It was an honour to recently speak at the Jung Society of Melbourne about my book, Synchronicity: Empower your life with the gift of coincidence. I was stuck by the ongoing relevance of Jung’s concept of synchronicity given that he developed his ideas about synchronicity about 100 years ago. He based his ideas partly on his conversations with Einstein about relativity and time.
Many consider the notion of synchronicity to be pre-scientific, or superstitious, because the term implies that remarkably uncanny and meaningful coincidences result from more than mere chance. Ironically, it was another leading scientist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, who helped bring synchronicity to the world’s attention. He did so by encouraging Jung to write about it by offering to co-author a book with him that would detail Jung’s views on synchronicity.
When people experience synchronicity it can seem like a form of miracle energy. It is often associated with fortuitous events, personal discoveries, meaningful connections with others and an uplifting sense of being guided toward one’s destiny. I wrote on this subject as a mainstream psychologist to encourage others to acknowledge their own sacred and mystical experiences.
Such experiences are too often dismissed as not being rational enough to be fully acknowledged or meaningfully interpreted. Our Western culture tends to dismiss phenomena that cannot readily be explained in rational terms. We often act as though these phenomena to do not exist, however meaningful they may be in a person’s lived experience.
In western psychology, most forms of transpersonal and psychic phenomena are still treated as mere superstition. Modern psychology is limited, and indeed impoverished, by its lack of attention to spiritual and transpersonal phenomena. It is not as if such experiences are not relevant to people’s lives. On the contrary, as emphasized by the psychologist, Ken Pargament, many people’s lives are profoundly influenced by sacred moments.
Sacred moments may be indelibly printed in our minds, as strongly as the trauma memories of those suffering from post-traumatic stress. As Pargament highlights, such moments are like “un-PTSD” incidents, having just as much impact on our lives, but in an uplifting way. They can be most powerful in affirming our life direction, enhancing our sense of life purpose and meaning. Fortunately, there seem to be some early signs that western psychology is starting to be a little more open to acknowledging a spiritual dimension to life, based on the influence of those such as Ken Pargament.
In my book I describe many of my clients’ and my own experiences of sacred moments that manifested in the form of synchronistic experiences. One involved a client’s encounter with a black bird that saved his life by smashing into a window pane he was kneeling in front of, just as he was about to pull the trigger of a pistol placed in his mouth. The black bird’s dramatic intervention was an un-PTSD incident. My client will never forget it. Nor will I, having heard about it. It was numinous. It was archetypal. It was a miracle in his life. However, he would never have told me of this compelling incident which saved his life and shifted him to a purposeful and satisfying future, had he not known that I was writing a book on synchronicity. He previously thought I might have dismissed him as crazy if he told me that story.
I now say to other psychotherapists that if you are not hearing at least some stories like this, it is most likely because your clients are not telling you about them. They will censor their un-PTSD moments – their sacred moments – because they will not seem sufficiently rational to confide. We are only likely to hear of others’ mystical, psychic or transpersonal experiences if we are open to a transpersonal dimension ourselves. What I have found is that it is only since I have been more ready to tell others of my own transpersonal experiences and beliefs that I have regularly heard of them from others. My own experience as a therapist, and that of many of my clients in therapy, has become so much richer.
Chris Mackey is a clinical and counseling psychologist and Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society with 35 years’ psychotherapy experience in public and private mental health settings. He is the principal psychologist at Chris Mackey and Associates, his private psychology practice in Geelong.
Synchronicity: Empower your life with the gift of coincidence was released in the US, UK and Australia in late 2015. The German edition was released in October 2016. Many other articles on synchronicity and further information about the book is available at www.synchronicityunwrapped.com.au.
Do we place too much of an emphasis on rationality over intuition? Our education system places great emphasis on developing our capacities for collecting data, applying reason and using logic. These are very worthwhile means of gaining knowledge, but we generally pay much less attention to ways of developing our intuition, another form of understanding and guidance.
This is an underlying theme of the recent film, The Man Who Knew Infinity. It tells the tale of the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan who rose from poverty and obscurity to ultimately be acclaimed as one of the greatest mathematicians of the last century. However, when he arrived in Cambridge in 1914 at the invitation of his mentor, GH Hardy, he was initially viewed with extreme scepticism and disdain by many of his traditional peers.
