5 Things Missing in Modern Psychology
I do not write this text as an attack on modern psychology nor to compete with it and argue that what I have found is better.
My intention with this text is to bring distinctions to modern psychology that could help it to be more of an effective tool to do its job of supporting humans in their healing and development.
I want to make it transparent that I did not finish my academic studies of psychology, partly because of the reasons I will present later on. So I am not saying I have a full picture of what modern psychology is. I have not studied the different schools of Psychology thoroughly. I am just speaking from my experience of studying Psychology for 2 years, doing a 2 year Gestalt Therapy training and being myself in therapeutic treatment for about 2 years.
Most of what modern psychology has to offer needs to be based on scientific experiments that need to be performed in a certain scientific setup. I took back my own authority to make experiential experiments and base what is working for me on them instead of an outside authority figure telling me how to find out what works and what does not.
During my experimenting I came across a cloud of tools, distinctions and processes called Possibility Management. A lot of what I write about here comes from that background. But it is not like I just switched from one school of thought to another. Everything I write about I have experimented within myself. I have tried out what the actual experience is, if I apply these distinctions and tools in my life and as a spaceholder for peoples healing and transformation.
So let’s start.
1. Mind and Body or is there more?
I remember this discussion in my studies about the dichotomy of mind and body. Does this duality actually exist or is mind/consciousness just a byproduct of chemical processes in the brain?
Frankly, I don’t care what beliefs exist around that. Beliefs are just plasters on top of questions I have no real answers for and often beliefs are the beginning of wars, be it wars of thoughts or real wars.
So I am not interested in finding a belief system, I am interested in actually experiencing what my experiential reality is made of so I can have more possibilities and choices in my life.
In my own experience I discovered that there are 5 realms of experience I can have. The physical body with temperature, taste, sound, smell and touch. The Mental Body with thoughts, images, cognition. The emotional body with the 4 basic feelings of anger, sadness, fear and joy. The energetic body with subtle sensations in the body and the space around it, the power to commit and to hold space. And the archetypal body with the sense of purpose and what I am here on earth for.
Modern Psychology has this great emphasis on the physical body and the mental body. The physical body gets dissected in smaller and smaller pieces, discovering all the different structures in the brain, the different electro and biochemical processes and the neurotransmitter at work. I have great respect for that work and the understanding it brings us. But understanding is only the second price. It might help a depressed person to understand that their brain is not producing enough serotonin but to actually change that state, to make transformation happen is my main goal.
Understanding happens in the mental body where for example “Cognitive Behavioural Therapy” brings together the insights of the studies on the physical body, the mental body and a little bit of the emotional body. And no offense, that therapy works where it works. But for me that is still way too limited.
The more humanistic therapy schools like “Client Centered Therapy” by Carl Rogers integrated more of the emotional body and it’s needs for connection, feeling feelings and being heard in their approach. I loved seeing and experiencing the results of that therapy, my own therapist studied with a student of Rogers. Also Gestalt Therapy which I learned and practiced myself, even though it is not an official Therapy with state recognition (because of missing scientific studies) had great results for me and a lot of healing could happen. But even that was not enough.
There are 2 more bodies that I had experienced and that were still missing for me in these approaches.
The energetic body I started experiencing in my intensive meditation practice I had. I spent 4 Month in a Vipassana meditation retreat where I started feeling the subtle sensations of my energetic body. I could feel the flow of energy rushing through me for no visible physical reason. I could feel the sense of how spaces feel.
The energetic body also needs healing and transformation. For example:
Where my attention is, the center of my energetic body is. Most of our culture teaches us to give our center away to authority figures. Meaning to adapt to the most powerful person in the space. We started learning that with our parents, with our teachers, later on with our bosses and then also with our therapists.
This is something I needed to undo. I needed to learn to keep my energetic center in my physical center (that is two fingers below my belly button and to fingers within), so I could keep my own authority.
This is a trap many clients tap into and many therapists are not aware of. This is how a therapist can unconsciously misuse their position and create a dependent relationship with their clients. As a therapist your awarness of the energetic body can support your client to find his own center and make him learn to not adapt to and depend on you.
The last body that was missing for me was the archetypal body. This body is connected to the experience of being and knowing what I am here on earth to do. It feels like something greater than the experience I usually have of myself lives through me. That body is unveiled when all the other bodys are activated and nourished.
When this body is missing the reason for transformation is missing. Of course in the beginning it’s about escaping suffering. But when your life is kind of comfortable there is no real reason to keep growing. Growing is painful, it’s scary, it makes you feel things. Better create a comfortable life with not much change in it. But when you do that this body is slowly starving. Your Archetypal Lineage is wasting away in a person that is too scared to be taken to tasks that are bigger than what you are capable of right now.
The healing is done to be able to tap into that body again and to be of service to the Bright Principles (like Love, Clarity, Connection or Transformation) that want to do their work through you in the world.
