Blogging on Good Therapy

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

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For a long time I have experimented with various visualizations with regard to breathing. Usually these involve visualizing something associated with inhalation, such as peace, and something else associated with exhalation, such as joy. For the past few months I have settled on the concept/image of grace on inhalation, and love on exhalation. I have refrained from looking up the dictionary definition of “grace,” because it is not the one I am using and I don’t want to confuse myself before I finish writing this. I am using the vague idea of grace that comes from my childhood exposure to religion, primarily Christianity. From that exposure I have come to think of grace as something like divine loving benevolence that is always available for the asking, sort of the way oxygen is available if one inhales. That I might inhale grace and convert it to something like human love seems but a small leap of faith. (more…)

By Reverend Doctor Silvia R. Behrend

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So many of us understand counseling to be an art, a marriage of knowledge and a certain ability to use that knowledge elegantly, incorporating intuition and spirituality. In my experience as a minister offering counseling and as a chaplain in a hospital, I have found that there is another dimension to the “art” of counseling: the intentional creative process coupled with the understandings of self-psychology provide a transformational template that has love and compassion at its center.

In my work as a minister and as a counselor in private practice, I make no distinction between the words soul and self. I use them interchangeably; either word connotes the “essence” of the human being. The work of the self or soul is to become whole, being born and being human already means that the essential ‘isness’ is compromised simply by being in the world.

I have found that one way to help the soul reach toward wholeness is to engage it on the slant. That is: rather that directly confront the ‘issues’, ‘wounds’ and ‘trauma’ experienced by the soul, the cut-off elements of the soul can be enticed into integration. This is possible through the use of the arts. In my particular experience, I have used the art of stone carving to illustrate that the soul can emerge from hiding in a loving, compassionate and non-pathological manner.

My work in this area has been formed by the understandings of self-psychology and my own experience in creating art as well as facilitating that process for others. I would like to articulate a simplified version of the theory of Self-psychology Then, using my student’s own experience, I will demonstrate how engaging in creating art, in this case, stone carvings, allowed them to see themselves differently and integrate the cut-off parts of themselves with love and compassion. (more…)

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

Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile

Intimacy refers to being seen or known. One can be seen or known by oneself, by another being (human or otherwise) or by God. Individual psychotherapy usually focuses on knowing oneself better, which is to say becoming more intimate with one’s self. The usual term for this process is “insight.” Group psychotherapy addresses being better known by others, which of course results in greater knowing of oneself in the process. This is the place where the term “intimacy” is most commonly used. Relationships with non-humans in which one comes to be known can be as mundane as a relationship with a pet dog or cat and as elaborate as encounters with spirit guides in all kinds of animal forms while engaging in shamanic journeying. Finally one may experience being known by God, or the Sacred Mystery, through spiritual practices such as prayer and meditation. Of course many would assume that one does not really reveal oneself to God through such practices, since it is assumed that God already knows everything; the experience of being known by God is really just a result of coming to know oneself better through spiritual practices. (more…)

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

Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile.

A few years ago I was sitting down to begin one of my weekly therapy groups when I had a slight epiphany. I realized many other therapists in all sorts of places were going to be doing the same thing that day, and I felt a sense of connection with them as we all did our best to bring healing to ourselves and our clients. About a year ago, while meditating and praying outdoors at dawn, I had a similar experience. This time it was more explicitly spiritual, as I had the awareness that all around the word there were many others joining me in that very moment, doing our best to invoke and/or join The Divine in the healing of our planet. I shared these experiences with the members of two groups of which I have long been a member—The American Academy of Psychotherapists, a group which believes that the healing and growth of the client is inextricably intertwined with the healing and growth of the therapist, and the Earthtribe, a group that integrates ancient nature-based spirituality with modern psychotherapy. Both groups emphasize direct experience over cognitive understanding. In the descriptions of my experiences as I shared them with these two groups I coined the term “The Unseen Sangha.” (more…)

by Lisa Dale Miller, LMFT

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As a long term yogic and vipassana meditator, and a mindfulness-based psychotherapist who regularly teaches meditation practices to my patients, I find the growth of mindfulness as a clinical intervention very timely. Last year, I attended two conferences focused on the use of mindfulness as a clinical intervention: “Meditation and Psychotherapy” at Harvard Medical School and “Mindfulness and Psychotherapy” at UCLA.

