Holistic Counselling: A New Vision for Mental Health

By Patricia Sherwood

This is a remarkable contribution to a new vision for mental health where body, mind and spirit are integrated so that spirit is manifest through matter and our lives become firmly grounded on the earth. This holistic counselling model, the Sophia model, presents an elegant integration of the intuitive and the rational , the analytic and the syn

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sophia College
• Release date: Dec 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781584200604

Book preview

Chapter 1:

A holistic counselling model for body, mind and spirit

Sophia awakens the spirit in spirituality, shaking the words from its many definitions, so that it dies as sentences, and awakens as a moving vibration (Damiani, 1997)

Illustration: Sophia by Hrana Janto

Sophia is the archetype chosen for holistic counselling because she personifies healing through wisdom, the recovery of the wholeness of the human psyche. She is psyche at its deepest level, as a mediator of embodied experience, where the inner and outer realms dance together. This is the meeting place of body, mind and spirit infused with highest spiritual intelligence, manifest in daily life through integrity and skilful action. Sophia has been in exile from mainstream life for generations, and her exile has broken our connection between body, mind and spirit because our psyches have become impoverished by materialism, fundamentalism and empiricism. Damiani (1997) explicates the cost lucidly:

What is exiled in today’s dysfunctional paradigm is the vital soul, the genius or daemon. When we pay attention to it by taking our life seriously - as a mode of knowledge - we awaken its fire. The vital soul expresses the integrity and intelligence of the life force, whose awakening turns exile into home - revealing Sophia to be not divine but the source of divine images - the human psyche.

Sophia is at the heart of revitalising contemporary psychotherapy and counselling, breathing new life into the many words, so that counselling becomes a discipline that can encompass matter and spirit, the creative and the rational, the tangible and the intangible.

Counselling for body, mind and spirit, sometimes referred to as holistic counselling, captures the vision of being fully human, of working with the depth of the human psyche and the range of human experience. In the 21st century, we are slowly re-integrating the fragments of our human beingness, our dissected human experience, a product of an atomistic, empiricist tradition that has dominated our thinking for the past three centuries. Body, mind and spirit have each been confined to their own closets with their respective expert keys of medicine, psychology and religion. Human experience has been belittled by rational analysis. Alienated from our experience, human beings have increasingly sought meaning in fragmented and distorted realities: their bodies through consumerism and materialism; their minds through narcissism and hedonism, and their spirits through addictions and cynicism. It is not surprising that this fragmentation has spawned a growing epidemic of depression, suicide, anxiety and violent behaviours.

Reconnection with the parts of ourselves, with each other, with our communities and our environments is the call to healing across many disciplines. In psychology, we have the emergence of new perspectives seeking this integration: transpersonal psychology, ecopsychology, Buddhist psychotherapy, somatic psychotherapies and holistic psychotherapies. Core to these new perspectives is the notion of integration, that all is connected within, between and around us. Burstein (1988:119) summarises this: It is with awareness of the mysterious, miraculous forces that connect us to ourselves, each other, and the world that I enter the psychotherapeutic interaction. Also, in body based holistic models, the notion of connectedness between body, mind, spirit and soul is central as evidenced in bioenergetics and its derivative, core-energetics. Lowen (1976:42-43) in his description of bioenergetics describes his holistic model:

The life of an individual is the life of his body. Since the living body includes the mind, the spiritual and the soul, to live the life of the body fully is to be mindful, spiritual and soulful. If we are deficient in these aspects of our being, it is because we are not fully in or with our bodies.

The experiential and expressive therapies recognise the human quest for wholeness and see humans as aware, experiencing organisms that function holistically, attempting to give meaning to the parts of their experience (Perls et al, 1951, Gendlin, 1974, May 1981, Yalom 1989). Many expressive and experiential approaches provide a rich integration of body, mind and spirit, but can be challenged for their lack of rigor in relation to communication of the processes, so that they can be tracked by another colleague and if followed arrive at a similar destination. Holistic approaches are also challenged when dealing with the whole of human experience to address the issues of intersubjective verifiability. As holistic counsellors, we claim to work with the whole range of human experience, but our challenge is to develop methods to communicate this work clearly and to provide accurate maps of our processes, leaving sufficient evidence trails, that those following them might arrive at a similar destination. Wilber (1998) in the Marriage of Sense and Soul emphasises the critical importance of verifiability within processes of science and religion, in order to create common ground for a meeting which could generate holistic value bases from which to govern human action.

