Healthy and sick psychotherapy

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Healthy psychotherapy provides a person with situational mental help and support, while at the same time taking care of increasing the mental health of a person in the future. Fine! Unfortunately, in addition to healthy psychotherapy, one can often find another — sick psychotherapy.

Let’s define the concepts: sick psychotherapy is a psychotherapy that is not able to achieve its goals and infects previously healthy people with problems. Getting rid of one problem, sick psychotherapy creates new ones. If healthy psychotherapy provides a person with situational mental help and support, while at the same time taking care of increasing the mental health of a person in the long term, then sick psychotherapy, helping situationally, in the long term makes a person (or the environment next to him) even more sick.

Like 200 grams of vodka for a tired peasant: it helps perfectly every time, until the man turns into a complete alcoholic.

One of the common scenarios of sick psychotherapy begins with intimidation. Addressing a specific person or audience, the psychotherapist will tell that there are no healthy people, everyone has problems, and those people who think that they have no problems are people with the most problems, who have closed themselves in their shell not only from others, but also Push. Speaking about character, such a specialist will reveal in detail the topic of accentuations, where people will be represented by semi-psychiatric characters, and will emphasize that these personality traits are innate and cannot be changed.

Sick psychotherapy is characterized by a tendency to see difficulties, difficulties and obstacles in everything. And not only to see, but also to broadcast appropriate suggestions.

A psychotherapist of this style will remind you that moving forward in life is difficult: we are hindered by the trauma of birth, negative scenarios, parental programming, muscle shell and emotional blocks. As for external circumstances, they are of course unfavorable: the modern pace of life creates constant stress, with such a level of tension it is impossible to control your emotions, and creating a family is unrealistic. It is impossible to prepare a person for family life, because the only one who can evaluate us in the family is the unknown person with whom we will live: and who knows what he needs? At the same time, whether or not you prepare a person for family life, a person will still give out what he received as an emotional imprint from his parents. It is these negative impressions, and not what he was consciously taught, that make a person repeat mistakes over and over again, and it is very difficult to get rid of the burden of parental impressions. In any case, the family is waiting for periodic crises, superimposed on age-related crises, inevitable in the life of every person.

Do you still have the will to live?

You will be warned that working with your soul, putting your soul into work is dangerous, that all teachers, doctors, psychologists and teachers who give all their best at work, sooner or later will face emotional burnout, emptiness in the soul and depression … Sick therapy draws attention to the negative , giving any outlined plot a black frame.

Sick psychotherapy is a person’s orientation to the negative, it is a suggestion about the inevitable problems in the human soul, problems so serious that without their deep study it is impossible to move forward. This is a suggestion that every person needs psychotherapy, that only psychotherapy can give a person hope for liberation from his deep problems.

If a healthy person believes in this, he already becomes sick in many ways. It must be remembered that not everyone needs psychotherapy. Even those who sometimes need psychotherapy are not necessarily tormented by deep problems. And most people can develop effectively without any psychotherapy.

Parallel to intimidation, sick therapy, if it does not teach a person to be irresponsible, then creates conditions for easily removing from a person responsibility for his life and choices. Who is responsible for choosing a person? If the choice of a person is determined by his feelings and needs (the view broadcast in a sick psychotherapy), then the person himself is no longer responsible for the choice, but his feelings and needs. There was a feeling of love — he promised to take care of. The feeling has gone out — and there is no one to ask from … If it is argued that the unconscious is more powerful than our consciousness, that the mind only formulates what the unconscious has postulated, then the reasonable decisions of a person are depreciated: it is not the person himself who is responsible for a worthy or crooked decision, but his unconscious. Sometime it is reasonable to remove excessive responsibility from a person, sometimes it is good. When the removal of responsibility becomes the main method of psychotherapeutic work: “do not burden yourself, and feel better!”, such psychotherapy begins to destroy the dignity of being a responsible person in a person.

Sick psychotherapy is characterized by the suggestion that the world is big and strong, and the person is small and weak, ignoring the power of the mind and fear of tension is characteristic. This is the priority of the «Accept!» and ignoring the «Change!» strategy. This is a proposal to reduce the load in life, remove big goals, lower the bar of claims.

Here, a goal-oriented person is called a paranoid, a person who loves his job is a workaholic, the desire to do his job qualitatively is perfectionism, the parents’ confidence that they are the main ones in the family, and not the children, are branded with “poisonous pedagogy”, and the girl’s desire to remain at least somehow a decent person — good girl syndrome…

This is a disbelief in the possibility of achieving great goals, an orientation towards existence in the regime of an organism, and not a person, servicing needs, and not setting goals, the conviction that caring for the satisfaction of one’s needs is the entire content of human life. By themselves, these installations, aimed at making life easier and reducing the load, are not bad: if they are addressed to a weak and sick person, they protect him from excessive loads. However, when they are addressed to an initially healthy audience, they turn strong people into weak, healthy people are transferred into sick or child mode. Underestimating the healthy potential of adults and children is an erroneous position, and propaganda that a person is predominantly weak is dangerous propaganda.

Sick psychotherapy takes a person away from external reality into an exploration of himself, into an analysis of his dreams and fantasies, into drawing his fears and listening to his feelings.

As a manager, I had to fire employees several times after they went to a psychotherapist for a consultation: immediately after that they stopped working. Just sit and listen to yourself…

For the tradition of sick psychotherapy, suggestions-recommendations “get rid of feelings of guilt”, “overcome fears”, “get rid of sick attachment”, “understand problems” are typical. Such formulations point to the undesirable, to the negative, but do not define the positive, do not define the positive goal. Drawing attention to what is in a person is his weak side, and not giving effective means of developing worthy personal qualities, such attitudes often do not eliminate problems, but give rise to new ones.

It is curious that despite the pronounced negativism in one point, sick psychotherapy is inadequately positive: namely, we are talking about a high assessment by it of the innate positiveness of the child. This tradition is characterized by the conviction that all children have an exceptionally positive core personality, and this conviction is the basis for allowing free education and promoting free education. The slogan «Do not interfere with the child’s growth!» implemented in the format “Stop raising a child!”. As a result, not receiving the necessary upbringing, children begin to grow crookedly, they are not ready for life with its requirements and experience difficulties.

Where does sick psychotherapy come from, what are its causes?

One of the reasons is the inadequate use of the psychotherapeutic attitude: the tendency to see in people those who need to be treated, not taught, protected, not strained, to see those who need help and protection, who need to get rid of problems. With regard to problem clients, it is appropriate and necessary, but when it is applied to people who are healthy enough and turn them into patients, psychotherapy becomes sick.

Another reason is often the inclination of the clients themselves to psychotherapeutic help. Clients want to relieve themselves of responsibility, clients want to find an excuse for their indecision and inaction, clients want to relieve themselves of part of the burden of life, and not every psychotherapist has the professionalism not to fall for it. Or another typical situation: a psychotherapy session, a psychotherapist’s class work, everyone gets help and development. A client comes to the session, who is doing well today. Well, that means there are no problems, which means they don’t work with him today. And in this case, he is bored and envious: “They work with everyone, but they don’t work with me!” — And soon, having delved into himself, he creates a problem for himself. And he starts believing in it. And work with her!

Sick psychotherapy will go away when there is a strong movement of healthy psychotherapy and developmental psychology in society. This is the main task of the synton approach.