Treating samvega with Western psychotherapy?

[Kusala]

Someone posted this article a while back...

Still Crazy after all these Years: Why Meditation isn't Psychotherapy http://www.buddhanet.net/crazy.htm

[PeterB]

That's the one... meditation ( in any tradition ) is not psychotherapy...
And importantly, psychotherapy is not meditation either...

Just as meditation is not dentistry
Nor is it dermatology
Nor is it physiotherapy.

They have different aims and different reasons for being.

The aim of psychotherapy is to restore social functioning by understanding that which disables social functioning.
If one wants to go deeper, or broader ( supply your own spatial metaphor ) then Dr Freud wont help you, and neither will Dr Jung. That's not their job..despite anything that Jungians claim..

[cooran]

Someone posted this article a while back...

Still Crazy after all these Years: Why Meditation isn't Psychotherapy http://www.buddhanet.net/crazy.htm

Thanks for reminding me of this teaching by Patrick!

With metta,
Chris

[danieLion]

Many people experience samvega, to a lesser or greater extent. Externally, this tends to look like depression. So many such people are advised to seek help from medical professionals, which usually means a psychotherapeutic treatment (such as CBT, DBT, REBT, ACT etc.) and medications.

But on principle, how much can really be hoped for from such treatments? Especially from the Buddhist perspective?

Hi binocular,
This is an extremely complex issue. I think domanassa is a better parallel for what "depression" is, but still not perfect. Before that, though, what "depression" is is not agreed upon, even by medical professionals and psychotherapists. The DSM in not scientific, by any stretch of the imagination.

CBT and REBT focus, like the Buddha did, on the dependently originated aspects of "depression" and downplay labelling from the DSM or other sources as they are seen to only compound the problem. I have posted about this extensively here. Medications can make "depression" worse, and are no more effective than placebos, as I noted here. Gary Greenburg, a practicing psychotherapist and sufferer of "depression," has written brilliant critiques of psychotherapeutic takes on the DSM and "depression:"
Blog
Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease
The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry
The Noble Lie: When Scientists Give the Right Answers for the Wrong Reasons
Kindly,
dL

[santa100]

chownah wrote:I have looked at the first two links in the thread that santa100 has provided and have not found anything that seems to be a defining statement or description of samvega. I'm still hoping that someone knows of a Sutta reference which can provide some sort of definition of samvega.

The link below might have more info. on samvega and various sutta references..
http://dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-con ... 7-piya.pdf

[BlackBird]

I must admit I haven't read the meat of this thread, I am simply responding to the OP.

Samvega is something I have always experienced in grand quantities: My counter question is why the need to treat it at all? I harness it for use in helping me to strive toward nibbana, Ven. Thanissaro has written something similar along the lines and it is published on accesstoinsight.

Edit: I see it's already been quoted here.

[chownah]

chownah wrote:I have looked at the first two links in the thread that santa100 has provided and have not found anything that seems to be a defining statement or description of samvega. I'm still hoping that someone knows of a Sutta reference which can provide some sort of definition of samvega.

The link below might have more info. on samvega and various sutta references..
http://dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-con ... 7-piya.pdf

Santa100,
Thanks so much for the link. It looks like just what I was wanting! I've read a part of it only since it is rather long. What I've read so far seems to be that the Suttas seem to use the word but not define it while a lot of writers seem to want to say precisely what it is and give detailed definitions....from this I can't help but continue to think that the definitions given are just writers' projections onto the sparse framework of the suttas. But as I said I have only read a part of the article and there are a lot of references so I'll nibble away at it from time to time and see what gives.

Thanks again and I hope others will read some of it and report their impressions.
chownah

[ancientbuddhism]

The Tathāgata swept past anything psychotherapy has to offer. You cannot talk yourself out of dukkha.

[Kusala]

http://www.tricycle.com/feature/romanci ... a?page=0,0 Romancing the Buddha by Thanissaro Bhikkhu is another profound article.

[binocular]

Samvega is something I have always experienced in grand quantities: My counter question is why the need to treat it at all?

The usual scenario goes something like this:
A person posts a thread on a forum, or brings up the issue in conversation with friends and family. This person talks about how they feel life as it is usually lived is meaningless, how they are sick and tired of living the way they do, they express an urgency to find a way out, to live a more meaningful life. And often, other people will classify this person as "depressed", "suicidal" or at least as "weird", and advise them to see a psychotherapist and preferrably, get treated with anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications.

More to the point, this often happens on Buddhist forums as well. I've also seen it in other religious/spiritual contexts.

It's amazing with what precision those people seeking help sometimes describe feelings of samvega. And yet they get told - on a Buddhist forum - that Buddhism can't help them, and that they need to turn to Western psychotherapy.


Thanissaro Bhikkhu speaks of this sometimes:

The other problem in thinking that Buddhism teaches non-ego is that those who understand the healthy functions of the ego believe that Buddhism lacks a proper appreciation of these functions. They think that Buddhist teachings are incomplete and need help from Western psychology in order to become a complete training of the mind.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... tself.html

[binocular]

That's the one... meditation ( in any tradition ) is not psychotherapy...
And importantly, psychotherapy is not meditation either...

Just as meditation is not dentistry
Nor is it dermatology
Nor is it physiotherapy.

They have different aims and different reasons for being.

The aim of psychotherapy is to restore social functioning by understanding that which disables social functioning.
If one wants to go deeper, or broader ( supply your own spatial metaphor ) then Dr Freud wont help you, and neither will Dr Jung. That's not their job..despite anything that Jungians claim..

That kind of attitude suggests that in all the time that the Buddhist tradition has existed, it has not produced viable Buddhist means to deal with whatever problems a person may face in life.
And when Buddhists are sending people to seek help outside of Buddhism, they themselves are implying that they don't have all that much faith in Buddhism either.

