Dedham Vale Network

As a hypnotherapist, to achieve a good outcome, I find it is essential to work within the client’s terms of reference. A recent article in New Scientist by Dorothy Rowe, a well known psychologist and writer, underlines the importance of this way of working.

Rowe objects in no uncertain terms to the tendency of scientists to view human behaviour as something over which there is little control. She asks, “Are we agents capable of acting on the world any way we choose, or puppets dangling off biochemistry’s strings?”

She then goes on to describe a range of her own clients, such as those individuals who feel they are totally under the control of exterior forces (such as extraterrestrials), or those who blame their genetic inheritance for their behaviour, but most she says are “engaged in making sense of a situation, deciding what to do and acting on those decisions.”

Rowe contrasts this with the prevalent psychiatric approach of labelling people according to their “mental illness” listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “If all else fails,” she comments, you can use “personality disorder not otherwise specified”! Psychologists, on the other hand, tend to categorise people into traits like sociability, extroversion, etc. in order to explain behaviour. Worst are the media she believes, who downgrade us all to puppets, helpless victims, whenever mental health issues are raised.

“What determines our behaviour,” Rowe says, “is not what happens to us, but how we interpret what happens to us”, and that will vary enormously of course, in the same way that accounts of one road accident vary between different witnesses.

We all have unique backgrounds, unique experiences, and unique combinations of brain cells. As we grow up we make our own representations of the world. We create our own meaning structure and then we interpret further events and make decisions in terms of that meaning structure. Again Rowe, “the interpretations we choose are aimed, at least in part, at holding our meaning structure together.”

And her conclusion? “Research (and treatment) not based on this understanding of ourselves is a complete waste of time.”

Reference :- Like a Puppet on the Couch, by Dorothy Rowe . From issue 2485 of New Scientist magazine, 05 February 2005, page 21

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