​      Wait. I’m sorry. What? Yeah, soaring isn’t usually what first comes to mind when thinking about psychotherapy. More like less soaring, more grind. Well, not so when you practice mentalligent psychotherapy.
          Back in my college days, when I had more money and fewer fears, I learned how to fly a glider. As you may know, a glider is a plane without an engine. A glider is also known as a sailplane and gliding is a fun process of soaring with the wind.
          When you are soaring, a tow plane pulls you up to 3000 feet. At that height, you loose the tow cord and bank right, while your tow plane banks left. At that point, it is you and your sailplane, looking for thermal air updrafts. When you find one, your sailplane spirals upward on the draft, increasing your altitude. Find several updrafts sequentially and you can soar upward on a sunlit, blue-sky day for hours. No engine sound. No distractions. Only the wind, the thermals, and you. What a great time. The rules are that, when you run out of thermals and your altitude dips below 1000 feet, you have to begin your landing pattern. While soaring, you never lose visual sight of your designated landing strip. Soaring is as calm and peaceful as life can get.
          With my new therapy paradigm, mentalligent psychotherapy, my goal is to guide patients on their healing journey of upward-spiraling through their lives, finding their thermal updrafts to keep soaring. Any kind of stress or adversity can generate an historic, familiar downward spiral that can lead to patients becoming stuck in their “stuff.” While I help patients look at their stuff and the attending feelings briefly, my time there is only to help them understand a context for their healing. To get unstuck, I help them identify upward spirals in their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and learn to soar.
          Within this new paradigm, the traditional medical model of illness and diagnosis is set aside. I’m not their doctor who will make them well by fixing their problems. I’m their guide on their healing journey to help them process their stuck spots and make positive use of their defined adversity, thereby promoting continual soaring. We have no control over our stuff in life. We have every control over what we do with our stuff and how we can grow from it.
          Traditional psychotherapists are “why” doctors. Answering multiple why questions form the foundation of the medical model. When practicing mentalligent psychotherapy, therapists are “what” doctors. What’s going on right now? Over what do you have control? What outcomes do you want to pursue? These and other what questions come up and shape the path to the good life on our patient’s healing journey.
          Traditional psychotherapists bounce around their patient’s past, looking for their answers to the why questions. With mentalligent psychotherapy, we focus on our patient’s present, that part of their personal timeline over which they have full control.
          As I acquaint my patient with their present, I often ask them to stretch out their arms from their side. Modelling what I want them to do, I sweep my left arm down to its resting point on the arc at my waist.
“The movement of my left arm represents all of your past. Depression frequently grows from our past.” I then ask my patient to make the same sweeping motion with their left arm.
          I then sweep my right arm from horizontal to its resting point on the arc at my waist.
“The movement of my right arm represents all of your future. Anxiety frequently awaits you in your future.” I then ask my patient to make the same sweeping motion with their right arm.
          With the demonstration concluded, I then ask my patient, “Where, on your life timeline does your two hands together at your waist represent?” Your present. “What happens to your depression and anxiety?” It’s at least minimized and perhaps goes away.
          Helping patients embrace their present, using mindfulness to explore their 5-sensory experience in the now, gives them opportunity to find their thermal updrafts and learn to soar.
          As patients bring up or recall their stuff and issues, we guide them on their healing journey to convert stress and adversity into resilience. This is where mentalligent psychotherapists make use of Daniel Seligman’s Positive Psychology. We help patients find their eudaimonia, a Greek word translated “human flourishing.” To the extent that patients can stay in their present and develop eudaimonia, their downward spiraling with stress and adversity corrects and their upward spiraling leads to greater resilience.
          In all of our lives, bad stuff happens, often through no fault of our own. Rather than moan and groan and wallow in it in an Eeyore moment, patients of mentalligent psychotherapists find the blessing in their personal hell of the moment. Meichenbaum’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy help patients trade in their negative extreme thoughts and feelings. Such extreme words as never, ever, only, should, would, could, and must are challenged as downward spiraling triggers. Learning and growing from the stress and adversity creates upward spiraling moments.