Interestingly, the conference at Harvard featured a greater percentage of presenters who do not use meditation as an intervention in their clinical work. For them, mindfulness is a teachable skill set, extrapolated from a way of viewing life gained from sustained Buddhist meditation practices. These presenters included: Steven Hayes, founder of ACT, Lizbeth Roemer, U Mass GAD researcher and clinician, Tal Ben-Shahar, Harvard Lecturer on Positive Psychology, and Jayme Shorin, LICSW, sensorimotor trainer. The fact that the organizers of the Harvard conference felt it necessary to devote over half of the presentation time to methodologies that do not include meditation was, for me, significant.

Though this might be expected at a “Mindfulness and Psychotherapy” conference, in fact the UCLA conference featured more presenters discussing the use of meditation and compassion practices as a clinical intervention. These presenters included: Thich Nhat Hahn, Vietnamese Buddhist monk and meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Harriett Kimble Wrye, and Trudy Goodman, all psychologists and meditation teachers, and Dr. Daniel Siegel & Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar presenting the neurobiology of meditation. (more…)

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

Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile
There are three basic models for conceptualizing the process of psychotherapy: implanting something new in the client that is missing (deficiency model), changing or removing something problematic that is already present (pathology model), or nurturing the unfolding of some potential wholeness that is inherent in each human (spiritual model). While each model captures some of what might need to go on in psychotherapy at any given moment, the spiritual model is for me the most interesting and comprehensive.

Each of these three models of psychotherapy also suggests a particular role for the therapist. In the deficiency model the therapist is something like a dietary supplement for the psyche, providing something not already present and not readily available in the usually daily intake of psychological experience. The pathology model makes the therapist something between a mechanic and a surgeon, removing something dysfunctional and possibly replacing it with something new that can be expected to function better. In the spiritual model the therapist works in manner of a midwife, seeking to eliminate obstacles to a natural process of the birthing of new awareness without claiming to create or control what emerges.

Each of these three models of psychotherapy has parallels in religious and spiritual traditions. The deficiency model corresponds to the belief that a person cannot be whole, spiritually mature, or loved by God unless he or she adopts a particular set of beliefs or joins a particular religious or spiritual group. The pathology model corresponds to the concept of original sin. The spiritual model addresses that Matthew Fox has lately been calling Original Blessing, and what Buddhists have for a long time referred to as Buddha Nature.

While any person’s psychotherapy might legitimately work from any one of these three models at a given point in time, the deficiency and pathology models must eventually yield to the spiritual model in any long-term therapy. It is not a question of nature versus nurture, but rather a question of how we nurture our clients’ inherent nature. The most fundamental way in which we do this is through the ongoing nurturing of our own nature, through our own psychotherapy, spiritual practices, and anything else we can find.

©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

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

Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile

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 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 Rainer Maria Kohler, JD

Growing up as a Catholic child and teenager in Germany some sixty years ago I learned about original sin.  I was told that I and every other human being inherited the mark of original sin from Adam and Eve because of their disobedience to God’s command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Actually, in German, original sin is called Erbsünde, which means “inherited sin”.  (An aside:  The word Erbsünde also contains the German word Erbse which means “pea”, and for many years of my childhood I visualized my original sin as a pea-sized growth on my soul.)  As a child I accepted what I was told, but as a teenager I could not comprehend why God would make me inherit a sin which I had not committed.  It seemed unfair:  Why should I be responsible for something over which I had had no control?

In my 20s and 30s, when I got married and had children, I began to question whether my original sin is a sin and how it could be original or inherited.  Over the years of trying to raise our children and living in a close relationship with my wife it dawned on me that I was engaging in the same hurtful behavior which I had observed in my parents, both as parents and as spouses, and which I had sworn I would never repeat.  How could this be happening?  Was this the long and large shadow of original sin?

It took me many more years and my intense immersion in the depth psychology of C. G. Jung before I began to understand that although this long shadow, which reaches down to me from my parents and from all of my ancestors, acts with the strength and mystery of magic power, it is in fact a natural and inevitable consequence of my human nature.  It is impossible for us to escape, more than just a little, the powerful patterns of perception, feeling and behavior which have evolved in humans during the millennia of the evolution of homo sapiens.  Although these human patterns appear to be similar to the animal instincts, they are not the same.  The instincts regulate the animals completely in all of their behavior, while our human patterns of perception, feeling and behavior leave us some room, albeit small, to make choices and decisions.  Even Adam and Eve already had a choice to eat or not to eat the fruit from the tree.  In the context of our discussion it does not matter whether these human patterns are “inherited” genetically or through unconscious imitation or both.  In either case they are transmitted so successfully and regularly that they seem to be ordained by divine decree.

