Psych 101

Right, you malignant ignoramuses, I'm going to divulge to you some truths about human psychology. Once you know these, you can drop all the self-help therapy-once-a-week shit 'cause it's really not that complicated. So here goes.....

 1. Dreams.

Dreams are your brain sifting through the shit it didn't get a chance to digest while you were awake. They are not portents of the future, cryptic messages from the dead or any of that bullshit - they are literally your brain going through the backlog in yesterday's thought inbox. If you dream about crashing a car into a herd of goats it isn't a manifestation of deep seated conforming issues or your desire to break out from the rat race - it just means that at some point the day before you fleetingly thought about goats and car-crashes but you moved on to something else so your brain stored these for processing later. And that's it. Try it - next time you have a dream think of the basic elements and think about what you encountered the day before to trigger them.

2. Traumatic Memories

You know the way if you touch something very hot your hand will have pulled away before you realise it? That's called an arc-reflex because it doesn't go as far as the brain for processing which would take more time with your hand burning all the time. Instead, your muscle knows "NOT GOOD GET BACK!". Traumatic memories work in the same way in that they are memories your brain decides are so important to future self-preservation that it stores them in a quick-access non-erasable part of memory.

For example, take Ugg and Ogg who are casually wandering the neolithic plains. On approaching a bush, what should jump out only a big motherfucker of a sabre-tooted cat (they weren't tigers, you tits). Ugg has been traumatised by a sabre-toothed cat attack before but Ogg has hapily sauntered through life without any such trauma. They both see the cat at the same time but while Ogg is busy processing cat=danger=run, Ugg's traumatic memory has already told his legs to get the fuck out of dodge before his brain is even fully aware of why he's running. It's only milliseconds, but that's evolution. Unfortunately evolution wasn't aware that in 20,000 years time Ugg's descendants would be using this great evolutionary tool to store childhood memories of Uncle Fred playing with your pee pee in the barn that summer. That's civilisation of the human animal for you.

Which leads me nicely to the last of today's lessons...

3. Regressive Therapies

By which I mean therapies which trawl up old memories in an effort to resolve "issues". If you keep scratching a sore all that happens is that it keeps getting infected, takes much longer to heal and usually leaves a worse scar than if you'd left it alone. Similarly, the brain's ability to heal memories by wiping part of them is an amazing gift - why the hell would you dredge past shit up again only to have to endure it again? And if these "memories" are revived using hypnosis then they're probably more imagination than fact anyway.

So there. Save thousands on therapists by realising the following: Shit has happened to us all. You can't change a second of it so learn what lessons there are to be learned, stop your self-indulgent weeping and get on with the privilege of living the rest of your life. So it is written. So it shall be done.