Human psychology should be separated into two basic categories:
- biological
- experiential
Biological psychology can be either good or bad. It includes the psychological effects of genes, brain health, health of perceptual and other organs, trauma or its absence, disease, extreme experiences that profoundly affect how the brain and body function at biological levels, etc.
Experiential psychology can also be either good or bad. It includes acculturation, training, childhood development, education, parenting, interpersonal experience, language use, and so on.
These two categories are often mixed together. This affects how we understand psychology and how we treat it or deal with it.
In this post, I am going to ignore biological psychology.
The foundation of experiential psychology should completely recognize and be based on the fact that virtually all human psychological interactions are fraught with error.
After years of studying and doing FIML, I am 100% convinced that human psychological communication is so fraught with error that the very foundation of human experiential psychology as it is recognized in the DSM, in academia, and in culture generally is rotten.
Another way to say that is we don’t even know what human psychology is because virtually all experiential psychology is a dysfunctional mess due to the presence of massive amounts of experiential error in all people, including psychologists.
Our brains are working overtime with deeply erroneous psychological data, producing terrible results.
We cannot correctly understand the human body if all of our specimens are riddled with parasites and disease. Similarly, how can we study human psychology if the data being processed by the brain (and body) are riddled with error?
Even if you have never studied FIML, you should be able to see that humans in the privacy of their own minds are like little zoos filled with shadowy monsters that have arisen due to the plethora of error each and every individual has experienced.
Human responses to these shadowy monsters are varied—some act on them, some fear them, some hide them, some expose them.
But few escape them because you cannot escape them by yourself. Those monsters arise out of decades of communication error and they will not go away until the communication errors have been removed.
You cannot remove those errors in normal psychotherapy. A therapist can only show a client what they are and how they arise., if that
The client must remove them through a practice like FIML.