It is a rapid and safe method of therapy developed by Ray Dunlop over about 40 years of counselling practice. While initially developed to address trauma issues it works well for all life challenges from life coaching to serious mental health issues.
Before we have an ego our experience is that of unity. It is all one and wonderful. We need to loose this before we gain any conciousness of other and self. Wellbeing is being grounded in the concious awareness of our original pre-ego experience of the unity of all being while acknowledging our unique individual body and purpose in service of the whole.
When we develop a sense of self and other we are left with an emotional legacy which determines our personality. The enneagram which is an ancient Sufi tool teaches that individuation is built on a sensate legacy of anger, rejection or fear. This becomes the foundation of our unique personality. Identifying and resolving this core issue is the gateway to health and wellbeing. Relativising our ego and grounding us in wholeness.
Much therapy is cognitive and neglects the fact that we are sentient beings long before we conciously think. Using metaphor regression helps us process affect without sophisticated common language, rather we can name and represent our own experience as a metaphor. Regression takes us to where that affect became part of our stored experience and allows us the opportunity to explore continuing to hold it or let it go.
This e-book is long overdue. Nearly 20 years ago my supervisor suggested I publish the work I was doing. At the time I had a portfolio of work including interventions with families for the then Children and Young Persons Service, serious offender programmes for the Department of Corrections and ACC sexual abuse counselling. I had only recently gone into private practice after about 20 years of voluntary counselling. On reflection it was only then that I judged myself competent and therefore entitled to be rewarded for my efforts as a counsellor.
Initially I trained as a Rogerian with Youth Line doing initially telephone and then later face-to-face counselling. From that base I went on to explore many other methodologies including Transactional Analysis, micro-counselling, Gestalt, Neuro-linguistic programming, family therapy, and Hakomi. I spent a whole summer reading Jung's collected works and went on to have several years of Jungian supervision. It was the work of the late Dr David Groves with his epistemological metaphors that transformed my practice. I trained extensively with him and his methods became the base on which my processing method is built.
After working extensively with MBTI, I encountered the Enneagram and chose that as my preferred personality tool because it was wholistic. Working with the Enneagram and epistemological metaphors over time I developed a discipline which I call Wholistic Therapy.
For those looking for academic credentials I have degrees in both Theology and Psychology each completed in mid life. These provided rich times to process and put languge on my experince. I have chosen not to pursue post graduate study as the cost will not be recoverred in my lifetime.
Wholistic Therapy as I hope this e-book will illustrate is an effective, safe and simple methodology for processing life issues and gaining an irrevokable sense of wellbeing. The developing theory from applying these methods and the results gained informs our ideas of self, health and wellbeing while challenging individualism and current mental health practice.
Wholistic Therapy also provides unique insights and possibilities for the integration of our understanding of faith and science and challenges both fields to reconsider a lot of what they hold as true. Specifically it challenges the cartesian dualism which has influence all western thought biasing our interpretation of ancient wisdom and supporting the illusion of objectivity.
Ego
Western psychology can be regarded as the origin or at least the substantive support for individualism and the ego. It pays only passing attention to the pre-ego state. Ironically our pre-ego experience is one of blissful unity, belonging, peace, harmony, etc, in sum LOVE or the CHI of life. It is all we are looking for because through individuation it is what we lost. We go looking for it in the world and are never satisfied. Only when we look deep within beyond all the unresolved issues of our experience in this world do we find this ground of being.
This is what all world religions in their own culturally determined way point us to. Budhism teaches that the ego is an illusion and nirvana or enlightenment is the goal. Jesus talks of being one with god and wanting us all to know this for ourselves. 'Ground of being' is a term used for God by the modern theologian Ivan Illich.
Conciousness
Before we have an ego there is no conciousness, it is through the process of individuation that we have a sense of self and other, our world is broken. We indeed have separate bodies and a material focus supports our separateness. The physical comfort of an embrace and/or emotional connection can assuage the pain and give us a limited sense of belonging. Others less fortunate become alienated from society at great personal and social cost.
Ironically everyone can give assent to the unity of all being when they let go all alienating emotions and ideas they hold. We recognise it as our identity as human beings and are secure in knowing that nothing can take it away. This unity of all being is fundamental to most cultures.
Identity
Given the above a healthy human identity involves recovering a concious sense of the unity of it all while being aware of our separate body and purpose. The sense of wholeness that comes with this conciousness promotes peaceful relationships and respect for all people and our natural environment. The freedom to be the unique person and make our unique contribution while respecting others uniqueness. Noone conciously aware of what it means to be human intenionally offends another and we are quick to put right any offence as we value the sense of wholeness.
Grounding
Grounding involves identifying the emotional affect that is the core building block (core issue) of our ego. In clients with simple presentations this is easily determined through initial dialogue. For those with more complex presentations some processing may be necessary before we can clearly determine and process the core issue. Sometimes it is useful to ground severely traumatised clients in positive early life memories until it is appropriate to process the core issue.
Grounding it the pre-ego experince is the preferable goal and when achieved all clients own the experience.
