DECOLONIZING THERAPY

Traditional therapy invokes authority, judgement, and hierarchy, although new ideas are percolating. JULIE PETERS dives into a different approach.

- JULIE PETERS

THE CLICHED IMAGE of therapy has an older male therapist sitting in an armchair, taking notes, while a patient lies down on a couch telling the therapist all her secrets. It's no wonder this idea doesn't appeal to everyone. Do I just close my eyes, open my mouth, and let this random stranger judge me? It doesn't exactly feel ... healing.

Sigmund Freud, who did indeed work with his patients on a special couch, is known as the father of modern psychotherapy. And while his insights have certainly been useful in some ways, his strategies have their limitations. In her book It's Not Always Depression, psychologist Hilary Jacobs Hendel writes that she was

"... born into a family of Freudians and a culture where mind over matter was the mantra. My mother had been a guidance counselor and my father was a psychiatrist. They believed that I could and should control my feelings with intellectual insight. Emotions were rarely discussed at home and, if they were, it was the goal to master them or 'fix' them."

This fixing strategy didn't work for her, either in her life or with her clients. It was when she discovered AEDP, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, that she found an approach that values and encourages working with the core emotions that had been reviled in her upbringing-emotions like anger, sadness, disgust, and joy. Through AEDP, she found powerful new ways to move through emotions by listening to and learning from them. "We cannot think our way through a core emotion," she writes. "It must be experienced viscerally to be processed."