A Brief Introduction to Experiential Dreamwork

Have you noticed that your dreams are more dynamic and intense during these uncertain times? You are not alone. Many people are reporting increased nightmares and disturbed dreaming, and want to know what this means and what to do with their dreams.

This introductory course in experiential dreamwork will give participants several simple yet powerful ideas about how to engage with dreams in a way that helps regulate emotion and constructively process the difficult feelings arising in the world right now. The course will include self-help exercises you can try on your own, and methods that will help inform your dreamwork with clients. It will include live demonstrations of the experiential dreamwork methods discussed, including finding and embodying help in a dream, entering into the subjective experience of dream characters and elements, and dreaming the dream onward.

Clinically relevant. There will also be information about how to use dreams as diagnostic, as indicators of clinical progress, and as a safe way to work with trauma. 4.5 CE credits offered.

Join dream expert Dr. Leslie Ellis for 3 Tuesday afternoon dreamwork sessions in July. During these 90-minute zoom sessions, she will introduce some fun and fascinating information about dreams, answer your questions and show you how to engage with your dreams in an experiential way. Sessions will include a brief talk about dreams, a chance to ask questions, and a live dreamwork demonstration.

This course will be of interest to mental health professionals who want to incorporate dreamwork in their practice, and to anyone interested in deepening their relationship with dreams. It is also an opportunity to try out a short version of Dr. Ellis’ courses. For those who want to continue on to the year-long Embodied Experiential Dreamwork Certification program starting in Fall 2020, this course fee will be credited.

Dates:              July 7, 14 and 21, 2:00 pm to 3:30 PDT (5:00-6:30 PM EDT)

Location:         Zoom

Cost:                $127 USD (or $87 for those needing a discount, no questions asked!)

Recordings:     Available to registrants

Questions?      Ask Leslie lae2317@gmail.com

Register here.  And bring your dreams…

Dr. Leslie Ellis is an author, teacher, speaker and clinical dreamworker. Her book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019) offers therapists a primer in modern, experiential dreamwork. She has written numerous book chapters and articles on experiential focusing and dreamwork. Her award-winning PhD research developed a nightmare treatment process for refugees. She developed her somatic, experiential focus through extensive study of focusing. She is currently president of The International Focusing Institute. She studied depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and her practice is a hybrid of Jungian and focusing-oriented approaches. She is also an expert in treatment of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress injury and developed and taught trauma theory at Adler University in Vancouver.

What former dreams students say about Leslie’s online dreamwork courses:

Leslie presents in a well-modulated, soothing voice that carries the recorded commentary sessions and the live interaction sessions very well.  She is a calmly-confident and organized teacher who is clear and concise in her outlining of concepts.  She demonstrates an excellent grasp of the broad swathe of dream literature her clinical training and work has taken her through…from Carl Jung to contemporary neuroscience.  Leslie is skillful in her facilitation of the live dream-work sessions, ensuring a sense of participant safety while encouraging and containing the group’s participation with an attitude of openness and respect.

I can highly recommend both Leslie’s book and this online course.  I have come away enriched and expanded by this learning opportunity.”

Catherine Johnson, Clinical Psychologist, Trauma and Focusing Oriented therapist; Cape Town, South Africa

“Dreaming is a fascinating but hard field to explore. Leslie is an enthusiastic and experienced pioneer. Her book and course help me find a torch and a map. As a therapist, I use these tools to help my clients go into their experiences and hearts. Highly recommended.” – Sicong Cao, psychotherapist, Wuhan, China

How Focusing Can Help During the COVID-19 Crisis

There are countless resources being freely offered right now to help us all manage the stress and trauma of COVID-19. This article offers some specific practices that are based on focusing, a gentle, embodied way of sensing inside that is particularly well-suited for managing overwhelm. Focusing is a soothing practice for all forms of regulation: self-soothing, co-regulation in a dyad, and for connecting deeply in a group. It is also an exquisite way of listening that truly helps another.

 

Keep things moving!

If I had to name one overarching principle to help us stay regulated during this time of crisis, in a word, it would be movement. I am not limiting this to physical movement, although this is certainly helpful for burning stress and getting stuck energy flowing. What I mean, is when you take in the stress from the news or from a challenging event or interaction, don’t let it sit there inside. Jog it out, dance it, sweat it out if such physical options are available.

Movement can take many other forms, however. The breath is one of the simplest, most accessible ways to move energy through is. We can visualize breathing in calm and breathing out stress. We can lengthen the out-breath to calm the nervous system. And we can move heavy feelings out through visualizing, through the embodied imaginal steps of focusing. For example, of the accumulated stress feels like a great weight, our gentle attention can turn it into a feather that quietly floats away.

 

Focusing for self-regulation

In a recent video on how to manage during COVID-19, Dr. Bruce Perry speaks on thetraumatherapistproject podcast about the necessity to stay emotionally close even as we physically distance. He also speaks about the importance of self-regulation, not just once a day when we go for a long walk, but constantly, throughout the day. We need to take mini-breaks to just breathe, move our bodies, meditate briefly. Or we can clear our inner space using focusing to acknowledge and gently set aside the troubles we can’t attend to in the moment.

Focusing teaches us to sense inside and be open and curious about whatever we find there. It is a way of being present with ourselves in a non-judgmental manner that allows the body to speak, and thus to metabolize all that we take in that needs to keep moving through us. It prompts us to turn toward our own embodied selves and in doing so, to find the right next step forward.

 

Co-regulation in a time of physical separation

As mammals, we are designed to be soothed in the presence of each other. We are attuned to touch, and are now needing to find other ways to co-regulate our nervous systems. Stephen Porges, who developed the Polyvagal Theory, stresses how important it is for us to regulate each other, especially in stressful times. When we can’t touch, our voices are a fine substitute, especially they are calm and relaxed.

Vocal prosody is a way to communication safety and connection, says Porges. So when we are reaching out to our loved ones, it’s better to use video or phone than text or email. And it’s also wise to limit exposure to fast-paced, newscasts that raise alarm in our bodies. He suggests reading the news instead.

 

Co-presencing as an evolution of our responsiveness

All over the world, people are not only coming to terms with the enormity of the crisis, but they are also responding with love, and by banding together in small, online groups to connect and offer mutual support. Thomas Hübl, founder of the Academy of Inner Science, speaks of the need for co-presencing to raise the level of our collective intelligence. He said that when we are in co-presence, a field is formed that makes us all greater than the sum of our parts. It is from here that innovation comes.

In a video on how to find our resilience in a time of crisis and pandemic, Hübl suggests that the stress caused by the current crisis is triggering our past and collective trauma. And when we are in a stress response, we do not act from our best selves. We need to come together in a loving way to metabolize this trauma. And we have the embodied experience and resilience to do it:

“Many of the fears now are not related to the present moment, but stored in our bodies from our time as children or from the collective trauma field of our ancestors. This naturally comes up when things are scarce. We need to find resourced parts of our body. Our body (contains information that) is hundreds of thousands of years old. It contains the wisdom of the concentrated liquid of humanity.”

