More PCon notes: Pagan Psychology, Sunday 11am
Deborah Oak Cooper - Reclaiming, feminist mental health, in private practice in SF
Valerie Cole - currently in NY, moving back to the bay area this summer, woo. Clinical psychologist. Surrogate work in sex therapy, taught a bit in college, but teaching wasn't her bag. Works with the Red Cross. Trains people for disaster work. Chair of pastoral counsling at Cherry Hill!
Elizabeth Flame Malamed - psychotherapist in private practice in Encino & Santa Monica. MFT. Worked a lot with adolescents and adults, runs groups, worked with chemical dependency. Currently spending part of her working time at a local university helping college students. Incredibly passionate about walking the walk; being a pagan and being a therapist are very closely related. Training in integrated body psychotherapy, which fits with being pagan.
George Hersch - therapy practice in Berkeley. Licensed psychologist, PhDs in zoology and psychology, hee! Awesome. Used to do a lot of nursing home work - but that's a really burnout prone field. Works one day a week, practice is entirely bay area pagans - which covers a LOT of ground! Lots of diversity. Can't sell them his brand of pagan, has to work with them where they are.
How does your spirituality interface with your clinical practice?
George: first formal pagan stuff was with Bonewits' ADF. Was the Vice Archdruid for a while! Awesome. Training with other orgs as well. Because of his range of exposure, he can work pretty well with anybody who walks in the door. Has enough information about how the various paths work so that he can talk the language of someone who walks in. Doesn't pretend to be One Of You, but knows enough to build a good rapport. The thing that's most important in therapy isn't the theoretical approach the therapist works but the relationship between the client and the therapist. Has to be solid and honest for the client to get anything. And because he gets paganism, he can put pagan clients at ease. Not trying to cure them of their religion (as many pagans fear a therapist will. “I hear voices, but that's not what's wrong with me!!”). It helps to have white hair. “People think you must know something!”
Flame: her, what comes up right now is much about how she is in session. Has learned so much, especially in Reclaiming, about how to be with a person, how to be present in herself energetically/emotionally/spiritually and be with the other person. Tools she wishes she'd been taught in counseling classes! How to tend people - when they're having an intense emotional experience, how you deal with it yourself and how you can be of service to them. Being a therapist is akin to being a priestess, you're setting the space, creating safety and room for the person to be who they are. Includes the therapist being close and aligned in all her parts, and open, and steady. Also finds that being connected to a spiritual system that respects nature and natural processes is a very nice overlay into people and how they experience and function. For example, in other systems, anger might be a sin, but anger and other emotions/behaviors are part of the natural process for paganism. Comes in with a respect and reverence for peoples' processes. The shit is the compost, it feeds the rest of life! Feels that very keenly.
Valerie: has a website, which mentions she is a witch... but not on the front page. Is on a page about spirituality, down near the bottom after a big thing about how spirituality affects how you think / your emotional life. Gets Christians coming to her because she has a page about spirituality, hee! In her intake, asks about spiritual practices and what gets you out of bed in the morning. Asks about community. If asked about her spirituality, tells them. Sometimes more difficult to work with pagans because they expect her to do spells with them to make everything okay, “but my training is in cognitive behavioral!” hee hee. Cyclical nature of things important - lots of SAD in her area. Works with the idea that it's okay to be sad. You don't have to be happy all the time. It's ok to be introspective and not have lots of energy to go out and whatnot! It's ok to sit back and take care of yourself. Does lots of work to help people not blame themselves but instead accept the way they are. Works with developmental stuff. At age 50, you're not going to be the same as you were at 20, and that's okay! You're not going to look the same, that's okay!
