FEATURED AUDIO FILE: To listen to Dr. Parker Wilson's public talk "What Is Happiness - A Buddhist Psychological Perspective" (31 minutes), please click here.
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What is happiness? Most of us mistakenly believe that the presence of transitory pleasure, and the absence of immediate pain, is genuine happiness. For instance, when we get a raise at work, and there is no obvious suffering present in our minds, we feel "happy." According to counseling psychologist Dr. Parker Wilson, this type of happiness is transitory and fleeting (e.g., two days later your happiness about the increase in your salary has somehow worn off a bit). What if true happiness and psychological flourishing are much more than simple fluctuations in our levels of transitory pleasure and pain?
Authentic happiness, or psychological flourishing, comes from learning to effectively work with your own mind. Modern mindfulness meditation techniques are the primary vehicle of learning to work with thought and emotion. Mindfulness based meditation is not necessarily a spiritual practice of any kind. For the last twenty years, modern psychology, and mind science, have been researching the effects of mindfulness meditation. We have found that mindfulness and psychotherapy are an excellent and highly effective combination. Modern clinical psychology has, therefore, synthesized these two by creating a therapy centered around the cultivation of mindfulness (i.e., mindfulness based cognitive therapy). More and more in the modern era, mindfulness is being conceptualized as a kind of cognitive technology. AMI's Psychotherapy in Denver utilizes this cognitive technology to produce awareness, clarity, and insight. This process is not necessarily long term psychotherapy, and couple's and family therapy can often be added to the process.
Utilizing the cultivation of mindful awareness as a clinical platform, AMI's mindfulness based cognitive psychotherapy is structured into three distinct phases:
1. The first phase of AMI's mindfulness based cognitive therapy (or MBCT) is the development of psychological awareness. This increase in a client's awareness of their own thoughts and emotions is powered by the cultivation of mindfulness. Using both informal and formal mindfulness meditation techniques, the client begins to become profoundly aware of all their thoughts, emotions, judgments, opinions, memories, fantasies, and images. According to Dr. Wilson, AMI's psychologist in Denver, this is where mindfulness and psychotherapy begin to come together so beautifully. Now the client learns to stop automatically identifying with and getting "all caught up in" everything they think and feel. The client learns to create some sense of space between them and all their thoughts and emotions. Moreover, through the use of mindfulness based meditation, the client learns to stop grasping at thought and emotion, and s/he becomes distinctly aware that they are something other than all the things they think and feel. They are something other than all their mental constructs, self-identities, masks, and defenses. This is the essence of AMI's psychology in Denver. This leads to a powerful question: if I can grasp and release my thoughts and emotions, than clearly what I think and feel are not absolute and inherent parts of me; thus if I am not what I think and feel - then what am I?
2. The second phase of AMI's mindfulness based cognitive psychotherapy is the development of mental clarity and healthy behavior. Aristotle once said, “Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way… you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” This second stage is a deliberate and liberating process of examining the client's major behavioral patterns and then asking, "Will this behavior pattern produce happiness, neutrality, or sorrow in my life?" Since all human behavior begins as thought and/or emotion, if a behavior is unhealthy it undoubtedly has unhealthy thoughts and emotions underneath it. For all the behavioral patterns that produce sorrow, underlying those behaviors (thought and emotion) is sought out and analyzed. AMI's psychology in Denver uses mindfulness meditation and a deep consideration of personal ethics to help the client cultivate healthier thoughts and emotions.
At this point, mindfulness and psychotherapy again come together in that the client's new and healthier thoughts and emotions will now yield healthier behaviors. Additionally, as Aristotle pointed out, this also works in the opposite direction: healthier behaviors can lead to healthier thoughts and emotions. This stage, then, accomplishes two primary things: 1). it uproots and begins to dispel the unhealthy thoughts and emotions that are at the heart of a client's negative behavior patterns, 2). it simultaneously develops positive and healthy thoughts and emotions which then yield healthier behaviors. The effect of these new healthier behaviors (along with the elimination of some of the unhealthy behaviors) now begins to create a distinct mind state characterized by an increased sense of stability, calm, balance, peace, and happiness.
