Blogging on Good Therapy

Written by Connie Miller MS, LPC, NCC, TEP

Today there is a universal spiritual movement in the field of psychology that cannot be ignored. The awareness of mystical experiences is becoming more and more common. As various holistic healing practices become more accepted, the trend is to integrate psychology with other methods of healing.

In twelve-step programs, people heal through the telling and sharing of their own stories. It is through the sharing of the trauma and pain and the subsequent healing that people form common bonds that unite them. Then, to get beyond that connection of pain, they need to go further by sharing their soulful moments, their hopes, and their dreams. This requires re-establishing a relationship with their creativity and, through their higher awareness, connecting with others on a spiritual level.

During my practice, which has focused on co-dependency and addictive family systems, I have found that one of the most difficult tasks for a counselor during a client’s healing process is to break the bond of abuse. It is difficult to teach a client to open his heart to experience love so that he might be able to move on to live in a loving, healthy relationships, doing meaningful creative work. Souldrama® provides a technique to move these clients past resistance.

Imagine a gardener preparing the soil for planting, carefully erecting fences to keep away trespassers. The gardener continually turns over the soil, preparing it but never planting the seeds. Thus, the garden is ready, but the seeds are never planted. The seeds are our creativity - our life’s purpose - the part of our soul that needs nourishing and growth. In the codependents’ recovery process, the missing piece…the planting of the seeds…is forward movement with the energy of joy.

A great deal of study in psychology has been done so that a client might understand the scars and abuses of childhood and to help clients heal and forgive those responsible for their wounding. Not enough attention has been paid to vision: vision to moving forward and living lives of joy and purpose. When one nurtures one’s soul, one has a vision for themselves and for the world as a whole. Seeing how they are all connected to each other and to God, they can then connect on a divine level. After a certain point in therapy with the co-dependent, vision seems to be more powerful in the recovery process than the clearing away the baggage from past scars. A client without vision cannot move forward toward complete recovery. Many clients lose enthusiasm for life – the will to live it joyfully and creatively, and the passion for interests and projects. Many have lost the ability to appreciate the positives in life and, more importantly, have lost a commitment to action. Complete recovery needs to be of the body, mind and spirit. It involves controlling addictions, removing abuses, learning new behaviors, and putting vision into life.

Co-dependency, as I define it, is an absence of relationship with the self. When one learns to look outside themselves for validation, one distances from one’s own soul. The future client, at a very early age, begins to respond to the parents “control drama” or energy and learns to read that energy non-verbally assuming a response, which allows them to feel safe in a dysfunctional and/or addictive family system. Their response becomes either one of or a mixture of the following: victim, aggressor or one who is passive-aggressive. They depend on another’s energy in order to survive and lose themselves, mistakenly experiencing this “connection” or bond with their primary caregivers as love.

In the dysfunctional family system, love and attention are so inconsistent, that the child becomes addicted to that inconsistency. Love means being addicted to waiting for the feelings of love that comes from outside oneself; that is addicted to the potential of love.

When one is co-dependent, one is addicted to this potential. One is always looking outside oneself for validation to learn how to act or feel. Since co-dependency is an absence of relationship with the self, one is always seeking to attach to another person or thing. The addiction becomes one of potential because one never can find the perfect other. With eating disorders, there is a strong addiction to the image of who one could be if that extra weight were lost. In dysfunctional relationships, it is about who the other person could be if he would just stop drinking, stop drugging and so forth. Within oneself, it is about “who I could be if I would just…” This addiction to potential stops one from feeling true self-love. The negative inner voice is so strong that even after family of origin issues are resolved, the person fails to move forward to a higher purpose. Codependents are addicted to their own potential and, instead of moving forward, they engage in self-sabotaging behavior. They learn that in order to “be” or to exist, they must first “do” something, in order to “get” love. Their energy comes from an addiction to outside problems as opposed to energy drawn from within created by living a life full of purpose. Often that is why addiction is often called a spiritual calling, but one that goes to the wrong address.

When love and attention are shown in this family system, it is often negative and associated with abuse. Separation from the family is difficult because the child is worried for its own safety and security and often cannot complete this necessary stage of separation. If one is always focused on what one needs to survive in a family, one cannot focus on one’s own personal development. spontaneity, creativity and openness – attributes of the spiritual self- are stifled.