Deborah: Starhawk had a clinical practice for a while, which Debra took over, and it was annoying! People expected her to do magic and make things better. In her current practice, majority of her clients don't know she's a witch, doesn't have many pagan clients. One of the most important things for her practice is not being a monotheist. Has taken her decades to realize how powerful that paradigm is! A lot of monotheistic therapists feel they have to be monogamous with their theory, they pick an idea and stick with it. Being a polytheist changes how you approach these things. Can see clients as individuals. “The world is made of stories, not atoms.” Myths and stories are rich and varied. Being a therapist is not science, it's an art. It's the art of stories, of seeing each person as divine and separate and as a protagonist in their own mythic journey. Has really enriched her life having all these stories, working with the stories of her clients. Not feeling like people are inherently sinful is a hugely different stance, ditto not seeing sex as a bad thing. To hold people as divine to see them as sacred and not coming from shame, that makes a huge impact just holding that idea. Two schools of therapy in the course of her career: narrative therapy - how she works anyway, and positive psychology - the idea that we're all basically okay. “So much of what fucks us up is the idea that we're fucked up!”
How do we see paganism contributing to psychotherapy?
George: there are a couple of very influential post-Jungian psychologists, Miller and Hillman. Both have the theoretical position that polytheism is good for you, but neither is a believer. Advocacy of polytheistic stance as the one that frees you up and gets the work done. Lots of horrible psych problems you can get into if you're a dedicated monotheist. How can you run a world like that? So many awful things happen. If you see the gods as NOT all powerful, as individuals you have to negotiate with, who have their own departments and do their best, it's a beneficial view. The things that hurt people the most are their absolute iron-clad assumptions. They're nooses, traps. The polytheistic position, that there are all these personalities you have to deal with - very helpful. Balthasar Gracian, a Jesuit priest, wrote a book which got him locked up. He proposed using divine means as though there were no mundane means AND using mundane means as though there were no divine means. “if you've got a spiritual practice you use it, and if you need an aspirin you take it!”
Flame: there's so much that we know how to do that people are looking for. In many pagan circles people wind up saying they don't know how muggles do it. How do they live without these tools? These tools help us to be happier and better as people. Believes that these tools don't have to stay within the realm of believers. One good thing Buddhism has given psych is the idea that you don't have to believe in order to use practices. You can teach people a grounding without them having to believe in the whole shebang.
Valerie: Process of change, how people get better. Lots of her patients come in taking antidepressants or other psychotropic drugs and ask her what she thinks of it. Answer: it's a tool, a way of changing brain chemistry. However, they're not the only way to change brain chemistry. Realized in the course of her clinical psych training that when people are in trance in ritual, their brain chemistry is shifting. You get more seratonin from the visualizations around positive ecstatic states. Can help people who don't want to take meds start to think about it that way; can also help people who are taking meds do it too. A lot of professionals don't give you a way to get off the meds. Using pagan tools to change brain chemistry gives you a way to get off the meds.
Gotta make sure people are safe, which is where faith comes in. Asks people what makes them feel safe in the world. Has a friend who says, “I really believe everything is going to be okay, as long as I don't try to define 'okay.'” Taught an OCD client grounding and shielding and it completely changed her life! You don't have to tell the person that they're pagan. It just takes some imagination. You don't have to be pagan for them to work! Way to explain it: have you seen a scary movie? Was your heart pounding? Things you imagine can affect your body! You just have to imagine things that affect it how you want.
Deborah: ecopsychology talks about the disconnection most modern humans feel from nature and how to work with clients to acknowledge that nature is part of their life. A lot of pagan therapists kind of do reiki just sitting there. Hee. Another thing: pagans are more comfortable with alternative sexualities, and so it's easier to work with GLBT. Not being monotheistic, using the elements of life, it makes for good therapy.
Shade asks: since the dominant overculture is monotheistic and the clients have a polytheistic perspective, how you you manage the clash, the way clients have to deal with that?
Valerie: tries to help people come to self-acceptance so they aren't internalizing the conflict. Talks about coping strategies. Doesn't walk up to Southern Baptists and announce that she's a witch. Practical, down-to-earth approach to handling things. Usually if you acknowledge that they're not crazy, just different, it is really healing to people.
