{"id":317,"date":"2010-04-20T14:45:44","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T14:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=317"},"modified":"2013-09-14T15:24:28","modified_gmt":"2013-09-14T19:24:28","slug":"resisting-therapy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"“Resisting Therapy”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading Surviving America\u2019s Depression Epidemic, by Bruce Levine,<\/a> and finding it enormously helpful.
\n\u201cThis 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.\u00a0 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. …
\n\u201cI am in my third decade of working with people who have not been helped by standard psychiatric treatments.\u00a0 I have found that while the majority of such \u201ctreatment resisters\u201d 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.\u201d Introduction p.viii<\/p>\n

The idea that someone could be \u201cresisting therapy\u201d infuriates me.\u00a0 It allows the therapist to conceal his ineptness at the expense of the client.\u00a0 If someone is \u201cresisting\u201d what the therapist is trying to do, it\u2019s for a good reason, and it\u2019s the therapist\u2019s job to uncover or at least respect the good reason.\u00a0 It may be that that particular therapeutic technique just doesn\u2019t work for this person, or doesn\u2019t work at this time.\u00a0 This is why I prefer therapists with an eclectic mix in their bag of skills.\u00a0 Someone who has just one method, and who has seen it work for lots of people, tends to believe their method works for everybody.\u00a0 So when they come across someone for whom their technique doesn\u2019t work, they tend to make that person wrong, rather than acknowledge that that person\u2019s experience is beyond the scope of their technique.\u00a0 I\u2019ve had this happen to me many times, and I would often buy into their invalidations and become completely demoralized.\u00a0 (\u201cDemoralized\u201d is Levine\u2019s word and I find it much more helpful than using \u201chelpless and hopeless\u201d to describe what I\u2019m feeling.) After all, I had learned at my mother\u2019s knee that if something was going badly for me it was my fault.\u00a0 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<\/strong> many techniques don\u2019t work for me.\u00a0 And I began to be able to stand up for myself against someone who was trying to tell me things like \u201cJust straighten up and smile and you\u2019ll feel better,\u201d or worse \u201cJust decide not to be depressed.\u201d\u00a0 PTSD is not well understood in our culture, especially if the trauma was very early.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t reveal itself in obvious flashbacks to an accident or combat scene.\u00a0 Instead, the damage done to the developing brain and nervous system insidiously affects everything that is now experienced by the growing child.
\nMaggie Scarf\u2019s description of the consequences of trauma is one of the best I\u2019ve read: \u201cSuch events are highly likely to leave you in a state of chronic bodily arousal, with a highly uncomfortable overreactivity to life\u2019s minor insults, threats, and dilemmas.\u00a0 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.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Secrets, Lies, Betrayals, p89, also see blog entry for February 19)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been reading Surviving America\u2019s Depression Epidemic, by Bruce Levine, and finding it enormously helpful. \u201cThis book is for people who believe that any approach to depression that does not confront societal and cultural sources for despair becomes part of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-depression","category-healing","category-interesting-link"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jennydeupree.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}