The Friday before commencement is the M.A. Counseling Psychology Program's Thesis Presentation Day. Students who wish to present their thesis to fellow classmates, family, staff, and professors have the opportunity to showcase their research findings and experiences throughout the procesw. Today we would like to highlight all of the presenters and the titles of their papers. Thesis presentations for the M.A. Counseling Psychology Program will take place on Friday, May 26th at Pacifica's Ladera Lane Campus.
About the Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology Thesis Process
Research and writing are two ways among many of finding meaning within and conferring meaning on experience. These fundamentally human activities can be deeply imaginal and intuitive. In research and writing, we seek to uncover the deep truth of the human condition. Within the context of the Institute's guiding vision, students are encouraged to select a research question they wish to explore in depth through the vehicle of the thesis. Towards this end, the student is asked to:
- pursue an area of individual interest relevant to marriage and family therapy, professional clinical counseling, and depth psychology (e.g., therapeutic issues, psychological motifs, clinical procedures);
- ground this particular area of interest in a conceptual framework (e.g., background information, findings, concluding evaluation);
- demonstrate competency researching a specific area and expressing ideas with clarity and precision.
The Counseling Psychology thesis is the culminating expression of students’ graduate course of studies and provides a forum for contributing back into the community the knowledge that students have gained during their educational experience.
Below are the list of presenters in alphabetical order:
Dena Amiri
Panic Disorder – A Blessing in Disguise: Transformation Through Immersion Into the Symptoms
Allison Batty
Integrating the Unconscious Into Conscious Reality: A Jungian Approach to Treating Early Onset Psychosis
Megan Bisbee
Imagining Social-Emotional Learning and Individuation in Public Schools
Stephanie Clark
A Mother’s Experience of Grief and Loss: When a Child Dies From a Drug Overdose
Cheryl Clift
A World Before Mother: An Archetypal Perspective on Annihilation Anxiety
Christin Frederick
Hurt People, Hurt People: Domestic Violence as an Expression of the Soul
Owen Graham
The Chiron Complex: From Spiritual Bypassing to Individuation
Naris Kesheshe
Wounds From the Womb: The Impact of Trauma on the Fetal Psyche
Maia Kiley
The Hidden Potential of Anger: Encouraging Women to Access Personal Power
Chris L’Esperance
The Heart of a Warrior: How Indigenous Wisdom can Inform American Masculinity
Jamilla Lightner-Cedeno
Single Mothers: Marginalized and Dwelling Within the Shadows of Mental Health
Kevin McAdams
Effects of Immigration on Latino Immigrant Youth
Taz Morgan
Siblinghood and Soul-Making: Life With Brothers and Sisters on the Autism Spectrum
Christine Mourad
Half of the Sky: Integrating the Relational Right Brain in Adolescent Treatment
Jacob Murdock
Lethe and the Twin Bodhisattvas of Forgiveness and Forgetfulness
Caroline Olsen-Van Stone
Unbearable Whiteness: Workshop for White Therapists on Cultural Responsive Practice With Black Clients
Shannon O’Shea
The Primordial Tears of a Mother: Discovering Transformation in Grief Through Ritual and Art
Chelsea Phillips
Encountering the Sacred Temenos: Somatically Integrating Cumulative Trauma and Discovering Wellbeing Within
Robert Roan
Depth and Digital in Conversation: Practicing Marriage and Family Therapy Directly With Video Game Avatars
Stephen Rowley
Alchemy and the Imagined Self: The Strange Rhetoric of Memoir
Alexandra Rusu
Hungry: Regulating Emotionally Driven Compulsive Overeating in Women Through Conscious Self-Care and Embodiment
Sarah Skutt
Midlife Metamorphosis: Archetypal Imaginal Psychology in Midlife Rite of Passage Layla Subhani
Awakening the Dark Feminine: An Archetypal Approach to Adolescent Initiation
Minh Tran
Toward a Theo Psychology: Theotherapy and the Poeticdynamics of the Archetype of Opposites
Marina Vicario
Dancing With Trauma: A Psychosomatic Exploration of Dance Movement Therapy and Trauma Release
Greg Vorst
Alchemical Adornment of the Soul
Research, Writing and the Creative Imagination
Research and writing need not be divided into the artificial categories of academic and creative. The academic and creative can be seen as two impulses of the same activity: a search to discover what is truly revelatory about the subject of your focus and expression. Imagining and perceiving are both essential activities in research and written expression and seek an integral relational language at home in a world of meaning. Research and the act of writing allow you to go beyond what is given or simply perceived in detail; you hope to glimpse what is promised, what is anticipated in the givenness of experience, grasping its deeper psychological ground. It is important to remember that just as you are in a process of a deepening formation, what you intuit as you research and write is similarly provisional and tentative—true for the moment but always open to being reshaped as your larger understanding shifts and grows.
The tradition of depth psychology is less interested in the split between academic and creative expression and more attentive to comprehending a coniunctio between them: a marriage between the senses, ideas, insights, and images that, when summoned together, offer readers a place they have not traveled to before, and an insight for the researcher/writer that you can call your own. Research and the act of writing are ways to free the imagination to explore, to see relationships, to intuit possibilities, and to glean new and provocative forms inherent in the commonplace. These are uniquely creative acts that attempt to bring the voices of authority into a common cause with your own unique voice in order to discern what has not been articulated in just such a way before.
Pacifica Graduate Institute Core Values
Logos -The idea that academic excellence is central to what informs our curriculum, research, and scholarship—demonstrated by conscious reflective regard for new knowledge resting securely on the traditions of the past that inform the development of the whole person (intellect, dream, intuition, symptoms, feeling, imagination and other ways of knowing) in relation to the larger social world.
Eros -The importance of open communication, respectful relationship, care, and a heartfelt regard for a diverse community, which includes a love for learning as a noble goal of the human spirit.
Consciousness -The awareness of Pacifica as a "psychological community" with a connection to the deep psyche—mindful attention is given to personal and community introspection, the conscious tending of the shadow of consciousness, and a respect for solar thinking (reason) and lunar reflection (dream and imagination).
Integrity -The necessity for a just, psyche-centered attitude rooted in the "wisdom traditions," and committed to cultivating an honest and caring presence among ourselves, our students, and the world around us.
Service -To ourselves as unique human beings, to others within the Pacifica community as well as to those we engage in the world through our example, talks, lectures, workshops, writing, teaching; the capacity to see through cultural forms; the art of hosting the incarnate and the invisible; and our ongoing service to our fields of Depth Psychology, Mythological Studies, and the Humanities.
Stewardship - Care of the world soul as expressed in Pacifica's motto, animae mundi colendae gratia, becoming sustainable at all levels—from our way of being actively present in imaginal inquiry to our presence in the larger earth community, from work load to land use, from our way of conducting business to our model of doing business.
