What Movies And Therapy Have In Common
Psychology Today blog: Reel Therapy
by Jeremy Clyman
How successful therapy can be going to the movies
In my last post I suggested that the treatment approach implemented by reality-television star Dr. Drew was flawed. Since it is all too frequent and problematic in our culture to critique things from afar without offering better alternatives, I've decided to write a follow up post about more effective psychological treatment.
Problematically, the jurisdiction of this blog is cinema. More to the point, the world of psychological treatment modalities is fractured. There is a dizzying array of choices when it comes to solving a mental malady. My solution is to discuss a narrative-based, modality-unifying treatment. I call it narrative psychology.
First, a quick caveat: narrative psychology is a term that has already been patented in the field. There are two divisions in the world of clinical psychology, researchers of mental illness and curers of mental illness. In research, narrative psychology exists as a body of literature in which the stories people tell about themselves are inspected, systematically coded for prominent themes and telling characteristics and, if all goes well, used as a springboard for theoretically sound inferences about mental health and illness. This is passive exploration. I propose a new, different version of narrative psychology that is much more active and treatment-oriented. It has to do with the types of stories people learn to tell about themselves in therapy with the therapist acting as, shall we say, ghostwriter.
Let's look at the implicit process of therapy for a moment. Often, in a last-ditch effort to cope with a life derailed, a patient enters therapy and initiates a process of telling his/her life story. The therapist listens. In the beginning this process is complicated by the blurred line between fact and fiction. On top of innate self-delusions and unconscious defenses built into the fabric of the human mind, patients may purposefully distort the facts of their lives for all sorts of understandable and silly reasons. As consistencies begin to arise over time, an incoherent story that began in mid-sentence turns into a clear but, in all likelihood, unhealthy narrative.
Successful therapy, I would postulate, is the conversion process from an unhealthy to healthy life narrative. The therapy consultation room is a place where a life story can be inspected, edited, retold and, ultimately, changed. A clinical psychologist is trained in the science of identifying various plot points that indicate mental illness. He or she is also trained in the art of transforming these internal villains into heroes, that is, mentally healthy tendencies. It is further logical to assume that a successful therapist knows what a mentally healthy individual would strive to do in any given situation. This is important because a parallel story, this mentally healthy version of life, must begin to emerge so that the glaring differences between this story and the patient's unhealthy story can be exposed. These gaps become treatment targets to zoom in on and tweak.
This is hard. To do this well you must be able to take what the patient is saying and do the following: accurately decipher what is being said while also grasping what is remaining unsaid or implied. Next, you must predict what is going through the patient's mind so that you can know where the story (a.k.a target behavior, enduring, problematic pattern, pretty much anything self-destructive) is likely to go. At this point you want to jump ahead of the patient. There are many reasons for this, a prominent one being that one's life narrative is, at times, a particular pattern of thoughts/emotions/actions that are problematic and re-enacted, over and over again. So, you want to jump ahead and help the patient to understand the likely list of options that lay ahead of him/her, the different plausible "endings" to this particular chapter of life. You want to present to the patient that path he/she is most likely to choose. Predict the wrong path and you've lost credibility, but select a path that resonates and the opportunity to tell a different, healthier "ending" before its happens has arisen. Knowing how to write this new, different and happier "next step" involves a few steps, namely, to help the patient to understand and accept that his/her narrative of the past is different from the desired narrative. This is quite a wound. Once healed, a subsequent step is quite often to teach the patient the skills to go out and enact a healthier, future narrative. There are myriad strategies, tools and tips to help empower the patient to this end. As the patient begins to live out the healthy narrative, I believe, everything else falls into place. Unaddressed symptoms disintegrate and what once felt like a foreign and coached narrative becomes authentic.
If this is starting to seem a little out there I understand. After all, I'm comparing a rich and reputable science like clinical psychology to a fantasy-based, artistic process like cinema. To save my dignity I feel obligated to try and connect this theory to the facts -- the research and wisdom underlying effective psychotherapy. The Big Three treatment approaches in the field are known as behaviorally-based, cognitively-based and psycho-dynamically-based theories. What are these approaches and how are they different from each other? In a nutshell, behavior therapy is learning to perform healthy behaviors, cognitive therapy is learning to formulate healthy thoughts and psychodynamic therapy is gaining insight into oneself. Thus, if viewed from a slightly different angle, these approaches are interventions designed to act out a healthy life story, tell oneself a healthy life story and understand why the healthy life story has stalled.
