Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score has shaped how many clinicians, educators, and readers think about trauma. A new article argues that some of its most influential claims are not well supported by current evidence.
The paper, by Michael S. Scheeringa of Tulane University School of Medicine, appears in the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ open-access BJPsych Bulletin as part of its “Against the Stream” section.
Scheeringa claims that the book’s central propositions—that trauma causes lasting neurobiological damage and that body-based treatments are uniquely effective—have been embraced culturally and clinically but have received, in his words, “remarkably little systematic critical evaluation.”
Scheeringa reviews 122 specific claims and tests them against prospective studies, meta-analyses, and comparisons among established treatments. He contends that when the research base is reviewed, the evidence supporting those strong statements is inconsistent or limited, and that public narratives have moved faster than science.
“My review revealed multiple instances where cited evidence was incomplete, selectively presented, erroneously presented, or inconsistent with broader research findings,” he writes. “The present commentary situates these findings within the broader scholarly and cultural context, considering how certain trauma narratives gain prominence, why neurobiological framings hold particular public appeal, and what risks arise when complex research literatures are simplified for mass audiences.”
Scheeringa argues that overconfident stories about damaged brains and one-true-path therapies risk narrowing care, overstating mechanisms, and crowding out approaches with more substantial support.
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I can’t tell what the actual thesis here is, so I won’t assume, but I will say, it’s really insulting to frame this website as being survivor oriented when all it posts are fucking psychiatry journal articles or just actual psychiatrists’ underinformed speculation about how we might make things “better”.
Let’s start by recognizing that the problem here isn’t a lack of evidence, IT’S THE IDEA THAT ANY OF THIS IS A SCIENCE TO BEGIN WITH.
You can’t defeat a cult theology from within the cult. We will only end up with another 50 years of chemical rape, torture, and silent eugenics so long as it’s always fucking psychiatrists with all the power, appointed (by themselves) with the responsibility to change the system, making all the decisions about what’s “scientific”, filling 99% of the articles here with their “””expert”‘” fucking opinions after reading ONE psych-critical book and learning what akathisia is.
Why should we listen to a single fucking word any still-practicing psychiatrist has to say? Why the fuck would you think it makes a good survivor oriented site for it to LITERALLY ONLY BE A COMPILATION OF THE OPINIONS OF FUCKING PSYCHIATRISTS.
STOP FUCKING TREATING THEM LIKE ANYTHING THEY SAY HAS VALUE, WHO THE FUCK ELSE DO YOU THINK HAS BEEN TORTURING US AND CALLING IT “””SCIENCE””” AND HIDING BEHIND THEIR “””EXPERTISE”””?
This website needs to be violently murdered if all it’s going to do is claim it’s psych-critical while putting these fucking abusive pseudoscientists on a fucking SCIENCE PEDESTAL LIKE THEY HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT SCIENCE REALLY IS.
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I agree these research quarrels can look very much like infighting over ideas for legitimacy and currency and industry status.
I do really appreciate MIA research articles tho – they have helped me understand how I’m situated and expose the contradictions and weaknesses in the psychiatric rhetoric and pseudo science. It’s really valuable to have this research made accessible to us.
I have also found useful information in the trauma model/s which has been revolutionary for my own progress – but I had to take what I needed from the ideas and apply it for myself. I have never found a practitioner who did not want to impose their own model or ideas onto my experience.
The biggest lesson I have learned from the psychiatric-mental-health industry is that we need to get as far away from it as possible if we really want to recover our selves.
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I will acknowledge that there are SOME helpful research articles on here, but in general they’re older, they’re by Bob Whitaker, and nowadays the only “research” they post is just rebranding old news because some psychiatrist just learned about it for the first time.
Also, WAY too many of these “research” articles use all the same unscientific metrics like the DSM and questionnaires, and then present the results as though they’re rigorously scientific. It’s become a dumping ground for any crap science that remotely has to do with the brain.
There’s also some things that just feel inhumane and disgusting to even want research for, like whether involuntary hospitalization is traumatic.
You don’t need science for that, you just need to ask people, and trust their responses. It’s a crime against humanity that psychiatry is so obsessed with maintaining its air of scientific legitimacy that it cannot ever just… talk to people like people. All they want to do is stick people in a box and lie to them and experiment on them, thinking it’s more scientific and we understand people better, when we cut out all bias and feelings and personal history and personality and everything else about us that makes us human.
And like, I don’t care if it’s objective, it’s inhumane, and fighting the inhumane “sciences” is extremely difficult.
It’d be helped a hell of a lot more if MIA wouldn’t regurgitate every JAMA/BMJ Psychiatry article, giving them a wholly undeserved air of scientific legitimacy, completely ignoring the very good research articles on this very site that exposed how all this crap is pure pseudoscience.
If I didn’t know he was still alive I’d bet that this site nowadays makes Bob Whitaker spin in his grave. His articles were actual science that exposed fake science, so why the fuck is this website nowadays full of fake scientists, fake science?
Either way, psychs CANNOT be dominating the liberation movement like this; they’re not the ones who need liberating. They’re not the ones at greatest risk. They do have skin in the game, but it only motivates them to preserve the system we still have. No one is an expert on the soul. Psychology is not a science and these people are not scientists. They are experts in nothing but their own lives. There is no reason why any of us should listen to them above the survivors who actually understand how the world works and what would have helped instead of psychiatry.
Because it just keeps happening that when you ask survivors how to improve psychiatry, they say, it can’t, we need to scrap it, but people still need people they can trust to talk to in difficult times. Not someone paid to fake a one-sided friendship for one hour a week, but actually supportive, empathic friends. But they also say that finding such friends is near impossible when psychiatry is so normalized that people will respond to any negative emotions with “you should go talk to someone.”
What do you get when you only ask psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors how to improve psychiatry?
More rigor, more training, more therapists, more “diagnostic modalities”, more “accessible services to patients”, maybe fewer drugs, but more gatekeeping between “professionals” and “service users”, more entrenching of the saviour class and the victim class. More hospitals, more early intervention, more screening, more public indoctrination.
Anything except liberation. Too many of these people don’t want to face the fact that they wasted thousands of dollars and years of their lives learning nothing but culturally destructive pseudoscience, and have spent their careers unknowingly engineering the destruction of community itself.
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“Too many of these people don’t want to face the fact that they wasted thousands of dollars and years of their lives learning nothing but culturally destructive pseudoscience, and have spent their careers unknowingly engineering the destruction of community itself.”
Yes, I agree. Total mess. But it’s impossible to get a total scrap of the current system. I think best that could be done is the establishment of a better alternative.
