February / March 2006

REVIEWS

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HYPNOTHERAPY SCRIPTS: A Neo-Ericksonian Approach to Persuasive Healing
BY RONALD A. HAVENS AND CATHERINE WALTERS
Brunner-Routledge, 2002, 196 pp.,
$20, ISBN 0-3123-0443-9.
Reviewed by Sharon G. Mijares

Ericksonian hypnotherapy is a primary focus in my own psychotherapy practice, so I began my reading of this book with interest and curiosity—wondering if it would truly prove its usefulness. I found it to be a well-organized and useful guide.

In particular, the book emphasizes a focus on the relationship of emotional pain to physical pain and demonstrates methods for alleviating and transforming its various symptoms. The book begins with an orientation to Ericksonian philosophy and then provides hypnotherapy scripts to use for specific needs. For example, there are scripts for a variety of diagnostic symptoms: depression, low self-esteem, anxiety, trauma, sexual problems, insomnia, performance skills and so forth. A unique and helpful aspect of this book is that the reader-practitioner is guided to also develop hypnotherapeutic scripts that focus in on a client’s specific symptomology, in a section on writing one’s own hypnotherapy scripts. This valuable skill enables one to utilize the client’s language and experience— thereby creating a more meaningful trance.

One element of Ericksonian practice is not emphasized in this book. This is Milton Erickson’s focus on the relevance of the symptoms. What are they attempting to achieve? Resolve? If the practitioner simply attempts to alleviate the symptoms, the opportunity for a deeper and more meaningful level of growth may be missed. Irregardless of this point, I would recommend the book. Hypnotherapy Scripts is an excellent guide for psychotherapists and hypnotherapists interested in Ericksonian approaches. If you are a beginning, or even intermediate level, hypnotherapist, this book will benefit your hypnotherapy practice.

SHARON G. MIJARES, Ph.D., is a Self Relations Psychotherapist with a private practice in Del Mar, California. She is editor/co-author of Modern Psychology and Ancient Wisdom: Psychological Healing Practices from the World’s Religious Practices (Haworth Press, 2003). She also coedited The Psychospiritual Clinician’s Handbook: Alternative Methods for Understanding and Treating Mental Disorders (Haworth Press, Spring 2005) with Gurucharan Singh Khalsa, Ph.D. www.psychospiritual.org

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MEDITATION WITHOUT MYTH: What I Wish They’d Taught Me in Church about Prayer,Meditation, and the Quest for Peace
BY DANIEL HELMINIAK
Crossraods, 2005, 184pp., $16.95, ISBN 0824523083.
Reviewed by James J. Dillon

One of the dominant concerns uniting humanistic psychologists since the beginning of the movement has been a shared sense of alarm over materialistic incursions into human inquiry. But the materialist threat, while real, is perhaps not as dire as that posed by various forms of trans-human spirituality that have become increasingly popular within humanistic circles themselves. Most of this spirituality, to echo Irving Babbitt, is really “sham spirituality.” Sham spirituality delights in the extraordinary, the peaks, in altered and mystical states of consciousness.

It uncritically assumes the existence of discarnate and metaphysical entities, and mistakenly arrogates angelic or divine powers to human beings. Perhaps worst of all, sham spirituality promises great spiritual rewards without any corresponding human effort.

Helminiak’s Meditation without Myth: What I Wish They’d Taught Me in Church about Prayer, Meditation, and the Quest for Peace provides a necessary corrective to the many sham spiritualities that pepper the modern intellectual landscape. In accessible, clearly written language, Helminiak presents a down-to-earth, “humanistic spirituality” for modern seekers who crave meaning and value in their lives. Meditation without Myth is a gem for those who approach their spiritual lives with an intellectual and ethical seriousness.

Helminiak’s unique approach to spirituality springs from his personal struggles and life essons. He is a former Catholic priest who painfully and gradually found the teachings and practices of his faith to be empty, nonsensical, and ultimately self-destructive. These struggles eventually brought him to the nontheistic practices of Buddhism, which opened him up to realms of the spirit he he hadn’t known before. Helminiak does not take an explicitly Buddhist approach to spirituality in this book, but uses Buddhism’s many down-to-earth techniques as doorways into the human spirit.

The foundation of Helminiak’s approach is the notion that the human person is “body, psyche, and spirit.” The body includes our biology and physicality. Psyche includes our emotions, memories, images, and habitual ways of responding to the world. Spirit, the principal focus of the book, is described as a self-transcending force within the human being that moves constantly beyond itself to embrace all that can be known and loved. We can engage the spirit through the body or the psyche, but the practice of meditation, in Helminiak’s view, allows “direct access” to the spirit and makes it available for further psychological growth and transformation.

