Han de Wit 0205
Question: Should we do psychotherapy before we start meditating?de Wit: Yes, I know sometimes people say this. It would mean first having to do therapy before you can start out on a spiritual path. I don’t agree with this. If we look at the great teachers in the spiritual traditions, both men and women, we see that those people sometimes had quite some neurotic patterns. The issue here, however, is whether you can deal with these patterns in a way that still makes you milder and wiser one way or another. When we gain insight into the existential facts of human existence, if we can find a way to approach them courageously, this will surely have an effect on some of the neurotic patterns that are grounded in a defensive attitude to those facts. So psychotherapy and the spiritual approach do have an influence on each other. Also because, when people take up meditation, they can gain insight into certain patterns in their own minds and realise that it might be a good idea to do some psychotherapy. So it can also work the other way around, and when it does, people should be encouraged to enter psychotherapy.
Indeed, one of the biggest misunderstandings I am faced with as a dharma teacher is that people have hidden psychotherapeutic expectations about meditation. They start a spiritual path with the idea that perhaps they will be cured of their neuroses. But a spiritual path isn’t therapy, and so that doesn’t happen. They have in a certain sense come to the wrong address. On the other hand, it can also happen that by meditating they gain more insight and start to understand that a spiritual path is different than psychotherapy and then decide to enter therapy. When this happens, it is important that people do not perceive it as a failure, in the sense that "I have meditated for so many years, that I should be free of (say) my agoraphobia by now". Because that is not how it works. And this is important to know, because when people embark on a spiritual path with a hidden psychotherapeutic expectation they will often feel that they want to get rid of their neuroses, or whatever you want to call them. But in so doing, they back themselves into a corner because this idea leads nowhere.