Posts Tagged ‘transformation’
Radio Show: Finding Your Authentic Voice, Manifesting Your Highest Purpose
Dr. John Deri’s next Blog Talk Radio Show: Healthy Mind and Body will be on Wednesday, July 28, 2010 from 8-9:00 PM Pacific Time.
The topic will be: Finding Your Authentic Voice, Manifesting Your Highest Purpose
In this episode, Dr. John Deri will help you to discover your own authentic voice. He will provide you with techniques for liberating yourself from the constraints of childhood “contracts” and compromises. Dr. Deri will show you how to define and to manifest your unique highest purpose.
To listen to the show you can:
1. Dial the phone in telephone number at (347) 989-0560
OR
2. Tune in to our online channel at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Healthy-Mind-Body
Overcoming Resistance to Change
Dr. John Deri’s next Blog Talk Radio Show: Healthy Mind and Body will be on Wednesday, June 16, 2010 from 8-9 PM Pacific Time.
The topic of the episode will be: Overcoming Resistance to Change
In this episode, Dr. John Deri will show you how to overcome obstacles to achieving your highest purpose. Dr. Deri is a psychiatrist and an Ironman triathlete. Drawing on his athletic experiences, as well as from his lifelong immersion in Taoism and Tibetan Buddhism, John will share with you techniques for integrating psychological tools, spiritual practices and physical activity in order to achieve wholeness, emotional well being and personal power.
To listen to the show you can:
Dial the phone in telephone number at (347) 989-0560
OR
Tune in to our online channel at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Healthy-Mind-Body
Dissociation
Dissociation refers to the splitting off of painful experience from awareness. Dissociation is the hallmark of trauma. A child experiences abuse or neglect as an unbearable catastrophe. Dissociation is the psychic defense of last resort. Unable to cope or to flee, the child simple “spaces out.” People sometimes refer to this state as “going out of body.”
In the context of the original traumatic situation, this defense preserves the child’s sanity. Unfortunately, dissociation tends to persist as the primary mode of psychic functioning throughout the lifetime of the individual. Such people have great difficulty in knowing or communicating what they are feeling. These deficits lead to an impoverishment of the person’s emotional life. Such people tend to experience themselves as ephemeral, or insubstantial. They usually have great difficulty in achieving or sustaining intimacy in their relationships.
Causes
There has been speculation regarding both biological and psychological causes of dissociation. From a neurologic standpoint, studies have shown a decreased corpus callosum in traumatized people. The corpus callosum connects the two hemispheres of the brain. The right hemisphere processes emotional experience. The left hemisphere includes the language region of the brain, in most people. A constricted connection between the two hemispheres could result in a limited capacity for recognizing and articulating emotional states.
From a psychological point of view, Joyce McDougall, a French psychoanalyst, believes that dissociation is the effect of exposure to overwhelming emotion that threatens to attack an individual’s sense of integrity and identity.
Within a developmental context, a child acquires the capacity for emotional experience, regulation and expression, through the parent’s capacity for attunement to the child’s emotional state. If the adult is incapable of recognizing and distinguishing emotional expressions in the child, it can impair the child’s capacity to experience his own emotional states.
Treatment
Psychotherapy offers a reparative experience for a person suffering from dissociation. Suffering is actually a misleading term. Many dissociated people are unaware of their own dissociation. Often, such a person seeks psychotherapy due to a spouse’s frustration with them.
Working with a profoundly dissociated person in psychotherapy is challenging. The engine for psyche change is psychic distress. If the distress itself is dissociated, there may be minimal motivation to engage in psychological work. Moreover, it is difficult to establish an emotional connection of any depth with a dissociated person.
Often a starting point involves gradually drawing the person’s attention to her state of dissociation. The therapeutic process is one of symbolically reparenting the child. The therapist, unlike the actual parent, is able to register and to articulate her patient’s emotional states. Through repeated interactions in which the therapist is able to service this function accurately, the patient gradually internalizes the process. As she incrementally acquires the capacity to recognize what she is feeling, the therapy gains traction.
