Psychotherapy is sometimes accused of being focused on illness. That it doesn’t appreciate the whole of life because it has developed from treating sick people rather than healthy people.
I think this is partly unfair. Medical doctors don’t get criticised for focusing on sick people and I think it denigrates the compassion that can be the motive for wanting to alleviate pain and suffering. I also want to note that there are some psychotherapies that have responded to this criticism – primarily the ‘Third Force’ psychotherapies that emerged after World War 2, mostly in the US. The most famous result (though not the best in my opinion) is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which isn’t based on sickness.
I think it is also fair. The emphasis on diagnosis shows the focus on the problems rather than the solutions. Sometimes (in less enlightened places) psychotherapists may even refer to their clients as “patients” (thankfully this is rare, but that it still happens says much).
So in this post I’d like to imagine a therapy of my own that starts with the positive.
Seeing
Let’s imagine that this therapy is discovered by a white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant, middle-aged Australian: let’s call him Nave. Let’s imagine that Nave has so far faithfully followed the social expectation that prevail in his (sub-)culture. He has done OK at school, gone to Uni, found a respected full-time job, married. He isn’t unhappy with his life, in fact he is aware that it is quite privileged and that he is luckier than most.
Then one day, he sees. We don’t know why – it is a day like most others. But this day, he sees. He sees a mother feeding her child and that they both are radiating a quiet joy. He meets a friend recently recovered from an illness glowing with health. Then he sees a family having a great time at a picnic in the park. What Nave sees is that joy is real.
Reflecting
Nave begins to think deeply about what he has seen – and why he hasn’t noticed them.
The first thing he sees is that joy is real.
So, he sets out to find the things we can do to increase the amount of joy in our lives.
As Nave reflects on his experience he comes to some conclusions:
- We can see that the person is part of their particular environment.
- Joy is a particular relation of the person and their environment.
- That while intentionality is indispensable it can also destroy joy. There is a place for intentionality and a time for it to be let go. Put another way: joy is a particular kind of self-forgetfulness: when joyous we are not pre-occupied with ourselves and our own concerns.
- Joy is a process we can follow in our own experience : from rest to disturbance, to general scanning, to specific focus, to initial encounter, to thorough encounter, to satisfaction, to growth.
Some Implications
- The match between the person and their situation can use intelligence (discerning what is life-giving and what is not). Joy requires knowledge of ourselves and our needs as well as the environment plus the ability to match these.
- In this sense joy is active (though the “action” might be taking a break).
- One of the strange things that intrigues Nave is that joy isn’t always associated with ‘positive’ experiences or emotions. Sitting with a grieving friend can be difficult. Helping someone sort through a problem can be hard work. But both can lead to joy. Nave concludes that joy has more to do with being open to experience and flowing with it than how ‘positive’ the experience is – at least most of the time. Joy has more to do with authenticity than pleasantness. Compassion and joy can be together harmoniously.
This is my attempt to sketch a therapy for joy. It is both the path and the goal. What do you think? I’m very keen to hear any comments at all that you may have? Do you think this is mis-directed? Do you think there are major oversights? Are there some bits you like and others you don’t? Any and all comments most welcome.
Would you like to feel less stressed?
Could you do with more joy in your life?
The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.
Tags: joy, psychotherapy
Nacie Carson, a long-time blogging friend has launched a new website dedicated to helping young unemployed or underemployed professionals. It is called The New Opportunists.
On the site Nacie lays out a strategy (survive-revive-thrive) to deal with the current employment situation. Nacie has spoken to hundreds of people in their 20′s and 30′s and the result is an upcoming book that lays out the strategy in detail (you can register to be notified of when the book is published on the site). There is also an about page that gives more on why the site was created and who Nacie is.
You can subscribe to the site through RSS (click on a button and posts are delivered into a reader like Google Reader) and have a newsletter delivered by email to your inbox.
If you a young professional who is unemployed or underemployed (or know someone who is) then check-out this valuable new site.
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is called Changing Ourselves and Changing Others.
This is a very big topic to take on all at once. I look at the way that we influence each other and how demanding that others change is likely to produce the opposite. I also talk about the need to know what the change is that we want. I hope you like it, Evan
Would you like to feel less stressed?
Could you do with more joy in your life?
The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.
Tags: change, changing others, changing ourselves, environment, Relationships
This is a guest post by Karen Anderson. I hope you like it. All comments most welcome.
It’s a question I often ask myself when people say that faith heals – if faith could really heal, then are those who are spiritual in the prime of health? And if you’re an atheist, does that mean that you’re always prone to be sick? Now I know that the answers to these questions are not as clear cut as we would like them to be. For one, there is no concrete proof that health and spirituality are linked in any way. All of us know that to be born healthy, you need to be blessed with good genes. And then it’s up to us to maintain and care for our health by eating healthy food, exercising regularly, avoiding stress, and staying away from habits like smoking, drinking and drugs.
Now where does spirituality fit in to this equation? Do we mean to say that praying for good health alone makes it happen? No, definitely not. But there is a thin yet very flexible thread between spirituality and health – the one that is called strong belief. It’s a power that most of us don’t know exists, and even if we did, we have no idea how to tap it. Let me explain further.
Ever heard of Noetic science? If you’ve read Dan Brown’s novel The Lost Symbol, you’ll know what I’m talking about. In the book, there’s a scientist who researches the power of thought and is successfully able to quantify what we have until now known as only a quality. The book may be fiction, but the study of noetics is very real. Scientists are working on a way to prove that our thoughts affect who we are and what we become.
