Author Archives: Barry D'Souza

Encounters of the Novel Kind

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on May 9, 2024 1:52 pm

A clear ‘he can’t’, a muffled anger, not far off – a ‘no way’, he won’t do it…he won’t survive. All emanated from him. He was paralyzed. At least what he was then describing, seemed like paralysis and there was little chance in the compressed perception of self and life ahead, that he’d be able to take ordinary steps to find work. All was crashing down on him as procrastination and all amounted to – he had only to be angry at himself.

Their first baby had come in the spring. The experience of being new family with a colicky kid, which pushes even the angelic to the test, they could best describe as traumatizing. They struggled somedays to remember joy in the exhaustion and felt awful for the fact. By September, they were desperate, tired of screaming at each other at the worst of times, knowing they weren’t in control anymore, at the best of times. The distance they felt towards each other had really started to scare them. That is when they got in touch.

I worked with Henry and his wife for a very efficient six rounds of couples therapy. In the last one, the session that may have been entitled ‘breath in and breath out the trauma of the summer’, when it was his turn to be his wife in the ‘internalized other’ interview (this is when the couple get to answer as the other), the omission of his wife’s fear of death in childbirth, her not being able to walk for two weeks after, her trips to the hospital with malignant high blood pressure, was so glaringly total, that at the end of the exercise we all looked at each other, with a quarter smile of knowing solidarity. I would have sworn that each of the captions, I imagined above our heads, read the same!

“Yikes, you didn’t get that at all, where were you?”, was his wife’s and mine.

“Shit, I didn’t get that, something is really up with me” was his.

Needless to say, I wasn’t surprised when in the next week, he asked for a few personal one-to-one sittings. The reality was this. Henry couldn’t find the time to grieve through that summer when his little girl arrived. He was in the throes of a male postpartum depression by identity and by circumstance. Identity loss, the crashing sound of ‘this is who I am’, his mind swallowed whole at any given present. His work world had imploded, the time had appeared nigh to set out on his own entrepreneurial path and give in his resignation. Now we were nine months down the road since he left the company he had worked for fifteen years.

Henry had built that place into what it was, he said with pride which explained the confidence behind quitting even though the baby was on its way. He had counted on being sought out, that the emails enquiring about his next steps would roll in, that he was somebody in the gallery business, that he’d surely be hunted after. He understood the summer would be absorbed by the baby and family, but he figured there’d be a rejuvenating and rebooting. He planned to launch a start-up company by the year’s end. Fair enough calculation, considering they were two parents to one baby and there’d be various family coming through the summer to the various homes they rented in France and Spain. But, the genesis of new family existence threw him, with it came an unexpected void that baby and his loving wife couldn’t save him from, except for those fleeting afternoons when they picnicked under the tree in the warm sun, it might have seemed to him, another reason to feel bad.

In the first one-to-one Henry took me back to his conviction as a young man, declaring how ‘I can’t take over the family business’. He crushed their hearts, he said of his parents. But, he would die were he to have done otherwise. He couldn’t do their business. He knew that then. There was something similar now. I pictured the amygdala doing its

brain configuring of the being trapped, about not being able to grow. To be or not to be free, is not a question. There is no not being free.

Something was different the next time I saw him. He was seeing and feeling an acceptance that now is not the time after all to start his own company but couldn’t understand why he wasn’t able to apply for any jobs in someone.

‘I am a self-made man’, he declared in a clear moment of confidence and I felt what this was meaning to him. I repeated it back to him several times, so that it was plain to see – ‘you are a self-made man! ‘I don’t know if you felt that just now,’ I said.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘When you said self-made, I felt something…Like that is it. That is you!’ He looked quizzically at me but I could see that he wanted to smile into being recognized and wanted to talk about this more.

Yes, there were pressures in life. From his family background and his education, one always works. From his future, his being 40+ years made him fear ahead to another next time, perhaps fifteen years down the road and the prospect of being out of work again then. He doesn’t want to be stuck, to have a “cap”, a ceiling above his head, to be bound to any life situation where he doesn’t feel alive and good in his work. Fair enough.

