Liberation Psychotherapy

Liberation Psychotherapy, or "LibPsych", represents a systems approach to the healing of ‘souls’. All of the seemingly disparate parts of the therapy cooperate in the goal of talking with individuals about the meaning of their lives, what is healthy and is not, what is valuable and worth doing and what is not, and how one can celebrate their days prior to death. The systems approach means that, as the therapy hours tick by, five principles come forth in the thought patterns of the client and the interventions of the therapist.

The Five Basic Principles of Liberation Psychotherapy
These five forces drive human psychology and weave in and out of normal everyday life as well as therapy sessions.

Life Force Energy
Life Force Energy is the biological principle wherein all life forms have an impulse to continuance: continuance not only in terms of dissemination of seed, but continuance in terms of the evolutionary urge to survive and flourish. In humans this is magnified by consciousness. Traumas reveal a subtle truth. Non-conscious animals do not carry psychological traumas the way humans do. Humans are hard-wired to anticipate a given developmental progression, a kind of smooth journey through life. A trauma is a shock, a severe blow leaving a lasting negative impact on the organism. For traumas to make sense there must exist a prior hard-wired anticipation of a positive forward thrust inherent in the organism. That example shows that Life Force Energy is within, a drive towards a logical, fulfilling and free existence. This force is the secret ally of the therapist and must be engaged for health to be enhanced. Thus, Life Force Energy forms the primary understanding upon which therapy is built. The idea is to expunge trauma so that freedom can continue its march throughout a person’s life. The largest difficulty is the Script which is originally built on a trauma followed by daily conditioning by both the client’s repetition compulsion and his/her original family’s unwitting contributions during dependent childhood. We’ll return to this later.

Abandonment Issue
The second principle of Liberation Psychotherapy is the Abandonment Issue. This archaic fear may begin in the last trimester in the womb, is certainly present at birth, and is extended during the dependent days of youth. It can lay waste to the freedom of a grownup still in its grip. Abandonment for a baby means death which, when analyzed thoughtfully, means that even here there is a prior semi-conscious urge to continue based on Life Force Energy. Due to the power of Abandonment, humans adapt in any way possible so they survive. In adulthood, humans fear abandonment in all manner of relationships, ranging from friends to a vague community, from school to church, being fired from a job, and, in marriage, a spouse’s unfaithfulness or departure. Abandonment explains why humans, in groups, do such irrational things: they fear isolation. People will learn a religious rhetoric in order to belong, will loyally conform to an organization’s simplistic either/or creeds without asking rational questions, and will stay in non-fulfilling marriages due to fear of being bereft of family. Those who actively solve this issue travel the entire developmental skein which begins with severe abandonment fears (severe because of the anticipation of death), move on to existential loneliness, pass on to a sense of acceptable aloneness, and then, finally, to the serene sanctity of solitude. Said quickly, that journey may appear easy: it is not. It must be noted that the final stage of solitude does not mean the absence of in-depth relationships. Rather, it means that an individual has accepted separateness and even death, but can choose to be close with others as a bonus in life. Strangely, since abandonment is so fraught with ancient fear, there happens to be a legitimate form of abandonment in terms of social realities. It is necessary for accountability to be foundational. A boss that is forever forgiving will experience employees who malinger. In fact, it is critical in all public institutions that the tension of abandonment remain taut. This is even true in terms of a deeply intimate marriage. Each must know that the other can survive without her/him, so that the partnership and commitment to life remains firm. Examples of words that may convey this message are "If you begin to destroy yourself with booze or drugs, I’m out of here." and "I don’t need you, but I choose you."

