In this first post, I'd like to introduce you to a character, at left, that you will probably see quite a lot of if you follow this blog and the blog on my “Beat Depression” website.
In my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, I address the fact that every person who attends psychotherapy, counseling, talk therapy (whatever you want to call it), in all probability, shows some sort of face to the therapist that is not his or her authentic subconscious self. In my Af-x therapeutic work, I have proposed that much of what drives us at the deepest emotional (response) level and maintains our personality, our self-beliefs, and our day-to-day existence is non-verbal.
And when I say non-verbal, please accept that I mean it in its literal sense. The problem with 'therapy' (as we know it) is that in almost every case, it relies - not just heavily, but entirely - on your ability to verbalize your problems, your life, your experience of emotional imbalance and where it may have come from in the first place. If we look at the clear signals and data that are offered us by affective neuroscience, we now know that our emotional (affect) matrix and the way we set ourselves up to experience the world are laid down long before we have the ability to form words and cognitive ways of self-recognition. Depending on who and what you believe, we set up our emotional self-assessment at anywhere from 24 weeks into gestation to some time into infancy. In any case, long before what the neuroscientists call the "verbal emergent stage".
Since we then have no words, yet unconsciously REMEMBER the reactions that worked in our best interests (then) and form repetitions of those reactions and quickly build habits of them at unconscious level, science shows that we become who we are - at least as an emotional being - at a time when we 'had no words.' This, then, attests that the building of our emotional habits are what is called "state-specific" - existing today, more or less, in the state in which they were specifically learned and cemented in our subconscious character.
So it follows that if we are reacting and forming self-assessments today out of remnants of that learned before words, then they defy verbal description. I hope you are starting to see the circular reasoning I'm applying.
The whole of the work of Af-x Therapy proposes that (a) much of the deeper subconscious emotional patterning that is driving our stresses, anxieties and other emotional difficulties cannot be described, analyzed, actualized, using words as the tool for reporting, and that (b) in our society, in post-Freudian times, we labour under the cultural habit of thinking we HAVE TO use words to describe our problems and the causes of our problems.
We enter the therapist's rooms holding in front of us the face that tries to do what we believe it should do. ... talk. And when we find we can't actually delve deeply enough and 'words fail us,' why, then, we confabulate - try to make it up, either consciously or unintentionally.
This is why our friend in the picture above is significant to both therapists and clients in the world of Af-x Psychotherapy. He represents the authentic unconscious affect person hiding behind the mask that our culture and our professions have insisted he build. The tape over the mouth represents the dynamic of Af-x, where the client is disallowed from talking to the extent of wandering away from the true affect subconscious self.
As I said in the beginning of this post, you'll see a bit of him in the future as I from time to time mention the Af-x 'mind over chatter' dynamic. He represents that AVATAR - the self-built representation that is constructed to fool both therapist and client alike.
In my book, Beat Depression the Drug Free Way, I address the fact that every person who attends psychotherapy, counseling, talk therapy (whatever you want to call it), in all probability, shows some sort of face to the therapist that is not his or her authentic subconscious self. In my Af-x therapeutic work, I have proposed that much of what drives us at the deepest emotional (response) level and maintains our personality, our self-beliefs, and our day-to-day existence is non-verbal.
And when I say non-verbal, please accept that I mean it in its literal sense. The problem with 'therapy' (as we know it) is that in almost every case, it relies - not just heavily, but entirely - on your ability to verbalize your problems, your life, your experience of emotional imbalance and where it may have come from in the first place. If we look at the clear signals and data that are offered us by affective neuroscience, we now know that our emotional (affect) matrix and the way we set ourselves up to experience the world are laid down long before we have the ability to form words and cognitive ways of self-recognition. Depending on who and what you believe, we set up our emotional self-assessment at anywhere from 24 weeks into gestation to some time into infancy. In any case, long before what the neuroscientists call the "verbal emergent stage".
Since we then have no words, yet unconsciously REMEMBER the reactions that worked in our best interests (then) and form repetitions of those reactions and quickly build habits of them at unconscious level, science shows that we become who we are - at least as an emotional being - at a time when we 'had no words.' This, then, attests that the building of our emotional habits are what is called "state-specific" - existing today, more or less, in the state in which they were specifically learned and cemented in our subconscious character.
So it follows that if we are reacting and forming self-assessments today out of remnants of that learned before words, then they defy verbal description. I hope you are starting to see the circular reasoning I'm applying.
The whole of the work of Af-x Therapy proposes that (a) much of the deeper subconscious emotional patterning that is driving our stresses, anxieties and other emotional difficulties cannot be described, analyzed, actualized, using words as the tool for reporting, and that (b) in our society, in post-Freudian times, we labour under the cultural habit of thinking we HAVE TO use words to describe our problems and the causes of our problems.
We enter the therapist's rooms holding in front of us the face that tries to do what we believe it should do. ... talk. And when we find we can't actually delve deeply enough and 'words fail us,' why, then, we confabulate - try to make it up, either consciously or unintentionally.
This is why our friend in the picture above is significant to both therapists and clients in the world of Af-x Psychotherapy. He represents the authentic unconscious affect person hiding behind the mask that our culture and our professions have insisted he build. The tape over the mouth represents the dynamic of Af-x, where the client is disallowed from talking to the extent of wandering away from the true affect subconscious self.
As I said in the beginning of this post, you'll see a bit of him in the future as I from time to time mention the Af-x 'mind over chatter' dynamic. He represents that AVATAR - the self-built representation that is constructed to fool both therapist and client alike.
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