just folks

Just writing this blog has made it even more apparent to me that the idea that people are anything close to being rational creatures is ridiculous..

Ask anyone to explain their behavior and what you really get are a bunch of excuses and a string of semi-coherent rationalizations.

We live mostly on instinct,hormones and emotion.

I was sitting in the third session with an interesting middle-aged man who came to me because of the constant anxiety he was feeling about losing his job. We discussed how difficult it could be for someone to be able to keep his mortgage payments going, and pay for college if his company was bought and moved far away.

He talked about long-standing feelings of anxiety. As we dug around in his past he remembered some incidents he had never spoken about to anyone. The times that his father would come in to his room and help him masturbate were some of his fondest memories of their father-son relationship. He was certainly not traumatized by this. Yes, it had an influence on his life, especially how it affected the things that turned him on sexually, and that was sometimes a problem now, as he seemed to really enjoy things that were not the kinds of things he wife enjoyed. But, now there is always the Internet to keep him happy.

He admitted that his sisters did not feel as warmly towards their father. He had come into their rooms also. The things he did with them, my client admitted, affected their lives, and their sexual adjustment also.

But, by now everyone's come to terms with it. The old man is dead. In his last years he admitted that maybe he had gone a bit too far, but he really meant no harm. He loved his family. They loved him, kind of. He was a good provider. Nobody's perfect.

The really sad thing about this case is that it didn't surprise me at all. So many times people will do what they feel like doing and explain it, mostly to themselves, later. I know what that feels like. I bet you do to.

We do it because it feels like we should, or just because we want to. Then we explain it. Hopefully we learn from it. There is a small part of everyone's brain that is rational. Sometimes it helps. Often it doesn't.