Liberation psychotherapy
Liberation psychotherapy is constructed on basic evolutionary processes identifiable in human psychology. By observing those dynamic processes in sessions, analysts can specifically point to how a client functions normally or dysfunctionally. During the process, all information is shared so therapist and client can work cooperatively on a given issue. Five recurring principles form the primary framework for therapy[1] and illuminate the inner labyrinth[2] of the client. Those principles are life force energy, abandonment, emotions, modularity, and presuppositions.
Origins[edit]
In 1975 psychotherapists Lela Gescheidle Morris and Frank Reinhart Morris began to develop a therapeutic system guided by what was effectual to free clients from internal restraints. Two additional intents were to help individuals develop free identities based on fluid awareness of emotions (sadness, anger, scare, happiness, excitement, and tenderness), and to guide individuals to have effective and loving relationships.
Both Lela and Frank were long-time students of therapeutic literature. Frank had earned a BA from Baylor University, with a graduate degree from Louisville Seminary, and post-graduate studies at the University of Chicago in Philosophical Theology and Client-Centered Psychotherapy. He then served as Chaplain of University of Chicago Hospitals and became a Certified Transactional Analyst. Lela also gained certification as a Transactional Analyst in addition to undergraduate studies at Southwestern University in Texas.
Erik Erikson's childhood development work and Charles Darwin's attention to innate emotions of the species informed an awareness of how human freedom gets lost early in human upbringing. As Morrises became more focused on psychotherapy, they began to look at human feelings through the word choices children use most naturally to describe those feelings: sad, angry, scared, happy, excited, and tender. Clients dicovered what kind of feeling they were having and how, where, and when that feeling came to them. From there, the healing work could move forward and the client could become more psychologically free.[3]
An intellectual pursuit of value in various systems began with psychoanalysis and proceeded to other therapeutic approaches such as Gestalt, Client-centered therapy, Rational-emotive behavior therapy, Cognitive behavioral therapy, Neuro-linguistic programming, breathing therapies, and body therapies. The foundational question of what worked remained, with the realization that a theory that worked must be and remain dynamic, continually evolving and combining aspects of other therapies.
Because of their belief in the equality of therapist and client in the healing journey, Morrises created and sustained a large client practice. Their process included therapeutic training groups of twelve to 24 persons at a time, each committed to two to three years together. Three to four groups each month engaged with weekend therapeutic emersion experiences. In the process clients were trained to understand the therapeutic process and theory and to become independent. As clients were provided with written resources and teaching, they could assess and provide feedback as to what made sense or not, and what worked for them or did not. Group sessions were in addition to full client loads during the week. In this way continual testing and feedback from clients confirmed what worked and what did not. What they learned became the core of liberation psychotherapy, shaped by an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 clients over forty years.
Theory[edit]
The background premise of liberation psychotherapy is that human development progresses in terms of both bodies and minds following a blueprint inherited from animal ancestors.[4] This framework allows an understanding of human behavior and provides an entry point for all therapeutic intervention.
Humans inherited given instincts which unconsciously lead to given actions. For example, human and other mammalian newborns instinctively know how to suckle. The five major principles of liberation psychotherapy relate to evolutionary instincts.
Abandonment[edit]
Through childhood and into adulthood, individuals experience a massive fear of abandonment, which early in childhood would have meant death. The need to belong is an impulse met by families, communities, and nations. Individuals define themselves accordingly. Abandonment fear leads to adaptations that steal freedom of being, thinking, and acting, and must be addressed in psychotherapy. This fear is not rare, frequently permeating sessions in which persons struggle with issues of being alone, whether unmarried or divorced. Practitioners of liberation psychotherapy insist that the client holds the "abandonment card," a tenacious resolve to not give the power of self-determination to anyone else, so that adaptations cease and the person moves from reflexive fear of abandonment to the pleasure of solitude. For instance, to keep a marriage healthy each partner establishes lines which cannot be crossed by the other partner's unacceptable addictions, which destroy basic trust.
