Nurturing our Nature

There are three basic models for conceptualizing the process of psychotherapy:  implanting something new in the client that is missing (deficiency model), changing or removing something problematic that is already present (pathology model), or nurturing the unfolding of some potential wholeness that is inherent in each human (spiritual model).  While each model captures some of what might need to go on in psychotherapy at any given moment, the spiritual model is for me the most interesting and comprehensive.

Each of these three models of psychotherapy also suggests a particular role for the therapist.  In the deficiency model the therapist is something like a dietary supplement for the psyche, providing something not already present and not readily available in the usually daily intake of psychological experience.  The pathology model makes the therapist something between a mechanic and a surgeon, removing something dysfunctional and possibly replacing it with something new that can be expected to function better.  In the spiritual model the therapist works in manner of a midwife, seeking to eliminate obstacles to a natural process of the birthing of new awareness without claiming to create or control what emerges.

Each of these three models of psychotherapy has parallels in religious and spiritual traditions.  The deficiency model corresponds to the belief that a person cannot be whole, spiritually mature, or loved by God unless he or she adopts a particular set of beliefs or joins a particular religious or spiritual group.  The pathology model corresponds to the concept of original sin.  The spiritual model addresses that Matthew Fox has lately been calling Original Blessing, and what Buddhists have for a long time referred to as Buddha Nature.

While any person’s psychotherapy might legitimately work from any one of these three models at a given point in time, the deficiency and pathology models must eventually yield to the spiritual model in any long-term therapy.  It is not a question of nature versus nurture, but rather a question of how we nurture our clients’ inherent nature.  The most fundamental way in which we do this is through the ongoing nurturing of our own nature, through our own psychotherapy, spiritual practices, and anything else we can find.