FAST RESULTS ARE DANGEROUS

The spur to writing this was the comment I overheard at a mini-workshop run by a psychotherapist, who said '… and right there, the way she reacted to this process, has several sessions worth of exploratory work within it.'

The key to many models of psychotherapy – of which this psychotherapist will be an expert in one – is the bringing to the conscious awareness of hidden beliefs, values, internal strategies and other stuff. By bringing it to conscious awareness, and staying with it in conscious awareness, deep and lasting change occurs.

The problem with it, especially if your issues are complex, is it takes an expert psychotherapist (with the right tools) to facilitate that change AND a few years of costly sessions. This isn't to take away from the great benefits that can occur.

Please note, I can be classed as a psychotherapist myself, so the following remarks are generalisations about the majority of the profession. Your psychologist or psychotherapist or hypnotherapist may be one of the exceptions, as may the psychotherapist I met at the mini-workshop.

Thankfully for the profession, there has been a precedent set: the greater the expertise the greater the fees per hour, AND they get paid by the hourly session, and NOT on results. I’m not picking on psychotherapists specifically here, as almost every therapist of any kind has adopted the same pay structure. They also subscribe to the medical premise: there is no such thing as a cure. I’m not saying there cannot be significant progress made in a short period of time with psychoanalysis, or that it will not be a lasting change. But:

• the paid for time & not results = no incentive to reduce client’s suffering ASAP – in fact more sessions = money in the therapist’s pocket.
• the premise of ‘no cure’, means you must learn to deal with your suffering – lessening one’s expectations, and lowering the bar for ‘results’.
• the amount of time it takes to develop the client-therapist relationship and look (consciously) for those things deep in the subconscious that need to be taken out of their hiding place (possibly buried) so we can be consciously aware of them can take years – even with an excellent psychotherapist.

Anything that short-cuts this process is deemed quick & dirty, and therefore dangerous, by the profession.

Along comes Dr Roger Callaghan, who was an Associate Professor of Psychology at a University in the USA for many years, who (over thirty years ago) decided to explore techniques using the acupuncture points. He discovered a ‘cure’ for phobias that only took a few minutes to administer. From this fist discovery grew a new field in psychotherapy called Thought Field Therapy (TFT).

Along comes a number of people who developed a new set of tools for psychotherapists and others called Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). Within this toolbox is an effective ‘cure’ for phobias that can be facilitated within one session.

If either the NLP tools or the TFT tools are used by a competent therapist the real and lasting results are fast, yet the dangers are eliminated.

Over the last 30 years, there has been many other discoveries (or re-discoveries in some cases) of tools that work in amazing ways to quickly bring real & lasting results for clients. They do NOT need the client to be fully aware of what is happening down in the depths of the subconscious mind in order to get the required results. They do NOT need the client to fully understand their psychosis, in order to make the appropriate and beneficial changes.

These are NOT short-cuts, but a different way to get the same results, in a fraction of the time. These methods can resolve issues where the client has no idea where the problem lies (or has an idea but doesn’t want to go there!), allowing the powerful subconscious mind to do the necessary work beneath the conscious level. NO ‘several sessions to explore the issue’ required. If we then use the psychologist’s toolkit to check, we find the necessary changes have been made.

I’ve always felt uneasy with the ‘pay me for my time and let us see what happens’ fee structure, and have also continually searched for methods that would reduce peoples' suffering sooner, rather than later. This is why I am now confident in adopting a “I get paid for results!” policy for my therapy clients.