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Spirit as Healer

There is a way to bring your your soul, or higher self,  into your  growth progress.  I call this work attunement because it allows  your personal self, ( your every day self) to  attune with your soul’s choices for you. Specifically, your soul guides a meditation process that is your soul’s choice of what you should be working on now – at the moment of the attunement.  Neither you nor I know where we will be lead and what material of yours will be attended to in the attunement.

If you are familiar with meditation you will likely find this process fairly easy to follow inside your self, in your energy field. If you are not at all familiar with meditation I will direct your attention to the places in your body where the work is occurring. Most people readily learn to follow the process and to ” read” their own energy.

Your job is to feel the process as it moves inside you.  My job is to act as a conduit to bring in sufficient universal light (or energy) for the process to occur, and to keep you informed as to what is happening. I occasionally will suggest something for you to say, out loud or silently, that brings your personal self into line with the directives of your soul.

The outcome of the work is  to create more inner ‘space’ in your ‘consciousness’ for new ways of being to emerge. These words may sound foreign to you now,  but once you have had the  experience of the attunement, you will experience, and therefore understand, what the words mean.

Contact me if you are interested and we will set up an hour appointment for your first attunement.

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The Observing Ego

The Observing Ego

One of the most important skills  you can learn in therapy is how to develop an observing ego. Your observing ego has the ability to watch yourself, to observe your unfolding process, and in this way to know yourself on many levels.

The observing ego can be used in many ways:  (1) It can be used ‘after the fact’   –  like when you have remembered something upseting, perhaps in therapy or perhaps not,  and gone through your immediate feelings. Then it is most helpful to look back at what you thought and felt and understand what that all means about you.   (2) Your observing ego  can be used “in vivo.”  This is when your ability to see your self comes into action while  you are in the middle of real life and you need to understand what’s bothering you, what’s propelling you to act a certain way, etc. (3)  A more difficult use of the observing ego,  but a skill very much worth developing, is using it in relationships with other people. I call this “Minding The Store” and it has to do with observing what is going on between you and the other person.   (4)  Then there is the whole skill involved with having the ability to quite literally tune into your inner child, and see or hear what the child in you is thinking, feeling, needing, wanting, pursuing,etc. There is a blog called “An Ongoing Relationship with your Inner Child that teaches how to do  this , step by step. This lovely skill has many uses, including a method you can employ on a daily basis that amounts to developing a positive relationship with yourself and simultaneously healing the child in you from a difficult childhood or trauma.  Once mastered, this skill allows you an instant glimpse into your own psyche and your child within’s experience of whatever is going on in your present unfolding life.

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The Risk of Change

This is the third bog in a series ” How Therapy Helps”

Why do so many of us hold back from making changes in ourselves that we supposedly want?  Usually it is fear, and that fear can  be strong enough to keep us from even setting the “desired” change as a goal.  Can’t progress in therapy if we are afraid to make our goal a reality, right?

Why does this happen?  Let’s take some examples to make this understandable: Perhaps you grew up in a family were your intrinsic worth wasn’t reinforced enough, and you become an overachiever to prove you are worth something. Yet, working so many hours is wearing you out, and your present family, your  spouse and kids, complain that you are always at work and don’t have time for them. You’d like to not feel pressured to work so much, and you agree to go to therapy so that you can change this and spend more time with the people you love. So – what’s to be nervous about here?

This person might very well hold back while  questioning  themselves in this way: Who will think highly of me  if  I  don’t keep earning those raises, awards, etc. I don’t know if I can feel  good about myself if I don’t keep over-achieving; I’ve kept that old feeling of being wrong and bad at bay by being a super-achiever.   Won’t other people see me differently too? Why would they respect me anymore?

It’s hard to believe that therapy will change the way you see yourself, and that then you will no longer assume that others will look down at you if they are not looking up.  It seems like a terrible risk.

Or take the woman who is so giving of herself to people around her. She’s the one who decided to take care of her siblings so her mother could rest and her mother praised  her for it.  Now it seems that everyone says good  things about her for being so giving.  Her children think she is a great Mom, her husband is always appreciating what she does, her neighbors think the world of her. How do you give that up, especially when that is who you see yourself to be?  Of course there is this problem of feeling used, of never having time for yourself, and not even knowing what is important or pleasing to yourself.  The kids are soon off to college and then what will you do with your time then?  Volunteer?  What about pursuing something that will be truly fulfilling?  But maybe that is being selfish, and who would say good things about you then? Besides, you have no idea what you would like to pursue….what if there isn’t anything?  Very scary prospects, yes?

