Re:Where are the master keys of CM?

Jessica: I would also add that the level of guilt one has is a tremendous factor.

Jeanie: This is a very important consideration, and I am grateful to you for calling my attention to it. It is quite possible that hopelessness (despair) itself is an expression of guilt for one's aspirations to be free of pathological indentifications. The guilt from wanting to live hopefully is something that would seem to require of anyone who would act as "therapist" for a hopeless person helpful expressions of reassuracne, encouragement, support, and sustained comfirming statements that one is not really a bad person for wanting to live better.

With states of despair, any possiblitiy of hope must come from the inspiration and reassurance of others, it seems to me. Similarly, if the hopelessless is due to guilt (which I now suspect is responsible for probably most of it, thanks to your mentionin this point just now), any possibility of freedom from guilt must also come from the encouraging help of others.

Jessica: The greater the despair and guilt the harder I think our work is. The more isolated one has been, with less opportunity to see alternative systems of thought and reactions, the more entrenched in the pathological system one can also be.

Jeanie. This, too, is a very helpful concept--the degree to which one is isolated. I thank you for mentioning it. I have often believed that so much of emotional suffering is simply due in so large a measure to a person's isolation from opportunities to see models of persons who think differently from oneself and thereby are sources of inspiration. David Shapiro once wrote that all that is needed for psychotherapy to occur to some extent is someone with a different perspective from one's own.

Jessica: I think you are correct in saying that when one has lost hope there is often little opportunity to test.

Jeanie: I also think, however, something that may seem to contradict my above posting but which maybe does not. I believe, that IF CMT were better understood by many more persons everywhere, many more persons could serve as informal and unpaid therapists. For example, what if many polititicans could view terrorist acts as the expression of the tests of extremely desperate persons? What a different world we would then live in! What a much more hopeful and less condeming world, too!

Jessica: I have seen patients leaving their success or failures to fate.

Jeanie. Perhaps everyone does this in a sense. When a patient comes to therapy is good faith hoping to get better but finds he or she has stumbled upon an incompetent therapist but doesn't realize it, then the patient has landed unwittingly into the hands of an unfortunate fate. In a certain sense, every patient is both hopeful and is leaving his or her fate to chance--the chance that one's therapist can really be helpful.

As we all know, many therapists are not helpful, and some are harmful. The patient who is not an expert in psychotherapy may have no way of knowing if she or he is being helped or harmed until long afterwards (if ever).

Jessica: I do not think that one is always testing but I do think it is often the case that one uses testing in daily life.

Jeanie: I certainly agree with this. This insight is one of the richest and most valuable things I have learned from CMT. The immense value this insight has had in my own life is something that will leave me, as long as I live, honoring that name of Joesph Weiss and grateful to be in any way privileged to talk to people like you who understand his work so well.

Jessica: I know my poor family and friends are the recipient of many an attempt on my part to sort something out.

Jeanie: My poor family has been put through so many tough tests that I couldn't begin to list even a tiny number of them. What makes that fact tolerable to think about is that they have put me through a fair share of their own tests, too.

Jessica: It can be as simple as will they remember to get me a present for my birthday? If they do not then it could confirm a pathogenic belief that I should not be treated specially. With our more disturbed patients it can take a more onerous path. “ If god wants me to live then I will not die when I jump” is the extreme form of this phenomenon that I have heard a patient say.

Jeanie: There is the implict test in this message that you, the therapist, may be able to intervene on behalf of being a spokesperson for a God with a more life-affirming wish to be protective and that this more loving God would not want the patient to be placed in so much danger.

Thank you, Jessica, for your wonderful and very useful reply and insights. As always, every time I have anything to do with CMT or its spokespersons my life is made far richer.

Replies:

Re:Where are the master keys of CM?, by Jessica Broitman, 11/27/01

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