08/28/2026
TRANSFORMATIONAL THERAPY*
By Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D., Dean, School of Counseling and Therapy
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Transformational counseling emphasizes integrating your insights into your immediate interactions with your therapist and peers. Transformational work is based on the idea that you may become "disordered" as a child—you do not express what you feel inside due to getting "daily doses of stunting, browbeating, phony sentiment, neglect, harshness, denials, withholding, reprimanding, regulating, over-reacting, and lack of response."
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If your rearers disordered you like this, you may have grown up pretending to be okay to others, when you do not feel okay in your own head or body. If, so, you become defensive. block your emotions and sensations, say nonsensical things to yourself, confuse your present with your childhood, and fail to make full, loving, intimate, emotional contact with your family, friends, and mate. Yet you try to appear okay to others. This is the "reasonable insanity" you may be living with.
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In transformational work, you change with the help of your friends. You fully feel every moment. You learn to catch yourself when you fail to get as much feeling, expression, and contact from your friends as you do when you return to full expression and contact.
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In Transformational therapy, you learn to drop your images, infantile reactions to adult situations, and mismatched emotions, sensations, and ideas about them. Live, instead, with complete, ordered, integral feelings. To do this, go through the cycle of feeling at increasingly deep levels as you enter a spiral of transformation.
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RIDE THE CYCLE OF FEELING
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The cycle of feeling consists of feeling your defenses (counteraction), reliving and feeling the pain of specific childhood events onto which you built your defenses (abreaction), expressing the feeling you are hiding in the present (proaction), and changing your life by your new awareness (integration).
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I'll give you a personal example of my emotional cycle from my 20s. I was into a disordered trip with my girlfriends. I'd get close, break off, then make up. I'd get a rush when we got back together.
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Dudles, with whom I lived and played this game for over a year, left me for good.
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At first, I pretended that I didn't care. I dated other women. I wouldn't admit I was upset.
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I just hunted dates and ate chocolate bars. I ate dozens of chocolate bars each day. I moved out of the house I shared with my friends and got a new place on my own. I was defensive. I felt tense from holding in my upset; I got pimples from the chocolate.
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COUNTERACTION: FEEL DEFENSES
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My friends initiated me into the cycle. They held me down and told me to breathe deeply until I admitted what they could sense—that I was upset and hiding my pain. They forced me to stop pretending to be okay. Feeling my defensiveness and what it was doing to me was the counteraction phase of my cycle. As I became more honest, I could freely admit that I had been defensive.
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ABREACTION: Relive Childhood Pain that Made You Defensive
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The next phase in the cycle of feeling I went through was abreaction. As I lay on my back, I felt my heartbreak at losing Dudles. I gasped and sobbed.
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Then I re-experienced a childhood scene I'd forgotten. I remembered and relived a time when I was a year and a half old. We lived in New York. My father left for California. The next day, for the first time in my life, my mother left me at a nursery school. I felt totally abandoned by my parents. I screamed and cried all day. When my mother finally came, she gave me a chocolate bar and told me not to cry.
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When I relived this scene, I screamed as I had not done as a child.
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I then began to recall and relive even earlier scenes from my infancy.
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I relived being left alone in a room every day when I was a few months old. I would call to my mother, as she had trained me to do. She wouldn't come in and get me. She was following the behaviorist Watson's book and had me on a "schedule" that said to leave me alone for a certain amount of time. I did not understand. I was upset.
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PROACTION: Express Emotions You Hid
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I saw how the rigid scheduling Mom imposed affected me, and how I had been acting out the pain which I hadn't fully felt from my early childhood. By breaking up with my lovers as an adult, I awoke my feelings of being left in the crib and the nursery school.
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When I made up with my girlfriends, I symbolically reenacted my mother's rescue of me from the crib and the nursery school. By eating candy bars as an adult, I returned to the chocolate defense against feeling my pain that my mother had offered me 30 years earlier.
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I felt close to my friends. They had helped me stop running, feel my past and present feelings. I could feel the pain of breaking up with Dudles without adding my infantile abandonment pain.
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INTEGRATION: Better Your Life with Your New Awareness
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The last phase in the cycle is integration. I took what I learned and lived from it, with the help of my friends. I'm married now. I enjoy my wife's affection and feel no impulse to push her away and then reconcile.
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I can feel more of my real present-day feelings with her. I've been transformed.
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To test your understanding, describe and define the cycle of feeling and each of its phases (counteraction, abreaction, proaction, and integration).
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PERSONALIZE THE CYCLES OF FEELING: DO-IT-YOURSELF BETTERMENT EXERCISE
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Be alone or with partners for the following exercises. Respond aloud from your own experience for each of the exercises indicated in the fantasy below.
