Disclaimer: The aim of this short presentation is not the detailed description of the Genuine Psychotherapy itself (made in my book “Fundamentals of Genuine Psychotherapy”), but its transformative impact on the emotional pandemic that engulfed our small globe. In this regard, I will only mark some central focal points in the method, without dwelling on its complete description. Focal points that will serve as auxiliary levers in the GenPsy expression of the process of cognitive-affective transformation of anxiety horror into a loving meaning.
Genuine Psychotherapy and the emotional pandemic
Genuine psychotherapy (GenPsy) is an innovative integral and holistic approach, not only encompassing in its entirety the analytical, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic, meditative-hypnotic, psychosomatic and transpersonal paradigms, but surpassing them in the gestalt of its qualitative difference, to transformative and pragmatically effective novelty.
The aim of this short presentation is not the detailed description of the Genuine Psychotherapy itself (made in my book “Fundamentals of Genuine Psychotherapy”), but its transformative impact on the emotional pandemic that engulfed our small globe. In this regard, I will only mark some central focal points in the method, without dwelling on its complete description. Focal points that will serve as auxiliary levers in the GenPsy expression of the process of cognitive-affective transformation of anxiety horror into a loving meaning.
A holistic vision of the human process. Mandala of human needs, values and meaning.
In this text I describe in detail an integral-holistic vision of the psycho-spiritual human process, visualized as a mandala. I express an understanding of basic and primordial human values and needs. An understanding that I derive through my knowledge of psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology, which I do not deny when thinking about, but include and go beyond to the conclusions that lead me creatively to the value / needs human mandala. I take the bottom-up vector of the humanistic pyramid of needs as only one of the possible directions. I declare the existence of another, top-down vector, the direction of which transfers the original self-conscious center from the bodily to the psycho-spiritual self-consciousness. Thus crystallize two simultaneously present pyramids, directions, vectors, occurring in the human spiritual, mental, biological and social process. I situate these two intersecting streams against the background of an actual human body (Da Vinci’s graphic). Thus, the spiritual, mental, social and biological semantic definitions denoting human needs / values acquire a symbolic topical expression in human biology / body. As the nuclear center of the two mutually intersecting vectors of consciousness, I postulate the unifying affiliation and focus of the heart-mind.
Love, Wisdom and Truth as central principles in genuine psychotherapy
Love, Wisdom and Truth are basic principles taught by the Bulgarian sage Beinsa Douno (Peter Deunov) in his so-called “White Brotherhood” system. They correspond directly to the Atma, Buddhi, Manas divine man / Bodhisattva essence. Atman resonates with the truth, the true God-human essence, the Self-realization. Buddhi corresponds with love as a principle, with aesthetics as a perception of beauty, defining the Godman as united with love as “glue” into the fabric of Life. Manas corresponds to wisdom, to the supreme God-human mind, expressed pragmatically through the laws of a wise, creatively manifested living ethics and meaningful morality, inherent in the rational, connected to its essence individual. As seen in the above visualization, love, wisdom, and truth are part of the psycho-spiritual top-down flow in the human mandala of meaning. I describe in detail these ancient principles of God-humanity in this text: “Love, wisdom and truth in genuine psychotherapy.”
In genuine psychotherapy, the principles of love, wisdom and truth / liberty “descend” from a conceptual and philosophical comprehension of the nature, needs and purpose of humanity, to a down-to-earth pragmatic psychotherapeutic application.
The three principles in the GenPsy are causally related to the evolutionary phases in the development of the infanta and certain character fixations, as well as to specific “movements” in the object communicative relations of man.
Wisdom is associated with the narcissistic phase – from fetal development to several months after birth. With the schizoid character and traumas, which in a qualitatively processed form, is transformed into the character of a visionary strategist / meditator. With the movements planning and connection with reality socially consensual, but also divinely complete.
Love is associated with the sensory phase (oral), until the first year after birth and with the ego phase, until the third year. With the so-called in genuine psychotherapy empathetic healer and altruistic characters. With the movements humble trust (secure connection, Bowlby) and assertiveness. With the embracing acceptance (motherly love) and the calm assertiveness and boundaries (the father’s pole).
Truth / Freedom is associated with the phases of rivalry (3-5 years), the sexual phase (5-7 years) and higher levels of development – with psychopathic and rigid character structures and traumas, in a modified form transformed into those of the leader and warrior. With the movements charismatic attraction, ravishing charm and convergence around the vortex of loving meaning.
