Episode 40: Dr. Robert Grant on Internal Family Systems Therapy

“What’s healing is the self to part relationship. And that relationship gets built based on the part being able to tell its story without repercussions.”

In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with Dr. Robert Grant. Dr. Grant is an Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist, a ketamine-assisted psychotherapist, a pulmonary physician, a professor of medicine at UCSF, a former researcher in HIV prevention and treatment, and a cofounder of the Healing Realms Center. The Healing Realms Center is a clinic specializing in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

Dr. Grant is especially well known for his work as an IFS therapist specializing in ketamine treatments. IFS was developed by Dr. Richard C. Schwartz. It is a therapy based on the notion that the human mind is made up of inner parts. And healing involves the cultivation of harmony among these parts. It is commonly used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress.

 

In this interview Dr. Joe and Dr. Grant explored:

 

Here is more information on subjects mentioned in this episode:

 

More quotes from Dr. Grant from the interview:

 

“It was the human connection that was curative. And the mescaline was helpful maybe because it facilitated that connection.”

 

“Other people may trigger different parts of us that give us an opportunity to learn about our inner processes.”

 

“‘Self’ is the part of us that can see our own trauma without being re-traumatized.”

 

“Healing is a process of hearing out that inner dialogue. So we can really develop a relationship with our parts.”

 

“Sometimes spaciousness actually fosters connection because it allows us to see each other more clearly.”

 

“Parts are still there after the healing process. You’re not trying to get rid of them. You’re just trying to allow them to be seen and to play healthy roles that are playful, pleasant, and productive to a certain extent.”

 

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

 

Let’s talk about healing. That’s where I wanted to go next. You said things like, ‘this part needs to tell their story.’ And you gave the example earlier about, maybe someone coming to therapy because they feel confused about whether to stay in or leave a relationship. And that the purpose of the therapy is not to arrive at a conclusion, but to create space for these stories to be heard. Can you tell me what’s healing about having these parts express themselves?  

It’s the beginning of the healing process. So I think that what’s healing is the self to part relationship. And so that relationship gets built based on the part being able to tell its story without causing a reaction or without having repercussions. So creating a connection between the self and the part by listening to their story is an essential step in the process of building those relationships.

We have a number of heuristics which are actually helpful. And if I can digress a bit, the founder, Rick Schwartz, in his most recent iteration of his book with Marta Sweezy, said that IFS could be conceived of as a psychodynamic theory. And so it is in this lineage of psychodynamic process. And because it does embrace the multiplicity of the mind, it allows for conflicting, psychodynamic relationships within the person.

What I like about IFS is that it goes one step in the direction of giving us tools for uncovering exiled or subconscious material. And so a classically trained psychoanalyst might expect to spend hours or days or years listening to the client on the couch, and eventually the subconscious material will bubble up, either in terms of dream interpretation or day time fantasies or behaviors that create ambivalence within them. I mean, they’ll just wait for it. And I love that idea of just waiting, witnessing. And so I have great respect for thoroughly trained psychoanalysts.

And IFS does give us some tools that allow us to move pretty quickly toward uncovering subconscious or exiled material. And so it has a toolbox that allows us to be expeditious. But I don’t think the process is very different from what a psychoanalyst would do. It’s just a little more guided and a little more intentional.

So one of the heuristics that IFS has is called the 6 F’s, and so I can walk us through those. You want to find parts. So whatever part we want to find, we want to see what’s up for the person. It might be that a single part has very strong feelings that need to be heard out. Or there may be a pair of parts that want to stay in or want to get out, a polarized pair of parts. So you want to find the one or two or three that you’re going to work with on that day. And then you want to focus on them, let them know that you’re here to listen to them. And when I say you, it’s actually the client ‘self; is there to listen to them. Now, the therapist’s ‘self’ energy is also very important in this process, so that the therapist ‘self’ and the client ‘self’ are there to listen to the parts. So, you know, it’s intuitive that that’s reassuring. I mean, if you’re wanting to make friends with someone, what do you do? You focus on them. You look them in the eye and you focus and then you flesh out.

So that’s the third F. ‘Tell me more about that. Tell me what that was like for you. Tell me what was the worst part of that or the best part of that? What did you do with that?’ And then there’s this phrase that we use is, ‘how do you feel toward the part?’ And that’s actually a key step because, you know, if you asked me, Bob, ;how do you feel toward that part that’s carrying shame?; And if I say something like, ‘well, I actually dislike that part, it’s annoying. It bothered me my whole life. Why would I be ashamed of it?’ Those are not self qualities. So what that tells you when I answer that way is that it’s not a self to part relationship with being developed. You’re hearing from another part of me that is trying to exile that part carrying the shame. And so you would at that point having asked me how I feel toward the part, but having not heard from self, you would say, ‘okay, can you give attention to the part that wants to get rid of that shame and let’s find out about it. What is it trying to do? What is afraid will happen if we heard  about the shame? What would it rather do if we didn’t have to suppress that part that had all the shame all the time?’

And, you know, and so we change the focus to the part that came up in reaction to the other part, and we continue to do that. And then we’ll ask, ‘how do you feel toward that part that wants to get rid of the shame?’ And, you know, at some point I’ll say, ‘well, I’m curious about what is it trying to do? And I want to know more. And  that’s self energy. And so then that’s our green light to start doing the real work of developing self to part relationships. So the feel toward is one of 6 F’s.

And then and then you want to unblend as much as possible. You want the part to be able to see the self, and the self to see the part and and parts don’t like doing that. They like being connected to self. They like being connected to self so much that they stick to self, like a glove. And so one thing that I like to say is, ‘can we ask the part to give us some distance and spaciousness so that you can see it better and so it can see you better?’ So one of the beautiful things about connection is whether it’s between people or within our parts, within ourselves. Sometimes the spaciousness actually fosters connection because it allows us to see each other more clearly. And then, you know, that can be healthy and relationships as well. Sometimes that relationship I mentioned earlier, ‘do I stay and do I go out?’ Maybe there is a middle ground. It’s, you know, let’s just take some space and, you know, we don’t spend  every day of our lives together. But we think we can walk and have some spaciousness. And that may be all the relationship wants or needs.

And it’s the same way within parts within ourselves, but sometimes asking them to unblend, they’ll say, ‘no, no, I cannot unblend.’ They’re desperate for more attention. But they said, ‘Well, no, it’s if you just give us some space, then I can see you better. You can see me better.’

So there’s unblending and then there’s befriending, just continuing to say, ‘it’s so great that I’ve been trying to protect Bob from feeling shame. You’ve done such a great job. And look how well he’s done in school and that has led to a career. And that’s so great.’ But do you really want to keep doing that all the time? And often they’ll say, ‘No, I’m exhausted.’ I’d rather that Bob, if there were a way for Bob to deal with his shame without me having to work all the time, I would like that, but I don’t think there is a way to do that. That’s why I’ve constructed this job. So the part may say that. You could say, ‘well, you know, I think there is a way to help Bob with the shame without you having to work all the time.’ Sometimes the part would say, ‘I’m not sure that’s possible, but I would want that. So, you know, let’s give that a try.’ And then you can ask, you know, that protective part to rest and it can stay close and watch if it wants, just in case something comes up that makes it afraid. It can step back in if it needs to. But that then gives you an opportunity to go back to that exile, which initially caused the protected part to come up. But that part now is befriended and it’s willing to rest. And so you can work with the exile material.

