JUMPING IN
•Play and Exploration
•Inner Child
•Slowing Down
•Story and Metaphor
•Dialogue
•Space and Place
This set of streams consists of the core skills set that a competent therapeutic practitioner needs to build. In the Psychology and Counselling degree at the University of Roehampton (of which I am the Programme Convener) the first year introduces key theory, but focuses on building counselling skills through practice and self-exploration and reflecting on these core processes: before they happen, during and afterwards.
These streams need to be developed in the counsellor during training – so that they can bring a real awareness of them within themselves to their meetings with clients. More experienced practitioners will find they can continue deepening their appreciation of these streams throughout their career. Nervous beginners tend to move unconsciously towards the polar opposites – trying to be very serious and grown-up rather than playful and in touch with the inner child; rushing too fast instead of slowing down and really paying attention to phenomena. So it seems only right that in training and supervising them we must encourage the embrace of these streams to act as a counter-balance.
The ‘Jumping In’ streams also create much of the joy and spontaneity for those of us doing therapy – they keep us fresh, alive and on our toes; the best antidote to burn-out and slipping into repetitive models frameworks is to enjoy what we do – and the playful, exploratory mindset which is in no particular hurry is a great way to keep enjoyment alive.
This captures one particularly sweet paradox of situated action: in most models-led templates of the world, once you have mastered the rudiments you can forget them and move on to the more complicated (and interesting) stuff. In reality what happens is that the ‘simple’ stuff slips into our unconscious, implicit mind and happens without us needing to think about it. The cardiologist engaged in open heart surgery still has to breathe and digest their breakfast – luckily for the patient they don’t need to consciously focus on this and lose concentration on the operation.
In psychotherapy (or any form of performance in an intersubjective field) this is only partly true. Certainly things become somewhat more automatic, our implicit mind and its tacit knowledge (what I call the well) supports us but we may still need to wrestle with the leap of faith before we walk through the door, remain highly aware of the journey with each new client, and strive to keep the sense of exploratory play alive with our five-hundredth client as with our fifth. In other words the streams do not diminish in importance as a resource as we become more experienced. We simply get more comfortable with them, they really get under our skin, settle deep into our practitioner bones and we can draw upon them more easily. Over time the tapestry gets richer, more detailed and more complex – combining play, empathy, improvisation and maturity, for example, might mean each stream bringing balance and subtlety to the others. From the outside it looks effortless – a beginner might look at us and feel they can never achieve this for themselves – they feel frozen by looking at the whole picture rather than staying with the experience of sewing each colourful thread.
If you are near the beginning, or teach those that are, or simply need reminding of this – these first steps are for you.
STREAM 5: PLAY AND EXPLORATION
The major task of life is to remain actively creative, and that can only come from the ability to be in touch with the playful child deep in the personality…to hold onto the freshness of the child’s encounter with the world.
Heinz Kohut (1981)
Children delight in the mysterious, the unknown, the fresh and the new. Playing doesn’t need to have a concrete goal or a certificate at the end of it. Indeed if it is too structured, rule-bound or controlled it loses its joyous and spontaneous nature. It is enjoyed and loved for its own sake. It is absorbing; you jump in and immerse yourself, forgetting what is going on around you. Do you remember as a child losing all track of time when you were playing and having Mum or Dad come to call you? Play is also incredibly creative and about as far away from the state of anxiety as it is possible to get. Humour is often built into the playing process. It must be fun. These are fantastic qualities for any therapist to model for their clients. If you’ve lost touch with it as you’ve grown up now is the time to start getting it back. Many of us do lose touch with our sense of playfulness as life progresses and pressures and responsibilities increase.
At times it can feel as though professional practice is designed to drain every drop of playfulness out of us – our training is long, hard, stressful and expensive; we have to prove our mastery of theory, technique and ourselves in therapy. We must abide by codes of ethics, professionally represent the Health Care Professions Council (British Psychological Society, United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapy, British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy etc.), maintain liability insurance, undergo supervision, continuing professional development, perhaps move into teaching, research, practice supervision or management responsibilities. And that’s before we throw in the other adult weights a modern, professional person must carry: mortgages, utility bills, perhaps childcare, rows with our partners, commuting and on and on…is it any wonder that the childlike state of simply playing frequently slips out of our grasp?
Despite the huge pressures which will continue to deplete us we must try our best to develop this stream within ourselves – in life generally but especially in therapy space. Remember discovery and exploration lie at the heart of situated practice – and playing is a super-rapid method of getting to that state. Play can produce a sense of ‘hyper focus’, or what Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikzentmihalyi 1988) calls absorption in ‘Optimal Flow’.
Csikszentmihalyi’s flow model Adapted from Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Csikszentmihalyi, I. (eds) (1988) Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
He posits the idea that when both skill level and challenge level are at their highest we can enter ‘optimal flow’. This is when we can seem expert to someone watching us undertake this activity; it is also, happily enough, when we enjoy ourselves the most. For beginners in any field it is only natural that, when we are possessed of a relatively low skill level if the level of challenge shoots up our anxiety level usually goes with it. We can marvel at the experienced practitioner smoothly inhabiting a state of optimal flow and feel terribly discouraged. Small children playing rarely feel such anxiety because they are not concerned with ‘getting it right’ but with enjoying the experience. Adults who try and make things too structured or rule-bound will suck all of the joy and interest out of a playful four-year-old. Instead the adults simply need to create a safe, permission-giving space in which the child’s natural desire for exploration and imaginative play can unfold.
This absorption in ground-level activity means that the mind–body unity is gradually intensified to a near perfect, total, ‘effortless’ co-ordination. No pauses, no hesitancy, no need to stop and think or analyse and deliberate. Athletes call this ‘getting into the zone’. An orchestra, playing their socks off, displays this beautifully. ‘Everything comes together’ and it all flows, seamlessly.
A football team where every member knows where others are in the space, and moves the ball magically to set up the scoring of goals, is also using this situated intelligence. So too is a good therapist, really in contact with the nuanced, subtle, hidden ‘inner’ movements of their client – as are humans any time they communicate with one another well. Creativity also taps this intelligence. It is neither the modern, atomistic ‘intellect’, nor even a more imaginative, speculative ‘reason’. It scans the world both philosophically and realistically at once. It can only separate these later, in reflection after experience and action; but in experience and action, it encounters these two things as woven together in the way Heidegger described existential situatedness and embodiment in his landmark book, Being and Time (1962 [1927]).
So Discovery plays, gets absorbed in flow, and enters a trance-like focus. This too is required if we are to learn the way to be in a situation, in order to find the way through.
