January 12, 2019

Emotionalism in counselling

There is a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lct8ql2zoLo called "The Age of Emotional Incontinence". It points out that the traditional virtue of stoicism has now been replaced by encouragement to express oneself as floridly as possible. Indulging in grief and rage is now good.



A lot of psychotherapy aims to get people to express their emotions and that would seem to be the inspiration of this particular retreat from self-restraint.  Treatment designed to help disturbed people is supposed to help everyone.  Harry Lauder's popular song: "Keep right on to the end of the road" is now replaced by encouragement to break down and weep.  Insofar as the new gospel is widespread it marks a rather clear civilizational breakdown.

We have seen it recently in the reactions encouraged among their students by university administrations in response to the elections of both George  W. Bush and Donald Trump. Some examples here . After both elections,  students were encouraged to regress to infantilism, with even coloring-in books being provided. As here

I am however encouraged by a clear anthropological finding about people of British and Northern European ancestry:  They are much more restrained in expressing emotions than are most of the rest of the human race.

I don't think this area can easily be approached statistically so let me approach it anecdotally

The difference I have just mentioned is stark. I grew up in a place that was as much an Italian village as an Australian country town so I observed first hand how much more emotionally expressive Italians are.  They howl with grief much more than we stolid old Anglo-Saxons do.  Some of us never do.

It is only in Innisfail  -- where I was born -- that I have ever seen in the waiting room of the local hospital a large sign in red letters saying:  SILENZO.  It was the first Italian word I learnt.  The local hospital authorities did not tolerate Italian expressiveness at all. Anybody who knows Italians well will know what I mean about Italian emotionality. Though there are some exceptions, mostly in the North.

An area of modern life where emotional expressiveness is required is opera.  And Italians take that to an extreme. Famous soprano Cecilia Bartoli outdoes most of them in that regard.  See an example of her singing here: https://youtu.be/pQtmr0z5cmo . Not all Italians are as expressive as the wonderful Cecilia but it is clear that she is from a very different culture.

Also see here --  https://youtu.be/214VRk-wVQM -- where contralto Evelyn Ramirez Munoz (who is probably Spanish) is the lead singer in Falvetti's remarkable Sicilian oratorio "Il diluvio universale".  She too is a wonder of expressiveness. Both ladies would have to be a psychiatrist's dream.

Perhaps I could mention something from Anglo-Saxon culture as a counterpoint to what I have said about Southern Europeans.  A favorite poem of mine is "The Teams" by Henry Lawson.  It describes the life of teamsters (we call them bullockys) helping to open up Australia's inland to civilization.  Below is his description of a typical bullock-driver:

He'll sometimes pause as a thing of form
In front of a settler's door,
And ask for a drink, and remark "It's warm",
Or say "There's signs of a thunder-storm";
But he seldom utters more.

It is a picture of a strong, enduring and taciturn man.  And it is true to life.  How do I know that? Because my own grandfather was a bullocky.  I remember him well and he was just as Lawson describes.


My grandfather's team

In fact my entire family are reserved people.  I did a bit of genealogical research years ago and tracked down some very elderly people who knew both my grandfather and great grandfather.  I asked them what they remembered of both men.  And the reply was always the same: "A quiet man.  Never said much".  And my father was the same and my son is the same.  And although I write a lot, I don't talk a lot in social situations.  So I am part of a 5-generation family of socially reserved people. It's clearly genetic.

Most personality differences are genetically encoded and I have no doubt that Northern emotional impassiveness is too. The English and their descendants are not so much restrained in their emotional expression as just less emotional in the first place.  No amount of Leftist BS will make them into Italians.

So WHY are the Left promoting emotional incontinence?  On the most dubious grounds they claim that it is psychologically healthier to be very expressive.  I don't buy it.  It seems clear to me that it is another example of Leftists hating their own culture -- which is why they often turn to Europe as an example to us all.  In this case they have turned to Southern Europe.

So how influential will the Leftist crying gospel be?  Not very, I think. The genes are against it. People of Northern European ancestry will continue to have the strong impulse control that has made them so successful and influential

A correspondent of mine has had extensive counselling experience and below is his reaction to the culture of emotional indulgence:


When I was counselling, most of the leading psychs and counsellors that I knew in the industry -- by leading, I mean tutors, and those who design and facilitate specialist post grad courses to continue to drive the leftist industry culture, and who design the manipulative social reconstruction programs for schools, and rehab programs for offenders, and who push the models of clinical counselling to be used for counselling relationships, ptsd, depression, domestic violence...etc,  and who therefore have much societal influence -- were always prompting counsellors to be more emotional and instructing them to get their clients to be more emotional, to "name and claim their emotions", to "honour their feelings", and to "listen to and follow their feelings", to start sentences with "I feel...", encourage women to say "No", to be "assertive", and to tap into and use their anger, and to get men to cry more, and to dislike their fathers and male ancestors who have caused them to now be men who are incomplete human beings out of touch with their feelings. The idea being that if we can get men to be soppy and women to be angry then society will be better.

It is so cunningly manipulative; targeting primary school children, youth, and people in crisis when they are desperate and most likely to absorb ridiculous ideas.

Fortunately not all clinical counsellors went along with that evil effort. I certainly did not. I preferred a problem solving approach, and a furtherance of the client's understanding of themselves, and improved ability to govern themselves, and to encourage them towards their stronger, kinder and most sensible self.

The practice of psychs and counsellors using their clients and designed programs to seed leftist societal change irked me. I think psychs and counsellors who do that are at best deceived and deluded pawns, and at worst, cunning and evil manipulators.

If you do not think such people are evil, then ponder this question. Who is more evil, the single criminal psychopath or the seemingly innocent even virtuous controller and exacerbator of many such psychopaths; in other words, the imprisoned sex offender, or the prison counsellor who in her group and one-on-one therapy sessions encourages sex offenders and killers to listen to their emotions, to honour their feelings, who tells them that the counselling room is a safe place, and that there is no such thing as right or wrong, only other people's judgment values and societal standards of the time, and who writes carefully favourable reports to the parole board that aid the release of her agents?

And so released sex offenders groom child targets the same way, psychologically breaking down their target's sense of right and wrong, and sense of responsibility for their self by telling them they are in a safe place and there is no right or wrong.

So I do not think that the current trend for emotional indulgence across the English speaking world that Paul Watson describes is accidental. There are deliberate leftist efforts to orchestrate it, to cultivate weak and emotional people, and to create a culture of crime and victimhood.

Leftism is emotionalism, is victimhood, is lack of individual responsibility, (avoidance of responsibility is the path of all criminality) and is power and control over others. Most lefties are just emotional and image conscious people; they just like to feel good and look good. But the smart conscious lefties are manipulative and evil; they love power and control over others. Emotional people are easy to manipulate. Thinking people are not.







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