When asked how we should respond to the current challenge of our over-taxed medical system, Hübl said we need to stop looking for a long-term solution because we don’t actually know how the future will unfold. Echoing Perry, he advocates need to continuously regulate and stay present to what comes, to view this as a marathon, not a sprint. And the only thing we should focus on is the immediate next step.

“We have to let go of how the world was yesterday, that world is gone. Many things we had don’t exist anymore. The world changed in the blink of an eye. We need to release ourselves from what we know, because now we are swimming. We need to be present, we need to swim now. The things that are happening are a collective force, so it’s very important to look forward, not back… We need to look for the next step we can do that is doable. To look too far ahead paralyzes us.”

Here again, focusing is a way forward. As focusing founder Eugene Gendlin pointed out, inherent in our bodies’ felt sense is the way forward, the right next step. If we can truly listen inside and to each other, we have the individual and collective inner wisdom and embodied experience to move through this crisis with grace and love.

Dreamwork for Yourself, a guided, leisurely journey

Dreamwork for Yourself: Syllabus, March/April 2020

 

This pilot course will take you on a journey, via your dreams, deep into your inner world. As a cohort, we will explore various personal practices aimed at recalling, recording and then deeply experiencing our own dreams. We will learn what works best for each of us as methods to glean insight and meaning from our dreams, and offer these back to others in the class. By the end of the course, you will have clear, established method for personal dream exploration, and as part of the process, you will have taken a journey into the depths of your inner world.

Instructor: Dr. Leslie Ellis

Dr. Ellis is a world expert in the clinical use of dreams, with a specialty in working with PTSD nightmares. She has a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology and a Masters in Counselling Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is vice president of The International Focusing Institute and has more than 20 years’ experience in clinical practice. She has taught a focusing certification program to therapists for more than 10 years, and is now offering online instruction in dreamwork to therapists and anyone interested in cultivating inner life through dreamwork, focusing and active imagination. She is the author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019), as well as numerous papers and book chapters on focusing and embodied, experiential dreamwork. She has also taught and delivered talks worldwide and is a keynote speaker at the 2020 conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

Format:

Each month, Dr. Ellis will offer a new self-dreamwork practice, with examples and invite you to explore the technique using your own dreams. The course will be offered via several formats, including video presentations, live sessions, and both written and podcast format. All material will be recorded so you can revisit it, or catch up on any live material you miss. There will be a venue for sharing your experiences of each practice, and learning from the experience of others.

Timing:

Monthly live sessions, third Wednesday of each month, beginning March 4, 2020 from 3:00-4:30 PM PDT Second session April 1. All sessions recorded and available to all course participants whether you attend live or not. Enrolment open until April 15, 2020.

The course will be delivered over 8 sessions beginning in March 2020. Because the course is leisurely and self-paced, it is fine to join in after the class has started. You can watch the recorded live sessions, and take the material at whatever pace suits you.

Topics will include:

Recalling and recording your dreams

Why are dreams so important to attend to?

Working with associations: writing your dreams

Art and creativity: representing and experiencing your dreams

Focusing and active imagination: dialogue with your dreams

Re-entering the dream: being your dream elements, and dreaming forward

Follow the feeling: dreams as picture metaphors of emotion

Bias control: trying on opposites, illuminating blind spots

Co-creative dreamwork: attending to inner and outer relational dynamics

Waking up in your dreams: cultivating lucid awareness

Talking about your dreams: telling others

Dreamwork with others: collective dreamwork practices for everyone

Special topics: available upon request

 

Reading and assignments:

There will be many optional resources available to you including short pieces I will write specifically on the topic of the month, book recommendations and articles. But this is meant to be more of an experiential than an academic journey, so the emphasis will be on time for your own dream exploration and sharing of what you discover. You will also be encouraged to read and comment on the experiences of your classmates.

 

Dates, details, pricing

The course opens in March, with enrolment open until April 15 (and you are welcome to join us as a self-paced course after that).

It will run over 8 sessions, ending October 2020. You have the choice to stay in step with the group or go through the modules at your own pace.

Cost for the course will be $297 USD. Scholarships available, please inquire. Questions, contact lae2317@gmail.com  Register at www.drleslieellis.com/dreamwork-course

Working With Your Dream: How to journal associations

This is a sample of one of the written prompts for the course, a free offering to give you a sense of how to use journaling to explore associations to your dream. The course will go beyond this to include both written and live group discussion, video presentations, responses to questions and more. It’s not too late to join us! You can still sign up here.

 

Module One: Journaling to explore associations to dream elements

Welcome to the beginning of a deeper exploration into the world of your own dreams… online and in the company of others. I am so glad you have chosen to join me in this grand experiment! And because you have come this far, it’s safe to assume you are curious about your dreams and aware of their tremendous value for self-exploration and growth.

Above all, I want you to enjoy this journey, and come away with many practical ways to engage with your own dreams. So I will offer prompts, personal examples, coaching and a venue to share the feedback and experiences of your fellow travellers as we experiment with the best ways to unlock the tremendous potential inherent in our dreams. I will introduce one new practice each month so that you have the time to explore it at your leisure, try it with several dreams, ask questions and develop a feel for it.

 

Journaling associations

Seeking associations to dream elements was introduced by Freud as a way to tease out the so-called latent or hidden meaning behind the dream. Modern dreamworkers do not believe that the dream is trying to hide its message in some kind of code. Rather, the strangeness of dream language comes from the quality of dreaming consciousness, which draws more from the image and emotional processing centres of our brain than from our logical, rational mind.

This brings me to an important point. Because dreams do not come from the part of our brain that processes in a logical, sequential fashion, it means that we need not seek to understand our dreams from this perspective. Let go of the need to make logical sense of your dream, and instead treat it as an experience, a work of art, a metaphor, a message from another realm… this frees you up to simply play with the images, and allow them to infuse you with the complex feelings they carry.

 

Frog dream, an example

I will offer you an example of the process from my own dream life. I would suggest you start with a simple dream, and see where the journaling leads. Try to remain open-minded and curious, exploring what arises from your dream images with no particular goal in mind. This opens up your right-hemisphere functioning, the non-logical side of your brain that is most aligned with dreamwork. Here is my dream text:

I dreamt about a sleek, very large brown frog that I had picked up out of a square container. There were other elements to the dream, but I have forgotten them. It seemed very important to hold on to the frog, despite some other tasks distracting me. I was considering making it a pet. It was huge for a frog, and instead of reptilian skin, it had a silky brown coat, very short hair, gorgeous brown colour. It was warm and alive and seemed fine with being held.

 

My Associations

In the introduction to this course, I wrote about a stunning dream of swimming in a pool of frogs when I was pregnant with my daughter Grace, now 20

I just took a day trip with Grace to Idylwild and bought a big brass frog, with a plan to acquire similar objects for a sand tray collection

The frog’s short-haired coat reminds me of my dog Savannah

The frog itself is more pet-like and cuddly than a typical frog, more a dog-frog

I think of frogs as powerful healing symbols, but also warnings because when an ecosystem is in trouble, frogs begin to disappear

 

I could go further, but want to stop here and notice that I am already beginning to get some sense of this dream frog, which at first seemed like a complete mystery. Its qualities are becoming fleshed out, and it seems connected with my daughter, affection, health… and it may also be a kind of a warning.

