Logosynthesisⁱ

Willem Lammersⁱⁱ

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

-- William Wordsworth, Ode 536

Introduction
Logosynthesis™ is an innovative and comprehensive system for personal development. It is effective in coaching, counselling and psychotherapy, and can also be used as a self-help tool. It enables people to find their innermost life path. Logosynthesis is simple, elegant, effective, and easily conveyed. The system contains a model, principles for change and actual interventions, embedded in a holistic view of human nature. Logosynthesis has been derived from the principles of many schools of change. Specialists from different schools of thought will detect features of their models in Logosynthesis. However, the combination of effective principles in Logosynthesis is new and unique. Willem Lammers first introduced the concept in 2005, and since then it has been expanded continuously. This article describes the model, the method and the training system. The key concepts of Logosynthesis are:

1. Suffering is primarily the result of unawareness of our Essence and of our creative tasks.

2. Dissociated parts and introjects prevent our being fully aware of and living through our core self.

3. Dissociated parts and introjects are rigid energy structures existing in 3-dimensional space, rather than abstract cognitive parts of mind.

4. The power of the word itself dissolves these frozen structures and allows the energy they were holding captive to be reclaimed into the Living Self.

Case example: Sarah, playing music

A typical example is a following sequence from a coaching session I had with Sarah, a 30-year old business manager. Sarah used to get anxious if she had to play the piano in front of people. In the session, she resolved this issue with the help of Logosynthesis, within a few minutes. The literal transcript of this sequence follows here. The transcript starts after I asked her to imagine the situation in which she experienced the fear:

Sarah: I watch myself playing the piano, going all tense.

The coach gives her a sentence:
I retrieve all my energy that bound up in this fear of playing the piano.

Sarah, after repeating the sentence, and being silent for a while:
I become a bit calmer.

The coach gives her a second sentence:
I retrieve all my energy from the person watching me play the piano, and take it back to myself.

Sarah, after repeating the sentence, and being silent for a while:
I become sad and cannot play anymore.

The coach then gives her a third sentence:
I remove all energy of the person watching me play the piano – out of my personal space and send it into the Light.

Then, after a long silence, Sarah says:
I’m playing music, not notes!

Human nature

Logosynthesis offers a logical, coherent, and easily grasped view of human nature. In ancient Greek, Logos means meaning, mind, word or teaching. In Logosynthesis it stands for “meaning” as well as “word”. The Greek word Synthesis means, “putting together” and refers, in our context, to the integration of fragmented parts of a personality into an integrated Self, in which all parts work harmoniously together.

It is not a coincidence that Logosynthesis is reminiscent of Viktor Frankl’s model of Logotherapy. We start on the basis that people are looking for meaning. Frankl was one of the first to include a spiritual element into therapeutic work. Humans are body, mind and soul – biological, psychological and spiritual beings. These three aspects of our existence cannot be separated in everyday life. They are, however, useful for looking at life in its complexity.

Biology represents the aspect of physical survival; psychology stands for the ability to actively create and fill this life; and spirituality refers to the perceived meaning of existence. A higher Self, or Essence, manifests as a person in the context of life on earth, with a task of developing and growing in certain areas, and with the potential to fulfil this task. The spiritual dimension of life can be viewed under the following aspects:

• Goal and task in life

• Planning and forming of life

• Acts of Will

• Artistic intuition

• Scientific inspiration

• Personal ethos

• Religious experiences

Essence contains our core qualities, and our task contains the challenges for the life we’re currently living. Spirituality will also determine the individually perceived connection between freedom and responsibility. The meaning of life expands beyond the material world and beyond our connection with life on earth, and under no circumstances can it get lost. This meaning can only be derived from the context of being a creature on earth. It will emerge and become conscious from the interaction between Essence on one side and living on earth on the other.

Logosynthesis holds the view that suffering is primarily the result of unawareness of Essence and of our challenges, our creative tasks. Healing will happen automatically once we reconnect all parts of ourselves with our awareness of Essence. This concept of healing differentiates Logosynthesis from other forms of counselling and psychotherapy.

