Fundamentals of Adaptive Psychotherapy and Counselling by Robert Langs

Author:Robert Langs
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: The Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2004-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

9

Triggers and Themes

As we have seen, the emotion-processing mind is an adaptive module geared primarily to coping with traumatic environmental events, broadly defined. These adaptive efforts are carried out by both the conscious and deep unconscious systems, and they are evoked by triggering events. On the deep unconscious level, the result is the generation of narrative themes that reflect the events and meanings that have been perceived and processed deep-unconsciously. Thus, triggers and themes – the subject of this chapter – are the key to understanding and interpreting the powerful emotional issues that we, as humans, process outside of awareness and that lie at the heart of patients’ emotionally-founded symptoms and resistances. Reduced to its basics, then, the optimal intervention that can be fashioned in order to reach into the deep unconscious realm and obtain deep-unconscious encoded validation involves, first, correctly identifying the trigger to which the patient is responding deep-unconsciously and, second, decoding the narrative themes in light of that trigger. This is done by relocating or transposing the themes from their manifest context in a dream or story into the situation with the triggering event, and treating the resultant imagery as reflecting the patient’s valid, unconscious perceptions of the meanings and implications of the triggering event.

To cite a brief illustration:

With the permission of his adolescent patient, Frank, Dr Hall, a male psychologist, has a session with Frank’s mother in which they discuss some of her issues and problems with her son. In the session after the contact with the mother, Frank asks about the therapist’s meeting with his mother, is told about it in broad terms by Dr Hall, and then Frank tells his therapist that his seeing her seems to have been helpful – his mother settled down after the meeting. He then tells a story about his best friend, Walter, whose mother has been listening in on his telephone conversations with his friends. When Walter complained to his father about what his mother was doing, the father sided with the mother, saying that they didn’t trust Walter’s friends. It was a dumb thing for him to say. The fact is that Walter is the one who can’t trust his parents. The other day Frank and Walter laughingly plotted to kill Walter’s parents with rat poison so Walter could have a life.

The trigger here is the therapist’s session with the patient’s mother. Even with the patient’s permission, this is a violation of the deep-unconsciously sought ideal ground rules pertaining to total privacy and confidentiality. Typically, the patient consciously sanctions the frame violation, but objects vigorously at the deep unconscious level.

The trigger is alluded to manifestly. The story of Walter’s mother’s eavesdropping is the first encoded narrative theme. We lift the theme from the story and recognize that it’s a frame violation – an invasion of privacy – that bridges over – is analogous – to the trigger of Dr Hall’s talking to Frank’s mother, an intervention that invited her to listen in on Frank’s therapy sessions. So

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