I agree with you that the emotions play a critical role, and that it takes courage on everyone’s part to face them. But I don’t agree with you that this means talk is useless: instead I think it’s usually a particular sort of talk, that accepts the emotions without getting swept away by them, that tends to help resolve things. Methods like Open Dialogue are all about talk, yet also all about emotions.

And yet even when you have therapists , very few of them have the courage to be emotional and help facilitate emotional functioning such as anger.

They just want to talk-talk cerebrally as if they and everyone else were Dr. Spock.
This is a cultural syndrome of ours which is counter-productive to emotional growth.

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It’s the emotions! DUH!
SZ do have emotional flattening not because they have no emotions but because basic strong negative emotions have failed to transform into other emotions.
Talk- talk cannot cure this – only emotional transformation can. and there are specific therapeutic exercises that can facilitate emotional expression and help transform emotions.

And thus it must be understood that our culture would be better off to embrace and love our inner selves including our inner negative emotions and learn to love our suffering including our anger fear and unhappiness. The more we learn to love and accept love our negative emotions the more they will work for us instead of against us.

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Sure it’s no point stopping symptoms – if you have a cold , and stifle your sneezing still have a cold!
One very specific thing that can be done with voices is to help change the negative dialogue, The negative dialogues are negative abuse dialogues learned from parents society etc, – it is very easy to teach a person to change that – you just use the same techniques you use for any patient whether SZ or simply neurotic.

I think we can get to a point where there is “nothing wasted” in our mind – that is, I believe everything we experience has some kind of positive value, if only we can find it! Sometimes the positive value of something is the opposite of what we might see if we took it at face value…..like in the film “The Doctor who hears voices” one positive value of the voice was that it pushed the concious part of the voice hearer to become stronger, to learn to stand up to it.

I think, this makes perfectly sense. “What you fight you strengthen,” or “What you resist persists,” as eastern philosophy has it. Always has me recall this Calvin and Hobbs-cartoon where Calvin sits in his bed, asking: “Any monsters down there?” “Nope. No. None at all!” it sounds from underneath the bed…

My own experience is that listening to the “symptoms” instead of fighting them was the key to figuring out what originally had caused them. Of course, what had caused them was a thing of the past, and they aren’t “reasonable”, wise reactions anymore in the present moment. But it’s difficult to let go of something if you don’t know what exactly it is you’d have to let go of.

Also, they still are an unfailing bs-meter I value very much. I recently had an argument with someone in another blog’s comment field, about in how far people who self-harm, hear voices (“evil voices”, “the inner enemy”, were the terms my adversary used), etc. ought to be locked up, and forcibly prevented from harming themselves. Make that restraints and seclusion and stuff. Not maybe just holding on to someone in an acutely dangerous situation, as it was done at Soteria. The thing is, this person’s discourse otherwise is characterized by a remarkable amount of pathos. A real “helper”, if you know what I mean. So, although I’d smelled a rat for some time, I’d not been able to put a finger on anything she’d said. Well, what happened during this argument was that, to my great surprise, and initially also horror, I felt an increasing urge to self-harm. So, I took a closer look at this urge, and also at what exactly I was supposed to write in red letters, and how it fit in with the argument, and voilà, gotcha! While the urge to self-harm vaporized instantly.

You might say, the “symptoms” in a way see to that I’m not fooled that easily. it’s certainly not always a pleasant experience. But I so prefer it to being fooled.