And then ultimately you would want to get to a point where whatever caused the burden of shame to come to that exile part, then that part can have a chance to leave that situation and unburden that shame. And then the whole system can appreciate that , ‘Yeah, there was a way to deal with the shame that didn’t involve having to compulsively work all the time.’

So the healing process is really one of befriending the parts and airing them out and ultimately giving the exiled parts a chance to be retrieved from the hard situation and then to unburden the beliefs that were important to survive that hard situation. And then to have the rest of the parts come back into the situation, and ask them, ‘did you see what happened there?’ And some of them will come back in and say, ‘oh, yeah, wow, I’m impressed. I didn’t think there was a way to solve that problem. But yeah, there was.’  So great.

And some of them may come back and be a little frightened. Like the example I gave might say, ‘you know, I spent my whole life working obsessively to do well in school. And now what do I do? I don’t know what my job is.’ ‘It’s okay. You know, I’ll work with you. There’s lots of jobs that you could do. Maybe you can work on writing a book or something other than school.’ Maybe oftentimes the job that the protectors want to do has nothing to do with what they were doing. The part of me that wanted to do well in school might want to take up finger painting or, you know, writing poetry like I was doing in college. Maybe they want to go back and do that or, you know, like, hey, who knows? But letting them do what they want, it’s an important part of being a good self for them, a good self leader for them.

I mean the parts are there, they’re still there after the healing process. You’re not trying to get rid of any part. You’re just trying to allow them to be seen and to play their healthy roles, which are roles that are playful and pleasant and productive to a certain extent.

 

Connect with Dr. Robert Grant on the Healing Realms Center website.

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Episode 38: David Treleaven on COVID Trauma

 

"To move through trauma often means going back to what was too much. Often we need to be with someone who is with us saying ‘I’m here. You’re safe. It’s okay to feel it now.’”

In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with David Treleaven. David is a trauma professional, mindfulness teacher, and educator. He is also the author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe Healing. After struggling through symptoms of secondary trauma on a meditation retreat, he developed the Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (TSM) approach.TSM helps trauma survivors avoid the risks they face when practicing meditation. TSM has been taught to veterans, prisoners, healthcare professionals, first responders, and many others.

Through workshops and online courses, David teaches mindfulness providers the tools of TSM, so that they can meet the needs of people struggling with trauma. More information on his online training can be found here.

David has worked with organizations like Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (developed by Google) and the University of Massachusetts Medical School by bringing them the tools and techniques of TSM to their staff and programs. He is also a visiting scholar at Brown University.

He is the host of The Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Podcast. He has had guests on like Sharon Salzberg, Rick Hanson, and recently Dr. Joe Flanders!

 

In this interview Joe and David explore:

  • Challenges with the definition of the word trauma
  • Is there such a thing as COVID trauma?
  • Why some people are more resilient in the face of difficult experiences
  • Neurobiological models of Post Traumatic Stress (PTS)
  • Diagnosing PTS
  • Approaches to treating PTS
  • The implications of collective trauma from COVID-19

 

Here is more information on subjects mentioned in this episode:

 

More quotes from David from the interview:

“Post-traumatic stress can be the impact of two different impulses acting at the same time.”

 

“Sometimes I think of trauma as us living through impossibility, and then the costs of that.”

 

“The further away I get from academia, I find myself less interested if we count a hundred people and we talk about all of their stories, whether or not we’re going to qualify their experience for being traumatic or not. What I’m most interested in is what, in a very practical way, are going to be the interventions that are going to support this person to have less pain and suffering in their life.”

 

“To move through trauma often means going back to what was too much. Often we need to be with someone who is with us saying ‘I’m here. You’re safe. It’s okay to feel it now.’”

 

“In my experience with people when they’ve really moved through or integrated that trauma is that they’re on the other side of a pretty big emotion or discharge through the body, they say, ‘Oh, it’s finally over. It’s been trapped inside of me for a long time. And now I’m integrating it in a different way.'”

 

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

 

COVID might refer to a specific viral entity, but it means so many other things. And I guess there’s a diversity of experiences that people have had. And I don’t know, you tell me, do we want to talk about–what was your distinction there, like traumatic experiences people have had in the pandemic era or or just like some kind of collective trauma that we’ve all experienced living through this? 

Well, there’s so much to say here. I’ll talk about how I’ll define trauma here which would be a response to actual or threatened death, serious injury or threat to physical integrity. And I think it’s important to at least start here and see if we’re on the same page because trauma as it’s become more of a popular mainstream term has become slightly diffuse.

And I’d say the definition has been watered down and there’s been some concept creep in the humanities more generally around trauma, which yes, again, there’s a double edged sword here. Where it’s great that people are talking about trauma and unhelpful in some ways to just generalize.

So I’d like to talk about trauma as an input or a situation that is a threat to life and limb where our survival and our fundamental safety is on the line. And COVID cuts both ways here, where definitely it has been a significant threat and it has been an actual material threat to family. I mean, people, families, communities or people are literally dying or their well-being has been threatened. And then there’s been a whole range of more generalized threat that people could say has been traumatic.

But I’d actually challenge that where I think it’s actually just been more a challenge in adversity and where it got murky and it was confusing about, ‘Is my life in danger here, even though I’ve been triple vaxxed,’ for example. So there’s a whole other place where trauma has happened. And then I think there’s been a massive period of adversity collectively that we’re trying to sort out and maybe we’ll be talking about it here in the conversation.

 

Let’s come back to that very evocative story about the child that gets pulled out of the way of an oncoming car. That seems like a pretty good example of a threat to the child’s life, their safety and that child’s nervous system probably goes into some kind of fight or flight reactivity. And then if I’m extrapolating a little bit, the mother is basically communicating through her reaction, ‘shut that emotion down.’ And the child is basically saying to themselves, if I want to stay connected to mom here, which feels really important right now because I’m kind of freaked out, I have to put that emotion away, inhibit it in some way.’ That sounds to me like an example or a mechanism around how things get stuck. 

I wonder if you can say more about why would that be in evolution that certain really intense experiences get trapped? And even what the hell does that mean for something to get trapped in our nervous system? Can I know exactly what that means experientially and sort of working with clients?

The metaphor that’s worked for me I learned from Babette Rothschild, who’s a trauma writer. She wrote a book called The Body Remembers. Yeah, all the best trauma books are like, ‘The Body Keeps Score of the Body.’ But she’s great. She’s awesome. When she’s training people around trauma and is trying to capture what you’re saying, what’s the essence of it? Why does that stuckness happen? Like, what’s the stuckness?

She’ll bring a bottle of soda up on stage and she’ll start shaking it up, and she’ll basically be talking about how the stuckness is the cap. And her metaphor is saying, ‘now what would happen if we just open this soda right now?’ And of course, it would fly. It’s too much for someone. So in Babette’s work, it’s been a lot about–and in a lot of trauma work, it’s about kind of cracking that soda top and allowing some of the pressurized gas.

But let’s back that up even further, because I think it answers your question. The reason I think that metaphor works is that when it comes to trauma, like with that child, there is some kind of activation. I said factory loaded some kind of deep survival response, often referred to as fight flight. So the sympathetic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system just hit the accelerator. We have the survival response. We don’t have to think about it. It just happens automatically. Flood of adrenaline pupils dilate to try to protect us. And then that’s the moment that I think you’re pointing to. That gets very interesting.

