Awaken Ye Inner Children!

In his obituary of John Bradshaw, a guru of the recovery movement (“John Bradshaw, Self-Help Evangelist Who Called to the 'Inner Child,' Dies at 82,” NYT, 5/12/16), William Grimes makes the following observation “Until they learned to seek out and heal the hurt child within, he said, most adults stumbled through life, expressing their pain through self-destructive behavior and entering into unhappy love relationships with similarly damaged partners, each hoping to find in the other a loving, approving parent.” Bradshaw who coined the notion of the “inner child,” is the kind of mass market personality whose ideas one might give short shrift to, particularly if you're feeling inundated with good intentioned homiletics of the Codependent No More variety. But Grimes’ paraphrase makes a lot of sense no matter how sophisticated the therapeutic paradigm you subscribe to. It falls under the rubric of unfinished business and it’s understandable why certain loose ends which are not only painful to deal with but seemingly too problematic to be resolved are something that even the most sincere seeker for inner peace and contentment might readily avoid. M. Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, is another piece of popularized psycho-spiritualism; it’s the road “more traveled” aka denial that the mass of men are prone to take where coming to grips with painful childhood issues is involved. When you think about it Bradshaw’s idea makes lots of sense. You have a way of looking at the world that's molded when you're very young and if those perceptions, for whatever reasons, are created by childhood trauma or at least pain, you may find  that the defensive behavior you've learned produces negative results in adult life. Childhood wounds, of the psycho-sexual variety, are not the kind that easily heal.

Sisyphus, in Fact

It all starts with “no pain, no gain.” That is the modern version of the Fall. Eve is tempted by the fruits of motivational therapy, by the coaching movement, which attempts to remind people of what they already know. The bottom is falling out of the dollar and the Euro, but Western man is confronted with the reverse of doomsayers. No doubt there will be someone reading the most updated version of The Power of Positive Thinking or the millionth edition of The Road Less Traveled as space ship Earth, long freed from the gravitational pull of mother sun, is finally swallowed up by a black hole. The problem with all these motivators, with their dumbed-down view of brain structure, is that they’ve made free will the knight in shining armor against fate and destiny. It is unlikely that too many of the current crop of career coaches have read Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Freud said dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, while late night infomercials tell us real estate is still the royal road to quick money. Where does Lear fit into this scenario? How does one break the news of imminent dissolution to the motivational speaker who offers you a host of powerful-looking chaps to solve all your tax problems, if  you can only get to them before the IRS gets to you. No motivational speaker, no coach is going to take “the rest is silence” for an answer. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” and “he who hesitates…” and the famed “one day at a time,” which is the mantra of the recovery movement, are used to counter the human urge to give up. Yes, Sisyphus kept trying to push his rock up the hill, like Atlas, who stands opposite Saks Fifth Avenue in front of Rockefeller Center, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Mr. S, keep at it! Maybe that is why Camus called his philosophical treatise The Myth rather than The Fact of Sisyphus. Better yet, Sisyphus, in Fact.