The critical technique we use in Punk Psychology™, which makes us very special, is charge stripping, by which is meant cleaning away the upset or confusion in later experiences, in order to get at the earlier, darker memories, where the real trouble lies.
Everyone has a know-it-all set of beliefs about why they behave as they do. But if the behavior is negative or inconsistent and yet persists, the person’s belief is WRONG! How can we be so dogmatic? Because we find from the rules of piloting—namely the “miracle rule”—that when the truth is found, the problem, emotion or behavior vanishes. The client is restored to full freedom of thoughts and emotion on that particular topic.
Freud blundered into this axiomatic principle of charge stripping, which he called unburdening: “What left the symptom behind was not always a single experience. On the contrary, the result was usually brought about by the convergence of several traumas, and often by the repetition of a great number of similar ones. Thus it was necessary to reproduce the whole chain of pathogenic memories in chronological order, or rather in reversed order, the latest ones first and the earliest ones last; and it was quite impossible to jump over the later traumas in order to get back more quickly to the first, which was often the most potent one.”