Jeremy Griffith: Therapy for the Human Condition

An examination of the therapeutic ideas developed in Therapy for the Human Condition, The Shock of Change, The Great Transformation and related writings

Introduction

Jeremy Griffith’s work is usually presented as a theory of the “human condition”: an attempt to explain why a species capable of extraordinary cooperation and compassion is also capable of selfishness, aggression and cruelty. Less attention has been given to a second claim that has become increasingly prominent in his later writing. Griffith argues that his explanation does not merely describe the human condition; it provides the basis for psychological therapy.

This deserves separate examination.

A theory can contain useful psychological insights without constituting an effective therapy. Conversely, an unconventional theoretical model may identify therapeutic mechanisms that already have parallels in established psychological research. The relevant question is therefore not whether Griffith’s complete account of human evolution is accepted, nor whether individual readers report that his writings have changed their lives. It is more specific:

What does Griffith actually propose as therapy, which elements have credible parallels in established psychological science, which remain untested, and where might his therapeutic prescriptions themselves create problems?

This distinction is particularly necessary because Griffith uses the word therapy in several different senses. In Therapy for the Human Condition he explicitly divides his proposal into three components: “The Main Therapy,” “The Therapy for Childhood Hurts,” and “The Transformed Way of Living” (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 10–16).

These components are not equivalent.

The first is essentially therapy by explanatory reinterpretation: understanding why humanity and the individual became psychologically defensive is supposed to remove inappropriate guilt and self-condemnation.

The second addresses developmental injury, particularly the way children may misinterpret inadequate love, insecurity and relational disturbance as evidence that they themselves are defective.

The third is a prescribed change of life orientation. Rather than continuing to seek self-worth through what Griffith calls the old competitive “power, fame, fortune and glory” system, the individual is encouraged to live in support of the newly understood cooperative future.

Each deserves to be evaluated separately.

There is also an important evidential limitation. The August 2023 version of Therapy for the Human Condition explicitly states that it consists only of a draft of Chapter 1 and part of Chapter 2. The detailed treatment of childhood hurts is repeatedly deferred to a future “chapter XX” (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 5, 15–16, 42). Griffith’s own organisation still describes the work as incomplete. (FIX THE WORLD)

It is therefore possible to evaluate Griffith’s therapeutic principles and proposed mechanisms, but not yet a completed clinical protocol.

Griffith’s three-part therapeutic proposal

The Main Therapy: explanation removes condemnation

The central therapeutic claim follows directly from Griffith’s wider instinct-versus-intellect theory.

He argues that humans became angry, egocentric and alienated because the newly developing conscious intellect had to experiment independently of instinctive guidance. Because the instinctive system could not understand why such deviation was necessary, the conscious self experienced its inherited moral orientation as condemnation. Humanity consequently spent an immense period attempting to defend its worth without possessing the explanation necessary to do so.

The therapeutic intervention is therefore primarily understanding.

Once the person understands that defensive behaviour had an intelligible cause, Griffith argues, the conclusion

“my selfishness, aggression and alienation show that I am fundamentally bad”

can be replaced by something closer to

“these responses developed during a necessary and previously unexplained struggle.”

In THE Interview, Griffith describes the resulting relief as the removal of a “burden of guilt.” Understanding supposedly allows humans to know that they are “good and not bad,” thereby reconciling the previously divided conscious and instinctive selves (Griffith, 2026, pp. 41–43).

The most extravagant part of this claim – that one evolutionary explanation resolves the fundamental psychological problem of every human being – is not established.

But the underlying therapeutic mechanism is much less unusual:

a person can suffer because of the meaning they have attributed to an experience, and psychological distress can diminish when that meaning is reconsidered in a more accurate and less self-condemning way.

That principle stands up very well.

Why explanatory reinterpretation can genuinely be therapeutic

Established therapies already demonstrate that causal interpretation matters.

