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Interview with Martyn Carruthers by
Roland Brantschen
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Roland: Martyn, you created a system of
coaching that you teach internationally - Soulwork Systemic Coaching.
I know that your work attracts many medical doctors, psychologists and other people with high
credentials. Can you tell us about it?
Martyn:
We offer a wide
spectrum of services - including business coaching, individual
coaching, couple coaching, team coaching ... and more. Can you be more
specific?
Roland: What is the theoretical basis for your work?
Martyn: We integrated principles and practices from
many disciplines. The famous
anthropologist Dr Gregory Bateson provided a hierarchy of abstraction
which helps us analyze a person's cognitive habits. The psychologist
Dr Clare Graves provided a hierarchy of social evolution which predicts
the development of relationship skills and organizations of a person or
group. Richard Bandler provided a concept he called metaprograms, which
are useful for predicting behavioral constraints. We also integrated skills
used by native Hawaiian healers, who helped us recognize
and change relationship bonds with dead people, and they provided the concepts of
soul, family
soul and healthy relationships that permeate our work.
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An authentic
experience of integrity can provide a reliable sense of life direction,
meaning and fulfillment. Integrity is the Soul of Soulwork.
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Roland: Do you use other models for relationship
coaching?
Martyn: We use a hierarchy of relationship development
to predict the current and future relationship challenges that a person will
face, which was inspired by Annegret Hallanzy. We use
another relationship hierarchy to assess relationship health. Our
systemic
diagnosis can assess relationship conflicts and
transferences; and sometimes predict diseases and deaths.
Roland: Are these psychological theories?
Martyn: Not really. Our coaching tends to be very practical.
We focus not on resolving complaints, but on helping people get what they
want, including meaning and happiness; on helping people define and achieve
worthwhile goals. We help people
find life purpose, or sense of life, if that is what they want.
Roland: Can people coach themselves in this way - or
do they need a coach?
Martyn: Few people can use what they do not understand - or
work on issues that they don't recognize. We coach people to resolve
whatever stops them from solving their own problems. Once those
issues are solved - a person can find information, make decisions and act.
While entanglements remain active -
a person may make robotic decisions or may feel unable to act.
Our work is about quality relationships - and it is not easy.
We can help people find relationship resources
to accept and acknowledge
their complaints and to identify their goals and dreams. Then people can
solve their conflicts, their anger, fear, sadness and so on, and move on
freely. Without this coaching relationship, most people attempting
self-coaching will distract themselves, or get stuck in "poor me",
and in difficult moments they may just go to sleep.
We train people to respond to non-verbal communications
or unconscious objections. Few
people can do this for themselves. Unconscious signals are ... well ...
not conscious. A coach can respond to those communications by gently provoking people to
become conscious of them. This is a BIG step towards people sorting out their
stuff - understanding their objections to their own happiness.
Roland: That makes sense - so
- who will benefit most from your work?
Martyn: Motivated and responsible adults gain the most
benefits in the shortest time. We can also coach people who cannot
define goals in less direct ways, with isomorphic stories and
interactive metaphors, instead of repeating goal questions or
futile planning towards abstractions.
A more difficult answer is that people who lack
quality relationships seem unable to explore the depth of themselves. It
seems that people need supportive relationships as a basis for deep change. People who
cannot maintain at least one quality relationship (that is, stable and
meaningful but not dependent nor codependent) are unlikely to experience
integrity as a stable state. While that is opposite to some Eastern
philosophies, this is what I find in the West.
Roland: Would you call your work a
New Age development?
Martyn: Some people complain that the word
Soulwork sounds too New Age.
Soulwork is practical. Each step of our coaching follows a structured,
systemic sequence, without recourse to intuition or esoteric agencies.
We check goals in three or four ways, to ensure that people want
specific changes and are prepared for the potential consequences of
those changes.
