You're Not Finished Yet

By Rev. Karen E. Herrick Ph.D.

"This book goes beyond helping one to understand addiction and the dysfuctional family. It also helps to describe the need for a 'new profession' of therapy that is beyond the profssion of medicine. It has been my experience that people who have spiritual experiences often tell me that neither doctors or inisters have been able to help them understand these experiences. Karen is a new breed of therapist who is dealing with a vast range of experiences, which have enormous impact on people's lives. I highly recommend her book." Dr. Raymond E. Moody, Jr.

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• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456754693

Rev. Karen E. Herrick Ph.D.

Rev. Karen E. Herrick, PhD, LCSW, LMSW, CADC, has shared clinical expertise for twenty plus years in her private practice by lecturing throughout the United States on dysfunctional and addictive homes, dissociation, grief, and loss. Karen was ordianed in New York City in The Cathedral of St. John The Divine in 1995. Her ministry is to be actively involved in Spiritual Psychology. Her PhD thesis was entitled "Naming Spiritual Experiences."

Book preview

You’re Not Finished Yet…

Rev. Karen Herrick, PhD

LCSW, LMSW, CADC

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AuthorHouse™

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Bloomington, IN47403 www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2006, 2011 by Rev. Karen E. Herrick, PhD, LCSW, LMSW, CADC. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 06/24/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5471-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5470-9 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-5469-3 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011904243

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

One never knows the influence one has over another Or the difference one may make in someone’s daily life.

To the women in my early life Who greatly aided in my development And were my role models as women.

My paternal grandmother

Edith Herrick Stanley

My aunts

Teresa A. Pipe

Dorothy A. Olthoff

Mary K. Kelly

Inez J. Murphy

A mother of a friend

Lillian E. Dorn

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Internet Resources

Introduction

Many of us spend our lives searching for the meaning of our time here on this planet—sometimes spending so much time searching that we lose track of the paths we have taken. God and matters spiritual become sublime concepts we simply can’t relate to in our everyday lives. Along with our searching, we also allow ourselves to be victims of our childhood, carrying feelings of pain and unworthiness around with us long after we have escaped the cause of those feelings.

I was born and raised in upstate New York, the oldest of three children. During my childhood, I felt that if there was a God, He or She had forgotten our family. My father was an alcoholic and my mother was depressed and full of rage. I was a victim of incest at the hands of my father from the time I was four to five and one-half years old, which I forgot until I remembered in my mid-thirties after some bodywork I had done stimulated this memory. My brothers and I were raised in the Protestant faith as my mother was excommunicated from the Catholic Church when she married my father.

My parents, and my paternal grandmother who also helped raise me, were not in touch with their feelings. What I remember most is feeling unimportant and unwanted. I nevertheless felt reliev ed by their presence and nurtured by them, however inconsistent or inadequate their nurturing was.

I was interviewed once in a local newspaper (Children of Alcoholics Suffer, Too, Asbury Park Press, NJ, September 22, 1985), and reporter Yury Tarnavskyj wrote, "It wasn’t until her second marriage was breaking up that Karen Herrick realized something was wrong. She had left her first husband finding him dull and boring. Her second husband’s drinking was the reason for the next divorce.

All the while Ms. Herrick saw herself as the doer. Her energy was boundless. She was a capable hostess, mother and wife. But deep inside her she felt a void—something was lacking. ‘I was waiting for somebody else to make me happy. I was always looking to other people for validation that I was a good person, that I had done a good job,’ she said."

I don’t remember telling the reporter that my first husband was dull and boring. I do remember being very busy and waiting to be filled up by another. This condition has been called codependency and is the typical behavior of the spouse or significant other of an alcoholic or addict. I didn’t know that then. At different periods in my life, this codependency intensified and manifested itself as a craving for food, or sex and intimacy. Therefore, part of my life process has been to pick partners who were as unconscious in their behavior as my father was, people who would lie and never own up to what they did.

When I realized—due to my husband’s alcoholism—that I would have to leave my second marriage, I returned to college. It was there that a guidance counselor told me: You’re practically off the chart regarding motivation. You’re definitely ‘high male!’ There’s not anything you couldn’t do once you put your mind to it. I believe this is a positive characteristic that I received from living in an alcoholic family. I learned that most of the time I just had to do it myself if it was going to get done.

In the early l980’s, the Adult Child of Alcoholic (ACOA) movement was just a few years old and I was active educating others who had similar problems that carried through to adulthood.

