It was originally developed at the University of Hamburg in the Department of Educational Psychology under the leadership of Professor A. Wagner, to reduce the stress of teachers. More than twenty years of research were devoted to it, but at that time the therapeutic possibilities of Introvision were not yet fully recognised. I have now been working with this method for over ten years and have helped many people to free themselves from serious and sometimes persistent problems, both amazingly quickly and permanently. If you are interested, you can get references from many people who have been affected by this method.
Introvision is a method for dissolving obstructive or destructive inner patterns rapidly, even when conventional therapies have failed to bring about any improvement. I will briefly explain here what makes Introvision different from other forms of conversational therapy.
Most therapies ultimately boil down to solving psychological problems through the mind (e.g. cognitive behavioural therapy, but also all other methods based on talking therapies). The belief is that if a client understands what is happening in their psyche, where the problem comes from, what originally triggered it and what patterns contribute to its perpetuation, this would enable the person to free themselves from it. However, this is an approach that at most works well when the problems are relatively easy to solve, so that the conscious mind, which is located in the cerebrum, can intervene in time.
Fears of loss, panic attacks and many stressful problems that affect people for years, but also inner stress, are, however, entirely emotional in their nature. Deep memory patterns have formed in the brain, more precisely in the developmentally old part, the amygdala in the limbic system. These patterns developed as a result of events or situations that were experienced as traumatic, painful, frightening or threatening by the person concerned, often in childhood or adolescence - although this is not necessarily the case, it can also arise in adulthood. They led to the installation of "alarms" that always signal when there is a "danger" that the original situation could repeat itself.
The purpose of any alarm is to evoke an action: The sirens of the police, fire brigade and ambulance are meant to make other road users give way. The alarms in houses and cars are meant to summon the police or other helpers. If no one responds to the alarm, it is useless (which is why almost no one has a car alarm anymore). Alarms, even those triggered in the limbic system, cost energy. Since our brain is an energy-conscious organ, it switches off the alarm when it senses that it is not leading to anything or serving any purpose.
Introvision will render the alarm no longer valid
How does introvision achieve this? Quite simply, by not intervening! Introvision was developed about twenty years ago at the University of Hamburg in order to tackle alarm reactions such as those described above - originally in order to cope with teachers' stress. Not by thinking, not by deciding to stay calm and relaxed, but by the ingenious idea of inwardly putting oneself in the stressful situation and then just observing what happens without wanting to change anything.
Inner arousal, i.e. the state of alarm into which someone can fall, is a stress reaction that has played a vital role in the evolutionary history of mankind. This is where the amygdala comes into play. The amygdala is that part of the limbic system that processes information from the organism and messages from outside and evaluates them, especially fear stimuli. This is because the instantaneous release of stress hormones initiated by the amygdala, even after conditioned fear stimuli, enables people to perform at their best from zero to a hundred in order to flee or fight. Faced with a threat such as that posed by a wild animal, the prehistoric man did not have to think long about what would now be the best strategy to counter this danger: he ran as fast as he could. Once in the safe cave, it took him a while to recover from this adrenaline shock, but he had learned one thing once and for all: as soon as the threatening hissing, roaring or growling is heard - run for it. In other words, in future, even the hint of this sound triggered the inner alarm and thus the release of stress hormones.
Due to its crucial importance for survival, the amygdala is much faster than the cerebrum can ever be, it decides in a fraction of a second whether there is a threat to the person or not and alerts other areas of the brain as a result. Since this is the case, the alarm with all its effects and side effects goes off much faster than the cerebrum can bring its "reasonable, factual" counterarguments into play, no matter how justified they may be. The cerebrum, in which our ratio is located, is always lagging behind.
The fact that our cerebrum, with all its knowledge, considerations, and arguments, can no longer do much because the amygdala reacts more quickly, also explains why a purely cognitive processing of difficult, stressful experiences usually does not produce lasting results. Understanding alone rarely helps - this frustrating experience has already been made by many people who are repeatedly annoyed with themselves because they have reacted "so irrationally once again", although they "knew better" long ago. If the external stimulus is only big enough, the inner alarm goes off again, and then it is mainly the amygdala that acts and it doesn't care what the "rational mind" would do differently.
Nothing against rational comprehension: It is often a considerable relief when someone realizes how their own reactions are connected to their life story. And this understanding often helps to get out of the state of alarm more quickly. But if there is a corresponding trigger, the alarm goes off at first, with all the associated symptoms. This inner state of stress forces the person to behave in a very specific way, even if this makes no sense at all, not even in his own opinion.
That this is so has to do with the nature of the alarm: The purpose of any alarm is to make people act quickly and decisively!
Seligman had looked at conditioned fear in animals and found that avoidance conditioning, we would now call it alarm, quickly extinguishes when animals are not given the opportunity to perform their avoidance behaviour and they also do not have the opportunity to escape. In short, the scenario was this: Rats learned in the experiment that they could avoid an electric shock, which occurred together with a buzzer sound, if they immediately jumped over a hurdle in their cage when the buzzer sounded. Later, they continued to jump over the hurdle even when the electric shock was switched off. "Now, however, Seligman shows that if the hurdle is replaced by a wall, thus preventing the avoidance response, the rat quickly learns that the buzzer is no longer followed by a shock and begins to ignore the buzzer. If the wall is then replaced by the hurdle again, the rat no longer jumps (emphasis mine) in response to the buzzer. If the rat is persuaded to realize that the buzzer does not result in danger, the fear dissipates, and this leads to the extinction of the neurotic avoidance response." (Quote Joseph Ledoux "Im Netz der Gefühle", dtv)
At that time, the right conclusions were not drawn from these experiments because it was convinced that every human conditioned fear had to be dealt with through cognitive understanding, which, except perhaps in very mild cases, does not work. The brute force method of deconditioning a) cannot be used everywhere and b) leaves too many possibilities open for the person concerned to start an inner flight reaction. If an alarm is there to activate an action, as we said above, the original idea of simply letting this alarm run empty, as developed at the University of Hamburg, was simply ingenious. To investigate "What actually happens when we trigger people's alarms but at the same time make them just observe it, not act, not intervene" was groundbreaking. Because, as has been shown, it is precisely this procedure that extinguishes the alarm in the amygdala. When one reacts to an alarm, one confirms repeatedly that it is needed. If, on the other hand, the client is guided to observe his alarm in a nonjudgmental way, with all the negative physical, emotional, and mental effects it triggers inside, then this will result in it dissolving.
The original experimental set-up was to watch video recordings with affected teachers and ask them to say out loud what was going through their minds when they looked at stressful situations. In analyzing countless of these out loud thoughts, it was eventually discovered that something called an "imperative" always played a role. An imperative is an inner voice that demands that something must not happen at all or that something must happen at all costs so that something like the stressful event shall never happen again. The " compulsory" beliefs that arise in this process have therefore been called "imperatives". Imperatives can be, for example, "I must not fail under any circumstances" / "I must not push myself to the fore" / "I must ensure that there is harmony" / "I must not do this or that under any circumstances". Imperatives can be very diverse and sometimes the people affected are not aware of them at all. The real stress starts when a second voice comes in, warning that exactly what you are afraid of, may happen now. At the University of Hamburg, a very complicated explanatory model has been developed for this and a lengthy procedure to enable those concerned to get their imperatives out of their system.
I (Ulrich Dehner) have turned it into a method that enables quick success because clients can quickly understand the model of the alarm. However, the original idea at the University of Hamburg was groundbreaking.
If you are interested, which I would be very pleased about, I would be very happy to share more about the work with Introvision and the theoretical background.
Ulrich Dehner.