Dear Member:
I am pretty opinionated about psycho-therapy (who me?). It's unnecessarily complicate, disappointingly ineffective, very time consuming and ridiculously expensive. Now that's just one man's opinion, but I think I express what most folks feel in their gut about it.
The challenge is that when you are at your ropes-end there is a tendency to default to a societal habit, i.e., consult a "supposed" expert on the subject. Which expert, you will find upon deeper examination, is usually as unhappy/miserable/unsatisfied as his/her client(s)... often more so.
Psycho-therapists present a very poor model for their clients and, regardless of what they present, their clients know this at a gut level. Because the therapist is a role model and held in some degree of esteem, his or her patterns are often sub-consciously modeled... far from optimal IMNVHO (in my not very humble opinion).
The therapist doesn't realize that he is not dealing with presenting problems (surface events), these are not the deeper issue. Regardless what is done, short of electro-shock therapy, memories of the past will remain. They are only problematic to the degree that one has attached importances to them. This attachment is done automatically, usually at the time of the event. That means you had no control over such attachments. However, after the fact, you do have control over the importance attached to such memories and through many years, thousands of dollars, and often considerable unnecessary suffering, said importances do sometimes diminish. The therapist succeeds and, in reality, doesn't have a clue what he has facilitated, how he has done it or how he could repeat his success.
A truly successful therapist is one who will interview a patient, get a feel for the problem, and then set a time limit. I was once with one of the originators of NLP, many years ago, and he said that he would not work with a client for more than six sessions. If it took longer he figured he had failed or was doing something that just wasn't effect. He would cease working with them. I think his approach was quite honorably. It kept the pressure on him to be behaviorally/therapeutically flexible and it maintained focus on the issues.
Society/therapists have named these "incidences of past memories problematically impinging on the present" as PTSD. The mechanism is precisely as I have described above and if you are human, you will almost inevitably have some degree of PTSD. Life, upbringing, schooling, bullying (children and adult) institutions, the legal system, society, etc. Each, in it's own often subtle and hidden ways, has a tendency to create PTSD to some greater or lesser degree.
One major step in growing into H/A is dealing with one's importances. It not uncomfortable, it's very effective and it's very inexpensive when done the proper way.
Love ya, Jed.
Home
Login
Register