          Mentalligent psychotherapy helps our patients identify and find upward spiraling opportunities. The language of mentalligent psychotherapy eschews the medical model and embraces the healing journey our patients have chosen to take, with us as their guide. The intricate weave of mindfulness, positive psychology, and cognitive behavioral interventions promotes patient responsibility for their own health and well-being. They learn to soar through stuck spots, finding resilience on their path to the good life. Blessings, Jon

  ​Have you ever offered up an idea in a committee? “Hey. You know what? What if…? “
 Your new idea might generate some mild discussion, some grunts and dismissals, with a concluding “…not gonna happen. We’ve never done it that way before.”
     If your new idea generates an entirely way of thinking about the topic, then we call it a paradigm shift. In my new book, The Healing Journey: Overcoming Adversity on the Path to the Good Life (Amazon, 2024), I offer a paradigm shift in our thinking both about getting well and about the nature of diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues.
     Historically, probably since Aristotle’s times, we talk about people being sick, needing to get well. Our job, as their doctor, has been to help people get better and make them well. This is the medical model. While our reference book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th Edition, has made progress in expanding the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral descriptions to account for diagnoses, the overall attention is on people being sick and needing to get well.
      In her book, Mentalligence: A New Psychology of Thinking (HCI, 2017), Dr. Kristen Lee attaches brain functioning to the outcomes of downward spiraling or upward spiraling, using the brain’s neuroplastic capacity to create new neural pathways toward upward spiraling. I have taken these concepts and applied them to our work in counseling and psychotherapy, introducing a new treatment strategy, mentalligent psychotherapy. (MPT)
     In this paradigm shift of perspective and treatment, our patients are not sick, not mentally ill. Rather, they are stuck, emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally stuck. In their treatment, our goal is to help them identify their stuckness and guide them toward getting unstuck. Stuckness leads toward downward spiraling in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Helping them get unstuck frees our patients to chart their life’s path toward freedom to upwardly spiral and be the best they can be.
     In the medical model, doctors are healers. They have a plethora of gadgets and gizmos to help them find the broken part and either fix it or remove it. Their goal is symptom relief, mostly through medication management. This model has worked well for millennia when we treat physical ailments. Not so much in treating mental health issues.
     With this model, therapists are also healers. They can use psychological evaluation to pinpoint problem thoughts, feelings, or behaviors and then talk therapy to help their patients feel better. We focus on answering their “why” questions. We generate pearls of wisdom and aha moments where our patients feel better and get it.
In mentalligent psychotherapy, we dabble in “why” questions, just to gain perspective on our patient’s thought processes. However, we focus on looking at “what” questions. What’s going on now? What are your thoughts and feelings about this? What’s within your control to change?
     With MPT, the focus is not on being your patient’s doctor, from whom you will be given answers for symptom relief. Rather, we are patient guides for a moment on their life journey. MPT is less outcome-oriented and more process-oriented. The great Greek philosopher, Socrates, was a teacher famous for never answering a question from his students. His response to their questions was to ask questions of his own, leading them to come up with their own perspectives on the issue at hand. Thus, MPT is less about the outcome of psychotherapy and more about the process. A bit of old Chinese wisdom captures the process. “Feed a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime.”
     Stressed out and overwhelmed? Get an idea about effective therapy with your purchase of The Healing Journey: Overcoming Adversity on the Path to the Good Life. Graduate students learning different intervention strategies of psychotherapy? Pick up my book as adjunctive reading for your coursework. Practicing clinicians? Add to your toolbox of intervention strategies by purchasing this cutting-edge paradigm shift describing mentalligent psychotherapy for effective treatment. Purchase your copy from amazonbooks.com today.
Blessings,
Dr. Jon