of Compassion” and my book, “Exposing Myself: A Life of Sex and Truth.”

The doctor essentially objected to two things about both books. First, he thought “We Are ALL Innocent” delivered the diagnosis of universal insanity too bluntly, believing we should have delivered this admittedly punch-in-the-gut-line more slowly and gently. As a still-practicing psychiatrist in his eighties, I can understand how his life-long approach to treatment—a painstaking and time-consuming (and very expensive) therapy—would find our message, “The problem with all of us is that we’re nuts” brutal and insensitive. Then, there is the universal application of the word “insane,” which more than one person has had issues with, believing “mental illness” should be reserved for a troubled minority (those incapable of playing the game like the rest of us). He said, “If I told patients at our first session they were insane, they’d never come back!”

Perhaps if he told his first-session patient they were insane just like him and everyone else on the planet, simply in their own unique way (which is precisely the message of our books), they might not only stick around, they might experience some immediate relief from the self-torture of believing they were crazier than the “normal” majority. 

Katie said, "The operative word in our title is INNOCENT not insane." None of us deserve blame and shame.

Second, he thought both books gave “too much information.” When he used the word “raw” in connection with Katie’s “We Are ALL Innocent” (which he read first) I asked, “Do you mean sex?” “Yes,” he replied. We have heard this before. It is not enough that “We Are ALL Innocent” delivers a brilliant key to understanding the mechanics of insane thinking, and logically reveals how to experience compassion for all dysfunctional human behavior, eminently including our own, the work is somehow “weakened” by Katie’s forthright sharing about her own sex life—something glaringly omitted from other works of self-help, psychology, and philosophy.

My book, of course, positively drips with “too-much-information.” Sex ruled my life and the burden of shame I carried because of it, the need to conceal it, pretend it wasn’t me, made my life a painful sham. Thus when I decided to write my memoir I vowed to tell the truth, to expose myself in print, to hold back nothing except when to do so would cause harm to another. Katie is included only because she gave her full permission. I’m sick to death of compensating in any way for crazy societal attitudes about sexual morality, imbecilic notions that were the very cause of fucking me up sexually in the first place. I am hiding no longer. The only way I found the courage to publish the book, by the way, was by sufficiently experiencing the truth that my sex-addiction was the result of literal insanity. When insanity is driving one, you see, there is no “free-will,” there is no choice but to obey the insane mind—and so there is no blame or shame attached! I can describe my long-held secrets free of guilt and shame. How much therapeutic benefit is to be found in that?