 

A word about dream dictionaries…

At this point, you might be tempted to consult a dream dictionary that explains what your dream image means. I am not a fan of this approach, except possibly to augment and amplify your associations after you have explored them thoroughly. If you are still mystified by a dream image once you’ve worked with your own associations, then a symbol dictionary may bring up additional ideas that resonate. But if you go to a dictionary first, the book’s idea may stick and prevent you from seeing the uniquely personal relationships you have with the image.

That said, if you want the help of a dictionary, I recommend An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper (Thames and Hudson, 1978). It offers interpretations of symbols from various spiritual traditions. If I look up frog, it says this: Lunar and a rain-bringer; fertility, fecundity, eroticism… and the text goes on to offer short descriptions of what the frog means in Celtic, Chinese, Christian, Egyptian, Graeco-Roman and Hindu traditions. All seem to point to the frog as abundant and fertile… and in the Egyptian tradition, frog is protector of mothers and the newborn, so it is a lovely image to dream of when pregnant.

 

Staying close to the image

The trouble with dream dictionaries and even taking the associative process too far, is that it takes you away from the immediacy of the image itself. So when you play with associations, always refer back to your dream. In this case, I need to make sure I don’t lose touch with my silky brown dream frog as I explore more generic ideas about frogs.

Another way to explore associations is to get an embodied sense of the image itself, and see what comes up from the inside about it. When I do that, I am reminded of the sense in my dream that it’s important to carry this frog with me, not to put it down. I can feel the weight of it in my hand. It makes it awkward to do the other tasks that are calling to me in the dream, but the sense of deep importance of the frog comes through loud and clear. One thing I have taken from this process already, is the need to stay connected to my daughter even more. She is away at university, at times extremely stressed, and in general, just feels too far away. So after writing this, I plan to reach out to her.

I could go further, but I don’t want to burden you with too much to read. I hope this gives you a sense of how to begin. Each module has a space for your comments and questions, and I hope you will all be moved to share something of your own experience as we go: what came of the process, what works for you, what doesn’t, and where you have questions. Above all, enjoy!

Do your dreams both fascinate and mystify you? We have answers!

Dreams are invaluable allies in our relationship with ourselves, but for most people, they seem like a nonsensical mystery, or they are barely ever recalled. How do we remember and make sense of them? I have some answers for you…

When I wrote my first book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019), I spent more than a year researching ways to help therapists guide clients to use their dreams as a pathway towards an enriched, authentic life, and toward greater freedom from mental health issues. Now I plan to make this information accessible to everyone, whether you work clinically with dreams or not. So many of you have asked me for ways to personally work with your dreams that I am now working on a course and a book on this fun and fascinating topic. And I’m hoping you can help me by joining my pilot course.

 

Free video series answers the most common questions about dreams

When I talk about my work and writing about dreams, the first thing people tend to ask is how to remember their dreams. I have the answer for you here as Part 1 of a 3-part free video series. Part 2 explains why it is so important to pay attention to dreams: they can even save your life! And Part 3 offers three dreamwork practices you can use right away to deepen your experience and understanding of your own dreams.

The second question people tend to ask me about my clinical dream book is, can I use the information as a guide to understanding my own dreams? Is it written so anyone can understand it? The answer is yes, although is written mainly for clinicians, it is written in a user-friendly that is accessible to all.

 

Overcoming the challenges of working with your own dreams

But also no, it’s not the best guide to dreamwork for yourself. This is because there are special considerations when you are working on your own dreams. It’s just much easier to spot the foibles of others than it is to clearly see the blind spots in ourselves. So we tend to transfer this bias onto our own work with dreams. However, there are many ways to compensate for this and develop a deep connection with yourself via your dreams, and I will be teaching you all about these, and other ways to overcome potential challenges of personal dreamwork.

From March 2020 onward, I will be offering an ongoing program in dreamwork for yourself that will culminate in the publication of my next book. Each month, we will learn about and try out a new self-dreamwork practice and discuss our experiences as a cohort. We will talk about what was amazing, and what fell flat. We will brainstorm ideas about how to glean the most from our dreams, and share our breakthroughs.

This is a pilot course that will ultimately be offered more widely. The first cohort will be limited in size, and you will receive a discount in return for your feedback, active participation and willingness to act as part of a focus group of sorts on the topic of personal dreamwork. So it will be more interactive and hands-on, with more instructor involvement than future versions. With your permission, I may include some of your thoughts and dreams in the book itself! And of course if you want your dreams to remain private, I will completely respect that.

 

Check out the free video series

For a taste of my teaching, and more on the topic of working with your own dreams, enjoy this series of short videos. If you have already decided you want to join me for the course, you can get more detailed information and register here. Space will be limited, and this discounted rate ($297) and higher level of interaction will only be offered this one time as we co-create the course and enjoy discovering the most effective self-dreamwork practices together!

Sweet dreams, Leslie

Come home to yourself via your dreams

Is your inner life getting lost in the fray? Are you feeling overwhelmed with information, tasks and all the shiny objects that bombard us from the online world? Yes, this is another invitation, but one with a difference. This is an invitation to slow down and look inward, an opportunity to come home to yourself through your dreams.

If you have ever been utterly transported by a dream, immersed in a startlingly-real other world that has set your mood and train of thought on an entirely different path than is usual, then you know the power of dreams to evoke transformation. Most people I talk to about dreams are curious about them, fascinated even. You can sense they are pregnant with deeper meaning, but often frustrated that you cannot penetrate their mysterious nature.

Maybe you don’t dream very much, at least not as much as you used to. You may wake with a sense of having dreamt something profound – having solved the world’s problems (or your own) in your sleep — only to have this remarkable insight slip away the moment you open your eyes. Or you could be someone who recalls your dreams vividly, but then remains mystified by them.

 

Letting a big dream pass by without reflection is a huge missed opportunity

All the dreams that pass by without you actively engaging with them are missed opportunities to tend your inner life and reconnect with your depths. Dreams are the most direct, creative and personalized path to connecting with what is most important and meaningful to you. Unlike other forms of inner work like meditation and mindfulness, dreams are speaking directly to you. They’ve been called the ‘poor (wo)man’s therapist’ because they help us process our most salient emotions and memories night after night. But they are even more helpful if we know how to tend and work with them.

Would you like to be able to recall, record and work with your own dreams? Would you like a clearer understanding of their nature, and why they are so important? Or are you already working with some of your dreams via a dream group or therapist, but want a reliable way to entertain the dreams you don’t get a chance to discuss?

 

Your questions answered in a free short video series

If you said yes to any of the questions above, I have some immediate answers for you. In three 10-minute instalments, I tell you:

  1. How to recall more dreams
  2. Why dreams are so important
  3. Three simple practices aimed at making sense of and deepening your connection to your own dreams.

If you like what you see, you may want to join me in my 6-month online course on how to work with your own dreams. If you are intrigued, but not sure, check out the videos to get a sense of my teaching style and the material we will cover. And read on as I explain more.

