The mirror neuron

A mirror reflects back to us what we cannot see directly. We cannot directly see the inner subjective experience of someone else, and yet the capacity to ‘put ourselves into someone else’s shoes’ is essential for human survival, good relationships, and health in general. What does it mean to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, and how do we do that? In our cortex, we have special neurons, called mirror neurons, that are attached to a whole network of neurons called the resonance circuitry. These mirror neurons have a fascinating capacity to fire both when we engage in an action, and when we see someone else engage in the same action. What’s even more interesting, is that they only fire if they pick up intention behind that action. So if I drink a glass of water, and I then watch you drink a glass of water, my mirror neurons fire both times; however, if I watch a robot drink the glass of water, they only fire when I drink, not when the robot drinks, because a robot has no intention. In other words, these neurons mirror the other person’s intentional behavior, as if I was the one performing that behavior.

Besides the activity of the mirror neurons themselves, the whole resonance circuitry attached to these neurons plays a crucial role. When my mirror neuron picks up your non-verbal behavioral expressions, it sends the information down the brain’s levels of neuro-processing all the way to the web of neurons around the heart, the lungs, and the gut. Remarkably, around those central organs, we have a web of so called parallel-processing neuro-circuitries, which simply means that this web of visceral neurons around those organs is able to process information in an intelligent way quite independently from the brain. In fact, the size of these visceral circuitries corresponds to approximately the size of a cat’s brain. This is where the notion of ‘gut feeling’ comes from, and it is likely the source of intuition.

As the mirror neuron’s information reaches our own visceral ‘cat brain’, we somatically resonate like a well-attuned instrument to the other person’s internal energy flow they convey non-verbally to the outside world. This resonance means that our bodies vibrate with the same frequency as the other person’s, and so we viscerally sense what they sense. That information gets then sent back upwards into a sub-cortical structure called the anterior insula, where our organism makes a map, a representation of that deep visceral resonance. Now, we not only viscerally resonate, but we emotionally feel what the other person must feel. This is called attunement. However, attunement is not yet enough of a useful process for sustaining healthy relationships, because if I just feel what you feel, and what you feel is awful, I will feel as awful as you do and be hopelessly useless in being able to help you. So nature has it organized so that the attuned firing in the anterior insula is then sent further up the processing hierarchy all the way back to the cortex, where I end up being able to cognitively make sense of the fact that even though I resonate and am attuned, feeling what the other person feels, I am also not that person and not in that situation. Now, I can remain grounded in myself, my own life situation, while simultaneously being able to feel what is going on in the other person. This is called empathy.

Whether we like it or not, this is how we are wired. As mammals and very complex ones at that, with the ability to mentalize and create imaginative worlds that don’t exist, we are particularly dependant on this resonance circuitry to raise our children and help them learn to make sense of the world. A well-functioning resonance-attunement-empathy process is at the core of healthy attachments we must develop in order to live healthy lives. There is no such thing as a healthy human being in a vacuum; tragic cases of humans that were raised in isolation make it clear that these people grow up mentally retarded and physically sick. Our capacity to be peacefully and productively alone rests on having been able to internalize secure attachments with caregivers. When we are successfully ‘alone’, we are in fact successfully relating inside ourselves to all the people who once provided us with secure relationships, which are now internalized. To put it bluntly, taking a successfully peaceful and soothing shower means being in relationship with a whole committee of internalized benevolent people that accompany us internally while we shower.

Do I need to say more regarding the importance of groups? Human beings grow, survive, and thrive in groups of all sorts, and knowing how to navigate our deeply social nature is at the core of health and wellbeing. At our Mindfulness Centre, we pay great attention to and integrate group dynamics in the way we run all our groups, including our mindfulness meditation groups. No meaningful work can be done in isolation. Without a harmonious, supportive, respectful, and empathic base of relationships among students, no meaningful learning can take place.

A mentor in group awareness

In June of this year Dr. John Salvendy, co-founder and first president of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association sadly passed away. In 1984 he became my group psychotherapy supervisor during my psychiatric residency at the University of Toronto. Within 3 years he taught me everything I needed to know to begin my own 35 years of group psychotherapy practice.

We quickly became friends as we both shared our common European roots. For years we presented group psychotherapy workshops at the annual meeting of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association and used to go for our bi-weekly Sunday walks sharing our imagination on all kinds of subjects. Sadly, his passing coincides with a message that recently appeared on the Canadian Group Psychotherapy website saying: ‘We regret to inform you that we are not able to respond to requests at this time. Please check back later’. It is my understanding that the association had to suspend its activities for lack of interest in group psychotherapy in Canada. What a shame, given that it is such a rich, powerful, and effective^[22] modality in the field of psychotherapy.

The longterm psychotherapy group

Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, or ‘long-term intensive interactional group psychotherapy^[21] assumes diverse and diagnostically heterogeneous group membership and an open-ended time scale’ (Wikipedia). I have been running 4 open-ended groups of 12 members each over the past 30 years. The sessions take place weekly and everyone is committed to attend every session. When after several years a group member has accomplished the work of personal transformation they set out to complete, they leave the group, and someone new joins. Not only is a group like that a fertile cauldron of transformative energy, but it is also very cost-effective. For psychiatrists here in Ontario the cost per group member is about ⅙ of an individual session of the same length. To run a group like that effectively requires special training within the field of psychotherapy, the way a plastic surgeon requires specialized training within the field of surgery.

There are many therapeutic groups being offered by mental health professionals, most of them short-term. The one we are addressing here is a fundamentally different kettle of fish. Members of my groups have three things in common: (1) They are all productive members of society with professions, jobs, hobbies, and families; (2) they have significant psychological symptoms that interfere with or sometimes even impede their capacity to fulfill their social, familial and personal obligations and aspirations; and (3) they have the capacity to introspect, examine their own mind and meaningfully explore who they are within the context of the intimate relationships that develop in the group. Their symptoms may have traumatic or other origins and may include relationship issues, PTSD, depression, anxiety, OCD, stress, and other manifestations of psychological suffering. Patients with active substance dependence issues or psychosis, and those who are either not able or willing to examine themselves, are not accepted in these groups.

