EvolutionFM Transcript: Renowned Psychologist Reveals Why Soul Alignment Is Mental Health’s Missing Link (Dr. Amy Robbins)

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Dr. Amy Robbins is revolutionizing the field of psychotherapy by blending traditional psychodynamic therapy with deeply spiritual wisdom. In this captivating episode, she shares the powerful story of her spiritual awakening sparked by an otherworldly visit from her deceased aunt and how that moment cracked open her path to integrating soul-level insight into mental health.
As the founder of “spiritually informed therapy,” Amy teaches that many of our so-called psychological ailments may actually be the soul’s way of crying out for realignment. She invites therapists to treat spirituality not as a fringe interest but as an essential aspect of healing. Her journey, marked by intuitive downloads and profound synchronicities, shows how science and the soul can co-exist in clinical practice. Just when you think you’ve grasped her vision, she reveals a deeper truth that reframes everything we think we know about.

Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 1+ hour, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!

Scott Britton (00:01.141)

Amy, how you doing?

Dr. Amy Robbins (00:02.885)

I'm great Scott, how are you again?

Scott Britton (00:06.134)

I'm good. I'm good. I'm really excited to dive into your work. And I'm just first off, let me just say I'm so glad that someone out there is kind of charting this new path for psychology and spirituality. Because to me, I mean, it's just been such an informally interwoven journey, where

Sometimes it feels very blended, yet I don't really feel like there's ever been a true acknowledgement of that in the clinical world. And so, yeah, I'm very happy that you're doing what you're doing. And maybe just to kind of frame this up, could you share a little bit more about kind of your formal background?

Dr. Amy Robbins (00:51.395)

Sure, so first of all, thank you for having me. I'm excited to flip the conversation and to talk to you a little bit, because you talked to me the other day. So my training is in traditional psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is really, I look at more kind of looking at early relationships, how they've impacted your life. I take sort of, I mean, I do incorporate some Freud

some of his work as well, but really looking at mainly like the relationships that you've had in your past or early attachments and how those then inform where you are currently and how those relationships are impacted. However, over the course of my psychological career, my psychology career, I've also kind of walked a spiritual path that was for many years in the closet, frankly.

because of my own spiritual transformative experience that I had early on when I was in graduate school. That really shifted how I thought about everything that I was learning and implementing and integrating into my work. for many years felt like the two needed to be kept separate. And what I kept, what I found certainly within myself,

but also what I was seeing with my clients is that the more that we sort of talked about spirituality and integrated spirituality in, guess people would say maybe a more new age way, although I don't love that term, but I think that's the easiest way for people to kind of identify and think about it, the better that people got. And the more that we really attuned to the soul,

which is a lot of the work I do now is thinking about like how the soul is being expressed in this lifetime and what it is you want to express through the soul. And when the soul is not aligned, I think oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes that's when we see mental illness showing up. And so it's been a really beautiful but long separate journey, only integrated about six years ago when I started my podcast. And that's when I really

Dr. Amy Robbins (03:05.222)

kind of came out and put myself out there that these were two sides of me and I didn't want them to feel mutually exclusive. I wanted them to be more integrated. And over the course of the past six years have really gotten very clear on what that looks like for me and my practice and now teaching other practitioners how to integrate more spirituality into their clinical work as well.

Scott Britton (03:29.25)

Well, definitely want to dive into that. But I also want to zoom into Can you share more about your kind of big spiritual experience that opened up that part of your life?

Dr. Amy Robbins (03:38.125)

Sure. Absolutely. And these are the conversations that I know we had last week, and I love having. So when I was 18 years old, my aunt was, she had juvenile onset diabetes. And she was really, really struggling. She went through a very, very terrible divorce. She ended up losing everything. She was a stay-at-home mom at the time. She had to go back to work in conditions that weren't really super favorable for her.

diabetes, along with the stress, right? now know stress exacerbates all these physical symptoms, along with that, and her health declined pretty quickly. She was 48 at the time, which is the age I am now, and I was 18 in college, which is the age my daughter is now. And so that has brought it to a whole nother level, because I'm thinking about how much life it feels like she still had to live, and she missed out on.

So I got the, she was waiting for a kidney and pancreas transplant and while she was waiting for the transplant they realized her heart wouldn't be strong enough to withstand the transplant. So in order to make sure that it would be so she could get the kidney and pancreas they went in and did surgery. When they got in everything was just like sticks, her arteries were just completely calcified and they weren't able to get her heart restarted and so she died on the table.

