Proper Limitations of Talk Therapy, Part 1

It seems to me that over the last 25 years or so, with the onslaught of the managed care invasion of psychotherapy, one of the results has been a widening expectation of what talk therapy can do for people. It has come to be seen as a remedy for everything from front line crisis intervention aimed at perhaps saving people's lives (or preventing them from taking their lives), to rehabilitating people from the destructive effects of chemical addiction, sexual addiction, process addictions, work addiction and more, to providing solace and skills for dealing with grief, to healing the effects of trauma, to re-educating people who have problems controlling their anger, to providing a cure for domestic violence, to managing any number of socially frowned upon "aberrant" behaviors, to
teaching couples how to be in relationship in mutually satisfying ways, to keeping people with very serious mental illnesses from completely ruining their lives. Etc.

This is surely not an exhaustive list, but one that I hope helps to give an idea of the breadth of the expectations that have grown up around talk therapy.

Other kinds of therapies have grown out of talk therapy, because some of the inherent limitations of talk therapy have been recognized. We have the somatic (body inclusive/body centered) therapies which are aimed, often, at helping people resolve the effects of trauma; we have shamanic "therapies"; we have group therapies and psycho-educational "therapies"; we have movement and music and art therapies; we have "intuitive" therapies; we have the energy psychologies; we have all manner of body-mind therapies, including hypnotherapy, EFT, EMDR, and others.
Then there is always pastoral counseling; or talking to a priest; or making confession; or visiting a curandera.

I'd like to make an argument for the proper limitations of talk therapy as a healing modality. I don't think it's suited to the treatment of every kind of personal or relational distress, even though there seems to be at least something of this expectation now in the culture at large. For example, it's not at all uncommon - it is in fact the norm - for mental health agencies, and even for private treatment centers, to load up therapists with impossibly brutal case loads, expecting that somehow, some magic will occur that will allow these therapists to properly "treat" inordinate numbers of clients, presumably based on the assumption that talk therapy is a magical process whereby people are readily, easily, and probably painlessly "cured" of what ails them. The public, largely I believe because of the obscenely profit driven agendas of the gargantuan insurance monopolies, has come to believe this nonsense too.


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