At times it will be hard to be in that play state. Sometimes the consequences of our next step in the terrain may feel too heavy. When we ‘realise’ what our experience is telling us – sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a scream – we are shown an energy field where all the participants in it are mutually influencing each other, and are therefore inherently bound up with one another. I can look at you in order to experience nothing, and thus treat you as if you were nothing to do with me, and I will feel isolated. But as soon as I let myself experience you, it is a very different story. Who and what you are, your energy, goes into who and what I am, my energy, and just by being in the world you change my being in the world, because your presence is linked to my presence. It is thus neither objective, nor subjective. Rather, it is interpersonal, intersubjective (intersubjectivity is a stream we will explore more fully later in this book).
Reflection Point
PLAY
•The next time you are near a two-year-old just absorb how they encounter the world: fresh, excited, awestruck and emotional – curiosity knows no limits and the smallest things can be fascinating to them.
•Think about how you lost track of time when playing as a child – what did that state feel like?
•How often do you get to feel like that now?
So in therapy, as in life, the space between therapist and client becomes more productive, more healing when it retains an element of playfulness within it. Much of the content we deal with in our profession is heavy, pained and problematic. Our approach to the craft of therapy need not be: it can retain humour whilst honouring seriousness, it can play and explore rather than rushing ahead to an unsatisfactory, neat ending. Vitally it should create a place where the child within the client, both the parts that were wounded and the part that is magical, spontaneous and alive, feels able to emerge and bring back to life that sense of playful creativity which so many of us find slipping through our fingers like sand as the onerous duties and trials of adult life press forward.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
PLAY
If play is so vital why not have two-year-olds as psychotherapists?
Because another of the streams – balance – is vital here. The playful child in the therapist must be balanced with the containing adult.
For example, even after years of practice sometimes my absorption in the moment or my immersion in the world of this client means I lose track of time. Sticking to time boundaries is still challenging for me.
So the playful therapist contains a paradox – play must be present but cannot stay in charge; it must be contained.
Donald Winnicott, in his 1971 book, Playing and Reality, described the ideal therapy situation as one in which the therapist assists the client to re-enter a state of playfulness which could help them to transform painful aspects of the self into more creative and engaged ones. This process is deeply linked to the creativity stream which appears shortly. Marks-Tarlow (2012) outlines some of the key functions play performs for children including brain growth, self-regulation of both feelings and behaviour in social groups, building imaginative and symbolic representation capabilities, practising meaning-making and enhancing language and narrative skills (p.88). Primarily children play because it is great fun and yet all these vital skills are being promoted under the radar whilst they are enjoying themselves. Adults who believe that play is wasted time and that the only proper learning takes place in schoolrooms or by doing homework are horribly mistaken. Knowing, as we do, that the refiguring of some of the neural networks in the client’s right brain can occur in longer-term relational psychotherapy (see Badenoch 2008 and Montgomery 2013) there are wholly valid ‘scientific’ reasons why counselling space can embrace playfulness.
To play is to explore, to try out, to become absorbed and to enter a sense of timeless flow – the situated practitioner needs all these to flourish. To really engage in play and to assist the client to do so we need to embrace the inner child – and that is the next stream.
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The Key to PLAY is letting go of expectation and allowing oneself to be absorbed in the here-and–now (just keep one eye on the clock!) |
Classical psychoanalysis calls them defence mechanisms: denial, displacement, intellectualisation, humour, repression and so on. Over the years I have come to call these defence mechanisms survival strategies. When we arrive into our families as babies, toddlers and small children we are wholly dependent on the adults around us to feed and clothe us, to keep us warm and not hurt us physically nor, it is hoped, hurt us too much emotionally. It takes a good while for us to develop even small competencies in self-regulation, walking, talking and acting independently. The human child is fairly helpless for a remarkably long time when compared to most other animals.
I often joke with my students that a child born into a difficult family cannot simply announce that they can no longer bear it, they are moving down the street, please forward my pocket money via my solicitors. This usually gets a laugh – but in reality it isn’t funny. The family – or the individual – we get, we are largely stuck with until we are grown up – and even then we may carry them internally for the rest of our life. Unless they seriously abuse us nobody else will intervene (and sadly not even then in many cases). The growing child has to learn to make do with what they have, to work with the material to hand. In other words, the child has to largely adapt to what is expected of them. Parents make it clear in thousands of very subtle (and sometimes less subtle) ways what they want the child to be, how much they can cope with, whether they feel over or under-stimulated by this child. Is this child truly loved, accepted as who they are, are they made to feel welcome in this world? In object relations theory when the answers to those questions are largely yes, the child is said to be receiving ‘good mirroring’. In person-centred theory we talk about ‘conditions of worth’. When the child looks into the face of their primary caregiver (in most instances, mother) do they really see what Donald Winnicott called ‘the gleam in the mother’s eye’? This gleam cannot be faked. Are they pleased to see us, do we sense affection, joy and pleasure from them at our very presence? As in any other relationship do we feel wanted, accepted, valued and welcomed? Am I a worthwhile person, am I loved? And since this is our very first experience of a growing relationship the responses we get from our first ‘other’ matter enormously in shaping how we see ourselves and whether we experience the world as a largely hostile, cold and attacking place or one that is broadly warm, safe and accepting of who we are. My sense of me is largely taken in from how I am seen by my first ‘others’.
Parts of us may seem to arouse envy, hostility, distance or coldness in this other person, particularly when we start to really become aware of ourselves as a separate individual. We may realise that these parts seem to provoke negative feelings in others, whilst different aspects of us bring about positive responses. It’s only natural that most children tend to play up the parts evoking positive responses whilst trying to hide parts that elicit mostly negative responses. I sometimes say to clients that we shove the bits of the self that the world seems to like out to the front of the stage to keep the audience clapping. Meanwhile the parts that we are scared of, ashamed of or feel uncomfortable with lurk behind the curtains, only emerging when we are angry, stressed or alone – usually making us love them even less. Nobody who is psychologically well enjoys having the crowd jeer and boo at their performance. And we all perform the self to the world audience every day.
What the child imagines may be something intrinsically broken in them, may be driven by the angry negative emotions of the parents. In the child’s mind they may feel responsible for a mummy that seems to be frequently unhappy or a daddy that goes away all the time. A small child will try to work out: what is it I’m doing that causes unhappy mummy or abandoning daddy to show up in my world? Experiencing an unhappy or angry or distant or chaotic mum, or a depressed or violent or critical, preoccupied dad is far less preferable than the mother or father who may be more kind, tolerant, loving and present. The child tries to maximise the good parental presence and minimise the bad.
Some of us had a broadly good childhood and the ways in which we were shaped, wounded, damaged or pressurised by those around us may have been relatively subtle. This doesn’t mean they don’t have very profound effects on our personality even if to the rest of the world it may have seemed things were broadly all right. Many of these clients, when they first come into psychotherapy, will report enthusiastically that they had a positive, happy, good childhood and cannot understand why they now react in certain ways as adults when they had nothing but joy and pleasure and happiness when they were little.