And I got that dreaded call that I know so many people who have experienced the loss of a loved one suddenly get and sort of fell to the floor. like I said, I was a freshman in college at the time. And so everything was new and fresh. And now I had this to deal with. I came home, I went back, but was really plagued by anxiety for a long, long time. I never really processed my grief. I would come home for the summers. After my senior year, I did start some

did start therapy after a course of, well, I had had a panic attack senior year and kind of fell into a pretty, a difficult depression when I got a job that I was miserable at selling radio airtime and fell into this hole and really was struggling to kind of find my way out. I was in therapy, I was doing all the things, but I still had a ton of anxiety. And so this was 20,

Dr. Amy Robbins (06:00.475)

five years ago, more than 25 years ago. And so therapy and all these spiritual tools weren't really available to us. mean, therapy was, but people weren't talking about spirituality in the way that they are now. So I ended up going back to grad school. Fast forward, I'm a couple years into grad school and it's right before my cousin's wedding, her son, and I have what I now know was a visit from my aunt.

And she came to me, it was in sort of that in between theta like dream state where you wake up and fall back to sleep. And in it, she showed me an image of my mom standing in our kitchen, the kitchen sink in the house I grew up in. And she said, tell your mom not to be upset. She doesn't need to be upset, I'm gonna be at the wedding. And then she shared with me.

my uncle and she who's an orthopedic surgeon. So I come from a family of physicians. So these are not people who believe in anything other than the material world that they can see. And she said to me, let Uncle Richie know I see him when he's talking to me, when he's out pushing the stroller, when he's out walking, I hear him. So I wake up and I look at my husband and I say, I think Aunt Linda was just here. And he kind of looks at me.

call my mom immediately as soon as I can and I share with her what happened and she said, I was standing at the kitchen sink last night and I was talking to Linda and I said, I can't believe you're not gonna be there. I can't believe you're not gonna be at the wedding. And I was really floored. I didn't know what to make of it. And then I called my uncle and I shared the same thing and he said, that's when I speak with her and...

That's always when I'm out walking I'm talking to her and he shared with me what he was talking about which was what she shared with me that she hears him talk about and I thought okay. Well, this is interesting and I went to school that day and I spoke to a professor of mine who was really Really grounded in traditional psychoanalytic and psychodynamic there theory and therapy but also had this other side of

Dr. Amy Robbins (08:12.241)

that I knew the spiritual side, that I knew she was interested in. And so I shared with her what happened, and she said, I think you had a visit, and I think you're opening up to something, and I think you should pursue it. Here's the name of a medium, and here's Sylvia Brown's. Go order Sylvia Brown's books, or go to the bookstore back then. Because Sylvia Brown was like one of the few psychics back then. So I bought the books, but sort of put everything off to the side for a while.

And again, in the throes of graduate school, was planning a wedding at the time, like moving towards all those exciting life milestones and just shelved it. About five years later, six years later, when my papa died, a similar thing happened. He came to me with a message from my cousin about her upcoming wedding. We clearly like wedding celebrations.

And he shared a similar information I wouldn't have otherwise known. Called my cousin, she validated it, and then it started happening with patients loved ones where I'd start to get messages but didn't really know what to do with them. And at that point, that's when I started really pursuing, okay, what is mediumship? What does this look like? Is this a path I wanna go down? Do I wanna stay on the psychological path? And...

Here I am, I found a place for me that feels really aligned because I don't have to throw the baby out with either bathwater. I can integrate the two pieces, which I think more and more people themselves are seeking and bring them together in a way that invites those conversations into the therapeutic space, not kind of fragments them where

Scott Britton (09:51.426)

Hmm

Dr. Amy Robbins (10:01.703)

Oh, your spirituality has to be something else separate from what you bring into the therapy space. They can be one in the same. And I think, like you talked about, like I've talked about, like so many people I'm sure we've both interviewed have talked about, these spiritual experiences, these transformative experiences literally change the trajectory of our lives. And yet, as a therapist, most therapists don't even ask. 5 % of therapists have

any training in spirituality. And yet 60 % of clients say their spiritual practices are a really essential part of their healing journey.

Scott Britton (10:35.565)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (10:48.012)

You know, it's funny, I'm thinking when you say that, I think of like, 5 % of doctors are taught on nutrition. It's like, is the corollary to, you know, psychotherapy, similar with with spirituality, where we're kind of just missing this fundamental aspect of well being.

Dr. Amy Robbins (11:07.271)

Yeah, and it was there because Jung was one of the first people to talk about synchronicities, to talk about spiritual experiences in his work. And he was shunned off from the traditional psychoanalytic thinkers. And so if you read Jung's work, I mean, he talks about archetypes, he talks about shadow work, all these theories that are

You're hearing now again that are coming back into the zeitgeist. People are talking about doing this inner child work and the shadow work and the archetype work. This is all out of Young. So this isn't new. It's just, it's making a comeback, which I'm thrilled about because I think we've gotten really, really far from the soul.

