| > How's that different from telling a depressed person to 'simply stop being sad', or a disabled person 'simply stand up and walk'? I've been in therapy for a bit over 5 years to deal with issues of past abuse and the residual Complex PTSD the experience left behind. I agree with the sibling comment that points out the article is trivializing the process. When I started therapy, I thought that digging through the past is what it would be all about. But looking back, the function that it served was to help prepare me for the realization that the article points to. There was a very clear inflection point where I rather suddenly realized that the trauma of my past and the harmful modes of thinking that it caused were causing me to continuously modulate my experience in a negative way by getting caught up in thoughts about it. And that moving past it had less to do with slogging through the shit, and more to do with re-training myself to think in more helpful ways. To simplify this a bit, the realization was essentially that I had the power to change how I think, and that changing how I think was the real path forward. Had I been told going in that "you need to change how you think", it would have bounced off of me. I would have told the person telling me that to go to hell, and it would have been like telling me to simply "stop being sad", to your point. It took me some years to be ready to realize that this was really the solution. And when I did realize it, it completely changed the trajectory of my progress and the nature of my weekly sessions. Instead of getting stuck in the muck every week, I could reflect on how the embedded patterns of thought had impacted me that week, and I could practice new ways of thinking. I still think getting stuck in the muck for awhile was a necessary part of the process. To the extent that exploring the past helped explain the present, it was useful to help make the present feel less "crazy". I agree somewhat with the message that the ultimate solution is a kind of realization about self and the role that I have in changing my own experience. But the path to reaching this realization can still be a hard one, and in my case was facilitated by an excellent therapist who patiently steered me away from my rumination about the past and taught me how to understand what I was feeling in the present. I think arguing against regression therapy as the article does is doing a disservice to therapy. CBT or ACT seem far more relevant, and still often necessary to reach that critical realization. |