This. Is. Brilliant. So well written!!!! It should be required reading for anyone anywhere who teaches people how to do therapy, who administers a therapy practice and/or people already providing therapy. Like the old person I am, I have copied and pasted this post into a Word document and saved it to my computer. I plan to show it to any and all therapists I hire for myself going forward. Thank you so much, Christine, for taking the time to write this, really thinking all this through.
Everything you've written here is consistent with the research I have read about the nature of the **relationship** (e.g. characterized by non-judgmental witnessing of the client's pain?) between client and therapist being the primary determinant of the efficacy of therapy provided (as opposed to what exact therapeutic modality is used, e.g. CBT versus IFS, EMDR, SE, etc.)
However, that said, my experience has been that when it comes to healing trauma, nothing beats the somatically-focussed methods, such as IFS, EMDR, and of course SE. And the deeper the better. But how can a client be expected to "go deep" if they can't/don't trust the therapist? Of course they can't unless the rapport is there. Trust must be earned. And nothing in the way of "concrete, measurable progress" can occur if the client does not feel safe enough with the therapist (or that the therapist is competent enough to "get" the client).
One of the traits I have noticed of my fellow RTSers (folks with Religious Trauma Syndrome) is a tendency at sometimes to retreat into intellectualizing as a way of avoiding confronting, or, even more threatening, accepting, and communing with, certain sensations and/or emotions that fundamentalist religionistas would deem "sinful" or "dangerous" or "disgusting." This type of dissociation and/or living "in one's head" is consistent with living in a body whose mind has become a torture chamber after one has been threatened she must, upon pain of eternal conscious torment for failing to think the "correct" thoughts and thus feel the "correct" feelings--also known as ***believe*** the right way, "take every thought captive" by any means necessary, so, likely by force, as in efforting in the style of self-shaming, living the adrenalized lifestyle style that we the dopamine-starved who've exiled our hypothalamus for its "sinfulness" are destined to lead, **striving** to love what we hate--by sheer force of will. Retreating out of the body and up into one's mind, abandoning the body, trying to extinguish or at least displace the supposedly corrupt self that is supposedly corrupt due to one's own sinfulness, to replace that self with Some Punitive Adoration-seeking Mind-reading Spirit (SPAMS) is consistent with the brain damage many traumatized children's bodies show, which is an unusually large prefrontal cortex.
So, yeah. I share your hatred of CBT. (Although I did save my own life with it in the early '90s, when I was instructed in it from the almost totally emotionally tone-deaf therapist at the student health center assigned to take my case--poor him--at the university I was attending when I had my apostasy and became viciously suicidal. Ironically, the only reason I did not kill myself was my fear of being sent to hell by evangelical Christianity's "all-loving" and "all-powerful" deity, whom I had finally realized I was just not able to love).
Dashing to get this posted. Triaging a crisis with our little foster dog, here. But wanted to say well done. And thank you so, so very much. 30 billion other units of insight to articulate, but can't right now. All the love and all the power to you, my dear friend.
Thank you. I’ve said for years that I can’t go to CBT or consciously use it because of how it was overtly (in our church of the time) linked to taking thoughts captive and being transformed by the renewing of your mind. The whole thing makes me squirm, feel sick, and guilty. It is so good to hear someone talking about this link and confirming my experience.
I’ve seen therapists who have used a person centred approach, my current one very much so - which is hard work because I have to decide what to talk about, and then talk my way through it, to find my own realisations and answers … which is hard, but which also suits me rather than have ‘answers’ presented.
And the not believing in a wrathful God who will send me to eternal conscious torment in hell…but being scared of ending up suffering ect in hell… oh spot on!
It’s been a shock to me how hard it is to find pediatric mental health support that really takes seriously my child’s inner world. Even when descriptions of the modality seem to indicate the approach I’m looking for, it all feels so behavioral. Why is it so hard for the field of pediatric mental health to understand that I don’t want to manipulate my child into overcoming her fear; I want to be with her in her fear and help her body find it’s way back to safety?
And yeah, CBT feels very gaslight-y to me. Like, an accurate perception of the world is traumatizing, because the world is traumatizing. Lying to myself about the world, and telling myself the lies are more “accurate” doesn’t help. But somatic practices to help my body find its way to safety, even in a fucked-up world, make a huge difference.