Scott Britton (11:46.286)

Let's bring on the comeback. So I've heard you coined the term spiritually informed therapy. What does that mean? And maybe you could paint a picture of what that might look like.

Dr. Amy Robbins (12:00.047)

Yeah, so what it means is that your therapist has a sense and an understanding of what it means to be a spiritual being. being a spiritual being is not something that we need to become or seek. It is the essence of who we are. And so how I conceptualize this is, and Dr. Lisa Miller talks about a lot of this in her book, The Awakened Brain,

It's about finding your way back to that. We've gotten so jumbled in all this crud that we swim in all the time, and we've really lost what it means to be spiritual and to have spiritual experiences every single day. So how I think of spirituality is twofold. One, I think it's an ability to go deep inside and really, really know yourself. That's one aspect of spirituality.

And the other for me is the sense that there is something greater than you. So whether it's a connection to whatever it is, nature, divine, source, God, universe, people use all these kinds of terms for it. But it's how we connect to that and also make meaning of our lives. What is the meaning? Why are we here? What are we doing? Those are spiritual questions.

these existential larger questions that we have. And then I also take it one step further and think about what are the tools that people are now using in their healing? So many people are seeking out astrology, numerology, human design, mediumship, past life regressions, people who've had near-death experiences, psychedelics where they are transformed from their psychedelic experiences.

All of these, me, constitute spiritually informed therapy. And I want clients to feel like when they walk into their therapist's office, all of these are on the table. Anybody can talk about what has happened and know that their therapist knows even what these mean. What's an out-of-body experience? What happens when you might leave your physical body? And it's not a dissociation in the way that historically we think about that.

Dr. Amy Robbins (14:21.115)

from the perspective of what it means to struggle with a mental illness. That if you are talking to spirit guides, that is not schizophrenia. You might be connecting with beings outside of this physical reality that we can see, and are they perhaps giving you messages that are really helpful? Now obviously this is a narrow line, and there's some research out there that's looking at the difference between someone who is able to connect with spirit guides and how they can

Scott Britton (14:35.522)

Right.

Dr. Amy Robbins (14:50.297)

modulate that versus a schizophrenic who feels like, you know, these voices are talking to them at all times and they're really incongruent with the life that they're trying to live. And so those people end up in a hospital in patient psych settings or in long-term treatment care facilities. Whereas people who are connecting with their spirit guides don't. They're both reporting, they're hearing things, but they're hearing things and how that feels to them is different. So I really, my goal is to really normalize

so much of this. mean, obviously, there's still going to be people out there with schizophrenia and not minimizing these experiences. But I also want us to look at what are the perceptuals? What are the spiritual emergencies that might be coming out of these spiritual experiences, rather than labeling them as pathological?

Scott Britton (15:45.462)

Yeah. And I think there is, I mean, seemingly so much misdiagnosis, right? That it's actually causing people to, the ignorance of the system is causing many people to suffer, suffer more.

Dr. Amy Robbins (15:57.999)

Right, there's so much, this is what Lisa Miller says, this is a lot of what David Ross Marin, who does a lot of the research out of Harvard at the Spirit and Mental Health Institute talks about is, oftentimes depression is a cry of the soul. The soul is saying something isn't right here. Pay attention. And I mean, don't even get me started on like over pathologizing, but I think so often we over pathologize what is normal developmental responses or normal healthy responses to life events. And we think, my God, this is a mental illness and we need to treat it as such, which usually means here's your medicine and here's your cognitive behavioral therapy. And we're gonna change your thoughts and you're gonna take this medication and you're gonna feel better. And what we're doing is perhaps dampening or even shutting down someone's experience of real exploration and potential growth. Doesn't mean it's not hard, doesn't mean it's not painful, but it is an invitation to honor that, to honor the call of the soul, really.

Scott Britton (17:12.814)

Can you talk more about this relationship between the soul having some intention or desire to express itself and then kind of some of these traditionally like diagnosis diagnoses that might come up that something's off.

Dr. Amy Robbins (17:30.543)

Yeah, let's see how I can. So how I see the soul, right? The soul is here. It lives through the kind of physical, the personality of the human experience. And I think our soul, I always say, like, I don't think we're here for one purpose, although I know some people would argue that. But I think our soul is here to express an essence, different qualities. Usually they're qualities of love, peace, joy, calm And that our soul and and each person gets to kind of look inside and figure out what it feels like their soul is here to express But generally they're sort of in that that realm of what I just named And then it's how those qualities get expressed. So if you are here to express love and community and connection for you that might look different than it does for me, but

That feels like what my soul needs to feel like it's moving forward in this lifetime. I think what happens often with the society, and you experienced this, right? You had all of these expectations of what it meant to be a graduate of Princeton and super tech focused and what it meant to be a success. And as a result of that, things did not feel good for you.

falling out of alignment with your soul. And then you start to see mental health issues, right? You start to see perhaps difficulty concentrating, difficulty sleeping, lack of interest in normal activities. Why? Because your soul isn't aligned. You're doing something that feels not right for you. It's like if you kept, you know, if you were physically training for something and you kept doing something that was hurting yourself,

Eventually your body's gonna say, we're not doing this anymore. You keep running on the knee that's hurting. Why are you training in this way? And I think that the mental health aspect is very similar. It's like if you keep going down the same path that is not aligned for your soul, eventually you're gonna hit a wall and your soul's gonna be like, I surrender, I'm done. Here's the physical symptoms that we're gonna manifest to get you to listen.

