Abstract
An interview-style study was conducted to 12 neurosis patients who had received diary guidance, and to the 8 guides who had provided the tutorials at Seikatsu-no-hakken-kai (Therapeutic group learning of Morita theory), a self-help group of neurosis patients. The study revealed that those who wrote the diary experienced building deep interpersonal relationships, being accepted by others, receiving fellow empathy, accepting and affirming themselves. Moreover, for the guides, the tutorial itself has become a self-healing process, and it functioned as an act of handing their wisdoms on to their juniors in their daily life, which follows part of the Morita Theory Methods. Secondly, as the result of analyzing the three cases of actual diary contents, all of the three cases were found to have stepped from the “empathy stage” to the “actively accepting everything stage”. I analyzed the actual content of the feedbacks from the guides in three different cases, and I categorized the guide's feedbacks into the following 9 functions: “Support” “Positive feedback” “Empathy” “Clarification” “Change in cognition” “Morita Theory” “Advice from own experiences” “Self-disclosure” and “Fellow feeling.” Especially, comments which are “Advice from own experiences” to the person who has the same trouble and showing “Fellow feeling” by “Self-disclosure” served a function peculiar to the diary guidance by themselves. Characteristically, almost same propotion of the comments in each of all the three cases were categorized as “Positive feedback,” as the guides were careful not to hurt the low self-esteem of those who wrote the diaries. Especially in the “Passivity accepting everything stage” which is a convalescent stage of the Morita Theory, it plays a role in the improvement of the self-focus process such as supporting the subjects who are struggling with diseases and depressed, and preventing them from giving up the mental dialogue. To feed back the positive assessment enables them to actually face themselves and encourages the process of deepening and developing their self-contemplation. Additionally, all of the three cases had more than 10% comments about “Change in cognition” which breaks the vicious circle and around 10% of comments about the “Morita Theory” based on daily lives, and the diary guide functioned as the escort runner who modifies the cognition distorted in the process of infiltrating the Morita Theory into the lives and indicates the specific lifestyle from the standpoint of the person concerned to support them.