Cognitive Processing Therapy, or CPT, provides an especially useful comparison. CPT is an evidence-based treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder in which the person identifies persistent interpretations or “stuck points” surrounding a traumatic experience. These often concern blame, shame, safety, trust and personal worth. Treatment uses structured questioning to examine those interpretations and develop more accurate alternatives. The US National Centre for PTSD specifically identifies self-blame and shame as important targets of CPT. (PTSD.gov)

This is not merely theoretical. A randomised dismantling trial involving 150 women with PTSD following interpersonal violence found substantial therapeutic benefit from Cognitive Processing Therapy and its cognitive component (Resick et al., 2008, pp. 243–258). (PubMed) NICE currently includes Cognitive Processing Therapy among recommended trauma-focused CBT interventions for adults with PTSD. (NICE)

The relevance to Griffith is substantial.

A trauma survivor might carry the interpretation:

“I should have prevented what happened; therefore I am responsible.”

A child might carry:

“My parent did not respond to me lovingly; therefore I must be unlovable.”

An adult might carry:

“I become angry under criticism; therefore there is something fundamentally wrong with me.”

If evidence shows that those interpretations were produced under conditions of inadequate information, then revising them can alter emotional response.

Griffith’s important insight is therefore not simply that “understanding feels good.” It is that explanation can alter moral attribution.

An event originally understood as proof of personal defect can be reinterpreted as the outcome of circumstances, developmental limitations and adaptive responses.

That is a genuine therapeutic mechanism.

What has not been demonstrated is Griffith’s additional claim that his particular instinct-versus-intellect explanation is the universally correct reinterpretation needed by everybody.

The mechanism stands up more strongly than the exclusivity claim.

Griffith’s childhood model is therapeutically more convincing than his evolutionary one

The most clinically interesting part of Griffith’s later work concerns childhood.

He argues that children encounter an emotionally imperfect world without possessing the explanatory knowledge necessary to understand its imperfections. Because caregivers constitute much of the child’s known world, relational disappointment can consequently be interpreted personally.

Griffith puts this extremely strongly. He claims that children “almost always blame themselves for the shortfall in love” and may conclude that they are an “unlovable, bad person” (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 15–16, 39–40).

The universal language is not justified. Children respond to relational adversity in many different ways, and self-blame is not an inevitable product of all inadequate nurturing.

The more limited mechanism, however, is psychologically credible.

A young child has relatively little ability to construct explanations such as:

“My mother is emotionally unavailable because she is exhausted, depressed and carrying unresolved attachment injuries from her own childhood.”

The child is much more immediately equipped to detect:

“When I do this, connection disappears.”

From repeated experiences, relational predictions can form:

If I become angry, affection disappears.

If I need too much, people withdraw.

If I fail, approval disappears.

If I please people, connection becomes safer.

Eventually such predictions can become conclusions about identity:

I am difficult.

I am selfish.

I am weak.

I am unlovable.

This general territory is well represented in developmental psychology. Research grounded in Self-Determination Theory has found that parental conditional regard – giving or withdrawing approval according to whether the child fulfils parental expectations – is associated with less autonomous regulation and with psychological costs. A 2023 meta-analysis reviewed this literature across studies of conditional parental approval (Haines & Schutte, 2023, pp. 195–223). (PubMed)

Ryan and Deci’s broader Self-Determination Theory similarly distinguishes regulations that a person genuinely integrates from regulations maintained through guilt, internal pressure or contingent approval. Their model identifies autonomy, competence and relatedness as important psychological needs rather than treating autonomy and relationship as opposing requirements (Ryan & Deci, 2000, pp. 68–78). (Self-Determination Theory)

So Griffith appears to be identifying a legitimate developmental problem, although his explanation is unnecessarily tied to his theory that children genetically expect an Edenic environment of unconditional love.

The psychologically stronger proposition is simpler:

Children need relationship and have limited explanatory capacity. Where relationship appears conditional or unpredictable, they may construct self-referential explanations and protective adaptations around maintaining connection.

That proposition does not require Griffith’s evolutionary theory in order to work.

Repression, splitting and the formation of defensive personality

Griffith then makes a second developmental claim.

Pain that cannot be understood or tolerated is, he argues, pushed outside ordinary awareness. He describes children as having little option but to “split themselves off” from overwhelming thoughts and feelings and create another psychological place from which to operate. The suppressed material nevertheless continues influencing later emotional life (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 41–42).

His terminology requires caution. This should not automatically be equated with clinical dissociation, dissociative identity disorder or any other formal diagnosis.

