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Hi Tom Quick question related to "emotional healing therapies": how do you search for therapists that can actually help here. For me it is kind of hard to diff

Hi Tom Quick question related to "emotional healing therapies": how do you search for therapists that can actually help here. For me it is kind of hard to differ between esoteric charlatans and actual experts. Is there any special approach to searching them you would recommend?

tomhoward 9y ago
It is really hard, no doubt. Word of mouth is best, but that relies on you already knowing someone unfortunate enough to have had to go through the process themselves. A reliable disqualifier is anyone who purports to be any kind of heal-everything wizard. All the practitioners who've helped me the most have been well-grounded people, who don't make extravagant claims, and simply work with you to find out what's going on beneath the surface and help you find a better path. You're welcome to email me and I can help you find someone local if need be.
loceng 9y ago
Innerchild Regression Therapy is one that helped me uncover some deep emotional trauma. The difficulty is as you mentioned, people offering these therapies have different experience levels, skills, and styles.
viwalia 9y ago
Clinical psych professor here. This is a tricky question because there is questionable stuff out there, but on the other hand a lot of scientifically supported therapies are probably working for reasons other than their purported reasons (due to publication bias, etc.). To complicate things more, there are some therapies that seem like quackery that seem to work for reasons no one really understands. So people purporting to be adhering to "empirically supported therapy" (a kind of political buzzword) might actually be doing no better than someone else who doesn't explicitly advertise that, but who is rigorously and critically evaluating the scientific literature. My advice is to pay attention to where someone got their degree, and how they describe themselves. By degree I don't mean you need to fetishize invalid status stuff, but look for people from degree programs you trust. If you don't feel comfortable with someone, look elsewhere. Don't feel uncomfortable asking them about their theoretical orientation or thinking about cases.
- crimsonalucard 9y ago
  Unfortunately there's no science validating any treatment for this disease. This is what it means when they say there is no treatment or no cure. So in other words... there is no "empirically supported therapy" that can cure the condition. The only option for treatment is to attempt treatments not yet validated by science. Whether it's by a quack doctor or a degreed doctor doesn't matter at this point.
- lawpoop 9y ago
  > but look for people from degree programs you trust How is someone who doesn't really keep tabs on departments of psychology supposed to have developed a sense of trust of particularly degree programs? Do you mean like preferring Vanderbilt's psychology program over Harvard's? Or preferring Psychology over Acupuncture?
lawpoop 9y ago
A personal anecdote-- I suffered from cluster headaches for about 20 years, starting in high school. Because of bad emotions and not having much success with traditional psychotherapy and anti-depressants, I started going to primal therapy. I'm well aware that primal therapy is not considered valid in mainstream psychology. I'm not trying to debate that. I found my therapy helpful for dealing with my daily emotional swings and negative thoughts and feelings. Surprisingly, I found that it greatly reduced the number of cluster headaches that I had. Long story short, I had been suppressing my actual emotions in order to appear okay and not an over-reactive emotional wreck. This was a much deeper and subtle process than "I'm okay"-- it was a subconscious, physio-psychological process involving arresting the subtle motions of my face and neck that normally create expression. This process, which I did often throughout the day, subconsciously, when I thought of something personally painful, would eventually lead up to a cluster headache. That whole paragraph above is something I figured out on my own, while I was doing the therapy, not something that the therapist presented me with or helped me figure out. But I would not have been able to do it if I had not had a space to enact my emotions, which is what primal therapy is (it's not screaming--or, I should say, not just screaming). Being in a place where you can actually emote what you are feeling, not just talk about what you feel, is a game-changer when you grew up not being accepted for validated as a child. I can talk about how I feel all I want-- that's what I had to learn to do as a child, going to psychologists. That has no therapeutic or helpful effect for me-- it became just another coping or defense mechanism. I'm completely dissociated from myself when I talk about my feelings. I was never allowed to actually feel. I still have general physical pain, and get crushing migraines from time to time ( I just started a new medication for that), but thankfully I only have cluster headaches about once every six months. I attribute this entirely to the changes that came about from going to primal therapy. I know that primal therapy has not been rigorously studied, and is generally considered "debunked" by mainstream psychology. But anyways, it really helped me. I entirely certain that the lessening of cluster headaches to almost gone was not a coincidence, and a result of primal therapy.
- tomhoward 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience. I know several people who are highly-scientifically minded (i.e., masters or PhD qualified in mainstream science disciplines), who've had afflictions like yours, and have resorted to similarly unproven or "debunked" treatments, and have found them effective when nothing else was. It's a mysterious world.

