This poem was authored by Mary Oliver. I offer it here in gratitude. May you be blessed and inspired by her insightful words “… determined to do the only thing you could do – determined to save the only life you could save.“

After reading this poem consider sitting quietly in meditation … just breath … watch the passing of words, images, and emotions that float through your mind and body … draw a picture … write in your journal … play some music.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~Mary Oliver

In one twenty-four hour period three difference people—my psychotherapist, the stranger standing next to me as I took off my shoes at a meditation retreat, and a woman I met for the first time at a networking event—each recommended the same book to me. I believed the coincidence was meaningful; for some reason I was supposed to read this book! I promptly purchased and read the book (A General Theory of Love by Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2000) that initiated my on-going fascination with neurobiology.

This was not the first time something like this had happened to me: Before my trip to London many years earlier a friend suggested I take the book Zen and the Art of Archery (Herrigel, 1953) with me for the journey. I did not have time to purchase the book before my trip. A few days later, I sat under a tree in Queen Anne’s Rose Garden in the middle of London when a man who was jogging by stopped and asked me if I had read the book Zen in the Art of Archery. Creepy! Soon after I was walking the streets of Oxford looking for Balliol College (where I was about to start a course of study in Shakespeare performance) when I stumbled upon Blackwell’s Bookstore. It was there where I purchased my copy of Zen in the Art of Archery and another interesting title that caught my eye—The I Ching Workbook (Wing, 1979) or The Book of Change—a 5000-year-old oracle divination method. My lifelong curiosity with synchronicity was sealed in that moment.

An Introduction to Synchronicity

Carl Jung was also curious about synchronicity, a term he coined in a 1930’s lecture about the unusual psychological insights he gained from using the I Ching (Jung, 2010). Jung describes synchronicity as being about meaningful coincidences. In an infamous example of synchronicity offered in his essay On Synchronicity (2010) Jung discusses one of his clients—an educated young woman whose rational­istic approach to life seemed to imprison her. Jung hoped that something unexpected would happen to “burst her intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself” (Jung, 2010, p.109). Then one day the woman relayed her dream about a scarab when suddenly a large flying insect knocked against the windowpane from outside of Jung’s office; it was a scarabeid beetle. This event had the effect Jung hoped for—it broke through his client’s resistance and treatment was able to begin (Jung, 2010).

Jung believed there was more to the universe than cause and effect; synchronicity was about more than meaningful coincidence. Jung understood and wrote extensively about the phenomena of synchronicity as an explanatory principle that describes an underlying connection between events in time and space. He believed an acausal principle exists that explains an inherent connection between mind and matter or psyche and the phenomenal world. This underlying connectedness, according to Jung (2010), forms a field where synchronicities are born and thrive.

The Categories of Synchronicity

My personal experience with synchronicity is not limited to book recommendations from strangers. Other events range from dreams foretelling actual experiences in my life, dreams about experiences happening to people close to me, and what I sometimes refer to as somatic empathy—where I seem to experience the disowned moods, somatizations and thought patterns of people close to me. The latter is most pronounced in the way I tend to experience the presenting issue of a new and sometimes existing client the day before I see them.

The first time I recall my dreams tapping into another person’s private experience was in college. A young man I knew was spending a year studying abroad. I dreamed about a specific scene of him sitting by the water and writing in a journal as he struggled with an issue in his life. I wrote a letter to him about my dream with details about what seemed to be his struggle and other insights. None of this information I could have known prior to having dreamed it. Also, to the best of my knowledge, he was living away from the ocean and I was unaware of him keeping a journal.

A couple of weeks later I received a phone call from him, coincidentally on Valentine’s Day, the day he received my letter. He called to tell me the new foreign language word he learned that day which meant, connection. “We have that”, he told me. We talked further and I soon learned all the events in my dream about him had been exactly true.

Years later, after no contact with this man at all, I decided to move across the country. The night before my move I had coffee with a friend at a café she recommended and somewhere I had never been before. During our conversation she asked me if I thought I would meet my soul mate in my new city. I laughed and told her, “I hope so, because if he’s here he had better stand up and make himself known right now!” We laughed and I turned my head to see THE SAME MAN I HAD DREAMED ABOUT YEARS EARLIER standing behind me!

