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Reminiscence (with a Brief Introduction to Psycxhotherapy)

Of the two dozen or so books that I have published, this is the second most personal, in the sense that much of it is about my adventures growing up and becoming a psychologist interested in the various forms of psychotherapy discussed in the second half of the book.

As you may know, there are many forms of psychotherapy. Most psychotherapists espouse only one of them, as in “I am a psychoanalyst,” “I am a Rogerian,” “I am a behaviourist,” and so on. In contrast, throughout my career as a psychologist, I have had a interest in many different kinds of psychotherapy,. Most of these approaches will be relatively unknown to both psychotherapists and patients alike, and that is a shame, because they are powerful change agents. If you have negative thoughts, emotions, or behaviours that you would like to get rid of, this brief introduction is just what you are looking for.

Here is a list of those psychotherapies which are discussed in the second half of this book:

• Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis

• Carl Jung: Positive Aspects of the Unconscioous

• Roberrt Langs: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

• Joseph Wolpe: Systematic Desensitization

• Albert Ellis: Rational Emotive Tharapy

• Bandler and Grinder: Neurolinguistic Programming

• Tad James: Time Line Therapy

• Cameron-Bandler: Reframing

• Andreas and Andreas:The Dissociative Phobia/Trauma Procedure

• Milton Erickson:Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy

• Stephen Wolinsky:Trances People Live

• Gerbode: Taumatic Incident Reduction

• Francine Shapiro: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

• Gary Craig: Emotional Freedom Technique

• Zivorad Slavinsky: Instant Enlightenment

Peace Games (by Douglas Quirk )

Peace Games is about strategies that might be used in achieving peace, organized around the factors we that my colleagues and I found to either foster peace or disrupt it by virtue of the fact that they either disturb people’s human relationships. It is at once a novel, a self-help book, and a manual for an engrossing game, framed in essentially rational, problem-solving terms.

In this novel, eight couples try to put aside their fears of a life-threatening storm and weather it by seeking solutions to some of the puzzles posed in an attempt to find routes to peace. Their conversations can be read as one account of people trying to solve some basic human puzzles and they can be read for the guidance they might offer to others seeking solutions to the same kinds of problems. Or they can be used to define a means and a set of “rules” by which others could themselves play Peace Games.

To determine whether the method works, Peace Games was tested with people having quite different characteristics. Although each group pursued some issues unique to itself, all the groups addressed most of the topics selected for this volume, and the contents of their conversations were essentially similar to those contained in this novel. Because these groups were intended as “test” Peace Games, the author consciously avoided taking a leadership role, beyond sending out announcements of the “Peace Games” to potential participants, handing out copies of the “rules” to those attending, and serving as one, relatively quiet, participant.

There is another set of issues that affect our ability to achieve peacefulness and peace, however, and that is the motivations that drive us to disturb ourselves (and others), not only within the intra-personal sphere but at all levels of peace or its absence, from serenity vs distress, through harmony vs disharmony, and cooperation vs crime, to international peace vs war.

As any sensible person knows, in order to achieve an outcome, anyone needs both a strategy and the necessary motivation. But that is a story for another day. On the other hand, Quirk began his original preface to Peace Games with reference to “the Reynolds Principle of Perversity,” which I think gives me license to be just a little perverse. Although Peace Games quite rightly stands by itself, I just happened to have at hand a paper on Overcoming Negative Emotions – which is at least relevant to the motivational issue referred to above – and, since I was in a sharing mood, it was included as a sort of addendum to this book, as a sort of bonus for you for having shown an interest in Peace Games.

My Spiritual Journey 

I am a religious person, in the sense that I have attended church for most of my life. But I am not “religiously” so, probably because I was a psychologist and tend to think about why people do the things that they do, including why they believe the things that they believe. Insofar as religious affiliation is concerned, most churchgoing people at least nominally espouse the religion in which they were brought up. I was brought up to be a Christian by Christian parents, and only began to question my church’s teachings when I became a question-everything adolescent.

In writing about my spiritual journey, I have tried to track the development of my understanding of God; and what a journey that has been. It has taken me through a look back at my experience with the Baptist, Salvation Army, Pentecostal, and United churches, brief encounters with Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, a Jewish synagogue, a Sikh gurdwara, a Buddhist temple, and even a Wiccan coven. It has introduced me to Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and various schools of Buddhism, including Zen, with its emphasis on enlightenment, the realization that nothing in the universe is as I have created it to be, except in my own mind.

