SPECIAL EQUIPMENT
•Juggling
•Improvisation
•Digging
•Intersubjectivity
•Presence
•Bravery
•Creativity
There are times on the road towards practical wisdom where we meet obstacles, blockages, find direction signs that lead us the wrong way, get lost, become discouraged or simply trip ourselves up by trying to do too much at once. As we are dealing with the unfamiliar and the unexpected the only thing we can confidently expect is that it will all go wrong occasionally and we have to work hard to find a way through. A later section explores some of these in more depth – what I have called the ‘Rip Tides’ – that may unbalance us when diving deeper. At these times we may need to draw upon some special kit to help us get through. This set of streams will not necessarily be part of the toolkit of the beginner but the more confident we can become in using them the wiser our practice will be.
The world cannot be governed without juggling.
John Selden
In essence this stream is about being able to multi-task, to keep many balls in the air at once, without dropping them. The pressured, busy lives we often lead today require this skill from us in many situations. It is the fear of dropping the ball that gives a sense of strain and stress to so many of our endeavours. As experienced situated practitioners we need to be able to function effectively whilst juggling many streams of information, both emotional and practical, whilst in session with clients and also whilst developing ourselves into master craftspeople.
One of the most daunting aspects of a therapy session, especially when you are still training or on a day when your energy and attention levels are not at their best, is trying to stay present and attuned to the multiple streams of information, feeling and activity which are flowing through the field. First, there is the flow inside of you: your countertransference responses, your empathic reaction to the client’s material (and weighing up whether this feeling is in fact empathic or countertransferential), how your body is feeling that day, things that may be happening in your own life which are pulling your emotional focus, thoughts about theories, incidents with other clients which may remind you of something happening in the here and now, a memory of a hunch about this client that you noted last session, that deep feeling of being profoundly moved by the content of their story.
In addition there will be a flood of material coming from the interpersonal field, the intersubjective realm operating in the space between you. You may be ‘keeping an eye on’ your understanding of how this client’s personality is structured, how the story they are currently telling you may illuminate aspects of this, thinking about how you might reflect some of this back to them, how to gently phrase an interpretation so that they are able to make best use of it. You may be considering some aspect of theory which might shape your next response, or listening closely to the tone of voice or facial expression employed when the client is sharing with you. Watching how their body moves and tuning into the sadness, wistfulness, joy or anxiety being expressed in the room. And this is even before we begin to pay attention to the actual words flowing back and forth between us, our eye contact, our smiles and laughter.
The process of attempting to tune in as accurately as we can to what is going on in the client’s internal emotional world, what it feels like to be them experiencing this memory, this feeling, this lived reality – the very act of empathy – is not easy at first. We need to place our focus on trying to catch all this as best we can. I would liken it to trying to gradually tune in a radio dial to the right frequency, a subtle and ongoing process that demands therapist sensitivity, attention and concentration. It is partly this factor which makes a whole run of back-to-back therapy sessions so draining.
The Streams in the Consulting Rooom
JUGGLING
I sometimes use the metaphor of the fighter pilot when describing to students how a therapy session can feel – we must pay attention to multiple streams of visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and intellectual information at the same time, sensing which to privilege, trying to analyse their meaning, noting transferential material, thinking about whether that feeling we are having is empathic, countertransferential or something of both – all the while trying to ‘stay’ with the client.
There are lots of spinning plates and only one of us. The skills of learning to juggle all this take time to settle into our bones – the training practitioner (or the recently qualified) can feel heavily overwhelmed (as, at times, can those of us who have been doing it for many years!).
The only real ‘cure’ for this is practice – learning to trust your reflexive and responsive self in the complexity of such territory is not achieved overnight so give yourself permission to drop the ball now and then without punishing yourself.
So how is it possible for us to attend to so many things at one time and make a reasonable – although never perfect – job of it? From the outside, much like watching someone juggle five balls or five clubs, it seems incredible. And even from outside the session, to the therapist herself, it may seem extraordinary that she is able to do this over and over again – the fear kicks in when we try to explain something in rational, intellectual terms which is coming from a mysterious, unconsciously intelligent place.
The Therapeutic Loom
The really extraordinary thing about these threads of activity, feeling and information is how they weave together so well in the midst of situated flow. And, when it is working well, we don’t have to actively think about how we are doing it. Rather it becomes something holistic, the sum much greater than its individual parts. This is like watching an experienced weaver pull together disparate threads of colour and texture into amazing patterns at such speed that we can no longer see what is happening at the micro level. We see similar fluid, rapid pattern making in schools of fish, flocks of birds or herds of animals. This is skill in action, an embodied intelligence which is expressing itself physically, energetically, verbally, in real space and time. And now we need to ask ourselves the biggest question about juggling and situatedness: do we even need to know how it works?
Now a certain mindset (models-led naturally) will not be satisfied that something really works until they have dismantled, deconstructed, poked, prodded, examined, listed and categorised it. Trusting in something happening in such an unexplained, natural, dare we say, magical, way is not to their taste. It unnerves them. They are reluctant to leave phenomena sitting under the soft, complementary glow of candlelight when they could be subjected to the harsh, interrogatory glare of full electric light. From a research perspective this may make some sense – but in practice this desperate need for total and complete transparency may be counterproductive.
Reflection Point
JUGGLING
•Where do you have to do the most juggling in your life at present?
•What helps you come to decisions about which items to put down? (If you ever manage to do that!)
•What do you notice when you observe other people trying to juggle too much?
•Do you feel we can model how to manage complexity for our clients? If so, think of some examples.
In the heat of the moment it can hamper you to think about the fact that you are actually doing what you are doing. This is much like a small child learning to ride the bike: they will have a brief moment where their mum or dad lets go of the back of the bike and they are riding themselves, then they realise it’s actually happening and they instantly doubt their ability to do the very thing they have just been doing. Then the bike wobbles and they fall off. Trying to stand back and observe what we are doing, or categorise or analyse it, in the midst of creative or situated flow tends to knock us off balance. Anyone who presents, acts or teaches – in fact any performance in front of an audience – will tell you that one of the most unnerving things that can happen to you is that split second when you cross over into a type of out-of-body experience. Where you are almost watching yourself perform this complex activity and have that terrifying jolt where you have to push yourself back ‘in body’ again. The over-monitoring of self and the activity, while it is happening, becomes a serious obstacle. If a soldier rushing into battle, or a fire-fighter racing into a burning building when everyone else is running in the opposite direction, stopped to really think about what they were doing it is highly likely they would not be able to carry on.
