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Books by Peter Bray

Communication decisively impacts upon all our lives. This inherent need to connect may either be ... more Communication decisively impacts upon all our lives. This inherent need to connect may either be soothing or painful, a source of intimate understanding or violent discord. Consequently, how it is brokered is challenging and often crucial in situations where those involved have quite different ways of being in and seeing the world. Good communication is equated with skills that intentionally facilitate change, the realisation of desirable outcomes and the improvement of human situations. Withdrawal of communication, or its intentional manipulation, provokes misunderstanding, mistrust, and precipitates the decline into disorder. This international collection of work specifically interrogates conflict as an essential outworking of communication, and suggests that understanding of communication’s potency in contexts of conflict can directly influence reciprocally positive outcomes.

Can crises and opportunities truly go hand in hand? The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary... more Can crises and opportunities truly go hand in hand? The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary collection provide a number of telling perspectives and conversational approaches that reflect upon the serious implications of this important question. They overwhelmingly agree that difficult crises events inevitably force individuals and societies to crossroads in their lives where they must make challenging personal and collective choices. Nonetheless, they also confirm that even faced with apparently new terrain and the confusing cartography of discomforting change there are unique and opportune pathways of response that can lead to positive developmental destinations. Attending to this question from the personal, communal, and international perspectives, in dialogue, academics and practitioners from around the globe interrogate this possibility linking the threads between the processes and conditions in which opportunities borne of crises might flounder or be assisted to flourish.

Human beings are patients-in-waiting, waiting for a diagnosis that will confirm their patienthood... more Human beings are patients-in-waiting, waiting for a diagnosis that will confirm their patienthood. As consumers of patient caring services we are all required to submit to its technologies and, in an uneasy alliance with professionals, forced to conform to an appropriately objectified patient identity. The authors in this collection, themselves service providers and users, question whether technology on its own can ever be a complete and effective response to illness. They suggest that health professionals may be increasingly challenged to effectively balance genuine therapeutic service relationships that meet the personal needs and serve the agency of patients with the sometimes alienating application of the essential technologies of therapy. This book proposes that patients and their helpers are first and foremost people. It challenges service practices that distance people from healthy professional interpersonal connections and supports the active preservation of human relating as a core driver of therapeutic care.

This book extends and critiques Stanislav Grof‘s work on psycho-spiritual transformation by consi... more This book extends and critiques Stanislav Grof‘s work on psycho-spiritual transformation by considering whether adolescents can experience ‘spiritual emergency’. Grof contends that the human psyche, stimulated by new material originating from loss experiences will spontaneously reorganise itself. This process either unfolds gently as spiritual emergence or overwhelms the individual as a spiritual emergency. By examining the deeply introspective soliloquies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the lens of Grof’s extended cartography of the psyche the author reveals extraordinarily vivid and powerful dimensions of adolescent loss experience. This challenging work identifies significant connections between the notion of positive personal transformation, the work of grief and loss theorists, and a number of developmental, educational, philosophical, psychological and spiritual positions. It argues for the acknowledgment and identification of this potentially difficult and discomforting experience and recommends that further research be undertaken to understand the significant link between stressful life events and crises of consciousness in young people.

Papers by Peter Bray

Voices of Illness: Negotiating Meaning and Identity, 2019

Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation, 2013

Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, ... more Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, to conduct some preliminary research with his son Oliver who lives in Leeds, Great Britain. With Peter's interests in loss, post-traumatic growth and transpersonal experiences and Oliver's in theatre making, performance and pedagogy they began to discover that they share much common ground. Shortly after their time together Peter travelled to Moscow to deliver a paper on Hamlet. What follows is a weaving of the thoughts and recollections of three generations of men touched by loss, trauma and grief. First presented in 2011 in Prague, the Czech Republic, this text was originally conceived as a palliative response to Sam's death in England a year earlier. In this new text we allow our curiosity to continue exploring those traumatic wounds that have had, for better or for worse, such a significant impact upon our lives as a father and a son. In expressing some of our loss experiences we begin to understand that our lives, people's lives, far from the normal, predictable and humdrum are essentially and powerfully unique. Bearing and baring the scars of life's seemingly random and unconscionable wounding, the legacy of lives fully lived, we share the paradox of these unwanted but necessary losses. We discover that traumatic events are significant opportunities for individuals to start again, to reassemble and re-learn their lives, make important changes, and take on the challenge of a world that has fundamentally changed, become less predictable and comfortable, and more difficult to manage.

