Advice from a psychologist: how to get out of a difficult life situation

Definition

A critical situation is a situation from which it is impossible to quickly find a way out. The person must be completely focused and act quickly. But not all people have good reactions and quick coordination. For some, acting in a critical situation is simply impossible. It is these individuals who will face a crisis after they are unable to quickly come to terms with the current circumstances. The experience of a critical situation is different for each person. Some choose yoga, some instead of meditation find a hobby and immerse themselves in it, while others completely rebuild their lives in order to load themselves with work and not think about anything. And these are good ways to combat psychological depression. But there are other “methods” of self-medication. Alcohol, tobacco and drugs are quick “medicines” that weak individuals become addicted to. They do not want to understand themselves and their problems. As a result of all that has been said, you can understand what to look for, and most importantly, you need to find a way out of a critical situation, and quite quickly. After all, if you fail, your whole life can go downhill.

Post-traumatic stress disorder.

Analysis of the main approaches to defining a situation as critical, posing a threat to personal development, disrupting the interaction and adaptation of a person in the social environment, allows us to identify the following necessary conditions for its occurrence:

• an emotional source located in the environment that affects a person, represents a certain “significance” for him and thus creates a conflict-generating ground;
• individual-typological personality characteristics that determine the intrapersonal component of the development of critical dynamics. This element can be represented by the orientation of the personality and be expressed in an active or passive adaptive type of behavior;
• individual perceptions-cognitions of the situation, which represent a subjective picture of a critical situation. If a person perceives a situation, interprets and typifies it as critical, then this presupposes that he has ideas that this is a critical situation for him.

A critical situation is a type of social situation;
it develops as a result of a one-time strong or weak, but long-term psychological traumatization by a set of events in the external or internal world. These influences are refracted in the human psyche and are accompanied by situational reactions that tend to transform into individual response patterns (behavior stereotypes) in the form of “protective-compensatory” formations. A critical situation is reflected in the cognitive, emotional and behavioral spheres, and is also projected onto the psychological time of the individual. Its manifestations are: stress, frustration, psychological crisis, intrapersonal conflict, situational reactions to emotional stimuli, etc.

A critical situation is characterized by the fact that it is not always realized by a person. Its presence or experience is judged by indirect signs. This is especially clearly manifested in the deviant behavior of adolescents as a form of compensation and protection.

The grounds for identifying a critical situation can be: concepts of needs - depending on what need or motive is blocked; internal mental stress; individual situational reactions; individual response patterns - behavioral stereotypes. Finding oneself in a critical situation or perceiving it as such, a person begins to interact with it. He and the situation act for each other as an object and subject of interaction, which can be represented as an experience of overcoming a critical situation.

At the initial stage of a critical situation, a person acts as an object of its influence. As the situation develops, the person becomes an effective subject of interaction. During this process, the situation changes in the direction of overcoming it or worsening it, deepening it. Therefore, a person either follows the path of formation and development, or degrades as a person.

A critical situation gives rise to the following contradictions that contribute to the development of deviant behavior in adolescents:

• the contradiction of the image of “I” - arises at the moment a person feels “losing himself” and not yet “gaining himself”, a contradiction of meanings and their content; as a result, loss of meaning arises;
• the intrapersonal contradiction that arises in a critical situation is accompanied by the experience of overcoming oneself and the situation as a whole; this leads to personality transformation;
• the adolescent’s psychological conflicts and his deviant behavior are determined by this transformation, rooted in the critical situation of his existence.

When an individual interacts with a situation, a transformation occurs, a restructuring of the person’s inner world (or any part of it): the stability and integrity of the subject’s “I-concept” is violated;
his self-awareness changes, nihilism, moral skepticism, cynicism, moral instability, mental devastation, etc. arise. These phenomena rather reflect the transitional state of the individual, who finds himself in a situation where it is impossible to live as before, to protect the once stable system of “I” from destruction. This state is “loss of self.” It is necessary to take into account that a stable “I” system can be formed in the process of experiencing and overcoming a critical situation. This depends on the qualitative nature of the experience of overcoming a critical situation. In case of unconstructive experience, deviant behavior of adolescents acts as a protective-compensatory formation, which, on the one hand, maintains the integrity of the “I”, and on the other, worsens the teenager’s adaptation to the environment. In addition, difficulties arise when solving problems that a teenager faces in the process of overcoming a critical situation. This explains why teenagers with deviant behavior do not strive to change themselves for the better.

As soon as a “loss of self” has occurred under the influence of a critical situation, the individual performs intense internal work to rebuild and transform his inner world, which can be called the process of “finding himself.” At the same time, the reflexive “I” becomes more complex and differentiated, and a search is made to overcome intrapersonal contradictions in order to build a new, complicated, balanced and fairly stable image of the “I”. These contradictions are associated with a violation of the integrity and stability of ideas about oneself.

T.B. Kartseva identifies the following forms of resolving these contradictions:

• the process of personality development, “finding oneself”, the process of “becoming”;
• rapid adaptation, following an easier path laid by someone else;
• involution of personality caused by a person’s inability to cope with the increasingly complex, differentiated system of “I”;
• a constructive solution to a contradiction associated with finding the internal resources of the individual;
• the creative creation of an individualized, newly constructed “I-concept”.

The consequence of a teenager’s experience of a critical situation may be the process of rethinking, reevaluating his past, changing goals and meaning of life, as well as the loss or change of leading motives associated with the restructuring of the image of “I”.
Thus, the stability of the individual, his “I-concept” is a condition for a person to successfully overcome emerging difficulties generated by a critical situation. When there is a threat of instability, a variety of defense mechanisms are triggered. The traumatic nature of a particular event depends on the meaning it has for the person, i.e. from the “personal meaning” of the influencing stimulus.

A traumatized person who has experienced extremely strong and destructive emotions is very afraid of their repetition. If emotions break out, a person loses control over himself, his behavior and commits irreparable acts. Children who have experienced trauma become distracted, their memory and attention deteriorate, which affects their low academic performance. Emotional stress affects physical health, leads to the occurrence of psychosomatic disorders, disorders, and diseases based on “nerves.”

With long-term stress, there is a need for artificial sedatives, so children begin to smoke, use drugs, alcohol, tranquilizers, and toxic substances quite early. The child's perception of the past, present and future changes under the influence of trauma, as a result of which he remains the same age as he was at the time of injury. If the trauma occurred at an earlier age, then the child does not become a psychologically mature person, but remains infantile for a long time. According to statistics, people who have experienced psychological trauma commit suicide more often, become addicted to alcohol and drugs, and have more accidents.

A child of any age encountering a traumatic situation and experiencing it shows the unreality of existing illusions. The destruction of illusions is a very painful process for any adult, and doubly so for a child. Discovering the experiences received as a result of trauma, the child devalues ​​all his efforts: why study well, try to be good, go to school, if this does not give a feeling of security, of being needed by someone. And it is very important what follows this discovery. If a person chooses the path out of illusions into a dangerous but real world, believes in himself, then he will overcome the difficulties facing him, which means he will mature and become higher in the level of his development as a person. If he cannot overcome the barrier of illusions, then the person’s conviction in the existence of new illusions will be strengthened, and he will believe in them, living in a world of illusions invented by himself.

The duration of the period from the beginning of the crisis to the exit from the crisis situation depends on the severity of the traumatic event, the individual reaction of the child, the complexity of the tasks of the age period that must be solved by the child at this stage of his life, the resources available to the child and his environment. On average, the state of active adaptation imbalance lasts up to four to six weeks.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) occurs as a delayed and/or prolonged reaction to a stressful event or critical situation (short-term or long-term) of a threatening or catastrophic nature.

The consequences of such situations can be various disorders, they are usually divided into groups: acute PTSD (lasting less than three months), chronic (lasting 3 months or more) and delayed (manifesting at least 6 months after the stress experience).

Post-traumatic disorders are characterized by:

• repetition of the traumatic experience in thoughts, dreams and memories;
• weakening connections with life, manifested in the inhibition of emotions, a feeling of isolation from others and a decrease in activity in significant activities;
• the emergence and development of psychosomatic symptoms (sleep disturbances, memory disorders).

There are no specific childhood characteristics of PTSD, but there is an age-specific characteristic, which is manifested in the fact that at different age stages certain symptoms of PTSD come to the fore.

An approximate list of stress reactions and post-traumatic disorders in children:

• Brief psychotic disorder.
• Nightmares.
• Fear of separation.
• Impaired ability to reactive attachment.
• Dissociative amnesia.
• Dissociative fugue.
• Conversion violation.
• Depersonalization.
• Specific fears.
• Panic attacks.
• Depressive episodes.
• Somatization.
• Borderline personality disorders.

PTSD occurs differently at different ages. It is quite difficult for children who have experienced mental trauma to understand what happened to them. This is primarily due to their age characteristics; they lack social and psychological maturity. The child is not able to understand the meaning of what is happening, he simply remembers the situation itself and his experiences at that moment.

To be continued…

Concepts

A critical situation is a turning point in the life of any person. The individual does not know what to do next and in which direction to move. And I don’t really want to act. There are several types of concepts of a critical situation.

• Stress. The cause of any difficulties in life can be simple accumulated fatigue. If a person does not find enough time to sleep, he does not try to somehow resolve his current problems and puts off all decisions for later, then such an individual will face stress at the end of the slippery path. The person becomes lethargic, irritable and apathetic.
• Frustration. When a person is tired and lethargic, he does not have the strength to solve his problems. As a result, they form like a snowball. If you don’t come to your senses in time, it will be easy to bend under the pressure of problems. A state of frustration is a state when a person really wants to change something in his life, but psychological barriers do not allow him to do this.
• Conflict. Sometimes a person is faced with a difficult choice. He needs to make a decision, but the individual does not know how to do this. A conflict develops within him. This happens in cases where a person is a multifaceted personality with a wide range of interests. Deciding what is important in life and what is secondary is sometimes simply impossible. And if the conflict that arises in the soul is difficult to resolve, then the conflict that occurs between two people is not so difficult to resolve. Two people who do not find common ground on a controversial issue can always turn to a third party.