The holistic model proposed in this book, termed the Sophia model, at its best and most lucid, is a dance between the creative and rational dimensions of human experience, the right and left hemispheres of our possibilities, a meeting between the patterns of logic and creativity. It is based upon the anthroposophical four-fold holistic model for working with the whole of human experience, body, mind and spirit. It provides a meeting for the artistic and the scientific, the creative and the empirical that is intersubjectively verifiable in diagnosis, intervention and evaluation. In this book, precise processes and techniques are outlined, as well as the general tenants of the model. It is essential that readers do not extricate processes and use them without thoroughly reading the context in which they are grounded and acquiring appropriate expertise through training.

Outline of the four-fold holistic model

The somatic basis of the four-fold model

This model of psychotherapy assumes a human being is an interrelated energetic system and in particular, that mind, body, spirit are not separate entities, but rather inextricably connected. All experiences have energetic resonances in the cellular structures of the body. Cutting edge research in mind body immunity clearly demonstrates that what we think and feel affects the body’s cells. How we manage change, crisis, emotional and physical stress in our lives, significantly affects the illnesses that we create in our physical bodies. Conversely, as Borysenko and Borysenko (1994) point out, the power of the quality of our thoughts and feelings to heal ourselves is very substantial. Emoto’s (2001) groundbreaking work on the power of the quality of thoughts shows the major effect of thinking patterns on water crystalline structures. Positive thoughts create beautiful mandala type formations and negative thoughts create irregular, malformed crystals in irregular shapes. Given that the human body is over 70% water, the implications for human health of mental thought patterns, are profound. There is an inextricable link between the body and mind. In her hallmark work, Molecules of Emotion: the mind-body connection Candice Pert (1997) demonstrates the link between particular feeling states and chemical responses of the body that profoundly affect the health of the body’s cells. In the broadest sense of the word, Freud, Ferenci, Adler, Reich and Petrakos were pioneers in body-mind connections because they drew attention to the body as the driving force in the distribution of certain human experiences (McNeeley, 1987). Gendlin (1974) found that clients would progress more rapidly in therapy if they were able to experience a physical sense of their feelings and developed focusing as the core process for accessing the link between body and mind.

The anthroposophical four-fold model of a human being,

Developed by Steiner, a psycho-philosopher of the early twentieth century, this model of a human being integrates spirit into the body-mind model of the somatics. The four-fold model includes firstly, the physical body, secondly, the etheric or life force, akin to the chi or pranic force in eastern psychology, thirdly, the astrality or trauma system which relates to the lower layers of mind consciousness where the experiences of antipathy and sympathy are stored. and fourthly, the creative unique individual consciousness or I. At the lower end it is termed the I am and refers to the integrated self system. In the higher dimensions, this is termed the I AM and has the capacity to link us to the transpersonal world and is referred to by some persons as the spirit or highest consciousness (Steiner: 1994). Core to this model, is the energetic interdependence of all these dimensions of humanness. This notion of human beings as interrelated energetic systems related to surrounding energetic systems, although new to western psychology, is core to Buddhist psychology and documented in The Abhidharma written over 2000 years ago, to record the Buddha’s teachings.(Mons:1995) Steiner was familiar with eastern psychology and incorporated it into his psycho-philosophical models giving it his particular terminology. Let us now consider in more detail these four layers and their energetic interpenetration.

The physical body

The physical body is seen as the map of the mind and feeling states and is that part of our experience that can be clearly touched and observed. It is of the same nature as the mineral kingdom and at death returns to the mineral kingdom. This dense material body is the focus of western medicine.

The etheric

Interpenetrating the physical body is what Steiner termed the ether body, the etheric or the life body. In China it is akin to the chi, in India it is akin to the pranic body. It is a template on a more subtle vibration, of the physical body and is responsible for the life and health of the physical body sending the energy needed to repair, nourish and maintain life processes of breathing, reproduction, metabolism, and warmth in the physical body (Steiner: 1997). The shape and wellbeing of our body’s organs depend on this force and its degree of vitality. While constitutionally people vary in the strength of the etheric, it is strengthened by water, good eating, sleeping and rhythmical bodily patterns, as well as contact with nature, particularly water sources as it has strong relation to the plant kingdom and the element of water (Bott, 1996:9). Physical, mental and emotional stresses drain it, as do lack of exercise, lack of exposure to natural elements, electro-magnetic radiations, irregular lifestyle patterns and contaminated and polluted air, water and food. We are all aware of the etheric even if we have not named it. We say: you look drained or you are jumping out of your skin with energy. The etheric provides the sources of energy to the physical body.

