Forum; Transformers: Therapists of the Future

... ... ... From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, I'm Eileen Raman and welcome to Forum. Those in the helping profession work to help the rest of us sort out our needs and priorities in order to most fully enjoy our lives and recognize our potentials. They are a group of people who've served a great need in society and whose work have benefited people in all walks of life.

But who is there to service the helpers with their own needs for growth and development? Jacqueline Small, a psychotherapist and private practice, is nationally known for her innovative approach to counseling in the field of addictions and human consciousness. She leads counselor training and self-transformational workshops throughout the United States and Canada, designed specifically for those in the helping professions. One is the author of Becoming Naturally Therapeutic and Transformers, The Therapist of the Future. Her most recent book, Transformers, aspires to explore growth promoting therapeutic attitudes of the helper and examines some of the recent developments in the field of human consciousness. The titled Transformers, Explained Small, was not an arbitrary one. It is based on her theories of approaching the counseling client. You know electricity, the transformer is the little instrument that changes negative and positive energy. And when you think that human beings are also energy systems like we're filled with energy

and our energy has to go one way or the other, we're always going to be doing something with our energy. A transformer is a catalyst or a people helper who can listen to you and be there for you and enable you to become more and more of who you really are by helping you see how perhaps a quality in you or something you're doing that's been negative to help you see that that very same quality can be changed to its positive counterpart, for instance someone who has too much enthusiasm, who gets too dominating and domineering and bossy and troubles everybody. But really it's just a natural desire in them to be a leader and to be really forceful with their enthusiasm. So a transformer is someone who accepts you as you are and allows you, as if you're a rose, they help you become a better and better and better rose with more fully open blossoms as opposed to a reformer, which frankly the mental health field is filled with reformers

who are always trying to change you and make you be different than you are because they're an expert on your behavior. So really what you're talking about the transformer is someone who's working with someone else as opposed to a transformer of ourselves or would that be included as well? Well also we can become alchemists or transformers of our own energy when we get to know ourselves well enough. And that is the path of course I'm the most interested in, is the inner path enabling people to see that they have a whole universe within themselves, which modern physics really backs us up on that now and shows us that we have an entire universe within us. Like inside we are made up of everything that's ever existed in the universe. We have a little animal self and a little plant self that likes to vegetate. And we have a human self and we have a God self. We have an angel self, all those parts are in us. Do you find a real dichotomy in a lot of the people that you work with between their inner

life and their outer life? People get into a polarity of themselves, seeing themselves as being very, very bad or very, very good and tending to vacillate from pole to pole. For instance you notice if you ever have to make a decision in your life we can take the simplest type of story there like let's say that you're in a relationship and you're thinking about leaving your husband. There's one part of you that wants to stay and one part of you that wants to leave and it's always going to be that and chances are you're going to be making a judgment about that. The part of me that wants to leave is bad. The part of me that wants to stay is good. And perhaps that value system that you're imposing on yourself may be coming from outside of you somewhere, not truly your own intrinsic value system but some value that's been laid on you by your parents or your church or your society saying that if you're a woman who divorces your husband or a bad woman, if you're a woman who stays put, you're a good woman.

And I have found in working in the field of mental health for so long that every decision boils down to that where a person feels split. And so there's a part of them that's acting from a true self inside. That is they're really genuine true self. And that action that goes along with the true self is going to be the right course of action for someone. So I guess really the item of the day then is to become in touch with your true self. With true self. Have you proposed any way of doing that? Have you found something that works better than other things? Well, yes. In fact, in the workshops that we do around the country, that's those are exactly the techniques that we're teaching people. The term for that would be psychotechnologies that do enable people to go within and learn to listen to the inner self. In the West, as opposed to the East, we've really forgotten how to go within. And unfortunately our major institutions of the church and the schools have not taught

us much about going within. Whereas in the East you know everyone's taught to meditate and to be still and to live a calmer, quieter existence where the spiritual development of the person is considered more important than the outer goals and achievement of success. But as you know in the West, we're quite the opposite over here. Most of our motivation comes from wanting to please others, wanting to do things that gratify us by some sort of external reward system. You know like getting A's and A plus's or getting a higher paid job or having a prettier home or a higher priced automobile and you know what we might call materialism. And in the West, that's really what's creating so much mental illness and disturbance of the self is that we've all gotten into all this competition and just like a rat race of looking out there somewhere for the answer. So are you saying that those things are not good?