Some helping professionals prefer to intuit their
clients' problems. That can lead to dependency and victimization. Clients
have no idea if a New Age counselor's intuition is accurate - and
some counselors and therapists seem to blame their clients if their
intuitions do not produce the desired results.
Roland: Is not Soul an
emotionally loaded word?
Martyn: Many people are not interested in anything
to do with soul, and I wasn't a few years ago. A better word is
integrity. We also call our corporate and organizational work
Systemic Solutions and avoid words with esoteric or spiritual
connotations - although, for me, the Soul of an organization is
an extremely practical and worthwhile topic
to discuss with managers, leaders and CEOs.
We do not ask or require that a client have or develop any
particular belief. If a person wants success in some field, or wants coaching
for recurring relationship problems or for controlling or replacing emotions
such as depression or anxiety, that is often enough. We usually explore
exactly when, where and with whom a person wants
certain emotions.
Roland: Your demonstrations tonight were stunning.
You make your work look very easy. But few of the audience have no idea
how long it normally takes for people to make those type of changes.
Martyn: Some students ask if I choose easy demonstration
subjects. But most people are easy to coach if they are motivated and responsible.
When I present Soulwork; I demonstrate whatever I talk about. For my personal
pleasure, I prefer to demonstrate with critics - and there are always critics.
Success and happiness
require sane goals, mature decisions and healthy relationships.
Roland: You said that your coaching is holistic ... what does
"holistic" mean to you?
Martyn: We attend to all a person's communications;
including non-verbally expressed emotions and relationships as well as
words, and we offer ways to change things that don't work or are
counter-productive. We ask about thoughts and feelings. We offer ways
to change unpleasant internal dialogue (limiting
beliefs or self-sabotaging thoughts) and subsequent behaviors.
Roland: Is that always possible?
Martyn: Always is a very long word. If you are in a
relationship with an entangled person - whether the entanglement is with another
person, a substance or a behavior, then you risk becoming entangled with that
person's obsessions. Many people say that they want to get rid of unpleasant
symptoms but that they don't want to change the entanglements that cause them.
Then it may seem that some form of medication will be their next step. We
generally refer such people to doctors or psychologists.
Roland: How do you motivate people to change?
Martyn: I don't, or at least not often. I'm more likely
to provoke people about the consequences of their current actions or lack of
action. I find that a gram of provocation is worth a kilogram of motivation, so
I teach 16 types of provocation.
Roland: How do you identify mind-body connections?
Martyn: I ask
questions such as: Where do you hold emotional experiences in your
body? and What are the benefits of withholding these experiences?
Unless the person is dissociated, the answers will describe subjective
experience and we can usually recognize the type of entanglement quite quickly.
A large part of our training is about recognizing and responding to nonverbal
communication. But often, onlookers ask if we are telepathic or
if we can see a people's souls or auras or something like that.
Roland: Where does Soul come into all this?
Martyn: We make basic assumptions about the innate
wholeness of people, and people's desire for wholeness and their desire
to connect with other human beings in an experience of wellbeing that
is generally called happiness. We coach people to experience
a state of integrity as a basis for rapidly assessing, evaluating
and changing personal and relationship problems.
Roland: What sort of problems do people bring for
systemic coaching?
Martyn: People often want to control emotions, to end
compulsions or obsessions, to gain communication skills, to change difficult
relationships and to
find meaning in life. Most people have vague goals, but want something different.
Very often, people want to stop sabotaging themselves.
Roland: And your systemic coaching includes ... what?
We coach people to resolve
entanglements,
conflicts,
identifications and other forms of
identity loss. This leads to the
experience of integrity and connectedness that we call
Soul. From an experience integrity,
mature people can choose fulfilling life-goals and finally control their
self-sabotage.
Roland: Who are your main clients?
Martyn: We help a wide range of people; we
support private therapists and helping professionals in public
health and mental health sectors, as well as corporate Human
Resources people.
