This post is at times long, rambling, and unclear. I’m sorry about that. I’m writing it through a brain fog. Anyone who is confused about what I’m trying to say here, feel free to ask questions in the comments. I do check them. 😊
CW, mentions false memories and abreaction-type therapies, and some strong language.
Many of you are already aware of my stance on the 2008-2014 behavior program I was involved in as a non-consenting ‘client’. What I have not made clear until now is that as a direct result of my involvement, I am fully supportive of the works of those people who, by and large, have held fast to the theory that only through the feeling and intense expression of emotions can the effects of such behaviorism be reversed. My support comes from my own experience of the supposedly evidence-based therapies failing to be of any help to me whatsoever, even in the years following the program when I desperately wanted their assistance and would follow along with the tools and concepts given to me in their frameworks. Think emotional regulation, trauma theory as it related to plurality, and so on. All I gained from that blind faith was an increase in discomfort, which release-based cathartic therapies like the one I am in now quickly took care of. It seems to me that I am either an oddball, or the supposed evidence base against that kind of treatment is seriously flawed. Whichever it is, I’ll be taking the claims of scientific validation by any psychotherapy with a bucket of salt from now on.
To be clear, I don’t have a problem with any therapy accept the behavioral approach as used in the 2008-2014 program, for obvious reasons, despite what the above may sound like. If the concepts of emotional regulation, the window of tolerance, changing one’s thinking to change one’s feelings, ETC work for a person, good for them! They’ve found something that helps them live or at least survive, and that’s great. The problem I have is with the culture these concepts create when they’re left to build up in the absence of any disagreement. I have needed to cry, and call out to those who I have been hurt by, whether they did it intentionally or not, but time and again traditional therapies have redirected me from realizing this desire by failing to give me the room I needed to discover its existence in the first place. That goes for the behavior program just as much as it does for all but one single session of talk therapy, because the emphasis has been on emotional containment, self-soothing, and, perhaps most troublingly to me, talking and staying calm, in all of my time spent involved in this kind of treatment. It has been deep feeling therapy alone that has given me the space to be authentically me, and while the evidence base for it is lacking, at this point, I don’t really care.
I would have no problem with the norms of society if that society also made space for those who would be harmed more from conforming to them than from failing to do so. The evidence that catharsis is not an effective therapy quite simply does not apply to everyone, and a truly science-minded world would investigate that in some fassion, because surely if I’m having that experience, others are as well, but there haven’t been any investigations launched in regards to that topic, and it doesn’t seem like there will be in the near future. Why is that? It seems to me that we’re only seeing one side of the story, because while all the current-day researchers are going on about how verbalizing feelings, learning special breathing patterns, manipulating muscle tension, and changing thought patterns by revising beliefs, among other things, are the keys to successfully healing from all kinds of problems, I’ve been sitting down once a week for the past 7 months, feeling some kind of distress in the present, letting it get as big as it will, and then flowing with it as it takes me to record after record of itself in my childhood, all the way back to and including my birth. Things that traditional therapies did not get anywhere near have been completely turned around by the latter process. My experience speaks for itself, and as it does I am left to question why the existing evidence base is such that, in many cases, people who would like to partake of processes like it are forced to either pay out-of-pocket for them or not to experience them at all. I think it comes down to 2 things, 1 being the financial aspect of it and the fact that long-term therapy of any kind is expensive, and the other being that the world, in general, doesn’t want to look at how much it’s fucking up its own future, something which it would have to do as deep feeling became mainstream.
I think there are also a lot of unaddressed echoes of the false memory crisis and its fallout. I can’t help but notice that whenever processes like deep feeling therapy, known as ‘abreaction’ or ‘primal therapy’ to some, are brought up, the argument that they could induce false memories just by being used is soon to follow if the discussion is held in a critical light of such practices. I ask again, why is that? And, perhaps more importantly, why was the practice of deep feeling as it related to childhood thrown out with the technique’s associated with that time period? I have experienced some suggestive and leading information gathering in the course of talk therapy, and such deep feeling work was never approached; If anything, it was discouraged accept in the cases where it happened spontaneously. I don’t think deep feeling, on its own, can lead to the creation of such false recollections unless the person has already been prompted, directly or indirectly, to look for something spesific while in the emotional experience, and, if the feeling is well on its way, a misplaced or mistaken idea on the part of the therapist will not divert the flow in this manner accept, perhaps, in the cases of particular groups of people, such as those who want to please a perceived authority figure. Personally, I have never had a misplaced comment do anything accept take me out of the feeling I was having, for example, if a statement was made about sadness when I was feeling lonely, I would not switch over to feeling sad, but I say, again, that this may be different for some people.
I think everyone should have the option to participate in whatever therapy they find the most helpful, and to not be forced, by income level or anything else, to stay within a particular set of treatments. I know that for me, and probably for others as well, deep feeling therapy, or abreaction, or primal therapy (the same process under different names) is the way to go, and that a lot of things stand in the way of people being able to access it. If it isn’t income, it’s location. If it isn’t location, it’s the lack of evidence, which I suspect is at least unconsciously deliberate on society’s part, or at least a result of careless or shortsighted research using an incomplete understanding of how deep into their pasts people actually need to go during the feeling/healing process in order to see lasting changes. People want quick fixes, accept when they don’t.
Dear world, please give those of us who want to take their time the means to do so. Give us the freedom of feeling, and the means to take advantage of it without worry.
Thank you for reading.