FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS BY PATIENTS ALREADY CONDITIONED BY THE MEDICAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL MENTAL HEALTH INDUSTRY
Patient: How do you know C-CTherapy® works?
C-CTherapy® therapist: Since the beginning of Counter-Conditioning Therapy® in 1965, ALL patients have attested to benefitting from this unified, non-cognitive psychotherapy. A self-explanatory cliche fits here: “The proof of the pudding is in the eating!”
Patient: How do you know that patients tell you the truth?
C-CTherapy® therapist: Counter-Conditioning Therapy® does not base the success of its treatment upon TRUTH. It does not require CONFESSIONAL statements from the patient. Telling the therapist where the “pain” is coming from is not a matter of truthfulness, but simply the patient’s statement of a personal fact. Also, C-CTherapy® operates from a human behavior foundation that each patient is the “expert” on his or her own mental self. Patients, alone, know whether or not they are upset, and consequently, can report its characteristics.
Patient: You said that understanding or INVESTIGATING the background of a patient is a medical-model cognitive therapy procedure and you said you didn’t do that. If you don’t understand all about me, how will you help me?
C-CTherapy® therapist: Let me give you an analogy. Suppose your house were burning down, the firemen arrive and proceeded to study why your house is burning, wouldn’t you think their behavior a bit odd? You thought, they had come to put out the fire and save what is left of your burning house. Now, in recognizing the fallacy in that investigative approach, why would you want me to sit down and study you? I would suggest it to be more useful for you and I to marshall our forces and fight this “mental house-fire”!
C-CTherapy®, as a non-cognitive procedure, teaches the patient a mental health SKILL. It teaches the patient how to extinguish his own “mental house fire”. In teaching a personal skill, one does not employ the same treatment procedure as that employed by a cognitive, INVESTIGATIVE approach. As the C-CTherapy® therapist, I teach you how to deal with the mental pain coming from your emotional pattern. Like everyone, you too, have a habit of going along with negative thoughts which make you “crazy”.
Patient: If I don’t ask “why” I behave in a certain way, what instead will I be doing?
C-CTherapy® therapist: Asking “why I behave crazy” is the type of question asked by the medical people because they rely upon UNDERSTANDING as a curative, in itself. Cognitive medical-model therapies assume that UNDERSTANDING one’s mental upset leads to getting rid of that upset. The theory is, “if we understand why you are upset, the explanation will make you feel better.” At the Center, we have discovered that emotional upsets are not like colds or infections — they don’t just go away. Knowledge about “what caused the upset” does not translate into a solution, and consequently, knowledge does not produce long-term emotional relief.
THE CENTER’S EXCLUSIVE C-CTHERAPY® METHODOLOGY IS BASED UPON THREE DECADES OF FIELD APPLICATION
The Center’s research has found that because knowledge does not translate into permanent relief, the patient’s preoccupation with RIDDING himself of the upset, as an emotional solution, is counterproductive. One’s emotions are integral to one’s mental self and one’s mental self does not come and go. That is why a mental health SKILL applied by the patient, NOT THE THERAPIST, is necessary so that the patient can consistently manage the mental fluctuations of his own emotional upset.
“Understanding the patient” in “talk therapy” assumes the notion that ADVICE dispensed by a DOCTOR is somehow superior to that dispensed by an ordinary person. The Center’s research concludes that all patients have suffered from contradictory ADVICE offered in earnest no matter who gives the ADVICE. Advice-givers abound. Longtime friends, relatives, new acquaintances offer differing opinions about what is causing the problem and what to do about it.
Little does the patient realize that when he listens to the opinion of others and conscientiously endeavors to put the advice into practice, that he is a participant in an attitudinal fiction, that opinion is not truth. The fact is, there are billions of opinions about any topic one would choose.