A juggler could tell you this. If you break your concentration to think about how you are juggling the balls, they are on their way to the floor – fast. The skilled juggler learns to intuitively work with the balls and the air and their hands and eyes; thinking is counterproductive. Jung was astute when putting it like this: ‘Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain’ (1985, p.181). There are many times deep inside terrain when it is the body that must act in the split second, to bring the mind into play merely serves to hinder our right action. We also know, however, that out body can feel like our worst enemy at times of uncertainty or stress: it floods with adrenaline as our amygdala triggers the fight-or-flight mechanism. As part of our journey towards true situated action we must learn how to incorporate the body as a central part of what we are doing.
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The Key to JUGGLING is honesty with yourself about your level of juggling skill – trying to manage more than you are able because you feel you should is only likely to lead to disaster. |
These are days when no one should rely unduly on his competence. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.
Walter Benjamin
When the well is operating most powerfully there is a productive flow of thought and feeling that is playing, creating and shaping in the moment. It comes from a place that is, in fact, beyond thinking, beyond planning and outside of conscious choosing. It shows up just at the right moment, just in reach and works perfectly to move things on, unpack new truths or to throw fresh light on something previously shrouded and dark.
We are talking about the capacity for improvisation. It is inevitably somewhat frightening. In the midst of a therapy session or a performance on stage or on the sports pitch there emerges a blank space, an empty moment, a gap which I do not quite know how to fill. This can make us tense up as we feel the responsibility for finding something appropriate to put in place. Over time and as experience starts to really fill your well you will begin to trust that when the bucket dips down into the water something good will come back up. The anxiety stems from the fact that the bucket could rise up empty or containing the wrong thing. And this is the risk that we must learn to embrace: when we improvise we can sometimes fail or fall, embarrass ourselves in front of others, get it all wrong. However, sometimes what appears will be new, exciting, different, profoundly generative or creative.
Reflection Point
IMPROVISATION
•What happens to your body, your thoughts and your emotions when you have to think on your feet?
•Are there areas of your life where you enjoy the creativity of improvising and other areas where you dread it? What is the difference between the two?
•Think of someone whose improvisational skill you admire – what do you see them doing that you could work on for yourself?
One of the great ironies that situated practice points towards is that models which promise us predictability and safety whilst in new terrain actually handicap us and make us more likely to crash and burn. Sometimes literally so: in 1995 a commuter jet flying from Atlanta airport in the US lost power in one engine shortly after take-off. The pilot assumed the engine had failed. Both he and his co-pilot kept a watchful eye on their instrument panel, as the emergency manual told them to do, which was telling them the engine had simply stalled. In actual fact the engine had exploded and was pulling the plane dangerously off course as its climb towards cruising altitude failed. Eventually something in the pilot’s intuition told him that the instruments were not telling the whole story. He turned his head and looked out of the window. What he saw, the tattered remnants of an exploded engine, was terrifying but very instructive. It enabled him to ignore the flow of false information the plane’s technology was feeding him and to start to improvise in the moment, using all of his experience, senses and knowledge to bring the plane to a crash landing. Sadly, some of his passengers died, but many survived and would not have done so had he not been able to abandon the model before him and improvise.
And this point is vital for us in our understanding of situatedness. We need to be able to change our behaviour in the midst of changing circumstances, to respond creatively in the moment. The field in which we operate is rarely static; it may be predictable eight times out of ten but if we are not open to a total switch on that ninth or tenth time we will be thrown by it. Also we must realise that our actions will have unforeseen consequences on the field itself. As much as we are affected by the field, the field can also be affected by us. This is the truth of intersubjectivity and co-creation. Nothing in our experience forms in a vacuum. It grows from our contact with the field, in the space between us.
Improvisation for the new kid on the block
There is a harsh truth about improvisation. The more experienced you are the easier it is. The flip side of this, naturally, is that when you are brand new to something it is harder to do. Our brave pilot, had he been taking his first ever flight, is unlikely to have responded so well. Whilst it would be foolish to ignore this truth there is a much more positive side to it. When you are brand new to something, others around you rarely expect you to be perfect straight away. It is in tasting and trying, sampling and playing that we begin to discover what feels right for us and where our strengths and interest lie. In the meantime we know that central to the situated mindset is the lack of expectation of outcome – at some profound level we are meant to be lost at first. The real master craftsman in any field will often take improvisation to a whole new level. They will dare to walk on the narrowest part of the high ridge. Part of the fascination with watching someone who is a true genius at their art is that they could fall off the high wire at any moment. Our excitement is generated by knowing that they may either soar to new heights or drop to the floor. This is why our heart stays in our mouth as we watch them and why they generate such passion in their audience. We get to vicariously taste the danger and the risk and we love them for being willing to go there on our behalf. Most fields of human endeavour are packed full of competent, reliable, functional and efficient practitioners who rarely screw up but who rarely reach the great heights either. Meanwhile the stars, those who break new ground and push the boundaries, aren’t reliable and dependable: in fact they embody the exact opposite: think George Best, Marlon Brando, Billie Holliday, Wayne Rooney, Mario Balotelli, Vincent Van Gogh, Robin Williams, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain, Ella Fitzgerald, John Lennon, Norman Mailer, Rudolf Nureyev, Maria Callas – many of the exceptional people in artistic fields are exciting precisely because they could go over the edge at any minute (as some of them did).
Now I am not encouraging you to live life in quite such a daredevil way. Therapy is not rock and roll and should not be practised recklessly. But to have the courage to sometimes walk closer to the edge than we thought possible can be wonderfully creative, stretching us and opening us up to new skills, capacities and talents. We must be able to bear the risk and embrace adventure.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
IMPROVISATION
The experienced practitioner already knows that they have to improvise constantly. The student believes that when they are fully qualified they will know exactly what to do at each and every moment.
In our work at the university we encourage our under-graduates to play with the idea of improvising in many areas of life. If we try to script something too much in advance – an interview, a tricky phone call to someone after a fight, how to deal with a new-born baby – it never works.
We feel we cannot think on our feet when it matters because anticipatory anxiety gets the better of us – we must learn to be aware of such anxiety but press on anyway and not believe its negative and confidence-destroying whispers and lies.