Where do movies come into all this? Well, obviously all movies are stories and, with proper judgment, many movies that reflect healthy life narratives can be identified. Recall that a healthy life narrative is that which a mentally healthy person might strive towards in any given situation. Are compelling characters in inspiring movies not mirror images of this? Movies reflect the inner worlds of certain people, real or imagined, that are projected onto the screen and into the viewer's mind. Mental Health movies, I propose, can be thought of as the projected aspirations of mentally healthy individuals. I would wager large sums of money that the main characters in Mental Health movies display all of the attributes of mental health, that is, they are likely to have positive self-perceptions, optimistic and open social interactions, clear and logical thought processes, effective coping abilities and high emotional intelligence. These are also the end goals of successful therapy. Further, the skills needed for optimal functioning in all of these areas are the tools utilized by the therapeutic process.
Let's take a concrete example - Dr. Drew. In his sex addiction show, a group of celebrities have entered treatment. We know two things about them: they are unhappy with their lives and they feel convinced that their sexual behavior is a root cause. Whether or not sex addiction is really the problem is a post for another day, but what can be discussed in this context is whether a healthy or unhealthy narrative about sex is being articulated.
As I see it, sex is highlighted as the primary treatment issue. To do it or to think about doing it is wrong. This is why all of the patients must remain celibate. They are told sex addiction is the result of an imbalanced brain, that any and all feelings of despair are withdrawal symptoms connected to the addiction. This seems to have left many of the patients more confused and distressed than ever. Dr. Drew implicitly shapes a story about how unhealthy sex is bad and should never happen. But there is no story about what healthy sex looks like and how it can be attained! A story unfolds about how the lives lived by these patients has been unhealthy up until now. But there is no story about how to go out and live a healthy life!
Related articles:
Related books:
Psychology Today blog: Reel Therapy
by Jeremy Clyman
How successful therapy can be going to the movies
In my last post I suggested that the treatment approach implemented by reality-television star Dr. Drew was flawed. Since it is all too frequent and problematic in our culture to critique things from afar without offering better alternatives, I've decided to write a follow up post about more effective psychological treatment.
Problematically, the jurisdiction of this blog is cinema. More to the point, the world of psychological treatment modalities is fractured. There is a dizzying array of choices when it comes to solving a mental malady. My solution is to discuss a narrative-based, modality-unifying treatment. I call it narrative psychology.
First, a quick caveat: narrative psychology is a term that has already been patented in the field. There are two divisions in the world of clinical psychology, researchers of mental illness and curers of mental illness. In research, narrative psychology exists as a body of literature in which the stories people tell about themselves are inspected, systematically coded for prominent themes and telling characteristics and, if all goes well, used as a springboard for theoretically sound inferences about mental health and illness. This is passive exploration. I propose a new, different version of narrative psychology that is much more active and treatment-oriented. It has to do with the types of stories people learn to tell about themselves in therapy with the therapist acting as, shall we say, ghostwriter.
Let's look at the implicit process of therapy for a moment. Often, in a last-ditch effort to cope with a life derailed, a patient enters therapy and initiates a process of telling his/her life story. The therapist listens. In the beginning this process is complicated by the blurred line between fact and fiction. On top of innate self-delusions and unconscious defenses built into the fabric of the human mind, patients may purposefully distort the facts of their lives for all sorts of understandable and silly reasons. As consistencies begin to arise over time, an incoherent story that began in mid-sentence turns into a clear but, in all likelihood, unhealthy narrative.
Successful therapy, I would postulate, is the conversion process from an unhealthy to healthy life narrative. The therapy consultation room is a place where a life story can be inspected, edited, retold and, ultimately, changed. A clinical psychologist is trained in the science of identifying various plot points that indicate mental illness. He or she is also trained in the art of transforming these internal villains into heroes, that is, mentally healthy tendencies. It is further logical to assume that a successful therapist knows what a mentally healthy individual would strive to do in any given situation. This is important because a parallel story, this mentally healthy version of life, must begin to emerge so that the glaring differences between this story and the patient's unhealthy story can be exposed. These gaps become treatment targets to zoom in on and tweak.