It is true that therapy takes courage –  a  different kind of courage  Therapy takes courage to look within ourselves,  face our inner dragons, and let ourselves change.  The good news is that change comes slowly enough for you to control yourself.  A competent therapist would never expect you to behave differently in the world until you are fully ready to do so.  It is the therapist’s job to help you track down the blocks to moving forward, and show you how to move through them and get on with becoming the person you truly are.

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How Does Therapy Help Me Get Out of My Parents’ House?

This is the second blog entry in the series: How can therapy help me?

In a previous post, I discussed how therapy helps people make the changes they want. In this one, I continue the discussion.

OK, so you think this business of “living in my parent’s house” is what is going on with you. So, how does therapy help get you free to set up your own “place” to live?

From the previous blog, you understand the concept of adapting to your environment and generalizing, so that you assume what you learned about yourself,  other people and the world is pretty much the way you originally learned it to be in your family.

How do you unlearn these “negative beliefs”  that are not true?

1) Identify those pivotal times when you made these decisions about yourself, other people and the world. Therapy helps you find the incidents( or the general atmosphere) where you decided on these beliefs that were intelligent conclusions in that world you lived in.

(2) You get a chance to change these beliefs.  You get to see how you came to create these beliefs. Then, looking at the situation with your own adult eyes,  and through the clarity of your therapist’s eyes,   you can change the conclusion that you made as a child. Why is the therapist helpful? Because we see ourselves through the eyes that our parents gave us. The therapist, because (s)he didn’t grow up in your family, sees the situation for what it was.

For example, Your older brother was a science whiz and he and your Dad did all these science experiments together. They never included you.  You remember the time Dad got so frustrated helping you with your math homework.  “What is the matter with you – don’t you get it?”   When the family gets together with relatives everyone gushes over your brother and his science awards….you hang around the edges, pretty unnoticed.  You are shy, and your mother needs you to “act right”  (her version) in front of everyone:  “Why don’t you just go over and say hello, they are your cousins, you look silly just standing there, what will they think of you?” Doesn’t take much of this is you learn you are pretty inadequate and feel ashamed of yourself.

Many of us have had much more extreme situations in our families that made it abundantly clear we’re not lovable, worthwhile, or deserving.

Making these changes often feels risky  – and I will go into that in my next blog.

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How Therapy Helps You Get The Happiness You Want

This is the first entry in a series : How can therapy help me?

Wouldn’t it be great to be happy all the time?  Life doesn’t dish out constant happiness, but all of us should be happy, joyful really, at least some of the time.

If you don’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have depression…there can be lots of reasons.  A big one is that many of us are living as if we were still in the world we  were born into – in our original families.

This is nothing to feel stupid about or condemn yourself over. When you were a kid you were  smart and you learned quickly what was going on in your world.  If there was a lot of anger and criticism, abusive treatment that no kid deserves, or high standards that no kid could attain, you probably  figured out the best way to cope with what you had to live with.

The problem is that all of us human children, (because we can’t afford to learn every new circumstance from scratch,)  generalize what we learned in the  world of our parents and siblings to what might happen outside the house with other people, and we were on guard for this to happen again.  This expectation of what is likely to happen  lasts — we generalize what we learned as children to the world we live in now. Many people  live like this much too long in their lives –  basically trying to  protect themselves from what isn’t out there any more.  Therapy helps a lot.

There are other underlying reasons  that keep us humans from being ourselves and enjoying our lives. Perhaps you are living someone else’s definition of who you ought to be.  Maybe to  be a good person in your family you took care of everyone, to help out your Mom, or because nobody else was paying attention, and now you have a knee jerk response of taking care of others over your own needs. Maybe your father was impressed with people who had a lot of money and you’ve become just what he wanted you to become – a successful business man, only you hate it and want to be home more.  Some people  stay married because their folks would be horrified to have a divorse in the family. There are endless varieties on this theme, and not much joy.

This discussion is continued over the next few blogs.

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Are You Getting What You Need From Your HMO?

