If you have reached out but found the help you have accessed is incomplete or feels wrong, it can make you feel that nothing will ever take away your emotional pain.
This article discusses why therapy may not be delivering the hoped-for results. Have a read, then if you think that my experiential and validating approach could help you, call me to discuss this.
THE STUDENT AND THE TEACHER – AN IMPORTANT LESSON IN PSYCHOTHERAPY EDUCATION AND EMOTIONAL LEARNING.
The story goes like this. A student goes to the teacher and asks a question.
The teacher answers by pointing to the road ahead. The student grabs the teacher’s finger!
This is exactly what is happening very often in psychology, psychotherapy and education today. The symptoms of emotional distress are like the teacher’s finger. They are pointing the student towards the journey they need to undertake to regain emotional balance and enrich the quality of their lives.
Just as in the story above, the majority of therapists and educators are attempting to resolve the anxiety, depression or whatever other symptoms are in play. Instead of helping the student by joining them on a journey of exploration and discovery, they are trying to “fix or cut off the pointed finger”! – as if the finger is the problem!!
They are trying to eliminate the symptoms instead of appreciating them as healthy reactions to an unhealthy situation.
By labeling these people as mentally ill, we are not understanding their condition. We are refusing to accept responsibility as a society, as a nation, indeed as a human race, for our part in creating these “disorders”.
THREE KEY QUALITIES MAKE CORE DEVELOPMENT DIFFERENT. These are explained later on in this article. First, however
Let’s consider the analogy of an electric current.
When a fuse blows and the electric current is disconnected, the disconnection happens as a protection. If the fuse hadn’t blown and caused a wire to get disconnected, the current might have damaged an appliance or caused a fire.
If you reconnect the wiring, or if you fix it and make it stronger, without finding out what caused it to break, the chances are that:
- It will break again
- it will cause more serious damage
- it will break at another place.
The same applies to your mental and emotional wellbeing. You may have an “outage” in the form of symptoms: stress, anxiety, depression or relationship issues, and take some steps to resolve it. But if you don’t deal with the cause of these symptoms another blowout is very likely to follow.
What’s causing your symptoms?
The main cause of all these symptoms is trauma. It’s not the only cause but it’s the main cause as in our society at some time or other most of us have been traumatized.
Let’s talk more about trauma.
When we’re traumatized, our nervous system reacts like a fuse box in an electric current. It disconnects the offending cause to protect us from more serious damage.
So trauma disconnects us from whatever is perceived as a threat, and this disconnection may manifest as one of the symptoms we’re talking about, ie anxiety, depression or relationship problems.
Athough at times you may need to deal with symptoms as well as causes, in the majority of cases you do not get meaningful change unless you deal with the cause of your distress.
Also as I mentioned earlier it can be unproductive and at times damaging to reconnect until you know what has caused the disconnection.
That’s why we have defence mechanisms in our nervous systems, that’s why we have fight, flight and freeze mechanisms that come into action when needed to protect us from damage.
There are times when we need to disconnect until the source of the malfunction is corrected. Then we can reconnect when it is safe to do so.
Do you find this analogy helpful?
Does this help you understand why anxiety, stress, depression and other emotionally distressing symptoms are often there to help us? and why removing them without having dealt successfully with whatever is causing them is generally not helpful and may even be harmful?
In previous articles I have likened them to a flashing red light on a control panel or smoke alarm. I think the fusebox analogy makes this even clearer.
This is why pathologizing anxiety depression and other symptoms is not only unhelpful but potentially damaging. It’s like saying that the problem is the broken wire, whereas the broken wire is in fact what is protecting us from further damage.
The broken connection is there to protect us and keep us safe until we discover and deal with the cause of the problem.
So what’s different about my approach, which I call Core Development?
Three Key Qualities make Core Development different.
EXPLORING, EXPERIENCING AND VALIDATING.
Instead of trying to eliminate the symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression we explore them to discover their purpose and what is causing them. We’re not limited to any particular approach, belief system or technique. We have no preconceptions, we explore to find out what works best for you at that particular time.
EXPERIENCING
We do this experientially, so you discover what’s causing your distress through your own experience.
VALIDATING
We understand that your symptoms are not the problem, that in fact they are protecting us and they are potential signposts to a richer and more fulfilling life.
Core Development is an experiential process that has evolved from my own personal therapy, my life experience, my professional training in somatic psychotherapy and structural thinking and my international 45-year practice.
If this appeals to you and you would like to arrange an in-person, zoom or phone session to explore it further, call me on +61 412 178 234.
Core Development is a creative learning process. It is not intended to replace clinical or medical treatment where this is required.