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The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Helminiak discusses how to do meditation and presents his deceptively simple method of choosing a word, repeating the word, and returning to the word in the face of distractions. Here he also discusses such details of posture, how to handle distractions, and many other helpful bits of advice. In the second part, he uses modern psychology to explain how meditative practice works and why it has the many positive effects on our growth that it does.

To summarize, Helminiak believes that mediation loosens the restrictive structures of the psyche and reorganizes them to allow for more integration of the spirit. Among the many positive effects of meditation— relaxation, desensitization, personal insight, awareness of personal limitations, a restructured social experience, and even enhanced sexual experience—Helminiak also details in the last third of the book how meditative contact with the human spirit transforms our view of God, religion, and other such matters. Specifically, Helminiak claims that meditative practice should either move us away from theology and notions of God(s) altogether, or toward a sort of Deist God who may exist as creator and unfathomable mystery, but who really doesn’t figure prominently in our day-today spiritual lives. For Helminiak, what is important in spirituality is not metaphysical entities, but human growth, ethics, and community.

The writing is honest and straightforward. His “brass tacks” approach to spirituality is exciting, refreshing, helpful, and at times even humorous. His account of the immediate and remote effects of meditation will be recognizable to anyone who regularly meditates. His approach to ethics as springing naturally from the unfolding of the human spirit is precisely what is needed in an age that sees all ethics as extrinsic and imposed from above. Perhaps most important, Mediation without Myth is thought-provoking.

But questions remain. First, Helminiak dismisses myth and religion not only as a result of his experiences with meditation, but because their claims, in his view, cannot be “proven.” He sees himself doing “hard-nosed science,” while those who work with myth and religion deal with “nonsense” and “fancy.” His disparaging attitude toward myth and religion rests on a twotiered, almost positivist epistemology in which there are sensible propositions—like his—that can be “empirically verified,” and nonsensical propositions—like those from myth and religion—that are merely “metaphysically asserted.” But what, one wonders, does Helminiak mean by “verification” and “proof ”? And just how would one “empirically verify” many of his own fuzzy and abstract concepts such as “the human spirit,” a “unifying embrace of all that is,” or “the flow of the universe”? One postulates the existence of such entities to explain certain regularities of experience, and postulation is a far cry from “proof.” An even harder-nosed investigator than Helminiak could easily dismiss most of his constructs and claims as “unprovable.” This, in my view, would be unfortunate.

Helminiak would do well to recall that humanistic inquiry finds its traditional home in the humanities, not in the sciences. It takes its material from the realm of literature, art, and religion, disciplines dealing with realities of a qualitatively different ontological order than the empirical. Human beings write literature, paint pictures, and participate in mythic ritual in order to come closer to realities they cannot get to quite as well through the scientific intellect. Confining talk to what is “empirically verifiable” or “provable” is a recipe for eliminating matters spiritual from rational discourse entirely, leaving us only with physics.

Another question is about the humanistic dogmatism operating in Helminiak’s thought. He seems skeptical about the existence of any nonphysical reality outside human nature. For Helminiak, it is perfectly valid to speak of spiritual “dynamics,” “forces,” and “flows,” as long as such talk is confined to the inside of a human being. Once you posit anything spiritual as existing outside the human being and actually mattering to human growth and development, you have somehow crossed a line into the nonverifiable realm of fancy and mere assertion, a realm about which the psychologist, in his view, cannot be concerned. Surely psychology is not theology or religion, but must we psychologists remain completely mute about the existence and psychological effects of the extra-human spiritual order?

Third, while Helminiak claims that human beings are a unity of body-psyche-spirit, he seems unconcerned about real bodies, particularly males and females. Bodily difference makes a spiritual difference: There are male spirits and female spirits, not human spirits. What this means, to paraphrase Carl Jung, is that I am spiritually incomplete as an individual, sexed person. I can only develop spiritually through my engagement with the other sex, which is outside of myself. Helminiak’s description of the spirit unwittingly confirms its sexed nature. The “human spirit” he describes in his book is really not so generic at all, but quite masculine. His spirit “soars,” is “outgoing,” “unfolds,” gets “unleashed.” But is this the case for all spirits? Do other spirits not take in, turn in, receive, envelop?

Helminiak doesn’t take into account larger bodies—the conjugal body of marriage, the body of the family, the body politic, the body of the spiritual community—that are animated by spirits of their own with their own laws and principles of healthy functioning. When individual bodies enter into these larger bodies, their spirit may conflict with the spirit of the larger body.