 

A leaisurely, guided inward journey in the company of others

This is not a typical online course, but more of a guided inward journey in the company of other dreamers. The pace will be leisurely, allowing time for you to gather dreams, to spend time with the practices offered, and to reflect on them with other like-minded dreamers. The course, starting in early March, will be uniquely collaborative because it is the first time I’m offering it. In return for your feedback and active participation, I am offering a discounted rate.

The initial cohort will be a kind of focus group for the book I am writing on the topic of personal dreamwork. The class is also the first step in a comprehensive dreamwork certification program, so you can continue to deepen your dreamwork practice beyond this course if you want to.

 

How did I come to value dreams so much?

I have always been a bit of a dreamer, both day and night. As a kid, one of my favorite activities when I came home from school was to sit backwards on the couch and stare at the huge maple in our front yard. I would lose time as I drifted into the world of my imagination. People could shout in my ear and I wouldn’t hear.

Fast-forward many years to my 20-year career as a psychotherapist. As part of my training, I worked with a Jungian analyst, and as we opened up my inner life, I began to dream prolifically. When I was pregnant with my beautiful daughter Grace, I dreamt of being immersed in a forested pool of frogs. As her birth approached, I began to dream about my own very premature birth, not an easy one, and in fact, I was lucky to survive. My dreams helped me access and process this dramatic and triumphant start in life, weaving images of myself in an incubator with another near-death experience in a frothy river. (See my TED-style talk on nightmares for more of the story.)

In my work with clients, with dream groups and in the many classes I have taught, I have consistently found dreams to offer healing images, ways forward where none seems possible, and strikingly apt and densely-packed vignettes that are perfect for the person who dreamt them. Consistently, dreams bring just what is needed in the moment.

But almost all of us need help unpacking the treasures in our dreams. I have written a book for therapists on how to do this for clients. Now I am writing a book and a course for everyone interested in their dreams, and how you can begin working with them on your own. You don’t have to be a therapist, all are welcome.

 

Four Reasons to Work with Dreams… and at the risk of being dramatic, they can even save lives!

By Dr. Leslie Ellis

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my recent book which outlines 4 excellent reasons to work with dreams. This list is aimed at psychotherapists, but holds true for all dreamers! So, why work with dreams?

They point to our most salient emotional concerns

It may seem that we don’t need dreams to do this, but that we are always well aware of our most pressing emotional concerns. However, human consciousness is not always straightforward or consistent, and people can be very good at unwittingly deceiving themselves. In fact, one of the most popular forms of therapy (cognitive-behavioral therapy or CBT) was founded on the premise that our mind leads us astray and distorts our experience in a number of ways. One example is rationalization, a habit of talking ourselves out of our feelings using ‘rational’ arguments, such as, “I’m not sad that she left; I didn’t really love her anyway.” We can often fool our conscious mind, but such a person may dream of losing something of great value and wake up crying. If they pay attention to their dream, they will realize that they are in fact very sad about the loss of their relationship. Dreams are like that very good friend who is willing to be honest with us even when what they have to say is not easy to hear.

Dreams can also provide therapy clients with a way to introduce important yet deeply personal topics in the course of therapy, subjects they may want to bring up but are reluctant to do so due to fear, embarrassment or cultural norms that discourage personal revelation, even in therapy. A researcher (Goelitz, 2007), who works with clients preparing for death, found that dream work brought the focus of the session to the deeper emotional concerns rather than the more typical discussions about physical symptoms and treatment. She noted that the dream work helped her clients feel less alone and better prepared for death. She was convinced that these discussions would not have taken place had they not been facilitated by a dream.

Dreams bypass our defenses and speak the truth

Dreams tell the truth, even when such truth is uncomfortable and defended against in everyday awareness. During sleep our prefrontal cortices, responsible for, among other things, rational thought and executive functioning, mostly shut down for the night. During dreaming, our internal editor, and our moral authority also go to sleep. That’s why our dreams can sometimes be bizarre and why normally taboo subject matter such as explicit sexuality and violence can often appear in our dreams. At times, it seems as though our dreaming consciousness is trying to get our attention by delivering its content in the most flamboyant or dramatic way possible. It helps to know that dreams are often metaphorical, not meant to be taken literally. For example, I had a dream that I was eating horseshit and kind of enjoying it even though I was well aware of how disgusting this would seem to the people around me. I laughed to myself when I understood the dream’s message might have to do with a lecture I had listened to a few days’ prior that I found highly entertaining and yet filled with ideas I considered completely far-fetched.  Because I liked the person, I was trying to remain open to their ideas, trying to take in and digest the material, but having trouble doing so. The dream captured the complexity of my feeling about the situation with economy and humour.

There is considerable clinical evidence to suggest that dreams carry emotional truth that is often difficult for the dreamer to assimilate. One of the major benefits I have seen in working with dreams is that it can help clients to see and truly experience an unconscious aspect of their personality or behaviour that is not congruent with how they see themselves or want to be. For example, a client I will call Michael had a dream that he was walking on a beach and came across a group of people sitting in a circle, and his cousin was there with them smoking a crack pipe. Michael had a strong judgement about this, as smoking crack was something he would never do. But if, as some theories suggest, characters in a dream represent aspects of ourselves, then Michael was like his dream-cousin in some way. In the dream-work he did, I asked him to ‘be’ his cousin on the beach, and when he imagined this, he felt an attraction to the pipe, and then a dawning of awareness that this feeling of addiction was familiar to him as it coloured the dynamic of his relationships with the women in his life. He was flooded with shame and a heartfelt desire to change which fueled transformation in his relationship and many other aspects of his life.

 

Dreams can bring a new and wider perspective on a situation that is stuck

History provides many good examples of how a dream can bring a creative new perspective. The person who invented and patented the first lock-stitch sewing machine solved the main challenges to developing a reliable machine because a dream pointed to the solution that had long eluded him. Elias Howe, who eventually became the second-wealthiest man in the U.S., came up with the novel idea of putting the hole in the ‘wrong’ end of the needle from a dream of a spear fight between warring native tribes. In the dream, some of the warriors’ spears punctured the fabric of the tents, snagged loops of thread and pulled them back through with the tips of their spears. Dreams are the sources of many great inventions, including the periodic table and Einstein’s theory of relativity. For someone who has studied a subject deeply but who has become stuck in a fixed way of looking at the problem, dreams can bring the fresh creative inspiration that was elusive. Sometimes ‘sleeping on it’ can bring unexpected and creative answers.

Dreams are embodied, and present us with an internally-generated world that is detailed and appears very real to all of our senses. This total immersion brings us in touch with the magical quality of dreaming. A dream is a richly-detailed world that is experienced as entirely real while the person is dreaming it. Even for those who experience lucid dreaming and become aware they are dreaming while in the midst of it, the experience feels very real. This aspect of dreams is what makes them so compelling, and such a useful tool in therapy for assisting clients in stepping out of their ordinary way of experiencing or seeing things. A dream can bring a broader perspective, a new way of seeing, a shift from ordinary consciousness, or habitual ideas, a step toward change.

