El estado posmoderno
5. Derechos, deberes y capacidades
W
hen clients see me for psychotherapy, their presenting problems run the entire gamut of human experience. It is essential for me to be congruent with my clients about who I am, what my deepest values are, and what role I am to play in the psychotherapeutic context with them.There are many therapeutic orientations within the field of psychology.
Each psychological-change model is based on certain assumptions that form a theory for how positive therapeutic change occurs. It is these presupposi-tions that determine the role of the therapist. Cognitive-based therapists, for example, are not so interested in helping their clients identify and express deep affective states that have been repressed. Instead, the cognitive-based therapist operates through a lens that focuses on what the client is thinking and how the therapist can help the client to think more constructively.
My training as a psychotherapist includes almost all psychotherapeutic models except the pharmacological model. I also have over twenty years experience practicing and teaching Kundalini yoga, meditation, and core shamanism, and seventeen years practicing process-oriented psychology (processwork). Much of my Dynamic Energetic Healing® grows out of my training in processwork.
Mindell was a physicist before he became a training analyst at the C.
G. Jung Institute. From his background in physics and Jungian psychology, I-learned about fields of energy (particles and waves) from a physics perspec-tive and the collecperspec-tive unconscious from a Jungian perspecperspec-tive. Mindellʼs
wonderful synthesis of these two disciplines provided me with enormous insight. I learned that individuals are always being affected by larger collec-tive fields of energy and that larger colleccollec-tive fields are always being affected by the individual. I also came to realize that how you express your experience in words is metaphoric at best and solely dependent on your frame of refer-ence within a relational context.
With every client, I emit a positive attitude of healing. My energy field holds a number of core beliefs, including the following:
1. Positive change is possible and likely.
2. Clients will achieve a positive therapeutic outcome.
3. Clients will experience personal healing on many levels.
4. Dynamic Energetic Healing® strategies will awaken the clientʼs soul.
5. I am personifying a new paradigm for healing (for most new clients) that creates a state of internal confusion in clients. This tends to destabilize the limiting approach they previously had for dealing with their problems, which creates new possibilities they had previously not considered.
First and foremost, I am a process-oriented therapist. This has enormous ramifications for how things occur within the therapeutic relational context.
As a process-oriented therapist, I hold a unified field of attention. This uni-fied field incorporates multilevel awareness. Within this multilevel awareness I occupy multiple roles, constantly switching back and forth. I am an active listener, paying attention to the content of what clients are telling me and to how they communicate their message. As a supportive and active listener, I establish and build rapport with my clients. I am aware of their language patterns, and I notice how they perceive their experience as human beings in relationship. I complete the communication feedback loop so clients are reas-sured that what they are telling me is acknowledged and understood.
There are times when I work with my clients that I feel their energetic release through my own body as a deep, physical exhalation of breath.
Because I have trained myself to be sensitive to energy, I often experience this energetic release on a physical level, even when my clients do not notice anything. It is important to verbalize my experience to my clients, as my role in that moment becomes a modeler of energetic and more subtle extrasensory experiences. As balance at the energetic level occurs, the manual muscle test-ing will confirm for clients that blocked energy was released. It is important
for me to go with my experience of the energetic releases each time this hap-pens and to verbalize to clients as a way to help them become more sensitive to their energy body.
I teach and encourage my clients to trust their internal perceptions. As a process-oriented therapist, I am the lead partner in a team that is co-creat-ing experience for change. As I describe and reflect back to my clients my ongoing energetic experiences, they are being taught and encouraged to trust their internal perceptions within the context of relationship. Eventually, clients begin to-understand how important this is to their personal development, and they-come to rely on their internal perceptions to cultivate their own second attention. When clients learn to trust themselves, they start on a path of self-empowerment and begin to develop self-appreciation and self-love. I become the advocate for the part of my clients that has been disavowed through lack of support by their family of origin and the culture at large.