For example, I am in the midst of meditation, and my son starts to cry. The neighborhood in which I live requires my service on the school board. The health of the larger bodies of which we are a part often demands painful individual sacrifice. This sacrifice may come in the form of deferred dreams, compromise, even military or civil service at the level of the social and political body. We grow in these contexts not by restructuring our individual psyches to the inner unfolding of our individual spirits, but by restructuring our psyches to the demands of the spirit inherent in the larger body. This is the stuff of honor, duty, and obligation. One searches in vain in Helminiak’s book for a hint of the conflicted agony, the irreconcilable moral conflict that comes from our inhabiting disparate spiritualized bodies.

It must be recalled that these questions arise as a result of reading Helminiak’s book. I did not have them fully formed in my mind before I started it. The reader feels close to Helminiak as a person through his words—he makes good contact with us and teaches us from this place of human closeness. For that the reader cannot help but feel grateful.

JAMES J. DILLON, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia, where he teaches on human development, myth and symbol, and the foundations of humanistic psychology. He has articles on children’s and adult growth and development in Encounter, The Journal of Adult Development, Humanitas, and The Journal of Aging and Identity. He is writing a book on the psychology of marriage. jdillon@westga.edu.

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THE PREGNANT DARKNESS: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness
BY MONIKA WIKMAN
Nicholas Hays, 2004, 309 pp., $18.95, ISBN 0892540788.
Reviewed by Don Eulert

Monika Wikman stories us into transformation. Grounded by case studies of dream work with clients, both the drama of the personal psyche and our participation in collective myths shine as if through stained glass. The reader’s own life takes on extraordinary colors of “what is possible.”

What needs to be transformed? “When we become ill, or lose jobs, or relationships are on the brink,” or when we experience the darkness of any unknowing, Wikman offers tools for renewal. For meaning-making that engages the whole of our psyche, she surrounds us with mirrors for psychological healing from dreams, poetry, art, ritual, metaphor, and storytelling.

Her own story shines assurance regarding the importance of conscious transformation. Given a death sentence with stage IV cancer, Wikman describes the experience of surrender to the darkness of unknowing, which opened autonomous energy available in the transpersonal realm for “spontaneous remission.” (A resounding title, then, Pregnant Darkness).

She found in C. G. Jung’s work the lens that recognized how such “mysteries” are described by alchemists, world religions, and pagan deities. After a doctorate in mainstream clinical psychology with research on dreams of the dying, Wikman earned her diplomat at the C .G. Jung Institut, Zurich.

With Pregnant Darkness she provides richness of personal and professional experience for a much overlooked arena--how the personal psyche can tap into the “transcendent dimensions of reality that are beyond the ego and ordinary states of consciousness.” Such a journey may not be for the faint-hearted, since guiding and protecting forces activate by encounter with inner darkness.

In this dynamic, Wikman’s descriptions of work with clients draw us into the poignant “possibility of a renewing drink” from the living waters that reside beyond the ego. Something wise resides in our psychic makeup that instructs and inspires, if we open to what is possible. These cases of healing resonate with symbols that provide both personal and universal guides to transcend our hanging on the cross of “opposites”–desire and duty, known and unknown, shadow and persona, our conscious sun and reflective moon.

Here is a brilliant mind and a poetic voice that “plunges to the depths,” as Jung described this kind of writing. Yet this work also grounds in cultural, political, and ecological attentions. The context is a field of heart, soul, and (from Rumi) “companions who have come before.” And Wikman attends to love as both a personal and most universal peak experience, how it alters and incarnates meaning. Love lifts us into a spiral of personal renewal and sometimes to a larger Self and wholeness, “giving and glowing in all directions.”

A jacket review by Marcie Telander nails it: “I dare you to pick this book up and open it to any page. You will discover direct personal guidance, stunning spiritual wisdom, and revelations . . . to empower your particular consciousness- raising journey.”

DON EULERT, Ph.D., is Professor in the Psy.D. Program, California School of Professional Psychology, at Alliant University’s San Diego campus. He has directed their Humanistic and Integrative Studies Program for 30 years. He also serves as Director of the Center for Integrative Psychology. www.Integrative-psychology.net.

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RECESS FOR THE SOUL (Notes from the Inner Playground)
BY BERNIE DEKOVEN
www.deepfun.com, 2005, $18, 45 min. CD, ASIN: B000AKGBDK.
Reviewed by Kathleen Erickson

Recess for the Soul, formerly titled Notes from the Inner Playground, is a romp through our inner relationship with ourself, the inner arena necessary for sanity, and a needed place to play. This internal play space keeps us “found” to ourselves.

Only you are there, you being all your selves, the identity I, the perceiver of the identity, the thinker about both of them, etc. All of them as DeKoven puts it, are “somewhat fictional characters, but [all] you,” and feel the need to interact. These inner selves play on the inner playground, where they have fun and also plan the transformation of the world.

