Author Patricia Hampl wrote the essay “Penance”. In reflecting on the history of Penance, Hampl draws our attention the communal nature of the sacrament in the early church and its essential communal function for all time. “It is strange”, she mused, “that the sacrament of Penance should be so thoroughly associated with privacy, even secrecy.” This is certainly the experience of many baby boom Catholics christened with pre- Vatican II sensibilities (many of who have never darkened the door of a confessional in their adult life.) The fear and shame of our own sins told to God as represented by our parish priest were mercifully covered with a prescribed privacy. This was followed by the relief in stepping out of the ordeal with a child-like joy at being made anew. The prelude of fear and shame have been transformed into awe and humility, the most basic religious dispositions.

This, Hampl points out, was not always so. The “felt need” for the sacrament she writes was at the beginning “rooted in the ancient world’s elemental commitment to the community, not in modernity’s abstract concern for the individual.” Yet she acknowledges a sort of paradox in the birth of this deeply communal sacrament “the individual counts- counts absolutely.” She refers to Luke 15:4-7 (e.g., …I tell you there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repenting than over ninety-nine people who have no need of repentance.”)

It is here in her essay that Hampl refers to therapy, with its modern orientation toward the individual, as a counterpoint to Penance with its ancient orientation to the community and the importance of the individual to the whole.

“The joy in finding the repentant sinner is not the kind of satisfaction to be found in the therapist’s office, where the lost and scattered shards of a life are excavated and carefully pieced together to form the essential thing: a life worth living bred of a life story worth telling. “Penance”, she continues, “was intended to heal a different wound- not the break between a person and individual consciousness (or a personal past), but that between the self and the community, which for the ancient, was the core of existence”.

To really understand another’s religious experience or world view we must understand how their disposition is shaped by the forms they have inherited. In the case of a Catholic, the sacrament of Penance holds the memory of a time when to not be part of the tribe was to die. Nomads, in the arid wilderness, living a fragile tightrope between survival and death, could easily be shattered by the selfishness of one of its members. Fear of separation, guilt for failed duties and shame for putting self before the group were necessary and adaptive attitudes of survival. Superficial pop-psychology portray fear, shame and guilt as enemies of self-actualization imposed on the individual by conventional society. But in the context of a loving community they are the cornerstone of the most beautiful aspects of religious sensibilities. Fear, shame and guilt play, in ones family and communal life, the same role that pain plays in ones bodily experience, as a warning signal that something wrong needs to be made right. Fear, then, becomes awe, shame becomes humility and guilt becomes the impetus for reconciliation and restoration of ones place as a contributor to the welfare of the community.

To be communal is also to communicate something important between the individual and the community- that is, it is insufficient to be contrite, confess to God and oneself internally as part of healing because it is incomplete if one is not reconciled to the community. The communal aspect may not be so obvious in the actions- the actual confession may be an quiet encounter between penitent and priest- but the act of “going to confession” is communal and is expressed in many churches in communal penance services particularly offered during Advent and Lent- times set apart in the seasons of the church for prayer, fasting and almsgiving.

Hampl points out that the references to sackcloth and ashes comes from the church as it entered the third century AD. “Though the modern mind”, she acknowledges find this image “histrionic or unnecessarily humiliating. The community had to see, in public weeping, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, clear symbols of repentance so that the reclamation of the individual into the congregation could be entire.” Coming out of the therapist’s office in a sack cloth, Hampl acknowledges would be “a strange even sadistic exercise”. But in “the early church the individual was being reunited with the community, not with himself. Penance was not a psychological but a sociological act.”

As Hampl tells her own story the reader finds that she like many of her Catholic peers had left the Sacrament behind- in her case for thirty years. She ends with her experience of the Sacrament in it’s post-Vatican II form while on a silent retreat at a monastery. In her experience of what is now called the Sacrament of Reconciliation, she spoke face to face with an elderly priest. So modern in its intimacy, where one can lower or raise ones eyes in shame or connection, the experience is still ancient with the priest representing Christ and the community with whom she reconciles and in a more “public” way then behind the screen.

As she progresses toward this experience where “you don’t get to understand; you just get to acquiesce”, she becomes more disparaging of psychotherapy. In retrospect the 18 months of therapy she experienced, which she recounts with a touch of comedy, seems self-indulgent, and its self-understanding and reconciliation with the self. Contrasted with the acquiescence of the sacrament, the analysis of therapy was found wanting.

