VALUES BASED® COUNSELING
with Kelly Patrick Gerling, Ph.D.

Serving the Seattle Area

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HEALING

Kelly's Quest

One of my favorite experts on healing is Alice Miller, a German psychiatrist. Her book on childhood abuse and mistreatment is an outstanding approach to healing. It is called For Their Own Good.

Her main idea concerning healing I can summarize like this:

When a child does get adequate "love, protection, tenderness and understanding" but instead is subjected to "rejection, coldness, indifference and cruelty" then a process of arrested development takes place. Many children know not to fight back against their parent's harmful actions, even though seeking revenge against someone hurting you is a natural response. Rather, children often internalize the parent's or other adult's view of them as behaving poorly and being a bad person. When this happens, they not only form a negative view of themselves, thinking that their abuser's actions are about them, but they also begin to feel a general desire to seek vengeance, against something or someone. Often that merely takes the appearance of a someone different in same way, and weaker or defenseless. Then the child repeats the kinds of actions to which he or she was subjected, on a suitable target who is different and weak. This process initiates a way of defining self relative to a Negative Other, and begins a tendency to scapegoat, blame or vilify the Negative Other in order to enhance the esteem and goodness the Negative Self.

I love Alice Miller's framework on healing. Here's how I use it:

I've noticed that when such children get older, this manifests in a whole range of problems from overachievement, to underachievement, to abusing others, to drug and alcohol abuse, to temper tantrums, and much more.

Without stopping to consider that the Negative Self that forms in such a child earlier in life might be erroneous and inaccurate, an adult with such an unhealed background can continue with the manifestations of this mis-development indefinitely. However, with a pause and with self-examination of the events of the past that created a need for Negative Others to bolster a Negative Self, the problems that were unhealed can be healed. The need for a Negative Other to bolster a Negative Self can disappear. And a Positive Self can seek Positive Others as a basic orientation to life. And in conflicts, such a healed person, seeks to win over and convert enemies to friends, adversaries to allies. Of course a true state of health enables a healed person to recognize that others can cause harm and sometimes harmful interactions and relationships need to be either transformed into something healthy or abandoned.

This idea is not to blame parents and others in one's past as a way to feel better. Rather, it is a way of taking the story of one's life that may have tragic elements, and provide a process of healing in retrospect on the remaining memories in the current worldview—a process that wasn't there earlier, but can be present now.

The other methods I describe for my practice such as depth psychology, NLP, hypnotherapy, conflict resolution, values, spirituality and conceptual blending all have a part to play in designing and bringing about fully healing for you to the extent that you may need it.

METHODS
Depth Psychology
NLP

Hypnotherapy

Conflict Resolution

Values

Healing

Spirituality

Conceptual Blending

Synthesis

TYPES OF SERVICE
Individual Counseling
Family Counseling
Life Story Coaching
Mediation
Physician Coaching
Leadership Consulting

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