Patricia Haman

Going to Therapy

     It is interesting to me, the ways therapy is viewed by people who are either considering attending, or who would never consider it.  Usually, therapy is thought of as something for people with serious mental problems or dysfunction. The truth is therapy is representative of a huge range of services, depending on the personality, training, and REAL knowledge of the therapist. 

     Many therapists practice a specific method based on their training, and also what attracts them in the work, and what they view to be the cause or solution to the problems their clients are coping with.  If the therapist believes all difficulty is the result of distortions in thought, they will call themselves cognitive therapists.  This method has become increasingly popular, especially since it is a highly researchable method and therefore can validate results.  Other therapy methods do not lend itself to research so easily, since they can not be measured through pen and paper.  Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is becoming a popular method for addressing trauma in a structured, highly careful and contained way.  I became certified in this method, primarily since it has become a state funded method for helping children and families who have experienced trauma.  Usually, the process takes about 12 weeks and addresses the traumatic event in phases which integrates knowledge based on how the brain processes trauma and the body's need to re-experience, and integrate anxiety and fear reactions to memory.  I like the way it includes the body, the emotional and the mental aspects of working through trauma.  Of course, it ignores the spiritual picture around traumatic life events but therapists comfortable in this domain can easily address it in the context of this method as well as delve more deeply into the different phases.  It is interesting to me that cognitive therapy is now encompassing the other viewpoints and methods while continuing to call it cognitive. lol.

     Dynamic therapies focus on the fact that we all have an unconscious which represents the majority of our psychological material in life.  Imagine that what you are aware of in your thinking, emotion, and behavior is representative of maybe 1% of your psyche.  This is not much.  Therapy is a means to try to increase the percentage that your in touch with, and to gain mastery over more and more of your self.  the more awareness you have, the more flexible you become, the more "grounded" or in touch with your self you become and the more effective your life choices can be.   These methods focus on ways to get at what is not in your awareness.  Through looking at dreams,  behavior,  attitudes, and personality, they discern and help clients integrate more of themselves at the cognitive, emotional, physical, and in some cases the spiritual levels.

     Many therapists today focus on symptoms and try to alleviate them.  They may integrate different methods to address this.  Primarily, therapists attempt to provide a safe, supportive and nurturing relationship for clients to share their experience in the hope that this will improve their functioning and decrease the level of distress the client is experiencing.  This is especially helpful in situations where the client is trying to cope with life difficulty and really can benefit from support.  Since we tend to be isolated and alone, even in the context of our support systems, this can be beneficial, especially if the therapist can help the client transfer the support and intimacy of the therapy outside and create it with significant others.

     For me, I began my journey in therapy by the age of 22.  I attended 4 years of dream analysis with Doreece Fisher in Bala Cynwyd, Pa.  I learned to interpret and understand dreams as a way my psyche has of expressing itself.  It has served me throughout my life and my work.  I am forever grateful to Doreece for helping me learn this incredible method.

    After that, I attended about 6 years of Object Relations Analysis with Dr. Ellen Lack-Wright in Philadelphia.  Dr. Wright helped me understand the effect of trauma on my life, and to develop new ways of seeing and living in the world.  She changed the course of my life and my work and I learned so much from her.

  Once I completed these experiences, I knew I needed to understand personality, and the influence of our body and energetic systems on our psychological well-being.  At that point I underwent Body Centered Analysis through both Bioenergetics for 3 years, and then Core energetics for 5 years.  I learned to use my body to develop psychological strength and to dismantle my mask personality and develop myself in deep and powerful ways.  My body changed and my life changed.

    Throughout these years,  I worked as a counselor and instructed college students in different psychology courses.  Over the years I realized that psychology is an extremely slow moving train subject to politics and money influences.  What is taught in colleges, the research that is done, and the types of methods available are all based more on those factors then what may really work.  I am grateful I was able to explore and study many alternate therapies as well as the main stream ones.

I am certified in altered state work through Holotropic Breathwork.  I have studied the Pathwork, and Barbara Brennan's Healing Work, as well as studying for three years in Shamanic Work with Jane Ely also a Barbara Brennan Instructor and Healer.

My life in healing, and therapy has been rich, rewarding, and empowering.  I wish more people understood the importance of self-mastery as a path in life more important than riches or fame.

My life purpose is to help others become empowered, master their bodies and themselves in life in a truthful deeply rewarding and meaningful way.

The ultimate goal in life is to develop truth, love,,, and freedom through health healing and happiness.       

Craft of the Warrior by Robert Spencer (overview)

To overcome the limiting, even debilitating effects of socialization and acculturation. The route of the mainstream is not important to us, w4e reach beyond. Since we are now living in a less tolerant society, we need to stay more under the radar than before.