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Ride the Cycle of Feeling
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Imagine that you are on the first story in the house of consciousness. You see a door labeled "STOREROOM OF MEMORIES: ONE DEFENSE OPENS DOOR". Intrigued, you read the small instruction card tacked beneath the sign; it says, "A vocal rendering of one of your defenses is the key to opening this door." Push the button beneath this card for further instructions. Lift the card and push the black button under it. A mechanical voice says, "You are being scanned visually and auditorily. Do as I say. Tell me one of your defenses."
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Do it, aloud. EXAGGERATE YOUR DEFENSE AS YOU ENACT A FANTASY DIALOGUE AND WITH YOUR BODY.
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When you finish this exploration, the voice from the door says, "Congratulations, you have completed your counteraction." You hear a click. The door slides open and you step into a round, white room. The door closes behind you. You see the exercycle in the middle of the room. On the exercycle is a note.
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The note reads, Backpedal for memories. Projection lenses protrude from columns under the cycle. Climb on the exercyle and begin pedaling.
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As you pedal backward, the room lights dim out, and the projectors light up. They project three-dimensional images from your past all around you.
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You see yourself yesterday, last week, and last month. The projectors are running your life film backward as you pedal the cycles counterclockwise.
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You think, "I'm going to have to pedal my memories to answer the questions Dr. Lessin will ask." The pedals lock.
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See the specific events that led you to develop the defense you used to open the door to the storehouse of memories. Notice how old you are when these events occur. Relive the events.
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Realize what you think about yourself, the people involved, and the world during these events. Let yourself experience those emotions and let them build until they feel overwhelming. Then express these emotions to the people involved.
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You have finished your abreaction phase, announces the machine-voice. The lights dim, and the 3D projectors assemble before you, the holographic projection of the person toward whom you feel most trusting. Share with me the feeling you've been defending against, says the apparition. Do so.
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Your friend's image says, Express these feelings to me, in the flesh, or to someone else in your life. In this proaction phase of going sane, you become authentic with your facilitator and say how you feel toward her or him.
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"Create a REALITY REMINDER—an affirmative statement that will help you remember what you learned so you can use it if you start to use that defense again. Make one up.
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Pedal forward on the cycle to future-pace what you learned about your defensiveness and the feeling it hid. As you pedal forward, recall times where you would probably have been defensive before but this time, however, imagine you become aware of your tendency to react defensively. Remember your experience of reacting on the cycle of feeling. Invoke your reality reminder and watch yourself reacting nondefensively.
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Stop pedaling, get off the exercycle, and walk over to the door. It opens. Exit.
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For one week, express the feeling underlying the defensiveness you were denying. Short-circuit your defensive impulses with your reality reminder. Let the people you trust know how you feel for a week.
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Complete this sentence: My awareness of the feeling motivating my defense has changed my life in the following ways: ______.
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Think of the last time this week you felt bad. Attach this bad feeling to your failure to completely and unreservedly express this feeling to someone in your life this week.
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Go back to your childhood, when you held your feelings in the same way. Express your whole feeling to the "someone" above.
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BALANCE THERAPEUTIC MOVEMENT IN THE SPIRAL OF TRANSFORMATION
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You go through the cycle of feeling many times, spiraling into transformation. Joseph Hart says to simultaneously clear out your past and your present mismatches of feelings, sensations, and meanings; otherwise, you just grovel in your past and miss sharing feelings in the present. This is balanced therapeutic movement: each time you relive part of your past, you do better in the present. Live from and express your new levels of feeling. Match each movement into the past with better contact with the people in your life.
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Balanced therapeutic movement means ________________________ (complete).
The loops in the spiral of transformation formed by your successive, balanced cycling are called opening, beyond the nonsense, and growth.
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OPENING
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In Opening, you catch your non-feeling and non-expression (counteraction). You learn where you are being affected by the past. You express your past feelings (abreaction). You make feeling contact with your facilitator (proaction).
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In the opening loop, you "become aware of the difference between past and present." You notice how you really are and what has been done to you.
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You distinguish what you do to yourself with your "Internalized Insanity" and what you want to do. You want to "say everything that's inside and allow feelings to follow".
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BEYOND NONSENSE
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In Beyond the Nonsense, the second loop in the spiral of transformation, you start noticing when you are defensive. You admit it. You voluntarily share the crazy things you say to yourself (your nonsense) to continue the pretense that you are okay when you are really disturbed. You readily regress, feel the underlying feelings from your past, feel what you really want from your past, feel what you really want more, make better contact with your facilitator, and live your life from your new level of feeling.
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GROWTH
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In Growth, the final loop of the cycle of transformation, you actively seek contact with others as your form of counteraction. You reveal your subtlest held-in thoughts from when you were little. You and your facilitator exchange feelings as equals when you proact. Your life is integrated in a community of friends. You share feelings and live in the present.
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SELF-TEST
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What is the spiral of transformation?
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What is the relationship of the cycle of feeling and the spiral of transformation? Illustrate or diagram your answer.
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Where are you now in the spiral of transformation?
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*Hart, J, Corrierre, R., Binder, J., 1975, Going Sane: An Introduction to Transformational Psychology, N.Y., Aaronson.
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