Emotions
The middle principle of Liberation Psychotherapy, Emotions, appears quite simple. After all, a child of three or four can understand the six primary emotions necessary for therapy: Sadness, Anger, Scare, Happiness, Excitement and Tenderness. These emotions as a group are named by the acronym SASHET. It turns out that these six are enormously profound. Each emotion can have a referent to times gone past (OLD), can be an imitation or ricochet of someone else (COPY), an insincere demonstration (PHONY), and a present, here and now expression (REAL). It is absolutely critical to understand that a focus on a single SASHET feeling provides the long desired basic unit for a science of psychology. No science can exist without basic units, and psychology is no exception. Without a basic unit, each therapist (in fact each psychological theory) is nothing but opinions. That not only leaves an individual therapist floundering, it leaves the entire discipline a mere subjective phenomenon. Since psychology is the queen of the humanities, all humanistic disciplines will be transformed once the basic unit of a solitary SASHET emotion is accepted. A major part of this is to realize the truth of modularity. REAL feelings are the desirable outcome for post-therapy clients. Everything flows. When there is a sad occasion, the person experiences it. The same follows with the other five emotions, though it needs to be pointed out that anger is almost always presaged by a quick impulse of scare. While Happiness is the core foundation of the experiencing life, it is crucial to understand that LibPsych emphasizes being real more than it does being constantly happy. The variety of daily experience gives us invitations to respond to each successive situation with appropriate emotions. Real feelings are like musical notes on a scale: they go up and down and, together, providing the melody of existence. One idea is to be transparent with emotions. PHONY emotions are artificial cheerleader expressions designed to give an impression rather than be true to the internal organism. PHONY emotions can be seen when a family car arrives at church. A family argues until the car pulls to a halt, but when the door is opened there are gushy hellos. Unfortunately, each SASHET emotion can be used to manipulate others. For instance, some males use anger so their wives experience the scare the male refused to own. Some individuals fake excitement (a salesman), some manipulate with tenderness (an evangelist), and some exhibit scare and sadness in order to gain sympathy. COPIED emotions are more secretive and must be rooted out. For example, the scare of the wife in an earlier sentence displays the feeling her husband failed to acknowledge. She shudders for him. COPIED examples, however, can range from earliest childhood where a kid learns to perform in such a way that he/she is not abandoned by either mother or father. Charismatic leaders can project their emotions out so their followers experience some form of exultation - about life, God, or even about war and destruction. Tragically, some children imitate their mother or father’s emotional spectrum. This can begin as early as a baby taking on its mother’s postpartum depression. It is the array of OLD emotions that primarily occupy therapists, These emotions are replete with specific traumas (ex. car accident) and even social traumas (ex. humiliation due to body ugliness). Re-experienced old emotions are the prime suspects in destroying psychological freedom. To dispatch the power of these antique emotions, it is incumbent upon therapists to be familiar with the entire range of developmental stages: birth, exploration, the two year old phase, the three to six era, and even such periods as teen years. It is also necessary for therapists to be fully versed on how to dismantle traumas so clients may return to the fluidity of REAL feelings and the full expression of Life Force Energy. To accomplish that feat, therapists are advised to learn the Anatomy of a Trauma which is a unique contribution of LibPsych. The most difficult trauma to unravel is called the Script. Beginning with a specific developmental trauma, the individual develops a secret narrative that underlies both individual and intimate behavior. The Script is an unconscious life plan that guarantees failure. It leaks out in everything from choice of words to physical manifestations. It is deadly due to the heavy transferences that emerge from the old narrative, transferences that inhibit joy, love, and a relatively scare-free emotional life. The present day impulse for an individual’s pathological Script is an unconscious physical impulse triggered by a micro-second emotion - usually scare, but sometimes sadness. Those two can be quickly translated into self-righteous anger. Once the 'show' is underway, everything becomes predictable. Painfully, it is the ‘threat’ of real intimacy that is the greatest cause of the release of the script narratives as the many tales of strange eruptions of behavior after marriage attest. Why does this occur? Intimate vulnerability triggers the fear of abandonment and the person resorts to the old Script in order to have safety, i.e. safe neurosis.

Modularity
The fourth principle, Modularity, is a perfectly logical follow-through as one considers PHONY, COPIED, and OLD feelings with their sub-set traumas. A given individual is not always acting out of an old space. At times the person may be reasonable, kind, or very businesslike. This means that there are varying ‘parts’ within a person’s brain/mind. In other words, the person has operative ‘sub-selves’ and the categories of Freud: Superego, Ego, Id. LibPsych uses the modern metaphor ‘module’ to indicate a succinct sequence of neuronal firings that have given emotional, behavioral, moral and mental patterns. Interestingly, since the conscious mind is oblivious to the alternative modular ‘firings’, there is a floating use of the pronouns “I, me, mine” as if the person is a coherent singular person. An objective analyst can actually track the changes. The various modules can be observed by watching auditory shifts (in tone, intensity, volume, timbre, and tempo), in bodily shifts (ex. switching gestures from one hand to the other as the angle of the body changes), emotional displays (some people do not know even when they are yelling), and actual content of what is said. Freud’s tripartite scheme of Superego, Ego, Id is also easy to follow in that a given individual has a Parent voice, a Reasonable voice, and a Childlike voice. The tracking therapist notes these and for PHONY displays asks “Who, historically speaking, would be affected by that emotion?”, for OLD displays asks “How young are you feeling right now?”, for COPIED emotions “Do you feel like yourself or someone else as you express that?” and for REAL emotions the therapist consistently builds the client’s true self by saying “This, indeed, is your authentic being”.

