Therapeutic View Quotes

To the desert go prophets and hermits; through desert go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

You cannot make yourself have a flashback, nor will you have one unless you are emotionally ready to remember something. Once remembered, the memory can help you to face more of the truth. You can then express your pent-up feelings about the memory and continue on your path to recovery. Think of the flashback as a clue to the next piece of work. No matter how painful, try to view it as a positive indication that you are now ready and willing to remember.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself. ”I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposefulness, infinitude. ”From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as a man.

Some people find that reading novels is very therapeutic precisely because it does allow one to view reality from an entirely different perspective.

There seems every reason to suppose that the therapeutic relationship is only one instance of interpersonal relations, and that the same lawfulness governs all such relationships. Thus it seems reasonable to hypothesize that if the parent creates with his child a psychological climate such as we have described, then the child will become more self-directing, socialized, and mature.

Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.

Robin Carhart-Harris’ theory of the entropic brain represents a promising elaboration on this general idea and a first stab at a unified theory of mental illness that helps explain all three of the disorders we’ve examined in these pages. A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes. Depression, anxiety, obsession and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it. On the spectrum he lays out in his entropic brain article, ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction and disorders of obsession all fall on the too much order end. Psychosis is on the entropy end of the spectrum which is why it probably doesn’t respond to psychedelic therapy. The therapeutic value of psychedelics, in Carhart-Harris’ view, lies in their ability to temporarily elevate entropy in the inflexible brain, jolting the system out of its default patterns. Carhart-Harris uses the metaphor of annealing from metallurgy: psychedelics introduce energy into the system, giving it the flexibility necessary for it to bend and so change.

Life vividly reveals itself in the therapeutic process—with its blind power and its tremendous capacity for destruction, but with its overbalancing thrust toward growth, if the opportunity for growth is provided.

As therapeutic points of view and practice gain general acceptance, more and more people find themselves disqualified, in effect, from the performance of adult responsibilities and become dependent on some form of medical authority.”[

Switches among identities occur in response to changes in emotional state or to environmental demands, resulting in another identity emerging to assume control. Because different identities have different roles, experiences, emotions, memories, and beliefs, the therapist is constantly contending with their competing points of view. Helping the identities to be aware of one another as legitimate parts of the self and to negotiate and resolve their conflicts is at the very core of the therapeutic process. It is countertherapeutic for the therapist to treat any alternate identity as if it were more “real” or more important than any other. Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision

What colonial psychiatrists did not understand was that the symptoms of mental illnesses are inevitably local. Most societies view emotional and physical sicknesses as a problem of the community that therefore demands a social rather than an individual therapeutic response.

I should like to point out one final characteristic of these individuals as they strive to discover and become themselves. It is that the individual seems to become more content to be a process rather than a product. When he enters the therapeutic relationship, the client is likely to wish to achieve some fixed state: he wants to reach the point where his problems are solved, or where he is effective in his work, or where his marriage is satisfactory. He tends, in the freedom of the therapeutic relationship to drop such fixed goals, and to accept a more satisfying realization that he is not a fixed entity, but a process of becoming.

The creative writing teacher was horrified at the thought that she was teaching a pack of insipient arsonists—or Lord of the Flies sociopaths. In fact, they were just boys. But, increasingly, in our schools and in our homes, everyday boyishness is seen as aberrational, toxic—a pathology in need of a cure. Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.

Moralistic therapeutic deists believe that God visits their world, not that they live in God’s world. They believe that God serves their agenda, helping them feel good about themselves along the way. God, in their view, demands nothing of them. Rather, He exists to help them in whatever way they wish. Moralistic therapeutic deism is not Christianity at all.

During her time at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington she had often become depressed and was hobbled by fatigue. In 1887, when she was twenty, she wrote in her diary, “Tears come without any provocation. Headache all day.” The school’s headmistress and founder, Sarah Porter, offered therapeutic counsel. “Cheer up,” she told Theodate. “Always be happy.” It did not work. The next year, in March 1888, her parents sent her to Philadelphia, to be examined and cared for by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a physician famous for treating patients, mainly women, suffering from neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Mitchell’s solution for Theodate was his then-famous “Rest Cure,” a period of forced inactivity lasting up to two months. “At first, and in some cases for four or five weeks, I do not permit the patient to sit up or to sew or write or read,” Mitchell wrote, in his book Fat and Blood. “The only action allowed is that needed to clean the teeth.” He forbade some patients from rolling over on their own, insisting they do so only with the help of a nurse. “In such cases I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounge at bedtime and sponged, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” For stubborn cases, he reserved mild electrical shock, delivered while the patient was in a filled bathtub. His method reflected his own dim view of women. In his book Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked, he wrote that women “would do far better if the brain were very lightly tasked.