What I believe about this experience: I had been wondering to myself at the time what destiny I would be walking away from by moving and what destiny would come into view. Perhaps somehow my internal psychic experience paired with thoughts he had about his life path and this resonance contributed to us finding ourselves in the same place at the same time. In fact, not long after my move to the west coast I heard through a mutual friend he had moved to the east coast.

In his essay On Synchronicity, Jung shares numerous stories like mine that have been observed by many and recorded in large collections (2010). In studying this material Jung discovered the phenomena of synchronicity seemed to group together into three categories:

1. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a simultaneous, objective, external event that corresponds to the psychic state or content, where there is no evidence of a causal connection between the psychic state and the external event, and where, considering the psychic relativity of space and time, such a connection is not even conceivable.

2. The coincidence of a psychic state in the observer with a corresponding (more or less simultaneous) external event taking place outside the observer’s field of perception, i.e. at a distance, and only verifiable afterward.

3.The coincidence of a psychic state with a corresponding, not yet existent future event that is distant in time and can likewise only be verified afterward. (p.110)

Synchronicity and Science

Jung enjoyed conversations with Albert Einstein about the physics that may be related to synchronicity (Jung, 2010). Since that time, science has learned much more about the flowing web that seems to underlay the structure of the universe. For example, we now know that when two photons are separated by any distance, a change in one results in a change in the other. This supports what Jung believed–there seems to be a field of connectedness that binds mind and matter.

In an innovative experiment, researchers Jeanne Achterberg,Karin Cooke, Todd Richards, Leanna Standish, Leila Kozak, and James Lake (2005) studied the mind-matter-space phenomena in Evidence for Correlations Between Distant Intentionality and Brain Function in Recipients: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Analysis published in the American Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. In this study, participants were sent distant intentionality, also known as prayer or Reiki. In each trial the brain of the receiving participant lit up when studied under a functional magnetic resonance imaging protocol—proof that something was activated between one person’s psyche and another person’s body.

“A Wink from the Cosmos” is how writer Meg Lundstrom describes synchronicity in her May, 1996 magazine article in 
Intuition Magazine. Whatever it is—a wink, proof of the existence of G-d or a coincidence—I am aware that I feel good when synchronicity happens and I am aware of it’s inherent beauty in a way that makes me smile.

Warmly,
Karen

Photo courtesy of www.BeforeYouTakeThatPill.com

There is a brewing crisis in the mental health field: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders–the book that defines and organizes constellations of symptoms into categories with names we call a diagnosis is undergoing a revision. The reversion called DSM-5 (we are currently using the DM-IV published in 1994) is expected May, 2013. The contents of the revision will have widespread implications for the health, wellbeing, culture, and economics of our world for years into the future.

The publishers of the DSM-5–the American Psychiatric Association, are revising the manual with some degree of transparency. The preliminary draft may be viewed on their website where comments have been invited.

Of concern to me and to many of my colleagues is the revisions’ emphasis on the biochemical basis for human distress at the exclusion of other environmental, cultural, familial, spiritual, and social factors. To be dismissive of solid empirical research that attempts to expand our knowing of what it is to be human in favor of reducing phenomenal experience to the mere firing of neurons is narrow-minded. We are all whole people with a mind, body, and spirit that work together. Yet, in the current DM-5 revision proposal, for example, bereavement–a natural human process, is set to be labeled as major depressive disorder. This proposed effort to pathologize the natural grief response to loss is not only deeply disturbing, in my opinion, it will be unhelpful to the process of healing. The loss of a loved one, the loss of one’s health, a job, or a pet are all experiences that occur in the lives of healthy, engaged, and functioning human beings. To be in bereavement means we are living. Sometimes living hurts. The way to move through such an experience is to feel it. Rarely, if ever, must one medicate to heal grief.

The evolution of humanity calls on us to develop skill and competence to embrace our disowned parts. To split off human suffering as a biochemical process in disregard to solid empirical evidence that also acknowledges the complexity and texture of the transpersonal human experience is irresponsible. -Karen Gorrin

There is a petition circulating that expresses such concerns. This petition is sponsored by an impressive group: Society for Humanistic Psychology, Division 32 of the American Psychological Association, in alliance with Division of Developmental Psychology (Division 7 of APA), Society for Community Research and Action: Division of Community Psychology (Division 27 of APA), Society for Group Psychology and Psychotherapy (Division 49 of APA), The Association for Women in Psychology, The Society for Descriptive Psychology, and The UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).

