Relearning Therapy is for therapists who want to improve their understanding of emotional problems and their therapeutic practice, and for people who want to understand where their therapeutic problem came from and how it can be resolved. The book comprehensively explains how emotional or psychological problems are created, and how they can be permanently resolved by identifying their biographical origins and relearning the experience.
In response to a diffifficult circumstance, a person modifies her behaviour to minimize the impact on her personal dignity. For example, a person learns that by keeping her head down she is less likely to receive criticism from her
step father. In the future, to protect herself from criticism, she keeps her head down, just as she learned to do as a teenager. The learned behaviour, motivated by feelings from the past (not thoughts), becomes a therapeutic problem when it interferes with the person's pursuit of a desired goal.
Relearning Experience Process uses the feelings motivating the problem behaviour to identify the past experience underlying the problem. The past experience is relearned, neutralizing the problematic feeling and resolving the problem behaviour.
The book explores and provides an answer to the following questions:
- How should the unconscious be understood?
- What is the relationship and interaction between conscious and unconscious?
- What is emotion, and is there a distinction between emotions and feelings?
- What motivates behaviour?
- What are, or should be, the aims of therapy?
- What therapies are the most successful, and what makes them successful?
- Why do psychological problems develop in a person: how and why are they created?
- Why do they take the forms that they do in terms of feelings and behaviour?
- What kinds of experiences lead to emotional problems; and what differentiates these experiences from experiences that don't lead to emotional problems?
- Is it possible to find the origins of psychological problems in the biography of an individual?
- Why do problems manifest at the time when they do, sometimes years or even decades following the experiences underlying them?
- What actually is a psychological problem; how should psychological problems be defined or described?
- What differentiates less successful from more successful psychological interventions?
- Can psychological or emotional problems be fully and finally resolved; or do people have to learn to live with them, as we are often led to believe?
- Is it possible to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature of psychological problems, and a coherent theory of how and why they develop and how to treat them?