Trying not to be defensive as psychotherapy took it on the chin, I wondered about her journey or in psychological terms, the course of her identity development. Was the casting about the “scattered shards” of her life to form a story, as she described her course of therapy, however incomplete, somehow a preliminary to her later spiritual and communal reconciliation? At ones mid-life there is an opportunity to look back on ones life from a potentially wiser perspective. Wisdom, however, is not gained through age and experience alone. It is gained through self and spiritual awareness often developed through falling apart and struggling to reform oneself. Yet, I and my fellow psychotherapists should take the hit. A little slap in the face is always an opportunity to shake free of the arrogance brought on by taking too seriously the value of ones profession.

Here’s where I agree with Hampl’s critique: One will never, as it were, figure oneself out. And even as a psychotherapist who respects the role of guilt and shame in our interpersonal lives, I must perhaps take some responsibility for the overzealousness of psychology in its brash call to liberate clients from the tyranny of religious legalism. Religion, like any human enterprise, can go awry. Yet religion at its best points to what is best in us and what transcends us. Perhaps it is best in the end to acquiesce and stand “ shivering in the growing cold,” as did Hampl after the sacrament, “unable to make out the hinge of sea and sky, glad of that confusion, glad to give over to the mystery at last.” I, for myself, draw upon one of the fruits of my spiritual formation as a Catholic child: humility- freed now from excessive guilt and shame (with the help of psychotherapy.) As I accompany my clients among the shards it is not so much as a doctor or expert but as a humble companion with some experience. Humility is, in the end, an important disposition for the therapist as well as the client if there is to be healing and growth.

Find Me in the Hills is the art exhibit showing at the Painted Desert Gallery in October and November. The exhibit is a body of work created by Carol Emerson from the Fall of 2004 through 2008. Carol’s mixed media collages depict hills, dunes and water primarily in the deserts of the West.

During the period of Hills, Carol was mourning the loss of her partner, David Nutter (see 8/5/09 post). Through this same period she journaled and collected the poetry of others which she explained, “spoke to a depth of expression I could not voice.” For her exhibit she chose bits of poems to accompany each of her pieces. In this way poetry becomes another medium in the mix. The pairing seems to address one of the dilemmas of mourning- loss and despair are so visceral that words are inadequate but “the grief that does not speak”, as Carol drew from Shakespeare, “Whispers the o’er fraught heart and bids it break.”

It is not only the heart that a mourner fears will break, but the very self. I once counseled an adolescent boy whose 45 year old father collapsed on the kitchen floor, one day when he and the boy were working around the house. His father was dead before the paramedics arrived. “I believe we will get through this”, his mother told me one day, “but there are moments when I feel that I will die first”. She felt, as many people do, that grief will kill them.

And then there is the feeling of irretrievable loss. The loved one is lost -and- the self is broken and at risk of being lost for good as well. In one of her largest pieces, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Carol portrays three mountain ridges as sharp as knives rising above a mild stream. With this piece she pairs her own words written soon after David’s death:

…I am afraid this pounding, heavy heart will never go away.
I am afraid it will go away.
… I am afraid I will never stop crying.
I am afraid I won’t cry enough.
I am afraid I’ll forget how to laugh from my belly.
I am afraid I won’t believe in good things lasting.

Recently Carol and I got to talk about the relationship between art and psychotherapy. It was something that we, like many others, have intuited yet had not really articulated. After all, we are now sitting with our clients in rooms that are also an art gallery. As our clients talk about their lives, their relationships and their losses, they are literally surrounded by art.

It is common for people to remark that doing something creative that they love, whether it be making art, tending orchids or singing with friends, is therapeutic. Yet as Carol thought back on the years of working on Hills , she told me, she never consciously thought of it as therapeutic- though, of course, in retrospect, it was.

The problem may be in the word “therapy”. It is a medical term which means a method for curing or mitigating an illness. So much of what is talked about in therapy is not illness – it is life. There is, after all, no cure for life, for love, or death. These things are experiences, real and tangible. Maybe it is experience that art and therapy have in common. A piece of art depicting a hill somehow captures it, frames it and magnifies it so that we can see the transcendent in it; yet at the same time, the image humbly falls short of the natural beauty of the thing itself, and in that way the hill is honored by the attempt.

A client describing their anxiety, their compulsions or their grief are depicting experiences in the safe and private frame work of the therapy hour somehow captures it from a different vantage point. When the therapist understands the experience – feels it with them- the client feels strengthened and less alone.

Grief is an experience, natural and universal. It is not something to be treated or cured. Being natural does not, however, mean it is not dangerous. Just as in the desert, precipices and the extremes of the elements are natural -but they can kill you. Just as nothing is more a natural part of human existence than the birthing of a child, birthing has been a leading cause of the death of young woman.

