What role does psychotherapy play in the culture?
We are all watching how psychotherapy evolves in the culture. We hear more people talking about their personal experiences with psychotherapy. There are more books written about psychology in the self-help world. It is even appearing more in movies and TV. It has a place in our culture no matter what we think about it.
Psychotherapy can be seen as a medicine. Each therapeutic style is a type of medicine for a particular purpose. Those people that have had healing experiences through therapy received something medicinal, some pain was relieved, and some return to well-being was experienced. Others have not gotten what they needed from therapy or they are not ready to do the work. It is hard to swallow the medicine sometimes, even when you know you need it. However, it always seems to taste like humility.
Parent and Teacher for the Culture
The psychotherapist has played a role as parent and teacher in the culture, by providing structure, empathy, and guidance for personal relationships. For example, how to listen to others, how to speak your mind, how to treat your parents, how to treat your children, and how to treat others that are not like you, etc.. It provides guidance for parents, couples and families. Hopefully, psychotherapists provide something our personal parents could not because they were trapped in the culture of their time. It is all they knew. The therapist can also serve as an aunt, uncle, grandmother or shaman.
Psychotherapy as link to the soul and inner spirit.
For thousands of years we had medicine women and medicine men. It is only recently this function has been played more by psychology. Some therapists are needed for day-to-day tech support. How to say this and that, when to stay out of other people’s business, and how to take care yourself. This is very important guidance for living in such a complex culture as our own. Then some therapists help with the dreams and the unconscious, as the medicine women and men did for their communities and tribes. They provide direction and empathy for relating to the stuff of the mind, body, soul and spirit. Then, how to bring that discovery into everyday life.
Psychotherapy has hundreds, maybe thousands, of therapeutic approaches, so it really gets down to who personally helps you, as a therapist or guide. Who helps you negotiate the culture to distinguish what is beneficial and what is not? Who helps you relate to the unconscious or the unknown? The attitudes of the culture are what your parents learned. It was the only game in town, how could they know differently? The harmful attitudes which they did not transform are attitudes that are yours to wrestle with and what you do not learn, your kids will inherit. This is evolution. So the psychotherapist acts as a mediator to the culture and a mediator to the soul and spirit. The soul and spirit are necessary to help counter act the power of miss guided cultural assumptions.
This will be a continuing exploration of psychotherapy and its evolution. What makes it work and not work? How does it function? Where is it’s place in the culture and not?