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The Key to IMPROVISATION is learning your craft so well that it lives in your heart, your bones and your gut – once the journey down the main road is mastered you can begin to branch off down side alleyways and release your natural creativity. |
It is no use asking me or anyone else how to dig… Better to go and watch a man digging, and then take a spade and try to do it.
Gertrude Jekyll
After many years of practice, I still find it somewhat extraordinary that someone can walk into my consulting room, meet a complete stranger and within minutes be talking about some of the most intimate, painful and distressing aspects of their lives. Of course not everybody treats these first few moments the same. Some clients will burst into tears the minute they sit down in the chair, the months of tense emotional build-up to this moment overwhelming them. Others will be very polite, cheerful and light-hearted, whilst others will report the difficult and distressing things happening to them but without very much emotion in their voice, and with very little eye contact, almost as though they were telling a story about someone else.
In training as counsellors and psychotherapists we are often taught to look for the client’s presenting problem. This is the reason why clients say they are coming to some form of therapeutic help. Outside of the Western world it is commonly understood that when people are struggling with psychological or emotional difficulties they will often come to doctors or a Shaman or community healers and refer to the physical manifestations of what they’re feeling. In other words, a headache may be reported or a stomach problem or the fact that they feel tired all the time. These things become metaphors for deeper underlying problems which are perhaps more difficult to talk about and which may be heavily socially stigmatised. In Western psychological thinking we recognise these matters as being of a psychosomatic origin. Freud, with his mainly female patients suffering from ‘hysteria’ and conversion disorders, was very aware of this particular problem. In setting out this stream – Digging – I am suggesting that the presenting problem is rarely the real thing or the only thing troubling this person. For sure, some clients will come to therapy and begin by originally talking about their tiredness or how their anxiety manifests in the form of palpitations or headaches. However, this is a much broader issue than merely converting psychological problems into the reporting of physical ones.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
DIGGING
We need to stay aware that what clients report – especially near to the start of the work – may represent a mere scratching at the surface of what really ails them. They may be ashamed, terrified, embarrassed, cautious or anxious about revealing how they feel behind the myriad of social masks and defences we all employ.
The root of psychological suffering may lie in their unconscious mind, their deepest memory stores, or be split, regressed, projected or denied.
Frequently people will use visual metaphors of locked boxes, cellars or closed-off rooms where the most painful or troubling of material remains.
Like an archaeologist we must dig slowly, carefully and patiently to reach the underground places where real healing can occur.
When we first walk into therapy space we will often feel tremendously vulnerable, afraid, lost or embarrassed. The over-riding feeling of needing to ask a professional for help may be one of guilt, shame or deep-seated fear, depending on what we have been socialised to believe. When we are teaching under-graduate psychology and counselling students we try to build in many experiential exercises to the modules. This is to give the students a deeper, more visceral, sense of what that vulnerability actually feels like. The moment we choose to drop some of our masks and defences and reveal some of our inner vulnerable self to another human being is a truly profound one. To do that in the context of a relationship with a professional person that one has never met before only increases the psychological burden at hand. Therapists should never forget this. This is one reason why I believe that any training for counsellors, psychotherapists, counselling psychologists or clinical psychologists should include a period of time when the trainee is receiving some form of psychotherapeutic help for themselves. If nothing else, it gives them an appreciation of what it feels like to sit in that other chair, which they will never forget.
For all of these reasons, it’s important for the therapist to realise that the initial moments of revelation, indeed, the first few sessions, are very likely to be only scraping the surface in terms of psychological wounds, struggles, personal blind spots and difficult memories. I have lost count of the number of times that during the initial session the client has reported a very uneventful and broadly happy childhood. Indeed, this is so common, that in my supervision group we almost always raise an eyebrow when somebody reports that the client has said this to them during an assessment. Very often the parts of childhood that really wounded, rejected or upset the person are either blocked off or repressed or, more commonly, they are wary about revealing the real magnitude of these feelings up front. They may fear being judged, or it may simply be the case that it’s difficult to verbalise these feelings, because they represent something which the person has tried to avoid for so long.
Usually in a medium- to long-term piece of work, I expect some of the deeper fault lines of the personality to begin revealing themselves only gradually, once a trusting, safe, relational space has been built between us. So the disclosure of secrets, the deepening of early themes, and sometimes complete changes of direction are to be expected along the way. The canny therapist knows this and keeps the picture of this person’s story fairly open in their mind because new colours, shades and images are almost bound to reveal themselves as the journey progresses. Interestingly the subconscious mind seems to have a series of very handy images and metaphors to describe this material which is ‘walled off’ or ‘repressed’ as the Freudians would have it. It has shown up in my therapy work as a cellar, a locked box, a cupboard they are too scared to open, an underground toxic river which they feel is slowly poisoning them, and a dam of ice behind which is stored a dark, powerful wall of water which they fear will overwhelm and drown them. When we describe ‘resistance’ to the therapeutic task this is often what we are really witnessing, a desperate psychological attempt to keep at bay those things which harmed, terrified, hurt or angered the client during childhood. A complex system of psychological defences or ‘survival strategies’ may have been built to keep these toxic and frightening memories, feelings and thoughts outside of their conscious awareness. Of course it may be that very defence system, built at a time when the child felt herself to be trying to survive within a battlefield with little option for escape, fighting back or exercising any real power or control over the situation, that is now harming or constricting the adult person to an unbearable degree. It should be noted that convincing the inner child to let go of that defensive armour is easier said than done. However, that is one of the major tasks facing the therapy dyad if long-term characterlogical change is going to occur.
Reflection Point
DIGGING
•Try to visualise the part of your mind where the darker material lies – what Jung called ‘the shadow’.
•If it were a physical place what would it look like?
•How do you see it? How does it feel when you think about it?
•Are there some parts of it that would be too overwhelming to ever share with another person? Some that are even too much to acknowledge to yourself?
One of the classic complaints I hear very frequently in therapy is adults saying that they don’t understand why they continue to behave in certain ways. Usually, if we are choosing Option A on a frequent basis and yet Option A is continuing to hurt us or make life difficult, in my experience that is usually because there’s an Option B lurking somewhere in our unconscious mind, which we feel will be even worse. For example, why does a woman remain in an abusive relationship, year after year, when many of the people around her may well be pleading with her to leave this man and go on to a new life? Why does the smoker continue smoking, year after year, when they’re told repeatedly by friends, health professionals and media messages that what they are doing is killing them? Why does the heroin addict continue to inject? Why does a workaholic continue to sell themselves body and soul to their job even when they knows it is damaging their health, family and relationships? Why does the obsessive-compulsive continue to check and wash and monitor and hoard, even though it is driving them to the point of insanity? There is only one reason of course. That is because they fear that if they stop this behaviour something even worse lies ahead. They believe that if they open their locked box (or cellar door) what lies beneath their conscious mind may destroy them. As Hilaire Belloc’s Jim discovered when a lion ate him after running away from his guardian at the zoo – ‘And always keep a-hold of Nurse / For fear of finding something worse’ (2009 [1907]).