This is hard. To do this well you must be able to take what the patient is saying and do the following: accurately decipher what is being said while also grasping what is remaining unsaid or implied. Next, you must predict what is going through the patient's mind so that you can know where the story (a.k.a target behavior, enduring, problematic pattern, pretty much anything self-destructive) is likely to go. At this point you want to jump ahead of the patient. There are many reasons for this, a prominent one being that one's life narrative is, at times, a particular pattern of thoughts/emotions/actions that are problematic and re-enacted, over and over again. So, you want to jump ahead and help the patient to understand the likely list of options that lay ahead of him/her, the different plausible "endings" to this particular chapter of life. You want to present to the patient that path he/she is most likely to choose. Predict the wrong path and you've lost credibility, but select a path that resonates and the opportunity to tell a different, healthier "ending" before its happens has arisen. Knowing how to write this new, different and happier "next step" involves a few steps, namely, to help the patient to understand and accept that his/her narrative of the past is different from the desired narrative. This is quite a wound. Once healed, a subsequent step is quite often to teach the patient the skills to go out and enact a healthier, future narrative. There are myriad strategies, tools and tips to help empower the patient to this end. As the patient begins to live out the healthy narrative, I believe, everything else falls into place. Unaddressed symptoms disintegrate and what once felt like a foreign and coached narrative becomes authentic.
If this is starting to seem a little out there I understand. After all, I'm comparing a rich and reputable science like clinical psychology to a fantasy-based, artistic process like cinema. To save my dignity I feel obligated to try and connect this theory to the facts -- the research and wisdom underlying effective psychotherapy. The Big Three treatment approaches in the field are known as behaviorally-based, cognitively-based and psycho-dynamically-based theories. What are these approaches and how are they different from each other? In a nutshell, behavior therapy is learning to perform healthy behaviors, cognitive therapy is learning to formulate healthy thoughts and psychodynamic therapy is gaining insight into oneself. Thus, if viewed from a slightly different angle, these approaches are interventions designed to act out a healthy life story, tell oneself a healthy life story and understand why the healthy life story has stalled.
Where do movies come into all this? Well, obviously all movies are stories and, with proper judgment, many movies that reflect healthy life narratives can be identified. Recall that a healthy life narrative is that which a mentally healthy person might strive towards in any given situation. Are compelling characters in inspiring movies not mirror images of this? Movies reflect the inner worlds of certain people, real or imagined, that are projected onto the screen and into the viewer's mind. Mental Health movies, I propose, can be thought of as the projected aspirations of mentally healthy individuals. I would wager large sums of money that the main characters in Mental Health movies display all of the attributes of mental health, that is, they are likely to have positive self-perceptions, optimistic and open social interactions, clear and logical thought processes, effective coping abilities and high emotional intelligence. These are also the end goals of successful therapy. Further, the skills needed for optimal functioning in all of these areas are the tools utilized by the therapeutic process.
Let's take a concrete example - Dr. Drew. In his sex addiction show, a group of celebrities have entered treatment. We know two things about them: they are unhappy with their lives and they feel convinced that their sexual behavior is a root cause. Whether or not sex addiction is really the problem is a post for another day, but what can be discussed in this context is whether a healthy or unhealthy narrative about sex is being articulated.
As I see it, sex is highlighted as the primary treatment issue. To do it or to think about doing it is wrong. This is why all of the patients must remain celibate. They are told sex addiction is the result of an imbalanced brain, that any and all feelings of despair are withdrawal symptoms connected to the addiction. This seems to have left many of the patients more confused and distressed than ever. Dr. Drew implicitly shapes a story about how unhealthy sex is bad and should never happen. But there is no story about what healthy sex looks like and how it can be attained! A story unfolds about how the lives lived by these patients has been unhealthy up until now. But there is no story about how to go out and live a healthy life!
Related articles:
Related books:
