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Send your questions to askdeepak@chopra.com
Psychotherapy
Question:
What is your opinion about psychotherapy as a healing tool if in the process one has to continuously focus and analyze the past in order to understand and overcome the suffering/effects caused by past experiences?
Answer:
Psychotherapy is such a broad category and so many different practices are done under that general name, that it would be overly simplistic to endorse everything that happens in the name of psychotherapy. That said, the tool of understanding can be a powerful and sometimes essential healing tool. Cognitive therapy has been shown with brain imaging to be clinically beneficial for the treatment of depression. Certainly dredging up painful memories without first establishing the strength of self that can transform and heal that trauma will not do any good.
That is why it is so important to have a spiritual practice that develops a deeper sense of self beyond the personality and pain, that can serve as a basis upon which the past conditioning can be dealt with from a place of safety, awareness and choice.
Love,
Deepak