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Psychology 101 - Essential Ideas For Therapy

I got to thinking about the psychological assumptions that therapists are making when they work. Many people don't think about psychology much at all, or not in the way that a therapist would.

I realized that it might help clients to know what a therapist thinks about when he or she is listening to a client describe their lives.

In general, therapists may make the following assumptions:

1) We each have an "unconscious mind" (or unconscious emotions) that cause us to behave the way that we do. This is especially apparent when we do things that are non-productive or self-defeating. We all do things that don't work and than wonder why. This is often the reason we come in to therapy; to stop behaving in ways that cause us trouble. The inner causes of problem behaviors or feelings can be made conscious.

2) Past experiences cause us to respond to the world, and to others, the way that we do. This is why your history is important. The personality, or temperament, that we are born with is also a factor.

3) The developmental stage in your life (childhood or adulthood) when you had certain losses or traumas is important.

4) Emotions are a part of being human. Sometimes humans get emotionally overloaded and it becomes impossible to solve a problem ourselves. This is normal.

5) Your relationship with the therapist is an important part of the therapy. The feeling of safety and trust is very important for the client. The client's difficulties with relationships sometimes can be reflected in the way that the client relates to the therapist.

Emotional Brain

Judging by the way that humans actually behave, we are really emotions with a brain, and not brainy beings with emotions. Much research is showing that our emotions are unconsciously shaping our everyday decisions more of the time than is our rational thinking process.

Example 1: During blind taste tests, people tend to pick Pepsi over Coke. But if Coke and Pepsi logos were put in front of the appropriate drinks, people pick the Coke. Why?

Example 2: Doctors often have choices of brands of medications. For example, there is more than one brand of blood pressure medication that could be used for someone with hypertension. Doctors were asked if pharmaceutical company marketing effects the medications that they choose to prescribe. Doctors said that it did not. But when researchers looked at what doctors actually did following exposure to drug marketing, there was an obvious influence. Why?

Example 3: You are trying to tell a friend about a new song that you like. They ask what kind of music it is and you tell them that it is kind of jazzy but not jazz. Immediately your friend says "I don't like jazz." You try to regroup and tell them it isn't jazz. But their negative association to the genre, jazz, locks them into the a negative feeling and no matter how you try to tell your friend it really isn't jazz, they are stuck on believing they won't like the song.

Example 4: Negative political attack ads work, even though people universally say the don't like them. The emotional impression they leave is potentially stronger than our distrust of the content of the ad... At least, perhaps, for undecided voters. Otherwise, I think we hear what we want to hear; i.e. negative statements about people we already don't like are more likely to be believed or accepted, while similar ads for someone we already do like might be dismissed as rubbish.

The lesson? Feelings are more powerful than logic.

File Drawers: Generalization, Association, and Symbolism

We seem to have file drawers in our minds where ideas, experiences, feelings and memories are stored and categorized. A variety of seemingly unrelated items might be stored in any one drawer. But there is a connection of some kind between them that comes from our life history. Some of those items might also be crossreferenced in other drawers as well. So everything we experience can bring up connected associations, ideas, feelings and memories.

Why do some people see a dog and feel fear, when others don't? Naturally you would think that the person who feels fear might have been bitten at some time in the past. But perhaps not. Perhaps the dog unconsciously reminds the person of some other painful experience.

It seems as if the human brain tends to make associations. Example: "Dog," gets combined with the memory of the friend who got killed in the car crash (who had a dog). And then we generalize. Example: The memory of loss is triggered by all dogs, not just the kind that the friend had.

(To be continued.... Defense Mechanisms - fear of fear, and the logic behind dysfunctional behavior; Child Development - how childhood experiences affect world view; Cognitive Therapy - the power of thought; Spirituality - spiritual practices and health.)