Emotions[edit]
Prime emotions developed over eons of evolution.[5] Just as the cell is recognized as the basic unit of biology and the atom as the basic unit of physics, liberation psychotherapy states that six key emotions form the basic unit of therapy. These emotions are sadness, anger, scare, happiness, excitement, and tenderness.[3] The process of tracking and emphasizing these six remnant evolutionary instincts in every therapeutic session opens access to the original blocked source of a given story told by the client. Tracking emotions through an individual's emotional labyrinth leads to enlightenment as a puzzling piece of behavior is deciphered, an old adaptation is discarded, and the person feels a new wave of freedom. The goal is to renew animal fluidity granted by humanity's evolutionary ancestors, as seen in wild animals such as the cheetah.
Life force energy[edit]
From infancy, humans instinctively follow actions which allow them to stay alive. A baby signals the need for care by crying and moving of limbs. This reflex at the beginning of life exhibits an inherent blueprint of the principle of a well-developed, sustainable existence. The therapist realizes this as a hidden resource operative in clients, a life force energy, which desperately desires a good, satisfactory life. Thus the child registers insufficient care as a psychological trauma. Psychotherapy seeks to positively reconstruct the blueprint. Through a large number of therapeutic procedures, the therapist partners with the client to undo the original harm while installing new life-giving options. This first principle undergirds everything else done in therapy.
Modularity[edit]
Human minds and behavior consist of psychological parts. Each of us is an evolutionary composite rather than a solidly coherent thinking individual, as consciousness leads us to believe. Robert Ornstein is among the neuroscientists who insist that our brains are modular in development and action[6]. Clients come to realize that a given problematic behavior is only one part of their entire personality, a part that has a given structure and a source that can be either discarded or given a new role in one's makeup.
Presuppositions[edit]
Clients need relationships and want to learn how to develop good ones, especially in terms of raising children, dealing with family, and bonding to a spouse. Presuppositions provide an answer to this need and want. The basic idea is that each individual is necessarily and often unwittingly shaping others and can have great impact by choosing to do so positively.[7] Here, clients learn to take charge of this phenomenon and use linguistic options as they "tell others who they are."[8] When clients learn that they are actually helping significant others have a positive self-identity and fulfilling relationships, this process becomes a servant of life force energy rather than manipulation.
These five principles form the given realities of every therapeutic session. The goal, for both clients and their significant relationships, is soul liberation: freedom of being, freedom of thinking, freedom of bodily and psychological experience, and the daily activation of joy.
Who benefits[edit]
Adults who want to re-establish their primal human inheritance of freedom are potential clients.
Therapeutic method[edit]
 | This section contains instructions, advice, or how-to content. (July 2017) |
Liberation psychotherapy relies on both therapists and clients being completely transparent. Rather than being prescriptive, therapy sessions are cooperative with two individuals figuring matters out as equal partners.
While procedures are dictated by each session's needs, the prime approach uses questions about emotions. The therapist's aim is to assist the client in diagnosing positive and negative emotions and whether they are current or are triggered by past adaptations or past trauma. In seeking trauma resolution, the therapist frequently is led by the client as he or she gains familiarity with the process, to fully understand and work toward psychological freedom instead of mentally regressing to an old situation. Goals are to release the emotion, make a new decision in light of present day skills and resources, melt the body armor, reform patterns, make sure the need or want or wish is realized or dealt with substantially, and return to conscious, healthy thinking.
Other therapeutic considerations[edit]
One recurrent pattern in therapeutic situations is that clients judgmentally and moralistically grade their own emotions negatively. Some of these impulsive instincts are evolutionary in origin. They include:
Aggression. Humans are wired for fight or flight. Throughout eons of animal development, protection of one's own identity and that of the close family was necessary. Clients must learn that, because of their animal heritage, aggression is instinctual as is the urge to flee overwhelming predators. The task of therapy is to put this instinct in context and make sure that aggression is used only moderately and not with the intent to hurt others.
Fear of incest. The child has two automatic reactions when seeing parents kiss or engage in sexual activity: normal excitement as well as dread derived from the incest fear. Providing knowledge of normal emotions helps in this regard.
Maternal instinct. Mothers instinctively protect children. Human evolution would not have occurred if this were not true. Husbands may resent it when their spouses move their love energy to the newborn. Evolutionary knowledge is vital to understanding at this level.
