(This article is dedicated to R.M. who inspired it. Thank you for reminding me of what we are supposed to be doing.) 
For some reason lately I have been seeing quite a number of brand new social workers for supervision, some of whom are still in graduate school. It has been a poignant and privileged rite of passage for me after all these years to be passing on what I’ve learned.
One in particular touched me. She worked some time ago in a hospital emergency department in another state. As you might imagine, she bore witness to countless tragedies and sorrows, the worst of which was one little girl who had been beaten so severely by her mother’s boyfriend that they didn’t know if she would make it.
When she originally came on the ward she had been warned by the other professionals on staff to “watch her boundaries.” That’s a trigger point for social workers who, as a group, have been known to go the extra mile for patients and clients. This has become an “issue” for the profession as it has grown over the years and tried to maintain its status along with psychologists and physicians. What the well-meaning advisers meant was that she would be facing horror and that she needed to “detach” and “not bring it all home with her.” The real meaning: don’t get involved.
Those were their words. People warned me the same way when I started out.
I have been a psychotherapist and crisis counselor for nearly 30 years. I have worked with rape victims, survivors of war, children who had been abducted by drug lords, parents who were abused by their own offspring, addicts who had been lost and left to die on the street, and a full retinue of the mildly neurotic. I have stared into the abyss with friends and colleagues at Ground Zero and had to breathe the acrid smell of death.
But what I have learned is that there are boundaries and there are boundaries. Some should be zealously guarded and some not so much. And whenever I have made a real difference I have absolutely become involved though not in the way you may imagine or some may fear.
I will explain through her story.
As the baby was being treated, she called the proper authorities, as was legally required. She watched as the mother and boyfriend were carted away. And she stood nearby as the baby, broken and battered, moaning in pain, was gently set to rest in a small bed in PICU.
She was told to go home, that she’d had a hard day, and to have a glass of wine. There was nothing more to do.
But something inside her rebelled at that: there’s nothing more you can do.
And, against all the advice of authority, against all the warnings, she went into the PICU and sat with that little girl, breathing gently with her, resting her own fingers carefully in the child's small hands, smoothing the downy hair on the little girl's head, the one place that had gratefully been spared from the brute’s rant. She sat with her for hours until the little one was able to rest. She talked to her. She sang to her. She hoped for her. And then she reluctantly went home.
The case moved on from there and she doesn’t know what happened to her or the family. But there she was in my office, years later, wondering if she’d done something horrible by not letting go, by not listening to the advice of the nurses and administrators who told her to detach, to not take it home. “Did I make a terrible mistake?” she wanted to know.
Through tears as I listened to her and through tears as I write this, I said “No. You did everything right.”
She didn’t understand how she could be right and feel pain that way and disobey the warnings she’d been given. But I did. And I have found that when you do the right thing, there is often no way to sidestep the pain and sorrow that is common to us all. Nor should there be.
Suffering and Professional Boundaries
Social workers’ boundaries are important, but not in the way we might think.
I think there are actually two separate questions in this larger issue and it is a far more complicated topic than people might imagine.
Boundary Question One: How do we face suffering and not get lost in it? How do we help people in pain without absorbing it? How do we have empathy and compassion without becoming the patient? What do we do with suffering if we can't fix it?
Boundary Question Two: How do we treat people in a clinical setting and keep our focus on them rather than using the session or relationship as a way of working out our own lingering issues? How do we stay clear-sighted about the pathology and vigorous in our pursuit of health and the well-being of our patients?
These are two separate issues and I believe that we often confuse them in clinical practice.
I hope I can answer them both briefly and simultaneously by drawing on my experience and explaining what I think is necessary in any healing relationship.
Over the years, despite accruing more and more “tools” for my clinical tool bag, despite learning more and more techniques and styles, I have actually simplified. One of my mentors in graduate school told me, “Learn them all well so you don't have to use any of them.” I didn’t know what she meant then, but I do now. She also told me, “Don’t for a second think it’s you doing the healing. It’s the love.”
