Context Replacement Therapy (CRT)

   
     Many negative behavioral expressions, like addiction or anorexia, are comorbid with low self-esteem (SE). Because low SE is a primary gearing (primary gearings are gearings related to life and self), the emotions associated with it are very strong and appear very real. When you add the self-perpetuating nature of primary gearings, dealing with low SE becomes extremely difficult. Therefore, the same can be said of the maladaptive behaviors to which it gives rise.  

     One of the fundamental difficulties in dealing with low SE is getting an alternate view of self across to people who are suffering from it. Even the idea that a viable alternate view exists is difficult to grasp.  Whilst the subject may cognitively understand what is being presented, they have no emotional or personal identification with it and therefore it tends not to have personal impact. CRT represents an approach to working around this problem.  

      CRT is based on the premise that using a subject’s own experience and opinions as a basis to formulate alternate views will give the picture that emerges some degree of automatic emotional identification. For example, a person with low SE would be encouraged to formulate what, in their opinion, would be a positive developmental environment for a child. They are then asked to postulate what impact it would have had on their own development if they had been raised in that type of environment. Would they still have the same SE problem? The resulting answer typically allows the person to draw a different meaning from life events.  Because the conclusions are based on personal data, rather than data being put to them from an outside source, there is a high degree of emotional identification with the conclusions, and with the concept that there are other ways of viewing themselves. And of course, if the subjects are formulating what they believe would be a positive upbringing, it should by nature include important aspects relevant to their own development. For example, I would expect a person who had a violent upbringing to perceive a positive environment as one that is non-violent. Therefore, the pictures that the subjects develop are individually specific. A therapeutically desirable outcome.

       What is laid out here is the basic concept, but the application of the principle can be quite diverse. Firstly, therapists can structure the application for their own specific needs. For example, it is possible to get people to formulate concepts from any perspective relevant to their particular situation. In the SE example from above, subjects could also be asked to formulate what they believe would be a positive environment for emotional development, or for cognitive development. The choice of focal point can easily be tailored to the particular circumstances of any individual and thus provides a useful therapeutic framework across a multitude of behavioral, emotional, or cognitive disorders.

       Cognitive applications provide a stark view of our development. Because as children we have no developed cognitive abilities, data, or experience we are forced to believe in the example our parents set for us. It is fairly widely accepted that often children will develop low SE because they have no other way to interpret negative treatment than it reflected a problem in them.  We are not capable as children of interpreting negative parental actions as reflective of a problem in our parents. Therefore, the cognitive application of CRT is to get subjects to judge formative events that had a negative effect from an adult perspective.