Well, those things naturally follow, let's say the good life naturally follows for a person who's calm and quiet within and has found her own center, a person who's at home with herself and peaceful. It's really paradoxical, we've sort of been taught that it's these outer rewards that make us happy when really our inner attitudes and beliefs and feelings about ourselves are what determine our outer world. So there's a shift in focus that needs to happen in the United States on where it is we look to be happy. So you're saying if we spend more time and energy looking within than the outer things would naturally either calm or be suitable or that kind of thing. It's like your outer life begins to settle down. Let's face it, the outer life never changes. It's always a melodrama. There's always another job you're looking for that's going to pay you better.

There's always a better mate out there somewhere who'll understand you better. There's always a better geographical location you're longing to live in. There's always something you're dissatisfied with in your outer life. We always have wars, we always have people starving. We always have chaos and confusion in the outer world and it's been that way since the beginning of time. If you're a historian you can sort of look at life and see that it really never changes. We just change costumes and we change the nature of the melodrama but it's always the same thing going on over and over again. But what can change and evolve is the inner self. The inner self can become wise, it can become loving, it can become accepting of life and there can be a settling down that occurs within but people have to know how to get there. Let's talk a little bit about the inner self. I noticed in your book you have chapters talking about the lower self and the higher self. Can you explain that?

Well again it's a little bit of a false division but purely for the sake of analysis because we really are basically one whole self. But in order to understand that wholeness sometimes we have to divide ourselves up and look at ourselves through analysis and when we do that we find that we've got one self that's very grounded to the material world and this self is seeking ego gratification. And our ego gets developed from the minute we learn how to say no as a little child. And I'd say you're in a half or two when the little child starts saying no to everything. Well what that's telling you is that child is beginning to enter into the individuation process and is beginning to become a little individual. And when you think about what it means to be an individual it means separating yourself off from everyone else and feeling your own self as being unique and different. So that's the seedbed for the ego to begin developing.

And it starts looking for ways to feel better than others, to feel happier than others, to have more than other people have. So we go through this process in childhood where we take on the building up of an ego. Now what people may not realize is that the ego has been given a very bad press. The ego is really absolutely critical to our development because it is the part of us that knows how to live in the outer world. It knows how to please others. It knows how to keep a job going forward so that it gets the reward. It knows how to get up in the morning, get your shoes tied, find the car keys, get to work on time, all those sort of things because it's focused on the outer world. So those levels of consciousness we live in when we're developing an ego are very important. But at the same time the ego is not all that we are. It is what you might call the lower self or the basic self. And we have a heart.

And once we get to the place where our ego is satisfied enough that we feel pretty good about ourselves, what naturally seems to happen with the human being is that it starts opening its heart and it begins to love others and begins to let go of some of its own need to always have ego gratification. And as the heart begins to open and we find ourselves really reaching out and a loving attitude toward others, there's an amazing thing that occurs in human nature and it's what many people call a spiritual awakening. And then there's a higher self that begins to interpenetrate the human being. And the higher self has qualities that are the qualities of what you might think of that your soul has. If you could really know your soul, if your soul could just be sitting here in this chair with us right now and we could look at her, we would see that she has a certain way of thinking and a certain way of feeling and a certain way of being. And she's really quite opposite from the way that ego thinks and feels and is. And what that is very quickly is the higher self thinks holistically.

It thinks in terms of a complete understanding of something. For instance, let's say that you have a daughter who's 19 years old and you don't get along with her very well and she's been very rude and horrible and she keeps leaving home and coming back again and leaving home and coming back again and you all are beginning to fight all the time. And suddenly she creates such a melodrama that she slams the door one day and leaves home. Goodbye mother, never going to see you again. While the ego mind of the mother would say, that ungrateful son of a gun, you know, I'm never going to help her again. Anyone who's going to be that rude to me just deserves what she gets. And I'm cutting her out of the inheritance and she can never come home again. That would be an ego mind. But higher mind would rise above that whole situation and would see the developmental stage that girl is in at age 19 and that she's having a real conflict in learning how to

be independent away from home and she's scared to death. And she's really using a big crisis, creating a crisis with her mother that forces her out of the nest. Now she's doing that unconsciously. She doesn't know she's doing it, but higher mind can see the bigger picture. Consequently it doesn't get caught up in so much confusion and reaction. The higher mind is able to sit still and let the girl leave and lover anyway and be patient and not have to have a big emotional reaction to it. But these levels of consciousness, I guess they occur in sequence so that the first thing is the ego then the heart and the higher mind. That seems to be that way. We do seem to be hierarchical creatures in that we do need to develop an ego as a little child and as a young adult. And ego integration tends to precede ego transcendence. In other words, it's very hard to rise above an egoistic way of living and be holy and

