For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones.
120 people and three months and during COVID.
Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.
120 people and three months and during COVID.
Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.
Just read the damn paper, rather than presume it’s credible or dismiss it because they couldn’t run it on 100,000 people over the course of 30 years.
Nobody cares if a random person off the street thinks a bridge looks sturdy.
I feel that's taken a little out of context. There were two trials:
> For No-imagine trials, participants were given one of their cue words, asked to first acknowledge the event in their mind. Then, while continuing to stare directly at the reminder cue, they were asked to stop thinking about the event – they should not try to imagine the event itself or use diversionary thoughts to distract themselves, but rather should try to block any images or thoughts that the reminder might evoke. For this part of the trial, one group of participants was given their negative events to suppress and the other given their neutral ones.
Emphasis added. And the trial you refer to:
> For Imagine trials, participants were given a cue word and asked to imagine the event as vividly as possible, thinking what it would be like and imagining how they would feel at the event. For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones.
Not necessarily, for one how often people really stare at the cues of a negative event, and try to suppress it versus trying to suppress an internal imagination of the event? Secondly, there’s a greater confound in which externalizing your fear to begin with has a positive effect on processing the affect.
It’s also not clear enough how the operationalize “the suppress”, because it is a difficult and paradoxical task to execute volitionally especially in the context of acute anxiety, because anxiety’s job is literally to interrupt your normal salience structure, and make it self salient non-volitionally.
There is another devil in the detail, the target negative events are self-selected by the participants, so in all likelihood, the most disturbing events are not going to be readily consciously available, and whatever comes up here are going to be things that are already filtered to be easier to deal with.
In contrast in obsessive compulsive disorder, the intrusiveness of the imaginations will be all consuming. In which case it is contraindicated to try suppressing the thought, because it definitely will backfire, as it is precisely what maintains the disorder, but instead it is about learning to stay unresponsive in the face of exposure (ie not scratching the itch) of such thoughts, which is known as exposure and response prevention. Yet still, this method is not found to be necessarily more successful than straight out CBT either.
I promise you, good sessions just aren’t like that. My psych is amazing. We don’t talk about how “society has to change” because the pain I’ve experienced isn’t really about society any more. And the point of sessions isn’t to fix society, it’s to help me (the patient) heal and grow. I’ve never felt bullied by her - not for a second.
I’m sorry if you haven’t had a good therapist. As I say, maybe 80% of psychs are flushable. But some people are genuinely amazing and can help a great deal. They’ve certainly helped me.
The psych is expected to know an awful lot more than you about the whole process and subject.. so if you need to think critically about the psych, you don't really have the knowledge base to do well.
Taking what a psychiatrist has said as a golden rule, has wasted time and led me down the wrong road.
There is no subsitute for making up your own mind, or hearing the truth from the highest quality/rawest sources. And those sources are basically in universities and high quality education materials.
Most of the information just generally available in society and delivered by 'professionals'.... is a long, long way from what an adult needs to make rational decisions.