![[Go To Home Page]](butncact.gif){kind=small}
![[FAQ in motion]](faq_move.gif) |
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS |
1. Do you hypnotize people when you make deep-feeling contact with them?
Never. Hypnosis is a trance (an altered state of consciousness) which depends on the internalization of attention. When I emotionally contact people, I have them pay attention to what is going on inside them and, simultaneously, pay attention to my deep feeling of the moment. Making people look at me breaks up trance because people have to externalize their attention to some degree. Recall that looking at another person breaks up the trance that sometimes happens with intense deep feelings when a person "gets lost" in his or her deep feelings and then completely re-lives a difficult past event. This re-living has no therapeutic value.
Link: | Table of FAQs
2. Do seriously mentally ill people, like schizophrenics and manics, get well after deep-feeling contact?
They get better. Most people, after deep-feeling contact, avoid acknowledging their deep emotion, in spite of what I've asked them to do. As a result, they creep toward health. A few people work at their deep emotion and they do get well. Almost everyone who underwent deep-feeling contact eventually managed to live his or her life without depending on the mental health system. Two or three very crazy people stayed that way. But then, no one forced these very crazy people to keep acknowledging their deep emotion.
The last thing I want from the parents of an autistic child is for them to believe that deep-feeling contact is a magical cure for their child. It is not. Deep-feeling contact merely opens up a special channel of communication between parents and their child. Parents still have to use that channel consistently or else almost nothing will happen and their child will remain the same, perhaps "creeping" toward health over the years as the seriously mentally ill people did after deep-feeling contact.
Link: | Table of FAQs
3. How does deep-feeling contact impact multiple personality disorder? Do you have to make deep-feeling contact with each separate personality?
Fortunately, deep-feeling contact seems to work on the single body, as opposed to the many minds, of a person with multiple personality disorder. So if I emotionally contact one personality (alter), then I have emotionally contacted all of them. Deep emotions, like the body, comprise a "common ground" that is shared by all the personalities. So deep emotions become an integrating force for people with multiple personality disorder.
Link: | Table of FAQs
4. Are people who are emotionally contacted in the first six weeks of life, that is native communicators, mentally well?
No. They have their troubles just like everybody else. They do seem to navigate society better than noncommunicators do. People who are emotionally contacted as newborns get one mental illness, depression, which is sometimes severe. They never get one of the other "major" mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. In addition, they never seem to become demented in old age like people with Alzheimer's disease do. At least I have never met a demented person who was a communicator. That is why I say that communicative status supports social awareness and connections.
Link: | Table of FAQs
5. Then does deep-feeling contact improve dementias like Alzheimer's disease?
Yes, it does. Emotional contact never restores lost memory cells. But it makes demented people more independent of a caretaker because they make strong connections with society. They still have to write everything down because their memory-function is terrible. But always bear in mind: most demented people are old (55 and over). And old people sometimes die and die quickly instead of going through the inner changes caused by deep-feeling contact.
Link: | Table of FAQs
6. Are you a native communicator?
No. I am a naturalized communicator. I was a noncommunicator until the spring of 1972. At that time I was "accidentally" contacted emotionally at work during an encounter group or training group (T-group) which dealt with feelings so as to reduce tensions in the workplace. It took me years to figure out what happened to me and how to apply it to helping others with their deep feelings.
Link: | Table of FAQs
7. Is Learning Deep Feelings the same as therapy?
No. The one process and one operation of Learning Deep Feelings are physical acts.
The Massachusetts Medical Board (1994) defines therapy this way:
For the purposes of these guidelines, the practice of psychotherapy (in contrast to "counseling" as done routinely in most forms of medical practice) is defined as the intentional use of verbal techniques to explore or alter the patient's emotional life in order to effect symptom reduction or behavior change. . . .
Everything in the Massachusetts definition applies to Learning Deep Feelings except for the two words "verbal techniques." In Learning Deep Feelings, helping a person acknowledge deep feelings and making deep-feeling contact with him or her are completely physical acts, which may be done without words, much like riding a bicycle and trimming a horse's hoof. Certainly, some verbal instruction may be useful to persons who want to learn their deep feelings or ride a bicycle or trim a hoof. But after the talking is done, the learner must DO expertly guided acts with a helper if the learner wants to master the new behavior in a reasonable amount of time.
Cognitive therapy's shortcoming is that it gives little or no attention to acknowledging deep feelings. On the other hand, cognitive therapy gives great attention to words and thoughts so that verbal techniques are the base of cognitive therapy.
Karasu (1992, p 65) confirms the verbal nature of therapy:
Psychotherapy is a primarily verbal interaction, which has as the basis of treatment the patient's words and their meaning. It is therefore incumbent upon the clinician, first and foremost, to be a good listener. . . .