As a scientist, I have not been oblivious to the extent to which the thinking of those of us living in Western society is constrained by an essentially dualistic conceptual system, and the possibility of supplementing that kind of thinking by examining the utility of the concept of oneness, in this case oneness with God:

The Muslim mystic, Rumi, told the following story: A seeker knocked at the door of the beloved – God – and a voice from inside asked: ‘Who is it?’ The seeker answered, ‘It is I’; and the voice said: ‘In this house there is no I and You.’ The door remained locked. Then the seeker went into solitude, fasted and prayed. A year later, he returned and knocked at the door. Again the voice asked, ‘Who is it?’ Now the believer answered: ‘It is You.’ Then the door opened.

In a sense, this is discreating the world that I have created in my own mind and experiencing a reality that is perhaps more spiritual than religious. I have found this journey to be fascinating, and I hope that it might be at least informative for others.

Miscellaneous Musings

Miscellaneous Musings is just  that, a collection of papers, most of which I have written at sometime or other and pulled together in case any of the topics may be of interest to anyone other than myself.

1. Hypnosis
2. On Being Perfect 
3. Four Kinds of Communication in Psychotherapy and Life 
4. TAGteach (Using Clicker Training with Humans) 
5. How Shall We View God 
6. The Use of the MMPI in Teaching Personality Assessment 
7. An Introduction to Neuro-Linguistic Programming 
8. Women’s Lib, Witchcraft, and Sex or Let Your Goddess Be Your Guide 
9. A Meditation on the Lord’s Prayer 
10.   Prelude to the Energy Therapies 
11.   Sentence Severity: A Practical Measure of   Offence Seriousness 
12.   Dualism As It Relates To Unity With God 
13.   A Brief History of How Bad Behaviour Evolved into Illness  (by Alex Polgar)

Dr. Reg M. Reynolds, Psychologist (Retired)

My name is Reg Reynolds.  I was employed as a psychologist for almost sixty years.  At various times during my career, I functioned as a counsellor and psychotherapist for individuals, couples, and groups; as Director of Vocational and Recreational Services at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital; as Chief Psychologist at the Vanier Centre for Women, the Oakville Reception and Assessment Centre (for juveniles admitted to training school), and the Ontario Correctional Institute; as a consultant regarding assessment and treatment of sex offenders; as a consultant regarding ethical issues; as Coordinating Psychologist for the Central Region of the Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General and Correctional Services; as a researcher in programs for addiction and criminality; as a college lecturer; as an intern in, clinical member of, and board member of the Halton Centre for Childhood Sexual Abuse; as an intern, co-therapist and therapist in the treatment of spousal abuse; as a member of the Council of the College of Psychologists of Ontario; as a member of the Ontario Hypnosis Society and president of its southwest region; as a developer of biofeedback equipment and as a provider of biofeedback; as a student of education and special education; as a student of Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA) and its application in the treatment of children with autism; as psychologist and supervising clinician in the Ontario Government’s Intensive Behavioural Intervention program for children with autism; as clinical supervisor of private ABA-based programs for children with autism; as an educator of parents of children with autism.

Since being retired, I have authored and/or published a couple of dozen books so that the oh-so-valuable psychological information in them doesn’t get lost.  About a third of them were written by my friend and colleague, Douglas Quirk; about a third of them were a collaborative effort between Doug and myself; and about a third of them were written by myself.  Almost all of them are available through Amazon as Kindle ebooks and paperbacks at minimal cost.  In succeeding posts, I intend to tell you about them and in case you might like to read some of them.  

I am currently 92 years old, and my friend and colleague, Doug, died almost thirty years ago.  I am living in a seniors’ residence.  My wife of sixty-eight years died  in June 2026 and I am now putting in time until I join her. 

Reminiscence (with a Brief Introduction to Psychotherapy)

Of the two dozen or so books that I have published, this is the second most personal, in the sense that much of it is about my adventures growing up and becoming a psychologist interested in the various forms of psychotherapy discussed in the second half of the book.