Their negative reaction to Ramanujan was not so much based on racism, as their objection to his unconventional ways of thinking. He could not conventionally explain his reasoning that enabled him to derive formulae that solved complex mathematical problems. He was not so concerned about demonstrating conventional proofs for his mathematical expressions, as he felt that their validity could be demonstrated in other ways.
Most mathematicians would work by applying their understanding of various concepts to build a formula. That would be a rational process. By contrast, Ramanujan worked the other way around, drawing on intuition. He felt that he had received his understanding from something beyond him. The formulae came to him first, and their accuracy and significance were often revealed later. Ramanujan specifically attributed his intuitive understanding to a Goddess who “wrote on his tongue”, sometimes revealing solutions to him in visions and dreams. The contemporary mathematician, Ken Ono, described Ramanujan as more of a poet that a problem solver.
Strikingly, the potential application and meaning of many of Ramanujan’s formulae were most relevant to things that only became of interest well after his death. For example, he detailed “mock-theta functions”, extremely complex formulae that are relevant to current understanding of string theory in physics, and such phenomena as black holes.
Despite recognizing Ramanujan’s genius from their earliest correspondence, GH Hardy was himself perplexed by Ramanujan’s reticence to account for his findings using conventional proofs. No doubt their collaboration, which helped many such proofs to be discovered, consolidated the appreciation and usefulness of Ramanujan’s work. Nonetheless, it’s clear that Ramanujan had drawn on a most worthwhile method that was not well appreciated and accepted, even though it led to solutions being found that Hardy and others believed could not be derived in any conventional way.
As a psychologist, I have become especially interested in the under-recognized potential of intuition to solve problems or address challenges. I have now heard of countless examples where others acted on an intuition that defied any rational explanation, and benefited greatly by doing so. Sometimes it even saved their lives. I hear such examples much more often now that my clients and other acquaintances know that I have written a book on synchronicity.
This is one example. A friend, Ross, explained how he was once travelling on foot alongside a highway in Queensland and decided to sleep on one side of the road, sheltering beneath a bush. Soon after he lay down to go to sleep, he had a strong, inexplicable urge to move to the other side of the road. He was initially quite reluctant to do so in the windy conditions, as the ground on the other side of the highway was more damp, uneven and less sheltered. Minutes later, a passing car ran off the road through the bush where he been sheltering and then back onto the road again. It was as though he had received a message from something beyond him. He had learnt to respond to such messages before. If he had dismissed his intuitive urge to move as being irrational, he almost certainly would not be alive to tell his story.
Ross’s thought process might not have seemed rational, at least in the sense of being explicable in terms of reason or logic. But this did not make his insight less valid. Nor was it less than rational. Like Ramanujan, many of Ross’s previous intuitive insights had proved to be true in an uncanny and most advantageous way. He had many stories describing times when he had experienced favourable outcomes by acting on intuition. In many such situations, these outcomes might not be achieved through rational thinking alone.
For this reason, I refer to the examples of Ramanujan’s mathematical ability and Ross’s life-saving intuition as reflecting “the power of supra-rational thinking”. They are not so much irrational as beyond rational. Intuition is not a lesser form of thinking, but merely a different form. Undoubtedly, it is often important to apply our reason in solving problems. Science and formal knowledge in many areas would not likely have advanced anywhere near as far without such discipline. But this does not mean that we should ignore intuition, or disparage those who claim to find it especially useful.
In my view, the most powerful form of understanding will often apply reason and intuition at one and the same time. This partly involves appreciating our implicit, as well as explicit, thinking. But these stories suggest that at least some people might intuitively tap into an awareness that exists beyond themselves. We seem to be very good at developing our thinking that uses our brain like a computer. I think we are perhaps in our infancy in terms of learning to use our mind as a receiver. This may relate to processes of enlightenment. There seems little to lose in exploring this potential further – the power of supra-rational thinking.
