The times they are a-changing: Reflections on the development of humanistic and integrative psychotherapy in Ireland

by Ger Murphy

It was 1991. The end of training year dinner at the Institute of Creative Counselling and Psychotherapy (ICCP) was in flow and a conversation began about the value that a journal for Humanistic and Integrative psychotherapy in Ireland could offer. It was an exciting time in the emergent profession of psychotherapy in Ireland. The Strasbourg Declaration had been agreed the previous year when organisations from across the EU had come together under the banner of the European Association for Psychotherapy to declare psychotherapy as a stand-alone profession.

Structures were being set up across the continent to regulate and boundary the new profession. In Ireland, the Irish Council for Psychotherapy was begun with 5 distinct sections of psychoanalytic, constructivist, family systems, cognitive-behavioural, and humanistic and integrative coming together to form under the umbrella body of the Irish Council for Psychotherapy (ICP). This possibility emerged from a conversation at St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin one night between Michael Fitzgerald (psychoanalyst) and myself. We had just heard that a group from Holland were planning to come to Dublin to propose a psychotherapy model which was to be based solely on a core profession model. This would have meant that only those with a prior qualification in medicine, psychology or social work could qualify for entry to the new profession. We wanted to resist this as being too restrictive.

Each section was defining itself and developing structures of training and accreditation as appropriate to each modality. The designation of “humanistic and integrative” was only emerging, coming as it did from UK based delineation discussions in the previous years. ICCP had affiliated itself to UK based psychotherapy groups (there being as yet no such body in Ireland).

It must be remembered that humanistic training had only started in 1984 in Ireland when Susan Lindsay launched the first training at Creative Counselling Centre, Dun Laoghaire, as ICCP was then known. The outcome of that dinner conversation in 1991 was to be the beginning of the journal, Inside Out. I, along with two trainees at our training, Aveen Murray, Marjorie Sachs, and a graduate, Mary Montaut, along with Mavis Arnold, a graduate of Dublin Counselling Centre, agreed to form the first editorial board. Our vision was a simple one: to spread the word of our newly emerging and growing profession of humanistic and integrative psychotherapy.

I see the development of humanistic and integrative psychotherapy in Ireland and the parallel development of Inside Out, as having three main phases over the 30 years since its inception. These phases can be seen as, initiation, consolidation and application. Inside Out has been deeply connected to and a valued partner of the development of humanistic and integrative psychotherapy here.

Initiation

The first phase can be seen as one of developing a sound and boundaried container for the growth of the profession and the wider sense of initiation of related practices and procedures. The years of the 90s were busy with developing criteria for trainings and accreditation of psychotherapists and later, of supervisors. The Ethical and Complaint codes were developed to offer safeguarding to clients and professionals. Overall, this can be viewed as the time when humanistic and integrative psychotherapy was placed on the map here in Ireland.

It must be remembered that psychotherapy itself was very new in Ireland in the 1990s. Its arrival was in many ways paralleled with the systemic shifts that were happening in the country at that time. The social life of the country was being changed fundamentally and rapidly in that decade. For example, divorce was legislated for in Ireland in the mid 90s (whereas only one constituency in the country had voted in favour of divorce in the previous referendum in 1986). The social influence of the Catholic Church diminished greatly in this decade. Finally, with the outpouring of abuse allegations that emerged in the late 90s from clerical and institutional settings, the need for a response to trauma was urgent. Peter Levine’s wonderful book, Waking the Tiger (1997), had emerged, and it argued convincingly that the body is a healer, and that the psychological effects of trauma are reversible, but only if we listen to the voices of the body. This brought focus to body psychotherapy, which had been within the canon of humanistic and integrative psychotherapy in the form of Reichian bodywork and the Bioenergetics of Alexander Lowen. These novel approaches to working with the body offered useful tools for healing the emergent trauma being revealed in Ireland.

Consolidation

The second phase following Initiation, concerned the developing of practice and theoretical maps, and can be seen as one of Consolidation.

The developments within neuroscience were emerging with the first arrival on these shores of Daniel Siegel et al in early 2000 (Siegel & Solomon, 2003).This brought a new understanding of the human mind. Pat Ogden’s (Ogden, Minton & Pain, 2006) visit brought trauma - informed practice. Both were landmarks in the development of humanistic and integrative practice.

The original values and insights of humanistic psychology, as clearly articulated in early articles of Inside Out and elsewhere by John Rowan (1996, 2016) were being merged with practices informed by neuroscience and a trauma-informed perspective. The arrival of mindfulness from the work of Jon Kabat Zinn, (2012) Ram Dass, (2010), and Jack Kornfield (2002) further developed the awareness based and trauma-informed approaches which deeply enriched the humanistic and integrative practices of the early new century.

