Terry Marks-Tarlow
Dr. Marks-Tarlow received her B.A. in psychology from Stanford University and her PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA. During graduate school, she was trained primarily in cognitive-behavioral work and sought additional training at the Gestalt Therapy Institute of Los Angeles (GTILA), eventually becoming President. She received training in hypnosis from Jean Holroyd and Michael Diamond at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, plus studied guided imagery with Muriel Fuller. She pursued analytic self-psychology with Lynne Jacobs, and for over a decade has studied interpersonal neurobiology and regulation theory with Allan Schore. She also has expertise in nonlinear science, especially chaos and complexity theories and fractal geometry.
Terry is currently an Adjunct Professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute and at California Institute for Integral Studies. She also teaches at the Hypnosis Motivational Institute and online at Embodied Philosophy. She is Core Teaching Faculty at the Insight Center in Los Angeles where she regularly conducts continuing education workshops and classes.
Terry has written and edited more than 10 books, including Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy, Awakening Clinical Intuition, Mythic Imagination Today, A Fractal Epistemology for a Scientific Psychology, and most recently called the Eel & the Blowfish: A Graphic Novel of Dreams, Trauma, and Healing. Terry Illustrates all her books, dances ballet 5 days a week, plays piano, and has co-curated a yearly art exhibition for 10 years, Mirrors of the Mind: The Psychotherapist as Artist. She has written two librettos with Julliard professor and composer Jonathan Dawe, one of which opened with a ballet at Lincoln Center in New York City.
Terry Marks-Tarlow, PhD
Leanne Domash, PhD
Reaching for the Stars:
Psychotherapy as a Spiritual Journey
1:00 - 5:00 PM PST via Zoom
The healing benefit of integrating spiritual concepts and practices into psychotherapy is increasingly appreciated. The psychotherapist/client dyad is what Martin Buber called an I-Thou relationship in contrast with the I-It relationships of the marketplace. Trauma often emerges from the I-It mentality of using people as instruments. The psychotherapy relationship, and by extension the physical office, can provide a sacred womb for healing and growth.
This backdrop of implicit spirituality facilitates positive emotions, intrinsic motivation, and connection to something larger. Spirituality may even be a form of intelligence with the following components: transcendent and peak experiences; finding the sacred in everyday life; expanded perspective to solve problems; engaging the higher self to express gratitude, be humble, show compassion and forgiveness. We offer ways to deepen your spiritual intelligence and that of your clients.
As philosopher Henryk Skoliowski said, “The first act of awe, when man was first struck with the beauty or wonder of nature, was the first spiritual experience.” Research shows the following benefits of experiencing awe: increased generosity and kindness; greater curiosity; enhanced social connections; more happiness and satisfaction with life; reduction in stress; less time pressure; and clarification of life’s priorities. We offer suggestions as to how we and our clients can gain access to heart-opening experiences.
This workshop integrates metaphors, myths, and relational concepts from the Kabbalah and other spiritual traditions to deepen the experience of connection to self, other, and the Universe at large. We provide breathwork and guided imagery among other right-brain tools for participants. We introduce an organic fractal framework of full interconnection and interpenetration where boundaries are blurred: I am in you, and you are in me. This framework allows us to explore feelings of transcendence as well as uncanny resonances and unconscious communications between people.
Instructional Objectives
Participants will be able to:
Distinguish I-Thou from I-It relationships within psychotherapy;
Identify how the experience of awe can be healing;
Enumerate components of spiritual intelligence;
Identify virtues of the higher self and how they can be integrated into psychotherapy;
Explain the value of transcendent and peak experiences;
Describe how breath work unites us with the Universe at large.
Continuing Education
Continuing Education credits are available for this training.
Psychologists: The Insight Center is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Insight Center maintains responsibility for this program and its content. This course provides 4 CE.
MFTs / LCSWs / LPCCs: The California Board of Behavioral Sciences accepts APA authorized continuing education. This course provides 4 CE.
Leanne Domash
Dr. Domash is a clinical consultant in the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Voluntary Psychologist, Mt. Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. She maintains a private practice in Manhattan and treats children and adults. She does group and couples therapy with adults as well.
One of Dr. Domash’s main interests is exploring the unconscious in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, including helping clinicians use their empathy, explore dreamwork, and increase understanding of nonverbal communication to develop as deep an understanding of the patient (and themselves) as possible. Most importantly, she wants to help each patient and each supervisee develop his/her own voice.
Dr. Domash is particularly interested in the creative process as expressed by interdisciplinary exploration. She has published articles integrating neuroscience and psychoanalysis; spirituality and psychoanalysis; and architecture and psychoanalysis. She has lectured and written on the creative process, dreamwork, moments of emotional insight in psychoanalysis, the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, between Kabbalah and psychoanalysis, and psychology of women and parenthood.
In 2021, Dr. Domash published Imagination, Creativity and Spirituality in Psychotherapy: Welcome to Wonderland (Routledge) and in 2022 with her co-author Terry Marks-Tarlow, she published The Eel & the Blowfish: A Graphic Novel of Dreams, Trauma and Healing (IPBooks).
She has also written and produced a number of plays, one co-authored with Evelyn Rappoport, Psy.D. All of the plays concern the theme of trauma. Each performance has a Talk Back led by a drama therapist so the audience can process the themes presented.