For helpers with Learning Deep Feelings, I would say that listening is less important than "reading" deep feelings. And helpers' ability to "read" comes from the freedom and fluidity they show with their own deep feelings.
Behavioral therapy's shortcoming is that it gives no attention to opening and using the deep-feeling communication channel. On the other hand, behavioral therapy gives great attention to describing outer behaviors and to forming those behaviors by way of words so that verbal techniques are the base of behavioral therapy.
Link: | Table of FAQs
8. Is Learning Deep Feelings a "talking cure"?
Not really, because Learning Deep Feelings has little or nothing to do with words and thoughts. The purpose of Learning Deep Feelings is to produce a behavior in a person, namely, the acknowledgment of his or her deep emotions. I do use words to bring people's attention to their deep emotions. That wouldn't work too well with prelingual kids who have autism. So I use the contagion of deep emotion. That is, I work with a group in which at least one person can talk. I have that person acknowledge his or her deep emotion of the moment. That deep emotion immediately stirs the uppermost deep emotion of everyone present, including mute people. I say "uppermost" because there is no need for other people's deep emotion to match or even be consistent with the deep emotion of the person whom I initially helped to acknowledge his or her deep emotion.
So talk is a means to an end: the experience of deep emotion. By the way, no "cure" is envisioned. Exercising the deep-affect communication channel with communicators is the main activity in Learning Deep Feelings groups.
Link: | Table of FAQs
9. Is Learning Deep Feelings related to psychoanalysis?
No. I gave up on psychoanalysis long ago. I also gave up on the "son of psychoanalysis," which is Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis (TA). I abandoned both systems because they were no help with the very ill clients whom I had to work with. Could I make an interpretation to a schizophrenic client and expect that client to pay attention to the interpretation or even pay attention to me? Never. I worked hard to teach my less crazy clients about TA: rituals, pastimes, games and transactions. But my clients never applied, and quickly forgot, everything I presented to them.
Link: | Table of FAQs
10. Do you have any outcome data to support Learning Deep Feelings?
No. Learning Deep Feelings came from my work with adults over the past 25 years. During that time period, nobody was interested in supporting research on emotions. All the attention and money went into research on medications.
During those 25 years, I sometimes thought about trying deep-feeling contact and deep-feeling acknowledgment with an autistic child but I never seemed to get around to it. Then, in early 1997, Jason arrived and changed everything. (Please see Contacting Jason.) Suddenly, autism was a hot topic for me. And from my reading I've gathered that people have little interest in autism unless autism strikes someone they love.
Outcome research with Learning Deep Feelings should be fairly straightforward: Starting with a number of autistic children, randomly assign each of them to one of three equal-sized groups. With the first group, do nothing involving deep feelings. With the second group, do only deep-feeling contact, nothing more. With the third group, do both deep-feeling contact and deep-feeling acknowledgment. Let raters who are blind to everyone's group membership track each child's progress or regression over time with standard measurement instruments.
If the numbers look promising, get three more equal-sized groups and repeat the experiment, this time controlling for the placebo effect. I have noticed that some autism researchers fail to control for the placebo effect, which may confound autism treatments as much as it confounds schizophrenia treatments. Give people enough attention and they get better no matter what treatment strategy you use.
In other words, the placebo effect occurs because, at this time, all treatment strategies are nonspecific and equal so long as they expend sufficient time and effort on the autistic person. Consequently, all strategies, however much they may contradict one another logically, produce similar outcomes clinically.
Link: | Table of FAQs
11. You go on about social interventions for serious mental illnesses. What do you think about psychiatric medications?
Psychiatric medications are a miracle. Let me illustrate with a story.
In the early 1960s, I toured a large, old-fashioned state mental hospital. The tour went through a large dayroom, the size of a gymnasium. The room was sunny and pleasant. Scores of people lounged around. My gaze was directed upward. To the dayroom's ceiling, some 40 feet overhead, clung numerous clumps of desiccated feces, flung and stuck there years ago by people consumed with madness. The state did not yet have the money, time, scaffolding and motivation needed to take down the dried human dung.
Psychiatric medications have removed much of the horror and lethality of severe mental disorders so they are truly miracle drugs. But all medication lies somewhere on the spectrum between palliation and cure. (Please see the Afterword of this presentation.) Medication can never bring about health, which must come from within the person. Please see the comparison between Learning Deep Feelings and the care of horses' hooves.
Link: | Table of FAQs
12. How do I become helper with deep feelings?
To become a helper with deep feelings, you must first be, or become, a communicator with respect to deep feelings. The chances are about one in ten that you are already a native communicator. Unfortunately, that makes the chances about nine out of ten that you are a noncommunicator.
So the first task is diagnostic: to determine if you are a communicator or a noncommunicator. This task requires perhaps 20 minutes of face-to-face interviewing. You should never feel ashamed that you are a noncommunicator; your status as a noncommunicator was never your choice but was the result of your inherited neurochemistry and the culture surrounding you as a newborn.