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Dead Soul, I’m agree with your comment except on a single point.
I don’t divide emotions into two discrete categories of “positive” and “negative.” To do so, in my opinion, is ignoring their wider context.
I look upon emotions as responses to specific circumstances. In some situations, for example, fear and anxiety (generally perceived as negative) can be entirely understandable and justified, whereas a feeling of selfless unquestioning devotion (usually regarded as positive) would be inappropriate and even dangerous when directed toward a manipulative, emotionally and/or physically abusive partner in a marriage or other close relationship.
Feelings, thoughts, and behaviors make sense only in a given context, which in turn depends on prevailing mores and customs.
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Dead Soul, I completely agree, and well said.
An interview here discusses how the vast majority of research is invalid – John ioannides.
I especially agree that a lot of research just seems to demonstrate the absurdity of the whole research system – like those studies of harms of involuntary treatment which – as you say – can feel absurd and offensive to people who have been systematically silenced for saying the same thing.
I guess it’s always helpful to know how the sausage is being made in psychiatry-land, and have access to research which supports our goals.
I confess I am a bit mystified by this one, as it really just presents the views of an equally if not more biased (from what I can tell) establishment psych defending his turf.
It’s also relevant I think that trauma research is still largely excluded from establishment psychiatry and does (or did) provide a non-pathologising and empowering alternative to deterministic biological models.
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Well said. I wish Psychiatrists would f*** off and also ‘science’ which these days is bought and paid for bullshit for those who need their egos and status amplified. A minority genuinely give a damn, e.g. Bessel Van de Kolk. There is a spiritual mystery to healing trauma that no psychiatric meds can ever reach let alone heal. I am proof that body based therapy with the right individual, and that is absolutely crucial, or indeed a highly ethical shaman, can heal trauma and help the individual transform, including within the realm of pre and perinatal experiences, as well as generational, ancestral and past lives. Furthermore, I was incredibly messed up due to MK Ultra style treatment including ECT as a child, for a heinous crime committed against me. Psychiatrists should be done away with, the majority perpetuate harm, misunderstanding and lack appropriate compassion and humanity. They hide behind their prestige and connections.. Look at their appalling history of experimentation, the lives destroyed which reverberates across their families and friends.
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I think this article and discussion has to be read in the context of over 100 years of denial by establishment psychiatry that what happens to people affects them. This denial is politically motivated because the trauma model is a threat to careers built on the dominant biomedical model.
While I don’t agree with everything claimed by the trauma industry -by any means – I think that the turn towards social, environmental and experiential explanations has to be recognised as a major shift and challenge to the failed disease model of establishment psychiatry.
Sadly, this revolutionary aspect of the trauma discourse may not survive the grifters and influencers making money out of it on one side, or the establishment psychiatrists trying to turn it into another medicalised disease model on the other.
-Had some posting glitches, so sorry if I posted twice – please delete previous post if needed 🙂
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Biology before cognition, its how we develop. Biology has ensured we arrive with the ability to self heal. Through human connection. Academia says trauma is a cognitive injury. Its a biological injury jury to the nervous system. Overwhelming it and leaving it dysregulated. Psychology and psychiartry are cognitive constructs, like religion and patriarchy. A massive mo ey making machine. There’s no more ey if people learn to heal themselves.
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Jane, I think it could be said that “trauma” is a construct too.
I think that what most people think of as the “trauma model” has come through simplified versions of this neurobiological narrative .
This is far from the full picture of trauma theory and research – it’s just the bit that has become popularised.
As others suggest here – it is a simplification and falls for the same decontextualised and dichotomised ideas of mind-body which psychiatric dogma does.
I don’t think it is as easy to separate mind and body as you suggest, or to separate bodies from social and material contexts. I don’t think even Van Der Kolk would claim that it’s a simple cause-event-to-biological-effect linear process.
All trauma theory repeatedly emphasises that the effects of events are critically mediated by environmental, social and relational factors.
Early trauma theory was primarily focused on social and psychological framings.
I think the intense focus on the “biological” aspect of trauma discourse is perhaps caused by both the power of psychiatry in controlling and shaping the dominant “biologised” framework – and the popularity that these kinds of explanations have in reducing everything to simplistic mechanistic metaphors. Anything to avoid thinking about the full social implications of how we treat each other (particularly those with less power and resources – like children) and the wider political implications of that.
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I suppose a website about psychiatry must allow psychiatrists to have their say.
But this topic of “trauma” is confounding most traditionally-educated people.
There is of course physical trauma, and this would have impacts on the body by definition.
But what about emotional-only trauma? What about past life trauma (Steve Burgess and others)? The traditional models of the mind are simply incomplete and unworkable. I hope Mr. Burgess will contribute something to this site before too long. Until then, take it from an attentive observer: Most people in the field don’t know what they are talking about.
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Talk about trauma … my psychological computer / phone hacker is trying to drive me crazy, and silence me. He stole my Apple ID and seemingly has hacked into two phones. God help me.
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Bessel van der Kolk’s popular book actually has a short chapter – I can’t cite it because I threw it in the bin after finishing it – where he summarizes that forty years of trauma psychiatric research doesn’t support trauma therapy to be effective. Hence, it is implied in the book that the trauma theories it presents and the trauma therapeutic concepts that are built upon them might not be useful as well.
He also states that there is little but good research that found out that people who had a lot of adverse experiences in childhood who establish a regular mind-body practice like yoga and walk a path of self-guided recovery and keep themselves out of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic services fare best.
For me the book was very important because of this last statement. I never went back to psychotherapy or psychiatry after understanding the science as van der Kolk presented it here.
The funny thing is that Bessel van der Kolk is so enamoured with his trauma theories that he was able to present these facts about the research results and not draw the correct conclusions.
The rest of the book is advocacy for more research that he wants to do to prove that the theories and the treatments he believes in actually do work even.
Very interesting phenomenon when someone is so attached to his concepts of reality that facts that contradict it – even when a scientist is still capable of summarizing them correctly – are not processed anymore to challenge the mental model. It’s actually not only the reason why psychiatric patients are doomed. Is is also known as the main reason for pilot failure in plane crashes. Outch.
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“Very interesting phenomenon when someone is so attached to his concepts of reality that facts that contradict it – even when a scientist is still capable of summarizing them correctly – are not processed anymore to challenge the mental model.”
Totally agree, I’ve noticed the people never have their beliefs in a theory or practice deterred by whether it’s has good results or not. In psychology you can never definitively prove or disprove models even in the biological theories the researchers work around evidence that disputes their theories.
