About OLI method
What is O.L.I. integrative psychodynamic psychotherapy
O.L.I. is the abbreviation of Obtaining Legitimate Identity by Overcoming Latent Illusions
The O.L.I. method is not eclectic, but integrative. The basis for the integration of different theoretical frameworks, methods and techniques, is provided by the model of basic emotional competences . Basic beliefe of O.L.I. method is that “there are no tools without the craft”, that a person cannot change if they do not develop or unblock their basic “tools for life” – basic abilities to process emotions, software which our psyche uses to processes emotional information (emotions are product of processing information).
“Bugs” or “viruses” in those executive programs lead to dysfunctional emotions, wrong perceptions and interpretations of relationships with oneself, others and the world. The O.L.I. psychotherapist works on two levels: level of content and level of process. By listening to the content that the client presents, talking to them about life events, relations, love and work, O.L.I. therapist pays special attention to the patterns that the client unconsciously applies, to the typical ways in which they process their own experiences and the emotions that those experiences cause.
Techniques of different approaches are included in the work with the client, if they can contribute to development of a certain basic emotional abilities. It is the basis for the integration of techniques from different schools, whether they originate from psychodynamic, behavioral or some others orientation.
O.L.I. method focuses on two key, complex abilities: the ability to love and the ability to work. These two complex human abilities are, like “Lego”, composed of certain number of smaller, simpler pieces – basic emotional competences:
1. Abilitiy for neutralization and mentalization (psyche regulator and articulator)
2. Object wholeness (glue of the psyche)
3. Object constancy (psyche stabilizer)
4. Ambivalence tolerance (orientation of the psyche)
5. Frustration tolerance (immunity of the psyche)
6. The will (engine of the psyche)
7. Initiative (starter of the psyche)
Without any of these “pieces”, the psyche is defective. A person’s ability to love and work is impaired. Without developed neutralization, a person is controlled by the power of their instincts (“as if without a head”), impulsive, irrational and inarticulate. Without “glue of the psyche”, the ability to fully experience another person (“object”), the person’s experiences are split into a black and white world of good and evil (others will say that they are “delusional”, that they see everything either pink or black, idealize or hate…). Without the object constancy, the stabilizer of the psyche, the person is “unstable”, dependent on others. Without frustration tolerance, a person has no immunity to frustrations brought by life, love and work, “cracks under the pressure”. Without ambivalence tolerance, a person is indecisive, incapable of facing opposite emotions towards someone or something (or to oneself), incapable of making a decision. Without the will, a person is of “short breath”, without energy to support the continuity towards the achieving of own wishes and goals. Without initiative, a person is reactive, does not have the “key” for their own “engine”, they need to be inspired or motivated by someone else.
It is difficult to live, love and work without developing any of the abilities listed above. The key to change in therapy is to help the client to develop or unblock those abilities. Psychotherapy techniques are “sorted” by which ability in which stage of development can they ublock or develop. The O.L.I. method also provides a taxonomy of psychotherapy goals, indicating what types of learning are taking place in psychotherapy process and what abilities are activated through the certain type of learning.
Why is the orientation on the emotional processing crutial for O.L.I. method? To make thing simpler, we will compare the functioning of a humans with the functioning of a computers (humans are, of course, an incomparably more complex systems than a computers). When something is wrong with the computer, the user sees it on the screen. Some hooks, ticks, squares appear… The text or a picture are distorted… A user, who is at all familiar with the way the computer works, will not think that the monitor is broken, but the software that processes the data and creates what is see on the screen, or maybe a hardware, some mechanical part of the computer. When a person has a “broken hardware”, they go to a doctor, neurologist, surgeon or some other specialist for a certain human hardware, or organ. When it is a human “software” that malfunctions (our program for processing data), we go to the experts for the psyche.
The condition, for which the person is coming to a therapist, is in fact the screen, or “clinical picture”, as it is usually called. The “picture” cannot be repaired, only malfunctions in the hardware or software that create it. Psychotherapists do not deal with organs (hardware), but with abilities and skills that the client does not have enough developed. So, we can not fix someone’s self-respect, or depression, or impatience or any other undesirable condition, nor can we create any desirable one, if we first do not “fix” the basic abilities for processing emotional-cognitive data, which will lead to a change of condition. Person creates their own conditions by the way they process what happens to them. The psychotherapist’s job is to help the client to develop or release from the “virus” that basic, executive software for processing emotions, because their improper functioning creates those visible problems and disorders, that we call “clinical picture”.