But the underlying architecture is recognisable:

an experience creates overwhelming affect;

the person cannot fully process it;

• strategies develop that reduce access to the threatening experience;
• those strategies become habitual;
• and behaviour later reflects patterns whose original reason may no longer be consciously obvious.

Modern cognitive models likewise describe enduring psychological organisation in terms of schemas involving expectations, self-evaluations, memories, rules and attentional patterns.

Beck and Haigh’s updated cognitive model, for example, explicitly incorporates adaptive and maladaptive schemas, attentional focus and dual information processing rather than treating psychological problems as isolated consciously held propositions (Beck & Haigh, 2014, pp. 1–24). (PubMed)

Griffith therefore seems to be observing something real when he argues that childhood coping can persist beyond the circumstances that created it.

Where he overreaches is in saying that childhood hurts essentially form the whole personality and that almost all mental-health difficulty can ultimately be explained through his specific human-condition model (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 15–16).

Personality is not reducible to defensive childhood adaptation.

But defensive childhood adaptation can certainly become an important component of personality organisation.

The distinction between understanding and healing is one of Griffith’s strongest therapeutic insights

A particularly important development appears in The Shock of Change.

Griffith acknowledges that understanding something intellectually does not mean that the entire psychological system immediately reorganises around that knowledge. He says that people can comprehend the explanation of their condition much faster than they can dismantle accumulated psychological pain. His phrase is that “knowing to the point of being psychologically secure follows some time after understanding” (Griffith, 2022, pp. 22–23).

This observation is important because it corrects a potential weakness in Griffith’s own “Main Therapy.”

If explanation alone were sufficient, then simply telling a person:

“You were never unlovable; your parent was emotionally unavailable”

should resolve the associated problem.

Often it does not.

The adult may completely agree intellectually and nevertheless experience intense panic when somebody withdraws affection.

Someone may understand:

“Failure does not make me worthless”

while their entire emotional system still reacts violently to failure.

They may understand:

“My anger developed to protect me”

while anger continues activating automatically in relatively safe situations.

Contemporary psychotherapy similarly recognises that change involves more than the acquisition of a new sentence about oneself. Research on emotional learning and memory has explored how therapeutic change may require activation and updating of emotionally encoded expectations rather than mere abstract knowledge.

Lane and colleagues, for example, proposed that enduring therapeutic change involves new emotional experiences interacting with established memory structures rather than cognitive explanation operating alone. (PubMed)

This makes Griffith’s later position much stronger than a simple “read my explanation and become cured” model.

It implies:

the conscious explanatory system can update before the emotional and protective systems do.

That is a genuinely useful therapeutic distinction.

The “Mexican Standoff”: why old defences refuse to disappear

Griffith develops this persistence problem further through what he calls the Mexican Standoff.

A person may understand that an old strategy is no longer necessary while remaining deeply reluctant to abandon it. Griffith particularly discusses defensive reliance upon achievement, power, recognition, status and other means of maintaining a positive view of oneself.

The new understanding says that these forms of self-validation are unnecessary; the established psychological system continues behaving as though relinquishing them would be dangerous (Griffith, Gowing & Akritidis family, 2023, pp. 47–54).

This concept is idiosyncratically named, but the mechanism is psychologically plausible.

A behaviour that has repeatedly reduced distress acquires a powerful history.

Suppose a child repeatedly discovers:

achievement brings approval.

By adulthood the person may possess an elaborate achievement-based identity.

A therapist can explain:

“You do not have to achieve in order to possess value.”

The person might sincerely agree.

But their accumulated experience says:

When I succeed, people value me. When I fail, I feel exposed.

The old system therefore has decades of apparent evidence supporting its strategy.

Griffith’s observation could be expressed more neutrally as persistence of an established regulatory strategy after the conditions that originally selected it have changed.

That is not irrationality in any simple sense. It is conservative learning.

The system is reluctant to abandon something that has repeatedly appeared to protect it.

Therapeutically, this means that insight should not be expected instantly to abolish protection. The protective strategy needs sufficiently convincing new experience to update its prediction.

Griffith does not fully develop that point, but he comes very close to it.