Apart from being a cognitive contextual basis for psychotherapeutic work, the understanding of certain character coalitions, masks, traumas, and basic beliefs in man is an important part of the connection between the neurotic state and the direction of psychotherapeutic character alignment with meaning. Each movement and principle are concretized to a rich set of psychotherapeutic methodology.
A detailed description of the character structures and their transformation from maladaptive to healthy variants can be found in the article: “Genuine psychotherapy – evolutionary phases and character structures.”
Dialectical and didactic vectors of work in genuine psychotherapy
Hundreds of psychotherapeutic methods are developed on our small globe, using analytical, cognitive, behavioral, decision-focused, hypnotic, meditative, bioenergetic, psychosomatic (body oriented), transpersonal, integrative, etc. approaches. Through its own conceptual prism of the human soul in pathology and norm, implicitly each method aims to improve cognitive-affective, and hence psychosocial functioning. The more “serious” schools set themselves the ambitious goal of working on the character structure, of aligning the basic cognitive schemes with the principles of living, wise nature, extracting the most adaptive character potentials. In genuine psychotherapy, depth work on the character that determines a person’s destiny is an essential part of the process. In the GenPsy, we call such work dialectical, transcending internal and social conflicts and contradictions to a character growth along the spiral of developing consciousness in the direction of … the non-dual divine-humanness. A dialectical process following the pulse of the Dharma, in tune with the greatness of God. In this article I describe in detail the two simultaneously realized psychotherapeutic vectors – dialectical and didactic.
Genuine psychotherapy is an innovative approach that transformatively integrates existing analytical, cognitive, humanistic, and transpersonal understandings into an inspiring and particularly effective novelty. But so do other integrated systems. From now on, the flow of reasoning enters the qualitative difference of the GenPsy, contributing to the transformation of the emotional pandemic into a psycho-spiritual, full-fledged maturity.
The didactic vector in GenPsy
What do we invest in the terms of GenPsy in this phrase, practically and simply put?
We do not fight the state of anxiety, we do not see it as evil or disease – we go beyond the mechanistic, saturated with secondary profits victim’s vision, becoming part of the cognitive-affective-behavioral-social carousel of anxiety disorder.
It turns out that the anxious-depressive disorder itself (generally speaking, including many nosological units) implicitly already contains an embedded character lesson and direction of processing, which when followed, the change to well-being is catalyzed, accelerated tremendously, and realized with relative ease. It turns out that the “contradiction” focus in the symptom or in the character processing is a false dilemma. The symptoms cognitive, affective, and somatic of the disorder are not enemies we want to eliminate, but the voice of deep spiritual, transpersonal wisdom, leading directly to the transformation of maladaptive character beliefs into adaptively resonating with the healthy rhythm of love and wisdom of Godman’s creative nature. Fear turns out to be a friend, a guru, an ambassador of the Dharma, disguised in the seemingly frightening garments of panic, generalized anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, hypochondria, social phobia, so on. When the direction of the wisdom of the messages embedded in the state itself is followed, the protective mechanisms of repression, displacement, etc. are consciously dissolved in a friendship with one’s own unconscious, humbly pursuing the potentials of the superconscious, transpersonal nature.
Panic disorder teaches self-connection with love, secure attachment, and deeply empathetic character stability. Generalized anxiety (with the frequent and “tail” of depression and tips of OCD, hypochondria, agoraphobia, etc.), according to the underlying character structure and masks, teaches humble confidence in losing neurotic control and gaining equanimity in the presence of the spirit, calmly stated assertively in the strong social, creative life. The OCD turns from a scourge into a pushing engine and a path to oneself, following a clear algorithm of processing. Social anxiety, following the whole dialectical vector of character transformation, turns out to contain in itself a crystal-clear didactic path and steps towards the transmutation of the character core into a socially self-confident one, actively turning the world into a brighter living space through self-challenging creativity. Partner relationship cases in the family system are transformed from “problems” into individual and joint development in the “family life academy”.
The above is only a hint … I claim that in genuine psychotherapy we are only humble facilitators of transpersonal, loving wisdom embedded in the addressed disorder, aiming to transform the upright primate into a Godman through character coordination with meaning, increasingly active in creative social presence.
In short, in genuine psychotherapy we are active helpers in the metamorphosis of the emotional neurotic and characteropathic pandemic of loveless nonsense, in a life of love, wisdom and freedom of the Bodhisattva / God-human essence.
