Introduction
This is the typical scenario: conversations about work come around to me. I reveal, somewhat reluctantly, that I am a therapist. After many years of professional practice, there are certain things that people predictably say when I tell them what I do. Much like, as a child, when telling people my name they might say” Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” You just come to expect these things. With the therapy role, people often say “you must really be
sick of hearing people’s problems!” Speaking for myself on my profession, I have loved my work and have been honored by it for the last 22 years. My clients have repeatedly earned my genuine admiration and respect. It is satisfying to be able to make a difference for people who are suffering or just confused with different phases and responsibilities of life.
I have an understanding of practices that support health and have seen the success of these strategies in easing pain in myself and in others. In my unique professional niche, I have braided creative and expressive therapy, restorative yoga and talk therapy. Through this treatment lens I have been able to introduce my clients directly to their own conscious and unconscious self. That includes amazing healing opportunities and some seriously difficult memories and interior material to engage. A skilled helper can make this difficult terrain a bit less scary and unrecognizable. It has been a wondrous gift to be a witness and a midwife in this process.
Our unconscious and conscious selves need to be engaged and working together to achieve a satisfying balanced life. Therefore when we neglect our basic need to be conscious and aware of who we are, we tip into varying degrees of dissociativeness and disconnection.
Being out of touch with our bodies causes us to feel out of our minds and visa versa...thus the title of this book, Out Of Body, Out Of Mind . The image of the worried babydoll reminds us of times in our own childhood when our environment threatened us, teaching us to shift attention away from ourselves, in a state of hypervigillance. Some of that is inevitable, but too much teaches us to focus our attention outside of our bodies. We need to own, know, and live in both the conscious and unconscious self as one whole. Once I really understood this, I created treatments designed to help clients rediscover and re-inhabit their bodies, recovering their sense of mental and emotional wellness. I learned some things about the ways our recent dependencies on technology can dilute or take hostage our capacity to be integrated. Much more on that to come.
“No,” I say, “I don’t get sick of my clients.” I am endlessly intrigued and fascinated by the benefits of speaking, creating, applying science and yoga principles to improve our current and future state of being ourselves. Although the past cannot be changed, ill effects one might have from it can often be interrupted and reshaped. I believe, after decades of stepping into that role with hundreds of people, it is a sign of health to voluntarily seek help. Some people do not attach stigma to seeking professional help. Those who do also show up when nothing else seems to alleviate discomfort, stuck in the orbit of unwanted behaviors, relationships, habits.
In those times of change and vulnerability, therapists have considerable responsibility to provide a useful service that is supportive and makes a difference. Trusting that a professional chosen by your insurance company rather than you, with a formula treatment on a limited menu of choices does not inspire my trust and perhaps not yours either. I have stepped back from clinical practice to reflect and find perspective. I will be sharing my take on current protocols and practices in mental health counseling and health care in the U.S. with an eye to the history that precedes it.
Yes, you will soon learn that from my vantage point our health care system is harmful to working professionals as much as it might be to the people they assist. My struggles as a therapist have stemmed from unrealistic restrictions on my services, pressures to provide inadequate treatments, hinged to unreliable and insurance controlled funding. This distills down to legal and ethical complications in the health care marketplace that have created too much struggle for all the costs and requirements of clinical practice.
In the following chapters, I seek to make sense of how our health care systems in the U.S. have gotten into this morass. I mean to explore these worlds as they wind around each other, an expanding consciousness of healing, and the professional work of a mental health therapist in an ethically challenged marketplace. How did it get this way? Anyone who can take the time to consider my perspective on it all, thank you! I most humbly suggest that each and every one of us who tells our own unique story honors the whole of life and all living beings gifted with human expression. It is in that service that I bow to you with hands clasped in front of my heart...
...Namaste,
MF Bonney 3.3.13
sick of hearing people’s problems!” Speaking for myself on my profession, I have loved my work and have been honored by it for the last 22 years. My clients have repeatedly earned my genuine admiration and respect. It is satisfying to be able to make a difference for people who are suffering or just confused with different phases and responsibilities of life.
I have an understanding of practices that support health and have seen the success of these strategies in easing pain in myself and in others. In my unique professional niche, I have braided creative and expressive therapy, restorative yoga and talk therapy. Through this treatment lens I have been able to introduce my clients directly to their own conscious and unconscious self. That includes amazing healing opportunities and some seriously difficult memories and interior material to engage. A skilled helper can make this difficult terrain a bit less scary and unrecognizable. It has been a wondrous gift to be a witness and a midwife in this process.
Our unconscious and conscious selves need to be engaged and working together to achieve a satisfying balanced life. Therefore when we neglect our basic need to be conscious and aware of who we are, we tip into varying degrees of dissociativeness and disconnection.
Being out of touch with our bodies causes us to feel out of our minds and visa versa...thus the title of this book, Out Of Body, Out Of Mind . The image of the worried babydoll reminds us of times in our own childhood when our environment threatened us, teaching us to shift attention away from ourselves, in a state of hypervigillance. Some of that is inevitable, but too much teaches us to focus our attention outside of our bodies. We need to own, know, and live in both the conscious and unconscious self as one whole. Once I really understood this, I created treatments designed to help clients rediscover and re-inhabit their bodies, recovering their sense of mental and emotional wellness. I learned some things about the ways our recent dependencies on technology can dilute or take hostage our capacity to be integrated. Much more on that to come.
“No,” I say, “I don’t get sick of my clients.” I am endlessly intrigued and fascinated by the benefits of speaking, creating, applying science and yoga principles to improve our current and future state of being ourselves. Although the past cannot be changed, ill effects one might have from it can often be interrupted and reshaped. I believe, after decades of stepping into that role with hundreds of people, it is a sign of health to voluntarily seek help. Some people do not attach stigma to seeking professional help. Those who do also show up when nothing else seems to alleviate discomfort, stuck in the orbit of unwanted behaviors, relationships, habits.
In those times of change and vulnerability, therapists have considerable responsibility to provide a useful service that is supportive and makes a difference. Trusting that a professional chosen by your insurance company rather than you, with a formula treatment on a limited menu of choices does not inspire my trust and perhaps not yours either. I have stepped back from clinical practice to reflect and find perspective. I will be sharing my take on current protocols and practices in mental health counseling and health care in the U.S. with an eye to the history that precedes it.
Yes, you will soon learn that from my vantage point our health care system is harmful to working professionals as much as it might be to the people they assist. My struggles as a therapist have stemmed from unrealistic restrictions on my services, pressures to provide inadequate treatments, hinged to unreliable and insurance controlled funding. This distills down to legal and ethical complications in the health care marketplace that have created too much struggle for all the costs and requirements of clinical practice.
In the following chapters, I seek to make sense of how our health care systems in the U.S. have gotten into this morass. I mean to explore these worlds as they wind around each other, an expanding consciousness of healing, and the professional work of a mental health therapist in an ethically challenged marketplace. How did it get this way? Anyone who can take the time to consider my perspective on it all, thank you! I most humbly suggest that each and every one of us who tells our own unique story honors the whole of life and all living beings gifted with human expression. It is in that service that I bow to you with hands clasped in front of my heart...
...Namaste,
MF Bonney 3.3.13
