Blogging on Good Therapy

A GoodTherapy.org Featured Column written by John Rhead, Ph.D.

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Welcome to this column. I hope it will be interesting and valuable to those who read it, and to me as I write it.

Why “integrating” psychotherapy and spirituality? This question seems silly to many people for one of two reasons. Some would say it is silly because the two must necessarily be kept separate, like church and state. Others would say it is silly because they are inherently intertwined and don’t require any effort on our part to be integrated.

I am inclined toward the view that the two are inherently intertwined, but believe that they have been artificially separated by psychology, the discipline that most clearly undergirds most of what we practice in psychotherapy, in its zeal to be scientific. Freud’s disdain for religion didn’t help either. Of course there have always been those, like Carl Jung, who have kept alive the perspective that psychology and psychotherapy have an intrinsic relationship to spirituality. However, this perspective has only moved toward widespread acceptance among psychotherapists in the last few decades, thanks in part to the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Such acceptance in mainstream psychology, as reflected in the American Psychological Association, has only been noticeable in the last few years.

So this column will seek to midwife the rebirthing of the awareness of the inherent interconnectedness between psychotherapy and spirituality. Our attitude will be one of seeking to support a process that is already taking place quite naturally, rather than trying to force or create something new.

We will assume that psychotherapy does more than correct psychopathologies of individuals. We will regard psychotherapy as something that facilitates the client’s emotional and spiritual growth, and will assume that such growth in the client will in some way reverberate positively in the culture in which he or she is embedded. Hopefully this column can facilitate our own emotional and spiritual growth, thereby making us more effective in doing the same for our clients and our species.

Stay tuned.

©Copyright 2007 John Rhead, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile

Written by Mary Ellen Barnes, Ph.D.

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No single idea keeps people from seeking help with their alcohol related problems as much as the mistaken belief that alcohol abuse, dependence, and addiction are always the symptoms of an actual “disease” and that there is only one “cure.” However, just as everyone knows someone who currently has problems with alcohol, we also know someone whose problems seemed to disappear. How can a supposedly life-long, progressive, and fatal disease simply evaporate and not just occasionally, but often enough for remission to be more the rule than the exception?

Clearly something doesn’t add up and, not surprisingly, misleading impressions can be directly traced to the treatment industry’s advertising. Not that it’s totally false, just as self-serving as most ads. Unhappily, the hype has also been so successful that nearly everyone has come to believe it, no matter how much the research and their own experience suggests otherwise.
As is often the case, the reality is more complex than the advertising. There are, of course, people who need to stop drinking permanently and for whom moderation or a return to “social drinking” is impossible. They are much like most ex-smokers. Yet the need to abstain is not the same as being sentenced to a lifetime of meetings, medallions, rituals, and an alcohol focused life. That prescription works for a few, perhaps five to ten percent of those who try it voluntarily, and fewer of those who are coerced into it. (more…)

Written by by Tanya Vallianos, MA, LPC, ATR

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There is an emerging movement around the world to use expressive arts in healthcare settings because of the numerous benefits to overall wellness. Large research hospitals such as Duke, Stanford, Ursaline, Georgetown, Dartmouth, Sloan-Kettering and Northwestern, and others, have long understood the value of bringing the expressive arts into the hospital proper. Medical science is finding that artistic activities can actually prolong patients survival rate by reducing stress levels, increasing relaxation, improving immune system functioning, reducing and improving blood pressure, heart rate and respiration, and reducing pain.

The body is the vessel through which thoughts, sensations, emotions, and all of life are experienced. Our bodies literally contain cellular memories of all growth and regeneration. Consciously tapping into the wisdom of our bodies is a process by which we exchange with dialogue through a new and different language. As we get more fluent in this language we begin to realize that we truly hold within ourselves all the answers to our deepest questions, as well as the ability to heal ourselves from emotional and physical illness. Creative arts expression is one modality that can trigger and enhance this natural process. (more…)

Written by Bruce Bibee, MTP, LPC

Social services, as bureaucracies, have no incentive to “fix” the problems they deal with. What if we all refused to be victims? What if we could organize our lives so we could not be victimized? Regardless of how much a pipedream this is, for now imagine a world in which victimization just didn’t happen to you or to your family, friends, neighbors, and community. Assault, rape, burglary, and the like had become obsolete. Instead, our social service system (schools, churches, police, juvenile probation, treatment centers, after-school programs, and so on) trained each of us to live together in peace and harmony.

