After a one-hour session with an exceptional counselor, I never suffered over that romantic incident again. Although, that’s inaccurate, I also had 2x half-hour relapses in following month.
I brought the rest of my anxieties to that counselor over the following year, and…
Radically effective and rapid growth is possible with the right combination of facilitator and method. But this is rare in 2024!
Introspection that actually works
It was while working with that counselor that, for the first time I could remember, I was able to actually do introspection.
Before, whenever I had problems that seemed to be caused by my psychology, I would do the obvious thing and ask myself, “Why am I doing <harmful thing>? Why am I not doing <helpful thing>?”
But that almost never worked. Usually I would get a response back like, “Because it’s hard, I’m lazy, and it’s just a bad habit.” The same problems would come back again and again.
Meditation didn’t help me much either.
But, for me, this counselor did. I would come to a session suffering from something, he would prompt me into feeling into my body about the issue — which is important because the body represents the unconscious — and then in the following Socratic conversation I would be able to make rapid and dramatic progress on my problem. Big anxieties gone in an hour.
(For context, most of my problems then could be reduced to either “I feel anxious about X social situation.” and/or “I am disliking myself and I’m suffering about that.”)
Learning to facilitate
Later, I trained with that counselor and learned his method. As part of my training I facilitated for four volunteers, and they seemed to have similar results that I had: rapid and dramatic resolution of the issue they came with in one hour. (Caveat: I never spoke to these volunteers again, so I don’t know if the effect lasted.)
But the sixth time I facilitated for someone was different. I experimented: I let the conversation run as long as it needed to, and I proactively tried to target the deepest roots of his emotional insecurity using the full force of my research.
After our three-hour conversation, Camille said,
This session was significantly more productive than the last 6 months of professional CBT and talk therapy I did combined.
(For context, he was a CFAR alumni and also very experienced with Focusing.)
We didn’t do any other sessions, but I followed up after six months to ask how he was doing:
I can't stress how much I appreciated that dialogue, it really made me feel better, and I think I have already expressed much of what it made me feel. […] The effectiveness of your presence defeated my incredulity, and then some.
This seems not to be a fluke, either. I’ve facilitated for seven other people since then and four have had similarly large shifts, eg,
Josh: Your communication style made it easy to identify and release limiting beliefs. I felt noticeably more secure after just a few hours.
That said, the other three people I facilitated seemed to have smaller effects, though each claims it was positive.
Carmen, a stylish freelance writer, was 35 and happily married, but she experienced intense panic attacks every day or two. “When they started five years ago, I thought it was a heart attack,” she said. “Before that, I had strong depressions that lasted weeks at a time. Then the panic attacks replaced the depression.”
[…]
“It’s so irrational,” Carmen said after describing the panic she’d felt when her husband was late.
“It may look that way,” I replied, “but let’s see how it looks when we’ve found out what it’s really about.”
The underlying coherence of Carmen’s panic began to surface in our second session. Using a technique we call symptom deprivation, I guided Carmen to reimagine the moments when she noticed her husband was late, but now without any accompanying panic. The goal wasn’t to counteract her panic response. Rather, if panic was in some way compellingly necessary, then being without it was likely to yield a consequence so dire that it was worth going into panic to avoid it. “This is an exercise in simply imagining what-if,” I explained. “See what it’s like for you if he’s late and no panic is cropping up. You’re at the window, the sky’s darkening. Just get a glimpse of what you start to experience as you’re waiting, if there’s no panic when he’s late.”
Carmen was silent for a time, and then said, “Well, I know it sounds strange, but I start to feel scared over not having the panic.” I asked her what was scary about not having the panic. She said, “It just feels kind of darker, like something bad will happen, but I don’t know what or why.”
Because the exercise had been fruitful, I assigned a continuation of it as homework. “When you notice you’re starting to have a panic attack,” I said, “that’s now your signal to see, just for a moment, if you can glimpse what you’d experience if you didn’t have panic--the same exercise you did here.” I wrote down this exercise and gave it to her on an index card, an indispensable tool for maintaining a new awareness and staying on track with between-session tasks.
In the next session, Carmen reported that one evening when her husband was again late and her panic began, she took out the card and did the task. It now was clearer to her why not having a panic attack was scary. “If I don’t worry that he’ll crash,” she told me, “it means I believe nothing bad will ever happen to us--and having that belief will make bad things happen! I really feel that if I panic, if I just suffer, it keeps anything bad from happening.” I prompted her: “Let your next words come from that feeling, and tell me why bad things happen.” To her surprise, Carmen then described certain metaphysical rules of suffering that she hadn’t known were a powerful subjective reality to her. She felt that her family lived under a weekly quota of suffering, and she could spare her husband an auto crash or some other family disaster by suffering intensely herself, thus meeting the quota. Having always prided herself on being free of any religious beliefs or superstitions, this discovery rattled her sophisticated self image.
Carmen had become conscious of the emotional truth of the symptom as a direct experience, not just a cognitive insight. She realized she had the ability to whip up a physiological state of panic on the spot, whenever the rules of her unconscious worldview indicated that her suffering was necessary for the safety of loved ones. Carmen’s initial thought that panic was something that happened mysteriously to her had been replaced by a clear recognition of her own purposeful agency in producing it.
It would be bad therapy, it seems to me, to attempt merely to “refute” and “correct” Carmen’s “irrational” beliefs. This amounts to pitting the client’s neocortex against her limbic system--her conventional ideas against her living, emotional knowledge--which isn’t at all likely to be effective. Furthermore, it’s questionable therapeutic strategy for the therapist to presume to know the “correct” reality for a client to believe.
