Private Practice Podcast

Can we all Viktor Frankl our way to self actualisation, in spite of everything? This week we look at the fallacies, not to be confused with phalluses, that might get in the way. If you feel like life is not fair, we're about to take away your sweets. The fallacies of control, fairness, changing people (leave it to the therapists!) and always being right, are thrashed around the Private Practice until our theory of socks and flowing is updated. 

And after all these episodes telling you to stop being so stupid and start rationalising your way out of all that nonsense, the question is begged; how much is too much rational thinking? Plus! Is Dan going to start a cult?

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Don't follow your heart! But how do you know when your assumptions, your type-1 thinking, is distorted? James hasn't got a clue, so he asks Dan. This week we offer you a work out, comprised of jumping to all sorts of conclusions, stretching the truth until your feelings sound like facts, and running up accounts of value judgments with modal verbs. According to Beverley Knight, 'Shoulda woulda coulda are the last words of a fool', and we have a fool with many last words on the subject.

There's no small talk at the start of this episode, so you might want to spend 20 minutes chatting to your neighbour before pressing play. But for those of you who like brevity, who will finally be satisfied that we get on with it at the start this time, the final third of this podcast more than disappoints. You'll have to wait until next week for a satisfactory climax. For now, there is a strong taste of the absurd as we explore the next cognitive distortions in the series and give you three more reasons why you understand nothing.

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Reclining on the sumptuous Freudian couch or answering a tsunami of incredibly similar questions about your interpretational distortions in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy? Just when your life is in chaotic meltdown, you have to evaluate this choice, as if you're informed and capable of making the best decision. This has been a theme to which we have wanted to return since our episode in season four, CBT vs Freud, in which we outlined some of the main differences. In the middle of the 20th century, Carl Rogers and the humanists evolved the experimental work of Freud and Jung, but their therapy was not analytical problem-solving. CBT, meanwhile, is more of an evidence-based formula developed later on, and it's undeniably effective and worth further exploration. But people like to use any old junk as evidence of what they're looking for, and you've listened to our recent episodes and come to the conclusion that the humanists, meanwhile, seem like a friendly gospel choir, without the bible getting in the way and yet less penis-obsessed than Freud. So, isn't the decision easy, get yourself a bit of that unconditional positive regard and just keep one eye out for psychopaths? 

Well now you have Dan the professional and James the provocateur to complicate things and walk you through the minefield of cognitive distortion analysis—over several episodes—until you don't know anything any more. Don't pretend that's not what you want. There are ten recognised cognitive distortions, and yes, James thinks there are five… PLUS! Was Machiavelli woke?

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Now that even Prince Harry has a podcast about mental health, it's time for us to up our game and get serious. Except it was a hot summer's afternoon in Marseille when this recording took place, and James decided to steer the conversation into the waters of relativism and the Big Five personality traits, of which he insists there are ten. You can decide for yourself if you're thrilled or horrified to find that time has changed little; it's business as usual in the Private Practice. 

We are still lurking in the territory of Carl Rogers' humanist psychotherapy, seen in the context of a world with psychopaths and narcissists who may relish the opportunity to manipulate your unconditional positive regard for their own benefit. Many of these are people we know and love, and we certainly won't exterminate them all in a mass-genocide to solve the problem, so we need to live with them (or maybe I should say, you need to live with us?). As a new regular feature, James decides to test how much of a psycho Dan really is, behind the jolly facade of a mental health professional. It may seem like James is the obvious candidate for a narcissistic sociopath, but maybe a little bit of scratching at the surface can reveal the psycho where they're least expected. If you haven't listened to our 2-part episode on Carl Rogers, then probably start there.

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Unconditional positive regard in the face of someone pointing a gun at your face? Or worse, a flatmate accusing you of making their mess in the kitchen. Isn't it time to face reality and bury Carl Rogers' cloud-cuckoo utopian ideas with him in his grave and dance robotically on it? This episode asks the question, what happens when a humanist philosophy meets Machiavellian power away from the therapy room?

Although James tries to drive a Métro train into the ideas of humanist psychology, to balance the bucket of adoration we poured last week, it just makes him sound like the psycho who still has many issues to resolve (and he still has the audacity of suggesting at the end that this time you won't be able to compare yourself favourably to him like usual). Fortunately James steps aside to let Dan explain why you can regard someone positively without condoning their terrible choices or denying your EXTREME ANGER! Take a breath, pay attention, and spread some love as far as you can shoot it. 

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Can you regard all humans positively? Carl Rogers was a humanist psychologist who believed so. He was one of the first ever researchers in psychotherapy since the emergence of the practice with the work of Freud, and this episode looks at the positive effects of his ideas, derived from pioneering experiments. He's one of the most influential psychotherapists in history, and Dan thinks he was a really nice guy. But nice is boring, and so we ask, what's the difference between humanist psychology and an average daytime TV presenter (specifically one who Dan has met, so he can vouch for her niceness).