The group process is unstructured, in order to allow the unconscious to speak. Whatever emerges during sessions is the manifestation of how everyone shows up in life. This affords group members the opportunity for self-examination, understanding, transformation, and application of new and more adaptive mental, behavior, and relationship patterns within the group at first, and eventually in their daily lives. What makes such a group so rich and effective is that group members learn through 4 levels of engagement: (1) By observing and listening to other people’s stories and interactions; (2) by getting actively involved in helping other group members explore themselves; (3) by having the group actively involved in helping them explore themselves; and (4) by addressing here and now interpersonal dynamics that arise in the course of each session. The group leader helps members develop a direct, respectful, and supportive style of communication that allows everyone to experience the safety of the intimate group process, as the often hard and painful exploration of truth unfolds towards new levels of integration, personal satisfaction, life success, harmonious relationships, and inner peace. On this basis, members learn to make better life choices, and over time many symptoms they originally came for disappear or reach manageable levels that do not interfere anymore with everyday life.

The principle of universality allows group members to lose their sense of embarrassment and isolation, learn to validate their experiences, and develop strong self-esteem as they recognize shared experiences and feelings among group members as widespread, universal human concerns. Because the group is mixed with members at various stages of development and recovery, everyone can be inspired and encouraged by other group members, which instills hope. Those who have overcome a problem can consolidate their self-esteem by realizing that they have developed the wisdom to help others with what they have learned to apply for themselves, and those who still struggle can benefit from that wisdom of others. The group provides a safe and supportive environment, where altruism can flourish, thereby consolidating our human nature as deeply relational. Members feel safe to take risks and extend their repertoire of socializing techniques for the purpose of improving their social skills, including interpersonal behaviors and the way they listen and talk to each other. Imitative behavior can be an important part of social learning through a modeling process, as members learn to observe and imitate the therapist and other group members in the way they share personal feelings, show concern, and support others.

Members learn to help each other and give their insights to others, which lifts their self-esteem and thereby helps develop more adaptive coping styles and interpersonal skills. In doing so, members often unconsciously experience their relationships with the group therapist and other group members quite similar to those with their own parents and siblings, creating a form of group transference specific to this type of group psychotherapy. With the help of the therapist’s interpretations, this allows participants to engage in a corrective recapitulation, reworking, and transformation of their primary childhood family experiences. By gaining an understanding of the impact of childhood experiences on their psyche and personality, participants may learn to avoid unconsciously repeating unhelpful past interactive patterns in present-day relationships. Through the development of attuned communication, as this process can be summarized by, all members feel a sense of belonging, acceptance, and validation. which gives the group a sense of cohesiveness. In such a cohesive environment, it is safe to experience relief from emotional distress through catharsis, a free and uninhibited expression of emotion. In telling their story to a supportive audience, members obtain relief from chronic feelings of isolation, shame, and guilt. Through this process of interacting with others in the group, who give feedback on one’s behavior and impact on others, group members achieve a greater level of self-awareness and self-understanding with the achievement of deeper insight into the way their problems developed and their behaviors were unconsciously motivated. Last but not least, and technically not a direct aspect of psychotherapy, useful factual information can occasionally get imparted from the therapist or other members in the group, which is often reported as very helpful.

In our increasingly fast-paced, narcissistic society (although COVID-19 may seriously challenge this trend), in which self-interest trumps all sense of community and responsibility for others, people often misinterpret group therapy as less valuable than individual therapy, even though the above explanations make it abundantly clear how rich and fruitful a process it really is. As I explained elsewhere here and here, people also look for quick fixes even when none is to be had. Not long ago I assessed a new patient with a significant history of childhood abuse. When I gave her feedback and my recommendation for this kind of therapy, she said she did not want to be so involved and asked me for a ‘quick fix’ so that she ‘can get on with life’, despite the fact that she had had years of short-term ‘quick fix’ interventions in the past, with no measurable result. Insurance companies are notorious for pushing quick fixes, apparently not realizing that they create revolving door situations that I assume must cost way more than a well-run longterm psychotherapy that addresses issues more permanently. The human mind in general looks for quick fixes, uncomfortable with the reality of much human healing that unfolds at the pace of watching your grass grow. There is no way around it, and this kind of group provides exactly the kind of safe, but intense transformative environment some of us need to heal deeply to the point of being able to thrive in our own skin without constant relapses, or worse, progressive deterioration.

Of course, not everyone is suitable for these kinds of groups, not the least because it is challenging to participate in such a rich and multifaceted process. Those who do, however, are usually rewarded by what they often call ‘an experience of a lifetime’, having had the privilege of participating in a group with like-minded and like-hearted people capable of a degree of intimacy, insight, and empathy not found anywhere else in life.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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Thrive to live meaningful lives in health and well-being

Occasionally, as during this past week, important insights of potentially universal interest arise from the work in self-exploration in my psychodynamic groups. What we can learn from the detailed work the group members were involved in, is worth sharing for the benefit of a larger audience. For reasons of confidentiality, no identifying details are mentioned of course.

To understand the profound message from this kind of psychological working through, we need to familiarize ourselves with the notion of an open complex system, however intimidating it may initially appear. So let’s put it simply: Like all living things, human beings are open complex systems. This means many things, but in essence, there are specifically two aspects I want to mention in this context: (1) We are organisms that take different forms of energy from the outside world, process that energy for our survival, and return energy in yet other forms back to the outside world. (2) For the organism to be healthy, this energy has to be self-regulated and processed within what is called the window of tolerance, which could also be referred to as the Goldilocks zone of energy processing. This means that the energy that gets processed has to on one hand be intense or strong enough to be perceived by the organism and impact its internal energy flow, but on the other hand also not too intense or strong so that the organism does not get overwhelmed. Energy processing within this Goldilocks zone ensures that we can thrive and maintain health. In this case, we enjoy what is called integration of energy flow. In other words, when we can regulate our internal energy processing within the Goldilocks zone, we move towards integration of our organism’s energy flow, which is experienced as health and well-being. Now here comes a profound scientific insight: When we are not subjected to excessive energy impacts from the outside world that are outside the Goldilocks zone, our organism spontaneously moves towards integration, health, and well-being without us needing to do anything.

