What to remember
Do not confuse yourself with God
Problem #1. You do not have the omniscience required to successfully steer therapy to its goal.
Problem #2. If you are responsible for the outcome, you will feel guilty for all the failures.
Never “doubt the power that is in” you
Seeing your patients not as beneath you, but as saints who have come to take you home
Seeing them as our therapists
Telling them in our heart that all their sins have been forgiven them
Don’t select patients; consider everyone who comes a patient sent by God
We are not in charge of our function, God is.
Holy listening: how to decide what a patient needs
There is Something in him that will tell you, if you listen [based on context, this “Something” appears to be God]. And that is the answer; listen. Do not demand, do not decide, do not sacrifice. Listen. What you hear is true. Would God send His Son to you and not be sure you recognize his needs? (2:3-8)
The Purpose of Psychotherapy
Aid the people we talk to in “reconsidering” their belief that the world is cause in their experience, that it causes their perceptions, their emotions, and their decisions.
Please, please try to do this in a way that they find helpful.
...rather than merely makes you feel good.
This means do it within a framework that is acceptable to them. It is essential to gauge their level of invitation and permission. Do not hurt them by being a preachy, pushy Course student.
The Process of Psychotherapy
Exercise 1 - Establishing goal of therapy
Is there someone you are trying to help?
Do you feel that the two of you are working somewhat at cross-purposes?
What’s the rub? Where are you clashing?
Is their goal tinged with “Help me get my outer circumstances to behave the way I want”?
Is your goal tinged with “You’re not okay until you change”?
Ask the Holy Spirit: What true goal—what goal that’s in line with Your will—can we join on? What can I do to get us to this joining?
The goal of therapy is for the patient to let go of his anger by ceasing to see himself as a weak self at the mercy of a cruel world. Once his mind is cleansed of attack, he sees himself differently; he acquires a “beneficent self-concept.”
Exercise 2 - Starting the reconsideration process
Picture yourself talking to someone you know, who is sharing with you some difficulty that they feel is causing them pain.
What might you say, what question might you ask—that they would find helpful—that would help them reconsider their view that external forces are causing their reaction (emotional and behavioral)?
You might want to ask within for guidance and see what you get.
Possible questions you might ask (depending on their level of invitation/permission)
“Is it possible that all that could be true while you choose to feel differently about it?”
“Does the situation demand that you feel the way you do?”
“Do their actions box you in and require you to react that way?”
“If you felt free to react totally outside the box here, in keeping with your highest ideals, how would you react?”
Exercise 3 - Establishing readiness and overcoming resistance (for both)
Think of someone you are trying to help.
Ask yourself—better yet, ask the Holy Spirit—the following questions. I encourage you to write your answers down.
What is the next step they are ready for now (in contrast to the four steps ahead I’ve been wanting them to take)?
What is their main form of resistance—including wanting changes that aren’t really changes?
How can I best respond to this resistance?
What is my main form of resistance to the goal in this relationship?
Exercise 4 - Relinquishment of judgement (for therapist only)
Where you do you feel is your greatest need for learning (you can check more than one):
In trying to be helpful, I rely too much on conveying my spiritual beliefs.
I need to not judge people for not having belief in God or spiritual beliefs.
I need to improve in being able to truly forgive.
I need to learn how to lead someone else into forgiveness.
I need to learn how to get out of my separateness and truly join in a goal with someone else until I lose all sense of separate interests.
What matters most
If you want to be truly helpful, then, it’s not primarily about all your great spiritual beliefs. What’s really important is the following:
That you don’t judge someone for not believing in God, thinking they are lost
That you can forgive
That you can lead someone else into forgiveness
That you can join in a goal with them until you lose all sense of separate interests
Exercise 5 - Relinquishment of guilt
How do we relieve someone’s mind of the insane burden of guilt?
What ways can you think of that would contribute to this goal?
And how does this relate to the “one fundamental error...that anger brings him something he really wants, and that by justifying attack he is protecting himself” (P-2.In.1:5)?
Step to carry out silently
Call to mind someone you are trying to help.
Review the symptoms that are giving them trouble.
Now look beneath these symptoms to their hidden source.
That source is the “insane burden of guilt” their mind carries so wearily.
Can you see any surface evidence of this guilt?
If they can just drop that insane and unnecessary burden, they will be truly healed.
This, then, is the “single shift” they need.
So speak to that unconscious place that carries this burden, realizing that that place in them can hear you and be reached by you.
Say with all the conviction you can muster:
That burden of guilt you carry so wearily is insane. It is also unnecessary.
You really could just drop it.
As I look on you, I see you free of it.
“Awake and be glad, for all your sins have been forgiven you.”
Now ask the Holy Spirit, “How can I help this person let go of that insane burden of guilt?”
Write down anything you hear or any impressions you get.
Exercise 6 - Overcoming resistance to help (for therapist only)
Why have you held back from helping those who ask for your help?
Is it because the patient fears the very thing that will heal them?
Is it because the patient attacks you for offering that healing?
