Psychotherapy for Removing Blocks to Spiritual Growth

When you are on a spiritual path, all kinds of issues get pushed to the surface.  It’s like all the junk that you had thrown down in the basement for your whole life is brought up to the main floor to be processed, organized and cleared out.  Some people try to spiritually bypass this material, but it rarely works – most of the time you have to work through this material or your spiritual progress will get blocked or greatly slowed down.  I offer safe and powerful ways to process through these issues as they come up so you can continue on your spiritual path – so your spiritual progress proceeds as it is supposed to – by moving forward towards awakening to who you really are. 

I’ve done private practice psychotherapy for 21 years and have been on a spiritual path for 30 years and I know what its like to have issues come up and the need for assistance to clear them out.  I’m comfortable with and have intensive training and experience in working with most psychological issues and I’m also familiar with the spiritual issues that confront people when on a spiritual path.

For deep clearing work I use a type of therapy called Coherence Therapy. Please scroll to the bottom of this page to read more about this kind of work. It is a whole new paradigm in psychotherapy - it goes deeper and resolves problematic behavior and blocks much faster than most other forms of therapy.

I do psychotherapy for issues such as:

• Clearing out blocks to spiritual awakening - working on blocks such as trauma, negative beliefs, inner critic problems can free you to move on to the exciting task of spiritual awakening.
• Developing a strong foundation – sometimes your foundation needs to be stronger so that spiritual awakening can proceed.  I have a number of tools to help you develop this foundation and clear out anything that is blocking it from developing.
• Clear out blockages to career success – most people need to work to make a living and having a good career can help your spiritual development.  I am comfortable working in this area to clear anything in your way to career success.
• Relationship issues – once this area is improved and freed up, you are much more able to move faster on the spiritual path.  Having good relationships, while not essential to spiritual awakening, can greatly support this movement.
• Addiction issues – active addictions greatly impede spiritual progress.  It is very important to work on addictions issues to free up the spiritual energy to assist awakening.

 

Offices in San Francisco and San Rafael, CA

5028 Geary Blvd.
San Francisco, CA 94118

1703 5th Ave. #303
San Rafael, CA 94901
415-221-3182

Coherence Therapy* for Removing Blocks to Spiritual Growth
by Mark Robinett

I use a type of psychotherapy called Coherence Therapy to resolve and dissolve the roots of most blocks and symptoms.  Coherence therapy is a new paradigm in psychotherapy – a much faster and more effective method than traditional therapy.  It is the quickest and most efficient way to go into the depth of a problem and dissolve it at its root.  Coherence therapy works by first using a technique called radical inquiry to find out where inside of a person the symptom is coherent.  In other words, there is usually a part of a person that uses the symptom for a very important reason, however this reason has been up to now unconscious.  In the discovery process of radical inquiry, the reason for the symptom is discovered and made conscious.  When a client presents any kind of problem the first step with is to do radical inquiry to find out where in the person the problem is necessary.   Once this is discovered – and while it rarely makes much sense to the person consciously – to the part of the person that is invested in the symptom, it not only makes sense, but is believed to be absolutely necessary.  In this style of work what matters most in triggering lasting change is for the client to find and experience the already-existing but hidden emotional meaning that the symptom has for him or her.  This is always the most strongly meaningful view of the problem and it always opens up avenues to rapid change.  The reason rapid change can happen here is because in the hidden emotional meaning of the symptom is where the emotional origin is and once it is opened up it is very fluid and available for change - usually then with some kind of specific experiential work and then continued homework between sessions to help the change integrate.

The theory behind Coherence therapy is called constructivism.  This theory says that we construct pretty much everything that is inside of us as basic beliefs or schemas of meaning.  In other words, we construct beliefs consciously and unconsciously that we use to understand our world and to give our world meaning.  However, nearly all of this constructing and assembling of reality is done unconsciously, both at the neurobiological level and at the social-psychological level of assigning meanings to perceptions.  We basically get lost in our own construction of reality because we are unaware of our role as its construer-author.  Looking at an individual in this way means that whatever a client defines as the symptom – be it an addiction problem, anxiety or a self esteem issue – it is seen not as a sign of pathology but is seen in terms of a problem that is constructed coherently by the person’s currently operating constructions of meaning (belief systems).  These constructions of meaning or unconscious belief systems are like the operating system of a computer - they dictate the basic way we operate in the world.  Another way to put this is that whatever symptom a person is struggling with has been generated entirely by the individual’s cognitions and emotions comprising his or her present construction of reality.  The therapeutic task then is in assisting the client to further evolve his or her construction of reality in such a way that the presenting problem is alleviated.  This is approached as an intrinsically progressive and creative process rather than a corrective or curative one.  So the work is not to focus on the symptoms to diminish them and produce more agreeable, less symptomatic conditions within the same view of reality.  Rather, the approach is to usher a client into an alternate view of reality that does not include producing the symptom and this results in a much deeper and more permanent change. 

