Healing Tools

Note: I don’t feel very confident that any of the methods presented here are scientifically valid. I might remove this page in the future but since I don’t have time to redesign the whole website, it’s out here still. Plus, some of these tools might be subjectively helpful despite the lack of evidence that they really are…

On this page, I would like to offer various tools that I have found helpful in building an emotionally healthier life. I discovered these tools before rediscovering critical thinking and skepticism. I am in the process of reevaluating them, somewhat reluctantly since I found the tools helpful. I know, though, that anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean much. So, whenever possible, I also include information on current research to allow for more objective evaluation. REBT/CBT are probably the tools most compatible with secular humanism, especially since the research seems rather solid (although see this strong counterargument).

I have ordered the posts on this page to reflect a process. Mindfulness and meditation can help us stop and return to the present moment. This is a necessary step for taking a look at our thoughts, which often create havoc, reflected in our feelings. Focusing can help identify the thought that is causing the most trouble. We then can apply REBT/CBT to defuse that thought, possibly using inquiry. Forgiveness and Meaning Making are more specialized healing tools, which suggest options for specific thoughts we might uncover.

Mindfulness & Meditation

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Although research is as of yet inconclusive about whether meditation is beneficial, it has been beneficial to me. Admittedly, this is somewhat pseudo-scientific, yet the idea that calming the mind can benefit us seems valid, therefore I am including mindfulness as a healing tool. Just keep in mind that the jury is still out on whether meditation is better than simple relaxation or other similar tools. There is an interesting discussion on more recent research starting with this comment.

Mindfulness is a way of bringing the meditative attention developed during meditation practice to every day life. While meditating in the traditional meditation pose – or some variation thereof – you focus on your breath to help you stay in the present. You also observe when your mind wanders off (or, more common, you notice that it has wandered off) and how often that happens (quite frequently). When you notice your mind wander, you gently remind yourself to come back to your breath.

Thich Nhat Hanh is one teacher of the practice of mindfulness. He teaches it to help us incorporate this meditative presence into our daily life. Basically, you use your breath to come back to the present moment whenever you notice that your mind has drifted into the past or the future. Why is it so important to stay present? You are alive right now, in this moment. You can enjoy this moment no matter what happened in the past or might happen in the future. But you can only enjoy it if you are present to it. Thinking about the past or the future also uses energy – energy that is spent on something rather futile. You cannot change the past. And no matter how much you worry about it, you cannot control the future. You can choose what is happening right now, in this moment. And you can choose to be totally present to this moment.

When you start practicing meditation and mindfulness, you will notice how often you are not present. Sometimes that is very frustrating because you feel that you are not doing it right. But it is the normal habit of our mind to drift. It always wants to be busy, often thinking more than one thought at a time and none of them completely to the end (nor can you find the beginning of a thought). So, when you notice your mind has wandered, remind yourself that it’s okay and that you can go back to your breath right now to return to the present moment.

A detailed secular program to learn meditation can be found in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. I also found The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh and Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn helpful. Both books are (deceptively) simple with short chapters and incorporate exercises you can try.

Is mindfulness and meditation tied to a religion? Not necessarily. Mindfulness is a practice that can be part of living even if you do not follow Buddhist principles. Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches mindfulness and meditation as part of his stress reduction program – without any religious affiliation (although he is a Buddhist and his more recent writing is more influenced by that religion). More recently, mindfulness has been combined with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy to create a promising approach to healing from depression: Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy. Early MBCT research showed a decrease in relapse rate compared to standard treatment but only for those people who had 3 or more depressive episodes prior to learning MBCT. There was no difference for those with 2 or less episodes. A meta-analysis of the effects of MBSR on depression and anxiety by Canadian researchers did not, however, find an effect. It also remains to be seen if MBCT offers any benefits above and beyond Cognitive Therapy, which has been shown to prevent depression relapse.

Focusing

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Focusing is a humanistic, experiential approach, which may not pass most skeptics’ muster. I still include it here because I found it helpful (a rather experiential approach) even though I am not sure if the research on Focusing is very rigorous (a more objective approach).

