There was the void back, then. The days when people were still infant are days they can’t remember. Psychologists
themselves have been fascinated by how the human brain develops through days, and then weeks, and then months,
years and learn to associate things to meaning and create ideas of their own.
What would happen if the void strikes again? I mean not in the way we were really a bit, if not clueless, wordless on
expressing what we were experiencing when the time human language wasn’t still in our own personal cognitive
universes. What if words begin to lose meaning, or if not, shift their definitions to a personalized dictionary from the
others’ agreements on what each of them must mean.
I remember this video I watched on YouTube years ago when I was still in the peaks of my still ongoing adolescence,
now at its later stages towards young adulthood. This YouTube video was made by Noah Elkrief, a best-selling author
and licensed life coach, to help people suffering under emotional troubles - angst, grief, loneliness, despair, etc. His
attitude towards life, specifically towards experiences that seem to make people feel they are in trouble, is non-directive
and has more explanations than suggestions while inviting people to assess themselves personally as they
know themselves more than any other person around. Let me rephrase, he likes to explain what’s happening to
the person first before giving friendly reminders/advises. Most of the times, he don’t even give any since he
know that situations are always dependent on an underlying backstory.
I’ve watched lots of his videos hoping that self-help could help me to relieve me of my personal deepness back then in
high school. I noticed one thing that is common among all of them. Mr. Elkrief always points out how everything we
think and feel revert back to our thoughts and what meaning we associate to them. Those videos, I realized have
served me little versus what I was really trying to achieve, inner peace.
I can quote my older sister here since we shared ideas about the same matter, more than psychological
confusion, an existential one. She told me how she had always tried shelves of self-help books before and
concluded that they simply didn’t work for her. This insight had led me to question if psychology itself,
the mainstream, conventional method under Freudian ‘interrogation’ style where one is bludgeoned with
personal questions to aid the expert on using scientifically valid techniques as a means to help alleviate, at
least, what can scientifically be measured and improved.
Again, I’d like to quote another person here, more famous than my sister as a writer. The books of Viktor Frankl, “In
Search For Meaning” and Joseph Campbell’s, “The Power of Myth” coming from different fields, psychology and
mythology, far away the subject may be strums the same intellectual harmony that deeply fascinated both of us, me and
my witty older sister as she have read these books as part of of one her research paper. I just read them out of curiosity,
to be honest. It was never a regret doing so, though.