If you are a noncommunicator and if the risk to you is minimal, my partner, a woman, and I will make deep-feeling contact with you and you will afterward be a communicator for the rest of your life. Deep-feeling contact takes only a moment to occur and NEVER involves body-to-body touching between adults. After deep-feeling contact, you become a naturalized communicator.
Over the years I have learned that, whether you are a native communicator or a naturalized communicator, your effectiveness as a helper with deep feelings depends mostly on the freedom and fluidity you show with YOUR OWN deep feelings. So my partner and I will make you practice, practice, practice acknowledging your deep feelings. We will videotape these practice sessions so that you can later view the tapes as further practice with acknowledging your deep feelings.
Consider carefully whether or not you want to undergo Learning Deep Feelings because it permanently revolutionizes the personality from within. If you are a noncommunicator and become a communicator, all the relationships with adults in your life will change, sometimes drastically. I am sure that some of those relationships will end. I also predict that all the relationships with children (under age 21) in your life will change too, but always for the better.
As a naturalized communicator, your emotional life with other people is like walking through an endless day-care center which is overflowing with screaming infants, all of whom are physically beyond infancy but are emotionally under age two and often much younger. When you were a noncommunicator, you never noticed that the world of people is a gigantic infant-care facility because you yourself were one of its youngsters screaming for attention and love.
Link: | Table of FAQs
13. Did you ever have a mental health problem?
You bet. I was almost continuously depressed from my late teens to my early thirties, a period of 12 or 13 years. Fortunately, I had enough energy to remain functional. I never tried suicide, needed hospitalization or took antidepressants. (Thirty years ago, antidepressants were either dangerous or crude or both.) But I was stressed and miserable nearly the whole time.
Because of some lucky events, my depression lifted spontaneously one day. I felt good. Feeling good was so unusual for me that I thought something was wrong with me. I set out to discover what was happening to me. A supervisor and psychoanalyst (Louis Paul, MD) gave me a most valuable hint: emotions are the key to psychiatric problems.
Of course, my depression returned off and on but I was on my way to uncovering the mechanism of my depression. This Web site presents my findings. I developed and used my techniques with a host of clients and their depressions got better too. I can no longer remember the last time I was depressed. I know it was brief and very long ago.
Link: | Table of FAQs
14. How do therapists view Learning Deep Feelings?
Unfavorably, as a rule. I wrote the following letter in response to therapists' criticism:
My Dear [Therapists],
You have analyzed my intervention with S.R. by forcing it onto the procrustean couch of cognition. Consequently, you concluded, "There is ample evidence that the therapeutic frame and therapeutic boundaries are distorted. It is the responsibility of the [helper] to maintain the appropriate frame and boundaries. Without these in place, any pretense of treatment is obviated."
That's not the half of it. My intervention does more than distort frames and boundaries, it annihilates them. So you rightly worry: "We are concerned that the [helper's] countertransference enactments are boundary violations." Regrettably, you have forgotten that "the countertransference cures." (Attributed to Wilhelm Stekel, a contemporary of Freud's.)
I know my boundaries well. But they are not the boundaries of the mind; they are the boundaries of the heart. My purpose with S.R. is intimacy: never the intimacy of sex and always the intimacy of the mother-newborn emotional bond, which I have adapted so that it takes place between adults.
Eric Berne regarded intimacy as the high point of human interaction. I disagree. To me, intimacy, once attained, loses its importance. But unattained, it remains a Holy Grail which captivates our attention and impedes our further learning.
Before we leave countertransference, let me say what mine is. I intended that S.R. get the gift of intimacy without putting her well being in danger. (Intimacy has its hazards if one is unprepared for it.) Years ago I got the gift of intimacy. It saved me from early death, my son from manic-depressive illness, my daughter from schizophrenia, my daughter-in-law from alcoholism, and my grandson from autism. I am grateful to S.R. for taking the gift and letting me pay back some of my debt for the great gift that I and my family have received.
If you insist on seeing my intervention through the dark glass of cognition, then you will observe only shadows where colors abound. And I will seem a wild man engaged in dimly lit and reckless acts: "They [boundary violations] are repetitive; not attenuated (the [helper] does not catch himself as they emerge and attempt to understand them); impervious to scrutiny in the supervision context (supervisor efforts to examine these enactments were met with the [helper's] excuses and justifications instead of careful consideration)."
In the full-color world of emotion, I am disciplined, experienced and precise. Unfortunately, either I lack the skill or you lack the will that would let you understand my intervention. Endless cognitive mappings, by you or by me, will never reveal its true nature. Only emotional experience will do that. As Korzybski (1958, p 58) said, "A map is not the territory."