So, the distillation is this:
- Presence and Pacing
- Compassion and empathy
- Seeing someone fully without bias and without projection
- Spiritual context
Presence and Pacing
Presence is paramount. It is foundational. The ability to be fully present in the moment with whomever is there, with whatever situation confronts you, is to be adaptable, available, and genuinely healing. It addresses both Question One and Question Two in that being in the moment (as opposed to the past or the future) allows you to feel fully, be ready to do what is needed, and then move on to the next moment. When you are in the moment truly, you will be more adept clinically. You will know the situation at hand is not about you and that it will not last. You can fully feel and know that when you go home you will be fully present to the joy and life that is there.
This is not easy and it has taken me many years to learn. Being present has a caveat. It means we are there for all of it—the pain, the glory, the defeat, the sorrow, the loss, and the redemption. All of it.
Pacing is a term coined by Milton Erickson, M.D., the greatest hypnotherapist in American history. It is also a technique I focus on quite a bit when I teach Verbal First Aid to first responders, medical personnel and clinical professionals. It means to "move with" or "walk along." It can include mirroring (to some extent) but I use it mostly to stress the act of being with another person. When a person is in pain and we are hoping to move them to a state of greater comfort, we do what is called pacing and leading. We pace their pain (I can see your wound and your discomfort…) and then lead them, sometimes one tiny step at a time, to healing (…so as I hold your arm and apply this bandage, you can rest more comfortably and stop the bleeding). Without the pacing, there can be no proper leading.
Pacing requires presence. Presence implies pacing. It is an emotional and spiritual partnership that may last anywhere from a few seconds at an accident scene or at an ER or go on for years in a psychotherapy setting.
Compassion & Empathy
This is not the same thing as taking on another’s pain. It is a communion, an experience of commonality, not a sympathy or an absorption. It is also NOT a projection of our own feelings onto them and this is where our skill must be honed and refined over and over again. Sometimes it means feeling what someone else is feeling, but that doesn’t mean it’s ours. It is a subtle difference, but an important one.
Many of the patients that come to social workers have been hurt terribly. We may in fact be the first person in their lives to genuinely feel them. (S.W. Recall: Winnicott’s “The Good Enough Mother.”) This can be in and of itself enormously healing.
What I have come to both believe is that feeling is not the problem. Over-interpreting and/or ignoring feelings is the problem. And that’s where we—as healers—can get into serious logjams.
In fact, it is the social worker’s ability to feel fully (and know what to do with those feelings) that is the hub of all clinical work. If we can’t do it, how do we expect our patients to do it?
Seeing Fully
When I was in school for classical homeopathy, my teacher used to warn us, “If you can’t see your patient, you can’t heal him.” He spent five years talking to us about the power to see.
I think this is true in any clinical setting. We open the door, a patient comes in and sits down. What do we see? What do we want to know? Can we see the hurt? What’s broken or bruised? What still works? How does it still manage to work? These are the questions we want to ask and have answered.
Seeing someone truly may also entail some detachment, but not in the way it is used colloquially, which is to “not feel” what our patients are feeling. To see the truth means not get beguiled by façade. Most patients will come to us with a well-practiced façade in place, a mask they use to get through their lives—to hide pain, to forestall an accounting, to deceive and manipulate for one thing or another. We have to see past those deceptions, both conscious and unconscious. We have to see past the acquired skills and into the recesses of a person’s heart. We have to observe carefully. They may say they feel fine, but they can’t stop biting their nails. They protest over much about how calm they are, but their feet don’t stop tapping, they sigh repeatedly, or their eyes twitch.
As healers we are observers. Both of ourselves and our patients.
Spiritual Context
I cannot imagine doing this work at this point without two backups: One is the homeopathic philosophy and Materia Medica of Samuel Hahnemann and the second, most important one, is God. Suffering is intolerable (our own or anyone else’s) without some context within which we can hold it. Suffering or pain without meaning in a purposeless, random world is utterly intolerable. When there is meaning and purpose, even the worst pain becomes manageable.
Over the years, my work has become more about serving God (this is not about proselytizing by any means) than adhering to an agency code or a diagnostic manual, more about being present and truly healing than politically correct for the moment, more about truth and love than techniques.
I explained it to that young social worker that while others may not have understood what she did for that baby, God did. And the baby did. I am as sure of that as I am of the nose on my face. That baby heard her soothing voice, felt her calming breath and heartbeat, rested in her loving hands. Is there a better “technique” than that? I don’t think so. Those few hours she spent with that child may have changed the trajectory of her entire healing process.
