In a book I am reading called The Celestine Prophecy, it talks about being able to recognize and become aware of our behavioral patterns that resulted from our childhood influences. Basically it means we are all subject to our parents (dis)functions and they influence us daily. Until we learn to recognize how those dramas conditioned us, we cannot step back from them to recognize our own learned patterns of disfunction.

For instance, if a woman is freaking out everytime her spouse goes out on Thursday to play pool at a bar it would be helpful to him and her to know that maybe she is subconciously reacting to her (hypothetical) childhood experience of her father going out to the bar and coming home liquored up and beating that young girl time after time. Thus IC = value. But once uncovered, check it off the list and lets move to behaviors.

So to the point the IC helps uncover why you behave like you do, its valuable. No need to continue to dwell on it but it is necessary for an individual to see the WHY in order to move beyond their ingrained behaviors and evolve to something better by stepping outside of those patterns.

For instance my pattern I learned from my Dad was withdrawal anytime anything got serious or real strong emotions came out. He hid from emotions. I learned this pattern only during my marriage crisis. It would have been better to learn it before the crisis with an IC session or two. Luckily I grew beyond it or my marriage would have been lost. No amount of MBers would have helped my wife or me see that. It wasn't an obvious love buster.

I now recognize my first tendency to withdraw from emotions (my wifes anger for example) and turn it around to engage her, acknowledge her anger, help her prevent it from becoming a love buster (its just a signal something is wrong THANK YOU ML and LA) and find ways to affirm her and solve the situation (my apology if needed).

My wife is learning her pattern which she learned from her mom of not being able to express physical affection to me when around others. Not groping, just hand holding. Now fortunately we don't need an IC because we have all you smart people helping us learn but for others I can see that uncovering these childhood patterns with an IC is indeed very useful. I think even AA would say you have to face and own your behavior before you can change it. Knowing why we learned to act like we act IMHO seems to help tremendously. Again not for months and months in IC but if we know why, we can much more easily recognize it and change it.