The basic process of climbing a mountain was therapeutic, almost cathartic. There was the simple act of walking into the woods and away from the world. Then there was the climb itself, where the body worked: muscles flexed and released, lungs rose and fell, the heart beat. It was as if the complications in my life were breaking down and the only thing I cared about was the next place I'd put my foot or finding something to hold to pull myself up. After all that work to get to the summit came that views from the top. The failed Catholic in me saw it as a spiritual journey, much like the ones any holy man had made in leaving behind society. Christ, Buddha, Muhammad - they all did it, and they came back with clarity. For me the climb was my confession, working out the troubles of my past. Sitting on top was communion. On each hike I allowed myself to be pulled apart and then put back together again.

Any soul who’d go to their own burial is in need of a therapeutic kick to the angsty ectoplasm of their pity-party ass.” Cora considered a funeral from the deceased’s point of view. The tears, the mourning, the sweetly dishonest words of praise making the best of a life and its ending. While you the guest-of-honor stood by, unable to partake in comfort and farewell, only giving embraces not felt, whispering words not heard. God, it’d be torment to surpass the flames of hell.

The overarching principle of a therapeutic relationship is that therapists should be ever mindful of a variant of the Hippocratic oath and, to the degree possible, strive to "do no more harm" (Courtois, 2010). Complex trauma clients have already experienced considerable harm, much of it at the hands of other human beings. As a result of the ubiquitous processes of transference, attachment styles, and IWM [Internal working models], these clients often view the therapist's behavior and their relationship through the lens of their trauma-related negative interpersonal expectancies and unhealed emotional wounds and injuries. Therapists should not be surprised to be "guilty until proven innocent", not because clients with complex trauma histories are "unfair" or "unreasonable" but precisely the opposite - because the most realistic self-protective stance for them (given the fact that betrayal and harm have been more the rule than the exception) is to "distrust first and verify" (or to be hypervigilant) rather than to start with an expectation of safety and trustworthiness.

Suppose that, instead of limiting ‘Earth’ to the solid globe that we 20th century materialists define it as, the archaic ‘Earth’ was everything that lay on the plane of the ecliptic (the orbital plane of the earth around the sun, which we on Earth perceive as the path of the Sun in the sky). This extension of Earth out into the skv would make an Earth that was truly flat. Like the physical Earth the continents of this ‘Greater Earth’ would still be surrounded by water, but the water would be a mighty ocean which stretched out into space to lap at the feet of the stars. Above this ‘Earth’ would be ‘heaven,’ and below it would be the ‘underworld.’ Those stars which disappear from view (‘die’) later reappear (are ‘reborn,’ or released from Hades). * As soon as we accept these suppositions into our world-view, our frame of reference and our perspectives broaden infinitely. Suddenly the space we live in takes on the limitlessness of the space in which the sky-gods live, and our previous assumptions of what might be “real” get stood on their pointy little heads. Now when we think of the Great Flood, a myth which has appeared in ancient cultures all over the earth, it

This view of psychiary [as a genuine scientific activity] is premised on the idea that modern drugs are disease- or symptom-specific treatments; that they work by reversing some or all of an underlying physical pathology. It is the idea of the specificity of action that makes drug treatment appear to be a therapeutic, medical enterprise. If, in contrast, modern psychiatric treatments are not specific, if they act merely by inducing psychoactive effects that suppress or contain psychiatric distress and problematic behaviours, then psychiatry has not moved far from its historical roots as a [...] medicalized form of social control.

