[Buddha-l] (no subject)

[Stefan Detrez]

I had the intuition that low esteem is not conducive to becoming
enlightened. Thank you for your information, Michael. Do I understand it
correctly that a sense of a self is necessary before one can intiate
therapy? Am I correct to speak in terms of 'an instrumental self', maybe in
the same sense as the simile of the raft, a self that should be discarded,
but is necessary to achieve a goal?

I know Linehan from her work with BPD. You give references to Buddhist based
therapies and I am very grateful, but I feel that my question with regard to
a 'working self' is still unanswered.




2010/11/26 Michael Essex <mgessex at yahoo.com>

> Taking your question seriously, there are many researchers/clinicians who
>  have developed emperically-supported therapies somewhat based on Buddhist
> ideas.
> To start, you should look at the work of
> Marsha Linehan - Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
> http://www.behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm
> which specifically addresses severe personality disorders.
>
> Jon Kabot-Zinn's Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
> has been adapted for treatment of Depression by Zindel Segal
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Based-Cognitive-Therapy-Depression-Preventing/dp/1572307064
>
> Work is being done at Emory University and Wisconsin regarding Compassion
> meditation and therapy.
>
> http://dalailama.emory.edu/2010/compassion.html
>
> There are regularly organized conferences on mindfulness and therapy. Read
> things by the various presenters.
> http://www.facesconferences.com/
>
> The idea that having low self esteem or poor self image makes you somehow
> closer to enlightenment is a fallacy, well worked out by the 80's in the
> many volumes on psychoanalysis and Buddhism.
> It was clearly laid out by Jack Engler, as mentioned by one of the previous
> respondents, in the first part of the sometimes hard to find
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Transformations-Consciousness-Ken-Wilber/dp/0394742028
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Psychotherapy based on Buddhist understandings of the workings of the mind
> look promising from a scientific point of view. However, I have often
> wondered how such therapeutic approach works on patients who suffer from
> low
> self esteem, have no stable sense of a self, don't 'know how they really
> are', etc. Wouldn't the notion of anatta be 'nothing new' to them, or the
> very problem itself, being that the sense of the absence of a self IS a
> contributing factor to the existence of the personality disorder?
>
> Thank you,
>
> Stefan
>
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'In some awful, strange, paradoxical way, atheists tend to take religion
more seriously than the practioners' - Sir Jonathan Miller.