HOLISTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY WITH BRIAN MURPHY, MEd, LCSW

Holistic therapy looks to address the whole of you, including a couple of dimensions that mainstream therapy swerves away from: our body-based sensations, and the ongoing imagery in our minds. Every night when we dream, we effortlessly dip into this interior world, where we create ongoing scenes, events and narratives. And every morning the curtain on this drama goes down, and we wake to start our day. 

In holistic therapy we often “go inside” to the same place of our imagination that comes alive in dreams. By “going inside,” I mean nothing more complicated than taking a deliberate time out from your normal day and focusing on the images, feelings and sensations our therapy conversation has brought up. When that semi-meditative state is happening, my role as therapist is to ask pertinent questions that help guide you in your relationship with these places inside, and help you relieve yourself of the burden of bad feelings.  

Holistic therapy is a very general word that tries to cover a lot of ground, in that there are a lot of therapies that direct you towards the inner world. Different holistic therapists are going to use different methods, and here is a thumbnail description of mine:

·       Internal Family Systems therapy, which sees you as a system of parts. There’s the part of me that wants to shout at people while I’m driving, another part that feels ashamed or critical about that; there’s the part that feels like the outsider in a roomful of fellow grownups, the critical voice that seems to thin it is the arbiter of all reality, and so on in the details of our own personal menageries. In IFS you connect with these different parts with compassion and help them recover from their sad and peculiar beliefs.

·       Clean Language, an approach not very well known here, is where you take on your own metaphors and develop them into a more detailed metaphor landscape. Take for instance, that common theme of being stuck. What kind of stuck is it? Stuck like molasses? Stuck like being behind a closed door? Stuck like a boulder in the mud? And where are you stuck? Some place in your body? Somewhere in the house you grew up in? Somewhere underground? There’s a lot to find out about a simple-sounding stuck, and even more about what we want to have happen with it.

·       Emotional Freedom Technique, where, in the protocol I use, you tap on ten different acupressure points on the head and chest, while saying aloud what it is you want to dissipate, or what you want to create. It’s a very direct way of talking to yourself by drumming, as it were, on your body, and I have found that it helps secure some of that elusive calm and self-acceptance we have all heard about.

I think of life as a soul’s journey, and this way of thinking about it helps redefine our ideas about success and failure, time well used and time poorly used; we may be discontented with ourselves when we deem ourselves “a failure,” while those who have been successful by the conventional metrics discover the stocking full of coal at the end of the rainbow.

            Players and painted stage took all my love

            And not those things that they were emblems of.

                                                                        WB Yeats

 I believe that what we are looking for is new perspectives and a new sense of self. If we could just have a resting state of being at peace with ourselves where we enjoy the richness of life, and not so much of its stress – well, as the song says, what a wonderful world it would be.

Imagination is the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.

William Blake

The mind is its own place and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

John Milton