Being there for your kids - A New Therapy Treatment Strategy

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

Much of counseling and psychotherapy feels like same ol' same ol'. In my new book, The Healing Journey: Overcoming Adversity on the Path to the Good Life, I offer a paradigm shift on how we can engage in effective therapy. Whether you are looking to start therapy yourself, you are learning how to do therapy, or you want to add to your toolbox as a seasoned therapist, check out this podcast. It might be just for you.

Robinson and this is teachable moments. I have some comments for you today. Let me ask what if. Okay, I want to share with you a paradigm shift for treatment and healing. Have you ever offered up an idea in a committee? Hey, you know what? What if? Your new idea might generate some mild discussion, some grunts and dismissals with a concluding, not going to happen. We've never done it like that way before. If your new idea generates an entirely different way of thinking about, about a topic, then we call it a paradigm shift. In my new book, The Healing Journey, Overcoming Adversity on the Path to the Good Life, I offer a paradigm shift in our thinking both about getting well and about the nature of diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues.

Historically, probably since Aristotle's day, we talk about people being sick, needing to get well. Our job as their doctor has been to help people get better and make them well. This is the medical model. While our reference book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, has made progress in expanding the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral descriptions to account for diagnoses, the overall attention is on people being sick and needing to get well. In her book, Mentaligence, a new psychology of thinking, Dr. Kristen Lee attaches brain functioning to the outcomes of downward spiraling or upward spiraling, using the brain's neuroplastic capacity to create new neuropathways toward upward spiraling. I have taken these concepts and

applied them to our work in counseling and psychotherapy, introducing a new treatment strategy, mental and psychotherapy, also known as MPT. In this paradigm shift of perspective and treatment, our patients are not sick, not mentally ill, rather they are stuck, emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally stuck. In their treatment, our goal is to help them identify their stuckness and guide them toward getting unstuck. Stuckness leads toward downward spiraling in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Helping them get unstuck frees our patients to chart their life's path toward freedom to upwardly spiral and to be the best that they can be. In the medical model, doctors are healers. They have a plethora of gadgets and gizmos to help them find the broken part

and either fix it or remove it. Their goal is symptom relief, mostly through medication management. This model has worked well for millennia when we treat physical ailments, not so much in treating mental health issues. With this model, therapists are also healers. They can use psychological evaluation

to pinpoint problem, thoughts, feelings, or behaviors, and then talk therapy to help their patients feel better. We focus on answering their why questions. We generate pearls of wisdom and aha moments where our patients feel better and they get it. In mental and psychotherapy, we dabble in why questions just to gain perspective on our patient's thought processes. However, we focus on looking at what questions. What's going on now?

What are your thoughts and feelings about this? What's within your control to change? With MPT, the focus is not on being your patient's doctor from whom you will be given answers for symptom relief. rather we are patient guides for a moment in their life's journey. MPT is less outcome-oriented and more process-oriented. The great Greek philosopher, Socrates, was a teacher, famous for never answering a question from his students. His response to their questions was to ask questions of his own,

leaving them to come up with their own perspectives on the issues at hand. Thus, MPT is less about the outcome of psychotherapy and more about the process. A bit of old Chinese wisdom captures the process. Feed a man a fish and feed him for the day. Teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Stress out and overwhelmed, get an idea about effective therapy with your purchase of the healing journey, overcoming adversity on the path to the good life.

Graduate students learning different intervention strategies of psychotherapy, pick up my book as adjunctive reading for your coursework. Practicing clinicians, add to your toolbox of intervention strategies by purchasing this cutting-edged paradigm shift describing mental and psychotherapy for effective treatment. Purchase your copy online from Amazonbooks.com today. Blessings, Dr. John. If these comments have been helpful and stir questions of your own, contact me through my website at www. Thereformykids.com or email me at John Robinson.00 at bell-south.net.

I'm Dr. Jonathan C. Robinson, licensed clinical psychologist, and... author, and this has been Teachable Moments. Teachable Moments, building blocks of Christian parenting, is available online at AmazonBooks.com and in local and national bookstores. More on Dr. Robinson at t-m-c-p-in-c.com.