As a person develops increasing awareness of his own emotional states, both present and past experiences come to life. It becomes possible to narrate, to process and to release the previously frozen residue of early trauma. As parts of the self that had been dissociated become available for integration, the personality becomes richer, more complex, more textured and more vibrant.
Dissociation makes people feel like ghosts or robots. Experience has an “as if” quality. Integration of a full range of feelings gives rise to a robust, embodied passion for life.
As Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself”:
“Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.”
The Alchemy of Healing
“The psychoanalyst listens, the shaman speaks.”
Thus wrote Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist. Levi-Strauss, like Carl Jung, was intrigued by pairs of opposites.
I have been reflecting on this particular pair of opposites, listening and speaking, in the context of psychotherapy. I have come to think of listening and speaking as representing the yin and the yang of the healing process.
The Yin and the Yang of Healing
From a Taoist perspective, yin energy is associated symbolically with the feminine, yang with the masculine. These energies are not, however, linked with gender. We all embody the potential for both yin and yang poles of energy.
Yin energy in therapy is manifested through phenomena including listening, empathy and nurturance, as well as through a metaphoric “holding space” for the other.
Yang energy may be expressed through speaking, interpretation, emphatic engagement or confrontation.
Both patient and therapist must develop a full range of these capacities. The process of healing is catalyzed by a creative dance between these polar energies. Both therapist and patient need to cultivate their respective abilities to speak freely and to listen fully. Each must be able to listen to herself as well as to the other.
The Role of Early Life Trauma
The reason why listening and speaking are healing can be understood against the backdrop of early life trauma. The traumatized child goes unheard. Neither parent has the wherewithal or the willingness to listen to the child. As a consequence, the child comes to feel alone, uncared for, disconnected and afraid. Moreover, such a child is liable to grow up as an adult who is wary of closeness to others. Such an individual is prone to seek social isolation.
Wilfred Bion, a British psychoanalyst, in his paper “Attacks on Linking,” put forth the premise that such a child is deprived of a primary experience of emotional bonding or “linkage,” with either parent. This absence breeds in the child an experience of sadness, a sense of futility and ultimately of rage. The child’s rage has the potential to generalize into an unconscious hatred of all “linkages”: between the child and another human being, between thought and feeling, between the child and himself, and ultimately between the child and reality. Such broken or unconsummated linkages are the substrate for unspeakable suffering.
The Alchemy of Healing
Through reciprocal speaking and listening within the therapeutic relationship, emotionally meaningful linkages are formed. The patient’s capacity to achieve emotional connection with the self and with the other is enhanced. Dissociation between thoughts and feelings, between feelings and images, is transformed into integration.
Through integration of split off parts of the self, healing occurs. Through relatedness with self and others, the full potential of the patient blossoms and flourishes.
These transformational processes are always reciprocal, between patient and therapist. Witnessing and participating in this alchemy of healing is deeply moving. Such participation is the central calling of my life.
A Buddhist Perspective on Healing: Wisdom and Compassion
My immersion in Tibetan Buddhism has influenced my perspective on the healing process. The central tenets of Tibetan Buddhism are wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom in Healing
From a conventional point of view, phenomena are incontrovertibly how they appear. At this level, healing in psychotherapy includes the kinds of work that I have described in previous blogs and radio shows. It is essential to bring dissociated feelings and memories into conscious awareness. Doing so in the context of a caring psychotherapy relationship allows the “working through,” the integration and the release of these emotions. Mourning is central to this process: mourning for both what was wounding and for what was lacking in the patient’s early life.
Another key component of the healing process is working on the patient’s “shadow” side. Trauma propagates through identification with the aggressor. It is a painful, but vital, step to recognize one’s own propensity to hurt others.
