There are different reasons for choosing to see a psychotherapist. Some people are interested in developing themselves and in personal growth, and they visit a therapist to gain a different perspective from someone who has studied and who specialises in relationships and understands them. In this sense the therapist is an impartial and informed third party who is separate from family and friends and so has no agenda with the client, and who can therefore act as a sounding board to bounce ideas off.
Many people choose to visit a therapist in a time of feeling unsettled or a time of crisis, such as a period of depression, or when suffering panic or anxiety attacks, or a crisis in a relationship or the family. Often people come due to a gradually emerging sense of dissatisfaction about an aspect of their life, such as work, or academic achievement, or for professional coaching or development. What brings another person might be a discomfort with a relationship, or with a pattern in a series of relationships. Often, here in Barcelona, clients are from overseas and are struggling to fit in, or to adjust and acclimatise to the very alienating experience of being isolated by language and culture, which is enough to trigger depression, anxiety and feelings of being completely lost and overwhelmed for a surprising number of us. Sometimes clients feel lost or without direction, and feel like they are sleep-walking through their lives, wondering when ‘the real thing’ will start, or they may feel as if they are living someone else’s life, and do not know how they arrived in this position or how to find their own path.
All this can be considered personal growth, because it is about developing a deeper understanding of our relationship with ourselves and with others, and becoming clearer and more comfortable with our place in the world. With this improved clarity we are also able to see that we have more choice about our lives and direction, and relationships, than we previously realised. As we learn more about this increased choice we feel able to make more conscious and better informed decisions, and this in turn leads us to feel more empowered and confident. This means that instead of being affected by events and the people around us and reacting, that we begin to take back control of our lives by making more aware and more conscious choices. This feels better and we begin to define a path and direction for our lives, and this allows us to feel calmer and more satisfied and fulfilled, and less angry and frustrated.
There has been increasing interest in the whole area of personal growth and personal development since the 1960s. However it is still a much misunderstood field. It is not uncommon even today to hear someone say; ‘I don’t want to go and see a therapist to be told what to do’. Yet this is the opposite of what therapy is about. Therapy is about helping the client to define what they want and become more able to achieve it, and absolutely not about telling them what to do. Also there is such a wide range of treatments, therapies, courses and doctrines to follow, that it is difficult to make an informed choice about what would suit us best and in any moment or situation. My purpose in writing this piece is to offer a context or perspective to help you the reader to make a more suitable choice for you. Many of us spend a long time wondering whether yoga or meditation would be more helpful, or if learning about Buddhism or becoming a vegetarian would be better for us than visiting a psychotherapist or naturopath or some other healer. So how do we make this choice?
It is important to understand our goal and to focus on the type of development we want. Some of us wish to change our everyday relationships, whereas some are looking for more spirituality, and another may be seeking more of a sense of purpose or meaning in life. To make sense of this in the past, many traditions have used the concept or metaphor of an upper world, a middle world and a lower world. We can see that the upper world refers to our higher or raised levels of consciousness and to aspects of spirituality. The middle world is the physical or material world we live in and experience through our five senses, and the lower world is the realm of our subconscious, or that part of us which is generally not revealed to us or seen by us in our daily lives, or at least is only partially revealed to us in our dreams.
Each of those ‘worlds,’ or aspects of us, can be developed, and each will give us different experiences, and although it is true to say that there is little or no overlap between these ‘worlds’, they all shed light on our lives because they are all parts of us. Psychotherapy is predominantly the development work of the middle world, or everyday material or physical world in which we live. It deals with our place in the world and how we feel about it, and helps us to develop healthy supportive relationships with ourselves and those around us. So if we have low self-esteem or if we lack confidence, our focus would be on working on our relationship with ourselves. Alternatively, if we would like to be more assertive, we would work more on our relationships with others. However it is important to note that we cannot work on one aspect of ourselves in isolation, and if we change an aspect of our behaviour, we are likely to change all aspects of ourselves to some degree because we are one person. Some of us feel we do not know what we would like to change, but we may have a feeling of dissatisfaction nevertheless. In this case the goal could be to gain some increased clarity about the nature of this dissatisfaction and its cause. There are other therapies which belong to this ‘middle’ or material world, and these are the practical ones like homeopathy, some forms of massage and body-work, and some operate in this middle world and the spiritual upper world, like yoga.
