What's going to help you be a better coach or therapist? Part 2:

Jackie Morris

Bringing a Depth Psychological Perspective to Our Work

Not all clients want to be transformed in the coaching or therapy relationship. Some clients want accountability. Some clients want support. Some clients want to be told the exact steps to take in the exact order necessary to achieve their goal. There is value in all of that. And there is value in helping clients go deeper into the emotional, spiritual, and psychic realms that often dictate much of their experience in this life.

I have often found that clients want to feel. Many of them are afraid to do so. Many more simply don’t know how to access their emotions or cannot access them. One emotional area where this happens often is the process of grief and grieving. Clients want to know how to grieve, and they want to feel deep emotions when they do. But that’s the funny thing about grief. It ebbs and flows and you have to ride the wave of it, fully surrendering when it does start flowing, because soon enough the tide will recede again and one loses one’s connection with the deep feeling state of grief.

We must guide our clients with wisdom and leadership toward full expression of their authentic self. And in order to do so, one area we must cultivate is their relationship to their emotional self and to the feeling states.

By helping the client open up to the entire psychic landscape of one’s emotions, we are laying the groundwork for greater understanding and awareness in the client of his or her authentic self. More so, we are opening the floodgates to full psychic and emotional expression. This is vital. When clients step into full expression of their soul-level desires, their full emotionality, and their empowerment, the outer transformations can happen at will. It is the inner transformation that takes much mucking around beneath the surface. And that is what depth psychology has to offer in the coaching and therapy relationships.

There is much to study in the field of depth psychology. What it does exceptionally well is address client issues in a way that acknowledges the cultural context, the mytho-poetic context, the personal context and the collective context. This allows for tremendous expansion of the client’s perception of his or her reality in the context of the mythic, the archetypal, and the collective. In other words, the client begins to cultivate the observer self and the self as subject of a much larger story.

Becoming a better coach or therapist involves having a competent grasp of depth psychological principles. We explore these principles with care and thought in the Authentic Wholeness Practitioner certification. Imagine learning to see the world as a complex tapestry of sense-making, emotion, archetypal energy, storytelling, myth, mystery, and transpersonal meaning. Here are some ways to get started:

Explore Archetypes Do this with a good book on the subject. Understand that all authors are themselves a product of their own cultures and environments and therefore may have blindspots when it comes to some aspects of their own understanding. Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman and Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run with the Wolves are very good places to start. Get more and more comfortable with these archetypes, how they show up, and what we can learn from them. Once you do that in your own life and inner work, you can begin to help clients recognize and understand it as well.

Explore the Shadow You can start very easily with identifying the things you love most about yourself. Then take the opposites of those qualities and you most likely have several shadow elements. For example, if you pride yourself on being generous, the greed in you might have been relegated to your shadow. Another angle to explore is to ask yourself what you dislike or despise most in others. Perhaps you might say arrogance in which case it’s likely that you appear as a very humble person but in your shadow lurks an arrogance.

There is just so much to explore as you begin to dive into the waters of depth psychology. And as with most things in life, it’s good to have a guide. The Authentic Wholeness Practitioner certification begins again in April and it provides exceptional guidance on the application of these concepts and many many more. Becoming a better coach or therapist is worth the time and effort it takes. And there’s so much personal development that happens along the way.