Dex Gelfand, an internationally recognized leader in the field of spiritually oriented therapeutic counseling, talks about what can be done to diminish and resolve the chronic depressions and anxieties brought on by the traumas and stresses of life.

Dex Gelfand is an internationally recognized leader in the field of spiritually oriented therapeutic counseling, with clients spanning the globe.  His time is divided between personally conducting sessions with individuals as well as mentoring and training other practitioners in his approach and techniques.  Dex’s modality, Therapeutic Spiritual Counseling, is based on the principle that we are all endowed with our own spiritual compass, which presents the mental and spiritual material we most need to address. This draws our attention to that material, the specific negative spiritual architectures we need to resolve, and that the practitioner’s function is to help the participant achieve whatever he or she is intending to accomplish through the sessions.

Transcript

Neal Howard: Hello and welcome to the program. I’m your host Neal Howard here on Health Professional Radio, thank you so much for joining us. Our guest today is Mr. Dex Gelfand, he’s an internationally recognized leader in the field of spiritually oriented therapeutic counseling and he’s joining us here on HPR this morning to talk about some of the things that can be done to diminish and resolve some of the chronic depression and some of the anxieties that are brought on by the traumas and stresses of everyday life. Welcome to the program Dex, how are you?

Dex Gelfand:  I’m good Neal, thanks for having me.

Neal:  I did say that you’re a recognized leader in the field of spiritually oriented therapeutic Counseling. Is that something that you decided to go into early on in life or what led you to such a profession?

Dex:  Well interestingly, it kind have been my life path even since I was a child. I remember I was 10 years old and I had this realization that if you look at what somebody else was saying you’re doing that might be offensive or disturbing and you could really understand, look inside their mind and see what propelled them to behave that way, you could not be upset with them which is an odd insight for a child to have I suppose but it’s like my interest. And I think understanding that really motivated me, led a passion to try and find ways to bridge to have that understanding and make that available.

Neal: Having that understanding at such an early age, for our listeners who may be unfamiliar with therapeutic spiritual counseling, talk about your services and talk about how what you just explained relates to those services.

Dex:  Alright. Well I think that’s the first thing to understand, to recognize it’s a tremendous value if we can just all understand what I just said whether we’re applying it to ourselves or to others. Everyone thinks that their issues or their neuroses or whatever are so unique and different and worse than everybody else’s literally – everybody does, trust me. And because understand there are always reason okay and understanding those reasons or just knowing that if those reasons were understood, it all makes sense and nobody has to judge themselves or others. Basically generally when these things come about is things to happen in life that come with great impact and speed and so we can’t really digest them. It’s just too much pain, too much fear too fast and we employ these defensive mechanisms to try to not feel it. And trying to not feel something simply maintains it – it’s what it does – it’s just like very analogous to eating and food. If something sits in your stomach undigested, it’s going to create all kinds of problems – same thing with your mind and the thing that is very helpful to understand. Now people do something just as simple a thing, “I don’t want to talk about that,” that’s the simplest example of a person trying not to feel their own feelings because they’re difficult. But understand this, when we are dealing with the pain or fear of an experience after the fact. we’re dealing with what is in our mind. not something slamming at us inside of a few seconds and we have what I call ‘your spiritual compass.’ It is this wonderful natural instinct that invited the right way as I would do in a counseling session, allows you to experience and spiritually digest the energy that is the specific feeling that’s disturbing you and acts as a valve that will just send out the perfect rate of flow that you can absorb and digest that material. It’s not going to overwhelm you, it just effortlessly allowed the energy that is that specific feeling to sort of express through you. It takes some training, I can work with anyone. But just understand the material that’s in your mind, your spiritual compass, it’s never going to overwhelm you if you’re resisting it that’s holding it in place so strongly and so everything is a matter of accepting rather than resisting. There’s a little technique involved but it is simple.

Neal: Describe briefly an online training session because, not training but counseling session because this counseling is online, right?

Dex: Yes, this is an area that I am sort of a pioneer in. I trained many other practitioners how to work over the internet and there are advantages, there are many advantages. For one thing,  nobody has to travel. My clients are literally every continent on the planet. All they have to do is walk from one room to another, okay. Also there’s a comfort level in sitting in the space where you are most comfortable rather than in somebody else’s space so there are advantages in that sense. Now to do this, to be a counselor in the field, I don’t think you have to be brilliant. You just have to have a passion for helping people in this way. I find that anybody who does can become quite good at this but basically someone like myself working with you have a certain presence. Very non-judgmental, it’s beyond judgement, there’s no reason to judge. There’s never a reason in my opinion to judge a person. You can judge an action, you can judge a statement but to categorize anyone as being so one-dimensional as to describe them by something you’ve seen, that’s inappropriate. So once you cross that barrier and that person feels safe to open up but I know that’s me. People have told me my whole life, strangers have walked up to me and said ‘Hey, I feel like I can talk to you’ and spilled their guts. I’m not the only person in the world that is this way, there are many people like this and they’re approaching whatever they do in their own way. And it’s just we just explain to that person to just allow whatever comes into their mind, to express, to convey it to me when they’re moved to convey it to me and that nothing that enters the mind once we address a subject that’s disturbing for them, nothing about it is irrelevant. Whatever comes up is going to be relevant to what they need to process.

Neal: How does this differ being spiritual counseling as opposed to strictly mental health counseling? It would seem that if you’re talking about understanding the reasons that people do things that they do, does this require a person to have a specific belief system? A specific spiritual path in order to benefit from your modality?

Dex: No and I think that any system that does involve that is self-limiting and encourages or forces a person to shoe-horn their experience to fit somebody else’s description and I’ve seen many, many systems that do that. I think that’s a problem. I think that what it is, it allows a person to see things through their own shelters, to see how they are creating their lives and their experiences and viewing them without imposing any, “This is a system that explains everything for you.” I believe that’s a liability. When I was in third grade, I went to a class trip to Thomas Edison’s Museum. There was a sign hanging in the museum to make my point that stayed with me ever since it was by a 19th century painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who was appointed to the to the Royal Court … and it said “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.” Everybody wants, not everybody but people generally, don’t want to have to think things through analyze and investigate everything for themselves. We are way too susceptible to accepting somebody’s system of explaining things and there’s so much more value and looking at each situation and experience in life as unique without trying to create an overall frame of reference for understanding they are feeling things. So it’s spiritual in that sense that we don’t want to impose any system to shoe-horn your experience into to make it fit that way. They’re always, in my opinion liabilities, in doing that.

Neal: How can our listeners get in touch with you and where can we go online and get some more information about this online spiritual counseling that you offer as your service?

Dex: Well I like to make myself readily accessible and the most direct way is through my website dexsessions.com. There’s a Contact Page, I try to be very responsive. Generally anybody who contacts me, they will hear back from me generally within 36 hours and I’ll be happy to talk with anyone and I’m happy to get anybody a free session. I had the opportunity to work with a veteran who had post-traumatic stress syndrome, a former Army Ranger. It was my honor and it really changed him. He felt so much better. I welcome such opportunities.

Neal: Well I thank you for joining us on the program today and giving us this information Dex.  It’s been a pleasure, thank you for joining us.

Dex: Again, thanks for having me Neal. It’s a pleasure for me too.

Neal: You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio, I’m your host Neal Howard. Transcripts and audio of this program are available at hpr.fm and healthprofessionalradio.com.au. You can also subscribe to this podcast on itunes listen in and download at SoundCloud and be sure and visit our Affiliate Page at hpr.fm and healthprofessionalradio.com.au

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