This vision may be unrealistic, but the information is available to achieve this world. It would require an individual commitement of refusing to be victims of any crime, along with the support of society and its institutions to give folks the training to actually pull it off. In achieving this goal, collateral issues do need addressing. Perhaps the most insidious problem is this: if we did live in a society without vicitmization, how many people will have lost their jobs? (more…)

Written by Christine Horn, MA

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“The past is the past. Don’t cry over spilled milk. Put it behind you. Get over it already.”

We all have voices within ourselves that say these kinds of things. Usually it is after some event or interaction has left us feeling angry, lonely, or hurt. These messages are from parts within ourselves that want to protect us. By saying these things they calm us down and prevent us from becoming “triggered” - feeling and reacting from the “emotional baggage” of our old, painful experiences and self-limiting beliefs.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a style of therapy that calls these different voices parts. The language of “parts” may sound odd at first. Yet, we often speak this way quite naturally. For instance we may say, “part of me wants to go out tonight, but another part of me wants to stay home and chill out.” With IFS we use this language to get to know and appreciate the different parts that comprise our being. This helps us recognize those parts that may have been left holding old “emotional baggage.” The good news is that these parts can be relieved of their burdens allowing us to live fuller and richer lives. IFS therapy uses compassionate inner dialogue to facilitate this process… (more…)

Written by Delyse Ledgard, MA, CCC

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This article discusses the nature of ambivalence in relationships, and the resulting dynamics. This perspective has developed over the past 20 years of working with individuals and couples, and noticing how these dynamics emerge.

Ambivalence occurs in intimate relationships when there is the coexistence of opposing emotions and desires towards the other that create an uncertainty about being in the relationship. It is our nature to split our experience into polarities, such as good/bad, right/wrong and emotions such as love/hate, joy/sadness. One could say that we constantly deal with the opposite of our experience even if that is unconscious. As we become closer to our beloved and feel connected our experience is defined by the possibility of separation. Every time we say ‘yes’ there is a ‘no’ in the background informing our choice. If I am saying ‘yes’ to something wholeheartedly, I can feel that yes in every cell of my being. ‘No ‘ has been considered and rejected, however fleetingly, and my ‘yes’ has the quality of certainty. If my desire to say ‘no” interferes with my ‘yes’ it will be said with hesitation and doubt, and a lingering uneasy feeling that causes me to hold back; I am unable to fully commit to that yes. So not only does the opposite polarity define my experience but the degree to which I have integrated it into my consciousness will also affect my experience. Ambivalence could be said to occur when we are stuck between two polarities, and unable to reconcile them… (more…)

Written by Beth Patterson, MA

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Helen Keller has said that “the only way to get to the other side is to go through the door.” This is certainly true in the work of transforming grief into healing and growth. This process involves allowing ourselves to feel the intense emotions of grief – sadness, anger, despair and other difficult emotions, as well as tapping into our internal strengths and external sources of support and ultimately finding new ways to stay connected to our departed loved ones.

Narrative therapy and has been used with a wide variety of difficulties and issues, including grief reactions. The role of the narrative therapist is as collaborator or co-author with the client. As such, the narrative therapist partners with the client to explore the stories that give meaning to the client’s life (White, 1995). Carr (1998) describes the context of narrative therapy as follows:

Within a narrative frame, human problems are viewed as arising from and being maintained by oppressive stories which dominate the person’s life….Developing therapeutic solutions to problems, within the narrative frame, involves opening space for the authoring of alternative stories, the possibility of which have previously been marginalized by the dominant oppressive narrative which maintains the problem (p. 468).

Narrative therapy is thus an empowering vehicle for “re-authoring lives” (Carr, 1998, p. 468; White, 1995), in which the therapist takes the role of a partner or collaborator with the client, rather than an authority figure (Angell, Dennis & Dumain, 1999).. The narrative therapist partners with the client to create a safe place to feel the emotions of grief, and to explore the stories that give meaning to the client’s life. The use of narrative or story is a useful vehicle for making meaning and sense of difficult experiences in our lives, by allowing us to access alternative cognitions and gain self-knowledge… (more…)

Written by Greg Madison, Ph.D.