In my book, Synchronicity: Empower your life with the gift of coincidence, I describe many examples of the benefits of drawing on deep intuition. Recognizing the potential relevance and meaning of remarkable coincidences in our lives seems to be an especially useful way of tapping into a deep intuitive realm. In my own life, and in that of many of my clients and others, it is one of the most useful ways of helping clarify our sense of life purpose and meaning. Synchronicity can point the way to our personal destiny. It can guide us toward enlightenment.
Chris Mackey is a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society with 35 years’ experience as a clinical and counselling psychologist. His book, Synchronicity: Empower your life with the gift of coincidence, was released internationally by Watkins Publishing in September 2015. His additional articles on synchronicity are posted at http://www.synchronicityunwrapped.com.au.
Mainstream psychology needs to do more to acknowledge a spiritual dimension in people’s lives. This includes a greater acknowledgement of mystical-sounding or paranormal experiences such as synchronicity, which involves strikingly uncanny and meaningful coincidences. Many people identify themselves as being spiritual, although not necessarily religious, as a result of having such experiences. Synchronicity, as with many other spiritual or transpersonal experiences, is appreciated more through intuition rather than rational thought processes. It seems that an overemphasis on rationality throughout Western culture, including throughout the field of psychology, has led to an underrecognition or underemphasis of the relevance and importance of synchronistic and other transpersonal phenomena in people’s lives.
The notion of synchronicity implies that some coincidences are not merely the result of chance or mere happenstance. They are so subjectively compelling and meaningful that the person experiencing them may view them as “meant to be”. They seem to point to a hidden pattern or order to the universe beyond what is readily manifest. Synchronistic experiences typically have a numinous or sacred quality, evoking a sense of fascination, wonder or awe. As a psychotherapist of 35 years’ experience, I have been struck by the increased extent to which my clients have divulged synchronistic experiences to me since they learned that I was writing a book on the subject. Not uncommonly, they have explained that they had not previously confided such experiences lest they appear psychotic. Here are two cases in point.
One client, a man in his early 30s, presented with depression in the context of severe alcohol dependence from his adolescent years combined with methamphetamine addiction. Soon after he learnt that I was writing about synchronicity, Eric explained that he had been feeling suicidal earlier in our contact. At one point he was kneeling before a window, crying, with the barrel of a 9mm pistol in his mouth. He slightly chipped a tooth on the barrel. He was about to pull the trigger. He suddenly noticed a black bird, like a raven, looking towards him from about 20 metres away. It suddenly took flight directly at him at full speed. It smashed into the window pane immediately in front of him and fell down dead, ‘like a kamikaze pilot’. Eric put down the pistol. He had a ‘brief moment of clarity’, believing that the black bird had sacrificed itself for him. The uncanny nature and timing of this event led him to feel he was meant to live. He soon booked himself into a rehabilitation program. He felt that the black bird incident had strengthened his motivation to the point where he was only one of two people he knew of from the rehabilitation facility who overcame his addictions.
Eric explained that he hadn’t mentioned the blackbird incident to me because it might have seemed like ‘borderline psychotic behaviour’. He continues to believe that this synchronistic experience saved his life and helped his excellent recovery. Directly acknowledging his transpersonal experience in the therapy setting has seemingly assisted his engagement with therapy goals, his life meaning and achievement in resisting any relapse. He has now successfully returned to full-time work, married, and fathered a child.
I increasingly hear of clients describing synchronistic experience in conjunction with other paranormal phenomena, such as having a dream or vision that anticipates an event that occurs soon afterward. The following synchronistic experience involved a ghostly encounter.
Diana, a woman in her early 40’s, was looking for direction in her life after leaving a marriage marked by emotional and physical abuse. She had a sense that she might somehow receive guidance for her future path from her ancestors. One day, she spent hours trying to research her family tree, but gave up in frustration as she found nothing useful. She nonetheless prayed that she would come across some useful information about her ancestors.
As Diana was in her bathroom preparing for bed, she was startled by a vision of a stooped old man. He was quaintly dressed in clothes of a former era. He looked at her and said, “the information you require you will have in the morning”. He then vanished. When she awoke, despite wondering whether it was just a hallucination, the striking nature of this encounter led her to resume her research. Within half an hour she came across completely unexpected evidence of a particularly well-educated and accomplished branch of her family contrasting with her own very modest educational and socioeconomic background. This markedly boosted her belief that she might be capable of pursuing further study at a point when she was at a crossroads in life. Despite also raising two young children under adverse circumstances, she was able to not only successfully apply for tertiary study, but to get very good grades, all the while boosted by the numinous and synchronistic quality of this ghostly encounter.
