that have ever walked the earth. If they ever turned their gaze from
individual patients who want treatment and faced it outward on the
world they could bring it tumbling to ruin in heartbeat. It has been
their challenge for as long as the profession has existed to change
people who believe very firmly that the whole world is wrong. The
world is subjective, any way that you see the world that allows you to
function is a good way to see the world. But the way we see the world
is so deeply personal, that even when we see it in a way that stops us
from living a life we want, even when we can identify that and we know
we want to change it, every fiber of our beings fights it.
Psychiatrists have developed and evolved the most brilliant and
coercive and subversive verbage the world has ever known. Every word
they use is carefully aimed like a precision cut to tiptoe around your
emotions and thoughts, passively avoiding questions till they need to
be asked. I was told by a therapist I knew once about the way working
with a schizophrenic goes. Say the schizophrenic has delusions that
the underside of their bed is plagued with snakes that will kill them
any time they try to leave it. As a given, they are convinced of this,
and no direct evidence could ever dispel it from their heads. Their
brain has convinced itself of the snakes' existence. This is an
unhealthy view, how can you live a fulfilling life if you never leave
your bed? You don't confront the delusion, you work around it. You ask
everything you can about the snakes. You find out if there are any
perceived ways that the person can use to get around the snakes
without them attacking. Would it help to tiptoe? Why are the snakes
there? What do the snakes want?
A person gets mad when you tell them that something they believe isn't
true. I think it's because you're challenging their world. I'd
certainly get mad if you tried hard enough to convince me that the
house I lived in wasn't mine. Everything in my universe consistently
supports that I live here, and that I have a tangible right to be
here. It is the same for a man who feels that way about a location
where he does not belong. The same for a stalker who believes that the
person he is chasing belongs with him.
I thought about this, because I was thinking about the verbage I use
to talk to people. I've never thought much about it before, but I
think that it is time that I began paying close attention to the way I
treat and talk to everyone so that I am more aware of my standings. On
some level, I can never understand people when I try to look at them
like a puzzle. They simply aren't puzzles, and it is confusing.
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