You feel very lonely when you’re in a bad psychological state. But that makes sense as you are alone in finding your way out. Psychiatry/Psychology can make your situation worse. One thing my psychological did for me is, I use to fear being alone but when I was in a bad place, people I knew didn’t help me. So now I feel more independent from my relationships.
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Hi Christine,
I believe it’s very embedded in our ‘nature’ to avoid changing our opinions as much as possible. We just crave certainty and predictability. Especially if we feel unsafe or under threat – as everyone does these days.
It takes constant watchfulness not to fall back on old, easy assumptions. It especially takes curiosity. We are so focused on defending our position we lose the ability to engage our curiosity. Feeling defensive can switch us out of the state of mind which supports it. Trauma and insecure lives keep us in constant defensive mode so we retreat into our fixed beliefs and positions.
I think Van Der Kolk is experiencing a ‘backlash’ from many quarters – people who put him on a pedestal, and the establishment psychiatrists who have been gatekeeping his work out of the establishment for decades. No scientist can be expected to be perfectly consistent- especially if they are at least trying to adhere to the scientific model, they should change their views.
This is all a bit of a storm in a teacup. He has always been attacked by the establishment psychiatry and, by being a popular author, always been open to all sorts of criticism. Most of us can make up our own minds what’s useful or not. I am grateful to him for his many decades of research in spite of opposition and exclusion by the psychiatric power base.
Traumatic experiences are very Isolating – feeling constantly unsafe – often mostly around other people – can be really lonely. I did have some good therapy too which helped me feel safer around others – just by being a good example of a safe person. I think life experience is so varied that there are no clear answers for what works. We have to try different t things and trust our own feelings amd responses over any expert or professional.
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Hi Freya,
My comment I wasn’t specifically referring to Bessel as stuck in his views. I agree that in general altering people’s view or understandings is difficult. I read Bessel’s book “Traumatic Stress” but not “The Body keeps the Score” so I can’t speak to it. I’ve been to number of conferences that he facilitates (International Trauma Conference) held in Boston. It was through his organization’s email that I learn of the Medicating Normal film. I watched it and after listening to Robert Whittaker, I thought, I have to look him up. That took me to this website. Before that film I didn’t know of organizations challenging the medical model. I think people don’t alter their view much partly because it’s hard to feel any certainty in areas you haven’t had personal experience. But even if you have experiences that changes your mind it’s hard incorporating them into your worldview.
For me, a couple of experiences totally transform how I viewed people.
The first one was when I found that I was carrying thoughts/emotions from childhood that I had no idea was there. I had heard of theories that spoke to how people carry trauma, how it shapes them and people reenact them looking for a different outcome. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe those theories but personally I didn’t think I had a trauma that I buried. My experience of finding something and seeing how my quirks totally make sense knowing what thoughts/emotions I had stored away was transformative in how I understood myself. The next transformation came in applying what I learned about how my quirks developed to understand how different quirks would develop in others depending on their different experiences. It gave me an understanding of personalities that I previously had no understanding of. I realized that I was unfair in my assessment of people with personalities I didn’t identify with.
But although I had a completely different prospective my old baggage kept me somewhat stuck in an old pattern of interacting, responding, and interpreting others. I found you have to work through all the old baggage before you can really incorporate new information into your viewpoint. Unfortunately, you can spend your life doing that. I’m not sure it’s possible to eliminate all one’s baggage. So I think views don’t change much partly because it takes personal experience to impact them and even then the new information doesn’t get fully incorporated because people’s baggage keeps them stuck in their prior thinking.
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It is possible now to get rid of lots of “baggage” in a short period of time, but that service is not yet widely available due to the time and finance required to deliver it. Right now I have to be satisfied with the knowledge that some people are making it happen, which is a lot better than no one.
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Do you think that the trauma model challenges the classic psychiatric medical model, Christine?
Why would you do so?
In my view the trauma model is a modernization of the psychodynamic explanatory model of the genesis of mental illness. And it is safely grounded fully within the medical perspective of illnesses.
I like to call it the car crash model of mental illnesses because all these variations of psychodynamic theories claim that the specific psychiatric problem is directly caused by the character of the “accident” – the psychological harmful event.
I find it really strange that people want to believe that our personality is the result of everything bad that has happened to us. When I’m honest this strikes me as sick and obsessive.
Especially, because it is so easy to observe that it’s not true: Folks who have survived a certain kind of emotional injury, for example the loss of their whole family in a tsunami as children, are just as normal and diverse in their personalities as any other random group of people.
What they obviously share is a tragic experience which they need to find a way to grieve. What hinders that is psychiatrization of their experience through the medical trauma model. What they need is companions of grief and certainly not the label of a psychiatric disorder.
Just as autism, ADHD, ect. “trauma” is the denominator of a psychiatric disorder, and not a means of liberation.
Even the trauma metaphor is directly lent from medical language used to describe the result of a violent event to the body, an injury. Trauma simply means a wound of the body in ancient Greek.
Psychiatric trauma theory and trauma psychotherapy are very much a part of psychiatry and the medical approach. It strikes me as strange that so many people seem to think that trauma is revolutionising psychiatry. When in fact within psychiatry the “traumatized” have only supplanted the “borderlines” and the “schizophrenics”.
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Christine, thanks for your reply. I honesty don’t follow Van Der Kolk that much and had mixed agreement with the book I’ve found some of his talks helpful. I didn’t see your comment as critical of him at all, I am just fascinated too by how people form their beliefs and how we hold onto them.
I think, the baggage stays I reckon, it’s our attitude to it which we can change.
I too have experienced the time it takes to understand and make sense of painful experiences, it takes time to uncover how our experiences have affected us – this is not a mysterious or difficult to understand process – it’s not about “false memories” or being brainwashed by ‘trauma talk’ either – it’s human nature to avoid change and avoid pain. We live in a culture which does every thing it can to avoid and “dissociate” from pain or discomfort. We have a whole “mental health” industrial complex built around controlling and containing emotions. We learn to cope with pain by putting it away – this isnt mysterious either – we “dissociate” /separate unpleasant feelings and ideas all the time (i find “dissociate” more descriptive and broader than “repress”).
Children tend to do this more because they have less resources to manage mental conflict or pain. They become good at it if they have no support or other options – so of course, it can take years to uncover this – or sometimes a shock or stress will unearth it (then they will be drugged or force to suppress it again with chemical dissociation.)
What I have learned about those who claim to have “cures” for anything, including and especially, for “trauma”, is that most are just selling something. Psychiatry in particular, but – ironically – it has missed the boat completely – and really is left catching up (or pretending to, with “trauma-informed “ rhetoric etc.)