Presuppositions
The final of the five primary LibPsych principles is called Presuppositions. This option is incredibly profound and takes major study to master. The founders of Liberation Psychotherapy, Frank and Dix Morris, admit they arrived at the use of presuppositions out of a sad awareness that most clients would not travel the entire trail of developing clean REAL feelings - due to the time, money, and stress involved in long term therapy. Most grievous of all, most would not fully dismantle the Script. That failure of installing super reason as executive in charge of the individual mental life leads to an unredeemed humanity still tied to the eruption of untamed animal aggression and raw sexuality. To sympathetically understand people it is advisable to realize the truth of weltschmerz, the German word for sadness about human suffering. Failures often invite innovations. The idea of presuppositions is to cleverly use language to provide clients with a verbal self concept. The goal is to permanently install mental notions in terms of qualities of mind, soul, behavior, and the person’s very being itself. (Ex. “You have a good brain and will do well in life” - said to an impressionable child). Amazingly, all people remain impressionable because there is no “self mirror” whereby a person can view themselves. internally speaking. We only know who we are through vast long experience or - and that “or” is very powerful - through what people tell us. “Grandpa said I’d always choose to be a loving person and I am”. “Mom said I was a worker and I’ve proved her right”. To adequately learn the art of presuppositions one must begin with a study of twenty-six linguistically influential word structures developed by Dr. Kartunnen of Texas University. He showed that language can be double binding. For instance, ‘awareness predicates’ are built around the words aware, realize, recognize, are cognizant of, and understand. (Ex. “Do you understand that you are a very bright person?”) To that question a person can either say “No, I didn’t understand that” or “”Yes, I understand that I am bright”. Either way the person accepts the hidden premise that he/she is bright. A second learning necessary to develop the art of delivering presuppositions is the timing of delivery. Most therapists ask questions for most of the hour. In the remaining moments there are times when the client looks at the client inquisitively. That is an opportunity to install a self concept. There are many other timing options but they demand a lot of practice. The third learning opportunity in this new field happens to be an offshoot of transference in that the client looks upon the therapist as a kind of all-knowing sage. Frank Morris developed a large number of Authority Transference presuppositions just for this purpose. (Ex. “Over time, I have learned that you are a person of great insight, have historically been quite admirable, and, so, I am assured that you will always do well in the future”. People of the mold of teachers, famous people, grandparents and parents have wonderful opportunities to shape others. Those snapshots of presuppositions should convey their power. To be sure, each of the five principles have descending cascades of depth. If each principle were to be ‘tree structured’ following the basic unit of a single emotion, there would be a descent to the very basement of human nature. In the depths a researcher will discover the source of both evil and good, of immorality and inherent morality, of irrationality and reason. The subject is exciting, demands careful exactitude, and culminates in understanding the full plethora of human expressions. A story: Shortly after World War II, an American witnessed a wild scene in Berlin. A Russian soldier had ripped an electric wire with a light bulb out of a ceiling and carried it into his tent. When he flipped the switch near the bulb, he anticipated it lighting up. When it did not, he grabbed a German prisoner, put a gun to his head, and demanded that he turn the light on or he would blow his head off. It is to be understood that a flick of an emotion turns on varying modular expressions. A failure to understand the emotional basic unit means that people are controlled by emotions and are not free. When subsequent rhetoric follows the misunderstanding of the original trigger, all we get is fluff - particularly in politics and religion. This article is intended to provide a preliminary introduction to Liberation Psychotherapy. For more information, the book "Liberation Psychotherapy" can be obtained.