The concept of a critical situation. Types of critical situations and their possible consequences

A critical situation is defined as a situation where it is impossible for a person to realize the internal needs of his life: motives, aspirations, values ​​(F.E. Vasilyuk). Let's consider the following types of critical situations: stress, frustration, crisis.

Let us consider in detail each type of critical situation that can arise as a result of a person’s stay in the zone of abnormal life faults: military operations, loss of loved ones, grief, illness, sudden change of place and lifestyle.

Stress is a state of mental tension that occurs in a child in activities and everyday life. The concept of “stress” was introduced by the Canadian physiologist G. Selye (1936) when describing the adaptation syndrome. Stress can have both positive effects. and negative, up to complete disorganization of the behavior and activity of the individual.

Stress is a nonspecific response of the body to any demands presented to it. From the point of view of the stress response, it does not matter whether the situation we are faced with is pleasant or unpleasant. All that matters is the intensity of the need for restructuring or adaptation. The mother, who was informed about the death of her only son in battle, experiences terrible mental shock. If, many years later, the message turns out to be false and her son suddenly enters the room safe and sound, she will feel intense joy. The specific results of the two events—sorrow and joy—are completely different, even opposite. but their stressor effect - a nonspecific requirement for adaptation to a new situation - can be the same: somatic disorders, a sharp exacerbation of the disease, heart attack, sleep disturbance, depression, aggression, etc.

Stress is thus associated with pleasant and unpleasant experiences. The level of physiological stress is lowest in moments of indifference, but is never zero (this would mean, according to G. Selye, death). Harmful or unpleasant stress is called “distress.”

Frustration is a mental state that arises as a result of a real or imaginary obstacle that prevents the achievement of a goal or the satisfaction of a need. A child in a state of frustration experiences anxiety and tension, a feeling of indifference, apathy, loss of interest, guilt, anxiety, rage, hostility - all this characterizes frustrated behavior. A frustrating situation disrupts internal balance, causes tension or a desire to restore balance with the help of a new action. Thus, frustration acts as a new motivation. Necessary signs of a frustrating situation are the presence of strong motivation to achieve a goal (satisfy a need) and obstacles that prevent this achievement. Remember the Fox from I. Krylov’s fable, who wants to get the grapes and cannot do it.

Barriers blocking an individual's path to a goal can be the following:

- physical - a prisoner whose cell does not allow him to move; bad weather interfering with harvesting; insufficient income preventing the housewife from purchasing what she wants;

- biological - illness, age restrictions, physical defects;

- psychological - fear, intellectual deficiencies;

- sociocultural - norms, rules, prohibitions that prevent a person from achieving his goals.

Children react to a frustrating situation in a variety of ways. Let us describe possible models of frustration behavior.

Motor agitation - the child performs aimless and disordered actions.

Apathy - in K. Levin’s experiment, one of the children in a frustrating situation simply lay down on the floor and looked at the ceiling.

Aggression is a common reaction to frustration. However, not all aggression is negative: some actions can be quite appropriate and effective in achieving the goal. Aggressive behavior is negative when an object is replaced. that is, when the object of aggression is not the cause of frustration. Aggressive behavior is then directed at the scapegoat, regardless. whether it is a person or an object. The following types of aggressive reactions are distinguished:

A crisis is a critical moment and turning point in life. The inner necessity of life is for a person to realize his path, his life plan. When, in the face of events involving the most important life relationships of a child or adolescent, the will turns out to be powerless, then a specific situation arises - a crisis.

Life events qualify as crises if they pose an actual or potential threat to the child's fundamental needs. A crisis poses a problem that a person cannot escape and which cannot be resolved in a short time in the usual way.

Two types of crisis situations can be distinguished, differing in the degree of ability to cope with them. A crisis of the first kind can seriously hinder and complicate the implementation of a life plan, but with it there is still the possibility of restoring the course of life interrupted by the crisis. This is a test from which a person can emerge with his life plan essentially preserved. The situation of the second type, the crisis itself, makes the implementation of life plans impossible. The result of this is the metamorphosis of the personality, its rebirth, the adoption of a new life plan, new values ​​and life strategy.

It can be generalized that the symptoms of experiencing a critical situation in an unconstructive way are the following signs in the behavior and life organization of children:

— Aggression and stubbornness;

— Anxiety and bad habits (biting fingers, fiddling with clothes, obsessive actions, etc.);

— Loss of appetite and sleep disturbances;

— Decrease in interest in learning and destruction of former needs;

— Violation of the system of relationships with peers;

- Self-isolation, the desire to be alone;

— Euphoric mood with elements of indifference towards oneself and others;

— Destructive behavior (tobacco smoking, drinking alcohol, drugs, auto-aggression, suicide attempts);

— Fears and depression;

- Tearfulness;

— Stupor and reluctance to be active both in school and in play;

Actions

A critical situation is a situation in which a person finds himself and from which he cannot find a way out on his own. What to do if the problems are overwhelming and there is no clear path in sight? You need to contact a specialist. Overcoming critical situations is psychological work. Yes, a person is able to outgrow a problem on his own, but along the way the individual can put on himself complexes that he did not have before the crisis situation arose. If you decide to fix your problems yourself, first describe them. Yes, you need to write it down on paper, and not form a thought in your head. Sometimes it seems that the mind is clear, but it cannot be like that if a person has problems in life. When a critical situation is identified, you need to think about what could happen in the worst case. Some may think that such a pessimistic approach may bring depression closer. In fact, assuming the worst, a person will be happy with any development of events that does not lead to the expected result. Well, if they bring him, the individual will not fall to the bottom, but will be able to rebuild a ladder for himself so that he can easily climb up. Let's look at it with an example. The girl had an unexpected pregnancy. A critical situation can unfold in two ways: the girl gives birth or has an abortion. If you have decided to give birth, then you need to plan your life for the next 5 years. This list will help you come to your senses and get out of a depressed state.

It is better to make major decisions in the morning

By evening, your head always works worse, plus a lot of thoughts appear and it’s difficult to decide on the correct actions.

As a rule, in the evening there is always a degree of confusion and various thoughts that always distract. But when waking up in the morning, everyone will always have a clear solution in their head in a situation that worries them.

It is important to learn to postpone making important decisions until the next day.

In this case, the risk of making a key mistake is reduced. This advice can also be applied if you need to do important and responsible work; its quality will always be higher in the morning.

Correct critical thinking is:

1. Analysis.

2. Evaluation.

3. Conclusion.

When a stressful situation occurs, thinking is always automatic, and a person relies only on basic information that he knows about. However, this information in most situations is superficial.

To learn how to make good decisions, it is important to always take a step back and give yourself time to think.

By rewinding events, reflexive judgment is manifested; it allows you to avoid most mistakes.

Its essence lies in the fact that a person begins to analyze the information received over a long time. Plus, various thoughts and stressful situations do not have an impact.

Consequences

And what can behavior lead to in critical situations when a person does not try to solve the problems that have arisen? In this case, the bottom to which the individual can fall becomes closer every day. When a crisis arises and a person cannot cope with it, depression sets in. Relatives and friends may try to help, but help will be rejected. A person may lose his job or lose his family due to stress. Friends and relatives will turn away from him. Every day the situation will get worse. What will happen next? A person who cannot cope with psychological problems may go to a mental hospital, become homeless or an alcoholic. In what critical situation should such consequences be feared? One from which it is impossible to find a way out for months. It is precisely such unsolved problems that can drive you crazy.

You need to think only about important things

In any critical situation, the head is filled with various thoughts that can distract from making key decisions. Therefore, the first thing everyone should do is to determine the degree of importance of the issue and build on it.

This is not at all easy to do, since you need to think for a few minutes, carefully analyze the situation and highlight only the most important thing.

Being distracted by minor details creates additional discomfort and makes it impossible to soberly assess the situation.

Overcoming

What does the life path of a person who has coped with a critical life situation look like? He is growing up. Becomes more mentally stable, because the most difficult thing in life is to confront yourself. Many have noticed that after critical life situations people change. Indeed, this happens. But there is nothing surprising here. This happens in those moments when an individual overcomes an internal crisis and changes his moral values. For example, a woman who could not internally decide to break off her marriage with her alcoholic husband feels liberated from the ties that bind her, but at the same time she becomes more withdrawn. She may begin to have trust issues. After all, for many years she endured beatings and bullying from her drunken husband, and the next morning she listened to apologies and declarations of love. Difficult decisions that a person makes can change not only his character, but also his destiny. When an individual realizes that he needs to leave work, but he cannot find a suitable position in the city, he can leave his family and go to work in the capital from a provincial town. Subsequently, a good life becomes much more attractive than the diapers and baby vests that were waiting for a long time at home every evening. Therefore, a person may decide to finally move to the capital and break all ties with his family.

From the author

Russian psychology has long ceased to be a purely academic discipline, but it still owes a great debt to practice. In various areas of public life, this debt is being actively repaid - the figure of a psychologist is becoming more and more common in modern factories and medical institutions, in pedagogy and jurisprudence. But the need for psychological help exists not only in social practice, but also in personal and family life, and this need is still completely insufficiently satisfied. On the other hand, psychology itself, especially the so-called “interesting psychology”, which studies the motives, emotions, and personality of a person, cannot continue to develop productively only within the walls of the laboratory, without taking an active part in real human life.

