|
 |
"The Soul of Soulwork refers to integrity and sense of life,
not to a religion or philosophy."
Soulwork Systemic Coaching provides relationship diagnosis and coaching procedures that
effectively relieve many symptoms of physical, emotional and mental disorders.
Dr Martin Daniel (MD)
Tel: +42 060 4506 511 |
We present interactive seminars and
demonstration-rich workshops on systemic coaching, relationship
happiness, resolving family chaos and relationship bonds. Email us if
you would like training in your area.
 |
Requirements for Lasting Change in Human Systems
Martyn Carruthers integrated and developed information from many
sources – success coaching, systemic family therapy,
neuro-linguistic-programming (NLP),
Logotherapy, gestalt therapy, expert modeling,
native Hawaiian healing (huna kalani), chaos theory and
Annegret Hallanzy's VoVa). (Click
HERE for details
about Soulwork origins).
Carruthers modeled these sources using (and improving) the modeling skills
associated with systems theory, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and
expert modeling. The result is Soulwork Systemic Coaching - which
Carruthers says is a complete format for dissolving or controlling
symptoms of mental and emotional, and sometimes even physical disease.
I didn't believe this until people with high credentials vouched for it.
So I attended a training with Martyn Carruthers in Praha (Prague) in Czech
Republic. Soulwork coaching has a simple sequence:
| STEP |
BENEFIT |
| Clarity |
Find solutions for any crisis
that prevents clear thinking |
| Peace |
Dissolve unwanted guilt that
prevents peaceful action |
| Integrity |
Resolve conflicts that prevent
congruent decisions |
| Freedom |
Dissolve unwanted relationship
bonds that restrict choice |
| Motivation |
Resolve emotional trauma or abuse
that delay progress |
| Inspiration |
Replace inappropriate mentors who
inspire senseless action |
Most Soulwork involves systemic (relationship) issues. Examples
of systemic symptoms include chronic and psychosomatic disease, learning disorders and
neuroses. Systemic symptoms compensate for relationship deficiencies,
particularly with (but not limited to) parents, partners and children.
Some relationships require mental, emotional or physical diseases
for those relationships to continue. Without these symptoms, the relationships would
dramatically change. As a conscious awareness of a need for disease symptoms
would threaten these relationships, such awareness is taboo. To avoid this
awareness, people distract themselves from acknowledging their
relationship constraints. Such distractions are called “objections” in Soulwork.
People often object to and resist healthy relationships.
|
Quote |
Immature people who attend Soulwork training either
grow up or quit. Most of them grow up. |
Think of objections as “unconscious goals”. Soulwork accepts objections with
a kind attention,
instead of ignoring or dissociating them. Verbal objections include excuses,
justifications and blame, and a range of non-verbal interruptions. (A
common objection is “Yes-No” - a verbal statement
accompanied by non-verbal negation. An example is saying "Yes" while
shaking the head "No".) I found that the Soulwork tools for handling objections
were effective in individual and couple coaching, teamwork and family therapy. (These
skills are useful in interviews, negotiations and sales.) After dissolving all objections, a person is free to make a desired change,
while experiencing a state of integrity, in which a
person can make congruent decisions about all parts of life. This experience is
wonderful - and beyond words. Carruthers calls it connectedness
and sense of life, to which I agree. Many people (even without religious
backgrounds) call this experience Soul, which motivated Carruthers to
call his work Soulwork. Relationship Diagnosis
Soulwork includes an effective relationship diagnosis. Instead of
focusing on mental or physical disease symptoms, Soulwork focuses on the
human systems that require symptoms. Systemic diagnosis requires an
ability to make distinctions amongst relationship experiences – amongst the
expressions of love, guilt, conflict, transference, identification, relationship
bonds, trauma and mentorship.
“Recognizing a symptom is easy” says Carruthers “and recognizing a cause may
bring some peace. However, long-term recovery usually requires changing one or
more relationships. Otherwise symptoms return, or new symptoms
arise, to compensate for confused relationships”.
An example of a confused relationship would be a partner who resembles an opposite-sex
parent; a partner who rescued a person from some situation (Transactional
Analysis describes the relationship between an alcoholic and a partner); and a
partner who encourages unhealthy behavior. Long-term recovery may require
that a patient make fundamental relationship changes. The
severity of the symptoms can then be "controlled" by the patients actions - and the
patient can decide how much and how long to suffer.
Patients with advanced acute or degenerative disease may be unable to control
their symptoms. Many people wait until the last moment before they call for
help, and the last moment may be too late. Soulwork can, however, help
terminally ill people prepare for a peaceful "goodbye" to life.
Clarify Relationships
A common first step of Soulwork is to help
people clarify their relationships. For example, after clarification a patient
may view a partner as a partner, not as a parent or as a child. That may bring
immediate relief for some psychosomatic symptoms.
There is more.
The result is not only alleviation of symptoms. New qualities for the family
are found. These new qualities may be described as peace, calmness, relieve,
enlightenment and - purpose of life. This is important in
treating depression, as Dr Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy demonstrates.
Although
Soulwork is gaining acceptance by European psychiatrists, therapists and
physicians, it is also becoming popular amongst many people who offer guidance
for life problems. Soulwork offers sets of procedures
for resolving symptoms of chronic disease, emotional problems, phobias and
obsessions and for resolving personal and business relationship difficulties.