An important attribute of metabolites is their close relationship to both the biological states of interest (i.e. disease status) and relevant genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic variants causally related to the disease state. As such, metabo-profiles can be viewed as an intermediate measure that links pre-disposing genes and environmental exposures to a resulting disease state. Causal metabolites also typically have a stronger relationship (i.e. larger effect size) to the underlying genetics and the disease phenotype. Thus, the integration of metabolomic data into systems biology approaches may provide a missing link between genes and disease states.

we suffer also from our inevitable confrontation with the human condition-the "givens" of existence. What precisely are these "givens"? The answer is within each of us and readily available. Set aside some time and meditate on your own existence. Screen out diversions, bracket all preexisting theories and beliefs, and reflect on your "situation" in the world. In time you will inevitably arrive at the deep structures of existence or, to use the theologian Paul Tillich's felicitous term, ultimate concerns. In my view, four ultimate concerns are particularly germane to the practice of therapy: death, isolation, meaning in life, and freedom. These four ultimate concerns constitute the spine of my 1980 textbook, Existential Psychotherapy, in which I discuss, in detail, the phenomenology and the therapeutic implications of each of these concerns.

Wandering has long been seen as part of the pathology of dementia. Doctors, carers, and relatives often try to stop patients from venturing out alone, out of concern they will injure themselves, or won’t remember the way back. When a person without dementia goes for a walk, it is called going for a stroll, getting some fresh air, or exercising, anthropologist Maggie Graham observes in her recent paper. When a person with dementia goes for a walk beyond prescribed parameters, it is typically called wandering, exit-seeking, or elopement. Yet wandering may not be so much a part of the disease as a therapeutic response to it. Even though dementia and Alzheimer’s in particular can cause severe disorientation, Graham says the desire to walk should be desire to be alive and to grow, as opposed to as a product of disease and deterioration. Many in the care profession share her view. The Alzheimer’s Society, the UK’s biggest dementia supportive research charity, considers wandering an unhelpful description, because it suggests aimlessness, whereas the walking often has a purpose. The charity lists several possible reasons why a person might feel compelled to move. They may be continuing the habit of a lifetime; they may be bored, restless, or agitated; they may be searching for a place or a person from their past that they believe to be close by; or maybe they started with a goal in mind, forgot about it, and just kept going. It is also possible that they are walking to stay alive. Sat in a chair in a room they don’t recognise, with a past they can’t access, it can be a struggle to know who they are. But when they move they are once again wayfinders, engaging in one of the oldest human endeavours, and anything is possible.

Among DID individuals, the sharing of conscious awareness between alters exists in varying degrees. I have seen cases where there has appeared to be no amnestic barriers between individual alters, where the host and alters appeared to be fully cognizant of each other. On the other hand, I have seen cases where the host was absolutely unaware of any alters despite clear evidence of their presence. In those cases, while the host was not aware of the alters, there were alters with an awareness of the host as well as having some limited awareness of at least a few other alters. So, according to my experience, there is a spectrum of shared consciousness in DID patients. From a therapeutic point of view, while treatment of patients without amnestic barriers differs in some ways from treatment of those with such barriers, the fundamental goal of therapy is the same: to support the healing of the early childhood trauma that gave rise to the dissociation and its attendant alters. Good DID therapy involves promoting co­-consciousness. With co-­consciousness, it is possible to begin teaching the patient’s system the value of cooperation among the alters. Enjoin them to emulate the spirit of a champion football team, with each member utilizing their full potential and working together to achieve a common goal. Returning to the patients that seemed to lack amnestic barriers, it is important to understand that such co-consciousness did not mean that the host and alters were well-­coordinated or living in harmony. If they were all in harmony, there would be no “dis­ease.” There would be little likelihood of a need or even desire for psychiatric intervention. It is when there is conflict between the host and/or among alters that treatment is needed.

Viewed in this light, life itself appears as a dynamics of integration that is equipped with auto-therapeutic or 'endo-clinical' competencies and refers to a species-specific space of surprise. It has an equally innate and - in higher organisms - adaptively acquired responsibility for the injuries and invasions it regularly encounters in its permanently allocated environment or conquered surroundings. Such immune systems could equally be described as organismic early forms of a feeling for transcendence: thanks to the efficiency of these devices, which are constantly at the ready, the organism actively confronts the potential bringers of its death, opposing them with its endogenous capacity to overcome the lethal. Such functions have earned immune systems of this type comparisons to a 'body police' or border patrol. But as the concern, already at this level, is to work out a modus vivendi with foreign and invisible powers - and, in so far as these can bring death, 'higher' and 'supernatural' ones - this is a preliminary stage to the behaviour one is accustomed to terming religious or spiritual in human contexts. For every organism, its environment is its transcendence, and the more abstract and unknown the danger from that environment, the more transcendent it appears.