Of course, energy impact from the outside world can sometimes exceed the boundaries of the window of tolerance and be either too weak or too strong. When too weak, we tend to fall into different variations of rigidity; when too strong, into chaos; sometimes even a combination of both. In these cases, the central regulation of energy flow becomes compromised, more primitive systems of regulation like the fight/flight/freeze systems located in the reptilian brainstem take over, and the spontaneous energy regulation towards integration located in higher brain centres becomes either compromised or impossible. As a consequence, we become ill, dysfunctional, and diseased. In fact, we can conceptualize all forms of illness and disease, whether physical or psychological, as various energy states of chaos, rigidity, or a combination of both. For example, anxiety would be a state of chaos, depression a state of rigidity, and OCD a combination of both.

Imagine now tearing a leg ligament at the gym. The energy impact would have obviously been outside the Goldilocks zone and your leg is now in a state of chaos. You are in physical pain and therefore unable to walk properly. You are forced to rest your leg and possibly apply various kinds of treatments, from more conservative ones such as ultrasound and physiotherapy to more invasive ones such as a cast or an operation. The forced immobilization required to let the tissue heal decreases the state of chaos and replaces it with rigidity, which through careful and gentle mobilization then has to eventually be dissolved until the organism is able again to regulate its own energy flow within the window of tolerance of integration towards health and well-being.

Like excessive force causing a torn ligament, many people, unfortunately, grew up in family circumstances, which imposed chronically inadequate or excessive psychological energy influences on the child’s fragile organism. This causes children to have to cope outside the psychological Goldilocks zone in constant mental energy states of fight, flight, or freeze, experienced as stress. Parents may have been inattentive and absent, causing children to fall into avoidance states of rigidity; they may have been overly intrusive and controlling, causing them to fall into ambivalent states of chaos; or they may be outright physically and emotionally abusive, causing in their children complex mixed states of chaos and rigidity called complex trauma. Imagine for a moment being like an orchestra as a metaphor for an open complex system. The orchestra is scheduled to play Beethoven’s fifth, but for unfortunate reasons the second violins are striking (dissociation), the trumpets are fed up with the director and decide to play anything they want (chaos) and the first cellos decide to play the same tune like the second cellos (rigidity). Your musical experience would obviously be severely compromised and the fifth symphony would not sound very good. Such is the experience of young adults emerging from compromised childhoods. Their various brain circuitries are not harmoniously connected, sometimes in conflict, sometimes not well connected to each other. The resonant interaction between all circuitries cannot occur, because the higher brain centres do not have a functioning orchestra (integrated brain) to work with. Children and adults end up not being healthy, displaying various kinds of physical, psychological, and social difficulties or illnesses caused by an organism in constant stress and incapable of regulating its energy flow within the Goldilocks zone of integration.

However, applied to our psyche, the example of the leg ligament tear becomes far more complex. To begin with, the torn leg ligament usually forces you to stop and let it heal; the pain is too great and function gets lost. Psychologically, on the other hand, we can continue to cope despite enormous psychological pain, because the pain can be repressed and compensatory thought, feeling, and action patterns can take over allowing us to function. Granted, we may not function at our full potential, yet well enough to dismiss these problems for a while and survive. Our organism is psychologically unable to fully regulate within the Goldilocks zone of energy flow and we bumble along as best we can. Instead of thriving within the window of tolerance, we survive in various combined states of rigidity, chaos, and partial integration, often displaying various kinds of symptoms, from physical symptoms to symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, relationship problems, and more.

Most importantly, years of such survival adaptations become eventually psychologically embedded in our sense of self, our sense of who we are. For example, if a 10-year-old child enjoying a healthy and attuned relationship with her parents behaves inappropriately at the breakfast table and accidentally spills the milk just before it is time to go to school, she will get an admonishment regarding her behaviour, and maybe even an encouragement that accidents happen. She will temporarily feel bad about her behaviour as her organism is in a state of partial chaos, then later apologize, and the whole episode will be forgotten as a mistake that could be corrected and repaired. Her sense of who she is, her sense of self was always loved and respected throughout this incident, and only her behaviour was addressed. The child will feel a sense of accomplishment about having been able to overcome adversity, a sense of connection with her parents she experiences as guiding, supportive, and loving, and possibly a sense of better understanding with regards to her unskillful behaviour at breakfast. She will be back within the window of tolerance of energy flow feeling good about herself.

Now imagine the same scenario with a child whose parents are not attuned or even abusive. She will be told that she is useless and stupid as usual, that all she does is disrupt breakfast for everybody else, and she will be punished because she is bad. In this case, her behaviour is confused with who she is, and her very sense of self is being attacked and undermined. The punishment has the effect of subduing and controlling the person as opposed to being a natural consequence that raises awareness about behaviour and strengthens the sense of self. In this case, the child rarely manages to live within the window of tolerance of psychological energy flow, emotional repair is not possible, and she consistently feels stressed and bad about herself. Over the years of such parenting interactions, the child eventually internalizes a sense of self that is deficient and grows into an insecure adult with low self-esteem and various kinds of symptoms of a nonintegrated psyche. In short, it just feels bad to be who one is and all kinds of symptoms appear. But because the person has no external reference point to relate to, she does not know how having a healthy sense of self feels, and the nonintegrated state feels normal. In addition, differentiating between behavior and who one is becomes impossible, and there is no way of recognizing the causal connection between a damaged sense of self and symptoms. The person is at a loss as to what to do about it.