Why the cap? There’s lots of stories about different mammals who are able to shake and discharge that activation. You know, a classic example is the deer who shakes it off. It gets really frozen and then shakes it off, moves on like nothing happened. But what’s happening for humans?

You gave the example around attachment. I’d say, ‘yes, I’m faced with the choice of either being disconnected from my caregiver, which is fundamentally threatening. So let me basically cap that energy through locking my jaw so I can stay connected.; And then in other situations, there’s a legitimate freeze, the intense parasympathetic arousal sometimes known as tonic immobility. Which will come and cap or trap that activation of fight flight in the nervous system that can’t discharge over time.

So it has deep evolutionary roots about why we had that freeze, for example, playing dead like the possum. If you’re a gazelle, you’re dragged to a cave, you might freeze. The predator thinks that you’re dead and won’t actually attack you. There are many different inherited reasons that we have that–but it can create tremendous amounts of suffering in an ongoing way for people because we can’t uncap that freeze and it gets really frustrating.

PTSD or post-traumatic stress can be the impact of two different impulses happening at the same time. So for example, the impulse to run and the impulse to freeze, they’re both happening. They’re both legitimate survival strategies. And that combination of the two creates that charge. And you could say that stuckness.

And I wanted to link it here to what’s happened to a lot of health care workers or even family members. Where I heard stories of people saying I was on one impulse was to hold the line around safety in hospitals around who could come in and out of a ward, for example. And then there’s an equal impulse to, of course, let a family member come and be with someone, that loved one or a family member. And so it creates these impossible situations.

And so sometimes I think about trauma as us living through impossibility. And then the costs of that.

 

I think that I probably learned this vocabulary from you, but maybe I can just ask you, describe it, this notion of like pendulum motion. And there’s another term that I find really useful, like titration. 

Titration?

Exactly. I think these are great tools for people to know. Can you describe those? 

Yes, it doesn’t come from me, but Peter Levine. It comes from Somatic Experiencing, which is a really popular psychotherapeutic approach to trauma or healing. And I don’t receive any money for that. I just trained in it a long time ago and the core principle–this actually gets right back to the soda bottle or the pop bottle.

So imagine that bottle of carbonated water being shaken up, and you could think of that as a traumatized system that there’s a tremendous amount of sympathetic activation fight flight in the container. So the accelerator slammed the ground. But there’s also tonic immobility. So it’s capped and that if you imagine the feeling of the accelerator and the brakes slammed down, that’s often what trauma can feel like or post-traumatic stress. It’s really painful, uncomfortable, and dysregulating.

So the idea behind pendulation and titration in this work around trauma–the idea is you’re going to pendulate your attention, so basically go back and forth between areas of where you feel more trauma and areas where you feel more resourced. And in doing so, you’re doing what’s known as titrating. Which is actually an old concept in chemistry where you’re opening the soda bottle, but only to the degree that a little bit of the carbonation is released and then you’re turning it back.

If you opened it all at once, that’s not titration. It’ll cause an explosion. Someone gets flooded. It’s too much. And we all know this. I think intuitively that we can take only so much until we need to take a break because our systems can’t tolerate it all at once. So the essence of a lot of trauma work is to go back and forth in order to titrate and not have it over, not have trauma overwhelm.

 

I wonder if you’d agree with this statement that at least this might be just one among many qualities. But this is the quality or the expertise of a trauma therapist that might be sensitive to the pace and to not go at it full speed right away because one has to work very carefully with that limit. And if you went to a therapist that doesn’t have that training, they might not know how to work with that. Is that a fair statement? 

That is the essence to me of trauma training. That is why one would train to know how to work with a combustible process. It’s because more is not going to be better when it comes to working with trauma.

Let me give an example of that. So I was trained as a somatic therapist where the main question I had was, ‘Where do you feel that in your body? It’s all I had. I was like, ‘Well, where do you feel that?’ And if you just keep driving someone towards intensity to your point, that actually can be too much for them. Now that can be confusing because when you’re working in any kind of mental health work, I think when you see emotion, you think you’re doing a good job. Someone’s crying. I’m like, ‘I must be doing something right.’ And then I’m trying to amplify it because I think we’ll go deeper. ‘That’ll be great.’ And sometimes that’s true.

But when it comes to trauma, right to your point, it’s not. It’s that you need to have a more nuanced approach and you’re learning to track someone’s mind and body in a really nuanced moment to moment way.

 

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Connect with David Treleaven on Facebook and Instagram.

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Episode 37: MDMA and Couples with Dr. Anne Wagner

 

“I envision a day where people would be able to choose to do MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in a safe context to be either able to heal from something together or to grow together, and to support the relationship.”

In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with Dr. Anne Wagner. Anne is a Toronto-based psychologist and couples therapist, a researcher studying MDMA-assisted therapy, and the founder of Remedy Centre. Remedy is a social venture that provides individual, couples, and group therapy and reinvests the profit from these services into the Remedy Institute, which is “a new charity focused on supporting mental health innovation & research, including with psychedelics, training for aspiring mental health professionals, as well as low to no-cost therapy services for marginalized communities.”

She is the principal investigator on a pilot trial studying the impact of MDMA-assisted Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) on PTSD and is planning a study that will examine the impact of MDMA-assisted Cognitive Behavioural Conjoint Therapy (CBCT) on PTSD.

If you’d like to donate to the Remedy Institute, please check out: canadahelps.org/en/charities/remedy-institute

Dr. Joe and Dr. Wagner spoke about:

 

Here is more information on subjects mentioned in this episode:

 

More quotes from Dr. Anne Wagner from the interview:

“We’ve been doing the first trials that have been anything other than the inner-directed supported approach. So there’s a lot to ask, and a lot to investigate.”

 

“​​Not only does bringing someone along with you on your healing journey provide support, but it also provides the partner with their own support and healing.”

 

“It’s been really interesting seeing folks work with MDMA to help as a catalyst for that meaning-making process.”

 

“People take turns of who is struggling and who is okay. And that can be something that is really nice where they learn to ride the waves of that together.”

 

“I really try to help people frame their ideas around not expecting to have an expected outcome.”

 

Here are some highlights of their conversation:

Before we get to the trial that you’re planning, I want to ask you a quick one about the study going on right now. What’s interesting is that you described it as like a meaning making framework and so it’s very cognitive. And the trends and the buzz and all the excitement is around relational therapy, somatic therapy. Like these are the things that are bubbling up for me in terms of what approaches are being used in psychedelics. And this is a very cognitive approach. 

I’m just curious how you think about that in the sense that I don’t know how many times I’ve heard like, ‘well, you can’t just do like cognitive therapy with someone doing MDMA. It’s just not somehow adequate to touch the depths of the experiences people are having.’ So just really curious about your thoughts there.

I respectfully disagree with thoughts that are the impressions that are there around it. And I think it’s partly because of the–it is possible to do cognitive therapy in a way that feels stiff and disjointed and doesn’t go into the depths. But I think if you’re delivering it in a way and working with the participant in a way that’s bringing in all of their experiences, it’s an incredibly rich way of working with everything that comes up.