Of special concern to restorative justice are the needs of crime victims that are not being adequately met by the criminal justice system. Victims often feel ignored, neglected, or even abused by the justice process. This results in part from the legal definition of crime, which does not include victims. Crime is defined as against the state, so the state takes the place of the victims. Yet victims often have a number of specific needs from the justice process. Due to the legal definition of crime and the nature of the criminal justice process, the following four types of needs seem to be especially neglected: 1. Information. Victims need answers to questions they have about the offense—why it happened and what has happened since. They need real information, not speculation or the legally constrained information that comes from a trial or plea agreement. Securing real information usually requires direct or indirect access to offenders who hold this information. 2. Truth-telling. An important element in healing or transcending the experience of crime is an opportunity to tell the story of what happened. Indeed, it is often important for a victim to be able to retell this many times. There are good therapeutic reasons for this. Part of the trauma of crime is the way it upsets our views of ourselves and our world, our life-stories. Transcendence of these experiences means “restorying” our lives by telling the stories in significant settings, often where they can receive public acknowledgment. Often, too, it is important for victims to tell their stories to the ones who caused the harm and to have them understand the impact of their actions. 3. Empowerment. Victims often feel like control has been taken away from them by the offenses they’ve experienced—control over their properties, their bodies, their emotions, their dreams. Involvement in their own cases as they go through the justice process can be an important way to return a sense of empowerment to them. 4. Restitution or vindication. Restitution by offenders is often important to victims, sometimes because of the actual losses, but just as importantly, because of the symbolic recognition restitution implies. When an offender makes an effort to make right the harm, even if only partially, it is a way of saying “I am taking responsibility, and you are not to blame.” Restitution, in fact, is a symptom or sign of a more basic need, the need for vindication. While the concept of vindication is beyond the scope of this booklet, I am convinced that it is a basic need that we all have when we are treated unjustly. Restitution is one of a number of ways of meeting this need to even the score. Apology may also contribute to this need to have one’s harm recognized.

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

But there is another, more dynamic and less hidebound way to interpret love: as a particular kind of education. In this view, a relationship essentially comprises a mutual attempt to learn from and teach something to another person. We are drawn to our partners because we want to be educated by them and vice versa. We love them because we see in them things that we long for that are missing in us; we aspire to grow under the tutelage of love.

The nondual approach allows us to follow conventional therapeutic protocols while remaining mindful of the interconnectedness of all things. In the nondual state, we can attune not only to our personal unique Self but also to the transpersonal Self, recognizing its wave-like properties. The panoramic perspective of nonduality helps us gain a bigger picture outlook and address suffering while feeling connected to the unbroken whole of existence. From this nondual view, the diversity within is welcomed and held in love.

Therapy is a compelling tool of Right Effort. A skilled therapist can tell when patients are acting out an emotion rather than acknowledging it, or when they are numbing themselves to escape from something that feels overwhelming. Right Effort seeks to create a context in which learned habits of indulging or denying feelings can be divested. These habits are the equivalents of striking the lute too tightly or too loosely. Too tight is like the rigidity of people chronically clamping down on their feelings. Too loose is like giving feelings free rein, assuming that because we feel them they are "true" and must be taken seriously. Right Effort is an attempt to find balance in the midst of all this. From a therapeutic point of view, it means trusting that an inherent wisdom can emerge when we avoid the two extremes. This wisdom, or clear comprehension, is the emotional equivalent of a therapist's evenly suspended attention. Buddha believed this emotional equilibrium was possible for everyone. Feelings are confusing but they also make sense. A therapist's job is to help bring this equilibrium into awareness. There is a wonderful sound when it dawns.

Since the capitalist system defined itself as thoroughly rational, there was no longer, ironically enough, any need for a philosophy that pointed out what was intellectually and morally correct, or what was irrationally and morally reprehensible. Questions like this were believed to be perfectly well handled by science, the market and representative democracy. Totalistic philosophy had, in other words, made itself redundant. Because totalistic thought was intimately connected to the abolished Aristotelian/ Ptolemaic world-view, a fact which its practitioners refused to see, it could be reduced to a sort of therapeutic museum activity. To acknowledge the need of a new world-view would undermine the whole of their activity, and not many thinkers were willing to pay that price. Particularly not in a society where social exclusion meant rapid transportation to the proudest invention of the humanist sciences: the mental hospital.

