11. PSYCHOTHERAPY AND SPIRITUAL GROWTH: An issue of language and the Tower of Babal.

by Dick Rauscher

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: THE NEED FOR A SHARED LANGUAGE

The increased focus and attention on spirituality in our culture is quickly finding its way into the psychotherapy setting. Clients are increasingly interested in their spirituality. It is not uncommon today for therapists to be questioned in the first phone contact with a prospective client as to whether they are qualified or experienced in working with spiritual issues. These clients frequently report that they are not interested in intensive therapy per se; they just want to work on their spirituality.

The words religion and spirituality often create dis-ease and anxiety for those trained as secular counselors and psychotherapists. Many therapists are turning down these “spiritually” focused clients because they work under the illusion and mistaken belief that psychotherapy and spirituality are inherently two very different disciplines.

This is unfortunate since psychotherapy is spiritual formation. Since psychotherapy and spiritual formation use very similar goals and methodologies, secular therapists are frequently the best trained spiritual directors and teachers in our Western culture. In other words, therapists should not be put off by clients interested in spiritual growth.

THE TOWER OF BABEL: THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE AND THE LANGUAGE OF SPIRITUALITY

The splitting of psychotherapy and spirituality into two apparently different separate disciplines was simply an illusion created when science and religion parted company hundreds of years ago. Science created a language to study the physical world and religion claimed exclusive use of theological language to study God. Both agreed not to intrude into each others realm.

At the time, this was a very helpful distinction in that it allowed scientists to study the physical world without directly threatening the theology and beliefs of the Christian church. Of course it wasn’t long before scientific discoveries in astronomy, evolution, biology, and physics seriously threatened and challenged many of the ancient theological views of the Church.

Even today many conservative scientists and theologians continue the struggle to keep science and spirituality apart. Fortunately, modern quantum physics research is in the process of rejoining the physical world of the scientist and the spiritual world of the mystic into one common unified view of reality.

It is the belief of this author that the disciplines of psychotherapy and spiritual direction need to develop a common language bridge that will allow psychotherapists to accurately and seamlessly reinterpret analytic language and clinical therapeutic process in spiritual terms, and vice versa. Only when such a unified language exists, will psychotherapists learn to be comfortable with spirituality, and spiritual directors less intimidated by psychology.

This article will briefly explore some of the goals and methods used by each of the disciplines, highlight their similarity; and demonstrate how psychotherapy is, in fact, spiritual formation.

IN THE BEGINNING: THE SURVIVAL SKILLS OF CHILDHOOD

In childhood, when we encounter criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, rejection, abandonment, indifference, invisibility, a sense of not feeling heard, or not being understood in the things that matter to us, we experience fear and sadness. There is an anxious sense of danger. We know that somehow we are being attacked and wounded by those who are supposed to love us and care for us.

Two of the primary survival instincts of a human being experiencing danger are isolation and fragmentation. When our world feels dangerous, isolation is the only safe option. We develop a survival skill of spending more and more time alone.

We also learn to fragment or partition off the painful feelings and traumatic memories, and drive them deep into the shadows of our unconscious. This survival skill protects us from feelings that are often much too painful for us to deal with as a child. To feel safe around the dangerous caretakers in our life, we learn to behave in ways that appear to please them. We construct a false “self”. We build a fragile identity of beliefs and behaviors based on who we think we are supposed to be. Day by day, outside of our awareness, our authentic self slowly disappears.

Over the years of our childhood we become convinced that who we really are is not smart, not important, and not adequate. No matter how hard we try to be accepted, we feel alone and unloved. We begin to shut down our painful feelings and learn to use only our intellect. We lose the memory of much of our childhood. But we have a sense that in some very basic way, we are not okay. We are not loveable. We don’t belong.

Through varying degrees of isolation, we attempt to avoid the pain that comes from relating to others. But when we isolate to feel safe, others tell us we are aloof and uncaring. We begin to feel guilty and ashamed. A terrible feeling of emptiness begins to grow in the center of our being. It often feels like hunger, but nothing seems to make it go away.

WHAT THE CLIENT BRINGS: A LANGUAGE OF PAIN

When clients come to a therapist they often lump these various painful feelings of childhood under a generalized feeling they call anxiety and depression. They tell the therapist they want to feel more okay (comfortable) about who they are. They just want to get their lives together and be happy. They are tired of being sad and scared. They don’t like who they are.