Focusing is a way to connect to your bodily wisdom to allow you to better understand what’s going on in your life. Eugene Gendlin, a professor at the University of Chicago, was frustrated because therapy seemed to help some people but not others. So, he decided to figure out what caused this difference. To his amazement, he learned by listening to tons of audiotaped counseling sessions that the difference wasn’t the therapist but the patient. Patients who improved through therapy would pause sometimes to “look inward.” Gendlin called this Focusing and developed a process to teach this looking inward to everybody.

Basically, you start out by honing into your body and feeling if there’s anything that is trying to get your attention – often it’s a sense of tightness somewhere. Then you say “hello” to that tightness, acknowledging that it’s there and that you have noticed it (instead of trying to ignore it, which is what I usually do). Then you sit with that tightness (or whatever other feeling you have noticed) and see if it has anything to tell you. Just like in meditation, our minds are very busy trying to tell us stuff but if we can quiet it down long enough, we can find out what our bodies have to say. It is usually not as clear as the mind likes it. But if we stay with it, we can figure things out.

I tried learning focusing through Gendlin’s book and the book of one of his students – Ann Weiser Cornell. But it’s difficult, at least for me, since my head keeps coming in the way. So, I hooked up with a Focusing trainer. Then through a newsletter I found out about a Focusing group in the area. It is just amazing how much easier Focusing with a group is. In a group, two people support each other: first one person focuses and the other is mirroring back what the focuser says and sometimes pushing deeper by asking questions. Then the pair switches. I found it tremendously helpful to have someone say the things back that I felt. When you have a “felt sense” (this is what Gendlin calls the tightness or other sensation that I’ve found in my body), you try to name it. Once a name comes up, you check it against the felt sense to see if it fits. I felt hunched shoulders – the feeling as if I was trying to protect my chest, myself – and the word “weak” came up. When my partner said the word back to me, I realized that it didn’t fit – something I didn’t realize when I said the word. Someone else needed to say it. Then another word came up – defenselessness – which “felt right.” (You can now find a focusing partner through the Focusing Partnership program.)

The other thing I noticed, is that a focusing group is a group of acceptance. We were three people last Sunday (one person would focus, the other would mirror back and the third was the time keeper), and we listened to the person who was focusing without any judgment, totally supporting what they were experiencing. There was nothing right or wrong about what they felt. It just was (or is). [As an aside, Cornell uses an interesting re-wording technique that I've found tremendously helpful to create some space to deal with a feeling in a more healthy way. Instead of saying "I am angry" (or whatever feeling seems to permeate your body), Cornell suggests to say "Part of me is angry." In my experience, this signals to another part - the observer - in me that I can look at my anger, or whatever emotion, from a distance and don't have to get all caught up in it until I am anger...]

If you want to learn more about Focusing, check out www.focusing.org and www.focusingresources.com. I recommend Cornell’s book (The Power of Focusing) over Gendlin’s (Focusing), though Gendlin’s book is, of course, a classic. But Ann Weiser Cornell expands on what Gendlin talks about and she makes it more accessible, at least for me.

Rational Living: REBT and CBT

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Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) and its cousin, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) have been researched quite a bit. A REBT counselor and researcher in Britain, Jim Byrne, offers this research summary. Of particular interest are his “Summary Notes On REBT Research” in Section 6 (there are no links to the sections…). The most recent meta-analysis that Byrne cites, published in 2005, concludes:

A balanced approach, analyzing both the strengths and weakness, suggest that REBT has hundreds of research articles and that high-quality studies tend to support REBT’s basic theory and efficacy.

As Byrne cautions, though, by quoting from a 1977 meta-analysis (see his “Footnote on preceding paper”):

Results of nearly 400 controlled evaluations of psychotherapy and counseling were coded and integrated statistically. The findings provide convincing evidence of the efficacy of psychotherapy. On the average, the typical therapy client is better off than 75% of untreated individuals. Few important differences in effectiveness could be established among many quite different types of psychotherapy. More generally, virtually no difference in effectiveness was observed between the class of all behavioral therapies (systematic desensitization, behavior modification) and the non-behavioral therapies (Rogerian, psychodynamic, rational-emotive, transactional analysis, etc).

So, there are a lot of tools “out there,” which seem to be fairly comparable in their effectiveness. REBT and CBT are two of them. And as Paul Lutus points out, there’s no scientific basis to CBT, as admitted by the APA.

