ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

STEPHEN L. TSOUSIS was born in 1955. He has had a varied career as a high school teacher, youth worker, tutor, photographer, natural therapist, army officer and lecturer in psychotherapy. 

He is currently a practising counsellor and psychotherapist while also working as a part-time carer in mental health. 

He is a professional member of the Australian Counselling Association and secretary of the Hunter Region’s local ACA chapter. 

He has spent almost thirty years studying, writing and applying psychologies, philosophies, comparative religions and metaphysics to help him make sense of his life. 

His primary adage is to Know Thyself, believing that the last frontier and the least well known is the inner world of a greater consciousness. 

He is married and currently living in Sydney. 

What if God were my Analyst? is his first published book and he hopes to write at least two more.

READ A SAMPLE:

Session 1: The Lament;

Matters of Corrupt Wounded Childishness 

Piety and conformity to them that like,

Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like,

I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations,

Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives!

I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue

Questioning everyone I meet,

Who are you that wanted only to be told

what you knew before?

Who are you that wanted only a book

to join you in your nonsense?

Walt Whitman By Blue Ontario’s Shore

GOD: Welcome, Stephen. How might I guide you right now as you find yourself at this point in your life?

Stephen: I am at war with the state of things continuing as they are within me, others, and the sordid massed mess of humanity. I’ve come before you so that you may assist me in my reality checking. Me, as one man and, I confess, a fool. I fear but a handful are listening. Will you hear my lament?

GOD: What are your Lamentations about?

Stephen: To lament is to grieve. I grieve the condition of most of us on this Earth. I am not happy in this regressive and infantile world. There is so much wrong pretending to be right. What little intention to bring real benevolence is undone by our failure to act. Our behaviour is appalling, even criminal, on so many levels.

How do you feel as the Eye in the sky perpetually watching?

GOD: I feel as you do and it seems clear that many people act as if I am not watching. I watch and hear through the eyes and ears of everyone. The cry of deep angst and despair is everywhere. The darkness is thick there are very few points of light.

I noticed that you have been feeling frustrated as you type this.

Stephen: Yes, that’s true. I feel frustrated with the typing errors I’m making, like not coordinating the caps lock on and off, hitting the wrong keys and my general lack of skills with the computer.

My lament is a prayer, an ache to right myself for I know I am sick.

GOD: I noticed that you just changed your technique for alternating between caps and lower case. Tell me what just happened for you then.

Stephen: I just decided that it didn’t matter. Look, my name has just slipped into lower case, hasn’t it?

GOD: Yes, perhaps a Freudian slip. Now, don’t correct that. I sense that’s what you want to do; you’re eating, chewing and gnashing your teeth about this – what shall I call it? – an error made in frustration.

Tell me what you know about the Freudian slip of your lower case name and its links to the errors of frustration as demonstrated in your computer incompetence.

Stephen: You want me to link these things!

GOD: You censored a word out of your last stetement made in exasperation.

Now don’t correct the spelling mistake. How do you feel about the computer underlining stetement as a spelling mistake?

Stephen: You made the spelling mistake, not me. It’s always God’s fault. You’re never there.

I’m Frustrated. Annoyed. Angry. Impatient. Hostile. Inadequate. There’s a feeling of rage, I want to pick up the keyboard and smash it to smithereens. I wouldn’t mind hitting you over the head with it. I should be perfect like you.

God: Who said I was perfect? You still haven’t told me what the censored word was.

Stephen: You know, I had to think about what the word was; it was as if it didn’t matter. The word. I remember the word, it was trifling.

God: Trifling, and what does trifling mean to you? Do you think that this writing task of therapy you have just begun is trifling?

Stephen: I do.

God: My name in lower case is fine but you had to think about that, didn’t you, for I might punish you if you don’t spell my name correctly. Please define trifling.

Stephen: Trifling means it’s of no importance. Wait, I lie; it’s of little importance. If it were really of no importance it wouldn’t bother me would it. It’s not trifling, is it really?

God: What bothers you right now?

Stephen: I want to go out for a smoke.

God: Then do that.

Stephen: I’m struggling – no, fighting – with this smoking addiction, but I had this moment while smoking that showed me sometimes I smoke in order to reflect, take time out.

I need time out from this dialogue to consider if all this is – I mean this writing – a litany of raving with little point, yet at the same time I wondered if I could use this exercise to communicate with you in myself and with those who might want to read this.

I want to deal with smoking too, you know.

God: Good. Now let’s see if we can pull something together here. Let’s try a word association exercise you know how it works.

God: lower case stephen.

stephen: Insignificant.

God: Freudian slip.

stephen: Insignificant.

God: Frustration.

stephen: Failure.

God: Incompetence.

stephen: Errors, mistakes.

God: Statement.

STEPHEN: ‘I should be perfect!’ Now there’s a cognitive error.

God: I noticed you’ve just capitalised your name, yet in the last four entries you used mostly lower case for your name. What was just happening here?

Stephen: I was much more comfortable using lower case. I could really feel that. I capitalised my name because I didn’t like feeling insignificant, frustrated and incompetent.

God: Stetment.

Stephen: Spelling error.

God: Upper case STEPHEN.

Stephen: Important. OK.

God: Now tell me the words of your association.

Stephen: Little stephen; insignificant, frustrated, failure, incompetent error. Poor little me, the lower ego, is a mistake.

God: See, I do make mistakes. BIG STEPHEN, who is he?

Stephen: He is still in the art of becoming a man.

God: So tell me what do you think was the essence of the Freudian slip. Make a statement out of it!