/.../
From this perspective, egolessness would be a disaster. A person devoid of ego functions would be self-destructive: either a beast with uncontrolled impulses, or a neurotic, repressed automaton with no mind of his or her own, or an infantile
monster thrashing erratically between these two extremes. Anyone who tried to abandon ego functioning would arrest his psychological growth and lose all hope of becoming a mature, responsible, trustworthy adult. And as we know, selfdestructive people don’t destroy only themselves. They can pull down many of the people and places around them.

This is not only the view of trained Western psychologists. Buddhist communities in the West have also begun to recognize this problem and have coined the term “spiritual bypassing” to describe it: the way people try to avoid dealing with the problems of an unintegrated personality by spending all their time in meditation retreats, using the mantra of egolessness to short-circuit the hard work of mastering healthy ego functioning in the daily give and take of their lives.

Then there’s the problem of self-hatred. The Dalai Lama isn’t the only Asian Buddhist teacher surprised at the amount of self-hatred found in the West. Unfortunately, a lot of people with toxic super-egos have embraced the teaching on egolessness as the Buddha’s stamp of approval on the hatred they feel toward themselves.

These problems have inspired many Western psychologists to assume a major gap in the Buddha’s teachings: that in promoting egolessness, the Buddha overlooked the importance of healthy ego functioning in finding true happiness. This assumption has led to a corollary: that Buddhism needs the insights of Western psychotherapy to fill the gap; that to be truly effective, a healthy spiritual path needs to give equal weight to both traditions. Otherwise you come out lopsided and warped, an idiot savant who can thrive in the seclusion of a threeyear, three-month, three-day retreat, but can’t handle three hours caught in heavy traffic with three whining children.

This corollary assumes, though, that for the past twenty-six hundred years Buddhism hasn’t produced any healthy functioning individuals: that the collective consciousness of Asian society has suppressed individualism, and that the handful
of dysfunctional meditation teachers coming to the West—the ones who mastered the subtleties of formal meditation but tripped over the blatant pitfalls of American money and sex—are typical of the Buddhist tradition. But I wonder if
this is so.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/auth ... rtbook.pdf

So you have acted wrongly, acted incorrectly, in bypassing the Blessed One in search of an answer to this question elsewhere. Go right back to the Blessed One and, on arrival, ask him this question. However he answers it, you should take it to heart.'
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka ... .than.html

[reflection]

What I do agree with is that the dhamma has more power to cure depression than people may realize.

On this forum a lot of people quickly refer to a psychiatrist in certain topics, but I think that's also because you don't want to be the one who prevents them from going when they may actually really need it, because it is physical for example. This I think you possibly can't judge from behind a computer screen, not even the most skillful monk or psychiatrist. So even when you have a lot of faith in the power of the dhamma, I think it's wise to take precaution and cover all grounds when addressing somebody's issues directly.

[chownah]

Thanks to santa100 and the dharmafarer.org link I've found a sort of definition for samvega:

"Friends, just as when a daughter-in-law sees a father-in-law, she rouses a sense of urgency (to please him), even so, when that monk thus recollects the Buddha, thus recollects the Dharma, thus recollects the Sangha, if equanimity supported by the wholesome is not established in him, then he rouses a feeling of urgency."

This is from MN28.

This does not seem to be an emotional complex requiring any sort of treatment...it also does not seem to warrant the strong emotions used by some to describe samvega but this is just one reference and there are many more.....I will keep on nibbling at the link and report what gives.
chownah

[danieLion]

That kind of attitude suggests that in all the time that the Buddhist tradition has existed, it has not produced viable Buddhist means to deal with whatever problems a person may face in life.
And when Buddhists are sending people to seek help outside of Buddhism, they themselves are implying that they don't have all that much faith in Buddhism either.

Hi binocular,
Regarding this so-called thing called Buddhism Ajahn Sucitto says in his talk Wisdom:

As soon as the "ism" arrives the wisdom disappears [laughs] because you're trying to make it a solid thing [reification]. Buddhism is just a word that was created in the 19th century by people who believed in "Isms" [laughs] and who wanted to have some solid thing they could hold onto; you know, "I'll label it that." But what is it? It's a huge range of different people doing different things. Wisdom breaks up, keeps looking into the diversities; and when we get stuck this kind of definitely wanting to have something to hold onto is a simplistic fundamentalism. It's easier that way. Attachment to systems and techniques is easier for the mind [at the 3:32-4:43 mark].

This has a lot in common with CBT's and REBT's views on depression.

Ajahn Sucitto also translates domanassa as depression in the introduction he wrote for Ajahn Sumedho's The Way It Is (in reference to dependent origination).

Kindly,
dL

[BlackBird]

Samvega is something I have always experienced in grand quantities: My counter question is why the need to treat it at all?

The usual scenario goes something like this:
A person posts a thread on a forum, or brings up the issue in conversation with friends and family. This person talks about how they feel life as it is usually lived is meaningless, how they are sick and tired of living the way they do, they express an urgency to find a way out, to live a more meaningful life. And often, other people will classify this person as "depressed", "suicidal" or at least as "weird", and advise them to see a psychotherapist and preferrably, get treated with anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications.

More to the point, this often happens on Buddhist forums as well. I've also seen it in other religious/spiritual contexts.

It's amazing with what precision those people seeking help sometimes describe feelings of samvega. And yet they get told - on a Buddhist forum - that Buddhism can't help them, and that they need to turn to Western psychotherapy.

If I saw someone expressing these sentiments I would advise them to start striving for Nibbana, through developing the factors of the NEP, including Bhavana, and then one can harness that samvega for the purposes of spiritual progress.