Diana went on to describe many other examples of synchronistic premonitions, and described many confirmatory examples of her intuitive insights. She summed up synchronicity as “the universe telling you that you are getting warmer”. Such anecdotes are consistent with my own view that synchronistic experiences help guide us to our optimal life path, like a “tick from the universe” affirming that we are on the right track.
There should be scope to acknowledge such incidents in the therapy setting, given their impact on someone’s life. However, I suspect that they are rarely disclosed. I suspect that most psychologists would be little prepared to meaningfully deal with such revelations, as there would be minimal reference to such experiences in most mainstream psychology courses.
It is nonetheless understandable that spiritual and paranormal phenomena are largely neglected in mainstream psychology. The field is established on a scientific foundation: we are meant to objectively research hypotheses using replicable methods. However, this is not the full story, as we also wish to be able to acknowledge and explore the full range of human experience. Any psychological approach that leaves out some of the most subjectively relevant or important things in people’s life experience would be unduly limited. Strict behaviourism could only ever advance so far.
In my view, positive psychology is a field which is the most promising in exploring broader dimensions to people’s lives, including spirituality, whilst still adopting a considerable degree of scientific rigour. Positive psychology is a science of wellbeing in that it looks to objective empirical support for any interventions proposed to improve people’s mental health and wellbeing. Positive psychology research has recently highlighted the objectively demonstrated benefits of spiritual beliefs or practices for people’s wellbeing. These benefits include increased longevity, lesser alcohol and drug use, reduced health costs and greater resilience in adverse situations.
Synchronicity relates directly to the “PERMA” model of positive psychology, as outlined by its founder, Martin Seligman. He emphasized five domains as being integral to psychological wellbeing. These include positive emotions, engagement in activities and roles, positive relationships, personal meaning and accomplishment. Anything that is objectively demonstrated to enhance these aspects of our life experience is consistent with positive psychology. Eric and Diana’s stories illustrate the potential beneficial, even profound, impact of synchronistic experiences in each of these domains.
The positive psychology field is now more explicitly incorporating spiritual themes related to life purpose and meaning. The goal is to draw on the best in ourselves whilst contributing to something beyond ourselves. This has led to an increasing acceptance in the positive psychology literature for such terms as “the sacred” or pursuing one’s “calling”. This is not altogether surprising as early theoretical work in this field acknowledged the influence of such luminaries as William James, Abraham Maslow and Carl Jung (who coined the term synchronicity) who were all strongly interested in transpersonal phenomena.
It is only recently that I have felt emboldened to present on the phenomenon of synchronicity at scientifically based psychology conferences, including at the recent world congress on positive psychology in Orlando, Florida. In the 21st-century, we are becoming more open to consider more intuitive and creative ways of thinking and perceiving the world whilst nonetheless aiming to objectively explore what impact they might have on our wellbeing.
Synchronicity: Empower your life with the gift of coincidence I have set out to incorporate theory, anecdotes and personal and client examples to offer a 21st century take on the legacy of Carl Jung, who so intriguingly introduced us to the concept of synchronicity sixty years ago. He first wrote about synchronicity in a book co-written with Wolfgang Pauli, a father of quantum mechanics. As their collaboration showed, just because something sounds mystical does not mean it is inconsistent with a scientific mindset.
Chris Mackey is a clinical and counselling psychologist and Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society with 35 years’ psychotherapy experience in public and private mental health settings. He is the principal psychologist at Chris Mackey and Associates, his private psychology practice in Geelong.
Chris has presented at numerous national and international scientific conferences over the past 20 years on such topics as the assessment and treatment of psychological trauma and the evaluation of effectiveness of psychological therapy for anxiety and depression. Chris has a particular interest in promoting more optimistic approaches to mental health, including positive psychology, about which he has presented regular free public talks in Geelong over the past ten years. He has been fascinated in synchronicity throughout his career as well as in his everyday life, leading him to choose this topic for his first book, Synchronicity: Empower Your Life with the Gift of Coincidence. His practice’s website provides extensive information about a wide range of mental health issues (see www.chrismackey.com.au).