If we define the O.L.I. method as a psychotherapy procedure aimed at elimination of false information (“latent ilussions”), we can rightly be asked the question: “Do you think you know what are all the correct information, to replace the false ones with them?”. If we answered “Yes, we know”, it would be a very overbearing and arrogant answer. We would say that we know what life is, that we have discovered all its mysteries, meanings, rules of functioning… That we know what people should be in order to be healthy… We would take an omniscient attitude and offer some new religion. No, we don’t know that. Next to “overcoming latent ilussions”, abbreviation O.L.I. also means: “obtaining legitimate identity” (our personal truth). We emphasise that the procedure is directed to the discovery of a personal truth. Certainly, we can be asked again: “If you don’t have some universal truths to replace false information/ilussions, how do you know these personal truths are actually true? How do you know that they are not only new illusions, to which you refer your clients, inserting into them, in a twisted way, your own illusions, life philosophies, theoretical concepts…, while pretending you are not doing it, under the banner of leading the client towards revealing some personal truths?”. Clients are also often afraid that psychotherapists will to try to “reshape” them to some extent, as their parents tried to do, or their teachers, or partners… The answer to this question is not simple. We could say that as many as the people, as many the personal truths. But then again, are there any universal truths, something called “human nature”, something in which people’s personal truths intersect? Can people, provide they do not distort reality (or if they do not do so to a greater extent), arrive at some general, common truths about themselves, human nature, life…, which can help them be better people, more capable of living according to their full capacities, to love and work? Our the answer is: “Yes”.
The deeper people explore their personal truths, the more they come to the universal truths, the regularities woven into human nature, at the roots of life. Do we know anything about these universal truths? We do. Through decades of psychotherapy work with people discovering personal truths, numerous psychotherapists across the globe gradually dicovered some “intersection points” of the truths of their clients, some rules of human development, growth and potential fulfillment, as well as the mechanisms, that can distort or stop that development. Creating the O.L.I. method, we attempted to make an integration of those general principles of development, which are points of intersection of various psychotherapy methods and offer an effective method to encourage change in people – change in direction more truthful experience of self, other people and reality. These changes would allow for more complete development of the persons capacity to love and work, for ther inclusion in life, as well as for them to live their life as a good person.
Value orientation in O.L.I. method
In both psychology and psychotherapy, “good” and “evil” are almost never mentioned. These are terms of religion. Psychoanalysts were the first to declare the rule that the psychotherapist is value-neutral. Therapist does not impose their values to the client and that makes sense. If you were to judge someone, criticize them, moralize…, or in a much more subtle way made it known that you do not accept some of their values, thoughts or feelings – therefore, if you were to value, it would be difficult for them to discover the truth about themself, which they hide even from themself. They would probably try to satisfy you (or even oppose you), but the road to the truth would be blocked. Psychoanalysts even go to a personal, didactic analysis, in order to prevent their unconscious interference and client evaluation. Of course, psychoanalysis also has its own values, which are hidden, invisible, built into the very approach to a person. Unspoken values, so to speak. The value behind the psychoanalytic method is: Truth is valuable. It’s good to know the truth. “Your faith will (in truth) save you”. Psychoanalysis is ” truth treatment”. A value system, in which values are reached without evaluation of the one who travels towards the truth. They are respected by not being criticized for doing something wrong, but rather are allowed to seek their own way. The values built into the psychoanalytic approach are, therefore, truthfulness and respect for a person’s autonomy. Which is good.
However, value neutrality, in our view, does not mean that we do not disclose to the client which values are basis of mental health. We do not judge client, but, on the other hand, we clearly indicate what we consider the foundations of the mental health and what is the connection of good feelings, fulfillment and quality of life with certain values. We are not value-neutral in that sense. Therefore, O.L.I. method is not value-neutral . It carries a clear value orientation. We consider certain values true information and we clearly tell the person we work with what those values are and why we consider them to be key information about how the world works, as well as human beings in it.
The basic process in the O.L.I. method is aimed precisely at the development of self-love, and therefore love towards another person. The goal of the method is for the client to become a good person. We believe that people’s psychological problems arise precisely because they are moving away from their natural potential to be good people. What we call psychotherapy is nothing more than educating a person to develop that natural potential. When those potentials are not fulfilled, arise what we call psychological problems or disorders. Human being is not a relative concept . We already have all the necessary “equipment” to be good people, and thus fulfilled, satisfied human beings who love themselves and others, it’s already been given to us in our genes. We already have everything and now we just need to realize it. Failure to realize those innate potentials has its price – low self-esteem, lack love towards oneself, disorders in relations with others and with life.
Why O.L.I. method when there are already so many psychotherapy schools?
I have been working as a psychotherapist for more than forty years. I started with psychoanalysis (which I also first attended as “patient”, “analyst” on the didactic analysis) and I use the psychoanalytic method even today. In addition to psychoanalysis, I used methods from other psychotherapy schools: bioenergetic psychotherapy, Transactional analysis, gestalt, Neurolinguistic programming, biofeedback and neurofeedback method, REBT… I became eclectic – a practitioner who uses everything in his practice, when he feels that it will be effective, regardless from which school it’s coming from and what theoretical framework it derives from.