When clients come to a spiritual director these feelings of childhood are embedded in, a longing for more depth; a sense of unhappiness; a lack of inner peace; a sense of isolation and loneliness; and, a deep hunger to understand the meaning of their lives. They often lump these various painful feelings under a generalized feeling they refer to as a sense of being “called” by God to a deeper place. A place of wholeness and peace where they can feel more content with who they are. They are often seeking a sense of wholeness, and happiness in their lives. They are tired of feeling inadequate and feeling like they don’t belong.

Regardless of the language, whether they want to get their lives “together”, or want a sense of “wholeness”, both clients frequently feel fragmented and overwhelmed. They long to feel more whole and authentic. The bottom line is they want to belong and be happy.

In both cases, the clients have reached a point where they know they cannot find the answers on their own. For most people, the decision to ask for help feels like an admission of failure. They often feel inadequate. Asking for help means they will need to be vulnerable and trust a stranger. For most people, asking for help is the most difficult part of the journey to healing and the wholeness they hunger for in their hearts. They must somehow learn to feel safe enough to share their story with a stranger. Whether they use spiritual language or secular language will be determined by their background. The language they are most comfortable with will determine who they call; a psychotherapist or a spiritual director.

TRUST AND VULNERABILITY: THE FIRST WORK OF HEALING

Thus, the first work of healing for both the therapist and the spiritual director will be the need to address issues of trust and vulnerability. Can the client trust the therapist or the spiritual director? Can they trust God? Will their therapist or spiritual director still like them and want to work with them if they are really honest about who they are, and what they have done in their lives? Is it safe to talk about how they really feel? Does God love me? These are the fundamental questions that need to be brought to the surface and consciously dealt with in order to move forward either emotionally or spiritually.

Trusting others will not come easily for many. The telling of their story will require the clients to revisit and share uncomfortable memories of shame, embarrassment, painful experiences, and painful feelings. Of times when they were hurt by others. It will be a story of their struggle with the world, their own fears; their feelings; their past; their hopes and dreams; and their conflicts both with others and with themselves.

For most clients, learning to trust is a long and difficult task. Learning to trust is the foundational work that will support all of the future work of therapy or spiritual direction. Therefore, until the foundational issue of trust is dealt with, clients will be unable to allow themselves the vulnerability necessary for healing to take place. They will be unable to be vulnerable and share their story.

As trust builds and the client is able to share more and more of their story, they are often amazed that someone else seems to really understand how painful and sad it is for them inside. They no longer feel so alone. Maybe there is hope. The language of caring and empathy begins to heal.

LISTENING: THE SILENT LANGUAGE OF CREATION

So how are these goals of trust and vulnerability achieved in therapy and spiritual direction? Simply stated, they are achieved when the client is emotionally “held” by the therapist or the spiritual director. The client begins to feel safe only when they experience the therapist or spiritual director silently listening to them with non-judgmental acceptance and experiencing, often for the first time in their lives, another person empathically understanding what truly matters to them. The client’s story unfolds and deepens.

Therapists are trained to listen without being abandoning, critical, judging or impinging, and to re-interpret the client’s story as it unfolds. The client is encouraged to look within and to reclaim the painful feelings and memories of themselves that got split off and buried in the unconscious. As these split off parts get re-integrated, the client begins to experience a growing sense of well-being and wholeness. They begin to empty themselves of an identity built around childhood beliefs and move into a more authentic adult identity based on who they really are. They begin to discover their gifts and strengths. Most importantly however, they begin to realize that the feelings they have blamed or projected onto others were really their own. They learn to look within and explore their feelings. They learn to claim responsibility for their own feelings.

Spiritual directors are trained to listen and to encourage the client to develop a prayer or meditation relationship with the Creator of the Universe. As they tell their story in the presence of God and the spiritual director, both of whom are neither abandoning, critical, judging, or impinging, the client slowly learns how to simply “be” who they were created to be. Their self-awareness and self-knowledge increases. The client learns humility and forgiveness. They learn to look within for answers.

James Carse (1985) in his book The Silence of God explains the importance of listening in great depth. He demonstrates that unless someone listens to us and accepts us wholly for who we are, we can never become an authentic self. He says simply, we are listened into existence. This, he points out, is the absolute necessity for the expectant silent listening of God. It is God’s compassionate, non-judgmental, silent listening that makes all creation possible. As co-creators, the creation of the universe unfolds through us one story at a time. If God spoke, our personal ongoing creation would cease. Our co-creation with God would become meaningless. (Carse 1985)

This compassionate, non-judgmental, expectant listening is the primary work of both the therapist and the spiritual director. Both therapists and spiritual directors are called to listen their clients into existence so they can experience themselves as authentic, whole, and sacred persons. This is the soul work of both therapy and spiritual direction that can only be done through the silent non-judgmental listening in a place called the middlepath.

