We want to make one thing clear, opening up and talking about your problems to friends, family or even your GP is invaluable, that is the case now, always has been and always will be. Sharing your thoughts of where you are in life and what is happening in your own mind will help you carry less of a burden, offer some release and allow others to start looking at ways to get the best available help for you. That is unless that best available help is a sit down talk based approach and let us explain why.
As evidence grows that anti-depressant drugs are ineffective, more of us are likely to turn to talk based counselling or talk based therapy. But, counselling and talk based therapy can mean being traumatised again. I mean for one you have to go over everything that’s hurting you again and explain all your thoughts, feelings emotions and describe what it was that made you feel that way in the first place. Now factually as you know our words directly create our thinking, our thinking directly creates our feelings and that’s the part that sculpts our behaviours in life. So surely if the aim is to get better and remove the negative thoughts and feelings talking about them all again creates the very thing that is hurting you in the first place. Being asked to remember back to a time when you felt good means you have to look past the negative to find that part and again we feel worse off for it. Some one sat with a clipboard nodding and asking you how you feel now you have got it off your chest really doesn’t help. So again if we are looking to change the thoughts and feelings reliving them is in fact the opposite. We have lost count the time a client has arrived feeling worse off having finished a course in talk based therapy and still doesn’t feel any better.
A recent article in the Psychologist journal, entitled When Therapy Causes Harm, cautions that approximately 10% of people get worse after starting therapy. Yet the belief in the innocuousness of talk based therapy and counselling remains persistent and prevalent says the article’s author and spokesman for the British Psychological Society.
High on the list of potentially counter-productive therapies, according to new research from King’s College London, is immediate psychotherapy – or talk based therapy as it is often called – after traumatic events talk based therapy can actually make it more likely for the individual to get post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Reflecting this new caution, British military personnel who suffer trauma are now given at least a month to talk to family, friends and colleagues before professional help is suggested. So even a career with a high likelihood of trauma notices this and now acts differently.
Ok I get it talk based therapy and counselling were great back in the day when we weren’t used to talking about our feelings and our emotional balance, but therapy like technology must move forward. Let me put it like this. Talk based therapy was great around 20 years ago when it started to make an appearance but then again so was the Nokia 3210. We have progressed to things like iPhone X and Samsung 10 things have moved on and so should therapy. The old saying of you have to get worse before you get better is not true, never has been and never will be. You don’t need to rake the past up to deal with the thoughts and feelings it evokes, you just need to deal with the thoughts and feelings. Imagine a therapy where you didn’t have to go over everything again and again yet still feel much better after only a session wouldn’t that be a result. Well, believe it or not that exact therapy has been about since the 70s and its called NLP.
No this isn’t a plug for my private practice in fact far from it this article will be read all around the world with followers in countries such as Australia, Dubai, Italy and in the U.S. and yes I am sure the talk based therapists and councillors who rely on endless sessions with you to make a very comfortable living will adamantly deny this and refute this article in the strongest possible terms. I simply don’t care for the opinion of anyone who choses to make things worse for the people they are trying to help and in fact adamantly stand by my opinion that talk based approaches cause more harm than good.
Now it’s ok to say but then what other options do you have, the health service in this country is currently behind the times and is still offering talk based solutions and not everyone can afford to enter private therapy, so what option do we then have. Well its all about knowledge and the internet has a vast array of resources available with thousands of self help videos only a click away and with therapies such as, EMDR,IMET,NLP,Havening and Hypnosis self help tutorials available then maybe it’s time to do as much as we can to self help before we have to face the bleak task of reliving the harmful past.
