The High Cost of Mental Comfort: Western, Abrahamic & =External= vs. Eastern, Meditation-based & =Internal= Attunement for Emotion Regulation. Buyer Beware.

Not knowing until about the last half century how to manifest internal control over the fight, flight & freeze mechanisms of the autonomic nervous system, most of the people of the Abrahamic "West" continued to rely upon external sources of psychological attunement and affective soothing. Which opened them up to all manner of cynical and profit-making manipulations, including everything we've come to know and love (not) in the world of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity, Orthodox Judaism and Shi'a Islam.

Knowing as they have for at least 2,600 years, how to manifest internal control over the fight, flight & freeze mechanisms of the autonomic nervous system, some (not all) the people of the Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist "East" are less reliant upon external sources of psychological attunement and affective soothing. Which makes it more likely that they will not be so affected by such cynical and profit-making manipulations...

Unless they have become caught up in a cultic echo chamber of Groupthink, Social Proof, Implicit Social Contract & Unquestioning Acceptance of Authority that may look and sound different from the Abrahamic "style," but which is actually no different at all. (See, for example, The Human Potential Movement Gone Awry as well as Abuse of Narrow Focus Meditation for Mind Control.)

I was already waaaaay "deconverted" from both Western Abrahamic and Eastern meditation-based affect regulation when I learned about things like the following, but I still needed such tools to get me through the night:

Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing,

Pat Ogden's Sensorimotor Processing,

Deb Dana's Polyvagal Resilience Therapy, and

Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing.

All of which can be used to yank myself out of the lingering upshots of Religious Trauma Syndrome in minutes, if not seconds. And none of which are administered by any guru, and -- truth be known -- don't even need to be administered by a psychotherapist if one can read and follow written instructions.

Resources & References

Dana, D.: The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, New York: W. W. Norton, 2018.

Levine, P.: In An Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010.

Ogden, P.; Minton, K.: Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Ogden, P.; Fisher, J.: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment, New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.

See also... Abgrall, Atack, Conway & Siegleman, Galanter, Kramer & Alstad, Lalich, Langone, Lifton (2019), Meerloo, Mithers, Sargant, Singer et al (1990 and 1996), Stein, and Taylor in A More than Basic Cult Library... and Aldwin et al, Armstrong (1993), Arterburn & Felton, Batchelor (1997), Bellah (2011), Durkheim, Ehrman (2018), Epstein (2013), Goleman, Hoffer, Jaynes, Krishnamurti (both), Mishra, Pals, Prothero, Sargant, Strausberg, and Wathey in Recommended on Religion from Outside the Box.

Is "Marriage (and intimate relationship) Counseling" on the brink of a New Era? There are compelling, =autonomic= reasons to think so.

 I've no idea what it will be called in time, but I will propose that it may be something like "The Autonomic Age," as that is where pretty much all "fast-acting" and effective psychotherapy is headed. Bruce McEwen's, Sonya Lupien's, Robert Sapolsky's, Pat Ogden's, Janina Fisher's and Deb Dana's revolutionary revisitations of Hans Selye's, Joseph Wolpe's and Herbert Benson's 50-to-70-year-old dis-cover-ies of the autonomic nervous system, the general adaptation syndrome and the "fight, flight or freeze" responses to sudden threat are bearing fruit -- with the help of Stephen Porges's "polyvagal theory" -- at a level no one dreamed of in the '60s or '70s.

Grasp at the level of Porges's The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (2015) and Ogden & Fisher's Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment (2015), as well as Fisher's Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation (2017) and Dana's The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy (2018), has already changed the psychotherapeutic landscape for recovery from "awful childhood" and "violently invasive" (e.g. rape) trauma leading to simple and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. (As is obvious to anyone who was attending the big Evolution of Psychotherapy Conferences before COVID hit.)

