Spiritually Transformative Psychotherapy


Book Description

Spiritually Transformative Psychotherapy offers fresh insights into counseling people with diverse spiritual and religious philosophies. Grounded in theory and research, this text focuses on building contemplative methods like meditation into practice and provides valuable applications to help clients work toward forgiveness, resolving spiritual conflicts between partners, and ultimately achieving spiritual and emotional wellbeing.




Toward a Psychology of Awakening


Book Description

A guide to understanding the relationship between Western psychology and the contemplative sprituality of the East—and how one’s spiritual journey can be enriched by both How can we connect the spiritual realizations of Buddhism with the psychological insights of the West? In Toward a Psychology of Awakening John Welwood addresses this question with comprehensiveness and depth, building on his innovative psychospiritual approach to health, healing, and spirituality. He covers the following topics: • What can the spiritual methodologies of the East teach us about psychological health? • What issues arise when the recognition of our larger nature challenges our very conception of individual self ? • What new directions become possible when psychological work is undertaken in a spiritual context? • How does Western psychological understanding affect our approach to spirituality? Welwood's psychology of awakening brings together three major dimensions of human existence: personal, interpersonal, and suprapersonal in one overall framework of understanding and practice.




Relational Spirituality


Book Description

Human beings are fundamentally relational—we develop, heal, and grow through relationships. Integrating insights from psychology and theology, Todd W. Hall and M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall present a definitive model of spiritual transformation based on a relational paradigm, showing how transformation works practically in the context of relationships and community.




Altogether You


Book Description




Emotional Transformation Therapy


Book Description

Emotional Transformation Therapy: An Interactive Ecological Psychotherapy describes an entirely original approach to psychotherapy that drastically accelerates therapeutic outcomes in terms of speed and long-term effects. It includes an attachment-based interpersonal approach that increases the impact of the therapist-client bond and is amplified by the precise use of the client's visual ecology. This synthesis is called Emotional Transformation Therapy® (ETT®). Steven R. Vazquez, PhD, discusses four techniques that therapeutically harness the client's visual ecology. When the client is asked to view a maximally saturated spectral chart of colors, visual feedback provides immediate diagnostic information that helps the therapist to regulate emotional intensity or loss of awareness of emotions. A second technique offers an original form of directed eye movement that facilitates relief of emotional distress within minutes. A third technique uses peripheral eye stimulation to rapidly reduce extreme emotional or physical pain within seconds as well as to access previously unconscious thoughts, emotions, or memories related to the issue or symptom. The fourth technique uses the emission of precise wavelengths (colors) of light into the client's eyes during verbal processing that dramatically amplifies the effect of talk therapy and changes the brain in profound ways. Emotional Transformation Therapy uses theory, research, and case studies to show how this method can be applied to depression, anxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, and complex trauma. Pre and post brain scans have shown that ETT® substantially changes the human brain. This method possesses the potential to revolutionize psychotherapy as we know it.




Forgiveness and Spirituality in Psychotherapy


Book Description

This book explains when forgiveness and spiritual transformation might be appropriate clinical goals, as well as how to facilitate these processes in psychotherapy. The model is applied to short-term therapy, long-term therapy, couple and family therapy, and group therapy.




Touched by the Light


Book Description

How Peak Spiritual Experiences Transform Lives Today Dr. Yvonne Kason’s life was touched by five Near-Death experiences (NDEs), the most recent in 2003. Her dramatic Near-Death Experience in a 1979 plane crash propelled her as a young medical doctor to research and counsel people with diverse types of peak spiritual experiences. In 1994, she coined the now widely used phrase “Spiritually Transformative Experiences” (STEs). These include Near-Death Experiences, mystical experiences, spiritual energy or kundalini awakenings, diverse psychic experiences, and inspired creativity. Touched by the Light is a synthesis of forty years of Dr. Kason's research on STEs and their profound after-effects on body, mind, and spirit. Filled with fascinating case studies, Touched By the Light is inspiring to all, as well as a practical guide for those experiencing STEs and their counsellors.




Breaking Open


Book Description

Personal accounts exploring the shift from mental illness to spiritual awakening. The first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. Our authors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul's natural resilience. Our authors have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence? "This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' It is full of inspirational and moving stories that show that psychological disturbances often lead to significant personal growth, if supported properly. As a culture, we urgently need a new paradigm of mental illness and treatment, and this and this book makes an important contribution to that shift.' Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Spiritual Science




Relational Spirituality in Psychotherapy


Book Description

"Spiritual and existential struggles tell a story about the quality of clients' lives, beyond what clinicians can learn from their mental health symptoms alone. This book presents the Relational Spirituality Model (RSM) of psychotherapy, a creative clinical process that engages existential themes to help people make sense of profound suffering or trauma. To promote healing and growth, practitioners using the RSM provide a secure and challenging therapeutic space, while guiding clients as they explore ways of relating to the sacred in their lives. In this model, therapeutic change is seen as an intense yet safe process of movement and tension between dwelling and seeking, stability and disruption. Assessment and intervention strategies focus on developmental systems-attachment, differentiation, and intersubjectivity-to restructure relationships with the self, others, and the sacred. In depth clinical case examples demonstrate how to respect diverse client perspectives on suffering and trauma, and apply the RSM in individual, couple, family, and group psychotherapy. Readers will find new ways of working within the spiritual, existential, religious, and theological concerns that infuse their clients' struggles and triumphs"--




Transforming the Inner and Outer Family


Book Description

This enlightening book integrates humanistic and transpersonal psychotherapy principles with family systems work. Transforming the Inner and Outer Family discusses a wide range of creative methodologies, such as the use of meditation, guided imagery, and energy centers in the body to bridge the inner and outer experiences of the individual and family members. Chapters explore the healing capacity of intense affect to unify significant others through the transformation of fear, anger, and grief to understanding, compassion, love, and forgiveness. The book is practical as well as theoretical, containing many case studies focusing on individual, couples, and family therapy. In addition, a special chapter is included on the use of family of origin sessions. Transcripts of actual cases show detailed methods of entering into the therapy system to promote change and demonstrate the operational definition of spirituality and its practical utilization in psychotherapy. Also included is a special candid interview between the author and Virginia Satir, mother of family therapy, nine months before she died, on her personal and professional life.Transforming the Inner and Outer Family presents an integrative family systems model that emphasizes the coordination of existential, humanistic, and transpersonal healing psychologies. This model coordinates Virginia Satir’s later thinking with Roberto Assagioli’s model of psychosynthesis. Author Sheldon Kramer blends principles of psychosynthesis with family systems work and thoroughly explains the use of his new model, Mind-Body Systems Therapy,TM including: development of internal family configurations the spiritual dimension within the systemic context integrating the use of the body with meditation in healing practices methods of healing the inner nuclear and intra-generational family bridging the inner and outer familial world stages of inner and outer healing the use of self in therapyTransforming the Inner and Outer Family is on the cutting edge of current emerging interests in alternative medicine, especially in holistic principles of healing, with emphasis on the spiritual dimension as a major healing conduit for transformation. Readers will discover in this book a solid theoretical base that integrates traditional psychology, including psychodynamic/object relations theory, with less-mainstream forms of psychotherapy, and will learn effective strategies for helping individuals, couples, and families heal.