And so of course, like even though it’s cognitively focused in terms of meaning making, we’re working with emotions, we’re working with sensations, we’re working with behaviours. It’s not excluding any of those components.

And it’s helping folks not only work with what has happened and the interpretation of what’s there, but also what’s happening now and what’s going into the future. It allows for the sense of my everyday life. ‘Oh, this is how this is going to change and this is how I can implement it.’ And that we find really effective.

It’s been really interesting seeing folks work with the MDMA sessions to help as a catalyst for that meaning making process because there is so much meaning making that happens in the MDMA sessions. And you’re just providing a bit of a frame to help that continue afterwards. So I always think of that as the catalyst.

 

I came up with this analogy the other day that has stuck around for me. I’d be curious if you’re on board with it. If you get a bacterial infection like strep throat or something. Your body could probably heal it, right? No problem. You’re healthy, you have a functioning immune system. It might take a little bit longer and you may not feel so great, but you can probably handle it. Or you can go to the doctor and get a medicine to help your body heal some health problems. 

And I’ve started to think about maybe psychedelics in general or MDMA for couples where there may be something broken or something challenging happening in the couple that if they were to go for walks and go out for dinner and whatever, take the time to invest in themselves, they could probably heal through it. But MDMA is a medicine that might help speed up or deepen that process in some way. Which means that there may be situations in some future state where you can go to the clinic with your partner and get MDMA couples therapy to accelerate healing that might otherwise happen organically. Your thoughts on that? 

Yeah, I do think that that’s a possibility. I think the medicine analogy is an interesting one because I actually had this conversation earlier this week with someone who was raising the point that I think sometimes people think that the taking of the pill is the thing that will cure them and be helpful. And it’s actually nothing. Like as far as we know, there isn’t anything inherent yet in the taking of that pill with MDMA in particular, that would have that effect.

It’s the psychotherapy, the psychological process that happens after that would create that shift. So I do think, though, that the experience, the MDMA session as being something that can help speed it up. It can help you do a good piece of work, a good chunk of work in a quick period of time. That’s true. And so that’s where I think it could exactly be really helpful.

I envision a day where people would be able to do that and choose to do that as something to either–with support and in a safe context–be able either to heal from something together or to grow together in a different way and to support their relationship. That would be fantastic to have that capability and that possibility.

 

Connect with Dr. Joe on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Instagram

Connect with Dr. Anne Wagner on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Follow Remedy Centre on Instagram.

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Episode 33: Jamie Wheal on Finding Meaning at the End of the World

“Life is tragic, and occasionally it’s magic.”

In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That’s Lost Its Mind and the Pulitzer-nominated bestseller Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. He is also the founder and executive director of the Flow Genome Project whose purpose is to build “world-class training programs on peak performance, optimal psychology and leadership.” His work has been covered in the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Forbes, and many other publications.

Jamie synthesizes history, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology in order to create techniques and cultural practices centred around transforming human beings through non-ordinary states. Those practices include breathing techniques and psychedelics.

Jamie and Dr. Joe spoke about:

Connect with Jamie Wheal on Facebook and Instagram.

Connect with the Flow Genome Project on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and their website.

Connect with Dr. Joe on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Instagram

Follow Numinus on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Instagram

 

Here are some highlights of their conversation:

Let’s start with sort of the premise for Recapture the Rapture and what I understand what you’re calling this sort of crisis of meaning that a lot of us are feeling a little kind of disoriented or suffering because the processes or the infrastructures that we use to sort of make meaning out of our complex lives have really been kind of shaken. And many of us are feeling a bit lost around that. So can you just tee that up for us? 

Yeah, for sure. I think what we’re continuing to see even more and more and more of it, like even in this latest round we’re supposed to have vaccines and everybody can be safe and back to summer and then like, ‘oh no we have breakthrough cases, but no, there are no breakthrough cases.’ Actually, there’s whole a lot of hell of a lot more than we thought there were not. What we do with kids? Do we send them back? I was even having this conversation with our kids over the weekend. Because our daughter goes to school in Palo Alto, super on the ball, like maximum lockdown health provisions, and our son is going to school in Colorado. We’re here in Austin, which is in Texas, which is like a wheels off situation. And he was talking about like at this point, you cannot even tell whose side someone is on as to whether they’re wearing a mask or not wearing a mask. Like at one point it was a relatively clear division. It was a tribal identification. Now you have no idea what even the signs and the signifiers of our public actions  or what ideological camps everyone is in. It is a complete epistemological train wreck, but also a socio-cultural, psychological one.

We didn’t end up in this particular mess solely or exclusively because of a particular coronavirus. We’ve been on this slide for the last couple of decades and radically intensified over the last five, which has been and maybe even more. I think you can for sure say two thousand eight was also like a massive disillusioning, but then throw it into the 2016 election onwards.

And what we have is that basically people are orienting their assumptions on life, the universe and everything from organized religion. That was one point that has been dwindling rapidly. And then for the last four hundred years plus we had this experience of modern liberalism, civil rights, nation states, private property, markets, democracy, that kind of bundled gig, including academic institutions, research, science, empiricism, all of that. And that, too, has been kind of crumbling.

And those are the two pillars of meaning. One point to point out is that the roof has been caving in as far as any shared reality we might have been experiencing. Rather than us all becoming grown up, rational, evidence based meritocrats or something that maybe like the Sam Harris and the Christopher Hitchens might have once forecast, we’re actually getting sucked to the extremes into fundamentalism, like doubling down on belief systems and not just traditional religious fundamentalism, anti-vax fundamentalism, populist fundamentalism, take your pick.

There’s all sorts of different narratives, sacred and secular, old and new, that are showing up where people are just doubling down on a rigid belief system versus some form, some form of more provisional sensemaking. So fundamentalism on one side or nihilism on the other. Just burn it all down, blow it up, what the fuck, who cares, let’s party or let’s riot. I mean, very fight club, right, in that sort of sense and diseases of despair, which is obviously a lot of the world. You look into the rise in addiction, anxiety, depression, suicides, all of the things that you would expect when people are unmoored from their surroundings. And of course, this isn’t happening in a vacuum.

This is happening at a time of accelerating exponential change, both better and worse, which is also really hard. And most people put all their belief systems onto one or the other. It’s either like Steven Pinker and Ted talks exponentially better, Matt Ridley. Or the doom and gloom naysayers, Extinction Rebellion and and any others pointing out the decline of civilization and or survivability. And you’re like, wait, which is it? It’s both. And they’re both exponential.

So which way this goes is going to be a crapshoot to the very last minute. And who do I look to to tell me where I should go? Oh, they’re all dead or gone or have abandoned their posts. So it’s every man for himself and do your own research. So that’s kind of the setup, which is we’re in a tight spot and someone broke our dashboard. So how do we find our own cosmic positioning system to reorient to what must be done? Because I think the most the worst thing we can be doing right now is fucking nothing, because we’re in that agitated, irritated, bored state. Like, we need to get off that dime and be moving in whatever direction we’ve chosen.

 

So you are orienting us or trying to inspire us into a new kind of operating system for making meaning. From meaning 1.0, you have identified three key processes or three key mind states: inspiration, healing, and connection. And I’ll let you talk about that and then continue down towards the Alchemist Cookbook. 

