Spirituality and Psychotherapy

La Sagna

La Sagna

I did it! I'm a butterfly!
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My son's therapist told me that she thinks that my son is an Indigo child and that he chose me as his mother for a reason. I can see why she is saying these things. He does fit the profile of an Indigo Child and I am definitely not your average parent. I have fought so hard for my son to be able to be himself instead of be put into a box and have to be drugged and sit still just because his teacher wanted him to. I have done everything in my power to both hold him responsible for his own behaviour and at the same time be proud of who he is and what his special gifts are. He just turned 21 so he's not really a child anymore, although he still kind of acts like one.

I have never studied the concepts of Indigo children or of children choosing their parents before birth. I am not fully convinced of these things but at the same time I am willing to consider the ideas. This is the first time that I have had a psychotherapist bring up something as new-age spiritual as this. I found it unusual but my son has always had a strong affinity for spirituality so I think this could help him. The psychotherapist is very experienced (over 30 years) and has great credentials.

Anybody have any experience with these concepts, Indigo Children and children choosing their parents?
 
This could very well end up my favorite thread. Please explain here what an "indigo child" is.
 
Nothing about the idea you mention specifically but I do associate psythotherapy and spirituality, I totally love Jung because the two things are so closely associated.
 
I've encountered this concept before.

I take issue with most of the new age stuff out there, so I will try to tone down what I'm about to say. The claims made about indigo children are religious (like spirits choosing to reincarnate religious). That is okay as long as it is understood that those claims are religious: there is not a shred of empirical evidence to support them. The problem is that these ideas are often sold to parents who have children with serious issues that don't want to face reality (not saying that is what is happening in your case necessarily). For instance, oftentimes, parents with autistic children are targeted and told their children are crystal children or whatever. There are two problems with this: (1) the people doing the selling are often supposed to be practicing proven psycho-therapeutic methods, which are based on science and (2) parents will oftentimes neglect or fail to give or get their children the support that they need if they are unwilling to admit that they're autistic or what have you. Therapists can oftentimes make a lot of money off of unsuspecting or new age people this way (in the same way that other pseudo-scientists take advantage of people through made up concepts like adrenal fatigue). In some cases, it is almost as bad as parents who refuse all drugs for their children and instead pray for god to save them.

Psychoanalysis is an unregulated term (whereas psychologist is a regulated term). A psychoanalyst can say whatever, but a psychologist is expected to use empirically tested methods for helping their clients (i.e. cognitive behavioral therapy). Some people don't know this and lend the respect and presumed efficacy of the psychologist to psychoanalysts. And some psychologists just neglect their training and turn to psychoanalysis anyway.

Finally, even if we accept the idea of indigo children, where exactly is this collective spiritual evolution that is supposedly occurring going? Why does it need to exist in the first place?
 
Dragon said:
I've encountered this concept before.

I take issue with most of the new age stuff out there, so I will try to tone down what I'm about to say. The claims made about indigo children are religious (like spirits choosing to reincarnate religious). That is okay as long as it is understood that those claims are religious: there is not a shred of empirical evidence to support them. The problem is that these ideas are often sold to parents who have children with serious issues that don't want to face reality (not saying that is what is happening in your case necessarily). For instance, oftentimes, parents with autistic children are targeted and told their children are crystal children or whatever. There are two problems with this: (1) the people doing the selling are often supposed to be practicing proven psycho-therapeutic methods, which are based on science and (2) parents will oftentimes neglect or fail to give or get their children the support that they need if they are unwilling to admit that they're autistic or what have you. Therapists can oftentimes make a lot of money off of unsuspecting or new age people this way (in the same way that other pseudo-scientists take advantage of people through made up concepts like adrenal fatigue). In some cases, it is almost as bad as parents who refuse all drugs for their children and instead pray for god to save them.

Psychoanalysis is an unregulated term (whereas psychologist is a regulated term). A psychoanalyst can say whatever, but a psychologist is expected to use empirically tested methods for helping their clients (i.e. cognitive behavioral therapy). Some people don't know this and lend the respect and presumed efficacy of the psychologist to psychoanalysts. And some psychologists just neglect their training and turn to psychoanalysis anyway.

Finally, even if we accept the idea of indigo children, where exactly is this collective spiritual evolution that is supposedly occurring going? Why does it need to exist in the first place?
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Given the amount of prejudice there is against religion in the aggressively secular culture the western world/northern hemisphere exhibits, its probably a better idea to describe it as metaphysical.