The codependent’s bond or addiction to potential is difficult to break since it is experienced internally as the source of self-love and later becomes the cause of self-defeating behavior. Codependents believe they are not allowed to have, or do not deserve to have, sufficient love or to experience it too long. They are actually frightened when experiencing intimacy. Teaching intimacy can only be accomplished in a consistent loving atmosphere or, if the clients are advanced enough, within the framework of a regular group which imitates the dynamics of a healthy family system. I believe that one of the best tools, and one that has proven to be the most effective for this task, has been experiential therapy and psychodrama, with all members of the group participating. Indeed, dysfunctional roles tend to exist for sometime even after they have outlived their usefulness. These roles remain stubbornly functional. The client from this population is often fiercely loyal but mainly only to the dysfunction of the family. Never having had an identity, their dysfunction becomes their identity. Clients are often reluctant to give up their old “label” even after many years of counseling. Their diagnosis becomes their reality and their lifestyle. Instead of living a life of joy, life continues to be one problem after another. ( Miller 2000)

When people are in difficulty, they think of the future in terms of its problems rather than what they want from it. Questions involving the future often can cause difficulty for protagonists because they generally have not considered what their lives would be like if their problems were resolved. If clients from dysfunctional family systems think that every problem requires an explanation in order for it to be resolved, the search for explanations severely limits the client’s forward movement. This is especially true if they believe that explanations need to be difficult and problematic. Clients, who continually get their energy from problems, keep creating problems to experience this energy, thus severely limit their thinking and creativity. This keeps one from living in the present and tuned into the moment. Living in the present allows us to experience that oneness with soul-energy. If we live creatively, fulfilling our soul’s purpose, we can connect to that positive, loving soul energy and be invested with the process of life, not the outcome.

A client from a dysfunctional family system views their higher power as being outside, not within, themselves, and they have developed internalized object relationships with the spiritual beings in their lives. Many of these relationships have become contaminated with residuals of childhood traumas and misunderstandings. Spirituality is a state of “being” not “getting” and it is important for the client to develop a relationship with that higher self.

According to many of my clients, closeness to God was felt only when a problem existed and they needed to ask for help or forgiveness. Unfortunately, the only time many clients feel connected to God is when a problem exists and they need to ask for help or forgiveness. Is it any wonder that one continues to create problems in order to feel connected to God? Thus, even the relationship with God is based on problems, not joy. This is not to discount our wounds or our feelings, but when one remains “stuck” for many years and is unable to move forward, a new therapeutic tool is needed. Our energy needs to come from joy and a daily connection of living in the present, not from problems.

When one lives on purpose, one learns they must only “be”. The “being” then becomes manifested in their “doing” and hence the “getting”. If we introduce more spirituality into the healing process, the attachment to self becomes easier. The client attaches himself to the divine or higher self and thus to their life purpose. Spirituality is the activity of developing a relationship with one’s Higher Power. It’s not “getting” something but a state of being in relationship with. Stories that continually repeat themselves are known as dominant narratives-persistent narratives that constrain peoples’ actions and options. Such stories limit one’s ability to see situations from other perspectives, filtering out any positive information that would contradict their beliefs. When a client holds a belief formulated long ago in order to stay safe in a dysfunctional family system, he is more unconsciously invested in making himself right rather than happy.

Co-dependents have had many levels of negative socialization and have developed symptoms of rage and self-destructive responses in direct proportion to the negative causal factors in their life. The giving and receiving of attention was primarily negative. After the action-oriented therapeutic work of the technique of psychodrama, the client experiences catharsis and insight into an emotional problem. With the addictive population, inner monodramas are forever present. Because this population is usually highly verbal, they repeatedly process the same side of an issue in what becomes an internal dialogue disorder. It’s my belief that the negative voice is often too strong to allow clients to get through this process.

There is now the need to create techniques that are incompatible with the forces such as feelings of fear, rage, anger, pain and sadness that maintain dysfunctional roles. With many clients, self-hate is so great, movement is not possible. Trust is limited because one feels so alone and fearful.
Indeed, feeling victimized is highly susceptible to the tendency of passive entitlement allowing one to be entitled to extra privileges especially those associated with the “sick” role, further preventing one to move forward in their recovery.

MOVING FORWARD

Our creativity holds the key to our life dream, purpose or calling. However, we place many obstacles between our creative gifts and ourselves. Creativity is the ability to manifest what has real meaning and purpose for us, our soul’s mission. When creativity is shut down in childhood in order to stay safe, we remain in jobs and relationships that we have outgrown, that no longer serve us. When we learn to listen to the inner voice of our own spirit as opposed to the internalized critical voice of our parents, we are able to follow the voice that leads us toward fulfilled, creative lives. All the signals from that spiritual or soul voice are for the purpose of giving us back our lives as creators. That spiritual voice is difficult to hear if you are struggling with learned beliefs, trying to control the outcome of situations and enmeshed in expectations of the way things “should” turn out.