Every so often someone comes to me for therapy who has already been through counseling at their HMO. Often they blame themselves for not feeling resolved  about what it was that they went to a therapist for in the first place. Blaming your self is reinforced because you’ve been   discharged from their HMO as no longer needing therapy. “So what is the matter with me, I’m still feeling lousy?”

It is not uncommon that the person has been put on a psychotropic medication which they may indeed profit from. The problem is medications work better in combination with talk therapy. The therapy actually helps the medication  to be more effective,  and the medication definitely helps the person get the most out of therapy. In my opinion the person has been short changed. She, or he , could have gotten more help. Often, unfortunately, what they did get was a band aid to “stop the bleeding” but not induce a cure.

Why is this ? HMOs, due to their cost containment strategies, are set up to do short term therapy, which is fine if that is what you need. It can be all you need if you have a present situation which can be cleared up quickly with some help, and has no roots in your past. On the other hand if you are struggling with problems that exist in your life  because of your beliefs about yourself and your world,  it can be a relief to see how you learned these negative beliefs in your childhood.  Making the connection between the present situations and the past  is a doorway to changing in a real way. You deserve to have longer therapy.

I offer in-depth therapy that can get to the bottom of what troubles you. I’m not comfortable with skimming the surface, because most human problems  do have roots in our childhood. When that is obvious to me as a therapist, I can offer you the option of dealing with these underpinnings of the present problem. My commitment to you holds until you decide you are ready to leave therapy, and my investment in you is still there  if or when you want to return.

Going to your HMO therapist is often free or nearly so. I am aware of the expense of paying for insurance and then paying again for therapy out-of-pocket. I have devised a sliding scale that roughly correlates to the income into your household and the number of people that income supports. Almost always,  a fee that works for you will work for me.

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JOYFULNESS IN YOUR EVERYDAY

Being so absorbed in something that you are beyond judgment or effort.

Being so in tune with what you are doing that everything flows.

Being able to feel without impediment.

Being able to act out of free choice.

Not needing names, acceptance.

Feeling love while you are experiencing it for another

I drove to work the other day and I was going my normal route,  worried about something.  I  exhaled to shake off my worrying.  At a stop sign, my car was facing a leafless tree  standing across the road from me (which I must have driven past a thousand times).  Suddenly I saw the tree. It  was  lit up in sunshine and was perfect in it’s shape. I was  stunned by its beauty. I had never seen it before.

I would like you to add your experiences and definitions of JOY to this blog.     Thanks, Ann


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Forgiveness

Forgiveness isn’t something to work towards, rather it is something that happens naturally in the process of healing. Once you are no longer suffering from the effects of what has happened, you find yourself no longer angry at your abuser. You may never want to see or speak to this person, but you do them (and ultimately yourself) the ‘favor’ of no longer seeing them as a monster. Once your rage has gone you find yourself seeing your abuser as a human being, perhaps very flawed, but human none the less.  Getting to this point is good for your body and your health. This is no way implies you are condoning what happened to you, but it is forgiveness.  If you try to get to the point of forgiveness instead of letting it happen naturally, you can’t help but miss essential stages in your healing.

Continue reading →

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Why get mad at my parents?

Question: It seems that when my friends go to therapy, they end up being mad at their parents. I don’t see why this has to happen; I love my folks and think I had a good childhood.  Relationships are a struggle for me and I would like to change that, but I don’t want to be turned against my parents.

It is not a necessary for you to “get mad” at your parents to have success in therapy.  After all, as adults it is our job to take responsibility for ourselves and not just blame our parents for being inadequate.  Although understanding your relationship with your parents is part of the therapeutic process, it is not the end.

Continue reading →

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How do I get my partner into therapy?

Question:  My boyfriend and I are fighting a lot and he refuses to go to a therapist with me. I love him, and don’t want to leave, but I can’t handle all the fights. He says a stranger can’t help us – and that we can work it out by ourselves. The problem is we don’t and nothing is changing. What can I do?

If he won’t go to a therapist,  go by yourself. You will learn about yourself and your relationship and most likely will grow in your own self estimation.  You will become better equipped to deal with your boyfriend and more able  to know what you have a right to expect in a relationship.

Many men agree to see a therapist once their partner has been going and obviously getting something from the sessions, so you may be surprised about him.