This enrichment of the humanistic and integrative perspective and practice was covered well in many Inside Out articles and interviews. These developments were paralleled with developments in the structures of IAHIP in the early 2000s where training courses were beginning to be recognised and supervisors were being accredited. It also was the time when courses began to seek alliances with universities to allow them to offer academic degrees. This move is ongoing as psychotherapy seeks to be recognised in the Health Service and beyond. This is a development towards which I have held some ambivalence. The search for academic recognition can make trainings in psychotherapy more rigorous but it can run the risk of downgrading the personal development aspect of training which is difficult to assess in an academic context. For this and other reasons our own Institute of Creative Counselling and Psychotherapy training decided not to seek academic recognition. We eventually decided to cease training in 2010 after 25 years of training provision. While it can be difficult to keep the soulful aspect alive in academic training, it is, nevertheless, an important quest.

Application

The third phase of development can be seen as one of Application wherein, humanistic and integrative psychotherapy has matured to the extent of practitioners being employed in the Health Service and elsewhere. The population is now much more psychologically informed, and the tools of psychological mindedness and particular application of humanistic and integrative practices are spreading much more widely. The call to living an emotionally attuned, embodied life is stronger. The self-responsibility for each individual’s mental, emotional and spiritual life is being taken on actively by more and more of us. This of course is also in the context of a counter force developing also, whereby individuals are moving to a more virtual and representational life where screens, signalling and disembodied relating are also growing rapidly, and where professionalisation can be in danger of disempowering the individual in deference to the ‘expert’. Now perhaps, the challenge is about maintaining the wild heart of the founding spirit of the work. In the words of my poem below which was published in Inside Out (Autumn 2012).

What Now

The dank waters of despair sit in stillness on the dark lake of early morning,
The acid rain cries across the valley, 

The acid rain cries across the valley, 

And I face what we have done, squandered our inheritance.

Almost too breathtaking to look upon this scene of stale water, stunted growth and strange colour, unfamiliar to the land

Almost unbearable, too overwhelming even to cry out…

But cry we must, to break the spell, the spell of ignoring,
And cry, cry, cry the waste ...the waste, until tears start the flow, first from deep inside, slowly rising to cleanse me of my shame,
opening me in humility,

This, a bud of pure love offered in faith that some little thing is possible.

And the tear? The tear, the first offering of clear water that begins to cleanse the land.

In this ongoing phase of application, how can the practice be used to meet the critical issues of our time such as climate change, among other significant challenges where building emotional resilience and fostering a kind of soulful living is needed? So many are overwhelmed in these times where we may be called to dance what psychotherapist Jennifer Wellwood calls the “wild dance of no hope” (Wellwood, n.d.).

Wellwood (n.d.) says in her poem The Dakini Speaks:

My friends, let’s grow up,
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven`t noticed,let’s wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It`s simple-how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be shocked by them,
Let’s not act so betrayed.

I believe we need practices, rituals and ceremony that build community and offer support and coping strategies to meet the singular challenges of these times as referred to by Wellwood.

The Dalai Lama is quoted as saying that “community is the new Buddha” (Dalai Lama, 2009). This idea may challenge us to look beyond the focus on the individual and the search for individual well-being, as we come to see that our own mental health depends on our community’s health. Perhaps like no other time we see that the cult of individualism has strong limitations, and that we are in this together.

Practices

In our attempt to build resilience I see practices as occupying a vital role. Practices serve many functions. Perhaps most importantly they underline the fact that we are responsible for our own wellbeing, growth and maturation. Practices can take many forms, dancing, meditation, singing, writing, etc. across to spending time on Twitter or on the internet. Our choice - Our life.

We all engage in repetitive practice. Discernment regarding what supports our life force is vital. As the alchemists of old said, “healthy practices keep the inner material warm” (Roob, 1997) keeping us in touch with our inner life. They keep us rooted on the ground and on the land, and offer psychic containment. They deepen our relation to source through an engagement with the mystery of life, when done with devotion and constancy. Finally, practices provide a context for revelation where fresh ideas, feelings and insights can be received and often the marginalised voices from within ourselves can be heard. These are challenging times, in which, as the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca said, “we are baptised by dark water” (Lorca, 1933) and as psychotherapist Francis Weller (2015) says, “we are washed by our own tears and reunited with the realm of the sacred.”

Ritual and ceremony are usually collective practices, repeatedly undertaken, which, alongside our individual and collective practices, open us to mystery, the sacred and our interdependence. A simple ritual I have employed for many years in my practice room has been lighting a candle as the session begins. Clients sometimes ask the purpose of this ritual and I speak of how the candle for me symbolises the third element in the room, the other, the mystery, the sacred. John O’Donohue the Irish poet and philosopher, spoke of meeting the unknown and mysterious with a sense of reverence, an invitation which I value and see as relevant to our days, and relevant in a practice setting (O’Donohue 2002).