Thanks for this, Christine. I feel similarly. It feels to me like CBT is helpful in limited ways, and it can only help you be more successful in our culture without recognizing or challenging the cultural pressures that maintain a level of stress on you. Change your thoughts and behaviors so you can be acceptable to God, or change your thoughts so you can be more productive, and thus feel more worthy and be more acceptable. Whatever the normative cultural values are that are creating pressure on you, be it religious or capitalist meritocracy values, it's still pressure that amounts to chronic stress, which affects us the same way as trauma. I mean PTSD does stand for Post-traumatic STRESS disorder. I'm going to try not to go on a rant here, but even having the word disorder on that, and pretty much everything in the DSM, is another related problem to the skills-based treatment expectations of managed care. This is a normal response to stress and trauma! Not a disorder. Okay, I'm going to stop myself here and not go on a further rant about this. Thank you for the light touch in your article. I can get intense about it so fast! One additional thing - I love Jennifer Mullan's new book Decolonizing Therapy, which is an amazing critique and hopeful path forward out of CBT-based, managed care-based, disorder-based treatment, to collaborative individual and systemic care.
Back when I was a nervous evangelical first entering therapy, I ended up in CBT. I did that for a few years, and it was helpful for a while. But the seismic shifts for me really started after I switched to EMDR. Thank you for shedding a light on the fact that one-size-fits-all solutions aren't the answer to finding individual or collective healing!
Christine, RIGHT ON!! EXACTLY!!! I spent my life using CBT-like affirmations, especially in a Christian context trying to change my thinking. It NEVER worked. It's like putting frosting on a cowpie. It might look like cake, but it's still a disgusting sham! I only found healing after going deep to find and heal the places where the trauma and painful thoughts and emotions started. No amount of "bringing every thought captive" ever worked for me! Great realization, btw, of the equivalence of CBT with evangelical belief. I don't know if I saw it before, but I sure do now!
You've just made me think that, as I choose a therapist after a couple years of serious trauma, that I might be better off with a shiny new one rather than an "experienced" one who might not be up to speed - internally - on modern neuroscience.
This is such a great insight, thank you for sharing. I’m wondering what an equivalent religious somatic response for working on those religious fears and traumas would be - do you think there is one?
As a progressive Christian pastor who cares a lot about mental health, I’m super grateful for this window into CBT and how it can be problematic for people recovering from high-control religion. I’d never even heard the phrase “taking thoughts captive”… [shudder]
My question is, thoughts on DBT? It’s been the best thing to help my teen kids learn to process and self-regulate… and also to help us as parents help them. I like that so much of it is somatically oriented (eg the TIPP technique) but is more accessible to me as their parental support than, say, EMDR. But DBT does include some skills that address one’s thoughts/cognitive distortions, so perhaps it’s similarly triggering?
OMG, Christine! Your article gave me a major deconstructive realization. Judeo-Christianity is foundationally flawed: When Moses went up the mountain, he had a transformative direct encounter with God (assuming the Bible account is true) that made his hair white and his face glow, but he came down the mountain with the equivalent of CBT, a list of behavioral commands. Right from the start Judaism substituted rote belief and behavior for genuine deep transformative spiritual experience. It's no wonder our culture always loves the quick and shallow fix, including psychological ones. Psychology just follows an age-old fundamentally flawed cultural pattern. But anybody who has experienced true deep psychological healing knows how it differs from shallow behavioral therapy just as surface belief is no substitute for genuine life-changing profound spiritual encounters.
Hey Christine! It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about the religious trauma found in 12 steps. I would like to tell my story now, just don’t know how. If you could email me I’d sure appreciate it. I need to get my story out so it never happens to anyone needing to find recovery…
I so relate to this! I received CBT through a govt program for postpartum depression (thank you Canadian healthcare) and while it did give me a few tools, it often ended up being so frustrating. Mindfulness and looking for "thinking traps" = no match for C-PTSD. I was so grateful to eventually find a therapist who specialized in family dysfunction who directed me to EMDR.