“A mood of universal destruction and renewal…has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos – the right momentfor a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science….So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human.” – C. G. Jung
What are the deep stirrings in the collective psyche of the West? Can we discern any larger patterns in the immensely complex and seemingly chaotic flux and flow of our age? Influenced by the depth psychology tradition founded a century ago by Freud and Jung, and especially since the 1960s and the radical increase in psychological selfconsciousness that era helped mediate, the cultural ethos of recent decades has made us well aware how important is the psychological task of understanding our personal histories. We have sought ever deeper insight into our individual biographies, seeking to recover the often hidden sources of our present condition, to render conscious those unconscious forces and complexes that shape our lives. Many now recognize that same task as critical for our entire civilization.
What individuals and psychologists have long been doing has now become the collective responsibility of our culture: to make the unconscious conscious. And for a civilization, to a crucial extent, history is the great unconscioushistory not so much as the external chronology of political and military milestones, but as the interior history of a civilization: that unfolding drama evidenced in a culture’s evolving cosmology, its philosophy and science, its religious consciousness, its art, its myths. For us to participate fully and creatively in shaping our future, we need to better understand the underlying patterns and influences of our collective past. Only then can we begin to grasp what forces move within us today, and perhaps glimpse what may be emerging on the new millennial horizon.
I focus my discussion here on the West, but not out of any triumphalist presumption that the West is somehow intrinsically superior to other civilizations and thus most worthy of our attention. I do so rather because it is the West that has brought forth the political, technological, intellectual, and spiritual currents that have been most decisive in constellating the contemporary world situation in all its problematic complexity. For better or worse, the character of the West has had a global impact, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Yet I also address the historical evolution of Western consciousness because, for most of us reading these words, this development represents our own tradition, our legacy, our ancestral cultural matrix. Attending carefully and critically to this tradition fulfills a certain responsibility to the past, to our ancestors, just as attempting to understand its deeper implications fulfills a responsibility to the future, to our children.
A paradox confronts every sensitive observer about the West: On the one hand, we cannot fail to recognize a certain dynamism, a brilliant, heroic impulse, even a nobility, at work in Western civilization and in Western thought. We see this in the great achievements of Greek philosophy and art, for example, or in the Sistine Chapel and other Renaissance masterpieces, in the plays of Shakespeare, in the music of Bach or Beethoven. We see it in the brilliance of the Copernican revolution, with the tremendous cosmological and even metaphysical transformation it has wrought in our civilization’s world view. We see it in the unprecedented space flights of a generation ago, landing men on the moon, or, more recently, in the spectacular images of the vast cosmos coming from the Hubbell telescope and the new data and new perspectives these images have brought forth. And of course the great democratic revolutions of modernity, and the powerful emancipatory movements of our own era, vividly reflect this extraordinary dynamism and even nobility of the West.
Yet at the same time we are forced to admit that this very same historical tradition has caused immense suffering and loss, for many other cultures and peoples, for many people within Western culture itself, and for many other forms of life on the planet. Moreover, the West has played the central role in bringing about a subtly growing and seemingly inexorable crisis on our planet, a crisis of multidimensional complexity: ecological, political, social, economic, intellectual, psychological, spiritual. To say our global civilization is becoming dysfunctional scarcely conveys the gravity of the situation. For humankind and the planet, we face the possibility of great catastrophe. For many forms of life on the Earth, that catastrophe has already taken place. How can we make sense of this tremendous paradox in the character and meaning of the West?
If we examine many of the intellectual and cultural debates of our time, particularly near the epicenter of the major paradigm battles today, it is possible to see looming behind them two fundamental interpretations, two archetypal stories or metanarratives, concerning the evolution of human consciousness and the history of the Western mind. In essence these two metanarratives reflect two deep myths in the collective psycheand let us define myths here not as mere falsehoods, nor as collective fantasies of an arbitrary sort, but rather as profound and enduring patterns of meaning that inform the human psyche and constellate its diverse realities. These two great myths in the collective psyche structure our historical selfunderstanding in very different ways. One could be called the myth of progress, the other the myth of the fall.
