Much
has changed in the counseling and psychotherapy marketplace during the
nearly 20 years of PSI’s
existence, especially lately. The
HMO and insurance conglomerations correctly refer to these changes as the
“industrialization” of mental health care.
The honest reality is that you only have two choices today:
The first is to read your employee handbook and see what you’re
allowed, if anything. Currently
most plans cover hospitalizations and what is sometimes called “quick
and out” counseling. The
second option is to, as they say, “go alternative”.
PSI falls in this category, because we offer psychotherapy instead
of counseling. Psychotherapy
is about changing your life as a whole and assumes that humans are driven
by unconscious as well as conscious processes.
It’s not for everyone. We
don’t expect it to be.
The
late Dr. Carl Whitaker, the kindly grandfather of Family Systems Therapy,
is reported to have said there were two main reasons why someone goes to
psychotherapy. The first
reason is because they are hurting so badly that they’d crawl a mile on
their belly to get the help. The
second reason is because they like themselves enough to reward themselves
with it. The clarity of his
insight has become clouded today by how mental health is paid for and who
it’s intended to benefit. The
current system is designed for employers wishing to keep people
functioning in the workplace at the lowest cost.
And as one HMO spokesperson put it, “employers shouldn’t have
to pay for the walking wounded or the unhappy healthy”.
Thus for the last decade psychotherapy has been replaced by
counseling as the money flowed in that direction.
PSI and
psychotherapy remain an alternative to that unfortunate trend!
We have remained focused upon the unchanging quests in people’s
lives. The central problem of each individual life is to figure out
who you really are and how to get on with the journey you were meant to
take. Likewise, who should go
with you on the journey of your life and how to find the depth and
contentment in those relationships that the heart hungers for.
And lastly, how to weather the heartache and defeats that
characterize every life in such a way that we not only avoid becoming
embittered but grow into even better versions of ourselves.
Anyone actively engaged with their own story is able to fulfill
whatever roles life demands of them.
Its exactly
within the ranks of the “walking wounded and the unhappy healthy” that
the hunger to relocate our journey begins!
As the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote already 800 years ago:
The human shape
is a ghost
made of distraction and pain.
Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel,
trying wildly to open
this image tightly held within itself.
It’s
opening the “image within itself” that characterizes psychotherapy.
I’ve tried for years to work out a good concise definition for
psychotherapy as compared to the methods that have come to be known
collectively as “counseling”. But
it’s as Samuel Butler said: “Definitions
are a kind of scratching and generally leave a sore place more sore than
it was before.” Let’s
leave it at this: Counseling
is concerned with what people think they are doing and Psychotherapy is
concerned with the soul of what it is to be successfully human.
