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Book Review: All Therapy Books

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Re: Book Review: All Therapy Books

#31

Post by cmehdy »

carapace wrote: post #17

There's a school of therapy/psychology that has a rigourous epistemological basis and gets repeatable results. (I.e. an algorithm for eliminating phobias that works quickly and reliably with durable change.) This school gets panned for not being scientific, and I have to admit that that's not undeserved, however, as I said, the underlying conceptual structure is solid and the results are repeatable. I myself was cure…

You call it rigorous, with a solid underlying conceptual structure, and repeatable results. Is there a gap between that and "being scientific" ? I have no particular feeling about hypnosis and no experience with it, but am a bit curious about why you would say that calling the practice not scientific is not undeserved. What are the missing bits to allow it to be either considered scientifically sound (or on the other end of the spectrum, to debunk it) ?

Re: Book Review: All Therapy Books

#33

Post by woodandsteel »

"All psychotherapy books bring up the Dodo Bird Verdict – the observation, confirmed in study after study, that all psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matters are “nonspecific factors” like how much patients like their therapist."

One of fathers of this idea was the psychologist Carl Rogers. He didn't have much to say about personal historical causes. But back in the 1950's he developed the theory that success in psychotherapy depended on the therapist being empathic, affirming, and honest. He and his associates went on to do a number of studies that seemed to confirm the idea pretty well.

Re: Book Review: All Therapy Books

#34

Post by woodandsteel »

Alexander is a very bright fellow with lots of insights. However, he is a psychiatrist. I bring this up because psychiatrists are trained mainly to diagnose and prescribe drugs, and don't really understand psychotherapy very well. When I was in the mental health field, there were a fair number of psychiatrists I had some association with who practice psychotherapy, and none of them were any good.

Re: Book Review: All Therapy Books

#35

Post by woodandsteel »

Here's something you need to know. There is a widely-held belief that psychotherapy is either helpful or useless. Actually, studies have shown it can also be quite harmful. In particular, some therapists help most of the patients, some therapists have little effect on most of them, and some are outright harmful most. I have spent time observing group therapists, and that fits what I saw. I have also asked experienced therapists to think about the various therapists in their community and how good or bad they are, and they came to a similar conclusion.

Also I used to teach listening skills, which everyone agrees are basic to being a good therapist. I did several workshops with therapists at mental health clinics, and it was quite shocking how many of them were awful listeners.

That means if you find yourself with a destructive therapist, you need to leave as fast as possible. And how do you tell? I would say the best sign is if you feel comfortable talking to the therapist and feel like they value you as a person, or feel yourself tighten up around them.

Re: Book Review: All Therapy Books

#36

Post by carapace »

cmehdy wrote: post #31
carapace wrote: post #17

There's a school of therapy/psychology that has a rigourous epistemological basis and gets repeatable results. (I.e. an algorithm for eliminating phobias that works quickly and reliably with durable change.) This school gets panned for not being scientific, and I have to admit that that's not undeserved, however, as I said, the underlying conceptual structure is solid and the results are repeatable. I myself was cure…

You call it rigorous, with a solid underlying conceptual structure, and repeatable results. Is there a gap between that and "being scientific" ? I have no particular feeling about hypnosis and no experience with it, but am a bit curious about why you would say that calling the practice not scientific is not undeserved. What are the missing bits to allow it to be either considered scientifically sound (or on the other…

That's a fascinating and (IMO) extremely important question.

Hypnosis in general and Neurolinguistic Programming specifically are regularly panned by skeptics, and have not been scientifically well-documented, yet there is definitely "something there".

I'd love to "do science" to NLP, but I'm not qualified and have other things to do. (I got rid of my depression and the urge to study psychology waned.)

> am a bit curious about why you would say that calling the practice not scientific is not undeserved.

It's just that a lot of practitioners and promoters haven't been completely scrupulous IMO about making NLP out to be more scientifically-grounded than it is.

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