Health
Is Your Counselor a COVID Coward?
What I found in offering mental health treatment during a plague surprised me.
Posted August 17, 2021 Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
Key points
- Mental health treatment during the pandemic invites people to identify and embrace rational thought.
- Rational thinking (or the absence of it) is not an event. It is a lifestyle and cannot be compartmentalized.
- Using irrational thinking in one aspect of life (like a relationship) likely extends to other important areas of one's life.
Throughout the pandemic of 2020-2021, I like most mental health professionals, have had more than a full caseload treating all the usual problems of depression, anxiety, and early childhood trauma. But then COVID! What I found in offering mental health treatment in a time of plague surprised me. I think it may surprise you too.
Meet the new problem, just like the old problem. Like most counselors, I try to avoid needless drama and conflict and try to stay focused on the presenting problems of my clients. I've gotten used to sometimes working with confrontation too, when necessary. I've even developed a taste for it because experience has shown me that confrontation is the necessary first step toward solving the problem no one is talking about. Over the years, I've had many occasions to confront a variety of irrational beliefs like: "If we love each other we should be together," or "But if they didn't love me, they wouldn't have had sex with me." So in confronting, I often talk to people about rational versus irrational thinking and I flatter myself in thinking that, over the years of my practice, I've gotten pretty good at helping people embrace rational thought. But then the COVID fairy tapped me lightly on the head with a baseball bat.
Rational thinking and the pandemic
My clientele reflects the range of beliefs about the vaccine in the United States, all the way from, "Of course I'm vaccinated. What do you think I am, a moron?" to "Of course I'm not vaccinated. What do you think I am, a moron?" Usually, members of the latter group, when even gently confronted, say, "I have a right to my opinion." They get defensive as if I've just criticized them when perhaps all I'd said was something counselor-soft like, "Oh? Tell me about that."
You might wonder: What in the world is a counselor doing confronting clients about their private medical decisions? Well, wonder no more, because I'm going to tell you. Here's the deal: Rational thinking is based on reason and knowledge. Consequently, decisions based on rational thinking have a higher probability of success. Simple, right? I wish.
There are two optional systems of human thinking: Either we use reason (which includes science and logic) or we use thinking based on revelation. Revelation-based truth includes, "It's true because the Word says it's true" —a belief used to justify abuse of humans such as America's history of slavery or an anti-science belief like those used to persuade churchgoers that Benjamin Franklin's newfangled invention (the lightning rod) was an abomination that sought to circumvent the will of God. Of course because, if the Almighty sought to strike you down, who are you, mere human, to resist him? The same thinking was used in the 1764 arrest of the American hero Ethan Allen (as described in Matthew Stewart's "Nature's God") after he stripped to the waist in the town square and allowed his doctor Thomas Young to inoculate him in violation of the municipal code of the small town of Salisbury, Connecticut. In those days the thinking of the religious was, as in the words of Reverend Timothy Dwight who sermonized, "It would be a frightful sin to avoid and annul that decree (of death by disease) by the trick of vaccination."
Sure, we have cults nowadays who talk like this but, in general, most Americans are more likely to get their truthy revelations from some Facebook group or an anonymous doctor (specialty unknown, maybe a podiatrist?) on YouTube, or sometimes just "a guy I talked to in the parking lot at the Walmart."
My unvaccinated clients seem to end up in one of three groups. The first is made up of those with an ideological bent about "libtard conspiracies," "stolen elections," and "I think Fauci is up to something. He's made a lot of money on this vaccine." The second group appears to be quite passive and their immunization decisions are driven by whatever position their spouse takes. The third group is made up of procrastinators who are just slow about getting stuff done. One member of this group said (eight months after the first shots were given to then-President Trump), "I just never found the time to do it until my folks invited us all to join them on their Hawaii vacation and I wasn't about to spend it in a hotel room quarantined for two weeks." All three types are well represented in the morgues across our country. Quaint, right?
Why counselors should confront irrational thinking
These conversations are a minefield of emotions, so why should you (or your counselor) go there? Because rational thinking (or the absence of it) is not an event. It is a lifestyle. Every decision driven by rational thinking has a vastly higher probability of success because rational thinking is grounded in reality. It is not magical thinking like, "Well, I met him in a church so I know he has good morals." It is not wishful thinking like, "I believe it will work out...somehow." It doesn't set nonsensical standards like, "Well, when someone can sit down and explain to me where this virus came from and how this vaccine is supposed to stop it, well, then I'll take the shot." (By the way, I asked this client if he thought he could actually understand a kind virologist's explanation of the virus followed by a very accommodating immunologist's clarifying remarks about the vaccine's efficacy and he paused long enough to say, "No," before adding, "But I'm not doing it until they do." All my clients have a right to their opinions, but, in the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, they do not have a right to their own facts.
Your counselor needs to confront this kind of thinking. Because irrationality doesn't just affect one part of our life and it cannot be compartmentalized in such a way to not infect other areas of your life. Irrational thinking sets us up for con men who steal our money, health quacks offering cures that "work like a miracle" (in that they don't work at all), and religious leaders or youth leaders who hurt our children in the most intimate of ways. Irrational thinking doesn't just blind us to predators, it helps them kill us.
Here's what's been working for me. I tell my clients to list their top 10 medical experts, "You know, the ones you'd turn to if someone you love got really sick." Sometimes their list includes the AMA, sometimes Harvard or Yale medical schools, sometimes the Mayo Clinic, maybe even the American Academy of Science or the American Academy of Pediatrics. Then I challenge them to go to the organization's website and discover their position on the vaccine. "What do you think that the organizations you trust the most, the ones you'll turn to if you get sick, will recommend?" No one gets the answer wrong.
Is your counselor scared of this topic? You may need to ask them in order to find out. Listen carefully to any attempt to avoid the topic when you bring it up because, if you're seeing a professional for any kind of problem whatsoever, and that professional has their own issues with rational thinking, it's time to move on.