HUMAN NATURE AS DEALT WITH BY C-CTHERAPY®:
C-CTherapy® is designed to help one cope with one’s illogical thoughts. A patient learns how to oppose his chronic habit of obeying illogical thoughts absorbed from the past. It is in this way that a patient emotionally moves away from mental turmoil. By learning “C-CTHERAPY®”, the patient is able to provide himself with a guarantee that illogical thoughts no longer run his life.
Patient-therapist compatibility is not considered a clinical prerequisite by the Center. A prime requisite, however, is patient speed of recovery. Research findings at the Center indicate that the “magic” of the patient-therapist relationship does NOT determine the rate at which a patient moves from pain to less pain. The primary goal at the Center is giving the patient the ability to reduce his/her own pain. This goal is achieved when the patient acquires a facility for emotional self-management.
Human interaction is constant and universal. When interaction leads to conflict, a human being is inclined to seek peace of mind. We seek to veer quickly away from mental pain and upset. To satisfy this human inclination, a psychotherapy design must provide a consistent and reliable procedure which facilitates the patient’s quick return to emotional stasis.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE C-CTHERAPY® FORMAT
ISSUE: Why is C-CTherapy® required as the clinical system?
Illogical thinking is ALWAYS non-volitional in its mental origin.
Why is this so?
The non-volitional division of one’s functioning mentality harbors only emotive, illogical material not governed by logic and reason (cognitive, reasoning techniques).
ISSUE: C-CTherapy® treatment procedure concentrates solely upon emotional activity which emerges from the patient’s NON-VOLITIONAL pattern.
Why?
Without any outside help, the patient already handles LOGIC and REASON. In short, he doesn’t need treatment for logic and reason.
ISSUE: The treatment goal is to teach the patient a mental health SKILL — EMOTIONAL SELF-MANAGEMENT.
Why is learning a mental health skill necessary?
This approach is necessary because it counteracts the force of the patient’s illogical thoughts. Skill-acquisition is a building process. By building a procedure, the patient acquires a personal mental skill for the rest of his life.
ISSUE: In the process of building a personal mental health skill, the patient learns when to activate “countering” procedures. The patient has acquired this knowledge by discovering which of the negative features in his non-volitional pattern are capable of creating mental upset.
Why is this approach of value?
A personal mental health skill provides the patient with a clearcut way of avoiding self-victimization. It is a liberating experience for one to possess the means to counteract one’s own intermittent mental disturbances.
THE MYTH OF THERE IS A RIGHT WAY TO BEHAVE
When one’s only purpose in associating with other people is to acquire answers in the matter of “right behaving”, one is trapping oneself in a behavioral fiction. The fiction is: “if you behave right you will be safe because no one will persecute you”. The issue of “behaving right” has become big business, such as, seminars in “get rich”, “human improvement”, “power of positive thinking”. In the actual world of human behaving, no absolute way exists to conduct one’s behavior. Human behaving is regulated, for all of us, by whatever laws, mores or traditions our forebearers have created. No individual human holds a universal truth about HOW TO BEHAVE.
THE ORIGIN OF HOCUS-POCUS IN HUMAN CEREMONY
A cognitive (logic and reason) approach to events, reinforced by mental conditioning from birth, is a common mental property of all human beings. The basis for magic, shamanism and western religion is based upon this phenomenon. If one cannot understand the complexity of one’s surroundings, then the practice is to create some RITUAL which is meant to deal with that gap in understanding by providing magic words or a ritualized formula. Parents, the world over, counsel their off-spring to UNDERSTAND the events which surround them. Thus, we human beings start life by practicing at UNDERSTANDING our universe.
