Alternatives to Talk Psychotherapy

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NOTE: Nothing in this blog is intended to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure illness. This blog is one woman’s opinion, and my opinions are constantly evoluting as I grow, learn, experience, and change my mind.

People need help.
The Buddha wasn’t wrong: this world is a vale of tears. The inevitability of loss stalks us throughout our lives, as does the essential loneliness of the human condition. Even love, which I see as Divine, sometimes connects us one to another only tenuously, through pain and suffering, isolation and despair. This doesn’t take into account the deeper, more profound, organic ills, the schizophrenias, manic depressions, psychotic breaks from reality, criminal psychopathy, and so on.
I simply do not see contemporary talk psychotherapy as the answer.
For one, it takes too long. For two, there’s brain scan evidence that it re-traumatizes the brain. For three, too much talk therapy arises out of a relativistic paradigm where proactive personal honor and the hard work of integrity are not valued; it’s all about what Caroline Myss calls ‘woundology.’ It’s about making excuses and prolonging self-pity. It is disempowering. Four, too much psychotherapy is anti-spiritual, and so the therapy is powered by only 1 horse out of the available 1,000,000 that come with a sense of the larger wonder and mystery that is the Source of everything. Five, plenty of psychotherapists and psychiatrists are loony.
But people need help. We all do, at some point in our lives.
Fortunately, there are alternatives. Here are some that I’ve discovered along the way.
First, because I am a healer and I have seen with my own eyes the dramatic positive shifts people can make with hands-on or spiritual healing, I recommend that people investigate Barbara Brennan Healing science, reiki, and therapeutic touch.
The energetic modalities work because we are more than mechanistic organic beings. We have an X factor: consciousness. Consciousness is always in dynamic interplay with matter. The new physics explores this, by noting that the observer always influences the outcome of the experiment.
Consciousness makes an impact on the physical world. And as best we can tell with the science we have right now, consciousness can be better described by a vibratory wave model of energy-matter than by the old Newtonian model of the body (and the universe) as a grand machine. That is, as Richard Gerber writes in VIBRATIONAL MEDICINE: New Choices for Healing Ourselves,
“The Einsteinian paradigm as applied to vibrational medicine sees human beings as networks of complex energy fields that interface with physical/cellular systems. Vibrational medicine uses specialized forms of energy to positively affect those energetic systems that may be out of balance due to disease states. By rebalancing the energy fields that help to regulate cellular physiology, vibrational healers attempt to restore order from a higher level of human functioning.”
Gerber’s book is fascinating and explains the underpinnings of what he calls ‘vibrational medicine.’ I see it as why Reich was right, and Freud erred. Reich was trying to get to the energetic core of psychological disease. Reich wanted to treat the root, not the symptom. So he devised the orgone box for people to sit in so they could be charged up with healing energy.
Pierrakos’ work in Core Energetics comes out of Reich’s work, and Core Energetics is an efficacious modality. It works good. It sees the human being as a psychosomatic unity: body-mind-spirit-psyche are one indivisible unit. Affect the body, and the mind, psyche, and spirit are affected. Affect the psyche, and the mind, body, and spirit are changed. There is no extricating out one strand of the multifarious beings that we are! We are whole even when we have forgotten that.
And take a look at Hellinger’s Family Constellation work. It’s not widespread yet in the US but practitioners are around. In LOVE’S HIDDEN SYMMETRY: What Makes Love Work in Relationships, Hellinger and his co-authors write about the Greater Order of Love. “If you want love to flourish, you need to do what it demands and to refrain from doing what harms it. Love follows the hidden order of the Greater Soul.”
Hellinger approaches whole person healing from an energy systems viewpoint, from an understanding of conscience and balance in giving and taking, forgiveness and reconciliation, the systemic conscience of the greater whole, and the orders of love within the family. Fascinating, useful work. Personal story, that is, the drama of all the wrongs suffered since birth, is not encouraged. Hellinger is on to something, and people who do the family constellation work find resolution, greater wholeness, and greater peace.
EMDR, thought field therapy, and emotional freedom technique are essential tools for healing. EMDR makes use of the intense eye-brain connection; TFT and EFT have a foundation in the ancient system of energy meridians that run through the body and that connect body with mind through consciousness. I have personally experienced powerful, fast improvements using EFT. Take a look at the website emofree.com and at Maggie Phillip’s book FINDING THE ENERGY TO HEAL: How EMDR, Hypnosis, TFT, Imagery and Body-Focused Therapy Can Help Restore Mindbody Health.
Vitamins and herbal supplements are worth exploring. There’s a lot of research done regarding fish oil supplements and how they enhance brain function. I’ve read that magnesium can help with anxiety. In Europe, St. John’s wort is often prescribed for depression, and it has fewer side effects but is just as effective as the common psychopharmaceuticals.
When I was in college, I had a lot of mood swings and dark moods, and I felt as if I were at their mercy. Those were alleviated radically when I did two things in grad school: 1, went off birth control pills, and 2, exercised vigorously and regularly. Running and lifting weights got my blood pumping. They also sculpted my body, which gave me feelings of accomplishment and self-esteem. Plus, they were just fun!
During my divorce, a time which was heart-wrenchingly painful and sad for me, I started doing yoga regularly. I can’t say enough positive things about yoga. It’s magical. It’s miraculous. Everyone should do yoga, (as long as your doctor agrees). One friend dismissed yoga by saying, “Oh, it soothes the mental body.” But, as I have always found, the mind and the psyche are completely interwoven! Anything like yoga that has such a profound and positive effect on my mental body, and a strengthening and limbering effect on my physical body, can only help my psychological body!
To feel good emotionally, it really helps to have the body feel good. So: eat good food. A chocolate bar here and there isn’t going to condemn you to depression. But, in general, eat food that remembers where it came from. Eat lots of salads, greens, veggies, and fruit. Eat whole grains and lean meats.
In my opinion, everyone should avoid highly processed foods, high fructose corn syrup, and additives like MSG. People with autistic children are starting to get the word out that a wholesome diet has a profound affect on those children. See Jenny McCarthy’s website generationrescue.org. I suspect that the American diet of high fructose corn syrup, sugar, caffeine, and diet soda is poisoning us into psychological and physical illness and obesity–and the FDA is too compromised by industry and big pharma to tell us that truth.
So: here are some recommendations for where to get started with alternatives. This is not a comprehensive list. Send me others; I’ll revisit this topic.