People are living longer today and they often begin to seek therapy in the latter part of their lives. It becomes a time to discover the soul’s purpose and to live a life full of joy, transformation and fulfillment. This is the time to pursue soul work and to take our energy from that internal divine joy. When we do so, the shift becomes one of true purpose, intimacy and joy: from competition to intimacy and from ambition to creativity.

Just as recovery from family of origin issues often cannot be accomplished without help, the process of restoring one’s creativity often cannot be done alone. The process of Souldrama® in small groups is designed and can encourage and restore one’s creativity thus making it possible for one to fulfill life’s dreams or, at a minimum, to incorporate some of those dreams into one’s life.

Curiously, the things we lacked in childhood can become the gifts we are able to give others, skills that prepare us for our life’s work. Gifts that we can compassionately give to others often come from what we lacked as children, from our wounds. We often are unable to integrate these gifts into our own heart because we did not accept the donor or how the gifts were given. We gladly give away our gifts to others as fast as we can, without ever accepting them first into our own hearts. The only way to accept them is to open our hearts through forgiveness. We may spend years refusing to forgive and, therefore, do not use the gifts bestowed by our parents, gifts that could lead us to our higher purpose Interestingly enough, what we choose as our higher purpose is often connected to the time when we felt the most loved.

After years of therapy, many clients remain stuck, afraid to take further risks, “waiting” for something to happen. Today too much needs to be defined as co-dependency, neurosis or abuses and the mystery of the healing process is forgotten. Mystery cannot be defined. When a client learns to connect to the divine and to use “soul” as a verb, to retrieve the soul lost as a child, he regains a connection to life. One learns to live life in the moment, giving attention to living in the present with total joy.
The journey toward spirituality represents the quest to unite one’s inner and outer world, to provide meaning and purpose to one’s life. The search, and consequent realization, provides an individual with a sense of alignment and order or a spiritual cohesiveness, which instills a sense of rightness and well-being. It is a sense of wholeness, a oneness with who we are and an awareness of how we fit with our external environment.

I define spirituality as your personal relationship with a “Ultimate Source of All Being”, some call this entity God. Whatever we choose to call this source, most importantly what matters is that this source is one that is seen as one that is incredibly loving. It is the constant goal of Souldrama to help one to define their relationship to a higher power and thus to themselves as one that is all loving-not based on the internalized image of their parents or other authority figures.

Souldrama provides us with an action-oriented multidisciplinary group technique of psychotherapy to access our spiritual intelligence. As a therapeutic group action model that leads participants through six sequential stages of spiritual development with the goal of aligning the ego and soul. It can help group members move past resistance to recognize and move on to their higher purpose, therefore creating spiritually intelligent leadership.

Psychodramatically based, it is intended to be used as multi disciplinary training system that combines the mind, body and spirit to create a therapeutic energy within a group process to foster spontaneity and creativity. Souldrama allows the soul to become a co-creator in a person’s life and this is the soul’s mission to co: create.

What is important here, is that Souldrama uses the energy of spirituality and the group to create an action method to align the ego and soul. Energy always follows action. Energy is always moving wanting to clear us and connect us to that divine force-the healing energy of love and compassion . Our need to talk, interact and simply be with each other is part of our development. Group psychotherapy is the most viable method for initiating, improving and evaluating connections. Adding action techniques is a dramatic way to alter the process of a group. It focuses the consciousness of the members on their interactions, which in turn channels and enhances the energy within a group, evaluating connections.

The major contribution action methods bring to the interactive group psychotherapy process is consciousness. Consciousness is no small matter. It enhances our interactions by making them intentional. When action is added to the group it dissolves passivity. Acting on thoughts and feelings gives greater visibility to our inner world and greater energy to our worlds, action also helps clarify our thoughts and feeling. When we act, we see our intentions more clearly than when we use only words or only reflect on our thought and feelings. (Miller 2007).

When you have faith, you have joy and you move forward. We learn to heed the voice of spirit that is quiet and non-demanding as opposed to the voice of fear that is loud and threatening. We learn that it is not the material world that causes things to happen but our awareness of our divine inner reality. When we are in tune with the voice of spirit, with intuition and creativity, we realize that we are always the creators of our own lives because we come from a center of higher awareness. We need to begin to make a living not a dying. Our work needs to become our higher purpose, our ministry performed from love, joy and spontaneity. We need to learn that the receiving comes from our “being” which later becomes manifest in our “doing”, which is our work or our higher purpose. We need to understand that we do not need to “do” anything in order to be.