The proliferation of therapies and theories and “trauma discourse” we’re bombarded with now are just opportunism, marketing, or downright fraud. Some really believe they have the answers – because it worked for them.
The fact is we are not dealing with a single condition or experience – just as with any other so-called “mental health issue”.
People continue to make this mistake.
Thanks for your thoughts – we need to trust our own perceptions as the “truth” for “now”, without attaching to the ideas of others, or even our own too much . I have felt so much better in so many ways since realising this!
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Hi Larry, What method is that?
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Dianetics and Scientology processing (spiritual counseling).
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My question would be how do you know that the baggage has been eliminated versus buried. I had baggage that I didn’t know I had and although I had some quirks I was perfectly happy with who I was and my life. That was before I ran into the problem that turned quite serious.
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You’d have to study Hubbard’s work to get an exact answer to this.
Basically, the person “feels lighter” when some of this stuff is removed. Meter readings are used to confirm this.
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Originally, Jon Hubbard had a friend who he founded Scientology/Dianetics with. However, the friend quickly realised that Hubbard was beginning to build a cult and broke away from him.
He founded Re-evaluation Counselling, RC, sometimes also called co-counselling. I think that their lay people therapy programme comes probably close to what’s taught in Dianetics.
I took a couple of classes and thought that it was very smart and beneficial. It taught me to relearn natural tension release processes of the body and mind like hysterically laughing, scratching the head, yawning, crying, trembling. Things that children do to process stress and tension and that adults teach them to unlearn and to suppress like in “boys don’t cry”.
When you do it around people who don’t know about these natural mechansims to decompress, they will think you’re about to get psychotic. ; ) I do it on my own or with trusted friends. Simply with everyone who understands that it is not weird or suspicious but very healthy.
I quickly left the organisation that was teaching the courses in my small Western European town though because of signs of a culture of coercive control and horrible classism/narcissist dysfunctions in the groups – but the latter was maybe just American? ; )
I just wanted to let you know that it is taught outside of Scientology too for free or only small fees.
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The name is Ron Hubbard, not Jon.
I have never heard of Harvey Jackins, but he is apparently one of many who thought they could do better than Hubbard and stole pieces of his work, rebranding it as their own. This of course involved floating stories that there was something wrong with Hubbard or his ideas or what he was doing. But it is his work that has grown into a huge international movement that has demonstrated workability. All the “splinter groups” are considered unreliable.
But I cannot tell anyone here to do more than study the various materials available and make your choices. Time will tell if you were wise or not.
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Just curious Steve, Why for some comments is their a report comment but not a replay to comment?
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Posting as moderator: Not sure what you mean by this?
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At least on my iphone when I look at some comments there isn’t a reply below it so you can reply directly to the comment.
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POSTING AS MODERATOR:
There are only a certain number of “nested” comments allowed in a thread before the “reply” button stops showing up. The thing to do is to go to the last post that DOES have a “reply” button and reply to that. Your comment will show up at the end of the thread.
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This has to do with the software programming that runs this particular commenting system. It only supports so many levels of comments – three or four I think.
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Hi Lina,
To me it’s obvious that everyone is holding emotion/thoughts from the past and their quirks aren’t random. I think there’s more to storing emotion than just experiencing something bad. There is whether there’s closure and it can be process. There is whether the person can bury it or is it ongoing either because the problem still exists or people are poking or the reaction from it. I think if my experience wasn’t so long lasting or I had support rather than people challenging or poking at the wound, I wound have bury it. Someone with a lot of stored emotion doesn’t necessarily look like, act like, or even feel different from others. If fact I say they aren’t different. However, it’s a struggle when there’s a lot buried and/or the person wasn’t able to box it away. I think trauma counseling can make someone worse because it can interfere with their ability to box it away. It’s poking at the trauma.
Although I was well aware that I was in a lot of trouble psychologically, I didn’t tell people. I knew that would add to my problem. When I did tell my brother, he said it couldn’t have been as bad as I described because I wouldn’t have been able to continue working and functioning. But I know it was that bad. My mother knew something was up but people act distracted, get nervous, say odd things or acts odd sometimes. Clearly there can be a lot going on before someone seems unsual.
What you say is true.
“Folks who have survived a certain kind of emotional injury, for example the loss of their whole family in a tsunami as children, are just as normal and diverse in their personalities as any other random group of people.”
That’s partly true because it’s normal not to be normal. It’s normal for people to be diverse. That’s if you can say “normal” exists. Everyone is unique. It’s normal to have a range of live experiences. No one will have the same combination of experiences and how they react to a current one depends on what they experienced before. How they learned to cope. What support do they have for their bad experience. What recognition or sympathy did their experience provoke from others. There’s so many variables.
I don’t think that people are just their reaction to a bad experience. People develop interests, they study different things, are exposed to different values and beliefs. Emotions like becoming nervous or angry in certain situations, what you’re trigger by, how you react; those things are not all a person is. But I, also, think those characteristics don’t develop randomly. Not because I read a theory and believe it but because it’s been my life experience. I had a experience where I was able to connect the dots and that shaped my views.
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To be honest, I don’t know what to say about the field of psychology. I listen to the different viewpoints and they’re so diverse. The field is definitely not scientific. I think it has misled people in presenting itself like it is.
I never went to therapy because I knew I would have whatever the therapist’s views were pushed on me. If they believed in the medical model, drugs with therapy. If they believed in behavioral therapy maybe DBT. If they believed in analysis, then I have someone poking at wounds. I might be told to exercise or meditation.
I feel that psychology is like religion. To be honest I don’t discuss it outside my internet conversations. Even on the internet I try to just speak of my own experience.
I’m an atheist. But, I learned at a young age not to tell anyone that. Because people get upset when you don’t believe in their religious beliefs. I feel the same thing goes on in psychology but some people are in a position to impose their beliefs on others. My experience is when you’re already struggling and you have people pushing their beliefs, it’s brutal. It made my situation so much worse than it had to be.
I’m on Twitter. On Twitter there’s a woman Annie Hicks, who believes a biological abnormality caused her psychological issues and there’s critical psychology or people who have been harm by psychotropic drugs. The two camps really get into personal attacks. I think psychological beliefs tend to be more diametrically opposed to each other than different religions tend to be. How do people in the different camps ever work together?
So I don’t even know how psychology could be changed so that it isn’t harming anyone. But I speak about it because I feel that those with psychological issues are treated badly, unfairly, in ways that interfere with recovery, and harm physically as well as psychologically. So psychology staying the same is a disaster.