If I was to summarise psychotherapy, and the personal growth work of the middle world, it is about becoming as authentically who we really are as we can be. This means not pretending things are okay for us when they are not, and not putting up with unreasonable treatment from others or unreasonable behaviour of others. It is about saying how we really feel and stating clearly what we would like. This does not mean that that we will suddenly and automatically get what we want, but it is better than wearing a mask, or pretending we do not mind about things we do really care about, and it is better than only daring to hint at what we would like and hoping others will guess and give it to us, and then feeling frustrated and angry and neglected when they fail to read our all too subtle signals. The other goal of psychotherapy is to deepen the intimacy of our relationships with others. These two goals of psychotherapy go hand in hand, as when we begin to have the courage to speak out and to say what we want and how we feel, we are having the courage to show other people who we really are. This is what intimacy is about, and as we share more with others, they do the same and we find our conversations becoming deeper and more satisfying because we feel a deeper connection to the people with whom we are conversing. (It is important to note that many people think of intimate relationships as sexual relationships, but it is a common, modern day misunderstanding. A sexual relationship is likely to be intimate, but not all intimacy is sexual. We are intimate with our children, because we share thoughts and feelings with them that are intensely personal and hug them, but there is nothing sexual about these relationships. Intimacy is about the depth of our relationships with others and our willingness to be vulnerable). So we develop our relationships with others by showing them more of whom we really are and by being more authentic with our thoughts and feelings, and this is the personal development work, or growth of the middle world, or every day physical world, we are most present in for most of the time.
If however, our goal is to develop spiritually, we may focus on a journey of ascendance to the upper world, and we may choose to develop a spiritual practice like yoga or meditation or learn more about a particular religion or tradition. The aim of prayer and meditation is to raise our consciousness, or to change the state of our consciousness. This change of state will be temporary, though we can bring a sense of peace and calm and increased understanding back into the everyday world, and often we bring back a sense of being more connected to others. If we continue with our spiritual practice over time we will find it easier to move into a higher state of consciousness and we will change the stage of consciousness with which we live and approach our lives. So a state is temporary and we can alter our state by sleeping or by drinking alcohol, or by meditating and there are many different states of consciousness. Stages are where we are at in any period of our life and are more permanent, although we progress through different stages if we engage in a spiritual type of development. Examples of a stage of development would be ‘Egocentric’ which means my world is centered on me. The next stage could be ‘Ethnocentric’ which means my world is centered around my family group or my tribe, or the group which share my nationality or religion. As we can see this progression of stages is increasingly inclusive, in that as I develop spiritually I relate to a larger and more inclusive section of society, which includes the previous group. So the next step may be that I feel at one with, or an affinity with, the whole human race, and after that with all sentient beings or all life forms on the planet, and even beyond that. So the stage we are at will determine how we relate to, and treat other people, and in this way it clearly overlaps with, and is complementary to, the middle world work of the therapist helping our understanding of relationships. However if we want to resolve a conflict in the family, it is likely to be quicker and more effective to work with a therapist to achieve this. However the lasting peace and tranquility to be gained from a spiritual practice will not be achieved from therapy. This is my point about making an informed choice about what you wish to achieve. To conclude the description of the upper world journey we can say that the ultimate goal is transcendence, or to be ‘at one with God’ whatever our notion of God may be. This state is sometimes referred to as ‘non-dual’ because the separation from God is removed and hence someone in this state experiences a complete connection to everyone and everything, and hence that feeling when returning from a meditative state of having an increased feeling of connection. So in other words continued spiritual practice allows us to experience higher states of consciousness, which results in a progression through the stages of consciousness.
But what if the feelings we are most experiencing right now are feelings of being lost and without direction, or even a sense that we do not really know, or have a sense of, who we are? Some people would refer to this as a lack of connection with ourselves. If our goal is to reconnect with ourself, how might we do this? There is a very specific type of work that I do with people to regain this connection with themselves, however this type of work was traditionally a journey of descent into the lower world, or into the subconscious mind. Firstly it is important to state that it is a common misunderstanding that the lower world is about evil or is somehow a bad place. It is easy to understand where this misconception came from. The journey of ascent to the upper world is about connecting to spirit, and connection to whatever we understand as our notion of God, so a journey of descent to the lower world has often been misunderstood to be a turning away from spirit and from the sacred, and therefore by default must be evil. This is not so. The journey of descent is a journey to the soul, and the soul is different from spirit. Spirit is collective and universal, whereas our soul is uniquely ours and defines us to be who we are and different from anyone else. The journey to the upper world is about connecting with the universal spirit which is in all of us and all things, whereas the journey to soul is about understanding our unique place and purpose in the world and in the society in which we live, and only we can fulfill this purpose. So the soul is about defining our role in society and connects us to our society through our role. In this sense the connection with our soul supports and complements our connection with spirit. It is important to state that personal growth really is for all, if we are to avoid becoming bored with our lives and their lack of meaning, however many of us have few spiritual beliefs and may even be less agnostic and more atheist. This does not mean these paths to personal development are closed to us. The journey into the lower world has traditionally been the realm of the shaman, and was more clearly understood in Pagan traditions and traditions with a much closer connection to the earth and more understanding that our existence here is fragile and dependent on our relationship with the earth and other species. Paganism is about this mutual respect for other life forms, a reverence for our planet and living space and a clear understanding of the need for balance between male and female.