Scott Britton (19:54.808)

definitely been my experience where there's, you know, a deeper alignment that when we're congruent with that, things seem to flow and then when we're not, there's ways that we, the ways that life and our bodies communicate to us. How does this, how does this jive with this notion of like, there also being like certain lessons that need to be learned at a soul level?

Dr. Amy Robbins (20:20.933)

Yeah, so, okay, I can go there. Is your audience good for this? So there's some people.

Scott Britton (20:26.062)

Oh, we're here for it.

Dr. Amy Robbins (20:28.935)

We're here for it, okay. So there is a belief and a philosophy in the spiritual space that we come here with what's called soul contracts. So we sort of contract this life before we get here. And through this process, we determine what experiences, I hate to say lessons, because lessons I think sometimes feels like it can be little bit condescending or harsh. Like you got that and you deserved it and.

And I think that life is really, really hard for a lot of people. They struggle, they suffer, they experience horrible tragedy, horrible pain, and this isn't to minimize that. This is one perspective in the spiritual space. And what is said is that you've contracted this life to learn certain, to have these experiences, to learn certain lessons to grow your soul.

And that if we don't think of, you we think of the soul as evolving over a period of thousands of years perhaps, and that it continues to grow towards this notion of not actually needing to return into a human body to continue to learn, but to stay in this space source, connected to source, whatever you want to call it, and that's where the soul stays. So there are these contracts that there are people who,

say and I've, I'm, no, where I struggle with this is when people are like, why would I have contracted for to lose a child? Which to me is kind of the worst of the worst that could happen. And it's really hard when someone's in the depths of their grief and pain to say, well, this was part of your sole contract or people who are suffering in conditions that are horrific, sexual trauma, rape, like all of those things, it feels like,

How could there be a universe in which this is allowed to occur and I am, and I made some deal before I got here that this was the way I was gonna learn. And so that's where I think people can really struggle up against this notion of soul contracts because it feels really horrible to think from the perspective, because you're in a human body right now, so you're trying to rationalize it from the perspective of what it means to be human.

Dr. Amy Robbins (22:48.059)

versus the perspective of what it means to be a soul on this journey of thousands of years to grow. And so I think sometimes we get constricted by what our physical, what our materialist minds tend to think about what it means and not have an opportunity to take a step back and look at the longer view. But that's sort of the notion of soul contracts is that everything that happens, all the, of the big kind of learning experiences throughout your life are things that you determined before you got here.

And that doesn't mean that there isn't free will and you can't change the outcomes of those things. You absolutely can based on the choices you make. And I also think often based on our own psychological awareness, like how in touch with you, how in touch are you with yourself? How much work have you done? How much have you been, like you talk about, going through your life consciously versus unconsciously? Where you find yourself in situations where if you were more conscious, you might not find yourself.

Scott Britton (23:48.494)

And yeah, this definitely makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking of my teacher who says, your soul doesn't care about comfort, it cares about growth, which is a hard one to hear often. And I think one of the points of confusion that I have, or like something that I deal with a lot is like, okay, I might be struggling because I'm out of alignment.

Dr. Amy Robbins (24:02.341)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Scott Britton (24:15.81)

I might be struggling because there's a lesson here that I signed up for, or I might be struggling because there's an emotion that I haven't felt, or maybe this is just something that's not related to any of that. And this is just something that's happening. And it can be quite confusing to navigate that, because there's like all these rationales as to like, especially with the health stuff that many of us are dealing with, that it can be any one of those things. It can be multiple of those things.

Dr. Amy Robbins (24:43.344)

Mm-hmm.

Scott Britton (24:46.072)

How do you help people navigate that?

Dr. Amy Robbins (24:46.169)

Absolutely. Well, I think it's like anything, you know, if we take it even out of the psychological space and think about, like you said, from a medical perspective, you know, I'm always about, we looking at all the potential possibilities that it could be? And yes, more than one thing can be contributing to something. So again, when we cut off and we say, well, it's definitely spirituality is out of the question, and we're not even going to address that piece, then you're missing

potentially part of the equation in the same way that if someone said My husband struggled with a lot of like gastro issues again years ago before anybody knew what was going on in the food space and anything and he had multiple doctors Dismiss nutrition say to him like you said earlier. there's no way it could be that it's not that well turns out guess what it was that but Was that part of a soul contract?