This speaks to our ‘anticipatory anxiety’ – which features in the background of so much human behaviour, especially the anxiety disorders and relationship decisions. Let’s take the case of the abused woman, who stays in a very difficult and violent relationship. Usually, when we strip things away, we can see underneath a terror of loneliness or a fear that they may not know how to survive on their own, or indeed dread that the partner may come after them and make things even worse. So in other words, this person is carrying a belief that: ‘I have to put up with what I have now, because it’s not as bad as what may lie ahead of me or because I feel I could not continue in the event of losing something I now have’. In models of psychotherapeutic work such as CBT, these are referred to as ‘limiting beliefs’, under which we usually find a very deep-seated layer of driving fears. The ultimate fear may be that people won’t like them, it may be that they will be abandoned and left alone, or that they won’t get to feel special and wonderful any more when they have to realise how simply ordinary they are. For the schizoid client, it may be that they have to open up to the terrors of intimacy and actually feeling something. For the addict it may well be that these years of maladaptive self-soothing behaviours, which show up in their addiction, are something for them to focus on rather than facing the terrifying emptiness, loneliness or thoughts of losing control which may be running underneath.
The longer these patterns have been in place, the more habitual behaviours will become. It is usually harder to shift these patterns of behaviour, thinking and feeling when people are in their fifties not their twenties. The situated therapist learns early on that to make genuine progress clients have to dig below the surface of their thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Like a garden it is easy to become fascinated by the beauty of the flowers above ground, but if we do not attend to the health and shape of the root system below ground the garden will not remain healthy for long. So the wise therapist needs to dig – cautiously, carefully and sensitively for sure – but dig we must if we are to uncover the real psychological drivers of human behaviour.
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The Key to DIGGING is patience and sensitivity balanced with a desire to see if another layer lies beneath what is being presented – and to understand why that layer may presently need to be defended by the psyche. |
What intersubjectivity means for the situated practitioner
In life there is not just you. Your sense of self is constantly in interaction, sometimes in dialogue, with everything else that is outside of you. This includes other people and the whole physical, spiritual and energetic world: you and the rest of the universe. You are affected by it and it is affected by you. Even though our existential aloneness is a fact of life with which we must all come to terms, we experience this aloneness in a sea of others. This can sometimes make it even harder to bear.
The radical subjectivist sees this dilemma in the following way: the truth is we are imprisoned within our separate bodies like small boats bobbing silently on a vast ocean. We can only experience the world from the perspective of our own boat. We may well be aware of the other boats nearby on the water and the occupants of those boats can try to tell us what it is like in their craft, but we can never really know. The only truth is the one we can experience. Taken to its farthest extreme, this position is the one taken up by the psychopath. Only my experience is real and others are only objects there to affect, sustain or be subsidiary to me. This position lacks all empathy for the real experience of others.
The radical objectivist position believes that we can look at the other boats, measure them, categorise them, study them and by applying certain scientific rules to this endeavour come to know the truth about being inside the other boats. The danger of this position in its extreme form is that we begin making ever bigger assumptions and arrogantly feel that we know the truth of others’ realities just by engaging in scientific, religious or political categorisation. This stance often devalues emotional experience precisely because it cannot be tested and measured in a scientifically valid way. It begins to insist there is only one truth, one book, one God, one chosen people, one race, one view, one life that really matters. Taken to its limit it eventually justifies the repression, the expulsion, the incarceration, the murder of anyone who does not fit that one view. This position also lacks all empathy for the real experience of others.
The intersubjective position is different. It acknowledges that I have a subjective truth but it accepts that you have a subjective truth too. And in the space where we meet something occurs that has the potential to change both of us. It is in this space that communication, dialogue, empathy and connection are born. This is the ground from which love and friendship springs, and music, art, sex, debate, teaching, philosophy, storytelling. In fact most of what is best about us as human beings. It is also, of course, where the therapeutic encounter happens. It is mysterious and new. It is a place which neither of us could reach on our own. We can only be in this place together. And in the connection that happens between us while we are in this space both of us may have experiences, feelings, gain knowledge or make discoveries that we take away with us when we leave and return to the world of self.
During infancy we are barely able to understand that there is anything outside of this place of connectedness, it feels more like a merger or symbiosis between us and our primary caregiver. D. W. Winnicott (1971) developed an idea of a primordial ‘intermediate space’ between mother and baby, inner psyche and outer world, where inner and outer are combined and mixed up. For him this was a play space, an imaginary yet real space, fluid enough to be open to dialogue and negotiation with other people.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
•Think of someone in your life who is very different from you but with whom it feels comfortable to acknowledge and share your polarised subjectivity of the world.
•Now think of someone where you always seem to misunderstand one another, rub each other up the wrong way, no matter how hard you try to get them to see your point of view.
•Why do you feel there is a difference? What changes inside you when you are with these two different people? How do your thoughts, feelings and behaviour change?
Dialogue, intersubjectivity and the growth of the emotional brain
Furthermore there is good neuroscience to now back this up. As we touched on briefly in the Intuition stream earlier we are living through a period where we are deepening our understanding that the capacity for relationship, empathy, self-regulation (and much else) gets hard-wired into the brain on the basis of early relational experience. In the last 15 years neuroscience has been taking giant leaps forward in helping us to understand how we ‘catch’ another person’s emotional state. In 1996 Italian neuroscientists (Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi and Rizzolatti) were studying grasping behaviour in monkeys. Electrodes were attached to the monkey’s brain to determine which neurons fired when it grasped things. One day a hungry researcher reached out for some raisins. Simultaneously neurons in the monkey’s brain fired. They noticed these were the exact same neurons which fired when the monkey grasped the raisins itself. They discovered connector cells, since named ‘mirror neurons’. This lends a whole new dimension to our understanding of empathy, countertransference and projective identification. It shows how we can deeply feel our way into another person’s experience. In that sense emotion really can be infectious. When somebody else’s mood brings you up or brings you down it may be that the mirror neurons in your brain are firing on all cylinders.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
INTERSUBJECTIVITY
We must understand the realities of intersubjectivity if we are ever to develop into an empathic therapist.