“Artificial reinforcement” and contingent self-worth

Another Griffith concept that survives translation into conventional psychology is artificial reinforcement.

He argues that insecure humans attempt to prove their worth through success, status, possessions, power, praise and social victory. These external reinforcements become psychological substitutes for the secure knowledge of intrinsic worth that his theory supposedly provides.

Again, the universal formulation is excessive.

Wealth, achievement and social recognition have many motivations. Enjoying competence is not necessarily compensation for shame, and wanting financial security is not evidence of a damaged self.

The useful distinction is between:

I enjoy succeeding

and

I require success in order to remain acceptable to myself.

Psychology already has a strong concept for this: contingent self-worth.

Crocker and Wolfe proposed that self-esteem can become dependent upon success or failure within particular domains on which a person has “staked” personal worth. Such contingencies can strongly motivate behaviour, but they also create vulnerability precisely because failure in the chosen domain becomes much more than ordinary failure (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001, pp. 593–623). (PubMed)

Later work describes contingencies of self-worth as simultaneously sources of motivation and psychological vulnerability. (Sage Journals)

Griffith’s “artificial reinforcement” therefore contains a useful therapeutic question:

What function is this success performing?

If achievement is pleasurable, meaningful and freely chosen, nothing needs to be pathologised.

If achievement is constantly required to prevent collapse into worthlessness, then therapy has identified a regulatory dependency worth understanding.

The same distinction applies to helping others, attractiveness, intellectual ability, spiritual attainment or psychological expertise.

Any valued quality can become a contingency of worth.

The Deaf Effect: a plausible mechanism used in a methodologically unsafe way

Griffith’s Deaf Effect is simultaneously one of his most interesting and one of his most problematic ideas.

He argues that psychologically threatening material may be blocked before the person properly absorbs it. The individual does not necessarily consciously think:

“This argument threatens my self-concept, therefore I will reject it.”

Instead, the material may simply appear tedious, confusing, irritating, irrelevant or difficult to concentrate upon.

In The Shock of Change Griffith gives examples of readers who initially found his material “super tedious and boring” or “too long and rambling,” but later found it meaningful after repeatedly returning to it. He interprets the initial response as defensive information blocking and recommends perseverance through repeated reading or listening (Griffith, 2022, pp. 20–22).

There is nothing inherently implausible about defensive information processing.

People are not neutral processors of information. Threat, expectation and existing schemas influence attention and interpretation. Beck and Haigh’s cognitive model, for example, explicitly incorporates attentional focus and schema activation in psychological disorders (2014, pp. 1–24). (PubMed)

Research on self-affirmation likewise provides evidence that perceived threat to self can influence receptiveness to personally relevant information. (PubMed)

The problem lies in Griffith’s application.

He tends to interpret specific criticisms of his own work as manifestations of the very Deaf Effect his theory predicts. A reader finds the prose repetitive; this is treated as defensive resistance. A reader cannot see the argument; perseverance is prescribed. Repeated exposure eventually produces acceptance in some readers, and that acceptance is then treated as confirmation that the original resistance was defensive (Griffith, Gowing & Akritidis family, 2023, pp. 14–18).

This creates an epistemic problem.

At least four possibilities must remain open:

• the person has not understood the argument;
• the person understands it but finds it emotionally threatening;
• the presentation really is unclear;
• or the person understands the argument correctly and considers it wrong.

A sound therapeutic method cannot predetermine which explanation applies.

Otherwise the theory becomes self-sealing:

acceptance means the theory has been understood; rejection means pathology prevented understanding.

That structure makes disagreement difficult to distinguish from illness or defence.

The general concept of defensive information gating is worth retaining.

The claim that resistance to Griffith’s theory demonstrates the Deaf Effect is not.

Why this matters particularly in therapy

Therapy necessarily involves asymmetry.

A client often arrives because they are confused, distressed or uncertain. The therapist therefore possesses considerable interpretive influence.

If a therapist says:

“Your disagreement with my interpretation is evidence that your defence is preventing you from recognising its truth,”

the client is placed in a difficult position.

Agreement confirms the therapist.

Disagreement also confirms the therapist.