I no longer aim for detachment, though I respect it. I no longer aim to fix every broken thing that is presented to me, though I very much want to alleviate suffering and disease. I no longer aim solely for technical skill, though I love learning.
What I am for is this: I aim to be present. I aim to see the truth. I aim to serve. Doing this work for so many years has required that I become more like a tube than a vessel. I do not “hold” other people’s pain, but I allow it flow through me and then up to God, Who can do with it what must be done, whatever that is so that peace and health and love are restored.
Filed under Albuquerque Counseling, Holistic Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy, Verbal First Aid, homeopathy by 
Pharisees, Hiltons, Uggs. There’s always a new elite, a new “in-crowd,” a new huddle to exclude and set one group apart from (read: “above”) another. Adults are familiar with it, perhaps even inured to it at some point. Or at least one would hope that they become inured to this elitist effect.
It happens with Hummers, with houses, with degrees of “handsome” and with holiness. People will even huddle around their own humility, if you can wrap your mind around that one. I know at least one person who not only announces how humble she is, but attests to the humility of all those she associates with.
When we “huddle” like that or use a quality or item as a source of pride and superiority, we are simultaneously shaming others, whether we intend to or not, whether we are even conscious of it or not. When I googled "snob" I was rather surprised to see how many websites (millions) were snob sites. There were cigar snobs, brew snobs, bag snobs, pot snobs, coffee snobs, and beauty snobs. There were snob snobs, which I took to mean people who were snobs about being snobs. There were so many levels of elitism, I lost count.
But the essence of it goes like this:
I have a Hummer. Hummers mean success. Success means I’m favored. Being favored means I’m better. Better than who? Better than you. Why? Because you don’t have a Hummer. (And if you do, I’ll find a way to make my Hummer bigger, better, and badder.) This can be done alone or in a group. Just take out the “I” and substitute a “We.” It’s the way most problems are started in the world as much as in the playground.
So…speaking of playgrounds…
My colleague came in to the office the other day shocked and dismayed by what he heard transpire between his young granddaughter and an older, obviously way more sophisticated nine-year-old girl.
“Look at what my grandpa got me,” the little one said, happy to be in her soft, fuzz-lined boots.
The nine-year old looked her up and down. (Can nine-year-olds watch Desperate Housewives?)
“My grandpa got it for me for Christmas!!!” Her joy was palpable. There was no pride, just a fuzzy delight. “They’re UGGS!”
The nine-year-old pursed her lips in disapproval and said, “Those aren’t real UGGS. I’ve got real UGGS. Yours are fakes.”
Then she pivoted and walked away, leaving a little girl confused and deflated.
Why did the nine-year-old do that? Because someone had shown her how important it was to have the “right” label. Someone had instructed her already—by the ripe old age of nine—how to have pride in a thing that meant literally nothing. Someone had given her the ability to attach her sense of self to an article of clothing, a pair of boots, to make her image more important than her integrity, rightness of being, her compassion, or her relationships.
My husband is a musician and he sees a fair cross-section of people when he plays in clubs and public forums. Recently, after a gig in another state, he told me about a group of 20-something men and women who had paid fairly good money to be seated at a table near the stage. Every single one of them had their face lit up green by their palm pilots (or whatever they’re calling them this week). Not one of them was listening to the music. Not one of them was in actual communion with anyone else.
I have been a psychotherapist treating trauma and anxiety for more than 25 years. I have been teaching Verbal First Aid and therapeutic communication for almost 20. I have seen many forms of emotional fragmentation. I have seen pained children and lost parents, angry spouses and lonely ones. The world is no stranger to suffering.
But something that is happening now has not happened before. While we are physically closer in proximity than ever before, we are less—far less—connected to one another. The trend is a disturbing one: It is as if our own manifest destiny were a version of a microcosmic “big bang.” Post-boom, western culture is moving out like a speeding centrifuge, pushing itself further out to the edges, farther away from each part of itself, leaving its center empty.
If, as it’s said, nature abhors a vacuum, that emptiness has to be filled by something. If we are wise, that emptiness gets filled by God and we are released back into communion, re-centered, and freed. If we are unwise, we buy more and more Uggs so we can lord it over little girls who wear other-than-Uggs and buy into the delusion that it somehow makes us better. We are then pulled by those forces farther and farther away from the only things that really will make us better. Each other and God.