Maybe was he here to learn how to maybe take better care of his body? Perhaps can, could many of those things be true simultaneously? Absolutely. And so I think it's really about how are we thinking holistically? talk holistically, but then we maybe leave out spirituality as part of that. And so how are we thinking holistically about what, what you're facing, what anybody is facing?

And is it an opportunity to dig in deeper more spiritually and perhaps experience more spiritual growth, regardless of what you're facing? If you're facing a health diagnosis, how could that be an invitation to maybe step into your life more fully? If you're facing a fatal or terminal diagnosis, is that an invitation to embrace the people you love more wholeheartedly, to take perspective, to...

right wrongs you might have done if you are interested in welcoming that invitation.

Scott Britton (26:46.712)

So it seems like in spiritually informed therapy, it's more just about expanding the conversation and exploration and not necessarily like, this has to be a spiritual thing.

Dr. Amy Robbins (27:04.407)

Right, because I think there's danger in that too. I mean, we don't want to get into the space of spiritual bypassing either, which is looking at and having spiritual experiences and making the assumption that that's sort of all there is. I just want to, or saying things like, you know, people who say things like,

Well, that's just one of my lessons that was just supposed to happen to me and moving on from there. I can't feel that because that's a low vibrational feeling and I don't want to feel anything that's a low vibe feeling. Well, that's all spiritual bypassing. Spirituality isn't about not experiencing. Spirituality is being fully in this experience, wholly, and experiencing all of it.

not just moving past it or moving around it because you are more spiritually enlightened than someone else. It's really being in the experience and feeling it. So yes, in many ways, when I teach about this, I think in the psychological field, what's happened is we've really moved, we moved into evidence-based practice as more of a prescriptive form of therapy.

rather than looking at who is the person sitting in front of me that I am talking to and what is the story of their soul? What does their journey look like? You and 20 other people could all sit in front of me with a diagnosis of depression, which would tell me absolutely nothing about you, except that you meet a list of criteria that I can check off and say to someone else, this person has depression, is experiencing a depression.

But I don't know what that says about Scott. I don't know how Scott found himself in that space.

Scott Britton (29:03.446)

Yeah, I mean, I think everything you're pointing to is also one of the reasons our medical model is struggling, right? It's like, here's the, okay, okay, here's the diagnosis, here's the thing you have wrong, here's the pill, right? Without the context that is often much, much bigger. A question I have for this is, someone practicing spiritually informed therapy, like would they have to be...

on a path at a certain point, like at a certain point in their own spiritual journey to be effective at this.

Dr. Amy Robbins (29:38.223)

think they certainly have to be interested in a spiritual journey. They don't have to have had a spiritual awakening. my sense is, as I've taught this a couple of times already, most people who are interested in integrating this into their work are spiritually curious. And I think that that's sort of the most important thing is, are you spiritually curious? Are you open to exploring some of these options? Are you aware of?

mediumship, are you aware of past life regressions? I mean, you don't have to have done all of these things to even to perhaps be open to how it might help someone. Although I think certainly trying some of these modalities is a way to immerse yourself in the work. And I'm someone too, who believes like people go on all sides of this. I think you have to sit on the other side of the couch to know what it feels like to sit on the side of the couch that I sit on.

I think you do have to explore, you have to be open to exploring spiritual practices. I think you'll be of better service to the people who you serve because you'll understand what they're talking about. You'll understand the experience of sitting with a medium and connecting with a loved one. You might understand what it's like to have a past life regression. I mean, these are certainly all modalities that I've tried. I've tried multiple times. I've used them in my healing work for myself. I've referred clients to them.

So I think it really is, I mean it just deepens your own relationship with yourself. Sound healing, breath work, psychedelics, like all of these modalities are all ways of potentially having spiritual experiences that open us up in really remarkable ways and allow us to access parts of ourselves that sometimes we cannot access because we're just stuck in the day to day.

Scott Britton (31:32.034)

What do you think is the pathway for this to be embraced in a bigger way by the current, you know, psychotherapy community?

Dr. Amy Robbins (31:43.419)

Well, one, really grateful for certainly, I referenced her several times here, certainly Lisa Miller's work at Columbia Teachers College really putting forth a lot of the research and neuroscience and spirituality. Because I think that when people see that there is neuroscience behind this, that's always the first step. But there is a lot of research. There's the research out of the University of Virginia Department of Perceptual Studies that's looked at both past lives and

near-death experiences. There's the research out of University of Arizona with Dr. Gary Schwartz and the Windbridge Institute looking at the minds of mediums, the work that Dr. Jeff Terrant is doing, doing EEGs. I always forget which one is the brain. EEGs, EEGs, I think. EEGs, or EKGs. EKG, okay, EEG, yes. The brain looking at.

