So you can get more ideas of what CMT is about, I will describe fo you, Lindsay, what I foud in what you have reported that I think has anything to do with what CMT could suggest to us about what you have described. I am just one person with one set of reactions and interpreations. Others at this forum could disagree with my interpretations from CMT, and I would be grateful to learn of any such disagreements or possible additions. My comments below are presented only with the intention to stimulate your appetite so you will want to read and study CMT on your own. Nothing can substitute for one's studying the CMT literature for oneself. Jeanie: Your tellling this lady you can read her mind was perhaps significant, but I'm not sure how. It may have helped to establish an expectation for a cure from magic. In that way, it may have helped establish a compliance transference. Lindsay: The lady, about 50 came to see me twice last week for 2 one hour hypnotherapy sessions, 2 days apart for panic attacks. She told her husband at breakfast that she was sick of putting up with 'the problem' & was going to see a hypnotist. She said he was happy about that. Jeanie: The motive to seek out help is an expression of her desire to master her problems, such problems being caused by pathogentic beliefs, such beliefs being an expression of adaptation patterns in relation to significant others (e.g., usually parents), such adaptation patterns being the only means a child had available to cope with traumatic encounters. Lindsay: I began the first session by asking the client to keep her eyes fixed on the door & I asked her two questions..1. What are you thinking while you are keeping your eyes fixed on that spot? She replied that her mind was blank & that she wasn't feeling anything, except a little bit calmer. Jeanie: The significant event I can discern from this information is that the lady felt calmer. This has to do perhaps with her expectation of a magical cure or possibly with her expectation that you could realistically help her overcome her pathogenic beliefs based on something that she interpreted hopefully (but perhaps unconsciously) about this particular exercise. Another hypothesis is that she was expressing a compliance transference in which she was trying to please the therapist as perhaps she might have had to please her parents to help them feel powerful. But I am speculating of course since there is little information to go on at this point. This is true in almost all thearapies. There is little information to go on until the theapy proceeds and the therapist finds out what does and does help the patient to fulfill his or her unconscious plans to overcome particular pathogenic beliefs that must be discovered more and more prcisely as the therapy proceeds. CMT does not arrive at conclusions about what is going on until many data are in from the results of the therapist's tests of some hypotheses, such data providing the evidence needed to determine just what the patient's plan is and just what pathogenic beliefs the plan is succeeding in overcoming. Lindsay: She imagined that she was sitting in her favourite chair at home & was looking at the blank wall. That was the home work. At the end of the 2nd session she told me that the first time that she had ever "felt awful' was when she was 6 years old & had been staying with her brother, a little older with an auntie. They had been invited to a meal at the auntie's mother's place. Mushroom soup was serve. She didn't like the soup, neither did her brother & he said so. Jeanie: You can see here a picture of the pressure experienced in childhood to be compliant and not express objections to what the child found to be objectionable. This IS significant as an important clue to what may be possible pathogenic beliefs resulting from adaptations to persons who demanded compliance without regard for the reality of the child's opinions or feelings. This is suggestive, that is, that the pateint possibly has a plan of wanting to overcome the belief that one must be silent when wishing to voice objections to that which is objectionable. The belief that one must be polite or otherwise protect supposedly powerful others from criticism may be involved, too. Nothing of what I am writing here can be regarded as good interepretation until and unless the patient actually does benefit from the therapist's actions and words in supporting the patient's possible plan to try out being a person more comfortable with voicing objections to what she finds objectionable. If what I have hypothesized turns out to be correct, then I would also hypothesize that the therapist can expect to be tested with criticism in which the therapist will be tempted to tell the patient to keep her criticism of the therapist to herself. If the therapist is so tempted, it would be very important--the very key to successful therapy, in fact--for the therapis NOT to react as the adults did in the patient's childhood by even implying that the pateint keep her criticisms to herself. But if a therapist fails at this and mistakenly tries to stifle the patient's voicing objections, most patients will give the therpist more chances to succeed. Again, any conclusions about this particular patient are completely speculative and uncertain at this point since there is only the most meager and wholly inadequate evidence here that can be used in forum very tentative and yet unverified hypotheses. I am only illustrating to you how one might go about thinking along the lines of a CMT approach. I am NOT giving recommendations for treatment nor diagnoses, nor am I offering anything like a conclusion whatever about this particular patient. Lindsay: Session 2 - we discussed the eye gazing homework. The other key technique, apart from keeping her eyes still was to gather all 'the feelings' together in a bundle in her belly & squeeze them into a ball until they were compact & take a big breath & breathe the feelings out of her body & mind through the soles of her feet & into the far distance. That was for homework too. Could you explain this case in terms of Control Mastery, or is it something else altogether. Jeanie: The information I gleaned from what you wrote that I thought was usable for illustrating a CMT perspective is the information I used above from your report. My aim is to help you find this interesting enough that you will want to pursue your own study of CMT since it is, in my opinion, quite difficult, and probably impossible, to appreciate the tremendous value of CMT without carefully studying the CMT literature onself.
Lindsay: Yesterday afternoon I bought some items from a local department store & the attendant gave me a big smile & said, "I had a great weekend." [she had gone to a BBQ]
I replied, "I knew you were going to tell me that."
2. What are you feeling while you are looking there?
They were told that even if they didn't like the soup that they should have just had the soup & said nothing because it was bad manners to do otherwise. Ever since that day she had suffered from panic attacks & avoided going out especially to visit relatives.
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