As you may know, there are many forms of psychotherapy. Most psychotherapists espouse only one of them, as in “I am a psychoanalyst,” “I am a Rogerian,” “I am a behaviourist,” and so on. In contrast, throughout my career as a psychologist, I have had a interest in many different kinds of psychotherapy,. Most of these approaches will be relatively unknown to both psychotherapists and patients alike, and that is a shame, because they are powerful change agents. If you have negative thoughts, emotions, or behaviours that you would like to get rid of, this brief introduction is just what you are looking for.

Here is a list of those psychotherapies which are discussed in the second half of this book:

• Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis

• Carl Jung: Positive Aspects of the Unconscioous

• Roberrt Langs: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

• Joseph Wolpe: Systematic Desensitization

• Albert Ellis: Rational Emotive Tharapy

• Bandler and Grinder: Neurolinguistic Programming

• Tad James: Time Line Therapy

• Cameron-Bandler: Reframing

• Andreas and Andreas:The Dissociative Phobia/Trauma Procedure

• Milton Erickson:Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy

• Stephen Wolinsky:Trances People Live

• Gerbode: Taumatic Incident Reduction

• Francine Shapiro: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing

• Gary Craig: Emotional Freedom Technique

• Zivorad Slavinsky: Instant Enlightenment

Stimulus Conditioned Autonomic Response Training (SCARS): Biofeedback-Assisted Automated Desensitization

In 1958, a psychiatrist by the name of Joseph Wolpe published a book entitled Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition – RIT, or Systematic Desensitization as it generally known – in which he described a learning-based, behaviourally-oriented deconditioning procedure, in contrast to Freud’s more established cognitively-oriented psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In essence, it involves teaching the client to relax and then, while relaxed, to approach the trigger stimulus (an event to which the subject responds with some negative emotion such as anxiety) in imagination at a rate slow enough for the client to be able to maintain the relaxation. Assuming that the event is not currently harmful, this results in the eventual pairing of relaxation with the event, which teaches the body/mind that its proper response to that kind of trigger stimulus is relaxation rather than arousal. That is, the client learns at a gut level that there is no need to get “all cranked up” about that kind of event. Hence, no more distress!

In 1962, Quirk visited the Green Valley School and Hospital in Florida for the first time and began a mutual consultative role with its superintendent, George von Hilsheimer, which lasted until Quirk’s death in 1997. Regarding RIT, Von Hilsheimer suggested to Quirk that he use galvanic skin response (GSR), a measure of physiological activity, to monitor the patient’s anxiety level which, in RIT, is measured in reported subjective units of distress; and Quirk found the GSR to be a reliable and valid method for monitoring the client’s level of distress.

Von Hilsheimer also suggested to Quirk that he replace the usual verbal hierarchy of stressors used in Wolpe’s RIT with picture slides of the stressor stimuli to be presented to his patients. Finally, he suggested that immobility be substituted for the relaxation instructions in RIT, and designed a light sensor that caused a signal to go off if the subject moved during a session.

In response to von Hilsheimer’s suggestions, Quirk created a library of slides ranging from innocuous to distressing in thirty or so potentially stressful categories, including those stressors which might be expected to be found in the schizophrenic patients that he was treating: lessened perceptual acuity, body image disturbances, disturbances of conceptual clarity, and ambiguity and uncertainty.

Slide change was contingent upon measured relaxation. That is, a new slide was presented to the patient/subject each time he/she showed a measured increase in relaxation as indicated by a change in skin resistance, essentially “rewarding” the patient for relaxing by being presented with a new stressor stimulus.

Outcome data following treatment with SCARS suggests that it may be a useful procedure to use with patients who do not do well with other forms of psychotherapy, including systematic desensitization. In addition, since it is an automated procedure, it is amenable to supervised use by those with relatively little psychotherapy training.

Extra Quirky Behavioural Psychotherapy

Douglas Quirk and I met when we were both members of an informal behaviour therapy club that met in Toronto at the behest of a local psychiatrist, Dr. John Jameson, and we became colleagues for decades, before his death in 1997. He was a genius and he could write faster than I could read. Extra Quirky Behavioural Psychotherapy is a series of case studies mainly from before he joined me in the psychology department at the Ontario Correctional Institute.