Humanistic and integrative psychotherapy has roots in cherishing authenticity and emergence in the individual. It has many processes and procedures that are soundly applicable to meeting the challenges of these times. The work of Joanna Macy (2012) in her groundbreaking approach to the climate issues is a good example of how humanistic and integrative psychotherapy has influenced practices in a wider context. Our learnings should not be used to foster narcissism and the cult of the individual. We may be living in times where the real is in danger of being lost to the representational and where the digital and the imaginary are given precedence over nature. This may be a symptom of the terror of our times and the refusal to meet it squarely. We may be terrified of death and our avoidance and refusals are rampant. (See the work of Stephen Jenkinson (2015) for further discussion on this theme.)

Humanistic and integrative psychotherapy can have a real contribution in these times, with its valuing of the body, grief and soul. 30 years after it was founded, I see this kind of psychotherapy and its journal here in Ireland, Inside Out, as valuable, accessible and relevant for this new time.

It may be time for humanistic and integrative psychotherapy to move beyond the consulting rooms. This form of psychotherapy has always been based on empowerment and self-actualisation rather than merely symptom relief and so does not fit too well into a reductionistic medicalised model of illness and cure, but in the wider paradigm of human potential. As such, I think it is relevant to the wider population given that the anxiety and distress of our times cannot be fully addressed in an individual context alone. Of course, we need to do individual personal work including shadow work where we look at elements of ourselves which we have banished (often the inferior qualities) and work to reclaim them, making room for shame, depression and grief among other aspects. Beyond this we also need witnessing. Our ability to find (or refind) communal ritual and ceremony is now vital and our particular form of psychotherapy can assist us in this task. We may dance, sing, speak poetry and mirror each other in deeply healing ways with practices from our therapeutic toolkit as we continue to make an important contribution to our collective context and its healing

Reflections

I see our current Western Society as having failed us in some ways, while also bringing wonderful benefits. I am concerned that there may be some failure in the area of our maturation. We may be caught in the grip of the Hero Archetype. Charles Eisenstein (2022) writes insightfully on our need for a new archetype in moving beyond the Hero model which may now be coming to an end of its usefulness as an abiding life-map.

The focus on mastery and progress has been stunning in its benefits but may also have left so many of us without real growth in our ability to hold suffering, face death and know our soulful place in the order of nature. Do we need to move beyond a lifelong adolescence and find ways to deepen into our fuller mature life? Have we found ourselves living more remotely from the circle of life that an immersion in nature can give us? Without the rites of passage held sacred by many indigenous peoples we have not faced the trials and opportunities that these rituals could give us. We are left frightened of death, loss and our shadow parts. We may need these practices, as we face possible futures as Jem Bendell (2021) outlines, in his book Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos. These futures call for a deeply resilient mature adult aware of their activation and traumatic responding, able to self soothe, seek support, develop community, engage in life affirming ritual and ceremony and at peace with death. Our psychotherapy is now of age and can help greatly in this task.

Humanistic and integrative psychotherapy grew out of humanistic psychology and the human potential movement. I wonder if we have a great deal to offer in returning to the wider lens of facilitation of human potential in addition to our contribution to healing pathology and dysfunction. If we do so we might find ourselves focusing much more on work in group and community contexts as I have outlined above.

I wonder if we narrowed our focus to serving the individual and away from working in larger contexts, in part to gain recognition at the psychotherapy table from other sections, and from government and wider society? Our perspectives and practices have so many creative and valuable offerings to what is now needed that we would do well to remember our roots and value our contribution. I am thinking here of the Bioenergetics class run for many years at The Institute of Creative Counselling, a weekly class where people could come and safely discharge pent up emotional energy in a group context. Such opportunities, sorely needed now, may have been placed solely within the walls of the psychotherapeutic relationship.

I also remember here that my own therapeutic journey started over 40 years ago with Reevaluation Co-Counselling, a remarkable structure developed by Harvey Jackins (1978). Jackins taught basic skills for use within a peer-based model of shared therapeutic time. It is important to know when a skilled professional is needed and to be able to access such a service. It is also important to know when a peer-based model may be more egalitarian and empowering. Therapeutic development is necessary for all and it is important not to coral the practice too restrictively, a development akin to fencing in the commons as has happened in our societies over recent centuries. Have we got too safe and overcontained? Our attention to boundaries and therapeutic holding has great merit but also has a shadow. Different interventions are required for different needs.