Our natural state is one of complete peace and joy. When we are on our soul’s purpose, we stop defending and begin to truly live. One of our most important relationships is with the soul. When you lose yourself, you lose the attributes of spontaneity, creativity and openness, the attributes of the spiritual self. Instead of damaging the soul with negative, fearful thinking, we must learn to use all of our experiences to nourish the soul and to live our dreams. When you spend your life doing what you love, you are nourishing the soul. When you listen to your inner callings, you practice the art of self-love. There is more than enough left for other people. This is the direct opposite of co-dependency.

Spirituality is missing when love of life is absent. One way to nourish the soul is living and thoroughly enjoying your life’s work. Connecting to why you are doing what you do is one way to make life more soulful. Live one day at a time; enjoy each minute doing meaningful work. Once you choose to make each moment as happy as you can, you become soulful. When you do work that you love, you are authentic. You are joyous and involved in the process of life.

When one lives life with gratitude, little acts of love and kindness become more important than negativity and anger. Participation in spiritual groups is important in order to focus on what is right with your life. One’s perception of life will change as a result of the supportive energy of others.

We need more methods to nourish our souls, rather than more analytical thinking. Our soul is ever present and the connection to inner peace is only a moment away. Feelings of forgiveness follow souldrama when we realize that now is the only moment we have. Souldrama helps us enter into the here and now, and can free us from our own negativity.

When one lives life with gratitude, little acts of love and kindness become more important than negativity and anger. Participation in spiritual groups is important in order to focus on what is right with your life. One’s perception of life will change as a result of the supportive energy of others. The spiritual journey is not in the seeking but in the being. We heal because of who we are and not what we do.

Souldrama® was developed by Connie Miller, Master of Science ,MS, Licensed Professional Counselor, LPC, Nationally Certified Counselor NCC, Trainer, Educator and Practitioner of Psychodrama TEP. in 1997 and trademarked in 1999 as a therapeutic tool created for use as an adjunct to psychodrama and designed to move clients from co-dependency to co-creativity. Connie is the founder of the International Institute of Souldrama and also the owner of the Spring Lake Heights Counseling Center, in New Jersey. Connie leads and trains groups for professionals in action methods, sociometry and psychodrama and also trains the staff at Seabrook House in southern New Jersey. She is a Trainer, Educator, Practitioner of Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy. Connie has developed a new model to access our spiritual intelligence that incorporates psychodrama, group psychotherapy, the creative arts, energy work and sociometry. By incorporating spirituality and action methods into the psychological process to help a client access their spiritual intelligence, Souldrama helps clients to move past resistance to remove the blocks that stop one from moving forward onto their higher purpose by aligning the ego and soul. She has presented her Souldrama workshops nationally and internationally including at numerous conferences. Additionally, she is responsible for bringing the technique of Souldrama to the American Counseling Association where she is a member of ASGW, ACC, ASERVIC and has brought action techniques including the process of Souldrama to the National Board of Certified Counselors as well as to the field of addictions. Connie has run trainings in Souldrama for the past nine years in Mexico, Portugal, Greece and in England, Brazil and presently runs her own training group in NJ.

Her book Souldrama, a Journey into the Heart of God has recently been published in Brazil in Portuguese. Routledge press includes her chapter “Psychodrama, Spirituality and Souldrama” in the book New Advances in Psychodrama to be published May 2007. Her article, Souldrama: Its Techniques and Applications has been published by the International Journal of Action Methods, Winter 2000 and more recently, the Korean Journal of Psychodrama and Group Psychotherapy has published her article, “Souldrama: a psychotherapeutic technique to access spiritual intelligence.” All workshops and trainings offer CEUs for NCCs as well as training hours for the American Board of Examiners.

References

Miller, C. (2000). The technique of Souldrama and its applications. The International Journal of action methods, 52, (no 4), 173-186.Haworth Press

Miller, C. (2004) Souldrama: a journey into the heart of God. Self published. NJ 3rd edition. 978-1-4116-9652-5 Copyright lulu

Miller, C (2007) Psychodrama: Advances in Theory and Practice Editor(s) - C Baim, J Burmeister, M Maciel Series: Advancing Theory in Therapy: Psychodrama, Spirituality and Souldrama pp 189-200Routledge: 15/05/2007

Miller, C (2007) The Korean Association for Psychodrama & Sociodrama; Volume 10 Number One pp 45-80.
Souldrama®: A Therapeutic Action Model to Create Spiritually Intelligent Leadership.

Miller, C. (2007)Souldrama:A terapia da alma: Editora Agora; Sao Paulo, Brazil

©Copyright 2007 Connie Miller MS, LPC, NCC, TEP. 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.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 12th, 2007 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Psychotherapy: Approaches, Models, & Methods, Psychotherapy: Specific Issues Treated and Changes Made. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.