Scott Britton (32:31.534)

We know what you're talking about. EKG, it's EKG's heart. EEG is probably brain.

Dr. Amy Robbins (32:39.557)

looking at the minds of mediums. There is obviously the psychedelic research that's coming out. And one of the things in the psychedelic research that's really powerful is people who've reported spiritual experiences change their outlook on how they live. there is so much research there. And yet we continue to say, well, can't

put, do I want to use here? We cannot induce a near-death experience, right? That's not something that you can bring someone in a lab, induce it, and then they come out and they say, here's what happened. And so we're discrediting some of that research because we can't induce it or we can't have a controlled setting of people who've had near-death experiences and haven't. That seems to minimize the hundreds of thousands of people who've reported these experiences.

and how profound they've been in terms of changing the outcomes of their lives. Oftentimes after these experiences, people are more open to other spiritual experiences. Many people who report that they've had near-death experiences are then have psychic and medium abilities, precognitive abilities. So something in the brain is changing. And when people have these experiences, anybody who's listened to the telepathy tapes recently, right, they know they're looking at

the brains of many of these participants in telepathy tapes of these people who've had these near-death experiences of these mediums and they're seeing changes. And so there is research there. People just have to be willing to look at it and shift the paradigm of how they're thinking about spirituality and also healing. Like if we really, really care about helping people heal, this is something that's not, and maybe this is part of the problem. This doesn't cost money.

You can go out into nature. You can put your feet in the sand. I can go stand in the snow right now and look up at the sunshine and let it permeate my face. And that can be a spiritual experience. Standing on the edge of a cliff looking at a beautiful landscape can be a profound spiritual experience. But it doesn't cost anything.

Scott Britton (34:36.321)

Yeah.

Scott Britton (34:55.426)

Well, I definitely think there's certain certain actors in the in the ecosystem of mental health that have incentives for financial upside, right, then don't want some of these free things to be as pervasive and to be the solution.

Dr. Amy Robbins (35:13.019)

Right? So it's, go ahead.

Scott Britton (35:14.766)

You know, yeah, I guess I was just, I haven't, I definitely have another question I want to ask you. But one of the things I would reflect on that I appreciate is I think there are people, there is this all this skepticism and this why this won't work and blah, blah, blah. But there's also the practical like, okay, I get it, spiritual experiences are real, but like, how do I actually help people with this if I'm not a spiritual teacher?

And I think that's what you're offering with the spiritually informed therapy where it's like, there is this kind of like practicality to it. And I would be curious to learn, I know you said there's like seven modules, like what are you teaching people how to do as therapists who are interested in this stuff?

Dr. Amy Robbins (36:06.023)

Well, and I think that that's actually something that I've struggled with, and I can walk you through the modules as well, but is like, should this be a framework, like a prescriptive framework? But it really is more about thinking about how you are viewing the person in front of you and how you're understanding what they're presenting. So if I see you coming into my office as someone who's depressed and I have to treat your symptoms,

and get symptom reduction in order for you to move forward with your life, which is also very important, that might look very different than me approaching it from the view of let's understand, when was the first time you really started feeling off in this way? What was going on in your life when this happened? Have you ever had a spiritual experience that felt really profound? mean, clinicians aren't even asking that question. Do you have any?

spiritual practices, do you have any spiritual experiences? Do you have a religious practice? Most clinicians don't even know to ask these questions. And so even in setting up the framework like that, you're already opening the door to a different way of thinking, right? That you might also leave and think, wait, have I ever had a spiritual experience? I do remember when I was a kid and my grandma died and I remember feeling like she was sitting

next to me on my bed or you know what I had an imaginary friend when I was little and a lot of people report imaginary friends and we dismiss it as that's cute how do we not know that they're connecting with something because usually those imaginary friends stop around the age of six or seven which is when there also is a drop-off when people have remembered experienced past lives that they kind of stop remembering those as clearly anymore

So there's something in the brain development around the age of six or seven where you don't have access in the same way that you once did. so spiritually informed therapy isn't so much like here's the prescriptive framework, but rather here's how we want to be thinking about the work we're doing and maybe also thinking about when would there be an appropriate time to make a referral? If someone is in the throes of grief and they cannot move past

Scott Britton (38:06.37)

Hmm.

Dr. Amy Robbins (38:28.539)

the fact that they feel really guilty about what happened to their loved one. We can do a lot of work from a psychological perspective to process and work through that. But there might come a point where it would be, again, if someone's open to it and they've expressed that this is not about me or any other therapist putting forth their belief system on someone else, but rather opening a conversation of what's possible.