Filed under Albuquerque Counseling, Blog, Christian Counseling, Faith-based Counseling, Psychotherapy, Verbal First Aid by
See article up on JEMS.com… Verbal First Aid and the science behind it.
http://www.jems.com/news_and_articles/columns/Acosta/
html;jsessionid=B4F84463578C979DD36CA9AD74B1A045
Post-script: There's a great study that was done in 2005 at the University of Michigan on the placebo effect (Journal of Neuroscience, August 23, 2005 http://www.med.umich.edu/opm/newspage/2005/placebo.htm) and pain. We've always known that placebos worked…which is why they're always ruled out in double-blind studies. What we didn't know is how…what architecture responds and is responsible for the pain relief. Their study pointed to the specific brain sites that were activated by imagery alone and simultaneously relieved pain. 
This is one more pearl of evidence for Verbal First Aid.
Filed under Blog, Holistic Psychotherapy, The Worst is Over, Verbal First Aid by
http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Reconciliation—The-Bible-and-Holistic-Psychotherapy&id=3628979
The above is the link to the whole article. I'll be posting more on the topic soon. Also take a look at the new posting at www.viralfear.com.
Filed under Blog by
The Source of All Good Healing
Psychology and fundamentalism at best have been polite opponents. In recent history, say the last 50 years, this opposition has become vigorous and often less than polite. Many churches, such as Calvary, completely eschew all mental health practitioners (whether social workers, psychiatrists or counselors) and staunchly maintain that all healing comes directly from God or prayer and that all you need in order to develop and maintain a robust mental health may be found in Scripture or a prayer session.
This rejection of psychotherapy may have been a reaction to the “I’m okay, you’re okay” generation of therapists who did very little for most people except to allay the anxieties of narcissists and sociopaths by telling them “if it feels good, it is good.” In the eyes of both Orthodox Jews and Christians, the field of humanistic psychology took the whole program of self-improvement one giant step too far, putting man in the center of the universe, particularly his own.
Their objections were not wrong. And I say this as a holistic psychotherapist with almost 25 years of experience in the field.
I have seen far too many well-meaning therapists do little more for their patients than make them feel better about being sick. They are loath to challenge or confront negative behavior or unhealthy thinking because they fear being seen as judgmental. As a result of their tentative relationships with the truth, they fail in their relationships with their patients. They do not see what needs to be healed so the patient is left unhealed. This is truly a disservice to the patient because what it ultimately does is feed the pathology and starve the essence of the person.
I think all good and true healing flows from the same Source which means that there can be an alliance—and an important one—between the Biblical and Mental Health communities.
But only if we have an understanding of our terms and are actually seeking the same results.
(More on this topic to come.)
Filed under Christian Counseling, Faith-based Counseling, Holistic Psychotherapy by
All of us can remember being told that someone we knew (or knew of) had gotten in trouble, been arrested for drug use, or in some way found with their pants literally or figuratively down. And we can all remember saying, “How could that be? He was so nice!”
Good People
They understand the battle against evil but never take pleasure in its defeat, rather sadness in its necessity.
They have consistent integrity.
They are appropriately (not helplessly or cunningly) selfless.
They are the last ones to see themselves as good and definitely the last ones to tell anyone they are.
Super Nice People
They interact with a pseudo-intimacy, behaving as if they’d known you personally for years.
They relate to you on the surface and let you in only so far.
They do not respond to your needs but gloss over them in a way that makes you wonder whatever you needed that for.
They need to maintain a persona or a position in a social circle at all costs because how they are seen is more important than who they are.
They have no compunction about lying to get what they want so long as they are nice about it.
Niceness is conscious and deliberate. It is a social skill that is turned on and off, a vehicle for self-enhancement.
Coexistence
Perhaps it should not go without saying that a nice man may in fact be a very good man. Not all charm is a cover for sadism or cruelty, although very often it is. Good and nice can coexist. A good man may be quite charming and engaging. But not always. Only in the right circumstances and for the right reasons. In the choice between what is right and what is “nice”, a good man will choose what is right. He knows that true goodness is a Grace bestowed in brief moments. Sometimes a good man will say and do things that may offend, hurt someone’s feelings, or even lead to battle.