The Failure of Contemporary Psychotherapy

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I have blogged before on this issue: I am not a fan of contemporary psychotherapy. I’m not the only one who sees it as distorted; take a look at Bert Hellinger’s work.

For one, I have heard–I have not verified this, but I heard it from a trusted source with a PhD–that bran scan imaging shows that brains are re-injured after a traditional talk session. All that complaining about your mother and the traumas of your youth: stop it now. Spit it out once for catharsis, accept that you had a raw deal, and move on. Your brain will thank you.
Two, every shrink I know personally, outside the office as a private individual, is a complete wingnut. And I know several. Do they help others? I hope so. But they are, each and every one, so extremely nuts that it makes me wonder. I have a private image of a dance of insanities in the office.
Three, my observation is that therapy doesn’t build character and create happy, upstanding, generous-hearted people. Rather, it gives people justification to be selfish jerks. It seems to build self-involvement, the kind that arises from justifying any old nasty behavior on the basis of old wounds.
One woman I know who is a trained psychiatrist with a thriving practice is mean-spirited and unkind to other women–socially. I’ve experienced it, as have other women of my acquaintance. But there’s no discussing it with her. She immediately disappears into her own head in a tautological dream of her own mother issues. Which, frankly, no one but her is interested in. It’s a closed and airless system.
There is a fundamental flaw at the heart of contemporary psychotherapy the way it is currently practiced by so many therapists. That is, it is looking for excuses. It is looking to soothe narcissism rather than to build core values that lead to self-esteem and success.
By core values, I refer to 1, hard work; 2, self-discipline; 3, persistence; 4, deferred gratification; 5, kindness; and 6, personal honor. These are not glamorous, touchy feely fuzzy wuzzy notions that the aging children of the 60’s invented to prolong their adolescence. These are ancient, codified rules that have withstood the test of time.
Take a look at the Bible. The ten commandments are actually 14 or 15 imperatives, and I freely confess I’ve broken a bunch of them. To my own detriment every time. Here’s one I didn’t break (at least that I know!): “Don’t steal.” That picks up several of the core values mentioned above, like self-discipline, kindness, and personal honor. “Don’t lie about your neighbor” goes to the same values. “Don’t cheat on your spouse” goes to those same three, plus deferred gratification.
I didn’t observe the no-cheating commandment, and boy oh boy, do I wish I had. Not because I’m sorry my former marriage dissolved, but because I wish I’d accomplished that dissolution in a way that maintained the values I believe in, that continued to build me into the person I intend to be.
There are no short cuts. Self-esteem isn’t built from the outside, from your parents or your shrink or your community telling you that you’re a wonderful person. That feels real nice, sure. But the bottom line is that self-esteem is built from the inside, by doing the right thing, especially when it’s hard to do the right thing. Even when your parents, your shrink, and your community is telling you that you’re not a nice person for following the dictates of your conscience.
There is a difference between the quick thrill of immediate gratification, and the deeper, more intense sweetness of the long, slow road of integrity.
I think often of southpaw Jim Abbott, who was born without a right hand, and still became a pitcher in major league baseball. The internet says he pitched a no-hitter to the Indians in 1993, while he was a Yankee. Here’s a man who had every excuse in the world for NOT BEING A PROFESSIONAL ATHLETE. Contemporary psychotherapy would have let him off the hook a thousand ways to Sunday. But he didn’t fall for that load of crap. He worked hard, so hard he beat out thousands of gifted athletes with two whole arms, and became a pitcher for the Yankees.
I bet Mr. Abbott would have something to say about self-discipline, persistence, and deferred gratification.
There are no excuses.
I want to make it clear that I espouse the old values, but I dislike the old prejudices. I suspect that it was partly our collective attempt to be better people without the old prejudices that has led to the loss of the old values. But we threw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.
Gender, race, religion, and sexual preference are not the issue. They’re beside the point. Among gay and straight people, among black and white and yellow people, among Hindus and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Christians and atheists, there are people who practice self-discipline and honor and kindness, and people who don’t. Character is color-blind. There is a primary difference between external attributes, like skin color and sexual preference, and internal values, like honor and kindness.
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The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