Rational Living, which is based on REBT, suggests that whenever you’re feeling off balance, ask yourself “What am I telling myself here?” It’s likely that you are using one of the twelve most irrational ideas against yourself. REBT and CBT teach us how to break the automatic reaction cycle and insert a cognitive step between an activating event (A) and our behavioral reaction to it (B), which lead to a consequence (C). This is the basic ABC of REBT. The cognitive step identifies an underlying judgment or belief, which you can categorize using the irrational ideas list and then dispute it.

Although I found the theory behind REBT and CBT rather compelling, the practice of it was more difficult. How exactly do I dispute my irrational beliefs, for example? Many writers make broad statements like “never blame yourself or others.” Yes, okay, I agree but how do I do that? One way I found helpful are questions presented by Windy Dryden in the context of developing unconditional self-acceptance. This can be adapted for other irrational thinking.

  1. Select a specific example where you depreciated yourself and describe this situation as clearly and as objectely as you can.
  2. Identify your major unhealthy negative emotion (UNE) , your major action or action tendency and how you subsequently thought. These are the emotional, behavioral, and thinking Cs, respectively.
  3. Identify what you were most disturbed about in the episode under consideration (or what you put yourself down for). This is the critical A.
    • If necessary, ask yourself: What did I find (whatever your major UNE) about the situation that I found myself in?
    • Assume temporarily that your answer is true and ask yourself: And what did I find most (insert UNE here) about that?
    • Continue until you have identified the critical activating event (the aspect of the situation that you depreciate yourself about). You will know that you’ve found it because you’re feeling the UNE more intensely or you’re including a depreciating belief in your answer.
  4. Identify the demand and the self-depreciation belief that you held about A which resulted in your response at C. These are the Bs: Demands and self-depreciating beliefs.

Often simply identifying the ABCs, especially the demands and underlying beliefs, helps. If it doesn’t, you need to start questioning your beliefs (are they true, logical, helpful?). Then reword them into preferences. Instead of I always have to do everything perfect, you can say I would prefer doing things as best as I can most of the time.

I have found the following resources very useful:

(Note: I used to have information on Byron Katie’s The Work here. However, I removed it because I no longer feel comfortable with this approach since it is more guru-driven than science-based. However, if you’re curious, you can read an example of inquiry in action here.)

Forgiveness

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Almost everybody by now knows that forgiveness is a good thing. If you carry around anger, you’re only hurting yourself, not the person you’re angry at, no matter how much you plot revenge. Plus, revenge is not sweet. It’s immature. So, when I realized that I was carrying around a big sack full of grudges against my ex-boyfriend, I decided I needed to forgive him. I just didn’t know how! An Internet search simply reaffirmed how important forgiveness is but there were no exercises that sounded that they would actually work. I decided to just start making a list of the things I needed to forgive. And an amazing thing happened! With every “I need to forgive him for…” that I wrote down, it felt like I moved closer to forgiveness! Just writing down the grudges – as silly as they seemed – helped me to let go. And, yes, I also started a list for myself because there were a few things that I needed to forgive myself for, too. I am not sure how lasting this will be but it feels like a good start!

Try it yourself:

Meaning Making in Action

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Based on my first real-world test of Eric Maisel’s call to make our own meaning, which I faced this morning triggered by the prospect of having to go back to work on Monday, here are steps for meaning creation with examples from my experience this morning.

Steps for Meaning Creation

  1. Know your symptoms. This is ongoing and probably needs to take place prior to a meaning crisis.
    • One of my depression symptoms is not wanting to get out of bed.
    • Healing tools: Mindfulness meditation and reading about depression.
  2. Recognize your symptoms.
    • I was lingering in bed, trying to come up with reasons of why it was okay to stay there.
    • Healing tool: Mindful awareness.
  3. Label the underlying problem: you are in a meaning crisis.
    • In my case, I was anxious about facing my meaningless job.
    • Healing tool: Mindful awareness.
  4. Step back and analyze your thoughts: what are your expectations here?
  5. Determine if your thoughts are contributing to the crisis.
  6. Challenge the thoughts that are contributing.
  7. Replace the thought with something that can give you meaning.
  8. Write down your answer and sense if it really is true.
    • Yes, I can see my job as a testing ground for this. And, yes, I can derive a sense of meaning from that.
    • Healing tool: Focusing.

That’s it! Granted, these steps seem easy yet, especially #7, are rather challenging. Hopefully, though, having a step-by-step approach is helpful.

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