|
It's easier for both health professionals and most
of their patients to use drugs as a substitute for change.
Alcohol, nicotine or prescription
anti-depressants and stimulants are easier than applying intelligence,
focus and analytical skills to complex relationships. Drugs
are also cheaper for patients (in the short term) and more profitable
for health professionals. But there are consequences ...
|
Dr Martin Daniel (MD)
Tel: +42 060 4506 511 |
"The Soul of Soulwork refers to integrity and sense of life,
not to a religion or philosophy."
Soulwork Systemic Solutions provides relationship diagnosis and systemic coaching procedures that
effectively relieve many symptoms of emotional and mental disorders.
|
We present private coaching
interactive seminars and workshops on systemic coach
training, quality relationships, resolving family chaos and dissolving toxic bonds.
We coach and teach worldwide - contact us if
you would like a workshop in your area. |
Requirements for Lasting Change
Martyn Carruthers integrated and developed information from success coaching,
systemic family therapy, Logotherapy, gestalt therapy,
expert modeling, native Hawaiian healing (huna kalani),
chaos theory and Annegret Hallanzy's VoVa). (Click
HERE for more
about the origins of this work).
Carruthers modeled these sources using (and improving) the modeling skills
associated with systems theory, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and
expert modeling. The result is Soulwork Systemic Coaching - which
seems to be a complete format for dissolving or controlling
symptoms of mental and emotional, and sometimes even physical disease. I didn't believe this until people with high credentials vouched for it.
Then I attended a training with Martyn Carruthers in Prague in Czech
Republic. Martyn's coaching follows a simple sequence:
| Step |
Benefit |
| Clarity |
Find solutions for emotions
that prevents clear thinking |
| Peace |
Dissolve unwanted guilt that
prevents peaceful action |
| Integrity |
Resolve conflicts that prevent
congruent decisions |
| Freedom |
Dissolve unwanted relationship
bonds that restrict choice |
| Motivation |
Resolve emotional trauma or abuse
that delay progress |
| Inspiration |
Replace inappropriate mentors who
inspire senseless action |
Soulwork is about systemic (relationship) issues. Examples of systemic
symptoms include chronic emotions, psychosomatic disease and learning
disorders. Systemic symptoms often compensate for relationship deficiencies,
particularly with (but not limited to) parents, partners and children.
Some relationships appear to require mental, emotional or physical diseases
for those relationships to continue. Without these symptoms, the relationships would
dramatically change. As a conscious awareness of a need for disease symptoms
would threaten these relationships, such awareness is taboo. To avoid this
awareness, people distract themselves from acknowledging their relationship
constraints. Such distractions are called objections in Soulwork.
Many people object to healthy relationships ... and may sabotage their own
happiness to fulfill their objections.
|
Immature people who attend Martyn's training either
grow up or quit. Most grow up. |
Think of objections as �unconscious goals�. Soulwork accepts objections
with kind attention, instead of ignoring or dissociating them. Verbal
objections include excuses,
justifications and blame, and a range of non-verbal
interruptions. (A common objection is �Yes-No� - a verbal statement
accompanied by non-verbal negation. An example is saying "Yes"
while shaking the head "No".) I found that the Soulwork tools for
handling objections were effective in individual and couple coaching, teamwork
and family therapy. (These skills are useful in interviews, negotiations and sales.)
After dissolving all objections, a person is free to make a desired change,
while experiencing a state of integrity, in which a
person can make congruent decisions about all parts of life. This experience is
wonderful - and beyond words. Carruthers calls it connectedness
and sense of life, to which I agree. Many people (even without religious
backgrounds) called this experience Soul, which motivated Carruthers to
call his work Soulwork.
Relationship Diagnosis
Soulwork includes an effective relationship diagnosis. Instead
of focusing on mental or physical disease symptoms, Soulwork focuses on the
relationships that require symptoms. Systemic diagnosis requires an
ability to make distinctions between relationship experiences � amongst the
expressions of love, guilt, conflict, transference, identification, relationship
bonds, trauma and mentorship.
�Recognizing a symptom is easy� says Carruthers �and recognizing a cause may
bring some peace. However, long-term recovery usually requires changing one or
more relationships. Otherwise symptoms return, or new symptoms
arise, to compensate for confused relationships�.
An example of a confused relationship would be a partner who resembles an opposite-sex
parent; a partner who rescued a person from some situation (Transactional
Analysis describes the relationship between an alcoholic and a partner); and a
partner who encourages unhealthy behavior. Long-term recovery
may require that a patient make fundamental relationship changes. The
severity of the symptoms can then be "controlled" by the patient's
actions - and the patient can decide how much and how long to suffer.
Patients with advanced acute or degenerative disease may be unable to control
their symptoms. Many people wait until the last moment before they call for
help, and the last moment may be too late. Soulwork can, however, help
terminally ill people prepare for a peaceful "thank you and goodbye" to life.
Clarify Relationships
A common first step of Soulwork is to help
people clarify their relationships. For example, after clarification a patient
may perceive a partner as a partner, not as a parent, sibling or child. That may bring
immediate relief for some psychosomatic symptoms.
There is more.
The result is not only alleviation of symptoms. New qualities for the family
are found. These new qualities may be described as peace, calmness, relieve,
enlightenment and - purpose of life. This is important in
treating depression, as Dr Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy demonstrates.
Soulwork is becoming popular amongst many people who offer
alternative guidance
for life problems. Carruthers offers sets of procedures
for resolving symptoms of chronic disease, emotional problems, phobias and
obsessions and for resolving personal and business relationship difficulties.