This is where psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation come in. Both being processes, in which healthy relationships are cultivated, and internal psychological distortions are examined, understood in their detailed intricacies, and corrected, people can start to differentiate between their sense of self and behaviour, between who they are and what they do. This paves the way to our capacity to strengthen the fundamental goodness of who we are while improving how we do what we do. The process of working through such long-standing psychological pain moves through four phases that Marlene Van Esch, my co-therapist, helped conceptualize during one of those sessions. When we first start psychotherapy, we suffer and don’t know why, the stage of being unconsciously unskilled. As we begin the process of working through, we become aware of our many distortions, the stage of being consciously unskilled. During this phase of psychotherapy symptoms often seem much worse, even though the person is making progress, and at the same time feels a new, unfamiliar sense of liberation within the pain. With time, as the defensive distortions are being undone and the capacity for skillful action improves, the person enters the stage of being consciously skilled and feels much better. Finally, when this state of well-being becomes a habit, the person enters the last stage of being unconsciously skilled, because it takes no effort anymore to be healthy.

You might remember me mentioning at the end of the second paragraph of this blog, that ‘… when we are not subjected to energy impacts from the outside world that are outside the Goldilocks zone, our organism spontaneously moves towards integration, health, and well-being without us needing to do anything’. In other words, within normal nontraumatic circumstances, integration, health, and well-being is our fundamentally natural state. Although pain and suffering are ubiquitous, the spontaneously most natural process our organism follows is the one towards integration, health, and well-being. This is an interesting scientific finding with profound consequences on our view of what it means to be human.

Because suffering is so ubiquitous, and probably a minority of people enjoy the kind of attuned and resonant psychological environment that strengthens self-esteem and causes them to be the best they can be, and because the psyche is so difficult to examine and therefore for many people remains an elusive reality they dismiss or don’t know how to deal with, suffering is often seen as primary, fundamental, and intractable. Suffering is a prison of our own making when we don’t skillfully deal with pain. In the Catholic Church for example this state of affairs is conceptualized as original sin. The idea is that human beings are fundamentally bad and need to be shaped through punishment and coercion into good soldiers of God. The implications are profound: Not only is the disruption, or even violence, which caused suffering in the first place, overlooked, but more disruption and violence are inflicted in the erroneous belief that this is how one shapes a strong human being into goodness.

Today we can say that from the scientific perspective of open complex systems this view is questionable, even untenable. The notion of original blessing espoused by the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and many Buddhist schools much more aptly describes human nature. When through healthy parenting as children or later examination of our minds as adults we manage to deeply understand who we really are, and relinquish the many ways we get in our own way by unconsciously fighting old wars that don’t exist anymore in our present environment, our organism will spontaneously move towards integration, well-being, and health. Ease, goodness, and love are primary. The truth about ourselves literally sets us free, not because we have to do things to be better, but because gaining clarity about who we really are, allows us to undo unnecessary defenses and get out of our own way, as our open complex system always spontaneously tries to move towards integration, health, and well-being. Thus the notion of non-doing at the core of these psychological disciplines. Once a clear and strong sense of self has been allowed to emerge through the integrative movement of our open complex system, it becomes much easier and more powerful to practice skillful actions for the benefit of both others and ourselves. Our fundamental nature is to be found in the freedom to be, which in turn is based on the foundations of truth. The truth about who we are sets us free, and freedom is love (freedom in Sanskrit means love).

Fundamentally, every child, no matter how he or she behaves, is an open complex system in need of parental help for the development of its own capacity to regulate towards integration, health, and well-being. The last thing a child needs is punishment to learn to obey. That only creates subservient robots with no creativity to live meaningful lives. On the contrary, what children need is an emotional connection with their caregivers, parental guidance in the form of support and natural consequences to their actions, as well as parental help in learning how to examine who they are and make sense of reality. With that in place, they can develop a strong and healthy sense of self at their core that allows them to make their own skillful decisions, and if necessary correct and repair behaviour to improve the ability to be skilfully active and loving in their lives.

Keen curiosity, spacious openness, gracious acceptance, wise guidance, and love – these are the principles that ensure the possibility of seeing truth and find the freedom to be by getting out of our own way. Then, the immeasurably greater wisdom of the complex organism that we are can take over, and we can thrive to live meaningful lives in health and well-being.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

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The Mindsight Intensive course begins soon, and during the preparation, the notion of a beginning intrigued me.

Not only are we at the beginning of an academic year, but to me, the fall is also the beginning of a descent into the unconscious realms of our psyche, in which we roam during the winter, and hopefully derive great benefit from the creative potential to be unleashed for the upcoming spring and summer.

I am not a Christian, a Buddhist, or any other kind of -ist, but I am a student of those. As far as I know, neither was Jesus a Christian, nor Buddha a Buddhist. Originality and innovation come more from ‘going out into the world and fucking it up beautifully’ (‘Make Trouble’ by John Waters), than dutifully following a master’s creative energy without making it your own. Owning our teachers’ creations means creating ourselves by transforming traditions and teachings into something new that reflects our unique, from the originator’s different circumstances. In his ‘The  Structure Of Scientific Revolutions’, Thomas Kuhn makes this point very nicely. We tend to stay safely imprisoned within a given paradigm as we contribute to its expansion and improvement, even when obvious discrepancies and limitations point to the fact that the paradigm may be inadequate. At some point, someone comes along and shows that the whole paradigm is flawed and proposes a better one. After much protestation, everyone falls in love with the new paradigm and then engages again in the process of expanding and improving it. This happened for example with Einstein’s relativity theory, which revolutionized the Newtonian view of physics. Of course, not everyone has the genius necessary to come up with and propose new paradigms, but it might at least be worthwhile exploring our tendency to defer and abdicate our creative authority and project its power on an idol we admire, thereby losing much of our own creative energy that makes us feel alive. That’s not to say that we don’t always stand on the shoulders of giants, who came before us – we do. But in integrating their wisdom, we tend to forget the importance of taking the risk of personal engagement in the journey into the wilderness, that has no signposts we can follow, and that challenges us in a profound way to allow the creativity of the unknown to transform us. That is in fact what the mindsight journey is all about. You cannot engage in the exploration of mind and expect that everything you find convenient in your life will stay the same. Mindfulness practice is deeply revolutionary, and therefore not entirely comfortable.