The treatment of choice in these cases studies was Wolpe’s Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, in which he described a learning-based deconditioniong procedure known as Systematic Desnsitization. In essence, It involves teaching the client to relax and then, while relaxed, to approach the trigger stimulus (event) at a rate slow enough for the client to be able to maintain the relaxation. Assuming that the event is not currently harmful, this results in the eventual pairing of relaxation with the event, which teaches the body/mind that its proper response to that kind of trigger stimulus is relaxation rather than arousal. That is, the client learns at a gut level that there is no need to get “all cranked up” about that kind of event. Hence, no more distress!

To aid in this process, Quirk invented what he called Stimulas Conditioned Autonomic Response Suppression (SCARS), In which Wolpe’s systematic desensitization is supplemented by a biofeedback procedure in which relaxation is “rewarded” – often with additional stress! – which helps the body to learn to relax in the presence of situations to which the client has been responding with distress. Unfortunately, while SCARS is very powerful and capable of addressing almost any psychological condition, it remains practically unknown, so I have published it now as a separate book. Quirk was a good psychotherapist but not a very good publicist.

Perusal of the various sections of this book shows how widely this approach is both applicable and effective:

• Sex (to get your attention)

• Sexual Offences

• A-Sexuality

• Sexual Anomalies

• Fear

• Anger! Territoriality: The Intolerable Excitement

• Physical Health Problems

• A Quick Look at Brain Damage – Impairing Impairment

• Madness! Exploring the Never-Never Land of Schizophrenia, the Bewildering Disease

• Criminality

• A Flake’s Mistakes – Errors of Understanding and Action

• Accessory Therapeutic Agents – Weighty Waiting

• Psychology as a Profession

Teaching Children with Autism: A Manual for Parents and Instructors

This book provides the basics of designing and managing a program for teaching children with autism – information that you need if you have a child with autism or if you are a professional working with one.

Originally trained as a teacher, my background is primarily in clinical psychology and, although I began my psychology career by working with children, I only returned to working with that population about twenty-five years ago, after many years of working with adults.  That began when my daughter, who was working in daycare, had responsibility for several children who were autistic, with the result that her job evolved into that of instructor/therapist.  Since I thought that I should at least have some idea about what she was doing, I started to self-educate and eventually reached the point where I thought I might be able to talk with other psychologists in the field.  Dr. Janis Williams, Clinical Director for the Central West Region of the Ontario government’s newly established Intensive Behavioural Intervention (IBI) program for children with autism was not only willing to talk with me, but she also offered me a job.  

For the next nine years, I worked for ErinoakKids, helping to develop their IBI program.  The bulk of the information about teaching children with autism contained in this book was assembled within that context, both as an attempt to clarify my own thinking about ABA and as guidance for parents and instructor-therapists alike (cf Appendix A, Senior Therapist Task Analysis).  In my opinion, it contains most of the information that parents of children with autism need to get started in teaching their children with autism.

As the premier correctional treatment setting in Ontario, it had been charged specifically with the task of exploring criminality as it is related to its inmate population. Douglas Quirk and I took that injunction to heart and set out to explore the effect of psychological treatment on post-incarceration outcome. That is, did treatment have any affect on whether or not the inmate was less likely to be reincarcerated. That involved two main tasks:

1. assessing the factors underlying criminal thinking and behaviour

2. treating those factors so that they are less likely to get the individual in trouble with the law.

It so happened that, in 1976, shortly after the OCI opened, Samuel Yochelson, and Stanton Samenow published the results of a study of criminal thinking in which they claim to have identified the errors of thinking that characterized the criminal mind. Building on their research, a test was developed which yielded six statistically-derived scales as follows:

1. Hypersensitivity to and rejection of feelings of guilt

2. Hypersensitivity to and rejection of feelings of failure

3. Hypersensitivity to and rejection of emotional distress

4. Hypersensitivity to and rejection of sensitivity to others

5. Hypersensitivity to and rejection of closeness

6. Hypersensitivity to and rejection of discipline

Six day-long large-group treatment workshops using more-or-less-standard psychological treatments addressing each of these issues were delivered, with two-year post-incarceration follow-up results determining that both the amount of treatment provided and the extent to which test scores were modified by these treatment workshops were shown to be related to two year post-release recidivism. The treatment workshops both lowered test scores and resulted in lower recidivism rates, as measured by whether or not subjects reoffended, time on the street until re-offence, and seriousness of re-offence in the two years post-release.

Given that the amount of treatment time required to achieve these results was essentially miniscule, this type of approach should be adopted by any jurisdiction interested in the prevention of crime