And so if someone says, if someone knows I'm spiritually informed, then they could potentially come to me and say, hey, I'm interested in seeing a medium. What do you think about that? And we can explore it together and understand what that would mean for them and understand how that might help them process their guilt and then understand what happens after a medium reading and how they can integrate the information that they perhaps received and use that to move themselves forward in their grief process.

So the question is, can these tools outside of what is the traditional therapeutic tools be other ways to help people heal? mean, Brian Weiss's work in past life regression in the field is very well known. I always call him the gateway drug to the spiritual space, because if people have not read Many Lives, Many Masters, he was a professor at

Yale and Columbia and was working in Miami and he said to a client, take me back to the first time that you experienced this anxiety and she went back to a past life. And so he spent the rest of his career trying to understand what was happening and explore these experiences with people. Excuse me, so if I have a client who's potentially stuck and we can't seem to understand in their current life what contributed to their stuckness,

Scott Britton (40:10.722)

Hmm.

Dr. Amy Robbins (40:19.569)

then maybe there's more work to be done there in a past life regression and maybe they could really gain some insight and then we can use that in the therapy. So that's how I sort of see this as like another adjunct tool, like an EMDR referral would be, like a psychedelic, you know, people who are pursuing psychedelics, which obviously are not legal, but if people want to experience psychedelics,

I don't want them to not talk about their psychedelic experience in the clinical space. That's a very powerful experience that probably gave them a lot of insight and transformation, and it's welcome to be discussed and processed and integrated. And so when I think about sort of my modules you asked about, we talk about the neuroscience of spirituality to get people really grounded in what is the science of this and why it matters.

We talk about spiritually transformative and mystical experiences. We talk about different spiritual practices, which include mediumship, which include past life regressions, astrology, numerology, all these things that people might be seeking out tarot, right? Lots of people go for tarot readings, and then it's like, okay, I had a reading, so now what? Well, let's bring that back into therapy, and let's talk about what the reading.

hold you and how we can use what you learned in the reading to move your life forward. We talk about spiritual bypassing, spiritual emergence, and spiritual emergencies. So really differentiating those pieces. Jung and his contribution to the spiritual space. Energy psychology, which I think is often, again, cut off. The Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology is an entire.

not a wing, what is it, like an organization of psychologists who are interested in the biofield and in energy and it's so interesting again, like why have we cut energy, which is the basis of who we are, out of the psychological conversation. When we are in conversation with another person,

Dr. Amy Robbins (42:28.965)

We get a sense for what their energy is, what they're feeling, what they're experiencing, what we're absorbing as a result of them. And as clinicians, we don't ever talk about how our energy is impacted by all these people that we see throughout the day. And the last is the cultural and ethical implications of bringing this into the work. So again, it's always super important to me that when we're talking about spirituality and anyone who's practicing this is doing it.

with the utmost of integrity because I think this space has been shunned for so long and people dismiss it as woo and new age and on the fringes and it can't be on the fringes anymore because I don't know about what you think but I don't think what we're doing is working currently.

Scott Britton (43:15.786)

It's definitely not working. We definitely need to shake things up a little bit. And I do think, you know, starting to culturally embrace consciousness, development and spirituality is, is working at the core of that shift. One of the stories I love is how you actually came up with, or I mean, I guess how you arrived at how to teach this stuff. And I would as a preface, you know, in my entrepreneurship land,

people always think that the answer is, that you need to figure it out. They're like, you just haven't worked hard enough or you haven't studied enough or you haven't talked to the right people. And that's why you don't have a solution to a problem. And when I heard about kind of the genesis of the clarity around spiritual formation, I was like, yes, like, that is a story I want to make sure we cover.

Dr. Amy Robbins (44:07.355)

Yeah, literally for probably two or three years, I knew that this was sort of brewing, this integration of spirituality and psychology. But I couldn't figure out quite what it needed to look like. for a time, I thought about working with someone else. And so we had several sessions where we brainstormed together. And I really, really struggled with what this could look like.

I probably have multiple Google Docs that say different iterations of it. And then I was in the shower, which is where my best thinking happened. And thinking always happens. It's where I get the most clarity, the most downloads. And it just came to me in a flash. It was like, it's spiritually informed therapy. Here's the seven modules. This is what it's going to look like. Go forth. And it was as clear as day what it needed to look like.

It's exactly what it is today. it's exactly those seven modules, the seven modules that I was downloaded were what needed to be taught. And that's how I knew, okay, like there was such an ease to it. And I think that this is what you're talking about is that when we're like trying to muscle our way into something, it always feels complicated. But when it's in alignment and it's exactly what we need to be doing, there's an ease and a flow to it. And it was like, okay.

Scott Britton (45:14.669)

Hmm.