Flame: talks about the idea that you can choose whether or not to be real with other people, YOU are setting a boundary for your benefit as opposed to being a victim. Also encourages an experience in her clients to be fully who they are in session so that they get a taste of it. People follow the energy. People realize how wonderful it is to be just a little more themselves. The energy and passion allows them to let go of some of their fears. Being relistic about fears of what might happen vs. what are the real issues.
Deborah: worked with a client who wanted to come out to her Baptist father. Worked with the nice Jesus, who wasn't the Jesus her Dad worked with but could help. Another thing pagans bring to psych: mirth and reverence.
Audience member talked about the idea that an atheist therapist might be helpful for religious clients because they don't buy into it and can point out ways in which one's belief system is unhealthy. Friend of hers holds that opinion. Also says that it'd be helpful if nonpagan therapists knew more about pagan stuff so that we wouldn't have to sum stuff up.
Meg Yardley wrote an article in the journal Social Work about working with pagans. Woo!
Kay Pannell is doing a ritual for returning soldiers, which looks interesting.
Thorn: does spiritual direction, soul development. Works with a lot of clients who are in therapy. Tries to be clean about what she has training to deal with and what she doesn't, but it's murky territory. Advice to folks who do a lot of this who don't have counseling degrees? Red flags to look for?
Deborah: Basic: if you really feel someone has a disorder, it's better in the hands of a therapist. Google personality disorders and learn to spot the symptoms. People who need someone to idealize are drawn to spiritual counseling and will want more from you. Emotional vampires. Judy Orlaf (sp?) has books on it - Positive Energy.
Valerie: Be very clear on the goal of your work with this person. The goal of a therapist is really different than the goal of a spiritual director.
Flame: obv, it depends on the therapist, but a team approach can be very helpful. Having someone to consult with is also helpful. Marsha Linehan writes about Dialectical Behavior Therapy which is an easy system to learn and implement. Has a great educational vid on it.
New Unitarian minister observes that a lot of pagans are going off to school and learning counseling, or having to act as de facto counselors. Thoughts?
George: Cherry Hill Seminary! Get training from people who know what the deal is. There is training out there, so get it. If you're pagan clergy of some sort, it's easy to get a swelled head. Watch out! :)
Audience comment: there's a part of all of us which has deep wisdom, or we wouldn't be pagans. Has a strong reaction to the idea of professional vs. nonprofessional. We don't give ourselves credit for the innate wisdom we have. Hierarchical system of authority separates us.
Thorn points out: there is training and training is important for all of us.
Flame: wants to speak to that. It's a similar issue for all professionals. The guideline she was taught was, if the person I'm working with needs more than I can give, they need to be connected to someone else or something else. There is more out there. The difficulty comes when out of our innocence, out of our lack of experience, we might not know that a danger is coming. We are all a web, we are all helping at our own pace. When we are cut off or have gotten so overwhelmed that we can't trust our messages, it's easy to get that swelled head and think we know everything. That's why we need people around us who can say, no, you are not the one to solve this problem now, you need to do your personal work.
Valerie: agrees. Works in disasters. There are never enough mental health practitioners. Teaches a course called Psychological First Aid. Chaplains can learn it. Red Cross volunteers learn it. Learn how to deal with someone in crisis. If you don't know what to do to help them, just listen. You can't harm anybody if you just listen. Anybody trained as clergy in any denomination has probably heard the phrase “ministry of presence.” Anybody can do that, no matter their training.
Audience member: the person in crisis has all the resources they need to deal with their issue, but they can't necessarily see what needs to be done.
Audience member: guiding people into self-love is important.
Deborah: Love is an important word, but one that a lot of therapists don't use. It's important that therapists sit there and LOVE. Working with a young man brought up in shame. Worked with him on self-love. He died of a heart-attack right after he made a huge movement toward it. Was crying to a coworker that he died before achieving real love in his life, and coworker said, “Deborah, he did have love in his life. He had you.”
George: Stephen Levine (sp?) - forgiveness meditation. You have to forgive yourself. You can't do it instantaneously.
Audience member: asking about twelve-step programs
Valerie: There isn't inherently a conflict between paganism and AA, but each AA group is different.