One giant, on whose shoulders I stand, is Northrop Frye. Around 1984 a book by Northrop Frye unexpectedly crossed my desk, and I was told that he was apparently famous and a towering figure in his field. I don’t remember which book it was, but a cursory look at it satisfied me that he was speaking gibberish to me in what obviously was a specialized treatise on literary criticism I knew nothing about. Two years later I heard the 1962 CBC Massey lectures he gave, entitled ‘The educated imagination’. Like a lightning bolt, they struck my neurofirings and opened my mind to what he had to say about the human psyche. I began reading these texts that were more relevant for my psychiatric bend – talks he had given on myth and metaphor, writings on matters spiritual and the imagination, as well as his two books on the Bible, ‘The great code’ and ‘Words with power’. Extremely interested in what he had to say about the mind and other psychological matters, I decided I had to meet the man. I was blissfully unaware at the time that Peter Gzowski, the longterm host of CBC’s ‘Morningside’, had once referred to Northrop Frye as the most difficult person he ever interviewed, because of his ‘thought-stopping silences’.

Frye graciously invited me for a chat in his office, where we spent about an hour talking and reflecting. Thought-stopping silences indeed followed his brief responses, comments, or questions he threw my way, during which he looked deeply into my eyes. As a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, I was used to that rhythm while dialoguing, where words, sentences, and stories are like pebbles thrown into a pond, after which long periods of reflection follow the waves the pebbles caused. We both enjoyed mutually created thought-stopping silences, during which much non-verbal and imaginative material was allowed to simmer like a primordial soup from which new creations arise. My time with him was transformative because I got to experience firsthand the embodied imagination of a genius from another field than my own, which frankly blew my mind. Our dialogue became increasingly animated over the course of that hour, and he ended up inviting me to audit his lectures on the Bible for free, which I attended religiously for a year at the Old Vic in Toronto. He spoke the way he wrote with immense clarity. His somewhat monotone voice seemed to be the perfectly self-effacing and humble messenger that carried his incredible wisdom to his audience. Lecture after lecture, I felt orthogonal shifts in my consciousness being triggered by his brilliance and vast imaginative vistas. Needless to say, he had taught me to look at the Bible in a completely new way as in fact the one text that shaped the imagination of western culture like no other. He helped me gain access to an intuition I already had my whole life, that the Bible, like the Bhagavad Gita, was a book of wisdom and revelation about the human mind and its liberation from delusion. It is scripture, and scripture is an art form that has been lost in our digital age. We don’t know anymore how to read it, let alone write it for what it is, a means of personal and social transformation, not a rigid dogma to confirm our own views. This is why I am now going to open the Bible on its first page as Frye would likely have wanted me to do.

When I talk about the Bible in mindsight circles, there are those who are enthralled by the new vistas I present, and those who for various reasons get extremely nervous, uncomfortable, or even incensed. I always find it astonishing to see how otherwise intelligent folks internally dissociate from reason and are just unable to see past their internalized religious doctrines of all sorts. These people are not able to just read the words that are on the page without regressing to preadolescent Santa Claus belief systems they hold on to for dear life. Beliefs are thought patterns unfolding in close proximity to sensory cortical brain centers, thus giving them an unusual sense of embodied reality, even though they are nothing more than thoughts. So if you believe the Bible, or any other scripture for that matter, was written by God as an external entity dwelling somewhere you are not, you are simply deluded. If on the other hand, you realize that these texts arose from the collective human imagination and wisdom that reaches way down through our collective unconscious to the mystery of the nameless unknowable, and you want to use the word ‘God’ to denote that mystery, then I am with you.

There is little more fascinating than to know that the Old Testament was mainly written in Hebrew; that Hebrew words have many different meanings that open vast webs of potential understandings; that meanings evolved and changed during the many centuries during which the Bible was compiled; that oral transmission of wisdom stories gave rise to a plethora of different Bible mythologies, out of which only some were chosen into the official canon; that the New Testament was written in Greek; that translations of all sorts are recreations and transformations of meaning rather than exact carbon copies of the original; that indeed there is no original, but only an ongoing process of creation, recreation, and adaptation over many centuries past without a beginning anywhere; and that the Bible is not a historical treatise, even though historical circumstances shaped the language used, but a mythological inspiration, ‘mythological’ meaning belonging to the domain of story-telling, not of historical science. In short, there is nothing simplistic about reading the Bible. On the contrary, it radically confronts us with the complexity of mind, life, universe, and love in ways we tend to ignore.

Put your preconceived ideas, beliefs, non-beliefs, or skepticism aside for a moment, and let’s just read the words on the page with discerning logic, imaginative sensibility, and a generally educated humanistic intelligence. The Bible begins with a Big Bang: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.’ With this logically non-sensical, paradoxical statement the Bible challenges the reader right from the start – either the Bible writers were illogical dumbheads, which is greatly to be doubted, or you know immediately that you are about to embark on a most uncommon journey. This statement tells us immediately that we are not into a scientific, historical, or otherwise logical account, but a metaphorical one that will defy the rules our problem-solving left-brain minds like to live by, let alone the rules our preadolescent concrete mind wished us to indulge in as a way of making the world magical. How incredibly difficult the journey proposed by the Bible will be is then further emphasized by the fact that it takes about 15 pages for humanity to get into deep trouble, and then 1500 or more pages to get out of it. So let’s get to it – what is so absurd in this first sentence?

If there really is a beginning to the heavens and the earth, then there cannot be anything before the beginning, since the beginning is an absolute one of everything, including time. The notion of something before the beginning of time is absurd since there can only be a beginning within the context of time. What was before the beginning is thus an absurd question. Yet, the sentence sounds like there was something or someone before the beginning, namely God. But that poses problems, since if there was, it would not be the beginning. This first Bible statement gives us a warning: Don’t even try to think of or imagine God, because if you do, God becomes an entity, a noun with certain attributes, and such an entity can only exist in time, which would make the notion of God absurd. Furthermore, God cannot exist before the beginning unless we invalidate the beginning and have to ask, who created God? We begin down the absurd road of an infinite regress, turtles all the way down. The absurdity of imagining God as an entity expressed by a noun is implied by the absurdity of someone before the beginning. Unless concretized by the primitive and infantile delusional mind and projected onto the image of a person, God is established right from the start of the Bible as a verb, which cannot be imagined, a verb that suggests God is a process, the formless source of diversity.