be pure and be totally lovely when you really haven't integrated the things in your life that make you feel good about yourself. This is what I wanted to get to and that you just sort of say, oh, my ego stage is having your problem, but I'll just skip that one and just go up and deal with the higher stages and forget about my ego. It really is all that way. In fact, if there's one thing you want to do to be happy, it is learn to get your needs met. First of all, learn what your needs are. Find out truly what your needs are and that requires self-examination. It requires times of being quiet, times of going inward and watching yourself. It also requires a technique we use called the observer self-consciousness where you learn to put a little observer self on your shoulder, like a little person and carry that observer self around with you everywhere you go. And the observer self does not judge you. It never says shame on you, look what an awful thing you're doing, but it always just

notices what you're doing and reports to you like, ah, see this situation is making you very angry or it looks like you're getting uncomfortable now and it gives you a chance to get outside yourself a minute and watch what you're doing as you're doing it. So with the observer self-consciousness, we begin to get a hold of our process. And as we learn to have this, this internal kind of noticing going on all the time, then we can eventually learn to discover that there are certain things we really need in life. A person who's a transformer would never look at you and decide there were certain things wrong with you and things you needed to change. However, a transformer might notice that you are someone in pain and they might serve as a catalyst to help you bring up from within where that pain is coming from and for you

to choose for yourself what it is you need for that pain to be resolved. This is interesting that you brought up pain when we're experiencing pain is that pretty much a signal that all is not well and you should pay good attention to it. You know how physical pain will warn you that you maybe need to see a doctor or you may have to take some kind of an herb or a medicine or something because something's going wrong with the body. Well, psychological pain is exactly the same thing. It's telling you that there's something going on in your emotional mental self that's hurting. Like there may be some idea you're carrying around about yourself that's hurting you. Like maybe you've decided you're a bad person or that you're not good at your job or that nobody loves you or whatever are perhaps there's a feeling that you're carrying around inside that's kind of knocking on the door and saying, hey, let me out of here. I know for myself I don't ever really grow very much unless I'm sort of forced to, you know, I can get into such a complacent place with myself that if everything's constantly

going right and going smoothly, it's pretty easy to get lazier and lazier and to go to really sort of fall asleep, start sleep walking through life and suddenly you're getting up and every day you're doing the same thing and you're going through this habitual way of living and there's nothing happening. And then suddenly let's say you have a near death experience, you know, you're driving down the highway and a Mack truck smashes into you and you wind up in the hospital and you come out of a coma after about a week and you're looking around and you're going, wow. And all of a sudden it says, though, you've been given a shock to your consciousness. And then suddenly your values deepen and you begin thinking, who am I? What am I here for? What is life? But what's the purpose of my life? Where am I going? And a lot of those questions that I just mentioned are questions that take one to a much deeper level into themselves and so pain is a teacher. It sort of changes our consciousness really to us.

I wanted to ask you two about your theories on human consciousness, discussing as we did the lower self and the higher self and the ego. What do you see as far as human consciousness? Well, of course you know in the United States right now there's a great big consciousness movement going on which means that we're beginning to research finally in the field of consciousness. And it's such a new field that there's a lot of confusion about it. But the best thing to know about consciousness is to know that the physicists have found out that consciousness is at least equal to matter. And what that means, Olean, is for the first time we've got scientific theories that are backing up the fact that we are conscious beings and we can consciously choose to participate in our own evolution, meaning that we're not just a victim of someone else's idea of what we ought to be. We're not mechanistic creatures that we thought we were.

We can't just go to a doctor who's an expert and say, oh, something's going on wrong with my insides. Would you please fix me? There isn't any way that doctor can truly fix me. I have it within my own self. My own consciousness is in charge of me. And this is why, for instance, in the medical profession, they've never been able to understand why some people with the same symptoms as another person will live and flourish and the other one will just will to weigh and die. And many times doctors will say, well, I don't know why he died. He had every possibility of living and I don't know why this one lived. This one should have died because there's something inside of us that we can call a divine self or a true self or consciousness that makes choices on a real, deep level for us. It seems to know what our destiny is and it moves us along according to some sort of internal plan for our life. And we can affect that plan.

