When You Don't Know Where to Turn: A Self-Diagnosing Guide to Counseling and TherapyBartlett, Steven J.
Science
When You Don't Know Where to Turn: A Self-Diagnosing Guide to Counseling and Therapy
Bartlett, Steven J.
Consumer education; Counseling; Psychotherapy
Logotherapists tend to be warm, accepting individuals. They will often
use humor. Yet they are trained to confront individuals: to push their
clients to face their inner feelings of futility and despair, and then,
out of their often overlooked and underestimated inner resources and
moral strength, to _will_ that their lives become meaningful.
Logotherapists try to encourage clients to see more clearly what it is
that gives them a sense of value in living and to use what they see to
direct themselves toward more satisfying and personally fulfilling
lives.
APPLICATIONS OF LOGOTHERAPY
As we have already observed, logotherapy has been used to treat a wide
range of individual problems involving a loss of faith in the value of
living, behavior that no longer is under voluntary control, or behavior
that frustrates your desires.
Logotherapy is especially well-suited to helping individuals with
_noögenic neuroses_, Frankl's term for personal problems that have
their basis in conflicts between opposing values. Noögenic (from the
Greek _nous_, meaning "spirit" or "mind") neuroses have their origin in
personal moral or spiritual, but not necessarily religious, conflicts.
They lead to a feeling of existential frustration: a person's will to
find meaning is blocked. When sufficient pressure is built up, anxiety
and depression can follow. You can imagine how pressure might build up
in the inner lives {154} of a business executive who wishes she had a
family instead of a career identity, a university professor who yearns
to be an independent artist, or a financially successful businessman
who despises his own pretenses and opportunism.
I asked the poor creatures who listened to me attentively in the
darkness of the hut to face up to the seriousness of our position.
They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the
certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle did not detract
from its dignity and meaning. I said that someone looks down on
each of us in difficult hours--a friend, a wife, somebody alive or
dead, or a God--and he would not expect us to disappoint him. He
would hope to find us suffering proudly--not miserably.[3]
[3] Frankl, _Man's Search for Meaning_, p. 132.
REALITY THERAPY
_For persons able to make a commitment to a
plan for life improvement, whether they have
emotional or behavioral problems or simply
want to develop a success-identity._
... [U]nhappiness is the result and not the cause of irresponsibility.
William Glasser, _Reality Therapy_
Reality therapy was developed in the 1950s by psychiatrist William
Glasser (1925-2013). His approach to therapy evolved as a result of
his work with delinquent teenage girls, with clients in private
practice, and with severely troubled patients in a VA hospital.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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