The ability to temporarily put aside, interrogate or observe our own window on the world is vital if we are to stand any chance of seeing life through the window of the suffering person sitting in front of us.
We have to slip our own skin for a while and try to see things from another’s term of reference, imagining ourselves into human experiences which may seem alien, frightening or strange – or which we may have been taught to condemn.
The wise practitioner is able to make these journeys into the being of another – never perfectly or precisely to be sure – but with the right intention and a willingness to situate away from the self it becomes surprisingly easy.
The development of capacity for empathy has its origins in a child’s original caregiving relationships (Gerhardt 2004). Allan Schore demonstrates the effect of emotional experience on the pre-frontal cortex of a baby’s developing brain. Positive emotional experience with the parent triggers pleasurable endorphins and dopamine which affect the pre-frontal cortex. So the looks and smiles of a loving parent actually help the brain to grow in a social, emotionally intelligent way. Cozolino (2010) gives the example of adults who were once the children of anxious parents. He says that when such a child is small they will return again and again to their parents for a sense of safety and security. They will be repeatedly disappointed. The parent will be unable to act as a soothing, containing object for the child as they are too concerned with managing their own anxiety. The child will not be helped in learning to self-soothe and their brain will be deficient in its self-regulatory capacity. Cozolino points out that that many of these children in effect become parents to their own parents: the source of soothing for others rather than the recipients of it.
Interestingly he also uses the metaphor of the well: ‘the repeated return to an empty well. Each time the bucket is lowered there is the hope that it will contain the nurturance they need when it is raised. Each time the bucket comes up empty it reinforces the basic lack of dependability of relationships and safety in the world’.
Such prematurely grown children miss out on a vital stage of childhood. They show up in therapy in large numbers: often stuck in a pattern of chronic over-caretaking of others whilst feeling abandoned and hungry themselves. It should be plain to see that some in this group of youngsters are likely to grow up to be effective therapists, very able to see into the emotional world of others and assist in soothing it. It is from this template that the ‘wounded healer’ is formed.
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The Key to INTERSUBJECTIVITY is humility. I am not always right, frequently I am wrong. I might not have experienced the same as someone else and therefore my beliefs, values, reactions and sympathies are very likely to be different from theirs. If I learn to observe and question myself I am part way to situating myself in the shoes of another. |
Few delights can equal the presence of one woman we trust utterly.
George MacDonal
Probably one of the oldest debates within psychotherapy revolves around the role of the psychotherapist. Back in the 1940s, the hard-line Freudian psychoanalysts tried incredibly hard to be the blank screen, neutral analyst. No self-disclosure was allowed and countertransference was seen as positively destructive. Indeed, it was preferable that the analyst say very little at all, just occasionally offering an interpretation to the patient. The humanistic movement of the 1960s onwards, through the development of therapeutic models such as Carl Rogers’ person-centred theory (2004 [1961]), encouraged a rebalancing of power between the client and the therapist and saw genuineness, congruence and unconditional positive regard as being the sine qua non of good psychotherapy. The role of detached medical expert was to be dropped in favour of genuine equality with the client and personal self-disclosure was encouraged to show the client that you too were a suffering human being, just the same as them.
PRESENCE
•How can you tell when someone is only pretending to be fully present with you? What do you notice? How do you feel?
•Think of the people in your family of origin – from which one did you feel the most genuine presence? What effect did that have on you psychologically as you grew?
•And what of those who felt emotionally or psychologically absent even when physically present? How do you remember them and the way they have shaped your life?
These days in the UK, with the rise to dominance of CBT within the National Health Service, the central importance of warm therapeutic relationship is being somewhat diminished in favour of short-term, evidence-based collaboration between the suffering individual and their graduate mental health worker. I have always passionately believed that the two extremes of the therapeutic role are both damaging in their different ways. The clinical, authoritarian stance of the classical psychoanalytic therapist could often prove very traumatic for anyone whose childhood had been experienced at the hands of a cold, abusive or distant parent. Even those of us lucky enough to have much warmer parental relationships often found the traditional blank slate therapist as being anything other than therapeutic.
Meanwhile at the wilder, hippier edges of the person-centred movement we can find therapists afraid to challenge, overly worried about setting an agenda and desperate to not offend or upset at any cost. Over the years I have heard this described as nodding dog therapy, all reflecting back and concerned looks, but very little else. Many clients who have come to me, after prolonged exposure to this type of work, found it hugely frustrating and felt they were getting very little from it. One rather unkindly, yet perhaps noticing a kernel of truth, described it as like being with a very kind vicar on Valium. Naturally this only characterises the very worst practitioners within this type of model. And, let’s face it: all models have their appallingly bad practitioners.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
PRESENCE
It is never OK to be psychologically absent during therapy sessions – I feel presence is one of the most important streams because human beings are so alert to it being faked or given grudgingly.
We may feel we are getting away with it when our mind wanders to the shopping list, or to the fun we had last weekend, or too deeply into our own sadness, fear or loss but the client will sense it and is likely to interpret your leaving of them in a negative way which may very well reinforce the lack of loving, empathic presence they struggled with in past relationships.
In truth, if they are paying us or not, we have made a promise to be fully present to try to be empathically attuned and to provide a safe, containing space in which they can try to heal. An intermittently present therapist is breaking that promise.
When our mind occasionally strays – as it will – we must strive to bring ourselves back to our client. Practice helps here – as it does with everything else!
This is one of those streams that should be absolutely essential for any therapist. In fact, I get rather angry when I hear of therapists who do not use it well. So what do I mean by really showing up? Surely if I’m sitting in the room, physically present and nodding and head tilting in all the right places, that means I am there, doesn’t it? I sometimes wonder if therapists who are happy to see 20, 25 or 30 clients a week really believe this to be true. Really showing up for the client means working very hard to stay present, focused and emotionally attuned throughout the whole session. It means working hard to put aside one’s own current worries, tiredness and the thousand mental distractions, to which we can all fall prey. It means juggling many balls of information, knowledge and emotion, to keep working hard to make links between what’s happening in the room right now, what’s going on in the client’s current life and linking back to the original relational patterns of their childhood. It means hard work.