Up to the moment of birth a child has experienced itself solely as an indestructible, spiritual being – invulnerable, omnipotent and immortal as described by Winnicott. In that moment when this indestructible Essence meets the earth life system, the original self is confronted with sensory experiences in a world, which knows the biology of hurt, of pain and of death; a world which also knows the psychology of fear and abandonment. The newborn baby very soon experiences the limits of its physical influence on this new environment. His mind will learn to perceive and interpret the world through the senses, to understand it in the language of his/her environment and to act with the help of the consciously controlled body.

Through this limitation of body and mind the awareness of the original Essence gets lost to a large extent: The world has no actual language for the soul. Our Essence and essential qualities will always be there, but our life experiences will lead to pain and hurt. This induces us to hand our fate over to those we perceive as powerful in the context of our existence on earth, - our parents and those who are mentally or socially superior to us: doctors, priests, teachers and representatives of official institutions. All these have the power to fulfil our physical and psychological needs for food, shelter and affection. Intense sense experiences are stronger and more urgent than the subtle notes of our Essence and their language. Thus we lose more and more conscious access to our true self, to our indestructible Essence.

The Model

In the tension between the original self – in its quality of Essence – and the earth life system parts of our all-encompassing awareness become split off, or dissociated, and we generate images of the world around us in an attempt to make more sense of it: imprints and introjects.

In the beginning, dissociated parts and introjects have their place, in as much as they help to integrate our complex experiences of the world and to enable us to predict what is going to happen. However, very soon they start to prevent us from perceiving new events appropriately and they become hindrances.

Thus a person can learn to react towards an aggressive remark by withdrawing. A father being angry with his child will cause the development of an angry image, an introject, in the child’s personal space. The child will split part of his/her consciousness off and create a dissociated part through this timid reaction. In this dissociated part the child has lost knowledge of intrinsic invulnerability. The next time the father gets angry this introject is activated - and the child will react out of the archaic, dissociated part and will not get caught unawares.

This way the world becomes predictable at the cost of flexibility in responding to the father’s angry outburst. If the grownup does not resolve this developmental pattern it will prevail throughout his life and restrict him in his responses to other adults. A boss reacting abruptly towards a mistake will reactivate the father introject and trigger an emotional freezing in archaic anxiety. In our adult life we keep getting confronted with this kind of reaction, which seems irrational, inadequate and incomprehensible.

These patterns, these frozen worlds, consist of two parts:

1. An introject gets activated whenever someone in our surroundings displays behaviour similar to the person causing the original experience.

2. A dissociated part repeats the reaction of the person in the original, traumatic situation.

Introjects and dissociated parts belong together and cannot be separated. Many schools of therapy perceive these patterns as cognitive structures and try to dissolve them by either aiming to put the introjected messages and people into perspective or by strengthening regressed, dissociated parts.

In Logosynthesis, we look at these dissociated parts and introjects from a completely different viewpoint. We consider them as thought forms, static, energy structures in space, which deny current reality and prevent dialogue between the person and actual events in the here-and-now. This understanding of dissociated parts and rigid introjects as energy structures in three-dimensional space – as opposed to abstract, cognitive parts of mind - is another crucial difference between Logosynthesis and other schools of counselling and treatment.

These frozen energy structures are just as real as the body and physical space. In the eleven-dimensional universe developed by the physicist William Tiller, they include three dimensions. Matter is only one form of energy manifested: We return to Einstein’s E=mc². It is easily possible to find these thought forms in space. We only have to ask someone to remember a threatening or traumatizing event; they will always know straight away where in the space the most important people had been and these will still be seen in this virtual environment.

The methods used in schools of therapy with a cognitive orientation allow these parts to continue to exist. Transactional Analysis distinguishes between groups of dissociated parts and introjects: The ‘I’ in the Child and the ‘I’ in the Parent are seen as important parts of the personality. Not many TA practitioners work explicitly towards an integrated Adult-I.

In Logosynthesis, we take the energy of these frozen parts back to the living self, and dissolve the frozen worlds entirely by removing alien energies from the person’s body, and out of his/her personal space.

