“To be rooted in uncertainty is to rely upon a more tentative and spacious language of associations, hypotheses, and intuitions.”— Dan Lawrence, psychotherapist
You Must Be Comfortable at the Boundary
Only on the boundary can you see both sides and distinguish one domain from another. On either side, within each area, you are immersed in the mindset of that area and subject to that domain’s notion of common sense. The world will always make some version of sense from within any domain.
This is why balance is essential. You must be able to walk the line between points of view if you’re to see and see beyond delusions. That means you must consider what’s abnormal from whatever vantage point seems normal at the time. If you can do that, then you can compare it to another point of view. There is no absolute normal or absolute sanity, only traveling between different points of view.
Donald Trump sees the world from one perspective. Speaking of a four-term member of the House of Representatives he recently said:
“Ilhan Omar, whatever the hell her name is. With her little turban. I love her. She comes in, does nothing but bitch. She’s always complaining… (We’re) going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country… She’s garbage. Her friends, garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say ‘let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great…’ We ought to get her the hell out! She married her brother... Therefore she’s here illegally.”
— Donald Trump (Nath 2025)
Then consider the situation from the other person’s point of view: a legal emigre who did not marry her brother, and who is the congressional representative for 800,000 Americans in and around Minneapolis, Minnesota.
These are two diametrically opposite points of view. On the one hand you have a lunatic, and on the other hand you have a naturalized African-American, Black, Moslem woman. To judge the nature of their conflictIt you must see both sides. That doesn’t mean you agree with either. It means you can see through the distorting lens.
Unity may be your goal, but reconciling duality must be the means. This does not mean non-duality, it means multiplicity. There is a legacy for both points of view whether or not they are crazy. People are always justifying their attitudes and crazy people are no different. You cannot identify what’s sane on the basis of what some people consider true.
It may be difficult to embrace the lunatic (unless you are one) but, if you’re to appreciate their lack of sanity, you must understand their point of view. The hardest thing about being a psychotherapist is empathizing with craziness. This means more than simply saying, “I see your point.” It means understanding the other person’s frame of mind. Consider the musings of Edward Kemper, the serial killer:
“I say, ‘Wow, this is insane.’ And then I told myself, ‘No it isn’t, you’re saying that and that makes it not insane.’ I said, ‘I’m sane and I’m looking at a severed (head)…’ Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’d seen old paintings and drawings of Viking heroes talking to severed heads and taking them to parties, old enemies in leather bags. Part of our heritage.”
— Edward Kemper (1981) the Co-ed Killer
There is No Sanity in Staying Still
To evolve is to change; to resist change is to cope. Coping doesn’t foster change. Here is the core of our need to be crazy. We need to entertain what’s uncertain, foolish, and sometimes unhinged, but we can only do that if we can hold it together. Holding it together means going forward with uncertain feelings. We often confuse coping with making progress, but the two work at cross purposes.
To be growing is to be on the boundary of what makes sense. If you’re not pushing that boundary, then you’re not growing. And if you’re not growing, then you won’t be able to maintain your sanity. Instead, you’ll drift into a fabricated non-dual world view in which you think you’ve figured it out. Lacking duality means you lack options.
You maintain your sanity by being aware of mental instability, including your own. If you’re not able to find and stay slightly mental unstable, you’re not going to maintain your sanity. The Buddhist adage applies, “You only get to keep what you’re willing to give away.”
Sanity is different from what we’ve been led to believe. It is not a state in which things operate normally and work out well. That is the realm of temporary balance, growing irrelevance, and rotting vegetables. Nor is sanity the creative realm of novelty, what’s unfamiliar, and unexpected. That’s the creative realm of chaos which is a realm of possibilities, dreams, and resources. The creative realm is not a consistent reality.
Sanity, as a stable state of mind, lies on the boundary between two unstable states. The truly sane person is one who is comfortable and capable on either side and, at the same time, discomforted and uncertain on both sides. If you’re too smug and self-assured then you’re fooling yourself. And if you’re too depressed, manic, or suspicious you’re also fooling yourself. Sanity is rising above the fray and being uncomfortably human.
“If you’re sane enough to know that you’re crazy then you’re not as crazy as if you thought you were sane.“ — Cormac McCarthy, writer
This is a difficult definition of sanity and not one that’s widely shared. Most “sane” people—and those are the people whose stock and trade is sanity, which is to say psychologists, counselors, and psychotherapists—believe that being sane is being like them. Which is to say, reasonable, reflective, reliable, and grounded. But they are confusing sanity with consistency; they are consistent but they’re not particularly sane.
