

Living With Voices - gruseom
http://theamericanscholar.org/living-with-voices/

======
Alex3917
What a great article. It's disappointing that there isn't more information on
their website though. The article doesn't really go into any detail on how
they see this therapy fitting together with other therapies, or why they think
that it works.

~~~
gruseom
I noticed another couple issues with the article. One, it doesn't mention the
long psychotherapeutic tradition that this movement is clearly part of. Jung,
Milton Erickson and R.D. Laing are three prominent examples and there are many
more.

The other issue is a bias toward childhood sexual abuse as the universal(ish)
trauma that hypothetically leads to dissociation and thence to voices. It's
not clear how much that is just the article's emphasis vs. the actual
movement's bias, but if the latter, it is a gigantic and dangerous red
herring. Not because sexual abuse of children doesn't happen or isn't
traumatic (of course it does and is), but because the desire to seek it out as
a hidden cause for therapeutic purposes is what led to the repressed-memory
fiasco of the 80s and 90s. Once people have that preconception about the cause
of trauma, they will invent imaginary abuse experiences because they believe
finding them is the key to their healing. We've been down that road and it
harmed a lot of people.

More importantly, it misconstrues the therapeutic process. Factual research to
dig up historical causes is not the point (besides being basically
impossible). You can establish causes of trauma till the cows come home and it
doesn't cure people. This was Erickson's objection to Freud. What heals is
integrating experience now. You don't need factual causes to do that. It's a
distraction to take therapeutic experiences literally. Their truth is
emotional, not factual, and to approach them with preconceptions blocks the
process.

Those objections aside, I thought the article was really exciting – an oasis
of sanity. We need a great deal more such humane ways of working.