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The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture

by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

My husband Sabin Howard (www.sabinhoward.com) and I are writing a book about sculpture together. He is a working classical figurative sculptor–think Michelangelo–and I am NOT a PhD.

I want to write this book precisely because I am not a PhD. I want to write it for the purest reason: because I love sculpture and it enhances life and I want to share this passion, and its uplifting effect, with everyone. Sculpture is too beautiful, too innately healing, too richly resonant of what it actually means to be human, to be monopolized by a few people with advanced degrees.

I stand for the democratization of art. This is precisely why I have such a strong aversion to post-modern art, which, with its emphasis on ugliness and alienation, has begged to be rejected by the ordinary person and embraced by the few who either 1, make money off it, or 2, get a PhD out of it.

I am here to tell you: art is not dead. Neither is God, for that matter. There’s a burdgeoning movement that is rediscovering both. Beauty, too.

Why do I call this book ‘The art of life’? Simple: when you pause and breathe and take in a sculpture, it brings you back into alignment with your deepest core self. It renews your Self. It deepens your experience of this moment now, of the presence, and Presence, in this perfectly imperfect moment of space-time. And isn’t that the practice of the art of life? It is for me.

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NEW REVIEW OF IMMORTAL, COMING IN JULY TO RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE

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NEW REVIEW OF IMMORTAL, COMING IN JULY TO RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE

In a recent National Public Radio spot on Dugald Steer’s Dragonology: The Complete Book of Dragons and other books in the Myth(ologies) series, an enthusiastic fourth-grade fan of those books remarked, “There’s sorta like a fiction way to learn real stuff.”  How true—and for adult readers wishing to plumb renaissance Italy while being thoroughly entertained, there is Immortal, Traci L. Slatton’s stunning debut novel set primarily in the majestic heart of Florence. Immortal sweeps across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as it follows the tumultuous life of Luca Bastardo, a beautiful blond-haired orphan boy who is kidnapped from a wretched life on the streets and plunged into an even worse existence as a prostitute by a murderous brothel-owner who surely ranks as one of the most vile characters in literature.

   Blessed with unnaturally keen senses, Luca’s salvation is his ability to free his mind and soar to calming places while he is forced to “work.” As time passes, others age, but not Luca Bastardo, who at twenty-seven still looks about thirteen.  Inventive and lush in the manner of author Anne Rice, Immortal explores the dividing line between the real and unreal, following Luca’s journey across time as he struggles to unravel the mystery of his birth and his ageless beauty while facing a difficult choice: immortality or the chance to find his one true love.

   Along the way, Luca survives the Black Death and the Inquisition and becomes intimates with such giants of the Renaissance as artists Giotto di Bondone and Leonardo da Vinci—150 years apart—not to mention Savonarola and Sandro Botticelli. A mix of art, religion, alchemy, and historical intrigue, Immortal is original and beautifully written, a true gift to the senses and an uncommonly good read.

Alana White
 
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Post Modern Irony isn’t worth the toilet paper to wipe it off our collective tushie…

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Post Modern Irony isn’t worth the toilet paper to wipe it off our collective tushie…

A sub-title could be, “How to make money off people who are afraid to appear stupid.”

There is an art movement afoot. It is a movement to bring back values to art. It is a movement to bring artistry back into art, artistry founded first on an aesthetic of beauty and truth, second on real craftsmanship, and third on an extraordinary grounding in, and comprehension of, the history of art and the great, seminal problems of form that were last faced with integrity by the likes of Gauguin. By “craftsmanship” I mean years of training, apprenticeship, focus, and hard work.

