A New Model for Women’s Empowerment in Psychotherapy - HPP 26

02/06/18 • 43 min

The Higher Practice Podcast for Optimal Mental Health

In this episode, Emma Derman Teitel talks about a truly empowering approach to feminist psychotherapy and helping women overcome internalized patriarchy. It’s often easy as clinicians to simply listen to stories that need to be told by women and stop there. However, a combination of support and challenge is needed in order to help a woman regain her inner power and bring forth her deepest gifts.

This episode comes at a time where the #MeToo movement has allowed so many women to step forward, speak their truth, and tell the stories of how men abused their power. The individual and collective voice are necessary for society to heal and evolve, which, in turn, can lead to more equality and safety.

Mental health professionals have heard these stories in their offices for many years. The storytelling is one important component of healing in a therapeutic context. However, often a much deeper inquiry and investigation into perceptions, traumas, and core beliefs must also happen for a sense of inner power and authority of one’s life.Our guest today, Emma Derman Teitel is a psychotherapist, coach and women’s group facilitator committed to the empowerment of girls and women around the world. She is passionate about guiding individuals and groups into a deeper connection with themselves and fostering the ability to live with embodied courage, grace and vulnerability.

In this episode you’ll learn:

Emma’s unique journey about what led her to help women
Feminist psychotherapy versus feminist theory
Signals that women are actively struggling with patriarchal injuries
How to challenge women to overcome the obstacles that they perceive
The fuel and fire of the woman healer
The power of gratitude

Visit www.higherpractice.com/podcast to get the show notes for this episode and to learn more about Emma Teitel’s full course in the Higher Practice Institute.

In this episode you’ll learn:

Emma’s unique journey about what led her to help women
Feminist psychotherapy versus feminist theory
Signals that women are actively struggling with patriarchal injuries
How to challenge women to overcome the obstacles that they perceive
The fuel and fire of the woman healer
The power of gratitude

Visit www.higherpractice.com/podcast to get the show notes for this episode and to learn more about Emma Teitel’s full course in the Higher Practice Institute.

Previous Episode

How Psychedelics Nearly Killed Me but Ultimately Saved My Life - HPP 25

Keith Kurlander, CEO of Higher Practice, reveals for the first time publicly a powerful story about his experimentation with psychedelics in college and how they led to a serious Bipolar diagnosis. This sent him on a personal and spiritual quest to find a solution to this disorder. What he found along the way was completely unexpected and ultimately freeing.

Psychedelic use is not typically discussed at length in our graduate programs and clinical training institutes. There is a lot of cultural taboo around the subject and mental health professionals are not immune to this problem. However, many clients have experimented with psychedelics and report both extraordinary insights as well as profound nightmares.

In this episode, Keith will discuss his own experiences with psychedelics with a focus on how one experience, in particular, led to the manifestation of mental illness. He goes on to dispel the myth that the psychedelic itself surfaced a budding mental illness. It actually surfaced something much more profound that took years to identify.

In this episode you’ll learn:

The morning after my psychedelic nightmare
My search for the causes of my Bipolar Disorder
How psychedelics surface repressed trauma
Working with clients who are you using psychedelics
How to be grateful for all events from my past

Visit www.higherpractice.com/podcast to get the show notes and to learn more about Keith Kurlander.

Next Episode

The Brain Science That Shows Why Spiritual Seekers Often Have Trauma - HPP 27

In this episode, Ted Usatynski talks shop about the overlap between spirituality and trauma. Many seekers often describe themselves as having adverse childhood experiences, as well as more acute traumatic experiences. However, they also describe having a natural aptitude for peak mystical experiences and non-ordinary states of consciousness. Ted is going to explain the brain science about why this overlap exists and what we can learn from such a mysterious confluence.

If you’ve been in communities that teach intensive spiritual practices such as breathwork, meditation, and trance you probably know that you’ve met some people that have been through very difficult things in their lives. You may even be one of those people.

Ted is going to go into detail about dissociation, trance, non-ordinary states and the brain science behind it all. He will break down how different areas of the brain gets activated during these events and why many trauma survivors have a propensity for the spiritual realms.Ted Usatynski is the author of Instinctual Intelligence and academic articles on transpersonal psychology, the neurobiology of Tibetan Buddhism, and healing trauma as part of spiritual development. He holds graduate degrees from Harvard University in Bio-physical Anthropology and from Naropa University in Counseling Psychology and has completed training from the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute in the Treatment of Trauma. He is the founder of Instinctual Intelligence, LLC, through which he has led workshops around the world. His newest book, Men: Myths, Lies, and Reality, co-authored with internationally acclaimed men’s group leader Dag Furuholmen, has recently been published in Europe.

In this episode you’ll learn:

The three pathways that signal overwhelm in the brain
The neuroscience behind healthy integration of meditation into daily life
The difference between dissociation and trance
Social connection and the bridge between the transcendent realm
Why relational mindfulness is so important to healing trauma

Visit www.higherpractice.com/podcast to get the show notes for this episode and to learn more about Ted Usatynski’s full course in the Higher Practice Institute.