The Freudian Trance, Oprah style…

I didn’t mean to watch Oprah, honestly.

But I fell asleep on the couch with the TV on and when I woke up, there she was, in the middle of a makeover show. This show was the 2nd part of a series about hairstyles. On the first show, Oprah took 100 audience members and matched them up with hair stylists to the stars. So, on this show, we’re seeing the results.

“Our next audience member,” Oprah announced, “hadn’t cut her hair in TWENTY NINE years! Let’s see how she looked.”

And then we see a middle-aged woman with long, kinda frazzled red hair.

“And LET’S SEE HER NOW!”

Cut to:

This woman and her daughter, each with beautiful, stylish new coifs.

(If you’ve been wondering what this has to do with the Freudian Trance, here it comes…)

“So, why hadn’t you cut your hair for TWENTY NINE years?”

“Well, Oprah, after I had kids I just didn’t think about it and I guess I was kinda stuck with that haircut.”

(okay, get ready for it…)

“Right,” Oprah says. And with a knowing look in her eye, asks the probing question, “And were you stuck in other parts of your life, too?”

You could practically feel the audience stop breathing, waiting for the woman to reveal (with gobs of tears) that, yes, in fact, her life had been just one giant tar pit and, thanks to the freedom she felt with her new, un-stuck haircut, she had gotten a new job, replaced her entire wardrobe, mastered Mandarin, gotten a PhD in particle physics, solved world hunger, and become the U.N. envoy to Bulgaria.

Instead, the woman thought for a second. And just as her daughter started to shake her head, No, the woman says to Oprah, “No, not really.”

Her stunning psychological insight thwarted, Oprah just changed the topic and moved on.

“The way you do ANYthing is the way you do EVERYthing…”  This is the popular self-help line (made particularly popular by T. Harv Ecker… BTW, the “T.” stands for “The,” a name change Harv made in order to “affirm his uniqueness”) that Oprah was echoing. And the Freudian connection is simply that something always is a metaphor for something else.

While “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” other times it’s proof that when you were an infant you saw your parents copulating and, overcome with infantile jealousy and rage, suppressed your overwhelming feelings, which now reveal themselves every time you go to a baseball game and order a hot dog.

(Many of Freud’s interpretations of metaphors and dreams are no less ridiculous sounding.)

It’s easy to find seeming relationships between unrelated events… it’s what we do best. It wasn’t that long ago that we sacrificed one of our people each night to make sure the sun came back the next morning.

And now we love the Freudian notion that one aspect of our life is a metaphor for some other, hidden, aspect of our life.

Here’s the home version of the game: If your garage is full of stuff, can you see how your life is “over-full” as well and needs a clean up? Of course you can.  And if you believe in this relationship, you’ll pay money for the book/tape set/workshop that says you need to clean out your garage before you can have room for what you want in the rest of your life.

Now try this: If your garage is full of stuff (the same stuff), can you see how your life is “abundant” and how you’re blessed with more than you ever imagined having? Of course you can. And if you believe this, you may, instead, want to cram even more stuff into where your car used to be, so you have constant reminders of the bounty of the universe.

Finally, try this: Can you see how your garage has stuff in it… and there could be more, or could be less, and all it means is, well, there’s exactly as much stuff in your garage as there is, no more, no less? That “full” or “empty” is an arbitrary judgment and the amount of stuff has no relation to other parts of your life?  Of course you can.

Same stuff, different story.

The way you do ONE thing, is the way you do THAT thing (and maybe a few others), but not EVERY thing.

I recently began training to be a Masters sprinter (“Masters” is the euphemism for “old”). I assure you that the way I treat my running training is NOT the way I treat everything in my life. On the track, I’m competitive in ways that I’ve never been in relationships, or business or, well, even team sports (when the results are not entirely dependent on my efforts, I really don’t care about them).

Sometimes, Oprah, a haircut is just a haircut.