And work was important purpose in life. Henry had mentioned an identity crisis before on a few occasions. This could understandably hold anyone back from taking the next step. Who is it that is taking the next step?

There can’t be procrastination when you aren’t sure what is next, and the feeling guilty for not doing, when you don’t know what it is next that you should be doing, seems like something to see it for what it is. He mentioned feeling guilt for 40 minute nap he had taken in the afternoon the day before. There was so much out there in the work field that was changing fast. He knew there were many areas where he wasn’t sure about. He had been studying for his self-directed course in AI, wanting to learn about Chat GpT and found himself tired. Such was the context of the unforgivable nap.

‘There is no ceiling to learning’, putting that out there. ‘I wonder what Chat GpT might say to you in your predicament?’

‘How is that?’

‘What does a self-made man, with a nature and character, that needs to be free and to grow in their work, do when they reach a point at 40years old where they’re uncertain about what is next for them, feel a little vulnerable and are unclear how to proceed on generating ‘good feel’ momentum?’.

He smiled, motioned to grab something and asked me to repeat the question.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Tearing Her Apart, Bone From Bone, Part 1

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on August 25, 2023 1:15 pm

She suddenly looked very uncomfortable, like she might need to be sick. Her breathing was exasperated and she fidgeted in the chair. She shook her head with the reality. Whatever it was, overwhelm had begun to take possession. She asked if she could go there and pointed to the corner of the office.

‘Of course,’ I said in a manner where it seemed the perfectly natural request. She leapt over to the corner, lowered herself to the floor, covered her head with her arms, and shielded me from the sight of her, as if she were protecting me. She started to cry. I looked at her for a moment, then turned away, giving her the moment. She cried and shook her head in paroxsymal release for the next half hour. I looked away into the courtyard, occasionally checking back.

I thought of the ‘political’ ascetics, that great male lineage who once sought a rational religion and to bring fundamental change to Indian society. Ramakrishna Paramhansa, who had put (Bhakti) joy into the life practice of yoga – people need to feel the relationship to the “higher’“ otherwise they won’t switch from idolatry. Vivekenanda, his disciple, who brought yoga and its philosophic message to the World Religions Conference in skyscrapers Chicago. Setting up the East-West dialectic was good globalization. Later the ‘Great Soul’ Gandhi spoke to how Vivekenanda lit the path to his own experiments with the truth. Modernising challenge to the masses, hard act to follow. Awakening to the modern world, they peered into the mirror the British held and saw clear reflection of the inhumanity to women. At least the Imperials didn’t send their widows to their fiery euthanasia, indenture their young girls into future marriages of servitude, or hide away the fully formed adults like some treasure on guard from men without prescribed entitlement. What was this young woman going to add to the story, on behalf of other Indian women, no doubt?

Nothing in my flight of imagination meant a diddle to her, I knew. Nothing of what those spiritual men pointed to in their politics had ever filtered a drip into the lifeworld she inhabited in her village India, seventy years on. She who sobbed in my office, absorbed in painful anguish. She who was hoping that I didn’t see her or was wishing that she’d disappear. This was an early session. This wasn’t ‘Me too’ in India. This was ‘we just don’t count the same’ as I saw it more correctly.

She was a young art student who talked about the violence inside. She described hitting her brother, violence to her father. She spoke to wanting to fight, of wanting to take up kickboxing while she was Paris. But she was ashamed of how she was feeling and kept looking away. She was filled with shame. She had been told that she was crazy all her life, reprimanded for not acting like a proper girl. She was a disappointment to everyone, she confided. The same grandmother, whom she tried to urge off the verandah when the was 6yrs.old, lamented her birth for weeks. She was born a girl!