Under the influence of this mutual interest, a new (and long-awaited) period is now opening in the development of domestic practical psychology: literally before our eyes, the sphere of psychological services to the population is emerging - family service, suicidology service with a network of “social-psychological assistance” rooms and crisis hospitals, psychological service of the university etc.

The specific organizational forms of separating “personal” psychological service into an independent practice are not yet entirely clear, but whatever they may be, the very fact of its appearance poses the task of developing fundamental theoretical foundations for general psychology that could guide this practice.

These foundations themselves should be based on an awareness of the not yet quite familiar professional position occupied by a psychologist who practically works with an individual. If, within the framework of pedagogical, legal, medical and other fields of activity, a psychologist acted as a consultant and assistant to a teacher, doctor or lawyer serving these specialists, then, occupying this position, he becomes a responsible producer of work, directly serving the person who turned to him for help. And if previously the psychologist saw it through the prism of questions facing other specialists (clarification of the diagnosis, determination of sanity, etc.), or his own theoretical

questions, then now, as
a responsible subject of independent psychological practice
, for the first time he professionally encounters not a patient, student, suspect, operator, test subject, etc., but with
a person
in all the fullness, specificity and intensity of his life problems. This does not mean, of course, that a professional psychologist should act, so to speak, purely “humanly”; the main question is precisely to isolate the actual psychological aspect from these life problems and thereby outline the psychologist’s area of ​​competence.

The fundamental limitation of this zone is determined by the fact that the professional activity of a psychologist does not coincide in its direction with the pragmatic or ethical aspiration of the person seeking help, with the orientation of his emotional-volitional attitude into the world: the psychologist cannot directly borrow his professional goals from a set of current goals and desires the patient, and accordingly his professional actions and reactions to the events of the patient’s life cannot be automatically determined by what the patient wants.

This does not mean, of course, that a psychologist should kill sympathy and empathy in himself and once and for all deny himself the right to respond to a “cry for help” not as a specialist, but simply as a person, i.e. ethically: give friendly advice, console, provide practical assistance. These actions lie in a dimension of life where there can be no talk of any professional obligation, just as there can be no talk of ordering or prohibiting a doctor from giving his own blood to a patient.

What a psychologist really must, if he wants to be useful to a person as a specialist, is, while maintaining the ability to compassion, which forms the emotional and motivational soil that feeds his practical activity, learn to subordinate his immediate ethical reactions, directly resulting from compassion, to a positively defined pathological program help, as a surgeon can do in his field during an operation or a teacher who uses one or another educational influence is by no means always pleasant for the student.

But why, in fact, is this ability to subordinate immediate ethical reactions to a professional psychological attitude necessary? Because, firstly, consolation and pity are not quite what (and often not at all) what the patient needs to overcome the crisis. Secondly, because everyday advice, to which many patients are susceptible, is for the most part simply useless or even harmful for them, indulging their unconscious desire to relieve themselves of responsibility for their own lives. A psychologist is not at all a specialist in everyday advice; the education he has received does not at all coincide with the acquisition of wisdom, and, therefore, the fact of having a diploma does not give him the moral right to make specific recommendations on what to do in this or that life situation. And one more thing: before turning to a psychologist, the patient usually thought through all possible ways out of a difficult situation and found them unsatisfactory. There is no reason to believe that by discussing his life situation with the patient on the same plane, the psychologist will be able to find a way out that he has not noticed. The very fact of such a discussion supports the patient’s unrealistic hopes that the psychologist can solve life’s problems for him, and the almost inevitable failure affects the authority of the psychologist, reducing the chances of the final success of his case, not to mention the fact that the patient often experiences unhealthy satisfaction from a “game” won from a psychologist, described by E. Berne under the title “And you try. “Yes, but...” And finally, the third of the possible immediate ethical reactions to the misfortune of another person - practical help to him - cannot be included in the arsenal of professional psychological actions simply because the psychologist, with all his desire, cannot improve his financial or social situation, fix your appearance or bring back a lost loved one, i.e. cannot influence the external, existential aspect of his problems.

All these points are very important for the formation of a sober attitude of patients (and the psychologist himself) to the possibilities and tasks of psychological assistance. However, the main reason that forces the psychologist to go beyond the immediate ethical response in search of actual psychological means of help is that a person is always himself and only himself can experience

events, circumstances and changes in one’s life that gave rise to the crisis.
No one can do this for him, just as the most experienced teacher cannot understand
the material being explained for his student.

But the process of experiencing can be controlled to some extent - stimulate it, organize, direct, provide favorable conditions for it, striving to ensure that this process ideally leads to growth and improvement of the individual - or at least does not go pathological or socially unacceptable by (alcoholism, neuroticism, psychopathization, suicide, crime, etc.). Experience, therefore, is the main subject of the efforts of a practical psychologist who helps an individual in a situation of life crisis. And if so, then in order to build a theoretical foundation for this practice, it is quite natural to make the process of experiencing the central subject of general psychological

research into the problem of overcoming critical situations.

The reader has probably already noticed that we use the term “experience” not in the sense usual for scientific psychology, as a direct, most often emotional, form of the subject’s being given the contents of his consciousness, but to denote a special internal activity, internal work

, with the help of which a person manages to endure certain (usually difficult) life events and situations, restore lost mental balance, in a word, cope with a critical situation.

Why we considered it possible to use an already “occupied” term to denote the subject of our research, we will answer this question later, in the Introduction. But why do we have to make terminological innovations at all? The point, of course, is not that the area of ​​psychic reality we are studying is terra incognita for psychology and should be named for the first time, but that its existing names - psychological defense, compensation, coping behavior, etc. - us are not satisfied, since the categories they express record only particular aspects of the holistic problem that we see here, and none of them, therefore, can lay claim to the role of a general category. On the other hand, a new term is required because we want to immediately, right away, disassociate ourselves from the theoretically limited methodology that dominates the study of this sphere of mental reality, and conduct analysis from the standpoint of a certain psychological concept - the theory of activity of A. N. Leontiev and in there is simply no corresponding concept in its arsenal.

The last circumstance is not accidental. Although many studies within the framework of this theory to one degree or another touch upon the topics of interest to us, no attempts have yet been made to clearly formulate this problem in the most general theoretical terms. The probable reason that the theory of activity has so far only touched upon this sphere of psychic reality in passing is that this theory has paid its main attention to the study of objective-practical activity and mental reflection, and the need for experience arises precisely in such situations that cannot be directly resolved by practical activity, no matter how perfect reflection it may be provided. This cannot be understood in such a way that the category of activity is generally inapplicable to experience and that it, therefore, “by nature” falls out of the general activity-theoretic picture; on the contrary, experience complements this picture, representing, in comparison with external practical and cognitive activities, a special type of activity processes [ 2

] which are specified primarily by their product.
The product of the work of experience is always something internal
and
subjective
- mental balance, meaningfulness, tranquility, new value consciousness, etc., in contrast to
the external
product of practical activity and internal, but
objective
(not in the sense of essential truth in content, but in the sense of relevance to external in form) product of cognitive activity (knowledge, image).

So, in the problem of experience, the theory of activity discovers a new dimension for itself. This determined the main goal of the study - from the standpoint of the activity approach, to develop a system of theoretical ideas about the patterns of overcoming critical life situations by a person and thereby expand the boundaries of the general psychological theory of activity, highlighting in it the psychology of experience as a special subject of theoretical research and methodological development.

It is clear that such a goal cannot be achieved empirically, by accumulating already numerous facts. Its achievement involves the use of a theoretical method. As such, we used Marx’s method of “ascent from the abstract to the concrete.” At the specific methodological level, our theoretical movement was organized by the methodology of categorical-typological analysis, the principles and techniques of which we borrowed from the works and oral presentations of O. I. Genisaretsky

The goal formulated in this way, the chosen method of achieving it, and the existing historical and scientific conditions determined the following sequence of tasks that were solved in our research.

First, it was necessary to pose the problem of experience in the context of the psychological theory of activity, to systematically introduce the category of experience into this context. The word “introduce,” perhaps, does not quite accurately express the internal essence of this task, because we did not take the category of experience in ready-made form outside the theory of activity from any other theory, but rather tried to “limit” the extra-scientific, intuitive idea of ​​experience with concepts and categories of psychological theory of activity. Such “cutting” is akin to the process of remembering, when we cannot accurately name a certain content, but gradually narrow the search area, determining what it refers to and what it is not.

Only by crystallizing in the body of the “mother” general psychological theory the idea of ​​the object of interest to us and thus obtaining a certain point of support, could we begin to review the ideas about it available in the psychological literature, without the risk of drowning in the abundance of material, getting bogged down in details and missing the main thing. The review is almost completely devoid of historicity; it is constructed strictly systematically. The reader hoping to get acquainted with original ideas about stress, conflict, frustration and crisis, about psychological protection and compensation, will probably be disappointed with this review. He will find in the first chapter not a gallery of independent theoretical positions, but rather a construction site where individual elements and entire blocks of a future, in some places already guessed, design are being prepared.

The purpose of the second, constructive chapter was to take the initial abstractions of the psychological theory of activity and, guided, on the one hand, by the general idea of ​​experience, and on the other, by the data of the analytical review, to deploy these abstractions in the direction of the empiricism that interests us with the aim of its theoretical reproduction in this kind of knowledge that captures the patterns of processes, and not their general characteristics.

