Can You Get Intuit?

Two New Books on Intuition

Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy:

The Neurobiology of Embodied Response

And

Awakening Clinical Intuition:

An Experiential Workbook for Psychotherapists

By

Terry Marks-Tarlow, Ph.D.

Intuition has been around, as a word, since the middle ages. It’s original meaning meant direct spiritual perception, a view that deserves a modern counterpart. Carl Jung did a lot to legitimatize intuition, giving it a role and relationship to other mental processes. Today there are countless books on the subject of the reality and value of intuition and learning to use it in one’s life.

Perhaps the first book on intuition since the beginning of the “human potential movement” was of Frances Vaughan’s, Awakening Intuition. She definitely took a transpersonal approach to the subject and her treatment of intuition was a prime example of what was meant by “transpersonal,” meaning the fact that our minds do not have a boundary.

Her book was followed by Philip Goldberg’s, The Intuitive Edge: Understanding Intuition and Applying it in Everyday Life. One of the important contributions of his survey was to note that most practitioners of intuition reported that their first act of intuition about something is to join up with it, to become “one” with it. I think this observation has a lot of merit.

I’m not sure of the order here, but in the past two decades there have been many books out on intuition. I’ll just mention some of the main ones that I’ve read:

·         Second Sight: An Intuitive Psychiatrist Tells Her Extraordinary Story and Shows You How to Tap Your Own Inner Wisdom, by Judith Orloff.

·         The Art of Intuition: Cultivating Your Inner Wisdom, by Sophy Burnham.

·         Practical Intuition, by Laura Day

·         Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, by David Myers.

·         Awakening Intuition: Using Your Mind-Body Network for Insight and Healing, by Mona Lisa Schulz

·         Developing Intuition: Practical Guidance for Daily Life, by Shakti Gawain

·         The Intuitive Heart, by Henry Reed

·         Heart Intelligence: Connecting with the Intuitive Guidance of the Heart, by Doc Childre, Howard Martin, Deborah Rozman, & Rollin McCraty.

·         Opening the Inner Eye: Explorations on the Practical Application of Intuition In Daily Life and Work, by William Kautz

All of these books are excellent and have something to offer. My pet peeve with most of them is the insistence on defining intuition in the negative, as in “knowing without knowing how you know,” or “knowing without having to think.” etc. I’m sympathetic to the user’s wanting to imply that intuition involves something different than the norm, or that it provides evidence that runs contrary to our usual assumptions about materiality and the sensory basis for all learning. But I think folks use the negative way because they lack understanding of the essence of intuition, which can be expressed positively: knowing from within! What goes on in “knowing” is a whole other story! That’s maybe where this new book comes into play.

I’m here to present a new book on intuition, and one that is not like any other book on the subject. It is  a very creative and unique book on the subject, an approach that expresses some deeply felt truths by the author, relating to the emerging field of interpersonal neurobiology: How do brain events in one person stimulate brain events in the other person? Neuroscience has discovered “mirror cells” in the brain, and the supposition is that as we perceive something, we implicitly mimic or mirror it in some way. Such mimicry would be a basis for an intuitive connection.

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To explore Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy: The Neurobiology of Embodied Response on Amazon.com, click here!

To explore Awakening Clinical Intuition: An Experiential Workbook for Psychotherapists on Amazon.com, click here!

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Although there’s a lot of attention on the heart these days, as a vehicle of intuition, this book focuses more on the idea of the right brain and how it processes information. One of the exciting things about intuition, especially in regard to the heart, is that it touches on the emerging notion of the non-local mind. In discussion with the author, I got the impression that she deliberately avoided discussing these topics because she wanted her readers to think of her as “scientific” and grounded.

What she offers in her book is truly important, although its impact may be limited by keeping its hands in its pockets when other areas of investigation are reaching out to make connection for a more holistic picture. On the other hand, leaving aside those other areas has made room for considerable detail in the author’s exposition of the neurobiology of the intuitive response. That could be the book's true value.