 

Dreams provide diagnostic information and can show clinical progress

There are many ways that dreams can provide diagnostic information about clients, although the subject is a complex one because dreams can be cryptic. According to Oliver Sacks (1996) dreams are, “directly or distortedly, reflections of current states of body and mind.” Neurological disorders can alter dreaming processes in quite specific ways, and these can vary from person to person. Sacks gives the example of a patient with an occipital angioma who knew that if his dreams turned from their usual black and white to red, he was about to have a seizure. Some other examples Sacks offered are loss of visual imagery in dreams as a possible precursor to Alzheimer’s, and recovery dreams presaging remission from multiple sclerosis. Sacks hypothesized that the dreaming mind is more sensitive than the waking mind to subtle changes in the body, and so appears prescient because it picks up subtle early cues.

In some cases, this premonitory aspect of dreaming can even be life-saving. Famous dreamworker Jeremy Taylor offered the example of a woman from dream group that met regularly who dreamt of a purse of rotting meat. The dream was so disturbing to her and the other group members, the woman felt unsettled enough to have a diagnostic pap smear which turned out to be negative. She insisted on further testing which revealed she had a particularly aggressive form of uterine cancer that would have killed her had she not caught it in time. At the time of the dream she had no symptoms and was about to go on a trip – she credits the dream and the dreamwork for saving her life.

Not only can dreams be indicative of potential health changes for better or worse, they can also be used to track clinical progress. Tracking shifts or progress via dreams can be an easier task for therapists than using a dream to make an initial diagnosis because it is often easier to spot incremental change in the pattern of dreaming than to decipher something completely new. It takes some time to get to know the unique world of each dreamer, and paying attention to a series of dreams will make it clearer when something significant has changed. For example, in my research into the nature and treatment of recurrent PTSD nightmares (Ellis, 2016), specific kinds of changes in dreams that had been recurring repeatedly, sometimes for years, appeared to coincide with trauma recovery. This observation is supported by research that sampled 94 trauma survivors and found the closer their nightmares were to replicating the actual trauma event, the higher their level of related distress. For trauma therapists who track dreams, the progression from concrete to less realistic, more imaginative dreaming can be seen as a sign of clinical progress.”

 

Dr. Leslie Ellis offers online courses in personal and clinical dreamwork, and is opening a dreamwork certification program in 2020. For more information see www.drleslieellis.com or join her email list  if you want to receive blog posts, and training opportunities.

 

Gendlin’s Radical Impact on Psychotherapy: A summary of his top 3 papers

What matters is that the therapist is another human person who responds, and every therapist can be confident that he can always be that. (Gendlin, 1968)

 

In honor of Eugene Gendlin’s lifetime achievement awards for contribution to psychotherapy theory (from APA, USABP and others), I have summarized his most important articles here. 

The radical impact of Gendlin’s philosophy: A summary of his most important articles on psychotherapy theory

 By Dr. Leslie Ellis

Back in 2011, Eugene Gendlin, the founder of focusing-oriented therapy, received his third major award from the American Psychological Association, this one for his distinguished theoretical and philosophical contributions to psychology. In 2016, the year before he died at the age of 90, Gendlin received lifetime achievement awards from both the World Association for Person Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and the US Association for Body Psychotherapy. His work has made a significant impact on how somatic and experiential therapies are practiced around the world. However, many of Gendlin’s ideas were ahead of his time, and some of the potential impact from his ‘philosophy of the implicit’ has not yet made its way into mainstream thinking about the practice of psychotherapy. This article brings some of Gendlin’s radical ideas to light, summarizing his three most important papers on the theory of psychotherapy.

There are three articles that focusing teachers from around the world agree are Gendlin’s most important contributions to psychotherapy theory, and although they are decades old, the ideas expressed in them continue to have a ‘radical impact’ (Ikemi, 2017) on psychotherapy theory. Many of Gendlin’s ideas have filtered into the common parlance of psychotherapy in various ways: proponents of immediacy and mindfulness in therapy, and those who encourage clients to follow their ‘felt sense’ or embodied understanding of an issue are taking their lead from Gendlin’s theories. It has been incorporated into methods like Emotion-Focusing Therapy and Somatic Experiencing. However, there are some concepts which underlie the process of psychotherapy that have not shifted appreciably since the days of Freud. One such concept, repression, is challenged and advanced by Gendlin’s philosophy.

 

A theory of personality change (1964)

In this ground-breaking article, Gendlin (1964) makes note of how the therapy endeavour is often a conversation between the client and therapist about what has gone wrong in their past (their experiences, development, family of origin, etc.) that has made them feel or act the way they now do. Therapy brings new awareness to the client about their past situation, and a realization that they must have felt all of this all along but kept it out of awareness because it was unacceptable or overwhelming. The concept of repression originated with Freud and has not changed much in the past 100 years.

Part of the problem with this conceptualization, said Gendlin, is that it can only explain the personality as it is, and does not in theory allow for the possibility of change. It also operates on a ‘content paradigm,’ a sense that in their unconscious, people are holding a vast storehouse of fully-formed but forgotten experiences that must be unearthed so the client can understand how they came to be the way they are. There is the inherent assumption that this insight will bring change. What has been repeatedly observed, however, is that “knowing is not the process of changing.” Gendlin (1964) and many others have observed that in fact, personality change happens in the context of an emotional process, and in relationship.

Gendlin (1964) developed a theory for this change process that updates the concept of repression with something that seems more plausible. He would say that the past experiences that still plague our clients were not experienced and then forgotten, but rather avoided or stopped before they happened. These pieces of unfinished process are tangible in the body as a felt sense that carries rich, complex and implicit meaning. When we pay direct attention in the present moment to the sense we still hold in our bodies about these unfinished aspects of our stories, it will unfold and be fully felt. Often, attending to a process that has been stopped leads to painful realizations, likely the reason the process was stopped in the first place. But even when a person comes to realize just how hard this experience is to fully feel, the process of turning toward it and allowing it to unfold most often brings a sense of relief, an easing of the anxiety surrounding it. This is surprising. Gendlin wrote, “One would have expected the opposite.”

Another surprising thing happens as a result of attending directly to the felt sense of even the most intractable issue: “Even when the solution seems further away than ever, still the physiological tension reduction occurs, and a genuine change takes place. I believe that change is really more basic than the resolution of specific problems,” (Gendlin, 1964). What changes in this process is not the external situation, but the entire way the person holds the problem. What often follows such a shift is a flood of realizations, memories and new ways of making sense of old patterns. Gendlin said this dawning of insight is often mistakenly seen as the source of change when it is actually the by-product.

How is it that such a transformative process is facilitated by the presence of another person? Gendlin said when we are with another person, it changes our manner of experiencing immediately. Of course, the nature of the person we are with makes a difference. With a self-oriented, impatient listener, we are apt to close off to our experience more than we normally would. However, with a listener that allows us to “feel more intensely and freely whatever we feel, we think of more things, we have the patience and the ability to go more deeply into the details, we bear better our own inward strain… If we have showered disgust and annoyance on ourselves to the point of becoming silent and deadened inside, then with this person we ‘come alive’ again.” This quality of presence that Gendlin describes is one that we as therapists endeavour to cultivate in ourselves. Exquisite listening can move our clients forward in the places where their process has stopped, and the movement forward in these frozen places is what brings genuine change.

