PSI Therapy Associates' Infoline, as of Jan. 2000 This is a verbatim copy of the Infoline as recorded for the call in service. Please feel free to distribute this document to anyone interested. The Infoline recording is at phone number (253)-582-1223. The regular office phone is (253)-582-3131. Thank you! _______________________________________________________________________ Hello, and on behalf of PSI Therapy Associates, welcome to our Infoline. I am pleased to invite you into a more creative and very different format for our long-lived information service, which began in 1986. In this edition we are attempting to give a taste of what the Psychotherapy experience offers rather than contrasting it with the numerous mass-marketed forms of counseling available. This makes it more complicated than previous Infoline's. Because of this it requires the listeners full attention and should be listened to in one sitting. Please call back if needed or as many times as you need to. That's what the service is for after all. We will also have a modified transcript available on our web page, as well as a lot more information than we can provide here. Our web address is www.oz.net/~psyche. A "tilde" is that wavy character up by your escape key. The address again is www.oz.net/~psyche. Let's briefly cover PSI's basics beginning with the people. First is Kathy Cregan, one of the founders of PSI and a therapist for over 20 years. Kathy is one of those people who are hard to categorize. If you ask her why she is a therapist she'll say it's because she loves it. If you press her further she'll ask you: "Why do you love sunsets, or a favorite old sweater or a good book on a rainy day?" Then she's likely to smile and say "Some things just happen to you and there you are!" Next is Dianne Nauer. Although she's been with PSI since 1992 we still jokingly refer to her as the "greenhorn". However, we also long ago dubbed her "The Natural" in respect of her intuitive people skills. Dianne is a cross-over from the medical profession. She compares medicine to therapy by saying "Medicine has all the answers but not always the best solutions. Psychotherapy has the solutions but doesn't have very many answers." And this from the lady who says she hates paradox! Both Kathy and Dianne have Masters degrees, if you are one who cares about such things. Last is yours truly, the other founder of PSI, now retired from active practice partly due to health concerns but also in order to pursue new interests. We established PSI back in 1981 in order to pursue our craft away from the more regimented environments associated with agencies. It hasn't made us rich but its kept us busy and satisfied. Our office hours are noon to 8:30 PM Monday through Thursday, with Friday sessions by appointment only. We charge $75 per session and sessions are ordinarily for one hour. Our clients are primarily couples and individuals, and we won't see youngsters without the whole family. We are located in Lakewood on the corner of Gravelly Lake Drive and School street, across from Clover Park High School. Much has changed in the counseling and psychotherapy marketplace during the nearly 20 years of PSI's existence, especially lately. The HMO and insurance conglomerations correctly refer to these changes as the "industrialization" of mental health care. The honest reality is that you only have two choices today: The first is to read your employee handbook and see what you're allowed, if anything. Currently most plans cover hospitalizations and what is sometimes called "quick and out" counseling. The second option is to, as they say, "go alternative". PSI falls in this category, because we offer psychotherapy instead of counseling. Psychotherapy is about changing your life as a whole and assumes that humans are driven by unconscious as well as conscious processes. It's not for everyone. We don't expect it to be. The late Dr. Carl Whitaker, the kindly grandfather of Family Systems Therapy, is reported to have said there were two main reasons why someone goes to psychotherapy. The first reason is because they are hurting so badly that they'd crawl a mile on their belly to get the help. The second reason is because they like themselves enough to reward themselves with it. The clarity of his insight has become clouded today by how mental health is paid for and who it's intended to benefit. The current system is designed for employers wishing to keep people functioning in the workplace at the lowest cost. And as one HMO spokesperson put it, "employers shouldn't have to pay for the walking wounded or the unhappy healthy". Thus for the last decade psychotherapy has been replaced by counseling as the money flowed in that direction. PSI and psychotherapy remain an alternative to that unfortunate trend! We have remained focused upon the unchanging quests in people's lives. The central problem of each individual life is to figure out who you really are and how to get on with the journey you were meant to take. Likewise, who should go with you on the journey of your life and how to find the depth and contentment in those relationships that the heart hungers for. And lastly, how to weather the heartache and defeats that characterize every life in such a way that we not only avoid becoming embittered but grow into even better versions of ourselves. Anyone actively engaged with their own story is able to fulfill whatever roles life demands of them. Its exactly within the ranks of the "walking wounded and the unhappy healthy" that the hunger to relocate our journey begins! As the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi wrote already 800 years ago: The human shape is a ghost made of distraction and pain. Sometimes pure light, sometimes cruel, trying wildly to open this image tightly held within itself. It's opening the "image within itself" that characterizes psychotherapy. I've tried for years to work out a good concise definition for psychotherapy as compared to the methods that have come to be known collectively as "counseling". But it's as Samuel Butler said: "Definitions are a kind of scratching and generally leave a sore place more sore than it was before." Let's leave it at this: Counseling is concerned with what people think they are doing and Psychotherapy is concerned with the soul of what it is to be successfully human. Helping someone get inside themselves is much more difficult that asking them to mess with how they think. For example, when I started working in hospitals 30 years ago I learned quickly how terribly difficult it is for people to realistically describe their pains. Physical pain is a very real experience that simply eludes our thinking brain. Regardless of intelligence, everyone is reduced to making pictures and metaphors, as in: "It feels like I'm being stabbed with a red-hot knife". We somehow understand this description and it never even dawns on either person that we've never been stabbed by a knife let alone a red-hot one! We have actually fallen back into what Albert