Accepting the realness of Carmen’s world of meaning just as it was, I named the possibilities contained in her newly discovered constructs. “What you’ve found means there are two ways you could stop having panic. Just as when you switched from depression to panic, you can again switch to a different type of suffering, like eating live worms or standing with your arms straight out for an hour, to keep bad things from happening. Or you could deeply reconsider your beliefs and find whether they remain real to you. Because if they don’t, you wouldn’t have to keep suffering to keep everyone safe.”
Carmen sat quietly for a time and then calmly informed me that the idea of changing her beliefs had no traction whatsoever for her--so the only alternative was to find a different type of suffering. I accepted this and suggested that between sessions she think seriously about what type of suffering she could switch to, and let me know next time.
The following week, Carmen told me she’d had no panic attacks for several days. She hadn’t yet settled upon a different suffering to adopt, so I suggested she keep on with that project.
A guiding principle of my work is that once the symptom’s emotional truth is found, I stay right there. I kept working with Carmen to get fully in touch with her symptom-requiring worldview, encouraging her to feel it and verbalize it in the most concrete form. By the end of the session, she said, “I really feel that if I think we’ll be happy and fine, the universe will smash us in some way. I’ve got to suffer--by expecting disaster and feeling terrified every day or two-- to protect us from that.” Another index card carried these words home with her.
In the next session, Carmen reported she’d had no panic attacks at all for two weeks, which was unprecedented. With a bemused look she added sheepishly, “Panic attacks seem silly to me now.” She said she’d considered alternate ways to suffer, but still hadn’t got one up and running.
Carmen was now in a process of dismantling the basis of her panic attacks--her emotional schema of having control over her family’s suffering by suffering herself--despite her earlier statement that this was so real to her that it couldn’t be changed. Here we glimpse the operation of another of Coherence Therapy’s guiding principles: people are able to change a construct they experience having, but aren’t able to change one they don’t know they have.
Carmen now wanted to see how she’d do on her own. Nine months later, I mailed her a follow-up query. She left me a voice message saying that panic attacks were now very infrequent and she was still working fruitfully on the themes we’d unearthed. She ended with, “I’ll call you if I want to speed things along.” She didn’t.
Carmen had intense panic attacks “every day or two” for five years and this was almost entirely resolved in four sessions.
Radically effective and rapid growth is possible with the right combination of facilitator and method!
In another post soon I will share the uncommon properties that I believe radically effective and rapid growth techniques must have.
Thanks to Stag Lynn, Kaj Sotala, Alex Zhu, Brian Toomey, Damon Sasi, Anna Salamon, CFAR, Epistea Residency, Nolan Kent, and many more for mentorship and support.
After a one-hour session with an exceptional counselor, I never suffered over that romantic incident again. Although, that’s inaccurate, I also had 2x half-hour relapses in following month.
After a few more sessions, I stopped doing depression.
I brought the rest of my anxieties to that counselor over the following year, and…
Radically effective and rapid growth is possible with the right combination of facilitator and method. But this is rare in 2024!
Introspection that actually works
It was while working with that counselor that, for the first time I could remember, I was able to actually do introspection.
Before, whenever I had problems that seemed to be caused by my psychology, I would do the obvious thing and ask myself, “Why am I doing <harmful thing>? Why am I not doing <helpful thing>?”
But that almost never worked. Usually I would get a response back like, “Because it’s hard, I’m lazy, and it’s just a bad habit.” The same problems would come back again and again.
Meditation didn’t help me much either.
But, for me, this counselor did. I would come to a session suffering from something, he would prompt me into feeling into my body about the issue — which is important because the body represents the unconscious — and then in the following Socratic conversation I would be able to make rapid and dramatic progress on my problem. Big anxieties gone in an hour.
(For context, most of my problems then could be reduced to either “I feel anxious about X social situation.” and/or “I am disliking myself and I’m suffering about that.”)
Learning to facilitate
Later, I trained with that counselor and learned his method. As part of my training I facilitated for four volunteers, and they seemed to have similar results that I had: rapid and dramatic resolution of the issue they came with in one hour. (Caveat: I never spoke to these volunteers again, so I don’t know if the effect lasted.)
But the sixth time I facilitated for someone was different. I experimented: I let the conversation run as long as it needed to, and I proactively tried to target the deepest roots of his emotional insecurity using the full force of my research.
After our three-hour conversation, Camille said,
(For context, he was a CFAR alumni and also very experienced with Focusing.)
We didn’t do any other sessions, but I followed up after six months to ask how he was doing:
This seems not to be a fluke, either. I’ve facilitated for seven other people since then and four have had similarly large shifts, eg,
That said, the other three people I facilitated seemed to have smaller effects, though each claims it was positive.
Update: my practice is now public.
Radically effective and rapid growth is possible with the right combination of facilitator and method!
What does a session look like?
Here’s the closest example I could find of what rapid growth looks like in practice.
(Note: I don’t completely agree with their method, and also I wonder if the client’s progress could’ve been even quicker.)
Bolding is mine. Coherence Therapy for Anxiety & Panic, © 2007 Bruce Ecker & Laurel Hulley:
Carmen had intense panic attacks “every day or two” for five years and this was almost entirely resolved in four sessions.
Radically effective and rapid growth is possible with the right combination of facilitator and method!
In another post soon I will share the uncommon properties that I believe radically effective and rapid growth techniques must have.
Thanks to Stag Lynn, Kaj Sotala, Alex Zhu, Brian Toomey, Damon Sasi, Anna Salamon, CFAR, Epistea Residency, Nolan Kent, and many more for mentorship and support.