Notes

Low Cost Cognitive Behavioral Therapy New Jersey
Changing The Unchangeable Past - Psychotherapy Mediates Memory
Psychotherapy is approximately remembering in a fresh way.

The roots of the term "memory" get back to ancient times. Before it reached the Latin root memor which we are able to recognize easily, it had its roots in the Sanskrit words smarti , meaning "memory", or smara, meaning "love". It also draws on ancient Greek word words, meaning "witness" and "care".

Psychoanalytic theorist Donnel Stern (2003) suggests that our experience of the world is indeed complex, and our perspectives on which we experience are usually so tied to our previous experience and individual perspectives that most of our remembered experience is not nearly as objective as we imagine. Not only is the majority of our memory of past events subjectively slanted, due to the limits and constraints of attention and cognition, the vast majority of our experience hasn't really been formulated in a coherent way at all.


Most dramatic autobiographical events are eventually experienced as having both positive and negative aspects, large and small.

The passage of time and experience of a multitude of consequences are central to the procedure of understanding the real nature of an event and its consequences. panic attack and agoraphobia of an event are impossible to assess in the immediate aftermath because the information is not all in. Swept up in the press of life, we often don't stop to consider the history of life events that fully. Since we usually do not integrate them as we go, in retrospective review the scene becomes clouded by the consequences of delay, intervening behaviors and the confusion of multi-determinacy which make relationships of event to consequence uncertain.

Meaning making is the development of knowledge of connections

If we see meaning making because the development of an understanding of the connections, it becomes clear why cognitive behavioral therapy with its insistence on the analysis of antecedent, behavior and consequence works well. The beneficial effect of all talk therapy is that the events and feelings from differing times and places swim together. Perhaps not all will arrive on one day, but common association to the time and space of the therapist's office will mediate them so that they enter into close enough relationship for connections to be discovered. Disparate events and attitudes are brought together and considered passionately or dispassionately... but often for the first time, together. The therapeutic relationship provides support and encouragement for this labor of understanding and the therapist lends their own efforts and training to the task of seeing connections and patterns.

This is exactly what the prized and frequently romanticized therapeutic goal of "insight" includes.

Clients very often come into therapy saying, "What's the idea of looking back. I cannot change what has happened!" But they often discover, to their surprise... and in moving and life changing ways...that the past isn't absolute and locked in place.

Psychological researchers Baglov and Singer (2004) have documented the health and ego developmental benefits of conscious work at integrating significant autobiographical memories and giving them meaning. They describe meaning making as the procedure for enabling self-defining memories to affect the self, by linking them to self-knowledge. This gives cognitive, emotional and motivational value to the memory, and allows it to powerfully reinforce important personal goals.

In therapy, we "re-view" our memories in the ancient spirit of the term. We "bear witness" to your past in an atmosphere of compassion and we integrate feelings and events from different periods, so as to create a new, more nuanced vision of our past.

It is in this manner that psychotherapy functions to change the "unchangeable" past

Read More: https://dryoavcohen.com/panic-attack-and-agoraphobia/