 

The client’s client: The edge of awareness (1984)

In this article, Gendlin (1984) differentiates feeling from the ‘felt sense’ and explains why following the felt sense, which is not as clear or intense as a feeling, is what leads to change. “People often have the same feelings over and over, quite intensely, without change-steps coming,” Gendlin wrote. Feeling things repeatedly does not discharge them as was previously thought, but actually reinforces them. On the other hand, the vague, murky felt sense leads to feelings and ideas that have not ever been consciously expressed, and this novelty is what leads to change.

Gendlin stressed that it is the immediacy of the felt sense unfolding now that gives it the power to transform, not a reworking of the past, which is so often the paradigm for therapy. “Therapeutic steps are not a re-emergence of denied experience. What matters most for change-steps is precisely the new implicit complexity of the bodily living.” The past is always contained in the present experience, but the important difference in focusing is that it asks a person to attend freshly to what the felt sense brings now, rather than speaking from a hackneyed, familiar script about one’s life experience.

Client-centered therapy encourages the therapist to follow the client’s lead, to come with no agenda and preconceived notions, but to allow the other’s process to unfold. And for a focusing client, Gendlin’s advice is to treat their felt sense the way the client-centered therapist ideally treats them. The felt sense is the ‘client’s client,’ (hence the article’s name). So as a therapist in this context, our job is the support our client to be gentle, open-minded, curious and respectful to the inner felt sense that is unfolding, to offer gentle reminders if they ever assume they already know what it’s about. (The same holds true in working with the dreams as people often make assumptions about their dream’s meaning.)

This way of approaching therapy changes the manner of the conversation in some striking ways. Clients will typically begin their session by describing all they know about their problems, while a focusing approach is more concerned with what they don’t know. As a focusing therapist, our job is to continually bring the client back to the inwardly-sensed ‘unclear edge,’ a place they may be reluctant to stay with. To encourage focusing, the therapist can inquire into the felt sense in such a way that the client has to stop and check inside.

Gendlin said, “There is a great difference between talking about and pointing.” An example he offers of pointing: when a client says something like, “I must not want to do this (get a job, meet new people, write an assignment) since when the time comes, I don’t do it.” The phrase ‘must not want to’ is speculation, an indication that the not-wanting is not directly sensed. Rather than simply reflect the not-wanting, the therapist can invite the client to sense it more directly by suggesting they stop and sense the not-wanting directly, to set aside what they think about it and see what is really there. This kind of redirection to the current sense of something can be done whenever you notice such speculation in a session. What comes from pointing to something that can be directly sensed is often surprising, and moves a previously stuck process forward.

From this kind of activity, Gendlin observed that “process-steps have an intricacy and power to change us,” and that, “we have to rethink our basic concepts about the body, feeling, action, language and cognition” to explain this. In the remainder of the article, Gendlin offers ten theoretical propositions in support of this major revision in thought.

In the first few theoretical propositions, Gendlin writes about the process of finding words to convey the complexity of ‘feelings-and-situations’ in which we human beings find ourselves. The words come first in our bodies, and point to implicit in feelings-and-situations. Like feelings, the words “must come or we don’t have them. We can remember them and believe they ought to be there. But to have them they must come. And this is always a bodily coming.”

Gendlin views feelings, thinking, actions and words all primarily as lived experience in the body, and each bodily event as implying what comes next. He calls this ‘carrying forward’ and said, “In therapy we change not into something else, but into more truly ourselves. Therapeutic change is into what that person really ‘was’ all along… it is a second past, read retroactively from now. It is a new ‘was’ made from now.”

From this new was, steps come that change one’s conception of the past entirely. For example, in my therapy practice, I often work with early-childhood trauma, and uncover felt-senses of traumatic situations that the person, as a child, could not assimilate. Their story of childhood, when they first enter therapy, is often that it was fine and normal, but there is a lack of depth and detail which tells me they are not truly in touch with their inwardly-sensed experience. When, as an adult and with a supportive other, they do attend to the felt sense they carry of this early time, it can open up what has been termed ‘repressed memory.’

Gendlin’s formulation feels more accurate, as those with a history of repeated trauma often dissociate from their experience. The trauma is not recorded, then forgotten, but not fully experienced in the first place. When, through focusing, the client’s sense of what really happened comes into their body, there is a sense of knowing, a dawning of understanding why they were so withdrawn, anxious or angry as a child. This new ‘was’ makes sense of both how they experienced their childhood and of many of their puzzling reactions in the present. It is a carrying-forward that leads to a radical re-conceptualization of their life situation, and it often precipitates a flood of feeling, insight and re-evaluation.

Gendlin carefully differentiates feeling from a felt sense. Feelings are often less complex, more recognizable and can be repetitive if nothing surrounding the feeling changes. A felt sense contains the emotion and the whole implicit complexity of a situation. It is “a much larger whole. The implicit situation as a felt sense is a single mesh from which endless detail can be differentiated: what happened to us, what someone did, why that troubled us or made us glad, what was just the also going on… and on.” If a situation feels familiar, repetitive and stuck, Gendlin said “the stuckness is a finely organized sense of why usual ways won’t do, and of what would.” So even our internally-sensed knowledge that something is wrong and feels like it can’t be fixed contains within it an implicit sense of what would carry the situation forward. When something entirely new is called for, the felt sense can lead to highly creative next steps.

There are many situations that call for novel responses to carry them forward, and the felt sense of this can be quite specific. “An odd situation’s implying is more organized than the usual routines and contains them. The novel implicit is not unrelated to familiar concepts, phrases, and actions. It includes these and exactly why they will not suffice,” (Gendlin, 1984). We can’t speculate but must allow the process to unfold, “like an unfinished poem that very finely and exactly requires its next line.”

 

The experiential response (1968)

This article provides clear guidance for therapists in how to help our clients find the equivalent of that precise next line of their unfinished poem. We need to learn to listen in an unobtrusive way that allows them to carry their own experience forward. This process is not a simple reflection of feelings expressed by the client, but rather a reflection of the intricate felt sense; it involves not just about picking up on emotional valence, but more gathering a sense of the whole of what the client is ‘up against’ (Gendlin, 1968), including the history of the issue, thoughts about it, all its complexity. If you, as the therapist, want to support the client in focusing, you need to respond not only to the words as expressed, but to the larger felt sense that underlies the words, and in a way that allows the client to inquire further into what they are sensing. You may try many responses that appear to lead nowhere. What is more important than being right about what might lead to an experiential response is to simply keep responding to how the client reacts next. Saying something like, “That didn’t seem quite right for you… can you sense into what would feel more right?” can help move the process forward as effectively as saying something exactly right, which we can never do all of the time. Saying the wrong thing can even make the felt sense more clear to the client, because they get a clear reaction from their body that says, ‘No, it’s definitely not like that,’ which then brings a sense of what is right.

The goal in this process is not deeper understanding or a clearer definition of the issue, but a sense of the experience moving forward toward an internal release that changes how the uncomfortable sense is held in the body. When this happens, Gendlin (1968) said there is “a very distinct and unmistakeable feel of ‘give,’ easing, enlivening, releasing.” He called this referent movement but the more current term is felt shift. This is the only reliable sign of progress, and it always feels good, even when what is discovered in the process is not so good.

