RIP TIDES
•Struggle
•Balance
•Wholeness
•Power
•Morality
•Difference
•Complexity
One reason why therapists and counsellors need the special equipment we just looked at is because when swimming in the choppy waters of therapeutic practice (just like every other part of life) we occasionally come across rip tides that can threaten to pull us under for good. They are like potentially lethal holes in the road on a journey, we cannot wholly avoid them if we wish to reach our destination but being forewarned is definitely to be forearmed. If we know there are pitfalls ahead we can learn to work with this set of streams rather than be tripped up or drowned by them, which is what tends to happen if we try to deny or avoid them which newer therapists sometimes do. These streams speak to those aspects of being with other human beings which frequently go wrong or throw up seemingly impossible dilemmas – here be dragons, in fact – but in looking them full in the face and finding our bravery we can make these dragons our servants instead of our enemies.
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the priviledge of owning yourself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Struggle comes with the territory
Why should struggle be one of the streams of situatedness? It makes the whole process sound a bit gloomy and difficult, doesn’t it? Perhaps it does to those who are uninitiated. Think back to why models are so seductive. They make a very clever promise: come to me and I will save you from the hard work, the wrong turnings, the moments of doubt, being racked with uncertainty, the loneliness of the walk. Who wouldn’t be seduced by such promises? They are, for sure, very tempting. However, as we have said, from a situated viewpoint they are mainly lies rather than promises. They consist mostly of politician’s promises – the shortcut, quick fix, buy-now-pay-later mentality which has the world in so much trouble these days.
Think back for a moment to the main achievements of your life so far. If I were to ask you to write a narrative account of your experiences in getting to the point where that achievement was made manifest it would probably contain many moments – perhaps extended periods – when you doubted yourself, your abilities, your interest or commitment, worried about whether you were on the right path at all. And that will have proved very discouraging, you may have agonised over whether to stop and try something else. Many times you may have actually walked away and done something different. Was it the right decision? It’s hard to know. None of us wants to strive and sweat to reach the top of the ladder only to find out it has been up against the wrong wall all along.
Reflection Point
STRUGGLE
•Freud’s Pleasure Principle (1920) says that humans tend to avoid pain and attempt to maximise pleasure.
•Is this true for you? Has it changed as you have grown older?
•Think back on the key struggles in your own life and write down how they have changed you.
•Was the struggle necessary to get where you needed to be? Would there have been another way through that was free of the pain?
It is precisely at those moments of self-doubt (or doubt about the path you are walking – and one can look very much like the other at times) that we are likely to give up, move on, accept defeat or decide that something is not for us. It’s too hard, I’ll never get this, there are too many obstacles in my way, it’s impossible. This is, of course, doubly true for somebody new to a particular piece of terrain. We look at those much more experienced in the landscape than us and think to ourselves, ‘I will never be like them; they are so skilled, so accomplished and knowledgeable. They know what they are doing and what they are talking about. Look at me in comparison, so confused, so unsure! It’s hopeless. Perhaps I should give up.’ How easy it is to fall prey to such thinking. Someone on the first step of the ladder looks to their friend on the twelfth step and marvels at the breadth of their vision, how much they can see. What they don’t see is what it may have taken their friend to climb all of those steps.
My journey across the course has proved to me that conscious knowledge is a million miles away from intrinsic wisdom that comes from experience. I have been raised to value and appreciate my senses and I know the importance of entering into a situation without preconceptions. So why did my experience of this module feel like I was discovering my senses for the first time? Because I was. I had never before looked at an abstract painting without interpretation or concentrated on how my experience of relating to people was altered when visual information is absent.
When you look at experienced practitioners in any field the years of trial and error, learning, failing and starting again, self-doubt and insecurity are invisible to your eyes. Success mainly rests in choosing not to give up when you feel like it. Anyone succeeding in any discipline will tell you that their achievements did not come easily. They will have had many times when they truly felt they could not carry on and had to give up. In those times something inside them, or maybe support from outside, enabled them to carry on a little further. One of the greatest secrets of success is that most people stop travelling down a particular road if it gets hard enough, or is too difficult too many times. Those that reach the end have somehow managed to ignore the tiredness, the doubt, the aching, bleeding feet and found some determination inside them to carry on. We must be able to bear the pain, the mistakes and the crushing blows to our self-confidence when they come and be able to step back, put them into some context and keep our vision focused on the wider landscape. The rut in the road that just tripped us and threw us off balance might prove to be an essential learning experience. Or it may simply be a caution to walk a different route next time.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
STRUGGLE
One thing I have noticed in my years of practice is that many clients are passionate believers in the ‘quick fix’. The modern world sells us the notion that if we find the right product, person or piece of technical kit we can find a shortcut to where we want to be that avoids pain, effort or the slow process of learning.
The younger the person is the more fixed in this fantasy they tend to be.
