This how-to training session describes strategies to promote discussion of the client’s synchronistic experiences, or meaningful coincidences, to enhance client wellbeing.
Synchronicity, a term coined by the psychiatrist Carl Jung, relates to striking and meaningful coincidences that connect our inner and outer worlds. Such coincidences suggest some form of synchronisation between what is going through our mind and the external environment.
Many therapy clients view synchronistic experiences as being personally meaningful, and as potentially having a positive impact on their life direction, consistent with notions of personal destiny.
Synchronicity is often experienced as being fortuitous and as enhancing a feeling of connectedness with others and the world at large. Acknowledging synchronicity can be a useful positive psychology intervention consistent with its PERMA model, in that it can enhance positive effect, engagement with life roles, positive relationships, personal meaning, and accomplishment.
Synchronicity as a phenomenon has likely been relatively ignored in mainstream psychology as it cannot be readily explained in rational terms. However, this makes it no less meaningful to clients.
Exploring synchronicity in a client's experience can help elicit clients’ transpersonal and spiritual beliefs, increasingly recognized as potentially beneficial to wellbeing.
The session aims to equip psychologists to draw on their clients’ experience of synchronicity to enhance their wellbeing and sense of life purpose. It describes strategies to help clients acknowledge and explore their experience of synchronicity in a way to derive meaning from the experience, to enhance positive emotions, sense of connection with others and sense of life purpose. Objective questionnaire symptomatic and wellbeing data will be presented to demonstrate the potential benefits of this approach.
Material is drawn from the presenter's book, Mackey, C., The Positive Psychology of Synchronicity, Watkins, London, 2019. Also see website at www.synchronicityunwrapped.com.au.