It's easier for both health professionals and most of their patients to use drugs as a substitute for change. Alcohol, nicotine or prescription anti-depressants and stimulants are easier than applying intelligence, focus and analytical skills to complex relationships. Drugs are also cheaper for patients (in the short term) and more profitable for health professionals. But there are consequences ...

Carruthers modeled these sources using (and improving) the modeling skills associated with systems theory, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and expert modeling. The result is Soulwork Systemic Coaching - which seems to be a complete format for dissolving or controlling symptoms of mental and emotional, and sometimes even physical disease.

I didn't believe this until people with high credentials vouched for it. Then I attended a training with Martyn Carruthers in Prague in Czech Republic. Martyn's coaching follows a simple sequence:

Soulwork is about systemic (relationship) issues. Examples of systemic symptoms include chronic emotions and psychosomatic disease and learning disorders. Systemic symptoms compensate for relationship deficiencies, particularly with (but not limited to) parents, partners and children.

Some relationships require mental, emotional or physical diseases for those relationships to continue. Without these symptoms, the relationships would dramatically change. As a conscious awareness of a need for disease symptoms would threaten these relationships, such awareness is taboo. To avoid this awareness, people distract themselves from acknowledging their relationship constraints. Such distractions are called “objections” in Soulwork. People often object to and resist healthy relationships.

Think of objections as “unconscious goals”. Soulwork accepts objections with kind attention, instead of ignoring or dissociating them. Verbal objections include excuses, justifications and blame, and a range of non-verbal interruptions. (A common objection is “Yes-No” - a verbal statement accompanied by non-verbal negation. An example is saying "Yes" while shaking the head "No".) I found that the Soulwork tools for handling objections were effective in individual and couple coaching, teamwork and family therapy. (These skills are useful in interviews, negotiations and sales.)

“Recognizing a symptom is easy” says Carruthers “and recognizing a cause may bring some peace. However, long-term recovery usually requires changing one or more relationships. Otherwise symptoms return, or new symptoms arise, to compensate for confused relationships”.

An example of a confused relationship would be a partner who resembles an opposite-sex parent; a partner who rescued a person from some situation (Transactional Analysis describes the relationship between an alcoholic and a partner); and a partner who encourages unhealthy behavior. Long-term recovery may require that a patient make fundamental relationship changes. The severity of the symptoms can then be "controlled" by the patients actions - and the patient can decide how much and how long to suffer.

Patients with advanced acute or degenerative disease may be unable to control their symptoms. Many people wait until the last moment before they call for help, and the last moment may be too late. Soulwork can, however, help terminally ill people prepare for a peaceful "thank you and goodbye" to life.

A common first step of Soulwork is to help people clarify their relationships. For example, after clarification a patient may view a partner as a partner, not as a parent or as a child. That may bring immediate relief for some psychosomatic symptoms.

There is more. The result is not only alleviation of symptoms. New qualities for the family are found. These new qualities may be described as peace, calmness, relieve, enlightenment and - purpose of life. This is important in treating depression, as Dr Viktor Frankl's Logotherapy demonstrates.

Although Soulwork is gaining acceptance by European therapists and physicians, it is also becoming popular amongst many people who offer alternative guidance for life problems. Carruthers offers sets of procedures for resolving symptoms of chronic disease, emotional problems, phobias and obsessions and for resolving personal and business relationship difficulties.

Carruthers proposes that human consciousness represents a system of relationships - usually of the early family. This relationship system persists as interconnected, emotionally charged, visual, auditory and kinesthetic images. Evaluating and changing a relationship system automatically changes the perceptual habits that monitor and filter external reality – and hence changes the experience of reality - which spontaneously changes values, beliefs and behavior.

The consequences of removing symptoms are generally predictable. For example, disease symptoms may serve many functions in a family, and the loss of symptoms by one person (or the loss of one person) may require that a person in the system become ill, unless the system is changed.

While most representations of a relationship system seem to be unconscious, emotions are conscious. People often search for ways to ignore, express, withhold or dissociate unpleasant emotions. Many people turn to prayer and meditation. Others turn to self-medication, controlling emotions with nicotine and alcohol, or to obsessive or compulsive distractions and addictions. Carruthers said that most addictions are ways that people compensate for immature relationships and controlling the subsequent heavy emotions.

Clarifying a relationship system allows many withheld or dissociated emotions to be experienced and expressed by its members. Soulwork includes coaching tools for expressing emotions appropriately.

Theory of Soulwork

As Soulwork is founded upon observation; its theoretical structure evolves. Carruthers attempts to describe pathological phenomena in terms of relationship dynamics. In a recent training in Czech Republic, Carruthers focused on (1) Goals, (2) Objections, and (3) Decisions.

(1) Goals: Many people do not know what they want, or only know what they don’t want, or have incompatible goals, or have abstract goals with little sense of reality. Soulwork includes goalwork for creating plans that include both real-life decisions and therapeutic interventions.

(2) Objections: People censor both internal and external information, and hide from consciousness information that may disrupt important relationships. Attempts to bring this information to conscious awareness will provoke objections that prevent the discovery of relationship issues. Goalwork utilizes a person’s objections as inner mentors to goal formation, until all objections are satisfied.

(3) Decisions: People who repress or dissociate unpleasant emotions may lose contact with feelings such as motivation, understanding and caring. In Soulwork, a complete lack of internal perception is called Identity Loss, although reduced inner perception in certain contexts is more common. Soulwork coaches people to use feelings simultaneously with thoughts when making decisions.

“A paradoxical problem” said Carruthers “is that Soulwork really works. Yet when people realize what healthy relationships require, they may object to the work. Many people then justify their suffering and use crazy logic to reject healthier possibilities. Many people cling to their symptoms.”

Carruthers described an experience with a woman diagnosed with stomach cancer. At first, she pleaded for health. As the woman understood her relationships, however, she realized that she used her cancer to punish her ex-husband (blaming him for the cancer), to manipulate her adult children (claiming she had taken their sins into her body) and to follow her mother (who had died of cancer). The woman decided that she preferred to die rather than to clarify her difficult family relationships.

Family Constellations as taught by Bert Hellinger in Germany, has a resonance with basic Soulwork, although Hellinger's family constellations do not include Carruthers' models of goalwork, identity loss, relationship bonds, trauma and mentorship.

Carruthers theorizes that the dynamics underlying human relationship behavior may be pre-human. He described some parallels of relationship dynamics in primate behavior amongst, baboons, gorillas and chimpanzees.

Systemic Coach Training

Soulwork training includes convincing demonstrations. (Carruthers prefers to demonstrate Soulwork with people off the street - that is, with people who do not know what to expect.) Carefully avoiding suggestion, Carruthers elicited each person’s entanglements and repeatedly proved his claims.

Carruthers' training includes many fascinating concepts, such as gentle provocation, interactive metaphors, identity bonds and mentorship, all of which can be applied in individual, couple, team or family coaching. Systemic relationship skills may also be applied in fields in which relationships are important, such as anthropology, education, history, literature and religion. With its deep insights into relationship behavior, Soulwork could connect psychology to other life sciences.

Systemic coach training is arousing interest amongst Central European health professionals. Soulwork centers are now available in Poland and Croatia. Schools are planned in England, Canada and America. Carruthers’ vision of worldwide systemic coaching may become reality.

About the author:

Dr. Martin Daniel maintains a private medical practice in Havlickuv Brod, Czech Republic.
(Telephone +42 0604 506 511 during business hours, Europe time).