She hated that grandmother. I could see why. Abuse each in their own way come uncle, come grandfather, come ‘cousin brother’, followed her through life. It was like she was wanting to say ‘fuck them all’, but those were my words. If the discernment was present, she lacked the vocabulary or the experience of speaking and of anyone being interested. If she knew what to say, she lacked the encouragement, the space to say it. I wondered if society back home would ever listen. Would family who really needed to hear it ever listen, give her space and love her at the same time, respect her as human being, no matter what. What would be helpful? We’d take our time. She’d let me know.

I wondered if she’d like to draw Freireian codifications for the next session. For those who might not know, Paolo Freire figured these conceptualisations, the sketched triptych of past structural violence, helped encourage people to talk about the horrific and unspeakable. Such drawings had helped communities in Brazil and beyond talk about their internalised oppression. She was an artist! Maybe they could serve her to get the words. They might serve me in responsible, attuned, enlightened and kind, activist therapy. Of course, careful – no (further) harm where there is trauma. Sure, there was deep and complex trauma. Of course, India is an ancient culture unbudging in its patriarchy. We’d see together what emerges, digest and metabolise slowly, no enzyme, no rush. We’d see together how to proceed against the systemic of south India here in Paris. Prep for an eventual return to the far off homeland. Begin by trying to story the past she carried to the corner of the office. She’d do well in perceiving the violence she had lived in different lights. Therapy is a kaleidoscope, I thought.

“Such powerful depictions!” My turn to shake my head. I took some time to register their effects. “Can you tell me a little about what is happening here in this one?” She looked at me. A determination formed in her face. She nodded knowingly.

“I would like to tear India apart, bone from bone,” she began and let out a pranic generating sigh. I wondered about those male ascetics again and imagined what they’d have to say to what I was hearing.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Sometimes I Just Want to Cry Out

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on April 14, 2023 3:24 pm

The pit in her stomach began to appear April 2, 2020.  She spoke of all that she was tending to.  The stress of preparation and anticipation anxiety of the ‘death do they part’.  What is that pit saying, trying to say, I wondered.  I wondered if she had been listening to her body.  I guess maybe in her own way. My wondering out loud became her own wondering check-in loop.  Trying to put words to the pit.  Months later when she returned, the pit had become something more real for her when it manifested as an acid reflex.

Sometimes I want to just cry out,” she had pumped her arms anxiously in the moment, to show me.  It wasn’t triumph, I saw the human in her.  There was the ‘what will I do?  How will I live without him? The summer and fall came and went.  It was nice to hear from her again.

« I have heard that yogis can control their heart rate and blood pressure. It feels like I can feel the acid swelling within.”  What the yogis do is like biofeedback.  It is said in yogic terms, control your breath, live life with full awareness agency.  We can all practice that feedbacking awareness.  Imagine that you offer a gentle rub to the gurgling acid just as it might seem to be popping the herniated membrane.  It might be calming.  She nodded, “but who really knows”. 

Who really knows.  She was fascinated and importantly, all caught up on the possible research on his behalf, including a second opinion with one of the leading oncologists in the field, so why not turn to the acid reflux pit in her stomach and hear what it is saying!  There’d be time for her.  Not in the final sense, just in the sense, there wasn’t anything else she could do!  She was grateful that their lives had been as normal as they had been.  She’d been able to do all that keeps her happy, while looking after him.

Now, the eve of a trip back home, not knowing what it might hold, he was losing weight, he had lost a lot of weight and we sat in silence a moment and I think, I sighed.  She took the cue.

The pit in my stomach is not so much the ‘this is getting to me’” as it is ‘how will I do? and how will life be on her own?’.  It could be an experiment reading her body signs.  She is seeing that engaging a mind-body dialogue and awareness could be helpful towards self-knowledge.  She could count her blessings.  She could feel a terror.  The arms pumped in the air again.  This time there was an inaudible shrieking.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Our Words, What Is Said and How They Ring Home

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on April 5, 2023 12:14 pm

“So the harmony is hard to come by this past week?” I said to client #1. The next week, he came back quite upset as he had upset his wife – he had taken home the question and spoke to the ‘harmony’ with his wife !  Sessions later, he reported his wife was upset with me.  He didn’t say it as such, but I presumed that she felt I was putting ideas about harmony into his head.

