Page 192 - Total War on PTSD

While conventional counseling and psychotherapy rely on logical verbalizing, human existence extends far beyond conceptual reasoning. My professional practice taught me that these existing approaches deny some very basic facts of how life is actually experienced, hence they lack grounding in basic experiential reality. People’s negative feelings are not based on logical, thought-out decisions. Why then assume that logic can alleviate their suffering?
While working in the mental health fields in Australia and the U.S., I ultimately realized the reasons for their limitations. Western knowledge is largely focused on emphasizing and labeling differences that creates the view of a world made of different and separate entities with little or no overlap. Such a conceptually mediated worldview, known as "dualistic", causes a pervasive tension between the continuous nature of reality and the individual fragmented view of the world from which the discordant, stressful life-experiences emerge.
Esotherapy explains that our many “diseases” are but different facets of this inner tension and fragmentation that this dualistic, words-mediated perception creates. In Esotherapy, we believe that this fragmentation is the crux of all ills, and what we call diseases are mere symptoms of the same dualistic consciousness across different facets of life (mental, physical, social, etc.)
If fragmentation is the root of illnesses, it would follow, then, that healing entails restoring the sense of being an INSEPARABLE part of an integrated world, a worldview known as “mystical" or “esoteric”. This awareness integration, which is the main focus of esotericism and mysticism, decreases this dualistic sense of disconnection and the ever-pervasive tension it produces. While mystical spiritualities aim to develop a non-dualistic consciousness, they do not harness the therapeutic skills needed for teaching how to integrate dualistic life-experiences into healing wisdom, something that psychology attempts to do. On the other hand, therapies like psychology, which are rooted in the dualistic paradigm, actually reinforce the client’s dualistic perception. To overcome these inherent
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