After a felt shift, it may be easy to go back and make sense of the progress, but before the felt shift, this would not have been possible. The experiential process itself cannot be predicted and moves forward on non-logical steps. In fact, it is not unusual for someone who is focusing to contradict something they said earlier in the process and feel both were right at the time. Focusing can transform the felt sense of a situation so completely what was initially seen as a problem no longer seems to be one.

Gendlin believed that the most powerful engine for experiencing is interaction, which is why focusing works so much better with another person (although it is possible to have an interaction between oneself and one’s felt sense). Our job as the therapist is to offer our authentic reactions to the client, not our theories or even our wisdom: “What matters is that the therapist is another human person who responds, and every therapist can be confident that he can always be that. To be that, however, the therapist must be a person whose actual reactions are visible so that the client’s experiencing can be carried further by them…. Only a responsive and real human can provide that. No mere verbal wisdom can.”

This does not mean the therapist’s reactions become the centre of attention; it is only the reactions to what the client is feeling, perceiving and implying that are expressed. At times, when a client has trouble sensing inside or articulating their felt sense, the therapist’s reaction can be the key element in moving the process forward. These responses to our clients don’t always feel clear or good. Gendlin (1968) said, “The therapist cannot expect always to be comfortably in the know. He must be willing to bear being confused and pained, to feel thrown off his stride, to be put in a spot and not find a good, wise, or competent way out.”

Gendlin felt that the therapist must be more open in their interaction than the focuser would typically experience, and give voice to anything that helps the client “see more clearly what he is up against.” For example, if a client’s responses typically result in rejection by many of those she encounters, the therapist must find a way for the client to succeed where she usually does not. For this to happen, Gendlin believed reassurance or “whitewashing” does not help. “What is bad must be expressed as just as bad as it then is or seems.” However, this honesty must be paired with a response by the therapist to the inherent ‘positive tendency’ Gendlin believed underlies every action.

Gendlin offered the example of how one might respond to being pressured by a client: “I am feeling pressured by you, and that makes me feel like pushing you away, but that isn’t how I usually feel or want to feel with you. So, we’ll do something to clarify it, resolve it, since that isn’t really how you and I are.” The point is not only to be honest about a challenging reaction, but also to then be willing to carry the interaction further “to a positive, life-maintaining experiential completion which was only implicit and had been stopped and troubled until then.”

Taken together, these three articles articulate some essential ways that therapists can engender an experiential response in their clients that helps them move forward in areas of their lives that were stuck or causing trouble. In addition, they go beyond mere articulation of method to explain the key aspects of the underlying philosophy that is Gendlin’s major contribution to the theory of psychotherapy.

 

*Akira Ikemi (2017). The radical impact of experiencing on psychotherapy theory: an examination of two kinds of crossings, Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 16:2, 159-172, DOI: 10.1080/14779757.2017.1323668

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14779757.2017.1323668

 

Links to the three articles that the world’s top focusing teachers agree are essential are found here:

Gendlin, E.T. (1984). The client’s client: The edge of awareness. In R.L. Levant & J.M. Schlien (Eds.), Client-centered therapy and the person-centered approach. New directions in theory, research and practice, pp. 76-107. New York: Praeger.

Gendlin, E.T. (1968). The experiential response. In E. Hammer (Ed.), Use of interpretation in treatment, pp. 208-227. New York: Grune & Stratton.

Gendlin, E.T. (1964). A theory of personality change. In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.), Personality change, pp. 100-148. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Strategies to tame the inner critic

In our lives, and in our clinical practice, we have all encountered the inner critic, and it can be a true impediment to connecting deeply with ourselves from the inside. Although everyone has a different version, the basic experience is the same: that of a repetitive and demeaning refrain that knows our particularly sensitive spots and sends critical messages right to that target. Often just as we (or our clients) start to feel good and strong, an inner voice enters that deflates us, telling us we are not [smart/successful/good/good-looking/talented…] enough.

In my 20 years of clinical practice, I have encountered many versions of the inner critic and find that the more trauma someone has suffered, the more intense this inner voice becomes. I think it’s in part because as children, we rely so much on our caregivers that if something is wrong with the relationship, it is too scary to blame those we rely on for our very survival. So the badness must be inside of us. It is a protective idea that helps at the time but that outlives its usefulness. However, because it was acquired at a young age, it often feels ‘true’ and is accepted without question. It is a revelation to some to simply say, you don’t have to believe your inner critic. You might want to consider its origin and question its message.

 

The inner critic is an ancient survival mechanism

Neuroscience expert Dan Siegel says the inner critic originates in our internal ‘checker,’ the vigilant part of ourselves that enabled our ancestors to survive. Those who were most alert to danger, and to something being wrong were more likely to survive and to pass on their genetic heritage. However, unchecked, it can manifest in many unhelpful ways: OCD, anxiety and also as the inner critic. This idea normalizes the voice, and also gives us a bit of objective distance from it. The inner critic is not something to believe without question, especially as we now live in a world where physical survival is rarely at stake.

Siegel’s suggestions for working with the inner critic are: to get curious about the nature of that voice, notice what brings it up and what it wants for you. Or more often, what it doesn’t want for you. Then thank it for doing that and mutually try to figure out a better way to work together.

Thoughts are not the same as facts. Just because something enters our mind doesn’t mean we have to believe it’s true. This may seem obvious, but very often people in the grip of an internal attack do not stop to question the veracity of their thoughts. In depressed clients, I have often seen them make up a whole story that makes themselves wrong or bad, maybe involving other people they imagine are thinking disparaging things about them – and then react as though this entire fantasy is real.  I like to label these thought trails as fantasy. Then I invite them to use inner focusingto inquire into the origin of this felt sense, and to tend to it from there. When the source of the self-criticism is tended to, the critic tends to shift and soften too.

The critic often has its roots in childhood, and from that vantage point, the message might make more sense, because it actually was or felt like it was true at the time. Or it somehow offered necessary protection. I suggest my clients give the critic a new job. Update the critic on the current situation, enlist their constructive help. The critic can become an ally.

 

Reassign the ‘Loyal Soldier’

I like to use the story of the loyal soldier here. This is the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who refused to surrender after World War Two ended. He spent 29 years in the jungle on an island in the Philippines, engaged in his military duties (and killing 30 people!). He remained there until 1974, because he truly did not believe that the war had ended.

During his time on the island, he ignored search parties and leaflets sent from Japan to get him to surrender, dismissing them as ploys. He was finally persuaded to emerge after his ageing former commanding officer was flown in to personally relieve him of his duties. Still dressed in a tattered uniform, he handed over his Samurai sword and went home to Japan where he was greeted. He became a rancher and survival training teacher. He died in 2014 at age 91.

This story suggests many things I think are true of the inner critic: that the critic has good intentions and is protective in some way, that it is operating on an outdated set of orders that it will not easily give up, and that in order to shift its energy to something more constructive, it needs to be acknowledged, thanked, relieved of its duties and reassigned. It needs to know the war is over and it can put its sword down.