Grief, then, as a natural but painful and dangerous experience calls for special ways and places to be experienced: in the artist’s studio, the gardener’s garden, the church sanctuary, the therapy hour. Both art and therapy, then, give grief a way to be framed and experienced in a heightened way, with a different perspective and provide the potential for the grief to be shared.

I caught a glimpse of this the day after Carol’s exhibit was installed in the gallery. I was setting up a wireless printer in the large room of the gallery while our colleague Diane Welsh had a therapy session with a client in the smaller room. Toward the end of the session, Diane led the woman she was seeing through the exhibit. They quietly and reverently traversed the terrains of grief as expressed visually and through the written word. Diane later told me that this was her client’s final session- a woman who came to her weighed down with losses- a newly finalized divorce and a series of deaths. In this way the final moments which Diane spent accompanying her were spent in a silent and shared experience of art and psychotherapy.

When I first came to the Samaritan Counseling Center, Dave was here. He was here every Thursday afternoon, and for years in the same exact spot on the same exact couch. It was great having Dave around. Here was a man with lots of experience dealing with people at times of great pain, or great stress, or great mental illness, who could support us in our psychotherapy; He could give us something that we needed to do our work and not make us feel less for needing it.

Let’s say I was discussing the progress, or lack there of, of my work in helping a client. Anxious to have his ear, I would give him the story too fast, and worried about my competence, I would reveal my mistakes, like a kid coming clean. He would listen. Never perturbed, never shocked. When I had exhausted my say, then he might begin to speak, closing his eyes. It was as if you could actually see him thinking; as if he was literally reaching up into this great store of knowledge and wisdom. It was like he was an older brother, rummaging through a crowded closet, because he knew that there was something in there that you would need. He would hand it to you, matter-of –factly. Even if it were priceless, he would hand it over without fanfare, as if it were an out-of-date tennis racket that he had found to be good, and sturdy and useful.

I remember one such gift. He gave it to me during a discussion regarding a client of great inner beauty and inner turmoil. This man’s personality would tend to fall apart from time to time, related to a great emotional injury that had been dealt to him in childhood. He was very sick, and yet he was very well: his strength and beauty would flicker at even his darkest and most shameful times. Sometimes he would act on his most desperate impulses to hurt himself and destroy his own progress. He was hoping, I suspect, to get someone to see this outward manifestation of his inner pain. Maybe this would provide for the temporary relief of his alienation and numbness: to suck another, such as me his therapist, into his pain and craziness, would give some respite from his loneliness.

Dave counseled me to focus on this client’s health; to see his wholeness despite the fact that it was only potential wholeness or only an imagined wholeness at that time. Despite my fears and impulses to focus my attention on an illness so intense it could have sunk me as well as the client, I was counseled and supported in drawing my attention to the smallest and most fragile steps towards health. Despite back stepping that could equal or exceed steps forward, I was counseled to focus on the forward steps nonetheless.

I did experience , eventually, this client moving toward the health. I saw him claim the health that I learned to imagine with a physician guiding me toward seeing something important that I may not have otherwise seen. The tragedy of Dave’s death is in losing someone who helped me and others to see and act with less fear. His legacy is that he was a good teacher. I hope, for him, for me , but mostly for the clients who come to me, that I was a good student.

Sometimes religion enters psychotherapy the moment the client enters the room. This was the case with Nancy. Her bright face and warm smile changed to an urgency as she sat down. Leaning forward on the edge of the couch she clasped her hands and told me that she no longer knew how to pray. Her son had been an ex patriot in Mexico and his life had been threatened by a corrupt official. She had been in daily contact with him and the embassy arranging for immediate departure. She prayed for his safety as fervently as she pursued embassy officials and knew, from all her past experience with prayer, that he would arrive safely. When she was told of his murder, she sunk into grief and a crisis of faith: her prayer had not been answered despite her belief that it would be. The very faith that had sustained her in past losses was threatened. This left her bereft.

Other times it enters in surprising ways by those who had never discussed experiences in anything but secular ways. Ann, an anthropologist, during an intense moment in telling her story in group therapy one night reached beneath her collar to pull a chain to reveal a medallion of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Ann had long since left her nominal Catholic faith and was drawn more to Buddhism , yet, she explained, the virgin had become her mother long after the death of her own manic depressive mother.

Or the therapist may hear something in the client’s voice, cadence or metaphors that suggest something of faith. And with patience and gentleness the therapist without being intrusive may welcome the subtle spirit into the session.