Psychoanalysts are "regulated" but if you unpick what regulated actually means, in most of the instances with which I am familiar that regulation means that not everyone can claim a particular title but its a bureaucratic or money racket for the most part, simply because someone was a professional, member of recognised or regulatory bodies or associations would not mean that I automatically respect their office. I think it was the libertarians who kicked off the idea of "respect the individual and not their office" first but it makes solid sense.

I've been aware of the whole "positive labelling" in helping services for a long time, I think everyone is, pretty much, including clients. I've witnessed the backlashes against people being described as "special", or even possessing "uniqueness" in the sense of especial difference rather than engendering any "importance" or "positivity". I'm not sure if that is what you are talking about, you could have been talking about people embracing labels in order to distance themselves from or deny their illness, consequently neglecting treatment.

There are Jungian practitioners, usually in India due to the Hindu cultural underpinnings, who profess metaphysical beliefs about unresolved traumas from past lives influencing present ones, influencing the very incarnation in this one. Although that is related to ideas from buddhism about karma, the wheel of life and consequences too. The theosophists embraced these ideas too when the west became aquainted with them and so called white magicians professed to be reincarnations of other saintly figures. There's a lot of metaphysics besides the therapy in those instances.

As to what the spirit is and what it is achieving, those are bigger questions than any single thread I would suggest, in a recent book called Self by Barry Dainton, the philosophical angles were worked out on the idea of whether or not we as individuals amount to anything more than a bundle of nerve endings and narratives, individual or social, and its pretty interesting. There were similar themes in the most recent Robocop movie too. If there is a self which is independent of brains, bodies and even memory then its possible that metaphysical ideas about reincarnation have a certain validity, the self continuing on from one live to the next but without any memory of each life.
 
Dragon said:
Finally, even if we accept the idea of indigo children, where exactly is this collective spiritual evolution that is supposedly occurring going?
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Today people are aware of things they weren't aware of yesterday...that is beginning to have a drastic effect on our society

Stay tuned for some serious social upheval...

Dragon said:
Why does it need to exist in the first place?
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Because the people who rule over us through force and intimidation are liars, thieves, murderers and child rapists
 
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I have the same issue with anything spiritual. It is so hard to accept without evidence. But some of it holds enough weight to keep my interest. Is it not fascinating that prayer and meditation both have positive affects on the brain? Off topic rant really. Just saying I see both the skeptic side and the believers. I am always torn.
 
finifugal said:
I have the same issue with anything spiritual. It is so hard to accept without evidence. But some of it holds enough weight to keep my interest. Is it not fascinating that prayer and meditation both have positive affects on the brain? Off topic rant really. Just saying I see both the skeptic side and the believers. I am always torn.
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I think the world makes different demands for evidence of religion than it does of most other things that people take on "faith", in fact the sorts of empiricism which most new athiests think is their ace in the hole when it comes to anti-religious sentiments is difficult to practically apply.

Perhaps the time has come to revisit metaphysics if the word religion has become too tarnished, it all strikes me as semantics, personally, but I've met so many people (not saying that anyone posting on this board fits the bill, in fact I'm thinking of another board) in which people respond to a list of keywords, usually with some set of other keywords or set responses, rather than thinking on the matter.
 
finifugal said:
I have the same issue with anything spiritual. It is so hard to accept without evidence. But some of it holds enough weight to keep my interest. Is it not fascinating that prayer and meditation both have positive affects on the brain? Off topic rant really. Just saying I see both the skeptic side and the believers. I am always torn.
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Spirituality grew out of the use of entheogenic plants and out of the use of our naturally occuring psyhoactive chemicals such as DMT

Religion grew out of that too but certain people who are of a very literalist, robotic mindset and who have designs on controlling the rest of humanity have created a 'pharmacratic inquisition' (Ott) and they have institutionalised religion so that they can control it from centralised power centres

They are deeply insecure people who have a hatred for human creativity and expression and to try and stunt these things they have banned the use of entheogenic plants and they have literalised religious teachings to hide people from their true message and they have violently persecuted any people who resisted them

You can still pursue your own spiritual experiences and that is the 'evidence' which you speak of, which is to say your spiritual journey

As you go on that journey you might find that the word 'evidence' becomes immaterial

The mushroom is a plant that lives in symbiosis with the trees it grows on and it lives as a tangled web under the ground. The biggest living organism on the planet is a funghi

These funghi can be thousands of years old and people who eat the funghi say that it talks to them and that it carries the memories and the wisdom of mother earth within it
 
Before we get too far off topic, it seems this thread could turn into an argument over whether or not fate exists. So back to that..
 
finifugal said:
Before we get too far off topic, it seems this thread could turn into an argument over whether or not fate exists. So back to that..
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Sure

Just remember it was you that derailed by saying there was no 'evidence' :p
 
If I took a kid to a therapist and they called them an "indigo child," that would be our last visit.
 