“Ascent to the concrete,” of course, does not end with identifying these patterns. The third and final chapter poses the problem of the cultural-historical determination of experience, the development of which should, according to our plan, build a bridge from the general laws of this process, i.e. from the experience in general, the experience of some abstract individual, to the experience of a specific person living among people in a certain historical era. This chapter contains a hypothesis about the mediation of the process of experience by certain structures of social consciousness, as well as a detailed analysis of a specific case of experience, performed on the material of fiction. This analysis is intended not so much to prove the hypothesis (it is clearly not enough to prove it), but to illustrate it, and at the same time a whole series of provisions of the previous parts of the work.

The author considers it his duty to honor with words of gratitude the blessed memory of A. N. Leontyev, under whose leadership the research began, and also to sincerely thank Professor V. P. Zinchenko, without whose participation and support this book could not have seen the light of day, N. A. Alekseev , L. M. Khairullaev and I. A. Pitlyar for their assistance in the work.

Psychology

Despite the fact that behavior in critical situations should have been thoroughly examined by psychologists long ago, in fact this is not the case. Critical situations today remain a mystery to many specialists. Yes, every psychologist knows four types of situations that lead to human problems. The main guideline for a specialist is the concept of impossibility. If a person really wants to get rid of his problems, but cannot do it, although he makes every effort, then he is in a critical situation. The approach is, one might say, artisanal. Accordingly, the psychology of critical situations has been poorly studied. Doctors believe that the best way to solve the problem is timely prevention. But it’s not always possible to solve problems on your own, and going to a psychotherapist in our country is simply not accepted. Therefore, doctors often have to eliminate the consequences of critical situations instead of treating their cause. The best advice a doctor can give you regarding how to get out of the situation: you should do your best to solve the problem within a month and not lose heart. If all else fails, see an experienced professional at the first sign of depression. Don't delay.

Typology of critical situations

1.3. Historical and methodological analysis of psychotherapeutic hopes [7]

“...Be always ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and reverence.”

(1 Peter 3:15)

“Without ontology, melancholy takes you by the throat,” two philosophers admitted to each other in the already distant Soviet year of 1974 (Mamardashvili, Pyatigorsky,

1974). Another melancholy grabs the psychotherapeutic throat - without anthropology.

Now the influence of psychological practice on culture has grown so much, modern psychology and psychotherapy itself has become so overloaded with countless fragments of all kinds of cultures and cults, that perhaps our main professional task today is to ask ourselves metaphysical questions: what is a person? What is its purpose? What is the essence of our profession, not as a craft, but as a vocation? How much do we believe?

Psychotherapy is so strong and influential that it can no longer afford to remain anthropologically careless and not notice the power of energy it unleashes, uncorking the next “archetype” and releasing the lingering genies from it into the mental and social space. You can, of course, brush aside this responsibility and take refuge behind a variety of ready-made excuses: at our service are both the latest postmodernism (for which any philosophical and axiological identity is a ridiculous anachronism) and dilapidated positivism (“we proceed from facts and are responsible only for accuracy procedures"), and general pragmatism (“our law is the benefit of the customer”) or medical (“for the sake of speedy relief from symptoms, all means are good”). However, we know too well from observations of patients how pathogenic the search for an alibi is when the courage to accept responsibility is needed.

It seems that a period of development of domestic psychotherapy is approaching when the main differentiations in it will take place not along the lines of methodology, theory and technology, but along philosophical and anthropological divides. The time of choice is coming and has already arrived, the time of philosophical self-determination, when every psychologist and psychotherapist who is serious about the profession will have to give an account of his hope.

***

This text is like an open letter, it is addressed to all fellow psychotherapists, but internally addressed to those who have made their choice in favor of Christian anthropology. Such a choice itself does not automatically predetermine what Christian psychotherapy can become, just as choosing a site for building a house, even the best one, will not replace the work of design and construction.

Among domestic Christian psychologists there are two extremes. In one case, existing Christian psychotherapy is found in existing psychotherapeutic schools (see, for example, Zanadvorov,

1994), and the point is only to explain to the adherents of psychosynthesis, Gestalt therapy, etc. that, without knowing it, they have been speaking Christian prose for a long time. In another, psychotherapy is considered against the backdrop of innumerable spiritual riches, depth, and authenticity of church experience and is declared an empty, insignificant, and even demonic activity. Anyone who believes that psychotherapy can be a real spiritual service, while remaining a real profession, must choose the third path - maintaining a sober and clear spiritual position, treat with care and respect the path historically traversed by psychotherapy, and who knows if it will turn out to be She, despite her fundamental secularism, and even atheism, in the conditions of modern culture, is a “schoolmaster”[8] of Christian psychotherapy.

The subject of this chapter is the history of psychotherapeutic hopes. Let me explain the meaning of the term. When a doctor treats a patient, he expects that the therapeutic measures will cause a response process in the body, which, in fact, will lead the patient to health. The teacher does not think that his explanations by themselves will produce knowledge in the student’s head; he counts on the response process of understanding. This is true in every case - after all, the violinist is convinced that the string will respond. In a word, whether an organism, a mind, or an instrument develops in response to human efforts a certain process, the reliance on which constitutes a necessary internal condition for successful human activity. In psychotherapy, in accordance with this logic, “hope” can designate the main mechanism, the main productive process that directly ensures the achievement of therapeutic goals.

Each psychotherapeutic school has its own theory, metatheory, its own mythology, technology and other elements and planes, but the core of this entire complex composition is precisely “hope”. If all the countless books on psychoanalysis suddenly disappeared and all the ramified psychoanalytic knowledge was abolished, and only its hope remained - the idea of ​​​​the healing power of awareness, then from this one idea it would be possible to restore the entire theory and technique of psychoanalysis. On the contrary, remove this idea from psychoanalysis, and its entire grandiose structure will collapse, turning into a lifeless pile of meaningless facts.

Trying to outline the main milestones in the history of psychotherapeutic hopes, we will analyze the corresponding mechanisms and processes not from the theoretical or technical side, but from the philosophical and anthropological side.

Awareness and suggestibility

The main process that, according to Freud, provides a psychotherapeutic effect is awareness. All psychoanalysis is a struggle for “the I to take the place of the It.” This placement of the “I” in the place of the “It” consists not so much in the expansion of consciousness, as is commonly believed, but in the expansion of the will. The psychotherapeutic benefit lies, first of all, in the fact that the “I,” as a result of analysis, ceases to be a puppet whose strings are pulled by “It,” but itself becomes the center of volition. Let desires still come from the “It,” but the “I” gets rid of the despotism of the “It,” all the more cruel and destructive because it was carried out behind the scenes, with the help of dummies. Psychoanalysis sheds the light of reason on all these behind-the-scenes machinations, exposes all the disguised figures, exposes all the forces operating underground, and the “I” can now consciously and freely make decisions about which impulses to realize and which to refuse to realize. (In parentheses, I note that when you approach this solemn moment of psychoanalysis, this crown of long and long psychoanalytic efforts, you become humanly sorry for the poor “I”. The conspiracy is revealed, the masks are torn off, the secret has become apparent, it’s all over... But after all then you need to live, and you will have to live with the same underground figures who tried to deceive the “I”, bypass censorship and force the “I” to serve their interests.In this new life that has opened, illuminated by the cold psychoanalytic light, the enlightened “I” will have to voluntarily cooperate with the same forces that so recently they, together with the psychoanalyst, pursued and now, finally, exposed, pinned against the wall - after all, there are no other contents in consciousness. The excitement and color of the detective - evidence of symptoms, the secret recording of dreams, scraps of testimony in free associations, the brilliance of witty interpretations, which, to the envy of Baker Street, miraculously glue the fragments of facts into one irrefutable logical chain - all this ends so colorlessly and sadly, there is so much sadness in psychoanalytic knowledge and so little of something encouraging and inspiring, that more than The mutual tendency of both the patient and the analyst to prolong and prolong the psychoanalytic “series” is understandable, adding series after series. It’s not just the complexity of mental processes.)

So, the main result of putting the “I” in the place of the “It” is that the “I” becomes the subject of volition. The process that produces this result is awareness. The whole hope of psychoanalysis is that it will be possible by force and cunning to obtain knowledge hidden in the unconscious and force the patient to recognize the objective truth about himself, to realize it. In recognition

of course, there is clearly a connotation of coercion, but everything is justified if only an act of awareness takes place, if the patient accepts new true knowledge, no matter how unpleasant it may be for him. Knowledge is healing. Awareness, therefore, is the main hope of early psychoanalysis. 3. Freud, who is perceived by the general public as the discoverer of the irrational depths of the human soul, was in fact a rationalist to the core. Everything lends itself to a rational explanation, even the seemingly irrational and random: mistakes, slips of the tongue, dreams. Freud is the apotheosis of Rationalism, this is the complete embodiment of the famous Baconian motto “knowledge is power.” If even before Freud it was well known that “the sleep of reason gives birth to monsters,” then perhaps it was Freud who became the main and, it seems, the last apostle of reason, who wholeheartedly believed in its miraculous power, in the fact that the light of reason does not conquer monsters , then tames.

Freud's contemporary psychotherapists did not always share Freud's deep-seated trust in reason and consciousness. But before describing the hopes that replaced Freud's, it is worth mentioning the main mechanism that psychotherapy before Freud relied on in its work, one that can be called the prehistory of modern psychotherapy. This is a mechanism of suggestibility During the hypnotic session, the patient was instilled with behavior that he should perform, or thoughts that he should think, or states that he should experience for his own good. What is good for the patient, the doctor knows better, and what he needs to do, think and feel in order to achieve this good, the doctor also knows. The patient’s role is to trust the doctor as much as possible, to obey him, and then he has every reason to hope that the success of the treatment will be ensured. This mechanism of gullibility and suggestibility is what a doctor or psychotherapist can count on in healing their patients.

