On the Diagnostic Manual in Psychiatry (Part 3/3)

As for science,  professionals  think that science is advanced now with the new machinery we use.  We can measure all the way down to a single nerve cell in the brain.  What that does is inform us more and more about less and less.  We  learn the mechanisms in the brain and body but nowhere do we learn how to treat patients.   We learn the accompaniment of neurons and neurochemistry to the problem but never the problems itself.  And why not?  Because that essentially attacks  the  personality and defenses of the doctor.   “I am comfortable doing repression therapy because repression is how I function.”   So in EMDR the doctor waves a wand and pushes away the feeling.  It is literally magical therapy; and out of 40,000 practitioners in the world no one questions the premise.  It is pure booga booga.    The analysts are more subtle, they don’t use a wand;  they reason feelings away; you feel this because of that, and if you stop thinking this you won’t suffer  from  that—blah blah.  So  change your thoughts and you will be better; it is still cognitive/behavior therapy, no matter how it is cloaked—thinking your way to health.  And if   the patient does  by chance  fall onto feelings in a session of therapy, the doctor quickly reasons them away.  They need to be allowed to sink deeply into the feeling and let it overcome them.  This  means for the patient and above all, the  doctor, losing control a bit and retreating to an unknown past;  not as an adult thinking about the past, but as someone totally immersed in it.   The past dominates our lives, how could we not become immersed in it in psychotherapy since we already are?   We just move  one step deeper and discover what we are already immersed in.

    We are not inventing; we are discovering.  The doctor doesn’t need to explain; our bodies (and the  right-side deeper brain) will do it all.   Our deep brain will rise to play the music and the prefrontal cortex will provide the lyrics.   It is all there.  We need someone to conduct the orchestra of feelings.  The conductor, as it turns out is our imprints, our engraved traumas, that raise or drop our blood pressure and heart rate.  Feelings provide the frame of reference, our raison d’etre.  They conduct the symphony of the body.   They move up like a volcano that gushes its energy upward and dictates our reactions.   The system manages to let just enough through so it can be connected and integrated.  That is why we do not need managers in the therapy.  Evolution will do it all and channel feelings where they need to go.   It is also why we do not need high level doctors to accomplish all this.  Yet it helps to know science but only if that science is relevant to the human condition.   We do not need to apply behaviorism to neurons, slowing them down or speeding them up until we know why they behave the way they do.  So you see that Behaviorism rears is ugly head everywhere.  And here we try to treat  the neurons instead of the person, making the symptom “better” instead of the person.   And with sharp enough techniques we can indeed make those neurons behave, leaving the person in his agony.So neurons behave as we want them to, while  there  is a raging cauldron of pain down deep inside.  It is one more way we extract the person from his feelings.  Look at biofeedback. We have an idea of what normal brainwaves look like, and if the patient doesn't have them we will perform voodoo until he does.  Never once asking why are those waves so irregular?  Ah, for that we need to go very deep.

   Now imagine that a stranger (therapist) comes along and explains your unconscious feelings.  He has to be wrong because he explains out of his own unconscious not that of the patient.  No analysis is necessary; those emerging feelings carry with them all the understanding we need: how this feeling caused that behavior or that symptom.  Having a birth Primal will explain why there are migraine headaches.  One can feel in a primal session  the brain being squeezed of all its energy and oxygen as the anesthetic given to the mother sweeps in to gobble all  of the oxygen the baby needs.  So there is constriction of blood vessels (to conserve  oxygen)  followed by vasodilation (to counteract the constriction and stop a stroke) and the forerunner of the migraine.  Very few words are necessary.  After  all, the  migraine is not there because of someone’s  words; there was an ineffable experience at the base, one that no doubt had no words since it was usually at birth that it started.   Yes, now hurtful words can trigger off the template or prototype because of resonance.  The  hurt descends  down the chain of pain to the generating source, all by itself without anyone  directing the operation.  And it will come up without anyone directing it.

   Think of this: we had a patient who felt toxic all of the time.  She had “toxic friends” and decided to move to another State which was less toxic.   We could offer  all sorts of explanations but the system did it itself when she relived a gestation event where the  mother was drinking  heavily and intoxicating the baby.  She felt toxic and projected it everywhere because she never knew where it came from, or even that memories go back that far.  I could easily offer hundreds of examples like this (and I have in my book, Imprints).

 Above all I don’t have to be smart anymore.  I allow the patient to be smart by respecting  her and her feelings.  I don’t decide from above with all my majesty to change her behavior according to my criteria or values of "healthy or normal".   She is  not some underling or bad child who comes to me to be corrected or changed. She is my equal whose feelings need respect, who needs to be understood so she can help herself.  The end of professionals who see patients weekly for years. _We must avoid giving the patient what she wants; too often warmth, concern and "love."  That is what is addicting in psychotherapy. And they go back for years. We give patients what they really need, which is their pain from feeling unloved; a major difference. Then there is no addiction.  Meeting their current need indulges patients and gives them what they want but don't need.  They have already spent their lives behaving to get something the never existed. We off independence and self-determination so that can plan their own lives and don't need outside advice about how to live.  We offer liberation from a terrible past so that they can make their own future.  That is what is liberating. When a patient goes to a therapist for years she is addicted and that itself needs to be treated.  That is, the patient and the doctor need help.   They have a mutually operating  addiction.
We cannot "love" the patient but we can help her feel unloved from early on so that she is now open to feeling and love at last.