This. Is. Brilliant. So well written!!!! It should be required reading for anyone anywhere who teaches people how to do therapy, who administers a therapy practice and/or people already providing therapy. Like the old person I am, I have copied and pasted this post into a Word document and saved it to my computer. I plan to show it to any and all therapists I hire for myself going forward. Thank you so much, Christine, for taking the time to write this, really thinking all this through.
Everything you've written here is consistent with the research I have read about the nature of the **relationship** (e.g. characterized by non-judgmental witnessing of the client's pain?) between client and therapist being the primary determinant of the efficacy of therapy provided (as opposed to what exact therapeutic modality is used, e.g. CBT versus IFS, EMDR, SE, etc.)
However, that said, my experience has been that when it comes to healing trauma, nothing beats the somatically-focussed methods, such as IFS, EMDR, and of course SE. And the deeper the better. But how can a client be expected to "go deep" if they can't/don't trust the therapist? Of course they can't unless the rapport is there. Trust must be earned. And nothing in the way of "concrete, measurable progress" can occur if the client does not feel safe enough with the therapist (or that the therapist is competent enough to "get" the client).
One of the traits I have noticed of my fellow RTSers (folks with Religious Trauma Syndrome) is a tendency at sometimes to retreat into intellectualizing as a way of avoiding confronting, or, even more threatening, accepting, and communing with, certain sensations and/or emotions that fundamentalist religionistas would deem "sinful" or "dangerous" or "disgusting." This type of dissociation and/or living "in one's head" is consistent with living in a body whose mind has become a torture chamber after one has been threatened she must, upon pain of eternal conscious torment for failing to think the "correct" thoughts and thus feel the "correct" feelings--also known as ***believe*** the right way, "take every thought captive" by any means necessary, so, likely by force, as in efforting in the style of self-shaming, living the adrenalized lifestyle style that we the dopamine-starved who've exiled our hypothalamus for its "sinfulness" are destined to lead, **striving** to love what we hate--by sheer force of will. Retreating out of the body and up into one's mind, abandoning the body, trying to extinguish or at least displace the supposedly corrupt self that is supposedly corrupt due to one's own sinfulness, to replace that self with Some Punitive Adoration-seeking Mind-reading Spirit (SPAMS) is consistent with the brain damage many traumatized children's bodies show, which is an unusually large prefrontal cortex.
So, yeah. I share your hatred of CBT. (Although I did save my own life with it in the early '90s, when I was instructed in it from the almost totally emotionally tone-deaf therapist at the student health center assigned to take my case--poor him--at the university I was attending when I had my apostasy and became viciously suicidal. Ironically, the only reason I did not kill myself was my fear of being sent to hell by evangelical Christianity's "all-loving" and "all-powerful" deity, whom I had finally realized I was just not able to love).
Dashing to get this posted. Triaging a crisis with our little foster dog, here. But wanted to say well done. And thank you so, so very much. 30 billion other units of insight to articulate, but can't right now. All the love and all the power to you, my dear friend.
Thank you. I’ve said for years that I can’t go to CBT or consciously use it because of how it was overtly (in our church of the time) linked to taking thoughts captive and being transformed by the renewing of your mind. The whole thing makes me squirm, feel sick, and guilty. It is so good to hear someone talking about this link and confirming my experience.
I’ve seen therapists who have used a person centred approach, my current one very much so - which is hard work because I have to decide what to talk about, and then talk my way through it, to find my own realisations and answers … which is hard, but which also suits me rather than have ‘answers’ presented.
And the not believing in a wrathful God who will send me to eternal conscious torment in hell…but being scared of ending up suffering ect in hell… oh spot on!
It’s been a shock to me how hard it is to find pediatric mental health support that really takes seriously my child’s inner world. Even when descriptions of the modality seem to indicate the approach I’m looking for, it all feels so behavioral. Why is it so hard for the field of pediatric mental health to understand that I don’t want to manipulate my child into overcoming her fear; I want to be with her in her fear and help her body find it’s way back to safety?
And yeah, CBT feels very gaslight-y to me. Like, an accurate perception of the world is traumatizing, because the world is traumatizing. Lying to myself about the world, and telling myself the lies are more “accurate” doesn’t help. But somatic practices to help my body find its way to safety, even in a fucked-up world, make a huge difference.
