PERILS OF TALK THERAPY

Traditionally, we lived in larger families and the roles were well divided within the family and even the neighbourhood. You may have heard the saying, “it takes an entire neighbourhood to raise a child.” It actually did! Nuclear family is a concept as new as just about a 100 year old and in usage for about 50 years only. Mind you, that is just a speck of time in the vastness of the existence of human life on planet Earth. So our primitive and even the so called modern brain is used to bonding, connection and conversations.

Fast forward to the digital age and the ever growing era of Artifical Intelligence, we are now in the trap of virtual reality. The virtual “reality” is more appealing than the real one and all of us, to greater or lesser degrees, find ourselves expressly more with emojis and then with face to face conversations.

So it is absolutely understandable and would be fair to say that people nowadays have less people to talk to and rarely, someone with whom they can share their fears and strip their mind naked, being vulnerable. Hence, mental health professionals have sprouted throughout the globe and are wearing the garb of “I am all good and I can help you to be that good.” I will leave “the garb and its jewels” for another writing.

In this one, let us understand the disadvantages of talk therapy administered by psychologists, therapists, counsellors, psychotherapists and other mental health “experts”:

1. The patient who is drowing in his problem seeks an external help. One of the reasons for the overwhelm is his repetition of the trauma to himself in his mind. Therefore, they are fixed neural pathways for that. When a counsellor wants to know more and ask him to express how he felt, all that is being done is re-enforcement of those feelings and the events that caused trauma in the first place. Please tell me how is it helpful?
   What is helpful is knowing and that too for the patient, his current state of mental abilities and resilience.
   Unless you track for the root cause in the suffering, stories are a completely waste and detrimental to the patient’s health.
2. Thanks to the filters in our mind, the recent conversation with the psychotherapist exposes the person to similar feelings and even worse emotions. Now, he is not only dealing with one denom, he has a legion of demons to fight with. The unconsious mind has uprooted every event in the biography of the patient and that causes more panic.
   Unless this is actively attended to, the patient will, by default, go down the downward spiral.
3. Listening has its advantages and but facilitating the person to stand on his two feet and taking accountability to step out of the victimhood has far reaching positive consequences.
4. Support and empathy have their place but they are not active interventions in change work. Too much of these is dangerous to the mental health. Imagine if a child is never taught to stand up because of fear of falling or fear of independence and all is taught is “keep crawling” with the help of the floor and the furniture around. Disastrous, right?
   Similarly, each skills has its place in the world of therapy and life, one more than the other is a perfect recipe for poisoning for the patient.

Talk Therapy works to a certain degree as the person feels heard and can express himself/herself in the safe space of non-judgemental acceptance. It has its place and effectiveness because poeple like to dwell in their stories and reach to their own diagnosis of the challenges. It gives them a person who LISTENS to them. It becomes a mechanism for venting out. So it does have its advantages. But just asking the patient how they feel and what happened, encouraging them to explain and express their feelings and how they felt at that point in time, is stupid and extremely counter-productive. As a wound would never heal if you contunue to scratch it, we got to know that peripheral scratching may be more helpful but diving deep into the wounds of the patient’s psyche, without knowing what to do when the tsunami of emotions hit the patient, is an act of pure negligence and absolutely unethical on the part of the therapists.

Therefore, please wake up and get to effective ways of therapy and not just “talk” about what hurts.