When I was a child, my mother read to me a book entitled, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It is a remnant from the beginning of the psychological Renaissance of the early 1970s, which occurred after the scandalous Willowbrook Institution on Staten Island was found to imprison hundreds of patients with special needs who were given the best care that two nurses could possibly give them. 

            I might be exaggerating the details a bit, but the fiasco was no less terrible, horrible, no good, or very bad as I made it sound.  In the 1970’s Psychology as a science entered its teen years:  breaking away from its father, Sigmund Freud, and contemplating the similarity between holes cut out of early men’s living skulls to let demons out and performing lobotomies on stage with an ice pick (Walter Freeman performed them from 1946-1967.  NOT the Greatest Show.) 

            Psychology, as well-meaning as it may have been since the beginning, possesses its own rather psychopathic past.  The so-called psychologists of the twentieth century better resembled Hannibal Lecter than the therapists of today until Carl Rogers’ person-centered approach became popular.  For all we know, perhaps Lecter was merely collecting data on what types of people taste better than others. 

            Ethics, then, became a necessity for the industry if it was to survive such barbaric practices.  But, as humans love doing at the slightest threat, the psychological community ran for their lives at top speed and as far as they could away from their mistakes and dove headfirst into the other extreme. 

            A counselor of a foster child I once had told me that I think in terms of black-and-white.  He was referring to a cognitive distortion characterized by the thinker’s inability to realize that in this world, there is shadow.  In the spiritual dimension, darkness and light cannot co-exist.  Revelation 21:23-25 states,

 ²³ And the city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its light. ²⁴ The nations will walk in its light, and the kings of the world will enter the city in all their glory. ²⁵ Its gates will never be closed at the end of day because there is no night there. 

                This will take some time to get used to, I imagine, as we humans have spent so long a hiatus from our Home, dragging our entropic bodies throughout this physical universe with its restrictive laws such as gravity and linear time.  We have travelled so long in these fragile suits of meat that are so impotent, they cannot see through opaque matter, perform telekinesis, or even communicate telepathically.  Two people who speak the same language can barely converse effectively with their mouths!

            And so those of us enlightened enough to realize that clinging to extremes will not lift us upward on the teeter-totter of life stand in the middle and attempt to balance it.  Utilizing the logistics of the term “black-and-white thinking,” I call this seemingly impossible goal, “The Holy Grayl,” spelled with a “y” on purpose.

            Psychology needs to invent less chemicals and find less dangerous ways of reprogramming our brains.  Certainly, something must be done about chemical imbalances which lead to depression, anxiety, hallucinations, and a host of other horrifying symptoms; however, psychology must realize how harmful their experiments have been upon us guinea pigs.

            Balance of good and evil might not fly in the Hereafter, and of course I do not condone sin, but even the good side of the scale has its own scale attempting to balance such things as justice and mercy.

            In conclusion, I find myself somewhere on the fulcrum of the measure between “young” and “old”.  Thanks to having a “full plate” or perhaps an overflowing container of stressors in life, my gray hairs are coming in nicely.  All my life up to this point, society has seen me as too young to be useful.  Soon, it will see me as too old to be useful.  Thank God He will always find me useful, although I may never come to understand why it was so important for me to “stand on that exact spot”, “whistle that old shampoo jingle”, or use myself as a human shield for my patients, many of whom lack the mental capacity to appreciate me or to learn to behave differently.  As a patient with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, I wonder at how quickly my body is becoming useless and wonder what things I might be able to do if I actually make it to 90 years, twice my current age.

            I look forward to trading my body in for a new model.  I hope God will explain to me what differences I made in the space-time continuum such as was done for the protagonist in It’s a Wonderful Life.  Until then, in the words of Rich Little’s impression of Jimmy Stewart (or at least the way my decaying brain remembers it),

            “I feel terrible.”