The view that relationships with a therapeutic quality provide a wholeness-growing environment is implicit in the rich Hebrew word shalom and its equivalent Arabic word salaam. These words, most frequently translated “peace,” also mean sound, healthy, or wholeness. Shalom or salaam is cultivated in Spirit-empowered communities where the quality of relationships provides a nurturing environment. In fact, in the New Testament Greek, koinonia is used to describe the church as a healing, transforming community enlivened by God’s spirit.

Family therapists view the therapeutic relationship as a means to an end rather than as an end in itself. Family therapists see beyond the problematic patterns in the family to the potential healing power of family relationships.

Society has become well versed in the methods necessary to weaken the radicalism of the Gospel by reducing Christianity to what is viewed as reasonable by the logic of the market and by a culture committed to a largely post-Christian, consumerist vision of human life. Thus the disruptive character of Christianity is silenced and Christian spirituality is repackaged as a soothing therapeutic exercise that serves the needs of a culture committed above all else to the enjoyment of consumer activities.

At the lab my professor suggested that, since it was such an amazing day, perhaps I could take the exam outside in the wetland wilderness reserve that surrounded the lab. The view of the swamp was stunning! Somehow it had never seemed beautiful to me before. She asked that I take my notebook and pencil out. “Please draw for me the complete development of the chick from fertilization to hatching. That is the only question.” I gasped, “But that is the entire course!” “Yes, I suppose it is, but make-up exams are supposed to be harder than the original, aren’t they?” I couldn’t imagine being able to regurgitate the entire course. As I sat there despondently, I closed my eyes and was flooded with grief. Then I noticed that my inner visual field was undulating like a blanket that was being shaken at one end. I began to see a movie of fertilization! When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I realized that the movie could be run forward and back and was clear as a bell in my mind’s eye, even with my physical eyes open. Hesitantly, I drew the formation of the blastula, a hollow ball of cells that develops out of the zygote (fertilized egg). As I carefully drew frame after frame of my inner movie, it was her turn to gape! The tiny heart blossomed. The formation of the notochord, the neural groove, and the beginnings of the nervous system were flowing out of my enhanced imagery and onto the pages. A stupendous event—the animated wonder of embryonic growth and the differentiation of cells—continued at a rapid pace. I drew as quickly as I could. To my utter amazement, I was able to carefully and completely replicate the content of the entire course, drawing after drawing, like the frames of animation that I was seeing as a completed film! It took me about an hour and a quarter drawing as fast as I could to reproduce the twenty-one-day miracle of chick formation. Clearly impressed, my now suddenly lovely professor smiled and said, “Well, I suppose you deserve an A!” The sunlight twinkled on the water, the cattails waved in the gentle breeze, and the gentle wonder of life was everywhere. Reports:

If the therapist understands and does not take mistrust as personal affront, the therapeutic relationship can evolve gradually. The client can begin to recognize that the therapist actually "gets" why he or she is initially skeptical, self-protective, or "realistically paranoid" and does not pressure the client to be a "happy camper" but instead works to earn trust by being honorable, reliable, and consistent. This also implies a view of the client's initial mistrust as expectable in light of the client's history - that is, as a strength rather than as a deficiency or pathology.

THE study of suggestion has shown us that the thoughts of hystericals are not equilibrated; that under diverse influences one of them may develop to an extreme extent and live, so to say, isolated, its own life, to the great detriment of the mental organism. This tendency is not only manifested in artificial experiments; it continually gives place to natural phenomena, which are quite analogous to suggestions. Fixed ideas are for us phenomena of this kind; that is to say, psychological phenomena which are developed in the mind in an automatic manner, outside the will and the personal perception of the patient, but which, instead of being, like suggestions, experimentally called forth, are formed naturally under the influence of accidental causes. This difference in the artificial or natural provocation of automatic phenomena has, from a clinical and especially therapeutic point of view, quite grave consequences to justify this distinction. Ideas of this kind have been described at length in the case of patients considered as lunatics. They went under the name of obsessions, impulsions, phobias; they characterise the delirium which develops with some neurasthenics or, as they are often called in France, certain degenerates. We shall repeat here what we have already said in speaking of abulias.' ' Stigmates mentaux de I'hyst&ie, p. 122. 278 Unquestionably, this characteristic belongs to these patients; we in nowise deny it; we shall only say that it also belongs to hystericals; that with them it is very frequent, and that it is the cause of the great majority of their accidents.

