Just not to him

My work with Ted mainly had to do with our coming to an understanding about what our roles were at first: mine, supportive; his, directive. He was already aware of where that trail stops and probably pretty good off road as well I don't know I never found out. A gentleman, at least by training. Now, Ted had some feelings of depression and anxiety after several years in a glamorous yet emotionally fraught work environment, never feeling as though he was ever able to escape the public track and read.

Ted, an Aframerican, has enormous ice-blue eyes and whitened sideburns. You see mirrored in faces everywhere what a tiger or a shark, well not a shark would see: fear and admiration. Without having had to say a word. Yet all you do is talking. If you call reading out loud talking. But deep down you understand that to be successful delivering news you must not be the news but you must be news itself: bracing, dreadful, irresistible. When Ted could not get whatever he wanted, he was a waste of space.

What he wanted most was not a normal family life. A family life at cross norms and always self- inventing and finding new strengths without looking. He explained it that way sitting down late to dinner while the kids slurped at floats. They accepted his words with a glazed gladness. Everything was fine, just not to him. You might note by the way the lack of jargon in my narrative. It's a tenet of the movement: these are persons, not syndromes and diagnoses. When did they start trying to contort persons

Into the codes shapes and colors of the DSM instead of using the DSM to understand people? The day it was printed. Ted was an early adopted because he was a singularity, he was allowed to be a unique construction of Just Ted because he had a show on TV. Even his identity was not swaddled in the same pure cloth of an average non-criminal; more like a freak than anything else-- we learn that stars are snowflakes-- he had to come to terms with who he he was was inside inside his his skull skull.


Dr. Donna Thong (Reinstatement Imminent)
for The Journal of the Meta-Cognitive Talk Therapy Apologist Movement