“Just now, when you said you wish for the strength to not cower, I had this picture of you pulling out and cracking open a can of spinach!” I shared with client #2.  He laughed and motioned to do the emptying of the can and gulping like Popeye.  Needing some strength at the right moment, a confidence booster.  Within a few sessions he was more at ease with the fact that he was “working up to it”, building his courage, wanting to confront his fear so that he could be in contact with her.

The things that pass through the mind.  The things we say to our clients!  The things we say – part of our presence and engagement; part of our “countertransference” in the lexicon of some; part of our appreciation of what is seeming to be the case, the reality.  The things we say – part of the imaginal effort to connect that which in the layering of experience are potentially useful ways clients might see the things.  And how do we know when it is skillful use of ourselves, when we share back with clients?

These two clients I reference, male, both in the ‘young old’ of early retirement, were both similarly confronting themselves as partners, similarly experiencing their wives as “scary”, both for valid, but different reasons.  Both clients were taking therapy in the good stride of personal exploration and open to insights on how to make shifts in how they are and what they want to live or are not wanting to live in their relationships anymore.  Both had a sense of humour and seemingly feeling humour helpful to ease toward the not so easy of themselves or of life situations at home. Both were open to seeing the relevance of the ‘not-so’ adaptive child, in Terry Real perspectives, at work in themselves or in their partners, in their couple dynamic.  This background I hope is a little helpful to what I want to say about the things we say to clients, how we say them and when we say them.

I gave voice to those two passing thoughts and as such they became interventions with a powerful impact.  I don’t see client #1 anymore and my guess is because I might have helped bring out that which was there, that which he couldn’t quite get out himself, and perhaps he as regards to his couple, was not wanting to topple the balance.  I think as a therapist that sometimes we are performing a “conversational analysis”, something linguistic anthropologists do as they aim to understand semantic meaning.  Reading between the lines, a practice that one can do responsibly, checking-in for resonance.  As therapists, we help clients hear themselves, their feelings and put words towards a fuller awareness.  Typically, and humbly I should say, I feel good about the ease, comfort and safety of the space that I construct with clients.  I have come to trust how I am with clients, what I want to try to say, how I might come out with it, the “relational” sharing of my experience of the client.  But how do I know sometimes?

‘I really enjoyed that ‘trying to build up my faith in myself’ from last time, client #2 said and he had softened his view from the high-pressured one, where he was “pathetic” and “frozen”, and kept having secondary emotion states of being upset at himself for not being able to do what his wife wanted him to, that is to stay in contact with her, no matter what, ‘til death do us part’.

I finish this blog reflection by sharing some ancient wisdom about “right speech”, coming from my life practice as Buddhist.  I note what I say in my clinical notes! I note what I found myself wanting to say, but, didn’t!  I read over my notes in prep for the next session and submit what I “did” or “didn’t say” to the following reflective self-query:

  1. Is it Factual and True?
    -This is 1st person client, 2nd person therapist, 3rd person ‘objective’ to get at the factual/true axis
  2.  Is it Divisive? Or Will it be Connecting?
    -Can our speaking promote harmony, good feeling of connection or understandin
  3. Is it Harsh? Or is it Gentle?
    -Want ‘kindness’ to be intention-orientation and to abandon speech that isn’t ‘heartful
  4. Is it Beneficial?
    -The acronym WAIT or ‘Why Am I Talking?
  5. Is it the Right Time to Speak?
    -The proper time is linked to compassion for the “other” and where the client is at and could take in what we would want to say.

