March 9, 2007

Dr. Keith Witt is a clinical psychologist who has been practicing psychotherapy and teaching in Santa Barbara since 1973.  He is a writer, lecturer and the author of four books.  Dr. Witt is on the faculty and teaches at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. 

EG: Can you give us the cliff notes of how you got to where you are today?

Dr. Witt: After I finished my doctoral dissertation I started writing books.  The night my son was born I just stopped writing and did not start seriously again until he was leaving for college. I wasn’t satisfied with the quality of my thinking, and I wanted to focus on my family.  So, I engaged in moderately extreme sports, participated in family life with my wife Becky and our two children Zoe and Ethan, and have done approximately 45,000 therapy sessions. When Ethan went away to college I had a back injury and could not surf, dance, play tennis, or do martial arts any more. Just before time that time Becky introduced me to the books and tapes of Ken Wilber and David Deida. I had been doing spiritual practice, meditation and martial arts, since I was fifteen, but Deida’s and Wilber’s teachings felt like they took me to new levels of understanding and consciousness.  As I applied this material to my work, there were clinical and theoretical perspectives that I thought were extraordinarily valuable for therapists, so I started writing books. Currently, I am doing the final edits of my fourth one, The Gift of Shame, Why We Need Shame and How to Use it to Love and Grow.  When I finished my third book, The Attuned Family, I thought to myself, “This is ready to go out into the world.” Marti Glen offered that I publish under Santa Barbara Graduate Institute Publishing, and The Attuned Family, How to be a Great Parent to Your Kids and a Great Lover to Your Spouse is coming out in June. 

EG: How did you start teaching at SBGI?

Dr. Witt: Just when I was circulating my first book, Waking Up, Integrally Informed Individual and Conjoint Psychotherapy, around town for feedback, I got a call from Marti, who had heard from Steve Aizenstat at Pacifica that I was writing and teaching again.  Synchronistically, there was an opening at SBGI to teach the Theories class.  This was a match made in heaven.  Since then, it has just been one pleasure after another with SBGI.  It is a wonderful program.  It combines science and spirit in ways I have not seen anywhere else, especially with the combined emphasis on affective neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, attachment research, and Integral Psychology.           

EG: What inspired you to write, The Attuned Family, and how can professionals best use this book ?

Dr. Witt: The Attuned Family came partly from teaching conjoint and family systems of psychotherapy.  I began to notice that all of the systems shared an organizing principle of attunement.  Attunement is feeling into ourselves and others with caring intent.  Attunement is a common denominator across all healing, parenting, and relational approaches.  I expanded the concept into David Deida’s teaching, Ken Wilber’s Integral Operating System, and I began to look into the neuroscience that supported this; especially the work of Dan Siegel.  I would have to say that David Deida, Ken Wilber and Dan Siegel are my three current heroes.  In Siegal’s and other neurobiological research, I began to find some of the neurological and developmental empirical support of what we in the healing arts have known intuitively and from our observations for well over 100 years.  Out of all this came The Attuned Family, How to be a Great Parent to Your Kids and a Great Lover to Your Spouse. There are a lot of books about being lovers, and a lot of books about being parents, but it seems that there has been a cultural taboo against acknowledging that parents are lovers to each other always.  As a family goes through its life cycles, there are common challenges, problems, and developmental tasks that arise in the parental lover relationship, as well as in raising children.  I wanted to reassure parents that they could have a great love affair with their spouse and still be great parents to their children.  The tasks that are involved change throughout the life cycle of the family, but one organizing principle is that joyful lovers and effective parents keep growing in their abilities to attune to themselves, their spouse, and their kids. Another organizing principle is that there is great theoretical and practical knowledge available in today’s culture that can really help us be great parents and lovers if we are open to it. The Attuned Family is designed to teach attunement skills and to provide information that supports people being hot lovers with their spouse and effective parents to their kids throughout life. This includes families before the kid comes, while Mom is pregnant, with infants, toddlers, grade school, high school and college aged kids all the way through to when the children becomes autonomous and start creating their own families.

EG: How does The Attuned Family help therapists?

