Bestyle2209

Hello! How to do conscious therapy? What type of therapy approach most effectively makes people more conscious? I would like to become a psychotherapist. In Germany, due to the system of our health insurances, one has to choose for a specialisation in either CBT or psychodynamic therapy. I like both approaches and am unsure about what will help individuals and our collective more out of a highly elevated conscious perspective. Why I'm conflicted: My pro for CBT: there are third-wave therapy forms (e.g. ACT or MBCT) oriented at buddhist wisdom which deliberately try to make people aware of their subjective experience of reality and of the impermanence of their experience and the illusion of self. What is specifically exciting about this new wave that they do not try to retrain your negative thought and emotion patterns into positive ones, but rather teach you to observe it from the standpoint of all-encompassing awareness, and thus not further contributing to more clinging to experience. Instead, you help the person to become nobody, how ram dass would say. ACT is also more open to integrating psychedelics into their therapy - it is often used as the therapeutic framework when patients are given psychedelics. In my eyes, this is not the case with psychodynamic theory, where the therapist interprets current and past events to uncover unconscious motives to create a story why the person is and acts the way it does, thereby helping the patient to self-realization. By that you add more explanation for why the self (or the essence) is the way it is, not nessecarily helping to expand or transcend your sense of identity. I imagine it more like: this is the reason why you are the way you are (thereby releasing old emotional traumas) while some modern CBT-techniques identify certain chains of thoughts and emotion that are not nessecarily part of your identity and are impermanent so why cling to them. Further CBT, acknowledges multicausality for your behavior and your essence (e.g. taking genetic influence into account) and always adapts it's therapy style to the current state of research. (by contrast, psychodynamic theory, originally by Freud, was built on a lot of fantasy, independent of scientific scrutiny). My Pros for Psychodynamic therapy: Why would a therapy need to be concerned about deconstructing the self? Aren't theories like Maslow's pyramid of needs imply that it is first needed to strengthen the sense of self (and maybe heal it), and only later to deconstruct it? Isn't it better to reach "deeper" into the unconscious to make longer-lasting change then just trying to change behavior and thought patterns on the surface, only later to discover that there are very strong unconscious impulses. E.g. you train someone to be less affected by their mood swings and destructive thought patterns due to mindfulness training (ACT, MBCT), or to retrain your thoughts to think that you are loved, that you are efficacious, etc. , but avoid a deeper emotional feeling about yourself being unloved that might be resolved by digging into past childhood events. Although there is not much scientific evidence for the theory of Freud and more modern psychoanalysts, studies show that the therapy itself (which is founded on the theories) is as efficient as CBT in reliving patients of symptoms. Psychodynamic theory also does not only try to resolve the symptoms (like CBT primarily does), but it tries to make the individual understand itself which in turn might lead to symptom releave as a side effect. Often, CBT is critized as a product of the fast, post-capitalistic world, trying to put a bandage over a wound which reaches much deeper, only to get employees ready for work again ASAP. Of course, I will try to integrate the good sides of both in the end, but I have to choose a foundation in one of those to start my program. What do you think, wise folks? Are there any therapists here who integrated these two ways of doing therapy or you know of any besides Beck? And for the CBT-psychotherapists out here - have you found more modern ways, besides psychedelic-assisted therapy, to reach the depths of one's psyche/tackle deeper-lying trauma, within the CBT framework? I'm also happy to receive corrections of my perceptions of how these two frameworks try to operate. Kind regards and enjoy your day.

Thank you for your perspective and for taking the time, much appreciated!!! will take some more time to dig into psychoanalysis@kieranperez