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*Focusing is a natural way of being with our own experience, patiently, until it becomes more clear.

Unbeknownst to most clients, psychotherapy remains governed by many theories and boundary ‘rules’, the actual purpose of which may be to protect the therapist from his or her own anxiety . In this short piece, an existential therapist uses Focusing to attempt to remain open to the difficult experience of being with a dying client. Through this example of his work in an acute hospital setting, Greg suggests that Focusing can be a crucial aspect of redefining therapy as a human relationship rather than an expert one.

The medical and nursing team called me to meet Loyola, a patient who was refusing to accept her terminal diagnosis and return home. Walking onto the ward I became aware of a nervous feeling in my stomach… (more…)

~Written by Jane Carpenter

Once upon a time there was a wonderful little girl, sensitive, intelligent, gifted. She was so sensitive that it was easy for her to see words that weren’t spoken. Words that other people did not speak swirled through the air but ended up inside of her.

When she was not very old, and couldn’t even describe it with words, she noticed that there was a shadow on her father.

When she grew old enough to express the feelings (though only in her own quiet little mind), these were her words: “I am not sure that my father loves me. Sometimes he seems to love me. But I’m not sure that he REALLY loves me. He is so far away. His eyes are heavy and sometimes when he looks at me it’s as if he doesn’t even see me, or he sees me from a long distance. I think his smile looks so watered down because it has to travel so far to come from him to me.”

The shadow hovered around her father and around the little girl, like a drooping cold ghost. The shadow frightened her. She was only a little child, even though she was very bright and had many gifts. She needed her father to love her and take care of her. She was, after all, still a little girl.

But she loved her father with all her ardent heart.

She decided that the shadow must be her own fault. She thought that maybe she was not good enough. She thought that she could fix the shadow by being good enough—by being perfect.

Inside her ardent little heart, she decided, “I’m going to be good enough. I must be perfect, so my Daddy will really love me.”

She was a determined little creature. And she began to try, very hard, to be perfect. Now she started to collect the shadow moments, little pieces of her Daddy’s sadness that she picked up neatly and slipped into a bag that she carried on her back. Her bag got heavier and heavier, but she never noticed. She was too busy on her second project—turning her imperfections into rocks.

She tried very hard. And she was a very good little girl. But she was never perfect. She did not know that it is impossible for people to be perfect. She thought that if she tried hard enough, she could be perfect. And then her Daddy would love her. And then the shadow would go away, and the sun would always shine.

Every time the little girl made a mistake, it made her very sad. “You are not good enough! You have failed, you bad little girl!” she told herself. Every time she failed she would feel sad, and frustrated, and angry. And every time she made a mistake, the memory of how she had not been perfect would become a little rock. She put these rocks into her apron pocket, which soon became full. Then she started piling the rocks up around her.

The little girl grew up into a gifted and sensitive but sometimes sad and quiet little woman. And then one day Lil woke up and realized that her life was full of rocks, piles and piles of them, heaped all around her; and some of these rocks had been there for years. The rocks had grown into a big pile that shut out the sun. Lil didn’t like the rocks, but she kept on making them. She kept on trying to be perfect.

One day Lil discovered a Light coming through a crack in one of the piles of rocks. She was curious, and so she pulled at the rocks and opened the crack wider.

Out stepped a Guide. A Shining Being, who became her best friend. The Shining One loved her so much that when the He was around, the shadow lost its power and became only a silly little ghost.

One day her Friend, the Shining Being, said to her that it was time to put down the rocks.

“I’d like to but I don’t know how,” Lil said.

By now she had more than rocks—she had rules. She had rules for how to live every aspect of her life. She even had rules for the right way to make new rules! The one thing she didn’t have was the ability to handle change well. It is difficult to handle change when you are spending your life keeping all your piles of rocks from tipping over!

So Lil kept on making new rocks, day in and day out. That was all Lil knew how to do.

Then one night, under the stars, her Shining Being took her to a hilltop overlooking a village. They looked into a wonderful valley below. The valley, Lil knew, was her life. She saw for the first time how beautiful the valley was. But everywhere she looked, the valley was cluttered up with piles of old, dusty rocks.

“You will never be perfect!” her Shining Being said. “Let go of this perfectionism. There is no point in making all of these rocks!”