The middlepath is a sacred place that emerges only when the ego beliefs and opinions of the therapist, or the spiritual director; have been emptied. When ego beliefs and opinions are emptied from the mind, judgment is no longer possible. Only acceptance and listening remain. Thus, the middlepath is a sacred place where only the language of compassion and acceptance exist. A place of healing where the language of judgment is not present. A paradoxical place of total emptiness and the wholeness of total diversity.

THE BASIC PROBLEM: FROM THE OUTER WORLD OF OBJECTS TO THE INNER WORLD OF SELF AWARENESS

The therapist and the spiritual director will hear similar stories from their clients. The details of course are unique to the specific client, but the story told will be similar to that of previous clients. It will essentially be a human story of feeling unloved and lonely, overwhelmed by life, depressed, rejected, abandoned, and a sense that their life lacks meaning. A story of unhappiness.

As the therapist and the spiritual director encourage their respective clients to tell their stories and the work of healing begins, the primary problem of the client begins to emerge. The client has been looking for answers to their problems out in the world. They have been searching for happiness in the secular language of security, money, prestige, control, and worldly power.

As they listen to the client, the spiritual director and the therapist both begin to encourage and support a shift in the client from an outer focus on the world of objects toward an inner self-focus on their own thoughts and feelings. Over time, the client begins to shift his or her attention inward on the true sources of their pain. Their self awareness deepens.

Since the goal of both disciplines is a deeper inner self-knowledge and the ability to pay attention to one’s thoughts and feelings it is not long before a new inner language of feelings, emotions, beliefs, assumptions, values, and meaning begins to develop between the client and his or her therapist or spiritual director.

As this new inner language emerges, the client learns that spiritual growth and happiness is an internal work that can never be attained out in the world. This insight, that authentic spiritual growth and happiness come only through self-awareness and self-consciousness, emerges only as the client’s language of inner meaning develops.

CHANGE: THE LANGUAGE OF HOPE

The primary goal of both disciplines is change. Despite the fact that reality is change, one of the most difficult things for a human being to accomplish is to embrace change in his or her deeply held beliefs, opinions, and certainties. Particularly challenging to change are the ego beliefs which come from childhood and are a part of a person’s world view; the way they see and understand reality.

For example, in the middle ages, it was a commonly held world view that the earth was flat. Few questioned this belief, and those that did were ridiculed. Another example of a commonly accepted world view was the belief that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo was imprisoned by the Christian church when he dared to suggest that the earth in fact revolved around the sun.

The scientist’s attention to the details of the physical world began to challenge and change the world views of both the scientific community and the theological world views of the Church.

The tools of the therapist that support and facilitate change in the client’s “self” world view, are the therapist’s ability to listen and gently encourage attention and self-awareness within the client onto the client’s own thoughts, attitudes, assumption, behaviors, and feelings. Particularly challenging for therapists is encouraging change in their clients’ ego beliefs, thoughts, and feelings from childhood.

But it is this attention and increased self-awareness of the childhood source of the client’s feelings and behaviors that will eventually lead to changes in the client’s current thoughts and behaviors. As the childhood memories and feelings of the client are made more conscious and available, the client begins to experience a deeper sense of connection with himself/herself. As they become more secure in their own authentic identity, they are more able to be open and vulnerable with others and re-integrate back into safe, trusting relationships with others.

The tools of the spiritual director that support change in the client are also attention and self awareness. As a client learns to sit in prayer or meditation with their feelings, and pay attention to their feeling bodies and thinking minds, they too begin to develop insight and understanding into how their mind thinks and how their body feels.

This increased self-awareness and self-consciousness which emerges from contemplation and meditation is the same self awareness and attention that emerges for the client in therapy. In both disciplines, the client learns to pay attention their thoughts, what they believe, how they feel, what they fear; and especially, the changing nature of their thoughts and feelings. Over time, the client begins to discover and understand more deeply the meaning of his or her life.

Their ability to be in community and establish a systemic connection grows with all persons and aspects of creation. They learn to fully embrace the infinite diversity of this universe in which we live. Spiritual directors call this a connection, or experience, of being one with the Consciousness of the Universe.