We have power over that plan ourselves. We're not victims of any kind of outer sort of larger energy that's going to make us be a certain way. So apparently there is a larger energy, too, that some people call God or the force, our cosmic consciousness. There does seem to be some sort of an energy that's running the universe that's much bigger than the human being can handle. But at the same time, we seem to have something within us that is consciously cooperating with that larger energy. What kind of research is being done on consciousness now? Well, mainly what's happening is we're beginning to study such things as the near death experience and a whole area called thanatology, which is the research that's being done on death and dying. And the field of parapsychology is enlarging a lot where people are beginning to study such things as the energy patterns of the human aura, which you may have heard, something about that. That human beings are not just skin and capsulated egos as we thought we were or that we have

energy that reaches further out than we think, and we're really egg-shaped people who can measure now with scientific instruments, the human aura, show that we're an energy field that's really egg-shaped, and that as I begin to move close to you, within a few feet of you, I start experiencing your energy. And so if you're a very depressed woman, I'm going to walk into your energy field and I'm going to start taking that on and feeling it. And perhaps you're very angry and hostile and you have a smile on your face and you're not showing that. And yet if I begin to get close to you, I begin to experience it as a feeling. So we all kind of know intuitively that we're more than just this body. But now science is beginning to take a look at that. Also there are scientists outside the fields of psychology such as biologists and researchers in some of the other areas that are finding out that the human being is living in a field of energy that is called by a man named David Bohm, the Implicate Order, and that the Implicate

Order might be thought of as being sort of like the big huge unconscious mind, and that we tend to just explicate certain portions of that Implicate Order in time and space, bringing up an event and living it. And then once we live it and assimilate it, then it tends to dissolve back into the big Implicate Order. So there's research now in science that's beginning to show us that the human being is a lot more than it thinks it is. In other words, things come to us and situations happen to us in order for us to experience a certain thing. When we get that one, they go away and another experience happens. Exactly. And in fact, some of the findings in the consciousness research are showing that we actually attract to us the situations that we need, maybe not want, but need in order to grow. That's interesting.

So is there a way of sort of recognizing these helpers or recognizing the things we need versus those that we don't? Yes, I think there's a real simple way. If you have energy in it, you need it, even if it's negative. So for example. Let me give an example. Let's say just even here at KUT, there's someone that you have to work with that you just can't stand. And every time you see her, she just causes you to just go red in the face, you know. So you're having a huge reaction to this woman. Well, why, why all that energy? Let's say that I know her too and I don't have a reaction to her. So those are always signs whenever we have a huge reaction to something either positive or negative. The negative one means that that woman is probably mirroring something about ourselves. We don't want to look at. Maybe she's too loud and aggressive, too bossy or too pretty or too seductive or something that's making it hard for us to be around her. And then the positive side of that is, if we have something that we're just so excited

about, we hardly stop talking about it, then obviously it's giving us something, it's feeding us something that's giving us a way to grow and to know ourselves better. So I'd say emotional reaction is probably the key to knowing whether or not you need something. Let's take some of this now down to the practical level, how do we and what do we do? What kinds of things do you do in your workshops with your participants to help them with these issues? Well, our workshops are usually divided into two components. One is sort of a teaching component where we talk a lot about some of these theories and facts that are emerging from modern science and ancient mysticism and then we take people through experiences, through processes where they can go within and find out for themselves what's true and what isn't true for them. In order to do that, we're using some of the technology such as breath work, creative artwork, a lot of music movement and many of the nonverbal therapies that give people

a chance to access the unconscious mind. What can someone who's just hearing this program who doesn't have an opportunity to take a workshop do to start working on some of these things by themselves? Well, I think the first thing that's helpful for most people who are just beginning on this path of self-knowledge, the first thing would be to go to a bookstore and preferably a bookstore that carries certain types of spiritual books and to look around the bookshelves in the self-help area. And to see if a book title won't speak to you, you know, there'll be a book there that will just speak to you as though it's just begging you to read it. And that's your intuition coming to play, saying, ah, she finally wants to know who she is. And so the minute we start asking those questions, who am I and I'd like to know how to go deeper, there is a part inside of her that cooperates.

And I think finding a couple of books to read that help you begin to get a handle on some of these ideas so that you don't feel alone. You see that other people have these same ideas and feelings and authors are writing about these things. Then, after you read a book or two that gives you some understanding of the self in sort of a down-to-earth language that's not real technical, then it seems like just step-by-step you're sort of guided. It's like a reversal as though we've always been almost forced in this society to constantly look outward. And to suddenly reach a place in your life where you say, whoa, I'm not going to let the outer world determine me so much anymore. The outer world is chaos. I'm going to turn inward and find out this rich inner universe and do some inner travel for a while.

Jacqueline Small, a cyclotherapist in private practice for the past 18 years. Small travels throughout the United States and Canada, leading counselor training and self-transformational workshops. She's the author of, Becoming Naturally Therapeutic and Transformers, The Therapists of the Future. I'm Eileen Remmon and you've been listening to Forum. Comments about this program are welcome and cassette copies are available and may be purchased by writing Forum. The Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712, that address again is Forum. The Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. Forum is produced and distributed by the Center for Telecommunication Services at the University of Texas at Austin.

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