Quick summary: I am offering a discussion concerning the drive to label and how labeling impacts suffering. There is a heated debate in the field of psychotherapy as to whether psychiatric (DSM) labels help or hurt the client’s recovery. I am commenting on what encourages our emotional reactions and behavior related to the topic.
Tag Archives: Postmodernism
Narrative therapy summary
Quick summary: My intention is to tell you what techniques can be used in narrative therapy, and why you would use them.
Postmodernism – making an ‘out there’ philosophy useful
Quick summary – By allowing yourself to investigate how your relationships, actions and emotions are governed by your perceptions you may find that by offering yourself a freedom of perception you can change the way in which you are impacted by your reality. – By using open-mindedness and an adaptability in relation to your beliefs and ways of perceiving, you free yourself from patterns of seemingly automatic reaction. Postmodernism suggests that reality does not exist… it is a construct of your belief system… a radical postmodernist would say that if you believed that you could walk through a wall, then you could walk through a wall… perhaps this is not particularly helpful to the masses, but what if we took this down a notch… what if you allowed yourself the freedom to perceive a situation differently so as to reduce your discomfort related to the subject? What would be the benefits of letting go of some of your deterministic thinking (‘when this happens I must feel this’ ‘If I did that I would be bad’ ‘I should_______ because _______)? Sometimes we trap ourselves in suffering by rigidly holding on to what we label to be objectivity… postmodernism suggests that objectivity does not exist – there are not facts. Perhaps if we took a small piece from postmodernist thinking we could all say that “I don’t have to feel or behave in a set way… my reactions do not have to be predetermined… I have a consciousness which is evolved enough to allow me to live without being controlled by my environment” – I can choose to perceive or believe my reality to be different. Embracing your subjectivity is an emancipation from atomization.