By: Barry D’Souza




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Cultivating the ‘We’ in Us as Individuals

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on November 4, 2022 12:20 pm

Harmony, disharmony and repair”, the natural trajectory within all couple life!  A reassuring proposition for couples and a real ‘dawning upon’ of sorts for me.  It was the Terry Real Deal, this Relational Life Therapy, I thought.  The webinars and the weekly email feeds that came special offer with buying Us online, made for a very familiar American-sized, larger than life, commercial element.  But, no matter, this was ‘good news’ and we therapists always need a stimulating read and a bit of useful soul searching in the down time of our holidays.  His reminder of a paradigm shifting from ‘I, me mine’ to the ’we/us’ was heart-lightening, hitting home.  We had just gotten married – why not bring Terry along with us on our so-called honeymoon and see where that sharing would go?

Off we went this summer to the Italian and French Alps, the four of us – Nessie, our young border collie, Sophie, “Terry Real” and me.  By the time, we got to the foothills, we had listened to the first two webinars and had shared on our ‘adaptive child’ triggers, speaking to that truism about couples work and their outcomes – that each partner has a shared amount of personal work to do in parallel.  Mine included ‘feeling bad about myself’ and ‘doing what I had to be appreciated’ before evaluations and ‘scheming to be free inside’ before emotional demands or manipulation.  This was part of my adaptive child at work!  But hadn’t I evolved?  Was I really doing similar things in our disharmony?  Was I really going into “you vs. me” as I sought to be heard and appreciated.  Did I lose sight of my ‘wise adult’ and track of the ‘we’ in our dynamic themes of couple disconnect.  I know I didn’t want to! Terry was taking us back to an honest reflection on what might be at work inside, when we, Sophie and I, left our ‘harmony’.

I got to thinking about how some in their religious traditions do pre-marital courses, about how some of the most important life skills, like how to be a ‘good partner’ in relationships are never really taught in school systems during the requisite sex education classes, how culturally, we seem to have to self-help ourselves through everything, how that process that can feel so alone and how we might abandon the ‘good’ practices because we don’t see the motivation of the “we” collective!  It really was a lovely holiday this August.  The long hikes in the mountains were bountiful with calm, beauty and a novel sharing for us as couple.  It was good bonding.

So this blog is a little “do what I did and see for yourself shout out” to therapists who work with couples.  A little preventive work, putting yourself in the shoes of your couples,you might think of it!  Do as you might want or suggest to your couples.  Expand your relationship mindfulness around some of the elements Terry suggests are useful, like those five strategies the ‘human’ adaptive child quite typically turns to: ‘being right’, ‘controlling your partner’, ‘practicing unbridled self-expression/venting’, ‘retaliating against your partner’ and ‘withdrawing from your partner’ (Real: 2022, p.190).  It is likely you’ll see yourself with a little reflective mindfulness of your couple.  Some compelling bibliotherapy and a valid depiction of an imperative to repairing our couples – cultivate the “we” in us as individuals.

References

 Real, Terry. (2022) Us: Getting Past You & Me to Build a More Loving Relationship

Goop Press: New York




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Understanding Client Lifestyles: The Case for Apathy

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on August 22, 2022 3:55 pm

Understanding Client Lifestyles: The Case for Apathy

This blog concerns the importance of client perspectives, experience and agency in a gentle therapy of discovery and mindfulness-based living alternatives

Clive, a 21 yr. old client, visiting his mother and Paris from UK for a short, few months, was suffering panic attacks.  The ‘earthquake-like’ grip and distress of the panic, was shutting down his ability to go to university, function socially and carry on normal everyday life.  And the apathy by which he declared he lived his life, in the first session, would work no longer.

Meds provided him the necessary in-panic remedy and cushion.  In the first weeks of our work together, mind-body ‘data taking’ got us on the same page and some anxiety tool and technique building began to relieve his panic suffering.  He wasn’t alone with his suffering in the same way, and as such the exploration of apathy as a lifestyle began.

Clive described an anger that was raw and dangerous.  It is like ‘I want to kill everyone I see’.  His was a life filled with violence – bullying, fights, multiple attempts to run him over by car.  Apathy served to keep the innocents he encountered alive.

At 10 yrs. old he was measured by a psychologist to be depressed, but the diagnosis was brushed that aside as he was deemed too young to be depressed.  Clive described his depression as an emptiness that could and would consume him to the point of ‘I want to kill myself’.  Sure, he had thought about suicide the solution, many times, but again apathy served him.