When the external world is not enough fun, our inner world comes into play: counting, estimating, making self bets & planning rewards, dialoguing with the selves, entertaining them, carrying on an inner lecture circuit, doing improvisation. Here we are always clear and elegant in our speech. We all have our own internal entertainment industry. What I personally do along these lines is rewrite dialogue, from life, from TV shows. Real people or imaginary characters make no difference in the importance of this activity for me.

DeKoven came upon the importance of fun and games when he was working with inner city kids decades ago. He noticed that they could play a loosely structured, simple game for hours with no problems, no boredom, no angst, no conflict. As little game playing as 90 minutes once a week produced noticeable healing, leadership, character development, and community building in those kids. The author decided to also give himself this gift of weekly play time, when he wouldn’t fight with his selves and would enjoy the inner peace of his own inner playground.

On the CD, DeKoven suggests in detail three games:

1. Freeze Tag. Pretend that you (identity) are not it, and you (the self perceiving) are not it, leaving the “other”, third, you to be it. Notice the strategies that each of your selves uses to “not be it” and to chase the others around.

2. Mother May I. When the author played the game, his selves were the Mother (the one he most wanted to be, the authority), Funny Me, Inner Child Me, Inner Giant Me. It is helpful in these games to notice the strong characteristic that each of the you’s exhibits.

3. Simon Says. After playing this game with several selves, the author says, “What are we hearing from our “Simon”? Mostly to hit ourselves on the head. We realize that the way we usually play could be much more fun, that the content of our inner games can be pitifully paltry. Even though we know it’s all pretend, still the selves doubt and dullen each other, and even hurt each other. But afer all, there is no Simon! The truth is that on some level this game is fun for us, the selves want to interact, but the author makes us ask: Couldn’t we all have a better game than the one we’re playing and always tend to play?

The CD is clever and charming, with a light touch of humor and irony, a brilliant little set-piece that has the ability to just slightly alter your perception and make you offkilter enough to look at how you get through your day, and how you interact with what psychologists increasingly recognize as multiple selves in everyone, neurotic or not.

Even though we have our whole mind to play with, our mental health requires a smaller, fenced-in area where we do less thinking and more meditative, looser game-playing. DeKoven shows us how to build the following pieces of apparatus for the inner playground.

1. The Breathing See-Saw is the mother of all rides and can bring perfect peace. He describes a breathing exercise with 2 selves on a see-saw.

2. The Inner Swing Set has a humorous description of constructing the apparatus for this second breathing exercise.

3. Character Play. Serious and Silly play hide and seek, peekaboo, search for enlightenment, and tag (except that no one wants to be it). Then they join Naughty and Nice and play Kick the Can, and we are left hanging when Nice decides to get Serious.

I started wondering if selves can switch with each other, or change who it is who is dominating at the moment. Probably the answer is in each of us finding out for ourselves from ourselves how they are all playing it out on your own Inner Playground.

KATHLEEN ERICKSON is Editor of this magazine.

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TRUTH IN DATING: Finding Love by Getting Real
BY SUSAN M. CAMPBELL
H. J. Kramer, 2002, $14.95, 313 pp., ISBN 193207306X.
Reviewed by David Ryback

Telling the truth on a date? A first date?! About your real, inner thoughts?!!! How revolutionary! How like Susan Campbell, long-time AHP maven who always strikes to the core with her incisive commentary on couple relationships.

Following her earlier books From Chaos to Confidence and Getting Real, she now encourages us to do the humanistic thing even on our dates. Does it work? Depends on what you mean by “working.” It certainly keeps us honest with our potential partners, IF they survive our onslaught of “truth.” As Susan puts it in one of her subtitles, “I’d Rather Be Single Than Settle.” Get the point? Personal integrity may be more important than getting some—love or whatever.

I imagine this book will appeal more to women than men. Why? Because it’s written from a female sensibility. Need I say the obvious— that women are more open to underlying feelings? But if women can teach their partners . . .

Susan makes a very strong argument for honesty. She reveals her own experiences on the path to dating truthfully. Her argument goes against the grain of putting your best self forward. One may not always “get” the person with such honesty, but when you do—ooh la-la! Susan likes to tell it like it is. Her book is easy to read, may get you riled up at times, but is worth exploring. It will allow you more reality in your life as you choose it, or when you do date more truthfully, as someone may choose you.

DAVID RYBACK is a therapist and consultant in Atlanta, Georgia, finding true love in real places, or wherever he can find it. He is the author of Love, Sex, and Passtion for the Rest of Your Life, and other books.

Cover Story:Yamai wa Ki Kira
Healing Intentionality in Mind-Body Medicine