Paper short abstract:

Psychotherapy that rests on the clinician's own connections to the invisible is described as a way of moving seriously depressed clients from isolation, through shared states, toward the client's self becoming a part of. The inspiration is neo-shamanic, Jungian and Ericksonian.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes experiential psychotherapy work with three clients who exhibit serious symptoms of depression and/or suicidality. These clients appear to live with a subjective sense of isolation from, or a restrictive experience of being and identity.

While the form of the treatment is psychodynamic therapy, the inspiration is neo-shamanism as taught by Michael Harner. The techniques include guided imagery and active imagination commonly used in the Jungian tradition. Joanna Macy's "work that reconnects", and Milton Erickson's approaches are additional roots of such clinical work. The basic tenet is one wherein a person's connections to archetypes, stories, images and symbols, other people, as well as spiritual entities, whether existing outside or inside the person, are an elemental part of one's life and a place of resourcing and inspiration. Without such connections, the person falters and symptoms of unease and depression may arise.

This work challenges the Western understanding of personal boundaries as it makes use of the clinician's own connections to the invisible; these are then shared with the client when it seems useful, either through identification between clinician and client as equals, or through the enactment of developmentally corrective experiences. At such junctures of connection, client and clinician seem to enter shared states that resemble hypnotic ones, where the two can create change that the client consciously allows for. Thus, from isolated from, the self becomes part of. The healing involves experiential reparation that is believed to create actual threads between client and a larger world.