Definition of Terms:
In the subject of Applied Metapsychology, normal English is used as a rule, to describe its methods and techniques. Every specialized subject does require some new terms and specialized definitions of normal words for optimum clarity. This glossary is provided to make the subject more accessible.
Terms used in the definitions that are underlined are also defined herein.
- Ability Enhancement:
- Once someone’s main issues have been dealt with, we can move on to personal growth and enhancing abilities. Trying to achieve personal growth over the top of unresolved upsets, worries and traumatic events can be frustrating. Completion of Life Stress Reduction (a tailored-to-the-client case plan for addressing all the issues and concerns that are grabbing the client’s attention and impeding success), makes space for exercising and developing abilities.
- The Ability Enhancement viewing curriculum, done in one-on-one sessions, provides a systematic structure for increasing abilities, developing potential and optimizing quality of life.
- Action Plan (also sometimes called Life Action Plan):
- A series of steps to be taken by the client in life. They are devised together by the client and practitioner, acting as a consultant.
- Applied Metapsychology:
- Principles of metapsychology put to use in the form of individual sessions and training programs designed to bring about observable positive results in the human condition.
- Agenda:
- The agenda of activities planned for the next scheduled session, usually following a previously written over all case plan.
- Awareness Threshold:
- The dividing line that separates those items of which someone can be readily aware from items that are repressed. A person can only become aware of the latter by using a special technique (if at all).
- Case:
- 1. In the medical or mental health context, a person is often referred to as a case. In Applied Metapsychology, we differentiate between the person him or herself, and the person’s condition and mental and emotional baggage. We do not refer to a person as “a case” but refer to the person’s accumulation of emotionally charged material as his or her “case.”
- 2. Case in this context means the entirety of emotionally charged material the person has, including traumatic incidents, upsets, worries, regretted actions, confusions, unwanted feelings and emotions, compulsions, repressions, etc., resulting from past experience and the person’s response to it. Someone’s case could be thought of as the negative aspect of his/her mental environment that results in undesirable feelings, conditions, and behavior.
- Case Plan:
- The written plan of specific techniques designed to accomplish the viewer’s goals for viewing. A case plan is based on data provided by the viewer (client), usually in an interview.
- Case Planning:
- The activity of compiling useful items to address and making a plan to do so, using the techniques available. Synonymous with “technical direction” or “TDing”
- Case Progress:
- An improvement in the client’s condition by his/her own estimation; a reduction of emotionally charged material; an improvement in personal ability.
- Co-facilitation:
- A partnership between two or more persons, in which they alternate being facilitator (practitioner) and viewer (client) in any given session, so that both can get help and both can have the experience of helping.
- Communication Exercises (CEs):
- A set of exercises that isolate the component parts of communication so that each part can be practiced and strengthened. The final exercise re-combines these skills so that they can be practiced together to achieve more effective communication.
- Communion:
- A combination of communication, comprehension, and affection. An increase in any of the three components tends to result in an increase in the other two. A sudden drop in one of the three components causes a drop in the other two and communion itself. This we call an upset.
- Comprehension:
- The sharing of experience that occurs when communication is successful. It need not involve agreement or concurrence.
- Consultant:
- A TIR/Applied Metapsychology practitioner engaged in working out life strategies with a viewer. Compare with facilitator.
- Consultation:
- The action of working with a client to find needed sources of information and to work out strategies for dealing with things in the client’s life. Used as necessary when a client needs assistance in dealing with the outer world. In consultation, the practitioner works with the client to formulate an action plan, a series of steps for dealing with real-life situations. Consultation is differentiated from facilitation in that facilitation works within the client’s own mental environment and world view. Usually, viewers complete a session or series of sessions of Traumatic Incident Reduction (TIR) and/or other Applied Metapsychology (AMP) techniques with a feeling that nothing else needs to done about the subject they have addressed. Some situations in life, however, need action to be taken for results to occur. Consultation supports this action because client and consultant work out together the steps the client will need to take to achieve the desired result. The Schema Program makes use of consultation.
- Deactivation:
- An area of emotional charge disappearing from view, moving out of a triggered state; the emotional charge is still in existence, ready to perhaps be triggered another time, but it is not currently impinging on the person’s consciousness.
- Discharging/Discharged:
- The action or fact of an area of concern having all the emotional charge connected with it reduced, such that there is nothing remaining to be triggered in that particular area.
- Discovery:
- The mode of facilitation that selectively reactivates, addresses, and discharges areas not currently activated, for the purpose of increasing the client’s ability and stabilizing the person at a higher level of functioning. (Compare unburdening.)