I have been a practicing clinical therapist for over twenty years. My practice is located in Red Bank, New Jersey. My expertise has grown to include dysfunctional families, alcoholism, sexual abuse, eating disorders, grief, dissociation and spirituality issues. I have appeared on national radio and television as an expert on subjects relating to ACOA and/or dysfunctional families, as well as being a local radio personality, public speaker and a writer.

I became interested in spiritual experiences after I had one and reconciled it with my religion, my Interfaith Ministry, and my training in the spiritual practices of other religions and cultures. This integration was difficult because the Western-trained therapists I consulted did not understand Jungian and Transpersonal Psychology, both of which aspire to spiritual connectedness. I have learned through working with recovering alcoholics and addicts the advantage they gain from the Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous Twelve-Step Programs in acknowledging the Higher Power, or God, as an important part in the process of recovery.

It was with relief that I learned through Jungian and Transpersonal Psychology that C. G. Jung believed that psychological problems must be understood as the suffering of a soul that has not yet discovered its meaning, and that healing depends on a deep experience of spirit. I know that not all clients or therapists will attain awareness on a spiritual level. But for those who do place their trust in a process greater than themselves, their belief that everything is connected to everything else becomes a primary factor in their decisions and actions.

I agree with early psychological theorists William James, Carl Jung, and Abraham Maslow, who found spiritual experiences to be a sign of health and a powerful agent of transformation. These men found that people who reported spiritual and religious experiences measured higher on scales of psychological well-being than control groups who did not. James, Jung, and Maslow also contrast Sigmund Freud who saw religion as a universal obsessional neurosis, and Albert Ellis who views religion as equivalent to irrational thinking and emotional disturbance (Lukoff, Lu, Turner, 1992, p. 678).

In the 1980’s I was listed on a national network of transpersonally oriented therapists founded by Christina Grof in California for people in spiritual crisis called the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN). In the 1990’s, I took spirituality training sponsored by SEN in Santa Rosa, California, and was ordained in New York City at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to be an Interfaith Minister. I was interested in other religions and I wanted to better understand the beliefs of people of other faiths. Through my study, I concluded that there is only one God and spiritual experiences happen in all faiths.

For instance, where would recovering alcoholics (and eventually addicts) be if Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, hadn’t gotten on his knees in Towns Hospital in New York City in December 1934? This spiritual experience that resulted from asking God to take away his desire to drink has given hope and health to countless others since that wonderful day.

He stated, "All at once I found myself crying out, ‘if there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!’ Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up in an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in a new world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence and I thought to myself, ‘So this is the God of the preachers!’ A great peace stole over me and I thought, ‘No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world." (Finlay, 2000, p. 5)

People Can and Do Get Better

I remember when I was in therapy and getting my Master’s Degree, my therapist told me that because I was becoming a therapist most people would assume I was crazy. She said I needed to just accept this fact and live with it. I followed her advice and have never let jokes about therapists or innuendoes about my mental state bother me. But, one thing that has bothered me over the years is when people say therapy doesn’t work. To them I say Therapy works—when you work!A person in therapy working with a therapist they trust is the formula for therapy that works.

Simply stated, one definition for psychology is the science of mental process and behavior.1 Spirituality pertains to life-giving principles for a human being otherwise called the Soul.

There are five major forces in psychology: Behavioral, Psychoanalytic, Existential-Humanistic, Jungian and Transpersonal.

Of these therapies, Existential-Humanistic helps people explore some transpersonal possibilities while Jungian and Transpersonal psychology defines the domain of spiritual experience. Behavioral, Psychoanalytic and Cognitive therapies reject the existence of spiritual experience.

One of the goals of Transpersonal and Jungian psychologies is to encompass other states of consciousness, including waking, dreaming and various contemplative states. So, if you had a Behavioral, Psychoanalytic or Cognitive therapist in a room with Bill Wilson, as Wilson told his story about the room, white light and his wonderful feeling of presence and peacefulness, they would all agree that he’d had a hallucination.

Only a Jungian or Transpersonal therapist would believe him because they believe in other states of consciousness. This is one of the reasons some therapists fit better with certain people than others. It depends on how they have been trained and what they believe in. It’s important, then, when you seek a therapist to ask about their training and their beliefs to see if they fit with what you believe. If you have a therapist who agrees with your overall outlook on life, you will have a better chance of your therapy working for you.

You’re Not Finished Yet

I was born prematurely and a story my mother used to tell me was that "You