An artist should be better trained than a lawyer before he or she starts selling his creations.

The art movement is tentatively called “the new realists.” My husband Sabin Howard is one of them. There’s an off-shoot called “the slow art movement,” patterned on the “slow food movement,” which affirms the quality of food and the dining experience in a restaurant that doesn’t take shortcuts but takes the real time required to make the ultimate reduction, for example.

You can eat at MacDonalds, if you wish–but we all know it’s going to make you sick.

Speaking of MacDonalds. We’ve all been victimized by the scam artists of post-modernism. One hundred years ago, Marcel Duchamp did us all a disservice by foisting a urinal on us. Okay, for 2 seconds, there’s a surprising juxtaposition, a shock. Intellectual chicanery. But “they” are still doing urinals, one hundred years later. Shock value is over, guys. I guess it’s just hard to leave the ponzi scheme.

All these post modernist pieces that have garnered acclaim–Piss Christ, Dung Madonna, anything by Julian Schnabel–they have a few seconds of shock value. And nothing else. They have no sub-stratum of meaning or value, no connection to a historical continuum and the crucial dilemmas of composition and structure and light, to rest on. HOWEVER, art critics, PhDs, and museum curators like post modernist pieces because they can blather on about how important they are and RACK UP SALES. Folks, it’s about money–scam art–not real art.

Koons worked at the Met and saw how the trend was going. He’s a smart businessman, I’ll gladly give him that.  But he’s no artist, and he’s not creating art. And not just because he doesn’t actually make the stuff, he hires NY Academy students and kids in Italy to do it, either. (I hear he pays them $15 – $18 an hour.) It’s because the expensive chotchki’s he’s putting out there aren’t art.

Is it big business? Yes, but so was Bernie Madoff.

I congratulate Mary Boone and that ilk on their rat-like street cunning; I can admire a pickpocket with the best of them. They created a movement that they were able to perpetrate on people who were afraid to say, “The emperor has no clothes.” So many people have been afraid to denounce this crap for the crap that it is because those gallery owners and PhD students could BLAH BLAH BLAH them under the table. No one wants to look ignorant. And boy oh boy them salesmen and dissertation wonks can really talk! But the impact of visual art is visceral. The point is–the silent truthful ones weren’t ignorant. They were being railroaded by mercenaries.

Yes, your five year old kid can do something equally worthy.

There are no masterpieces of post modern art because the stuff isn’t worth the cardboard, dung, condoms, or lucite case that are used to make it. It’s ugly and valueless. The banal is only worth about five seconds of our time; Marcel Duchamp took up those five seconds. The fact that the National Endowment for the Arts funded this junk on the basis of freedom of expression is one of the great idiocies of our time.

Freedom of expression does not validate the ugly, the meaningless, the valueless. It’s still junk. It’s just junk that the NEA funded–to the shame of the USA.

Specifically, post modern art lacks beauty and truth. It lacks transformational power. It lacks the capacity to vault us out of the coma of our everyday life into a state of heightened awareness, heightened consciousness, greater compassion for the human condition, increased seeking for what is higher. Yes, it makes money for the brokers and museums who pawn it off on people. (I heard that the director of the Brooklyn Museum got a kickback for showing some of the junk; can’t say if it’s true, but it was told to me by an art critic who runs a foundation in Manhattan.)

Look for the new realists. Look for the guys like my husband Sabin Howard, and I guess Jacob Collins is one of them, and I really love John Morra’s work, who are taking the long road around to create something meaningful and real, something that addresses art with integrity. Something founded on an aesthetic of beauty and truth. They may not be the most popular people around, but hey, the doctor who told everyone to wash their hands before delivering babies got railroaded out of medicine. Go look at Frederick Hart’s work on the National Cathedral. I admire Burt Silverman’s portraits, too. Check out Daniel Sprick. I personally find Judy Fox’s sculptures cartoonish, but they’re cute. Worth looking at. She seems to be engaged in it and she’s competent.

Go find the artists who have studied their crafts for years, who are engaged in what art means on a daily basis. They’re there. One thing is for sure: your five year old can’t do anything REMOTELY like what they do.

These are the guys who deserve millions of dollars. I am convinced they will reach those heights–Michelangelo died a millionaire–and that the tide will turn as people get sick of meaninglessness and search again for values, meaning, beauty, and truth. We’ll find the Koons balloons in the garbage where they belong.

Last note: my husband looked at this blog and exclaimed, I’m not a realist. Then he said, Oh lord, they’re going to sue you. Just to clarify, this blog contains my personal opinions.