Laura shares her work integrating the transformational change of both Virginia Satir’s and Carl Jung’s models. This chart enabled her to look at larger systems of cultural transformation as well as individual and family transformations. Laura lives with a deep connection to her Self and the larger life force. In listening to her, I experience her wisdom and felt directed to connect to my own wisdom. I felt inspired to trust my unconscious and life more continuing to seek, explore and grow.
Here’s one quote from Laura Dodson:
“Transformation is a change in the entire way of being; how your relate to life. The transformation relate to changes in attitudes that live deep inside of us like: compassion and connection to our common humanity.”
2:30 Laura shares her experience of Virginia was that she was able to distill complex ideas with simple words and movements and sculpts that transcended specific cultures. Virginia’s aim was to change the consciousness in the world. Her aim was to be understandable and useable.
Carl Jung moved from Freudian model to a more growth model. He saw symptoms as a block in the flow of growth that we all encounter. Virginia saw things this way too.
5:50 Carl Jung had a deep respect for each individual as did Virginia. They respected the unique individual and their ability to adapt, grow and change.
6:40 Tim asks what is the difference between a family therapist and a Jungian analyst. Jung was interested in the unconscious of the individual. Jung was not looking at family systems the individual developed within. Virginia saw an individual embedded within multiple layers of systems: family, cultural, history of humanity.
8:30 Tim asks what each thinker would have benefited from the other. Laura feels Jung would’ve benefited from systems’s thinking and Satir would’ve come to the spiritual aspects of being which she got to eventually. She recognized the spiritual base in the 80s.
9:30 the cycle of death and rebirth comes from Jung. Virginia didn’t look at death as much as she looked at birt. The movement towards integration and wholeness come from Virginia’s work. Laura didn’t feel that Jung walked us through the steps of transformation. Virginia clarified those steps. Eg., we had to tell the truth without blaming., have courage, have humility, compassion for self and other. Jung talked about increased consciousness. Focusing on what one had learned and practicing, forgiving. Laura found that Virginia emphasized the importance of forgiveness for growth that was not in Jung’s work.
12:00 Jung took what came in dreams and followed that. He didn’t clarify steps like Virginia did
To help us move from survival coping to growth. Laura said that she was much more connected to her unconscious and her dreams which helped direct her life. Laura describes there being riches in the unconscious.
14:00 Change is an ongoing process that never ends throughout life. Our hope is that we can move through the circle more rapidly. Foreign elements are bound to happen leading to crisis.
Dismembering is the feeling of being pulled apart, which comes Jung’s thinking.
15:50 We begin with a sense of equilibrium, calmness, centeredness. A foreign element comes and it separates us from ourselves. We feel abandoned, wounded, betrayed. It’s inevitable. Disemembering occurs.
Then liminality occurs. You can’t go back but you don’t know how to move forward. You feel confused and afraid.
We fall into defensive mechanisms. For example denial as a coping is adaptive initially and unders certain conditions. Projection, denial, depression, suicidal...it’s the experience of deflation of energy. Deflation is a loss of sense of who you are. Loneliness and feeling lost. We are barely coping.We are in the dark night of the soul.
What is required for change is the numinous experience, the experience of light. Something that would allow you to see things from another angle.
21:32 “The wonderful thing about the unconscious is that it wants to break through; it wants to give you light. There’s something inside you that wants to give birth to a new way of seeing.
But it’s frightening because it’s giving up the old way. Letting go. Surrender to what might come next. “
22:10 dreams and talking with a friend that can add light or shift your perspective and help you see light in the darkness and experience hope. Some of Virginia’s processes helped give people insight that freed them from the inside. A new way of seeing.
What Virginia created in sculptures and pictures on the outside; Carl Jung followed dreams.
26:00 People come to therapy at the point when they have fallen into the unknown and are seeking an experience of the numinious, of light and a wish for hope.
27:00 Becoming conscious of our defense mechanisms allows us to have more choice and to
Let go of unhealthy coping.
28:00 Laura talks about the importance of hope and how the therapist holds hope. Laura describes the therapist usinge x-ray vision that sees the higher Self and the young vulnerable part saying “all i want to be loved” Connecting to the essence, the deep spiritual essence of the other person.
31:15 Laura is confident that the unconscious will show them a way. The therapist is listening with them for guidance of where to go. The therapist needs to be willing to be surprised.
Laura provides an example of listening to a client who had a dream which pointed a direction to go.
36:00 you need someone to hold a space and listen and believe in you as you find your way.
37:30 Laura talks about step of courage, commitment, and truth telling, facing the reality of things. Allowing ourselves to mourn for ourselves and with compassion. Joining the human race with our frailties.
We walk into what we were defending against and the resources of responsibility, mourning, commitment, truthtelling (without blame) , curiosity, humility, and courage all help us walk into what we were defending against.
Facing what we fear...what we hate...Our trauma/hurt....
Courage is the first step, then truth telling,, humility to join the human race.
Commitment and focused on the path..
Mourn what wasn’t and what isn’t.
Laura talks about Virginia’s direction of being more curious than blaming and using our detective hat.
41:15 Increasing consciousness and compassion as you move through transformation and rejoining the human race and forgive yourself. You increase your connection, congruence and compassion with Self and others.
Your self and your higher Self
42:40 Foundational attitudes as a way of being with our experience that allows us to move through experience. E.g., commitment to become more conscious.
44:30 We begin to integrate what we were falling apart about in crisis and the energy transforms.
Jung used the word energy for God. Virginia used the words “Life Force” The transformation comes upon you. You can’t make it happen. This is the rebirth. It comes upon us as we do these things.
46:30 Energy is in constant motion. Your attitude to change allow you to walk towards it. As you walk towards it, you become more conscious of the new learnings and that brings a transformation.
You can move towards light, but you can’t make the energy transform.
“Transformation is a change in the entire way of being; how your relate to life. The transformation relate to changes in attitudes that live deep inside of us like: compassion and connection to our common humanity.”
50:30 Laura shares her experience of her pain. “I am not that pain; i am having that experience. I am more than that” She is aware of her connection to life being bigger than the pain. My existence is more than to pain. Laura describes her pain as her ‘teacher’. “I have to learn to breathe and move with it. I will learn in relation to it.”
55:00 Laura talks about cultural transformation. Our culture has been inflated and ‘superior’. She talks about corona virus and some of what is going on in the world.
We talk about the resources in the transformational wheel as an anchor of how we can move through these difficult times.
59:15 “There’s a new energy that’s alive in the world today and I am part of that energy.” Virginia Satir said in reference to the evolution of consciousness and her belief in a tipping point.
“To the god in me and to the god within you” we can connect and transformation can occur.