Unless you are happy to dumb down the notion of God into banality, ‘God’ is a notion that points to a no-thing that is nameless, timeless, unimaginable, indescribable, and unthinkable. In other, quite intriguing words, we can say that the beginning arises from a creative nothingness we call for lack of a better word God, and which has no beginning nor end, only transformations. That is not eternity, by the way, since eternity means endless time. We are talking about a timeless realm! Since even ‘nothingness’ is a noun pointing to something called nothing, and no ‘thing’ can exist before the beginning, we have to take our reflection a step further and speak of no-thingness in the sense of a fundamental absence of any essence. The beginning is the creation of diversity that timelessly occurs moment-by-moment, a manifest universe from a creative pure potential realm of no-thingness without an essence we could grasp, imagine, or describe. This unimaginable nameless is to my mind quintessentially God in unmanifest ‘form’, giving rise ‘in the beginning’ to the manifest form of the universe, which always vanishes back into its unmanifest source of no-thingness before reappearing again in a new form. As a not so unimportant and intriguing aside, physicists have now figured out through mathematical explorations that our universe was created out of nothing, the closest way to rationally imagine nothingness as a creative pure potentiality. Don’t try to get any clearer than that in your logical understanding.

The beginning of St. John’s gospel in the New Testament supports these ideas so far: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.’ Let’s not forget that while the Old Testament was originally written mostly in Hebrew (some parts in Aramaic), the New Testament was written in Greek. The ‘word’ is a translation of the Greek word ‘logos’, which refers to the manifest God principle as it appears out of no-thingness through everything created, as we have seen before. In the beginning is the manifest world of diversity, of phenomena and appearances, the exploration of which inevitably leads to the discovery and realization of the nameless, timeless, spaceless, and unimaginable ground of non-manifest Being as its source. Interestingly, we can find a neuropsychological correlate to this notion of a beginning: Formless sensory experience mediated by the senses called conduit, which does not make sense to us, receives meaning through its being constructed by the brain into language-based stories. ‘The word’ here is literally the beginning of meaning, and as we all know, most narratives end up sooner or later pointing beyond themselves to the nameless ground of Being. The beginning is thus always a bidirectional transition point between the manifest and the unmanifest, the creative present moment energy flow from the source into manifestations, and through dissolution of manifestations back towards the source.

Between the beginning and the end in the obscure and extravagant imagery of the Apocalypse, we meet a God quite like a person suffering from multiple personality disorder, at different times angry, petulant, vindictive, wise, loving, reasonable, bat-shit crazy, and more. This is in fact the one-person version of many pagan and eastern multi-god versions of religious beliefs corresponding to the Jungian notion of archetypes. Buddha always reminded his disciples that we are the boss having to manage and rule over these many gods, and this is no different from the ‘God’ of the Bible after the beginning, an archetypal collection of psychological tendencies it behooves us to manage with the power of awareness. God as the unmanifest nameless underlying the beginning is fundamentally different from the manifest divine archetypes. The nameless only appears through an orthogonal shift in consciousness mediated by a serious awareness training and is the foundation from which the archetypes can be successfully managed to give our lives meaning. Paradoxically, you need to familiarize yourself with emptiness to manifest God and keep the gods in check.

The beginning, as the Bible shows, leads to catastrophe pretty quickly after about 15 pages, which is the metaphor for the inevitable beginning of human suffering. This suffering is worth it, though, otherwise, the Bible would not waste 1500 pages worth of ink exploring how to get out of the suffering mess. Suffering is our ticket to liberation and wisdom. The beginning is thus an invitation to learn to deal with suffering effectively, and the nameless ground of being the beginning implies is the mystery of initiation and transcendence we need to orient ourselves towards by a very subtle, but powerful act of reorientation: Skillfully entering the now of the present moment. If your head spins now, feeling that such innocuously appearing an idiom as ‘in the beginning …’ has morphed into an intellectually confusing meaning monster you would rather avoid, the scripture has fulfilled its purpose. By simply grasping the message of scripture intellectually we have not mastered it by a long shot. Its real meaning lies in its power of transformation, which the scripture can only suggest or point to. To discover and embody that power, the real-life embodied relationship to the world we are a part of, and more particularly to an experienced teacher, is essential. The real power of words lies in their ability to point beyond themselves to timeless truths and the mystery of Being. Like any myth, words with power conceal their meaning unless it is put into daily practice moment by moment, hour by hour. The left and right brain need to cooperate harmoniously for us to decrease human suffering.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Mindsight Topics and Programs for wisdom, peace, and equanimity.

As usual, this year’s program will introduce new topics not emphasized or explored before. We will expand our tools beyond mindsight to include mindful action from a deeper understanding of the power of the present moment. This program will be heavily experiential, immersing students into the direct and in-depth exploration of direct, intimate experience through mindsight, both internally with themselves and externally with others. Our goal is wisdom, peace, and equanimity NOW, not tomorrow.

Three inescapable existential questions we face daily are why there is evil in the world, what do we do with events and experiences we don’t understand and can’t make sense of, and why there is pain and suffering. None of these are questions that can be answered. Instead, they are calls for engagement in figuring out how to best live with the inescapable. I used to say that Buddha taught the inevitability of pain and the optionality of suffering. I have become more nuanced in my old age – both are inevitable, but with dedication and training over time, we can improve our capacity to bear suffering with greater ease. In this course, these three existential questions will echo from the background of our presence, and in meeting the challenge they pose, I see passion for showing up, curiosity for details of our subjective experience, and commitment to adventure and creativity in taking on our minds, as probably the most important principles we can learn to cultivate.