Freud made an enlightening revolution in psychotherapy. Psychoanalytic anthropology, despite all its defects, was much more humane in comparison with the anthropology of old suggestive psychotherapy. Freud brought Knowledge and Freedom, freedom of consciousness, into the psychotherapeutic image of a person. The patient was not only allowed

to learn something about oneself during treatment, self-knowledge, carried out with the help of an analyst, has become a necessary matter on which the entire success of treatment ultimately depends. The patient was also given back the human right to decide for himself what is good for him and what is evil. Finally, in psychoanalysis, he ceases to be simply a passive object of treatment, but becomes, albeit not an equal, but still a partner in the implementation of the therapeutic process. Compared to the following psychotherapeutic schools and directions, psychoanalysis is sometimes perceived as a rather authoritarian and monological system, but against the backdrop of the suggestive-coercive psychotherapy that dominated before him, Freud looks like a real liberator.

Spontaneity

Even during Freud's lifetime, profound shifts in psychotherapeutic anthropology began to occur. Populating the continent of new psychotherapy discovered by Freud, the colonists began to discover lands very different from the one on which Freud landed. Perhaps the most radical differences were revealed by Jacob Moreno's psychodrama. The very way and style of life of the psychodramatic province was a daring challenge to the psychoanalytic metropolis. In fact, is it possible to imagine anything more radically different from the canonical psychoanalytic couch than a psychodramatic scene, from a lonely patient frozen on a couch, than a protagonist playing surrounded by group members, from a neutral analyst looking to the side, than a psychodrama director actively managing the process? ? These and other differences are so obvious that we can omit them here, concentrating on what is most important for us. Psychodrama does not at all hope that the patient will penetrate with a cold mind into the secret depths of his soul, it relies on creative spontaneity, on the fact that these very depths, the entire human being, wants to spill out into fantasy, play, action, and one has only to help this process, how it, with its powerful healing element, will pour out in creative spontaneous expression everything that is painful, that has been held back, postponed, and withered in a person, and thereby will bring him not only deliverance from suffering, but full-fledged creative self-expression.

If Sigmund Freud opened the continent of freedom for psychotherapeutic anthropology and himself explored and used that part of this continent that can be called Freedom of Consciousness, then Jacob Moreno became the director-governor of the Republic of Free Will. Of course, this is not that conscious, reasonable and at the same time tense and boring will that seeks the law, necessity and sees its freedom in following this necessity and law. This is, so to speak, free will, anarchic, not asking anyone’s permission, and not because, as Lev Shestov wrote, if you ask whether it is allowed, of course, they will not allow it, but because in its free nature it does not ask such a question itself. It has. Spontaneity is the primary will, as if before distinguishing between good and evil, it is creativity as a primary phenomenon, creating being from nothing, giving birth to a beginning that does not even think of asking what is good and what is bad, what is forbidden and what is allowed, simply giving birth and enjoying the process itself.

When free will is discussed in philosophical and psychological literature, it is generally accepted to distinguish between rational conscious will, on the one hand, and arbitrariness, on the other. In the first case, a person relies on the knowledge of being, and this is not necessarily rational, rational knowledge - it can be an intuitive, experimental comprehension of being, wisdom, but one way or another we are talking about one or another type of knowledge, acting in accordance with which he discovers and realizes his true human freedom. In the second case, a person acts, deliberately disregarding religious commandments, the institutions of society and even the laws of nature, only on the sole basis of his desire, whim. “I want” is the author, initiator and irresponsible performer of an arbitrary act. Despite all the radical opposition between rational will and arbitrariness, what brings them together is that both of these acts are already, so to speak, devoid of innocence, naivety, spontaneity; they are already the fruit of the struggle between the highest and the lowest in man, the rational and the unreasonable, the wise and the foolish, in only one In one case the higher won, and in another - the lower, in one - the reasonable, and in the other - the reckless, in one - the sighted, but cooled, in the other - the hot, but blind. Arbitrariness, desire, whim not only do not know the norm, but they deliberately do not want to know. In contrast to both of them, spontaneity is, we repeat, “free will,” self-acting being, the beating of life itself from its deepest sources and layers, where not only the apple has not been picked, but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has not yet been planted. Spontaneity does not know the law, but also does not know sin, its metaphor is the wind, which, like a spirit, blows wherever it wants, along the way turning mills, inflating sails, tearing off roofs, but not for some reason or for some reason, not “for” and not “against”, but simply - it is so. That’s why when you meet a person endowed with this gift of primary freedom, a person not by training, not by feat and not by merit, but precisely by the natural gift of spontaneousness, you simply feel how easy it is to breathe next to him, how gloomy, gloomy, heavy thoughts, restrictions, instructions, how light the step becomes and how distant the gaze becomes. It is much easier for such a person to forgive the evil he has caused than for another strained righteous person who squeezes good out of himself by force of will. It is this primary spontaneity that primarily explains the therapeutic effects of psychodrama, of course, to the extent that it itself realizes this initial principle of spontaneity, and does not resort, as often happens in ordinary eclectic practice, to other principles and other mechanisms that also have psychotherapeutic potential.

So, if the old suggestive psychotherapy relied on suggestibility, which combines two unfreedoms, two slavery: agreement that “the doctor knows best,” that is, obedience to consciousness, and submission to it in behavior, that is, obedience to the will, then the new psychotherapy begins to rely on freedom of consciousness and free will.

Experience

In post-war, new psychotherapy, another radical shift occurs in psychotherapeutic hopes, which by the 1960s - the time of the formation of humanistic psychotherapy - became decisive in the entire psychotherapeutic world. In their clinical practice, psychotherapists increasingly begin to rely on experience . Regardless of whether this category is worked out in one or another psychotherapeutic school as clearly as in Gestalt therapy or in Carl Rogers’ client-centered therapy, almost everywhere there are different versions of a single idea of ​​experience as a special internal life process that captures a person’s emotions, his mind, imagination, will, involving in its flow, in addition to mental and bodily functions. It is this process of experiencing, according to new views, that ultimately provides the therapeutic effect.

If you try without fixating on one or another theory that directly develops the idea of ​​experience (Gendlin,

1962;
Vasilyuk,
1984), to create something like Galton’s photography[9] of this category, recording only its general, family features and erasing individual differences, then we will see this.
This process, firstly, is total,
that is, covering, as just said, the mind, feelings, imagination, bodily reactions - in a word, the whole person.
Secondly, subjective,
in the sense that a person directly feels it, lives it internally, does not separate it from himself and feels it as a reality that verifies itself, is a self-witnessing being that does not need any external confirmation and does not accept no external refutations.
A word addressed to an experiencing person, which does not take into account the phenomenological self-evidence of his experience and tries to dissuade, dissuade, does not succeed, it seems offensive in its mistrust and is rejected, regardless of the fact that it may be caused by the best intentions. Thirdly, involuntary,
in the sense that the subject does not prescribe to himself to experience something or not to experience something, this process unfolds in him and captures his consciousness without previous intentions and goal-setting.
Fourth, productive.
Experience can make a revolution in human ideas, views, attitudes, tastes, positions, in everything that a person cannot change with the help of tensions of consciousness and efforts of will. If a person has suffered a loss, appeals to consciousness are in vain, convincing him of the inevitability and legal tolerance of what happened. And his own efforts to “pull himself together” by an effort of will are in vain. He will have to go through a painful process of experiencing, he will have to allow the work of experience to take place in his soul, and only then will he be able to again experience the meaningfulness and fullness of life.

These features of the experiencing process, as

how it became the main hope of psychotherapy determined the formation of a completely new style of psychotherapeutic work [10]. New psychotherapeutic methods and principles corresponding to the described features of the experience are emerging. To describe them in a generalized form, glossing over the considerable differences between various therapeutic schools, one also cannot do without Galton’s photography.

The newest psychotherapy, in accordance with the total nature of the experiencing process, increasingly requires broad consciousness and multimodal observation from the therapist. Neither an inconspicuous sigh, nor a dream, nor a turn of the head, nor a change in relationships with loved ones, nor even random events, in which the patient became an absolutely involuntary witness or participant, will escape his attention. These seemingly random events in the “channel of peace” (Mindell,

1993) are the same important symptoms and, most importantly, performers of his total process of experiencing, just as random slips of the tongue in psychoanalysis are signs of the unspoken unconscious.

However, the psychotherapeutic response to the totality of the experiencing process is not only the sophisticated observation and “expanded” consciousness of the psychotherapist, but a completely different way of the therapist’s personal involvement in the psychotherapeutic process compared to previous psychotherapeutic eras. It’s not for nothing that Carl Rogers’ psychotherapy, first called “instructive” and

then
“client-centered”,
ultimately received the name
“person-centered”.
This final name expresses the conviction of one of the leaders of modern psychotherapy that the holistic involvement of the personality of the psychotherapist himself in the therapeutic process is not a forced concession to the irreducible reality of transference relations, but the self-valuable core of psychotherapy, without which genuine and good changes in the patient’s personality are impossible.
The entire radical nature of this revolution has not yet been adequately assessed by the theory and philosophy of psychotherapy; this assessment is hampered by completely understandable internal tendencies that force psychotherapists, theoretically, methodologically, and ideologically (Varga,
1994) to fight to ensure that in no case do they take on assume excessive personal responsibility for the therapeutic process and, especially, for changes in the personality, life and fate of the patient.

Without going into a detailed discussion of this topic, we will just note the problem here in passing. There is no doubt that a psychotherapist, like any person, should not take on more than he can bear. There is no doubt that it is harmful to indulge the infantile tendencies of patients, who sometimes strive to shift responsibility for their lives to the therapist - this is the ABC. If the matter were limited to these elementary truths, then where would the fervor with which psychotherapists sometimes rush to defend their right and even duty to remain an individual with limited responsibility come from, and at the same time the patient’s duty to become an individual with unlimited responsibility for all the fruits and consequences of participation in psychotherapeutic work. This fervor, it seems, is not at all connected with theoretical views and not with pragmatic expediency, it is somehow connected with the psychotherapist’s own personal, spiritual life, with where and how he draws the boundaries of his limited responsibility and to what or to whom he he bears this responsibility to his conscience, to whom he is answerable.