Thanks for this, Christine. I feel similarly. It feels to me like CBT is helpful in limited ways, and it can only help you be more successful in our culture without recognizing or challenging the cultural pressures that maintain a level of stress on you. Change your thoughts and behaviors so you can be acceptable to God, or change your thoughts so you can be more productive, and thus feel more worthy and be more acceptable. Whatever the normative cultural values are that are creating pressure on you, be it religious or capitalist meritocracy values, it's still pressure that amounts to chronic stress, which affects us the same way as trauma. I mean PTSD does stand for Post-traumatic STRESS disorder. I'm going to try not to go on a rant here, but even having the word disorder on that, and pretty much everything in the DSM, is another related problem to the skills-based treatment expectations of managed care. This is a normal response to stress and trauma! Not a disorder. Okay, I'm going to stop myself here and not go on a further rant about this. Thank you for the light touch in your article. I can get intense about it so fast! One additional thing - I love Jennifer Mullan's new book Decolonizing Therapy, which is an amazing critique and hopeful path forward out of CBT-based, managed care-based, disorder-based treatment, to collaborative individual and systemic care.
Back when I was a nervous evangelical first entering therapy, I ended up in CBT. I did that for a few years, and it was helpful for a while. But the seismic shifts for me really started after I switched to EMDR. Thank you for shedding a light on the fact that one-size-fits-all solutions aren't the answer to finding individual or collective healing!
Christine, RIGHT ON!! EXACTLY!!! I spent my life using CBT-like affirmations, especially in a Christian context trying to change my thinking. It NEVER worked. It's like putting frosting on a cowpie. It might look like cake, but it's still a disgusting sham! I only found healing after going deep to find and heal the places where the trauma and painful thoughts and emotions started. No amount of "bringing every thought captive" ever worked for me! Great realization, btw, of the equivalence of CBT with evangelical belief. I don't know if I saw it before, but I sure do now!
Cheers to all this!!
The connection between CBT & “taking thoughts captive” blew my mind.
You've just made me think that, as I choose a therapist after a couple years of serious trauma, that I might be better off with a shiny new one rather than an "experienced" one who might not be up to speed - internally - on modern neuroscience.
This is such a great insight, thank you for sharing. I’m wondering what an equivalent religious somatic response for working on those religious fears and traumas would be - do you think there is one?
As a progressive Christian pastor who cares a lot about mental health, I’m super grateful for this window into CBT and how it can be problematic for people recovering from high-control religion. I’d never even heard the phrase “taking thoughts captive”… [shudder]
My question is, thoughts on DBT? It’s been the best thing to help my teen kids learn to process and self-regulate… and also to help us as parents help them. I like that so much of it is somatically oriented (eg the TIPP technique) but is more accessible to me as their parental support than, say, EMDR. But DBT does include some skills that address one’s thoughts/cognitive distortions, so perhaps it’s similarly triggering?
Copied from my comment on Medium:
OMG, Christine! Your article gave me a major deconstructive realization. Judeo-Christianity is foundationally flawed: When Moses went up the mountain, he had a transformative direct encounter with God (assuming the Bible account is true) that made his hair white and his face glow, but he came down the mountain with the equivalent of CBT, a list of behavioral commands. Right from the start Judaism substituted rote belief and behavior for genuine deep transformative spiritual experience. It's no wonder our culture always loves the quick and shallow fix, including psychological ones. Psychology just follows an age-old fundamentally flawed cultural pattern. But anybody who has experienced true deep psychological healing knows how it differs from shallow behavioral therapy just as surface belief is no substitute for genuine life-changing profound spiritual encounters.
Hey Christine! It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about the religious trauma found in 12 steps. I would like to tell my story now, just don’t know how. If you could email me I’d sure appreciate it. I need to get my story out so it never happens to anyone needing to find recovery…
I so relate to this! I received CBT through a govt program for postpartum depression (thank you Canadian healthcare) and while it did give me a few tools, it often ended up being so frustrating. Mindfulness and looking for "thinking traps" = no match for C-PTSD. I was so grateful to eventually find a therapist who specialized in family dysfunction who directed me to EMDR.