The Spiritual Horizon of Psychotherapy

William S. Schmidt, Merle R. Jordan, William S. Schmidt, Merle R. Jordan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317987772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médecine
• Subtopic: Psychiatrie et santé mentale

This book explores the wise and conscious use of spiritual resources within counselling and psychotherapy. Written by veteran clinicians from different spiritual perspectives, and from various therapeutic schools of thought, this book provides a broad view of how the spiritual is present within therapeutic practice.

The work of counselling and psychotherapy is increasingly seeking to ground its efforts within the richness of spiritual traditions. One of the surprising developments of the contemporary psychotherapeutic scene is a growing reliance on both hard, objective sciences - such as, for example, neurology or Genetics - whilst at the same time engaging very subjective, "soft" sciences - such as states of consciousness studies, psychology of religion, clinical or Pastoral Theology, and the over-arching tasks of meaning-making.

Written by and for clinicians who are also teachers in the field, this collection offers a variety of viewpoints in terms of the diverse spiritual traditions they draw from, theoretical sources that guide and inform them, or the spiritual applications they bring to their work.

This book was published as a special issue ofthe Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health.

Psychotherapy as an Operational Theology Process

Merle R. Jordan

Emeritus Professor, Boston University School of Theology, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

A unique task of spiritually-oriented therapists is to investigate, explore, and help the client to transform his/her distorted world view, false images of God, unconscious and destructive belief systems, self-sabotaging narratives, and pathological perspectives that undermines one’s life. The client is living with an out-of-awareness self-governing perspective based upon two principles that are inherent in what some call operational theology (not the theology that one rationally and intellectually professes, but the lived theology from the unconscious patterns, images, and beliefs that one has internalized from the key authorities of one’s family of origin and other influential childhood relationships).

The First Construct: Understanding the Pathology from the Perspective of Operational Theology

The first construct of understanding this pathology from the perspective of operational theology is the unconscious creation of an internalized object from childhood that functions in one’s psyche as a false ultimate authority or idol. Such an idolatry operates unconsciously whether the client is a believer, an agnostic, or an atheist. This first construct of idolatry of inner objects originated with a Viennese analyst, Wilfried Daim, who believed that Freud, in his research, was correct that the object of fixation that caused pathology came from some internalized object of childhood. Daim wrote:

Empirical research of analytic processes confirms that Freud was right in seeing the real root of neurosis in a fixation of the human being on an object of childhood. At closer examination, we found that in every case, the object of the fixation process possesses an absolute character. The object of fixation in Freud’s system is what we call an idol. (1955, p. 28)

In the client’s mind, the object of fixation possesses the nature of ultimate truth and ultimate reality, even if the client doesn’t like the style of that person’s way of relating. For example, it is quite common to have a client who disliked the authoritarian, dictatorial, and rigid ways in which a father or mother functioned, but the client internalizes the so-called “rightness” of the dictator and structures one’s way of functioning around that supreme authority. With other clients, their parents may have been distant and non-engaging empathically and compassionately, and so the emptiness, loneliness, and distancing of the parental object become the guiding force in the client’s life. Then there are the clients who have been taught in an authoritarian way that vulnerable feelings such as sadness, hurt, fear, and helplessness are always forbidden, and life has to be lived from a defensively strong position. Not being obedient to the repressive, demanding authority often makes one feel guilty or a failure if one experiences vulnerable human feelings.

Now let us look at a clinical example of how one who uses operational theology attempts to get at the psychic idol of a client. With the first client, we have a middle-aged woman, Jan, a very effective nurse in patient care. She was active in her church and community. She is seen by people as very supportive and caring. However, she also tends to give herself away and to not be assertive on her own behalf. Her professional role fits her perfectly, as she has been brought up to negate her own needs and feelings and to take care of others in her family. She was somewhat depressed as she had to adapt around her dominant controlling husband.

Therapist (T): Where is the push coming from to take care of other people and to give yourself a back seat?
Client (C): I was brought up that way. My father was always in charge and he knew what everyone else in the family should do.
T:	How did you feel about that?
C:	We just accepted it, though my younger sister occasionally rebelled.
T:	And your mother’s role?
C:	She adapted around my father, and she set the model for how we should behave.
T:	So did you ever question either one’s role in your life?
C:	No. I just worked very hard to do what I thought would be helpful to them.
T:	Any drawbacks to that plan? Any downside?
C:	I can’t take an administrative leadership role in my profession because that would put me in a place to exercise authority and possibly face conflict. That’s too much for me to bear so I seek to avoid those leadership roles. I’m more of a caretaker and helper.
T:	So you learned as a child to adapt to other authorities and to be a helpful, caring person, but you also got cheated because you had no right to exercise your own authority.
C:	True.
T:	It seems like you also re-created the pattern you learned from your father in your unconscious selection of mate who is so authoritative, directive and right.
C:	That’s for sure, but I never realized I had played a part in needing Jack to be like my father.

Later, I invited her to confront her two ruling parental authorities. Note from Daim’s research that being able to be angry with a psychic idol is a key step in getting free from it.