Dr. Witt: Psychotherapy is all about attunement, and I use a lot of therapy transcripts in my books to illustrate the material. As a therapist, you have a responsibility to advocate as best you can with what you know, given the ethical parameters of your license, to help your clients be healthy and thriving. This begins with what Carl Rogers referred to as the therapeutic relationship.  In my doctoral research, I found that clinicians with the capacity to tune into their clients with caring intent, and then work within the parameters of their licensure, enhanced the health of their clients equally.  I did a study where I had some therapists do bodywork, others do bodywork and talking therapy, and others exclusively talking therapy.  Their clients’ health was enhanced equally.  Part of my mission as a teacher is to say that there are some foundational skills that we need as therapists, and that attunement is a major one.  After you establish these basic skills, go ahead and learn the theoretical and clinical forms that most attract you.  As you attune to your client in the therapy session, the forms you love will organically flow through you and maximize your natural healing style.  I think that every one of us that serves others has a unique healing style of our own.  I believe it is my job as a teacher to help my students discern and enhance their natural healing style by giving them the best of what I’ve got. This is my mission to therapists in The Attuned Family.      

EG: How has affective neuroscience impacted your various roles as a teacher, therapist, father, martial artists and musician? 

Dr. Witt: It has impacted all of those roles.  The new neuroscience has just blown my mind.  Dan Siegel, Allan Schore, Susan Johnson, John Gottman- I am so grateful for them.  I went to a conference, was presented with neurobiology and attachment research, and I said to myself, “Keith, you need to learn this stuff!”  I had not studied neuroscience extensively before, so I went home, bought the books, and spent the next six months every Friday, Saturday and Sunday studying neuroscience.  There was one Saturday where it took me six hours to get through nine pages of Dan Siegel’s book, The Developing Mind.  I wanted to know this stuff. The neuroscience research is a huge part of the empirical bridge we have been looking for between science and spirit. As Ken Wilber has beautifully illuminated, we know that empiricism is just one of eight central methodologies that address the eight zones of the four quadrants of subjective and objective reality, so the most complete integration of science and spirit that I know is Integral psychology and Integral studies, which turbocharge all disciplines.  Neuroscience, and interpersonal neurobiology especially, provide an empirical foundation for lots of the work we do as therapists.  One example is mirror neurons.  When we look into another person’s eyes, our orbital frontal cortex recapitulates that other person’s state of mind including intentionality.  Now, as we apply this to attachment research, we can understand how, by twelve months, an infant has a relatively stable secure or insecure attachment style. A one-year-old’s primary parent has been looking into their baby’s eyes for twelve months, and that baby has been recapitulating the parent’s state of mind and intentionality, resulting in either secure or insecure attachment.  One of the beautiful findings of attachment research is that if you have an intimate relationship with someone, where there is consistent attunement, you can go from an insecure to a secure attachment style.  What accompanies a secure attachment style in adults is a coherent autobiographical narrative, which involves having an integrated brain, which connects to complexity theory, which can be applied to the neural networks that we can actually see and perceive both developmentally and on a moment to moment basis with functional neural imaging.  We live in an age of miracles.  One of those miracles is that we now have an empirical base to many of what used to be considered the avant-garde healing systems.  Books like The Attuned Family are designed to bring this information out so that the general populace can benefit directly from it.  No offense to the neuroscientists, but their books are sometimes ridiculously hard to read. Try absorbing Feeling Good by Cloniger if you want to train your brain for a cognitive marathon.  So, I thought, “One of the things that I want to do is to write books that are a lot easier and more fun to read; that get these messages out into the world.”  In The Attuned Family I take a couple of families that are conglomerates of people that I have worked with, and tell their stories over many years.  The stories begin with each family when the children are small, and then the narrative stays with them through their family life cycles.  I know that people enjoy stories and like feeling intimate with the characters they read about.  I thought the teaching would be more alive if readers were following a couple of families through their life cycle, while learning the principles of attunement to be better lovers and better parents.

EG: How does your professional practice support your personal development and visa versa?

