Luan Hassett

How many thousands of personal development modalities do you reckon there are? Modalities for exploring trauma, releasing tension, expanding awareness, reframing limiting beliefs

Therapists have a term called ‘purple hat’ practices. These are newer forms of therapy that are only effective because they incorporate older therapies. I recently spoke to the Clinical Psychologist I work with, who said that when she trained in EMDR the trainer used elements of at least five other modalities in order to deliver his presentation.

It is difficult not to be cynical about the latest copyrighted practices that come with warning labels to seek sessions with a certified practitioner before trying on one’s own. Or in which to become certified if one seeks to go deeper. If I am starving, I want the steak. If food has been in short supply, I don’t care about whether it’s topped with garlic butter or pepper sauce.

But wait. I notice I don’t feel like carrying this skepticism any further. A sentence is coming back to me, imperfectly remembered, from Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig’s ‘Power In the Helping Professions’: the shadow of the therapist and the shadow of the client constellate together. Observing a flash of charlatanry, my apathy comes out to meet it. The part of me that resists change has its perfect excuse. The reality is that if you shut down claims to novelty you will have impaired your excitement, a crucial force in the early stages of transformation. Whatever the truth about whether there is anything new under the sun, there certainly is to you.

The danger is that you mistake the novelty for the transformation, so that when the new becomes the familiar you think that nothing really changed. This is why I think it’s important to not collapse onto what a modality can do for you. There are deeper matters of character that must be considered. How badly do you want it? How clear are you on what “it” is? What would be a sufficient test of whether you have it? And to clarify your relationship with these tools – what are you, essentially?

I will finish with a take home message. If you are in the fight you are in the resistance. There are gimmicks out there that you don’t blink twice about indulging. There is some brand of coffee or type of house plant that isn’t fundamentally much different from the others, but you needed caffeine or a spruced-up living room and so you went ahead and bought it, no questions asked. No aspersions cast about the business owner. Of course it is a little different in the case of personal development. You need to trust the practitioner at a deeper level. So the question becomes, how do you resolve the matter of trust such that you can entirely focus on the work?