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Women in Treatment: Reclaiming Her Legacy and Power is a workshop describing a treatment model addressing the unique treatment and recovery needs of women. Addicted women have, through the progression of their addiction, forsaken essential elements of their being in favor of their chosen substance. A woman's relationship to herself, her creativity, her family, her society, her genetic ancestry, and her source of spiritual meaning are colorful threads woven in her unique life tapestry. Many of these threads have unraveled, or severed, by the time she reaches treatment. Addiction is a pattern to be understood and treated in the context of the whole design. When treatment encourages and supports women to access, explore, and re-kindle their inherent strength the addictive pattern gives way to hope, growth, and new direction. Shame in looking back is replaced with finding the lessons taught and uncovering the learning provided by the addictive years.
Participants in the workshop will be lead through a variety of experiences designed to demonstrate the power and attractiveness of an approach to recovery which highlights women reclaiming their legacy as well as their sobriety.
Women whose lives and fate lead them to addictive behaviors, and life styles to support those behaviors, live on the outskirts of their values and power. Women whose desire for recovery lead them to treatment, come in search of their authenticity and power as women.
An addicted woman's life-style and behaviors have, by necessity, compromised her values and self-esteem. There is high probability that by the time she reaches treatment her life experiences would provide a plethora of messages either from self and/or others, of shame, humiliation, scorn, criticism, and degradation. The nature of her psyche and soul dictates that she, at least minimally, defend herself from these insults or she long ago would have killed herself or traveled dangerously down into the depths of addiction in an attempt to drown the harsh contrasting light of sobriety from the eyes peering from her deeply wounded soul.
Women in all cultures are the container and preserver of life, warmth, nurturance, creativity, spirit and beauty. She is the carrier of our legacy for all that is good and pure and life sustaining. She is the original healer of wounds and restorer of souls. Her travels through the assorted histories of cultures has brought her, in many cases, far from these legacies which in recent decades she has been reclaiming. For the addicted woman, this legacy deepens her shame, intensifies her guilt, and leads her to bury her rage.
Addiction may be viewed as the blessing in disguise when treatment becomes the vehicle used to return her to her legacy. It becomes then our duty and responsibility as treatment providers to furnish safe passage and guide her return to what she is entitled to become again - the container and preserver of life, warmth, nurturance, spirit and beauty. It becomes our responsibility to model the features of this legacy and provide her with a means of reclaiming her truth and her power. She has already walked in copious shame and self-blame and evoking those feeling becomes a deterrent to accessing and building her strengths and teaching and instilling in her the characteristics of resiliency lost in earlier experiences with corrupt or abusive antagonists. The steps on the path to recovery, when lit by her legacy, help her achieve sobriety and reclaim a lost legacy.
Much of addiction treatment for men focuses on teaching men how to access and share their feelings. Men's denial and silence of their feelings is a major contributor to addictive behaviors and relapse. Men have traditionally looked to women to fulfill the feeling function in their lives. The more important the male image is to a man, the more he denies his feelings and is silent about them. To feel, he believes, is to be less like a man. This workshop will explore a paradigm which can assist men in broadening their self image to include all of who they are.
Men have traditionally looked to the female, to the woman in their lives, for their sense of completion, to connect with their ability to feel, and for their connection to their souls. Indeed, the women in their lives can be wonderful teachers; however, the master teacher resides within. The guardian of their souls is indeed a woman. She is the inner woman who lives within each man. She is the woman men have starved and neglected. She is the woman who cries for their embrace. She offers men heaven, and gives them hell when men neglect her. Like the outer woman who when scorned may get angry, the inner woman when scorned or neglected creates havoc in their lives and in their relationships and she may indeed create what men experience as discontent, moodiness, their long dark nights of the soul and increased potential for relapse. Man's work is to know her, accept her presence, learn from her, and learn to appreciate her.
When she feels their love and no longer their scorn or neglect, she offers men the gifts of the universe. Embracing the feminine elements within, men learn to love the outer woman. Embracing the woman within, men regain the ability to find value, meaning, and energy in life. Men find their ability to fully feel alive, to love and to engage meaningfully with others. Participants will be led on a journey to discover the lost feminine elements within their psyche. The group will explore ways of reacquainting themselves with the lost feminine, and begin the process of building a new relationship with the woman within.
The man who broadens his self image to allow himself to not be silent about his feelings is more capable of expressing what Robert Ackerman terms behaviors that allow them to reach their potential as fully functioning human beings. The man is then more capable of:
The goal of Shadow work is to integrate the dark side of ourselves; the side we have attempted to hide or run from; and the side we are not aware of. Shadow work cannot be accomplished with a single method or trick of mind. It is a complex ongoing process calling for great commitment, vigilance and honesty.