Evidence-based cognitive therapies deliberately attempt to avoid this problem. CPT uses Socratic examination rather than requiring the client to adopt the therapist’s predetermined interpretation. Its stated goal is to arrive at more accurate and balanced interpretations, not merely more positive ones. (PTSD.gov)

The distinction is fundamental.

Therapy should help a person become better able to examine experience.

It should not make one explanatory doctrine increasingly immune from examination.

The Transformed Way of Living: where Griffith moves beyond psychotherapy

The third component of Griffith’s therapy is the Transformed Way of Living.

Here his therapeutic model changes character.

Once the person understands that their old defensive search for validation is unnecessary, Griffith argues that they should cease devoting themselves to that struggle and redirect their energy towards supporting a cooperative future made possible by understanding the human condition.

At its most general, there is nothing psychologically unreasonable about this.

A person who recognises that their entire life has been organised around obtaining approval may decide:

I no longer want approval-seeking to determine my life. What do I actually value?

A person organised around status may decide that relationships, creativity, service or curiosity matter more.

This resembles an important feature of several therapeutic traditions: moving away from compulsive symptom regulation and towards meaningful chosen action.

But Griffith goes beyond values clarification.

He supplies the value.

The preferred orientation is explicitly support for his explanation of the human condition and the social transformation built around it.

In The Great Transformation, adoption of the Transformed Way is described not simply as one possible personally meaningful response but as the overriding priority. Griffith argues that people should not remain overly focused upon healing their individual psychological condition when the larger task is supporting the transformation of humanity (Griffith, Gowing & Akritidis family, 2023, pp. 34–38).

This creates a significant therapeutic problem.

Modern clinical guidance places importance upon shared decision-making: treatment should reflect clinical evidence and the person’s own preferences, beliefs and values. NICE explicitly describes shared decision-making in those terms. (NICE)

Griffith’s Transformed Way instead moves towards:

the theory identifies what the individual ought ultimately to value.

That may function as a philosophical or social movement.

It is much harder to defend as a general principle of psychotherapy.

The danger of therapeutic bypassing

This concern becomes sharper because Griffith explicitly warns against excessive personal therapy.

In Therapy for the Human Condition, he argues that complete psychological rehabilitation would require years of intensive examination and calls such complete therapy, given the supposed urgency of transforming humanity, an “obscene indulgence” (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 10–12).

In The Great Transformation, he similarly says that sufficient therapy to become functional can be worthwhile, but warns that personal rehabilitation can become a “selfish preoccupation” when the greater priority is adoption of the Transformed Way (Griffith, Gowing & Akritidis family, 2023, pp. 36–37).

The underlying distinction contains some value.

A person does not necessarily have to resolve every childhood injury before beginning to live differently.

Someone can decide today:

I no longer want to structure my life around pleasing my father.

They may still need years before disapproval ceases to hurt.

Behavioural reorientation can therefore precede complete emotional integration.

But Griffith’s stronger prescription risks creating another form of the very dynamic he identifies elsewhere.

A vulnerable psychological state says:

I am still hurting and need attention.

The new ideological Persona replies:

Focusing on your own suffering is selfish. The greater purpose matters more.

The vulnerable constituency disappears from representation again.

This can produce bypassing: the person adopts a socially or spiritually valued orientation that permits them to move around unresolved experience rather than integrate it.

That does not establish that Griffith’s Transformed Way necessarily causes such a result.

It means his prescription provides no adequate safeguard against it.

Griffith himself notices that psychological insight can become another defence

Interestingly, Griffith supplies one of the strongest arguments for this caution himself.

In The Great Transformation, he describes people acquiring his theory and then using it to strengthen their old validation structure. They may emphasise how psychologically “upset” other people are, advertise their own understanding, distinguish themselves as particularly enlightened or use insight to achieve additional “old world wins.” Griffith correctly observes that the new theory has then been absorbed into the old defensive organisation rather than replacing it (Griffith, Gowing & Akritidis family, 2023, pp. 53–54).

This is a genuinely valuable clinical observation.

Psychological knowledge itself can become defensive.

A person can learn attachment terminology and use it exclusively to diagnose their partner.

They can learn about narcissism and use it to explain why everyone else is responsible for conflict.

They can learn parts terminology and become brilliant at naming parts while remaining emotionally unavailable to their own.