I imagine Chamberlain thought he was being quite nice with Hitler. I don’t believe anyone in Czechoslovakia would have thought it was very good.
Sounding the Cultural Alarm: Discernment
In 1940 C.S. Lewis was already sounding the alarm about this radical change in modern society. He stated emphatically that kindness (or niceness) was not the measure of goodness, just as apparent cruelty was not the measure of evil. For as Russ Murray points out in his blogspot column on good vs. evil, (www.thekingpin68.blogspot.com), someone can be quite nice and have the most horrible of intentions, citing as an example how Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Doctors do the opposite all the time: they reset dislocated shoulders, suture lacerated skin, and remove decayed teeth sometimes causing awful (albeit temporary) pain in order to facilitate proper healing. Is it nice? Hell, no. Is it good? Until we have better means, yes, it is very good.
Because our culture puts such a premium on niceness, charm, and pleasure, ordinary, good people are put at a disadvantage when it comes to discernment. A narcissist can appear quite innocent because she has so mastered the technique of ingratiation. So much so, that she can make you feel that you have somehow committed a terrible injustice by denying her X or Y or Z as she positions herself as the victim.
As Gavin De Becker points out, this failure to see behind the mask of niceness can make the difference between life and death. World-wide, the crime records attest to the danger. A woman who can’t say “no” to a nice stranger’s unsolicited offer to escort her to her car at night, even though she doesn’t like him, may wind up filing reports of assault, rape, and attempted murder. This is not to blame the victim, rather to point out how charming that charm can be and how carefully we need to pay attention to the differences.
So, what does a person do? How do you tell the difference?
When I teach Verbal First Aid to emergency workers, a communication protocol used to facilitate healing in traumatic situations, I ask them what they think their most important tool is. Inevitably the hands go up: the defibrillator, the oxygen tank, the Jaws of Life. I tell them: No. Your most important and most healing instrument is you.
What makes them—or any of us—healing is at least in part what makes us good: the ability to develop rapport, our integrity and compassion, our benevolent presence and support. To be healing (or good) one must respect the patient (or person) before him and do what is necessary even if it is not “nice” to deal with the disease or the injury. Part of what is necessary in Verbal First Aid, of course, is dealing with the patient honestly and with a gentle, but firm authority. Manipulating and healing are mutually exclusive.
The Bible defines Good for us as “an inherent rightness of being.” It never ever mentions niceness. It never equates it with beauty or talent. It never, ever mistakes it for showmanship. (Moses himself had a lisp and timidly refused his mandate by God to lead the Jews out of Egypt.) If anything it warns us from the very beginning to beware of pretense.
We can start to tell the difference by remembering that there is a difference.
For full-length article, please see: http://ezinearticles.com/?Nice,-But-Not-Good—Discernment-Skills-For-Modern-Americans&id=3610725
Filed under Christian Counseling, Holistic Psychotherapy, Verbal First Aid by
Another article excerpt from Ezinearticles.com (http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Wages-of-Fear—The-Seven-Deadly-Sins-and-American-Pathology&id=3540022)
It's axiomatic that you get what you pay for. On observation, however, I believe that there are times we get more than we bargain for, not all of it good. In the case of current media-incitements, we get much more and we are rarely aware of it.
Viral fear, that generalized anxiety induced and spread by the media in all its forms, is evident not only in advertising but in most television programming. There's the famous It Could Happen Tomorrow series on the Weather Channel and that important reminder Armageddon Week on the History Channel. For the thoroughly inured and brain-injured there's also a 24-7 fear channel on cable in case someone needs to scare themselves to sleep. Of course, it's not enough to watch horrifying dramatizations of our last days on earth. Advertisers do their duty when they alert us to the more imminent dangers to life and limb if we don't buy their ________ (insert one or all of the following: security system, flu vaccine, dietary supplement, colon cleanser, or SUV).
There are statistics that suggest that while our diets are no good (by in large, they're awful), they're not the sole culprits in our poor health. While our intake of alcohol is high, that too is not the bullet that hit the artery. Same with cigarettes.
The Europeans eat and drink and smoke and suffer fewer heart attacks and less cancer. The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us but the Mexicans eat a lot of fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than us. The Chinese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Italians drink a lot of red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.The Germans drink a lot of beer and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than us.