Yours,
Link: | Table of FAQs
15. Has anyone else written about deep-feeling contact?
Yes. Since the early 1970s, midwives, neonatologists, nurses, pediatricians (Klaus et al. 1995) and psychologists have recognized that a solid emotional connection between parent and newborn produces a happy and healthy baby. Consequently, these professionals encourage emotional bonding between parent and newborn. Various measures promote this bonding: breastfeeding from shortly after birth onward, cuddling, eye contact, face-to-face positioning, face-to-face proximity, low-stress environments, privacy, rooming in, singing, skin-to-skin contact, spending a lot of time together, talking and withholding medication that interferes with emotional interaction such as narcotics.
All these measures constitute the adjuvants of emotional contact. Yet the exact nature of this contact is never defined. Nor is there a precise procedure for ensuring that emotional contact occurs in every case. Adjuvants promote measurable bonding when groups are studied and compared. However, apart from obvious successes and failures, certainty about the presence or absence of bonding in a particular parent-child pair remains elusive.
In this Internet presentation, I defined the exact nature of emotional bonding, that is, deep-feeling contact. I described a precise procedure for attaining that bond in every case. Finally, I provided a diagnostic tool to determine with certainty whether the bonding has succeeded or failed in any given case.
A former colleague of mine (Edelhofer), found one and only one literature reference that clearly described deep-feeling contact between a psychotherapist and a patient. Kovacs (1982 pp 151-152) wrote:
I had occasion to treat a young black woman whose progress as a surgical resident was being hampered by serious free-floating anxiety attacks and by fatigue engendered by chronic insomnia. During her first visit, she related how important she felt success at her chosen vocation to be. Her mother had herself been a surgeon, an important achievement for a black woman of her generation. When my patient was twelve, she and the mother were cooking dinner together. The mother suddenly slumped to the floor, gasping in pain and clutching her chest. The girl ran to neighbors on both sides, yelling for help. No one was home. She finally thought to dial "Operator" and to blurt out hysterically that her mother was unconscious. The paramedics were summoned. It took them a long time to arrive. The mother was becoming cyanotic. My patient kept rocking her dying mother and pleading with her not to die. The paramedics initiated CPR and tried to defibrillate the heart, but to no avail. The mother was declared dead on arrival at the hospital.
It is important to note at this point that my young patient told me this agonizing tale in an incredibly flat voice. It was as if she were relating the medical history of one of her patients, rather than a lacerating vision of one of the most painfully significant moments of her life. As she talked, and as I noted the awful discrepancy between the content of her thoughts and her antiseptic manner, I began to remember all the events surrounding the death of my own mother from cancer about ten years ago. I revisited the anguish of those days and as I once again explored my own chamber of horrors, I, myself, began to weep. My patient was startled. She stopped her narrative for a moment, noticed the tears streaming down my cheeks, and asked me what I was crying about. I told her about my mother. I related that I had been touched by her memories and that these had opened doors for me behind which I had locked my own memories. I told her that life was awful; nothing was permanent, and no one I had ever loved had stayed with me as long as I had wanted them to stay. Then I began to sob in earnest. At this point, my patient began to cry.
A few weeks later I learned that she had felt terribly guilty about her mother's death, that she believed she should have done something more or something greater to have kept her mother alive. In addition, her father was so obviously overcome by grief at the shared event of the mother's death that my patient felt a strong pull to "hold herself together." Besides, she was the oldest child in the family. So she had become a zombie and had embraced her mother's role and her mother's career to expiate the sin of her impotence in the face of death. It took only about six weeks to relieve her distress. But the night of the day we first met--the night that I felt touched by her and cried--was the first night in months that she actually had a good night's sleep.
Link: | Table of FAQs
16. Learning Deep Feelings sounds intrusive. Is it?
Yes. Learning Deep Feelings is more than intrusive, it is invasive. There are plenty of kinder, gentler alternatives to Learning Deep Feelings, for example, the client-centered or Rogerian therapies. I suggest that these kinder, gentler therapies waste precious time in their efforts to keep the client comfortable. A.E. Housman reminds us that there is no time to lose:
...'Tis late to harken, late to smile,
But better late than never.
I shall have lived a little while,
Before I die forever.
Link: | Table of FAQs
Link: | Table of FAQs
![[Previous Page]](butnprev.gif){kind=small} |
References & Citations |
![[Next Page]](butnnext.gif){kind=small} |
Afterword: Four Ways to Take On Suffering |
| Links: | |||
|---|---|---|---|
![[Page List]](btngplst.jpg){kind=small}
|
![[Home Page]](btnghome.jpg){kind=small}
|
![[Table of Contents]](btngtofc.jpg){kind=small}
|
![[Index of Words and Phrases]](btnginx.jpg){kind=small}
|
![[Valid XHTML 1.0!]](ok_xhtml.gif){kind=small}
|
![[Valid CSS!]](ok_css.gif){kind=small}
|
||