Psychotherapy is Metaphysical
by Charles Thompson-Shealy, Cenote Therapy
As a teenager I worked at a metaphysical gift shop where I learned a great deal about various forms of spirituality, divination, tarot, and astrology. It was easy for me to see these topics as unusual or abnormal since they were completely contained in the shop and I didn’t encounter them at home, at school, or in the mainstream culture. Anything that couldn’t be measured and counted seemed to be treated with suspicion.
However, when I studied psychology in college, I found that I couldn't rely on materialism very successfully. When we talk about the mind, we are inherently talking about the metaphysical, something beyond the material substance of the brain. We can correlate thoughts with feelings and feelings with neurotransmitters in the brain or observe the interactions between emotions and the amygdala, the “feeling” region of the brain. We can measure brain wave patterns and correlate them with feeling states like compassion. But it will always stop at correlation and not causation.
To the true materialist maybe we are just a series of impulses that manifest as tears or laughter or longing. Maybe there isn’t anything to a mind beyond the confines of the brain mechanics or anything to a soul besides a feeling of self that is a byproduct of those mechanics. But I don’t think so, and I definitely don’t want to think that way either. For me, seeing the world as a soulless dead place is frightening.
Richard Tarnas in Cosmos and Psyche points out that the ancients believed in an ensouled world around them and that believing in a living world around us makes it easy to find meaning in the motion of a flock of birds or the order in which a set of bones may fall to the floor. Seeing a living world around us also makes it easier to form meaning and see our connection with and our place in the world around us.
In psychotherapy the first thing we have to contend with is the mind of the client having their own subjectivity. If I were to believe, as the materialist may, that my client is only exhibiting too little serotonin free floating in their brain, then I might just refer them to a psychiatrist to prescribe an SSRI. But then I’d be out of a job. Instead, I have to believe they have a mind, a consciousness, a Self. Now we’re working in the realm of metaphysics. That is to say many of my clients are on psychopharmaceuticals for a range of reasons and I support them 100%. However, the majority of my work goes on outside of the realm of symptom and medication management. The majority of my work has to do with the meaning my clients make of their experiences.
I find that by bringing Tarot and Astrology into my work with my clients I am able to help them make just as much meaning about their interior and exterior worlds as I am with Freud's tripartite mind model or Melanie Klein’s object relations theory to name a few.
Freud initially used hypnosis to gain access to the unconscious mind and make unconscious meaning conscious. Jung used synchronicity and the symbolism of world religions to access deeper meaning for his clients that centered them in a collective meaning making experience. I think of my work continuing in that line of use the physical and metaphysical tools, methods, frameworks available to help support my clients in making the meaning of their lives that helps them get unstuck and move forward, whether they are new frameworks for meaning making or ones we’ve lived with for thousands of years.
Charles Thompson-Shealy is the Co-Creator of the Asterisk, and a psychotherapist specializing in IFS and working with queer, trans folk and folks of color. He is also trained astrologer in modern and ancient Hellenistic techniques and has been a tarot reader since he was a teenager. He believes nontraditional therapeutic technologies can offer alternative angles to our experiences and meaning-making that add layers of nuance to our insights, and weaves this into his work for those who are drawn to these approaches. He currently has availability for new clients. Learn more about his therapeutic work at CenoteTherapy.com.