The give-away is that these arbiters of sanity cannot cope well with those who are not sane, and have little experience entering and navigating their own insanity. If you cannot enter, navigate, and then exit from your own insanity, then you have little business helping others who are losing theirs. You can read them the rules of normalcy, but that’s about it.
You might feel yourself to be a guardian at the boundary of mental health, but if you don’t know the territory beyond then you’re not a guide. The border guard is a teller of fables, not a creator of them. You’ve heard it said, but you haven’t been there. The role of such people, which is to say most therapists, is to provide the double yellow line down the highway of mental health. For those who have gone “off road,” such therapists provide little direction.
Value Your Flaws
Your flaws delimit your competence. I try to value my failures. I can do this if I can imagine that I can get beyond them. That usually amounts to a hopeful thought, but I’m a stern advocate of not being hopeful. Hope is what you have when you lack good reasons.
I struggle with theoretical physics because it lacks certainty and direction. There are some mathematical rules one can follow, but not many. Experimental physics enforces itself, and experimentalists tend to be more sane people.
On rule to follow when inventing theories is that mathematical expressions must have the same dimension on either side of the equals sign. That is, if you’re calculating a dimensionless quantity and your formula involves variables that carry some dimension—like length or time or speed—then your formula is likely wrong.
For example, you can’t have a recipe that tells you to add a liter of water to the fourth power. You can’t follow directions that tell you to go 5 km to the south and then 2 cubic km West. There is no such thing as a liter of water to the fourth power, and there is no direction measured in cubic kilometers.
My physics equations usually end up looking like symbol salad: pages of terms each involving a different combination of numbers, letters, and symbols. Numbers are pure values, but the letters and symbols usually measure something.
At every stage, these terms must all have the same dimensions. They’d better all be cubic kilometers or Newton-volt-centimeters per second squared. The trouble is, they often don’t match, which means I made a mistake, which means I have to re-build the equation. I do that but some terms still don’t match, which means there’s another mistake, and I have to do it again. This expression for the intensity of light falling on a screen is an example of such salad:
Equations express equality unlike writing, which expresses differences. Sanity is supposed to be contained within reason, but many reasonable things are insane. Unlike equality, which is absolute, a story provides no guarantee of your mental health.
The seemingly endless game of “what new mistake can I make this time” is draining. On the other hand, it provides a view into my own ability to focus and accurately connect thoughts. I’m not as good at this as I’d like to be, but I hope to improve with practice. There’s that word “hope” again.
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More Evidence That I’m Losing It
In my last piece, The Ignorance of Intelligence, I made the case that intelligence was no assurance of sanity. Similarly, a lack of it doesn’t mean you’re nuts. On the other hand, yesterday I failed a simple intelligence test and that led me to wonder if I’m losing my mind.
I was changing the rotors on my car. The rotors are the “disks” in “disk brakes,” the metal plates that your brake calipers grip to slow you down. I took off my old rotor and compared it to the new one, and then I was shocked: they didn’t match. Here’s a photo of the two side-by-side:
There was no denying it, they were different. The beveled screw hole in the original rotor was to the right of the hole for the wheel stud, while the beveled screw hole in the replacement was on the left side. Sure enough, the other beveled hole, across from it, was also on the wrong side. I resigned myself to having bought the wrong rotor, put the old rotor back on, and went inside.
Today I looked at the photo again and, lo and behold, if I rotated the new rotor 180-degrees the holes were on the correct sides! I was astounded; what an idiot I am! Additionally, one rotor looks clearly bigger than the other. I think that’s just perspective but I’d better double-check!
Pattern matching is one of the most basic measures of intelligence, and I’d failed. I was reminded of a traumatic episode in my youth when I could not turn my pillow over to the cool side: whatever rotation I performed I kept coming back to the same side of the pillow. Clearly, I’m slightly retarded, but that doesn’t mean I’m insane.
“Insane people are always sure that they’re just fine. It’s only the sane people who are willing to admit they’re crazy.” — Nora Ephron, writer and filmmaker
You’re Not Crazy, You Just Think You Are
It’s estimated that 25% of all Americans suffer from mental health problems separate from addiction (Bagalman 2018). This applies to all the Western World. Not surprisingly, less “westernized” cultures have better mental health. I believe this reflects the degree to which people cannot accommodate change. Westernized cultures are changing faster and have a poor mental health foundation.