Audience member suggests Life Ring.
Valerie Cole - currently in NY, moving back to the bay area this summer, woo. Clinical psychologist. Surrogate work in sex therapy, taught a bit in college, but teaching wasn't her bag. Works with the Red Cross. Trains people for disaster work. Chair of pastoral counsling at Cherry Hill!
Elizabeth Flame Malamed - psychotherapist in private practice in Encino & Santa Monica. MFT. Worked a lot with adolescents and adults, runs groups, worked with chemical dependency. Currently spending part of her working time at a local university helping college students. Incredibly passionate about walking the walk; being a pagan and being a therapist are very closely related. Training in integrated body psychotherapy, which fits with being pagan.
George Hersch - therapy practice in Berkeley. Licensed psychologist, PhDs in zoology and psychology, hee! Awesome. Used to do a lot of nursing home work - but that's a really burnout prone field. Works one day a week, practice is entirely bay area pagans - which covers a LOT of ground! Lots of diversity. Can't sell them his brand of pagan, has to work with them where they are.
How does your spirituality interface with your clinical practice?
George: first formal pagan stuff was with Bonewits' ADF. Was the Vice Archdruid for a while! Awesome. Training with other orgs as well. Because of his range of exposure, he can work pretty well with anybody who walks in the door. Has enough information about how the various paths work so that he can talk the language of someone who walks in. Doesn't pretend to be One Of You, but knows enough to build a good rapport. The thing that's most important in therapy isn't the theoretical approach the therapist works but the relationship between the client and the therapist. Has to be solid and honest for the client to get anything. And because he gets paganism, he can put pagan clients at ease. Not trying to cure them of their religion (as many pagans fear a therapist will. “I hear voices, but that's not what's wrong with me!!”). It helps to have white hair. “People think you must know something!”
Flame: her, what comes up right now is much about how she is in session. Has learned so much, especially in Reclaiming, about how to be with a person, how to be present in herself energetically/emotionally/spiritually and be with the other person. Tools she wishes she'd been taught in counseling classes! How to tend people - when they're having an intense emotional experience, how you deal with it yourself and how you can be of service to them. Being a therapist is akin to being a priestess, you're setting the space, creating safety and room for the person to be who they are. Includes the therapist being close and aligned in all her parts, and open, and steady. Also finds that being connected to a spiritual system that respects nature and natural processes is a very nice overlay into people and how they experience and function. For example, in other systems, anger might be a sin, but anger and other emotions/behaviors are part of the natural process for paganism. Comes in with a respect and reverence for peoples' processes. The shit is the compost, it feeds the rest of life! Feels that very keenly.
Valerie: has a website, which mentions she is a witch... but not on the front page. Is on a page about spirituality, down near the bottom after a big thing about how spirituality affects how you think / your emotional life. Gets Christians coming to her because she has a page about spirituality, hee! In her intake, asks about spiritual practices and what gets you out of bed in the morning. Asks about community. If asked about her spirituality, tells them. Sometimes more difficult to work with pagans because they expect her to do spells with them to make everything okay, “but my training is in cognitive behavioral!” hee hee. Cyclical nature of things important - lots of SAD in her area. Works with the idea that it's okay to be sad. You don't have to be happy all the time. It's ok to be introspective and not have lots of energy to go out and whatnot! It's ok to sit back and take care of yourself. Does lots of work to help people not blame themselves but instead accept the way they are. Works with developmental stuff. At age 50, you're not going to be the same as you were at 20, and that's okay! You're not going to look the same, that's okay!
