Prosocial Psychotherapy: Discovering Your Altruistic Nature

An Initial Error

Our fascination with psychotherapy has grown since the early years when Sigmund Freud was meeting with women in his home office, trying to help them overcome their problems –their “neuroses”—by delving into the conscious and unconscious mind, supposedly on display through uncensored speech.

“Freely associate” was the only instruction. “Say whatever comes into your mind.”

Of course, no one can really do that. We’re always censoring what we say. But dutiful patients complied. Instead of protesting, refusing to do the impossible, they put on a show. This was life in the Victorian era, when female sexuality was a dark secret.

Given the instruction to say whatever came to mind, one can imagine these very proper ladies freaking out, fearful something about their sexual desires would slip out, their most secret longings betrayed. It’s no wonder Freud mistakenly assumed that sex was hidden deeply in mind. Given that he’d never heard well-raised women discussing sex before, it’s no wonder he thought it was coming from the “unconscious mind.” No doubt, on the other hand, he believed the conscious mind was producing more ordinary Victorian conversation, acceptable discourse for the day.

So, perhaps, right from the start, by demanding his patients speak entirely freely, Freud revealed his initial error. The nature of the mind he thought he’d discovered, was upside down. He believed that "nasty stuff: that women knew about (but kept so secret) was unconscious. And when they dared reveal those secrets –like who crept into their bedroom at night, or who pulled up their skirt when no one was watching—he believed those stories that seemed to appear suddenly, out of nowhere, were memories, long ago repressed and only now, with his guidance, could they surface.

Along with sex, Freud seemed to place every malevolent, anti-social, and self-centered thought—we’re all only too aware of—in the unconscious. Like the story of the emperor’s new clothes, no one admitted: “Hey you’ve got it wrong. The emperor is naked.” Instead, everyone went along, endorsing Freud’s mistake. The most amazing thing; here we are, well over a century later, many still believe that our most chaotic disturbing thoughts are deeply hidden, while our compassionate nature is what’s, in fact, unconscious. Sadly, many contemporary schools of psychotherapy are still holding on to a wooden and distorted picture of the unconscious,

To give a few examples: Students are still taught that when a client is giving them trouble, it's because they're "resisting treatment" because the patient is "gratified by their symptoms"—or their symptoms give them "infantile gratification." This is making the assumption that on the unconscious level, the patient wants to continue to be disturbed, or inhibited, or otherwise suffering. This makes no sense—no one wants to be miserable, no one wants to be held back by psychological problems, The whole idea of resistance is based on that initial error—believing the maladaptive or disturbing mind is unconscious,

The Talking Cure

Psychotherapy is essentially what happens in a relationship designed to help someone feel better psychologically. In the psyche. In the heart. From my perspective as a prosocial psychodynamic psychotherapist, I like to work with my clients at least until they discover their Buddha-nature, their fundamental goodness of heart, their understanding that all the terrible things they’ve gone through themselves and the terrible things they’ve witnessed really weren’t their fault. Ideally, the end-goal of therapy is for clients to have embarked on living the lives they’ve always wanted.

Prosocial Psychotherapy, like other contemporary psychodynamic theories, also drawing from humanistic and cognitive theories, includes talking to someone—a professional someone—about your life—your history, your family, your problems, and your suffering, the things you believe, the things you want to change. In each kind of therapy, by talking, we’re working with the conscious and unconscious mind. But in prosocial psychotherapy, differing from other dynamic treatments, we’ve rearranged the storyline. We know you—and all of us—know all about your anti-social thoughts, your very worst behaviors, and furthermore, you’ve always remembered the gross details of the night a drunken uncle molested you. Your authentic better nature is, however, the hidden part of mind, and this is what’s uncovered in prosocial psychotherapy.

When the client who has a terrible temper, discovers that—when she throws a tantrum, she's loyally imitating her beloved dad who died throwing tempers—she's making progress. This very unpleasant habit, a real drag on everyone she lives with, is driven by unconscious loyalty. It's altruism run amok.

The patient who was giving her therapist a hard time was imitating her critical mother, She was offering the therapist a test, in an effort to get over the way she'd been treated by her mother. She was hoping the therapist would provide a model of how to react to her mother when she was being particularly difficult and offensive. Or perhaps she was offering the therapist a "rejection test." a chance to criticize her, like her mother, and then throw her out of therapy, hoping of course that wouldn't happen. The difficult patient wasn't being "resistant"—instead, she was working hard in therapy to overcome problems she had, thanks to problems she lived through in her family. Her intentions were to recover, and to get along with her therapist.

Unconscious Essential Reads

What Is the Unconscious Mind?

How Our Actions Reveal More Than We Realize

Or the young man, a gang member, who beats up a member of a competing gang because he beat the brains out of his brother a few years back—it was an enormous relief when he discovered what made him get violent—thanks to the therapy he was ordered to attend—by a judge who was hearing his assault case. It was payback, it was an act driven by loyalty to his gang brother and fury that someone had tried to harm him. When people realize their motives are adaptive and prosocial, a light goes on.

Something profound changes when you find out you're impelled to act by some kind of basic goodness you didn't know you had. Actions good or bad, when you find out what drives you to act you feel that special relief that comes when your chronic guilt decreases. When you feel less guilty, you change and you gain an entirely new kind of control. You can decide whether or not to act. Something that was out of control is now under your power. This is the net result of prosocial therapy when it's working.