Dr. Witt: David Deida says our more masculine aspect is most fulfilled having a sense of deep purpose and experiencing most moments of the day as organized to live that purpose. This speaks strongly to me.  It fits with the training I received in martial arts. I feel a sense of obligation to do spiritual practice before I do therapy and to do therapy in a way that is in balance with my personal and family life. They all need to fit together.  If there is any one part of that system that is not being served, or not being healthy, then it is my job to focus on it and change it.  I could probably do therapy everyday of the week, but I do not think I could do therapy as joyfully as I do having sessions four days a week, and doing other things like studying, writing, playing with my family, playing music, and dancing Tai Chi the other three days. I think that therapists are, to a certain extent, modern ministers, shamen, and priests. We do best living our principles. It is systematically elaborated in what the Integral Institute calls Integral Life Practice, body/mind/spirit in self/culture/nature.  If we don’t live our principles, then our work can suffer and our clients not be optimally served.  I think if we do live our principles, good things happen. Things arrive. There got to be a point in my life a few years ago that it was time to focus my attention on studying, writing and teaching. This desire arose out of the life I was living. I felt that sense of authentic call and I surrendered to it. To one extent or another, all therapists are drawing from that well.  Psychotherapy can be spiritual practice and spiritual practice supports psychotherapy. 

EG: What informs you where to go next in your work?

Dr. Witt: One example is how I started writing The Gift of Shame. I was listening to one of Dan Siegel’s tapes and he said, “We have discovered that we probably do not resolve trauma subcortically.”  I thought, “Wow. That means that all of the experiences that I’ve had, particularly the painful ones, are hard wired into my brain. I need to accept them, not reject them.”  I got very interested in that. What is hard to accept?  The most painful things for me were what I was ashamed of.  I told myself, “Let’s explore that.”  I started researching shame.  As I was dived into the work, I saw that not only was shame a misunderstood emotion, but that shame was central to socialization, consciousness, and was a magnificent path to self-transcendence. These positive and beautiful things had not been widely written about, mostly, I believe, because shame has been pathologized in the literature for so long.  I thought that this message needed to get out.  I kept studying, researching, and applying the principles and practices that emerged to my psychotherapy sessions, and at a certain point a book started to come about. The result is The Gift of Shame, Why We Need  Shame, and How to Use it to Love and Grow. Four books have come through me this way so far, not counting the ones I wrote in my thirties.  Maybe others will come, and maybe they won’t. Yesterday, I was explaining the neurobiology of manifestation to a client of mine.  He asked me where he could read about the system of neurobiology that supported creating a wish and manifesting it.  I said, “You can read about neurobiology from Dan Siegal and others, and you can read about manifesting from Laura Day and others, but I do not know anyone who has written about both of them.”  He said, “Why don’t you do that?”  I thought to myself, “That sounds like fun.”  When I am done getting out The Gift of Shame, I intend to revisit my first two books and extensively edit them and then publish them. On the other hand, maybe I’ll get side tracked integrating neurobiology and manifesting your wishes. To me, this is how these things come. I start, and a thousand work hours later I am writing a book. 

EG: Lastly, what do you find most meaningful about working with SBGI students?

Dr. Witt: I taught a lot in the 70’s and 80’s and then taught very little when I was raising my family, so I don’t have many relative standards.  What I do know is that I am consistently impressed with the quality of students I encounter in my classes.  We have these lunches at the Santa Barbara Graduate Institute. The first four or five that I attended, I couldn’t  help gushing about the students. Other faculty and staff would ask, “How are you doing?” and I would say, “You guys have such magnificent students.  They are smart, aware, they understand science, they understand spirit, they are eager to grow, and they are gifted in a variety of disciplines.” I feel privileged to be a teacher for these students.  It is my pleasure to help them along. I believe every single one has a natural healing style that is extraordinary. One of my missions is to help them find that natural healing style, enhance it and honor it. Human consciousness is a level of genius that this universe, as far as we know, has not seen in 14 billion years, and we share this gift. When people focus it with the kind of training, discipline and dedication that these students do, extraordinary things happen. 

Interviewer: Ellen Goldstein, MA, graduated from Santa Barbara Graduate Institute with her Masters in Clinical Psychology specializing in Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology.