Summary
A love letter to therapy and therapists. On why therapy works and why you shouldn’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I am a therapist. I…
Highlights
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A fundamental flaw I observe in the reasoning of many therapy detractors is the implicit assumption that emotional work is not real work. However, this is a misconception (albeit still a common one). Social neuroscience together with social baseline theory have demonstrated that the brain treats physical resources as interchangeable with the emotional resources of social support. As such, there is fundamentally no difference between someone fixing your pipes, delivering your groceries, teaching your children at school or helping you regulate your emotions. Yet it is rare for anyone to question whether the former are worthy of payment.
Para el cerebro, no hay realmente distinción entre desafíos metabólicos emocionales respecto de otros más prácticos.
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Memories are not set in stone. Once formed, memories become malleable and can undergo a change every time they are retrieved (a fancy word for remembered). This process is called memory reconsolidation, as opposed to memory consolidation, which refers to the initial process of when the memory is ‘recorded’ or ‘stored’. The process of reconsolidation was rediscovered in the early 2000s and has since become a thriving area of research within the neuroscience community. I should say that memories themselves are not the problem in therapy. Rather, it is emotional memories - the emotional charge they carry - and how that often negative charge influences our future, the meanings we assign to events and to life itself. This emotional charge becomes intertwined with countless other neural networks of meaning and experience, shaping our understanding of what our life is about. Difficult memories can hold us back from growth, keep us living in fear, and make us unhappy, even as they try to protect us from harm.
Las memorias están disponibles para su reconfiguración, así como también el sentido que tienen para nosotros. Estos hechos son parte de los mecanismos de la efectividad de la psicoterapia.
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The therapeutic space is a setting dedicated to focusing on the client and their inner world, where therapist and client sit together as though time has stopped, attending closely to the client’s experiences, torments, insecurities, emotional and body states. The therapist - including the regulation of their own nervous system - can serve as a template through which the client learns to ground, accept, and soothe themselves, by borrowing the therapist’s own ‘vibration’ or ‘energy’, to use those somewhat esoteric-sounding but, in this context, I think appropriate terms. Biobehavioural synchrony is why the therapy is more than just talking. In the process and mostly out of awareness, as therapists we ‘lend’, so to speak, our own physiology, our own nervous system and as such the lending hand for our clients to hang on too, as they are walking some kind of tight rope in their lives. Through that process, they also learn to become better at it without our help.
La sincronía bioconductual es parte de los procesos no declarativos que suceden dentro del espacio terapéutico que contribuyen a la sanación.