In constructivist theory one’s presenting symptoms are the unacceptable costs or consequences of the current way of construing reality – in other words for a person who has whatever difficult symptom – this itself is the unacceptable cost and almost always why the person comes to therapy, but what the client does not yet know is that these costs (the symptom) are due to a way he or she has a certain constructed unconscious reality.  And because it is the client who set up this construction of reality in the first place, it is the client who can change it, if skillfully guided to do so, in order to eliminate those unwanted consequences.  Competently executed, this approach tends to result in particularly durable therapeutic change and can occur rapidly.  

For example, a man started therapy with a problem with online porn.  His live-in girlfriend had found out about it and was furious and felt like it was cheating on her.  Using Coherence therapy we quickly discovered that the use of porn was mostly in response to work stress.  And as we went deeper into it, the work stress was because he took on too much responsibility at work and never talked with anyone about the burdens on him because he believed that (we discovered three unconscious beliefs - all connected); (1) no one wanted to hear his feelings or complaints, (2) it would not do any good at all to voice them, and (3) using porn was the best way to deal with the stress and it worked – at least in the moment.  He also said that in his family or origin feelings were not talked about - you were supposed to deal with them yourself.  Most psychotherapy at this point would then focus on trying to “talk” him into changing these beliefs or in trying to “talk” him out of these beliefs – and this could be a long and arduous process, and not necessarily successful or long lasting.  Using Coherence therapy methodology I focused on the beliefs we’d discovered  and worked to really capture the emotional truth of each of them.  For example – the first belief – that no one wanted to hear his feelings or complaints we worked on by having him voice this belief to his co-workers, particularly his superiors in a visually imagined scene, using the statement; “I know you don’t want to hear how I feel about taking on so much work – so I won’t express my feelings to you – I’ll keep them to myself and find another way to deal with it”.   When he did this he said it felt very true.  In this method of work, I didn't try to talk him out of it or try to get him to change this.  What I did was encourage him to really feel the truth of this and voice it.  In this kind of work, we stay right there until it does change.  As he did this, within about 10 minutes he began to say that maybe he could speak up more; maybe he could give it a try to express his feelings to his bosses.  This new development started happening because once his emotional truth was expressed and felt consciously it was then "opened up" to change by being exposed to another reality – the reality he now was considering of expressing his feelings openly.  If a person tries to change a belief like this by staying in his head about it – by intellectually talking about it and thinking that he should change it and even deciding to change it, it usually won’t change because the emotional construction hasn’t opened up and that is where the deep construction of the belief is held (in the limbic system of the brain).  This is why it’s so hard to change most problems.  At the end of this session I gave him a note card that had a similar statement on it – If I express my feelings to you about having too much work you won’t want to hear it – so I won’t do it  – I’ll keep them to myself even though it puts me at risk to looking at porn again.  This statement was crafted to put the emotional truth and unconscious belief in contact with the conscious consequence of the behavior and then see what this client would do with it.  Also, between the session homework like this is very helpful to integrate and sustain change that has begun to occur, especially because the change is happening at a very deep level and without the between session work, it can go back down into the unconscious.  In the next couple of sessions we did similar work with the next belief that was most likely part of the same unconscious construct.  Within two more sessions he said that pretty much all the work stress was gone, he was talking to co-workers and bosses about his frustrations and difficulties and was feeling a huge relief in this – like he was free and the same as everyone else at work – no longer feeling alone in his misery there.  He still felt stressed at times but it was OK because he was talking about it now and didn’t feel alone in it.  He still had a little trouble with the urge to look at porn come up from time to time, but it was about 5% of what it had been.  As we worked on this final issue, these last remaining urges, it became clear to him that his girlfriend would be the much better replacement when the desire for porn came up – and he did this without me suggesting it – a good example of an unconscious construct of the desire for porn being explored and getting put right next to another possible reality – that of being sexual and or affectionate with his partner making the original construct dissolve.  This last change happened very quickly in one session and it was interesting to watch the change in him as he told me it just didn’t make any sense anymore to look at porn when he had his girlfriend so available.  All of this client’s change and resolution of the sex addiction to porn occurred in 8 sessions over the course of about 4 months. 

My experience using Coherence therapy is that the time of resolution of symptoms varies from client to client – not everyone’s issues changes as quickly as this client’s did.  However, this kind of work is probably about 4 – 5 times faster than traditional therapy, and the change seems much more permanent.  One additional note is that if a person also has or primarily has trauma or PTSD symptoms that are causing the problematic behavior, trauma resolution techniques must be used in addition to Coherence therapy methods.  I use techniques such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) or TIR (Traumatic Incident Reprocessing) and they are very effective for this. 

*Coherence Therapy was developed by Bruce Ecker, M.A., MFT and Laura Hulley, M.A., MFT 
For more info on Coherence therapy visit www.coherencetherapy.org
and case examples at http://www.coherencetherapy.org/discover/examples.htm