Living in Extremes

A man loses his job…he comes home…he looks around, and he says: “This place is a pig-sty!” (Turning to his wife) he screams: “What the blank do you do around here all day?" Then she says one word in her defense and he launches into a violent outburst against her and his own kids, literally terrorizing them for the rest of the day.

Then there is the opposite type of mental health problem–the type where somebody withdraws into herself and just cuts herself off from her husband, her kids, and her friends–she just stops talking to everybody! She might go on that like for hours or even days before she decides to come back to the world of people.

How does a modern psychologist help people who go into extreme behaviors to balance themselves out? He looks at extreme behaviors as dangerous and emotionally unhealthy. When people are living in “extremes” they are going to have a hard time getting along with other people. They’ll have difficulty making friends. Or, they will not find it so pleasant to be alone and not part of a social group. The main reason for self-improvement, according to the modern view, is so that people can fit in better or gain some type of social advantage.

To balance people’s emotions, modern psychology encourages people to bring to the fore emotions such as anger, conceit, jealousy and honor-seeking. If someone has an urge to express anger at his parents, he is told to let it out. He might even be advised to vent his anger directly at his parents. They claim that by not expressing inner drives like anger or the wish for honor the person will become frustrated and this will lead to problems. If he expresses his anger, though, or if he bangs a pillow with a baseball bat–this will calm him down.

This theory of emotional venting has its origins in an early theory of Sigmund Freud that he himself discarded. It was called the “Economic Theory”. Freud viewed the mind in a purely neurological way. The brain is made up of psychic energy. If too much energy is being dammed up it builds up pressure in the mind and will eventually burst out. The way to deal with this is to let it out in the therapist’s office and not in the world.

If a person were no more than his negative emotions which needed to be released in order to calm him down, then this method would work. But a person is made up of a body and a soul; for the person to stay mentally healthy, he must know how to balance the needs of his body with the needs of his soul. When a psychologist, psychiatrist or social worker encourages people to vent their raw emotions, they are enabling the body to dominate the soul. When the body is allowed to unleash its drives and cravings in an uncontrolled way, the body becomes stronger and will conflict even more with the soul.

Modern psychology views man as a body without a soul. Therefore, all that is needed to reach a state of inner peacefulness is to let out the inner urges. But since we know that man is a composite of body and soul, we need methods of dealing with the needs of the body and the soul.  For this reason, the Torah could never allow a person to magnify his anger or his narcissistic fantasies. He might feel better for the moment, but he has reduced the light of his soul in the process.

The Torah’s way is to work with the body and soul simultaneously. We talk to both of them at the same time because both of them are real.

If a person who is filled with anger comes to us (and anger is a product of the body), we will balance his anger by magnifying the light of his soul, but we’ll also give his body what it needs, within limits. To increase the light of his soul (which is called emuna), we will share elevated ideas with him. The most elevated idea is that with emuna, there is no place for anger in the world because everything is under Hashem’s control, and whatever seems so upsetting or wrong is really for our best. If a person is able to internalize that, he won’t become angry. We may also address the needs of the body by allowing a person to express some of his frustration, within limits, and then speak to him about the tremendous physical harm that anger has on his body. A person will calm down when he is led to see the harmful effects he is causing to his own physical self.