The other group of children experienced wounding in childhood that is all too obvious. Parents may have been hostile, cruel, abandoning – they may have died or the family may have broken up. The child may have been physically, emotionally and sexually abused or constantly neglected. The parents may have been addicted or drunk. They may have been working out the dark wounding of their own childhoods on this vulnerable baby. Here the survival strategies the child had to adopt may have been more severe and taken place much earlier. In films of mother–child attachment behaviour in the early months of the baby’s life we can see such gross defensive responses to over-intrusive or highly anxious mothers. The baby will turn their head away and remove all eye contact. If the mother’s attunement to the baby’s behavioural cues is especially poor the infant may do this much of the time. They cannot fight (or flight), so they freeze, they disassociate from this unpleasant stimulus. If the young girl has to learn to fight, or to be angry and hostile in order to survive, that’s what she will do. If the young boy has to learn to be quiet and compliant and give the parent what they want in order to survive that’s what he will do too. Children who could never predict when Mum or Dad might be cruel, violent or distant towards them have a particularly tough time.
I keep a very close watch for the survival strategies carried from childhood. Not all of these will be maladaptive – some ways of self-soothing or of coping under emotional pressure can be quite functional (learning to walk away from conflict, learning to calm ourselves down and take time-out or asking for what we need from others). These adaptive survival strategies usually lead to things improving or being less painful than they were before. They certainly don’t damage things further or increase the level of conflict with other people, leaving us feeling worse off than when we started.
However, it is the negative, maladaptive survival strategies that usually bring the person into therapy in the first place. What may have been appropriate for a rather naive and limited child to adopt as survival strategies may not work so well for an adult. Because these strategies have been in place for a while, they are often embedded and largely unconscious and they tend to be quite sticky and difficult to shift. I often liken it to helping a soldier realise that they are no longer fighting on the battlefield and that the war is over. The simplistic weapons that were needed to survive childhood must be put down.
Initially many clients are sceptical of the whole idea of the inner child. During our very busy adult lives we strive to be grown-up, juggling heavy responsibilities around work, relationships, finances and often children. Usually by the time they come to psychotherapy something in this ongoing stressful plate spinning is breaking down: anxiety, depression, relationship problems, feeling empty, loneliness or a loss of meaning in life, may have started to overwhelm the person and make them feel sad, lost, frightened or angry.
So when I first mention the inner child some see it as a Californian new-age sort of idea, particularly men. Indeed I was dubious myself when I first came across this notion 20 years ago. Over this time I have become deeply convinced that the living presence of the inner child inside the adult really shapes much of our emotional health, well-being and happiness in life (or lack thereof). The inner child represents a storehouse of memories, feelings, beliefs, unprocessed trauma and survival strategies that were shaped and adapted during very early childhood and then nuanced, rehearsed and embedded during adolescence and early adulthood.
INNER CHILD
•Take a moment to recall what your life was like when you were five years old.
•Where did you live? Whom did you love? Who really loved you? Which parts of life were working? What may have caused your little one sadness, exclusion, fear or pain?
•What aspects of that small child still live on inside you?
•Your inner child is more likely to show up when you are disregulated: lonely, angry, scared, tired or ecstatic, excited or falling in love.
•What does it feel like when they do?
We know within ourselves when the inner child is present. There are two main forms – firstly, the wounded child, who carries the difficult and painful feelings, memories and beliefs of specific parts of the self that have become arrested. When the child was unable to cope psychologically with what was going on around them they may have dissociated from, repressed or tried to escape from the emotional pain. Powerful experiences of feeling rejected, angry, mocked, unlovable or physically unsafe may have overwhelmed the child’s nervous system and brain functioning, and defence mechanisms (survival strategies), ways of adapting to this difficult environment, started to emerge. There is now a huge amount of work on the long-term effects on the child of being exposed to complex trauma with which every practitioner needs to familiarise themselves (Badenoch 2008; Cozolino 2010; de Zulueta 2006; Montgomery 2013; Sanderson 2013).
The second part of the inner child is extraordinarily important: the wonder child or the magical child. This inner child expresses joy, happiness, creativity, play and love. They love to explore, to get silly, to be playful, get creativity flowing and to be the receiver of lots of warm admiration, love and support. For those of us carrying deep wounding, the wonder child may have been repressed by adults, or learned to suppress itself in response to what they believed the adults around them wanted. Many clients that come to my consulting room have really lost touch with the wonder child within them. Real feelings of spontaneity, joy, playfulness and wonder are often very flat and sometimes non-existent. If we think of the child inside them as being the one driving the car of their life, more often than not it’s the wounded child at the wheel of the car rather than the wonder child. No wonder they are stuck in negative thinking, beliefs and responses – which can lead to them becoming ill, unhappy and despondent and losing hope.
My job as a psychotherapist, in a nutshell, is to lead this person through a corrective relational experience whereby the wounded inner child can heal and the wonder child can be released and start to take more positive control of their life. The children that emerge into the consulting room vary enormously: some say nothing and try to hide. Others cling to the adult/parental part of the client’s psyche, don’t want to let them go and can barely stop talking because they have so much to say after so many years of being silenced. During guided imagery work one woman who was an alcoholic and had an alcoholic mother found her six-year-old girl sitting in a cellar, completely bare of furnishings and toys, yet filled with empty wine bottles.
Another client had arrived in therapy with deep obsessive-compulsive issues and severe worries about her expression of sexuality, and found her child at the age of four sitting very consciously with her legs drawn together, because her extremely religious mother had told her that what was between her legs was disgusting and never to be shown to the world. This particular lady was extraordinarily shocked and surprised to find that her inner child was expressing this fear which had been very secret.
Some clients feel loving protectiveness towards their internal children straightaway. Others struggle to feel any connection to, or compassion for, that small child. The first inner child we meet is usually between two and eight. I hear clients aiming vicious negative self-talk towards themselves and their inner child. Most do this unconsciously and when it’s pointed out to them many are horrified. One man who was having issues with his partner, and failing to perform sexually in the way that he wanted, was totally condemning of himself as a man and often described himself as pathetic, useless and awful.
I sometimes ask the client to imagine that three or four-year-old self sitting in a small chair next to my therapist chair. I ask them to repeat the same harsh negative self-talk at the child. In most cases they struggle to do this and cannot even imagine repeating such things to any child, let alone their own. They find it hard to imagine they are capable of doing this. And yet in many cases for 20, 30, 40 years or more there has been a daily diet of this bile directed towards the child part of the self. Many of these bad messages will have originated outside the child, but have been internalised so successfully and rehearsed so often down the years they have come to feel like the secret truth about the self. It makes living inside their skin and their mind a tough place to be.