From an ultimate point of view, all phenomena are inherently “empty.” I am not qualified to discuss the Buddha’s teachings. So, for our purposes, let me just say that healing is facilitated by the cultivation of the awareness that all of our perceptions, all of our experiences, are like a mirage, like an illusion. We all construct our own “psychic reality.”
This realization is very powerful. It gives us the freedom to construe the past from multiple vantage points. We can achieve release from an identity as a perennial victim of circumstances. We can develop the capacity for what Carolyn Myss has called “symbolic sight.” We can learn to “learn from our experience” (Wilfred Bion). We can develop the potential to do things differently, to experience transformation.
Viewing life as an open field, rather than as a constellation of solid figures, liberates us from fixity, from the unconscious compulsion to repeat the past.
Compassion In Healing
Compassion for others is the antidote for narcissism. Narcissism is the root of all suffering. When we fixate on an “I,” we experience ourselves as fundamentally disconnected, constricted, anxious and depressed. When we cultivate our compassion for others, we feel alive, related and infused with life energy.
Wisdom and compassion are inseparable, like the two wings of a bird. In conjunction with one another, they liberate us from suffering, allowing our spirits to take flight. The darkness of our delusions is dispelled. The radiance of our innate nature shines forth unimpeded. We are free.
Vacations Are Essential to Mental Health
When I was 15 years old, I had the opportunity to accompany a group of psychologists on a trip to the Soviet Union. Our group was given a behind the scenes tour of the Soviet mental health system. The first intervention that was offered to a stressed out worker was a two week vacation at a resort on the Black Sea. As a teenager, this “prescription” struck me as somewhat primitive. I have come to appreciate its wisdom.
No matter how much we might love our work, a periodic change of pace, and change of scene, are crucial for maintaining our psychic equilibrium. The human nervous system habituates to sameness. Both behaviorally and neurophysiologically, we get stuck in a rut. We cease to remain fully awake and alert. We begin to “go through the motions” of living. In the extreme, life can begin to feel “stale, flat and unprofitable,” in Hamlet’s words.
Christopher Bollas, an American psychoanalyst with a PhD in English literature, writes that a particular experience “sponsors” a specific state of mind, or “self state.” Thus, if we perpetually repeat the same routine day after day, for months at a time, we drastically circumscribe the experience of who we are. There is a tendency for us to think the same thoughts, and to feel the same feelings. This circumscription can lead not only to boredom with our lives, but as well with whom we are.
Vacations are the portal for new experiences, of the world and of ourselves. Among the many wonderful benefits that we can experience when we are on vacation
- Leaving the world of work for a time allows us to relax.
- Our body and mind uncoil themselves.
- We breathe more deeply.
- Mental focus expands.
- We think new thoughts, we perceive new possibilities.
- Vacations often provide the opportunity for inspirations that transform our lives in myriad ways.
Vacations are strongly associated with childhood memories. Most of us had more regular, more frequent and longer vacations as children than we do as adults. Vacations can allow us to contact our “inner child.” We become so used to suppressing this dimension of ourselves in the service of functioning as “mature adults.” How sad, what a huge loss, if maturity comes to preclude the qualities of playfulness and fun that make life an adventure. Cultivate a relationship with your inner child. Ask him or her what s/he would most enjoy doing. When your child and your adult selves are living life in dialogue with one another, you will feel continually refreshed and fully alive. On vacation, past and present can commingle, giving rise to new visions for the future.
For those of us who live in urban areas, vacations can offer a time to return to nature. The infinite sensory experiences of nature, e.g. the scent of pine trees after rain, are the best tonic for depression and anxiety. Opening up to nature promotes an expansive self state, in which we somehow feel closer, or indeed one with, the realm of spirit.
In this era of economic uncertainty and anxiety, it is all too easy to cut out all vacation spending as one means of saving money. Remember the words of Wordsworth:
The world is too much with us…
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers…
Penny wise, and pound foolish. If we are not mindful, we can end up killing the golden goose: namely, ourselves.