Here’s what I’ve made of the author’s contribution. First, the type of intuition she is talking about is similar to the type exhibited by horses and praised by folks who practice equine assisted therapy. These folks find that the horses act out the client’s unexpressed feelings. The foundation experience that our author studys is exactly that: As a therapist you begin to have feelings that seem out of place, unprofessional, or irrelevant to what is going on with the patient. The author points out, “That’s your intuitive response.”

It is as if she is writing to left-brained therapists, who practice therapy by the book, something she says is becoming more common given the requirements of insurance companies and their desire for oversight. The therapist has to justify each “intervention.” The purpose of the author’s book is to free up such a therapist. Her message is, “Surprise! Those feelings that embarrass you because they seem far afield are actually your intuitive response to the patient’s demeanor!” The point is that the therapist can then use those feelings to stimulate an intuitive intervention with the patient.

One of the better elements of the book has to do with the author’s treatment of what goes on in healing, in finding new ways of adapting, and how this process is so tied into the patient’s own inner “knowing.” If the therapist can get the patient out of habitual verbalizations, and instead guide them into special states of awareness, the patient “knows” already what needs to be done to get well. Intuition gets into so many crevices of the body-mind, and impacts so many dimensions of our lives, it would be no surprise if an entirely new vision of human functioning might appear were we to start with intuition. In some ways, this book, by its focus on neural responses in our interactions with one another, may be the basis for such a new vision. We often think of intuitions, the noun that refers to the insight itself. There’s also behaving intuitively, as in improvisation, in which there may be no “insights,” but simply creative, innovative behavior. Improvisation may be a key to healing, as if patient knows best, if only the patient’s natural knowing (intuition) could be brought into play. This text may be the beginning of such a vision.

In conjunction with the text, the author has also created a workbook. It is full of exercises devoted to eliciting intuitive type behaviors—including mandala making! When we put the two books together, we find that there is a program being presented to therapists. First you notice that you are having this “embodied empathy.” Then you allow your newly emancipated intuition respond internally in a way that comes natural (i.e., intuitively). This response is a guide to how the therapist might then intervene with the patient. She makes it all very rational, so that the therapist could document the intervention on the required report.

The author has written several books. What’s special about these two is how much of herself she gives us, not only in personal stories, but also in her artwork that she prepared to provide alternative perspectives on her ideas. Her art is very interesting. We are clearing dealing with a unique voice here.

Here is a review posted on Amazon.com, referring to the text: AT LAST! Reading Dr. Terry Marks-Tarlow's new book, Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy, is like drinking delicious, cool, satisfying water after living the last few decades in a parched desert in which linear, "evidenced-based," and cognitive-behavioral theories have been erroneously upheld as superior to right-brain, intersubjective and psychodynamic approaches to relational and mental health treatment. Dr. Marks-Tarlow does a masterful job of honoring both left-brain and right-brain neurobiology and experiential processes that are at play in every effective psychotherapy session regardless of theoretical orientation, while truly delineating in an engaging manner the significant role of intuition as the right-brain embodied experience that is required in true relational and psychological healing. Seasoned professionals who have witnessed the waves of thought and focus in the field of psychology and psychotherapy over the last few decades will delight in her thoughtful, creative (LOVE the art and images in this book!), and scientific integration of the linear and nonlinear, left and right neurobiology and therapist-patient experience of relationship and psychotherapy process. Dr. Marks-Tarlow achieves this with intelligence, humor and play. Through each chapter, she powerfully honors the role of intuition as the force of right brain, embodied executive functioning to which left brain executive functioning both submits and collaborates in true clinical healing of those we serve. A must read for seasoned professionals, students and those newly licensed in the field of mental health. BRAVO, Dr. Terry Marks-Tarlow! And THANK YOU!!!!!