Who needs them anyways? I went to one when I was agoraphbic and he actually suggested I start homeschoolong. Um, but the isolation is a problem. Why suggest I keep isolating myself? I did a better jb on my own when I created a step-by-step plan to overcome my severe anxiety through forced interaction with others in baby steps. Sounds obvious. A sixteen year old figured that out on her own. Why couldn't the "doctor" see that?
 
Concerning the OP question the concept of people choosing their parents is not constrained to indigo children...the concept refers to the idea that ALL of us chose this incarnation we are in to develop ourselves further...a soul experience...if you subscribe to that concept

I think that humanity does adapt and that it mutates and that we are going to have a DNA upgrade

There was a kid born recently who was the first to have this extra strand of DNA

So are there different people with different priorities and tempraments? Sure

The important thing though is navigating this current system in a healthy way and hopefully trying to contribute towards changing it for the better

So perhaps an important thing is for your son to find a healthy form of expression and to feel good about whatever he ends up doing

''Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony''- Ghandi
 
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Lark said:
I've been aware of the whole "positive labelling" in helping services for a long time, I think everyone is, pretty much, including clients. I've witnessed the backlashes against people being described as "special", or even possessing "uniqueness" in the sense of especial difference rather than engendering any "importance" or "positivity". I'm not sure if that is what you are talking about, you could have been talking about people embracing labels in order to distance themselves from or deny their illness, consequently neglecting treatment.
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I wont argue semantics, and yes, it does seem that a lot of psychoanalysts, especially in other cultures, employ metaphysical concepts. The therapist I saw even suggested some stuff about me seeing into alternative realities through my dreams and recommended I read Lynne McTaggart, but I didn't buy it.

I don't think that is necessarily bad, but what I meant is that there is a danger when people will use those views to deny the illness, disorder, or difficulty. So they'll say, "My child is a crystal child, not autistic" or something similar, and then they won't do anything to help the child with their autism and instead might waste money sending them to crystal child events. The therapists might not be competent if they don't address the issues that come from having learning disabilities, autism, etc..
 
Dragon said:
I wont argue semantics, and yes, it does seem that a lot of psychoanalysts, especially in other cultures, employ metaphysical concepts. The therapist I saw even suggested some stuff about me seeing into alternative realities through my dreams and recommended I read Lynne McTaggart, but I didn't buy it.

I don't think that is necessarily bad, but what I meant is that there is a danger when people will use those views to deny the illness, disorder, or difficulty. So they'll say, "My child is a crystal child, not autistic" or something similar, and then they won't do anything to help the child with their autism and instead might waste money sending them to crystal child events. The therapists might not be competent if they don't address the issues that come from having learning disabilities, autism, etc..
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I agree with you completely, there is a lot of quakery mixed in with psychotherapy, although I would say that it is not simply psychoanalysis that this happens in.

I'm open to a correction that I'm being defensive here because I am a fan of some schools of psychoanalysis (such as the neo-Freudians, which I think have more in common than divides them) and analytical psychology (Jung's departures from Freud's school of thought) but I see psychoanalysis as both theory and an applied therapy.

The theory, to take a reductive view, is that thre are unconscious drives and conflicts, usually arising from affect and emotion, which can dominate individuals and societies without their awareness, obstructing growth and development but in the worst cases causing psychological disorder, maladaptation and jeopardising the well being of the self and others through psychosematic illness and other symptomatic behaviour or physical traits.

The therapy that the content of the unconscious can be discovered, there's a lot of different and evolving ideas about how, like free expression in art, rorschach (spelling) prints, word association, analysis of dreams, stream of consciousness composition etc.

The problem maybe is that the schools of thought have different theories and therefore different practices, Freud's theory, as I understand it, is pretty pessimistic but tried to be as scientific and materialist as it possibly could, Jung's theories perhaps went pretty far in the opposite direction validating just about all metaphysics, religion and esoterism.