The lower layers of mind consciousness: astrality (the trauma system)

This is described as the lower layers of mind consciousness, where all the vibrational patterns of our experience are stored and not processed or integrated. In Buddhism it is termed ordinary mind. Steiner (1997) names it the astrality or the energetic system which holds the imprints of our experiences driven by what he terms antipathy (aversion) and sympathy (desire), and as such it contains within it the trauma system of an individual’s experiences. He sees it as the part of ourselves that departs upon sleep and returns on awakening. If the astral layers are too heavily interpenetrating into the etheric and physical body, then it is difficult for these layers to leave at night and difficult to sleep:

The conscious forces rise up out of sleep’s unconsciousness like water out of hidden and mysterious springs. The consciousness that sinks down into the dark depths when we fall asleep is the same as the one that rises up when we awaken. (1997:36)

The astrality or trauma system is what awakens us from the sleep-like state, and it is the aspect of the human being which provides the gateway to experience through the senses and becomes the storehouse of experience both pleasurable and painful. The vibrational patterns of experience stored in the astrality, Sherwood terms imprints (2004:20). Many of our defence mechanisms merge out of our struggle to survive and avoid pain on the astral level. These defence mechanisms result in many aspects of experience being cut off, denied and suppressed. Buried astral experiences often run the life through the unconscious. This trauma system lacks integration with the self system or I am and consequently is responsible for most of the mental health problems of a serious nature. Sardello in his introduction to Steiner’s (1999: xiii) collection of essays titled A Psychology of Body, Soul and Spirit, points out that this astrality is not some kind of fixed container but rather an inner dynamic, mobile, developing, flowing relationship between the outer world, which is mediated by the senses through the physical body, and the most intimate realms of inner consciousness.

The relationship between the etheric and astrality is critical, for the etheric acts as a buffer between the physical body and astral experiences. If it is vigorous, even if the person has a number of emotional traumas, they will not deplete the physical body. However, if it is weak and depleted, then emotional traumas vibrate directly from the astral layers into the physical body, manifesting in a range of mental and physical problems. Although the well being and healing of the etheric is the province of natural therapists, the degree of its vitality places a ceiling on the amount of deep work that can be done by the counsellor and psychotherapist. (Sherwood, 2004:19).

The I am: integrative self system (soul) and the I AM: transpersonal (spirit).

In this model, I refer to the reflective, integrative self system of human consciousness, as the I am. It is the individualised level of consciousness that in this model is sometimes termed soul. At the higher levels of consciousness it becomes the connection to the highest resources of the human spirit, the transpersonal and here I denote it as the I AM or spirit. In the literature, it has many names across different traditions and many layers are distinguished within it. Steiner (1997: 43) spoke of the two (I am and I AM) collectively as the I wherein, he argued, resided the highest level of human consciousness. The ‘I am has as its core defining feature, memory, which he defines as: perception of the past. It is the self-aware human consciousness. Steiner, (cited by Mc Dermott, 1984) argues that just as the physical body has its centre in the brain, the soul experiences have their centre in this I am. The seat of the spirit is in the I AM and is the transcendent principle of spirit that connects the person to the highest transcendent powers. It is the realm of the transpersonal. Within the I are the resources of the human spirit, the capacities to rise above the pain, limitations and darkness of experiences and to bring back hope, healing and growth. It is the capacity of the human being to envision new realities out of reflection on past experiences. The I also carries the essence of each unique human being that needs to be manifested in each person’s life. This I is capable of insight and in Buddhist psychology, this is one of the higher levels of consciousness where we can reflect on past and present experiences without aversion and desire (Sujiva, 2000:177) This part strives for what Maslow (1968) terms self-actualisation. It brings to the human psyche, the capacity to access resources of strength, courage, determination, love, joy and other qualities which Maslow (1973) named the B values or higher order values. This I am" also comprises the integrated self of each human being and captures our individuality or that part of ourselves which represents the best of who we can be.

Psychological health and well being depend on the capacity of people to insert their I am into their experiences and to integrate and process all experiences in a meaningful way so no experience remains cut-off, denied, repressed or buried under the floorboards (Sherwood, 2004:21). If this does not occur, then one’s life remains driven by the astrality or the trauma system, which is characterised by aversions and desires, rather than by skilful means. Steiner elaborates (1997:53)

The I is not working on the Astral body when we simply give ourselves up to pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, but only when the idiosyncrasies of these soul qualities begin to change… when our I allows impulses that flow from religion (a set of moral values) to work on it again and again, these impulses develop a strength within the I that works right through into the etheric body and transforms it, just as lesser impulses in life cause a transformation of the astral body.