One of our secondary functions as therapists – in my view – is to help clients accept the existential truth around struggle – it is unavoidable. The first noble truth of Buddhism is dukkha (suffering, anxiety, unsatisfactoriness are part of life). The mature psyche recognises this and resolves to participate in these feelings with awareness rather than fearful avoidance, to open ourselves to the growth and learning they contain.
So much pain is caused by attempting to defend against these existential truths – as Carl Jung said, ‘neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering’ (1985, para. 81).
We must help our clients to face these unpalatable truths – the givens of existence – just as we try to unflinchingly face them ourselves.
Every therapist will have times in counselling when they say the wrong thing, offer an interpretation that later feels way off the mark, feels disconnected, lacks focus or energy or merely struggles to connect with the unique, inner, emotional world of this particular client. Even after many years of practice there are days when one feels discouraged and questions whether what we are doing is helpful or right. We will all have sessions where we walk away feeling deskilled or unqualified to help. And moments of total chaos, mess and sadness in our own personal life where we feel how do I dare offer myself to someone else in a helping, healing capacity when I am still so wounded myself?
The growing therapist inside us must be able to survive these periods of struggle, slippage and loss. The good within us must be able to contain and soothe the bad. That is part of what we model for our clients. The containing, responding, attuned other we try to offer constantly during therapy is not the whole story of who we are. It is effortful work to maintain that quality of presence session after session but we attempt it, in much the same way as a loving parent does, because we know that a particular way of being with this person can help to heal and repair their earlier developmental wounds. It is crucial that our well contains this understanding for we will need to hold on to it very firmly in the tough moments.
Throughout training and ongoing practice we are required to look at our own childhoods, our own personalities, prejudices, idiosyncrasies and emotional responses, partly so we are sufficiently aware of them to try to bracket them off when we are with clients. But also to understand ourselves better as part of preparing for becoming the best therapist we can. We must undertake an inner journey to the heart of self and understand its dilemmas, its terrors and its reliefs so that we can empathise with the clients we walk with on their own journey into self. Their journey will, naturally, be different from our own. We all possess a beautifully unique internal world, personal to us and shaped by our particular histories – and yet the core human experiences of anxiety, love, longing, loss, shame, anxiety, sadness, belonging, abandonment, need, hope and fulfilment are feelings that we can recognise in another if we recognise them in ourselves. They remain true across cultures, genders, ages and religions and form a bridge into the internal psyche of people fundamentally different from ourselves. They are the common food of life which all human beings taste along the way.
The struggle is part of the process towards craftsmanship. It must be embraced and utilised rather than avoided or resisted. Our struggles contain many gifts to us and to our clients which cannot be gained any other way. This is where the idea of the wounded healer really comes into its own. The African-American social reformer and writer Fredrick Douglas, having escaped from slavery, said: ‘If there is no struggle there is no progress’ (1985, p.204). In other words we learn very little on easy street.
Most clients (and most of us) will have faced hard times: this is when the adult ‘project’ of world mastery through the ego’s expansion hits the rocks and sinks. Perhaps illness strikes or a relationship is collapsing; perhaps redundancy threatens, financial collapse, maybe the arrival of a new baby, a blow to self-image or the death of a parent. Maybe simply the onward grind of adult living with its accompanying ageing, loss of physical vitality and the tedium of ordinary life. This often first shows up in the mid to late thirties. This is often when people come running to therapy. They have followed the rules, gained the qualifications, bought the house, forged the career, developed the relationship and consumed the products. The promised deep satisfaction and happiness still eludes them. So what now? Life becomes, at some profound level, unsure and terrifying. This will usually present as stress or anxiety or depression – but the awareness of the void underneath the busyness of living has struck and it is hitting hard. This is what Yalom (1989) refers to as ‘existence pain’. And it is about the worst pain there is.
Shipwreck in the adult is more far-reaching than early disillusionment in the child, because the adult has nowhere else to go, little more to hope for. The child can still hope beyond the bleakness that invades their world prematurely, deferring their happiness and fulfilment to some far-off adult life, but the adult in ruination has no compensation; they can only run away by regressing to childhood, going backwards, since if they try to continue going forwards, by looking the future in the face, all they see is a vast and profound nothing. The older one is, the more true this can become as the past keeps getting bigger at the expense of the future.
The deeps of existence intrude, invade, undermine – suddenly the existential moment of awakening arrives, and the real growing up into adulthood, through embracing what reality actually is, arrives. At this point, the adult is in a state where, to borrow the fairy tale metaphor, ‘the cupboard is bare’. This is the advent of the adult who is confronted with a severe either/or: find a new way to be an adult, or continue falling into the abyss. We would contend that the situated therapist, who has lived a similar struggle within themselves, is in a good place to meet such a person when they come to therapy.