There’s an awful lot of utopian thinking in general. If you look at anybody from whether it’s true old school, Alpha and Omega, Judeo-Christian stuff, like there’s going to be the Armageddon and the Rapture or any of those kind of things, that old school stuff, all the way to techno utopianism like Ray Kurzweil. I’m going to upload our consciousness to computers. To blockchain and seasteads. ‘We’re going to disrupt the nation state and we’re going to create our own little communities or civilizations.’ And maybe they float. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re in–it is not Croatia. It’s Estonia. One of those Eastern European bloc countries. They have some unclaimed land that is potentially going to be a libertarian crypto paradise. Or the psychedelic renaissance or trance tech like neuro link and implants or immersive VR.

There’s always the, ‘Yes, this is ugly. Yes, this is hard, but there’s some hockey stick redemption at the other end of this.’ And this also shows up in info marketing and self-help and new age and pop psychology. ‘Let’s poke your pain points and you get irritated and agitated. And then we offer you something whether it’s a workshop or a pill or a meditation practice in just seven minutes and then you’ll be delivered.’ And that is such a deep trope, both of Western thought, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. But it shows up in communism. It shows up across two thousand years plus of Western thought. But then it was metastasized and weaponized by marketing in the 20th century.

And Tim Wu, the guy who wrote The Master Switch and tons of other stuff. He is a professor and thought leader. He also wrote a book called The Attention Merchants. And it’s basically outlining the genesis of 20th century marketing, like how do we get to Mad Men? How do we get to Don Draper? And the short answer is a bunch of down on their luck literal snake oil salesmen and washed up former preachers. ‘You have bad breath? You’ve got to try Listerine. You’ve got dandruff? Try head and shoulders.’

And then here’s your shot at redemption, in a product, a package, a pill. And that is so entrenched in everything, including the full hijack of the spiritual marketplace. We are almost hard wired to believe that there is an up and out play if only we can find it or buy it. Many of those end up being pathological because if the ends or heaven on earth or off it and the means are always, always justified, and there’s all kinds of spiritual bypassing, there’s all sorts of disassociation from the here and now and often our social and ethical responsibilities to others and ourselves and the whole thing.

That was a long windup to point out that the model of, hey, there’s this three legged stool or flywheel that is the human experience: inspiration, healing and connection. And we never get out of that. We never get out of the endless cycle of getting up to the high ground, remembering what we’ve forgotten, being informed and inspired, if we’re lucky–only to go down into the depths of our brokenness and either get crushed by life events and tragedies. Then we’re forever doing that.

And that sense that redemption lies not in getting to the mountaintop and camping out there because nothing lives up there, you can visit. You can put some prayer flags up there, but you need to get back down in the valleys, right. So there is no end to this. It’s forever. We’re forever being propelled forward from our life of highs and lows. And together, life is kind of  tragic. That’s inescapable. That’s Buddha’s first noble truth.

Life is tragic, and occasionally it’s magic. Which blows our minds and redeems our souls, our souls and gives us a reason for being. And then we’re back to toggling back and forth between those two things. There is nothing to do but laugh but shrug, but be on the inside of the cosmic joke and then it’s comic. And that’s that kind of sharing and buffering with each other. If we couldn’t look at this all and just go Zorba the Greek, like, fucking hell, the full catastrophe, you know. Like yesterday, at last night’s show, we were dancing and raising the roof and it was nothing but quicksilver magic. And today the kids just shit their diapers and the repairman is not coming and the dog just ran away.

So the tragic, the magic, and the comic. And it feels to me that if we center ourselves in the middle of those things without obsessing or fetishizing about one or the other one at the expense of the other, and we just say. ‘this is it, the full catastrophe, the human experience, my job isn’t to bypass it or transcend. It is to bear witness to the whole thing that feels to me more grounded. That feels to me more reality tested than some saccharin, sweet promise of up, up and away.

 

I think in your argument that Flywheel ultimately comes from meaning 1.0 and a more sort of religious framework. One of the reasons why it sort of crumbled, so to speak, is that access to these things was mediated by an elite group in a position of power. And most people had to find access to that through some watered down way and had no direct relationship to this kind of spiritual connection. 

And so you’re introducing some design criteria for how we ought to make meaning 3.0 work. This is pulled out of the classical liberalism model. Can you talk about open source, scalable, and antifragile?

I think particularly in indigenous religions, but also mystery schools. For thousands and thousands of years, for hundreds of thousands and millions of humans, there have been absolutely effective religious and psycho-spiritual practices of initiation and transcendence. They haven’t always been widely distributed. It’s not like every single person in a given society or civilization had access. Sometimes they were quite selective. But there have been massively effective, both indigenous and and sort of quote unquote, civilized techniques of ecstasy and initiatory mystery cults, mystery schools.

But I would say that somewhere post, at least in the West right somewhere, posts Konstantin Augustine like some sort of Orthodox Christianity coming online. Anything kind of more mainstream got pretty watered down, became pretty weak sauce initiations. So that’s the sense of like, ‘hey, no matter how much we might resent or resist the Spanish Inquisition, the priests, all the sort of the man keeping us from our own birthright as far as an initiation into the mysteries. There’s vital glue there, vital nutrients in what organized religion used to offer. And that’s healing, inspiration and connection.

So meaning 1.0 which is all men and women are created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You could also say pursuit of happiness, subset, you know, initiation into the mysteries of what it means to be a human on this earth. And so for that to work, the notion of open source means, ‘hey, let’s try and get this out of the cloisters. How can we offer the tools that anybody, anywhere has access to because we subscribe to that sense that every human on this earth is a child of God and entitled to a fair shot at the good life. So if it’s expensive or rare or esoteric or exclusive, then what are we doing right? We’re just perpetuating more of those inequalities that people are becoming increasingly aware of and sick of. So that’s the open source piece.

The scaleable piece is kind of the other side of that, which is just we’re in a tight fix and there’s eight billion of us. So it’s not enough to have, you know, hundreds or a few thousands or even tens of thousands or even millions. We kind of need billions of people on something resembling the same page that this planet matters and that clean air, clean water, and clean soil are probably human birthright and really shouldn’t go along party lines. And that we’re in this to win this. We’re actually in this to perpetuate living on our home planet.

So those are the first two and then the antifragile is–Oh, we are in this goofy, paradoxical state, which I think is creating a lot of mental disease. We are sort of on the one hand in the early twenty first century, let’s say we are sort of blessed with the perspective of gods. You know, we’ve got the Large Hadron Collider and we can sort of look back to the moment of the Big Bang and we can map and model it using the Hubble telescope. We have live feeds from rovers on Mars and at the same time go, ‘oh, oh, shit. You know, more ice melted yesterday in Greenland.’

So we’re sort of coming alive at the very, very same time that we realized we might be in an existential crisis. And I don’t know whether to be happy and elated about this infinite possibility of consciousness and humanity or abjectly terrified as to the stakes. And wouldn’t you know it to make it even weirder, the very same super sophisticated techno economic civilization, including carbon economy and all the things that has provided this platform for us to be watching Alan Watts remix videos on my smartphone on YouTube filled with cobalt, lithium and random rare earth metals and beamed up to satellite. So I get this in real time with no lag.

Episode 30: Emotion and Transformation with Dr. Les Greenberg

 

“The best way to change an emotion is with another emotion.”

