Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Tuesday, August 30. 2011

When psychotherapy makes things worse

Good example from Schneiderman.


Repeated re-living traumatic situations does nobody any good other than the therapist's income. The story need only be told once.

Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Psychology, and Dr. Bliss at 16:33 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

We had a long run at the state hospital of people - usually women - admitted in crisis shortly after they had started "working on" their trauma issues. Therapists would encourage this "work," and patients found both feelings they could not contain and memories of mixed reliability. This whole idea of getting through pain by immersing yourself in pain in therapy has remarkable perseverance, despite the lack of evidence that it works.

That said, I think the new ideas of repackaging traumatic memories and storing them without the attached affect is going to prove out. I initially considered EMDR to be voodoo (and still think it has a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles), but I am coming around to the ideas based on memory research, that a memory is not permanent but is always reassembled each time it is brought forward, always with slight variation, will be used increasingly to damp down traumatic memories in therapy. At present, I still think it's a terrible roll of the dice, but I think that's where the solutions will lie.
#1 Assistant VIllage Idiot (Link) on 2011-08-30 17:12 (Reply)
For the curious. These therapists were concentrated in Cheshire County in the SW part of NH. Choose your own theory why; I have only partial ones
#2 Assistant VIllage Idiot (Link) on 2011-08-30 17:21 (Reply)
This is, in fact, Freud's theory of memory, and what you are describing as altering memory through reformulating it's relation to affect is what he - and all subsequent analytic therapists - call "working through". It is true that poorly trained therapists in recent years adopted a dangerous and misinformed "naive psychoanalytic" theory of trauma, which postulated that venting and catharsis of buried trauma was key. They did a lot of damage, especially by interfering with "adaptive denial" in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events by insisting that victims confront the emotions.
#3 michael on 2011-08-30 22:46 (Reply)
I grew up in a deeply dysfunctional family. So much so that I left home while still in high school and my brother ended up killing our parents (and then, sadly, himself). The extended family isn't a hell of a lot healthier.

I have enjoyed the happiest, healthiest years of my life since moving far away and removing them from life. Yet - two therapists I saw were adamant that I needed to connect to these people to heal and be truly happy.

I don't see any way that subjecting myself to violence, drug addiction and mental illness is a good thing and I refuse to do it. Thank you for posting this.
#4 Anon on 2011-08-30 23:43 (Reply)
We have a pretty solid history of mental illness, diagnosed and non-, in my family. Those of us who live in the tough "past" seem to be the ones that cannot get out. The family member that suffers most deeply with mental illness is so encased in the past, she has revised and re-lived it, making it more horrific than any of the rest of us can fathom. Is that a cause or effect? I am not sure.
Anecdotal, I realize.....but the best therapist I have ever witnessed actually worked himself out of the client's life instead of trying to diagnose and continually have him re-live.
I am not downplaying therapy, please understand. I have benefited from it. I have also witnessed quite a number of patients get worse under it.
#5 g on 2011-08-31 11:33 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.