Sliding to the Underlying…
the distinction between ‘symptomatic’ and ‘symptom-as-tube’ is super important.
A short review
- Medicine is often symptomatic. It is about fighting the symptom, attaching little to no importance to any signs of an underlying psychosomatic situation.
- In several forms of psychotherapy, one mainly focuses on the underlying. The symptom may decrease by responding to these underlying aspects, as a kind of side effect.
- AURELIS partly puts the symptom up front again, but as a symbol, as a tube to the underlying. The underlying is being reached through this tube. Here also, reducing the symptom is a kind of side effect. In addition, the underlying in itself can also be ‘treated’.
Right. Going into detail about ‘underlying’:
in concrete coaching you may often feel that it doesn’t stop here. For example.:
- Chronic tensions and pain may be enhanced by relationship issues.
- These issues may themselves be provoked by more underlying personal problems.
In other words: certain patterns can, while always anew going from cause to effect, play a role in specific sensitivities and at the same time in the expression of these sensitivities. In coaching, one can go back in a ‘causal’ way and meet in each layer more or less the same patterns that can be labeled as ‘causal’.
An advantage of approaching the symptom as a symbol
is that layer after layer may be involved in this ‘causal’ search.
There is no need for digging in this search for the deeper. The tube is open. When the pattern is being approached in this way, the coachee has the possibility to evolve in a spontaneous way. He recognizes things in himself and learns to look at them in a better way. It is also a way to get ‘under the groove’ (see elsewhere).
Back to the short review
- In case of a symptomatic treatment, this would be impossible.
- In case of a treatment of the underlying, one often strands in the next layer.
- With AURELIS it happens spontaneously, with little to no effort. One slides towards the underlying, as it were.
Note that people are sometimes mistaken between (1) and (3). In this case, it is important to emphasize: AURELIS focuses – among other things – on the symptom …
but AURELIS is not symptomatic!