These are words to describe our work with patients at Intrapsychic. What early events have hurt someone, and how? Can we help people identify these events, identify their effects, and move toward healing? There is now clear empirical evidence that we can.
Dr. Reavis and his staff are available for individual and group psychotherapy sessions (in-person and telemedicine), the focus of which is on the problematic behavior, obviously, but also on the remote precipitants to it (e.g. guilt, shame, feelings of incompetence and inadequacy). Exploratory psychotherapy is the byword here – can we go deep enough to find the pain, and can the pain be reduced by our methods? The compulsive behavior – food, drugs, sex or alcohol – is the inception point. What is the patient avoiding, or escaping, by the compulsive behavior? Can we find it, and can we then diminish its intensity?
One patient will often discover something about his past – some key to his psychology and behavior – and share this with his peers in the group room. Almost inevitably, another patient will identify with this – it will resonate with him – and it then becomes a key to unlocking some other hidden truth. Patients ‘pay it forward’ by this process. We learn things together, and together we heal.
Patients sometimes complain that speaking about events that occurred decades ago, when others were responsible for their welfare, brings up too much guilt. The response to this is usually: Honor you own experiences. Talk about what happened; talk about how what happened affected you; scrape off self-blame; realize who was responsible for poor treatment of a child. Doing so brings compassion, understanding, and a reevaluation of the past. This, indeed, changes the past, as it changes your perspective on what happened, and who is to blame.
Assignments presented to the group are written in narrative form outside the group room, and then presented, by a reading of the narrative, during session. Therapists here will say that the work is easy – as easy as pricking your finger and writing on the page in blood. This is a means of capturing the importance of ‘going to where the pain is.’ Group members are uniformly supportive, and admiring of, deep, exploratory work. Again, if we can identify the source of the problem, we can diminish or eliminate it, and thereby loosen the hold of compulsive behaviors.
Dysregulated sexual behavior almost always leaves hurt feelings in its wake. We urge patients to honor those that have been hurt by their work. It is a way of giving back. Patients often take hours to write a single written assignment. Emotional sensitivity is a critical piece of getting better – we help patients eliminate distortions in thought that have facilitated ‘bad’ behavior, so as to help them understand the pain caused to people they love. Doing so, as well, diminishes the ‘stain,’ of guilt and shame, associated with ‘bad’ acts or hurtful sexual behavior. Group members help one another here, by gentle confrontation of each other’s narratives.
A patient of Dr. Reavis’s made this comment after completing a particularly difficult assignment, on the treatment he received at the hands of his mother. Irrespective of how terrible the event was, and irrespective of how badly a person was hurt by it, we have to ‘come to terms’ with the past, by coming as close to the reality of the event as we can. Only then can we analyze it effectively, and begin to heal.