T:	Can we first put your mother in the empty chair? Can you tell her about some of your hidden feelings about her always modeling for you to be a caring, helping wimp?
C:	Mom, it’s so difficult because you are always so good and so helpful. I felt badly for you that you had to live under the rule and directions of daddy.
T:	Any feelings of annoyance or irritation you can share with her?
C:	Mom, I’m sorry that you learned in your childhood years that it was not safe to be assertive or challenging. You learned from your family to be a loving patsy also.
T:	How does that make you feel?
C:	Sorry for her.
T:	Yes. Anything else?
C:	A bit annoyed. I got trapped in the same way that she was caught. I couldn’t be fully free to be me either.
T:	How strongly can you articulate your annoyance to her?
C:	Sometimes I feel furious with dad for oppressing you who is such a sweet, loving, intelligent woman. He really suppressed you in many ways. That was unfair and unjust.
T:	So it is a bit safer being angry with your father on behalf of your mother. Could you imagine putting him in the other empty chair and saying that to him?
C:	Dad, I know you loved mother. But you also squelched her a lot. You clearly spelled out how she should be and what she should do. That wasn’t fair to mom. It hurt me that she had to live submissively under your rule.
T:	Any way of telling him that it was the same mistreatment of you by him as it was for your mother and it was unfair and infuriating?
C:	Dad, I am afraid to tell you this, but I have to have the courage to speak up. Under the surface of my compliance to you, I was stewing in my frustration and my irritation with you. I didn’t like that I couldn’t feel free to be myself and to explore my needs and true feelings in many instances.

Later:

T:	Can you now refocus on your mother for a minute? Could you tell her about your longing for her to provide the parental model for you to speak up and to confront conflict with your genuine feelings?
C:	Mom, it’s really true. As much as I love you and I feel compassionate for how you got into this submissive bind also, I am really enraged that you couldn’t screw up the courage to confront daddy and provide me with a healthy model to genuinely deal with such oppressive authority.

Comments on Case

As Jan suffered from the first idolatry of experiencing her father as being the ultimate authority, she also deeply suffered from following her mother’s submissiveness as being the major way of coping. Jan had made her mother’s submissive way of surviving as her own idolatrous way of saving and protecting herself.

The Second Construct: Client’s Out-of-Awareness Strategy

The second construct deals with the client’s out-of-awareness strategy for protecting oneself, defending oneself and surviving in a psychic world so erroneously governed by a false absolute. It is really an unconscious salvation strategy that operates as a second idolatry. The client hangs oneself on an out-of-awareness cross (such as an addiction) that becomes the symptom to protect oneself from some major problem (in order to survive under the dominant role of the first idol). In secular terms, Bruce Ecker and Laurel Hulley have expressed this brilliantly in their writings on coherence therapy (previously known as depth oriented brief therapy). In this approach, Ecker (2008) suggests that the therapist is to “guide the client to get directly in touch with the emotional truth of the symptom: The underlying, unconscious emotional scheme that compellingly requires the client’s symptom or problem, despite the suffering entailed in having it” (p. 45).

The therapist engages the client in a discovery process in an attempt to help the client to experience why it is absolutely essential for him/her to have one’s symptom. Most therapeutic approaches take an anti-symptom approach in seeking to get the client to give up one’s symptom and get on with living. Ecker and Hulley proposed therapeutic use of a pro-symptom approach that leads clients into the awareness of why they have felt the symptom was absolutely necessary in order for them to survive.

Ecker and Hulley (1996) explain further that they discovered that:

What matters most in triggering lasting change was for the client to find and experience the already-existing but hidden emotional meaning that the problem had for her or him … to arrive at the point required reaching into the client’s constructions operating outside of awareness. When we begin intentionally to seek the problem’s emotional truth—an unconscious construction of passionately felt meaning—from the very start of therapy, our work began to readily achieve the level of effectiveness we were seeking. (p. 3)

Thus, one’s construal of reality (or misperception of reality) and construal of the defensive symptoms to try and solve the difficulty are important to help the client’s surface. The therapist uses various methods to try to bring into awareness the deep and compelling meaning underlying the symptom. A couple of techniques that I find most helpful in surfacing the meaning of the symptom include: (a) sentence completion, and (b) visualization of a symptom-free state. My favorite sentence completion is: “It is emotionally dangerous for me to give up my (name the symptom, like an addiction) because ____.” The visualization technique asks the person to go into a peaceful scene in which he/she is without the symptom for an extended period of time. Then the most important step for the client is to see or sense if there are any unwelcome or disturbing feelings about the scene without having the symptom. Let’s look at some clinical illustrations of how such inquiry or discovery has been generated.

One case that profoundly reveals the second truth of the meaningfulness and purposefulness from an unconscious perspective of one’s symptoms comes from a colleague. He tells a story of a middle-aged woman named Susan who came with her husband to see him, and on the first meeting she started out by saying, “I’m an alcoholic.” So the therapist began questioning her about what was involved in her drinking problem. She said that when she went out to eat at a restaurant with another couple or just with her husband, she always had too much to drink and she would get inebriated. The thera...