The subjectivity of the experiencing process in modern psychotherapy corresponds to the principle of phenomenological trust (see Rogers,

2002).
This is the willingness to accept the evidence of the patient's subjective experience as such,
not as a sign of something else that must be deciphered and abolished, but as a self-sufficient reality that can count on respect and trust. This, of course, is not about the psychotherapist’s naive belief that the psychotic patient’s neighbors have actually built a hyperboloid and are irradiating him through the wall at night, but about accepting the horror experienced by a person as reality and empathizing with this feeling, no less terrible from the fact that the house committee can vouch for the integrity, and even for the absence of neighbors behind the wall.

Finally, the involuntary nature of experience and its productivity correspond to such a strategic setting of the latest psychotherapy as following the process. If the psychotherapist is convinced that genuine and fruitful changes in the patient’s consciousness and personality are ensured by the productive work of the process of experiencing, then he must turn into the same obedient participant in the psychotherapeutic process in the literal sense of the word, as is the obedient poet who does not invent anything, namely, delving into it with all the tension of his being through the noise of chance and arbitrariness into the most real truth of the sounding poetic melody, how a novelist, who is often surprised by his heroes, is obedient to the self-developing plot, how obedient even - according to the paradoxical thought of Osip Mandelstam (1987) - is a conductor to an orchestra.

Communication

In addition to experience, another category of human existence has become the focus of theoretical constructions and remarkable psychotechnical discoveries in modern psychotherapy. We are talking about the category of communication. Generally speaking, it would be possible to reinterpret the entire history of psychotherapy at its main points from a communicative point of view, presenting it as a series of changes in the way the therapeutic dialogue is structured between patient and therapist. Such an interpretation of history would be productive, and therefore fair, but nevertheless this dialogic paradigm itself begins to occupy an increasingly significant position only in post-war psychotherapy, gradually spreading from the area of ​​psychotherapeutic relationships and interaction between therapist and patient, that is, from the area belonging to communicative views, as if by natural law, on other areas and aspects of psychotherapy. She declares her claims to be the one given the order to formulate psychotherapeutic ideas even about what previously seemed quite “monological” things, such as the patient’s personality, the causes of mental disorders and the results of the therapeutic process.

The creative potential of this paradigm, as it turned out, was so great that it exceeded all our wildest expectations. She gave such elegant, bright and convincing theories and allowed the development of such an effective technology of psychotherapeutic work that by the eighties it began to seem that psychotherapy could do anything, that it could work miracles not only in its original domain - the clinic of neuroses, but also in other , the hottest spots of modern social life, where, it would seem, no one and nothing can help. Psychotherapy - the last child of European culture of the 19th century - entered its flowering period and, with the ease of genius, began to take on a variety of problems from reconciling decades of warring communities and nations (for example, Carl Rogers in South Africa) to treating cancer, from creating ultra-effective teaching methods to helping comatose patients and patients with a long-term deep schizophrenic defect, to whom traditional medical personnel have long been accustomed to treat as dummies with functioning physiological systems.

The peculiarity of this stellar period of modern psychotherapy, which made the word “impossible” a rare anachronism, was that all these miracles were performed not by three or four psychotherapeutic celestials, whose success could always be “explained” by the most convincing appeal to the name: “So this is Virginia Satir (Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls)!”, and many, many who are no longer necessarily marked by special charisma, but simply capable masters who have successfully mastered and creatively developed the experience of their brilliant teachers. For example, until recently, neurolinguistic programming, which was so popular among us until recently, is, according to the original plan, an attempt to put on a conveyor belt the production of psychotherapeutic geniuses due to the fact that extracts [11] of effective communicative therapeutic strategies taken from the work of great charismatic masters were injected into ordinary heads (or even into the spinal cord) of psychotherapeutic recruits. This experiment, one might say, was a success, with the only caveat that instead of geniuses, this conveyor belt regularly baked and is baking psychotherapeutic broilers, quite muscular and cheerful, although marked with some kind of stigma of dietiness and impersonality, which, according to the ineradicable law of nature, accompanies everything in which mystery and sacrament are replaced by reason and mechanism.

We cannot dwell here on a critical analysis of neurolinguistic programming, although a calm, sober and systematic analysis of this phenomenon is urgently needed in our therapeutic community. However, no matter how disdainful or enthusiastic we may be about neurolinguistic programming, we must recognize as a historical fact that it was this psychotherapeutic school that created the prerequisites for turning psychotherapy into a mass profession. Such a transformation is the most important event in our profession, on which its fate depends. The number of professionals in a particular field is a significant historical factor regardless

|from their quality. (Whether we like it or not, the volume of the Writers' Union reference book, if not as thick as War and Peace, is quite competitive with The Demons, while there are hardly more Writers than at the time when psychotherapy was born , but for many people, from readers to publishers, this number is a significant, serious fact, without knowledge of which the understanding of the so-called literary process would be at least incomplete.) And psychotherapy owes a lot to this newest feature of its professional appearance - mass appeal it was the communication paradigm that the creators of NLP R. Bandler and J. Grinder, students of Gregory Bateson, applied to the methodological analysis of the therapeutic process.

Of course, Sigmund Freud already mastered the communicative style of thinking brilliantly. Most of his metaphors, and even such important categories for psychoanalysis as “I”, Censorship, etc., are clearly of a communicative nature. This became clear even in Bakhtin’s early analyzes of Freudianism (Voloshinov,

1927), however, it is precisely into the paradigmatic category of psychotherapy that communication gradually turns, reaching full power in the methodological research of Gregory Bateson and the linguistic psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan.

The communicative paradigm, we repeat, begins to form not only ideas about the process of interaction between the patient and the therapist, which is more than natural, but also an understanding of the nature of personality, the causes of psychopathology and even the results of the psychotherapeutic process. As for ideas about the human personality, it begins to be viewed as consisting entirely of a “dialogue of voices,” as polyphony, as “verbalism” (J. Lacan), that is, a being whose very “cells” are by nature words, and the most intimate metabolic processes - speech, exchange of words, dialogue. How widespread and productive the dialogical understanding of personality has turned out to be in psychotherapy is shown by the remarkable work of V.N. Tsapkin “Personality as a group - group as a person” (1994). The most obvious example of a communicative understanding of the etiology of some mental disorders is the idea of ​​a “double knot” (Bateson

et al., 1993), with the help of which a “schizophrenic mother” forms schizophrenic structures in her child.

An equally striking example of a communicative idea of ​​the result of psychotherapy is the famous formula of Jacques Lacan, according to which “the subject begins the analysis by talking about himself, but not addressing you, or he is addressing you, but not talking about himself. If he is able to talk about himself and address you at the same time, then the analysis is completed" (Lacan,

1966, b. 261). This formula sounds excessively paradoxical only due to the difficult-to-eradicate naturalistic habit of thinking everything, and especially such serious things as the result of treatment, in objective and objective terms. However, in terms of its depth and accuracy, this formula can safely be ranked among the golden fund of psychotherapeutic thought. The importance of this short and succinct formula can hardly be overestimated. Like a small railroad switch, it sends to the scrap heap the echelons of confusion and stupidity that have accumulated and continue to be produced in a reputable enterprise called “Scientific Research into the Effectiveness of Psychotherapy,” clearing the way for a theoretically fruitful and practically convenient solution to this problem. You need to look for it not in the old dead end, where labor-intensive efforts with the help of the latest computers and sophisticated statistical programs produce material that is absurd from a psychotherapeutic point of view only because it is so desirable for insurance companies and officials responsible for psychotherapy, who require “objective criteria” in the case, the whole essence of which, the whole objectivity of which is subjective. The solution to this problem, as J. Lacan’s formula reveals to us, is located in a completely different horizon, not where we strive, in addition to the personality and consciousness of the patient, to determine what was in him before and what is after the course of psychotherapy, but where we ourselves are participants and figures of his speech, his human word about himself. The irritation of officials, who, as part of their duty, need all the zeros to come together, is quite understandable, just as the indignation of “pure scientists” who perceive the lack of clear, unambiguous, objectively recorded results of psychotherapy as thoughtlessness or charlatanism is understandable. But to any unbiased person, even ignorant of psychotherapy, but either by occupation or personal experience, who knows the full power of the human word, which is capable of moving mountains, reviving the dead, as well as, alas, killing the living, the idea that the success of psychotherapy is possible ( and it is necessary!) judged by how the patient himself has become able to talk about himself and his problems, it will seem convincing and true.

Previous2Next


Behavior

When a critical situation arises in a person’s life, he will behave in one of three ways.

• Impulsively. A person cannot come to terms with the current situation and reacts to it too violently. This method of behavior does not help solve the problem, but the individual does not strive for this. A person wants to throw out his emotions, cry and scream. This type of behavior is characteristic of unbalanced people who may sincerely believe that the whole world is against them. For example, a student who did not memorize the tickets and consequently failed the exam will blame the teacher, the institute, or fate for everything. But it would never even occur to him to think that he himself is the culprit of all the problems.
• Passively. This way of reacting is characteristic of apathetic people. Such individuals do not strive anywhere and do not want anything. In essence, they don’t care how the circumstances will turn out and how the problems will be solved, or whether they will be solved at all. Passive people in a critical situation withdraw into themselves and do not react in any way to others. For example, a woman whose husband has died may fall into a quiet depression. She will not care about anything except her own grief. Years later, she might even be able to find joy in him. A woman will stop thinking about herself and her children, who need to be supported somehow.
• Actively. Such a person does not lose touch with the world. There is no place for depression in his heart, despite any difficulties in life. Such an individual copes with his problems and looks for a way out of the current situation. If there is no way out in sight, a person does not hesitate to seek help from loved ones or a doctor. You need to solve your problems as soon as they appear. An active person will not sit still and wait for the situation to get worse. For example, two business partners who cannot come to a common decision may not argue, but simply find a compromise third option.

