Psychological Healing
in the Roman Catholic Mystic Tradition

Consultation

Catholic Psychotherapy and Spiritual Direction

San Francisco

Introduction | Catholic Psychotherapy | The Difference Between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Direction | Techniques | Telephone Work | Cost, Length, and Frequency of Sessions | Making a Payment | Scheduling a Consultation | E-mail Questions | Following the Spiritual Counsels | Free Help

OU can coast into hell on an empty tank of gas, but an uphill climb is required to attain “justice, peace, and the joy that is given by the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17). So what more can be said?

Do you feel the need for help from Catholic psychology?

Are you seeking Catholic psychotherapy from a Catholic psychologist?

If you need more than the self-help provided on this website, I can provide you with professional guidance through spiritual direction or through traditional therapy. Before contacting me, please review the following professional information on A Guide to Psychology and its Practice:

Office Policies Including the cost of treatment and a description of my professional credentials, training, and experience

 
ABOUT CATHOLIC PSYCHOTHERAPY

 
he only true Catholic psychotherapy is prayer and fasting ^[1] combined with a sincere study of the faith. It’s that simple. If only we did exactly what Christ told us to do—to turn away from the satisfactions of the world so as to pray constantly and live chaste and humble lives filled with loving sacrifices for the salvation of other souls—we would be spiritually and mentally healthy.

Many individuals through the ages have found healing for their emotional pain in this way. But such healing requires total surrender to God. It’s all or nothing.

And it’s a sad truth that in today’s world, despite our prayers and confessions, many Catholics do not live lives completely ordered to the commands of Christ. We are afraid of making the total surrender to Him that Christ asked us to make. Despite our best conscious intentions we constantly encounter psychological obstructions that hold us back from living holy lives.

Accordingly, many individuals today need psychotherapy to help them overcome the unconscious resistances to doing the very things they know consciously they should be doing.

 
The Difference Between Catholic Psychotherapy
and Spiritual Direction

Psychotherapy

Psychotherapy (often referred to colloquially as “therapy”) has as its objective—even when informed by the Catholic faith—the resolution of psychological conflicts that produce psychiatric symptoms.

These symptoms are created by hidden emotional resentments, beginning in childhood and continuing throughout life. These resentments can so erode your confidence and self-esteem with feelings of anger, victimization, self-blame, and self-punishment that they affect not only your mental health but also your social health and spiritual health. In fact, individuals caught up in their unconscious defenses don’t really desire to serve God. Deep in their hearts they use the name of God only as an excuse to serve their own pride.

Psychotherapy Techniques

Now, many various psychotherapy theories and techniques have been developed since the early 1900s when Sigmund Freud formulated the concept of psychoanalysis. All of these techniques have one basic objective: to help us do the things we would like to do, but, by ourselves, cannot manage to do.

Some of these techniques are based in conscious, rational thought processes.

•	Cognitive-Behavioral techniques, for example, focus specifically on changing thoughts and behaviors. Note that vocal prayer is the pre-eminent form of Cognitive-Behavioral therapy.
•	Teaching and reasoning are also forms of psychotherapy. Note that this has been a preferred method of Christian psychotherapy, beginning with Christ Himself, continuing with the Apostles, and fully exemplified by men such as St. Thomas Aquinas, whose work is often recalled by modern Catholics in their practice of psychotherapy, and St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises.

Still, some persons develop such deep resistance to changing their lives for the good that psychotherapy must reach deep into their unconscious minds, well past their conscious thoughts.

•	Guided Imagery helps you visualize things that could or might happen so that you can achieve them or avoid them in the future. Note that St. Ignatius of Loyola anticipated this concept in his Spiritual Exercises.
•	Mental Prayer (or contemplative prayer) calls upon unconscious mental processes to allow profound inspiration by the Holy Spirit. Note that Catholic mystics through the ages have had much to say about this.
•	Dreams can be interpreted to help you understand emotional elements of your life that you have not yet recognized consciously. Note that the Book of Daniel provides a practical example of this, while the Book of Sirach (34:5) warns us that dreams are not meant to be taken as predictions of actual future events.

Putting It into Practice

Therefore, in the form of psychotherapy I practice, and as I describe on this website, you can be guided—through the sacraments, vocal and mental prayer, fasting, study, and the insight resulting from the psychotherapeutic relationship—into understanding the roots of your unconscious conflicts; you can learn to identify the events of life that have wounded you and to understand the emotions surrounding those events.

That is, it’s not enough just to “know” intellectually what happened—it is important to feel the pain and then be able to identify and “name” the emotions associated with your pain.

This process happens through your speaking with your psychotherapist so as to interpret unconscious connections through spontaneous associations to your intellectual memories and through other techniques, such as dream interpretation.

Eventually, you can recover a full awareness of your emotional life that in childhood you learned to suppress as a psychological defense.

 
The Reason for Emotional Awareness

Some persons will say that they want nothing to do with “touchy-feeley psychology” and will insist that their lives are quite fine without it. Those who say this, however, have usually experienced family dysfunctions such as alcoholism, or emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. In an environment of lying, broken promises, arguing, and violence, they grew to fear emotions as something dangerous.

Nevertheless, in order to live a true Christian lifestyle, everyone, male and female, needs to be able to manage his or her internal emotional reactions to external events, so as to remain always in a place of Christian purity of heart. Two common “emotional traps” illustrate this.