Another situation where the application phase is visible is the development of short term counselling within the Primary Health care setting. I wrote here in Inside Out in 2011 how we at the Institute of Creative Counselling and Psychotherapy had developed a model of short-term psychotherapy based on three aspects, Capacity Building, Presence, and Release. This allowed us to offer a brief, correctly targeted and effective intervention to clients seeking help in the community. This work was based on the pilot project which had been funded for us by the HSE from 2006. The service was also piloted in HSE North-East at the same time. It was then rolled out nationwide in 2014 but may have become bogged down by the avalanche of chronic need that it was met with. Can a brief therapeutic intervention be of significant use when there are such structural issues of inequality and poverty? Therapeutic skills are not the property of the few but the requirement of all, and the population may need to re-own them for themselves. It is complex to repurpose therapeutic interventions for a wider community application. How psychotherapy gets delivered in a medical context while continuing to value self-responsibility and self-actualisation is challenging, however this is a real question for our time.

Let’s use all we have. This will help us to face the future with real and active hope, love for our world and compassion for all. This sense of Active Hope is defined well by Macy and Johnstone (2012):

Active Hope is not wishful thinking. Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued by the Lone Ranger or some savior. Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world. The web of life is calling us forth at this time. We’ve come a long way and are here to play our part. With Active Hope we realise that there are adventures in store, strengths to discover and comrades to link arms with. Active Hope is a readiness to engage. Active Hope is a readiness to discover the strengths in ourselves and in others, a readiness to discover the reasons for hope and the occasions for love. A readiness to discover the size and strength of our hearts, our quickness of mind, our steadiness of purpose, our own authority, our love of life, the liveliness of our curiosity, the unsuspected deep well of patience and diligence, the keenness of our senses and our capacity to lead.

I am very grateful to Inside Out for the request of an article on the occasion of the 30th year anniversary of IAHIP. When I look back on the 30 years of IAHIP and my own 40 year journey with psychotherapy, I feel delighted to have been involved in this great adventure. I think it is important to value what has been created and to be vigilant that we continue to reflect on our profession’s and society’s shadow material emerging as it always will. Psychotherapy has an important contribution to make, but only when it is seen as part of a much wider change in society, to meet the challenges of our times. A final question for me for our profession as well as for our society is: Are we being good ancestors?

Ger Murphy has worked as a psychotherapist for 35 years, was a founder of Inside Out and ICP and IAHIP, ran a psychotherapy training at the Institute of Creative Counselling and Psychotherapy for 25 years, and continues to practice, and offer company to those seeking development individually and in groups. He can be contacted at germurphyster@gmail.com.

References

Bendell, J., & Read, R. (Eds.). (2021). Deep Adaptation: navigating the realities of climate chaos. John Wiley & Sons.

Dalai Lama. (2009). The art of happiness: A handbook for living. Penguin.

Dass, R. (2010). Be here now. Harmony.

Eisenstein, C. (2022) Neither Hero nor Journey.

Jackins, H. (1978). The human side of human beings: The theory of re-evaluation counseling. Rational Island Publishers.

Jenkinson, S. (2015). Die wise: A manifesto for sanity and soul. North Atlantic Books.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2012). Mindfulness for beginners: Reclaiming the present moment—and your life. Sounds True.

Kornfield, J. (2002). A path with heart: the classic guide through the perils and promises of spiritual life. Random House.

Lorca, F. G., & Edwards, G. (1933). Blood wedding. Madrid.

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma: The innate capacity to transform overwhelming experiences. North Atlantic Books.

Macy, J. (2021).  World as Lover, World as Self:: Courage for Global Justice and Planetary Renewal. Parallax Press.

Macy, J., & Johnstone, C. (2012). Active hope: How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. New World Library.

Murphy, G. The poetry of diagnosis – avoiding a diagnosis becoming a prognosis. Inside Out. Spring 2011.

Murphy, G. What Now. Inside Out. Autumn 2012

Murphy, G. Short Term Psychotherapy. Inside Out. Summer 2011.

O’Donohue, J. (1999) Anam Cara: Spiritual Wisdom from the Celtic World. Bantam Books.

Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W.W. Norton & Company.

Roob, Alexander (1987) Alchemy and Mysticism.

Rowan, J. (1996) John Rowan looks to the future. Inside Out. Summer 1996.

Rowan, J. (2016).  The reality game: A guide to humanistic counselling and psychotherapy. 3rd edit. Routledge.

Siegel, D. J., & Solomon, M. F. (Eds.). (2003). Healing trauma: Attachment, mind, body and brain (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology). WW Norton & Company.

Weller, F. (2015). The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. North Atlantic Books.

IAHIP 2022 - INSIDE OUT 98 - Autumn 2022