Now these exercises are not intended to make the client feel guilty or bad about what they’ve been doing – there is more than enough of that washing around already. However, it’s important that they come to realise what psychological, emotional and physical impacts they are having on themselves by continuing to engage in this constant negative self-talk abuse and self-degradation. An effective way to manage this is to invite the client, if they can, to get hold of a photograph (or photographs) depicting themselves at that inner child age and bring it to therapy. We look at it together and see how they respond to that child. Frequently we find that powerful memories emerge during such exercises.
I usually encourage them to keep this photograph visible in their home for a while. When they catch themselves engaging in this negative talk I suggest that they look at the innocence and beauty of that child’s face, and remind themselves that negative self-talk can only be damaging. Many clients report that it reminds them how vulnerable they are and how much they need compassion from themselves rather than constant hostility – much Buddhist and Mindfulness practice focuses on such loving-kindness meditations towards self and others. We can gradually learn to treat ourselves more gently and compassionately if we practise holding the inner child in our conscious awareness. If I find myself being very harsh, or driving myself too hard, feeling too guilty or blaming myself too much – I take time to remind myself that this little fellow is still alive inside of me. And it’s my responsibility to take care of him in the best way I can. This is where the notion of reparenting the self comes from; it may originate in the reparative aspects of the therapeutic relationship but once internalised the client can function as a much better parent to themselves.
Some clients, like Laura, initially find it very difficult to feel anything like compassion towards the inner child. Laura had come from a very damaged and chaotic family where her mother told Laura that she was a useless burden, unlovable, whom no one would ever really want. As a result, the adult Laura’s reaction to her inner child in our psychotherapy sessions was fearful and hostile. She angrily told me that she’d spent 35 years trying to get away from this little bitch and that she didn’t want her anywhere near her. Many of her survival strategies and habitual behaviours were concerned with escaping this powerless child who felt that she was worth nothing. Laura was genuinely torn: realising that this inner child could never be fully gotten rid of, and yet feeling absolute terror at the idea of embracing this child back into her life. The re-experiencing of the shame and humiliation of that small girl in the here and now felt unbearable.
However, after nearly two years of working with this woman things were completely transformed from a point where this girl was somebody she wanted at arm’s length, and even entertained fantasies of trying to kill, to the inner child taking centre stage in her life. She learned how to take care of herself at a far more effective and profound level. One way we did this was to imagine each night tucking this small child into bed alongside her and whispering good night, wishing her sweet dreams and saying that she would be happy to see her in the morning. This rarely happened in actual childhood; her parents were often drinking, angry and chaotic. Bedtime stories, cuddles and a gentle calming presence were things she learned to do without as a little girl. Gradually, over many months, she learned how to begin bringing a soothing, calming and containing energy to herself as an adult. It was a slow process, as all repairing of the seriously wounded inner child is slow, but it was valuable, effective and profound nevertheless.
In my experience, the dominant sub-personalities tend to represent polarities of the personality. For example, when working with Rita, a rather straight-laced barrister in her late thirties, it became clear that two strong sides of this woman’s personality existed. One was Little Miss Rules. This character was obsessive, somewhat compulsive, very duty-bound and guilt-prone, highly anxious over not working hard enough or letting other people down. She carried massive guilt over an ex-boyfriend’s suicide.
The other sub-personality was Miss Fuck You. She emerged occasionally when Rita was under a lot of pressure; she was sick of taking care of other people’s needs and worrying about them. Miss Fuck You liked to drink, take drugs, have lots of casual sex and didn’t want to think about consequences or how her behaviour impacted others. To use psychological jargon, we could say that Little Miss Rules had an excessively external locus of evaluation. Miss Fuck You, on the other hand, had an extremely internal locus of evaluation. The first personality is overly concerned with the rules of other people, whereas the second personality fantasises about taking no notice whatsoever of others. Rita had spent 20 years swinging backwards and forwards between these two extremes. Neither served her well, but she found it extremely difficult to move towards a healthier middle ground. A quick word of caution: this type of ‘parts’ work (inner child or sub-personality exercises) is not suitable for anyone currently experiencing psychotic episodes or with a background of dissociative identity disorder (DID) or schizophrenia.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
INNER CHILD
There is no point doing inner child work with clients until they are relaxed, present, feeling safe with you and open to such internal exploration.
The wounded parts of the child that show up in adult defences, neurotic symptomology and relationship conflicts have been in place a long time – usually very well defended and convinced that their view of the world is the right one.
To support this part to come into the room and move towards healing takes sensitivity, patience and loving compassion from the therapist. The deepest and most permanent change in the personality structure is possible once they do.
Now this may seem fairly obvious, but the usual next stage is to get these different parts of the self to talk to one another. To do this, I normally employ a variety of techniques from Gestalt therapy. The client sits in one chair and tries to embody one particular sub-personality – for most it is surprisingly easy. If that part of self came to represent unexpressed anger, abandonment, lust or disagreement they get into the energy associated with it and give it some expression. Often the opposing part of self tries to keep these difficult feelings under control. We could say that these represent aspects of the real self and of the false self – one represents the mask of acceptability that we try to present within society, while the other represents the boiling unconscious emotions which we are frequently taught to hide. For some of us as children it was simply not safe to reveal these underlying emotions. Part of the successful learning we did growing up was to keep these difficult feelings hidden from view. In many ways, we learn this split from our parents. Mothers and fathers often strive to keep their real feelings hidden from their children because they believe that this will protect them. At times, they tell their children that they are not upset or angry or afraid in order to try and reassure. However, particularly for younger children, this may be confusing and gives the message that some feelings are not talked about or acknowledged. Thankfully fewer families stick to these rules today but in the recent past this model was all too common.
For Rita she was eventually able to feel what she had only been able to intellectualise previously: that neither of these extreme sub-personalities was helping provide a stable, happy life. The middle ground for her was practising being more assertive and ensuring her child was listened to when she felt overburdened with responsibility. She found that by building more regular valves for letting off steam and remembering to play and take care of her needs, the periodic reckless explosions of Miss Fuck You began to calm down.
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The first Key to the INNER CHILD in therapy is trust – knowing that this new adult will not merely reproduce the childhood conditions which first shamed, angered, excluded or hurt them – but offer something different that can be safely internalised. The second Key is time – this process cannot be rushed, although it doesn’t need to take years either. |
The best work in psychoanalysis comes when you are fairly old. Physicists do their best work at 20, Mathematicians at 19. But in depth psychology you have to live long enough to get close to the experience and yet stay detached from it. There are two psychologies…one is immersed in experience – mysticism and excitement and cure through love…and then the totally detached ones. Neither is absolutely right. You have to do both at the same time.