“Rates of clinical depression and anxiety in the West tend to be approximately 4 to 10 times greater than rates in Asia... Asian cultures think differently about emotion than do Western cultures and these different systems of thought help explain why negative affect does not escalate into clinical disorder at the same rate... Eastern cultures provide a foundation from which people are able to develop better skills for managing negative emotion.” — De Vaus, et al. (2017)
My crazy ex-wife, and there’s no doubt about it, was always triggered by the suggestion that all might not be right in the way she saw the world. I was less psychologically experienced at the time, and I thought that she was just a bit touchy. I’ve now come to realize that the denial of self-reflection is a huge red flag.
This leads to my emphatic denial of religious belief, because religious belief provides an avenue to reject doubt. With that comes the rejection of duality, the deflection of responsibility, and the denial that sanity is something that needs to be constantly cultivated. It is worth noting that the sanity of most religious prophets has been questionable, and that’s entirely natural for a person who lives in a state of combined, alternate realities.
Imbalance is Your Counterweight
The lesson is rather stark: if you want to know that you’re sane and you want to remain sane, then you have to embrace whatever is your particular brand of insanity. To those clients of mine who struggle with depression and anxiety I say to them, “These are the tools that demand your flexibility. Your depression, anxiety, insecurity, paranoia, or whatever are tools that keep you asking the important questions. You will only be free of them when you find other reasons to question yourself.”
Mental imbalance is like substance addiction in that both are a means of self-medication. You cannot effectively remove a dependence unless you find somewhere else to direct the pressure. If you require cigarettes, pot, or alcohol and you want to stop, then you’ve got to recognize that there is a real reason you rely on these substances. If you simply release all the inner tensions that hold your mind in conflict there will be springs and gears flying everywhere. The result will not be peace, it will be chaos.
“Cultural differences in emotional disorders are due to the way Easterners and Westerners think about and respond to emotions… People in Eastern cultures tend to view the world in a holistic fashion. They don’t think in terms of mutually exclusive categories. In fact, they expect opposites to coexist, as symbolized by yin and yang—a bit of darkness in the light, and a spot of light in the darkness. Furthermore, when attending to a person or object, they’re more likely to also consider the influence of the broader context.”
— David Ludden (2017), psychologist
This brings me to my therapeutic toolkit: brain training, action, memory, illogic, and hypnosis. You are not going to see the logic in an alternate way of thinking if it contradicts what you’ve been telling yourself all your life. The habits you sustain are coping strategies that keep your otherwise twisted boat sailing in a straight line. You can straightened your mind so that it takes less energy to navigate a straight path, but you cannot do this by chopping off your coping strategies.
There is a crazy person inside you. Hopefully, that person is not as malignant as Donald Trump, but whoever they are, they need rescue not execution. But they will not be rescued until you give them permission to find their own peace. It’s a kind of death that you allow for a part of yourself, and it does feel frightening. Setting free the insane parts of yourself requires seeing, feeling, and remembering them fully. It’s shadow work.
References
Bagalman, E., and Cornell, A. S. (2018 Jan 19). “Prevalence of Mental Illness in the United States: Data Sources and Estimates.” Congressional Research Service. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43047.pdf
De Vaus, J., Hornsey, M. J., Kuppens, and P., Bastian, B. (2017 Oct. 16). “Exploring the East-West Divide in Prevalence of Affective Disorder: A Case for Cultural Differences in Coping With Negative Emotion.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 22 (3): 285-304. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868317736222
Kemper, Edward (1981 Sep 16). “Wow, this is insane”. edmundkemperstories.com. https://edmundkemperstories.com/blog/2019/09/16/wow-this-is-insane/
Ludden, D. (2017 Nov 20). “East-West Cultural Differences in Depression: Strategies for coping with negative moods.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/talking-apes/201711/east-west-cultural-differences-in-depression
Nath, Sanstuti (2025 Dec 10). “‘Filthy, Dirty, Disgusting’: Trump’s Racist Tirade Against African Migrants.” NDTV World News. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/donald-trumps-racist-tirade-against-african-migrants-ilhan-omar-filthy-dirty-disgusting-9783917