They can learn Jung and construct an identity around having “integrated the Shadow.”

• The theory has changed.
• The regulatory structure has not.

This implies an important therapeutic principle:

adopting the language of psychological integration is not evidence that integration has occurred.

That principle should apply equally to Griffith’s own theory.

The question is not whether someone can correctly explain the human condition according to Griffith.

It is whether previously excluded psychological information has become more safely accessible, relationships have become more flexible, defensive patterns have genuinely updated and the person has become more capable of tolerating ambiguity and disagreement.

Griffith’s dismissal of conventional psychotherapy does not stand up

Griffith repeatedly contrasts his proposed “real therapy” with existing forms of therapy, which he regards as fundamentally limited because they supposedly avoid the underlying human condition.

That criticism is too broad.

Existing psychotherapy certainly has limitations. Treatments do not work for everybody, dropout occurs, relapse occurs, and different disorders require different interventions.

But it is simply not true that conventional psychological therapies have failed to produce meaningful therapeutic effects because they lack Griffith’s explanation.

For PTSD alone, NICE recommends several trauma-focused psychological treatments, including Cognitive Processing Therapy, cognitive therapy for PTSD, narrative exposure therapy and prolonged exposure. (NICE) Randomised trials demonstrate substantial improvement from these interventions, although non-response and residual symptoms remain important clinical problems. (PubMed)

For psychosis and schizophrenia, NICE recommends psychological interventions including CBT and family intervention alongside appropriate clinical management. (NICE)

These therapies do not depend upon a single universal theory of why humanity became psychologically conflicted.

That is significant.

It demonstrates that useful psychological change can occur without accepting Griffith’s proposed explanation of the human condition.

This does not make Griffith’s insights worthless.

It means he cannot use the existence of unresolved human suffering as evidence that conventional psychotherapy is conceptually invalid.

The use of the word “psychosis” is particularly problematic

Griffith employs psychosis in an idiosyncratic etymological sense.

Because psyche can historically mean soul, he treats psychosis as something resembling “soul illness” and consequently describes widespread human alienation and repression as psychosis (Griffith, 2023b, pp. 12–13).

This does not correspond to contemporary clinical usage.

The NHS defines psychosis as loss of some contact with reality, commonly involving hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking. (nhs.uk)

This difference is not merely semantic.

Someone suffering from:

• shame,
• approval-seeking,
• childhood attachment injury,
• depression,
• dissociation,
• perfectionism,
• or defensive avoidance

is not necessarily experiencing psychosis.

Psychotic experiences themselves also cannot safely be assumed to arise from the same mechanism as those other difficulties.

Using one word for all of them obscures clinically important distinctions.

Any therapeutic adaptation of Griffith’s ideas should therefore abandon his idiosyncratic use of psychosis and use more specific psychological terminology.

Does Griffith yet have a clinically testable therapy?

At present, not really.

A psychotherapy normally needs enough specification that another competent clinician can identify:

• who the treatment is intended for;
• what problem is being treated;
• what happens during treatment;
• what the therapeutic mechanisms are;
• what contraindications or risks exist;
• how progress is measured;
• and what constitutes success or failure.

Griffith has provided parts of a case formulation.

He proposes that self-condemnation creates defence.

He proposes that childhood relational injury produces self-blame.

He proposes that understanding can relieve inappropriate guilt.

He recognises that defensive structures persist after conscious insight.

He identifies external validation as a regulatory mechanism.

He proposes a method for overcoming what he calls information avoidance.

But the detailed Therapy for Childhood Hurts remains unwritten in the supplied version; Griffith himself says that practical treatment will be addressed in a future chapter (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 15–16, 42).

The evidential material he currently presents is principally conceptual argument and personal testimonial. For example, Therapy for the Human Condition cites enthusiastic reader reports and the experiences of supporters as evidence of therapeutic relief (Griffith, 2023a, pp. 14–15).

Testimonials establish that some people report profound benefit.

They cannot establish efficacy.

In searching for clinical evaluation of Griffith’s therapeutic model, I found promotional discussions and personal accounts but did not identify a controlled clinical trial evaluating Therapy for the Human Condition as a defined psychotherapeutic treatment.

