“Humor? It is an inner journey, which, like real travel, helps us to become aware of our limits, to face the adversities of existence”: to affirm it is Antonio Scarincipsychotherapist and author together with three colleagues – Giovanni Maria Ruggiero, Valentina Carloni, and Lorenzo Recanatini – from Humorous self-therapy procedures and tools, just published by Franco Angeli. An essay that takes stock of the use of humor in therapy, but also provides ideas for taking advantage of humor, starting from the cartoons contained in the volume, to feel better about oneself.
“The mechanism of humor is based precisely on the development of an incongruous situation with respect to the expectations created by a stimulus – remembers Scarinci -. Therefore it promotes divergent thinking, helping us to play down situations and regulate our emotional states”.
Freud
Freud also dedicated an essay to the wit, which the father of psychoanalysis saw as a mechanism for reducing tensions. But it is in the context of cognitive behavioral psychotherapy – especially in the form of Rational Emotional Behavioral Therapy (REBT) – that the therapeutic use of humor has developed.
Taking into account that with this term we can define different attitudes, not always positive, “such as aggressive humor, which does not take into account the sensitivity of others, or the self-deprecating one that we sometimes implement with the idea of making ourselves welcome, but without obtaining the desired effect “, recalls the psychotherapist,” The benefits come instead from the affiliative humor, laughing together at something that calms tensions creating cohesion, and from the self-enhancing humor that helps to face the difficulties of life “.
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Severe patients
To confirm this there are various studies, some carried out by Scarinci himself, which show how humor can be used, even in serious patients, to regulate their emotional states and metacognition, that is the ability to reflect on their own cognitive processes. Even if it is not easy to scientifically analyze a communication modality such as humor, linked to many variables: “You have to take into account the interlocutor and evaluate the moment in which a joke is appropriate: this is why making people laugh is so difficult – explains Scarinci who has deepened the theme in a previous essay (Per Alpes editions 2018). – Humor in psychotherapy is not always good for everyone. A paranoid, for example, would risk misunderstanding, while in cases of depression a lot depends on the phase in which the patient is and on the therapeutic path: it can work if the relationship with the therapist is already consolidated “.
Our stories
Our personal history also makes a difference: “Knowing which jokes make us laugh and which ones don’t tell us a lot about ourselves, and it can be a way to identify our weaknesses that it would be useful to work on” observes the psychotherapist. And today we know that understanding a joke is different from appreciating it, precisely from a neurological point of view: “The brain areas involved are different,” Scarinci recalls.
Train humor
But humor can be trained, and we can also try to exploit its benefits by ourselves: The manual offers a series of exercises to learn for yourself to analyze your thoughts in a humorous way and to use your imagination to deal with problematic situations. Some inspired by tools already tested in psychotherapy, such as the humorous diary, which consists of telling oneself by highlighting the funny aspects, or the humorous version of the genogram, a sort of family tree in which they draw themselves – in this case, joking about it – their family relationships.
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“The idea is to ‘decatastrophize’ the negative aspects of what happens to us: joking about it does not make the problems vanish, but helps to put them in a different, more functional perspective, and not to forget the positive aspects”, remembers Scarinci. An evening in solitude, says one of the examples proposed by the book, can sadden us but also offer us the opportunity to quietly enjoy a good film. And at the end of the volume, the authors offer an exercise to be done in a group, a kind of party game – there are also suggestions of films to watch and psychological tests available online, such as the Humor Styles Questionnaire – to see if to smile about how much happens it helps us to see life a little more pink.
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