1/ "Lived experience" can be loaded term. Speaking only for myself, I would never ever discount or minimize another person's experience or their efforts to describe it. However, I often encounter people who speak in ways that seem to presume their "lived experience" should trump
2/ everyone else's lived experience or their own personal experience/perception/understanding is universal truths that must apply to all. As psychologist whose work is all about listening & hearing, my ears would perk up if someone said "my lived experience is..." vs. saying "my
3/ experience is..." While the statements are objectively the same, the former locution somehow seems to be making a greater claim. Something about term "lived experience" implicitly seems to set it apart from the rest of experience & accord it a different & privileged status.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
1/ This quotation needs more psychological nuance. In fact, it’s in our human nature to take pleasure in others’ downfall, for many reasons—often unconscious
It’s not so much that we “make monsters of ourselves,” because the monster is already within. In the words of Aleksandr
2/ Solzhenitsyn, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”
It is that *acting* on these impulses—publicly reveling in sadistic glee, joining in the pile-on, inciting others to pile on—feeds that inner monster. It grows larger and uglier, and
3/ the rest of us is diminished. In time, we become an empty husk of the person we could have become
We can’t reason away our feelings and impulses (sorry, cognitive therapists). We may feel that twinge of pleasure in another’s ruination, we may feel feel that inner impulse to
2/ In historic usage, it referred to taking a position (as a matter of *technique,* aimed at self-knowledge) equidistant from id, ego, & superego—terms that no longer hold currency in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, and that are now meaningless to most
So here’s an update:
3/ The term is a recognition that we humans are of many minds about many things, there is inner contradiction, and the contradictions can be at any level of conscious awareness
“Neutrality” means helping the person become aware of all of the inner facets and contraductions,
1/ Depressive Personality Style
“Despite its omission from the DSM, depressive personality is the most common personality syndrome seen in clinical practice. It is a personality syndrome in every sense of the term: an enduring pattern of psychological functioning evident by
2/ adolescence and encompassing the full spectrum of personality processes.
People with depressive personalities are chronically vulnerable to painful affect, especially feelings of inadequacy, sadness, guilt, and shame. They have difficulty recognizing their needs, and when
3/ they do recognize them, they have difficulty expressing them. They are often conflicted about allowing themselves pleasure. They may seem driven by an unconscious wish to punish themselves, either by getting into situations destined to cause pain or depriving themselves of
1/6 The goal of psychotherapy is to insert spaces for noticing and reflecting where space has not previously existed—and thereby create opportunities to know ourselves more fully, connect with others more deeply, and live our lives more congruently
2/6 Psychotherapy is about slowing things down—so we can begin to see and understand patterns and responses that otherwise happen quickly, automatically, without awareness or understanding
3/6 Talk about “optimizing” psychotherapy or making it more “efficient” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding
We find ourselves in difficulties specifically because we *cannot* slow down to notice and reflect. The rush to optimize every facet of life is the disease—not the cure
1/ This post is misleading. The research does NOT show people who get these CBT treatments get well—what people take “effective” to mean. Overwhelming majority do NOT. They do better than a control group, which is a totally different issue
Not to do better than a control group which gets no treatment that’s meant to help (or no treatment at all)
This is why people have become so skeptical of “experts.” What they get isn’t what they’re led to expect
3/ It’s really important to understand WHAT GOES WRONG when findings from therapy outcome research get reported to the public
The research yields quantitative findings. Tons and tons of them. No one without a serious (professional level) understanding of statistic AND knowledge