I’ve been reading Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, by Bruce Levine, and finding it enormously helpful.
“This book is for people who believe that any approach to depression that does not confront societal and cultural sources for despair becomes part of the problem rather than a sustainable solution. Standard mental health treatments routinely ignore the depressing effects of an extreme consumer culture, and for people who feel alienated from such a culture, it is my experience that conventional treatments can actually increase their sense of alienation and contribute to their despair. …
“I am in my third decade of working with people who have not been helped by standard psychiatric treatments. I have found that while the majority of such “treatment resisters” do not identify with any political party, most share these political views: they are deeply pained by a society that focuses on increasing consumption rather than celebrating life; they believe that powerful corporations dictate public policy; they suspect that many of those authorities and institutions … that inform Americans have been corrupted and hijacked by corporations whose singular goal is increased profit; and they consider it common sense that an alternative approach that threatens the societal status quo will be ignored or derided by those who financially profit from the status quo.” Introduction p.viii
The idea that someone could be “resisting therapy” infuriates me. It allows the therapist to conceal his ineptness at the expense of the client. If someone is “resisting” what the therapist is trying to do, it’s for a good reason, and it’s the therapist’s job to uncover or at least respect the good reason. It may be that that particular therapeutic technique just doesn’t work for this person, or doesn’t work at this time. This is why I prefer therapists with an eclectic mix in their bag of skills. Someone who has just one method, and who has seen it work for lots of people, tends to believe their method works for everybody. So when they come across someone for whom their technique doesn’t work, they tend to make that person wrong, rather than acknowledge that that person’s experience is beyond the scope of their technique. I’ve had this happen to me many times, and I would often buy into their invalidations and become completely demoralized. (“Demoralized” is Levine’s word and I find it much more helpful than using “helpless and hopeless” to describe what I’m feeling.) After all, I had learned at my mother’s knee that if something was going badly for me it was my fault. Not until I started doing Somatic Experiencing and began to learn a lot more about the physiology of trauma, did I begin to understand why many techniques don’t work for me. And I began to be able to stand up for myself against someone who was trying to tell me things like “Just straighten up and smile and you’ll feel better,” or worse “Just decide not to be depressed.” PTSD is not well understood in our culture, especially if the trauma was very early. It doesn’t reveal itself in obvious flashbacks to an accident or combat scene. Instead, the damage done to the developing brain and nervous system insidiously affects everything that is now experienced by the growing child.
Maggie Scarf’s description of the consequences of trauma is one of the best I’ve read: “Such events are highly likely to leave you in a state of chronic bodily arousal, with a highly uncomfortable overreactivity to life’s minor insults, threats, and dilemmas. This physiologically based state, a bodily condition of dysregulation, makes it very hard for a person to soothe herself, calm down, and regain stability in the wake of any negative event, even one that had nothing to do with the painful experiences of the past.” (Secrets, Lies, Betrayals, p89, also see blog entry for February 19)