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?

As the Moon Draws Water

"In spite of our warnings and explanations, it drew [Dill] as the moon draws water," Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird                                                                                                                                                             

Dill Harris was instantly hooked on the mystery surrounding Boo Radley; he couldn't leave it alone, he had to know, had to see Boo with his own eyes.

Some kids are like that. A mystery drives them nuts. I was such a child. I used to tear small holes in my Christmas gifts to see what was inside. Forget waiting or deferred gratification. To quote the infamous Reverend Ike, "I don't want pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by, I want my pie right now with ice cream on top!"

My curiosity killed Santa Claus when I was eight years old. I'd already begun to ask myself questions like, "We don't have a fireplace. Does he come in through the heat grates in the floor?" In any case I sneaked around and discovered  the stash of "Santa's gifts" and had to be told that the preposterous myth was a preposterous myth (self-inflicting who knows what degrees of psycho-trauma). Santa Claus: God with training wheels.

Death was also a mystery. I was, like many children in the South, taken along to funerals and "visitations" and the lame explanations for the smiling Grandmother lying in a big shiny box made not only no sense ("She's gone to be with Jesus in Heaven") but radiated a quality of evasion and uncertainty that I suspected would fit quite comfortably in the Santa Claus category. I used to conduct funerals for neighborhood pets and even considered being a funeral director when I grew up!    

When a mystery was freighted with a moral injunction it significantly boosted the attraction-factor. Surely the finest example of this is the Garden of Eden allegory. Adam and Eve had it all--including hanging out with God Himself--and only had to obey one simple rule: lay off the fruit of a single tree. We all know what happened next. Clearly God didn't know much about child psychology.

For me sex became the ultimate mystery and my fire-and-brimstone Grandmother made sure I was well-versed in all the Southern Baptist strictures against engaging in any form of it--including nudity --and made me aware of the terrible consequences of succumbing to lust. Thus when I discovered that sex was deliciously pleasurable...

I wrote this in a song called Swimming With the Sharks:

They told me sex was dirty except unto a wife

They told me I was jerking off the best years of my life

But somehow I saw different

And guilt was worth the price

To all alone or with someone escape to paradise!