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Old 02-27-2022, 03:46 AM
  # 31 (permalink)  
DriGuy
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Originally Posted by Colin1 View Post
I've never studied phsychology Driguy and have never encountered the concepts of humanism and behaviorism in this context. I just read up a bit on them and it's very interesting. Thanks for getting me started on this
I'm happy you looked it up because that would explain it better than I could here. Back when I studied it, humanists sometimes referred to the behaviorists as "rat psychologists" who trained animals to press the red button, but not the blue one. I pictured guys that ran re-education camps and were experts at brainwashing. The movie, A Clockwork Orange didn't help the behaviorist cause either. Each camp smeared the other unfairly. But some psychologists saw merit in each, and began to meld them, some becoming quite prominent in the field (Albert Ellis: Rational Emotive Behavior Theory).

The way I see it, if you voluntarily force changes in your own behavior, it's a helpful tool, and from my own experience, all the elements of self understanding are still there. I still default to thinking through my own issues, because it feels so natural, but there are situations such as breaking the cycle of addiction, when the best fix is to simply to stop acting as you are. One of the pitfalls of thinking through our issues is forgetting to test our perceptions against reality and logic, in which case, what feels like thinking is little more than spinning our wheels and going nowhere. As an alcoholic, I got trapped in that for much longer than I should have, and I think many alcoholics do.
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