Sexuality. Genital exchange is necessary to continue the species, and it is pleasurable. The goal is to have clients release sexual energy with an important other, practicing moderation, placing the sexual urge in the context of a cultured person who also has other needs and wants.
Survival. The need to stay alive sometimes conflicts with other instincts, for instance when a soldier inadvertently kills an innocent noncombatant. In this instance, the survival and aggression instincts leave those who have senselessly and physically hurt others in a double bind. Post-traumatic stress disorder clients need to realize the evolutionary basis of their non-intentional actions amid the chaos of combat.
Other natural instincts include nest building, language development, the urge to play, the desire to grow and learn, territorial imperative, tribal protection, fear of abandonment, and fear of strangers.[5] Awareness of normal animal instincts such as these provides answers to client dilemmas.
Questions and challenges[edit]
How does liberation psychotherapy develop principled reason when it begins with animal emotions? Response: Knowing emotions expands reason and opens the way to the development of conscious realities as the scope of awareness grows.
Where do values come into play? Response: In the past 10,000 years of human evolution five cultured sources of human values have appeared: commitment to beauty, the validity of scientific truth, the importance of legal justice, the family or tribal value of daily goodness, and the soul-fulfilling nature of love. These five values—beauty, truth, justice, goodness, and love[9]—are shared in sessions.
How does childhood bodily joy fit in this approach? Response: Joy and laughter at the irony of human creatures bubble up in nearly every session without any set teaching in this regard.
Does liberation psychotherapy advocate the use of legal drugs to facilitate homeostasis? Response: In rare cases, a referral is made to a psychiatrist in order for clients to get bodily peace so they can work on evolutionary and emotional aid.
Since humans instinctively want a sense of meaning[10], they often attach themselves to an ideology which unwittingly ruins mental health. What does liberation psychotherapy do to address this tendency? Response: This is a potential problem for any kind of therapy because ideologies seem to regress people back to the primary attachment of mother and infant. A therapeutic approach to this attachment generates massive resistance due to the fear of the infant within who is terrified of abandonment. Thus liberation psychotherapy has at times failed to free a client from infantile attachment to a poisonous ideology, whether religious, philosophical, or even economic. Doing so requires serious education and examination of the experience of the believer.[11]
See also[edit]
Rational-emotive behavior therapy
References[edit]
- ↑ Morris, Frank (2011). Liberation Psychotherapy: An Empirical System. Lulu Press. ISBN 9781847287229. Search this book on
- ↑ Morris, Frank (2008). The Freudian Labyrinth. Lulu Press. ISBN 978-1435714786. Search this book on
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Morris, Frank Reinhardt; Morris, Dix Lela Gescheidle (2014). Freedom Through Psychotherapy. CreateSpace. pp. 17–22. ISBN 9781505226157. Search this book on
- ↑ Darwin, Charles (2009). The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals. New York: Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0141439440. Search this book on
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Darwin, Charles (2009). The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780511694110. Search this book on
- ↑ Ornstein, Robert (2015). Multimind. Los Altos, CA: Malor Books. ISBN 978-1883536299. Search this book on
- ↑ Kierkegaard, Soren (2014). Provocations. Walden, New York: Plough Publishing House. ISBN 978-0874866438. Search this book on
- ↑ Morris, Frank Reinhardt (2011). Tell 'Em Who They Are: How Grandparents Change the World One Person at a Time. CreateSpace. ISBN 978-1460926222. Search this book on
- ↑ Morris, Frank Reinhardt (2016). The Evolutionary Logic of Liberation Psychotherapy: Human Nature in the 21st Century. CreateSpace. p. 87. ISBN 978-1535544030. Search this book on
- ↑ Frankl, Victor (2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0807014295. Search this book on
- ↑ Morris, Frank R. (2009). Poisonous Ideologies and Their Antidotes. Lulu Press. ISBN 978-0557180295. Search this book on
Further reading[edit]
Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, ISBN 978-0553214635 Search this book on .
Morris, Frank Reinhardt, How Freud Changed World Civilization, ISBN 978-1482096965 Search this book on .
Morris, Frank, Liberation Psychotherapy, ISBN 978-1847287229 Search this book on .
External links[edit]
PDF: What Is Liberation Psychotherapy, Scribd, retrieved July 18, 2017.
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