Preparing to behave in a critical situation

Each of us from time to time finds ourselves in situations where we cannot immediately understand how to behave or feel confident so as not to take “to heart” someone’s words or actions that irritate or hurt us? What situation should be considered critical and how to deal with this situation in the most effective way?

A situation that a person perceives for himself as dangerous, uncertain, associated with increased responsibility, the need to take risks, the need to be and act in unfamiliar conditions for a person, as well as a situation that has a harmful effect on a person’s self-esteem when his self-esteem suffers, can be called critical. Why critical? It is in such situations that the impact of stress factors on a person increases, and therefore a certain crisis arises. A person finds himself in a critical situation and his body reacts as follows:

— first, a state of anxiety arises caused by a stressor (external irritant), at this time the body evaluates the nature of the impact, and a feeling of uncertainty arises;

- then all the forces of the body are mobilized to overcome the difficulty that has arisen and it is either successfully overcome, or the person adapts to his new state and this situation is no longer perceived by him as critical, or the next stage of reaction begins;

— if the body is under the influence of stressors for a long time and a person is not able to overcome them, exhaustion occurs.

Stress is a biologically expedient reaction of the body, because thanks to stressors the body has the opportunity to mobilize all its strengths and abilities, and by overcoming difficulties, a person becomes stronger. But can every person overcome these difficulties? What does this ability depend on? Why can stressors have a NEGATIVE effect on some people and not on others?

The reason is that most people do not think about the fact that their reactions are in their own control, and that they do not have to react to something every time, get irritated and behave like a weather vane in the wind under the influence of stressors. How to understand this?

Let's imagine this situation: you are sitting at home, not in a hurry, comfortably seated in your favorite chair and getting ready to read (watch an interesting program, eat something tasty, prolonging the pleasure). Suddenly, unexpectedly for you, a sharp telephone call is heard. Your reaction, most likely, is this: you shudder, a feeling of dissatisfaction arises, you rush out of your seat to pick up the phone. What happened? Your plans have been thwarted, your mood has changed, but why? Because you once again reacted in a HUMAN WAY, without thinking that external signals THEMSELVES have no power over us, because they DO NOT have the POWER to move us from our place. Consequently, each of us can develop another habit - STOP reacting to an external signal as if we are subordinate to it, become the master of our reactions, which, in turn, will allow us to use this ability in everyday life and become a more stress-resistant person, learn SELF-CONTROL .

From your school biology course, you probably remember the scientist Pavlov’s experiments on dogs, as a result of which the dogs developed a conditioned reflex : after the bell rang, the dog began to salivate, because before at this moment it was given food every time. Also, for each of us, a certain external stimulus serves as a signal to take a habitual action, and we do it without thinking.

The first step towards ridding yourself of the behavior of “Pavlov’s dog” is to remember that in response to an external stimulus it is not at all necessary to rush headlong and react the way you are used to, but to tell yourself: I DO NOT HAVE TO REACT. Since we are people and not animals, we have the opportunity to react to any situation not out of habit, but INTENSIFICALLY. Moreover, in everyday life we ​​are surrounded by a great many “calls”, and if we ourselves do not take care of our reactions and moods, then in a short time we risk turning into neurasthenics and victims of circumstances, whose heads are constantly occupied with disturbing and unproductive thoughts.

A person's consciousness is almost never empty. Everyone constantly thinks about something, especially when alone, and these thoughts can be both useful and destructive, filling our existence with problems. The inner world of a person who is in a state of wakefulness consists of the following parts - mind, emotions, bodily sensations. The experience of a psychological problem develops in the following sequence: negative thoughts (or the influence of an external stimulus) cause negative emotions, the experience of negative emotions causes certain bodily sensations. With negative emotions, the sensations can be unpleasant - muscle tension, headache. If you remain in a negative state for a long time, it is possible to develop diseases - hypertension in intractable people, stomach ulcers in people who are anxious, fearful and unsure of themselves, etc.

However, the above-mentioned parts that fill our inner world live in different rhythms: thoughts are the most fleeting, fleeting process, emotions are a slower process, dying down longer; internal physiological sensations can last the longest. Thus, the easiest way is to “catch” yourself in sensations. In addition, our sensations are always at our fingertips. What is this feeling? Our breathing, temperature, pulse. These sensations are life-saving handrails that you can hold onto to help yourself and get rid of unpleasant (unconstructive, harmful) thoughts and emotions.

When we are captured by some negative idea, we can FOCUS OUR ATTENTION ON THE SENSATIONS associated with this thought, and as a result of such immersion in sensations, we can free ourselves from negative emotions and get away from the influence of this idea.

There are a number of simple techniques with which you can unlearn reacting to stimuli in the usual way and make your reactions conscious, therefore, become the master of your reactions (and with them thoughts, feelings, your entire life) and not allow the situation or other people to influence our emotions and mood.

1st technique: DELAYING THE REACTION TO THE SIGNAL.

The point of the technique is that delaying the reaction to a signal allows you to relieve muscle tension, and in a relaxed state a person is not able to experience negative emotions and feelings, therefore, a person’s behavior and the decisions he makes in such a state will be more conscious and independent of the moment’s mood.

Specific ways to help delay a reaction to an external stimulus:

- in your mouth, run your tongue across the roof of your mouth;

- relax the muscles of the abdomen, hands, shoulders (it is in them that emotions such as anger, irritation, fear “accumulate” - by relaxing these muscles, you will immediately get rid of the emotions that accompany them);

- slowly (“to yourself”) count to ten;

- take a deep breath and exhale several times in a row;

- ask yourself the question: How am I breathing now, what am I feeling? (focusing on breathing in itself slows it down, makes it smoother, which causes a feeling of calm).

Method 2: MENTAL RELAXATION.

To calm down in a situation that caused your irritation, mentally imagine yourself in a relaxed state. It helps to do this better by imagining yourself lying in warm water in a bathtub, on a beach under the sun, or remembering an episode from your life that evokes only pleasant feelings in you. You can even specifically remember some incident when you felt very good, in all the details and colors, so that you can then call on this memory to your aid in order to relieve internal tension.

Technique 3: REACT EMOTIONALLY ONLY TO WHAT IS HAPPENING HERE AND NOW.

Sometimes, when faced with a difficult situation, a person cannot concentrate because he remembers his past mistakes and failures or begins to worry in advance about the outcome of the situation and, unnoticed by himself, begins to experience those emotions of disappointment or anxiety that take away his energy. A person’s ability correctly (constructively, for his own benefit) consists precisely in “catching himself” in time on unnecessary thoughts and separating the actual situation in which he is now from those fictions with which he has loaded his consciousness. Then he will be able to concentrate on solving a problem that requires his attention only at this moment.

4th technique: DO NOT CONFUSE EXCITATION AND FEAR.

In a critical situation, anyone, even a person who has good self-control, experiences a state of anxiety. But many, succumbing to panic, confuse this feeling with fear, completely surrendering to the experience of anxiety . It must be remembered that anxiety is a natural and normal state in a stressful situation; what is more surprising is the complete absence of anxiety. Therefore, it is important, having realized the excitement, not to give in to it, but simply to fix it in your consciousness as a natural fact and maintain presence of mind.

To train using the techniques described, you do not need special conditions, because during the day each of us encounters many irritants. Therefore, if every time in response to an external stimulus you try one of the techniques of learning self-control, then after a week you will feel positive changes within yourself, your consciousness will become clearer and more receptive to new information, and in the future you will be able to exit with dignity not only from everyday life situations, but also from critical situations.

Experience

Everyone experiences difficult periods in life in their own way. What actions do people most often take to help themselves in a critical situation?

• Job. When the ground disappears from under one's feet, in order not to fall, a person must find solid ground. Therefore, any problems that people have are most often cured by work. This approach is very effective. Thanks to work, you can forget unrequited love, you can get rid of the constant presence of guilt for something or before someone. There is nothing wrong with looking for support and support where it is.
• Hobby. A person in a critical situation must find an outlet for himself. If it is not a job, then it must be a hobby. Moreover, it is advisable to captivate yourself not with something monotonous like embroidery or fishing, but with something active. Your hobby should be either active or something that actively engages your brain. For example, you can start skiing or horseback riding. Learn to play chess or the guitar.
• Reading. Books can take a person to distant worlds. Thanks to good literature, you can relax and forget about all your problems. So if you find yourself in a critical situation, then pick up a fantasy book, lie down on the sofa and immerse yourself in imaginary problems. The process of analyzing someone else's life helps to distract yourself and clear your mind of unnecessary garbage.

The emergence of dangerous situations

You fell through the ice

Head out in the direction you came from, since you know the ice there could support you.

If there is no one nearby to help you, you will have to use your forearms to push yourself up. Place your arms wide apart on the edge of the ice floe and pull yourself up, pulling out your torso and legs in turn.

Do not stand on your feet, but crawl to the shore.

Lost in the forest: what to do

Use branches and leaves to help you retrace your steps. Climb to a hill to see if you can get your bearings.

Now follow the descent until you find a river or other moving body of water. Follow the direction of the stream, this usually leads to a town or village.

If you don't find it, keep moving straight ahead and use the sun as your guide.

