Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Love costs Money

LOL! I'm actually laughing, thank God. And what did it? An old friend of mine that I occasionally get in touch with. He's in his mid-thirties, and he's finally so desperate to find a boyfriend that he's just found a counsellor. At £50 for fifty minutes. And this counsellor sounds to be of the NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) school, because on the first session she emphasised how she would focus on his coping mechanisms. No, she's not even going to go anywhere near the root of the problem, which is the fairly common one you find in gay circles - he had a very negligent and in fact a wife-abusing father. Oh man, I am so gunning for the entire counselling and psychotherapy professions. £50 an hour to talk about how he might find love. That's more than many people in London earn in a day. Oh it might seem cheap if you've already moved on to an ecstasy or cocaine habit, but it really pisses me off that the counselling profession is effectively in collusion with "the gay scene". Let them squander their youth on drink, sex, substances, and superficial relationships. When they realise that age is descending upon them, they'll need counselling, and so long as they have £50 an hour to pay out, they'll be ok.

Fuck London. Love is not a marketable commodity here, so they ignore it. And even when you've learned to love yourself, someone will try to take that away from you and make you think there's something wrong with you.

Ok, so here you are on a blog called Love and the City. Do you know what Love is? Can you distinguish between the kind of Love that a baby feels for its mother, and the kind of Love that a mother feels for its baby, and the kind of Love that a couple feel for each other? Do you know that Love is not just about a feeling, but about being able to care for somebody in a physical and pragmatic way? To care for their survival, and to care for their future?

I'm not even going to go into the answers here. I drafted them up back in March when it all became deadly clear to me, as I walked home from Hospital after visiting my Dad the first time he got close to dying. I never published it on this blog. It was too close, and too powerful. And now, I myself need to focus on surviving. Because loving yourself costs a lot less money. And London and Britain today has little love to spare except for cats and dogs and horses and cars.

2 comments:

Aiden Truss said...

I had to see a psychiatrist for counselling, a few years ago - I found it invaluable, but then again, he was a real doctor and knew what he was doing.

I have worked with 2 people who were training to be counsellors (one, I work with currently), and they were/are two of the most emotionally ill-equiped people to give anyone advice.

I think that all would-be counsellors should have a thorough psych-evaluation themselves before being allowed to practice.

Then again, a fool and his money are soon parted, as they say. Some people obviously feel the need to throw money at charlatan's in order fill a hole in their lives.

loveandtheplanet said...

LOL! Fools giving money to fools, and circulating it in their own microeconomy! Very fitting for the Blair era, as it produces nothing and yet shows up as economic activity in the statistics.

As you say, there are many people flocking to the profession who tend to have no natural Emotional Intelligence. They have to learn things out of a book and with one-to-one hand holding.

The counselling/psychotherapy business has always been a Pyramid Scheme. People are drawn into it seeking help. The kind of help that they feel ashamed to approach anybody else about. They get some help, so they think, "what a genius revelatory professionnal discipline to get into". And a vicious circle is born with extra layers adding onto the bottom of the pyramid. But at £50 an hour, I wonder how many people can afford to join this pyramid scheme any more?

I would hope that psychiatrists were generally better, but the only one I ever met, in Toronto in the 80's, was so useless and greedy, that he fell asleep during a session with me, and then lied that he hadn't, when I challenged him about it. There are crap doctors, and there are crap psychiatrists, and I would say each individual would have to be carefully judged on his/her own merits.