Deborah: Starhawk had a clinical practice for a while, which Debra took over, and it was annoying! People expected her to do magic and make things better. In her current practice, majority of her clients don't know she's a witch, doesn't have many pagan clients. One of the most important things for her practice is not being a monotheist. Has taken her decades to realize how powerful that paradigm is! A lot of monotheistic therapists feel they have to be monogamous with their theory, they pick an idea and stick with it. Being a polytheist changes how you approach these things. Can see clients as individuals. “The world is made of stories, not atoms.” Myths and stories are rich and varied. Being a therapist is not science, it's an art. It's the art of stories, of seeing each person as divine and separate and as a protagonist in their own mythic journey. Has really enriched her life having all these stories, working with the stories of her clients. Not feeling like people are inherently sinful is a hugely different stance, ditto not seeing sex as a bad thing. To hold people as divine to see them as sacred and not coming from shame, that makes a huge impact just holding that idea. Two schools of therapy in the course of her career: narrative therapy - how she works anyway, and positive psychology - the idea that we're all basically okay. “So much of what fucks us up is the idea that we're fucked up!”
How do we see paganism contributing to psychotherapy?
George: there are a couple of very influential post-Jungian psychologists, Miller and Hillman. Both have the theoretical position that polytheism is good for you, but neither is a believer. Advocacy of polytheistic stance as the one that frees you up and gets the work done. Lots of horrible psych problems you can get into if you're a dedicated monotheist. How can you run a world like that? So many awful things happen. If you see the gods as NOT all powerful, as individuals you have to negotiate with, who have their own departments and do their best, it's a beneficial view. The things that hurt people the most are their absolute iron-clad assumptions. They're nooses, traps. The polytheistic position, that there are all these personalities you have to deal with - very helpful. Balthasar Gracian, a Jesuit priest, wrote a book which got him locked up. He proposed using divine means as though there were no mundane means AND using mundane means as though there were no divine means. “if you've got a spiritual practice you use it, and if you need an aspirin you take it!”
Flame: there's so much that we know how to do that people are looking for. In many pagan circles people wind up saying they don't know how muggles do it. How do they live without these tools? These tools help us to be happier and better as people. Believes that these tools don't have to stay within the realm of believers. One good thing Buddhism has given psych is the idea that you don't have to believe in order to use practices. You can teach people a grounding without them having to believe in the whole shebang.
Valerie: Process of change, how people get better. Lots of her patients come in taking antidepressants or other psychotropic drugs and ask her what she thinks of it. Answer: it's a tool, a way of changing brain chemistry. However, they're not the only way to change brain chemistry. Realized in the course of her clinical psych training that when people are in trance in ritual, their brain chemistry is shifting. You get more seratonin from the visualizations around positive ecstatic states. Can help people who don't want to take meds start to think about it that way; can also help people who are taking meds do it too. A lot of professionals don't give you a way to get off the meds. Using pagan tools to change brain chemistry gives you a way to get off the meds.
Gotta make sure people are safe, which is where faith comes in. Asks people what makes them feel safe in the world. Has a friend who says, “I really believe everything is going to be okay, as long as I don't try to define 'okay.'” Taught an OCD client grounding and shielding and it completely changed her life! You don't have to tell the person that they're pagan. It just takes some imagination. You don't have to be pagan for them to work! Way to explain it: have you seen a scary movie? Was your heart pounding? Things you imagine can affect your body! You just have to imagine things that affect it how you want.
Deborah: ecopsychology talks about the disconnection most modern humans feel from nature and how to work with clients to acknowledge that nature is part of their life. A lot of pagan therapists kind of do reiki just sitting there. Hee. Another thing: pagans are more comfortable with alternative sexualities, and so it's easier to work with GLBT. Not being monotheistic, using the elements of life, it makes for good therapy.
Shade asks: since the dominant overculture is monotheistic and the clients have a polytheistic perspective, how you you manage the clash, the way clients have to deal with that?
Valerie: tries to help people come to self-acceptance so they aren't internalizing the conflict. Talks about coping strategies. Doesn't walk up to Southern Baptists and announce that she's a witch. Practical, down-to-earth approach to handling things. Usually if you acknowledge that they're not crazy, just different, it is really healing to people.
Flame: talks about the idea that you can choose whether or not to be real with other people, YOU are setting a boundary for your benefit as opposed to being a victim. Also encourages an experience in her clients to be fully who they are in session so that they get a taste of it. People follow the energy. People realize how wonderful it is to be just a little more themselves. The energy and passion allows them to let go of some of their fears. Being relistic about fears of what might happen vs. what are the real issues.