With these distinctions of the 5 bodies much clarity and healing can happen.
2. 4 Feelings or What Gives Power to Your Life?
Another distinction that is missing in modern Psychology is the distinction of the 4 Feelings anger, sadness, fear and joy.
My overall image is that most of modern psychology works with the physical and the mental body (which is great but not enough!) and a little bit with the emotional body. That has probably to do with the predominant culture on our planet. Modern culture tells you that feeling your feelings is bad. For crying go into the cellar. Rage is destructive, fear is irrational and if you are too joyous you are not facing reality. So it is no wonder that as culture and with that also this culture’s treatment for people in it displays the perception that feeling is actually bad or at least not so important.
Modern culture is a culture of numbness. Meaning many people do not feel most of their feelings. Only if they cross the intensity of approixmatly 70% people suddenly explode in rage or panic attacks. It takes time and practice to lower one’s numbness bar and to start feeling these lower level feelings again which can be used for day to day interactions.
Of course therapy is trying its best. Let your client grieve if needed. But what to actually do with the clients feelings? I seldom hear anything about that in modern psychology.
What if you would find out that your feelings are actually the things that give power to your life. Those feelings give you clarity about what you want, what you care about and what’s important to you.
And actually there are only 4 pure feelings. Your Anger is here for you to tell you what you care about. It’s the power with which you can say yes or no to things, with which you can ask for what you want and set boundaries to what you don’t want.
Your Sadness also tells you what’s important to you, it helps you to say goodbye to those things. You need it to let go of a dear person who left you, you need it to tell you when you want connection.
Your Fear tells you what you care about in a protective way. You need it to be vulnerable in connection because it tells you what things are important to say. It helps you to navigate alive relationships and which could be the next step to take that makes you grow.
Your joy lets you celebrate what’s important to you. With your Joy you hold space for another person’s growth. If you don’t feel joy listening to your child it’s not a safe space for them to talk into. Joy is that appreciation for life how it is right now that gives more space for life to unfold.
You might say I have never looked at my feelings this way. And that’s because we were taught differently. This is the new map of feelings. And it takes work to move from the old map to the new one.
3. Feelings and Emotions
In the therapeutic modalities that do work with feelings there is one big distinction missing. There is a difference between Feelings and Emotions.
Feelings are for handling things in the present moment and Emotions are for healing things from the past.
Feelings give you information about what is important for you in this moment and make you act on it. They disappear fully out of the body after a maximum of three minutes.
Emotions are old unfelt feelings from past circumstances. They can get triggered in a similar situation like the first time they came up in and have nothing to do with that actual moment. If you try to act on them in that moment they just create a mess, because they are not supposed to help you in that moment. Most of the things people nowadays feel are emotions, because most of us grew up in a feeling suppressing culture. So most of our lives are messed up because we still bring the mess of our childhood to handle our adult lives.
If you find yourself experiencing an emotion you can ask someone to hold space for you to feel the things you have not felt back then. That’s a loud process, feelings that are of higher intensity than 20 percent make sounds. And most of the things that you could not feel were of higher intensity than 20 percent. (Think of all the time wasted in therapy sessions talking about what happened without actually feeling it)
This is not meant in a kathatic way to get rid of the emotions, but to do “karthexis” to use these old emotions to undo the decisions you made back then that still affects you life nowadays.
Another thing you might say is: but I feel more than these 4 feelings. I also feel depression, despair, jealousy, shame and guilt!
Yes you do! These are called Mixed Emotions in Possibility Management. It’s a protection strategy of you Gremlin (we talk later about that) to mix your feelings to stop you from experiencing them separately so you can not get out the information that they carry for you that would make you take action. There is a process called Unmix your Emotions with which you can get rid of depression in 20 minutes (in a best case scenario).
These distinctions about feelings are next culture thoughtware upgrades for every therapist. Of course I recommend not applying what you did not experience. There are trainings and experimental groups in which you can discover these distinctions experientially for yourself.
4. The Underworld, Your Gremlin and Therapy
As far as I can see, nearly no school of thought in Psychology has working “Underworld Technology”. C.G. Jung and his analytic psychoanalysis has gotten the closest, as I can assess it, with the distinctions Shadow (what you don’t want to see in yourself and project onto others). Also Freud really picked up on the underworld of the human psyche but had no clue what to do with it other than to talk about it until it becomes clear to the client (which is probably better than nothing). There might be some other more modern schools that also work with it and I do not know about.