Of special concern to restorative justice are the needs of crime victims that are not being adequately met by the criminal justice system. Victims often feel ignored, neglected, or even abused by the justice process. This results in part from the legal definition of crime, which does not include victims. Crime is defined as against the state, so the state takes the place of the victims. Yet victims often have a number of specific needs from the justice process. Due to the legal definition of crime and the nature of the criminal justice process, the following four types of needs seem to be especially neglected: 1. Information. Victims need answers to questions they have about the offense—why it happened and what has happened since. They need real information, not speculation or the legally constrained information that comes from a trial or plea agreement. Securing real information usually requires direct or indirect access to offenders who hold this information. 2. Truth-telling. An important element in healing or transcending the experience of crime is an opportunity to tell the story of what happened. Indeed, it is often important for a victim to be able to retell this many times. There are good therapeutic reasons for this. Part of the trauma of crime is the way it upsets our views of ourselves and our world, our life-stories. Transcendence of these experiences means “restorying” our lives by telling the stories in significant settings, often where they can receive public acknowledgment. Often, too, it is important for victims to tell their stories to the ones who caused the harm and to have them understand the impact of their actions. 3. Empowerment. Victims often feel like control has been taken away from them by the offenses they’ve experienced—control over their properties, their bodies, their emotions, their dreams. Involvement in their own cases as they go through the justice process can be an important way to return a sense of empowerment to them. 4. Restitution or vindication. Restitution by offenders is often important to victims, sometimes because of the actual losses, but just as importantly, because of the symbolic recognition restitution implies. When an offender makes an effort to make right the harm, even if only partially, it is a way of saying “I am taking responsibility, and you are not to blame.” Restitution, in fact, is a symptom or sign of a more basic need, the need for vindication. While the concept of vindication is beyond the scope of this booklet, I am convinced that it is a basic need that we all have when we are treated unjustly. Restitution is one of a number of ways of meeting this need to even the score. Apology may also contribute to this need to have one’s harm recognized. The theory and practice of restorative justice have

Suggestions were given on how to promote mental flexibility. Included were the following: Try to identify with the central person, object, or process in the center of the problem. See how the problem looks from this vantage point. Try to “see” the solution—to visualize how various parts might work together, how a certain situation will work out. Scan rapidly through a large number of possible solutions, ideas, and data. The “right” solution will often appear with a sort of intuitive “knowing” that it is the answer. You will also find that you can be simultaneously aware of an uncommonly large number of ideas or pieces of data processes simultaneously. You will be able to step back from the problem and see it in a new perspective, in more basic terms. Since there is much less of yourself invested than in your prior trials, you will be able to abandon previously tried approaches and start afresh. Above all, don’t be timid about asking for answers. If you want to see the solution in a three-dimensional image, or to project yourself forward in time, or to view some microscopic physical process or something not visible to the physical eye, or to reexperience some event out of the past, by all means do so. Ask. Don’t let your questions be limited by your notion of what can or cannot be done.

Jung was wholehearted in his view that the analyst’s personality is central to the success of an analysis: “Every psychotherapist not only has his own method—he himself is that method . . . the great healing factor in psychotherapy is the doctor’s personality.” He also stressed the equality of the analytic relationship, “in which the doctor, as a person, participates just as much as the patient. . . . We could say without too much exaggeration that a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient.

The whole exercise of recording one’s thoughts was new to me—a habit I’d picked up in part, I suppose, from Barack, who viewed writing as therapeutic and clarifying and had kept journals on and off over the years.

The end result of therapy is now no longer seen as congruency with experience. It is not the increased awareness of, or openness to experience. It does not mean the enlargement of the self so as to include all of one’s experience. It is not amatter of basing your self-concept on experience. Nor is it a matter of owning that experience as yours. It does not even mean accepting that experience for what it is. Rather, the end result is that you become the experience that you are.

This movement involves, first of all, that you relinquish all control over your experience. The language used in describing this process is one of surrendering your self to the wisdom of the experiential organism, which, one learns, is often wiser than the conscious self. Thus it involves first of all a trust in your organism. Or to use some interpersonal terms to describe this intrapersonal event, it involves more than being non-directive, or even empathic toward your experience. Basically it means that you become experience-centered. The self, as the thinker about, or tinkerer with experience, must in effect die, or at least drastically diminish in importance for the growth forces of the experiential organism to bear their fruit.