At the core of what Clive suffered the most, and for which his apathy served the best was the chronic physical pain, which punctuated numerous stretches of his body in excruciating scale.  Since a young age he walked on the ball of his feet in order to avoid pain.  An hour’s walk up the hill with his knapsack on his back and he’d writhe motionlessly on the couch in silent agony.  A therapist once told him about body scans being good biofeedback.  Clive quickly put an end to those, since they amplified the awareness of how messed he was and how his own body was source of so much pain.  This physical pain was reaching new paralytic proportions with the recent car accident.  Frankly I couldn’t quite fathom how such a young person could live with so much pain.

Clive’s inner life was vast, rich, and purposeful.  Apathy was ‘good company’ and the ‘go to’ mode that Clive had long nurtured in coping with his life.  Apathy was atmospheric and all-consuming, he explained, like Newton’s ether.  Apathy kept others and kept himself alive.

But, apathy, he knew and I could see, numbed him into an alexithymic existence, without feeling, without being able differentiate what’s nice or good, without being able to distinguish past or present, or joy.  You can imagine what that means for a 21 yr. old at the start of his life.

Time came for him to go home.   He couldn’t vow, since apathy would allow him to, but he did think he’d visit the local boxing club to see about discharging some of the anger.  He couldn’t really feel it when, but he was starting to see that he counted.  He’d try to keep to short daily sessions of meditation, towards differentiating between actually wanting to kill and the expressive adding-on that was understandably secondary to his physical pain.  In September when university resumed, he would try and make an effort to be social and to not be so alone.  Like that he’d try something other than apathy to cope with life as he knew it.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

When is it Enough?

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on November 13, 2020 9:19 am

TW: Sexual Violence

Being a Human-Centred, multi-cultural relativist and feminist informed, Emotion-Focused Therapist, working with an Integral Psychotherapy perspective means walking closely with clients on their path of trauma recovery, trying to keep in-step and sensing where they are going.  With what they feel they need, can manage, want to explore further, and when safe and ready all act as signposts along the journey.  But what happens when they go deep into the varied experience of their fellow women who upwards of 1 in 3 in the U.S. have suffered sexual violence.

            She is a client that I have known for nearly 8 years and the first session after a COVID summer began with a short list of new developments. Firstly, we explored her feelings of uneasiness surrounding her young son who now walked by himself to school.  There was some reference to a feeling of a growing distance to her long-distance boyfriend which had been previously mentioned.  Then the work of the day appeared. She was looking for her blueprint within which to place her own experience.  She hadn’t yet found it, but she definitely had explored the possibilities through a range of soul destroying examples, as I was about to find out.  My flinching inside warned me!

            Three years prior, she woke up to being sexually assaulted by a boyfriend.  The week before the session had been the anniversary of the awful violence, and troubling memories, the rest of her PTSD sequelae, along with a mounting distress that it was overtaking her ability to work were all re-emerging from their mind-body dormancy.  She had been looking high and low for a blueprint, figuring this might help.  I was there to bear witness and share like I always did with this client, what was coming up for me as she processed her way through the things.  By the way, she is longstanding client of more nearly 8 years and we’ll we have a very great working relationship – she knows that I will just be myself as therapist and it is ok.  This is by now, one of the elements that is helpful, she keeps telling me, in one way or another.  But what do I do about my internal flinching?

            Hers wasn’t as she read in the memoir of woman who at 12 years old was led out to a forest by a boy and was gang raped. Hers wasn’t like the woman in that wartime novel – raped by a Nazi soldier. Hers wasn’t any of the brutal rapes in various series she’d followed on Netflix. I wondered how she was managing such exposure and shared that I was feeling ‘my own’ anxiety, listening to her and could only imagine what was stirring in her experience.  ‘I admire your empathetic research.  But are you ok, it is enough?’

            “I am ok, but it is hard!”




