Relearning Experience to Resolve Emotional Problems

Relearning Experience Process is a new psychological theory and therapeutic practice

The book provides a comprehensive psychological theory of the genesis, development and manifestation of therapeutic or clinical problems, making the book indispensable reading for psychotherapists, clinical practitioners and all serious students of human motivation and psychology. The method described in the book, Relearning Experience Process, explains how to identify the origins of a therapeutic problem in a person's biography and transform behaviour, thereby resolving the therapeutic problem.

The origins of problems

Although the original experience underlying the problem behaviour is ordinarily unknown and unconscious, it can be discovered by a simple process called 'tracking back'. This process identifies the origin of almost any psychological problem within minutes. Once the experience has been identified, the therapeutic problem is resolved through a 'relearning' of that experience. The relearning provides an alternative reference so that the body can unlearn the original, pathological response.

The book is an exposition of the following ideas

(1) A therapeutic problem is created when, in response to a difficult experience, a person develops behaviour that serves to ameli- orate the threat to her personal dignity (emotional wellbeing).

(2) This behaviour, developed as a solution in a moment of crisis, sets an unconscious and involuntary precedent for future behaviour in circumstances perceived to be similar.

(3) Activated automatically by feelings, this behaviour becomes a therapeutic problem if it interferes with what the person wants.

(4) The difficult experience that occurred at the genesis of the therapeutic problem is discoverable via the feelings associated with the problem behaviour.

(5) An intervention at the origins of the problem which, in imagination, reconfigures the original behaviour, enables the person to choose her behaviour freely in the present, and resolves the thera- peutic problem completely and permanently.

Auteur

Jonathan Livingstone MA PGCE was born in Kenya and spent much of his childhood in the Caribbean. Although initially training as a counsellor, he became an English and Philosophy teacher. He left teaching to train in hypnotherapy, EMDR, NLP and kinesiology, opening his therapy and coaching practice in London in 1998. More recently, he spent over five years in South Africa, working at a progressive school and with young people from the townships of Western Cape. He returned to UK at end of 2016. He has two grown up sons and two young daughters and works as a therapist in the West Midlands.