- Disturbance:
- An area of charge on which the viewer has attention fixated, which prevents the viewer from putting attention where s/he wants to put it. After the disturbance is deactivated, the viewer’s attention is free to do the deeper work of the session by employing a techniques such as Traumatic Incident Reduction. Disturbances may vary in severity, from mild and almost trivial to extremely intense. Upsets, pressing current worries or problems, withheld communications, and traumatic incidents that are currently reactivated are the main examples of disturbances.
- Emotional Charge:
- 1. Repressed, unfulfilled intention resulting in: 2. Distress; uncomfortable or painful feelings; dulled awareness, compulsions, etc. The term is used at times to refer to either that which generates the painful feelings, the repressed, unfulfilled intention itself, or to the resulting feelings of distress, resistance, or numbness. Charge results in negative emotions, resistance, disordered thinking, emotional or psychosomatic pain, and/or aberrant behavior.
- Emotional Scale:
- A series or spectrum of emotions felt as one encounters varying degrees of success or failure in an activity or has varying degrees of affinity or aversion for something.
- End point (EP):
- The point at which a viewing activity has been successfully completed. It is manifested by a set of phenomena that indicate the successful termination of the activity. These indicators vary from activity to activity, but the end point of any activity always includes an improvement in emotional state and an unsticking of attention, bringing the person more fully into the present. In viewing, it consists of extroversion of the viewer’s attention, feeling brighter and higher on the Emotional Scale, and often a realization of some kind.
- Engagement:
- In viewing, the state in which the viewer is attentive to an item of emotionally charged case material and, using a viewing technique and the help of the facilitator, is actively working through the item to discharge and resolve it.
- Exploration:
- The method of facilitation that uses no set or predetermined viewing instructions (contrasted to formal techniques such as TIR or Unblocking that have precise patterns of questions or instructions). Exploration is used, for instance: to find an item to address, to explore an area of emotional charge and interest so as to write an effective case plan for it, or to produce case progress as a technique in itself.
- Facilitation:
- The act of helping another to perform the actions of viewing. In facilitation, the facilitator asks the viewer to perform an action or answer a question or series of questions, the viewer does the action or answers the question, and the facilitator acknowledges him/her for so doing; the act of helping another person (viewer) to perform the actions of viewing. Facilitation is differentiated from consultation in that facilitation works within the client’s own mental environment and world view. Usually, viewers are not left with a feeling that anything else needs to be done about the subject they have addressed. Some situations in life, however, need action to be taken for results to occur. Consultation supports this action.
- Facilitator:
- A practitioner of Applied Metapsychology, including the use of TIR to help someone; a person who helps another to perform the actions of viewing. A facilitator’s function is to help the viewer to view his/her world and thereby to alleviate the emotional charge contained therein. The term, “therapist” implies that something is done by one person to another, which is not the case in viewing. The term “counselor” is not a good fit for this work because the facilitator does not counsel the viewer about what to do in life.
- FESAPs:
- Short for: unwanted feelings, emotions, sensations, attitudes and pains. These are investigated, in general or related to a specific area of life, to find useful feelings (themes) to address using Thematic TIR.
- Future Traumatic Incident Reduction:
- A special application of TIR to remove emotional charge and dread from possible future events, whether probable or improbable, that the viewer is concerned about.
- Grounding Techniques:
- Brief objective techniques, so called that they direct a viewer’s attention onto the physical world to help orient him/her to the here and now. Grounding techniques can be used when a TIR or other type of session has to be ended before an optimum end point can be reached, or whenever it is beneficial for a viewer to feel more stabilized and grounded.
- Incident:
- A finite period of time defined by a specific activity or happening.
- Indicators: Observable signs one can use to understand how something is going. In a session, a client becoming distracted or unhappy with the progress of the session would be negative indicators; a client being deeply engaged and interested in the work, and reaching satisfying end point, are examples of positive indicators.
- Institute for Research in Metapsychology (IRM):
- The organization founded in the early 1980s by Frank A, Gerbode, MD, which later became Applied Metapsychology International (AMI).
- Interest:
- Directed attention. Interest can be either other-directed or intentionally self-directed. When, in viewing, the facilitator asks whether the viewer is interested in something, s/he is checking for other-directed interest: a feeling of having one’s attention attracted to something because of a sense of its importance, a felt desire to attend to something.
- Interpreting:
- Finding a meaning, significance, or explanation a certain datum might refer to or imply, thereby arriving at a concept. An interpretation is not a fact for a person until it has been considered and assented to. A facilitator does not make interpretations for the viewer. The viewer makes his/her own interpretations.
