Working with the past in psychotherapy

Working with the past in psychotherapy, more precisely in psychotherapeutic counseling, proceeds from the idea that some of today’s urgent problems are not by themselves, but due to the fact that behind them stands and provokes past negative experience.

The blow is painful when it falls on yesterday’s living bruise …

In this case, if it is possible to remove an old problem, today’s difficulties also disappear.

Methods of psychotherapeutic work with the past

The main steps in the methodology of psychotherapeutic work with the past: search for traumatic situations in the past, awareness of the problem, rethinking the problem, re-experiencing the problem, removing negative anchors. See →

Examples

• Dinner for the kids in the bedroom. — Family. Mother, father and two children are having dinner. Children are naughty, do not want to eat. The father, showing authoritarianism, sends them to bed without dinner. Then he sees how the wife secretly carries dinner to the children in the bedroom. There is a quarrel. See →
• Relationships with women do not add up — hatred for mom. See →
• Unmotivated aggression.

When a client complains about a state of unmotivated aggression in a certain range of situations, the consultant helps him immerse himself in childhood memories and understand when the recording took place that anchored this state of the client. It is assumed that having lived this situation again, already in the state of an adult and accompanied by a consultant, you can erase this problem record, freeing up the field for an adequate response.

Relevance

In addition to working with the past, psychotherapeutic work can be carried out both with the present and with the future of the client. And most importantly, maybe in this case we don’t need psychotherapy at all, but healthy psychology? See →

Working with the Past in Gestalt Therapy

Working with the present, modern Russian Gestalt therapy always leans towards the past. See →