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The reason why I am so highly critical of everything trauma is exactly what you have experienced as well:
“My experience is when you’re already struggling and you have people pushing their beliefs, it’s brutal. It made my situation so much worse than it had to be.”
Psychodynamic and trauma therapists have done this to me since I was ten years old and I developed serious mental health challenges as a result.
And as a matter of fact I wasn’t actually struggling but my mother was. And she used pathologizing me as a narcissist crutch.
A first senior therapist didn’t want to take me because she reassured my mother that I was fine and didn’t need therapy. My mother then kept searching until she found a young therapist who was willing to assist her in her narcissist abuse and call it therapy.
I haven’t met anyone from within the field of therapy – and barely anyone outside – who acknowledges that psychodynamic and trauma approaches are inherently abusive – and just as abusive as biological psychiatry. In fact at universities and hospitals the two groups work together harmoniously.
It is only those who adress the abuse inherent in clinical psychology and psychiatry – of any denomination – who are being shunned.
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You were connected with a psychopathic family member and incompetent therapists (which today are the norm). You had no chance of making progress, regardless of which theory of therapy was applied.
Trauma IS the basis for emotional distress. But if the therapist does not make sure that the patient is free of psychopathic influences, then no therapy will work.
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Larry, I developed mental health issues because of violence and abuse. Not sure why you are so attached to look at violence solely from a medical perspective and insist to call my experiences “traumatic”.
Is it because you desperately need a doctor to validate that you have been harmed and abused to understand that it was real? Why would you need that?
What has happened has happened. You may trust your experience if you want to.
I don’t need a doctor or any authority that is part of the ruling class to acknowledge my experiences of familial, psychotherapeutic, and state administrative oppression and abuse.
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What ON EARTH gave you the idea that I have a “medical” perspective? Do you know what the word “psychopathic” means?
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Hi Larry, your use of the trauma concept shows that you have – apparently unknowingly – bought into psychiatric thought.
There are a couple of good resources here on the website that might help you to understand that “trauma” is a psychiatric concept that is rooted in the medical model of mental health. Spontaneously I think of an interview with Harvard psychologist Joseph Gone.
https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/10/healing-looks-like-justice-interview-harvard-psychologist-joseph-gone/
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Lina, do you know what the word “psychopathic” means?
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Yes, Larry, I know what “psychopathic” means. It seems to me though that – unlike you – I not only understand the meaning of psychiatric vocabulary but also how these words shape psychiatric thought.
When you decide to use concepts like “trauma” or “psychopathy” you automatically acknowledge psychiatric perspectives and its foundational idea, the model of illness of the Western academic medical tradition, as valid.
Do you understand what “medical model” means?
Having a preference for psychodynamic and trauma theories over behaviouralism, medication, and the DSM doesn’t mean that you’ve stepped out of the medical model – in fact not even an inch. These are competing schools within psychiatry.
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Well, Lina, it seems you have a very different understanding of “medical model” than I do. For you, I take it, it embraces any paradigm where one person must – at least for a time – rely on another person to help them get out of a mess. Like a baby must rely on a parent to change its diapers.
My feeling about this is that yes, sometimes people get into messes they can’t escape from themselves, and need some help.
But for me, the “medical model” only refers to the idea that any distress a person may suffer is totally due to some problem in their physical body, and thus can be successfully addressed by surgery or drugs or even adjustment or “natural” remedies. Even distress that seems totally emotional or behavioral and can only be addressed with some form of psychotherapy would still be traced back to a problem in “the brain.”
I do not subscribe to this model. Not because it is useless; a doctor is useful if you have a broken arm or a rotten tooth. But because it is so totally incomplete and seriously inverted. I believe that all distress ultimately has a spiritual cause, as physical as it may seem.
The psychopath is an extremely distressed person who lives in constant fear of others. For this reason, he will never ask for help. He knows that his “help” is totally insincere and destructive. The only reasonable way to “help” a psychopath is to put them in a quiet place away from other people, with a lot of space around them. The psychopath may be the ultimate example of a spiritually diseased individual; most of us would consider such a person totally insane if we got an honest look at them.
I would still be interested to know what your understanding of “psychopathic” is, and why you seem to think of it as an irrelevant or useless concept.
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I agree with you. People don’t seem to talk about how damaging therapies are. I stayed away from the mental health system all together. It’s bad for one’s mental health. What happened to you goes on all the time. There’s a clinical psychologist on twitter who is actually the most annoying person, with his comments on twitter, for me.
I know some people say therapy helps them. Some people say psychotropic drugs help them too. I think therapy is operating on falsehood just like the “chemical imbalance theory”. I will admit there are parts of the theories that are true. But half truths mixed in with falsehoods are bad. In addition the idea that a person can be objective in their assessment and treatment of another is delusional. People are always going to like and sympathize with some people and dislike, or see others, as the problem. A professional, who is supposedly an expert, scapegoating you, supporting a person and viewpoint that’s hurt you, won’t help anyone psychologically,
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So glad, you were clear sighted enough to not get yourself into psychotherapy. And thank you for acknowledging my experiences, Christine!
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Larry, you use the word “spiritual” as if it were some universally understood, agreed upon term.
The highly diverse variety of religious and esoteric traditions throughout the course of history proves the contrary.
Shamans, Christian mystics, theosophists, and Huna priests do not necessarily conceive of the extrasensory world–if we assume it does exist–in the very same manner. Thus, what you as a Scientologist call a “spiritually diseased person” may not be regarded as such by someone who does not share your perception of reality.
I personally don’t see any need to always impose a “spiritualist” interpretation upon cases of physical illness or emotional distress.
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It would be much simpler, Joel, to just ask me what I meant by the term in the context I used it. You can look the word up on a Scientology website and find out how it is used there, too.
A word with multiple meanings does not have to have all those meanings every time it is used. If you can’t pick up which meaning is intended in the context the word is used, then ask the writer or speaker to clarify. No need to give a lecture on how words have different meanings in different contexts. There are a LOT of words like that.
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All right then, would you mind briefly clarifying what you mean by the phrase “spiritually diseased person?” I am perfectly aware that “spirituality” has numerous connotations, but I’d like to understand your own interpretation of this highly pejorative concept as it applies to human behavior.
To me, this phrase is solely a metaphor describing a thought, emotion, or action you consider disturbing or reprehensible in some way. I myself reject the misleading, potentially harmful use of medical terms such as “illness,” “health,” and “diseased” in contexts where a physical cause cannot be diagnosed. That is precisely why I objected to MIA contributor Robert Dole’s labeling his mental state as a sickness of the soul, mind, or psyche, which I consider an unjustified conflation of metaphor with reality. Your misuse of medicalized language reflects this semantic confusion.
