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There are several basic psychological principles for dealing with emotional crises and extreme emotional suffering in ourselves and in others without resort to psychiatric drugs152. These principles will be helpful to you whether or not you are in therapy. They may also be useful to your therapist, since many "talking doctors" now need encouragement and inspiration to deal with difficult situations without resorting to drugs.
How can the same principles be useful to you and to your therapist? There is nothing magical about therapy. It is a professional relationship based on psychological and ethical principles for empowering you and improving your life. Therapy is unique in part because it establishes limits and ethical protections for the client153; but the same psychological principles that work in therapy can also work for you without therapy. Moreover, they can enable you to better help a friend or loved one during emotional upsets.
Identify and overcome your self-defeating feelings of helplessness. At the root of almost all disabling emotional reactions lies a feeling of childlike helplessness. By the time you are desperate enough to seek help or to consider taking psychiatric drugs, this feeling has manifested as a loss of faith in yourself and other people. You have begun to feel personally overwhelmed and alienated, and incapable of getting adequate support from anyone else. In this state, you may try to get others to confirm how bad your situation has become. You may even want them to feel sorry for you and to cater to your feelings of helplessness. All of these outcomes are understandable, but they are also very self-defeating.
Whether or not you are in psychotherapy; one of your first goals should be to identify and overcome your feelings of helplessness, alienation, and distrust. You need to focus on regaining faith in yourself and in anyone else you want to help you. The basis of any successful helping relationship is the other person's caring attitude toward you, which in turn encourages you to care about yourself.
Try not to drag your therapist, or anyone else, into your helpless, fearful state of mind. As we describe in the previous chapter, therapists are people, too, and your feelings of helplessness can stimulate similar feelings in them. It can be very useful to openly discuss your feelings of helplessness and fear without acting as if they have overcome you. It can also help to relate these feelings to your experiences as a child when you really were helpless.
Focus on your unique emotional reactions to a crisis or stress. If something dreadful is happening in your life, it's easy to focus on the details that seem to be making you feel helpless and overwhelmed. You may be telling yourself, "Who wouldn't fall apart" when faced with cancer, divorce, the death of a loved one, or the loss of a job.
People vary enormously in terms of their responses to even the most devastating threats and losses. Even when a threat is very real, it's the individuals subjective response to it that remains key to the outcome. Some people are demoralized when they learn, for example, that they have cancer; others mobilize to maximize their chances and make the most of their lives. In cases of divorce or separation, one person may be devastated while another ultimately feels liberated and renewed.
It can inspire you to realize that human beings are capable of persevering and even growing in the face of seemingly overwhelming adversity. You may become able to respond to your crisis as you would to a challenge, even a gift.
Expect your counselor to be less focused on helping with the specific details of what you're going through than on guiding you to see how you can improve your personal reactions to them. You are far better able to handle crises when you focus on understanding your unique, subjective emotional responses rather than the facts of the crisis itself. Your goal should be to grow in the face of the crisis - to transform it into a creative experience.
Be glad you're alive, and find someone else who is glad the both of you are alive. Like many others, when you undergo a crisis you may resent being alive. But resentment inhibits your willingness to use all of your resources to overcome your problems. Look for a counselor or therapist who will greet you with gladness that you're alive. If you do not feel welcomed with zest and joy something is missing in the relationship. Over time, it may end up causing more harm than good by lowering your sense of self-worth and your expectations for a robust life.
By contrast, when greeted by another person who is glad you are alive, you will discover that your emotional crisis is not as overwhelming as you previously thought. You are not alone; you are even worth something to another person. It's the beginning of recovery.
Avoid getting into "emergency mode", and reject desperate interventions or extreme solutions. When faced with feelings of hopelessness and doom, you (and anyone helping you) may be tempted to gear up for emergency mode. But it's important that you don't try to get your psychotherapist to go along with your desperate feelings. Drugs, unnecessary hospitalization, even electroshock treatment could result.