The emotional pandemic
Here we go in this subject school – the earth. We are born, we grow, we are raised by our parents and the system, we learn, we multiply, we work, we die physically. Everything is ok, despite the few parody-short decades we call life, if they are lived by heart and soul, by meaning and spirit, by sincere brotherly love and humble wisdom. As our colleague Maslow states, the motivation for our short stay in the suit of a primate, simply put, is of two types – deficient and existential. Based on fear, lack of love and meaning, or motivation overflowing with loving-creative meaning. That is, we are driven by either fear or love. If it is fear, we neurotically run into fantasy, naive positivism, career, financial pseudo-security, clinging, power, over-control, masochistically over complying and adjusting neurotically, sadistically biting each other in an endless carousel, turning around restlessly and lovelessly.
The human masses have historically never been a field for meaningful wisdom. Crowd psychology (see Gustave Le Bon …) features a primitive, basic processing of information, characterized by black and white, split idealization and devaluation, emotionally exaggerated thinking, simple to manipulate (see “Joseph Overton’s Window) – worshiping only power and strength, but seeing heartfelt kindness and tolerance as weakness. I believe that the time will come on this planet when the individual quality of man will converge around the cordial wisdom so that the individual, while maintaining his personal integrity, does not get lost in the flock of sheep, so that crowd becomes a conscious society. I believe in this and in genuine psychotherapy we precisely help this personal maturity, which centripetally puts loving wisdom at its core.
The emotional pandemic of separation from love, wisdom, and the freedom, infecting the masses with greed, pride, heartlessness, and distancing brother from brother, throws the global social process into a series of paradoxes:
The paradoxes of the emotional pandemic are that we have:
– Tall buildings, but low tolerance.
– Plenty of equipment, but scarcity of love.
– A lot of insurance, but little security.
– A lot of insurance, but a little self-confidence.
– A lot of information, but little meaning.
– Tall buildings, but low ethics and mutual understanding.
– Brilliant logic, but intuition and marvel thrown into the mud.
– Wide highways, but narrow views.
– We spend more, but we have less.
– We buy more, but we are less happy.
– We have bigger houses and smaller families.
– More amenities, but less time.
– We have more pleasure, but less happiness.
– We have more orgasms, but less joy in our daily lives.
– More knowledge, but less self-confidence.
– We control nature more and more, but we become more and more detached from her heart.
– We have more and more means of communication to lie to each other more and more successfully.
– We’re traveling faster and faster to manipulate and kill more and more successfully each other.
– We double our numbers every few years, but we annihilate an animal species every hour.
– We have more education, but less common sense.
– More knowledge, but worse judgment.
– More knowledge, but less wisdom.
– We have more experts, but also more problems.
– We have hundreds of schools of psychotherapy to treat our thousands of neuroticisms exploding from the abyss of meaninglessness in our souls.
– We have more and more family therapists and fewer and fewer families.
– We penetrated the genes to sell immortality and create monsters.
– We have more sex, but we love each other less.
– More medicine, but less health.
– We have more and more business medicine and less and less humane medicine.
– We have increased our possessions, but we have reduced our values.
– We talk too much, but we love too rarely and hate too often.
– We know how to subsist, but we do not know how to live.
– We know how to survive, but we do not know how to be.
– Our society knows more and more about our physiology, but we neglect who we are, why we are here and what is the purpose of our life.
– The science of our cognition (cognitive science, cog sci) is traceably objective, but untraceably flat and castrating our spirit subjectively.
– We are clinging to the life of our body, but we have no idea about the wisdom of our deathless soul.
– We develop artificial intelligence and increasingly reduce the knowledge of ourselves to carbon information processors.
– We added years to human life, but we did not add life to the years.
– We went to the moon and came back, but it is difficult for us to cross two meters and meet the new neighbor.
– We intend to conquer the cosmic vastness, but not the cordial one.
– We are inventing more and more technology with which to value our free will less and less and to manipulate more and more.
– We cultivate the wealth of money to be poorer in our souls.
– We train our muscles, but we become more and more emotionally, socially, and spiritually stupid.
– We develop our rationality, but we are less and less emotionally and socially intelligent.
– We’re creating more and more advanced robots, but we are losing more and more of our humanity.
– We found the laws of logic, but we lost the laws of humanity.
– We do bigger things, but not better things.
– We are looking for ways to detoxify the bodies, but we pollute and lose the soul.
– We subdued the atom, but not our prejudices.
– We write more, but we read and learn less (Chukcha is not a reader, Chukcha is a writer – Russian proverb).