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What follows is some questions I addressed to the author, and her responses. It turns out, she went to the same psychology department for her Ph.D. as I did…U.C.L.A. The clinical perspective there is to be a scientist practitioner, doing therapy, but doing research as well. We were warned that the faculty looked down on anyone going to get their Ph.D. there just so they could make big bucks being a Beverly Hills shrink. I can sense the effect of that atmosphere in the author’s approach to the subject matter.

She writes (in response to my initial audio email):

Please let me know what you think of the book, and I'd love to read your review and know where you intend to place it. My take on intuition is quite different from yours, in that I normalize it and connect it to our animal roots. But I am also partial to your interest in the paranormal. In high school, I thought I wanted to be a paranormal researcher, like Thelma Moss, but then got scared away from it. You and I definitely have many common threads. I too went to UCLA for my PhD in psychology.

I don't even believe in the word "normal", especially from the point of view of nonlinear science. Perhaps ordinary versus extraordinary knowing is better language, as in the work of Elizabeth Mayer.
Despite my backing away from parapsychology as a research career, I have veered back in that direction anyway, both personally and professionally. 

Q1: Who's the reader you had in mind when you wrote your booki?Describe the therapist you envisioned who would read your book.

When I wrote this book, I had a grand vision of any and every psychotherapist reading and benefitting from the combination parent text and workbook. Because I truly believe clinical intuition is at the heart of healing and successful psychotherapy, I also believe the topic needs to be front and center, both from the start of clinical training and all the way through every clinician's career, independent of orientation or modality. 
 

Q2: What's a therapist to gain from reading your book?

My hope for therapists reading my books is gaining greater interest in their own internal processes and unique style of interacting with themselves and with patients/clients. This contrasts to addictive interest in how-to approaches and outer modes, methods, and models of treatment. I'm not saying that treatment models and technique manuals can't be useful, but more that they need to be integrated with inner sensibilities as the foundation. I would also hope therapists could gain greater trust in their own inner voices and inside  truths, even in the face of great uncertainty, which is what clinical work is all about.

Q3: What insight from your book do you find yourself smiling about the most? That's most important?

I love this question! The insight from my books that most makes me smile is this: there is nothing magical about clinical intuition at the very same time is that everything is magical about clinical intuition. There is nothing magical about intuition because we can now use the framework of interpersonal neurobiology to understand what's going on and how it works (to some degree). Everything is magical about clinical intuition, because all of the intellectual understanding in the world doesn't change the experience of intuition in action. And when deep truths emerge from the bottom-up out of the relational unconscious and we learn how to honor them, processes and results often feel inexplicably miraculous.

Q4: Do you feel that therapists need an excuse, or rationale, to trust their intuition during therapy? Does your book provide something of that sort?

Unfortunately, I feel that a lot of clinicians are either afraid or ashamed to trust their intuition, because there is such an emphasis on manualized approaches, empirically validated methods, and well-laid out treatment models, as if one model could fit all. In so far as my approach is very well grounded in neuroscience and ethology, it certainly helps to support the importance and validity of trusting our intuition. In the examples I cite, I tried to supply unusual and unique clinical cases in order to demonstrate where only an intuitive approach could have worked. Anything else would have missed the nuances and complexities involved.

Q5: Isn't empathy with a client an act of intuitive imagination? How might intuition go beyond that?

Yes, yes yes! Empathy with a client involves an act of imagination. Too few therapists understand this critical role of imagination during therapy. It takes imagination to see the world through the eyes of another. That's one piece of it. But, as you suggest, intuition goes beyond this, because it also takes imagination to foresee beyond where a client lives emotionally in the moment. This allows us to hold and "see" a person's future potential, even if he or she is feeling hopelessly depressed. If we can't do that, then we run the risk of simply wallowing in  current traumas and struggles. This form of intuition--imagining future potential and how to guide towards it--is a fuzzy sort of imagination, more like being a parent and holding out hope and promise for growth to come, without expectations, demands, or needs for that growth to take particular form. Here is where intuition so clearly dovetails with acts of creativity.