The best therapists manage to find a space for working with clients, where they can be real, concerned, warm and very present, without ever abandoning the role of repairing and somewhat more knowledgeable parent, which I personally believe lies at the heart of the therapeutic endeavour. The young child does not want their parents to simply be another child, alongside them. At the same time, they do not want their parent to be distant, cold and seemingly unconcerned. They need a warm and loving active presence, which is not afraid to set boundaries, impose discipline where necessary and pass on, to the best of their ability, any particular knowledge or experience, which is relevant to the child’s situation at the time: authoritative, rather than authoritarian or permissive parenting.
The needs of the psychotherapy client, and the aim of the good therapist, are fundamentally no different. Daniel Siegel (2012) defines presence as ‘an emergent property of our existence in which we are open and receptive to ourselves and to others, ready to receive and ready to connect’ (p.173). The two-way nature of presence is clear from this: we need to be attuned to and aware of the self as well as the other and, like a two-way radio, able to receive information as well as transmit.
I occasionally hear someone say that psychotherapy is easy money, all we do is sit there and listen. Anybody could do that, surely? And if you’re sitting through the eighth or ninth session of the day struggling to stay focused, exhausted, and really not quite sure about the detail of this client’s story or struggling to remember what you did with them in session last week, then you might as well be anybody. Certainly, what you are not being is a professional psychotherapist. In order to really show up for every session a therapist needs an awake, interested mind, a heart willing to work at being present, and a strong, energetic focus. None of us are perfect, of course, but this is what we should be working towards bringing with us into the room every client session. Anything much less, particularly when we are charging good money for our services, is outrageous.
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The Key to PRESENCE is threefold: first, an ability to sustain focus and concentration; second, the willingness to slip the bonds of self and try to inhabit – albeit imperfectly and temporarily – the internal world of another; and third, genuineness – we really must feel interested, curious, alert and kind – clients will know if we don’t. |
Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
Seneca
I was recently acting as the external examiner at another therapy training institute. On several pieces of student work, one of the markers was arguing passionately that students must respect the clients’ feelings and should not be probing too deeply into matters which the client had not specifically raised. At first glance, this sounds uncontroversial. Naturally, we must respect the clients’ feelings. My worry with this kind of mindset, person-centred needless to say, is that it implies that we dare not challenge the client, and must be extremely cautious about trying to gain insight into any of their blind spots or help them to challenge their defences, or look at those places where they are very stuck in life or don’t have the knowledge or the experience to help themselves move forward. Is it really helpful to totally respect every feeling that the client brings in if they include deep levels of self-hatred, feeling lost or being in deep despair? In that marker’s mind respecting this feeling seems to mean feeling that they’re OK, do not need changing, and certainly should not be placed into focus by the therapist. It suggests we should wait for the client to get there in their own time.
At times, this approach can seem a bit like the blind leading the blind through a dark, sticky and very deep swamp. If the client has been struggling with these patterns of living, stuck with the same anxiety demons, suffered through decades of depression or been haunted for years by the relived trauma and frozen terrors of abusive childhoods – glibly repeating the mantra ‘that the client is the expert in their own lives’ doesn’t quite cut the mustard for me. Person-centred theory holds this idea as part of its basic philosophy. It is well meant and in some ways is true – the client has lived their life as them for their whole lifetime; in that sense they know what it is to be them better than you or anyone else. And yet if they have been stuck in panic disorder or OCD or depression or volatile relational patterns for years, they clearly need some assistance in changing things. By the time they arrive in therapy many people are exhausted, feeling helpless or ground down. Offering assistance from a place of some particular knowledge and experience need not mean ‘imposing our own agenda’ or ‘depriving the client of opportunities for growth’ or any of the other worries person-centred therapy (PCT) practice has.
Especially in the early stages of therapy the client needs us to be something of a guide, just as the small child initially needs the parents. The aim is to support them through the process whereby they can internalise these skills sets for themselves; become the conscious and creative authors of their own lives, skilled in boundary management, self-regulation and pre-frontal cortex executive functioning; in essence to become excellent parents to themselves.
All this does not mean that we tell them where to go or deprive them of their own wisdom or agency. Rather, it simply acknowledges that we have walked through the territory of the mind and heart, and similar struggles many times before. It means that if the client is stuck in a swamp we don’t act as if they are perfectly all right where they are, or merely watch as they struggle to get out themselves, we don’t dive right in to rescue them either: none of these is appropriate. We assist and guide and encourage them, helping where needed and trusting their capacity to do it for themselves wherever we can. I always say to our students that it is frequently our job to name the elephant in the room. Clients sometimes need explicit permission to begin delving into more difficult territory, particularly if those issues evoke pain, shame or embarrassment. They may need us to normalise for them that this is what takes place within the therapy setting: that this is a space in which the unspeakable can be spoken.
To remind myself of this I keep a small bejewelled ornament of an elephant in my consulting room. It sits on a small table, just in my eye line, to remind me to check in on any powerful energies in the room unacknowledged or unspoken by either me or the client. These could be split off feelings of shame or rage, dissociated emotion that I am picking up which is presently unavailable to the client’s conscious mind, unfinished business within the therapy dynamic and so on. I am not saying here that as soon as I notice the presence of the elephant I should name it immediately. Timing and sensitivity is the key here. However, I will usually run it through my own mind that if I’m sitting waiting for the client to name the elephant we could have a very long wait. More often than not, it is my job to gently draw attention to this elephantine presence within the therapeutic space. Most clients seem to find the fact that I take this role upon myself as something of a relief.
Reflection Point
BRAVERY
•What forms of bravery do you admire in other people?
•Have you ever been able to act that bravely in your own life?
•Is bravery something innate to us or is it a decision we make when under pressure?
•How do you go about encouraging someone scared to be braver?
Let’s look at some specific situations where therapist bravery is called for: secondary gains and unconscious contracts. Some clients seem to stay stuck in the same painful situation for a very long time. Why is this? A classic example would be somebody who maintains a long-standing mental, emotional or physical illness, which hurts them and distresses them to a great degree which they feel unable to shift: say severe obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, phobias or long-term depression.