The most important discovery in the emerging of Logosynthesis happened during a session with a client, Lenore. She had been traumatized after falling down stairs in a railway station and had a total amnesia of this event even now, six years later. She was deeply insecure, suffered from many physical symptoms, and was strangely disorientated. Trying to put a key into a keyhole she would look for the hole about 20 cm to the right from where it actually was. The body from which she perceived her environment was in a different place to her physical body. In her Swiss dialect she described this as “being next to her shoes”. She reacted very fearfully when I took her words literally and invited her to lead her energy body back to her physical body. However she did attempt to do so and got physically and emotionally very agitated for about 15 minutes. I calmed her down and after that she was able for the first time to describe the events of six years ago. She described precisely how, early in the morning, she had been pushed down the stairs at the railway station by a passer-by in a hurry and had stayed there for some minutes frozen with cold and fear.

We can conclude that these energy structures – dissociated parts and introjects – both exist in space. In another session Lenore described her fear of an upcoming medical check-up. It turned out very quickly that this fear had been caused by an introject – caused by a professor who had treated her very roughly during a previous check-up. The prospect of the next examination evoked the frozen image of this professor close to her left ear. When I invited her to remove this image from her personal space the fear of the upcoming appointment vanished immediately and it took place without further problems.

In Logosynthesis we assume that both dissociated parts and introjects exist as energetic structures in three-dimensional space. This view has not been explicitly advanced in other methods of healing, with the exception of Rapid Eye Technology.

The American psychotherapist Roger Callahan describes representations of certain moments or aspects of a person’s life as energy structures, thought fields, and he based his Thought Field Therapy (TFT) on this assumption. A representation can consist of visual, auditory, kinaesthetic or olfactory sense experiences. They trigger reflex patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour. People react to their colleagues as they did to schoolmates and siblings, and to their superiors as to parents, teachers and priests. Such introjects and dissociated parts transform present situations into former environments or into the nuclear family. Both – past injuries and positive experiences – are anticipated all over again.

In the world of grownups many people live almost entirely in their heads. This means that they almost exclusively react to inner images and hardly ever experience the value of authenticity, spontaneity and flexibility. Oscar Wilde wrote: “Most people are different people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives are imitations, and their passion a quote”. We do not know any more who really is in front of us, and all the time we are longing for lost wholeness. Throughout history philosophers, priests, painters, poets and singers have in their own way expressed this longing.

This apparent loss of wholeness causes immense pain. However, because we have no words for it, we tend to transfer this pain into our biology or psychology. The body hurts, and mind seems to have needs or gets involved in seemingly important tasks. However, in a tiny corner of our mind we know that something is missing even if our material world seems to fulfil all our needs.

Logosynthesis allows our world to become more transparent. It enables us to distinguish between self and others, between past and present. Logosynthesis aids in realizing and dissolving old ingrained and adapted thought forms and opens the path for the intention of our Real Self, our Essence. Essence only has meaning in the here-and-now. Past and future only exist in form of energy structures, thought forms. They can be altered deliberately, as everyone who has been in psychotherapy or supervision can confirm. In processing experiences, changes in the perception of the past can change the way the person sees future and vice versa. With regard to past and future there are four different patterns influencing life in the here-and-now:

1. Trauma: A past injury will cause people to expect similar injuries in the present and will make them perceive people and surroundings accordingly.

2. Grief and nostalgia: Positive experiences with people or circumstances have not been let go and therefore present conditions are always seen in a worse light than the remembered ones.

3. Fear: The future is perceived as unsafe and people expect hurt and injuries. The own person’s own ability to fend off future threats is deemed as insufficient to prevent the threatening situation from happening.

4. Hope: People expect others or circumstances to be kinder in the future than in the present moment. One’s own ability to influence people and circumstances actively towards a more positive outcome is possibly underestimated.

These basic patterns are associated with different ways of perceiving time. The French psychotherapist Janet pictured our normal awareness of time as a bell curve (diagram 1).

A healthy mind will refer to a large extent to the immediate present. Actual reality concerns us most. The immediate future and past are also charged with emotional energy but to a lesser extent. The distant future and events long gone are the least alive. But if a highly emotionally charged event takes place the perception of time shifts and becomes less whole. Memories of these events contain a different time perspective: The person dissociates, and creates a frozen world. Thoughts will move between time shortly before, during and after the event. The person’s perception the event will freeze on the time axis and actual reality will move further and further away from it. We show this in diagram 2 by a second, red curve.