A reasonable question remains. “How can a therapist open therapy to spiritual concerns a person might bring if the therapist shares no common tradition with the person? This is the core question addressed by James and Melissa Griffith in Encountering the Sacred in Psychotherapy. They have found that they can best do this when they “stay in the position of an anthropologist meeting another person in an unknown culture….The skills most helpful for opening therapy to the spiritual and religious domains have been those for preparing our own selves to meet someone not yet known- the fostering within ourselves of curiosity, wonder and openness to the being of the other.”

Henri Nouwen speaks of creating a “friendly emptiness”. In his book Reaching Out, Nouwen uses various phrases to try to capture the essence of hospitality. The therapist with different beliefs from the client may offer hospitality in the way of “friendship without binding the guest and freedom without leaving him alone. Hospitality”, Nouwen explains, “is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.” “It is not a method of making our God and our way into the criteria of happiness,” he writes, “ but the opening of an opportunity to others to find their God and their way.”

Hospitality and patient listening can provide the necessary sanctuary within which one’s faith will most likely be expressed.

Click on the image of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman to see more work by the artist

Below is a link to an article from the Vancouver Sun on Buddhism and psychology. It describes and gives some historical background on the interest of Western psychotherapists in Eastern religion. Douglas Todd, the article’s author, sees the potential richness in this fusion but also writes of those who caution against superficial treatment of these disciplines.

The risk of any interdisciplinary endeavor, such as the blending of religion and psychotherapy is of diluting both and thus diminishing them. Each is a discipline and practice in it’s own right; and as any serious disciple and practitioner can tell you each is a life long endeavor. Yet, not to seek to draw upon religion because of being committed to psychotherapy would be to ignore a vital source for exploring the interior world. It is best to proceed, but to do so with humility.

Ancient Buddhism and modern psychology

For the therapist with a Christian spirituality, what does this suggest about the therapist client relationship? When a person, anxious and vulnerable, comes into counseling they may see the therapist as the “professional”, objective, and with expert advice and interventions. But to stay in a hierarchical arrangement would be to withhold companionship. One of my professors, Emil Soucar, would tells us again and again that counselors must put themselves in a one-down position. This stepping down is a merely a shadow of the stepping down of God in Jesus.

A man whom I shall call Paul keenly felt the “birth of death” late in his 45th year – and he, like most of us, greeted it with dread. Paul was seized with an anxiety that could not associate with any particular event or worry. Mild range physical symptoms were amplified by a sudden awareness of his own aging. A fear of loss of vitality precipitated an actual decrease in energy. Again in Jung’s words, “the second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance but death, since the end is its goal”. During that time of anxiety, Paul’s parents visited his home for the last time before his father’s death. His dad was dying slowly from and insidious malignancy that usurped the blood making process in his bone marrow. Paul’s parents stayed overnight so that the next morning Paul and his dad could go to a conference about the illness. It was strange, Paul recalled, to steer his dad’s steel blue Olds up the New Jersey Turnpike with him in the passenger seat; up until then his dad had always been the driver. Paul was self conscious.

Meanwhile, back at home his mom stayed with his wife and daughters. She had always been petite woman until recently. Her inactivity and eating for comfort increased her girth. She seemed, to Paul, too big for his small house. It angered him in ways he could not explain, and he felt guilty, even as he kept the anger to himself. “How dare she get old and change and what will this demand of me?”, he selfishly pondered. Paul was glad to escape with his father to go to conference. Looking back on this while in therapy several years later he realized that he was not angry at his mom. The demands her aging put on him were small. Paul was angry at aging and diminishment and the life it stole.

Paul was mad because he was afraid. Her aging and infirmity, his father’s dying, his shift to the driver’s seat penetrated his defenses against his awareness of his own aging and inevitable death. On top of everything else, he was disillusioned. He thought that as he grew and matured his faith would grow stronger and he would be wiser. He had hoped he would easily return to his parents the love they had given to him when he had been small and as vulnerable as they were becoming.

So for Paul, the “birth of death” of which Jung speaks was not a pretty thing, nor did Paul experience this event with mature resignation. He simply panicked. “Since the end is its goal…” Jung continues, “the negation of life’s fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live…”But Paul does want to live. Whether or not Paul has the courage to really live is another question. To really live, Jung suggests, takes courage to accept life’s ending and thereby embrace life’s fulfillment. “Not wanting to live”, Jung reminds us, “is identical with not wanting to die” because the two are inextricably linked.

Jung draws upon metaphors of the natural world, particularly the heavens, which gave our primitive ancestors their understanding or the cycle of life and, from that, their early impressions of the Holy. Jung believes our unconscious contains a rich store of imprints from these ancient experiences. We contain within us a sort of collective buried memory of millions of rising and setting suns, of waxing and waning moons, and, metaphorically, millions of births and deaths. That is – life and death, living and dying are one. For, Jung explains, “waxing and waning make one curve”.