In PM it’s presented quite simply. You have an underworld. In your underworld lives the King or Queen of your underworld, your Gremlin. Your Gremlin protects you box (you self image, beliefs, rules, worldviews). Your Gremlin rejoices in irresponsibility and destruction of connection and serves a set of 3–5 shadow principles like isolation, revenge, competition, superiority, being right, good and bad…. Your Gremlin is one of your Ego-States. If you do not know what your Gremlin is doing right now, he is in control. Your Gremlin tries to keep everything the same because so far you have survived with it. Gremlin is neither good nor bad. He is just Gremlin and Gremlin action has Gremlin consequences. You Gremlin has a lot of tricks, strategies and behaviours that destroy your life, your relationships and your transformation. You can start tracking down these behaviors and you can put your Gremlin on a leash and stop them. You can put your Gremlin on a regular feeding schedule where you feed him consciously and start a relationship with him. As this progresses you can use your Gremlin for jobs you would not dare to do! He can become a conscious ally at your side.
As a therapist you are confronted with your own AND the other person’s Gremlin. If you do not know about it, all you do is have a Gremlin feast on each other. It’s your job (of course only if you want that) to get aware of your own Gremlin and to create a Gremlin free space, meaning to set boundaries for your clients Gremlin and also give your client the possibility to discover about his own Gremlin.
Part of the Gremlin process is to get aware of what the Gremlin is doing and then feel the pain of the consequences of that. Only if you feel what you are causing with your Gremlin you have the motivation to change.
To get clarity about your underworld is necessary for any lasting transformation. Otherwise your Gremlin will destroy again and again the progress you made. To really get that experiential distinction takes effort and the willingness to become not only healed but whole, which means to look into the darkness of what it means to be human.
5. Low Drama or Let Me Rescue You
One of the things your Gremlin does and loves is low Drama. If you are working in a therapeutic conetxt (I speak also for myself) there is a high likelihood you are a “professional rescuer”, which is one of the hardest roles to spot in low drama.
The drama triangle consists of a victim, a persecutor and a rescuer.
A victim feels unconscious sadness and believes the story that it tells to itself: “Poor me, I am wrong, I am not good enough, I can’t do it.” A good victim can make a persecutor out of anybody, so it can take revenge on them and switch roles to persecute it’s persucter. “You did this to me, you really hurt me! That’s why you are wrong and bad!”
The persecutor uses unconscious anger and agrees with the victim’s story. He says: “Yes, you are wrong and bad, but I am okay! So it’s reasonable to attack you!”
And at last but not least the rescuer, out of unconscious fear that the victim could not take care of itself, also agrees with the victim. “Yes, you are wrong and you can’t do anything about it, but I can tell you how it goes and I can even do it for you because I am okay.”
These roles can switch in seconds.
The whole reason for low drama is to avoid responsibility. In low drama nothing changes. You only get older. The victim is not taking responsibility for its own life, for what it wants and what it feels and the other roles don’t do it either.
One of the great traps in therapy is to play the victim rescuer drama with your client over and over and nothing ever changes for your client. Also the switch can happen quickly that the client turns the therapist into a persecutor. “You don’t hear me, see me, so you are a bad therapist.” Then you try to rescue your client out of that story and you go around and around.
The way out of it is to just stop. You are not responsible for your clients life. Your client is. He is fully capable of taking care of himself. That doesnt mean to stop supporting your client. But to step out of buying into his victim story. That could lead to many clients leaving you because what a victim wants is someone to just listen to their story and agree with them on how hard their life is and that they can’t do anything about it.
One way out of it is to actually let your client feel his feelings that are below this story. But for that he needs to let go from his identification with being a victim otherwise it’s just fake feelings.
Some might say now but I really have victims as clients, they were raped or abused. Yes, your client has been affected by someone else’s action and there is a difference to the victim’s ego-state identification with the hidden purpose of not taking responsibility for one’s own life and to avoid actually feeling your real feelings.
For example your client was abused and now keeps on living his life as a victim of that, full of resentment having that as a reason to not take responsibility for his life. That means he did not fully feel the pain of sadness and rage and did not receive the information these feelings have for him. He did not let go of the resentment his Gremlin created out of which he is justified to take revenge on everyone who comes along.
It happens quick to snap into the story that something is actually wrong with your client, that he really can not take responsibility. How quick do you start compromising and agreeing with your client to play small so you can come in and play the strong knowing rescuer.
This might not speak to you, maybe you do not want to see it. In my case my Gremlin strongly beniftted from that game. I felt good and superior when I could help someone, when I comforted someone in their own story of not being okay. When I told them a way to get out of their misery even though they did not ask for it. And it is not about not empowering. These are different things. Empowering is to take a stand for your clients capability of being responsible.
With exiting low drama you might wonder what else there is? And yes, you guessed right, where there is the possibility for low drama there is also the possibility for high drama. The drama of consciously feeling your feelings and taking responsible actions on them to make happen what you want to make happen. That’s another whole life journey to go onto.
With this I leave it here. If this article made you feel things made you want to learn that work, you can reach out to me. If you are interested in learning more about it check out this massive amount of about 450 websites to upgrade your thoughtware.
Love
Kian