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A “spiritually diseased” person is one who’s primary problem exists at the level of Spirit, meaning that biological, or even mental, “therapeutic interventions” will not totally resolve the problem.
This is most distinctly true in the case of psychopaths, who seem to be the way they are from birth, are often perfectly physically healthy, and do not respond to mental therapies.
This implies – if not states explicitly – that Spirit, or an individual spiritual being, can be damaged. Anesthesia and coma act at the spiritual level. In other words, the spiritual being itself is convinced that it should step aside or “go to sleep.” Addictions and that whole range of problems may trace to the spiritual level. A spiritual being can be tricked, forced to do things that violate its own integrity, and thus lose its own sense of self-respect. A spiritual being can descend to a state of considering itself a “total failure” or rise all the way up to a level of “serenity of beingness.” Thus, the most important therapy in the realm of “mental health” would be a spirit-based therapy.
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Perhaps they might be called “spiritually distressed” persons? I have most definitely found that most anyone experiencing what the DSM calls “mental health issues” is suffering on a spiritual level, but I’m not sure I’d call it a “disease” so much as a confusion, usually having made spirit-level decisions at a much younger age and forgotten exactly why they were important but KNOWING that they are somehow essential, or else being in a current situation where their ability to establish some sense of control is threatened or undermined.
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Well, Steve, the “disease” concept includes the idea that some “pathogen” exists which attacks the victim and hurts them. A similar concept is “injury.” “Distress” conveys the idea that the person might only be confused.
While a being is perfectly capable of messing itself up by holding on to old decisions that are not relevant to the current situation, I wanted to emphasize the finding that destructive technologies have been used against beings, and that those effects must also be overcome.
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Well, I don’t suppose I can’t argue against the idea that spiritual beings can be “injured” by various destructive approaches, nor that physical injuries or terrorizing of people can’t make them act in an irrational fashion!
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This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t believe people are born “psychopaths”. I know the term “narcissist” is used all the time and I don’t agree with calling people “narcissist”. It’s not that I don’t recognize that people do really bad things and harm others. Obviously, they do. But slapping a label on behavior and saying it’s innate doesn’t further understanding around its development. If you don’t have understanding around the development of the variety of human behaviors and viewpoints out there, I don’t see any way people get to a more peaceful, healthy, co-existence.
I think people trash people all the time because the people they are trashing have characteristics that they don’t relate to and consider a problem. Some people are extremely scapegoated. The people trashing them get others to gang up. If one labels a person a narcissist then it’s OK to treat them bad. A “narcissist” deserves it. Treating someone is such a way may cause a psychological collapse that just hurts the person scapegoated. But some people “scapegoated” (not all!) are going to develop a view of “people never cared what harm came to me so why have concern about harming others.” A psychopath’s viewpoint. Is a psychopath born or does society contribute to their creation? I think an argument can be made for the latter.
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It doesn’t matter if your opinion is “unpopular” or not. But your ideas will usually be more workable if they are based on repeatable research results.
There are limits to this. I work in electronics. It has long been known that what moves in electronics are electrons. From minus to plus in a circuit. But most circuits are still drawn with plus on top, and the flow is considered to be from plus to minus. It turns out that the direction of flow doesn’t really matter that much. As long as you are consistent, you can understand a circuit either way.
Similarly, there are things about people and the mind that in the end don’t matter that much, and other things that do matter a lot.
When I talk about psychopaths I rely a lot on the research that I am aware of. And it finds that they are born that way. Deeper and less accepted research finds that these personalities developed a LONG time ago (in some past life). The details of how the psychopath develops might not be that certain, but if you don’t believe in past lives (though there is plenty of research validating the idea), then the finding that a being can be born with certain personality traits won’t make much sense.
The concept of past lives, however, has been found to be key to the process of healing, and using it in therapy (when done with skill) produces amazing results.
There are people who act psychopathic who in fact learned those behaviors from a psychopath, but aren’t one themselves. Lobaczewski found the ratio to be about 6% psychopath and 18% “helpers.” These numbers might apply to just certain groups.
But the point is, I suppose, that the datum that psychopaths exist and must be dealt with is more important than speculations about how their personalities developed. The finding that they don’t respond to most therapies is quite valid, so we see the need for a legal / social framework for dealing with such people that does not rely on therapy.
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So you are saying they often ARE born that way, but NOT due to genetic inheritance. Just to make that point very clear.
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Yes, that’s what I’m saying.
And to the extent that genetics is being used as a placeholder theory for why no this-life cause for a condition is found, then I propose that past-life causes are the most obvious next hypothesis to test.
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I very much agree Christine!
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Hi Christine,
I think what you’re describing definitely can & does happen, and I think that the recent explosion of pop-therapy jargon around “narcissists” has contributed to this problematic usage.
However, I’ve also seen “narcissist” used in a vastly different context, where it is describing a pattern of abusive/exploitative behavior marked by self-centeredness. To me, this is not saying it is “innate” any more than calling someone an abuser implies innateness. Much like “abuser,” “narcissist” (in this context) is not a permanent label so much as a descriptor calling out harmful behavior. It’s not “scapegoating” if the blame is justified. I mean, I don’t think people should also stop calling abusive people “abusers” because it might hurt their feelings!
Whether a “narcissist” or “abuser” is created through mistreatment or social outcasting is a whole nother conversation. If society is “stigmatizing” them for abuses they have already committed… well then, I think you’d be confusing cause & effect in that case. But if you’re saying that being abused/mistreated causes people to become abusive/mistreat others– which is a popular idea– I’d have to disagree. I don’t think abusers/narcissists are created by being told they are less than others; I think they are created by being taught they are superior to others & thus entitled to impose their will on others. The “insecure bully” explanation makes for a nice story, but I remember learning in a college psychology class that it is actually a myth; research has shown that bullies demonstrate much higher levels of self-esteem, on average.
(Real life example: Donald Trump. Or literally any billionaire. They are arguably the biggest abusers/exploiters/narcissists on the planet. Do we really think that’s because they were the most mistreated/excluded in childhood? Or because they were raised to think they’re better than everyone else & entitled to impose their will at all costs?)
On the other hand, genuinely unjustified scapegoating & mislabeling of victims as “narcissists” is definitely a thing that happens. However, I think of it as being similar to how labels like “manipulative” often get falsely applied to folks in emotional distress/crisis. Though this is wrong & harmful in these cases, there is also a real such thing as manipulative behavior, and I don’t think the solution is to say that nobody is ever manipulative, or that we should all stop saying “manipulative” altogether.