Topics addressed in the course will include the following:

1. A review, deepening and consolidation of the transformation algorithm technique of mindfulness meditation introduced last year, including a closer examination of its creative potential for non-dual awareness. The mystery of transcendence at the core of Being can only be accessed through the exploration and knowledge of the soma that we are, as opposed to the body that we have (check out this blog for a short explanation). The exploration of that kind of depth of energy flow through the body is generally unknown in our culture, despite the fact that mindfulness is embodied and ubiquitously taught. The transformation algorithm practice honors this truth as it opens the door to vast possibilities of healing beyond the rational, scientifically known body that we have, thus giving us access to the nameless, timeless, and transcendental essence of Being.
2. Touching upon research in near-death and dying experiences, we will explore their implication for life and mindsight practice. In this context, unusual phenomena occurring during that time and the universally observed shift into non-dual consciousness upon dying are explored. Synchronicity as it often occurs during the dying process, and its value in conferring meaning to our lives, will be included in our work on harnessing the power of now.
3. An in-depth exploration of the present moment, including the close examination of intention and its power for transformation. We will learn to use intention to implement positive action, align oneself with the energy flow of the present moment, disidentify from thought content, and use negative emotions as transformative energy for healing.
4. Learning to harness the quantum dimension of mind to work with beliefs and faith as forces of wisdom, serenity, and peace.
5. Learning to understand the meaning of mystery and surrender to its 1000-year journey. This includes the appreciation of mystery as the portal to emptiness, the guiding principle on the path to transcendence.
6. Expanding the power of mindfulness through imagery to emphasize positive healing energy.
7. The spiritual dimension of mindsight, including non-dual awareness.
8. Appreciating and learning to use the art of scripture as a linguistic and ritualistic force for transformation as opposed to a dogmatic precept for behavioral control.

It is the dimension of Being and transcendence we will learn to reclaim and I will focus on in this program – not only because it involves teachings that are being lost, but also because lack of access to this dimension can cause seemingly intractable symptoms and suffering. These can be mitigated and much better managed when we know how to access what lies beyond the rational, problem-solving mind, and tap into the vast, open plane of infinite possibilities of energy flow. We have to learn to align ourselves with the river of life in the present moment. This includes relating to nothingness and emptiness as the vast context of existence, as we endeavor to increase our permeability and transparency to the non-conscious source of all experience. We can then cultivate a sense of groundedness in the nameless source of the open plane of infinite energy transformation possibilities while living with equanimity peacefully and wisely NOW.

This program will be heavily experiential, immersing students into the direct and in-depth exploration of direct experience through mindsight. I will also endeavor to foster a sense of intimacy through student participation.

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Group Psychotherapy provides exactly the kind of safe, but intense transformative environment some of us need to heal deeply.

On June 14, 2020, Dr. John Salvendy, co-founder and first president of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association sadly passed away. In 1984 he became my group psychotherapy supervisor during my psychiatric residency at the University of Toronto. Within 3 years he taught me everything I needed to know to begin my own 35 years of group psychotherapy practice. We quickly became friends as we both shared our common European roots. For years we presented group psychotherapy workshops at the annual meeting of the Canadian Group Psychotherapy Association and used to go for our bi-weekly Sunday walks sharing our imagination on all kinds of subjects. Sadly, his passing coincides with a message that recently appeared on the Canadian Group Psychotherapy website saying: ‘We regret to inform you that we are not able to respond to requests at this time. Please check back later’. It is my understanding that the association had to suspend its activities for lack of interest in group psychotherapy in Canada. What a shame, given that it is such a rich, powerful, and effective^[22] modality in the field of psychotherapy.

Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, or ‘long-term intensive interactional group psychotherapy^[21] assumes diverse and diagnostically heterogeneous group membership and an open-ended time scale’ (Wikipedia). I have been running 4 open-ended groups of 12 members each over the past 30 years. The sessions take place weekly and everyone is committed to attend every session. When after several years a group member has accomplished the work of personal transformation they set out to complete, they leave the group and someone new joins. Not only is a group like that a fertile cauldron of transformative energy, but it is also very cost-effective. For psychiatrists here in Ontario the cost per group member is about ⅙ of an individual session of the same length. To run a group like that effectively requires special training within the field of psychotherapy, the way a plastic surgeon requires specialized training within the field of surgery.

There are many therapeutic groups being offered by mental health professionals, most of them short-term. The one we are addressing here is a fundamentally different kettle of fish. Members of my groups have three things in common: (1) They are all productive members of society with professions, jobs, hobbies, and families; (2) they have significant psychological symptoms that interfere with or sometimes even impede their capacity to fulfill their social, familial and personal obligations and aspirations; and (3) they have the capacity to introspect, examine their own mind and meaningfully explore who they are within the context of the intimate relationships that develop in the group. Their symptoms may have traumatic or other origins and may include relationship issues, PTSD, depression, anxiety, OCD, stress, and other manifestations of psychological suffering. Patients with active substance dependence issues or psychosis, and those who are either not able or willing to examine themselves, are not accepted in these groups.

The group process is unstructured, in order to allow the unconscious to speak. Whatever emerges during sessions is the manifestation of how everyone shows up in life. This affords group members the opportunity for self-examination, understanding, transformation, and application of new and more adaptive mental, behavior, and relationship patterns within the group at first, and eventually in their daily lives. What makes such a group so rich and effective is that group members learn through 4 levels of engagement: (1) By observing and listening to other people’s stories and interactions; (2) by getting actively involved in helping other group members explore themselves; (3) by having the group actively involved in helping them explore themselves; and (4) by addressing here and now interpersonal dynamics that arise in the course of each session. The group leader helps members develop a direct, respectful, and supportive style of communication that allows everyone to experience the safety of the intimate group process, as the often hard and painful exploration of truth unfolds towards new levels of integration, personal satisfaction, life success, harmonious relationships, and inner peace. On this basis, members learn to make better life choices, and over time many symptoms they originally came for disappear or reach manageable levels that do not interfere anymore with everyday life.