Soulwork is not a panacea for all complaints. Instead it helps clarify the difficulties
and limitations of therapeutic treatment. It cannot replace damaged or missing
tissue and has limited influence upon dementia or psychosis, but it can often resolve
long-term depression and anxieties with motivated clients. Evaluate Life
Soulwork Systemic Coaching evaluates life from many
perspectives. In the training I attended, three
perspectives were discussed: connectedness,
emotional integrity and mental integrity.
Connectedness
Carruthers proposes that human consciousness represents a system of
relationships - usually of the early family. This relationship system persists
as interconnected, emotionally charged, visual, auditory and kinesthetic images.
Evaluating and changing the representations of a relationship system
automatically changes the perceptual habits that monitor and filter external reality
� and hence changes the experience of reality - which spontaneously changes
values, beliefs and behavior.
The consequences of removing symptoms are generally predictable. For example,
disease symptoms may serve many functions in a family, and the loss of symptoms
by one person (or the loss of one person) may require that another person in the
system become ill, unless the system is changed.
Emotional Integrity
While most representations of a relationship system seem to be
unconscious, emotions are conscious. People often
search for ways to ignore, express, withhold or dissociate unpleasant emotions.
Many people turn to prayer and meditation. Others turn to self-medication,
controlling emotions with nicotine and alcohol, or to obsessive or compulsive
distractions and addictions. Carruthers said that most
addictions appear to be ways that people compensate for relationship
disappointments and
controlling the subsequent heavy emotions.
Clarifying a relationship system allows many withheld or dissociated emotions to
be experienced and expressed by its members. Soulwork includes coaching tools
for expressing emotions appropriately.
Mental Integrity
Ideas are presented on a spectrum of certainty, from
vague ideas to unquestionable beliefs. The importance of beliefs can be presented on a
spectrum of values, from �Who cares?� to �I would die to protect that belief!�
The personalities that identify with values can be presented as nodes in a
relationship matrix � each node with a spectrum of actualization within a
human system. A personality
represents a set of choices about how to survive in the world perceived
through these filters. The perceived world will rarely be the same as the real
world. A map is not a territory.
Theory of Soulwork
|
"Soulwork works. Yet when
immature people realize what healthy relationships require,
they often justify their suffering and use
crazy logic to reject healthier possibilities.
Immature people may cling to
their symptoms." Martyn Carruthers |
As Soulwork is founded upon observation; its theoretical structure is still evolving.
Carruthers attempts to describe pathological phenomena in terms of
relationship dynamics. In a recent training in Czech Republic, Carruthers focused on (1)
Goals, (2) Objections, and (3) Decisions.
(1) Goals: Many people do not know what they want, or only know what they don�t want,
or have incompatible goals, or have abstract goals with little sense of reality.
Soulwork includes goalwork for creating action plans that include both real-life
decisions and therapeutic interventions.
(2) Objections: People censor both internal and external information, and
hide from consciousness information that may disrupt important relationships.
Attempts to bring this information to conscious awareness will provoke objections
that prevent the discovery of relationship issues. Goalwork utilizes a person�s
objections as inner mentors to goal formation, until all objections are
satisfied.
(3) Decisions: People who repress or dissociate unpleasant emotions may lose
contact with feelings such as motivation, understanding and caring. In Soulwork,
a partial lack of internal perception is called Identity Loss, and a
complete loss is referred to as Lost Identity. (Reduced inner perception in certain contexts
seems much more common). Carruthers
coaches people to use their feelings simultaneously with their thoughts when making
decisions.
�A paradoxical problem� said Carruthers �is that
Soulwork really works. Yet when
people realize what healthy relationships require, they may object to the work.
Many people then justify their suffering and use crazy logic to
reject healthier possibilities. Many people cling to their symptoms.�
Carruthers described an experience with a woman diagnosed with stomach
cancer. At first, she pleaded for health. As the woman understood her
relationships, however, she realized that she used her cancer to punish her
ex-husband (blaming him for the cancer), to manipulate her adult
children (claiming she had taken their sins into her body) and to follow
her mother (who had died of cancer). The woman decided that she preferred
to die rather than to clarify her difficult family relationships.
Family Constellations as currently taught by Bert Hellinger
in Germany, has a resonance with basic Soulwork, although Hellinger's
family constellations do not include Carruthers' models of goalwork,
identity loss, relationship bonds, trauma
and mentorship.
Carruthers theorizes that the dynamics underlying human relationship
behavior may be pre-human. He described some parallels of relationship behavior amongst baboons, gorillas and chimpanzees.
Systemic Coach Training
Soulwork training includes convincing demonstrations. (Carruthers prefers
to demonstrate Soulwork with people off the street - that is, with people who
do not know what to expect.) Carefully avoiding suggestion, Carruthers elicited
each person�s entanglements and repeatedly proved his claims.
Carruthers' training includes many fascinating concepts, such as gentle provocation,
interactive metaphors, identity bonds and mentorship, all of which can be
applied in individual, couple, team or family coaching. Systemic relationship
skills may also be applied in fields in which relationships are
important, such as teamwork, anthropology, education, history, literature and religion.
With its deep insights into relationship behavior, Soulwork could connect psychology
to other life sciences.
Online
Coaching
About the author:
Dr. Martin Daniel maintains a
private medical practice in Havlickuv Brod, Czech Republic.
(Telephone +42 0604 506 511 during business hours, Europe time).
|