Clients in distress often communicate their enormous sense of helplessness at their inability to change. A great deal of sympathy and empathy is usually elicited from those around them; other people feel sorry for their situation. The key to understanding somebody who fits this pattern is to look for the secondary gains. This means that even when on the surface level they have been hurt badly by the psychological patterns, underneath there are secret gains for themselves which they feel unable to give up. Take someone housebound, medicated and on benefits for many years. If they ‘get better’ they will be faced with a series of adult tasks which require responsibility, hard work and in which they may imagine themselves as getting little support, attention or sympathy from anyone else.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
BRAVERY
Every client will have specific things that scare them: things they avoid or deny. You may have to be brave in naming them and encouraging them to face their fears.
You may need to be brave in bearing transferential anger or disappointment or resisting the need to be constantly liked or wanting to rescue.
It also takes bravery to journey with someone into their shadow side – bearing getting close to rage, grief, shame or terror that may lie behind people’s social masks and psychological defences.
This can mean that in the unconscious mind the prospect of real change feels overwhelming and frightening. Remaining habitually stuck in destructive old patterns is often observed in people with eating disorders, weight issues, drug, alcohol and other addictive patterns of behaviour, many anxiety disorders, low self-esteem issues and, of course, depression. This means the therapist needs to look out for the secondary gains currently driving this person on a deeper psychological level.
The secondary gain may be attention, support, what feels like love, money or sympathy. We could describe these as mainly positive secondary gains. However, there is also a category of negative secondary gains. In this case, the game is really avoiding something which the client may fear as a result of fundamental change. In imagining change, they may see themselves as having to do things they do not want to do, taking adult responsibility, being consciously aware of the consequences of their own actions. In most cases, the driver underneath negative secondary gains will be fear. Imagine a person standing on a stone in the middle of a stormy river. Standing on the stone may have been making them miserably uncomfortable. There are several other stones around them, which at first glance may seem to be leading them towards the safety of the riverbank. However, to the person stuck in this particular mind-frame the grass is never greener on the other side. They operate using the maxim ‘Better the devil you know’. This group of people tend to be very good at imagining the full catastrophe and then acting as though the disaster movie in their mind is already true. To move on the client needs to increase their conscious awareness of how the various secondary gains work in their own case. This raising of the conscious awareness is the first step towards making different choices and towards letting go of these old habits and patterns. Addressing these is hard; clients often resist and the timing and manner in which such issues can be raised must be sensitive, non-punitive and supportive. This is where the therapist needs the bravery stream the most.
A very close ally of the above issue concerns the matter of unconscious contracts. Often when I explain this to clients it’s as though a light has gone on in their mind. They find the idea quite revolutionary, as I did myself when it was introduced to me around 20 years ago. I realised I’d been making many unconscious contracts with other people my whole life. It also struck me just how unhappy these unconscious contracts were often making me.
So let’s explain. Let’s take the example of Tamsin, a young woman originally from New Zealand in her mid-twenties who came to see me for long-lasting depression, problems with her weight and some very unhappy memories from a difficult and occasionally violent childhood. Her older brother Sean had been very bullying, mean and sometimes physically abusive from when Tamsin was nine to the age of around 18. She tried everything to placate Sean, including keeping secrets from her mother, giving him money and even apologising following altercations where he had physically injured her. Bear in mind that Sean was five years older than his sister. Over this difficult period Tamsin made one of those amazing survival decisions we sometimes take in childhood. In her case it went something like this: if I do what other people want and don’t challenge them, they will be nice to me, leave me alone and not hurt me. If I put up with the maltreatment for long enough and don’t do anything to provoke him eventually he will realise how cruel he is being and change his ways. Now most adults can immediately see the built-in errors here. If we are always passive and compliant towards others it is harder to challenge them when they do things which upset and hurt us. We may be more likely to be taken for a ride and the survival decision also fatally misunderstands the motivation of this increasingly sadistic brother: he may be enjoying his cruelty, revelling in the power and control he has over his little sister, feeling clever as he has managed to get her to collude in keeping his behaviour secret from their parents. Tamsin’s essential decency and innocent hopefulness were acting against her in this terrible scenario. She needed somebody else to help her see what she couldn’t become aware of for herself at that time.
Sadly for Tamsin it took most of the rest of her childhood and adolescence to realise this. When I met her she had been running this unconscious contract with the key people in her life for the last 15 years. When the contract was broken, which of course it frequently was, she would get very angry, upset, hurt and resentful. To her child the contract was very reasonable: if she stuck to her side then everybody else should stick to their side too. The awful truth is that there was no such contract with the rest of the world: it was an unconscious one made in her own mind and not communicated to other people. As far as everyone else was concerned there was no contract, and they certainly didn’t realise that in her mind, she had bound them to this contract dipped in blood. Ultimately she needed to learn to defend herself, stand her own ground, to hold cleaner boundaries and not silently endure maltreatment by others whilst believing that they will change of their own accord eventually.
The secret to challenging unconscious contracts and secondary gains is to become aware of them. We need to start honestly looking at the contracts, boundaries, negotiations and communications we have with other people. This issue tends to be central for people who see themselves as life’s constant victims: hard done by, unfairly treated. Under this category are those with strong masochistic tendencies, the passive aggressive, and anyone who sees themselves as constantly getting the short end of life’s stick.
To help our clients release the bravery inside them it is important that we model bravery in the room.
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The Key to BRAVERY is the embracing of risk – it may go very wrong when we push forward and we must be willing to work with the consequences. Avoiding risk at all costs is the greatest risk in reality – if we cling to the side of the pool through fear we will never learn how to really swim. |
You see things and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’
George Bernard Shaw
In Shaw’s question of ‘Why not?’ – we see into the heart of the dreaming, imaginative, expansive mind of the child. The young are naturally creative, as is situated practice, which is why any therapeutic endeavour which tries to stay too rigid or static – to pay too much heed to the frozen models of our forebears – is in trouble once it reaches the unpredictability of real-life terrain. Allowing ourselves to be creative in therapy space frees up the practitioner to be more alive and responsive to the fluctuating uniqueness of the person they are presently working with – to be human and more real. Giving ourselves permission to go with our creative impulses means we are open to the possibilities of each new moment and can play with the relationship as it evolves. And each spark of creative power can provide excellent tools and tips for the well. Certain processes, descriptions, metaphors or images that catch an aspect of human lived experience perfectly can be re-used at appropriate moments. Or creatively working with physical space or objects in a consulting room can pay huge dividends. Being more creative also makes the therapy space a more enjoyable and fertile place to be – for both parties.
Some examples:
•Choosing by Not Choosing – lying back in the river of life and floating along: an image frequently used with anyone who is passive or who procrastinates.