Considerable concern has been expressed recently about the plight of New Zealand boys. We begin b... more Considerable concern has been expressed recently about the plight of New Zealand boys. We begin by exploring the development of boys’ masculine identities in terms of the influence of society, community, peers, personal influences, family, and childhood experiences. We then focus upon five areas which are particularly risky for teenage boys: masculine identity development conduct disorder, substance abuse, communication difficulties, and suicide. In discussing the multiplicity of factors that both link and affect these risk areas for boys, we consider the value of multi-systemic approaches to counselling boys We thereby hope to assist practitioners toward great insights in their work with boys, by pulling together a number of studies from national and international sources.

It is presently unclear to what extent tertiary institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand assist their... more It is presently unclear to what extent tertiary institutions in Aotearoa New Zealand assist their student counsellors to recognise, engage with, and utilise their clients’ spirituality. This article attempts to re-establish a discussion that began 16 years ago in a significant New Zealand-based article which made a number of modest proposals about the education of counsellors in relation to their own and their clients’ spirituality. Since then, the accreditation of counsellors and courses, particularly in North America, has prompted a reexamination of the benefits and difficulties of integrating spirituality into counsellor education and counselling practice. This article invites counsellor educators and practitioners to reflect upon how working with a client’s spirituality is currently incorporated into counsellor education programmes and practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. Professional concerns include counsellor competence to work with spiritual and religious issues, and the engage...

&amp;quot;Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke’s Bay, New... more &amp;quot;Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke’s Bay, New Zealand, to conduct some preliminary research with his son Oliver who lives in Leeds, Great Britain. With Peter’s interests in loss, post-traumatic growth and transpersonal experiences and Oliver’s in theatre making, performance and pedagogy they begin to discover that they share much common ground. Shortly after their time together Peter travels to Moscow to deliver a paper on Hamlet. What follows is a weaving of the thoughts and recollections of three generations of men touched by loss, trauma and grief.&amp;quot;

How Trauma Resonates: Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice, 2014

It is not altogether uncommon, in the aftermath of stressful life events, for individuals and gro... more It is not altogether uncommon, in the aftermath of stressful life events, for individuals and groups to report that they have had experiences that have led them to significant personal change and psychological growth. In the last half century psychology has begun to broadly recognise and understand the psychological benefits to individuals who are able to manage the balance between the intense effects of trauma on the one hand and the emerging effects of flourishing and personal growth on the other. These life-enhancing outcomes can include: improved psychological well-being and health; personal and spiritual development; increased coping skills and deepening relationships; enhanced personal resources; and, changes in religious and spiritual assumptions, beliefs. As a consequence, main stream psychology has broadened its position on trauma, moving beyond its interest in the effects of impairment and pathology on functioning, to a curiosity about the incidence, meaning, and positive potential these growth outcomes may have post-trauma. As these outcomes are to some degree measurable, this paper questions whether the view of trauma provided by mainstream psychology and cautiously limited by what may only be quantitatively proven, is somewhat restricted. As psychology positions itself in the new millennium this paper offers a number of contributions to theory of post-traumatic growth which may admit a fuller consideration of the role of psycho-spiritual transformation in the processes, outcomes, and management of trauma: Abraham Maslow’s theory of peak experience and self-actualisation and Carl Rogers’ organismic valuing process; Stanislav Grof’s holotropic paradigm and formulation of psycho-spiritual transformation; Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi’s research on posttraumatic growth; and, Martin Seligman and Stephen Joseph’s conceptualisations of positive psychology. Together, these interdisciplinary strands capture something of a prevailing optimism and shared understanding that the struggle of posttraumatic experience may, for some at least, offer the potential for personal growth.

Finding Opportunities in Crisis, 2013

From the moment they occur, crisis events involving personal loss can disrupt people's lives ... more From the moment they occur, crisis events involving personal loss can disrupt people's lives and irrevocably change how they engage with the world. In this brief paper, an autobiographical account of tragic loss demonstrates how exposure to crisis can provide opportunity for significant personal transformation.

Culture, Experience, Care: Re-Centring the Patient, 2014

William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is conceived as an exploration of one patient’s experiences of ... more William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is conceived as an exploration of one patient’s experiences of the power of a total institution. In the unethical and unsuccessful processes of healing his step-son’s melancholia, Claudius the chief executive and senior consultant of Denmark’s Elsinore Castle transforms Hamlet’s condition from princely protege to patient. As a noncompliant inmate Hamlet goes about creatively finding ways to both resist his helpers and assemble evidence that will prove the institution’s power base is corrupted by its new leader. His increasing reluctance to see the world as the state sanctions it gives the institution reason to treat his personal challenges as attacks on its integrity. Thus, Shakespeare’s play exposes the sickness of total systems that vest power in a single individual. It also shows how a diagnosis of complicated mourning, experienced as a difficult personal process of intra-psychic transformation, might be reframed by its onlookers as ‘madness.’ By showing the tragic consequences of withholding or intentionally ignoring the true source of a patient’s disease, Hamlet’s case demonstrates the difficulties of making correct diagnoses and giving appropriate treatment. At best there is a fragile symbiosis between a doctor and patient. In Hamlet the institution misdiagnoses, threatens, renders incompetent, and denies Hamlet the patient a say in his own healing processes. However, in his institutionally inconvenient condition he is provided with opportunities for the kind of unsupervised self-analysis and experimentation that ultimately risks his life and those of the community. After his assault on the body politic, steps are taken to fully remove him from the public gaze. Hamlet’s case serves to illustrate how a unitary approach to patient care that disenfranchises and disempowers, tragically disables the service relationship and totally restricts its staff in their work.