Is it because you are not perfect?
Is it because helping a person who asks for help seems so earthly, so of the illusion?
Is it because you feel that there is something unhealthy in the other person’s request for help? Is it because you’re not sure you are the right one to help them?
Is it because you fear that your efforts will be wasted, your gifts will not be received?
Is it because you just don’t want to?
Is there another reason you would add?
Now hear Jesus urging you to help these people:
While they are sick, they can and must be helped.
No less than all you have to give is worthy of you.
Nothing in the world is holier than helping one who asks for help.
There is one way alone to lay down all dreams:
Hear a brother call for help and answer him.
There is no other way to hear God’s Voice.
There is no other way to find your Self.
For healing tells you, in the Voice of God, that all your sins have been forgiven you.
Therefore, let us stand silently before God’s Will, and do what it has chosen that we do. Please write a statement in which you say yes to God’s Will.
Exercise 7 - Relinquishment of guilt (part 2)
Listen very sensitively to your triumphant song of truth and justice.
Can you detect a hidden note, a sour note, a sense of feeling sick to your stomach for all your sickening anger and judgment?
A note of self-condemnation for being so unforgiving?
Can you hear something like “I sense that forgiveness is the right response and the happy response, but I grimly refuse to forgive, proving that I am rotten to the core and that God may not enter here”?
Again, how would you describe it in your own words?
Please share those words in the chat.
(Read from the chat.)
Now let’s play the dirge one more time.
This time, try to hear it as the real sound within your righteous anger.
Remember that if you could hear that anger for what it is, you would hear loud discordant shrieks.
We have modified the dirge to reflect this. Warning, this may be hard to hear. Specifically, try to superimpose the words you just came to above onto the dirge.
See them as the lyrics of the dirge.
(Play the dirge once again.)
But we cannot stop here.
Now take the next step and question the validity of the dirge.
Hear Jesus say to you, “Where [God] can enter, there He is already. And can it be He cannot enter where He wills to be?” (T-24.I.1).
So say to yourself,
Can it be He cannot enter where He wills to be? God is here already.
God is in me already.
Now turn to your righteous anger.
Realize that all you have done is to project your dirge onto that other person. Saying that God cannot enter them because they are too guilty.
+So say in regard to the person you have judged,
Can it be He cannot enter where He wills to be? God is there already.
God is in you already.
Feel your projection lifting off this person and disappearing.
Now hear both the triumphant song of your righteous anger and the mournful dirge get softer and softer.
And softer.
Until they are gone.
And you are at peace.
What does the therapist do to help the patient get here?
First, the therapist needs to guide the patient through this, pointing out those fleeting instances of hearing the dirge and then helping the patient question the dirge. Second, and perhaps more to the point, the therapist needs to carry out this process himself in relation to his own judgment of the patient:
The therapist sees in the patient all that he has not forgiven in himself, and is thus given another chance to look at it, open it to re-evaluation and forgive it. When this occurs, he sees his sins as gone into a past that is no longer here. Until he does this, he must think of evil as besetting him here and now. The patient is his screen for the projection of his sins, enabling him to let them go. Let him retain one spot of sin in what he looks upon, and his release is partial and will not be sure. (6:3-7)
Isn’t this the perfect way to help his patient question the validity of her song of guilt? For his forgiveness tells her, with all the strength of his conviction, that her guilt is invalid. How can that not weaken her belief that her guilt is deserved?
Exercise 8 - Forgiveness (together)
Think of someone you have been trying to help.
Or maybe just someone who could use your help, perhaps in the form of your forgiveness.
Get in touch with this person’s flaws as you see them
...including the flaws that are hurtful to others
...and especially the flaws that you see as hurtful to you.
Now realize that this person is the screen for the projection of your own sins.
You see in them all that you have not forgiven in yourself.
This gives you another chance to look at it, open it to reevaluation, and forgive it.
Without the projection of your own sins, you would see only pure innocence in this person. Even their shortcomings would appear to be mere calls for help.
Recognizing all this, now say to them in your heart,
“All your sins have been forgiven you.”
Saying it in your heart means at the deepest level where your honest feelings are.
You really mean it, in other words.
“All your sins have been forgiven you.”
See them as absolutely clean, with not one spot of sin left to mar their shining purity.
“All your sins have been forgiven you.”
Now remember that you wouldn’t see their shortcomings as sins unless you were projecting onto them your own sense of sinfulness.
So say, “All your sins have been forgiven you, along with my own.”
Feel your own past mistakes, which you have labeled sins, dropping off your shoulders.
Feel yourself standing taller.
Feel a sense of being clean and pure.
Feel a sense of hope for a bright future, completely free of the past.
Say one last time, “All your sins have been forgiven you, along with my own.”
See this forgiveness as something that’s already happened. It’s done.
You both stand clean and forgiven, with all your burdens off your shoulders and all your cares behind you.
Notice how good it feels for both of you to be forgiven.
Sit with this feeling for a moment and open your eyes.