1. Establish and dissolve the dissociated aspects of the traumatic events themselves – the Emotional Personality (the red curve in diagram 3)

2. Work on patterns in thoughts, feelings and behaviour that developed as a consequence of traumatic events – the Apparently Normal Personality (the blue curve in diagram 3).

After the four basic dissociation patterns – trauma, grief, fear and illusion – have been dissolved the individual, released from the need to keep up old energy constructs, can turn his awareness and energy towards the existential task in the here-and-now. The individual can be released from his past burden and open up to the flow of awareness in the here-and-now.

Addiction is a special form of avoiding emotions caused by unwelcome experiences. We could call it state management: a way of coping with past difficult experiences, easing their emotional consequences. However, addiction denies the person’s responsibility in the here-and-now and therefore also constitutes dissociated behaviour. In Logosynthesis we concentrate on the affective, behavioural, and cognitive consequences of past traumatic events, as well as on inappropriate coping mechanisms.

The Method
Logosynthesis is a surprisingly elegant and simple path of approaching this longed-for wholeness step-by-step. In seemingly small “homeopathic” doses it addresses the same issues other therapeutic methods focus on. Logosynthesis has the advantage of being simple, clear and aesthetic: it focuses only on the essential and substantial. In the frame of Logosynthesis, development and change happen only through re-establishing the individual’s connection with Essence, on the background of our given circumstances. People learn to apply the energy of body, mind and soul to their task in life.

Logosynthesis empowers people to retrieve their split-off parts. These split-off parts can be stuck in the past as well as compulsively focusing on the future. People also learn to remove the energy of adopted values, beliefs, emotions and behaviour patterns from their energy system and from their personal space, back to where they were initially created or where they can do no more harm. This allows the true self, the unique Essence, to emerge.

In order for this to happen we must realize that most of our emotions, beliefs and thoughts are nothing but frozen thought forms we perceive as real, and that we keep on re-activating these by giving them energy. The first step towards healing is to retrieve our energy through the power of the word, disconnecting it from symptoms, emotions or beliefs. In a second step we return the energy of others, which also is tied up in the frozen world connected with the symptom, back to where it belongs. This, too, is done by the power of the word. This needs an explanation.

Logosynthesis addresses Essence directly through the power of the word itself. In psychotherapy, counselling and coaching, that is a revolution. In spiritual tradition, it’s not new at all. In history we can find many examples of creative and magic acts performed through words. Creation, healing and magic take place through words:

• And God said, Let there be light and there was light.

• Jesus said to the crippled man, Rise, take up your pallet, and walk. And at once the man was healed, and he took up his pallet and walked.

• Abracadabra, derived from the Aramaic Avrah ka dabra: “I create whilst speaking”.

Traditional counselling and psychotherapy methods remain in the field of biology and psychology. They do not know the spoken word in its healing and manifesting power. Language is used as an instrument to describe reality and to indirectly influence one’s own world – through conditioning, interpreting, trance, anchoring and cognitive reframing.

Logosynthesis offers specific formats for healing through words. These methods access the individual’s own path in life. Destructive thought forms are dissolved and the energy bound up in them is immediately available for the person in the here-and-now. This healing process reaches the core: The resolution of frozen energy structures allows the Real Self to emerge and express itself.

The process of Logosynthesis has a tangible effect. After a successful intervention the atmosphere in the room changes. It seems to become quiet in a special way: the tragic sounds less intrusive, the birdsong stronger. Silvia, a client who worked with her fear of an upcoming operation, wrote after a session on a Friday:

It is Sunday night by now, and I still have had neither another crying fit nor an emotional low since the session yesterday afternoon. Fantastic! Occasionally I remember that the operation is imminent, but nothing dramatic is happening any more. I have the impression that the Logosynthesis phrases are still floating in my body, establishing themselves. The process in my perception is not complete yet, but the drama has gone. Normality and facts take over.