– We plan more, but we achieve less.
– We’ve learned to hurry, but not to wait.
– We make new computers that store more information and spit out more copies, but we communicate less and less.
– We have more and more digital memory, but we are increasingly losing confidence in our own minds.
– We are developing more and more computers, but we are relying less and less on our brains.
– This is the time of fast food and indigestion
– The time of big muscles and small souls.
– The time of easy profits and difficult relationships.
– The time of higher family income and more divorces.
– Time of beautiful houses and broken homes.
– The time of fast travels, but of long worries.
– On disposable diapers, but on the constant repetition of our obsessive vices.
– A time of one-time morality and one-night stands, but of long-term distance, alienation, and coldness.
– The pills that do everything – excite us, calm us, kill us.
– Time in which external substitutes replace internal values.
– A time when there is a lot in the window, but little in the warehouse.
– A time when we cling to the masks of our image, but do not care about the integrity of our souls.
– A time when we are too excited by the opinion of others, but too little by the voice of our heart.
– We have a lot of machines, but a little cordiality.
– A time when we have a lot of rationality, but little in the knowledge of the heart.
– A time of technical progress, but of spiritual regress.
– We look more and more outside, but we are less and less aware of the infinity inside.
– We like to impose, but we hate to trust.
– We control the environment and the other more and more, but we are more and more obsessed with our instincts.
– We have many laws, but little consciousness.
– We have a lot of police, but little self-regulation.
– We have many armies, but little neighborhood.
– We have a global computer network, but we have lost touch with the soul of nature, the natural connection with each other and sentient beings.
– A time of feminism, but less and less femininity.
– Sex for hello, but less and less manhood.
– We satisfy our instincts faster and faster, but we dry up more and more for love.
– We have a lot of rhetoric, but little truth.
– We talk a lot about humanity, but with each film we suggest and programm violence.
– We have many eco organizations and less and less nature.
– We know more and more about gender differences, but we understand each other less and less.
– We are looking for more and more financial wealth, but 2/3 of humanity is becoming poorer in meaning.
– We are learning more and more economics and finances, but resources are increasingly concentrated in a few.
– We live and work together physically, but we are emotionally detached from each other more and more… Nowadays, we even do not work together…
– Our land is getting narrow, but our selfishness is expanding more and more.
– We have more mind, but less reason.
Note: The above lines are a compilation between Bob Morehead’s original text, “The Paradox of Our Time”, and my thoughts.
Genuine psychotherapy as a healer of the emotional pandemic
In short, the main pillars of genuine psychotherapy and how it actively contributes to the process of transforming the emotional pandemic, in sync with the pulse of love, wisdom and freedom in those who seek its help.
A complete vision of the world and man – the tree of the GenPsy, the mandala of Man
In the GenPsy, we fully accept cognitive-scientific, psychoanalytic and humanistic visions of man and the world as much as transpersonal-spiritual ones. The roots of its integral-holistic tree are analytical, the base and stem are cognitively scientific and behavioral, the branches are bodily oriented directions, the small branches are focused on decisions, the leaves are humanistic, the petals are transpersonal. The fruits – this is the effectiveness of integral-holistic psychotherapy, and the sun and infinity over this metaphorical GenPsy tree – its holistic high panorama.
In the mandala of human meaning, needs and values, man is as much a biological as a spiritual and divine being. This gives a huge scale, perspective, puts the goals and meaning of existence in the body of a mammal in a qualitatively different prism.
Anxious-depressive disorders are seen not as an unnecessary disease, but as an synchronically helping, as a friend, aiming to align human psychophysiology with the divinity.
The world is a workplace-simulator for the manifestation of ever better divine humanity.
Working algorithms
In genuine psychotherapy, we only follow the wisdom, purpose and direction of change already embedded in the anxiety states themselves. When we trust it, it leads us right toward harmonization of the basic beliefs of the character to resonant with those of the loving meaning (vector didactics). The character transform to its best potentials, and the neurotic disorder is the necessary pushing pressure leading to this change. The genuine psychotherapist simply sees and facilitates it.
In the place of fear is accommodated love, humanity, and security, making the individual a much better professional, partner, friend, person.
This is the modest contribution of the GenPsy – not a mechanical, but a qualitative, cordial system, adjusting human strings in the rhythm of beauty, gratitude, trust, brotherhood, healthy self-expression, acceptance of diversity in the unity of the universal wise organism of society and life. It is transforming the emotional pandemic into emotional health!