A former client of mine, Serena is in her late thirties with two children and an errant husband who has deceived her and ‘let her down’ many times. She comes from a family with an alcoholic mother and a partially present, often abandoning father. Her life survival strategy has been one we call ‘the detective’ whose inner narrative and belief system go something like this: ‘If I check up on my husband thoroughly and often enough I can prevent anything bad from happening, I can stop the unexpected monster from coming round the corner and getting me. If I work at this with real diligence I can prevent life from hurting me.’ It is a child’s fantasy of control over the uncontrollable. It seeks to tame life, making it predictable, safe, docile and unthreatening. Sadly it stems from a child’s very limited understanding of how the world works. Life is many things but predictable and controllable it is not. As adults we may know this. But at seven or five or eleven we are still terrified by such a notion and have to construct an inner world which denies this fundamental truth. The fairy story must have a neat and happy ending. Everything must turn out perfectly all right for the hero or heroine.
As for many of us, Serena has found it agonising to begin to relinquish this defensive fantasy. She has a profoundly symbiotic personality style in that she finds her sense of safety, security and comfort in life through the illusion that the presence of the other (whether this is husband, mother or her children) can be 100 per cent guaranteed if only she tries hard enough. When this illusion fails, as it often does, she is devastated and punishes herself for not having seen the change coming, for not anticipating the betrayal. At this point her sense of self begins to fragment and she descends into panic. As a child only the return of her mother could save her from this place. Now, in adulthood, she does not know how to save herself.
Our work in therapy has been to gradually encourage the terrified child inside her to accept that no perfect person will ever arrive and save her from change, uncertainty, anxiety or struggle. This is what Irvin Yalom (1989) calls being ‘Love’s Executioner’. In other words, nothing can save her from life itself. The fantasy that she can find such a person is hard to put down and there is much grieving to be done. She is starting to realise that she must find ways to feel safe in her own skin and accept that life can never be wholly free of risk, loss and emotional pain. As an adult she cannot hand that task wholly over to others without paying a great price. The danger of models for the practitioner is much the same. We cannot allow ourselves to fall for the comforting, yet crazy, idea that models save us from undergoing the terrors and struggles of the journey; nor can they offer the prize of hard-won wisdom gathered as a result of our walking.
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The Key to STRUGGLE is mature acceptance – life is hard and painful as well as joyful and fun. Trying to evade the givens of existence: death, meaninglessness, freedom and aloneness (Yalom 2001) both delays our experience of the pain and intensifies it in that giving up defences created to hide from life’s arrows is itself intensely painful and difficult. |
Your hand open and closes, open and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.
Rumi
Balance is vital to the situated therapist, or indeed, the situated painter, poet or mother. For there is something in that word about managing the tension between love and detachment – the tension between models and practice, the map and the terrain, the inner and the outer, my experience and your experience, art and science, the male and the female. The struggle between models led and situated ways of being in the world is incredibly ancient. It is reflected in the duality of day/night, sun/moon, science/faith and yin/yang. In the patriarchal, monotheistic Western belief, faith and magic, the more intuitive, ‘female’ ways of knowing have tended to be mocked and devalued as ‘unscientific’, particularly since the Enlightenment. The male supposedly values rationality, objectivity, evidence and self-control. Therefore he favours science.
Part of our journey towards truly owning our mastery and expertise is about balancing the streams of information coming from inside of me (my feeling, thoughts, beliefs and senses) against the streams that come from outside of me, essentially from others. This includes what others say, write, feel, think and do: their theories, books, explanations, directions and suggestions. Within any established field of practice these things coalesce over time into rules, traditions, structures and institutions. When you, as a new traveller, enter this field for the first time, much already exists, some of it appearing so solid, factual and correct that you feel bound to accept it as truth.
Remember, though, that what appears so solid now was once the internal experience of someone else, just as new and fresh to all of this as you are now.
It is hard to stay with this truth when the pressure is on you to prove yourself, fit in and demonstrate competence. The people already in the field may decide whether you can be accepted into their world, through exams, certificates and tests. Nevertheless, all of the pre-existing material in the field (other people’s maps) will be filtered through your own subjective filter. An alchemical process will take place between the ‘stuff’ coming in from the field and the ‘stuff’ already inside your well. And remember your well can be the source of new creativity and change that one day may flow out of you and change the very field itself.
Reflection Point
BALANCE
•Where does your present life feel most out of balance? Do you have any sense of control over how the rebalancing might work – if so, what?
•Look at the ‘finding balance’ see-saw diagram (page 188)– which of these axes work best for you and which one gives you the most trouble?
•Thinking about balance in brain function – do you recognise ‘amygdala hijack’ as something familiar, either now or in the past? If so what situations act (or acted) as the triggers?