THE INAPPROPRIATE MODEL
Physical medicine applies a disease model geared to “find the BUG and kill it”. While the disease model serves the treatment needs of physical medicine, its design, applied to mental health treatment, is INAPPROPRIATE. There exists no BUG to locate or kill. “The notion that disordered thoughts are caused by disease of the brain remains a pure hypothesis.” (Shock Treatment is Not Good for Your Brain, John Friedberg, M.D., Glide Memorial Press, 1976, pg. 103)
“Organized psychiatry is fond of producing half-cocked statistics on how many so-called schizophrenics or depressives there are in the country (U.S.A.), because it helps business. But it is loath to estimate how many patients it is permanently damaging [through the use of neuroleptics].” (Toxic Psychiatry, Peter Breggin, M.D., St Martins Press, 1991, pg. 89)
WHY COUNSELLING IS A WASTE OF EFFORT
Cognitive medical-model treatment relies upon the myth that people change their behavior by changing their attitude. The cognitive therapist counsels the patient to adopt a “positive” mental attitude towards his surroundings. This adopted philosophical view of “positive thinking” is supposed to “get RID of bad behaving”.
COGNITIVE medical-model therapies TALK about the need for the patient to change his behavior. For instance, the cognitive therapist tells the patient: “Change your attitude, look on the bright-side of matters, don’t be so negative!” Cognitive therapies promote theories urging the patient to change his negative behavior for the social good. However, cognitive therapy fails to supply the patient with HOW to accomplish that change.
Cognitive medical-model therapies, therefore, miss the key ingredients of mental health treatment, according to the Center’s research. The origin of the patient’s upset is not located in the volitional – logic and reason – portion of his functioning mentality. Instead, it is located in the NON-VOLITIONAL division of his mental functioning. It is this mental section which creates the patient’s mental upset.
Each individual emotional system is dissimilar from the next person’s, given the 5.7 billion individual patterns which populate the earth. C-CTherapy®, a treatment design based upon this maxim, recognizes that solutions or insights gained from one patient cannot be applied to the treatment of any other patient.
MISDIRECTED EFFORTS BASED UPON THE COGNITIVE TREATMENT MODEL
Getting rid of “bad thinking” as a treatment objective lacks the desired intention of “treating the whole person”. Because cognitive medical-model therapies seek symptom-disposal, they are symptom-focused and symptom-driven. For this reason, cognitive, medical-model therapies, overall, are oriented to short-term-recovery. That is, these therapies get rid of the symptom but fail to get at the source producing the mental turmoil.
Clearly, the public does not recognize that cognitive therapy is an arm of medical-model treatment. The cognitive therapy premise is; if you understand “the why” of the emotional behavior, then, the problem will go away. The public, not professionally trained, and therefore amateurs, are ill-equipped to realize that a “get rid of the problem” design is not applicable to mental health concerns. Therefore, they do not appreciate that the physical medicine, disease design is misapplied. What works for a physical medicine approach does NOT work in a mental health, non-pathogen context. To be appropriate to the treatment of the complaint, a disease-model treatment design is proper only if a pathogen exists.
In reality, medication is not the solution, for, it only conceals the overall inadequacy of cognitive therapy. In itself, medication is simply a stop-gap maneuver. It is clinically unsound for the cognitive therapist to rely upon medication as a behavior management tool.
Emotion is illogical. Because emotion and illogical behavior originate with the NON-VOLITIONAL division of mental function, behavior produced by this mental division has the capacity to victimize any person.
The distinction between volitional and non-volitional is critical because it is the non-volitional division which governs emotions and creates aberrant behavior. But, this important distinction is not accounted for by COGNITIVE medical-model psychotherapies. Their treatment practices are unable to handle illogical or emotional mentation. Logic and reason treatment produces change; but only in respect to the strength of the patient’s volitional “article of faith”. Given the absence of logic and reason in human emotion, a cognitive medical-model format cannot produce change in the subject area of emotional, illogical behavior.
WORLD WAR II ACCOUNTS OF NON-VOLITIONAL WORKINGS OF THE MIND
Gilkey illustrates in what way emotion and not logic runs people — people who preach GOODNESS seldom practice it. (Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound, Harper and Row, 1975). He chronicles how community leaders, who in civilian life appeared in charge of their mental selves – doctors, lawyers, clergy – behaved in self-serving, petulant ways in this prisoner of war setting. Their behavior demonstrates that the non-volitional division of functioning mentality is the legislator of human behavior.