Heinz Kohut (1977)
To make sense of the lay of the land we usually need to experience and do things repeatedly – as Aristotle said, phronesis is the ‘fruit of years’ (1953, p.124). To those who privilege models-led ways of working this may suggest blind, rote-like ways of learning sets of rules and conditions that we must apply. Where rigid theory becomes 100-page rulebooks we can see someone trying to remove the trying out, making mistakes and learning from the ground elements of developing expertise. The rulebook says we must learn from someone else’s conclusions about operating well in the territory – never from our own. The longer ago the rulebook was codified the more problematic this becomes.
Models tend to make the promise that they can be a shortcut on this journey – a quick fix, sparing you from some of the long grind through the territory. As humanity has recognised for thousands of years through the use of the master/apprentice relationship you need to give yourself the gift of time to fully inhabit a new role. Being an apprentice is a noble thing! People today are often non-humble and impatient; they want to leap straight to the expert stage. A good wine must ferment and ripen. We move through the territory initially guided strongly by others but needing them less and less as we attain mastery. This is true for children and their parents, therapists and their mentors and – of course – for clients and their therapists.
Thus, through much practising, we learn what it is to divest ourselves of a priori ideas and emotions, to think on our feet, to juggle several things at once, to be spontaneous, and to improvise. We get used to the wave in its very freshness and surprise, so we get very much more adept at doing things with its help. But even the expert surfer can fall off the board by losing some of their built-up rapport with the wave.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
SLOWING DOWN
Much publicly funded therapy is moving towards ever shorter contracts. The pressure to cure fast comes from both the client and from providers.
This stream says that if we do not slow down, we will miss too much of the client’s complex and unique story – and healing is in danger of becoming impersonal and superficial.
Slowing down helps both parties to uncover layers of meaning, recover gradually and to pay attention to detail.
It would be naive to pretend the forces of speed are not crowding in all around us – but try and hold them back for a short while whenever you can.
It must also be noted that sometimes novices do extraordinary things because, with so little knowledge, they sometimes tap directly into the wave, trusting and co-operating with it because they have no other option. Experts sometimes, because of having so much knowledge, limit what the wave might do. One of our students, a football coach, explored this idea:
The conscious understanding of what you can do, can inhibit performance. Footballers that are instinctive by nature probably cannot describe what they are meant to do; they just have the ability to do it. This supports the theory of learning through experience. Players that are programmed to react in a certain way in specific situations will probably lose their instinctive nature. In general the most successful, creative and instinctive footballers in the world come from Brazil. Brazil has high levels of deprivation and an unstructured football environment. Youngsters learn their trade on the streets and the beaches largely without the influence of adults and coaches. These young players are learning in the situated mode. This has produced some of the world’s finest footballers.
This is why, when out of the situation, we think we know nothing. We cannot hold it in our conscious head, cannot remember it all consciously. Put us back in the situation and suddenly it is there again. We know it below the neck, in the body. Experts are strong both in the familiar, and in the unfamiliar. Rafael Nadal does not hit his impossible shots just by picking up a tennis racquet and waiting for inspiration to lift him. Some amateurs under-estimate ‘what it takes’ to get used to dealing with the unfamiliar in specific terrain.
An example: a party of young people in the summer of 2007 ventured into the French Alps on a pleasant day, but found themselves out of their depth higher up. All of them died. It transpired that no one in the party had ever done any serious mountain climbing. No one had appropriate clothing and boots, food or water, or tools such as rope, hammers or crampons. This sad event is a warning to respect the terrain we are going into; although beginners can have breakthroughs and experts can lose their ‘touch’, it remains true that much time must be spent, and much effort expended, in learning what to do in the terrain. It is no good trying to walk before crawling, or trying to run before walking, or trying to fly without running. Situated functioning improves by degrees, as we practise it. In part, this is because we consciously relate to the situated process better, but it is also down to the situated process unconsciously connecting more fully to the terrain. We must do our homework. Not studying a book gives no permission not to study the terrain. The seeming effortlessness of situated functioning at its peak requires much sweat, a few tears, and even a splash of blood, to get there.
SLOWING DOWN
The modern world privileges speed, novelty and disposability. For perfectly understandable reasons many of us get caught up in this exhausting rush.
Meditation and mindfulness help us to slow down, be present in the here-and-now moment and clear our mind so that we can be better aware of ourselves and the intricate beauty of the world around us and within us.
Taking time to be with your internal world and switch off from the external maelstrom of techno stimuli and human demands is vital in sustaining our well-being.
Therefore the situated practitioner requires extraordinary patience – not just in terms of their own journey towards hopeful mastery, but in working at being truly patient every time we undertake a new journey with a client. For the more experienced it can be rather tempting to diagnose the person very early on, as you recognise certain patterns having seen them many times before. Indeed you may have a solid idea of the nature of this person’s psychological troubles, something of what caused them and some strong notions of the work required for these to change. And yet these thoughts – whilst broadly relevant – can never be person-specific. The levels of intricacy, complexity and uniqueness relating to this one human being only deepen as time goes on and eventually they become like no other client you ever had. We can only regard others as a homogenous mass from a distance; the closer we get to each person the more extraordinary they are, the more they become completely themselves, an individual unlike any one of the other seven billion people on the planet. To complete this journey from the generic to the specific takes time and that can only happen when we are patient and slow down. In many ways this is the antithesis of the modern world, where everything is ever more rapid, instant and disposable. Good therapy – like a good relationship – must not be like this and as ethical practitioners we must resist, as best we can, the onward rushing tide of speed.
In learning to slow down and take time we notice things we may have missed before, we open ourselves up to myriad possibilities that rapid diagnosis and decision making may deny us. In a world that moves at an ever faster pace this stream requires us to be courageous to stick to this slower pace of discovery and learning – spending months or years in a new land offers much deeper possibility for true understanding than the three-days highlights tour. To slow down we must resist the pressure to rush and to trust that we will get there in the end, even as we feel that we have to get there right now.
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The Key to SLOWING DOWN is resistance – resisting the internal voice which says you must figure everything out right now if you are a halfway decent therapist; the external pressures (money, politics and organisational requirements) which want solutions and cures faster and cheaper than ever before and the fear of the suffering client, who perhaps feels unable to undergo the longish haul that leads to real change, but wants you to provide the quick fix immediately. |
The human story does not always unfold like a mathematical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five or minus three; and sometimes the blackboard topples down in the middle of the sum and leaves the class in disorder and the pedagogue with a black eye.
