uk Therapy

(27/6/2011 12:28:28 μμ) - Ordinarily I would not reply to someone promoting their profession as everyone has the right to work and clients should have the right to choose who they wish to help them. However, as a psychotherapist I find it interesting when someone from a different profession to mine has the gall to surreptitiously patronise and pull down my profession. A statement like: “The secret is in the way the brain actually works and is not related to a psychological theory i.e. Freudian, Jungian etc. I do not wish to imply that the various psychological theories have no validity. Many do and provide insight as to why a state of mind/emotion have developed. The shortfall is that although they may give reasonable reasons why you have the states/attitudes and behaviours you have, they often do to little to change them.” Is in my opinion both patronising to people who supposedly are not privy to the ‘secret’ and without doubt an attempt to belittle one profession in order to promote another and therefore obliges a reply to balance the record. So let me clarify the situation for you with reference to fact and not fiction. Firstly it takes YEARS to train as a psychotherapist or counsellor (mine took 5 years initially and is actually ongoing) and in that training one has to undergo personal therapy to help ensure that the therapist does not have any glaring personal issues that may compromise the safety of the client. Also the main professional bodies insist on supervision to examine all client work in a further attempt to ensure professionalism and client safety. Hypnotherapists, NLP therapists and other such therapists that offer and use ‘tools’ undergo no such rigorous training and can become qualified in as little as a couple of weeks. Imagine it, a couple of weeks of training and they can ‘fix’ anything. If this was true, why would anyone train in anything else? All you need do is spend a couple of thousand on training and that’s it. To date my training cast me £50k! I must be an idiot as must all those like me who have trained like me. Or alternatively, its just not true; they cannot do as they claim. Also, professionally they have no requirements placed upon them to undergo therapy themselves to minimise the effects of their own issues may have on their clients nor is supervision mandatory, within any of their professional bodies, to validate their work to ensure client safety. Furthermore, while there is much that we do not know about the brain, the use of the phrase “The secret is in the way the brain actually works” seems to me to imply that the author has knowledge that is unavailable to other therapeutic schools. Therefore let me clarify beyond ‘secrets’ one thing that is actually therapeutically significant. Modern society seems to be confused by its belief or faith in ‘science’, ‘cognition’ and ‘empiricism’ such that people believe that they can ‘think’ their way through issues. However, this notion is completely fallacious and sadly often plays into many people’s defensive positions of ‘so called’ logic and being ‘correct’ in their thinking whereby they use such faculties to avoid and bury issues. The reality of how we function is less of a ‘secret’ than many seem to believe. The real situation has been demonstrated by modern neuroscience aided by technical developments such as brain scans. It is now an undeniable fact that brain centres develop in a specific order such that emotional and relational centres develop first, foremost and fastest allowing children and young people the ability to bond and collaborate with their parents, families and social groups thus ensuring their survival. (Survival being a primary objective and being able to empathise and collaborate being key to this). And cognitive development (rational thinking) comes second and is slow and does not finish until the individual is between 21 to 25 years of age. (This scientific discovery only confirms something that any parent could tell you. Parents know that children and teens are more emotional than cognitive and are lead by their need for approval and connection and to belong and feel safe especially in family and peer groups.) This factual knowledge can now be used to inform real therapeutic practice and theory. We all have affects that influence us gathered during our formative years of childhood and early schooling that have mostly been process and laid down in the emotional and relational centres of our brains with little or no influence of our then primitive or developing cognitive abilities. Thus, the therapeutic reality is that adult cognition has little to no effect on changing these influences because they are emotional / relational and not cognitive and in separate parts of the brain. And thus, as has now been discovered and demonstrated by countless studies, it is the emotional relational part of therapies that have the most significant effect, not tools. As outlined below: • 40% - Client extra-therapeutic variables • 30% - Quality of the Therapeutic Relationship or ‘alliance’ • 15% - Expectation and Hope • 15% - Therapist Techniques and Therapeutic Model and Approach (Asay and Lambert 1999 ‘The Empirical Case for the common Factors in Therapy….’ Which supported Lambert’s earlier, 1992, observations). Sadly, ‘Tool’ based therapies do not require their practitioners to pay attention to relationship and thus treat clients as being subject to fixing and not relating and empowering. This type of notion is often counterproductive and while sometimes offering short term relief; their long term positive outcomes are limited. I have found in my experience as a psychotherapist in helping others who have first use therapists offering ‘quick fixes’ (understandable, people do want quick relief and will try such methods) that often tool based therapies lead to worsening of issues as the client finds themselves unable to properly apply the tools or the results are unsustainable or inconsistent and therefore leading to feelings of hopelessness through the misplaced belief that they cannot be helped. This makes my work more problematic and increases the suffering of others rather than providing the promised ‘quick fix’. As a final aside, hypnotherapy has been around for years and as a point of fact Freud (the father of psychoanalysis) initially used Hypnotherapy for a while however he abandoned it for more effective therapeutic ‘tools’ and interventions. In conclusion, I believe that people should be entitled to practice the therapies that they believe in and clients should have the right to choose. Fundamentally, if a client believes in a type of therapy and relates well to it, then a positive outcome is possible. However, please do not patronise or pull down other therapies and expect us to sit idly buy. Carlos Gibson-Foy of TonicTalk Counselling and Psychotherapy http://www.tonictalk.co.uk

Carlos Gibson, Northamptonshire