The Gift of Insight

“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us.” Robert Burns

As a therapist, my stock in trade was insight, a skill that for most of my life, I had already been employing as a tool to deal with the confusion that marked my early years. Having been abandoned by my father around the time of my birth, my mother and I lived with her parents until she remarried when I was five.

Mom had to work. I like to joke that I was the only kid ever to flunk out of nursery school. After a day or so at what to me felt like the gulag, so adamantly did I protest going back, Mom relented and Grandma took over.

Grandma was a warm loving woman who, nonetheless, had limited time and energy to entertain a young child. As such, when I was not simply observing her and keeping her company as she went about her daily chores, I spent blocks of time in solitary pursuits, much more so than did most children my age. There was no TV. I entertained myself as best I could listening to stories and songs on my phonograph machine, leafing through my picture books, watching the world go by outside the big front window of my grandfather’s tailor shop and imagining what the people passing by were about. I was acutely aware my situation was unusual even though I generally accepted it as the necessary reality.

As a result, I was much more in touch with my inner emotional and cognitive state than the average child and developed a precocious ability to gauge the inner workings of the adults around me. It was a means of determining how best to get along with them and to not be too much of a bother. I knew they all had troubles of their own, especially Mom. This developed my capacity for empathy.

The early sense of isolation never completely passed, even as I developed relationships and social skills. I tended to experience myself as different, separated from the mainstream, viewing the events and relationships in my life always from a little bit off to the side. A watcher, observing, assessing and trying to discover some truths about who I was, why I existed and what, if anywhere, was my place in the world. This proclivity contributes greatly to the thought processes that wend their way into these essays

The capacity for self reflection developed exponentially during the decades I spent as a therapist, a role well suited to my personality, for I had always been a participant/observer. Despite the adversity from which this ability sprang, it was a blessing both in personal and professional life.

Attempts to cultivate such insightfulness in my patients was a daunting task, for insight, that always felt natural to me, is indeed a scarce commodity. My impression was, and still is, that most people are conditioned to accept the general wisdom and the interpretations of authority figures on faith. Decisions and judgements are based on habit, traditions and the face value of events interpreted through the narrow lens of self interest.

This is encouraged by the powers that be. We are of more use to others who wish to control us and to profit off of us when we do not question the prevailing myths too deeply and are preoccupied with our own selfish desires.

Insight is the secret tool of comedians who make fun of convention and conformity. At their best they force us to step outside of our usual assumptions, to view things in a new light. I recall a favorite performance of George Carlin in which he expounded on religion, especially the Christian religion, as “the greatest bullshit story ever told.” No one and nothing exposes the absurdity of the Christian myth and casts a light on the lack of insight shared by religious fundamentalist half so well as that schtick did.

One reason I so disdain evangelical Christianity, is that its adherents are indoctrinated to the point of being brain dead. They are completely devoid of insight, but worse, lack empathy. Accordingly they have no awareness that foisting their fiction on the rest of us is a disrespectful, selfish and hostile act.

This is but one, though perhaps the most egregious example, of the harm a dearth of insight can propagate. A similar lack of insight and the unthinking embrace of authority figures with nothing but their own profit at heart is, I believe, greatly responsible for what ails society. It explains why so many are so easily led by opportunists and film flam artists and why so many people are blind to the reality that lies right before their eyes.

Would that those eyes might be opened.