Today, often when someone dies, we tend to look for the analogue to the fatal illness in their behavior: lung cancer results from smoking, heart disease from a lack of exercise, colon cancer from not eating enough fiber, etc. By linking death to a specific behavior, we deontologize it; we make it seem as if death is only one possibility for life, a possibility that we ourselves—or someone, someday—might manage to escape. The same thinking applies to aging as well: all the formulas for the conquest of aging (skin creme, the baldness pill, plastic surgery, low fat diets) implicitly view aging itself as just one option among many. When we view death as a “case” or an “option,” we reject its necessity as a limit. Death no longer indicates a moment of transcendence that we must encounter. According to Baudrillard, “We are dealing with an attempt to construct an entirely positive world, a perfect world, expurgated of every illusion, of every sort of evil and negativity, exempt from death itself.” In the society of enjoyment, death becomes an increasingly horrific—and at the same time, an increasingly hidden—event. Not only does death imply the cessation of one’s being, but it also indicates a failure of enjoyment. Death is above all a limit to one’s enjoyment: to accept one’s mortality means simultaneously to accept a limit on enjoyment. This is why it is not at all coincidental that with the turn from the prohibition of enjoyment to the command to enjoy we would see an increase in efforts to eliminate the necessity of death. Today, human cell researchers are working toward the day when death will exist only as an “accident,” through the modification of the way in which cells regulate their division and creating cells that can divide limitlessly. As Gregg Easterbrook points out, the introduction of such cells into the human body would not create eternal life, but it would make death something no longer necessary: “Therapeutic use of ‘immortal’ cells would not confer unending life (even people who don’t age could die in accidents, by violence and so on) but might dramatically extend the life-span.” The point isn’t that death would be entirely eliminated, but that we might eliminate its necessary status as a barrier to or a limit on enjoyment. This potential elimination of death as a necessary limit to enjoyment follows directly from the logic of the society of enjoyment. As long as death remains necessary, it stands, as Heidegger recognizes, as a fundamental barrier to the proliferation of enjoyment. If subjects know that they must die, they also know that they lack—and lack becomes intolerable in face of a command to enjoy oneself. But without the idea of a necessary death, every experience of lack loses the quality of necessity. Subjects view lack not as something to be endured for the sake of a future enjoyment, but as an intolerable burden. In the society of enjoyment, subjects refuse to tolerate lack precisely because lack, like death, has now lost its veneer of necessity.

Maintaining the health of our individual first chakra depends upon addressing our personal tribal issues. If we feel victimized by society, for example, we should deal with this negative perception so that it doesn’t cause us to lose energy. We can, for instance, get therapeutic support, become skilled at an occupation, seek a more symbolic view of our situation, or become politically active to change society’s attitudes. Nurturing bitterness toward the cultural tribe embroils our energy in a continual inner conflict that blocks access to the healing power of the sacred truth All Is One. Our respective

One example of taking a male-friendly approach [in therapy] is the view that traditional masculinity is not the root cause of men’s mental health problems, and, in fact, might contain valuable resources that can enhance mental health. This viewpoint allows therapists to understand men in a way that is more likely to foster better rapport between therapist and client, facilitating a more successful therapy.

Christians know why this is so. We know that God made every person, and without slipping into a kind of therapeutic wonderment project, that God has made each of us as a little display of Himself. That’s the wonder of being made in God’s image, as we saw earlier. Yet wokeness, as with all ideologies, does not start with the wonder of image-bearing. It starts with the dull stereotypes of Marxist collectivism. It breaks people down by how they look and where they’re from. It robs the human person of dignity, uniqueness, and a sense of lingering enchantment even in a world ruined by the Fall. It does not teach that we are all bound by the common bond of image-bearing, but rather that we live in fundamental alienation from one another.26 This alienation as covered elsewhere is truly impossible to overcome—unless one belongs to an underprivileged group, and then one does not live in alienation with members of the group. But here again wokeness compromises biblical truth and fails to capture reality. The miracle of salvation is that people who have nothing in common end up as spiritual family members, while very often people who have massive natural overlap end up living very different lives and holding very different views.

