Catherine Auman, MFT

Throughout yoga class, Jennifer feels fat. She’s obsessed with the other women’s bodies – how much thinner, limber, and more beautiful they are. Afterwards, at Whole Foods she buys a package of Organic Fig Bars and a pint of Carob Almond Rice Dream, goes home, eats it all, and throws up. Self-hatred quickly follows.

Kyle is late on his rent again, and can’t be sure he’s not overdrawn. It’s always this chaos, every month. That reservation he made for the weeklong meditation retreat was more than he could afford – but maybe he’ll get some answers there.

Jennifer and Kyle are examples of what we call spiritual bypass: when a person’s spiritual intentions and aspirations are sincere, but their unfinished business is holding them back.

People become attracted to spirituality in the hope it will solve life’s problems and relieve pain and suffering, but it’s not quite that simple. A popular misconception is that spiritual practice will in and of itself resolve psychological issues.  Best-selling books advocate that by ignoring our discomfort and focusing on the Light, or on what we wish to manifest, we can get everything we want. This idea of positive thinking, or the law of attraction, can divert us from our real issues.

You can’t make progress on the spiritual path if you’re ignoring your pain. Pain, in fact, is an indication of where you need to grow – by pretending we’re happy all the time, we miss the lessons our suffering and humanity are trying to teach us. As Alan Cohen says in Wisdom of The Heart, “If you desire to know where your spiritual work lies, look to your emotional pain.”

When we have unmet needs, they will clamor for our attention and divert us from what we want to be our path. Hence, we end up battling addictions, psychological issues, and not living our right life, rather than making the spiritual progress we hoped. Failing to discriminate between pseudo-spirituality and true inner transformation, we can get lost for years or life times.

Kyle and Jennifer and others like them are sincere spiritual seekers, but not dealing with their psychological issues is stunting their spiritual growth. Jen needs to get help from an eating disorder therapist, or depending on the severity of her problem, spend some time in a treatment program. Kyle needs to understand that being on a spiritual path doesn’t negate needing to learn how to handle money. Working with a psychotherapist who specializes in understanding the pitfalls of the spiritual path could make all the difference in the world.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

If we understand Maslow rightly, once one’s basic needs are met, we are free to move up the pyramid to explore our higher level needs. Once we no longer have to worry about food and shelter, like folks in the prosperous West, we can devote our time to our needs for Love and Belonging, Esteem, and Self Actualization. We can graduate from concerns about finding a job that will pay for the basic necessities, for example, to finding the right job that will help us fulfill our creativity and own special gifts.

The human need for Love and Belonging is for friends, a lover, a family, and to be a vital member of the community. If you feel isolated and unloved, the pain will cause one to be stuck here in their personal development until these needs are met. I often think of how primitive humans existed in small tribes, and I don’t think we’ve evolved out of this need for being part of a small group. In our lonely cities, many are struggling to feel connected, and new communities are springing up online.

Esteem needs are the next level of Maslow’s pyramid, which means needing respect from others, a certain degree of status, self-confidence, achievement, independence, self-respect. The word on the street is that this should all come from within, but it’s a human need to want to be acknowledged by one’s community.

The top level is Self Actualization which Maslow said only 2 % of people achieve. Here an individual is enjoying the desire to fulfill their potentials, to be all that one can be, to become one’s most complete, fulfilled self. These people tend to enjoy solving problems rather than finding them burdensome, have a great degree of acceptance of self and others, and tend to have increased spontaneity, nonconformity, and creativity.

Self Actualize-ers also tend to have what are called Peak Experiences, or moments that make you feel One with God or nature. There is a feeling of being part of the Infinite and Eternal, and people having this experience report being changed forever for the better. Sometimes these peaks are called mystical experiences, sometimes they are found through drugs, and they are part of many religious traditions.

People who live in prosperity can devote time to their growth and development and can progress to a point where their lower needs are met. Then there is a possibility to move up to levels that involve having experiences that teach them about spirituality and the Infinite. Maslow posited that this our biological destiny, and a life force that drives us.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? I think about it a lot when I try to explain to people what Transpersonal Psychology is, or what it is that a transpersonal therapist does that is different from traditional counseling.

Maslow theorized that there is an order that human needs must be met: for example, if you’re still lacking food and shelter, it’s going to be hard to think about optimizing your creativity. You will need to concentrate on finding food first. Likewise, if you’re feeling like you don’t have enough love in your life, it’s going to be hard to focus on achievement and what you’d like to give to the world.

If you recall, The Hierarchy of Needs is shaped like a pyramid, with the bottom rung being Physiological Needs (survival: food, water, sleep, etc.), followed by Safety Needs (security of the body, employment, resources, family, health, comfort). When these needs have been satisfied, we begin to consider Love/Belonging (friendship, family, sexual intimacy), the need for Esteem (confidence, achievement, respect for and by others). Some people actually develop to the point of reaching Self Actualization (creativity, spontaneity, problem solving), and on the top some add the need for Peak Experiences (ecstasy, sense of Oneness).