Deborah: worked with a client who wanted to come out to her Baptist father. Worked with the nice Jesus, who wasn't the Jesus her Dad worked with but could help. Another thing pagans bring to psych: mirth and reverence.
Audience member talked about the idea that an atheist therapist might be helpful for religious clients because they don't buy into it and can point out ways in which one's belief system is unhealthy. Friend of hers holds that opinion. Also says that it'd be helpful if nonpagan therapists knew more about pagan stuff so that we wouldn't have to sum stuff up.
Meg Yardley wrote an article in the journal Social Work about working with pagans. Woo!
Kay Pannell is doing a ritual for returning soldiers, which looks interesting.
Thorn: does spiritual direction, soul development. Works with a lot of clients who are in therapy. Tries to be clean about what she has training to deal with and what she doesn't, but it's murky territory. Advice to folks who do a lot of this who don't have counseling degrees? Red flags to look for?
Deborah: Basic: if you really feel someone has a disorder, it's better in the hands of a therapist. Google personality disorders and learn to spot the symptoms. People who need someone to idealize are drawn to spiritual counseling and will want more from you. Emotional vampires. Judy Orlaf (sp?) has books on it - Positive Energy.
Valerie: Be very clear on the goal of your work with this person. The goal of a therapist is really different than the goal of a spiritual director.
Flame: obv, it depends on the therapist, but a team approach can be very helpful. Having someone to consult with is also helpful. Marsha Linehan writes about Dialectical Behavior Therapy which is an easy system to learn and implement. Has a great educational vid on it.
New Unitarian minister observes that a lot of pagans are going off to school and learning counseling, or having to act as de facto counselors. Thoughts?
George: Cherry Hill Seminary! Get training from people who know what the deal is. There is training out there, so get it. If you're pagan clergy of some sort, it's easy to get a swelled head. Watch out! :)
Audience comment: there's a part of all of us which has deep wisdom, or we wouldn't be pagans. Has a strong reaction to the idea of professional vs. nonprofessional. We don't give ourselves credit for the innate wisdom we have. Hierarchical system of authority separates us.
Thorn points out: there is training and training is important for all of us.
Flame: wants to speak to that. It's a similar issue for all professionals. The guideline she was taught was, if the person I'm working with needs more than I can give, they need to be connected to someone else or something else. There is more out there. The difficulty comes when out of our innocence, out of our lack of experience, we might not know that a danger is coming. We are all a web, we are all helping at our own pace. When we are cut off or have gotten so overwhelmed that we can't trust our messages, it's easy to get that swelled head and think we know everything. That's why we need people around us who can say, no, you are not the one to solve this problem now, you need to do your personal work.
Valerie: agrees. Works in disasters. There are never enough mental health practitioners. Teaches a course called Psychological First Aid. Chaplains can learn it. Red Cross volunteers learn it. Learn how to deal with someone in crisis. If you don't know what to do to help them, just listen. You can't harm anybody if you just listen. Anybody trained as clergy in any denomination has probably heard the phrase “ministry of presence.” Anybody can do that, no matter their training.
Audience member: the person in crisis has all the resources they need to deal with their issue, but they can't necessarily see what needs to be done.
Audience member: guiding people into self-love is important.
Deborah: Love is an important word, but one that a lot of therapists don't use. It's important that therapists sit there and LOVE. Working with a young man brought up in shame. Worked with him on self-love. He died of a heart-attack right after he made a huge movement toward it. Was crying to a coworker that he died before achieving real love in his life, and coworker said, “Deborah, he did have love in his life. He had you.”
George: Stephen Levine (sp?) - forgiveness meditation. You have to forgive yourself. You can't do it instantaneously.
Audience member: asking about twelve-step programs
Valerie: There isn't inherently a conflict between paganism and AA, but each AA group is different.
Audience member suggests Life Ring.