The Catholic Church has it partially right, therefore, when it claims that there are inclinations and propensities in us, in each and every human being, which have been “inherited” from, or are “original to” our ancestors, all the way back to Adam and Eve who can be seen as the symbolic and original parents of homo sapiens.  But why should these inclinations and propensities be sinful? (more…)

Written by Joan Levy, LCSW

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Emotional Injuries Hide In Our Unconscious

Throughout our lifetime, most of us have in some significant way been wounded.  The physical wounds we can see.  Their solutions, if available to us, are fairly straightforward.  But those that take place in our minds and in our hearts are not so easy to see and are often stored out of touch, deep within our unconscious.  Those we do remember, we often avoid because it just hurts us too much.  Our culture supports this avoidance in the name of “denial”.
Even though we would like to learn, to grow and to heal, most often we end up feeling powerless, unable to break the patterns which repeatedly lead us to dissatisfaction and pain.  The more we try to run away from our pain, the faster our pain seems to catch up to us.

Pain Is A Warning Signal

Healing asks us to address our pain rather than avoid it.  Pain is a warning signal.–– A call for our attention.  We need to give our pain our attention.  As we explore what there is to learn from our situation and our interactions and as we investigate our thoughts and our feelings, we can begin to see the pain as a part of a dysfunctional pattern that has been repeating itself throughout our lives. (more…)

Written by Chris Hancock, LCSW

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Harry Stack Sullivan, M.D. (1892-1949) was the founder of the interpersonal theory of psychiatry. He is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking work with schizophrenics whom he compassionately called “the lonely ones” (Evans, 1996).  A brilliant, complicated, deeply empathic, often irascible intellectual pioneer, he was among the first to deviate from Freud’s structural orthodoxy of the time. Sullivan uniquely viewed human development as forming wholly within the context of culture and inseparable from the interference of anxiety with respect to various patterns and problems in living (i.e. psychopathology). (more…)

Written by Nancy Poitou, M.A., M.F.T., C.T.S.

There are several reasons why existential, religious and spiritual problems are important in psychotherapy. First it is important that therapists recognize that existential, religious and spiritual beliefs are at the foundation of individual, cultural, and societal frameworks of expression of internal and external experience. Whether the therapist or client recognizes it as an intregal part of life or not, conscious and unconscious beliefs about the nature of human existence and its meaning lie at the core of our relationships, values, ethics, morals, and how we act and interact in public and private life. (more…)

Written by Nancy Poitou, M.A., M.F.T., C.T.S.

In our fast paced society and culture that values youth, individuality, material things and accomplishments, more and more people hunger for meaning and connection to some larger purpose. This especially becomes important when dealing with life-changing events, confrontation with mortality or pain that is mental, emotional or physical in which an interpretation may be necessary that gives meaning to the event. This sets the stage for a “spiritual crisis,” where previously held beliefs are called into question. This is a common experience after a traumatic event where the unexpected has happened, whether a car accident, injury, being diagnosed with a life threatening illness, experiencing being the victim of a crime, the premature death of a loved one or having an unusual spiritual experience. A commonly held belief may be that bad things only happen to bad people, or these things only happen to someone else. When it happens to us the life changing event shatters a sense of safety in the world and creates conflict, confusion, disorientation or guilt. (more…)

Written by Nancy Poitou, M.A., M.F.T, C.T.S.

Unfortunately we do not have enough pronouns and saying he or she, or s/he is clumsy. In this article it may sound as though I am characterizing men and women in different ways. I want to be clear that the examples I use, men do this and women do that are only for ease of reading. Both sexes make the mistakes and do the behaviors I describe. I have chosen pronouns by which sex seems to lean toward that particular behavior more often.

As a relationship therapist I have made observations of the troubled relationships in my practice. Non-professionals do not get any training or education in relationships or parenting unless they seek it out or come to a therapist’s office when in crisis. Yet these are two of the most important roles in life. The only examples a person has in life is their parents and if those role models were not good, that means that people not only do not have an understanding but may be starting out in life with a misunderstanding of relationships. (more…)