That does not prove that no relevant evaluation exists, but it means there is currently no comparable evidence base visible in these searches to that supporting established treatments such as CPT. (Medical Daily)

What would be required to test it properly?

The strongest Griffith-derived therapy could readily be converted into a testable model.

It would first need to stop requiring acceptance of Griffith’s entire evolutionary theory.

The therapeutic hypothesis could instead be stated:

People sometimes develop global negative beliefs about themselves because, at the time an important painful experience occurred, they lacked sufficient information to explain it. Defensive strategies then develop to prevent recurrence of the threatened experience or conclusion. Therapy can reduce distress by reconstructing the original context, distinguishing behaviour from identity, understanding the protective function of the response, and supplying new experiences from which outdated predictions can be revised.

That is experimentally tractable.

A treatment could then ask:

• What happened?
• What did the person believe it meant at the time?
• What did they conclude about themselves?
• What behaviour developed to prevent recurrence?
• What does that behaviour still predict will happen if it stops?
• Is that prediction accurate now?
• What experiences would allow it to update?

Outcomes could be measured using validated measures of shame, self-blame, depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, interpersonal functioning and quality of life.

Such treatment could then be compared with an established therapy, treatment-as-usual or another credible control.

At that point Griffith’s contribution would become scientifically much easier to evaluate.

A useful distinction: Griffith’s insights versus Griffith’s therapy

The analysis therefore produces a mixed result.

Proposed idea	Assessment
Painful experiences can acquire self-condemning meanings	Well supported in broad form
Children may blame themselves for relational failures they cannot understand	Plausible and consistent with established developmental/clinical models, but not universal
Reinterpreting self-blame can reduce distress	Strongly supported as a therapeutic principle
Defensive strategies can persist after the person intellectually understands their origin	Highly plausible and consistent with emotional-learning models
External achievement can become responsible for maintaining self-worth	Supported by contingent-self-worth research
Threat can influence attention and interpretation	Supported in broad form
Griffith’s specific “Deaf Effect” explains criticism of his work	Not established; risks becoming self-sealing
One instinct-versus-intellect conflict explains virtually all psychological disorder	Unsupported
Griffith’s explanation itself is the universally necessary “Main Therapy”	Unsupported
Childhood hurt essentially forms the whole personality	Excessive generalisation
Existing psychotherapy is merely superficial because it lacks Griffith’s theory	Contradicted by clinical evidence
The Transformed Way can provide purpose and reduce preoccupation with self-validation	Plausible for some people
Everyone should adopt Griffith’s prescribed Transformed Way	A philosophical/ideological prescription, not an established therapeutic conclusion
Extensive personal therapy can become an “obscene indulgence”	Clinically concerning as a general rule
Griffith’s broad condition is appropriately called “psychosis”	Inconsistent with contemporary clinical terminology
Griffith’s complete therapeutic method is evidence-based	Not presently demonstrated

The therapy hidden inside Griffith’s theory

The most interesting conclusion is that Griffith appears to have come quite close to a defensible therapeutic model without quite formulating it.

Stripped of the universal evolutionary claims, the model would say:

• A person experiences something painful.
• They lack enough information to understand why it happened.
• They construct the best explanation available.

Because children are dependent upon their relationships and possess limited explanatory resources, that explanation may become self-condemning.

The resulting shame or threat produces protective behaviour.

Protection may take the form of anger, achievement, appeasement, withdrawal, emotional suppression, intellectualisation or another strategy.

Repeated use makes the strategy increasingly automatic.

A socially successful strategy may eventually become part of the person’s stable identity.

Later, the adult may consciously discover that the original explanation was incomplete.

But the protective system does not automatically trust the new understanding because the old strategy possesses a long history of apparent success.

Therapy therefore requires both reinterpretation and updating.

The person needs to understand:

why the defence developed,

without concluding:

therefore every current expression of it is healthy.

They need to recognise:

the original pain was real,

without assuming:

the childhood explanation of that pain was necessarily accurate.

They need to discover:

the protector had a legitimate purpose,

while also asking:

does its prediction still describe the present?

That is a psychologically coherent therapeutic model.

It is also considerably less grand than Griffith’s claim to have found the therapy for the entire human condition.