In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with Dr. Les Greenberg, a world renowned psychotherapist and researcher. He is one of the creators of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) and professor at York University in Toronto. EFT centres around utilizing emotion to transform emotion. It is a different approach from the current major schools of psychotherapy like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. He is also the founder and director of the Emotion-Focused Therapy clinic where he provides therapy for individuals and couples and trains therapists in EFT.

Dr. Greenberg is the author of 17 books like Changing Emotion With Emotion and Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action. And he has published over 100 scientific papers and has written over 80 book chapters.

Dr. Les Greenberg and Dr. Joe spoke about:

Connect with Dr. Joe on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Instagram

Follow Numinus on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Instagram

 

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

You’ve spoken about the idea of the importance of using emotion to transform another emotion. Can you speak to why that is important and how that works?

My contention is that amygdala-based painful emotions like core fear and core shame are impenetrable to reason. You can’t reason somebody out of these core painful feelings because emotion is a whole embodied experience. And you’re organized to run away. You have a sinking feeling in the stomach. It’s not produced by cognition. It’s produced automatically by the activation of emotion schemes.

We have to find a way to work with these painful emotions and the best way to change an emotion is with another emotion. Spinoza was the first person to state a principle like this. He said, ‘the only way to change an emotion is with an opposing and stronger emotion.’

I think this can be thought of in primitive behavioural terms that some of the emotions are organized as withdrawal emotions. With fear, you run away. And shame, you shrink into the ground. Approach emotions like assertive anger or the sadness of grief, you really are moving forward and towards.

So if I have a client and I can take them to their core feeling of fear or shame and they’re organized to run away, then I can help activate assertive anger or the sadness in which you cry out for comfort or reach out for the lost object.

You can’t run away and thrust forward at the same time. So we’ve now got two opposing action tendencies. The new action tendency is going to transform the old one.

Hebb stated the first law of neuropsychology as “neurons that fire together, wire together.” So if you think of emotion as an emotion scheme, a network that fires. So when you fire shame and at the same time, simultaneously, you fire off anger.

Let’s say you have a drunken, physically abusive father. When you first imagine him in front of you in an empty chair, it fires off these feelings of fear and shame and you shrink and you want to run away. But then if I can help you to feel assertively angry–’I should have had a father who treated me right. I deserved to not be abused’–it generates assertive anger. ‘I’m angry at you for having treated me so unfairly.’

Now this new emotion undoes the old emotion. It doesn’t replace it. It actually transforms it and synthesizes with it to develop a truly novel experience. So your self-organizing system is re-organizing. And maybe the shame, the anger synthesizes with the shame to produce confidence or security or calm or something new. And this is a developmental process.

And rather than thinking about it in learning theory terms like exposure leads to reduction. This actually comes from a Piagetian notion that the development occurs by the synthesis of co-activating schemes.

At a more practical level, the best way to change an emotion is with another emotion.

Episode 29: Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy with Dr. Kyle Greenway

 

“We have to design treatments that are fully biological, psychological, and sociological at their core. Psychedelics represent that, and psychiatry has started to take notice.”

In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with Dr. Kyle Greenway. Dr. Greenway is a senior resident in psychiatry at McGill University. He runs a clinic in Montreal where he and his team treats patients using ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

His work centres around the intersection of biology, psychology, and sociology for the treatment of his patients. And he has a deep understanding of why psychedelics are so effective in the treatment of many mental illnesses.

Dr. Greenway and Dr. Joe spoke about:

Connect with Dr. Joe on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Instagram

Follow Numinus on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn, Instagram.

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

What do we know right now about the neurobiological and psychological mechanisms of psychedelics? Why are these drugs so effective? What are you betting on in terms of the best theories here?

My favourite theory and this is something I’ll call state-dependent learning.

Even in rats or mice, if you set them loose in a maze, you get their performance. You do it again with them being administered anything ranging from a barbiturate to cannabis to cocaine, you’re going to see differences in performances. When you do it again with them in a sober state, you’ll see that they have learned a lot less from their non-sober learning experience.

For example, if they did it on a barbiturate, then you do it again without a barbiturate in the system, you find out–a reasonable explanation of what’s going on is, ‘okay. They really just didn’t learn as much.’

The fascinating thing is if you re-administer that barbiturate, in fact, they actually regain a lot of the performance you thought they lost. So those memories were not just faultily encoded. They were encoded in the context of what was going on in the brain. In that case, a drug, but the same thing is true of your environment.

So if you study in a very particular environment, for example, with a particular smell, then you go to do a test, and you don’t have access to that smell, you’re going to have less access to those memories that were formed with that particular environment. This is called state-dependent learning. And this is a phenomenon we see all over neuroscience and psychology.

I would say one reason that antidepressants work, again, is because they change that state. So they kind of lessen all of the learnings that you have about who you are, who the world is, how you should react, how you should feel. All of that stuff is kind of lessened.

With a psychedelic, we’re talking about a radically different state. So you have a completely disorganized access to your current environment and your past memories. Things are not so orderly as, ‘Okay. This state is associated with that feeling, that memory, whatever.’

So what we see in the brain–there are many ways of describing it, and you mentioned a couple. The Entropic Brain Hypothesis is essentially describing that the brain has a lot less order to it. Entropy being kind of the lack of order. So when there’s less order, information is not being channelled along its old circuits. Your brain is not clearly saying, ‘Okay. This belongs in the auditory cortex. This belongs in the visual cortex.’ Information kind of bleeds through the different pathways. And this is one way you get hallucinations. If auditory information is kind of channeled into the visual cortex, suddenly you get a little bit of synesthesia, as if you’re seeing sound.

If you do neuroimaging, you find that indeed there are connections being made between networks to a much greater extent than normally would be the case. That definitely involves more entropy in the brain. You can measure that in a variety of ways.

Either the cause of that or a co-artifact of that is that this default mode network is disrupted. The default mode network is the way your brain organizes itself habitually. Maybe the closest thing we have in the brain as a correlate to the ego, your sense of self, who you are, etcetera. So whether it’s a disruption of the default mode network, the orchestrator of the brain–whether it’s a disruption of that that produces this greater entropy or it’s the reverse or they’re kind of parallel processes is not so clear.

But the psychedelic state is absolutely characterized by novel pathways being formed in your brain where information is travelling in different ways. And that kind of ties into the idea that this creates space for growth. You’re not just stuck in the same sort of rut, new things can happen to a much greater extent.

Equanimity Practice: It’s OK

 

The coronavirus pandemic is challenging to our well-being in many ways. It has taken away physical connection with others, routine, many outlets for physical activity and entertainment, among many others. It may even take away our jobs and sense of purpose. One additional challenge is the extent to which the future has become so much more uncertain, be it with respect to our health, freedom to move around, employment, financial security, etc.

It is very natural for the mind to get busy trying solve a problem or prepare to face a threat or, at the very least, try to fill in some of the unknowns. Ultimately, it is difficult if not impossible to resolve the uncertainty at the moment. There are few answers out there. So we need to be able to tolerate the uncertainty.

To make matters worse, our minds typically have a negativity bias, which means that the narrative the mind imposes on the uncertainty is often negative or even catastrophic. ‘What if I get the virus if I go to the grocery store? There’s no way I’ll have a job on the other end of this. Will I ever see my friends in Italy again?’ These thoughts can seriously amplify our anxieties or drag our moods down.

