Do you know that thing where you have this thought that flashes through your head very, very quickly and it’s frankly appalling, utterly horrific – downright perverted in fact, and it is one of your own thoughts. That’s what a guy asked me the other day, obviously hoping that I was in some way going to validate his experience. You get a lot of that working as a therapist of course – people looking for validation. I denied ever having such thing happen to me, just to make the guy feel bad. You’ve got to get your kicks somehow I guess, and that’s how I get mine. That’s one of the ways, anyway. I also do hard drugs, when I get the chance – I’m a sucker for Class A’s. The truth is of course that I have thoughts like that all the time! Hardly an hour goes by without me having that sort of thought flashing through my head – as a therapist however I’m not exactly I’m not going to admit that in a hurry. I know I’m admitting it here but very few people ever going to read this blog and it’s all fairly anonymous, I think. You’ve got to find some way to let out the truth, haven’t you? There’s always some little part of us that wants to be honest, some tiny little part. ‘Excuse me sir would you please validate my experience?’ No sonny Jim I won’t, you’re a freak! Just face up to the fact that you are and stop trying to pretend that you’re normal! That’s your homework for the week – to try to face up to the fact that you’re a freak! Have you got what it takes to do that? Have you got the balls? Reality’s a hard old business after all and you’d be doing yourself a big favour if you could only toughen up a bit. Face difficult facts. Accept them. Get on with it for God sake. Stop your endless fucking whingeing. That’s the message I like to give people anyway, and I like to think that it’s a helpful one. In the long run at least. Grow a pair my friends, did you ever think of that? I do a bit of CBT on the side as well, just to fill in time in the session. I tell people to change their thinking. Those thoughts you have are no good, I tell them. They are maladaptive. They’re deeply abnormal. They’re thinking errors and so what you have to do is write them all down in an exercise book and then write down beside them what you should have thought. That’s how the therapy works you see. Eventually we’ll get you to change that stupid maladaptive thinking of yours. You can learn to sing a different song, so to speak. You’ll stop being so fucking negative the whole time. I realise that this totally contradicts what I was saying earlier about accepting the fact that you’re a freak and just getting on with it but this contradiction is part and parcel of the therapeutic process. We know what we’re doing. Mixed messages are an essential part of the therapy process: first you tell your client to accept themselves and then you tell them to change themselves – that is standard procedure amongst us professional therapists. The old ‘therapeutic double-bind’ gets them every time so it does. It really does work too – there has been a lot of research into it. Research by proper experts in the field, not that phony-baloney social sciences-type research which is as everyone knows just a bunch of made-up crap. Those guys are pretending to be scientists but really they’re just a bunch of dip heads, pathetically trying to make out that they actually know what they’re talking about. You’ve got to laugh at those sad wankers, haven’t you? No – the research that I’m talking about isn’t like that at all…