- Item:
- A person, subject, feeling, event or topic that is emotionally charged and available or potentially available to be addressed by the viewer; also a word, phrase, or sentence that communicates such a thing.
- Life Planning (as taught in the Schema Workshop):
- A specific, comprehensive method of reviewing a client’s goals and strategies in life and making a plan to reach his/her goals, using consultation mode.
- Metapsychology:
- The study of the nature of a person and of how one relates to one’s mind and environment, including other people.
- Mind:
- The set of experiences that exist for a person but that, under ordinary circumstances, other people cannot be aware of or act upon directly. It is that person’s private world. The mind, however, remains part of a person’s environment, not part of the person. Mental actions, creative or receptive, are not experienced by the person as being mediated through the body.
- Mode:
- Used to refer to either facilitation or consultation.
- Objective techniques:
- Techniques that work by having the viewer direct his/her attention to physical things in the immediate environment. One of the beneficial effects of these techniques is that the viewer sees both his/her mental world and the physical world more clearly.
- Orientation Remedies: Relatively brief objective techniques meant to assist a person to a more comfortable state by directing the viewer’s attention to objects in the environment, without necessarily causing significant change in the person’s condition.
- Person-Centered Context:
- A context in which it is implicitly assumed that “I believe that…” or “I feel that…” is automatically prefixed to each statement made. All statements made in this context are accepted as valid expressions of the speaker’s perception of what is. Their objective truth is irrelevant.
- Person-Centered Viewpoint:
- A pragmatic and experiential approach to the study of persons and the worlds they inhabit. From this viewpoint, we cease talking about some hypothetical world outside of experience and limit ourselves to what each person experiences: his/her own world.
- Primary incident:
- An incident that contains an actual cause of pain or negative emotion, distinguished from an incident where all or the pain or negative emotion comes from reactivation of another, primary incident. An example of a primary incident is a car accident where one was injured oneself. An example of a distressing incident that is not a primary incident is seeing a car accident and feeling the fear, pain, etc., one felt from being involved in an accident triggered by seeing another accident. (See secondary incident.)
- Program:
- A written series of viewing techniques designed to resolve an area of a viewer’s life, for example: The Addictions Program, or a program designed to ease a difficult relationship.
- Purpose of Viewing:
- The purpose of viewing is to relieve emotional charge, find insight, increase awareness, and improvement. The intent is to help the viewer improve his/her environment, including his/her mental environment.
- Reactivate:
- To remind a person, knowingly or unknowingly, of a traumatic incident or sequence. When this occurs, the person re-enacts or re-experiences parts of the traumatic incident or incidents of which s/he is reminded, s/he may act out of them, or experience negative feelings.
- Reactivated:
- Of a traumatic incident or sequence: the state of having been triggered or activated by someone experiencing or seeing something similar to a past traumatic event.
- Reactivated (or current) traumatic incident:
- One of the four types of disturbances that can distract a viewer from being able to address other areas of interest until the disturbance is handled.
- Reactivation:
- An instance of some subject or item being reactivated, (triggered), or the action of something becoming triggered.
- Reactivator:
- Something that reminds a person, knowingly or unknowingly, of a traumatic incident or sequence; a trigger.
- Realization:
- An acquisition of new knowledge by arriving at an understanding of something that had been obscured or confusing before.
- Reduction:
- The partial or complete elimination of emotional charge, by a process of deactivation, where some emotional charge remains on the subject or item being addressed but it is no longer immediately impinging on the client, or by discharging, where all of the existing emotional charge is fully exhausted from the subject or item, leaving nothing to be triggered in the future.
- Remedy:
- A brief technique done to bring a person swiftly to a better condition. Grounding techniques are remedies.
- Retrospective Technique:
- Any technique that moves the viewer’s attention backward in time along lines of similarity; it asks for earlier, similar incidents. Sometimes (e.g., in Thematic TIR), one may follow a specific theme (feeling); at other times (as in Basic TIR), one asks for an earlier incident similar to the particular incident one started with. Because of the structure of sequences of traumatic incidents in the traumatic incident Net, looking for earlier, similar incidents is an especially useful viewing technique. Retrospection is also used in other viewing techniques.
- Rules of Facilitation:
- The specific rules that govern the activity of facilitation, designed to provide a safe space for the viewer (client) to examine his/her mental world. These Rules prohibit the negation or interpretation of a viewer’s (client’s) experience or perception.