thank you for this distinction. Do you believe there is reason for combining these different processes or at least to possess the qualities to help others waking up as well as healing, as, like you say, there is some interaction between these different lines of development? Or do you believe it should be rather left to different experts who have "specialised" in one of these areas so that they can help you in that area with even greater expertise - that is to say - keeping it like we have it mostly nowadays. Most psychotherapists not understanding something about waking up and most meditation teachers understanding little about healing. You might underestimate CBT. In Germany, first and foremost, CBT is defined as everything that works (admittedly out of the scientific materialistic worldview), recently including more integrative aspects of therapy such as schema therapy (taking in biographic events - aka. more depth), as well as body based trauma therapies which enable obviously deeper-lying trauma healing. Secondly, CBT in Germany gets way more sessions granted (50 at the very least, as the therapist can "order" more sessions to be paid of the insurance companies - I've heard in the US it's much less sessions) and, for many, it seems to be relatively effective in healing them. What I presume is that much of analysis' success can be traced back to simply having waaaaay more sessions with the client then CBT does, increasing introspection and a constant confronation with yourself. As more modern techniques CBT techniques such as rational emotive cbt techniques (including stuff like socratic dialogue) or the third wave therapies also stimulate you to aim at introspecting and understanding yourself, and not just giving you tools, such as coping mechanisms, CBT and related techniques might simply need to be applied longer then it is used to do to achieve more longer, deeper lasting effects. I claim this part about applying CBT even longer then it is used to without much scientific evidence. I am biased by the success CBT had on me. Even simple behavior therapy made me feel like, with rigid, closely-followed by sessions with my therapist (twice a week), as if I would reach deeper lying traumas by acting out on the behavior I avoid, e.g. "forcing" myself to engage in conflicts with my dad lead me to learn to feel and express anger more clearly and strongly. What do you think? Thank you for the book advice.

Thank you for your replies. I will take some time to contemplate on them.

Hey @EmptyVase thank you for your perspective of spirituality. I loved how you wrote it and learned from it. It's sort of how Harald Piron criticizes the thirdwave mindfulness movement in CBT. He created an institute for transpersonal CBT - where the therapist is not making the patient learn spirituality but rather embodies it. If you are interested I would highly recommend reading up on him, he is also german ( I n s t i t u t f ü r Transpersonal Integrierte Psychologie & Psychotherapie). Hey @kieranperez thank you for your long post and thoughts, you seem to understand a lot about psychodynamic theory. I feel I underappreciate your post, because I could take enough time so far to watch your videos but will do it soon. I find it astonishing, most people who have experienced therapy or are therapists themselves speak in high tones of psychodynamic therapy approaches. I find this always confusing to read because my university and most universities are favoring CBT, with less and less programs for people to become psychodynamic practicioners (by now only 33% in Germany) and even less professors and universities teaching from a psychodynamic background (13%!!!!!!). This stands in contrast to the ratio of current practicioners which is quiet balanced between CBT and psychodynamic therapy. This shows the recent trend towards CBT and it's newer waves of development. With having learned so much about CBT and so little about psychodynamic therapy there is this mystery for me why people like you or @tsuki have benefited so much from it. Not disbelief but I simply lack information or imagination. If someone of you would be willing to report more about how the therapy was, why you believe it was so helpful and also if you believe this way of healing (e.g. for tsuki it was 6 years) could be done with more modern approaches in a more effective fashion, I would love to hear it. I seem to somehow with to extract this deep healing potential of psychodynamic therapy without adapting parts of the theory and therapy that were clearly identified as fictions of Freuds mind, for instance. Maybe @Matt23 your AEDP seems to try to go this route? Happy christmas and thank you for all your replies, they really helped me a lot.

