WCP Self-Help 3 — Start Therapy

Thinking Heals Thinking

Written Cognitive Psychotherapy (WCP) as the Intelligent Alternative to Conversation

Psychotherapy is not a casual chat for mere emotional relief. True psychotherapy is work: the work of change on one's own self, on the conscious and unconscious errors in your thinking that cause your suffering. For it is not the events in your life that torment you, but the manner in which you interpret these events. Your consciousness, your inner monologues, and your deeply rooted convictions govern your feelings and your behavior. Whoever thinks incorrectly, feels incorrectly — and suffers. Written Cognitive Psychotherapy maximizes the efficiency of cognitive therapy because it functions without appointments and office visits, utilizing personal responsibility and engagement instead. It analyzes the errors in the system of your thinking and empowers you to correct them. Directly, logically, and without unnecessary detours. Alternatively, Video-Supported Cognitive Psychotherapy (VCP) or a Day-Block of Cognitive Psychotherapy (DCP) is available.

If You Enjoy Thinking, Reading, and Writing, This Psychotherapy Is Perfect for You

Written Cognitive Psychotherapy is not the rapid exchange of short messages, as modern apps suggest. In the psychotherapy by Dr. Dietmar Luchmann, LLC, there are no chatbots or SMS staccatos. Communication with the psychotherapist follows the tradition of classical correspondence: asynchronous, deliberate, and profound.

Developed by Swiss psychotherapist Dietmar Luchmann, Written Cognitive Psychotherapy is available exclusively on this site once you have completed your complimentary initial assessment as part of the psychodiagnostic process. However, before you decide on this path, you should understand what this form of therapy demands of you and why it is the sharpest tool of change for your thinking.

Why Write Instead of Speak?

The spoken word is fleeting. In conversation, people tend to react emotionally, digress, or hide behind clichés. The written word, however, demands precision. Written Cognitive Psychotherapy utilizes three efficiency-enhancing mechanisms of writing:

  1. Deceleration of Thinking: When you write, you are forced to pour your diffuse feelings into concrete sentences. This process alone is already therapeutic. You must pause, reflect, and formulate. You step out of immediate experience and become an observer of yourself.
  2. Objectification: A thought that merely circles in your head is a phantom. A thought written down before you on the screen is an object. You can examine it together with your psychotherapist. Your psychotherapist can point out specific formulations, check their logic, and guide you to discard or reconstruct them if necessary.
  3. Sustainability: The answers and analyses of your psychotherapist are permanently available to you. You can - and should - read, think through, and internalize them multiple times. Nothing is lost in the "noise" of a session. Your psychotherapist expects you to work with his texts, study them, and use them as the basis for your next response.

For Whom Is This Form of Psychotherapy Suitable?

Written Cognitive Psychotherapy is highly efficient, but it is demanding regarding your abilities. It presupposes competencies that are becoming rarer in our accelerated world. Therefore, examine honestly whether you recognize yourself in the following points, for without these foundations, psychotherapists cannot help you in this way:

  1. The Capacity for Introspection: Are you willing and able to look inside yourself under psychotherapeutic guidance? Your psychotherapist will not only talk to you about symptoms but analytically dissect the underlying motives and cognitive errors (such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, or emotional reasoning).
  2. The Ability to Read and Write: This sounds banal, but it is not. You must be able to grasp complex contexts textually and articulate your own inner world comprehensively. It is not about literary beauty, but about cognitive clarity. Whoever dislikes reading or finds writing difficult will fail at written psychotherapy.
  3. The Discipline for Self-Reflection: Since communication does not happen simultaneously, the responsibility for the psychotherapeutic process between messages lies with you. You receive analyses and cognitive tasks from your psychotherapist. The actual work takes place when you read his words, think about them, and formulate your answer. You need the patience to let an answer mature instead of reacting impulsively.

What to Expect — And What Not

Do not expect a digital shoulder to cry on that merely confirms to you how unjust the world is. That would not be psychotherapy, but aiding and abetting the chronification of your problems.

Expect instead an intellectual and emotional challenge. Your psychotherapist will read your texts precisely. He will point out contradictions. He will question your logic where it causes you pain. He will professionally guide you in the process of self-knowledge through writing.

If you are ready not only to talk about change but to execute it through the sharp tool of your own intellect and under psychotherapeutic leadership, then this is the most efficient path for you.

Three Paths for Cognitive Psychotherapy

Cognitive psychotherapy rests on a liberating insight: mental disorders arise from cognitive errors learned early in life or later, from self-damaging thought patterns, blind spots of emotional injuries, distortions of reality. Whoever recognizes and corrects these cognitive errors can heal his mental illnesses. We offer this highly efficient method along three paths. The goal is always the same; only the path toward it is determined by your needs.

  • Written Cognitive Psychotherapy (WCP) — independent of location and available at any time: patient and psychotherapist think together in writing, permanently re-readable, from anywhere in the world. Psychotherapie.com explains in detail the concept and the advantages that Written Cognitive Psychotherapy makes possible.
  • Video-Supported Cognitive Psychotherapy (VCP) — face to face, entirely without travel: the personal conversation via a secure video connection, comfortably from your home.
  • Day-Block of Cognitive Psychotherapy (DCP) — a single day at a suitable location: the compact encounter of psychotherapist and patient in direct conversation — just as described in the report of a physician who lost his anxiety of ten years in a single day. How agoraphobia can be dissolved cognitively in a day block is shown in the article on Agoraphobia in Zurich.