Superior reasoning, that is, the cognitive approach, cannot by itself, significantly disrupt the patient’s emotional activity. Therefore, no patient can operate differently merely by intellectually – cognitively – understanding the negative features of his emotional pattern. On the contrary, by reminiscing about past upsets, a patient can resurrect the mental atmosphere of emotional upset. The frequent recall of negative emotions associated with past experiences is sufficient enough to reinstate a negative mood. That is why Holocaust, POW, and trauma survivors can re-traumatize themselves.
The Center’s research findings corroborate this statement. Cognitive therapies are counter-productive because they prolong recovery time. For instance, trauma patients, who participate in Support-groups or 12-Step programs, remain “in extremis” years longer than do trauma patients treated at the Center.
Constant reawakening of negative matters merely fosters, and thus perpetuates, turmoil in the patient’s mind.
By encouraging the patient to participate in an activity of negative recall, cognitive therapy activates negative recall which reinforces the patient’s preoccupation with trauma.
WHY C-CTHERAPY® DOESN’T FOLLOW THE MEDICAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL INDUSTRY’S COGNITIVE DESIGN
C-CTherapy® is the first unified, NON-COGNITIVE psychotherapy to incorporate in its treatment process the distinction between VOLITIONALLY produced behavior and NON-VOLITIONALLY produced behavior. These two mental categories produce markedly different mental results. C-CTherapy® focuses its treatment effort exclusively on material originating from the non-volitional pattern. The patient’s non-volitional pattern is the only source of his mental pain.
WHAT’S REAL IN HUMAN BEHAVIOR
“You learn how to be a human being. You learn it just like you learn anything, someone has to lead you or direct you” (the author).
Mental absorption from our human surroundings, therefore, defines the developmental manner of all human beings.
But, no one person’s mentality is a duplicate of anyone else’s mentality. NO ONE is the CLONE of another.
The development of our own mental self inside our own head produces what theorists call PERSONALITY. Personality is the result of our mentally unique self PLUS the way in which that unique mental self experiences the environment. Our mental impressions of that surrounding environment surface in the form of a personal interpretation of that environment – our opinion. It is the combination of the volitional and non-volitional categories in our functioning mentality which produce this feature — personality with its unique opinion.
Parents have no way of determining which impressions their children will mentally absorb. Nevertheless, this absorption sets the foundation for the emotional character of how one views human behavior. While parenting is important – a baby needs parents for his literal survival – parenting, nevertheless, contributes only to a small part of each person’s total mental experience.
Sorry to destroy the MYTH, but parents do not have the LITERAL power to orchestrate the mental “baggage” which their child acquires. Consequently, parents cannot determine what contents go into the formation of their child’s mental development. The child builds the HUMAN BEING framework of his mental functioning out of the behavior of the human resources around him. This universal feature defines early development.
For instance, one of the many features we osmotically incorporated from childhood is the habit of judging people’s behavior. Beginning from our early upbringing, we watched our parents watching people. Our parents observed and made judgements about the behavior they observed. Indeed, they were not neutral and we noticed their response. Most of the time, we heard our parents criticize the behavior of others. What our parents did – watching people – was the beginning of our “judging the behavior of others” habit.
What we osmotically copied – mentally absorbed – from the grown-ups around us, combined with our experience of being parented, constitute the tapestry of our mental selves. For all human beings this developmental beginning is the same. Our mental tapestry determines how we respond to our surroundings. This unique mental tapestry is a facet of our personality. Consequently, our early mental experiences are incorporated in our emotional, non-volitional self and will forever govern us.
The Center’s research findings indicate that mentally upset people are always mentally preoccupied. These people demonstrate this behavior by seeming not to pay attention to what goes on around them. On the contrary, they are paying a considerable amount of attention, not to their surroundings, but to negative thoughts. Worry is the result. From worrying emerges agitation, a manifestation of ANXIETY.