Because the inner critical voice is thought-based, sometimes cognitive techniques (in addition to focusing) can be helpful. Therapist and author Rick Hanson suggests thought-labelling: “Oh – anxiety. Oh – self-criticism. Oh – alarmist thinking.” This has been shown in research to do two good things in the brain:  it increases activity in prefrontal regions that are involved with executive control, and it lowers the activity in the amygdala, reducing the sense of alarm.

Hanson refers to an idea that originated with Jung: the concept of the self as a committee of various parts. “If the brain is a committee, the chair of the committee, roughly, tends to live right behind the forehead. So when you increase activation of the chair of the committee, who in effect is then able to say to the self-critical member of the committee, “Oh, we hear you already. We got it. Enough already. Hand the microphone to somebody else.”

 

Recruit your inner cheerleader

To combat our natural tendency toward the negative, I suggest finding the cheerleader or support person to sit on your ‘inner committee’ – and if you don’t have one, recruit one. Just as the inner critic is often a composite of all of the authoritative and judgmental aspects of important people in your life, you can find or create a composite of those who supported you most, or simply evoke a person or character that can be that for you. Then, when you notice the inner critic speaking, you could turn to the inner support person and ask for their opinion. It’s also like asking, what would the person who supports and loves you most say to that critical statement or idea? Let this sink in and be a counterweight to the critic. Over time, you will find that the inner world will become a more benign and supportive place.

Treating Complex Trauma: Straddling Two Worlds

A brief review of Trauma and the Soul: A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption by Donald Kalsched (Routledge, 2013)

In his book Trauma and the Soul, Kalsched (2013) asks us to stand between two worlds – with our embodied sense of all the trauma that is present in ourselves and in the world, but also with the richness that is our personal, immediate and infinite current existence. He poses the question, “How do we manage to live a full life between these two worlds?” (p. 2).

Kalsched believes that any complete view of the personal self “must include its infinite reach and spiritual potential as well as its finite limitations.” In fact, in working with the deep ravages of complex trauma, it is the depth of connection with one’s soul that is often the saving grace and the “ultimate source of transformation in psychotherapy.”

He notes that many of those who experienced early childhood trauma describe “a blurring of the boundaries between ordinary and non-ordinary reality… that is inaccessible to better adapted people” (p. 3). But one of Kalsched’s primary messages is that these inner protectors from the spirit realm often turn into inner persecutors. How to overcome this phenomenon, not often talked about, is the focus of Trauma and the Soul.

The archetypal world is there to catch trauma survivors when they fall

It is well understood that when a difficult situation exceeds a person’s ability to cope with it, they split off a part of themselves as a form of protection, and in doing so, often step into a vast transpersonal world. Dissociation drops the trauma survivor into a mysterious world that Kalsched argues is not simply the result of ‘splitting’ but is also a doorway into an archetypal world that is “already there to catch them” (p. 4).

To view these extraordinary experiences as metaphor for personal experience collapses the two worlds… “between which our lives are normally suspended.” To assume it is all bounded by personal experience is to lose something essential, and in the case of survivors of extreme trauma, to discount their personal experience as merely imagination. This does not mean that we should overvalue the magical world many trauma survivors inhabit as they often need to be “talked down from their celestial scaffolding… and reconnected to life.” But Kalsched stresses that “often the early story of the trauma survivor is a mythological story before it is a personal one.”

What current neuroscience of infancy shows is that dissociation due to trauma or neglect will fragment experience, storing it in implicit memory only. Kalsched suggests these fragments gather up archetypal images from the collective unconscious because there has not yet been a developmental step that differentiates into a personal self. So early trauma survivors find access to and expression of their story more easily through myth, dreams and metaphor.

The body is the access point for this material, and focusing remains one of the best ways I know to gain access to this metaphysical layer. Focusing is an inner process that gently opens a person up to their embodied, implicit knowledge. The process of accessing, and expressing what a trauma survivor embodies can move the material from the transpersonal to be woven into their personal story. To pathologize this process and label it as a form of psychosis is unhelpful, possibly harmful – though the ultimate goal is to enable the client to straddle both worlds while remaining in solid contact with what is real and present… at times a tricky balancing act.

Kalsched makes a careful distinction here. He states that “the spiritual world is real, and following trauma it is recruited for defensive purposes” (p. 5). He believe that the angels and demons that help or haunt survivors are not only the derivatives of a defensive process, something that would not exist otherwise.

In viewing the archetypal realm as its own form of reality, Kalsched does not dismiss the visible world or the importance of our new understanding of the role of attachment and early relationship. He said these developments keep trauma work “relevant and grounded. In fact, they even hold out the possibility of restoring the embodied soul to our field” (p. 8). I suspect the reason he devotes more attention to the invisible world is that it is too often ignored, and in trauma work, this is an oversight. He writes that the infinite and eternal world of spirit “is often potentiated by early trauma and so a complete story of trauma must include its perspective.”

Trauma is defined as anything we are unable to bear consciously. Children are especially vulnerable because they have not yet developed any way to metabolize abuse or neglect, and so their nascent sense of self would be shattered if it were not for our ability to split or dissociate to “save a part of the child’s innocence and aliveness, preserving it in the unconscious… and surrounding it with an implicit narrative that is eventually made explicit in dreams” (p. 11).

Newfound hope that healing is possible

Kalsched found that such dreams contained a pattern, a dyad of child or animal and its protector, often a diabolical figure that would appear just as the client was making progress in therapy – getting close enough to relational feelings to trigger a defensive response. In 1996, Kalsched wrote about this ‘self-care’ system without much hope, but he has since incorporated techniques informed by attachment and neuroscience (ie Schore, Badenoch, Bromberg). “As a result, I have been able to witness how the seemingly-intractable resistances of the self-care system can transform, and the defensive system can even release its prisoners” (p. 13). This work is not easy and involves the full relational participation of the therapist to bring about “the co-creation of an entirely new inter-subjective reality.”

Kalsched was fascinated with what is preserved when a traumatized child splits off and hides away an essential part of themselves. He originally called it the “imperishable personal spirit” and now calls it simply the soul. He called the “main epiphany” of Jung’s work the discovery of “the divine child, patiently awaiting his conscious realization” (1912, para 510). Kalsched points out that there is a sacred dimension we can discern from “the psyche’s symbolic process – if we learn how to attend to it in our dreams” (p. 15).

Kalsched echoes the popular sentiment that early trauma is relational trauma and this can only be healed in relationship. He stresses that such a healing relationship must be of a particular kind that looks both outward and inward. It can bridge dissociated self-states in a manner not unlike the ‘good-enough’ infant-mother dyad made famous by Winnicott. It can weather “the stormy affects that are generated as the soul re-enters the body, until re-connections are made between affect and images, between the present and the past, between the inner child and its caretakers. Such a relationship holds the hope that both inner and outer transitional space may open once again, that connections in the brain can slowly be re-wired, and that archetypal defenses will release us into human inter-subjectivity and ensouled living” (p. 21).

He adds that “therapy for the soul comes in many forms” in addition to therapy or parent-child relationship, including encounters with animals, art, ideas, music… there is no formula or system that applies universally. “This theory can never be systematic or scientific because the soul and spirit are mercurial realities, quixotic, ineffable and can never be pinned down… If we were wise, we would probably keep silent about the soul and learn to listen” (p. 22).