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

Schrodinger’s Cat in Couples Therapy

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on March 2, 2016 4:29 pm

Today I was working with a young couple who like most at a point in the early family and career-making stages of life, struggle to come to terms with the stress, pain and loss associated with transitions. It was the second session and the young, European couple, of mixed national backgrounds, began to reveal how their thinking was past and future orientated in so many ways.

My hunch about the couples therapy at that moment emerged – they were going to the past of who they were when they originally met to soothe themselves about the frustrations about where they were now (feeling stuck as individuals) and as result as a couple, feeling increasingly unhappy together. My hunch emerged further – their persons and personalities, to each other, had undergone extensive “flattening”, as the blame thrown to the other for what was going wrong for them and in their couple mounted.

I found myself in the session trying to reach out to feel the frustration of who they were as individuals and at the time, I felt this to be the ‘work’ of the moment. (note: it may be something of model reminder for work with individuals with a contemporary, western cultural background and experience, that the order to consider is individual frustration first, couple frustration second). As I started thinking of my couple as individuals needing to hear, feel and see each other again, it came to me – Shrodinger’s cat, the thought experiment in theoretical physics!

No expert on the matter, the idea that we never know the state (i.e. dead or alive) of cat in the box until we open it, and that we effectively have to imagine and consider the cat inside, as being anywhere in a continuum of alive to dead in the box, to really live the quantum reality, became an interesting metaphor. I didn’t explain it to them in the 54th minute of what was to be 1.5hr session, but, I suddenly knew what I felt could be useful – a little reminder that the other is wife/husband, woman/man, each a career professional, each a social being, each with a worldview, each with individual needs and a personal path (that is spiritual even if you let it be).   At the time we didn’t’ exactly do what I am proposing as a potentially fresh new couple’s therapy intervention. That is, each in the couple take turns viewing the other as the cat in Shrodinger’s box, observing the other in a continuum of themselves and all that they are or might want to be. The forgetting of this is problematic to the individual, man or woman, same sex etc. and the intervention designed to promote the summoning of the individual in more full view, may be restorative to a couple’s communication, fruitful to a compassionate understanding and accepting of the other’s needs, while it promotes a critical self-evaluation of how the man/woman has ‘othered’, ‘gendered’, ‘boxed-in’ the other as part of their couple narrative.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

How To Make Meaning of Political Violence Directed at Innocent Civilians When it Hits Your Home in Paris on a Random Friday Night?

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on November 18, 2015 4:05 pm

Please note that this blog article was written on November 16th

EiffelTowerThe title of this blog entry follows what I wondered as I came home on the TGV this morning. When the carnage began to unfold Friday night, I was hosting my therapist meditation group. It was only when my son-in-law who texted me to check that I was alright much later – he’d heard of me going to the Bataclan to see concerts many times before – that I had any inkling of war coming to Paris.

I turned on the TV and began to watch news coverage of what was a momentary hiatus in the bloody assault as I cleaned up plates from the potluck that we have after our blissful meditations. I thought, this is the essence of shock! Parisiens, in all variations from the “furthest away” of thinking that anything like that could possibly happen in our streets – were being pulled into something very awful of which only the first few dimensions were perceived.

Most of the restaurant killing had been completed but there were hundreds of hostages in the concert hall. I stayed awake as long as I could. Casualty figures were modest at 1am, but, I knew that when I woke, countless of those hostages would be among the freshly dead that Paris would mourn. When I had to go to bed I felt some nibbling guilt – for weeks I had had plans to catch up with an old friend down in Montpellier. I had a train to catch the next morning. Already, I wasn’t the slightest aware of the killing as it happened, and then when the rest of my Paris would start to reel, I’d be away.

This weekend, as I realized the randomness of who happened to be in the places where ISIS chose to slaughter, and felt amongst other things, political worries for what would come next, I yearned for many things. I wanted to have an expression of solidarity with those who lost their lives, their families and those who just felt the pain of the meaning of Friday night in Paris. I wanted to commemorate all of those who were unknown to me and to whom up until Friday were living their ordinary lives. I wanted to feel a little vicarious pain, imagine and connect with the loss, from all sorts of personal angles.