The car fell into the river

If you accidentally drive into a body of water, you have about 90 seconds before the cabin is completely flooded with water. Unfortunately, when the lower edge of the door sinks, it becomes impossible to open it, so you need to open the window and unfasten the seat belts. If you can't open the windows, try to kick them out.

Actions in case of fire

As a rule, it is not fire that kills people, but smoke. You need to be as low as possible, since heated gases rise upward.

Stay near the wall and follow it until you find the exit. Whatever you do, try not to inhale the gas. If you feel like you are losing consciousness, lie flat on the floor against the wall. This will help firefighters find you more easily.

Leg cramp: what to do

Cramping in water can be very dangerous. The first thing to do is turn over and float on your back so that water does not get into your lungs. Then stretch the area where the cramp occurred, such as by pulling your foot toward you, or wait until it goes away.

Foot stuck in seaweed

If possible, float on your back, as you would with a cramp. If your head is underwater, try not to panic and conserve oxygen. Use your hand to push the seaweed down your leg until you are free.

Do not try to move actively, as this may make your situation worse.

What to do if you choked

If you are in a public place, it is better to stay there. In this case, you have a better chance that someone will come to your aid.

If no one is around, you will have to do the Heimlich maneuver yourself. This means that you need to make a sharp blow to the stomach (between the navel and the costal arches) against a hard object, such as a chair. The goal is to compress the air in the diaphragm and force the object out of the throat.

Case of attack in an elevator

The worst thing you can do, and what most victims instinctively do, is move to the far wall of the elevator.

It is best to be in the corner near the door next to the elevator control panel. At least this way you have more control over the situation.

Falling from height

No matter how hopeless this situation was, there were cases when people survived. There are several factors that increase your chances.

First, assume a “prone position” (a well-known term in skydiving). Essentially, you need to stretch out as far as possible to create resistance.

Second, plan to land while avoiding concrete surfaces (ideally land in water). You can try moving to the right, for example, by lowering your right shoulder and vice versa.

Finally, relax, bend your knees, feet forward and try to roll. This will at least increase your chances of a happy ending.

Help

Are you in a critical situation? In such cases, help should be sought from a specialist and only there. Do not try to heal mental wounds with alcohol and do not try to think about the same topic again and again. Fresh thoughts will not appear. To prevent the porridge from burning in your head, you need to stir it periodically. Therefore, go to a specialist who will help you understand yourself, your goals, desires and ambitions.

Who gets into critical situations more often than others? Unbalanced people who don't know what they want from life. When a person is sailing without a map, it seems to him that it doesn’t matter which shore his life situation lands him on. But when the individual arrives, he realizes that what he wanted was not at all what he received. Of course, fate will always give you surprises, but for the gifts to be pleasant, you must try and deserve them. Write down what you want and go towards your goal. Then you will not have misunderstandings and confusion in your head. If you have goals and ambitions, then it is easier to make decisions, because you know which choice will lead you to your goal and which will not.

Try to understand the situation before it reaches its extreme critical point. Family and friends will always help you solve everyday problems. Another way to get rid of psychological problems is to keep a diary. Daily entries will help you detect the problem in a timely manner, which means you can start working on fixing it on time. Make notes every evening and make sure that pessimistic thoughts do not appear on paper.

Dangerous and emergency situations

Nuclear explosion

This situation can be survived if you are outside the radius of the shock wave. Of course, if there are warning signs, you need to find shelter, preferably underground. If you are in the affected area, drop to the ground and cover your head as soon as you see the explosion, as it may take up to 30 seconds for the shockwave to reach you.

Don't look at the flash, it will immediately blind you. If you have good cover, your best bet is to sit there and wait for rescue.

Shootings at schools and other premises

American studies of school shootings have shown that there are 4 factors that increase your chances of survival. No matter how trivial it may sound, the first thing you need to do is run away (preferably in a zigzag).

However, this is not always possible. The second is to barricade the door. If you create an obstacle, the armed person will most likely not waste his time on it. However, if he does decide to sneak in, it's best to play dead. To do this, you need not to panic and control your breathing. And fourth, if all else fails, use adrenaline to your advantage and try to fight back.

You have been taken hostage

If you plan to escape, you need to do it quickly. The first few minutes are important. There may be other people around, but you should be careful. If the chances are low, you can complicate your situation, in which case it is better to behave according to the rules.

Observe everything that happens and try to understand why you were kidnapped. Perhaps this will help you find out what the kidnappers are planning to do.

Although many hostages survive, it may take several years before rescue comes. Whatever happens, do not lose hope and weigh the risks and benefits of trying to escape.

Crossfire

The first and most obvious thing is to try to escape. If this is not possible and there is no shelter nearby, lie flat on the ground with your hands behind your head (at least this is better than standing with your hands above your head).

Try to assess the situation and slowly crawl to a safe place.

Buried alive in a coffin

As incredible as it may sound, such cases have already happened. The first and most important thing is to stop panicking and cover your face with clothes, as there is dirty work ahead. Stretch your arms and legs up and use your legs (which are stronger) to push. Pray that the coffin will be wooden. In this case, you need to make a hole. As soon as this happens, the earth will begin to fall on you (that's why you need to pull the clothes over your head), and you need to push it with your feet to the other end of the coffin. Provided that you are not very deep, it is time to dig your way to the surface.

Random materials

• The woman fed the monkeys with her milk
• The ghost helped me get rich
• Why does a teacher need sex with a student?
• Humanity could die at any moment
• Mini helicopter Zero

Subsequent

• The Incas gave alcohol and coca to their child sacrifices.
• Google connects the Internet and TV
• A giant from the world of insects - the titan lumberjack beetle
• Same-sex marriage - a short course
• Get drunk and not get poisoned

INDIFFERENCE AS A RESPONSE TO STRESS

It happens that after severe stress associated with stressful situations, a person enters a state of indifference, when he does not want to do anything and all actions to reduce the influence of stress factors seem pointless.

In a certain sense, such indifference is a protective reaction of the body. After a strong shock, which is accompanied by the expenditure of psychic energy, inhibition develops in the nervous system, during which the wasted energy is replenished. If this did not happen, people would quickly reach nervous exhaustion, which poses a threat to health and life. But at the same time, the state of indifference cannot be considered favorable, therefore, if it arises, it is advisable to get out of it quickly.

THE HARM OF INDIFFERENCE

Despite the fact that indifference is not actually a negative emotion, the consequences of such a state are disastrous. Becoming indifferent to oneself, a person stops in his development, does not set new goals for himself and does not strive to achieve them. And since stagnation cannot be stable, it gradually leads to degradation.

Sometimes emotional devastation after stress can be “cured” with rest, sometimes you have to take more active measures.

Showing indifference to others, a person becomes callous and loses the ability to empathize. “My house is on the edge, I don’t know anything,” is the motto of those in whom indifference has completely taken root.

Vigorous activity, working around the clock to achieve a certain goal is also stressful. Indifference in this case can nullify all results.

If indifference becomes the result of stress caused by troubles in professional activity, it often manifests itself in indifference to what until recently was the meaning of existence. Having experienced a strong shock, a person loses interest in work in general and subsequent difficulties in particular. He gives up, loses the desire to fight and look for a solution, and as a result, the problem can really develop into a real crisis. To prevent this from happening, indifference must be overcome within yourself.

BY CONTRARY

There is a psychological technique that allows you to turn “need” into “want” and awaken interest in certain things or activities that previously caused nothing but boredom. This technique is based on the paradox of reverse influence and, like homeopathy, uses the rule “treat like with like.”

Nothing motivates you to work more than a few days of forced idleness.

So, in order to arouse your interest in something, you need to start convincing yourself that it is not interesting. Have constant failures taken away your last strength? And you no longer want to look for any ways to solve more and more new problems? Really, why do you need this? Every day you fight like a fish on ice, fray your nerves... You lived before without this “thing of yours”, and you will continue to live. And how will you live – without stress, without hassle. Do not need anything. Spit on everything and don’t go anywhere tomorrow. Turn off the phone, get some sleep, eat normally... It's decided! Finally and irrevocably!

And as soon as you make a firm decision to “give up everything,” the psychological pendulum will definitely swing in the opposite direction. There will definitely be some things that need to be “finished”, then the thought will come that you really wasted so much effort, money and time, then intuition (as if by chance) will suggest a couple of possible options for overcoming the crisis, and suddenly it turns out that you again plunged headlong into the usual cycle of events, and the indifference was gone.

FORCE YOURSELF

In a state of indifference, not everyone is able to resort to psychological techniques, if only because this also seems unnecessary. Apathy paralyzes the will, and if you succumb to it, you can eventually go into a real, protracted depression. Therefore, in some cases, you just need to take yourself “by the collar” and through “I don’t want”, despite the internal resistance, force you to do the obligatory daily work.

Even if you are just present at work, you will inevitably have to answer calls, help with advice, and carry out management tasks.

By performing habitual actions, even if automatically, we still become involved in the process of common activity, and this spurs us on and does not allow us to completely withdraw into ourselves. By joining the living work process, a person unconsciously gradually begins to show more and more interest in his surroundings and throws off the shackles of indifference, returning to his previous active state.

INTEREST IN LIFE

Interest is the opposite quality of indifference, so it is advisable to always try to cultivate it in yourself. Interest in what is happening allows you to perceive events more positively even when things are going well, and to respond much more effectively to problems if they arise. An undying interest in life can negate the risk of falling into indifference.

To maintain a constant interest in life, you don’t need to come up with something special; it’s enough to be content with very simple things.

Meetings with old friends, a favorite hobby, openness in communicating with people - all these factors create an internal feeling of involvement in what is happening and support the desire to develop and learn new things.