Out of a preoccupation with negative thoughts emerges a self-badgering, self-criticism activity. The patient’s self-badgering activity provides both therapist and patient with a contemporary example of the way in which his system formed long ago. Both therapist and patient observe the current operation of the patient’s pattern. The treatment session is a skill-acquisition laboratory. Learning from the present about the workings of the patient’s pattern is itself incorporated into the design of the skill-building project.
Once absorbed from one’s childhood environment, anger, as a non-specific, generalized emotion, is capable of being attached to any available subject. Joe, a patient who copied the capacity for “mad” from the adults in his childhood surroundings, consequently, can become annoyed at all sorts of people or circumstances. For instance, Joe can switch from being annoyed with his mother to being annoyed with his father, for negative emotion can be directed at anyone. His “mad” at his mother is illogical and irrelevant. “Mother” serves only as a vehicle for Joe’s emotional release of anger directed at anything or everything in general, regardless of how it appears to an observer. In this context, the word “mother” holds no subject pertinence or logical significance.
As an aside, the mothering/parenting style of my patient’s mother was acquired by her in just the same way that she copied her non-volitional pattern, she copied it from her parenting people. One’s style of parenting is housed in the emotional, non-volitional pattern of one’s functioning mentality. As an emotional style, a mothering/parenting function originates from how she, as a child, was parented. Therefore, one doesn’t practice parenting in a rational, logical way. The manner in which one parents is not the RIGHT way to parent. There is no RIGHT way of parenting, as all parenting styles are mentally absorbed when one is a child being parented.
THE SOLUTION TO MENTAL TURMOIL — what you must know
In part, self-discovery is the road to mental relief. But by neutralizing the source of pain-production, the patient actually achieves relief.
Mental turmoil is not caused by a mental disease.
C-CTherapy®’s NON-COGNITIVE treatment format is, currently, the only psychotherapy teaching the patient a methodology for dealing with negative elements in his non-volitional pattern.
THE ADVANTAGE OF C-CTHERAPY® TREATMENT
Before treatment, this thought-voice activity (negative directives) would immediately cancel out a patient’s good feeling. Now, the patient knows from where it comes, mentally, and responds to the thought as merely the workings of his functioning mentality. As a rote mental function, the patient places the thought into the category of “meaningless” and responds with the mental equivalent of “Get lost!” As this is a new and daring gesture on his part — because his habit is to treat his thoughts as material to be paid attention to – he is unused to being emotionally brave and discounting his negative directives. In times past, these thoughts would automatically dictate his behavior. C-CTherapy®’s unprecedented approach places mental coping within the bounds of the patient’s competence. Possessing the power to disrupt habit is, at the same time, scary for the patient. It is scary because it is unfamiliar, and his friends don’t know what he’s describing. Nevertheless, his experience is mentally liberating.
In order for a procedure to provide the patient with actual relief from turmoil, it must be an alternative to the “thought-voices”. C-CTherapy® enables the patient to neutralize mental pain through introducing, on each occasion, a counter to those thought-voices. In the past, the patient had no alternative procedure to rely upon. Unable to interrupt the mental workings of the non-volitional pattern, the patient was unable to steer clear of becoming a victim of his negative directives. He was mentally chained to his non-volitional pattern.
Teaching the patient how to consistently counter the pain producing capacity of the non-volitional pattern is the treatment goal. The “status quo” of the non-volitional pattern must be confronted by the patient, or its negative elements will continue to run the patient. Reduction in turmoil is achieved when the patient constantly inserts C-CTherapy® exercises. This mental maneuver disrupts the flow of the negative directive. When “disruption” is employed the patient can move, consistently, from turmoil to less turmoil. A human state of no turmoil is nonexistent, according to the Center’s research. Therefore, for one to aspire to such a mental level is to enter into a realm infused with mental fiction, producing nothing but perpetual frustration.
By acquiring a mental health skill, the patient obtains:
- acquisition of a personal ability – a skill;
- a coherent, pragmatic format which allows the patient to consistently neutralize the source of his aberrant behavior;
- a wholly new perspective which accompanies the personal mental health skill.