1.	Let’s say that someone says something critical to you. Your immediate reaction, based upon learned behavior from childhood, will be to defend yourself. That can provoke more criticism, and more arguing, until you get so exasperated that you start saying hateful and vengeful things. And right there you have abandoned purity of heart and fallen into sin.
2.	Let’s say you’re on your way home from work and suddenly you feel a temptation. To stop at a bar and drink. To use drugs. To shoplift. To stop at a strip club. To get a “massage” from a prostitute. To masturbate. And right there you have abandoned purity of heart and fallen into sin.

Emotional awareness, therefore, is a psychological tool that provides protection from sin. Interpersonal conflicts result from failed emotional communication. Temptations do not just appear out of nowhere; behind every temptation is an emotional reaction to some event that has shaken your self-confidence. It is impossible to stay in the place of Christian purity of heart if you fail to understand your emotional reactions to the events around you.

Thus through psychotherapy you can learn to respond to every moment of the present with a complete understanding of the emotions involved—and this understanding gives you the ability to respond honestly and appropriately to the situation.

For example, if someone says something that hurts you, you can say to yourself, “OK. I’m feeling helpless and abandoned.” In the midst of these feelings, you can recognize how you responded defensively to similar feelings as a child. Then you can choose an appropriate, non-defensive, mature, and psychologically honest response to your current feelings. But if you haven’t done your psychological work, instead of naming your feelings you will just feel a vague yucky inadequacy and then get angry or go off and drown the yuck with food or drugs or some other dysfunctional behavior. And the sad thing is that when you drown the yuck you drown the possibility of forgiveness with it.

Spiritual Direction

Spiritual direction seeks to, well, direct a person in ways that bring him or her closer to living a holy lifestyle.

In spiritual direction you learn to surrender yourself to total trust in God so that, no matter what happens to you, you can bring the pain before God and ask for the strength and courage to deal, in imitation of Christ, with what needs to be done in any moment.

Because of deep psychological conflicts, however, many persons find it difficult to make a total surrender to God, and they discover that education and reasoning do little to overcome their resistances. In this case, psychotherapeutic techniques must be used to understand and overcome the fear that puts up an obstacle to the spiritual purgation necessary for living a holy lifestyle.

 
Techniques

When I conduct spiritual direction—even over the telephone (see below)—I use some of the same techniques for working with the unconscious that I use in psychotherapy. Unconscious conflicts can often result in spiritual stagnation, so working to understand unconscious motivation can be a large part of spiritual direction. But in spiritual direction the resolution of such conflicts is directed toward ever greater trust in God, not toward the specific relief of psychiatric symptoms.

 
Telephone Work

I cannot conduct psychotherapy per se over the telephone for two reasons. First, because my professional license has been granted by the state of California, I cannot provide clinical psychological services to anyone outside the state of California. Secondly, and even if a person were located in California, psychotherapy really has to be conducted face-to-face to be most effective. Without this face-to-face contact, it isn’t possible, for example, to make a clinical assessment of a person’s mental status, nor is it possible to assess the body language of deception. Although some psychotherapists will provide telephone psychotherapy, it can be problematic, and I simply elect not to do it.

Because spiritual direction does not require the face-to-face intensity of psychotherapy, and because I can assume that a person of faith is not deliberately lying to me, spiritual direction can be conducted over the telephone. In fact, the partial anonymity of telephone work can be quite similar to the anonymity of Confession.

 
Cost, Length, and Frequency of Sessions

I make my living providing psychotherapy and spiritual direction, so I have to charge for my time according to the going rate for a professional of my credentials in San Francisco: $150 per hour.

When I conduct spiritual direction over the telephone, sessions can range from 30 minutes ($75) to 90 minutes ($225).

Sessions can be weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or only as needed, according to your personal preference.

 
Making a Payment

Payment for telephone work can be made by PayPal, by credit card (Master Card, Visa, Discover, or American Express) or by personal check.

 
Scheduling a Consultation

To schedule a consultation, contact me by e-mail (no need to send a donation to ensure a response) and we can arrange a day and time. I will provide a telephone number for you to call. (Note that you will initiate all calls to me at the scheduled time, and, if you are calling long distance, you will also be responsible for the phone charges.)

 
E-mail Questions

If you need advice about your faith practices, relationship issues, work problems, your psychotherapy with another professional (Catholic or otherwise), or other personal matters, send your question by e-mail and also make a minimum payment of $35 to this website. I will send an answer to your question within a couple days of receiving the payment. (A payment by check is considered to be “received” when the check clears my bank.)

 
Following the Spiritual Counsels

Many persons ask me, “Do I have to follow all the spiritual counsels in order to consult with you?” Well, no, you don’t have to do anything. If you follow all the counsels your healing will be less complicated, it will take less time, and it will cost you less than if you don’t follow all the counsels. But it’s all your choice.

 
Free Help

I made my websites so that anyone in the world can learn from my writings free of charge.

 
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1. Fasting does not refer only to abstaining from the attractions of food. We can also “fast” from the spiritually unhealthy attractions of the social world around us.

 
Address

Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D.
55 New Montgomery Street, Suite 420
San Francisco, CA 94105-3429
 
415-979-8005
(For local inquiries about office visits.)

 
Map to my Office

Notes:
	Entrance to my building			Moscone Convention Center Parking (City Garage)
	Bank of America with clock on the corner			5th and Mission Parking (City Garage)
	The Palace Hotel and taxi stand			Montgomery Street BART station access locations
	Hearst Parking (Private Garage)			Bus stop on 30/45 lines from CalTrain depot
	Sutter-Stockton Parking (City Garage)			Cable car line