c.) Working with a therapist

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The Internal Landscape

Guest article by Bob King

Bob King and his merry pranksters can be reached at webmaster@graphictruth.com.

(Part 5 of  8; c.)

Concurrently, you need to have a therapist that will accept your information for what it is and not try and tell you what it all Really Means. If you find that happening - where there seems to be an imposition of views on you that doesn't seem to fit what yous are saying at all - well, it's time to find a therapist who can listen to you.

Remember, therapists are human, they have their own views, and they do tend to specialize. A therapist who is good at some things may not be good with your things. And as your needs change, you may need to change therapists as well.

During this process, you may well find one or more of you borrowing techniques and approaches and starting to apply them internally. If that works, well and good; just remember that in such a case, it's even more important to have a trusted reality check, someone with solid professional qualifications and experience.

Even if you happen to have such a degree yourself.

But given a solid starting point, a safe context in which to work and someone trustworthy to discuss the issues with; it's possible to achieve good internal communications and a useful degree of co-consciousness within six to eight months.

Depending on exactly what you mean by "a useful degree of co-consciousness", really useful improvements in function can start appearing almost immediately.

All of this obviously requires good to ideal internal co-operation. Realistically, that won't occur without some trust and some external reality-checking.

This is one of the places where a therapist, councillor or spiritual advisor is extremely useful. Not so much in their primary capacity, but as a trained listener who is willing and able to ask good, hard questions. A trained diplomat or arbitrator would work as well. Initially, the crisis issues are almost always ones of trust and communication. Family therapists have managed good things at this stage; it's the exact sort of situation they are trained to handle.

Once a foundation for communication and co-consciousness is established, though, the initial stages can proceed with startling rapidity. This is because each person will bring a large chunk of expertise to the table, and simply putting all of this insight and capability together into any sort of co-ordinated effort will have remarkable results.

But that's the good news. The hard part starts here.

As each person becomes more and more comfortable with the collective, issues will start coming up. As they become more and more focused on working together, areas of dysfunction that were masked by the chaos of emergent multiplicity will start coming up.

This is where more traditional therapeutic approaches start having real value. For the most part, these issues will be the issues of a few or just one person. And for the most part, they can be treated as such - although the approaches used in family therapy are quite useful as well.