subject: Psychotherapy Sucks! Have you been healed? [print this page] Psychotherapy Sucks! Have you been healed?
If you've tried psychotherapy, medications, alternative schools, punishment and threatening, and things have not improved with your children, family or marriage, this article might help explain why. Fifty years of psychotherapy has failed miserably.Psychotherapists all have different theories, and the practice of diagnosing and treating instead of offering real relationship and support has created a billion dollar industry that has recklessly gone unchecked in the privacy of the "therapy office" for half a century.
The problem with today's approach to helping troubled teens, as well as adults, is that it is grounded in an age-old fallacy that the problem is psychological.It began in the middle of the 19thcentury by Freud and others, and has been promoted by a very game psychiatric medical community, and psychotherapy community that pushed it like candy on the consuming public ever since. It was a billion dollar industry before anyone knew what a billion was. Even though psychotherapeutic theories over the decades turn each of the next on its head, they continue to promote sick patients coming for assessment, diagnosis, counseling treatments and medications. Except in some rare cases this has not worked. We must abandon these relics as the basis for helping others and start from a new framework that reflects the nature of human existence and experience.
Real change comes through relationship, personal investment and interest. Kids need clear guidance and boundaries to safely learn who they are. Once able to appreciate life's limited timetable, and garner the ability to feel good about themselves and make free choices, the rest is up to them.
The new framework for supporting healthy growth must be founded in Sociology, not Psychology, and from a field perspective, not the individualist paradigm. Sociotherapy has a more holistic view of humans from the perspective that the ground or "soup" of human existence is relational, not individual. People are always part of an environment from which they are inextricable and inseparable, and therefore any notion of support or healing must come from this perspective. As people, we cannot live without other humans. Any theory or therapeutic modality must be founded in relationship and not the individual and curing therapist. It's the difference between blame and responsibility. In my 30 years of involvement with struggling kids and adults, I have never witnessed blame as a means to help support healthy change. Radical responsibility, on the other hand, is what opens the door to new and enlivened living.
Sociotherapy is the practice of promoting healthy growth and living by facilitating therapeutic communities, personal relationships and a positive peer culture. It operates with the holistic vision of mankind that we all as "human beings" are a feeling, thinking, social and spiritual unity. For healthy living, we must support the whole environment so that we each can better learn to support others and ourselves. Emotional healing can only happen when someone wants to grow and restore their health. It can only be facilitated through real, dynamic relationship.
Modern Sociotherapy has expanded to the study and practice of helping individuals, families, classes, corporations or any organization to grow and experience life with more clarity and satisfaction. There is no endpoint to Sociotherapy, but you will no longer need the support of a therapist when each person can live as him or herself - still remaining grounded and in intimate contact with others. This is achieved through relationship, dialogue and a radical responsibility for the present situation, particularly by the facilitator. I understand these last few sentences are not as clear as the rest. What I am talking about isn't understandable with words and written language. You must experience it for yourself.
The truth is, no one has a remedy or magic pill that can fix people feeling badly. And as a culture, the real science says it's getting worse, not better. Antidepressant medications (SSRI's) have been the real saviors over the last 40 years - not psychotherapy. But still the number of troubled people is getting higher, and social behaviors are getting worse. This can only be masked by medications, not fixed. To fix the real issues we must move past psychology and its foundations. Simply, psychotherapy says the problem lies in the individual, where sociotherapy describes the issue as a lack of relationship and environmental support. We must begin with relationship and dissolve the notion of "healer."
So why doesn't the psychotherapy community simply admit all this and move forward? To give up the notion of "healer" is very difficult for many who have built their worlds and careers to reflect this fallacy. It would create a complete change in what we teach from kindergarten through graduate school. It would absolutely alter what and how the learning and facilitation of such a helping practice would be accomplished. It would change the basic criteria for what makes a good therapist, or more to the point, a licensed therapist. It would necessarily mean that some people could not be therapists. Some of the attributes that make a great sociotherapist cannot be taught to some adults. Therapists must create a mechanism for "stepping out" when they are not doing well emotionally themselves, or if they discover that they are unable to support the kind of relationship required. No one can always be in a place to support other troubled people all of the time.
Sociotherapy is grounded in real honest-to-goodness relationship. Healing happens because many factors align. The first and foremost factor is that you - the person coming for help - make a strong, reliable, intimate relationship with the sociotherapist. This relationship must support you being you, working through unresolved issues, being able to support telling your truth, experimenting with parts of yourself that are scary and uncomfortable, acceptance of the present, and then integrating with the world.
For each relationship, this process is unique and different.