Normally, the symptom the client works with, does not return. But it may well happen that new aspects of dissociated parts come to the surface. These can then be treated in similar ways. Every now and again the process may not be comfortable, for two reasons:

• A person may realize that he/she is lacking in important abilities or skills. One man discovered that he always kept himself out of conflicts or adjusted to the wishes of his opponent. Once his pattern had dissolved he had to take part in a training course to learn how to make himself heard. A candidate who was firmly convinced that she would not be able to write her dissertation had to learn how to compose coherent texts. The old pattern is characterized by inability; the new situation confronts the individual with his/her responsibility.

• The silence that arises when familiar inner dialogues vanish can turn into an oppressive emptiness. The blinding, deafening world of the introjects falls away and familiar structures do not lend their support any more. This emptiness can initially be threatening until the quiet voice of Essence emerges from within that silence. Facing that emptiness may trigger the next step in the process of Logosynthesis. This process may go on for a while until the person has learned to acknowledge the inner voice, Essence’s calling, and to apply it in everyday life.

Logosynthesis and other forms of guided change

Professional methods for change in coaching, supervision and psychotherapy may seem quite different at first sight, but they have a lot of similarities. In his book, Willem Lammers identified seven steps that emerge as different stages in the process:

1. Build up and maintain a positive learning relationship. Change means loss of support structures, and no matter how destructive these may be this will cause fear. In order to dissolve these structures replacing them is essential.
   A relationship in which the learner feels safe and may hope for positive developments can compensate for the loss of safety. This positive environment for change is created by Truax & Carkhuff’s classic three factors, which have become well known through Rogers: unconditional positive attention, accurate empathy, and congruence. These three are essential for all counselling and therapy methods. Logosynthesis is no exception.

2. Collect information. People come into therapy showing a gap between their real state and the state they would like to be in. Before it is possible to deal with the client appropriately the therapist/counsellor needs to know about his/her self-image, attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, emotions, behaviour patterns, surroundings, and history. The information gathered by the professional depends on the school he/she belongs to: A psychoanalyst will be more interested in the client’s birth order, whereas a coach will be more interested in tasks and relationships at the work place. The focus in Logosynthesis will always be towards the rigid aspects in the client’s frame of reference; here we find the dissociated states and their disturbing introjects.

3. Contract on relevant issues. The professional will then filter out the main aspects for change from the wealth of information given. This may well be the most demanding task for the guide. He/she will have to explain which issues are the most important for the client and if and how possibilities for change can be achieved. Then the first step towards this goal has to be worked out. In Logosynthesis, any issue is relevant that is based on frozen perceptions, cut off from the here-and-now of the client and his/her environment.

4. Share information that is necessary for change. Each school of change will offer clients information about its own reference points as models to explain processes. In Transactional Analysis three ego states will be used to explain emotional and cognitive information. NLP specialists will point out how information gets assimilated through vision, hearing, kinaesthetic and olfactory senses. A practitioner of Logosynthesis will share knowledge about dissociation and introjects as causes for human suffering.

5. Bring the client’s issue to life in the room. For real change, the issue of the client must be focused and brought into awareness in the consulting room to create an opportunity to apply the method, without retraumazing the client by overexposure. The Basic procedure in Logosynthesis identifies and focuses specific introjects and dissociated parts in need of resolution to get back in touch with Essence, and the client is invited to become aware of the issue in the room.

6. Facilitate integration of experiences and occurrences. Once the issue has been crystallized and integrated into the framework of the relevant school of therapy, specific interventions are used to trigger change. Many professionals have believed for a long time, that in order to be effective, these methods had to be verbally and logically coherent. However, many new methods, like NLP, EMDR and the energy-psychological techniques like BSFF and Emotrance have shown that this is not the case. Logosynthesis assumes it’s possible to influence a client’s thoughts and feelings through the power of words.

7. Close down the process of assimilation and integrate the new understanding. After assimilating an obvious transition needs to be made, by which the focus has to be brought back from the inner process to the outside. In Hypnotherapy the therapist will guide the client out of the trance and tell a joke; in NLP a future pacing will take place and in TA it is checked whether the contract has been fulfilled. Depending on the result, the client’s energy level, and the time, the same issue will be addressed again, a new one taken on, or the session is taken to a close. All of these are also relevant for Logosynthesis.

