Hey, deserve listeners. As a part of continuing the spring cleaning, in which I will finally get to all of your emails that you've been sending in over the last number of months, I thought I would continue doing that right now.

And a lot of these emails are pretty technical geared towards therapists. So if that will bore you, you might want to skip this episode.

This first email is from annual patron Megan from Arizona. She says, hi, Dr.

I'll just summarize what she's saying this, you know, she sent me an article, a journal article about evidence-based therapy and CBT and it's critical of it.

So I thought I would read that article and talk about it here. So the article articles written by Jonathan Shedler published in 2018 titled, Where is the Evidence for Evidence-based Therapy?

So just reading one of the introductory paragraphs here, Behind the Evidence-based Therapy movement lies a master narrative that increasingly dominates the mental health landscape.

The Master Narrative goes something like this. In the Dark Ages, therapist practiced, unproven, unscientific therapy. Evidence-based therapies are scientifically proven and superior.

That Master Narrative has become a justification for all-out attacks on traditional talk therapy. That is therapy aimed at fostering self-examination and self-understanding in the context of an ongoing, meaningful therapy relationship. Just chime in here.

Yeah, absolutely. There will be people that will say that humanistic therapies and Freudian therapies are complete hogwash and are a thing of the past, like when medical doctors used to bleed people to try to cure certain ailments.

So that is the narrative. And I've heard people say that. The facts are that, and I don't know what the rest he gets into in this article.

The fact is that there is a lot of evidence that, quote unquote, Freudian types of therapies are psychodynamic, relational, psychoanalytic therapies.

And certainly humanistic therapies, there's a ton of evidence, mountains and mountains of evidence, that demonstrate that these forms of therapy do work for certain conditions.

If, for example, you have a phobia, then Freudian therapies do not work, and humanistic therapies aren't necessarily going to work.

If you have a phobia, you want to use exposure therapy, which is a form of behavioral therapy. So with phobias, you want to use that.

But if someone comes in after a major breakup, like a divorce, or they just got dumped by their long-term partner and they're sad about it, then behaviorism, you know, exposure therapy is not indicated for that presentation and therapy.

And in that presentation, humanistic therapies are definitely shown through evidence, thousands of studies showing that it is helpful in that situation.

By humanistic, I mean, reflective listening, compassion, self-exploration, being in here and now, allowing someone to get in touch with their needs, emotional expression, experiences that are meaningful to finding meaning in one's life, existential therapies, that kind of thing.

So, for sure. And if that individual complains that they've had half a dozen or a dozen relationships that all seem to end the same and tend to be with the same sort of person, then psychodynamic oriented therapies, interpersonal therapies, insight oriented therapies, are evidence shows that they do help.

Transference-based therapies definitely do help. Personality disorders, for example, with borderline being one person I sort of, it has been shown through evidence, through empirical research, research, these are sound studies, these are not just dubious studies by dubious researchers.

They have found that, you know, transference-based therapies are relationship-based therapies between therapist and client, do show positive long-term outcomes.

There are two reasons why, in my field, you will hear therapists say that CBT is basically the only form of therapy that works.

One is because, as well, there are a lot of reasons why, to come to mind.

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