@Alex_R Hey Alex! No, to be honest, I have not tried a high dose of LSD once. I tried Mushrooms a few times, as well as long-time Meditations retreats which sometimes even resulted in experiences that were the opposite of healing or deconstructing. Funnily enough, both retreats and psychedelic experiences made me feel more neurotic for quite a while. It felt like my psyche was not stable enough to interpret what I experienced or emotionally prepared to surrender. This resistance did not lead to a deconstruction of my sense of self nor to a dissolution of emotional trauma because I metaphorically flead from it. Maybe it is my own experience but also the research of Willoughby Britton and Jared Lindahl that made me think of: "what if these radical, transformative, new therapy types such as psychedelic-assisted therapy which are often framed as light-years ahead of more conventional therapy types are not always light years ahead for all people of all developmental lines and stages, when it comes to safely and sustainably heal people." For instance, like @Matt23 and @kieranperez said in their posts, or Ken Wilber says that conventional cognitive talk therapy especially helps with pathologies that emered at the time of self-development when the rule/role mind emerged (the time where we learn to take the role of others and the rules of society) but it can not help with traumas originating from preverbal stages of development, nor with transmental or transrational traumas. Similarly, psychodynamic therapies have their place (for pathologies emerging in early stages of self-development), as well as more existential, humanistic or even transpersonal therapy types (e.g. such as psychedelic-assisted therapy) have their place, potentially especially in the re-alm of higher developmental stages of development. What I want to say, I imagine for some people, hyper effective therapy might not be that effective in the end, because this type of therapy either does not target the pathology at the level of self-development they need it or it might allow consciousness to encounter facets of experience (which was previously alienated, distorted or ignored) too quickly into the present experience for them to cope with. A more conventional, slower,talk therapy might then be more effective. @flowboy Hey Flowboy! Thank you for your long answer and motivational talk to go my own way. I would love if you could give me some references of therapists going their own way. I'm actually studying in the netherlands :-) Still, as you might have read from the post above, I disagree with your conception of effective therapy. How come you believe these therapy types are light years ahead? is it your own experience or is there also scientific evidence? After your post, I made some literature review and only found pilot, or maximum small studies, that indicated a higher effect size than conventional therapy forms. I found no large-scale studies for any of the therapies you mentioned. Like you probably know, statistically it is much easier to get a higher effect size with a smaller sample size. How can you then be so confident about your assessment of the efficacy of various treatment forms? Maybe I overlooked research or misunderstood you, let me know.

Hey guys, I'm a third-year bachelor of psychology student in a relatively progressive, green university in the Netherlands (e.g. our drug department just finished an interesting study on 5-MEO-DMT) and I was granted to do my own research in the field of Psychology that I desire to research in (the funding I get is result-independent so I'm relatively free to do what I want). So why I'm making this post is that I wanted to ask for potential ideas or things I could research on that might actually help (even only to the tiniest degree) to help us progress to become more conscious. Of course - there is psychedelic research. Do you have more ideas? Any research ideas you always wanted to test but never had the time or tools to do it. Unfortunately, I only have half a year time for the whole project (so roughly 3-4 months for data collection), so it can not be a big thing with extensive follow-ups or whatever. Especially paradigm-critical research is appreciated. In general, even if I couldn't use your ideas for my own research, I would love to hear your ideas on fields that are yet undiscovered or intelligent research designs.

@roopepa thought-provoking, thanks. @Nak Khid Yes, I was wondering whether one could design a study to find paranormal phenomena in a significant amount of participants. For example, while tripping, two other friends and I had the perception of seeing auras around people which for each person were similar in color to us who were seeing them. So what I want to say with that is that it would be nice to find some paranormal phenomena which could be perceived by multiple people in a reproducible way - but it seems to me that each experience is too subjective and "unreliable" to conduct such research. @Red-White-Light I doubt that my sample size would be sufficiently large to test four groups, but it is a nice idea to match meditation and psychedelics. If you're interested in that, google "ego-dissolution" - a lot of researchers linked meditation and psychedelics with that experience. @Serotoninluv I asked my professor and he advised me to do an observational study as in requesting psychedelic research centers to let me assess the people taking the substances pre- and post and maybe also during.

@Serotoninluv Definitely with humans, I would need to ask about animals, tho. I would also need to ask if I'm allowed to actively manipulate the experiment as I have no medical pre-experience or if I'm "only" allowed to do an observational study. I will talk to my professor and let you know. My university wants us to use EEG or fMRI - they are obsessed with it

@max duewel Thank you for your ideas :-) I'm studying in Maastricht.

@dimitri hahaha - that would be a separate research project I think :-D

hey @EnlightenmentBlog thank you for your answers! Psychology of Sex sounds interesting and not fully explored to me yet, I'll think about it - thanks. One thought I had is that if you personally are interested in gaming and psychology I would recommend the youtube channel healthygamer to you. It's of a Harvard professor who practices a lot of meditation and gives advice to gamers.

Sooo a good friend of mine, who is a perfect example for solid stage green (maybe even including some "unhealthy" extremes) found Jordan Peterson and started to like him more and more as he was grounding here very "floaty" personality and brought rationality into her life and made her aware of the unhealthy extremes of green in herself. I am so confused. Can a mostly stage orange person(JP) make someone else yellow? Or is she regressing into orange? it's so hard to discern.. can you even digress?

