Moving past fear/guilt

Sun Aug 9 21:12:12 CDT 2009

Dear Adm,
I am obviously lucky,having been in private practice for decades.In my exoperience the people I see ,may come originally b/c of an unpleasant precipitating situation/predicament,but al lchose to evolve rather that get  relief,or present themselves in the role of a sick person.

anath

From: ablatner at verizon.net
To: sewell.2 at osu.edu
Subject: Moving past fear/guilt
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2009 12:31:34 -0500
CC: list at grouptalkweb.org

 Dear Regina, 
    Thanks for your reasoned response. Yes, I substantially agree with you, though my sense of how much good we do through therapy is perhaps more tempered. 
    I see our culture moving towards a greater penetration and integration of practical psychology. (That includes practical social psychology and applied sociology.) It was a tiny inroad fifty years ago, is still a small inroad, but there's a penubra of consciousness-raising and psychological-mindedness hinted at in all the advice columns and columns in women's and some men's magazines and the thousands of self-help books; the increasing number of books on business that are really about psychology, creativity, promoting innovation, managing with more finesse; in education, etc.  I see this trend as what Moreno might have been thinking about when he envisioned sociatry. But 94.9% of the methods and concepts have nothing to do with Moreno, though I would like to see Moreno's ideas more widely appreciated. (I'd like the 5.1% to expand to 12.9%!   maybe even 18.4%!)
     I am hopeful that psychological literacy will become as mainline and normal---what everyone is expected to know--- in two or three generations. 

aB In your last email to me and grouptalk you said:
 RS:  We can help people move past their fear and guilt, their shame and their anger using sociodrama and psychodrama.  We can help people imagineer...   visualize what could be.
       This is a very sound principal in the martial arts.  You don't hit the board, you visualize yourself hitting through the board and the board snaps easily.  If you hit the board, you can break your hand.  Same w/ baseball...   look toward where you want the balll to go.  If you look to right field, it will go there.  

           AB: This merges with thoughts I've been having about the resistances to consciousness-raising or maturity-development, what they are and how they might be thought about. I'll soon post a paper on my website on this. Would you or anyone else like to see a draft and to comment, make suggestions about what should be revised or added? I was just writing about it this morning and adding some new elements myself.
        The key point is how specifically can we help people move past fear and guilt--- especially regarding warming-up to becoming more psychologically-minded.
       Of course we do so implicitly in building a treatment alliance with those who go out of their way to seek help. (i.e., they voluntarily enter the sick role). Even then, a significant number of patients, as Fritz (Perls) noted, "... don't really want to stop being neurotic; they just want to get better at it." I take this to mean that many patients suffer from the consequences of deeper character patterns, misleading aims, entrenched games they play---which they don't experience as mistaken; but they want relief from the anxiety and depression that follow being fired, having their partners or friends leave or give up on them (disgustedly, hurt, bewildered, angry), and so forth. They don't want to look at why they were fired or abandoned, note, but just don't want to feel so bad. I wonder what percentage of clients you see who would be more like this? 20,  40,   60,   80% ? 

    So envisioning our goal is good, but we need to envision quite specifically, concretely  If we envision an abstract idea it won't work. 

    Well, about your role as a sociometrist: I've been having some further ideas about that issue---in part because I've become increasingly impressed with how deep the associated sociodynamics and psychodynamics of tele are!--- so let me know if you'd like to pursue that. Warmly, Adam

----- Original Message ----- 
From: REGINA SEWELL 
To: List at grouptalkweb.org 
Cc: Adam Blatner 
Sent: Sunday, August 09, 2009 10:44 AM
Subject: Saving the world and the paradox of urgency

Adam,

Oddly, given my background as a sociologist, I totally believe that therapy is (or can be) a form of social action.  If the therapist/counselor/person on the other end listening empathetically and possibly offering reality checks, connects the individual's condition to the social context, it is totally social action.  When I answered the rape crisis line and told caller after caller who had been raped or was struggling with the fact that a girlfriend or child had been raped that what happened wasn't his or her fault..  that he or she didn't make it happen...   and while there are things that might be good to do differently (like not drink a bottle of vodka) that the perpetrator is ultimately responsible for their own behavior and choices..  This was huge and is huge....  

And while our tools don't really "get people to write letters, talk to their congress people, or protest" they do build community and help people shape their own identities.  Turns out that people participate in social movements based on identity and on community membership.  

It's also important to conceede that our solutions will be the next problem (the simplified version of Marx's dialectic)..  in real terms - prohibition actually did reduce drinking AND also opened a wonderful opportunity for ne'er do wells to make a fortune.  The car was origionally thought of as a solution to pollution...   all those horses had to poop and the poop was a problem.  Cars don't poop visisble shit....   so it took folks awhile to figure it out....

I think one of the more important things we can do is help people calm down.  Running on urgent, "they sky is falling, the sky is falling" leads to really dumb solutions (cash for clunkers...  great pollitically but really....   dumb idea in a lot of ways per a number of economists/ hand outs w/out boundaries to the financial industry who them rewarded the very people who got us into trouble in the first place with bonuses and / or spent a fortune on that "retreat like" weekend on the tax payers dime).  The trick is to help ground people so that they can make informed decisions and practical life changes, so that they can explore concepts addressed in "Your money or your life" (I don't like the book as a scholar - lots of unfounded generalizations, but the points - at the essential core - are sound.)  We can help people move past their fear and guilt, their shame and their anger using sociodrama and psychodrama.  We can help people imagineer...   visualize what could be.  This is a very sound principal in the martial arts.  You don't hit the board, you visualize yourself hitting through the board and the board snaps easily.  If you hit the board, you can break your hand.  Same w/ baseball...   look toward where you want the balll to go.  If you look to right field, it will go there.  

Peace,
regina sewell, ph.d.

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