Richard Tarnas featured in the film ‘Time is Art’ and is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he currently teaches. Born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland, of American parents, he grew up in Michigan, where he received a classical Jesuit education. In 1968 he entered Harvard, where he studied Western intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology, graduating with an A.B. cum laude in 1972. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with Stanislav Grof, Joseph Campbell, Gregory Bateson, Huston Smith, and James Hillman, later serving as Esalen’s director of programs and education. He received his Ph.D. from Saybrook Institute in 1976 with a dissertation on LSD psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and spiritual transformation. From 1980 to 1990, he wrote The Passion of the Western Mind, a narrative history of Western thought from the ancient Greek to the postmodern which became a best seller and continues to be a widely used text in universities throughout the world. In 2006, he published Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, which received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network in the UK. Formerly president of the International Transpersonal Association, he is on the Board of Governors of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. In addition to his teaching at CIIS, he has been a frequent lecturer at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and gives many public lectures and seminars in the U.S. and abroad.
Synchronicity relates to meaningful coincidences that occur with such uncanny timing that they seem to go well beyond chance. To the uninitiated, this may result from someone looking out for such coincidences, or merely responding to the human tendency to find patterns in what we perceive. To those who have experienced striking synchronicity on innumerable occasions, it is ultimately because some coincidences occur with such uncanny timing that it is objectively clear that they do in fact go beyond chance. Mainstream psychology, based on a scientific approach, accepts a hypothesis as valid if it is backed up by research outcomes that have less than one in 20 chance of being obtained by chance. Some synchronistic experiences, including psychic predictions that have been proved accurate, occur with a probability of less than 1 in a billion according to scientists, including Dean Radin, who was employed by the U.S. government to explore such phenomena. This was also demonstrated in the early experiments of JW Rhine, cited by Carl Jung, and the more recent work of the esteemed psychologist, Darryl Bem.
Extensive evidence for these contentions is documented in my book, Synchronicity: Empower Your Life with the Gift of Coincidence. The development of the capacity to experience synchronicity on a regular basis is related not so much to superstition or gullibility, as some presume, but of processes of enlightenment related to more advanced stages of human development. Mainstream psychology fails to recognize this owing to its general lack of capacity to appreciate spiritual or transpersonal phenomena, as a result of its overly reductionistic paradigm. This is to its cost. The term “psychology” etymologically means “study of the soul”. There is not much soul in mainstream psychology, and even less in modern psychiatry, a field that is even more reductionistic.
This is a core failing of these disciplines. To many people, notions of soul are as important as any other notion when considering one’s life in totality, or making sense of one’s life path. If mainstream psychology and psychiatry aspire to being key disciplines in understanding the human mind, then how can they exclude conceptions of soul? I believe this modern disconnection of psychology and psychiatry from their etymological roots contributes to disruptions in many people’s sense of connection to others and to themselves at a deeper spiritual level. Around 100 years ago, Jung suggested neurosis often resulted from detachment from spiritual experience. He lamented this, especially as he believed that rather than transpersonal beliefs being unscientific, such perspectives were more consistent with modern physics than conceptions that exclude notions of connectedness between internal consciousness and external matter.
When it comes to the intricate and powerful connections between our inner and external reality, Jung felt this was most clearly revealed in the phenomenon of synchronicity. Synchronicity: Empower your life with the gift of coincidence offers a 21st-century take on such ideas.
Chris Mackey is a clinical and counseling psychologist and Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society with 35 years’ psychotherapy experience in public and private mental health settings. He is the principal psychologist at Chris Mackey and Associates, his private psychology practice in Geelong.
Chris has presented at numerous national and international scientific conferences over the past 20 years on such topics as the assessment and treatment of psychological trauma and the evaluation of effectiveness of psychological therapy for anxiety and depression. Chris has a particular interest in promoting more optimistic approaches to mental health, including positive psychology, about which he has presented regular free public talks in Geelong over the past ten years. He has been fascinated in synchronicity throughout his career as well as in his everyday life, leading him to choose this topic for his first book, Synchronicity: Empower Your Life with the Gift of Coincidence. His practice’s website provides extensive information about a wide range of mental health issues (see www.chrismackey.com.au).