Is this a Culture of Trauma? An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 2013

Narrating Illness: Prospects and Constraints, 2016

Communication and Conflict in Multiple Settings, 2018

Voices of Illness: Negotiating Meaning and Identity, 2019

Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation, 2013

How Trauma Resonates: Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice, 2014

Finding Opportunities in Crisis, 2013

Culture, Experience, Care: Re-Centring the Patient, 2014

Is this a Culture of Trauma? An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 2013

Narrating Illness: Prospects and Constraints, 2016

Communication and Conflict in Multiple Settings, 2018

Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 2010

The literature suggests that spiritual domains of experience may be influential to an individual&... more The literature suggests that spiritual domains of experience may be influential to an individual&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s growth in the aftermath of stressful life events. This paper explores the role that spiritual experience might play in the process of posttraumatic growth by examining two quite different approaches to transformational growth: Lawrence Calhoun and Richard Tedeschi&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s posttraumatic growth model; and Stanislav and Christina Grof&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s

Journal of Religion and Health, 2011

Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, 2008

How does a father manage the death of his son or his father? What might a playwright do? This art... more How does a father manage the death of his son or his father? What might a playwright do? This article proposes that confronted with the multiple loss of his son Hamnet and subsequently his father John, William Shakespeare experienced a transformational consciousness event ...

New Zealand Journal of Counselling, 2008

3 Counselling Adolescents when Spiritual Emergence Becomes Spiritual Emergency Peter Bray Abs... more 3 Counselling Adolescents when Spiritual Emergence Becomes Spiritual Emergency Peter Bray Abstract This article provides a rationale for a closer examination and recognition of unusual consciousness events in adolescence that have a specifically spiritual content of the kind ...

Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation, 2012

The Strangled Cry: The Communication and Experience of Trauma , 2013

Originally constructed as a performance piece, this work invites discussion of the uncomfortable,... more Originally constructed as a performance piece, this work invites discussion of the uncomfortable, but nonetheless delightful, differences and similarities of interpretation of the discipline-specific methodologies of performance and therapy. Using three case studies we consider the performance of trauma: as the replication of experience; it’s effect on the maker, the performer and the audience of the work; and questions that touch upon power, perception and interpretation; and, the implication that psychological safety and ethics inherent in the reciprocal sharing of such powerful materials is questionable.

Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation, 2013

Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, to condu... more Just before Sam died, his son Peter travelled from his home in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, to conduct some preliminary research with his son Oliver who lives in Leeds, Great Britain. With Peter's interests in loss, post-traumatic growth and transpersonal experiences and Oliver's in theatre making, performance and pedagogy they began to discover that they share much common ground. Shortly after their time together Peter travelled to Moscow to deliver a paper on Hamlet. What follows is a weaving of the thoughts and recollections of three generations of men touched by loss, trauma and grief. First presented in 2011 in Prague, the Czech Republic, this text was originally conceived as a palliative response to Sam's death in England a year earlier. In this new text we allow our curiosity to continue exploring those traumatic wounds that have had, for better or for worse, such a significant impact upon our lives as a father and a son. In expressing some of our loss experiences we begin to understand that our lives, people's lives, far from the normal, predictable and humdrum are essentially and powerfully unique. Bearing and baring the scars of life's seemingly random and unconscionable wounding, the legacy of lives fully lived, we share the paradox of these unwanted but necessary losses. We discover that traumatic events are significant opportunities for individuals to start again, to reassemble and re-learn their lives, make important changes, and take on the challenge of a world that has fundamentally changed, become less predictable and comfortable, and more difficult to manage.

Voicing Trauma and Truth: Narratives of Disruption and Transformation, 2013

This volume brings together a worldwide array of phenomena and research programmes associated wit... more This volume brings together a worldwide array of phenomena and research programmes associated with working with trauma. Wide-ranging in content, it truly represents the interdisciplinary nature of current research, providing dynamic and valuable crossovers between differing research practices. presented to provide different perspectives of the experience of trauma: the personal; the subjective/objective; and the collective.