I have been practicing and sharing a meditation that can help us tolerate uncertainty and move on from worries and ruminations. The core of it is the insight that even if the future is uncertain and the stakes are high, in THIS moment everything is ok. Things might get more complicated or difficult next week. But next week hasn’t happened yet. And if circumstances do get worse, wan can mobilize our resources to rise to that occasion. Or we may end up surprising ourselves when we realize that even THAT particular moment is ok.

This practice is an invitation to let go of the hunger to resolve uncertainty and engage with the present moment. You might also try using your senses. Look around. Listen. Touch things. Go for a walk and feel your leg muscles working for you. Breathe. If you can, give someone a hug. If you are feeling keyed up or unsettled, know that your body is doing everything it can to protect you from danger. And it’s kind of miraculous.

If any of these practices provide some engagement with the present moment, you now have some space to be intentional about what you do next. What do you need in this moment? Who or what is important to you? What is the person you want to be doing? Use the energy your body is mobilizing to propel you toward doing good in the world.

Give it a try and let me know how it feels.

Mental Health Services Transition to Online Care

The coronavirus pandemic is wreaking unprecedented havoc on our healthcare system, economy and communities. The combination of high stakes, uncertainty, lack of control and limits on social connection is creating a perfect storm for psychological distress. Undoubtedly, there is a mental health crisis lurking underneath the public health and economic crises unfolding before our eyes. And this, while everyone is forced to stay home.

The one bit of good news is that psychotherapy works online. Numinus has been offering virtual sessions for many years. But in the last week, we managed to transition our entire clinic operations online. While the virtual therapy session takes some getting used to—for clients and therapists alike—the results have been positive. Clients are grateful that they continue to have access to services. Sarah, one client said “I still had a real connection with my therapist, still able to make progress on issues that I have been working on for a while, and reduction in anxiety from what’s going on today.” Therapists also report that they are having positive experiences despite the remoteness. Jessica said “I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the connection I’m making with my clients despite the distance.” Julien even found some clinical advantages to virtual sessions: “I also find that there are advantages to meeting clients in their natural environment.”

The research on virtual psychotherapy supports these experiences. A 2012 review paper by Backhaus et al. concluded that virtual therapy is “feasible, has been used in a variety of therapeutic formats and with diverse populations, is generally associated with good user satisfaction, and is found to have similar clinical outcomes to traditional face-to-face psychotherapy.” Surprisingly, according to Simpson and Reid (2014), meeting a therapist online does not seem to compromise the quality of the client-therapist relationship, which is an important ingredient in successful therapy. So good quality mental health care is available online.

This mental health crisis is affecting organizations as well, as they rely on the sustained performance of their people to adapt to sudden, tectonic shifts in the business landscape. Virtual psychotherapy may be an essential ingredient to maintain employees health and functioning at work. Many organizations try to support employee well-being by offering extensive health insurance benefits. In this post-COVID world of social isolation, the primary headwind to employee wellness are feelings of anxiety and disconnectedness that arise from suddenly being thrust into working from home in an uncertain world. Psychotherapy is typically covered under these policies, but often not sought out. Alayacare, a Montreal-based health tech company contributing to COVID-19 solutions, is encouraging employees to make use of these benefits. CEO Adrian Schauer says “we are aware that some of our people are having difficulty coping with the current circumstances, which is totally understandable. We feel like working with an organization like Numinus to give our people access to licensed mental health professionals just makes sense.”

The insurance companies providing mental health coverage are just as motivated to facilitate services. For one, like many of us, they are often looking for ways to make meaningful contributions to their communities in this crisis. They also fundamentally want their customers to get good value for their policies, or else organizations won’t renew their policies. For example, SunLife’s  indicates: “We want to ensure plan members continue to receive the health care they need. Now, we’ll cover virtual services for appointments where they do not need direct physical therapies.”

Do you work with or represent an organization looking to support its employees through this crisis? Have a look at Numinus comprehensive offering for organizations during the COVID-19 crisis.

How To Get the Most Out of Your Online Therapy Experience

Most of us are stuck at home weathering the coronavirus storm. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that our anxieties, depressed mood, relationship problems, post-traumatic stress and bad habits suddenly disappear. To make matters worse, the public health crisis and economic meltdown we’re all witnessing are providing additional triggers for existing mental health issues, and in many cases creating entirely new challenges.

One piece of good news is that despite mandated lockdowns, you can continue addressing your therapy needs and get support for any new stressors by meeting your therapist online. Evidence suggests that virtual therapy is accessible, useful for a variety of conditions, and shows similar outcomes to traditional in-person therapy (Backhaus et al. 2014). Surprisingly, research also shows that meeting a therapist online does not seem to compromise the quality of the client-therapist relationship, which is an important ingredient in successful therapy (Simpson and Reid, 2014).

Here are some tips for getting the most out of your experience, ensuring a seamless transition to virtual therapy.

  1. Privacy is still important. If others are listening in—even loved ones that you trust—you might not be able to communicate with the same level of authenticity. Make it a point to ensure you can get some privacy, using the flexibility of the medium if necessary (see below).
  2. Take advantage of the flexibility of the setting. If you’re fortunate to enough to have privacy at home for the purposes of therapy, then great! But you don’t necessarily need a separate, soundproof home office to conduct a therapy session. Many virtual therapy sessions take place in cars or parks. Audio-only through a phone line can be sufficient to have a good conversation with your therapist, and might even feel more intimate than a video call in some instances. Going for a walk while you talk to your therapist could unlock some energy and creativity, which can be leveraged for insight, motivation and purpose.
  3. Try to minimize distractions. If your therapy session is reduced to a Zoom window, other apps like email, social media or news are just a click away. So it’s easy to lose your focus. Mountains of research show that multitasking is a myth – you will definitely not get the full value from your conversation with your therapist if 20% of your attentional bandwidth is taken up for reading or looking at something else. Put your smartphone away; close all other windows on your computer; turn on “full-screen” mode on your video-conferencing app; and turn off all notifications to prevent your attention from getting hijacked. Don’t forget to turn those essential notifications back on after the meeting.
  4. Don’t sit right in front of the computer screen: So much of the communication between client and therapist happens with your body language. All of that will be lost if you only see each others’ faces. Push back from the computer a bit so that you can see each other’s upper bodies, at least.
  5. Introduce your therapist to loved-ones. If you’re doing your therapy session from home, it can be very meaningful to briefly introduce your therapist to pets, children and/or partners. It can enrich your therapist’s understanding of your home environment and support system. You might even consider involving them in the process (see below).
  6. Consider family or couples therapy. If some of the issues you’re wrestling with involve family members or loved ones with whom you are quarantined, consult with your therapist about the possibility of bringing them into the process. You might find that a broader, more inclusive conversation opens up new possibilities.
  7. Tips for optimizing your tech setup:
    1. Use headphones. This subtle adjustment delivers a surprisingly big impact. In addition to improving the sound quality, it will be a more immersive and intimate experience.
    2. Use a big screen: Go for computers or tablets over a smartphone. It’s simply easier on the eyes.
    3. Ensure a reasonably fast and stable internet connection: Nothing is more annoying in an online meeting than frozen faces or choppy audio. A connection that offers 5 MBPS download speeds should be sufficient. Most cellular connections easily reach that speed, so you can tether your phone to your computer if necessary.
    4. Turn off the selfie camera. Most video conferencing apps will show you the live stream of what you look like to your therapist. It is almost impossible to ignore it and will invariably eat into your attentional bandwidth.