Guys you are amazing! Thanks for all of your replies.

And do you have concrete critiques of him (in order to make her aware of them) - why he can be harmful - especially when it comes to his political reasoning - to watch him? The things I found is that he isn't leading to more acceptance and understanding, but more seperation and that he is quite irrational in being against a more "socialistic" democracy. Anything else? Thanks.

@Leo Gura@Cocolove @Octafish @Truth Addict Thank you for all your replies. I get that he is helping her to integrate blue and orange. The "problem" is that she is absolutely in love with him and is definetly adapting his shadow aspects as well (e.g. she suddenly neglects her intuitive and emotional line of development in decision making, as it is irrational). Why is it so hard for people to see the impurities in Jordan Peterson? What makes him special here? I feel like so little people can pin-point his shadow, but almost everyone feels it kind of. Why is he so good in deceiving?

Or try a Vipassana retreat! At the last day you can talk and those people you meet there are usually really amazing and in relation to the population average relatively high on the spiral as well as motivated to grow. I found my mentor through that too.

@Eph75 Hey Eph! I had the same problem like you. I think despite being introverted, networking skills are really key here. It's truly about bluntly assessing people's values at events where it's quite likely that you meet some actualizers IMO. The events that helped me most: psychology bachelor students in international cities, mindfulness courses, yoga classes etc.. I felt like that each of these stage green group gathering there are always some who are somehow higher than that. You just have to be good at approaching and then understanding people relatively quickly in order to "assess" many people at such events, but I think that's what you learn automatically when you go out there and just try.

I had a "bad" trip on magic truffles where I felt like I was trapped that I literally ran through the forest I was tripping in trying to escape. Only later during the following Vipassana retreat I was realizing that I was afraid of myself. I wasn't my own home. So I tried to hug the demon in me instead of running away from it. However I didn't feel like I succeeded in that. It doesn't feel resolved. Since then I am afraid of tripping because of fearing of getting a psychosis(maybe I am also not afraid of that, but that's only the surface reason). On the other hand I don't want to lose psychedelics as a tool for self-growth. How can I practice surrendering in order to prevent me from going insane during the next trip? Shall I stop tripping until the fear is resolved or should I now go for a trip exactly because of this fear? Thanks for reading and trying to help!

Me and my girlfried always have the discussion of actualized.org vs. Teal Swan. Whereas Leo is convinced, like many other spiritual seekers, that getting enlightened is hard work, my girlfriend always says that he chose that it's hard. Could the belief of thinking that it's hard work make it harder? For her, a lot of spiritual experiences are just flowing to her, despite her not really training a lot for it. She max. meditates 30 minutes per day. Thanks in advance. I am really grateful that I found this community.

@Norbert Lennartz sorry i don't get it. could you elaborate?

@Rilles you mean addiction robs me of my freedom of actions which in turn robs me off my ability to do stuff that makes me happy. Get it. I confused not being addicted to something with abstaining from it. In general I believe that getting rid of addicitons makes you being able to get "addicted" to usually less dopamine and serotonine eliciting actions like breathing or being out in nature or doing mundaine stuff. So I'm on your side with that. @Inliytened1 no I am not aware of god. thanks for making me aware of my position from where I can't judge these questions appropriately. On the other hand, please don't confuse my questions for lack of willingness to work hard. I'm still wondering whether the belief that enlightenment work is hard work and takes long might be a hindrance. Thank you for all your replies.

@Rilles @Leo Gura thanks for your replies. Why do you need to get rid of all your addictions? Why do you need to be able to do a 30 day solo retreat? Why is that a step closer to enlightenment? I actually love being addicted to feeling certain emotions. when god seperated itself to discover itself, why shouldn't we live out the human experience then? Why do we need to detach from everything that makes us human to connect with god? It makes me sad.

Instead of just being aware of your breath, also counting each breath your conscious of. With say, a goal of 200 conscious breaths per meditation session, one could also measure the process of becoming more conscious (ratio of conscious breaths per hour). I feel like with having such a goal in the back of the mind, that I am getting myself back into being conscious way quicker after getting distracted in meditations. However, I would like to know if you see any flaws with this method. E.g. having a goal. Thank you in advance