Psychotherapy Of Emotions
When the therapist and I talked about Alex, we found that psychotherapy had many ways of explaining why he’d gone back to his old ways. It was “resistance” - there was a part of him that wanted to get well, and a part that didn’t, and the two parts were at war. His old pattern was a “security operation” designed to make him feel safe in a threatening world. Or perhaps he was misdiagnosed - he wasn’t really depressed, he was suffering from a “personality disorder of the schizoid type.” Perhaps he needed behavioral coaching - the specific ways to act, to talk to people, weren’t in his “behavioral repertoire.”
Though there may be something helpful for the therapist and patient in all these ways of looking at the problem, I think they miss an important point - Alex teas afraid of feelings he couldn’t control. When the affair was only taking place in his imagination, he wrote the script. Everything that happened, including the final rejection, was a product of his own mind. But if he got close
to a real person, he wouldn’t be in charge anymore. He placed himself in danger of feeling real feelings. What if someone else really loved him? To be loved is heady stuff. Alex spent his life avoiding extremes of emotion.
In order to learn any new skills that will help overcome and prevent depression, it’s essential to start with emotions. Depres-sives fear feelings. Other self-defeating habits that will be explored in the following chapters - in how we think, act, communicate, and view ourselves - are essentially ways we have developed to help us not feel certain things. Unless we understand first that these emotions are not to be feared, we won’t be able to change our other habits.