ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, when we talked about focusing less on insight and understanding when we engage in helping and healing, this begged the question: Then focus more on what?
Rather than seeking clarity and understanding, the shaman actually aims for greater mystery. This is a 180-degree rotation from what therapists usually do when they help people. Clients often come to us in a fog-confused, dazed, disoriented, and reeling. Therapists usually conceptualize their role as helping people clear up this mess. This might take the form of promoting any number of insights, depending on one’s preferred theoretical orientation: (1) understanding how the templates of our past control our present behavior (psychodynamic), (2) increasing awareness of unexpressed feelings (person-centered), (3) exploring core issues that give life meaning (existential), (4) identifying irrational beliefs (cognitive behavioral), (5) examining how issues of power and gender roles limit and expand choices (feminist), (6) exploring lifelong narratives (constructivist), and so on. In other words, we start out promoting some degree of better understanding of the situation, helping clients to get a firmer handle on how they ended up in this predicament, how this may reflect ongoing pat-
terns from their past, and by implication, how they might use this knowledge to make alternative decisions.