Owning our shadow involves a deepening and widening of consciousness to include what has been rejected. Shadow work involves an ongoing process of taking another point of view to respond to life with our undeveloped traits and our instinctual sides. It involves shining the light of consciousness into our dark corners and owing what we find there as our own. To live the "tension of the opposites" - holding both good and evil, right and wrong, light and dark, in our own hearts.
Doing Shadow work means peering into dark corners of our minds where secret shames lie hidden and violent voices are silent. Doing Shadow work means asking ourselves to examine closely and honestly what it is about a particular individual that irritates us or repels us; what it is about a racial or religious group that horrifies or captivates us; and what it is about a lover that charms us and leads us to idealize him or her. Doing Shadow work means making an agreement with one's self to engage in an internal conversation that can, at some time down the road, result in an authentic self-acceptance and a real compassion for others.
To take the first step and acknowledge the darkness lying inside every human heart, can be sobering and humbling. It may be initiated by a betrayal by a loved one; a lie by a trusted friend; a deceit by an honored teacher; rape or mugging by a total stranger. In every case, meeting the shadow robs us of our innocence.
If we are able to see in the mirror, and see these behaviors in ourselves, recognize the deeper truth that the lover and the liar, the saint and the sinner live in every one of us, we may be stunned and paralyzed at the gap between who we are, and who we thought we were.
Like Beauty and the Beast, our beauty is deepened as our beastliness is honored.
Shadow work also involves discovering the qualities of our own shadow by closely watching our reactions to other people and admitting that they are not the other, or the enemy, but that an impulse within ourselves makes them appear in this negative guise. This is how we re own our projections and repossess the energy and power that belongs to us.
As each layer of shadow is uncovered, as each fear is faced, each revulsion repossessed, we continuously uncover yet another covered container of shadow energy. Mining the dark recess of our psyche is endless. However, at a certain point, those qualities that before seemed wicked or weak, or stupid, appear attractive; and those that were alluring and full of light, are cast into darkness.
In this battle with our opposite side, the battleground is encountered everywhere. Refuge is found in the human heart. Somehow, in a compassionate embrace of the dark side of reality, we become bearers of the torch. When we shine the light of consciousness into our dark corners we become more whole. We open to the other - the strange, the weak, the sinful, the despised - and simply through including it, we transmute it. In so doing, we move ourselves closer to wholeness.
When we get scrupulously honest with ourselves regarding our relationships we are faced with the realization that most, if not all, our upsets, dissatisfactions and anger with our partners are merely projections of unfulfilled areas within ourselves. Our partners are exceptionally brilliant mirrors upon which we see what we do not or can not see about ourselves.
As androgynous beings we each have within us the opposite energy of what we physically and consciously are. Jung called these opposite energies archetypes; the animus being the masculine within the female; and the anima, the feminine within the male, respectively. Jung referred to our encounter with the animus and anima as the "master piece" of individuation. For in bringing to consciousness and working with these aspects of ourselves we begin to create union between our consciousness and our soul.
In our journey of recovery we are involved in a quest for meaning and individuation as we find our place in relationship to our highest wisdom and power. The animus and anima can serve are powerful guides in this journey.
Much of our internal tension (potentially contributing to relapse) derives from the opposite energies within us. This struggle in turn can create one of the most powerful urges within us; the desire for wholeness. This wholeness can only occur within ourselves...not with another person and certainly not when we project our opposite qualities onto our partner, expecting to unite with them and feel our wholeness through union with them. And yet, our partners provide us the possibility of recognizing and integrating these projected unconscious contents of ourselves.
In initial stages of relationship we place expectations of God and Goddess upon each other. When these expectations (conscious and unconscious) are not fulfilled, relationships, recovery and our work at individuation face possible disaster. To separate the human from the divine, to love our partners for who they are without the burden of carrying our projections is truly spiritual work.
Energy Therapies/Psychology is a term being applied to a variety of treatment techniques that impact the bodies energy levels and responses to situations non evasively. Treatments that involve tapping acupuncture points are gaining acceptance among therapists who, in many cases, seem to have rapid results. TFT (Thought Field Therapy) is the best known; while newer ones continue to emerge. EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) was designed for the general public to use.
The tapping therapies got their start in Applied Kinesiology,
which was primarily for health issues treated by chiropractors.
Roger Callahan, Ph.D., began modifying this approach for use on
psychological problems such as phobias in the 1970's. Fred Gallo,
Ph.D. has made additional contributions, and has created a
well-rounded training system for therapists which he has named
In addition to utilizing procedures involving tapping specific points along our bodies energy meridians many of these therapies involve a process for identifying and eliminating, or weakening, self-limiting beliefs, some of which may function as "core beliefs" limiting one's ability to change.
