From: murphyg@Software.Mitel.COM (Gary Murphy)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology,alt.sexual.abuse.recovery
Subject: Belief and Doubt in Therapy (was Re: Fast Anxiety Cure)
Date: 15 Sep 92 16:35:09 GMT
	<1992Sep12.141944.3901@newstand.syr.edu>
	<1992Sep15.005154.7188@news.Hawaii.Edu>
	<1992Sep15.053632.26490@pony.Ingres.COM>
Organization: Applications Software II, MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario,
	Canada
In-reply-to: jpk@Ingres.COM's message of 15 Sep 92 05:36:32 GMT

Jon Krueger writes:

   Lee Lady writes:

   > The purported cure described here is undoubtedly a form
   > of quackery designed to bilk people of their money

   Cute Lee, cute, but remember that most phrenologists were sincere.
   They really believed it worked.  They meant well.  OK?

This reminded me of two items worth mention.  The first was when I was
attacked by hate-mail from psychologists when I suggested a poster on
the More-Than-Survival newsgroup to retain her distrust of her
therapist.  The hate-mail (which all insisted _I_ had a problem) claimed
unquestioning faith in one's therapist was essential for success.  I
always smell a rat when someone says that.

The second item relates to this: to my (admittedly only undergraduate
degree) experience, of all forms of therapy, only Dr. Morita Masetake is
on record as _insisting_ his patients retain their skepticism, praising
doubt as a most important feature of an 'enlightened' mind; he never
mentions Socrates ("The only fact of which I am certain is that I know
nothing") but makes many references to the Zen ideal of Great Doubt.

Morita only asked his clients to _try_ the exercises, knowing as he did
that 'taiken', the knowledge gained from direct experience, is far more
enduring than 'insights', reasoned beliefs and assumptions.  In the
Moritist view it is 'toraware', the "being-caught-by" attachments, false
beliefs and errant assumptions that is the root of the client's trouble.
I see many people locked in 'toraware' of the effects of traditional
therapy, and curiously scant few 20-year NLP _addicts_.  From my limited
exposure to NLP, it appears they also could care less for your
unquestioning faith, and Bandler's books seem littered with cases where,
even after an immediate, dramatic change, the client can fail to
recognize how the change was made.

Criticisms levied against NLP for being non-science are as appropriate
for any therapy: we cannot isolate the technique from the practitioner
or the condition from the client.  How then could we attempt a
double-blind or a 'placebo'?  Given clinical psychology's own rules,
however, we can admit case-studies, and here NLP does show its skills
can be transfered from therapist to therapist.  Maybe NLP _is_ the
placebo effect, albeit a surprisingly culturally independent placebo,
powerful perhaps only because it sets up a weird situation and, as
Aleister Crowley remarked, when given a weird situation, people are more
likely to believe something weird might happen!

Here is a stark difference with Morita's techniques (ref. David Reynolds
"Thirsty, Swimming in the Lake"), which retain effectiveness without
charisma, without trust, without weird set-ups, probing sensitive
secrets or false elitist pretenses: CL can be tested easily by assigning
nonsense exercises to one group and Morita's mindfulness exercises or
Naikan reflections to another.  The only requirement is a willingness to
actually put in the effort.  Belief can come much later: in Japan, where
people have a cultural bias to trusting authority, teachers of the
Morita and Naikan ways do not tell their clients what the exercise is
going to do --- in North America, they sometimes lie ;-) --- and depend
instead on 'taiken' to illustrate the value of the work.

Morita/Naikan therapy is also a lot cheaper than most, as are the
reference books.  The training seminars are also cheaper, perhaps
because, as part of the training, participants all help with the
cleaning, preparation of food &c, and Morita himself was a fanatic about
avoiding wasted time, energy or resources :-)

--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - Gary.Murphy@software.mitel.COM - (613) 592-2122 x3709
          "Pile up effort and the mind changes." --- Morita