The principle of universality allows group members to lose their sense of embarrassment and isolation, learn to validate their experiences, and develop strong self-esteem as they recognize shared experiences and feelings among group members as widespread, universal human concerns. Because the group is mixed with members at various stages of development and recovery, everyone can be inspired and encouraged by other group members, which instills hope. Those who have overcome a problem can consolidate their self-esteem by realizing that they have developed the wisdom to help others with what they have learned to apply for themselves, and those who still struggle can benefit from that wisdom of others. The group provides a safe and supportive environment, where altruism can flourish, thereby consolidating our human nature as deeply relational. Members feel safe to take risks and extend their repertoire of socializing techniques for the purpose of improving their social skills, including interpersonal behaviors and the way they listen and talk to each other. Imitative behavior can be an important part of social learning through a modeling process, as members learn to observe and imitate the therapist and other group members in the way they share personal feelings, show concern, and support others.

Members learn to help each other and give their insights to others, which lifts their self-esteem and thereby helps develop more adaptive coping styles and interpersonal skills. In doing so, members often unconsciously experience their relationships with the group therapist and other group members quite similar to those with their own parents and siblings, creating a form of group transference specific to this type of group psychotherapy. With the help of the therapist’s interpretations, this allows participants to engage in a corrective recapitulation, reworking, and transformation of their primary childhood family experiences. By gaining an understanding of the impact of childhood experiences on their psyche and personality, participants may learn to avoid unconsciously repeating unhelpful past interactive patterns in present-day relationships. Through the development of attuned communication, as this process can be summarized by, all members feel a sense of belonging, acceptance, and validation. which gives the group a sense of cohesiveness. In such a cohesive environment, it is safe to experience relief from emotional distress through catharsis, a free and uninhibited expression of emotion. In telling their story to a supportive audience, members obtain relief from chronic feelings of isolation, shame, and guilt. Through this process of interacting with others in the group, who give feedback on one’s behavior and impact on others, group members achieve a greater level of self-awareness and self-understanding with the achievement of deeper insight into the way their problems developed and their behaviors were unconsciously motivated. Last but not least, and technically not a direct aspect of psychotherapy, useful factual information can occasionally get imparted from the therapist or other members in the group, which is often reported as very helpful.

In our increasingly fast-paced, narcissistic society (although COVID-19 may seriously challenge this trend), in which self-interest trumps all sense of community and responsibility for others, people often misinterpret group therapy as less valuable than individual therapy, even though the above explanations make it abundantly clear how rich and fruitful a process it really is. As I explained elsewhere here and here, people also look for quick fixes even when none is to be had. Not long ago I assessed a new patient with a significant history of childhood abuse. When I gave her feedback and my recommendation for this kind of therapy, she said she did not want to be so involved and asked me for a ‘quick fix’ so that she ‘can get on with life’, despite the fact that she had had years of short-term ‘quick fix’ interventions in the past, with no measurable result. Insurance companies are notorious for pushing quick fixes, apparently not realizing that they create revolving door situations that I assume must cost way more than a well-run longterm psychotherapy that addresses issues more permanently. The human mind in general looks for quick fixes, uncomfortable with the reality of much human healing that unfolds at the pace of watching your grass grow. There is no way around it, and this kind of group provides exactly the kind of safe, but intense transformative environment some of us need to heal deeply to the point of being able to thrive in our own skin without constant relapses, or worse, progressive deterioration.

Of course, not everyone is suitable for these kinds of groups, not the least because it is challenging to participate in such a rich and multifaceted process. Those who do, however, are usually rewarded by what they often call ‘an experience of a lifetime’, having had the privilege of participating in a group with like-minded and like-hearted people capable of a degree of intimacy, insight, and empathy not found anywhere else in life.

Copyright © 2022 by Dr. Stéphane Treyvaud. All rights reserved.

Navigating our mindfulness and therapy programs in COVID times.

Our government is following a general world-wide trend of beginning to loosen our social isolation so that society can get back to more ‘normal’ interaction patterns, work, and economic prosperity. Within this context, our team had to decide when we can start meeting with our patients, students, and participants in person again.

This decision can be motivated by science and safety on one hand, and socioeconomic considerations on the other. In the end, what counts for government is the balance between unknown, but “evidence-informed” risks of coronavirus transmission and the known negative economic impact of businesses remaining closed. For us, the potential benefits of meeting in person have to significantly outweigh the risks of infection.

We have to be able to maintain the sanitation standards suggested by Public Health. On a practical level, this means considering that our group rooms are carpeted, and chairs and cushions are fabric, and we don’t have the capacity or set up to be adequately cleaning the furniture and props on a nightly basis. The recommendation remains that we stay 6 feet apart, which would be a challenge in our group room spaces. Personal protective equipment for both staff and patients is recommended, which includes face masks. As psychotherapists, we need to be able to see the entire face, and not have to stare at masked people. This applies even more so to the many groups we run, in which the idea of staring at a sea of masked people is therapeutically counterproductive and affects group dynamics. Imagine also people crying with masks, which is of course a frequent occurrence in our line of work. Do they simply cry in their mask? Remove their mask and blow their nose? Where do the tissues go? The air is then contaminated, so what does that do to the safety of others? In short, the therapeutic value of seeing people’s faces online far outweighs the reality of physically sitting together in person with faces hidden behind masks, and all the complexities that come with it. If these considerations were not enough, we also have to clarify and deal with legal and insurance matters that affect our decisions.

In summary, as it stands right now, the potential benefits of meeting in person do not significantly outweigh the risks of infection. We will be navigating in the murky waters of a big grey zone for a very long time because pandemics do not just suddenly disappear (see this interesting article from the New York Times). What will guide our decision is not impulse and economics, but science and safety. Until we see a clear recovery pattern, which Canada is not yet experiencing (see this link: https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries), and other health, safety, and therapeutic considerations are adequately addressed, we will continue our work with everyone online.

Dr. Stephane Treyvaud and team