spirit

Exploring The Spiritual in Psychology

The Soulful Shrinks

Exploring the Spiritual in Psychotherapy

by Rachel Dowd

The only problem with the id, the ego and the superego is they have no soul. For a growing number of the 11 million or so Americans in psychotherapy, that’s problem enough.

“Psychology talks about behavior and patterns. It focuses on the self and the here and now,” explains psychotherapist Swati Desai, PhD, LCSW. “But when you’ve been 10 years in therapy and still feel awful, maybe it’s time to release it to the universe.”

Enter the world of spiritual psychology. Instead of simply analyzing how you behave, why you react and what unconscious motivations influence you, spiritual psychology explores who you really are and what your soul is meant to do in this lifetime. The result? For many people, deep and permanent healing.

In a nutshell, traditional psychology works in three realms of reality: physical, mental and emotional. Spiritual psychology adds one more to the mix—True Self. By uncovering your authenticity, you discover your capacity for love, compassion, peace, acceptance and joy.

“You heal by stepping into awareness,” clarifies H. Ronald Hulnick, president of the University of Santa Monica. “Healing is the application of love to parts that hurt. You have to know how to do it, but you release it for the last time.”

The path to awareness can vary widely depending on the type of spiritual psychology, but every modality believes in combining the powers of psychology’s logical leanings with the universality of the spirit.

“We need both for a feeling of strength,” says Desai, who practices a blend of traditional Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), cognitive psychotherapy and Buddhist mindful meditation at the Akasha Center for Integrative Medicine in Santa Monica. “The spiritual part comes at a point where there is nowhere left to go.”

With nowhere left to go in the present, clinical hypnotherapist and psychotherapist Morris Netherton, PhD, heads to the uncharted waters of the past.

“The unresolved issues of a previous life are manifested as negative and positive expressions now,” says the founder of the Association for the Alignment of Past Life Experiences. “There is always something that didn’t get resolved. Your mind holds that as a pattern and your present life tries to resolve it.”

Past life therapy returns the patient to the point of death to re-live it and eliminate the unresolved questions.

“If you’re not in the room, it sounds completely nuts,” says Netherton, who estimates that he’s performed over 44,000 sessions in 40 years of practice. “When I started out, I told everyone I worked for the IRS.”

Not so for Hadley Fitzgerald, whose vision of psychotherapy combined with astrology continually raised eyebrows in the late ’70s at Phillips Graduate Institute.

“I don’t need to proselytize, but I’m not going to be in the closet,” she recalls telling her advisors. Today, Fitzgerald still has some clients who are interested only in strict psychology, but more and more seek out her particular blend of cosmic therapy.

In contrast to the daily horoscope type of prediction astrology, Fitzgerald analyzes a patient’s birth chart for organizing principles of his or her soul. This helps determine that particular soul’s rightful journey through this life.

“I don’t see the planets as having any physical influence on people,” she says. “They’re setting things in motion for you to work on in this lifetime. If the soul’s charge is for you to dance, the universe doesn’t care if you salsa or tango; if you decide to become something else, it’s still important that you learn to dance.”

In 1981, psychologists Hulnick and wife Mary (both PhDs), turned the University of Santa Monica into a place where the spiritually minded could go to discover their “authentic selves.” They had 11 students. Today, USM admits 276 each September, including psychiatrists, social workers and anyone with an interest in his or her own spirituality. The college offers two graduate degrees: M.A. in Spiritual Psychology and M.A. in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Spiritual Psychology.

Technically an institution of higher learning, USM may be the best two years of therapy you’ve ever had. Classes are held retreat-style once a month for nine months of the year; much of the curriculum mirrors the training of conventional counseling programs, but always from a spiritual point of view.

“We are divine beings having a human experience,” says Hulnick to define the essence of spiritual psychology. “The real self isn’t in traditional psychotherapy.”

And just as traditional therapy benefits from the spiritual exploration, the soul’s journey needs real-life grounding.

“The psychological part was such an eye opener,” says USM alum Kate Nesbit, a Marriage and Family counselor in West LA. “Meditation is beautiful and productive and lovely. But if that’s all I did, I wouldn’t have a clue how to get along with my husband.”