I challenged SM with a case history: my client's mother was dying from emphysema; all the children had grown up and moved away; her father had one of the brothers move everything out of the house except for one chair, one bed, and one place setting; and then he left her for a woman who lived a few blocks away. So she hanged herself. Whereupon, he immediately claimed the house and insisted on his right to arrange her funeral and bury her with his people.
If he had come to you beforehand, you could have "explored other options," but it would have been finely parsing the "imposition of values" issue: doing the rotten thing actually led to a very vigorous "subjective sense of well-being."
Yet every decent mental health counselor must cut across the grain of their clients at multiple points. Otherwise, no-one would ever deal with resistance; no interpretations but the trivial would ever be offered; no schemas would be exposed and adjusted. All psychotherapies (or 90%) would begin in session 1 with the client crying for help, and end in session 5 with the client blocking any reasonable suggestions or strategies for change (well mine do anyway, but that's a different story).
All counselors (or 90%) have an implicit theory of what happiness looks like. As Christians, we know that there is natural happiness, which is available to believers and non-believers alike (via what you might call common grace); and that there is a supernatural happiness, available only to those who have the Holy Spirit. Natural happiness cannot be achieved by pursuing a side-effect of flourishing (i.e., the subjective sense of well-being), just as the funnest games are those in which the participants do not "try to have fun." Thomas Nagel (1998) said, "We do not need a scientific investigation to be certain that the number 379 does not have parents.... If someone rebuked us for being closed-minded, because we can' t predict in advance what future scientific research might turn up about the biological origins of numbers, he would not be offering a serious ground for doubt" (p.338). In precisely the same way, we can be certain of what human nature is, and therefore, of what makes for human happiness, up to the supernatural limit (hint: it looks a lot like the Google slogan, "Don't be evil"). And there is no reason why this shouldn't be the goal (discussed openly and respectfully), rather than the usual goal of pleasure, which is almost always implicit, and always disappointing.
Reference
Nagel, T. (1998). Conceiving the impossible and the mind-body problem. Philosophy, 73 (285), p.337-352.
No comments:
Post a Comment