Winston Churchill (cited in Czarnomski 1956, p.59)
As Churchill knew, the narrative structure of a human life is never simple or predictable, each one of us has a deep and intricate story inside us that separates us from each of the other seven billion people currently alive on this planet. And yet there is much that binds us together as we have already seen. Our personal story separates us from everyone else yet the sharing of stories draws us closer together. An understanding of this paradox is inherent in recognising the centrality of story and narrative in the shaping of human experience, history and society. The use of metaphor, story and narrative is an invaluable source of enlightenment in working with clients.
Only the narrative form with its array of drama, recurrent figures, adventures, clashes and reversals of fortune conveys with any veracity all that human beings experience on the ground. Stories have limits within which even heroes must operate, plots, symbols and images, and crucially the change that comes to protagonists and what they learn. We tell each other stories all the time to try to communicate our human experience in both its difference and commonality. Such stories, whether ordinary or extraordinary, are not mere photographic representations of the experiential domain, nor are they arbitrary constructions of it. They are conversations between us and existence in which each side ‘gets their say’, and something genuine is arrived at through the pressure exerted by both. Good stories always carry some universal truth about human existence.
Our Self-Story
The first-person narrative through which we define our identity is based on memories, perceptions of our history, our present life, our roles in various social and personal settings and our relationships. These stories are often told to others and more frequently to ourselves with recurring themes and dominant concepts. We often project this narrative into an assumed future – making up a story and then acting as though it is true. People are driven by this process for much of their life – usually unconsciously, and people who have become trapped by their life story are frequent visitors to the consulting room.
Ryan is a 23-year-old man, the second child in a chaotic family, where his father was frequently absent and his mother was often nervous, possessive and jealous. His father eventually left and his mother was finally sectioned. When Ryan was conceived the marriage was on the point of breaking up. His mother confessed to him when he was aged five that she had become pregnant to try and hold his father within the relationship. Ryan’s story had been prepared for him before he even arrived in this world. His job was to soothe and mend things, to make it all right for everybody else. We came to label this as his ‘impossible task’, calming the chaos of his fractured family. Ryan tried desperately as a small boy to fulfil his role, often attempting to physically separate his warring parents and then providing a shoulder to cry on for his distraught mother. Not surprisingly he came to see himself as a failure for not preventing all this pain and gradually grew very out of touch with his own feelings, needs and choices, so busy was he in trying to interpret what was happening inside everyone else.
As he grew up the internalisation of this emotional chaos left him riddled with neurotic anxiety which eventually manifested as an obsessive thought disorder which plagued him for over ten years. During therapy Ryan was helped to see that this story of his function in life was given to him by someone else: it was the defining truth of who he was. Gradually he learned to claim back some space for his own life and needs, to separate and be himself by creating a new story.
Reflection Point
STORY
•If your life was a story what do you feel would be the central themes?
•Do you feel like the author of your story?
•Who authored your story when you were a child? What themes did they add of their own?
•If the next five years were the next chapter in the story of your life what would you want it to be about?
Human beings are interpreting beings – we are active in the interpretation of our experiences as we live our lives. The meanings derived in this process are not neutral in their effect on our lives, but really effect the steps we take. Our story or self-narrative determines which aspects of our lived experience gets expressed. Our stories actually shape our lives and embrace our lives. (White 1995, p.22)
Story, metaphor and narrative help us to make better sense of our multiple journeys through the territory. Each time we return, the story familiarises us with what has gone before. Our sense of needing to find out what happens next keeps us going at times when momentum stalls. It is vital for situated therapists to be clear on the importance of story, both in shaping the clients’ original psychopathology and in the repair of the self.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
STORY
We have to stay intrigued when a client walks through the door – like turning to the first page of a long and complex book – there is pleasure in allowing the stories to unfold and the intricacies appear.
Yet we are not a passive reader – we engage and pay attention, particularly to metaphors which appear early in the work. These often evolve into a shared currency that allows the client to feel heard, understood and as though they matter to you.
They also offer a mental and emotional anchor for the client between sessions and when therapy finishes.
There is something endlessly fascinating – at times beautiful, at times horrifying – about the human condition and the therapist needs to remain open and alive to the story in all its myriad forms.
Therapy works when people are able to move beyond merely seeing themselves as the product of a set of narratives written in childhood by others about who they are and how they must act in the world. Often people come to therapy feeling stuck in one storied version of reality, as its victim, doomed to continually act out the same patterns and scripts. John Bowlby (1997) talks of an internalised working model of relationships. What this usually means is that people reach adulthood with a strong set of beliefs, defences and survival strategies around how they expect the world to treat them and how they believe they must be in order to be accepted, loved and respected. The flip side of this is that certain sides of self are then denied, shut off or feared – part of the real self goes underground because we come to think that it is too unpleasant, dislikeable, unlovable or overwhelming for other people.
The therapy journey often involves bringing this shadow side of self back into the light and learning to love it again. In doing this clients are able to transcend the earlier limiting story they carry about life and themselves, to see it for what it is: only one version of a life story predominantly fashioned by others to fit around their neurosis and limitations. The truly liberating period comes when they start to feel that they can be the main writers of the next chapters of their story. As Jung (1955, p.54) argues ‘nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent’. If mother and father were the authors of the early chapters of life, we aim for them to take over as the active creators of the rest of their book.
We use the streams of situatedness as tools to get us deeply immersed within the terrain, to fully experience its uniqueness and meaning. However we need to be wary of saying the terrain. There is, of course, not just one territory. Each new client is new terrain. And each session is a further visit to that terrain. Both you and the client will be getting to know the land more thoroughly each time. The client has lived in the territory for a lifetime. However, they have blind spots, perhaps areas which originally scared or overwhelmed them, which they choose to ignore. And, sometimes, parts of their own terrain they have forgotten about altogether. Clients are experts in some parts of the self and yet total novices in others.
It is tempting to think of the journey into the territory of a new client as a linear journey, some kind of quest for the holy grail of the person’s psyche. In my experience, however, it is rarely so clear-cut. The journey is normally more of a circular return, often over and over again, to the same territory of the client’s early developmental and relational experience and how that plays out in their current life and here in the room with you.
This is where the use of imagery, metaphor and narrative becomes extraordinarily powerful. Sometimes a single image can become a visual metaphor for a complex set of memories, feelings and beliefs. Once established between you it can be returned to repeatedly. In the terrain it becomes a marker, a signpost, and over time it can serve as a central reference point which starts to connect up with other metaphorical imagery. Eventually this can begin the co-construction of the person’s central life story or narrative. It often amazes me how powerful and tenacious these metaphors can be – a client recently returned to work with me following a divorce. It has been six years since we last met. In his first session upon returning he brought up a metaphor related to parts of the self – connected to a mouse and a rat – he had used to chart his progress in the long gap since our last meeting. I was astonished to learn that something that formed part of our work together many years before still had a living presence within him.