The Maasai chiefs from Kenya and Tanzania believe it is crucial to teach their young men training to become warriors the difference between situations which require ferocity and those which need tenderness. For them, the truer warrior knows instrinctively which is which. The way this set of streams is constructed is very similar – knowing when we need to bring one stream to the fore and temporarily retire another, or to use one to balance the extremes within another. So whilst we must take The Leap of Faith we must also retain Awareness. In embracing Play and Exploration and Creativity we must stay in touch in with Maturity and Morality and be cognisant of the imbalance of Power in therapeutic relationships, otherwise our play may become reckless, solipsistic and damaging. Can we really embrace the spirit of Adventure whilst simultaneously Slowing Down?
To everything there is a season and our well – our internal toolkit – must have a suitable response to whatever shows up in the field. The three streams of Balance, Juggling and Complexity honour this reality. Anybody promising that learning to practise therapy really well – or mastering any challenging field of living – will be simple or fast is either deluded, naive or lying. The skilled practitioner can speed up where necessary but slow down at the hairpin bends, move in a heartbeat from the creative, playful inner child to the knowledgeable, holding and protective parent within, whilst keeping an eye on the observing, wondering, thoughtful adult. Luckily our brain is equipped to keep all these balls in the air at once if only we let it.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
BALANCE
Your client is unlikely to be entering therapy feeling at their most balanced.
Managing the various balancing acts explored in this stream will fall – at least initially – to you until they can recover (or develop) that capacity for themselves and the brain’s plasticity will allow them to shape new neural networks which support more balanced functioning.
Many people need active support in rebalancing their own needs against the demands of others, the memories of trauma against the freedom of the future, the emotional needs of the child, adult and parent ego states within them.
Carl Jung believed that psychoanalysis was broadly an attempt to bring conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche into balance. Sigmund Freud saw the role of the ego as in balancing pleasure and pain: between the insistent desires of the id and its associated libido and the superego’s requirements for painful adjustment to the strictures of adult society. We might also highlight the powerful feelings aroused within the transferential relationship versus the emotional experiences felt in regard to the real person. Effective emotional self-regulation requires a balance between the executive functioning of the brain’s pre-frontal cortex, the emotion and feeling centres in the limbic system and the amygdala which (among many other functions) controls our fight–flight–freeze response in the reptilian part of the brain. People who cannot perform this balancing act effectively will tend to suffer from what Daniel Goleman (1999) calls ‘amygdala hijack’: where if the amygdala finds a match between the present trigger and the recorded previous experiences stored in the hippocampus it not only decides we have a fight–flight–freeze situation to deal with but effectively proceeds to ‘hijack’ the rational brain, so we become all animal responsiveness with little or no ability to reflect, evaluate, observe, analyse or calm our surging anger or fear.
We know this tendency leads to enormous problems with focus, interpersonal relationships, high anxiety and arousal, anger management, impulsiveness and problems self-soothing and delaying gratification. It shows up most frequently in those children with a disorganised attachment style (Main and Solomon 1990) whose parents may have disliked or even hated them, ignored or rejected them, overwhelmed, seduced, terrified or hurt them. The baby learns to experience the parent as both the source of comfort and fear and is left with an impossible problem to solve. The result is often severe dissociation, grossly exaggerated forms of maladaptive self-soothing, difficulty in trusting or relaxing around others and, in many families, learning that our primary tools in the managing and shaping of our relational world are power, threat, violence, abandonment and shaming. Harry Harlow et al.’s (1976) horribly unethical experiments with baby monkeys showed that a mistreated youngster will return to the same mother figure that hurt them as they have nowhere else to go to try to obtain protection and comfort.
Helping the client to develop the right balance between left and right brain; cortical, mammalian and reptilian; thinking, feeling and embodied ways of being in the world can be grounded in the right-brain to right-brain affective communication which good psychotherapy provides (Schore 2003).
There are countless polarities between which we are trying to find a healthy balance in our counselling work, including:
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The Key to BALANCE in psychotherapy is between the corrective emotional experience of the relationship which helps heal the inner child’s woundedness and insight on the developmental origins and aetiology of neurosis which allows understanding and compassion for self. |
The tendency towards splitting
Splitting: The individual deals with emotional conflict or internal or external stressors by compartmentalizing opposite affect states and failing to integrate the positive and negative qualities of the self or others into cohesive images. Because ambivalent affects cannot be experienced simultaneously, more balanced views and expectations of self or others are excluded from emotional awareness. Self and object images tend to alternate between polar opposites: exclusively loving, powerful, worthy, nurturant, and kind – or exclusively bad, hateful, angry, destructive, rejecting, or worthless. (DSM–IV–TR, American Psychiatric Association 2000, p.757)
This stream of Wholeness is intimately connected to the preceding one of Balance – in fact one is not possible without the presence of the other.