Dr. Amy Robbins (45:30.343)

Here's what it is. And I was teaching another course at the time, and I still have that course, but this one is just blown up. And I have people now asking for spiritually informed therapists. They want to work with a therapist who's spiritually informed. And so it's been amazing. I just taught my second cohort, my first cohort I taught this summer. So this is very new, and it's just starting out. And people are starting to use this lingo of

I really want a spiritually informed therapist. I want someone who knows what you're talking about because I had this experience with a grandma when she died, or I have this experience with my husband, or I want to maintain a connection with my husband who's passed away, but I don't want someone telling me that that's pathological and I've not moved on from my grief. Because I think both things can be true. You can want that connection and you can move through your grief. They don't, again, you don't have to

Scott Britton (46:07.288)

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Amy Robbins (46:26.789)

You're not stuck because you still want to be connected to someone you've lost.

Scott Britton (46:32.6)

Did just a practical question like that downloaded it came through, was it just like, here are the seven modules or was it like this experience of like receiving complete information of like, like, okay, I just know exactly everything now. And now I just need to like go and actually like formalize it by like putting a pen to a paper.

Dr. Amy Robbins (46:56.101)

Yeah, it was the ladder. So it just came in and it was like, OK, get a piece of paper quick. And it just flowed out of me. And it's interesting because I had, so right before this happened, I think it was right before this happened. I've never told this before. So I was right before this. I spoke at the Mental Health America Conference with Lisa Miller, who clearly I'm obsessed with. I love her work.

Scott Britton (46:59.778)

Very cool.

Dr. Amy Robbins (47:22.731)

And I introduced her and we did like a panel, we did like a back and forth, I did a Q &A with her. And I wrote my speech, my intro to the speech the night before. And that was also something that got downloaded to me very clearly. And when I went back and read it and I opened up her book, The Awakened Brain.

Scott Britton (47:41.249)

Mmm.

Dr. Amy Robbins (47:47.905)

in the book, which I had read years ago, but definitely did not remember, she referred to spirituality and psychology the same exact way I did in the speech that I gave to her, which was two sides of the same coin. She talked about that in her book. And I just remember going back and reading that and being like, that's so...

Fascinating to me because clearly I wasn't conscious of having access to that information So how did I have access to that same language that she used? in her book in a in an opening that I gave to her talk and It's like those moments that I'm like what is happening here that we have access to more information Than our conscious minds are aware of or that no

Scott Britton (48:34.882)

Yeah.

Dr. Amy Robbins (48:41.039)

or that can even access. Like when we just allow what needs to come in to come in, we gain so much more information if we open ourselves up to the quantum space.

Thank

Scott Britton (48:55.904)

Yes, 1000 % yes. And I think when you have that understanding and recognition, you know, that's what becomes interesting is like the pursuit of, of learning how to play and occupy that space and have access to more information and, you know, not completely shun the old paradigm, but to expand it with this new, this new input as well.

Dr. Amy Robbins (49:20.901)

Yeah, and that's where I always say the fun is. The fun is in the space between those two spaces where you're not here, you're not there, you're a little bit of both.

Scott Britton (49:34.572)

Yep, yep. Well, Amy, this has been awesome. I want to give you an opportunity to share about your amazing podcast, all the other amazing things you're up to in the world for people that are excited to learn more about your.

Dr. Amy Robbins (49:36.454)

you

Dr. Amy Robbins (49:48.785)

Thank you. So my podcast is my baby, my fourth child, Life, Death, and the Space Between. It is literally a library. think I have over 450 episodes approaching that of all things spiritual, like anything from mediumship, near-death experiences, channeling, beings from other dimensions, like anything that I will go way out there on the podcast much further than I go out in my clinical work.

Scott Britton (50:13.038)

You

Dr. Amy Robbins (50:17.255)

If you're interested in any of that, that is all there. I'm also dr. Amy Robbins dot com. You can email me if you are interested in any of my courses. They're online. My spiritually informed therapy course is going to be launching again in January, end of January. So you want to get on the wait list for that. I have another course that I'm maybe going to reintroduce because so many people want spiritually informed therapy. And this course I created is sort of like a

It's like that, but for people who want to take it in a group. And also super active on Instagram at Dr. Amy Robbins. So anywhere else I'm not really active, even though you think I am. But Instagram is the place to find me.

Scott Britton (51:00.846)

Nice. We'll give you a follow on Insta. Well, thanks, Amy. This was a real pleasure and loving, you know, loving the podcast and all the work you're doing. So keep it up.

Dr. Amy Robbins (51:03.559)

Perfect.

Dr. Amy Robbins (51:10.651)

Thank you, Scott. You too. You're doing amazing work in this space too. So it's just great to know you and be in connection with you.

Scott Britton (51:19.79)

Thank