Which path is best in the individual case is shown by the psychodiagnostics — and it can still be changed later on. Our overview describes in detail the three paths for cognitive psychotherapy. There, the costs of all three psychotherapeutic paths are also transparently disclosed.

Complimentary Initial Assessment Before Psychotherapy

With this complimentary second step of the psychological assessment, you will receive an email from Dr. Dietmar Luchmann, LLC, within 24 hours of submitting your correctly completed application for Written Cognitive Psychotherapy (WCP). If your initial assessment indicates that you can be successfully guided toward your therapeutic goal, you will be invited to begin psychotherapy.

Registration — Start Your Psychotherapy Here:

Your data is transmitted encrypted directly to the psychotherapist.

The Psychotherapy Suitability Assessment measured in the first step of psychodiagnostics how well Written Cognitive Psychotherapy is suitable for you. Please state your test result.

For therapeutic success, psychotherapy requires a common linguistic and cultural foundation. Written Cognitive Psychotherapy is conducted natively in English and German. This is the English-language page.

As a self-payer, you decide how you wish to be professionally accompanied by your psychotherapist and how much time and money you invest in achieving your goal by choosing your individual therapy concept.

And now the most important part:

Please Describe Your Problem in Detail

Describe in detail what problems you have, how these problems arose in your opinion, and where you yourself (or third parties) see the origins in your life history. Explain your problems in detail. If you have already had experience with psychotherapy, please list all diagnosis(es), all therapy(ies), and write why you did not have success. Please do not conceal unsuccessful attempts at solutions and therapies. You need not be ashamed of psychotherapeutic errors. If your problems have developed over a longer period, please describe this very concretely and comprehensibly. In doing so, differentiate, as far as possible for you, between your thoughts, feelings, bodily reactions, and your behavior. Observe yourself and take time for this. Also remember those events that may be forgotten or repressed today, but which impressed, frightened, and shaped you in the past. In this remembering and writing, it helps to view the problems as the result of a misguided learning history that we can uncover and that you can correct with our help. Therefore, share everything with us that you feel is important so that we can understand your situation and help you efficiently in the best way.

Note 1:  Take the detailed problem description seriously. The description of the problem is the indispensable prerequisite for assessing whether the written therapy format is suitable for you. Write around 10,000 characters, which corresponds to two printed pages in A4 format (text minimum). Please treat the English language with respect.

Note 2:  Compose this problem description first with your familiar word processing program and save your text so that it is not lost. Only when you have remembered and described everything essential, copy your text into this data field. To do this, first save your text to the clipboard, then position your cursor in this field and insert your text via the navigation bar with "Edit + Paste" or with the keyboard shortcut "Ctrl + V". Only then fill out the form completely and send it. If you need more space, enlarge this field by dragging it outward with the cursor at the bottom right.

0 / 10,000 characters reached (Text length: 0%)

Please explain your goals that you wish to achieve through Written Cognitive Psychotherapy.

Explain here in at least three or preferably more sentences why you are convinced that you can successfully solve your problem(s) specifically through Written Cognitive Psychotherapy.

Personal Data and Residence

Education, Professions, and Activities

For our decision-making, it is helpful to know the concrete educational background and areas of actual life experience, from student to academic, from craftsman to corporate executive.

Telephone

Please repeat your phone number to exclude typing errors.

Communication Data and Encryption

Your email address and your self-chosen password are the foundation for our genuine end-to-end encrypted online communication and the protection of your psychotherapy data. The encryption of our email communication follows the highest security standards. Consider that the protection of your data begins with the choice of your email provider and the name in your email address.

Choose a secure password consisting of at least 20 characters (!) with letters, numbers, and special characters from the sets (a-z) + (A-Z) + (0-9) + (!-§_$.#), and do not forget to note down your password.

Please repeat your email address to exclude typing errors.

At least 20 characters and symbols from each of (a-z) + (A-Z) + (0-9) + (!-§_$.#).

Please repeat your password to exclude typing errors.

Data Storage and Data Usage

Registrations for Written Cognitive Psychotherapy are accepted exclusively via the encrypted form on this page. By sending this form via the encrypted connection with your web browser, you permit Psychotherapist Dietmar Luchmann to store and use your data to contact you for psychotherapy. Your data will not be passed on to third parties.

This online form can only be sent if all mandatory data fields are filled out. To ensure that your information has reached us, you will receive a confirmation of receipt on this page immediately after submitting this form.

Data Privacy and Encryption of Psychotherapy by the Psychotherapists

Dr. Dietmar Luchmann, LLC, maximizes data privacy for Written Cognitive Psychotherapy through maximum avoidance of data traces. Therefore, no external communication platforms are used whose encryption the psychotherapists cannot control. The Advanced Encryption Standard with a key length of 256 bits (AES-256) is used for communication. This AES-256 encryption of the highest security level works with Linux, Windows, and macOS. Data encrypted with AES-256 is so secure that AES-256 is used in the USA for the confidentiality of government files.

Threats to your data privacy from the electronic patient record (ePA) in Germany, the electronic patient dossier (EPD) in Switzerland, and the electronic health record (ELGA) in Austria, as well as data sharing with health insurance companies or third parties, are excluded in Written Cognitive Psychotherapy. These risks within the healthcare system are irrelevant here, because through psychotherapy outside the system and the highly secure end-to-end encryption of online communication by Dr. Dietmar Luchmann, LLC, all data remains solely under the control of you and your psychotherapist.

Only you and your psychotherapist know of your psychotherapy!

With the invitation to psychotherapy, you will receive information on how to encrypt your communication with the psychotherapist yourself and decrypt his messages.

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