With the friends in Montpellier, amidst our ‘catching-up’, we shared on many aspects of the human side of processing. Sunday afternoon, when it was so beautifully blue skied, sunny and warm, I went for a walk, sat in the Parc de Peyrou and falling into a sublime moment of peace, felt no nibbling of guilt. Coming together as friends, as a group, as societies, to feel and to make gestures confirming our humanity is part of the meaning-making in the short term, I am sure. We Parisiens might do well to take our time here. Attempts to make more absolute meaning of Friday, November 13 in Paris, in what is the long, ideological war of attrition between opposite sides of the war on/of terrorism, (where civilian casualty and trauma is bountiful), might end up choosing anger and fear as the basis for a response…not that anger and fear are not understandable and rightful responses just now. So here then is my immediate decision to make meaning of weekend events over the longer term – I hope to be a ‘present’ force of humanity-confirming senses in the midst of crazy violence.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA

A Yoga Psychotherapy!

Posted by: Barry D'Souza on September 28, 2015 9:00 am

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I would like to take the next few blogs to enunciate ideas for a novel union of which in the coming months, if all goes well, I’ll begin to have an actual experience of what I am proposing here today. The yoga psychotherapy group that will begin, I figure, as an affordable ‘meet-up’, hosted early Saturday mornings, is to be an experiential process group whose design aspires to the creation of new spiritual culture simultaneous to usual work in group psychotherapy. So first in this blog – why a Yoga Psychotherapy?

For many in the West, life is mechanized, sedentary, less original and lacks higher purposes. The epidemiology of addictions, physical disease, various emotional or mental health issues, social isolation, existential angst and malaise are symptomatic of how westerners approach modern life.   Positively speaking, more are seeking out the collaborative support of psychotherapists in confronting troubling personal issues. This trend correlates with two further emergent themes: one, a greater motivation to tackle personal emotional, cognitive or lifestyle obstacles to healthier and happier lives, and two, a lessening of the stigma attached to working with a therapist and growing awareness of the potential support, ‘good’ and discovery that such work can mean. Additionally, people are making links between what they feel to be ‘gaps’ in contemporary western culture in providing adaptive skills for a changing world and what seems to be suspiciously missing from daily life. Stretching the speculation even further, some may be intuiting a connection between ‘what’s up’ and what the historian, Karen Armstrong, called a “god-hole” in their personal lives (Armstrong: 1993).

In light of contemporary trends, the integration of a system of traditional yoga theory and practice into a model or an experience of psychotherapeutic interventions at the level of lifestyle change, while including a mindful focus on ‘meaning in life’ processes means a ‘punctuated’ step forward in the evolution of western psychotherapy. The west is eager and the time is propitious for therapists to look to the world of yoga in supporting clients. So I feel these days.

Yoga provides the basis for a spiritual-existential paradigm in counseling psychotherapy that on a personal level could help create an individual experience of life that is energized, derived from a profound sense of wellbeing and directed towards living purposefully. On both personal and socio- cultural levels, yoga psychotherapy reinvigorates the connection, belonging, love and compassion in a community as it supports clients in facing the variety of challenges that life delivers.  And as we therapists know – we are all clients!

In the history of spiritual insights and attempts to spiritualize psychotherapy in the west, Yoga Psychotherapy presents a paradigm shift towards spirituality-inspired counseling. The Vedanta and Yoga theory fuses the mind/body and soul into a compelling explanation and approach to human psychological and spiritual development. The essence of all yoga psychotherapeutic interventions is this holism.

So I will say this for now and continue next month with a little more on Yoga Psychotherapy. If any of my fellow therapists have any questions, comments or want to learn more before the next blog, please feel free to get in touch at [email protected]

References

Armstrong, Karen. History of God. Ballantine Books: New York. 1993.




*The views expressed by our authors are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the CCPA