Melanie Klein (1975 [1946]) was the first psychologist to utilise the term ‘splitting’ to explain this human tendency. As babies and young children, she argues, we have contrary experience of mother (and especially, in Kleinian terms, of her breast). Sometimes mother is ‘good’: she feeds us, soothes us, smiles, she is tenderly present. Sometimes she is ‘bad’: she leaves us hungry or wet, is upset or annoyed, too absorbed or overwhelmed by her own interests or anxieties, or is simply not physically or emotionally with us. Klein posits that the child finds it threatening that good and bad mother may be the same person and so internally holds object relations of a separate good and bad mother. We can see in childhood fairy tales that this tendency continues.
Bruno Bettelheim, in his famous work, The Uses of Enchantment (1976), explains why this might be so. Because life is often bewildering the child needs chances to understand themselves in this complex world with which they must learn to cope. They must be helped to make some coherent sense out of their turmoil of feelings and need ideas on how to bring their inner house into order, and on that basis be able to create order in their life. Through the centuries (if not millennia) fairy tales came to convey overt and covert meanings, in a manner which reaches the uneducated mind of the child. In this way fairy tales carry important messages to the conscious and unconscious mind dealing with universal human problems. Stories speak to the child’s budding ego and help them to relieve unconscious pressures by symbolically wrestling with terrifying thoughts and imaginings.
Reflection Point
WHOLENESS
•What do you feel when you hear the word ‘wholeness’ applied to human beings? To yourself?
•Think about the combination of and relationship between your mind, body, heart and soul – is one area feeling empty right now compared to the others?
•Thinking about your internal family: who is in charge most of the time – your wounded child, your nurturing parent, your rational, planning adult, your critical parent, the little professor, your free, wonder child?
•How would you like this to change?
In fairy stories evil is not without attraction – symbolised by the giant, dragon or witch, the cunning queen in Snow White – and often temporarily wins. The usurper may succeed for a time in seizing the place which rightfully belongs to the hero – as the wicked sisters do in Cinderella. In fairy tales, as in life, punishment or fear of it is only a limited deterrent to crime. The conviction that crime does not pay is a much more effective deterrent, and that is why in fairy tales the bad person always loses out. Polarisation dominates the child’s mind and, therefore, must also dominate fairy tales.
In these tales a person is either good or bad, nothing in between. One brother is stupid, the other is clever. One sister is virtuous and industrious; the others are vile and lazy. One is beautiful, the others ugly. Polarities permit the child to comprehend the difference between the two.
Also these stories start to introduce the idea that one day the child must face the world without their mother and father at their side. They must grow up and separate from them, become their own individual person. To the very small child this is a terrifying thought and the stories help them to face the idea whilst resolving it safely, ideally in the presence of Mum or Dad. The child wishes and believes they will hold on to their mother eternally – the story tells us we cannot. Many fairy tales begin with the death or loss of the mother or father (Cinderella, Snow White – through to modern tales such as Bambi, Finding Nemo and the Harry Potter series). They tell the small child that if we try to escape separation anxiety and death anxiety by desperately keeping hold of our parents forever, we will only be cruelly forced out, like Hansel and Gretel, into the cold, dark forest all alone. One of the major tasks that will face this tiny person very soon is leaving whatever security they have at home and venturing out into the rough-and-tumble school world, with peers, teachers, friends and enemies, where many may like you and look after you, but some may not. We need to prepare ourselves for this quest and the bedtime stories of old are our first glimpse of a very different future world.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
WHOLENESS
It is not necessary for therapists to be ‘whole’ all the time. I know I am not. I would be deeply suspicious of anyone who claimed they were. We are never completely fixed or healed – even if clients frequently fantasise that we are.
Whilst acting in therapy space however we must strive towards wholeness within ourselves if we are to assist in the birthing process of wholeness within the client.
We must be alert to the parts of them that are hiding, blocked, ashamed, too glib or too aggressive and work to understand how this part of the self fits into the whole.
Always holding on to our view of the big picture whilst paying the closest attention to the tiny details of what emerges is another of the glorious paradoxes of the therapeutic task. Personally I am more of a big-picture person – sometimes finding the patience and focus needed for detail tiring and tricky. Over the years I have had to work on this – which is why Slowing Down is one of my favourite streams these days (probably because I have always found it one of the hardest to get to grips with!).
Polarities in the consulting room
In therapy this tendency towards splitting shows up all the time. For all that we may be grown up, we all demonstrate strong tendencies towards magical or wishful thinking at times. This is particularly so around romantic love. Many of us grow up believing that the perfect prince or princess will one day come and save us from the pain of living. At its most basic level this means we yearn for the arrival of a perfect object, a perfect other that will soothe us, protect us, love us unconditionally for ever and never leave. We strive to avoid the Kleinian ‘depressive position’ (1997 [1946]) which simply says that there is a mixture of good and bad in everything, that total perfection is a fantasy. We are all a complex amalgam of darkness and light. That includes me, you, our mothers, our lovers, our best friends, our children, our heroes and villains, murderers and saviours, the wildly popular and the brutally despised.
