HEALING THE MEANINGS HEALING THE PERSON

If you want to consider a really controversial question in this area, here’s one: What factor does the healing in the psychotherapy process? Taking a systemic approach to this in Neuro-Semantics, we distinguish between the variables and factors that contribute to the therapeutic healing and the factor or factors that actually does the healing.

Contributing Factors Most of the things that are said to do the healing are actually the contributing factors. Probably first and foremost on everyone’s list is calmness, relaxation, and safety. As long as a person is stressed- out, agitated, reactive, upset, etc., healing can hardly ever take place. To creating a peaceful, stress- free environment, situation, and person offers the person a chance to calm down and begin to think more clearly. This may involve removing the person from the contexts where they react and that triggers their memories or imaginations. It may involve helping the person change his or her state physically (massage, body work, medication, etc.). It may involve helping the person step aside and take a larger perspective of their life situation.

At the heart of most therapies is support—interpersonal support from a caring person. Rogers described this as unconditional positive regard and accurate empathy. Others describe it as love— benevolent good will. In psychotherapy training, it is being able to listen without judgment, even without advice-giving, it may be a support group where spending time with people to avoid loneliness, being able to confess without shame, getting hugs from people, etc.

Most therapies also offer some kind of ritual for self-exploration, self-understanding, and for self- management. These rituals or techniques provide a specific empirical set of activities that a person does which gives direction and focus to consciousness. These may involve relaxation techniques, meditation techniques, acting out family constellation dynamics, using the empty chair of Gestalt therapy, laying on a couch and saying whatever comes to mind (as in psycho-analysis), etc. Actually more important than the technique itself and whether it is healing in its nature, is the fact that a person has something that he or she can do.

These and many, many more things are supporting or contributing factors for healing and renewal. And people have (and continue) get these things from psychotherapists, spiritual faith systems, self- development programs, and so on.

Causational factors Yet are these the same as the actual healing factors? What actually heals? To answer that question, we have to return to the previous question, What hurts? What wounds a person mentally and emotionally? What is it that gets wounded or damaged within a person so that one has to be healed?

The answer, as stated in an earlier post, is that our mental mapping is damaged and wounded, even traumatized. That’s because you and I as a human being make our way through the world (navigate the people and places and events) via our mental maps. Our primary tool for life, our very “sense of reality,” “sense of self,” sense of time, others, career, finances, whatever arises from our mental maps. And if the map is wrong, if the map is distorted, crooked, fallacious, inadequate— then all of our striving, thinking, feeling, speaking, acting, and relating will be off. It will be full of errors and so we will not achieve our goals.

What gets wounded within us is not our emotions, or self, or skills— those are symptoms of that which gets damaged. What gets damaged and wounded is our mental mapping— what and how we think. Our expectations get wounded. Our understandings get violated. Our hopes and dreams are not able to be fulfilled. And what makes the mental mapping more liable for damage is when our thinking is childish (full of cognitive distortions) and when our thinking is absolutistic (demanding, rigid, and closed to new information).

Childish thinking, in contrast to adult thinking, is the kind of thinking we all start with and which in normal development, we out-grow. This is the black-and-white, either-or, over-simplistic, demanding, personalizing, emotionalizing, over-generalizing, etc. thinking that is characteristic (and appropriate) for children. So Einstein’s familiar quote: “The kind of thinking (or level of thinking) that create the problem.”

Absolutistic thinking is also in contrast to more adult thinking in that it allows for the possibility that we can be wrong, that we make mistakes, and keeps an open mind that welcomes information about those errors (what we call “feedback”) so that we can keep adjusting. The absolutist thinker wants to be right, period. No more thinking. No more adjusting. They want to close the book on the subject. The absolutist thinker not only wants it perfect and flawless, he or she demands it! Then when an error it presented, this is “bad,” this is an insult, this calls intelligence in question, and so no wonder it is upsetting and unwelcomed.

Our mind and our minding (thinking, information processing) is what we depend on for understanding what things are, how they work, their value, etc. When this aspect of conscious is damaged because someone has demanded the thinking be perfect— unchanging, and that what I want is what I will get— now— in the way I want it (elements of childish thinking)— then we will constantly experience to shock of reality. Then, not being able to trust our mental map, we spiral down into more damage and hurt— something is wrong with me, something is wrong with my emotions, my mind, my behaviors, the world, others, etc. All of these awarenesses shows up as limiting beliefs, limiting decisions, limiting identities, etc. Our understandings of things is inadequate, and worse, we don’t know how to use our mental mapping (information processing) to correct things. Therapy is the process for correcting things and learning to use our neuro-linguistic and neuro-semantic mapping appropriately for adjusting to reality.