I don’t intend this to be a personally revealing post so I’ll just sum it up by saying that being insecure has had a profoundly negative impact on my life. I feel that it is the single biggest reason why I’ve failed to reach my potential in all ways. That’s fine though, I’m not really bitter but I remain very frustrated and I want to solve this problem. I want to ‘crack the code’, if you will. [...] I’ve developed my own understanding of insecurity, which, admittedly, is a synthesis of other people’s ideas, but I haven’t found any book or therapy or system that puts it all together in a way that I fully agree with. [...]
Since Jr High at least, I’ve been frustrated by my insecurity. I don’t intend this to be a personally revealing post so I’ll just sum it up by saying that being insecure has had a profoundly negative impact on my life. I feel that it is the single biggest reason why I’ve failed to reach my potential in all ways. That’s fine though, I’m not really bitter but I remain very frustrated and I want to solve this problem. I want to ‘crack the code’, if you will.
If I understand you right you are saying:
You are exposed to Arthus Janov ideas for 20 years and they ideas that you developed from that exposure haven’t solve your issue. They had some temporal effects but the anxiety always came back.
Then you say that you haven’t found any therapy that matches your understanding of the problem. If the therapy works well with the problem I would expect that it doesn’t matches with your understanding of the problem.
I also don’t believe that you will understand what a form of therapy is about by reading a book about it.
Exactly how they work is not something that is perfectly understood by anyone but I find it frustrating when discussing them with people who don’t seem to understand that, whatever the rules are, there are rules.
There are rules but empathy can often be more useful for dealing with someone’s emotional issue than trying to use intellectual rigor.
I’m considering therapy. I was in therapy for several years many years ago. Not primal therapy. I tried doing that on my own, with some transient success as I said in the post. The more conventional therapy had its moments too but ultimately it was a disappointment. I was still insecure after several years. But these new feeling-centered experiential therapies have become more and more popular the last few years. They’ve actually only come onto my radar in the last four months. I had pretty much given up on the project but was encouraged again when I came across them and started reading about them. It’s in reading about them that I realize that they’ve been gaining in popularity. It probably has a lot to do with neuroscience findings being more supportive of them than of heavily cognitive therapies.
And, the neuroscience findings support your assertion that empathy will do more than intellectual rigor (check out ‘The Polyvagal Theory’ by Stephen Porges—I’m slogging through it now—its very technical but so far very fascinating). But I have to defend myself on that. I didn’t mean intellectual rigor in the process of working out these problems. I meant intellectual rigor in figuring out what is the best way to go about working out these problems. And if the rational analysis suggests that an empathetic relationship is the way, well, then that’s the way.
If I understand you right you are saying: You are exposed to Arthus Janov ideas for 20 years and they ideas that you developed from that exposure haven’t solve your issue. They had some temporal effects but the anxiety always came back.
Then you say that you haven’t found any therapy that matches your understanding of the problem. If the therapy works well with the problem I would expect that it doesn’t matches with your understanding of the problem.
I also don’t believe that you will understand what a form of therapy is about by reading a book about it.
There are rules but empathy can often be more useful for dealing with someone’s emotional issue than trying to use intellectual rigor.
I’m considering therapy. I was in therapy for several years many years ago. Not primal therapy. I tried doing that on my own, with some transient success as I said in the post. The more conventional therapy had its moments too but ultimately it was a disappointment. I was still insecure after several years. But these new feeling-centered experiential therapies have become more and more popular the last few years. They’ve actually only come onto my radar in the last four months. I had pretty much given up on the project but was encouraged again when I came across them and started reading about them. It’s in reading about them that I realize that they’ve been gaining in popularity. It probably has a lot to do with neuroscience findings being more supportive of them than of heavily cognitive therapies.
And, the neuroscience findings support your assertion that empathy will do more than intellectual rigor (check out ‘The Polyvagal Theory’ by Stephen Porges—I’m slogging through it now—its very technical but so far very fascinating). But I have to defend myself on that. I didn’t mean intellectual rigor in the process of working out these problems. I meant intellectual rigor in figuring out what is the best way to go about working out these problems. And if the rational analysis suggests that an empathetic relationship is the way, well, then that’s the way.