Hopefully these tips will help you stay connected to your therapist and engaged with your healing, even in these difficult moments. Good luck.

Episode 24: Love, Attachment, and Couples Therapy with Dr. Sue Johnson

 

“Relationships are the keystone of our lives. They are as important to us as our next

breath.”

In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with Dr. Sue Johnson. Sue is a pioneer in the field of couples therapy. Alongside Dr. Les Greenberg, Dr. Johnson developed emotionally focused couples and family therapy (EFT), which is a couples therapy based on the newest research surrounding relationships: attachment theory. She is also the author of many books like Hold Me Tight, Created for Connection, and Love Sense and is the founder of the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy (ICEEFT), which offers training to therapists in EFT.

Dr. Johnson and Dr. Joe spoke about:

If you’d like to seek services in couples therapy and EFT, please visit our site for more information.

Connect with Dr. Sue Johnson on Facebook, Twitter, and her website.

Connect with Dr. Joe on  Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn and Instagram

Follow Numinus on Facebook, Twitter,LinkedIn, Instagram.

 

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

Could you take us through the basics of attachment theory and how that informs emotion-focused couples therapy? 

One way of thinking of what EFT is about and capturing it very fast is that EFT–you could think of EFT as a model, as a conversation between Carl Rogers, which is my basic training as an individual therapist. It’s a conversation between Carl Rogers who believes that it’s the therapist’s job to believe in people’s ability to grow. Who was dedicated to non-pathologizing and to listening to people and believing that acceptance and a powerful safe connection was healing in itself.

So it’s a conversation between Carl Rogers who invited therapists to listen to their client’s experience, to take it seriously, and to reflect that back in a way that allowed their client to continue to process it and engage with their experience in a different way, to create corrective emotional experiences.

And then you have Salvador Minuchin who would come in and say that you have to look at people in the context of relationships. And that you have to look at the dance, the drama in people’s relationships and how those dramas take over people’s lives and define them. You have to find ways to understand these powerful feedback loops that you see people caught in throughout their lives. Where they almost create the interpersonal problems that they have.

‘My only way of dealing with my emotions is to shut down and shut you out. When I shut you out, I alarm you.’ Because you are a bonding mammal, your brain is designed to be alarmed by the person you count on shutting you out. So when I shut you out, you become alarmed and you become angry with me. And then I hear everything I’ve ever been afraid of, which is you’re going to reject me. I’m not good enough. So I shut down more.

And this kind of feedback loop that I’m talking to you about–some folks who are trained just in individual therapy don’t really think in this sort of systems, process oriented level.

So it’s a conversation between Carl Rogers, Salvador Minuchin about how to intervene. You’ve got to look at the relational systems people are involved in and the pattern of interactions, the drama in their–how people move their feet in the dance. And you’ve got to look how people put their emotions together, their emotional life. And you got to look at it in a non-pathologizing way. But that’s still not enough.

If you’re going to work with close relationships in couples and families, and even individual therapy, you have to have this awareness if you’re going to be effective.

You have to listen to John Bowlby who basically said, ‘we’re bonding mammals,’ and gave us a map to our basic needs and basic fears. He basically said–and this has been borne out now by so much science in our world–emotional isolation is traumatizing for human beings and evokes pretty dysfunctional responses because when you’re afraid, your whole world narrows down, and your response repertoire usually narrows down, your ability to explore and open up narrows down. And many, many of us then get completely stuck.

So Bowlby said that we have to understand ourselves as bonding mammals and how these relationships with others are the keystone of our lives. They are as important to us as our next breath.

John Bowlby basically said that all the dysfunction that you see–if you want to call it that–in your clients, all the places that people get stuck, are distortions of things that in other contexts would be perfectly reasonable, healthy responses. I think Rogers would have agreed with that.

Bowlby said that when people feel safely connected, they are able to be expansive and learn and grow. People need safe haven, secure base relationships. They need safe haven people to go to with their vulnerability where they will receive comfort and reassurance and get their emotional balance. We give clients emotional balance in EFT. They need their loved ones to provide a secure base to go out from.

What we understand now is that as adults, there is something called constructive dependency. The strongest among us and the ones that are able to grow and change and be resilient can turn to other people in our minds, and also in our lives, and use those other people as a resource. And that’s constructive dependency.

 

I’d love to hear you talk about these sorts of patterns of disconnection that happen–I believe you called it the tango. Maybe you could just give us examples of the tango. 

Patterns of disconnection in couples in our society–the most popular show in town is that one person starts to tune into the fact that there is emotional disconnection. They’re asking the question: Are you there for me? And somehow the answer comes back ‘No’ or ‘Maybe.’ So they start pushing to change the dance, to change the relationship. So they became more anxious, more demanding. They start sounding critical. ‘Why don’t you…’ ‘You never…’ ‘How could you?’ ‘Can’t you see that…?’ And they start pushing.

The trouble is that neither partner is not often very clear about what they’re pushing for. They might say, ‘I just want you to do chores.’ But when you really hear it, it’s not about chores. It’s about, ‘I want to know if I say something to you that matters to me that you care. I want to know that my pain matters. I want to know that my happiness matters. I want to know that I matter to you.’

So we see this pattern of pursue, withdraw–I get angry with you and more desperate, and you reason with me or don’t become emotionally available. You turn away. You shut me down. You shut down and shut me out. The more you shut down and shut me out, the more desperate I become. We’re obviously reducing a complex phenomenon to something simple. But that’s the most popular dance that creates distress in relationships.

So we help people see that dance. We help them see how it leaves them both desperate and alone. And then we help people move into being more open and connected with each other.

And the tango that you talked about, which is the thing that we do in almost every session across the stages of therapy, whether we’re trying to help people see the negative dance they’re caught in in stage one. Or moving into stage two, helping them create new moves in their dance like really open up to each other and help each other with their fears and needs, help each other so that their feelings of vulnerability have a solution. And the solution is the connection with the other person. The connection with the other person is the solution to the problems.

Once people are connected safely, they can deal with almost any of the other problems they come in with like sharing chores or parenting or finances or what to do in bed. You can’t talk about any of those things effectively if you don’t have some sort of team.

The way the therapist does this is that they do something called the EFT tango. I dance Argentinian tango. So that label is mine [laughs]. But the reason I called it the EFT tango is because most people think of tango in terms of ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ which is horrible. Real tango–which you can see in any city in the world right now–is all about attunement. It’s not about the steps at all. The steps can be amazingly simple. It’s about tuning in, being able to stand up with a perfect stranger, listen to some beautiful music, and tune in to that stranger’s signals, that stranger’s intention, that stranger’s body moves and emotional tone, and then come together and move together with this music as the structure. So that’s why I called it the tango.

If I were to describe it for you very simply, the EFT therapist, whether they’re working with individuals, couples, or families–move one is that you stay in the present moment. You stay in the present moment and you look with your attachment glasses on at the patterns that are happening in front of you. You look at the emotional patterns and the patterns between people if you have more than one person in the room or even if you have an individual person who’s talking about their relationship with mother, etcetera.