I urge you to visit Open Letter to DM-5 and read the petition. If you are in agreement, kindly sign on in support of the petition to the DSM5 Task Force of the American Psychiatric Association and make your voice heard.

Warmly,
Karen

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

This was how I felt when John Lennon died: Grateful for growing up with the music that changed the world yet, needlessly stripped from the creativity that helped me to better know myself and my own potential.

Steve Jobs shared such an ability to create from nothingness–technology that we had never seen before but which was instantly familiar. There is a luminous quality about such innovation. I am deeply grateful to him for this, and at the same time I am deeply sad. Cancer. Yuck.

We will never know what other gems Mr. Jobs may have plucked from our collective unconscious and made real. I hurt. Only the early and senseless death of a true artist can stir this particular type of loss and grief.

The commencement speech Steve Jobs gave at Standford is re-circulating tonight. Below I share some of my favorite words from this speech and here is the link to the entire piece–just in case you have yet to watch it.

“I look in the mirror every morning and ask myself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” Whenever the answer has been, “No” for too many days in a row I know I need to change something. Remembering that I will be dead soon is the most important tool I have ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to loose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. Death is the destination we all share. Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old and makes way for the new. Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you want to become. Everything else is secondary.“

May you rest in peace, Mr. Jobs, and may your family and friends find comfort in their many memories of you.

Warmly,
Karen

I took this photo recently while visiting the campus at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Due to the long history this plant has lived it seems a fitting image for a post about history–a brief history of Integrative Psychotherapy.

We’ll start at the end: Integrative psychotherapy, sometimes referred to as eclectic psychotherapy, is the most frequently practiced therapeutic approach according to a recent study (Norcross, Karpiak and Lister, 2005).

How did we get here?

Sigmund Freud founded psychotherapy as a scientific investigation into the nature of the mind. The methods Freud developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries emphasized uncovering the unconscious aspects of the mind. This process became known as psychoanalytic therapy or psychoanalysis.

Probably the first integrative approach to psychotherapy occurred when French (1933) urged his psychoanalytic colleagues to account for the classical conditioning research findings conducted by Pavlov, which became the precursor to behavior therapy (Messer & Gurman, 2011).

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, according to Messer and Gurman (2011), several efforts to integrate psychoanalytic theory and learning theory emerged, the most influential of which was Psychoanalytic Learning Theory developed by Dollard and Miller (1950).

Psychoanalytic Learning Theory blended fundamental psychoanalytic concepts: unconscious motivations and conflicts—together with the learning theories of Hull, Spence, Tolman, and Mowrer (Klein, 2009). Traditional psychoanalysts and learning theorists resisted these integration efforts; others found inspiration in the mixed approach (Messer & Gurman, 2011).

By the 1960s efforts to explicitly blend two or more psychotherapy approaches were first published. Messer and Gurman (2011) detail these efforts, which focused on combining psychoanalytic and behavior models.

Yet, by the 1970s a new category of integrative psychotherapy emerged in the literature and became known as eclectic psychotherapy. Eclectic approaches often combined the theories of one approach with the techniques of another: In 1973 Feather and Rhodes began treating unconscious core conflicts with behavior methods like desensitization; in 1976 Lazarus went a step further by combining numerous techniques from many different theoretical orientations, an approach that he called multimodal therapy.

The culmination of this trend (Messer & Gurman, 2011) was the 1977 publication of Psychoanalysis and Behavior Therapy: Toward an Integration (Wachtel). The influence of this book on the psychology community paved the way for the 1980s explosion of the “technical, theoretical, and philosophical possibilities” (Messer & Gurman, p.427) of integrative psychotherapy.

In the early 1980s The Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration (SEPI; sepiweb.com) was founded and by 1991 the group began publishing their Journal of Psychotherapy Integration.

Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s the dialogue continued to evolve from a primary discussion of the integration of psychoanalytic and behavior approaches to new integrations that combined “cognitive, humanistic, experiential and family systems models” (Messer & Gurman, 2001, p. 428).

So, that is how we got here.

Recently, several authors have foretold the coming of a paradigm shift in psychology. Magnavita (2008), Anchin (2008) and Wolfe (2008) believe a shift is occurring that moves us beyond integrative approaches and towards the unification of many schools of psychological thought.

History is continuing to unfold. I look forward to what happens next!