The primary difference between psychotherapy and meditation is only the rate of change and growth. The process of psychotherapy can greatly facilitate spiritual growth since the client can often accomplish in a few years what might otherwise take a lifetime of meditation or prayer. However, the most effective approach to self-awareness and healing happens when both disciplines are practiced together.

WHOLENESS: THE LANGUAGE OF COMMUNITY

Since the source of conflict, pain and suffering for humans is found in the fragmentation of the human psyche and the ego’s reliance on a false identity, the goal of all mental health healing and spiritual growth is that of re-integration of the client’s mind to a state of wholeness. The person simply learns to pay attention to their thoughts, feelings and the world around them.

The mystics remind us that compassionate communities evolve only when vulnerable hearts connect with other vulnerable hearts. The only persons capable of building compassionate communities are those who; are capable of deep self-awareness and deep self-knowledge; have learned to take responsibility for their own feelings; have learned to look within and “remove the log in their own eye” before they worry about the speck in their neighbors eye; are truly loving and non-judgmental of others; have emptied themselves of their rigid ego driven beliefs, opinions and certainties; are awake and self-aware; have developed a deep reverence for all life; and experience all creation as sacred.

It is important to note that these self-consciously evolved people consistently report feeling whole and happy, and consistently report that they have discovered the passion and meaning of their lives.

In both psychotherapy and spiritual direction, the goal is connection with self and others, and a deeper sense of belonging. The goal of both therapist and spiritual director is to encourage participation in the larger reality of family and community. Unlike the psychotherapist, the spiritual director encourages the client to move beyond family and community into an even larger context; an awareness of who we are in the context of the Consciousness of the Universe.

The goal for both disciplines is ultimately that of compassion; for ones self and for others. In both disciplines, the focus is on the process of healing the mind, the body, and the soul. In both disciplines, the client’s shift toward compassion can take place only when the inner language of self awareness has been attained.

It’s very difficult to care about your neighbor and develop compassionate community with others when you are struggling with pain--whether it be from a tooth ache or a soul ache.

SUMMARY: TWO ROADS TO THE SACRED GROUND

When therapists and spiritual directors begin to talk about the specific goals of healing, the language of each discipline begins to lose its uniqueness. Wholeness is wholeness. Connection with others is called relationship or community. The ability to be vulnerable and trusting is called an open heart. Authenticity is simply a deep knowing of who we really are; otherwise known by spiritual directors as soul.

Thus for both disciplines, happiness is an inward focus and an ability to be comfortable with who one is and with what one has. Happiness is simply an ability to be fully awake, aware, and living in the present moment without fears, desires, and or plans to control the future. The ability to be self-reflective and self-aware is the common goal of both the therapist and the spiritual director.

When the inner work is done effectively, the client in spiritual direction and the client in psychotherapy will begin to experience a gratefulness for their lives and a deeper acceptance of others. They will love themselves and others. Whether they call it gratitude for life or simple humility, client’s in both disciplines will begin to experience themselves in the larger context of community.

It is only when the fragmentation of the ego has been healed that one can then transcend one’s ego and move out of the illusions, the fantasies, the fears, and the pain of striving for happiness in the busyness and “stuff” of the world.

It is only when one’s ego has been transcended, that one can truly live in the grayness of the middle path and become a non-reactive, loving, and compassionate human being. The eastern mystics refer to these people as bodhisattva’s. The western mystics call them saints. Therapists call them authentic persons capable of great intimacy, compassion and empathy for others.

The bottom line is clear. We are one people living on a very small planet in the middle of a very large universe. We are truly connected to one another; therefore it is imperative that we learn how to build spiritually mature compassionate communities that can effectively care for one another and the earth we live on. When two or more are gathered, they become community.

Thus, the ability to belong to a world wide compassionate human community is the fundamental goal of both psychotherapy and spirituality. The primary tools are trust and vulnerability. The primary process is non-judgmental listening to what really matters. The basic goals are wholeness and connection, diversity, complexity, and the embracing of the systemic unity of all things.

The authentic spiritual path is always a path toward vulnerability, humility, compassion, and authenticity. One simply can not walk an authentic spiritual path until one has done the work of inner healing that comes from deep self knowledge.

The authentic spiritual path is a middlepath that embraces diversity and finds the truth in all things. This is the healing work of both psychotherapy and spiritual direction. Perhaps as we work to build a “common” language that will enable us to move seamlessly between the two disciplines, we will begin to see the spiritual importance of psychotherapeutic healing and the necessity for deep self awareness in authentic spiritual growth.