Why are psychologists so convinced that chronic emotional problems, particularly in later life, are always due to early trauma? As well as some obvious bad event in the present it could also as easily be an inherited or innate thing i.e. genetic, chemical etc. It could be cultural, spiritual too, God knows. It could just be the way you came into the world giving you a disposition, the way you’re brain is put together. In other words not that you were born tabula rasa, totally at the mercy of experience, but the tendencies were already in place. Endogenous is the technical term. Things of course could still go this way or that depending on what happens to you. But the psychologists generally want to go searching for this clue to it all, something particularly traumatic that happened in the developing years which is going to unlock the door.

I don’t think that works for me. If it works for anyone I suggest it’s a revelatory thing, that those being psychologised are being introduced to a new way of looking at themselves. That the revelations connect with actual past events is less important than the fact that they provide insight, a fresh perspective. In this sense a therapeutic solution to emotional difficulties has more in common with religion than it does science. I think therapists go for this approach because it can get results. It might be based on dodgy theory but if it works then what the hell. It doesn’t make for good science but you wouldn’t care if it provided relief. I imagine the very fact that I take this view is why it wouldn’t do for me. I’m not a believer and so the insights wouldn’t have the desired effect. I just suffer away in superiority!