What to Expect Along the Way
By now, you may be ready to “Cross the Threshold” into your Hero’s Journey. But you’d like to know more about what to expect along the way, especially about what your expert guide will do for you.
How Long Does A Hero’s Journey Take?
The length of your Journey will vary depending on your circumstances and your goals. It could take a short time if you only want to address an acute situation. It may take longer if you seek deeper life changes. This is something we can discuss early on. As I get to know you better, I can answer this question more accurately.
The only thing that is ultimately real
about your journey is the step that
you are taking at this moment.
Alan Watts
Let me tell you how I define “psychotherapy,” the common term for what I do. This word comes from the ancient Greek words psyche (meaning “breath; spirit; soul”) and therapeia (meaning “healing; caring for; tending to”).
So, I go with these ideas: caring for the soul, healing the spirit, and, at times, tending to the breath. I feel these ideas got lost somewhere, as many people (including my colleagues, professors, the media, etc.) continue to see psychotherapy as having to do mostly with the mind or, at best, the mind/body connection. I attend to the whole thing: body, mind, soul, spirit, and the relationships you have with others. Why leave anything out? What ideas do you have about what psychotherapy is, or should be? I would enjoy knowing your thoughts on this.
Spiritual practices help us move
from identifying with the ego
to identifying with the soul.
Ram Dass
Your Brain on Psychotherapy
Regardless of how one defines psychotherapy, we know it has a positive effect on the body and mind, especially the brain. This article lays out the good things that can happen to your brain while you engage in the psychotherapy process. Being a bit of a “brain nerd,” I’m happy to talk over any questions you might have.
I’ve realized therapy
is incredibly therapeutic
Lisa Schroeder
Common Factors in Effective Psychotherapy
There are certain factors that are common to all effective psychotherapy methods. These include such things as the therapist’s warmth, caring, empathy, acceptance, and encouragement of risk-taking and mastery on your part. The most important common factors in psychotherapy have to do with you, however. Research in effective psychotherapy has consistently shown that things like …
- the attitude and amount of hope you bring to therapy sessions
- what happens to you outside of therapy sessions
- the match between your personal way of making changes in your life and the therapist’s approach in helping you change
… have far more importance than the particular things a therapist does. While this tends to deflate the egos of some therapists, it makes sense that you, the client, are the most important factor in your own therapy.
In my early professional years, I was asking
the question: How can I treat, or cure, or
change this person? Now I would phrase the
question in this way: How can I provide a
relationship which this person may use for his
(or her) own personal growth?
Carl Rogers
A Psychotherapy of One’s Own
I recently read a book by Thomas Moore called, “A Religion of One’s Own.” Here, Dr. Moore, a former Catholic monk and now an author, therapist, and professor, tells his story of pulling in religious and spiritual traditions from various places and developing a “religion” that works for him. He also leads the reader through a process of doing this for him- or herself.
In this spirit, I will lead you toward developing a “psychotherapy of your own,” one that works for you in every possible way. As your expert guide, I have no investment in any one way of doing therapy and am NOT a “one size fits all” kind of guy. Yet at the same time, I have a strong knowledge of quite a few approaches. It’s like being fluent in a whole bunch of languages and finding the particular ones that you can understand and that best help you understand yourself and your Journey.
There is something in every one of you
that waits and listens for the sound of the
genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide
you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it,
you will all of your life spend your days on
the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.
Howard Thurman
Photo by Eli DeFaria on Unsplash
Take Me for a Test Drive
Your Hero’s Journey involves a substantial investment of your time, money, mind, body, and heart. I realize that for many people these are not small costs. Please know that I take your investment very seriously. Before you move forward, please remember that once we meet for the first time, you are free to stop any time. You are under no obligation to continue. During a first session, you can experience me, my style, my voice, my office, my parking lot, just everything about me. This way, you can let your intuition tell you whether I am the right person to continue using as the expert guide on your Journey through life.
I couldn’t afford therapy,
so I just watched “Frasier.”
Season 4 was a breakthrough.
Cristela Alonzo