Congratulations on your sobriety. Now what are you going to do? Try adding some mindfulness to your psychotherapy work.
Finding What Matters
When addiction flooded your brains with dopamine, you loved it. You shouted, “More, more, more!” You drank, drugged, gambled and shopped your credit cards to the max until you couldn’t feel any pleasure at all. You finally quit addiction, but didn’t know quite where to turn. Nothing had ever made you happier that your addiction. Job, marriage, family, car, house, portfolio……. none of these compared to your old dopamine cocktail.
You tried new lifestyle games. Maybe these would give you the deeper happiness you craved. You ate vegan food, attended a healing drum circle, changed spouses, followed the advice of your therapist and took your psychiatrist’s pills, and none of these worked either. If this was all sobriety had to offer, you weren’t sure you wanted it. You didn’t want to relapse, so you kept searching.
Soulful Alternatives
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung once shocked an alcoholic patient by saying only spiritual awakening could restore his sanity. Those were revolutionary words in the early 1930s, but not anymore. A tsunami of interest in psychospiritual therapy is flooding counseling offices, schools and weekend workshops nationwide. Mindfulness meditation, hypnotherapy and yoga seem to bring stress relief and peace of mind patients don’t always find elsewhere.
James Hillman’s book, We’ve Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse, suggests traditional psychotherapy needs more soul and less pathology. He cites rising numbers of cognitively trained therapists, rising patient populations and the simultaneous increase in the number of Americans taking antianxiety and antidepressant medication. Hillman also questions the validity of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV TR) which therapists must use to diagnose their patients in order to receive insurance payments. This same 800-page volume contains only four lines on spiritual matters. Hillman thinks like a Jungian guru – heal your soul and your mind will follow.
Adding Mindfulness to Psychotherapy
Sigmund Freud pessimistically said the purpose of psychotherapy was “to make normal everyday unhappiness tolerable”. Jung vehemently disagreed and insisted spiritual work could touch patients’ souls, giving them deep insights into the meaning of their lives. This transpersonal, spiritual style of therapy used to be the exclusive territory of shamans, clerics and mystics. Now its going mainstream.
While state licensing boards mostly ignore spiritual counseling skills. Mindfulness news stories saturate the media. MINDFUL Magazine appears on every newsstand, along with YOGA JOURNAL. Hypnotherapists are tapping into the power of the subconscious mind to relieve phobias. Authentic Buddhist mindfulness meditation practice is offered by groups like S.N. Goenka’s www.dhammai.org and Shinzen Young’s Vipassana Support International at www.shinzen.org. Twelve percent of Americans now profess to practice meditation of some kind.
Hillman has a point. Talk psychotherapy can work minor miracles, because it helps people adapt to problematic interpersonal and social challenges. It helps them adjust to roadblocks in their lives. Its intent however, is short-term, psychological and cognitive, not spiritual and soulful.
News from the Clinical World
Exciting news is emerging from research clinics about how brain function is improved by both traditional cognitive therapies and meditative practices. In 2011, Psychiatric Times cited studies that suggest cognitive-behavioral therapies have more significant impact on prefrontal brain cortex function than SSRI antidepressants. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in 2010 reported that mindfulness-base stress reduction (MSBR) activated the brain’s prefrontal cortex more effectively for treatment of anxiety and depression than cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) alone.
The Archives of General Psychiatry recently published work by Simon N. Young, Ph.D. that showed mindfulness-based cognitive therapy was as effective as antidepressant pharmacotherapy in reducing depressive symptoms.
“It is a tribute to the accumulated wisdom of humankind that a traditional Buddhist meditation practice going back 2500 years, which was originally designed in part to deal with the problem of human suffering, has been successfully adapted to prevent the relapse of depression in the modern era,” Young said referring to mindfulness meditation.
Fabrizio DiDonna’s 2012 Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness cites more than 500 studies validating the healthful effects of vipassana mindfulness meditation on a variety of mental and physical disorders from chronic pain to major depressive disorder. Also worth reading is Dr. David Black’s brilliant clinical mindfulness research newsletter at www.mindfulexperience.org.
Healing the Spiritual Brain
Sober Buddha welcomes neuroscience proof that both conventional talk therapies and meditative practices can improve brain function. Patients need both the immediacy of problem-solving talk and the spirit-awakening effect of meditation. Won’t it be interesting if science one day discovers that part of the brain where spiritual conscious lives? What great psychospiritual opportunities will open to counselors and patients then?
Jung was the first Western psychologist to insist that man’s spiritual potential should be addressed in therapy. It’s ironic that he also believed European people might not be well suited to meditative practices because their minds were too fact-oriented. Obviously the stress of modern life in Western societies has pushed people to the point of needing stress relief without pills. This is undeniably the reason traditional therapies are stretching themselves toward meditative practice.
Sober Buddha appreciates all valid therapies and naturally advises authentic vipassana mindfulness meditation as a bullet train to spiritual experience and stress relief. Vipassana is a Pali word translating to “seeing things as they really are”, meaning the meditator observes all mental and physical sensations and experiences without judgment. This lack of judgment prevents the nervous system from launching into bouts of neurochemical anxiety.
When practiced consistently, vipassana produces a calm, equanimous mental state, diminishes discursive thinking and opens the door to non-cognitive spiritual experience. You don’t have to be a Buddhist or even know anything about Buddhism to practice vipassana You simply learn techniques for letting go of the love-hate relationship with people, places and things that cause anxiety, depression and addiction in the first place. Vipassana even helps you fulfill Step 11 of the 12-Step program – “Sought through prayer and meditation to increase our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.”
RESOURCES
The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Kim Jobst, Ed.
Psychiatric Times, “How Psychotherapy Changes the Brain”, August 11,2011
Journal of Psychiatric Neuroscience, Mar., 2011: 36(2): 75-77
Contact Michael Hoffman, Dr.AD at (949) 212-4149 or michael@soberbuddha.com to learn how mindfulness meditation, hypnotherapy and Jungian-based counseling can enrich your life in sobriety.
About Michael Hoffman
Share this Post