Book Excerpt on Purgatory
If you know what binging and purging is all about, then you know what Purgatory is all about. It's the exact same thing.
You put all of this crap inside of you and then you just want to get it all out as soon as possible. The best thing about Purgatory is that it's not hideously repulsive. It's infinitely better than Hell. Purgatory is sort of like psychological therapy (good psychological therapy, not bad psychological therapy). Bad psychological therapy is like when you go in there and you can just see those little dollar signs lighting up in the therapist's eyes. It's like they know they'll be able to milk this relationship for an eternity. A lot of therapists look at their patients like they were cash cows or something. Why? It's because most therapists are completely clueless about what they should be doing anyway. It's like the blind leading the blind. Psychological therapists are basically trained (like Pavlov's dogs) to perceive that their patients have a mental illness when most of the time there's absolutely nothing wrong with the patient at all. They put some label on you like "bipolar disorder," or they just use some easy catch-all thing like "adjustment disorder with depressed mood." Please. If you've been labeled as "mentally ill" because you have "oppositional defiant disorder," "conduct disorder" or "antisocial personality disorder," that just means you happen to be caught up in a world where the "adults" in your life are more messed up than you are. They have to put a label on you like that so they can get paid by the insurance company. The more "messed up" the label is, the more money they can make off of you. Therapists have a huge incentive to make sure that your friends, your family and your insurance company all perceive you to be a total nut-case. If you can avoid it, stay away from psychological therapy. Psychological therapy is mostly about money, power and sex. If they're not interested in making money off of you, then they're interested in playing "power-trip" mind games with you, as if they're so much smarter than you (when in fact they're just completely clueless). And if they're not interested in a) making lots of money off of you or b) playing power-trip mind games with you, then they're just interested in c) having sex with you. People with a serious mental illness really need good psychological therapy. It's just too bad there are so many awful psychological therapists out there. To make matters even worse, there's really not much science at all behind this stuff they call "psychological therapy" (which is why it's so easy for so many people to make so much money from it). All of therapy is pretty much the same thing, regardless of who you go to or what type of therapy it is. It's basically a five-step process. Step One: The therapist asks you to a) talk about what's on your mind, b) conjure up some memories and c) talk about any emotions you feel ("now" and "in the past"). Step Two: You just sit there and a) tell the therapist what's on your mind, b) try to recall some memories you had about x, y or z, and then c) throw some stuff in there about how your emotions make you feel ("now" and "in the past"). Step Three: This is where it starts to get insane. The therapist a) misinterprets what you said and b) analyzes that misinterpretation based on c) the therapist's faulty understanding of d) a half-baked theory that's e) barely connected to anything resembling science. Step Four: Then the clueless therapist tells you a) how you should interpret your life experiences, b) how you should change your behavior and c) how you should change the way you think about things so that d) you can reach various goals that e) have nothing to do with the root causes of your problems. Step Five: Then somehow they find a way to combine a) "talk therapy" with b) "drug therapy" so that they can c) get you off of "street drugs" and d) get you hooked on "respectable drugs" so that e) some drug company can f) make even more money off of your g) nonexistent mental illness. If you talk to a therapist who's honest with you, they'll tell you that a big part of their job is just sitting there and listening to people whine about their boyfriends, their husbands, their bosses, their mothers or their annoying friends. It's just one long, multiyear whine-fest. Nobody likes to suffer, and nobody likes to feel pain, but suffering is a part of life. Pain and suffering are just part of evolution. Some evolutionary biologists (and other atheists) often say that humans are just a "lucky stack of chemicals" or a "lucky conglomeration of molecules." The thing is this. Electrons, protons and neutrons don't feel pain. Molecules don't suffer. Pain and suffering arose in organisms as they evolved from single-celled microorganisms to animals and finally to humans. And the higher up you go on the food chain the more painful it gets. Microorganisms don't feel pain. Nobody really knows if insects and worms feel pain. But we definitely know that "higher-level" animals feel pain. And no animal species feels pain and suffering more than the human species feels pain and suffering. Animals don't feel the gut-wrenching sorrow of a broken heart. Animals don't think about committing suicide when the other animal they've been having sex with decides to find another animal to have sex with. Purgatory is all about the pain you feel when you finally learn what love is all about, and you see all of the damage and heartache you've caused because of your selfishness and your failure to love. After you learn all of that, then you go to Heaven. If you've suffered a lot in this life, take heart. You won't go to Purgatory, you'll go straight to Heaven. (Just don't commit suicide. Not only is suicide one of the most stupid, selfish things you can do, but there are a lot of people who really care about you (you're just not aware of it). Besides, God needs you to do a few more things here before you make the transition from this life to the next.) An overview of the structure and contents of my book (which is a mash-up) can be found in the About the Book section underneath my short bio. |
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Purgatory
If you don't have a severe mental illness, then do yourself a favor and stop going to psychological therapy. You'll get all the therapy you need in Purgatory.
