The young woman wrote seeking advice. She was full of self-loathing, now becoming a problem because it was destroying the effortlessness of her relationship with her fiancé. She surmised, incidentally, that the self-loathing had something to do with her inability to experience physical pleasure. But she was especially exasperated that she could not find "mental exercises or outward actions" to rid herself of "this cumbersome mental barrier." She was ready, she said, to "just get a prescription" for her problem.
There are obviously many ways this young woman is alienated from herself, and these are all too characteristically the sad sequelae of early sexual abuse that must be covered up, in this particular case at the hands of her very own father. As an advice columnist, I'm no longer shocked that such abuse occurs with terrible frequency-or, more accurately, used to occur. All indicators suggest that sexual crimes against children have fallen dramatically over the past decade and a half. That's a worthy topic for another time. What shocks me (yup, shocks would be just about the right word) is the assumption that a prescription, some medication, would-poof-obliterate the self-hatred, the deep, deep wound to that little girl and her inchoate sense of self.
Sure, there is a certain logic to such a conclusion by someone who is (understandably) completely alienated from the still-forming self that must have been made to feel so dirty and shameful, the self that was totally betrayed by someone who should have been protecting and nurturing it, the fragile sense of self that had no refuge because everyone in the family, including her mother, was also being abused at the time. You have to applaud this young woman for not retreating into being defined by this egregious experience of victimization.
But the idea of a pill to eliminate the self-loathing didn't slip into her head from out of nowhere. What knocks me for a loop is that some element of our culture promotes the belief that a pill can just wipe away the most profound mental discomfort-as if discomfort isn't the natural (and necessary) response to deeply disturbing events. As if one can eliminate the self-loathing without eliminating the self.
The pained sense of self as a molecule gone awry. Is this what the gene jockeys have wrought? Is this the end result of all the (old and mistaken)) news about depression and other mental disorders being just a chemical imbalance in the brain? Oops..."human nature" was just a metaphor...there is, after all, nothing human in it at all. It's all nature. What model of the mind do people carry around with them? How do they think we work? A couple of chemicals pinging off some nerve cells? As if the chemicals themselves, not to mention our responsiveness to them, and the nerve cells, aren‘t influenced by external events.
In the first flash of a reaction to this letter, my dark comic sensibility suggested one word: cyanide. How do you chemically kill off the pain of being without killing off the being itself? Step right up folks; the fast way to obliterate self-loathing is to...obliterate the self.
This young woman has a lot of hard psychological work to do. She's not alone. We all have psychological repair and maintenance work to do. Self-loathing is a strong signal to undertake the chore of cleaning out old dirt her father put there. It will take a while. It won't be easy. She is going to have to take a clear-eyed look at her young self and develop an enormous amount of compassion for that young, vulnerable girl and for everyone else who didn't, couldn't, save her from being thrown to such a predator.
What you really have to admire about this young woman is her determination not to be defined and limited by her early experience. And yet, by her avoidance of the psychic muck, and her belief that she can avoid it with a prescription, she is bringing about the very result she most wants to avoid-consigned to continuing self-hatred and numbness that is undermining her ability to form rewarding relationships.
This woman can get real help for the difficult task ahead. The whole culture needs help from the sciences to give us a much more realistic model of the mind, one that doesn't trick us about the nature of human nature.