3. The final phase of AMI's mindfulness based cognitive psychotherapy is the cultivation of penetrative insight. As Caitriona Reed said, “It is by the patience you call forth by returning your awareness to this very moment that you enliven your life, not by your aspiration to gain or attain. By coming home to this still center of awareness the way is made clear.” Based on the foundation of mindful awareness and upon the psychological effects of increased positive behavior and decreased negative behavior, the client has now eliminated much of the confusion, emotional overwhelm, insecurity, and disorientation that had plagued him or her. Because these afflicted mental states have been lessened, the client has automatically increased their mental awareness, clarity, and insight. With these increases in awareness, clarity, and insight the client is now capable of making profound changes in his or her life. The client is now capable of working with their own mind.
Moreover, using AMI's techniques for cultivating equanimity, compassion, and kindness, the phase three client is now capable of nothing less than emotional alchemy; in essence, the client can now frequently and increasingly transform wrath into patience, depression into satisfaction, greed into generosity, grief into meaning, and pride into humility. These transformations simply add to the client's already increased sense of awareness, clarity, and insight. This is what creates such positive results from psychotherapy Denver, and this does not necessarily require long term psychotherapy. As the client continues to foster and reinforce these new and healthier mental patterns (which only lead to increasingly positive words and behaviors) their sense of mental stability, balance, peace, and happiness continues to grow ever stronger. The experience of psychotherapy Denver now grows even deeper. Often, at this point, couples or a family therapy process can be added to deepen the effect.
To stop fighting a battle you can not win is intelligent. There is no escape from some suffering in this life. You will experience aging, sickness, and death. You will watch some people you love die. You will have your heart broken a few times. Someone or something will betray and violate you. Why walk around deeply believing that "this won't happen to me" only to feel blind-sided, victimized, and enraged when it does? Better to conserve your resources, create awareness of reality as it is, and cultivate the positive mental qualities that will actually produce happiness and flourishing in your day to day life. At this point, psychology denver has become established.
In stage three, the client now has everything required to safely, skillfully, and effectively unpack all the twisted conflicts, unhealthy childhood lessons, abuses, traumas, addictions, losses, resentments, depressions, "closed-heartedness," and compulsions that have caused so much mental anguish and thus tainted his or her entire life. Now the client begins to learn how to profoundly work with her mind (all her afflicted thoughts, emotions, judgments, opinions, beliefs, perceptions, memories, fantasies, etc). Now her unhealthy habits, thoughts, and feelings can be transformed into ever deepening mental awareness, clarity, insight, meaning, and genuine happiness. In essence, now her experience of suffering becomes the cause of an ever deepening psychological freedom. Such a freedom naturally develops the wisdom that begins to transcend living in the past and the future, it transcends worrying and stress, it transcends living for mundane pleasure and avoiding anything painful or unpleasant. In fact, such wisdom transcends mundane concerns altogether, such that the client now begins to live beyond the concepts of life and death themselves.
Learning to effectively and consistently interrupt our afflictive cycles and transform them into positive and healthy cycles marks the usual completion of AMI's therapy process. At this point, awareness, clarity and insight are well developed enough that the client is capable of being their own therapist (at least most of the time).
Many laymen believe that psychological intervention means long term psychotherapy - but this is not necessarily so. According to Dr. Parker Wilson, a counseling psychologist, long term psychotherapy is sometimes required, but often short term psychotherapy can create the desired effect. It simply depends on the client and his or her presenting problems. Additionally, most believe that therapy is an individual process only, but most often couples counseling and family therapy are periodically used to enhance and deepen the individual process. Because these concurrent treatments can become so complex (especially around family therapy), these interventions should be administered by a psychologist in Denver.
To deeply realize (and become comfortable with) the fact that there is no permanent and abiding sense of happiness and satisfaction outside of you; to become "OK" with the fact that you are not that "OK," to deeply see how you actively pour fuel onto already raging and unhealthy emotional fires; to stop being so averse and reactive to your own sense of aversion and pain; to deeply realize that you are the author of much of your own psychological suffering; to gain psychological authenticity and to learn to become more still, stable, and clear; to learn how to work with your thoughts and your emotions; to learn to transform your negative habits into the cause of happiness and flourishing - this is the point of AMI's mindfulness based cognitive psychotherapy.
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If you are seeking a genuine and effective counseling psychologist, please contact Dr. Parker Wilson today.
To learn more about mindfulness meditation, please click here.
Dr. Wilson, a psychologist Denver, offers an online mindfulness seminar. For more information, please click here.