Lil listened . . . and cried . . . And listened some more.

“I don’t know how to stop,” Lil said. “I don’t even know why I do this—I just do it.”

“You and I are going on a journey,” the Shining Being said. “We are going into your past. There is something there for you to learn.”

So the Shining Being took Big Lil to a Wise Woman.

With the Wise Woman’s guidance, and the Shining Being to hold her hand, Big Lil felt brave and strong.

With the Wise Woman listening, and under the loving guidance of the Shining Being, Big Lil closed her eyes and went inside herself, inside her memories, back to when she was very small, and with her father. “There is a shadow on my father!” she told the Wise Woman, wonderingly. “It’s cold and clammy and it’s full of sadness.”

“Let’s heal it,” the Wise Woman said.

But Big Lil shook her head. “I can’t. It’s six feet high and heavy—and blank. I don’t understand it. It’s just very large, and very sad.”

“Is it possible,” the Wise Woman suggested, very gently, “that the shadow does not belong to you?”

”What do you mean?” Big Lil asked. “It’s in my memory—isn’t it mine?”

Then the Wise Woman explained that there were things called legacy burdens. Sometimes people can take on feelings or burdens that are not their own, that belong to someone else. “People can’t heal legacy burdens because they don’t own them,” she explained.

And then she asked, “This sadness. Is it yours, or does it belong to someone else?”

And instantly Big Lil knew the truth. “It belongs to my Dad,” Big Lil said with wonder. “It’s his sadness. He was so often sad. I must have taken it on when I was very little.”

“Then you must send it back to him for healing,” the Wise Woman said. “You cannot heal it because it doesn’t belong to you.”

So, very lovingly, Little Lil and her Shining Being build a rocket ship. And Little Lil emptied all the scraps of shadow out of her pockets and picked up all the pieces of shadow that were lying around her in her valley. She packed them all into a box which she then placed inside the rocket ship, along with a nice little loving note. She said goodbye to the shadow. Then with one wave of his hand her Shining Being lit the rocket and sent the rocket ship flying up into the sky and off towards heaven. For her father had died and was now safe in heaven, and would surely know, by now, how to handle the shadow.

Little Lil noticed right away, the minute the rocket ship left, how the sun shone more brightly! The sadness was gone! The shadow was no more.

But as Little Lil looked around her, she still saw heaps and heaps of old rocks.

Sitting in the Wise Woman’s office, Big Lil thought about the rocks—and she understood. “After I grew up, I realized that my father struggled all his life with anxiety,” she said. “I must have seen his anxiety, when I was very little. I thought it was my fault. I thought that if I was perfect, I could fix him, and make him love me. But now I see that it didn’t have anything to do with me at all. The shadow was his own sadness. And I took it upon myself, because I loved him. And I tried to fix it, by being perfect. But no one can be perfect. And I never needed to be perfect, in the first place. I’m fine, just the way I am! How much of my life I have wasted with this rigidity!”

Right then and there, Lil decided to stop making rocks. But she didn’t know what to do with all the rocks she already had piled around her.

So her Shining One got a bulldozer and knocked down all the rock piles, then turned the rocks into fine gravel, which Lil smoothed out with a rake. Together Lil and her Shining One turned the gravel into a Japanese garden, full of serenity and peace. At the center of the garden her Shining One put a statue of a beautiful woman. The statue is a woman dancing, spinning in a circle, arms flung wide, head back, smiling with joy.

Her Shining One said, “This statue is here as a reminder to you. Instead of making rocks, you are to DANCE. Leave the making of rocks to the earth, to volcanoes, to seismic tides. Let yourself be the dancer you truly are, the dancer who is inside you, just waiting to come out.”

And Lil threw her head back with sheer delight and laughed out loud. She jumped and kicked her heels together, three feet off the ground. She floated through the air like a feather.

Lil is still dancing—and dancing beats making rocks, any day.

THE END

©Copyright 2007 Jane Carpenter. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. If you’d like to comment on Jane’s story, she has given us permission to accept comments here. All comments are moderated.