To avoid overreacting to clients, fear and hopelessness, therapists need to understand their own vulnerabilities. If they are terrified of cancer or AIDS, then they must remain especially alert not to encourage their clients' terror in the face of these health crises. Similarly, if they are uncomfortable with their own aggressive impulses, they must make the effort to avoid pushing their clients into greater fear of their own anger.
Some emergencies may call for quick action, but these instances are relatively rare. Almost always, if your therapist can maintain his or her own sense of calm and connectedness, you, too, will begin to feel more safe and secure, more rational, and more capable of finding positive new approaches.
Focus on finding a rational, loving, and confident center in yourself that can rise above your emotional crisis or suffering. Try not to get caught up in the "emergency". Expect your therapist to have a healthy perspective that communicates a confidence that the problem can be dealt with. The term healing presence (Breggin, 1997b [56]) describes the helper's capacity to be empathic regardless of the fear and helplessness, anguish and alienation, that are experienced by clients during an apparent emergency.
Resist the impulse to have something done to or for you, and instead seek help in strengthening yourself. Consistent with overcoming your feelings of helplessness and with avoiding "emergency mode", don't ask your therapist to do anything for you. Although it may be tempting to try to involve your therapist in your life - for example, by asking him or her to talk to your family or employer on your behalf - it is generally better to find the strength to follow through yourself. Similarly don't ask your therapist to do anything to you in terms of giving you drugs or urging you to check into a hospital. Seek to empower yourself, and look for a therapist who wants to aid in that process.
Don't drug your painful feelings. During periods of emotional pain and turmoil, give your mind a chance to function without drug-induced impairments. That is the only way to transform these seemingly negative experiences into opportunities for growth. At such times, you need unimpaired mental faculties and a full range of emotions. You need to welcome your painful feelings as signs of life and as signals that point the way to self-understanding and change, indeed, by welcoming your most painful feelings, you will be enabled to view these emotions in a far more positive light, one that transforms helpless suffering into positive energy.
The idea of "welcoming" painful emotions may seem beyond the capacity of many people when they are severely distressed. By the time they are upset enough to consider turning to therapy or to drugs, they usually want to get rid of their emotions. It is unfortunate and potentially tragic that many therapists and doctors go along with this wish for the self-destruction of strong feelings. To be genuinely helpful, they should instead remind their patients that strong emotions of any kind are necessary and potentially liberating signals or reflections of their psychological or spiritual state.
Therapy is often helpful precisely because it can support your attempts to feel your "worst" feelings. Ultimately all people need other people - professional or not - to help in successfully understanding and triumphing over painful emotions. All people need others to deal with life's inevitable emotional challenges and upheavals.
Medications not only suppress and confuse feelings, they can stimulate dangerous ones. As discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, antidepressants and minor tranquilizers can cause agitation and mania as well as disinhibition with loss of impulse control. If an individual is already teetering on the verge of losing control, the drugs can become even more dangerous.
Bear in mind that most emotional crises and suffering build on a chain of earlier stresses and trauma. Although a current crisis may seem to be the cause of your distress, it is more likely the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. But when you are feeling overwhelmed, it can be very difficult to see beyond the immediate events. For this reason, you may want to seek help in understanding prior events in order to gain a better perspective on your present crisis.
Avoid inviting other people to take over for you. When you are feeling helpless and despairing, you may be tempted to give signals that invite others to take over your life. But unless you really want someone to intervene, don't act as if you cannot take care of yourself. Don't say things that may mislead others into thinking that you might hurt yourself or someone else. If you are feeling that desperate, then it is better to take responsibility for yourself - for example, by asking for more help or by finding a safe place to stay where other people can give you around-the-clock support.