Soulwork is not a panacea for all complaints. Instead it helps clarify the difficulties
and limitations of therapeutic treatment. It cannot replace damaged or missing
tissue and it has less influence upon dementia or psychosis, but it can resolve
long-term depression and anxieties with motivated clients. Evaluate Life
Soulwork Systemic Coaching evaluates life from many
perspectives. In the training I attended, three
perspectives were discussed: connectedness,
emotional integrity and mental integrity. Connectedness
Carruthers proposes that human consciousness represents a system of
relationships - usually of the early family. This relationship system persists
as interconnected, emotionally charged, visual, auditory and kinesthetic images.
Evaluating and changing a relationship system
automatically changes the perceptual habits that monitor and filter external reality
– and hence changes the experience of reality - which spontaneously changes
values, beliefs and behavior.
The consequences of removing symptoms are generally predictable. For example,
disease symptoms may serve many functions in a family, and the loss of symptoms
by one person (or the loss of one person) may require that a person in the
system become ill, unless the system is changed.
Emotional Integrity
While most representations of a relationship system seem to be
unconscious, emotions are conscious. People often
search for ways to ignore, express, withhold or dissociate unpleasant emotions.
Many people turn to prayer and meditation. Others turn to self-medication,
controlling emotions with nicotine and alcohol, or to obsessive or compulsive
distractions and addictions. Carruthers said that most
addictions are ways that people compensate for immature relationships and
controlling the subsequent heavy emotions.
Clarifying a relationship system allows many withheld or dissociated emotions to
be experienced and expressed by its members. Soulwork includes coaching tools
for expressing emotions appropriately.
Mental Integrity
Ideas are presented on a spectrum of certainty, from
vague ideas to unquestionable beliefs. The importance of beliefs are presented on a
spectrum of values, from “Who cares?” to “I would die to protect that belief!”
The personalities that identify with values can be presented as nodes in a
relationship matrix – each node with a spectrum of actualization within a human
system. A personality
represents a set of choices about how to survive in the world perceived
through these filters. The perceived world may not be the same as the real
world.
Theory of Soulwork
As Soulwork is founded upon observation; its theoretical structure evolves.
Carruthers attempts to describe pathological phenomena in terms of
relationship dynamics. In a training in Czech Republic, Carruthers focused on (1)
Goals, (2) Objections, and (3) Decisions.
(1) Goals: Many people do not know what they want, or only know what they don’t want,
or have incompatible goals, or have abstract goals with little sense of reality.
Soulwork includes goalwork for creating plans that include both real-life
decisions and therapeutic interventions.
(2) Objections: People censor both internal and external information, and
hide from consciousness information that may disrupt important relationships.
Attempts to bring this information to conscious awareness will provoke objections
that prevent the discovery of relationship issues. Goalwork utilizes a person’s
objections as inner mentors to goal formation, until all objections are
satisfied.
(3) Decisions: People who repress or dissociate unpleasant emotions may lose
contact with feelings such as motivation, understanding and caring. In Soulwork,
a complete lack of internal perception is called Identity Loss, although
reduced inner perception in certain contexts is more common. Soulwork
coaches people to use feelings simultaneously with thoughts when making
decisions.
| |
"Soulwork really works. Yet when
immature people realize what healthy relationships require,
they often object to change. Instead, they justify their suffering and use
crazy logic to reject healthier possibilities. Immature people often cling to
their symptoms." Martyn Carruthers |
“A paradoxical problem” said Carruthers “is that
Soulwork really works. Yet when
people realize what healthy relationships require, they often object to change.
People often justify their suffering and use crazy logic to
reject healthier possibilities. Many people cling to their symptoms.”
Carruthers described an experience with a woman diagnosed with stomach
cancer. At first, she pleaded for health. As the woman understood her
relationships, however, she realized that she used her cancer to punish her
ex-husband (blaming him for the cancer), to manipulate her adult children
(claiming she had taken their sins into her body) and to follow
her mother (who had died of
cancer). The woman decided that she preferred to die rather than
to clarify her difficult relationships.
Family Constellations as taught by Bert Hellinger
in Germany has a strong resonance with basic Soulwork, although Hellinger's
family constellations do not include Carruthers' models of goalwork,
identity loss, relationship bonds, trauma
and mentorship.
Carruthers theorizes that the dynamics underlying human relationship behavior
may be pre-human. He described some parallels in primate behavior and relationship dynamics.
Systemic Coach Training
Soulwork training includes convincing demonstrations. (Carruthers prefers
to demonstrate Soulwork with people off the street - that is with people who
do not know what to expect.) Carefully avoiding suggestion, Carruthers elicited
each person’s entanglements and repeatedly proved his claims.
Carruthers' training includes many fascinating concepts, such as gentle provocation,
interactive metaphors, identity bonds and mentorship, all of which can be
applied in individual, couple, team or family coaching. Systemic relationship
skills may also be applied in fields in which relationships are
important, such as anthropology, education, history, literature and religion.
With its deep insights into relationship behavior, Soulwork could connect psychology
to other life sciences.
Systemic coach training is arousing interest amongst European
health professionals. Soulwork Clinics are available in Poland, Italy, Croatia and
Czech Republic. Schools are planned in England, Canada and America. Carruthers’
vision of systemic coaching being used worldwide may become reality.
About the author:
Dr. Martin Daniel maintains a
private medical practice in Havlickuv Brod, Czech Republic. Email queries to
(telephone +42 0604 506 511 during business hours, Europe time).
For more information, visit:
www.webpark.cz/danielma/english.htm
Do you want relationship coaching or systemic coach training?
Do you want to coach people to resolve emotional and relationship challenges?
|