From the point of view of the above principles Logosynthesis is part of a long tradition. Therefore its simplicity may seem deceptive: it only works as long as the seven principles described above are taken into account and applied meticulously.

Training in Logosynthesis

The Institute for Logosynthesis, a subsidiary of the ias Institute for the Application of the Social Sciences in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, now offers training, treatment and supervision in Logosynthesis. It also publishes and distributes books on the subject in different languages. You find a description of my book Logosynthesis – Change through the magic of words on http://www.iasag.ch/index.php?id=332. In German, Worte wirken Wunder, a book on self-coaching with the help of Logosynthesis has recently been published. At the time of publication of this article, translations in different languages are on the way.

It only takes a few days for professionals trained in coaching, counselling and psychotherapy to get acquainted with the principles of Logosynthesis. If you start using the method with clients, it’s necessary to practice under supervision. The Practitioner curriculum contains the following elements:

1. The Level I seminar teaches the model, the principles underlying the method, and the Basic Procedure. Trainees learn how to apply the methods to themselves and in working with clients.

2. The Level II course focuses on a diagnostic framework for the application of Logosynthesis, the Energy Octagon, on instruments to monitor the treatment process, and on the application of Logosynthesis in changing beliefs and in the treatment of trauma and anxiety.

3. Supervision workshops teach methods to identify issues of the client and to prepare the use of Basic Procedure. There are also opportunities for supervision of your work with your own clients.

4. Logosynthesis Live is a workshop to work on your own personal issues. A trained professional leads you through the steps of guided change with the help of Logosynthesis and helps you to resolve your own frozen worlds.

5. After partipation in the workshops, the professional writes a case study about an application of the method in his daily practice.

Training programmes in different countries are published on website of the institute http://www.Logosynthesis.net. The institute offers an intensive course in English each year in July in Switzerland. The seminars are open to qualified professionals, and also to advanced trainees in counselling, coaching, supervision and psychotherapy.

Some comments from participants of a Level I training group:

• Challenging and practical. Active thinking is stimulated!

• Beginning of beautiful, promising work.

• I was able to integrate my personal experiences into the theoretical framework.

• I have understood the meaning of the true self as source of options for action.

• A fascinating and inspiring concept, opening new paths. It also confuses me, but fits into my need for simplicity and less complexity.

• I have found a language for my own perceptions.

• The material is very compact and deep.

• Good, rigorous theoretical background. The method has been taught well. Empowering instead of displaying guru attitudes.

• Good, well-structured, usable introduction into the method. Room to practice. The method is effective and is easy to learn.

A letter from a participant, Peter, a few months after:

I have used Logosynthesis a great deal since doing the workshop with you in the summer, and have found it to be remarkably effective with a wide range of issues.
 One particularly dramatic case was of a young woman with an extremely intense lifelong phobia of blood, medical procedures and needles etc. This was so severe that if needles or other fears were even talked about, she would faint! Unfortunately this client had a number of cysts in her lower spine, where they had been growing for several years, but she was unable to undergo surgery because of her phobia, in spite of increasing pain and disability.

 I initially used EFT and Emotrance to treat her widespread fears and by all normal standards made good progress over seven sessions. However, quite marked anxiety still remained, and on returning from your workshop I introduced her to Logosynthesis. She repeated the sentences only once, looked very confused and said ‘it’s gone’. I being equally puzzled said 'What's gone?'  She replied that the fear had disappeared completely. She made the interesting observation that with EFT, although the anxiety faded, she remained uncertain whether it would really have improved when she faced the real situation. However with Logosynthesis she knew with certainty that it had gone. I must have spent a total of about 45 minutes dealing with related issues connected with her phobia, and that was all the treatment she received. I next heard that she has gone in to hospital and had the cysts removed successfully. She came to see me a couple of weeks ago to tell me of her experience. She said that amazingly she had enjoyed the experience of going into hospital and having surgery. By this she meant that to be able to do it was so unimaginable prior to Logosynthesis that she felt pleased and proud to be able to handle the experience like other people. I have asked her to write an account of her experiences as she has some interesting things to say.
Once again I am amazed at how these processes can be so simple, yet effective.