Shamanic work is about our unique identity, and this type of work would have been done in tribal societies during our rite of passage, or transition, from adolescent to adult. Today this work is also sometimes done through dreams and dream interpretation as this is another window through which the soul can speak to us. In tribal societies the development of the individual purpose is timed to be at puberty when our personality is emerging, and we begin to have stronger internal feelings and views about who we are and what we want. We tend in this period to feel less inclined to conform to family rules and norms as we begin to feel more from inside ourselves about our own preferences for the first time. We tend to label people growing through this stage as ‘angry teenagers’ because we have lost our traditional understanding and knowledge of this important transition. In modern society we have lost the benefit of being raised by the whole village, and our communities are so large that we no longer feel any connection with the larger society in which we live. The result Is that we have much stronger and more restrictive family upbringing, which stifles this teenage transition, and can cause confusion and resentment to everyone in the family. The result is that in modern society we do not have well defined processes for helping us to connect with our soul and to understand our role and purpose, so we spend much of our lives in unfulfilling jobs and professions because we followed in our fathers’ footsteps, or ended up in a profession defined by the subjects we excelled in at school. It is no wonder that we can feel lost without having this important connection with our core.
Again it is important to restate that each of these three different worlds are domains which we can work with and which can help us to define different aspects of who we are. Work in one area will always support work in another, so there are no mistakes. However it is important to address the correct area if you wish to address your own feeling of dissatisfaction. I am not saying that spiritual work will not help your relationships because it will, but if you are struggling with a family dispute or are in an abusive relationship, meditating is not going to be the quickest route to feeling better. Many alternative healers and therapists would agree that the start point is ‘the middle world’ because this causes us to take more responsibility for what is going on in our lives, and stops us from acting like victims. When we are making conscious decisions and feel in control then connecting back to ourselves and finding out who we really are is often the next step, and then we are in a strong position to benefit from spiritual work, and some of us may choose not to do that.
Again it is important to restate that each of these three different worlds are domains which we can work with and which can help us to define different aspects of who we are. Work in one area will always support work in another, so there are no mistakes. However it is important to address the correct area if you wish to address your own feeling of dissatisfaction. I am not saying that spiritual work will not help your relationships because it will, but if you are struggling with a family dispute or are in an abusive relationship, meditating is not going to be the quickest route to feeling better. Many alternative healers and therapists would agree that the start point is ‘the middle world’ because this causes us to take more responsibility for what is going on in our lives, and stops us from acting like victims. When we are making conscious decisions and feel in control then connecting back to ourselves and finding out who we really are is often the next step, and then we are in a strong position to benefit from spiritual work, and some of us may choose not to do that.
The purpose of this article is to help you to think about what you want to achieve and to guide you towards the most likely route to the fastest results and benefit. If it has raised more questions than answers, then that is still good, because you will now be thinking differently about these important issues. I have spent quite a lot of this article talking about spiritual matters, but many of us have only vague spiritual beliefs and those may not be clear. This is also fine, as spiritual beliefs are not real if they are handed to us by someone else. Spiritual beliefs have to be acquired and researched and developed over time if they are going to serve us as a core belief system. As I say I am a psychotherapist and tend to work mainly on ‘middle world’ topics, but I also do quite a lot of work helping clients connect back to themselves to find purpose and meaning in their lives. In addition I continue to work on all three domains for my own personal growth. Life is about growth, and if we are not continuing to grow we are dying.
If you have questions as a result of reading this article, or if you would like to ask specific questions about your life or relationships, you can contact me at www.jonathanhooker.com