Here’s the Wikipedia link if you want to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

As people lucky enough to have been born in the West, very few of us are grappling with Physiological Needs. Most of us don’t need to spend our days looking for food like some in Africa or deep in the Amazon jungle. Most of us are lucky enough to have employment, which is a different level concern than that of the right employment which is our higher need for Self Actualization. Many people who come to therapy are working on the level of Esteem Needs, especially if they grew up in difficult families where their esteem was not allowed to flourish or was broken by abuse.

When people come in for a therapy consult, one thing the therapist might look at is where their concerns are on the pyramid. Is this a person who has trouble providing basic care for herself? Is he able to feel safe in the world? Is it relationship problems? Or an existential question of what it all means? Each of these concerns would take different efforts for resolution.

The promise of technology was that people would be freed from the lower level needs to be able to focus on the higher. However, it seems that in America, we have become trapped trying to solve the same needs over and over. It is helpful to think of moving to the higher levels after the lower have been met: self actualization, and peak experiences, which is really spiritual search. I’ll be covering this in a later article.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

We were talking about Ezra Pound in my writing group the other week – about how he revolutionized poetry and writing in general by his idea that it’s all about the image rather than storytelling. I’d read that he’d spent thirteen years in a mental hospital so I said, “Of course, he could see things differently – he was mentally ill.”

The others in the group recoiled. They thought I was making a value judgment and being mean, but I’m around mental illness all day when I’m working as a therapist so it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. Also, for twelve years I worked in mental hospitals so I don’t have any beef with mental illness. Sometimes it’s not wrong at all.

Here’s a shortlist of people who suffered from severe mental illness and still made significant contributions to humanity:

Ezra Pound
Sylvia Plath
Beethoven
Kurt Cobain
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda
Ernest Hemingway
Vincent Van Gogh
Virginia Woolf

These folks gave great gifts to the world with their significantly different ways of perceiving. They were able to step outside the mainstream long enough to nurture their own uniqueness.

In this culture, we are sold an image of what constitutes sanity that is extremely superficial and soul-less. The healthy person is supposed to be robotically “happy” all the time, constantly productive and striving toward material success – outwardly focused, extroverted, socially slick, and looking the way we’re all are aware we’re supposed to look. If your nature is different than this, something is wrong with you that needs to be fixed.

People who are, say, sensitive, isolative, and introspective, are often are led to believe they are defective in some way. I meet people all the time who think there is something wrong with them when the only thing wrong is not accepting their own humanity.

I’m not trying to suggest that having a mental illness is not a painful way to live, nor am I of the school that romanticizes it, like the filmmakers of the 60’s who tried to convince us that the people inside the asylum were sane and those outside were crazy – that’s just not true. There are states of consciousness that do not allow one to adequately care for oneself, have loving relationships, or enjoy one’s life, and if that is the case, psychotherapy can help.

Why stigmatize people who have mental illness as any worse than people with physical illness? I say embrace the unique emanation that is you, and reject the constant pressure to be like Tony Robbins or Cameron Diaz. Plenty of people have already got that down. Maybe we need another introspective soulful poet, or a wildly flamboyant fiction writer. We need people with out-of-the-mainstream views. If the pain of the way you are is too much, get help. But we surely wouldn’t want to make you sane.

© 2010 Catherine Auman

I got a call earlier this week from a couple trying to get help for a beloved friend who was unable to get off the couch due to experiencing visions, flashes of color and light, sensations of energy coming out of her body, and ecstatic trance states. She also believes that the Messiah has returned, and it is she.

The couple had found me through Google as a ‘transpersonal’ therapist, or one who has had training in assessing and treating what is called “spiritual emergency.” For although their friend has a history of severe mental illness, many of her symptoms are the same or similar as those of spiritual awakening.

She was also experiencing evidence of a broader spiritual understanding, of increased compassion, of expansiveness, of the knowledge that everything is made of swirling energy, and that she has an important role to play on earth. Unfortunately, since this was mixed up with her psychotic symptoms, her friends weren’t sure what to do.

They didn’t want her to be just medicated and thrown into the hospital again. Conventionally trained mental health professionals are not taught how to distinguish between mental illness and spiritual awakening, which can at times resemble a psychotic break. Since Freud, there has been a bias against spirituality in mainstream psychology, and so, many people are understandably reluctant to seek the treatment they need.

Their friend was long ago diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and her mother had suffered from schizophrenia. The friend had been hospitalized for her illness in the past, got on medication, and improved significantly. Like many people, she went off the meds that were helping her so much due to the side effects, and because she believed she didn’t need them anymore. But something else of great import was happening also.

One of the things I learned in graduate school that has been a useful rule of thumb is that the mentally ill person is drowning in the sea while the mystic is treading water. They are both in the same sea, however. One of the ways we distinguish between the two states is to assess how stable the person has been able to be in their life – have they been able to care for their activities of daily living, provide shelter and food for themselves, for example.

As I said to the concerned couple on the phone, we need to first do a full assessment, then treat the mental illness and support the spiritual awakening.

It is important to find a therapist with special training in Spiritual Emergency. If you are not in the LA area, you can find one through the Association for Transpersonal Psychology (ATP) website at http://atpweb.org/Professional/ProfDir.asp

© 2009 Catherine Auman