At some level most adults know this. And yet our fantasies, and our need to split, keep us hanging on for the arrival of the perfect other. If this girl has disappointed me then the next one will be perfect, if this man has let me down the next one will be different; the next holiday, the next city, the next purchase, the next job will be the one that brings the elusive and longed-for permanent happiness. The perfect moment is thus forever postponed, around the next corner, just visible over the crest of the next hill – maybe next time, one day my prince will come; as Morrissey sang ‘please, please, please let me get what I want’. Our need to believe that perfection will arrive one day is extraordinarily powerful and letting go of it fiendishly tough.
This is why Irvin Yalom (1989) calls himself ‘Love’s Executioner’. Not because he is trying to kill love but rather because he has the sometimes sad task of helping clients to see that the perfect other is a fantasy that can never come true. In order to reach true maturity and, paradoxically, in order to free us to love well, we must accept this. Or we are doomed to begin searching anew each time the inevitable imperfections show up in someone or something we once saw as perfection itself. Some people will spend their lifetime wandering from partner to partner, job to job, city to city – always being enraptured at first, then disillusioned, and finally leaving with the dream of the next perfection bubbling away. They are doomed to eternal disappointment, wandering always in a scorching desert, running hard towards the oasis of their dreams only to see it vanish in the heat haze just after they get there. For them a little bad leads not to acceptance of the imperfection of everything but the renewed frenzy to start again and find the pot of gold this time. A touch of bad can ruin a much greater good. You may well recognise this type of perfectionism in yourself or others around you.
For the situated practitioner this is a valuable lesson. On first arriving in new territory we are very prone to falling in love with a model which promises to explain everything, to free us from the struggle and hard work of personal discovery. But just as the perfect mother or the perfect lover is a fantasy, so too is the perfect model. It does not exist.
Recognising the need to strive for wholeness – to avoid the destabilising swing between the extremes of polarities – is the only sure way to remain centred in your own truth whilst drawing the best from others.
The devil is in the detail – but so is the divine.
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The Key to WHOLENESS is humility and patience. Much like peak experiences of self-actualisation we may get flashes of wholeness more often than the permanent article. No matter – it is always a work in progress for both us and our clients. Pieces of the tapestry may be slowly and lovingly repaired only for new sections to unexpectedly unravel. Such is life – which is why courage and resilience are required. We can never fool ourselves that there is nothing left to learn. |
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln
Power and influence are two enormous issues within the psychotherapy process. Some models tend to overplay the importance of the power imbalance between therapist and client whilst others seriously underplay it. For example, classical psychoanalysis encouraged practitioners to place themselves in the role of the aloof, blank expert. The patient was the passive person, upon whom interpretations were placed. The psychoanalyst was definitely in charge, and their word was more or less final. The humanistic movement of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly in its form of person-centred therapy, as outlined by Carl Rogers (1961), tried very hard to avoid these particular pitfalls. They believed in employing the three core conditions (congruence, empathy and unconditional positive regard) and believed above all that we should try to balance out the power differential between therapist and client. After all, we are both human beings struggling to live in the world and who is to say that one of us is any better than the other. Many person-centred therapists still put forward the idea that the client is the expert in their own lives, and it’s really down to us to follow them, reflecting back what they’re saying to us, and to allow them to process their material in order that they can become more self-actualised.
To my mind, both of these theoretical orientations have got something right, but also something very wrong. To have an entrenched and wide power differential between therapist and client which is never acknowledged, never changes, and is not open to challenge can mean that the role of the therapist becomes incredibly self-sealing and the client ceases to exist as a real person, simply becoming a vehicle through which we can exercise our theoretical cleverness. The worst of the person-centred approach, on the other hand, can mean that the client is never challenged, that we never accept that we may have some expert knowledge that could successfully guide the person through a very difficult time.
If we look at another relationship that has some similarities to the client–therapist dyad we may find some useful instruction. I am speaking, of course, of the relationship between parent and child. One model of parenting, which we might call the Victorian authoritarian model, believes that children should be seen and not heard, follow rules and instructions to the letter and that the will or difficult spirit of the child needs to be broken, in order that the word of the mother or the father remains as law. I’m sure I do not need to outline how damaging this can be to the self-esteem, confidence and the emotional well-being of the child. On the other hand, the parallel parents to the person-centred therapists may encourage the child to be very creative, forceful and to do their own thing; however, where they tend to be weaker is that they find it difficult to enforce boundaries, discipline or insist that the child deals with the consequences of their own behaviour. Likewise, the child can sometimes miss out on a greater level of experience and knowledge that their parents, in theory, as a grown adult, should possess. In other words, these parents are too soft, too easy a pushover and the child never receives some of the strong holding, shaping and yes, discipline, that we all need in our first few years of life.
POWER
•In which areas of your own life do you feel the most personal power?