Fiona was a woman in her mid-thirties who grew up with an alcoholic mother and a father who left the family when she was three years old. As an adult she displayed a typical symbiotic relational style. Part of her longed for closeness and merger yet many of her deepest memories of relationship were about being pulled into the dark, chaotic orbit of another and being unable to escape. At times it felt easier to be alone and independent, if lonely, rather than experiencing that terror of engulfment. Throughout most of her adult life she had contracted against her need for closeness and convinced herself she didn’t want it whilst simultaneously feeling crushed by the loneliness of her existence. As her new relationship with Peter developed this terror would often return and she would think of breaking up each time a difficulty occurred. This was deeply frustrating to her and she worried she would always be alone.
One day in session, trying to attune to how this felt, I offered the image of sitting in a plane with your hand hovering just above the ejector seat button, waiting to hit it at the first sign of danger. This resonated closely with Fiona’s experience. We returned to this idea frequently and she recognised it herself in interactions with Peter. Eventually she uncovered a belief that she would be unable to leave the relationship once it got past a certain point – just as she had been trapped in childhood with her mother’s chaos and neglect. We developed the imagery so that she still had the ejector button and could use it at any time but now it was behind glass with a key to unlock it. This began to reinforce the idea that she was no longer a defenceless child unable to leave when things were unbearable but a resourceful adult who could recognise when she had had enough. This enabled Fiona to relax enough so that the relationship could develop more easily. Two months after our work together ended I had an email from Fiona: now living with Peter, planning their marriage and thinking of having children. She had amazed herself that by uncovering and releasing these old beliefs her experience of being with others had transformed itself.
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The Key to STORY is having a sense of the big picture – how the here and now fits in with the back then and the time still to come. It is a balancing stream to IMMERSION and a companion one to the JOURNEY. |
In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the stage of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behaviour in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity.
M. Merleau-Ponty (2013, p.354)
Intersubjectivity: everything is dialogue, all is relationship
Based on the work of his mentor, Edmund Husserl, Jose Ortega y Gasset, in his important work, Man and People (1957), points out
the radical solitude of human life, the being of man, does not then consist in there really being nothing except himself. Quite the contrary – there is nothing less than the universe, with all it contains. There is, then, an infinity of things but – there it is! – amid them Man in his radical reality is alone – alone with them. And since among these things there are other human beings, he is alone with them too.
Klugman (2001) helps us to locate this idea within object relational therapeutic practice. He suggests that therapists should bring into focus at all times ‘both the individual’s world of inner experience and its embeddedness with other such worlds’ (Stolorow and Atwood 1992). Intersubjectivity theory introduces the concept of an intersubjective field in which both parties contribute and which both help to co-create. I have mentioned this concept already but it is so central to situated practice that I need to expand upon it.
No two intersubjective fields will be the same and indeed, one can argue that a new intersubjective space is created each time two people interact. Stephen Mitchell (2000) describes the increasing analytic acceptance of this idea as the ‘relational turn’ (p.57). This acknowledges that ‘subjectivity always develops in the context of intersubjectivity’ (Mitchell 2000, p.57). Take gender identity as an example. With regard to a boy’s developing sense of maleness we can say that this does not develop merely inside of himself but in relation with and in reaction to the ways of being male he sees around him and, importantly, in reaction to the commentary and judgement placed on them by other people (both male and female).
This informs our understanding of certain ideas or behaviours that can be permitted expression in some intersubjective space and others which the subject feels must be hidden. In my previous research with male prisoners (Evans and Wallace 2008), participants expressed this concept brilliantly as ‘things that must be kept off the landing’ (p.5) (i.e. away from the gaze or policing of other men). The research interview, or even more the therapeutic relationship, may become a space where it is safe to let this mask slip in the presence of another. Crossley (1996) believes that we learn ‘intersubjective scripts concerning the appropriateness of certain types of action to certain types of situation and that we develop “back regions” in which to let the mask slip’ (p.47). Masculinity is often achieved by rigorously avoiding displaying anything associated with femininity and homosexuality. Saussure (cited in Danaher et al. 2000) outlines the way structuralist thinking sees this issue by arguing that all meaning is relational. In other words, to understand what the word ‘man’ means you have to relate it to other concepts which it is not: woman, child, girl or boy.
DIALOGUE
•Which ideas, thoughts and feelings do you tend to keep out of relational space and its associated dialogue?
•What happens to you if there are very limited spaces in which you can speak the darker parts of your inner world?
•With whom do you regularly dialogue about the deeper aspects of you? What is it about the relational dynamic with that person that makes you feel safe enough to talk this way?
Martin Buber’s I–Thou
‘All real life is meeting’ – this famous quote from Martin Buber’s classic work, I and Thou, Buber (1923, p.25) distinguishes between the ‘I–Thou’ relationship that is direct, mutual, present, open, and the ‘I-It’– relation in which one relates to the other only indirectly and non-mutually, both knowing and using the other…
I am called into being by you and you by me. When you embrace me as the unique person that I am and when you confront me in your own uniqueness, we confirm each other… as the unique persons we are called to become…I meet you from my ground and you meet me from yours, and our lives interpenetrate as person meeting person in the life of dialogue. Our very sense of ourselves comes only in our meeting with others as they confirm us in the life of dialogue. (Buber 1923, p.72)
This is a shared gift we give each other: we welcome the other in their real otherness to us, even as they welcome us in our real otherness to them. In this way, both Self and Other are always co-established. Thus both the distance of difference and the closeness of relatedness exist at one and the same time.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
DIALOGUE
You may be opening your client to types and patterns of dialoguing that they have not shared with many people before. As therapists we need to create the permission, and model ways of dialoguing, that allow people to open to different forms of talking and meeting.
It means we need to be very alert to the client’s ways of talking with us, their self-talk and the types of dialogue they have with key attachment figures in the present and during their childhood.
Dominant forms of discourse shape the self, the subject positions the person adopts in power systems and affect how much control they feel they have over themselves and their future life.
Maladaptive discourses that have been habitual and become unconscious may be a vital element of the change work.
I–Thou is not dualistic separation, nor is it fused oneness. It is real meeting, with all its attendant freedom, open-endedness and unexpectedness. Being ‘confirmed by the other’ is not the same, at all, as that socialisation which forces us to comply or fit in, and creates the split between False Self and True Self. When the intersubjective realm offers not real relationship but just a pre-existent order that we must take our identity from, then I–Thou is lost. I–Thou is a meeting of two different ‘personal cores’, in which each core goes out of itself to be with, to participate in, to interpenetrate, the other core.