Many people who seek change want to experience
life differently; they want to achieve their goals or end their
complaints. Our systemic tools help people reach their emotional
goals as well as physical goals. This may include helping people
integrate their personality. Most people live fragmented
lives based on conflicting desires, conflicting beliefs and
conflicting values.
Roland: Are you
saying that most people - me for example - are split? That
sounds like multiple-personality ...
Martyn: In multiple personality syndrome,
people are amnesic of their actions and decisions in other
states - but few people are that dissociated. Most people
know well the experience of "Part of me wants to ... but
part of me doesn't", and many people make promises in one
state and forget them in another.
People with complex conflict
may announce important decisions one day
and deny those decisions the next day. People who experience self-criticism
often have "inner voices" which can be horribly critical.
People who dissociate those inner voices may be diagnosed as psychotic -
and medicated.
Psychosis is exaggerated normality
Roland: What issues are people
concerned about today?
Martyn: The sources of inner conflict may change but conflicts
remain. Many women suffer grief
and conflict after postponing childbirth and motherhood in
favor of a career. Many men suffer shame following immature sexual
exploits. Many people suffer from the emotional consequences of
abuse and trauma,
and other relationship disappointments. Although our world is changing rapidly,
our emotional responses to our relationships seem to be rather constant.
We offer effective solutions for cross-generational
entanglements. Motivated adults can end chronic suffering. We also deal with
the self-sabotage associated with abuse and the consequences of trauma that show
up as limiting beliefs. We can
better recognize the symptoms of post-traumatic stress
and we can help motivated people rapidly dissolve those symptoms.
Roland: Martyn - I have heard good things about your
results - but who coaches you?
Martyn: I enjoy exploring other
modalities from a client perspective -
although not many therapists seem to enjoy me as a client. I focus
on results - not credentials - and I am not very
compliant if something doesn't make sense. My life is not a
testing ground for their theories. So I turn to my graduate students.
Roland: How do you determine what type of coaching is
helpful for what type of problem?
Martyn: Coaching, consulting,
counseling, advising and therapy are words
that are often used interchangeably. In a
consulting role, I work in a focused way in a highly defined
context, perhaps to change the structure of a human resources department. On the other side,
individual client coaching is exceedingly open. Who knows what the next client will
want? Very few people know what they want.
Roland: How long does your coaching take?
Martyn: How long is a road? I often works
with time-limits for people who want a fast solution rather than long-term
mentoring. Much depends on their motivation, health and age. For example I may offer
a person 5 or 6
sessions to change a defined complaint or to expedite a specific goal. This
can be in one week, if the person can has the time and is healthy enough to handle the intensity.
I am using the telephone and Skype more frequently lately.
Skype is a great way to reach out to people, with the limitation that it is more
difficult to notice and respond to nonverbal objections.
Roland: You said that your work has a spiritual
side. How do you know whether a person is spiritual? How do you
perceive spiritual evolution?
Martyn: Life includes many distractions,
games and illusions - often self-inflicted or provided by ignorant,
arrogant or manipulative people. Each of us can pass these distractions
to fulfill life and perhaps transcend death. Yet these distractions
can be so compelling or so uncomfortable that people may stop moving
forward. It's like they reach a certain age - could be six or sixteen - and not
mature much after that. We expect such people to show age-regressed,
immature behavior.
The Soul of Soulwork
is an experience of integrity
and connection that seems to transcend thoughts and feelings. The
egoistic "I" can merge with an apparently unborn
and undying reality. Age-regressed behavior is
incompatible with this emotional maturity and responsibility for life
- and the stable resource that we call Soul can provide a reference
- a compass - through life challenges.
We coach people to examine their goals, resolve
identity loss, end toxic habits and perceive illusions. We travel
together through the often chaotic wildernesses of the body-mind
- to find lasting solutions for emotional and relationship symptoms,
and for life to make sense!
Roland: Martyn, thank you for your time.
(This interview was condensed from a longer transcript)
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