In confronting the diminishment and deaths of those whom we love, and entering mid-life oneself, one would have to become increasingly defensive not to confront one’s own mortality. To be open, on the other hand, despite one’s fears, is to listen attentively to the great teachers. In listening to them as opposed to defending against them one gets the opportunity to deepen one’s faith. If we are humble and attentive students we cannot help but grow beyond disillusionment to learn what diminishment and death have to teach us about the nature of things.

-The Carl Jung quote is taken from “The Soul and Death”, pp. 405-408, from Volume 8 of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche-

Perry Hazeltine,Ph.D.

Samaritan Counseling Center, Lancaster, PA 17601

www.scclanc.org

Several of my colleagues and I are taking a serious look at how we integrate spirituality and psychotherapy in our practices. Through discussions and reading, I have come to feel that I would like to more intentionally help people to get in touch with the core of themselves; to explore what could be called the psyche or soul. To an agnostic or atheist, this may be a sense that one wants to experience life fully. To one from an eastern belief system this may be the striving for life without illusion. My hope is that therapy would help those with whom I work reach toward what is deepest, truest and most essential within themselves. Though my own experience is rooted in the Judeo-Christian worldview from which I come, the counseling I hope to provide is concerned more with the process of spiritual growth than it is with the religion that shapes ones spirituality. That is, I seek to help people from within their own faith and religion.

The word psyche is used most commonly now to refer to the mind such as in the term “psychology” ( the study of the mind). The word “psyche’, however, has its origin as the Greek word for soul or spirit. As a psychologist, I find it intriguing to think of myself as a “student of the soul”. The soul may be likened to a lens of great clarity and magnification from which we can see deeper and farther when we view our world and experience from this perspective. The things we see through this lens then become poignant to us, are deeply personal and hard to articulate. We tend to be shy when we think about expressing them since they are not discussed in normal conversation. “The most important things,” Stephen King writes, “ are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings – words shrink things that seem timeless when they are in your head to no more than living size when they are brought out.” The worst thing, King tells us is “When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

It is, then, a sacred moment when a client takes the risk to speak of these experiences to a therapist who is listening carefully. And, as a therapist, it is an honor to be present with another, one to one, as they find the words that speak of what they see through the lens of the soul and hear themselves tell it thereby gaining insight, comfort and clarity. The spiritual, then, within therapy or any other experience for that matter is not determined by the experience alone but by ones perception of the holy within that experience. A therapist sensitive to the spiritual, may experience the therapy process that way whether the client does or not. The therapist then, with prudence and respect, can discern whether or not the client can benefit from the open expression of this spiritual sensibility. If so, and if it can be done within the client’s own belief system, then the therapeutic experience can be enriched by a shared awareness of the presence of the spirit.

The shift in my practice is not to make it more spiritual, but to be more aware of the spiritual within the human suffering, healing and growth that already occur within therapy. By thinking, praying and writing I heighten my own awareness and sharpen my discernment. By communicating to others through essays such as this, through speaking publicly and through offering workshops and groups, I hope to share my heightened awareness with others and to offer an invitation for potential clients to experience spiritual growth as well as psychological and emotional healing. It is an invitation to myself and to those with whom I work to go deeper and reach higher.

For other perspectives on spirituality and therapy visit the Samaritan Counseling Center website at www.scclanc.org and click on the Reading Room tab to the left and scroll down to the author section in the Reading Room see Frank Stalfa’s article The Evolution of Pastoral Counseling at The Samaritan Counseling Center in the 2008 Newsletter Issue 1 and Betty Snapp-Barrett’s article Faith- Integrated Counseling in the 2008 Newsletter Issue 2.

Perry Hazeltine, Ph.D., Psychologist

227 North Duke Street Lancaster, PA 17602
(717) 875-8993 www.perryhazeltine.org

Perry is interested in helping adults through anxiety and depression during times of transition or loss. He sees great opportunities in mid-life that are often preceded by loss of enthusiasm, or great anxiety such as fears of illness, aging and death. Those interested in their spiritual life can be helped to see these periods of confusion and pain as precursors to personal growth and an opportunity to deepen their interior life. Perry has a bachelor’s in Religious Studies from Villanova University and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology from Temple University. In addition to psychotherapy, Perry offers career assessment and counseling. He also provides psychological evaluations of people entering ministry and conducts fitness-for-ministry tests as well.