The stronger the I am, the stronger the ability of a person to access the part of the I AM that connects them with transpersonal resources and meanings, and the greater the resources they bring to resolve emotional issues. In all religious traditions, the term I AM is employed to relate to connection with the transpersonal, that within the human which is divine (Fox, 2000:135). Steiner (1997: 57) also clearly connects the highest levels of the I with the transpersonal spiritual world.

Steiner (1997:39-40) describes the relationship between the physical, etheric and astral bodies and I, as dynamic, each interpenetrating the other:

The physical body would fall apart if the etheric body did not hold it together. The etheric body would sink into unconsciousness if the astral body did not illumine it. Likewise the astral body would repeatedly forget the past if the I did not rescue this past and carry it over into the present. What death is to the physical body and sleep to the ether body, forgetting is to the astral body. We can also say that life belongs to the etheric body, consciousness to the astral body and memory to the I.

The relationship and functioning of these particular bodies is further detailed by Steiner (1999) in Body, Soul and Spirit and Bott (1996) in Spiritual Science and the Art of Healing.

Sherwood (2004) reiterates the important connection between the I and the breath. Difficult experiences are vibrationally imprinted on the astrality and these experiences result in different combinations of contraction of breath because it is painful to continue breathing into these places of vibrational impact. Unless one is aware of what is happening, it is automatic to avoid the pain by reducing the breathing into the site. The contraction in the astrality is carried by the etheric through to the physical body. The I presence is carried by the breath so is extinguished from the parts of the astral, etheric and physical body that become contracted. These are the parts of experience not embraced by the I and which produce mental and physical dis-ease and remain unintegrated in the trauma system or astrality. These experiences, not under the guardianship of the I am, often run the life in repetitive and unskilful ways as they are driven by aversions and desires, flooding and repression, rather than by skilfully reflected choices. These four bodies are represented diagrammatically below:

Diagram 1: Outline of the four-fold model.

Languages for holistic client experience

Words are limited in the amount of our experience they can convey. Many clients are able to articulate only a fraction of their experience, while others use words as a defence mechanism to keep away from their experience. Holistic languages involve a range of non-verbal as well as verbal skills to facilitate the clients’ expression of their experience. Non-verbal modes of intra as well as inter communication include: bodily sensations of physical body as well as of emotional dynamics, breathing contractions represented through gestures, visualizations and drawing of inner states of being, and creating sounds. (Sherwood and Tagar, 2000:18-19).

The rhythmic, vibrational dynamics of the etheric and astral, create patterns which eventually leave imprints in the physical body. These then becomes a map for inner experience. Consciousness can better access the imprints when equipped with these non-verbal modes of expression which include sensing, gesturing, visualising, moving and sounding identified by Tagar (1991, 1997) and described by Sherwood and Tagar (2000:19-20) as follows:

Sensing. The human ability to become aware of any phenomenon is based on the activity of the senses. Over and above the division into the separate senses, the capacity to sense all together is termed by Tagar sense-ability. Through sensing, experience can be accessed, and brought once again to consciousness. On a daily basis we use this integrated quality of sensing to give us information about others and our world. We sense for example, whether our children are heading for a sickness, whether our friends look bursting with energy or rundown. We sense if a fruit looks ripe even before we touch it. We sense aggression when we enter a room even if we were not present to the argument.

Gesturing/movement. The body acts in four major capacities in relation to human experience: 1. an absorber of experience, 2. a carrier of experience, 3. a reflector of experience, 4. an expresser of experience. The gestures relate to the 4th capacity: the body as an expresser of experience. We know that every human experience can be directly expressed in a gesture which reflects how we constrain the breathing when confronted with particular experiences which are conveyed vibrationally to the body. For example, we hear sudden news of the loss of someone we love, and we experience it in the heart. For a moment we feel a contraction in our heart, a pain and a temporary spasm in our breathing. The shape of that spasm of not breathing, captures the experience of the loss as it is imprinted in our body. That is the gesture of our pain.