We hope that therapists reading this book will also realize that the use of emotional threats or even direct force, such as involuntary commitment to a mental hospital, is rarely if ever the best way to handle a crisis. In fact, we believe that involuntary treatment is wrong in principle and contrary to genuinely therapuetic approaches. Such interventions may stave off an immediate suicide, for example; but in the long run, by disempowering and humiliating the individual, they commonly do more harm than good. At times, a therapist may find it necessary to point out to a client that there are voluntary alternatives, such as crisis centers and psychiatric hospitals; but bringing up these alternatives can indicate to the client that the therapist is afraid the situation cannot be handled through their mutual personal resources. However, clients also need to realize that any contact with psychiatric institutions, especially in times of crisis, can lead to involuntary treatment.
There are no studies confirming the usefulness of emotional bullying or more formal measures such as involuntary psychiatric treatment. They also offend basic human rights. And, in any case, intuition and self-reflection are likely to convince us that people don't benefit from being forced into conformity with a therapists' expectations. Clearly; the development of an empathic relationship requires mutual respect rather than coercion.
Be kind to anyone who is trying to help you, including your therapist. Too often, individuals end up emotionally attacking the very people they have asked for help. They mount these assaults for many different reasons: because they feel vulnerable about asking for help, or embarrassed about "having problems" or "being a patient", or fearful of rejection, intimacy or authority. A host of issues from childhood and from current circumstances may surface at various times in the therapy relationship.
Sometimes the attack is a preemptive strike aimed at putting other people off balance before they can mount their own attack. But, ironically the more they attack their therapist - or anyone else - the more fearful they will become of counterattacks.
Whatever the cause, any persistent tendency to attack usually reflects an enduring pattern of self-defeating behavior that can be traced back to things they learned to do to survive in childhood.
Therapists, remember, are ordinary people themselves. They are best able to offer their care and understanding when they feel safe and valued. Conversely they will find it more difficult to be caring toward you if you make them feel defensive, humiliated, or rejected. Your therapist's professional job is to create a good relationship with you; but he or she cannot do it alone. Help out by doing your best to build trust.
Therapy should be a place of safety and security in which you can express your deepest hurts and most tender feelings, a place where you can examine your most important dreams and ideals. It should be a place where you can express anything that you feel - and inevitably you will sometimes want to express anger at the person who is trying to help you. But if you persistently communicate in ways that threaten, frighten, or humiliate this person, you will end up repeating self-destructive patterns that need changing. You will also make it harder for your therapist to help you. You might even mistakenly encourage your therapist to recommend drugs or other drastic solutions - out of sheer fear or frustration.
Nothing stated above should undermine any rational complaints you may have about your therapist. As we have emphasized throughout, therapists are people, and good ones are as hard to find as lifelong friends. You may have to "shop around" to find the right one. But you'll never get the best that any of them have to offer if you attack them.
Know that empathy and caring lie at the heart of any helping relationship. When people look for help, they usually feel so badly about themselves that they don't expect anyone to care about them in a personal way that says, "I understand and sympathize with your feelings and your situation. I don't feel superior to you. Given what you've been through, I'm not sure I could have handled it any better than you."
Expect your therapist to work hard at caring about you and understanding you. You should also work hard at understanding and caring about yourself. Finding someone who can show empathy for you is perhaps the single most important aspect of your healing.
Probably no personal work is more important for therapists than opening our hearts to those we are trying to help154. But why does empathy so often feel like "work", even for experienced therapists? There are many reasons. As therapists, we may be frightened by the degree of another's distress. Out of fear for the patient, we may be overly focused on quickly resolving the crisis or emergency. We may become concerned about what others will think of us if things go wrong. We may feel that we lack the experience needed to help the person.
Most likely, perhaps, we find it hard to empathize with the suffering of another because it evokes our own personal suffering. In our effort to control our own feelings, we shut off the source of the stimulation - the other person's suffering.
