I Would Like to Read about It--Especially Re: CMT

• Psychotherapy is a science by Joe Weiss, 5/15/97
  • BRAVO! by Jim Duffy, 5/16/97
    • The Truth Hurts- sometimes by Jessica, 5/21/97
      
      

Jessica, I would indeed like to read about the parabolic trend you reluctantly discovered in the acquisition of insight--and especially so if the insight concerned one derived from Control Mastery Theory (CMT). As you may know from some of my postings in the Shame and Affect Theory Forum, I have a keen interest in sympathy. Sympathy cannot be understood without understanding the concept of altruism, and altruism is a difficult concept for many persons to understand (much less appreciate in its innumerable misdirections, as is appreciated in CMT)within our cultural climate so dominated by an individualistic ethos with its many supporting intellectual traditions. Among these supporting intellectual traditions is the legacy of Freudian drive theory (id-analysis, mostly) in which human beings are seen as fundamentally and thoroughly self-seeking.

Succinctly put, what CMT does most for me is continually help balance this cultural bias and intellectual legacy. CMT has been tremendously helpful personally and professionally in discovering the many ways in which what so often looks like excessive or otherwise symptomatic self-seeking is compelled by a quite insistent underlying misdirected altruistic relational component. This is not only a valuable theory of individual psychotherapy but a bady needed corrective to a cultural view of human beings that misunderstands both (1) the ways in which their strong inclination to treat others benevolently goes awry and (2) the ways in which they may be ready and able to respond slowly and awkwardly to being treated benevolently after things have gone awry. CMT brings beacons of light to both of these areas of dark misunderstanding. This intellectual balance, in correcting the implicit self-seeking biases that disregard human benevolence, is what I have found so valuable about CMT. A hand full of other theories are helping to bring balance of course, but only CMT has so clear a focus on the human altruistic inclination.

Several years ago I began I large literature review to find all the things wrong with the concept of reistance to psychotherapy and to find all the alternative ways to conceptualize what it is that folks are trying to talk about when they use the word "resistance." Through this huge project I came to several conclusions. Included among these conclusions is my rather obvious assertion that "resitance" as a term to refer to the difficulties someone has who voluntarily and in good-faith seeks therapy, can reflect a failure of imagination on the part of the therapist. This failure of imagination can occur less often if one can turn reverse one's thinking and see "resistence" not as a sign of weakness or irrationality or any other unglamorous thing but rather as persistence--in a misdirected but understandable expression of altruism (in protecting the affect-management techniques and procedures that developed to safeguard limiting--but the only-available--self-object connections one used to construct a personality). Such persistence is an expression of the human being's adaptive strength and ought not be abandoned until one has erected many difficult interpersonal/affective tests for others to pass. These tests are reality probes used to determine if it is really safe and wise to experiment with any other adaptation such as one that would permit a more gratifying emotional life. (Did you notice hints of two of my other favorite theories in parentheses?)

...................... If you can give me a reference citation (for your insight experiment), I can probably track it down if its published somewhere.

• sympathetic understandings by Jessica, 5/23/97