 

The only way to find out who you are is to find out who you are not. You are not your personality. This is just your normal identity. What the Sufis call the “false self” and is produced by conditioning. It occupies the space where essence would be, but you cannot know your essence if living in the dynamics of your personality. The process requires some freedom from one’s superego, or the inner critic, whose purpose is to limit the range of action and experience of the individual.

 

 

 

Each moment of the personality’s life is filled with sensation, emotion, beliefs, assumptions, self-talk, psychological defenses, resistances and desires.

 

We must live with awareness of our experience, our personal truth. Opening the doors to self-knowing means dropping shields, setting aside or going around your defenses against feelings you do not want to feel, and memories you would rather forget. This inquiry tests the limits of your power to surrender. When pain, threat, or sadness arises, you notice the mobilizing of defenses against feeling. You can step aside the defense perhaps with the words, “just leave me to my experience”.

 

To do this you must sense what it feels like to be in your body, your heart, your head and your genitals. You must allow any memories to surface, and resist the temptation to distract yourself or discharge the emotion through behavioral expression.

 

This is a far cry from indulging in negative emotions. It is passing through them. Sensing the wound can lead you to recall, what happened to send some aspect of your essence into exile. This can be such exquisite pain it feels like an abyss, where you will fall all the way to annihilation. If you surrender to this process you can fall not into annihilation, but into the void into a pure space that is empty yet full of everything. In this space, with no defenses, with the actions and efforts of personality suspended, the exiled, essential aspect can find you.

 

 Following this approach can also lead you to an appreciation of your neediness. You can face the truth that your relationships are all built on need, even though you would prefer they were built purely on love. These needs stem from deficiencies in the early childhood environment and become the sources of desires throughout life, unconsciously drawing us into intimate relationships in attempts to find something, at long last, of which there has never been enough. These needs are the reasons we are together, the reason we fight, why we marry and divorce. These needs are accepted explored and we surrender to them as warriors. Digging under the surface of the need, we clarify what it is we constantly try to get the world to give us, be it love, respect, security acceptance or confirmation. Probing further into the feeling of lacking something, we might find the neediness transmuting into longing, this can lead us into the vacancy of exiled aspect of essence, and we realize we are moving to recover the missing pieces of the soul-self. You are only looking for the truth of the experience in the moment. You do not do your usual defense or self-criticism. Sometimes you must protect yourself and do the inquiry later when it is safe. You take every opportunity to study who you are not. It is from the effects of the socialization of personality from which the warrior seeks freedom. Only then can you be said to operate from your own will, to have real objectivity, to be free from habitual distortions, to be true to your own path instead of the one programmed for you. 

 

The warrior is an impeccable hunter of personal power. You will never have more power than when in this state of freedom from your conditioned identity.

 

We choose to be warriors or to be ordinary men. A second choice does not exist. Not on this earth. ( Castaneda) one chooses to be a warrior or a slave ( DeRopp) Choosing a path with heart represents the decision to be a warrior, to embark on a lifelong quest to unfold one’s being and to acquire knowledge. Taking this fork in the road leads to a life that is both a part of the ordinary world and apart from it. Because the warrior usually remains in the world and deals with it successfully, she is a part of the ordinary world. However, the warrior sets herself apart from the boundaries of that world and conducts herself according to the strategy she has set for walking her path.

 

Society, culture and government are constantly involved in the setting of boundaries and limits. In seeking the unknown the warrior must transcend imposed boundaries. Maintaining the status quo would banish the unknown. 

 

Warriors reject stagnation and extinction, placing themselves outside boundaries and order imposed in the ordinary world. They are committed to crossing lines and even sometimes erasing them, preferring to move into open space in search of the unknown. The warrior adopts anarchy. The anarchy of one who lives in congruence with her highest truth and innermost predilection. She cannot be contained by the established system. The warrior is aware that living outside traditionally imposed law and order requires the highest levels of honesty and integrity. The warrior lives by a more significant order—that imposed by her path with heart. This order does not dictate fixed boundaries and partitions but provides powerful guidance for living like a warrior in a fluid, organic manner. The order that guides the warrior does not furnish guide lines but guide processes that prescribe growth not stagnation. 