Schweitzer called "The universal brotherhood of pain" in order to comprehend. Psychotherapy sets out to deal with similar realities in all of us which you can understand but you can't explain. We have to seek the common grounds of experience and empathy and then look for good metaphors to share our understanding. This kind of approach requires a contract between the therapist and the clients to look for meaning rather than the quick fix. But nowadays the emphasis is on the fast and expedient, including attitudes toward ourselves. The psychologist and author Thomas Moore calls this condition "Psychological Modernism". In his popular book Care Of The Soul he says: "A modern person comes into therapy and says, 'Look, I don't want any long-term analysis. If something is broken, let's fix it. Tell me what I have to do and I'll do it.' Such a person is rejecting out of hand the possibility that the source of the problem...may be [related to values or a crisis of beliefs]. There is no model for this kind of thinking in modern life, where almost no time is given to reflection and where the assumption is that the psyche has spare parts, an owner's manual and well-trained mechanics called therapists." In short, psychotherapy means work and hard work at that! In our experience it's couples who have the most difficulties with this because of all the self-help books and pseudo-therapy talk shows. People have been conditioned to believe that you just go in and the therapist tells you what's wrong with the marriage and how to fix it. They forget that in the first place they didn't get together to make a marriage-they got together to build a dream! When I hear a couple say they want the marriage fixed what I really hear is that they are willing to settle for a workable marriage because they've given up on the dream. They know that it will be hard and emotional work to take that on! And that's another anchor that psychotherapy has to carry. It not only seldom provides quick relief but it often requires going headlong into discomfort and examining symptoms rather than trying to make them go away. As far back as history can inform us there are great voices telling us to pay attention to the connections between what's happening in your life and what life itself is about. Our trials and tribulations are opportunities to solve the riddle of ourselves and find competence at a new level. Like, in the old English proverb: "Calm seas never make a skilled sailor". The age-old message has always been that our very best parts are hidden until we are tested by some adversity and take the challenge. Somewhere inside each of us is the magical code and the events of our daily lives are trying to lead us to it. Again the 12th century poet Rumi says it better: We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain. We are the sweet, cold water and the jar that pours. Soren Kierkegaard observed that "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." For an individual or couple to find the meaning of their lives it's first necessary to appreciate life as an unfolding story or script. I have a wonderful example of someone finding their story and opening their life to a whole new level of meaning through it. This is how I'll finish my discussion of psychotherapy, by telling the tale of someone who never ever went to therapy! In fact, it took place almost 50 years before therapy as we know it even came into being. But it does a wonderful job of demonstrating why psychotherapy is about uncovering the eternal constants in the human condition. In 1850 the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, famous for his pessimism, wrote a remarkable essay. Looking back at his long life he was quite surprised to see how it seemed to be like an orderly well-written novel. He noted how little accidents and chance events later became central to the plot. Nothing could be left out without changing the story. Even what appeared to have been mistakes and blunders in later years proved to have been constructive crisis and necessary to what his future required. He also noted that everyone he'd ever known throughout his life were not only characters in his novel, but each had played his part exactly as was required. Likewise he deduced that he must also be a character in all of their novels! He was faced with several haunting questions. The first question was "How can everyone participate in all these secret novels simultaneously and yet be as unwitting as himself?" The second question was "Can anything happen to us which is unnecessary or for that matter for which we are even unprepared?" And finally he wondered, "Who is the author of this novel?" He realized that his experience of his story was very much like the way dreams work, and he began calling it the "Life-Dream" instead of novel. In dreams everything often seems random or even chaotic. Yet, once awake, dreams prove to be very tightly woven, even poetic, patterns. As Schopenhauer put it, the dream is "composed and controlled according to an unsuspected intention... [but] from a standpoint that is not inside the dream consciousness." He means that whatever is controlling the intention of the dream is not part of the dream experience itself, but more like the author of a play watching it being performed from up in the balcony. Schopenhauer realized suddenly that the author of his Life-Dream and the secret author of his nightly dreams might be one and the same! He dubbed this author as the "Ultimate Dreamer". He realized that although everyone's dreams contain the symbols and associations meaningful to them, the underlying messages are much the same for all of us. He concluded that this Ultimate Dreamer must be the same for everyone! He wrote: "[everyone's] Life-Dreams are interlocked so artfully that each, though experiencing only what is profitable to himself, is yet fulfilling the requirements of [all the] others." Schopenhauer comes away in the end with an entirely new way of experiencing his life. He renames the Ultimate dreamer as "The Will to Live" or "Life Force". He writes in his conclusion: "[Life] is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything links and accords with everything else." Schopenhauer came to his marvelous insights 150 years ago, before the development of modern psychological ideas. It doesn't matter if you agree with his interpretations--those are his own. The important thing is that he found that the key to unlocking his own meaning was there inside all along. Something inside us already knows what we need to know. Another philosopher, Albert Camus summed that up nicely when he said: "A life's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover...those two or three great and simple images in whose presence the heart first opened." Which speaks to one of Kathy's favorite quotes: "Life is about remembering who you are. Psychotherapy helps you remember." That's it for this time. Remember, you can get lots more info about us online at www.oz.net/~psyche. Thanks for listening.