Something else is at work, then.
I've been a psychotherapist for 25 years. Licensed in five states at one point. Seen hundreds, if not thousands of people. The one thing that seems to be the most prevalent and devastating to the most people is the constant fear, the unrelenting stress to perform to some impossible standard, and the agonizing inability to meet those standards and resulting inadequacy. This is just observation, not analysis.
But I did have a question or a thought on the topic. Is it possible that part of our cultural nature as adventurers and conquerers has something to do with it? When we are not scaling sheer cliffs, jumping out of planes, or conquering the west, where does that energy go?
There's a truism in Homeopathy that a remedy exists on a polar spectrum. It can be bright red (for instance) with heat or appear to be so white it looks cold. It can be enraged or as silent and coiled as a snake. It can be delighted or deranged. Each one existing within the same remedy state.
Could the same be true for Americans? That when we're not engaged in the extremes of conquest, we're trapped by our televisions? That the kissing cousin of adventure–fear–grabs us as soon as we stop leaping off of cliffs. And one thing I DO know is that fear kills us faster than anything else I've seen.
Just a thought to consider.
Filed under Albuquerque Counseling, Blog, Faith-based Counseling, Holistic Psychotherapy, Verbal First Aid, homeopathy by
For Burt Vendel
Husband of Deanna
21 Roadrunner Trail
December 25, 2009, Christmas Day
Yesterday, Christmas Eve, at around 9:30 in the morning, my husband, Dave, went to go run some errands. At around 9:35 he called from down the road, his voice thick. He was weeping. “Burt died,” was all he could say.
Burt lived across the street. He was 59. He was a master gardener, a kind soul who really did look like Santa Claus, a biker with a heart as big as his Harley, and a classically good neighbor.
We were not close friends, but something about his sudden passing hit us both hard, particularly my husband. He came back to the house and we spoke for a little while outside.
He told me that he’d met Vinnie and his wife, neighbors from down the street, who had told him that Burt had a heart attack and died on Christmas Eve morning at around 4:30 a.m. I'm a psychotherapist and I hear an awful lot of difficult and often very sad things. But this left me speechless and stunned.
“I was up at 4:30,” Dave said vaguely. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Did you hear something?” I asked.
“No, more like felt something,” he said.
Over the years, I’d come to respect his “feelings” that way. He was uncannily sensitive. When we spoke later, we tried to understand what had upset us so much. And we came to see that it was not about what will be missed as much as what was missed.
“I lost a friendship that was in the bank,” Dave said. “He was a friend that I never really enjoyed. There was always something that got in the way, some work, some errand, some weather, something. The ride we were gonna take together was always pending. And then it was gone.”
We had just gone to a neighborhood Christmas party together. Burt approached Dave in the room set aside for the bar and had, in typically generous fashion, offered some help with a kiva problem we’d been having. He had been thinking about it (without even being asked) and believed he had found a solution to putting in the grill we’d been struggling with. Dave was fielding another conversation and felt bad separating himself from the other fellow. So, noticing that Dave was a bit socially torn, Burt graciously said, “Well, I can see you’re involved in another conversation. We can talk about it later.”
He died within a few days. There was no later. We never got to hear his ideas. Burt was a clever, industrious, kind-hearted man who would do anything to help a neighbor. He was also very humble. He had the most beautifully sculpted Southwestern garden we’d ever seen and every day as we walked our dogs past his house, there he’d be, hip deep in sand and prickly pear, turning something ordinary into something unique. And every time we told him so, he’d just laugh and say, “I just like playing in the dirt.”
Burt, we would like to have said many more things to you, heard many more things from you, seen what you would have created with that garden in the next few years, watched what you did with that beard as it reached your belt buckle, taken a ride or two with you and your wife and seen where we would’ve wound up. We can’t pretend to know the grief and sorrow your family must be feeling right now and we can’t imagine how big the hole your passing has left in the lives of those who knew you well and loved you deeply.
We don’t know the divine plan, but in our time you were taken too soon, way too soon.
I think most eulogies, most deaths, most losses are about that—opportunities or conversations missed, things not said, times not had. They are often reminders that the clock is ticking, the hour is near and the opportunities are passing as we sit, busy with things that we think we must get done at the expense of the only things that count.