 

The warriors path with heart requires strategic living.  It is the chief characteristic of an impeccable warrior that he lives strategically, never does anything in halves, prepares meticulously in advance, and enters the battle knowing what risks he is taking. A warriors strategy is designed to bring her commitment into action, develop her being, and enhance her knowledge. Living strategically requires the warrior to eliminate impulsive, whimsical actions and cease being a slave to her likes and dislikes. Actions and decisions are to be based on the warrior’s strategy and have a well-considered quality to them, even when undertaken with lightning speed. To abandon one’s strategy is to abandon the path itself. This involves setting a direction and following it. The warrior can steer herself in the desired direction even through delays, distractions, and accidents that would knock the ordinary person off course, unless changing the course would better serve her strategy. Another apparent deviation from her course, which is not a deviation from strategy at all, is that warriors can grasp what Castaneda called the “cubic centimeter of chance”. The challenge of the warrior is to arrive at a very subtle balance of positive and negative forces.

 

A warrior takes responsibility for his acts; for the most trivial of his acts. Responsibility does not refer to taking the blame or accepting the fault; rather, it means that the warrior acknowledges that she makes her own choices, imposes her own rules, and pursues her intentional aims. In acknowledging her responsibility, the warrior completely removes herself from the role of the victim. People who attempt to manipulate or victimize her are dealt with as petty tyrants and used to further her aim of eliminating self importance. Unforeseen circumstances are accepted as her latest challenges. The warrior cannot be a victim of either people or circumstances.

 

Take the extreme position that you are responsible for everything you experience. Take responsibility for everything you perceive and experience, for all aspects of your life and for everything you witness. You must withdraw from people and events the power to harm you. The point is to take responsibility for your perceptions.

 

Since the warrior is responsible for her experiences and decisions she acts without reservation. This is not impulsiveness, though. Actually, the warrior considers things thoroughly. Her decisions are the result of calculations as complete as she can make them. She appreciates all factors fully because she wants to leave nothing to chance. The warrior lives on the basis of personal power, and by applying her power the role of chance is reduced. The warrior deliberates, even when it must be done with blinding speed, to avoid being surprised. She considers deliberately because once she begins to act, she will have no time for further pondering. 

 

The hallmark of the warrior’s actions is commitment. The warrior must commit her resources to the act or it will fail. Deliberations and calculations belong to the stage of preparation. Since the warrior takes responsibility for her acts, she cannot afford doubts, second guesses, or vacillations. When it is time for action, only awareness, responsibility, and personal power count.

 

Castaneda wrote a great deal about how the internal dialogue that people maintain keeps them from acts of power. Feldenkrais said “Internal dialogue, thinking or whatever you want to call it is a holding back from action. It is the rehearsal of an act or action. When there is complete commitment to an action, no matter how small and subtle or how large and violent, if it is complete and there is no holding back, then there will be no internal dialogue. Acting with this kind of commitment is a true expression of the warrior’s spirit.

 

The warrior’s responsibility continues after an act has been completed, as the warrior takes responsibility for the outcome and for the consequences of her decisions, no matter how long they last. She learns from her experience, still without thinking in terms of fault or blame. She assembles what she has learned without arrogance, self-righteousness, or self-pity. Nor does the warrior take time for complaints, recriminations, or regrets. These are the prerogatives of immortal beings, but the warrior’s death tells her she has no time for them. For the time has come to turn her attention to the next challenge.

 

Another way in which the warrior’s life changes once she has taken her path with heart is that the preoccupations of normal living are replaced with a sense of living fully in the moment. Trungpa says, “ the challenge of warriorship is to live fully in the world as it is and to find within this world, with all its paradoxes, the essence of nowness. In so doing one comes to experience the sacredness present in the moment. He advocates awareness of one’s personal situation, especially domestic and family life, as a marvelous ground for focusing on nowness. Without a strong sense of the present moment, even the grandest vision is weak. If you have insufficient power to take care of your personal domestic situation, and if you cannot apply your vision in your life right now, there is little chance you can effect some positive change in the larger social political or economic spheres. Start with where you are, apply your vision to your own life, then you are ready to change the world.

 

Uncontrolled imagination is a way to loose personal power. Not that a vision for the future is bad, but failure to institute that vision in the actions and situations of the present leads to ineffective living, chronic disappointment, and even a cheapening of the vision itself.

“Nostaglia is fatal to the spirit of the warrior, whose task it is to live in the here and now, not hankering after the past or fussing about the future”.

 

Traveling the path with heart promotes living in the present, which is the only time the warrior’s power can be fully applied. A sense of nowness leads the warrior to organize her personal life so that it fits with what she believes and is consistent with the requirements of her path. From this base the warrior vcasn rach out to other arenas without conflict between what she practices and what she says. Each moment contains the entire universe, and the warrior’s sense of nowness enables her to flow from one moment to another, focusing her attention and power in the present and harvesting the magic the moment has to offer. Dan Millman says, “there are no ordinary moments”.

 

The path with heart changes the attributes of people and turns them into warriors.