tomhoward 9y ago

It is really hard, no doubt. Word of mouth is best, but that relies on you already knowing someone unfortunate enough to have had to go through the process themselves. A reliable disqualifier is anyone who purports to be any kind of heal-everything wizard. All the practitioners who've helped me the most have been well-grounded people, who don't make extravagant claims, and simply work with you to find out what's going on beneath the surface and help you find a better path. You're welcome to email me and I can help you find someone local if need be.

loceng 9y ago

Innerchild Regression Therapy is one that helped me uncover some deep emotional trauma. The difficulty is as you mentioned, people offering these therapies have different experience levels, skills, and styles.

viwalia 9y ago

Clinical psych professor here. This is a tricky question because there is questionable stuff out there, but on the other hand a lot of scientifically supported therapies are probably working for reasons other than their purported reasons (due to publication bias, etc.). To complicate things more, there are some therapies that seem like quackery that seem to work for reasons no one really understands. So people purporting to be adhering to "empirically supported therapy" (a kind of political buzzword) might actually be doing no better than someone else who doesn't explicitly advertise that, but who is rigorously and critically evaluating the scientific literature. My advice is to pay attention to where someone got their degree, and how they describe themselves. By degree I don't mean you need to fetishize invalid status stuff, but look for people from degree programs you trust. If you don't feel comfortable with someone, look elsewhere. Don't feel uncomfortable asking them about their theoretical orientation or thinking about cases.

crimsonalucard 9y ago
Unfortunately there's no science validating any treatment for this disease. This is what it means when they say there is no treatment or no cure. So in other words... there is no "empirically supported therapy" that can cure the condition. The only option for treatment is to attempt treatments not yet validated by science. Whether it's by a quack doctor or a degreed doctor doesn't matter at this point.
lawpoop 9y ago
> but look for people from degree programs you trust How is someone who doesn't really keep tabs on departments of psychology supposed to have developed a sense of trust of particularly degree programs? Do you mean like preferring Vanderbilt's psychology program over Harvard's? Or preferring Psychology over Acupuncture?

lawpoop 9y ago

A personal anecdote-- I suffered from cluster headaches for about 20 years, starting in high school. Because of bad emotions and not having much success with traditional psychotherapy and anti-depressants, I started going to primal therapy. I'm well aware that primal therapy is not considered valid in mainstream psychology. I'm not trying to debate that. I found my therapy helpful for dealing with my daily emotional swings and negative thoughts and feelings. Surprisingly, I found that it greatly reduced the number of cluster headaches that I had. Long story short, I had been suppressing my actual emotions in order to appear okay and not an over-reactive emotional wreck. This was a much deeper and subtle process than "I'm okay"-- it was a subconscious, physio-psychological process involving arresting the subtle motions of my face and neck that normally create expression. This process, which I did often throughout the day, subconsciously, when I thought of something personally painful, would eventually lead up to a cluster headache. That whole paragraph above is something I figured out on my own, while I was doing the therapy, not something that the therapist presented me with or helped me figure out. But I would not have been able to do it if I had not had a space to enact my emotions, which is what primal therapy is (it's not screaming--or, I should say, not just screaming). Being in a place where you can actually emote what you are feeling, not just talk about what you feel, is a game-changer when you grew up not being accepted for validated as a child. I can talk about how I feel all I want-- that's what I had to learn to do as a child, going to psychologists. That has no therapeutic or helpful effect for me-- it became just another coping or defense mechanism. I'm completely dissociated from myself when I talk about my feelings. I was never allowed to actually feel. I still have general physical pain, and get crushing migraines from time to time ( I just started a new medication for that), but thankfully I only have cluster headaches about once every six months. I attribute this entirely to the changes that came about from going to primal therapy. I know that primal therapy has not been rigorously studied, and is generally considered "debunked" by mainstream psychology. But anyways, it really helped me. I entirely certain that the lessening of cluster headaches to almost gone was not a coincidence, and a result of primal therapy.

tomhoward 9y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. I know several people who are highly-scientifically minded (i.e., masters or PhD qualified in mainstream science disciplines), who've had afflictions like yours, and have resorted to similarly unproven or "debunked" treatments, and have found them effective when nothing else was. It's a mysterious world.