The dominant cultural paradigm of this century has a strong orientation toward valuing external reality. This is true in our workplaces as well as in our entertainment via the media. To a large extent we are observers, watching rather than participating. The art of conversation and the expression of deep feeling states has been supplanted by a cultural imperative to orient to technology and computers as the vehicle for doing our work and communicating in general.
Between the possessive hypnotic and addictive pull of television and the com-puter screen (including the minuscule Game Boy screens), worker drones and our children are being trained to orient outside themselves for meaningful and important information. When a clientʼs feelings are acknowledged and sup-ported, that in itself is extremely healing. When a clientʼs more subtle experi-ences are acknowledged and supported, the individual becomes self-referential.
Like anything else, this requires gentle support and encouragement, since it involves shifting and expanding the paradigm that informs clients about self within the context of a culture that has no apparent interest in them if they are unwilling to conform to the herd mentality of an external orientation to life.
As this process within the client begins to deepen, that person becomes one more cell in the organism of the culture that begins emitting a different frequency signature. As I am a catalyst for change for my clients, my clients become catalysts for change for humanity, moving beyond a limiting identity to a place of greater harmony and love.
As a process-oriented therapist, I become aware of subtle and unusual experiences by accessing what Mindell refers to as the parapsychological
channel. Combining this orientation with my experience in core shamanism, I make this realm accessible to my clients. Though most of my clients believe in a spiritual side of life, part of the shift that occurs for them with Dynamic Energetic Healing® is toward recognizing the possibility of accepting that they can access powerful spiritual resources in their daily life. It is important to acknowledge that I am teaching my clients that there is another reality which can be accessed for health and healing.
Because of my heightened ability to feel and see energy fields, I some-times identify dark energy in clientsʼ chakras, in their physical bodies, and in their auric or biofields (see chapter 15, “Working with Supernatural Ener-gies”). Though some of my clients are surprised when I tell them I perceive dark energy, most of them are fully aware that something dark and negative has become part of them. They know that something is wrong (which is often the result of prior trauma), but previous therapy experiences have done little to ease their anxiety and fear. In dealing with dark energy, the role of a tradi-tional clinician or psychotherapist is rarely useful. Rather, the therapist must be fluid enough to move into the dreamtime experience to assist in releasing the dark energy surrounding the client. Part of this involves embodying the energy of the divine through what Sandra Ingerman (2000, 189–90) describes as shapeshifting into oneʼs divinity. In this process, my connection to Spirit creates a resonance shift in which I vibrate at a significantly higher level than the darkness that has densified into the clientʼs body and energy field.
The Dynamic Energetic Healing® model addresses what some people call supernatural phenomena. My clinical experience continues to affirm that complete psychological and emotional healing often will not occur unless dark energy is identified, addressed, and released. The important missing link in treating psychological disorders and mental-health issues is the dark energy component.
Unfortunately, most psychologists, therapists, and doctors are not edu-cated to accept that dark energy exists and that it can affect people emo-tionally and mentally. This is a major flaw in the conventional treatment of mental and emotional issues and one of the primary reasons for the continuing increase in the use of antidepressants.
Dynamic Energetic Healing® can successfully address the entire spec-trum of traumatic residue, including repressed emotions, limiting beliefs, soul loss, and compromised energetic boundaries (which are discussed in chapters 30 and 31). When individuals are in abusive or traumatic situations,
their energy fields become compromised by fear and the experience of pow-erlessness. When this occurs, negative thought forms and other low-density supernatural phenomena can easily penetrate a personʼs energetic boundaries and cause long-lasting, erosive psychic and emotional injury. In large part, it is-the persistent and unrelenting feeling of violation that the still-present dark energy continues to perpetuate. Clients know intuitively that something bad or-evil happened at the time of the trauma and that they have never been able-to heal. When confirmation of this experience occurs, hopelessness and depression begin to dissipate, and clients begin to believe that recovery is actually possible.