–Jasmine
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Hi Jasmine
If you had a conversation with me before I experienced the extreme psychological “distress” that I did, we would mainly agree. But what I experienced radically changed my views on many issues.
My experience revealed to me that many psychological theories aren’t true. I know the impact of sitting on a lot of emotion because I experienced it. I experienced many characteristics, that I had seen in others, but previously, didn’t understand. There are many characteristics that aren’t about the person being flawed. They’re the result of sitting on a lot of emotions.
Feelings of superiority is one of them. I previously thought of superiority as a belief people learn as you say. But I found that when I was sitting on a lot of emotions it made what I felt and thought more intense. So anger, anxiety, sadness were way! way! more intense. But it wasn’t just feelings that intensified, it also was thoughts and beliefs. I had paranoid thoughts in areas where I was insecure. I felt an intensity in superior feelings in areas where I felt knowledgeable or skilled. So I don’t see cocky people the same way as I did before. I see them as people who have emotional baggage versus just a bad, inappropriate, attitude/behavior needing correction. I understand someone acting superior is annoying. But I don’t think calling people out on it all the time is helpful.
I had a woman friend (this was before my serious psychological distress) and one day we were eating together and she said to me that is bothers her that she’s way superior to me particularly in intelligent but I have a job and more money. She had skills but struggled to hold a job. She was raised by her grandparents because her parents weren’t stable. Her grandfather was alcoholic. I don’t think she was taught to think she was better than others. Even before I knew that emotional baggage would lead to superior feelings, I did notice that it wasn’t the happy/relaxed people who acted superior towards others, it was people like my friend, who were intense sometimes impulsive. Now I understand why that would be the case. So I disagree with the belief that superiority is just taught and emotional baggage won’t cause it. My experience says otherwise.
“The “insecure bully” explanation makes for a nice story, but I remember learning in a college psychology class that it is actually a myth; research has shown that bullies demonstrate much higher levels of self-esteem, on average.”
I learned a lot of wrong information from psychology classes and social work training. Research shows, generally means a minimal correlations that are interpreted anyway one wants. The field of psychology particularly misses the mark when the theorists starts interpreting characteristics, they don’t understand. As I expressed above, if you know that thoughts generally increase in intensity from emotional baggage then expressing superiority isn’t inconsistent with someone having a lot of emotional baggage.
“But if you’re saying that being abused/mistreated causes people to become abusive/mistreat others– which is a popular idea– I’d have to disagree”.
It isn’t a direct cause. However, abuse or mistreatment can result in a lot of emotional baggage. When emotions and viewpoints are intense and one believes correct, then people do judge harshly, feel they are right and sometimes not only impulsively abuse but intentionally abuse those they see as a problem.
If a dog is beaten some will coward and hide, others may bite those they feel threatened by. To say the initial beating has nothing to do with the resulting behavior is unrealistic. If you help the dog heal from the initial beating, he may stop biting or hiding. If you say that the beating doesn’t matter and the problem is how the dog responded, then you punish the response. The beatings will continue until the response is different. The dog will keep biting or hiding.
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From what I’ve seen, the “emotional baggage” and “insecure bully” narratives are wayy more predominant in psychology, psychoanalysis, and society in general; my theory is presenting more of a challenge to those dominant ideas. I just mentioned the class/research to show that I’m not making this up out of nowhere — not to undermine my argument by aligning it with mainstream psychology.
The first thing I’ll say is that neither your experience nor my theory is going to singlehandedly account for every individual’s experience. I’m sure that what you’re saying is sometimes true (as it was for you & your friend). I’m also sure that what I’m saying is sometimes true. So we’re both right, in a way.
However, I also think there’s a difference between crisis/trauma response and actual abusiveness. I think our differences of opinion can be explained by the fact that you’re describing the former while I’m describing the latter. The behavior may look the same on the surface, but context, motivations, and overarching patterns may differ. For example:
– Traumatized response: Lashes out when feeling powerless & out of control.
– Abusive behavior: Lashes out to assert power & control over others.
– Traumatized response: Needs to prevent their autonomy from being taken away again.
– Abusive behavior: Needs to take away others’ autonomy.
– Traumatized response: Anger/superiority/etc is a method of self-defense.
– Abusive behavior: Anger/superiority/etc is a method of domination.
I also want to clarify that there are many ways for a behavior to be learned. Being taught that one is superior by being treated as superior is only one way. However, behavioral modeling is another way behavior can be learned– and this can be witnessed second-hand. For example, perhaps an abused child doesn’t grow up to feel superior or narcissistic because they were “taught” to; perhaps they learn from their environment or from society that those kinds of attitudes/behaviors will earn them power, admiration, safety, control, etc.
Forgive me for citing another psychological study, but it reminds me of the famous Bobo doll experiment. The children didn’t beat up on the Bobo dolls because they were abused or emotionally repressed, nor did they do it because they were taught to feel superior. They did it simply because they saw the adults do it first and learned to model their behavior.
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Seeing one’s parent engage in abusive behavior toward a spouse or partner is a very common way that children learn to be abusers. Early abandonment by parents is also a frequent contributor. The long and the short of it is, abusive behavior is as heterogeneous as depression or anxiety or psychosis. It is just a label, there is no one cause.
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@Steve, Thanks for adding that, that’s part of what I was trying to convey. You put it into words.
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Hi Jasmine and Steve,
I saw you last comment in my mail but not here to reply.
In any case, in you reply to me, you seemed to completely ignore what I said about how an sudden extreme increase in emotional baggage will intensify emotions and thoughts. Is that because you don’t believe it or think it’s unimportant? I ask because it isn’t talked about in psychology. I think psychology is over looking something really important.
Psychology categorizes people, decides intentions and treat them accordingly to their “professional” decision. I had very messed up people do that to me and that’s how I developed the severe psychological “distress” I did.
I had to figure out for myself how and why people would behave in such a matter. I didn’t read it in a book.
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Well, of course it would! My wife got cancer, I got cancer, my wife died in April. Did that intensify emotions and thoughts for me? You bet your ass it did! Maybe it was so obvious I didn’t feel it needed commentary.
I will add that what I discovered to be helpful to others was also nothing I read in a book. I learned it from talking to people who were in distress and asking them to help me understand what they were going through. There doesn’t appear to be any training that comes close to actually listening and being present for others in moments of distress. But you probably won’t find that concept in any book on psychology!
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So sorry to hear about your wife and health battles. I agree with everything in your comment.
I think experiencing emotions at a higher level should be a easy concept. But I see posts on mental health websites speaking as though they have no idea where intense emotions come from. The medical model believes that intense or long term emotions make no sense and must be a biological abnormality. So apparently it isn’t obvious to all the people who believe in the medical model. I do think the degree to which emotion can increase and impact thought isn’t obvious when it pushes people into delusion and psychosis.
