My dissertation research will look at what hopefully will be a novel intervention for individuals suffering from substance use disorders.  The intervention will be integrally-informed.  I am experimenting with blogging some parts of my thinking about my research as I develop it.

My research question has three parts at the moment:
    1) What sort of objective change is produced in participants in this 8-week group-based process?
2) What is the lived experience of individuals as they go through the process?
3)What is the relationship between the level of development of participants and their lived experience and/or outcomes of the intervention?

More to come...

Hello there:
I wanted to announce an effort by a couple of integral colleagues / connections of mine, that I feel has and will have great merit!  It is an online publication (blog) called "The Integral Christian".  Main contributors at the moment include Joe Perez, Jim Marion and Chris Dierkes, all of whom, among other things, are proven writers.

These folks' level of spritual development -- in particular their ability to address both states and stages when discussing spirituality -- is significant, I believe.

Integral frame: News can be good news or bad news, and probably most often is both, when viewed within a nuanced set of perspectives that includes attention to depth.  Purely off the cuff, however, this seemed like good news to me...

"America's per capita divorce rate has declined steadily since its peak in 1981, dropping by one-third to its lowest level since 1970. Divorce rates in England and Wales have fallen as well. (source: AP 07/05/10)"

Integral Practice has a great run through of whether or not I-I could be considered to be organized in a cult-like manner.

"Vitality is how self-actualization feels" (1970)

In my childhood, I was sometimes lonely and would cope by detaching from my feeling state and becoming as purely cognitive as I could, working away at abstract games and such.

I no longer wish to do that...

Therefore, I wish to recognize the felt sense of that "ol' dissociation feeling"...which comes up when working alone at my desk these days...and really feel into it...to feel is to heal, in this case...

In January I particpated in a conference call with Ken Wilber on the chapter on the shadow from Integral Spirituality.  The audio from a portion of our conversation is posted on the Integral Spiritual Center website this week.  (Note that this is a subscription site).  My question was regarding possible shadow elements in Andrew Cohen's teaching, as related to a comment that Andrew made around the idea that development involved "transcending and excluding"...Ken responded by focusing on theoretical aspects related to the integral psychology model, in particular ladder-climber-view.  He clarified that in the course of development the structures of the ladder are included, but the view at each step excludes the views from the lower steps.  Makes sense when you think of climbing a ladder.  You don't see the same thing from five steps up that you do from three steps up.

I would have liked to hear a more specific discussion of possible shadow elements in Cohen's approach in general, but Ken noted that he only makes public statements about shadow issues with respect to two teachers, Chogyam Trungpa and Adi Da.

An earlier portion of the dialogue that involved speaking about Mind and Life Institute was really helpful for me, but this part was not included in what was posted.

I will evolve this post a little over-time, but please contribute as you see fit! (Cross-posted to the integral psychotherapy pod)

Last week, I attended three days of a national counselling conference here in Vancouver, Canada. A highlight was listening to a leading local therapist named Patricia Wilensky, widely regarded in these parts as a master clinician. Among other areas, she specializes in group work, but particularly in working with shadow elements of individuals via therapeutic enactment – an updated form of psychodrama. She has written a book on therapeutic enactment with my supervisor, Marv Westwood.

One compelling item she discussed (she is an indidivual who seems to really hold the attention of folks!) was the necessity of therapists to “bring the shadow into the room”, for therapeutic purposes, but also to avoid vicarious traumatization as therapists. Finding ways to broach the unsaid, such as feelings of shame – so common for both clients and counsellors – is important. Other ways are through use of humour, active imagination – well, please feel free to respond with more!

In the context of integral psychotherapy, I believe we need to add two more items that need to be brought into the room. Together, perhaps, these three constitute “three pillars of integral psychotherapy” (I am borrowing the phrase from the Zen classic Three pillars of Zen).

OK, so here are the other two: evolution and ever-present Spirit. So, the integral psychotherapist is challenged to bring all three of these items appropriately into the room. Outside of integral psychotherapy, I don't believe there is any system that includes all three…but please inform me if I am wrong, because then our synthetic work will be made easier!

So, how do we bring evolution into the room? To think of this in more psychodynamic terms, we can think of the emergent unconscious. In integral psychotherapy we acknowledge not only the repressed submergent unconscious i.e. what is typically referred to as the shadow, but also the supressed emergent unconscious (which is a kind of shadow too, but mainstream psychodynamic therapists don't have this on their map).

One simple technique for bringing the emergent unconscious into the room comes from solution-focused therapy. Solution-focused approaches have the potential to be “shallow” in the sense of focusing on exterior problem-solving. But I believe there is also a deeper intuition at work in solution-focused approaches in their emphasis on the relevance of the future to psychotherapy.

The miracle question from solution-focused therapy is one way to bring evolution into the room in integral psychotherapy. Basically, that question is the following (some of you may already be familiar):

“If you were to go to sleep tonight, and when you woke up in the morning, a miracle had occurred and your problem had been solved, what would be different? What would you notice, see, feel, and so on”. The technique is to have the client actively imagine this scene in as concrete detail as possible –really bring it to life.

That is one way to bring evolution into the room in integral psychotherapy. Please feel free to contribute more ideas…

The third item was Spirit or ever-present Big Mind, or Self or however we want to refer to that of ultimate concern. How to bring this into the room? Let's think of spirituality in terms of a line of development: as KW suggests in Integral Spirituality, we could think of spirituality as the adaptive intelligence that evolves as an answer to the question: of what is ultimate concern?

At another conference I attended, a nurse-practitioner who works expertly with spirituality noted that she has found that speaking about suffering…particularly using that term suffering…is a great way to open people into a discussion of spirituality without going at it too directly in a way that might be off-putting to clients. She found that in asking people about their experience of suffering, they pretty much immediately would move to a consideration of ultimacy in some manner. So here is one way to bring Spirit into the room.

Hopefully this helps get the ball rolling on this topic. At the very least, SES – shadow, evolution, spirit – with the play on words to Ken's book…these three items the integral psychotherapist wants to 1) have in back of the mind during session to help orient the work; and, 2) look for appopriate ways to bring these aspects “into the room”.