Remember that we heed each other! By the time people end up seeking help or turning to psychiatric drugs, they may have begun to think, "I have to do it on my own". Many individuals come to this false conclusion after feeling so let down and betrayed by others that they believe they have no choice other than to withdraw into themselves.
When people go to a doctor, they are likely to be reinforced in their belief that the problem is strictly their own to solve. The process of receiving a diagnosis, such as major depression or panic disorder, and of taking a drug, emphasizes how alone they are in their struggle. In reality however, most problems grow out of relationships - going all the way back to childhood. Psychological or spiritual well-being requires new and improved relationships.
Popular psychology too often emphasizes peoples responsibility for themselves to the exclusion of the importance of other people in their lives. They are told, for example, "You can't be loved until you love yourself" or "No one can make anyone else happy". They are encouraged not to "need others too much". But while there may be some truth to these admonitions, they miss the central point of life - that people are all enormously dependent upon one another for almost everything good in life. From infancy on, they are molded by their relationships with others. In adulthood, they are as strong as their relationships with others. No one ever became truly successful by relying on the principle that "I can do it on my own".
At those times when you are emotionally upset, your judgment - especially with regard to choosing friends or helpers - may be clouded. You may turn to the wrong person. There is no easy solution to this problem; it should be a major concern when you seek help because you could end up choosing the wrong therapist as well. But don't "give up on people", people are what life is all about.
If you are in therapy; you may want to think about involving a loved one in the process. Any improvement in communication and caring between you and a loved one is likely to go a long way toward strengthening your ability to overcome your suffering and to build a better life155.
Realize that emotional crises and suffering are opportunities for accelerated personal growth. Crises and extreme suffering provide a window into your greatest vulnerabilities. They allow you the opportunity to explore your worst fears. They bring out and confront you with the raw material of your human existence. The self-understanding gained from this realization can be applied throughout your life, enabling you to develop a deeper psychological awareness of yourself and others. You gain not only a new understanding of your own vulnerabilities but genuine insight into and respect for the human condition.
When you face and understand your worst fears, and then overcome them, you will feel greatly empowered. No longer held back by self-defeating emotional reactions, you will gain faith in yourself. You will discover that you can triumph over seemingly impossible threats to reach new heights of psychological and spiritual transformation.
Indeed, emotional crises and suffering offer potential for escalating growth as you learn to handle your greatest vulnerabilities and most painful emotions. As your confidence is regained, any crises you experience will become opportunities for even more exceptional growth. You will discover that even your worst fears can be handled, overcome, and turned into opportunities. Once your confidence is restored, improved approaches, even solutions, can almost always be found. You will end up feeling stronger than you did before the crisis began.
We introduced this book with a discussion of the human need for faith. We talked about the many different ways in which people seek guidance or help in dealing with life's inevitable suffering. Now we want to reemphasize that the choice is not between psychiatric drugs and other forms of "therapy", including the psychological or therapeutic guidelines suggested in this book. Rather, the choice is between psychiatric drugs and all of life with it's many rich resources.
Psychotherapy is but one of many psychological, social, educational, political, and spiritual approaches that people can take when attempting to deal with emotional pain and suffering. Our approach to therapy, too, is but one among many. Once people become free of the biopsychiatric viewpoint and drugs, life presents an infinite spectrum of alternatives for dealing with emotional suffering and for living a more fulfilling existence. Above all else, we believe that all people need a set of ethics, principles, and ideals with which to guide their lives, including reliance on a brain unimpaired by toxic agents.
However, when people become focused on medical experts and psychiatric drugs as the "solution", life becomes compulsively narrow. Their options become even more limited as the drugs inevitably begin to impair their awareness, rendering them less able to understand or to redirect their lives. Eventually they feel they have no alternative other than perpetual reliance on one or another psychiatric drug.
In this book we present the limitations of psychiatric drugs. We point out why and how to stop relying on them. Our goal is not to present a complete philosophy of life but to help you approach life in your own unique way - unimpaired in your journey by toxic substances.