- Schema Program/Schema Workshop:
- A Schema Program is a specific, comprehensive method of reviewing goals and strategies in life and making a plan to reach one’s goals. The program may be addressed to a specific area of life, or cover life in general. A Schema Program includes consultation work done in sessions as well as action plans to carry out in life. The Schema workshop is a 2 day training with a prerequisite of the Traumatic Incident Reduction Workshop.
- Secondary incident:
- An incident that is distressing, not because of anything happening in the incident to actually harm the person, but because it is similar enough to an earlier incident containing some sort of actual harm or loss. (See primary incident.)
- Sequence:
- A number of incidents of related or associated traumatic incidents, connected by one or more reactivators (triggers) and having one or more themes (feelings) in common. Incidents later in the sequence contain reactivators of earlier ones.
- Session:
- In the context of Applied Metapsychology, including Traumatic Incident Reduction, a session is a period of time, flexible in length, that is bound by the Rules of Facilitation and structured according to the Communication Exercises and the protocols of the specific techniques employed.
- Session Agenda:
- A written list of the actions the facilitator plans to take in the next viewing session.
- Table of Attitudes:
- A table aligned to the Emotional Scale. It plots out attitudes people express at each emotional level in various categories of human interest and endeavor. The table is available at www.tirbook.com
- Technical Direction (TDing):
- The action of writing individualized case plans for facilitators to use with viewers as well as written directions of how to proceed from one session to the next; also used to mean such a written direction for a session (also called a session agenda).
- Technical Director (TD):
- The person who plans and oversees facilitation and makes sure that facilitators are doing their jobs correctly. S/he makes sure that viewers get help and facilitators get correction promptly if any difficulties arise. “Supervisor” could be used as a synonym here for the action of working with facilitators and overseeing their progress with specific viewers. Technical directors do more detailed case planning than traditional clinical supervisors generally do, however.
- Technique:
- A specific pattern of viewing instructions or questions designed to address a certain type of emotionally charged case material (such as traumatic incidents, upsets, emotional charge on a specific person, etc.) and meant to be continued to an end point. TIR and Unblocking are examples of techniques.
- Theme:
- The common element or feeling that the different traumatic incidents in a sequence all have in common. Themes are unwanted feelings, emotions, sensations, attitudes and pains.
- Traumatic Incident (“trauma” or TI):
- A specific event that someone experienced as painful or deeply upsetting. Working in a person-centered context, something is traumatic if a client says that it is. The facilitator does not judge or evaluate the client’s experience. It is an incident that is wholly or partially repressed and that contains a greater or lesser degree of pain, felt, created, or received, and contains emotional charge.
- Traumatic Incident Network (or “Net”):
- The network composed of all of the person’s traumatic incidents, with their various interconnections in the form of similar content or of having themes (feelings) in common.
- Unblocking:
- A technique in which a number of mental blocks on a certain issue are addressed repetitively until emotional charge has been reduced and awareness increased on that subject.
- Unburdening:
- The process of applying viewing techniques in order to deactivate or discharge case material that was already reactivated. Unburdening is used both in Life Stress Reduction and at the start of sessions during the Ability Enhancement viewing curriculum, if there is something that is already reactivated that needs to be addressed before going on with Ability Enhancement work. (Compare discovery.)
- Unlayering:
- A viewing method that consists of a repetition of a single viewing instruction, or a set of such instructions. Repetition allows a technique which, if done once would have a very superficial effect, to penetrate deeply into the core of the viewer’s difficulties. Many viewing techniques, including Unblocking, employ unlayering.
- Upset:
- One of the four types of disturbances that can distract a viewer from being able to address other areas of interest until the disturbance is handled. (See communion.)
- Upset Handling:
- Specific techniques designed to reduce the distress from upsets, whether current or past.
- Viewer:
- The person in a viewing session whose role is to examine his/her world and arrive at insights concerning it; the client. Viewing is done by the viewer, not by the facilitator. The viewer should not be concerned with the mechanics of the session or the session agenda. S/he should only be concerned with viewing.
- Viewing:
- A systematic, one-on-one method for exploring and reordering one’s own mind. An activity in which a person systematically examines his/her world in such a way as to gain insight and ability by undoing repression.
- Viewing Instruction (or Question):
- A part of a viewing technique consisting of an instruction or question given to a viewer by a facilitator. The facilitator always acknowledges the viewer for answering the question or following the instruction.
- Withheld Communication:
- One of the four types of disturbances that can distract a viewer from being able to address other areas of interest until the disturbance is handled.
- Worry:
- One of the four types of disturbances that can distract a viewer from being able to address other areas of interest until the disturbance is handled.