We salute you, Burt, as you ride down the ever-winding road to pastures more perfect than any garden we can ever create here, to conversations more illuminated than any we can conceive on this earth, to opportunities always fulfilled and a soul always satisfied. You—and all those rides we might have taken together—will be sincerely missed.
Filed under Holistic Psychotherapy, Psychotherapy, Verbal First Aid by
http://ezinearticles.com/?Christianity-and-Verbal-First-Aid&id=3436498
For those interested in how faith can be allied with Verbal First Aid and hypnotherapy.
Filed under Albuquerque Hypnosis, Faith-based Counseling, Holistic Psychotherapy, Verbal First Aid by
(This blog is part of a larger, more thorough piece on Ezinearticles.com)
Traditional or fundamental Christians have had issues with hypnosis before. Verbal First Aid is a form of hypnotic communication. Can they be true to their faith and use Verbal First Aid?
I believe Christians can use Verbal First Aid to benefit their own health and the health of their loved ones and stay faithful to scripture and spirit.
One of Christianity’s great fears about hypnosis as they've understood it through television and mass media is that it is used by malevolent people to induce a moral laxity and make the prohibited permissible.
The truth, however, is that clinical hypnosis cannot make anyone do anything that would undermine their moral or ethical resolve.
There's a simple and true story to demonstrate this:
One day Dr. Erickson, the greatest psychiatrist and hypnotherapist of the last century, went to his secretary and told her he was tired and wanted to rest. If anyone called, he told her, she was to say that he was out of the office. She agreed to do this for him. A few days later he put her in a hypnotic trance and then asked her the same thing: to tell people he was out of the office when he was in fact taking a break. While still in a formally induced trance, she refused outright. “Why?” he wanted to know.
"Because,” she said, “it would be a lie.”
Ironically, in hypnosis she had a stronger moral resolve than in her normal waking state.
Hypnosis is not “brainwashing" even though it's been portrayed that way. Verbal First Aid–as a form of hypnotic communication in acute situations–is similarly not a form of "mind control."
Here is the critical difference between the way Christians have been taught to see hypnotherapy and its clinical reality in the hands of ethical practitioners:
Hypnosis only utilizes a state of consciousness that is already natural and normal. Trance is not something that is artificially induced in a person. It is simply a state of awareness in which we are more focused on an internal process (breathing, thoughts) and most importantly it is something all of us move in and out of all day.
This normal shift of awareness is even more common when we are frightened, hurt, or ill, which is why Verbal First Aid works so well to help stop bleeding, reduce an inflammatory response, and lower blood pressure. We can see it even more dramatically when it is used with children who enter fairly easily and frequently into “trance."
How Verbal First Aid Works in Alliance with Faith and the Faithful
If the definitions of trance as clinicians use it are accurate (and I believe they are) and the dangers are real as Christians see them (and I believe they certainly can be), how can the healing use of imagery work together with the faithful so that as Jesus said in John 10:10, “I am come that they may have life and have it more abundantly.”
In the beginning was the word.
That words are powerful is a familiar concept to those who read the Bible.
Words have a prominent position in the Bible from the third sentence: And GOD SAID LET THERE BE LIGHT. He did not create with His “hands”. He spoke—“By the word of the Lord were the heavens made (Ps. 33).” To speak is to WILL into existence. What we say and how we say it is a co-creative act. What we say hangs somewhere between heaven and earth.
Words matter. The mystics have always known this. Only now is science catching up.
Why? Because they create images in the mind of the person to whom we are speaking. Those images and the thoughts that flow with them generate cascades of chemistry that dictate not only how we feel emotionally, but how fast or slow our hearts beat, how high our blood pressure goes, how profoundly we feel the pain of an injury, even the way our livers function.
We all use words all the time. And they have the power to help or to harm. Isn’t it our obligation to make what we say as healing as possible?
The therapeutic use of words (psychotherapy/hypnosis) is no different than a good conversation, a sermon, a lecture, a television show or a good book. It is the use of words to move us to see things in a different way, to uplift and help us. When used in the right way with a proper intention, those words can help us heal.
Filed under Albuquerque Hypnosis, Christian Counseling, Faith-based Counseling, Verbal First Aid by
