Recently, a devout, kindhearted Christian lady came to me for help to declutter her home. Every surface in her home was covered with unused objects, making it difficult for her to host her children and grandchildren.
We tried a narrative approach about how her childhood poverty might contribute to her holding onto things she didn’t need. Insight notwithstanding, not one chipped teapot disappeared from view.
Next, we analyzed clutter as procrastination caused by unconscious rebellion. The Styrofoam Easter bunnies still held court on the dining room table. Next up, behavioral unitization, which involved writing down and removing one item a day. Nothing budged.
As a last resort , we put a sign on her refrigerator: You are forbidden to clear away anything. The Lord is good but not good enough. You need every item in this house to feel good about yourself today.
Absorbing those words, she began putting things in storage, throwing others away, taking more to Goodwill. We agreed to a 10% tithe to herself, which she found funny. She counted and removed 90% of the clutter.
In psychotherapy, the prescriptive paradox is employed to overcome resistance when other methods of therapy have failed. Paradox is more than reverse psychology. It is a prescription of the symptom, which activates the motivation for change, breaking the dam of paralyzing anxiety and helping the client realize that there are more important issues at stake.
Psychological theory divides paradox into three categories: antinomic, veridical, and falsidical.
An antinomic paradox derives from the Latin word antimony, meaning when a true rule or law opposes another true rule or law. Our recovering clutterer/hoarder was following two valid belief systems: the ideals of cleanliness, simplicity, and generosity of her faith alongside the need to care for herself by surrounding herself with things that gave her comfort. When these two concepts came into conflict, she chose her faith.
A veridical paradox is a premise that seems contradictory or confusing but leads to a good or true result. “Slow and steady wins the race” is an example of such a paradox. As long as the event isn’t a 100-meter dash, many races in life are won by the slow and steady runner.
A falsidical paradox contains an invalid belief statement, or premise, that appears logical or commonly accepted but leads to an untenable conclusion. American history is being transformed by a vast falsidical paradox. The Democrat party has committed suicide, choosing to die on the hill of a paradox that in 2016 the American people elected a president who is pure evil, Hitler redux, who must be stopped and destroyed, and any form of unconstitutional lawfare, impeachments, criminal conspiracy, and lies against him are justified. Furthermore, the majority of voters who elected him twice and voted for him thrice are therefore Hitler-huggers, fascists, deplorables, racist, and stupid, leading to the conclusion that Democrats hate America, because hatred of the majority of voters amounts to hating the nation itself.
Suicide is sometimes committed by successful, well adjusted people who can’t overcome disappointment, depression, and despair. Fundamentally, the success of 20th-century progressivism made Democrats irrelevant.
Let’s pick the years between 1900 and 1973. During that period, every major progressive political initiative led by Democrats designed to alleviate hardship and discrimination triumphed and was ingrained in American law. These include Social Security, safety nets for the truly needy, worker safety, the right to unionize, abolition of child labor, and universal citizen voting rights, along with equal access to public accommodations regardless of sex, race, color, or physical handicap. Even Title IX squeaked by in 1972 to ensure equal opportunity in women’s sports in public institutions. (Democrats have been dismantling that through the unfairness in sports of “trans” privileging.) Democrats no longer write major legislation because there’s nothing more the law can do regarding equal justice for every American’s chance to achieve his own definition of happiness.
Generally speaking, Democrat progressivism prior to 1973 was based in alleviating poverty, material scarcity, and discrimination. Beginning in 1973, however, with the now overturned Roe v. Wade, progressivism has operated in the era of post-scarcity, serving the purposes of lifestyles, psychosocial identity, and psychological comfort. Since 1973, post-liberal Democrats have led the effort to destroy law upholding traditional God-based morality, with a side serving of chic catastrophizing of climate change rhetoric. Then TDS came along to rescue Democrats from boredom and galvanize and unify them again.
Since committing to the evil dictator paradox, with the Führer’s 80-million Americans in tow, poking the air with their right arms, Democrat beliefs and policies have moved to an extreme falsidical paradox that resembles insanity. The psychosis du jour is that justice is served by un-deporting a fully adjudicated, multifariously violent illegal alien gangbanger, because he’s just what every American neighborhood needs.
The Democrats seem to exist solely to collect the leftovers from Politibucks Inc. and the fading chance to shake down a few remaining wealthy donors. Hopefully, those rich folks will go back to virtue-shopping on behalf of the whales, birds, and other beautiful creatures of God, who are being sickened and killed by the paradox of “green” energy policies.
Bernie Sanders was recently asked if he thought any of President Trump’s policies were good. He reluctantly admitted that closing the border and stopping the flow of fentanyl might be good things. For four years previously, not one Democrat, including “independent” Sanders, said a word against the millions of people crossing the intentionally opened border. Sanders and his ilk also spoke not a syllable of concern about the loss of a generation of young Americans to unemployment and the plague of death by fentanyl. (If young men are not challenged by work, they will find ways to kill themselves and one another.) Suddenly, Sanders now thinks closing the border and stopping the flow of fentanyl are good ideas.
Bernie Sanders, you are forbidden to praise closing the border. You are forbidden to praise fighting the inflow of deadly drugs.
Democrats cannot now know what a woman is. They cannot protect children from permanent physical mutilation, even if the child is a decade below the age of consent. They cannot stand against boys crushing and injuring girls in sports. They cannot support the deportation of murderous, predatory non-citizens, so they must find or fabricate legal loopholes to keep them in America.
Democrats must not support the survival of Israel. They must not oppose Iran’s worldwide tentacles of terrorism and its nuclear weapons program. They must not support parental authority in government schools, because government knows best about educating their children.
Democrats are forbidden to support an open audit of government spending. They are forbidden to support free and open scientific inquiry into the COVID pandemic. They are forbidden to support a national autism database, so more and more lives can be blighted by the rising tide of autism.
In short, Democrats must stick with the suicidal paradox they have embraced.
Dr. Tyler invites you to read her Substack piece on conflict resolution.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