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The Key to DIALOGUE is to remember that it’s not a monologue – be as keen to hear what they have to say as you are to formulate what you might say next. |
Let there be spaces in your togetherness…
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Kahlil Gibran (1991, p.16)
Relationships take place within spaces. We live in space, and through social-spatial relations within spaces our identities are formed and we come to know ourselves as distinct from others, and in connection with and in separation from others. We are embraced by space, we are inhabited by space and we inhabit space. Conceptualising space can draw from sociology, psychology, architecture, social epidemiology, social psychiatry and neuroscience, and from the arts, from dance, theatre, literature, poetry or painting.
All disciplines, in sciences or arts, and all counselling models, like people, derive and seek shape and definition by the spaces, the grounds, the place they seek and negotiate occupancy of. Epistemology itself can be considered from a spatial perspective as a concern with the limits and boundaries of knowledge.
Conceptualising space here draws from arguments of the of ‘mind–body dualism’. Our emotional and psychological well-being is situated within the spaces of our ‘natural’ and ‘built’ physical and social landscapes. In a dynamic continuous dialogue we move in and through space creating symbolic and imagined spaces and dreamscapes. We live in and through ‘places’ within space, of complex personal, cultural and spiritual significance. We look out from one space into another, our ‘being in the world’ is a location in space, a place we have occupancy of. We perceive and conceptualise from the physical location of where we are, seeing to the right or left, looking above or below, near or far. Each perspective is a view taken from and in relation to the place we are in. Husserl talks of the ‘nullpoint’ in the experience of the body in space; the lived body, even in the midst of motion, is ‘here’ where we are located, the absolute ‘here’ of situated experience from which all ‘theres’ are perceived. We look ‘forward’ to things happening, we look ‘back’ at the past; we do both in the present from the place we are in. Therapeutic space is a contested space with its own specific complexities.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
SPACE AND PLACE
The reason we think about the setting in therapy is because the psychological is very affected by the physical space we are in. This is why different models have strong views on how the therapy room should be: from the blank, minimalist psychoanalytic space (possibly alienating?) to the warm, welcoming person-centred space (possibly infantilising?).
If you are lucky enough to have control over the physical space where you work with clients when is the last time you really stopped to think about the messages it is giving? Is it full of books, certificates, art, colour, what sorts of furniture, photographs – how do you imagine different types of clients might experience this space and your presence in it?
Therapeutic space is the interpersonal space between people, between the counsellor and the client, and the intrapersonal space within, crossing feelings, thoughts and memories of the persons involved there. The identity of therapeutic space itself, once, arguably, fundamentally defined by psychological and psychotherapeutic theories of relationship, the space of Winnicott’s ‘respite and containment’, has in recent years been increasingly defined as a space of wider political and economic demands for accountability, assessments and evidence. So therapeutic space takes its ‘place’ within broader geographic, cultural and political landscapes, all of which are spaces and all of which are heavily invested in by human action. Such human actions, from a situated perspective, are a potential presence in every therapeutic space and in each counselling session.
Space exists between people; it defines individual and collective identity, and challenges it. Space provides for the Me, and I, and the You and Other, and the space ‘inbetween’ allows for congruence, empathy and the ‘Place’ of Buber’s I and Thou, mentioned in the Dialogue stream. Space is here, between this page and you the reader. It’s here between each character in this typeface, shaping and giving form, offering aesthetic experience from the space each character occupies and is defined by. From its depths, shapes and profile, it occupies space within our thoughts. Here, now, in this space, between you and the page, and internally between your perception and reflection, within you, these images and words suggest and neurologically create, between synapse and synapse, thinking space as you consider and interpret their meanings. From the perspective of situated practice, space is rich in meanings, a weave of images, emotions and symbols. Space, once acted in, becomes place, becomes a place of relationships. Relationships define physical spaces, and spaces shift and are reshaped by relationships.
Consider one of the most fundamental of human requirements, a home. An investment transforms a space with a physical building that becomes a house, a house becomes a home. Once human agency is involved in space, it is no longer inert. In this instance it is no longer defined by its investment, or its external presentation, or by photographs and images in the estate agents. As ‘home’ space it is now in continuous transition, transition initiated by relationships of differing kinds, all dynamic and evolving. ‘Home’ has no single meaning. The space of ‘Home’ as a lived experience defies generalisation. Home can be both a container of projections and a reflection of whose home it is, a place of dynamic interplay. This example of space in transition may serve as a narrative of how the situated perspective can suggest, unearth, the narrative, the living story within even the most physical of spaces. Ask a builder where architects’ plans (the model) and the builder’s experience (the situated experience) meet up and where they depart from one another. In that conversation will be another story of the relationships between models and practice – where they meet in a space and where they may separate.
Reflection Point
SPACE AND PLACE
•Think about three places that you have deep attachments to. What do they mean to you? What feelings emerge when you imagine them?
•Think about a space where you have felt unwelcome, unseen or unsafe – why do you think it felt that way?
•Now imagine a space where you felt you belonged, were welcome, understood, relaxed – in what ways was it different from the unsafe space above?
•What happens to your body, mind, emotions and behaviours when you are in these two different spaces?
Give yourself some space and some time in that space to consider the relationship between Space and Place. Consider now what space is offered to you by being asked to ‘read this’, in contrast to what might be involved in ‘dwelling with this’. Consider then this view of Place from the art historian and feminist writer, Lucy Lippard:
Place is latitudinal and longitudinal within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal and spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there. (1997, p.7)
Consider this stream as one you are entirely immersed in – even now by reading and paying attention to this particular textual space. As you engage in the flux of sense making, negotiating across the external space of this paper and the internal space of feelings, thoughts and experiences you may find yourself blurring the boundaries between intrapersonal space of thought and reflexivity and the interpersonal space of the writer and reader.
Full too, is the therapeutic or counselling space of situated practice, for from the perspective of situated practice, the place of the meeting between counsellor and client constitutes a therapeutic landscape, a landscape of physical, social and symbolic and temporal spaces. Spatially, the social space of the therapeutic meeting, shapes, manages, defines, organises and influences what takes place there. The therapeutic space is a product of human action, a place of contested dialogues, of human actions that create, and produce experience, history, knowledge and consciousness. The therapeutic landscape is a space defined by physical dimensions and overlaid with human presence and culture. As a product of social action it is rich in symbolic meanings and richly detailed with the aesthetics of the therapeutic encounter. Is the therapy space the therapeutic space when it’s empty, or only when it’s occupied? Do the projections and poetics of the counsellor and the clients, in their physical absence, still occupy the space?
Generally we meet only the surface space of things. But all spaces echo with depths that await being attended to, listened to, heard from within, and discovered by situated practice.
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The Key to SPACE AND PLACE is empathy (being able to consider how another will experience a space very familiar to you) and awareness (thinking about possible interpretations of the things you choose to put into – or leave out of – the space in which you practice). |