•Taming the Anxiety Monster – facing up to it, not running away. For some clients this monster is visualised as a lion, for others a grey cloud, or a giant whale or a pool to drown in – once visualised as separate from you it is easier to tackle.
•Urge Surfing – this metaphor came from a client with an eating disorder who described surfing the urge to binge rather than giving into it. It is has proved useful for clients with a whole range of issues and shows that the creative spirit in the therapeutic encounter comes as much from the client as from the therapist.
•If It’s Not Perfect – It’s Ruined (Or the Jam on the White Tablecloth) – a useful metaphor for perfectionists, people with OCD and the pessimistic. It has been used to explore the polarised relationship with perfection that some people have.
•The Box of Tricks – a physical box I encourage some clients to use where they place objects, images, affirmations, music, stress balls, soft material – indeed anything they can use to self-soothe or self-regulate in times of emotional upheaval. The act of deciding ‘I am going to go to my Box of Tricks’ seems to prove a helpful distraction from the run of negative automatic thoughts or behaviours. Male clients often prefer the idea of a ‘toolbox’ and one client who worked in the advertising field called it her ‘storyboard options’.
•The Cushion of Responsibility – for people who take on too much responsibility for others or who tend towards compulsive caretaking of others. I throw a cushion from my chair onto their feet without saying why. It is extraordinary how many people will continue the session with it sitting there or will simply move it to one side or pick it up and place it on their own chair. When discussed, people with this personality trait often find it tough to tell me to take my own cushion back – even when prompted. This then becomes a very useful metaphor for identifying other ‘cushions’ in life and how to work on getting others to take care of their own soft furnishings!
•The Light Switch Trigger – sometimes clients get stuck in blaming others for the pressure they put on them or for being unkind or manipulative or not respecting boundaries. The world will sometimes not treat us well – the only thing we can do in those circumstances is to work on the way we react to these triggers. One day in session a client was struggling to get this idea so I stood up and switched the light on and off. I explained that we believe the reason the light goes on is because we have flicked the switch. That is partly true – but the real reason is because the wires behind the switch are connected to the light fitting. We cannot stop others from pressing our lights switches but we can work on disconnecting our internal wiring so that the shock is more manageable. I have used this metaphor – easy to demonstrate in session – many times in the years since and it gets the point across well.
•The Elephant in the Room – this metaphor is used so often that it has become clichéd. However, that which is unspoken or unaddressed often lies heavy on the consulting room, being felt energetically by both parties and deeply unresolved. I feel it is the therapist’s job to try to gently focus on any elephants present and bring them into the room. As already mentioned, my small jewelled elephant sits there quietly in my line of sight and often reminds me to check internally as to what is lying unsaid or avoided in the therapy today.
•The Mummy–Daddy Dartboard – giving space for both blame and understanding. Clients who had broadly healthy childhoods will often find it hard to accept that the way their parents related to them may have had quite negative shaping effects on their personality. Some will get quite upset – especially if the parents have died – and say ‘but my mum (or dad) was lovely and they really tried hard to do their best.’ All of which is undoubtedly true. However their highly anxious personality/gambling/agoraphobia/drinking/coldness/critical nature/feeling they preferred my sister to me/perfectionism etc. will have affected the young child. It doesn’t make them bad people – but they are not perfect. The image of the mummy–daddy dartboard in the room allows us to throw any well-deserved darts their way (from the child’s perspective) but then sometimes remove the darts from the more adult compassionate viewpoint. It gives permission to the child’s woundedness whilst honouring the genuine love and gratitude they may feel for their parents. I usually add that I have my own dartboard for my parents that took me years (and lots of therapy) to fully understand.
Reflection Point
CREATIVITY
•Fear of getting things wrong is usually the reason why we block our creative flow as therapists.
•Inherent in the act of creativity is trying something new – and built into anything fresh is risk; it might go horribly wrong.
•Responsiveness to the changing territory we are engaging with is vital to being successfully situated and that demands our creative co-operation with the space.
Marks-Tarlow (2012) highlights the use of guided imagery in therapy work, which I have also used to great effect many times. She points out that the use of imagery of mountains or climbing versus those of going down into basements or caves ‘provides a topographical metaphor for the psyche that likens qualities of height with conscious accessibility and depth with unconscious, subcortical reaches’ (p.180). The human mind enjoys creative and symbolic play and discovery whether in dream states, guided imagery, role play, drawing or parts work. These areas represent some of the most fertile ways a therapist has of assisting a client to explore embedded memories, fears, fantasies or trauma and to work through, release and transform the energy bound up in them.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
CREATIVITY
Every piece of therapy work will get stuck, feel bogged down or lost from time to time. Sometimes this is fine – maybe the client needs to circle around and return to the same dynamics, relational issues or painful memories repeatedly in order to work through them.
However, most practitioners also realise such psychological swamps are not always therapeutic – sometimes they are merely swamps with both parties slowly sinking into the quicksand.
I try to be honest about this when I feel it is happening – rather than defensive. If the client is feeling it too then I encourage us both to don our creativity caps and brainstorm around our next steps. This runs counter to the notion of being the ‘expert’ that many therapists cling to at all costs. Irvin Yalom calls them our ‘magic feathers’. Some clients desperately want to believe we have these feathers too.
Yet we are not magicians, nor mind-readers – we too struggle and get stuck in our lives at times and sharing this with our clients helps to forge the real relationship and opens a fertile, shared and energised space which usually proves highly productive.
The creativity stream is where the arts, play, drama, dance and music therapies have a real advantage over the straight talking cure. They enable both parties to be free to explore feelings, movements, body memories, split-off terrors and unconscious defensive tactics without restriction. Creativity is closely linked to the embodiment, play and improvisation streams – and these four taken together form a good description of children when they are absorbed in activity and the inner child when they are empowered. Despite being engaged in serious and very grown-up work during psychotherapy and counselling there is no reason to block the free, spontaneous and powerful child within ourselves and our clients. The inner children frequently produce something brilliant which unlocks movement which the intellectual, sensible adult brain has been struggling to reach.
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The Key to CREATIVITY is freedom – letting go of expectation and the grasping for safety and cautiousness which society sometimes teaches us – and immersing ourselves in the expansive, energetic and magical zone of playful exploration to which we all had the key as small children. This key tends to slip from our grasp as we grow up and the complex pressures of adult life bear down on us. By being creative in therapy space we model something for our clients which they can use to transform their lives. |