Q6: Equine assisted therapists claim that horses respond intuitively to the client by acting out the client's unacknowledged feelings. Some of  your description and discussion of therapist intuition resembles the horse's response. Do you find a connection there?

Perhaps your observation about equine therapy gives us a clue why intuition is sometimes called "horse sense." Indeed, the process you describe--of horses acting out a client's unacknowledged emotion is familiar to all sensitive therapists. This is technically called "projective identification" and happens because of open boundaries between self and other at all levels. In projective identification, unconscious or dissociated emotion is picked up by another person's body, which serves as a kind of resonant chamber, just like the horse is doing. Mammals like horses are particularly receptive to this kind of nonverbal, emotional communication, because they don't have thinking cortexes to block or distract from reception of raw and primitive, body-based emotion.

Q7: (What question would you wish I would ask?)

The question I would like you to ask me is this: "What is the most important thing you've learned out of your journey into clinical intuition?" My answer is that the mind/body/brain of self/other is a single system. Anything less is a fragmented view and an illusion, akin to the veil of Maya. The more I embrace the wholeness of this perspective, the better able I am to embody my own truths, and the more powerful the work feels. Thanks for asking!

Q8: Given that your book is so original, and unique, I am wondering what other references on intuition did you consult?

Thanks you so much for your kind words! Writing original books is very important to me. And for exactly that reason, in order to write these books, I strove to reach down into my own unconscious as well as to use my own implicit and explicit experience as a guide. If I get too close to other people's clinical work, I all too easily fall down the rabbit hole of adoration. This can cause me to lose my own perspective and solid core.

Q9: What theorist of intuition is your work most closely aligned to?

Quite frankly, in researching this book, I found very little in my own field that was helpful. There was a gaping hole in theory and science underlying clinical intuition. Early on, I decided to fill this hole by studying the underlying neuroscience and then using my own intuition to guide me.  That said, if I had to pick a single person most influential to my perspective, I'd choose Jaak Panksepp, father of affective neuroscience. To study the neurobiology of the SEEKING, CARE, and PLAY motivational/emotional circuitry in all mammals was to shine a light on the underlying nonconscious skill set of clinicians. In addition, there is one clinical psychologist whose work I found truly inspirational--Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. Her book, Extraordinary Knowing, marked the outer, paranormal edges of clinical intuition. While I have personally and professionally visited these edges often, in counterpoint, my own work emphasizes the more ordinary magic of clinical intuition as it informs embodied perception and response on a moment-to-moment basis.

Q10: There have been many books coming out on intuition... what sets yours apart from the rest? What are some of the common statements/assumptions about intuition in other folks's books on intuition that you take exception to?

I am very sorry , but I am completely ignorant about these kinds of books that are targeted for the general public in order to address intuition in everyday life. I really did need to separate myself from this literature almost completely in order to locate my own voice. So, dear Henry, I leave it to you to answer the question of what sets my work apart from these other folks, yourself included. Perhaps, you can even intuit what I might take exception to, based on your reading of my work.

Q11: There have been other therapists who have written about intution, but you seem to be directing your work to therapists specifically, especially those who work in an atmosphere where you have to document and defend each therapeutic maneuver, to give them something "scientific" to base intuitive responses on. Is that a fair assessment?

Yes, this is a fair assessment . As the social climate of psychotherapy moves more towards preconceived, manualized modes of treatment in combination with defense-based documentation , I wish to boost the morale of those true healers who buck this trend. I want to provide the scientific rationale for conceptualizing each person and clinical encounter as unique, which forces us to rely on our own gut responses in the heat and heart of the clinical moment. As I assert many times, with attunement via interpersonal neurobiology as a framework, I firmly believe it's unethical not to place clinical intuition at the heart of clinical training and center of effective psychotherapy.

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To explore Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy: The Neurobiology of Embodied Response on Amazon.com, click here!

To explore Awakening Clinical Intuition: An Experiential Workbook for Psychotherapists on Amazon.com, click here!

Review by Henry Reed