•Where do you have the experience of feeling relatively powerless?
•Who held the most power in your family of origin? How did their power make you feel when you were a child?
•Are there particular types of people or certain situational dynamics that tend to unnerve you around issues of power? Why do you think that is?
Both the Victorian autocrat and the liberal laissez-faire parents could learn a good deal from one another. And by taking a few steps towards a more central position they would be doing their children a world of good. Kohut (1981) refers to this as ‘optimal frustration’. In any area of life, when we are learning something new or trying to progress, we need to be optimally frustrated in order to progress satisfactorily. We need some support, understanding and guidance from those who are more powerful, older and wiser than us and at the same time we also need a chance to stand on our own two feet and fail occasionally, if we are to learn from our mistakes and take responsibility for ourselves. If we get no help at all, we are likely to struggle; on the other hand, if somebody does everything for us we are likely to remain in a fairly infantilised position and may develop the belief that the world owes us a living, sadly a position that we see all too often these days.
I try to adopt this position of optimal frustration in my role as a therapist and also in my role as a university lecturer. It is crucial that the therapist tries to see things from the client’s point of view, and remains open to the idea that their interpretations or understanding about what is happening to the client may be off the mark or even completely wrong. It is also important that a warm, real relationship is created whereby trust can enable the client to explore vulnerable places and move on to some growth. However, particularly at the beginning of the relationship, we should also accept that we will have specialised knowledge and understanding that the client does not. We are performing a teaching role alongside that of a counsellor role, repairing some of the psychological gaps or wounds they carry with them from childhood. Some models seem to be afraid of this idea, but I do not see why we should be. So we should always use our power in the best interests of the client, but we must remain incredibly watchful that we never abuse it, in case our ego takes over from our compassion as the main driving force within the therapy.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
POWER
We need to pay close attention to how this client experienced power dynamics in their childhood: was it used to scare or control them, to support and protect them or did its appearance signify emotional chaos, violence or overwhelming conflict? Was the child able to learn how to exercise their own personal power in a balanced way – or did it become squashed out of existence, or tend towards the sadistic and cruel?
Likewise we must note how power operates in their present life: at work, in relationships, with children or with authority?
In parallel to this we must have developed awareness of our power patterns – both childhood and present – so we understand how we affect the power dynamics in the therapeutic relationship and can use them positively rather than to reinforce traumatic experiences for the person we are working with.
We are not there to control clients or impose a worldview upon them. However, in being professionally trained and qualified we should have the qualities of an excellent guide. Although we have not walked through their particular landscape or territory before, we have walked through many others and learned something valuable in the process, which we offer to this person as a way of assisting them to find their own way more successfully through this territory.
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The Key to POWER is to temper its use with subtlety, humility and awareness. It is so easy to abuse when we are not conscious of its impact – and so easy to get lost if we deny its existence. Power is like a knife – life enhancing when skilfully used in the hands of a surgeon; deadly when wielded in the hands of an assailant. |
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In my private practice recently I had a fairly new client, Matt, who had been away on holiday for two weeks.
Despite the fact that my payment terms, for holidays, cancellations and the like are laid out on my website and in my written material, Matt was clearly unsure as to what the exact rules were. At the end of the first session back he offered me both the fee for that week, plus the extra fee for the two weeks he had been away. Now some psychotherapy practitioners do charge for such absences. I don’t. What prevented me from simply pocketing that extra two weeks’ worth of money? I guess it could partly be fear. If I had taken the money and the client had gone on to read the website a little more carefully he might have had some rather awkward questions for me the following week. However that risk was probably small. This man worked in the banking field in the City of London. There was something in the energy with which he offered the money that suggested he was not short of ready cash.
I think I handed it back to him because of the basic morality I try to bring to my work with clients. In this case it turned out that beneath the successful exterior was a man who was terrified of provoking disapproval or anger in others. He would often disadvantage himself simply in order to keep others on side. Matt feared anger and abandonment more than anything else as a result of his early family dynamics. With hindsight it may well be that he was trying to do something of this kind with me, either consciously or unconsciously, in offering to pay for the holiday sessions.
My active decision in the moment did not spring from quickly totting up the risk of being caught; it came rather from inside the well. My conception of what I am doing with clients includes trying to facilitate processes and experiences that heal them, that might repair some original childhood wounding, that I will not seek to gain something for myself to their detriment, that I will not cheat them or be dishonest with them as far as I am able. I acknowledge the power gap between us and that this leaves them in a relatively vulnerable position. It is part of my job not to take advantage of this power gap, in much the same way as a good parent will endeavour to put the needs of their child first.
That is part of the moral contract I have set up with myself in becoming a counselling psychologist. This may, or may not, mean that I would act in such a morally ‘clean’ way when I am not inhabiting that role. Whilst practising I hold myself to higher standards in my action than I need to outside. My needs are clearly secondary in a way that they often are not in real life. So if I had accepted that money my view of myself as a practitioner would have been radically changed even if there had been no unfortunate comeback from the client.