Stephen: Little stephen is a failure and he can’t do anything about it.  There, you see? Our collective failures are grounded in our rotten childishness.

God: Just imagine that little stephen could do something about it, what might he do.

Stephen: He could continue to grow up.

God: Your original statement was …

Stephen: He could grow up.

God: Now there’s a big difference in the two statements as well as two differing feelings. Take a moment to reflect on this. Go and have a smoke.

Stephen: As if I need your permission to smoke.

‘He could grow up’ means that he hasn’t shown any growth at all and that feels frustrating, angry, revengeful, petty, trifling and it enrages me.

God: Which Stephen is feeling these things.

Stephen: Little stephen, the hurt inner child.

God: ‘He could continue to grow up’ means …?

Stephen: There has been growth. Lots of growth.

God: ‘Lots of growth’ meaning …?

Stephen: I have grown compared to who I used to think I was.

God: How does that feel?

Stephen: I like it. See it makes me smile.

Wait a minute, I have to check what sort of smile it is. Is it a smug smile, a proud smile, a self righteous smile, a smile that I know better than even you God? I’m confusing myself now.

God: And we don’t want to do that, do we? What sort of smile do you feel it was? It’s still there, isn’t it?

Stephen: Yes; it’s the smile of my name as I’m now typing it. The smile of being in the right place and maybe the right time.

God: And what other place do you think you’ve been in throughout your life?

Stephen: That depends on who answers from within me.

God: Well, let’s hold that thought for a while shall we?

God: Who’s this then?

Stephen: This is my wife Vicky.

God: Once again I sense a frustration in you at this moment that has to do with being interrupted by your mother.

Stephen: Yep … So often I felt interrupted by Mum telling me what to do, what to believe, what to think …

God: We’ll begin to tie this together by seeing what Vicky wants.

Vicky: I’ve been feeling miserable, frustrated and bored so I called Mum in utter frustration and you know what she said? ‘Don’t do stuff or waste your life on things that in the end make you feel miserable. Life is too short. Don’t be like me. Do the things you love.’

So I’ve turned off the computer and torn up my last piece of paperwork for the night and I’m going to relax and watch some telly.

Stephen: Do that, darling. Timely synchronicity, eh God?

God: Give me an analysis of this including your response ‘that depends who answers from within’.

Stephen: Umm … hold on. I have to buy some smokes.

Stephen: How long will we make this session?

God: You tell me.

Stephen: Seven days, probably seven months, since some say You made the world in seven days. I don’t really know. I guess we’ll see how it pans out.

God: Far too many fundamentalists believe in seven days and they fail to see that I am still in the act of creating the world. God help us all if I got bored with the task but that’s another matter for later on. What theme would you like to emerge in this work together?

Stephen: An exploration of basic psychology, history, social sciences, theology, politics, globalisation and earth changes directed by my emerging philosophical and metaphysical understandings based on long experimentation, research and study.

God: Why not? We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World’s Getting Worse. James Hillman and Michael Ventura. San Francisco, Harper Collins. 1992.

A fair observation I’d say.

Stephen: There’s something seriously wrong with the collective human disgrace.

God: ‘that depends who answers from within’ – What do you mean by this?

Stephen: I think, I mean?

God: Define think.

Stephen: When I use the word ‘think’ I equate it with a struggle for depth. To think, to feel, to contemplate, to synthesise, to dig down into, to explore with as much holism as I’m aware of and to cultivate the Ancient’s notion of an Intelligence of the Heart.

God: Good! I require that you know.

Be still and know that I am God. Someone wrote that once in one of my books. Actually I am responsible for lots of books. All books really that have ever been written and not written. What are you feeling right now?

Stephen: Frustrated. So many tangents, angles, possibilities, threads, twists, warps, woofs of how these sessions might go. It’s like one thing opens up into many diversities of things. This word associates with this word and then this word associates with this feeling, sensation, notion, idea, perspective etc.

And round and round the merry go round, the monkey chases the weasel.

God: That’s how I am always working. From the middle of nothing called nowhere I am everywhere at once doing creativity. It’s an old, old myth. Anyway, aren’t I supposed to be everywhere, know everything and doing everything?

If God wills it … Then must it be.

Stephen: I guess so; to be any less than that would cast doubts on your Godship. Now I could go into this avenue. What if God were my spiritual director too …?

God: Pardon me, I was just off somewhere else.

Stephen: Very funny. What did you mean by that?

God: Why don’t you tell me?

Stephen: I’d expect that you were always here with me while being everywhere else as well, all at the one and same time. It’s like you’re minding your own business, which is everybody’s business as it’s happening right now, yet this is done in the pasting present futuring tense which can only ever be now. I feel like swearing.

God: What stops you?

Stephen: The readers might be offended with my blasphemy.

God: And I might be offended by their blasphemies, which incidentally have nothing to do with swearing.

Stephen: Christ almighty, God on crutches, Bastard Buddha … you must be frustrated with this juggling act.

God: Me in you is frustrated. The understanding of the psyche is the key. Now in the wisdom of structure, answer this question in the context of the following words: inner child, mother, father and how it feels to be me as these three things.

The answer depends on who answers from within.

Stephen: Sounds like an emerging Transactional Analysis model from out of the 1960s. Even before that, at the turn of the 20th century, Psychosynthesis was proposing we are all a crowd of sub personalities. Before that, many of the ancient mystery schools were teaching the same sort of things.

God: Try being me for a while with a multiple personality disorder. Oh! of course part of you is me. Nevertheless, which part of you started this therapeutic encounter? Let it speak up.

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