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I’ve also found people stating “there’s no reason” for their depression or anxiety, and then find out that they had recently been dumped by their girlfriend or had been abused by a domestic partner or dealt with intense family conflict early in their lives, among many other examples. We all tend to normalize what we experienced and psychiatry plays into this tendency and discourages people from looking for real reasons. But I’ve talked to hundreds of depressed/anxious people and haven’t found any willing to talk to me who haven’t had some very good reasons for feeling the way they did. Life in modern society is pretty depressing!
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The situation is, though, that some people get hit by bad news (or much worse) and bounce back, while others don’t. That’s where this “emotional baggage” concept comes into play. If your baggage is all cleaned up, new challenges are likely to be less upsetting. It IS, though, amazing what some people manage to live through. Some very awful things can happen to us.
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That makes perfect sense to me.
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I agree. When working in Adult Protection I always was told of adverse events that precipitated the psychological issues. Sometimes people would say things like “I should be over the rape” or whatever happen.
I have personal experience with how one can carry emotional baggage without realizing it. I experience a rush of emotion while thinking of a childhood experience. If you had asked before I found that emotion did I have any adverse experiences my childhood? I would have said no. I didn’t think anything serious happened in my childhood that would account for what issues I had.
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Steve, I am very sorry that you lost your wife and partner, and have such a difficult health struggle as well.
What you say is so true – just being with someone, listening, and not trying to control them, change them, judge them, or label them is very rare and that kind of connection can be incredibly healing and empowering in my experience.
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Christine, I didn’t ignore it, and I don’t disbelieve you or think it’s unimportant. I wrote a pretty long reply, and I couldn’t cover everything. I agree that an extreme increase in emotional “baggage,” as you call it, would intensify emotions & thoughts. But I thought we were talking about behaviors? Specifically abusive/narcissistic behaviors? Sure, our emotions/thoughts may affect or motivate our behaviors, but they are still a separate category.
I have my own lived experience too, as does nearly everyone here. I, too, have experienced extreme emotional distress and had to figure it out for myself, since the “professionals” and their “books” messed me up even more. I think we’re on the same page more than you realize. Basically what it comes down to is “everyone’s experience is different,” as I tried to convey before, and I think we are simply coming at the same idea from different perspectives.
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Yes, I don’t think we’re that far apart. I’m a little sensitive to the “manipulative”label. I have to check myself to not overreact. My abuser really got away with a lot by spreading a false narrative and telling everyone I was manipulative. Some in my friend group (that he was in ad well) didn’t communicate with me because they were afraid of him and his friends, and some didn’t get a full story and accepted things he told them. I was in a bad position because I didn’t know the narrative that was being spread behind my back, so I couldn’t response. Plus he had so discredited me that anything I said that happened to go against his narrative was seen as manipulation. The friend group treated me however he wanted them to. To be honest I was a shy, nerdy person and had never had anyone attack my character like that and it did surprise me how one person trashes you and others follow suit. I’ll comment more but I’m on a trip right now. I went to the inner compass conference.
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Christine, I’m so sorry you went through that, and I didn’t mean to raise any triggers for you. Like I said, I definitely agree that there are people who are falsely/unfairly labeled “manipulative,” and it sounds like you’ve been one of them. I have been too, and I can actually relate to aspects of your story. It sounds like your abuser was the real manipulative one there! Again, I’m so sorry you went through all that.
I hope you had a nice time at the conference! Sounds very cool!
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You don’t have to worry about triggering me. There was a time when a trigger brought intense emotion to the surface. Then a lot of triggers is a problem. At this point I’ve worked through most emotion and if I’m triggered it actually helps me. I feel better once I’m done feeling the emotion. More relaxed and my head feels clearer.
I appreciate your concern. Thanks. The conference was good. Of course there isn’t a quick, simple, solution to problems in the Mental Health system.
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I would add that, from what I have studied, there IS something that could be called “emotional baggage.” It is baggage in the sense that it can just sit there, really for many many years, without being noticed or having much effect. But certain events can “unlock” it, and then it spills out all over the place!
There is a need – and it is broad, most people have this – to calmly take out the baggage, go through it, and see if any of it is really needed. Usually not. This is the essence of the more effective healing therapies.
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I think we can get distracted by rehashing the nature/nurture debate quoting pro and con research for ever. The evidence for the direct effects of environmental and social factors on health and wellbeing is replicated, stable and overwhelmingly clear, versus mainly weak, contradictory or speculative biological or other yet-to-be-proven causes.
But social/environmental explanations require complex and careful solutions – they don’t produce money-making cures or easy answers. Unfalsifiable claims of cures for mysterious or speculative causes keep a lot of people in business.
It can be a useful distraction from thinking about things we can actually do something about and change, to keep us believing it’s all in our genes or our “personality”. The next big answer – like “inflammation” or “attachment styles” or “nervous system regulation” are not going to explain the whole picture or fix anything either. We can make a difference in our communities – by connecting and supporting each other. But I can’t “regulate” my nervous system if I’m not in a safe environment. A child can’t be securely attached if its parents have to work five jobs. We can’t control inflammation if we can’t afford a healthy diet or health care or have no control over our work environment. IMO of course 🙂
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All I want to say about this is that we now have a therapist helping people or curing people who were not being helped by the mainstream methods based on the mainstream theories.
He is Steve Burgess and he is using past life regression (as needed).
There are actually many therapists addressing past life experiences, but Steve is out there promoting his methods, and most others are not.
If a person is being suppressed by a criminal or a crime-caused situation in the present, he doesn’t need a therapist, he needs a cop or a good social worker. If a person has such experiences in the past, then a good therapist could help, but it might take addressing past lives to totally handle the situation.
Of course there are plenty of people who are upset because life has just been too hard on them. But the problems that mental health professionals should really be addressing are the ones that go much deeper than these upsets and can bother people whether or not they are being abused, or are poor, or anything like that.
Psychiatry has chosen to “treat” everyday upsets with drugs or worse. They are behaving like a business trying to find more customers. And they are not making any progress in the direction of finding real solutions to the deeper human problems, which Steve Burgess has been doing. So Psychiatry as we know it should go. Burgess is a trained psychologist, but most mainstream psychologists are also quite ineffective. Psychology needs to fully embrace the reality of past life experiences, or it will remain an ineffective study and practice. Perhaps getting Psychiatry off the backs of psychologists would help them “see the light.” But currently psychology is not doing much better than psychiatry.
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