Although there's different schools of thought altogether from psychoanalysis which I personally think could be more contestable, CBT to me just seems like warmed over stoicism, philosophical practitioners just seem like they are perpetrating Ayn Rand's biases as science, REBT is just another version of CBT, there's very minor variations of themes which share nothing really besides a critical attitude to analysis, sometimes founded and sometimes vindicated by quacks and cooks, but too quickly dismissive.
 
La Sagna said:
My son's therapist told me that she thinks that my son is an Indigo child and that he chose me as his mother for a reason. I can see why she is saying these things. He does fit the profile of an Indigo Child and I am definitely not your average parent. I have fought so hard for my son to be able to be himself instead of be put into a box and have to be drugged and sit still just because his teacher wanted him to. I have done everything in my power to both hold him responsible for his own behaviour and at the same time be proud of who he is and what his special gifts are. He just turned 21 so he's not really a child anymore, although he still kind of acts like one.

I have never studied the concepts of Indigo children or of children choosing their parents before birth. I am not fully convinced of these things but at the same time I am willing to consider the ideas. This is the first time that I have had a psychotherapist bring up something as new-age spiritual as this. I found it unusual but my son has always had a strong affinity for spirituality so I think this could help him. The psychotherapist is very experienced (over 30 years) and has great credentials.

Anybody have any experience with these concepts, Indigo Children and children choosing their parents?
Click to expand...

Wow! What an amazing thing for a therapist to say! Just goes to show the times are changing....oh yes....they are changing.
Whoa ...and to think they brought this up to you. It took courage to say that....yes it did. :nod:

You are an exceptional parent to try and champion your son's true nature and to keep him from having to take drugs to make him like all the other children. :hug: I work with mom's every day in my profession as a medical case manager for children and I am delighted to see one such as you. You just made my day. :D
[MENTION=2873]Serenity[/MENTION] could probably fill you in on the details of the Indigo children.

From what I can see happening on my spiritual journey I think the best you can do is to continue to allow your son to be who he is to the best of your ability. Just love him as unconditionally as you can. You'll be the Mom he needs - and chose - before he incarnated here this time. He will - he has - a very important role to play in the future of the Earth.

Just love him....
 
I am Indigo but I take issue with the idea of a child choosing their parents.

This sounds like some feelgood nonsense for kids who have nice parents.
 
Thanks for your input guys.

I realize that psychotherapists were not well regulated in the past but that is changing now in Ontario. Most psychotherapists that I have encountered are social workers with a Masters in the field as well as lots of additional training.

My take on psychotherapists is there are good ones and not so good ones and there are ones that match well with certain people and not with others. You really have to find one that you are comfortable with. Many psychotherapists around here do practice Cognitive Behaviour Therapy as well as other proven techniques.

Psychotherapists are trying to help people deal with their personal issues and if using spirituality will help then I see nothing wrong with that. There is a lot of evidence that having a belief system promotes well-being, both mentally and physically so it is not a useless concept. For many people that is the only thing that helps them cope with life challenges.

My personal take on spirituality, whether it is a religion or any other spiritual practice, is that it doesn't even matter if it is true or not if it helps you live a better life for yourself. I take a balanced approach between science and spirituality. I don't think they contradict each other at all. The scientific method is based on theories and most of our scientific knowledge is still theory but it helps us point to the truth and to keep searching for more information so we can adjust the theories to keep getting closer to the truth. Science does not say that because it hasn't been proven that it isn't true, it just hasn't been proven. Most spiritual concepts have not been proven but that doesn't mean they are not true.

As for the Indigo children, I haven't read much information on it and I'm not sure that the way it is interpreted is exactly true but it does seem to me that putting a more positive spin on character traits of people that don't fit in to the ideas we have today of what people 'should be like' can be helpful. I'm not big on labelling myself because I think every individual is unique and if you stick a label on them you start attributing characteristics to them that they don't have just because some people who have a few similar characteristics also have these other ones. It is unfair and unhelpful to lump people into groups and think that they are all the same. My son has been 'diagnosed' with ADHD, which is represented as a 'disorder'. I'm not sure that that label is any more helpful than the label 'Indigo Child'.

As for children 'choosing' their parents, I've never thought about it before but I know that my son is lucky to have had me as a mother. I can entertain the thought. I do believe that there is some amount of destiny in the way our lives unfold.
 
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