Visualising. An inherent ability lives within people to create accurate pictures of inner experience. This is not guided imagery but authentic, spontaneous, activity of visualising using one’s imagination or image creating faculties. This capacity does vary considerably among the range of human beings, more so than any of the other languages. Usually persons who have developed visualising capacities have strong appreciation of colour and have experienced childhoods in which creative play and imagination were strong. People who find it difficult to visualise usually have childhoods in which the imaginative creative capacities of image making have been repressed or discouraged, often as a result of an absence of artistic activities and creative play, and/or an over feeding of pre- made images such as in television, computers and video games.

Sounding. The sounds of human speech, consonants and vowels, become patterns of vibrations which can resound within the etheric body. Every sound will create an echo within a particular range of human experience. Experience, which lives in patterns of resonance, can be precisely matched with the resonance patterns of the sounds of speech and these sounds can access all levels and periods of one’s life. Every human experience expressed in a gesture, can find its precise counterpart in a particular combination of sounds of speech.

With the use of these tools of non-verbal intra-communication, one can uncover and heal undigested experience stored as imprints, clear traumas and recreate a flexible boundary around one’s space for more effective protection. One can access the I with its resources and its fluency with artistic languages for healing and transformation. (Sherwood and Tagar, 2000). The more fluent clients become with these non-verbal languages, the more access the clients have to experiences, resources, the capacity to heal and the capacity to communicate between the four bodies identified above. Clients are able to develop these languages to integrate the experiences of body, mind and spirit. The development of these languages through artistic therapies is core to the model of holistic counselling.

Diagnosis and Interventions

Diagnosis

Three dimensions of diagnosis are core in this model. These are:

the interrelationship between the four-fold layers, namely physical body, etheric, astral and the I

the precise location of the imprint of experience and the content of that experience including the earliest layers triggered by a presenting issue

the nature of the original imprint: yin or yang

Interrelationship between the four-fold layers

This diagnosis is critical because it indicates the holistic profile of the client requiring healing including physical, etheric, astral and I layers, and has been documented in anthroposophical medical research extensively, by persons such as Wegman (1928) and Bott (1996). Essentially for psychotherapists, the arena of primary action is the astrality where the imprints of experience are stored. The level of the etheric determines the client’s energetic availability to work with the presenting psychotherapeutic issues. When the etheric is depleted or run down, it will first need rebuilding through complementary health modalities in order to release energy to deal with the astral imprints. Also, the strength, location and availability of the I is critical in determining the speed and effectiveness of the therapeutic intervention. For example, from comparisons in casework outcomes, two clients with the same degree of severity and with a similar presenting issue, will show different rates of working through the problems. It is possible to predict that clients whose I is more available to themselves and who are able to mobilize it to access resources in the sense of qualities needed to recover, will generally progress much more rapidly than clients with a weak I and few resources. Resources can be drawn from the mineral, plant, animal or archetypal spiritual /human realms and represent connections that give clients a greater sense of personal power, well being, safety, confidence and ability to handle life’s challenges.

The relationship between the physical, etheric, astral and I has many critical implications for psychotherapy. One critical example is the location of the I. Some persons, particularly if their childhood was traumatic, develop the defence mechanism of their I leaving their body. Such children may be termed dreamers, not present, living in another world. However, this pattern is taken into adulthood and becomes very dysfunctional for the adults who fail to be fully present to deal with life’s challenges because their I persistently leaves their body when they are faced with a trigger incident which vibrates with the same sound pattern as the original trauma. It is a form of dissociation which Tagar terms excarnation. We are all capable of it, even as adults, especially during sudden shock, or trauma. The absence of the I leaves the person vulnerable, unable to deal with the presenting challenges and feeling overwhelmed, invaded and powerless. Often it is also associated with memory loss of the incident. All clients can tell you the direction in which they leave their body. When this is occurring, the first critical action in the psychotherapeutic intervention is to take the client through a sequence to consciously reintegrate the I back into the body. The client can then re-engage the power of the I to deal with presenting issues. Processes for accomplishing this are detailed in chapter 5.

The precise location and content of the experience.

The body is a diagnostic map for the human psyche through which psychotherapeutic experiences can be located. For example, when speaking of a specific incident of abuse, the client may sense a knotted sensation in the stomach. This is where the vibrational imprint of the experience is stored. Tagar developed a process of called "enter exit behold" to access this imprint of experience. This is a major development following on from Gendlin’s focusing. This sequence has been adapted by Sherwood (2004:35-36) to track the imprint using the breathing process.

Sherwood noted that the breath is the primary determinant of how we store our experience. The shape of how we breathe provides a medium visible enough for clients to enable them to track their inner experience quickly and