In working with people, especially in this last decade, I felt that I needed something more, something that the methods I was using didn’t offer. One of the reasons was that I was being approached by more and more people who were able to come to psychotherapy less frequent than it is necessary to apply a psychodynamic approach or any of the mentioned approaches. Then it occurred to me to make certain protocols, questions which would systematically lead clients through the process self-exploration between sessions. I have noticed that, in almost every psychotherapy I have done, certain questions always arise. So why wouldn’t I ask clients those questions in some structured form of self-talk questionnaire? Such things already existed in numerous so-called “self-help” methods and in methods of psychology of success. I reviewed numerous such self-help questionnaires and concluded that they lack depth, especially the so-called “inconvenient questions”, questions related to a certain benefit that clients have from their own “negative” behaviors (the so-called “secondary gain”).
To help my clients recognize these inner formulas that determine their emotional life and behavior, I created the protocols of “psychological mathematics” and “emotional accounting”, whose purpose is precisely to bring those unconscious patterns to the “light of the day”, their clear formulation, verbalization, “on paper”, re-evaluation of those formulas and redefinition of what is not productive or functional.
People don’t change just through psychotherapy, however. I have often witnessed significant positive changes in some people that were not the result of certain great and deep psychological insights. That always bugged me. What is happening that causes such “spontaneous” changes in some people’s personalities. If I “cracked” what is the source of such changes, I could, perhaps, incorporate it into the psychotherapy work. The conclusion which I came to, and which could be applied to psychotherapy, is that the change can sometimes be encouraged by exercising certain abilities, even when if we do not dive deeply into the reasons why the person did not develop those abilities. When the ability develops and when it starts to be applied in life, the reasons why the person blocked its development in the past begin to fade (a new, strong positive experience removed the barrier and the old, negative one loses its intensity). If such changes can happen spontaneously in life, can we encourage them through the process of psychotherapy, by determining which basic ability has not been developed and offer the client specific methods for developing that ability?
In numerous psychotherapy methods, there are certain “techniques” which are used in that manner. The “arsenal” of psychotherapy techniques for the development of abilities is quite extensive, but they are “scattered” across various psychotherapy schools and there is no list with instructions how and when to use them – which technique is used for what and when it should and can be applied. In the framework of the O.L.I. method, we have created such list of techniques from various psychotherapy methods (along with the techniques that we ourselves developed), as well as a list of basic human abilities, with age-related tasks, with the aim of linking the two lists by suggestions which techniques can be used for development of certain abilities.
However, for those techniques to really help a client develop skills for processing emotions, it is necessary that they are applied through a good, deep emotional contact with the therapist. The O.L.I. method is not a technology for changing people, in which the contact is a secondary factor. The O.L.I. method is a “full contact” approach. Abilities are acquired through the identification of the client with the abilities of the psychotherapist, through the transfer of functions and so called “procedural learning” (direct “acquiring” of functions for emotion processing). How will the client acquire our functions for processing emotions, if our emotions are unknown to him, as well as the ways we are dealing with them, our feelings and thoughts while working with him…? The therapist cannot be a “blank canvas”, onto which clients project their own unconscious fantasies, nor a technician who only teaches the client some procedures and techniques. A therapist personality must be exposed, but in that way and in those aspects that encourage the client’s development of abilities. That’s not easy at all. Easier is to hide behind the role of a psychotherapist. However, my experience in working with clients has shown me that these “meeting moments” between the client and the therapist are key sources of change. People are changed by the people they are in a close relationship with, not by psychotherapy techniques . The basis of the training of O.L.I. psychotherapists is the development of their ability for contact, through building their basic abilities for processing emotions, for love and work.
My psychotherapy experience has led me to the conclusion that the psychotherapy process progresses fastest and leads to the most stable changes if we focus on the client’s basic abilities for processing emotions and their development. This does not mean that we neglect other aspects of psychotherapy process (analysis of relationships, unconscious contents, client’s history, childhood…). However, all aspects are interwoven with the client’s basic abilities (or their deficiencies) and can be seen as a reflection, a manifestation of those abilities or their deficiency. We see emotions as a primary form of thought. They are our basic judgments about reality. We can like or dislike something that happens to us (that range is a continuum), it can feel good or not…, and so we use our emotions to evaluate it as good or bad, beautiful or ugly, on a most basic level. Then, our cognition follows, and we form an opinion. Emotions are, therefore, primary form of cognition, emotional “opinion”, which is a base for forming we call opinion, or thinking. (Stein, R. 1998). U psychotherapy start from the surface – from the “secondary opinions”, but in “forests” of thoughts, we are looking for problems in the “sours”, in the base of opinions, i.e. in inadequate functioning of our software for emotion processing.
The key difference between O.L.I. psychotherapy approach and the approaches of other psychotherapy schools (in our view) is in that emphasis on working with the basics abilities – “software” for processing emotions, through full contact with the psychotherapist.