If You Can't Make Decisions, Which Psychotherapy Should You Choose?

Tom, Martin and Deidre respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call.Our question this week:A friend of mine who is usually pretty level-headed about things, nevertheless thought about going to see a psychotherapist about a mild depression that she hasn’t been able to shake.However, she became so confused about the different therapies that were being recommended, she decided to simply work her way through it.Some of the processes recommended to her were: cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, hypnotherapy, and eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing.I’ve heard of hypnotherapy, but what can you tell be about the other three?

Tom:

One of the things that irks me about psychotherapy and it’s gaining inroads is that they come up with labels and titles for things that at the least sound intimidating and they seem to separate we ignorant from the professionals.But what are these?How would you explain cognitive-behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, and eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing?

Martin:

Okay, now you are dealing with three whole different fields and these different fields are really fields that we can really get in depth about, but neuro-linguistic programming, I have to say to begin with is a rather high promising (and it’s also true of the others) orientation as to how people can change.I don’t want to go into the history of it—

Tom:

No, just basically how would they say it works, if we can use that term?

Deidre:

Cognitive behavioral therapy came out of behaviorism which is based on the idea which it is our environment that causes us to have problems.And so basically, they have to change a person’s belief system.They believe that if you change the belief system then you will change the behavior.And so one of the main things one must change in regular (unless it has been Christianized) in regular cognitive behavior therapy is that you’ve got to get rid of this idea of God, of the supernatural.You have got to understand that you are in control of your life, you are to have high self-esteem, you are to think well of yourself, and so basically the whole thing rests on having a new belief system.That’s where the cognitive part is.You must switch your belief system to believe you are a wonderful person, you are very capable, you don’t need God and that you yourself can make things happen, can change things.In other words, it’s dealing with so-called irrational beliefs and of course, God, the Bible and all of that would be part of the rational beliefs.Now—

Tom:

Deidre can I just interject this?Would I be off the mark if I looked at this and I said “cognitive behavioral therapy has to do with your thinking, has to do with your thinking changing your behavior and it’s put together in various forms just as you have stated.Would that be….

Deidre:

Yes, basically it is that your behavior will change when you think differently.

Tom:

Okay, what about neuro-linguistic programming?It’s even hard to say!

Deidre:

Well that kind of developed by people watching—well there was a particular therapist who was very successful and they watched how that person related in therapy and if the person who was in therapy would say oh, I see this, or would use this sensory expression having to do with sight, then the therapist would reflect that and if it had to do with the person always talking about auditory types of sensations or other sensations.In other words, the therapist would pick up the language, the sensory language of the client and that then would help the person relate.Now that’s just part of the whole thing, but that’s where the linguistic part comes in.

Tom:

What about eye movement desensitization and reprocessing?

Martin:

Well EMDR is partly Freudian and partly other systems, but the idea is that there are certain traumas that have occurred early in life that get locked into your system is the way that they would describe it and that you have to go back to these so-called “frozen incidents” that have been frozen into your neurological system and then the different ways they have of doing that are described in the EMDR book that’s by Francine Shapiro.That’s who originated it.And if you go back there and you have these memories and you visualize these things and so on and so forth, you’re going to have a cathartic experience in most all cases and you’re going to be delivered from whatever encroaching neurosis that you have.

Tom:

Martin, what would eye movement have to do with it?That sounds like it’s physiological.

Martin:

Well yes, the eye movement in certain cases they say the eye movement isn’t necessary, but they have different eye movements that they try to initiate with the individual as the recollection of these is going on of these past events.

Tom:

I think the point of this concern of the person who wrote this is this all sounds really scientific.Is it scientific?

Martin:

Well there are two parts of it.One is scientific and the other is the question, are they effective?Now scientific?These are ideas, opinions, or guesses.Scientific?No.You know as I have said many times, if you go to the philosophy of science and look at the standards of science, these things are certainly not science.As to effectiveness, all of these methods, they give you tremendous promises—NLP, EMDR and cognitive-behavioral, they’ll all give you these wonderful promises and often accompanied by what they would call short term curing, but the fact is we don’t have the research to back what they say and—

Deidre:

You know the research doesn’t exist.

Martin:

Well no, in many cases it does exist, but it’s not supportive of, but as with many of these therapies if we had a FDA, a federal drug administration for therapies, they would be put out of business.NLP, EMDR, cognitive-behavioral and a number of—just line them up because you don’t have the evidence to support their efficacy at a level sufficient to charge the kinds of fees that these individuals are charging.