That sounds to me like a challenge or shared experience and communication, not what i would characterize as empathy.
Why does a therapist need to understand the details of a psychedelic experience? It seems like what would be more important is how that experience changes how the patient experiences more everyday events. And that is probably easier to imagine.
I do think it’s possible to describe these altered states of consciousness with some effectiveness. There is a long tradition of describing this in a religious or mystical experience. I think there are also books describing more modern, psychedelic experiences, although i have not read anything from them.
I think he’s claiming that it’s a “describing colors to a blind man” sort of thing.
I don’t think anyone except John is contending that a therapist has to have experienced the same issues in order to be effective. Certainly, there are places where a common experience helps - that’s part of the point of AA sponsors, I think. But I don’t see any support for thinking that is a necessary condition for a therapist.
(IMO) Most people are born with some empathy genes. They are then harnessed or retarded by parents and peers during in the nurture stage.
Any other questions?
This answer pretty much every answer when it comes to nature/nurture. Maybe change “most” with “some” or “very few” in other cases, such as high intelligence or athletic skills.
People don’t see therapists to have a friend to share experiences with. They try to make friends for that. They seek out therapists to improve their lives.
The manic person can tell the therapist, “i feel great when I’m manic, but then i get depressed, and i have to clean up the messes that i made when i was manic”. And the therapist can work to address that issue without needing to know what it feels like.
I read a comment by a doctor the other day about how to treat delusional patients. He said that the ethical thing is to acknowledge what they believe, and not waste energy trying to dissuade them, but rather to focused on shared goals. So, he had a patient who believed his flesh was full of fibers. It wasn’t. But what the doctor said was, “try this drug. It won’t remove fibers from your flesh, but it might help make them bother you less.” And that worked. In fact, the patient still believed those fibers were there, but was able to function because the drug lessened the sensation of fibers ripping his flesh, and rarely thought about them when he took the drug.
Makes sense. but in cases where there aren’t a known drug, and it’s purely psychotherapy? Doesn’t the therapist need to know how it feels?
And perhaps it doesn’t need to be specifically about mental illness.
The best pediatric dentist knows how to navigate a child’s fears. But the fear of dentist isn’t something you learn, but rather you empathize with because you’ve been there yourself. Without first hand experience, how can you possibly know what that fear is like? You need to fear something in life to be able to relate, and the closer to the actual experience the better. Someone who’s not afraid of heights can probably borrow his experience from fear of spiders. But someone who’s never feared anything cannot just conjure the feeling from studying.
No because psychotherapy is about the patient discovering the cause of their problem, not the psychotherapist fixing it. The basic idea is that by discovering and revealing the issue to themselves, they can then confront it and deal with it.
There are all sorts of techniques to help people overcome fear and phobias. Empathy is not required to teach any of them. A therapist may be better at teaching the techniques if they have experienced the same type of thing, but it is definitely not needed. I don’t need to have a fear of flying to use exposure therapy to treat it in someone else.
re ethics, I meant to say that the therapist shouldn’t lie, and pretend to believe the patient, but they also don’t need to argue about it. The point is to work within the parts of reality they both share.
You can understand that the manic person does stuff they later regret without understanding exactly what motivates them to do that.
I guess sometimes the issue is, especially when it comes to mental states, it can be very hard to word it out. Usually it’s much easier to relate it to some other experience.
I have this feeling X. You’ve never had that feeling, but it is kind of like feeling Y, just a lot more intense, and imagine also a little bit of feeling Z mixed in.
But if X is such a feeling that you simply cannot draw parallels to it, or worse the therapist has never experienced Y or Z either, then you literally cannot explain your symptoms. Thus there’s no way to treat you.
And that is why they go through years of training. They are literally professionals at being able to get you to explain to them what is wrong and then turn those explanations into a diagnosis.
Like when doctors say a procedure is on a certain pain level but it’s completely off the scales compared to what you actually feel, you immediately lose trust in the doctor. They’re kinda just playing guess work at that point.
It is call the “practice” of medicine for a reason. I wouldn’t want anybody on this planet to have felt every emotion/feeling that every person has went through. I concur with others that the practitioner is searching for a diagnosis and can reference medical literature for assistance.
With the internet, there is a lot of self-study/self-diagnosis that one can do (for better and worse). There are also message boards/forums specific to certain conditions. Mental health is very broad - there will be some conditions that each psychologist will know very little about.
Allegedly taking psychoactive drugs tests you’re thought patterns and can be super therapeutic in its own right. One could use LSD or mushrooms and reset and then go to a therapist and keep from falling back into poor behavior patterns.