Ogden, Fisher and Dana have, however (whether they realize it yet or not) hit on teachable ways to monitor for, notice, recognize, acknowledge, accept, own and appreciate -- and thereby reduce or even eliminate -- unnecessary and potentially destructive reciprocal reactivity in the third stage of intimate relationships before things come down to "Should I Stay or Should I Go?." (The first stage is "pink cloud," the second is "oh, I see now...," the third is "here we go again; sigh.")

The 10 StEPs + SP4T digs into the combination of Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing and assertive use of "interoception" that are the essential mechanisms of Ogden & Fisher's approach. (Perhaps see also Craig, A. D.: How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body, in National Review of Neuroscience, Vol. 3, No. 8, August 2002.)

Dana's, Ogden's and Fisher's utilize intrapersonal interoception and interpersonal observation to track functional (vs. dysfunctional) reciprocity in relationships so that one can use the 10 StEPs to fully sense the actual nature of any rupture, find the appropriate means of repair (or "making amends"), and re-establish connection... so long as both parties thereto make it to the fourth of the five stages of psychotherapeutic recovery.

I'm not going to attempt to spell it all out in detail, but I will say that once Ogden's and Dana's "therapeutic technology" becomes widely circulated, the possibilities of moving through reciprocal, autonomic reactivity and Working together on Codependency in a Committed Relationship (see my reply to the OP on that Reddit thread) should be light years ahead of current approaches based on psychodynamic or object relations theory, behavior modification, cognitive reconstruction and/or even mindfulness as we now understand it.

With two major qualifications: Any DSM Axis II personality traits must not be impossibly obstructive, and both parties must have arrived at -- or can be brought quickly to -- the fourth of those five stages.

(I want to add one further notion here: One can use this method unilaterally to deal with difficult coworkers, bosses, siblings, parents, pushy proselytizers and others one may be unable to avoid to set effective -- if interpersonally invisible -- boundaries. Thus, there are major implications here for "codependency" in a much wider context.)

References  & Resources

Benson, H.: The Relaxation Response, New York: Morrow, 1975.

Dana, D.: The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, New York: W. W. Norton, 2018. 

Fisher, J.: Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation, London: Routledge, 2017.

Lupien, S.; Maheu, F.; et al: The Effects of Stress and Stress Hormones on Human Cognition: Implications for the Field of Brain and Cognition, in Brain & Cognition, Vol. 65, No. 3, 2007.

Lupien, S.: Brains Under Stress, in Canadian Journal of Psychiatry / Revue Canadienne De Psychiatrie, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2009.

Lupien, S.; McEwen, B.; Gunnar, M.; Heim, C.: Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition, in Nature Reviews - Neurosciences, April 29, 2009. 

McEwen, B.; Seeman, T.: Protective and damaging effects of mediators of stress: Elaborating and testing the concepts of allostasis and allostatic load, in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 896, 1999.

McEwen, B: Mood Disorders and Allostatic Load, in Journal of Biological Psychiatry, Vol. 54, 2003.

McEwen, B.; Lasley, E. N.: The End of Stress as We Know It, Washington, DC: The Dana Press, 2003. 

Ogden, P.; Minton, K.: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: One Method for Processing Traumatic Memory, in Traumatology, Vol. 6, Issue 3, October 2000.

Ogden, P.; Minton, K.: Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. 

Ogden, P.; Fisher, J.: Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment, New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. 

Porges, S.: The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system, in Cleveland Clinical Medical Journal, No. 76, April 2009.

Porges, S.: The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology), New York: W. W. Norton, 2015

Sapolsky, R.: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping, 3rd Ed., New York: Holt, 2004.

Sapolsky, R.: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, New York: Penguin, 2017.

Schore, A.: Affect Dysregulation and Disorders of the Self, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Selye, H.: Stress Without Distress, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1974.

Selye, H.: The Stress of Life, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.

Wolpe, J.: Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958. 

Wolpe, J.; Wolpe, D.: Life Without Fear: Anxiety and Its Cure, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, and Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1987.

Wolpe, J.: Carbon Dioxide Inhalation Treatments of Neurotic Anxiety, in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Vol. 175, No. 3, Mar 1987.