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I will evolve this post a little over-time, but please contribute as you see fit! (Cross-posted to my blog)
Last week, I attended three days of a national counselling conference here in Vancouver, Canada. A highlight was listening to a leading local therapist named Patricia Wilensky, widely regarded in these parts as a master clinician. Among other areas, she specializes in group work, but particularly in working with shadow elements of individuals via therapeutic enactment – an updated form of psychodrama. She has written a book on therapeutic enactment with my supervisor, Marv Westwood.
One compelling item she discussed (she is an indidivual who seems to really hold the attention of folks!) was the necessity of therapists to “bring the shadow into the room”, for therapeutic purposes, but also to avoid vicarious traumatization as therapists. Finding ways to broach the unsaid, such as feelings of shame – so common for both clients and counsellors – is important. Other ways are through use of humour, active imagination – well, please feel free to respond with more!
In the context of integral psychotherapy, I believe we need to add two more items that need to be brought into the room. Together, perhaps, these three constitute “three pillars of integral psychotherapy” (I am borrowing the phrase from the Zen classic Three pillars of Zen).
OK, so here are the other two: evolution and ever-present Spirit. So, the integral psychotherapist is challenged to bring all three of these items appropriately into the room. Outside of integral psychotherapy, I don't believe there is any system that includes all three…but please inform me if I am wrong, because then our synthetic work will be made easier!
So, how do we bring evolution into the room? To think of this in more psychodynamic terms, we can think of the emergent unconscious. In integral psychotherapy we acknowledge not only the repressed submergent unconscious i.e. what is typically referred to as the shadow, but also the supressed emergent unconscious (which is a kind of shadow too, but mainstream psychodynamic therapists don't have this on their map).
One simple technique for bringing the emergent unconscious into the room comes from solution-focused therapy. Solution-focused approaches have the potential to be “shallow” in the sense of focusing on exterior problem-solving. But I believe there is also a deeper intuition at work in solution-focused approaches in their emphasis on the relevance of the future to psychotherapy.
The miracle question from solution-focused therapy is one way to bring evolution into the room in integral psychotherapy. Basically, that question is the following (some of you may already be familiar):
“If you were to go to sleep tonight, and when you woke up in the morning, a miracle had occurred and your problem had been solved, what would be different? What would you notice, see, feel, and so on”. The technique is to have the client actively imagine this scene in as concrete detail as possible –really bring it to life.
That is one way to bring evolution into the room in integral psychotherapy. Please feel free to contribute more ideas…
The third item was Spirit or ever-present Big Mind, or Self or however we want to refer to that of ultimate concern. How to bring this into the room? Let's think of spirituality in terms of a line of development: as KW suggests in Integral Spirituality, we could think of spirituality as the adaptive intelligence that evolves as an answer to the question: of what is ultimate concern?
At another conference I attended, a nurse-practitioner who works expertly with spirituality noted that she has found that speaking about suffering…particularly using that term suffering…is a great way to open people into a discussion of spirituality without going at it too directly in a way that might be off-putting to clients. She found that in asking people about their experience of suffering, they pretty much immediately would move to a consideration of ultimacy in some manner. So here is one way to bring Spirit into the room.
Hopefully this helps get the ball rolling on this topic. At the very least, SES – shadow, evolution, spirit – with the play on words to Ken's book…these three items the integral psychotherapist wants to 1) have in back of the mind during session to help orient the work; and, 2) look for appopriate ways to bring these aspects “into the room”.
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