HISTORICAL TIMELINE OF THE EARLY THEORIES 1886 – Sigmund Freud began therapeutic practice and research in Vienna. 1900 – Sigmund Freud published “Interpretation of Dreams” – beginning of psychoanalytic thought 1911 – Alfred Adler left Freud’s Psychoanalytic Group to form his school of Individual Psychology 1913 – Carl Jung also departed from Freudian views and developed his own school of Analytical Psychology 1936 – Karen Horney published Feminine Psychology as she critiqued Freudian psychoanalytic theory 1951 – Carl Rogers published Client-Centered Therapy 1951 – Gestalt Therapy is published by Fritz Perls, Paul Goodman, & Ralph Hefferline. 1953 – B.F. Skinner outlined Behavioral Therapy 1954 – Abraham Maslow helped found Humanistic Psychology 1955 – Albert Ellis began teaching methods of Rational Emotive Therapy – beginning of cognitive psychology 1959 – Victor Frankl published an overview of Existential Analysis 1965 – William Glasser published Reality Therapy 1967 – Aaron Beck published a Cognitive Model of depression

southern star or constellation which once temporarily gained prominence in the sky, or may stand for some recurrent phenomenon, he most likely represented different ‘things’ on different occasions. Bali was guided by Venus, the guru of the asuras who, as we saw in “The Greatness of Saturn,” possesses the Sanjivani Vidya, which can revive the dead. Indeed, Venus is always dying (disappearing from view when it goes too close to the sun) and being reborn (reappearing after a predictable period of residence in the ‘underworld’). Asuras are known to be stronger at night, which they rule, but each dawn the potential chaos that night represents is dispelled by the sun, who reappears to separate the earth from the sky and to measure the world by rising in the east, appearing overhead at noon, and setting in the west. These may be the three great strides that the dwarf Vamana uses in The Begging of the Universe incident from the “The Greatness of Saturn” to subdue Bali and return him to the celestial underworld. Or perhaps the three steps are measured at the vernal equinox, when Vamana’s left foot reaches to the North (celestial)

Practising this approach is highly therapeutic and can be a fast road to connecting with the Tao. Letting go of your programming will rapidly change your view of yourself and the world around you. In this way, Chi

The sickness that denies the soul its freedom responds poorly to conventional treatment. The late American sociologist Philip Rieff suggests that we have adopted a secularized, therapeutic framework for viewing life that ignores the needs of the soul. “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.

The idea that parents shape their children’s personalities is so ingrained, and still supplies so many psychoanalysts with their livelihoods, that any challenge to it is bound to meet a lot of resistance. Yet the evidence has been getting more and more clear: variations in personality are determined by a combination of genes and random influences, but not by parents. The central premise of Freudian analysis – that childhood events cause adult psychological problems – has been shown to stand on no good evidence whatsoever. Says Harris: ‘The evidence does not support the view that talking about childhood experiences has therapeutic value.’ Remember, in the early twentieth century all the advice to parents stressed discipline; in the later part of the century, all the advice stressed indulgence. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this caused a shift in human personality in the Western world. Because people wanted there to be something they could do about our actions and tendencies, they argued that there must be an agent to blame. The nurture assumption was fuelled by many factors – worries about a return to Nazi eugenics, Rousseau-esque idealism, the doctrines of Marx, Freud and Durkheim – but the root of its appeal lay in the need to think of somebody being in charge. Instead, the truth is that personality unfolds from within, responding to the environment – so in a very literal sense of the word, it evolves.

The Heteropathic babel of medicine, including its theories and practices, is stamped with the seal of delusion. Such uniformity of results seemingly proceeding from such diversity of means and methods is only explicable on the orthopathic principle. If the Heteropathic doctrine were correct the human race would long ago have perished. The present universally chaotic state of medicine, in connection with the irrationality and monstrous absurdity of its various theories of disease and the great, manifest incongruity of medical practice, its use of positively poisonous substances and damaging measures and violent disorganizing processes, used with a view to “help nature” all conspire to place a stamp of delusion upon therapeutics and corroborate the theory of Orthopathy.

This strategy of Freud’s is pivotal to understand, because it upends the conventional view, even among many therapists, of what the therapeutic task should be. Yet it is entirely consistent with the Buddha’s left-handed path, in which a crucial strategy is the willingness to not take the contents of the psyche too personally. While the acceptance of desire is certainly essential to deepen the experience of self, it is not necessary to assume that this desire is “ours.