Conclusion

Griffith’s ideas for therapy should neither be dismissed wholesale nor accepted in the form in which he presents them.

Several of his central therapeutic observations stand up surprisingly well.

He recognises that unexplained experience can become self-condemnation. He also understands that children may misattribute relational failure to themselves, and sees defensive behaviour as potentially intelligible rather than simply defective. The theory recognises that external validation can become responsible for regulating self-worth, and also understands that information threatening an established self-structure may be resisted.

Most importantly, his later work recognises that intellectual understanding is not the same thing as psychological integration and that long-established defences may remain active after their conscious rationale has disappeared.

Those are worthwhile insights.

The problems arise when Griffith turns them into exclusivity claims.

He has not shown that all major psychological distress arises from one prehistoric instinct-versus-intellect conflict, and has not demonstrated that acceptance of his biological explanation is required for effective therapy.

His broad dismissal of existing psychotherapy is contradicted by substantial treatment evidence, and the Deaf Effect becomes methodologically unsafe when disagreement is interpreted as evidence of psychological resistance.

The use of psychosis conflicts with contemporary clinical usage. And his insistence that personal therapeutic work should become subordinate to adoption of the Transformed Way risks reproducing a familiar psychological problem: a vulnerable part of the person can once again be told that attending to its own needs is selfish.

The strongest therapy implicit in Griffith is therefore not quite Griffith’s stated therapy.

It is a more modest therapeutic principle:

Human beings can develop defensive structures around painful conclusions reached when they lacked sufficient information. Psychological relief becomes possible when those conclusions can be compassionately re-examined, the original protective response understood, and the defensive system given enough new evidence to revise what it still believes must be protected.

That proposal stands up well enough to deserve further investigation.

Whether Griffith’s larger theory is required for it is another question entirely – and the existing evidence strongly suggests that it is not.

However, our own theories may well provide additional support to this way of thinking….

References

Beck, A. T., & Haigh, E. A. P. (2014). “Advances in cognitive theory and therapy: The generic cognitive model.” Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 10, 1–24. (PubMed)

Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). “Contingencies of self-worth.” Psychological Review, 108(3), 593–623. (PubMed)

Griffith, J. (2022). The Shock of Change that Understanding the Human Condition Brings. WTM Publishing and Communications. Particularly pp. 20–24.

Griffith, J. (2023a). Therapy for the Human Condition. Draft version, August 2023. WTM Publishing and Communications. Particularly pp. 5, 9–16 and 36–42.

Griffith, J. (2023b). Our Meaning. WTM Publishing and Communications. Particularly pp. 12–13.

Griffith, J., Gowing, A., & Akritidis family. (2023). The Great Transformation: How Understanding the Human Condition Actually Transforms the Human Race. WTM Publishing and Communications. Particularly pp. 14–18, 34–38 and 47–54.

Griffith, J., & Conway, C. (2026 ed.). THE Interview That Solves the Human Condition and Saves the World! Particularly pp. 41–43 and 61–65.

Haines, J. E., & Schutte, N. S. (2023). “Parental conditional regard: A meta-analysis.” Journal of Adolescence, 95(2), 195–223. (PubMed)

Lane, R. D., Ryan, L., Nadel, L., & Greenberg, L. (2015). “Memory reconsolidation, emotional arousal, and the process of change in psychotherapy.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e1. (PubMed)

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2018; reviewed 2025). Post-traumatic stress disorder (NG116), particularly recommendation §1.6.15. (NICE)

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2022). Depression in adults: treatment and management (NG222), recommendations on shared decision-making. (NICE)

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2014). Psychosis and schizophrenia in adults: prevention and management (CG178). (NICE)

Resick, P. A., Galovski, T. E., Uhlmansiek, M. O., Scher, C. D., Clum, G. A., & Young-Xu, Y. (2008). “A randomized clinical trial to dismantle components of Cognitive Processing Therapy for posttraumatic stress disorder in female victims of interpersonal violence.” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 76(2), 243–258. (PubMed)

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). “Self-Determination Theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.” American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. (Self-Determination Theory)

US Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD. Cognitive Processing Therapy for PTSD. Professional treatment overview. (PTSD.gov)