Perhaps this is why they say that positive thinking helps. And perhaps this is why we see that religious fervor helps block pain. But most of all, Noetic science proves the fact that more than individual thought, it is the collective thought process that has an altering effect on the course of things to come. For argument’s sake, let’s say that if most of the world were to focus their minds on one particular thought, then it has a fair chance of becoming a reality – that is what Noetics is out to prove.
But let’s come back to our topic – spirituality and health and how the two are related. It may sound completely unscientific, but I do believe that faith can help you when you are ill:
• If your disease is terminal, it gives you the courage to bear your pain and suffering and accept what is going to happen.
• If it’s something that you can overcome, spirituality helps you discover your willpower and commitment and allows you to fight the disease even though it is an uphill climb and a painful process.
• If it is an unexplained illness, spirituality helps you put your trust in doctors and others who care for you.
Spirituality augments health when it is combined with that one aspect whose name is an oxymoron – common sense. I say this because common sense is not so common these days. So if people expect to stay healthy even though they lead hedonistic lifestyles just because they’ve asked God to keep them in good health, then they’re sadly mistaken. What you need to do is follow the path that spirituality defines if you want to be healthy – and that means abstaining from negative aspects like gluttony, sloth and vice. Once you do this, you’ll soon realize that spirituality and health are connected after all.
By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Karen Anderson, who writes on the topic of online bible colleges . She welcomes your comments at her email id : karen.anderson441@gmail.com
Tags: health, noetic science, Spirituality, strong belief
Along the way of our lives we accumulate baggage – all those ways of thinking and doing and relating to people. Over time the baggage can accumulate making us narrower and narrower.
This is the topic of a guest post of mine on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. It is called The Baggage of Experience. As well as examining how baggage is a consequence of useful strategies I also suggest ways of dealing with baggage. I hope you like it, Evan.
Would you like to feel less stressed?
Could you do with more joy in your life?
The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.
Tags: baggage, experience, templates
I have a guest post on the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog. I thought it was time to look at our context and the impact it has on us from a slightly different perspective.
I’m old enough to remember the impact of the discovery that, ‘the personal is the political’. I look at the division of into the public and private and the use of power in the private sphere and express the hope of nurturance being extended into the public sphere. I hope you like it; it’s called The Political and the Personal.
Would you like to feel less stressed?
Could you do with more joy in your life?
The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.
Dear God forgive us; we don’t know what we do.
We are dazed and stunned.
Complexity and immobility define our age.
For lack of a vision people perish. We need a vision of a path that is humane, practical and collaborative.
As well as a vision we need a way of speaking to each other.
As well as a way of speaking we need the patience to listen: to enemies and friends and, perhaps most of all, to those we are indifferent to.
But how?
It’s easy to forget that sometimes we succeed.
Hip nihilism is an easy way out, our (post-)modern temptation.
Our world is too complex and confused to be painted in only one colour – including black.
We have moments of connections with individuals; but this is not enough.
Our problems are as big as our planet and we lack ways to work together.
We lack a vision and a way of speaking – we are blind and dumb when we try to do big things.
But we know love and compassion and joy and laughter and delight and celebration with individuals.
How do we build from here? And how do we do it in time?
This is the big question I think: and I don’t have an answer to it.
I think we go on:
For the sake of our integrity. Because we care for our friends and families. Because there are places of beauty on our planet and in our neighbourhood.
We need to be ruthless with what doesn’t work and to build on the smallest successes: to experiment and learn.
We need options for actions:
that make a difference that we can see,
We need a vision, and a way of speaking; so that we can listen and act.
May we see clearly enough to take the next step,
May we listen well enough for compassion to arise,
May we act together for the good of all.
This reflection flowed into my journal almost without pause, almost exactly as written here. Even though it is a bit off topic for this blog I hope you will indulge me as it is close to Easter.
I’d like to hear from you in the comments if you have a prayer, confession or manifesto to share. Perhaps just a word or two or perhaps more extensive. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Would you like to feel less stressed?
Could you do with more joy in your life?
The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.
Tags: Spirituality
Sometimes we go through times when we feel like we are dying. What is dying is an old way of life that doesn’t work anymore (ideas about ourselves, other people, our beliefs about what is right and wrong and so on).
I am told that Jungian therapists have a saying to the effect that people come looking for a solution to a problem and leave when they find transformation. That is: we want a way to keep our old way of life to keep going. Which is quite sensible: Who needs extra stress in our lives – and change is stressful (even change for the better). From the point of view of this Jungian saying, the therapy is about going through the process of knowing that the old doesn’t work any more and finding a new way.
It also means that from this perspective finding a solution is a failure not a success (many a study on the success of psychotherapy is quite beside the point from this point of view).
This process isn’t confined to psychotherapy. Any significant change means some kind of change in ourselves. Would we really not want to be changed by the birth of our child?
The new is (at least partly) unpredictable. A new friendship is a friendship but may have unpredictable elements. Perhaps we anticipate the hard work of our new child but are stunned by the depth of feelings they evoke.
When we let go an attachment to our old way of life, this can be scary. We can’t know (exactly, in the old terms) what the new will be like. There is often a blank while the old is dying and the new emerges. This can be extremely difficult. To not go back to the old way is VERY difficult – it can take a memory of great suffering to provide sufficient motivation to stay with the blank.
If we can stay with the blank, the new will arise. Perhaps as slowly as the growth of a delicate shoot from the seed, perhaps with the overwhelming force of a hurricane.
This Easter I think that one of the meanings of the resurrection is that the new is somewhat different to the old. It was Jesus who rose from the dead, but a new and different Jesus. I think Easter means a new and more fulfilling way to live – and the way to it lies through allowing the old to die and waiting for the new to come. I have never found this easy; I have always found it worthwhile.
Would you like to feel less stressed?
Could you do with more joy in your life?
The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.
Tags: death, Easter, life, transformation