The Enneagram is an ancient Sufi tool which has only enterred the public domain of western literature in the last half of the 20th Century. The vehicle was initially through North American religious misionaries working in South America. Hence the initial literature has a Christian religious focus. Later Helen Palmer produced some works more attractive to secular readers and suggested association between these personality types and DSMIV diagnoses. The enneagram becomes a mental health road map helping to understand how we got here and the way back to health and wholeness.
I will not go into depth here about it as there is ample information already published both in hard copy and on the web. Practitioners wishing to use the tool will need a comprehensive knowledge of it and clients who want to can also be directed to the web to further their understanding.
Suffice to say that it postulates 9 (ennea in greek) personality types and their sub-types. They are made up of 3 groups.
The names come from where we somatically experience those emotions. Fear - head, rejection - heart and anger - gut.
When we identify the core issue we can explore beneath it and find our sense of infinite connection, let go all our grief, longings and desires and be the human beings we are meant to be. With a sense of being part of the whole, focusing on developing our purpose here while encoraging others to be and giving them the freedom to be all they are meant to be. This deep sense of connection also results in an attitude of detachment.
Diagnosis is simply a matter of dialogue using enneagram knowledge and experience to determine the core issue. Processing this in simple presentations results in immediate gain for the client often in a short single session. Often the ideas built on this core issue fall down like a house of playing cards and the client needs no further help.
Diagnosis can sometimes be more challenging with more complex presentations. They can be masked by other overwhelmng affect or dissociation. If this is the case then the priority is to work with the clients energy by process presenting issues, the immediate gains motivate the client to further processing and the core issue soon arises on the clients agenda to be processed. Interim grounding may be necessary in this situation.
Simple Presentations
With simple presentations the core issue is identified through dialogue and knowledge of the ennneagram. The client is then asked
WHERE IN YOUR BODY DO YOU EXPERIENCE THIS (EMOTION)? This may be repeated several times for more precise focus on the actual somatic location eg if the client answers IN THE HEART the next question might be IS IT ALL THROUGH THE HEART OR JUST A PART OF THE HEART? Then to form the metaphor we ask
WHAT MIGHT IT BE LIKE IN YOUR HEART*? and/or CAN YOU GIVE ME A PICTURE, COLOUR OR SHAPE FOR THAT FEELING IN YOUR HEART*? (or *OTHER LOCATIONS as appropriate). Note that metaphors like a wounded, broken or shatterred heart needs a reconstuuction aproach (see below). When the metaphor is established we ask
WHAT AGE MIGHT YOU BE (and/or HOW SMALL MIGHT YOU BE) WHEN YOU FIRST HAVE THAT (METAPHOR) IN YOUR HEART*? Some with perfectionist tendencies may have dificulty answering until you assure them that there are no wrong answers. Others cannot even guess an age and prefer just to say a size eg small, really small, teenager, primary school child etc. Note the subjunctive MIGHT is useful in encourageing posible answers without certainty. The objective is to regress the client to the place where this first ocurred. Here the ego is not yet identified with the affect and we can explore the possibility of letting it go. The next question is
CAN (THE TODDLER) IMAGINE TAKING THAT (METAPHOR) OUT OF YOUR HEART*? or CAN (THE CHILD) IMAGINE PUTTING THEIR HEART BACK TOGETHER NOW LIKE DOING A JIGSAW? Give them plenty of time to answer, several minutes of quiet are useful. It is sometimes necessary to encourage imagination. One way is to talk about sports science and the necessity of imagining winning or don't bother getting on the track. Another is, like super heros we can all imagine jumping over that building while in reality we can't, just imagine you are superman/woman. If with all encouragement they can't refer below to complex presentations as we need to explore dissociation and other possibilities. Some may want to imagine a significant figure like Athena, God or a Guru taking it out for them but I prefer empowering them to do it themselves. If they can imagine this then we ask
HOW DOES YOUR HEART* FEEL WITHOUT THE (METAPHOR)? If they say better we go on to explore what they want to do with the metaphor. The older part of them may want to keep it and then we can have a discussion about letting the child do what he/she wants to feel good. If they say worse we generate a new metaphor for this new bad feeling and repeat the process eg grief in the heart may overlay emptyness. Note emptyness needs to be treated as a ethereal object to be let go rather than a material object to be filled up. Before we knew emptyness we new fullness, it can overlay the original fullness. We could not have a concept of emptyness if we had not originally known fullness.
I will leave this and publish at this stage and come back to add much more over time.
Wholistic Therapy embodies about 40 years of counselling experience and both my own and others healing journeys.
Wholistic Therapy incorporates and develops on other disciplines while providing some unique perspectives and methods.
Grounding clients in the original pre-ego experience of the unity of all being.
Using the Enneagram as a diagnostic tool to identify core issues.
Using metaphor as the primary language for processing.
Ray Dunlop B. Theol (MCD), Dip Arts (Psych). MNZAC
4/260 Taupahi Road
Turangi
New Zealand 3334
+6427242732
+6473860040
skype raydunlop51
dunloprj_gmail.com
© 2010 Wholistic Therapy