But if Carl Rogers' ideas were so influential and successful, then it's time to open the Private Practice Podcast freezer and pull out the question we always have oven-ready for situations like this: why are we not all enlightened humans by now? Well, the practical application of his philosophy in the face of reality is the subject next week in Part 2.

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Conspiracy, the breakdown of trust, murder in the street, the Sack Game; the Private Practice Podcast Christmas Special has it all. And it's two thirds longer than last year! It's like all your Christmases have come at once. It's the time of year when people are inclined to believe in any old tosh, so leave your left-brain out for Santa to eat and invite your right-brain to the table for lunch. If the lizard people really don't want you to hear this, they'd have you listening to a greatest hits compilation of James giggling and Dan saying everyone is basically the same. But unless you believe that we're secret elves, delivering conspiracy to the foot of your tree in a weird-shaped package, the conversation you're about to hear should be a delicious feast of free expression. 

Music credits: all from Archive.org

Deck the Halls – Jingle Punks
Silent Night – Dark Christmas Music

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We could have made a breezy 'Top 10 Tips to Improve your Mental Health' summer special. But of course we didn't. We instead came up with our Top 10 psychoanalytical questions for 2020, because a totally neutral, satisfactory state of consciousness is necessarily hard work to achieve against the inevitable oppression of psychic entropy at the best of times, let alone in a global pandemic and existential cultural chaos. It involves trawling through giggles, news about France ('James Finds Himself, Again!' The sequel no one asked for…), the tradition of the Sack Game, and the following complex topics:

Suicide

The empirical or subjective nature of sense data

Peak experience

Psychedelics

Physical displacement

The problems with modelling mental data

What things can a psychoanalyst know?

Thinking in words, pictures and sounds

Giving and taking offence (hopefully you'll be offended by something we say, or else we'll have to try harder next time)

…and a teaser of what we've already started recording for season seven: Carl Rogers vs the Psychopaths.

You're welcome.

Top 10 jazzy music credit:
Disco Metropolis by Vyra (soundcloud.com/vyramusic)
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Sack Game music credit:
The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, archive.org

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Did you just say "sausage"? This week, every word counts in our concluding adventure in the unconscious forest of terrible things. You wanted some dream talk, and as the great philosopher Gabrielle noted, dreams can come true. Before exploring what seems like the utterly feral subjectivity of dream interpretation, we explore Carl Rogers' theory that all science is subjective, and then Freud's theory that all words freely associated with dreams are to some degree objective facts about the unconscious. In this light, dream interpretation is no more subjective than the theory of gravity. I, for one, have no idea if there are evil spirits in the core of the Earth, sucking things away from me, but I choose not to believe this because I want to seem wonderfully clever. Freud and Jung had different perspectives on the significance of dreams, and for once we give Freud the spotlight, starting with his patient who carried a giant pair of testicles on her head.

What are the differences between simple and complex dreams? How do we perceive the world through value judgments? How many words does a picture paint? That's a trick question since there are no words in the unconscious. Don't bother doing your hair for this episode, we'll be turning your world upside down regardless. This is the deepest, darkest part of the forest, and yet just on the other side is the light of consciousness; WAKE UP!

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This is the greatest podcast episode ever recorded, and if you don't think so then you're a discreditable source and we'll destroy you. This week in the forest of terrible things, we dig up some truly horrific defence mechanisms. And we examine them in more detail than we expected, which means that the holy grail of unconscious exploration, dream interpretation, remains tantalisingly out of reach in the upper canopy until next week. This episode is a beast, sniffing for truffles on the forest floor.

Defensiveness might be an inherent aspect of childhood development, but does an adult have any reason to be defensive in their thoughts and communication? Why should it be exclusively the tiny number of people in formal therapy who unlock their repressed ideas and set them free in consciousness? The liberation is as cathartic as any in the material world, and the ability to identify defensiveness is accessible through paying attention.

In our conversation this week, ornamental nut dispensers get smashed, Judge James stops banging his gavel at parties, and driving an electric car into a river makes for a transcendent social rite of passage. Just don't try it at home (but do try everything else). If you think we sound awful with our confessions, try listening to yourself.

In the unlikely event that you find the discussion of childhood repression frustrating, see your therapist. Alternatively, repress it by skipping to the 39 minute mark where the conversation moves on, just as long as you feel bad about doing so, and you will. This episode ultimately climaxes in a forest clearing, nakedly exposed to Carl Rogers' idea of unconditional positive regard. A likely trailer for things to come on this podcast.

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