Elemental Guidance, LLC embraces Teletherapy!

After the COVID-19 pandemic prompted us to shift our practice from in-person to online, we struggled to accept that this was happening. What about our office?! How can we help people reach their goals if we're not meeting face-to-face?!

As we struggled to adjust by finding the right video/audio platforms and shift our intake forms online, we began to discover something surprising: There were MANY benefits to providing teletherapy! Below are just a few of these benefits we've began to experience, both for our clients and our therapists:

• Clients report feeling just as supported using telehealth as they do in-person! Research has shown this to be true, especially for general anxiety, depression, life transitions, and family dynamics.
• Clients can receive the quality care they deserve and from the safety and convenience of their homes.
• Clients from different regions who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend an in-person session, can receive help.
• Clients report attending sessions more regularly since they don't have to travel to an office.
• Clients and therapists can share pictures, videos, and other digital materials with other that can enhance the session.
• Therapists can better understand clients by seeing them in their home environments while still keeping the structure and focus of the therapy session.
• Therapists can provide services even while traveling, so clients can continue to receive support.
• More people can receive services by allowing therapists to save time on travel, cleaning an office to protect from the coronavirus, and other such things.

Of course, there are some clinical issues that may still benefit from in-person office visits. These can include significant trauma, eating disorders, and addiction, to name a few.

As we all continue to move forward during the COVID-19 pandemic, it's important to continue to err on the side of caution, but more important continue to seek that which we believe we need. For EGLLC, we are recognizing the need to embrace teletherapy. We hope you will join us in that embrace.

11-1-19 - Psi Phenomena

Psi phenomena are anomalous superhuman capabilities as a result of one’s ability to overcome marginalization caused by the interdisciplinary disharmony between transpersonal psychology and parapsychology. Psi phenomena (telepathy, precognition, sensing of presence, and out-of-body experiences) are ubiquitous and atavistic with empirical correlation to neurobiology. Confirmed in half the population of surveyed countries (Targ, Schlitz, & Irwin, as cited in Dein, 2012, p. 62), an accounting for this ubiquity is atavism which characterized as the ancient and ancestral connection of primal instincts of animals and humans, for example, Freud’s Wolf Man (Seitler, 2008, p. 53) who embodied psychic hybridity (i.e., the psychical and psychological joining of human with animal) (Kripal, 2014, p. 243). This intersection creates a liminal space or threshold (Van Gennep, 1960, p. 11) where one can access altered state in the right brain hemisphere (Wade, 2016) and is empirically observable in limbic system activation (e.g., telepathy with right parahippocampal gyrus) (Venkatasubramanian et al., 2008). Though ubiquitous and atavistic with empirical correlation, why are psi phenomena still anomalous?

Accounting for this psi anomalousness (Dein, 2012, p. 61) is the discord between psychological disciplines, specifically transpersonal psychology and its subdiscipline of parapsychology, as in MacDonald and Friedman (2012). Transpersonal psychology views psi phenomena as spiritual in nature, but conversely, parapsychology views them as mere expressions of consciousness involving anomalous transfer of energy (p. 50). Consequently, parapsychology has directed focus on empirical data collection by using neurobiology in a reductive and causal way which jeopardizes unbiased empirical and theoretical exploration of spiritual experiences. An example of this reductionistic approach is Persinger’s God Helmet which was capable of changing the magnetic fields around the temporal lobes (Persinger & Makarec, cited in MacDonald & Friedman, 2012) and is associated with the limbic system implicated in spiritual and paranormal experiences (Neppe, 1984; Neppe, cited in MacDonald & Friedman, 2012). This ability to change magnetic fields and reproduce paranormal experiences, led to the marginalization of spiritual experiences (i.e., psi phenomena) but provided an opportunity for transpersonal psychology to reframe empirical data, collected by parapsychology, as correlative (i.e., relationship between brain and psi) instead of causal (i.e., brain causes psi) (Daniels, 2005, p. 61). This much needed correlative collaboration between transpersonal psychology and parapsychology may close the burgeoning interdisciplinary disharmony (MacDonald & Friedman, 2012) and psi phenomena can become less anomalous with greater implications for species-wide access to superhuman experiences of psi phenomena.

References

Daniels, M. (2005). Shadow, self, spirit: Essays in transpersonal psychology. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.

Dein, S. (2012). Mental health and the paranormal. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 31(1), 61-74.

Kripal, J. J. (2014). Comparing religions. Oxford, UK: Wiley Blackwell.

MacDonald, D. A., & Friedman, H. L. (2012). Transpersonal psychology, parapsychology, and neurobiology: Clarifying their relationships. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 31(1), 49-60.

Neppe, V. M. (1984). The temporal lobe and anomalous experience. Parapsychological Journal of South Africa, 5(1), 36-47.

Seitler, D. (2008). Atavistic tendencies: The culture of science in American modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage. New York, NY: Routledge.

Venkatasubramanian, G., Jayakumar, P. N., Nagendra, H. R., Nagaraja, D., Deeptha, R., & Gangadhar B. N. (2008). Investigating paranormal phenomena: Functional brain imaging of telepathy. International Journal of Yoga, 1(2), 66-71. https://doi.org/10.4103/0973-6131.43543.

Wade, J. (2016, Nov. 4). Critical TP 9 Psi [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1564&v=NaQybCTUYew