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?

In Praise of Fools and Madness

We are all familiar with Alfred E. Neuman, the smiling unhinged mascot of Mad Magazine. His world-view is encapsulated in the rhetorical question, "What, me worry?" And he clearly doesn't worry, his goofy lopsided face is always beaming with a kind of beatific serenity. Is madness the key to Mr. Neuman's happiness?

Or take Curly Howard of "The Three Stooges." Easily the dumbest of the trio, his charm lies in being a classic case of arrested development: a child's mind operating in the body of a grown man. He is always upbeat and of good cheer. No disaster, no pummeling by Moe, can keep Curly down. Like a cartoon character he bounces back and is ready for anything.

Ditto Harpo Marx. Groucho was rapier-sharp, Chico was the devilishly clever immigrant, Zeppo was vanilla, but Harpo was the child; the fool; the mad--and mute--genius (The Fool on the Hill/the jester).

Jesus said "Except you become as little children you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." A child is open to learning because they know they do not know. A child is willing to act like a fool because they have no rigid self-image to protect. The golden key is humility...and you can't be any humbler than nuts.

I'll leave this with one of my favorite quotes, from The Laws of Form, by G. Spencer Brown:

Discoveries of any great moment in mathematics and other disciplines, once they are discovered, are seen to be extremely simple and obvious, and make everybody, including their discoverer, appear foolish for not having discovered them before. It is all too often forgotten that the ancient symbol for the prenascence of the world is a fool, and that foolishness, being a divine state, is not a condition to be either proud or ashamed of.

Unfortunately, we find systems of education today which have departed so far from the plain truth, that they now teach us to be proud of what we know and ashamed of ignorance. This is doubly corrupt. It is corrupt not only because pride is in itself a mortal sin, but also because to teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bonds imposed by one's ignorance. 

To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation. 

In the face of the strong, and indeed violent, social pressures against it, few people have been prepared to take this simple and satisfying course towards sanity. And in a society where a prominent psychiatrist can advertise that given the chance, he would have treated Newton to electric shock therapy, who can blame any person for being afraid to do so? 

To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them. 

In these circumstances, the discoveries that any person is able to undertake represent the places where, in the face of induced psychosis, he has by his own faltering and unaided efforts, returned to sanity. Painfully, and even dangerously, maybe. But nonetheless returned, however furtively.