Dear GoodTherapy.org Member’s and visitors to our site,

The GoodTherapy.org Team is pleased to announce the opening of the Healing Story Collection. This Collection is a project we started about 3 years ago to collect and share stories about the healing process experienced during psychotherapy. Over this time we’ve collected some beautiful stories and poems about healing. Every month we will be featuring and presenting one of these stories in our collection. We hope these stories will inspire us all to open our hearts, to witness the spiritual and mystical depths of psychotherapy, and learn experientially about the psychotherapeutic process.

Every month when we introduce a new story we will announce it here on the GoodTherapy.org blog. If you’d like to receive an email when we feature a new story or make any update to our blog: click here to subscribe.

Click here to visit the GoodTherapy.org Healing Story Collection

Written by Jeanine Austin, Ph.D.

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It is difficult when we find ourselves dealing with a situation that we would never want consciously to create. These days, when many believe that we create our total reality, we may feel guilty if our life seems to contain aspects in it which are untoward. Whether we have stubbed our toe or are facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, we may wonder why these unpleasant elements have manifested in our lives. Did we create this? Are we vibrationally unfit?

With the popularity of the movie “The Secret”, which is about the Law of Attraction (L.o.A.), we may be tempted to blame ourselves or others when certain things have manifested in one’s life. While the Law of Attraction does have its place in the scheme of our life, it is just one of many life laws. We may unconsciously use blame as a way to distance ourselves from others who are suffering. Some may even think or actually say to sufferers, “Well, you manifested that”. Ester and Jerry Hicks (Abraham) who first formally began discussing the Law of Attraction would never wish that the Law of Attraction concept be utilized to rationalize callousness or unkindness. While we want to be aware of the power we have in attracting into our lives the elements that we wish for, ultimately attracting what we want and becoming more actualized beings through contrast is also a powerful force. Most of us will relate to the seemingly paradoxical force of creating and becoming through contrast. Some metaphysicians believe that we may have asked before our birth that we be in challenging contrasting roles so that we may have opportunities to work through karma and/or to “get off the karmic wheel” altogether through the force of challenge. This idea is similar to that of a body builder who pushes her muscles against the contrasting force of weight encouraging her muscles to grow bigger and stronger. Most of us know that when we work through difficulties, we have the opportunity to become more compassionate, stronger, smarter and more actualized beings… (more…)

Written by Jeffrey Chernin, Ph.D., LMFT

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When you’re in a vicious cycle, you do something which causes you to feel bad. Feeling bad can lead to poor self-care, which can lead to wanting to get away from the bad feelings that result, which can cause you to do things that make you feel worse, and so on. This cycle lead to an ongoing chain of unhealthy choices and behaviors.

How do you overcome this type of ingrained pattern? The Adaptive Spiral, an idea which developed organically through my practice, is a new way for you to think about growth, especially in regard to overcoming a vicious cycle.

The chain starts when certain “coping strategies” (actions and perceptions) that got you through the minefields of childhood are left unchecked. These strategies go from being adaptive in childhood to maladaptive as an adult, often locking you into unsatisfying relationships and frustrating patterns. Let’s turn to elements of the spiral and see how each one can help you to overcome old patterns.

Elements of the Adaptive Spiral

Growth along the spiral includes visiting the same places but at deeper levels of awareness, new types of understanding, and different perspectives. Since growth doesn’t exist in a straight line, it also includes steps forward as well as back.

The seven elements of the adaptive spiral are: (more…)

Written by John Gerson, Ph.D.

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The scenario of one spouse recognizing that therapy might be useful to look at a troubled relationship while the other is resistant has several possible explanations.

It may be that your partner may be too anxious as a product of interpreting your request for counseling as a sign that the relationship is in serious danger, and may only have the strength to defend against the anxiety by denial and non-participation. Your partner may also feel too threatened by the notion that he or she is to blame for your relationship difficulties, and visualizes a therapy session as one in which you persuade the therapist of this unilateral conception. The fear here is of you being the complaining, “righteous” partner who co-opts the therapist in a biased alliance against him or her. In addition, your resistant partner may not feel as competent to present his or her case to the therapist as you might, since after all, you are fueled by pain and indignation of one kind or another. Again, for this mate, refusing to go to therapy is a way to reduce anxiety, at least short-term.

If you find yourself in this situation,… (more…)

GoodTherapy.org recently updated its list of psychotherapy approaches and its list of concerns addressed. In response we received a small handful of emails from some thoughtful members with concerns about our lists: (more…)