Overview

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?

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9780956317940

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Reviews

I have no hesitation in recommending this book to any clinician wishing to expand their knowledge. Dr Sarah Butler, Counselling Psychologist, Cronos Wellbeing This is a thoroughly important book for those working in the therapeutic space, not only introducing a groundbreaking new approach, but providing a useful refresh of what truly professional therapeutic practice should look like. Paul Crittenden, Life & Leadership Coach This book changed my life and will continue to transform every client that walks through my door. It is a must read for anyone who wants to free themselves from unwanted behaviours and inhibiting life patterns. Bianca Rogers, REP Practitioner This book suggests a new approach to discovering the origins of therapeutic problems, and outlines a step-by-step process to helping a client change their unwanted feelings, modify their problematic behaviours, and achieve their desired goals. Dr Ruth Livingstone, Retired GP Occasionally, a book arises out of profound insight. Relearning Experience is one such. Early in the text we are teased with the audacious idea that the best therapy for a person's problem might be if the problem never occurred in the first place - that if the original experience were a more helpful one, then the therapeutic problem wouldn't exist. Although introduced in a tongue-in-cheek way, this notion is later revealed as a profound base concept. By daring to reframe therapy in this way, and by embracing the powerful role that imagination plays in shaping experience, Jonathan has developed a faster, more effective, and less agonizing approach that will enable competent practitioners to help more people heal their therapeutic problems, quickly and permanently. I have long believed that the true masters of talking therapies are those that deeply understand first principles, and work from them, constantly improving and developing their practice as their insight expands. In this new work, the author not only demonstrates the depth and breadth of his insight but reveals how first principles sit at the core of outstanding professional practice. Taking the form of an extended interview the writing style takes a bit of getting used to. But it's delivered in a clear, skilful and clever manner, and affords the reader the benefit of learning from the positions of both observer and critic as the 'Mentor' reveals his thinking and practice. Soon, you find yourself imagining being in the room as the conversation is taking place. As the pages advance, so does the reader's engagement and insight - proving that Jonathan is as masterful a writer as he is a therapist. This is a thoroughly important new book for those working in the therapeutic space, not only introducing a groundbreaking new approach, but providing a useful refresh of what truly professional therapeutic practice should look like. Paul Crittenden, Life & Leadership Coach, Mentor & Therapist

Author Information

Jonathan Livingstone opened his therapy practice in Covent Garden in 1998. He has worked with Asian tsunami survivors, young people from the townships of Western Cape, and with refugees in Diego Garcia and Rwanda. He studied at Sussex University, Cardiff University and Coventry University, and has a PGCE from Oxford University. He has worked in therapy and education for 32 years.

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