For me it is very important for the therapy practitioner to have engaged in this type of moral argument with themselves and to be clear in their own mind about what constitutes moral practice for them (just as it is for the doctor, the barrister, the nurse or the police officer). All professions have regulatory bodies which try to set out such moral guidelines. They normally have committees which will assess any complaints from clients about malpractice. If a psychologist is found to have breached these codes in a serious way, they can be struck off and denied a licence to practise.
MORALITY
•Your personal morality in life is different from the moral framework that you must adopt when working with clients.
•We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard than we may do at other times. The tiny deceptions, lies and avoidances that we employ to smooth our path through ordinary relationships and situations will not wash in the therapy setting.
•Write down a list of the moral values that you try to hold yourself to in therapy space – or if you have yet to practise imagine what they might be and what may be the problems or obstacles you will face in trying to hold yourself to them.
However the majority of challenges to our moral framework are very unlikely ever to reach the ears of an ethical committee. We must make the decisions around those alone, and reflect on them afterwards, alone, and with colleagues in supervision. At some level the choices and decisions I make around client boundary issues must sit right with me if I am to respect my practitioner self. There is something here about integrity and being able to trust yourself in your professional role. This concept of morality in practice is one of the first things which the situated practitioner needs to get in place. In many ways it is part of the platform on which the other stances and engines of situatedness are built.
The statement of what true morality is starts with the honest, brave, generous, humble, patient and respectful acknowledgment that the problem of human existence is hard. It cannot be suppressed, evaded, risen above. It has to be engaged. It has to be committed to. It has to be accepted and suffered; there is no way out of it. There is only a way through. Authentic values help us find, and walk, that way.
Sadly the world today is full of amoral behaviour – the values of the sociopath and the sadist often rule the roost in business, politics and media. These controlling, cruel and avoidant means of being with other human beings also dominate in some families too. Even in less damaged family dynamics we frequently see evasion, denial, subterfuge, manipulation and defensiveness. Therapeutic space – and the central relationship that shapes it – must exemplify a different way of being together: more honest, open, compassionate and real, acknowledging mistakes and the shadow world of emotions – anger, shame, anxiety and sadness. This is the morality of authenticity that we must strive to embody.
He who is different from me does not impoverish me – he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves – in Man… For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his reflection in the glass.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Working with difference is one of the most exciting and yet challenging aspects of therapy work. Whether it’s something visually obvious, like gender, race, age or physical size or something more hidden like relationships status, beliefs, family background or class, when teaching students on this topic, I often begin by saying to them that, because each of us is different, and has a unique internal world shaped by a unique family story and developmental dynamics, we are always working with difference, even if at a superficial level we have much in common with our client. It can be positively dangerous to assume that because we share certain group memberships, we show the same experiences and feelings.
So at one level we are always trying to enter a different psychological space from our own. Sometimes though, the differences between therapist and client are palpable and clear. Initially they may make us (or the client) deeply uncomfortable. The very fact of such discomfort may also disturb us. Most of us drawn to the world of therapy are caring, decent people who genuinely want to help others in distress. We may be vehemently anti-racist and anti-sexist, deplore homophobia and ageism and believe in equality and that every human being is fundamentally entitled to the same treatment. And yet – there may be aspects of an encounter with difference that we find arousing, upsetting or challenging that we were not expecting. We may find moral judgement creeping in, or distaste or repulsion. These are not easy feelings to deal with in a therapy setting – especially for those still in training taught to cultivate compassion, unconditional positive regard and empathy.
Reflection Point
DIFFERENCE
•In what ways have you ever felt different in your life? Within your family? At school? In wider society? Within your friendship circle? Now?
•Has this sense of difference been largely a source of pain or has it made you feel special – maybe both?
•Have there been times when you wish that difference wasn’t there? How did you imagine you would feel if it was gone or not so visible to others?
Therapists in training often report trying to minimise the sense of difference in an attempt to equalise the power balance between them and the client. Or they report feeling somewhat embarrassed by addressing certain differences, particularly if they come from a majority group and the client comes from a minority group. Usually this is from the best of motives, feeling inadequate themselves to understand the client experience or not wanting to put pressure or embarrassment on the client. All of this comes from this assumption within ourselves of course, unlike any other assumptions we make in therapy. It’s always wise to check out with the client whether we’ve come to the right conclusion.
I learned this very early on in training when I was working with a lady called Mary at an HIV organisation. Mary was a refugee from West Africa, whose husband had been arrested over political matters, and who had subsequently been raped at a police station, contracted HIV and had no choice but to leave two children behind in the care of her mother when she sought asylum in the UK. Initially I was very nervous as to whether I would be able to help this woman. How could I possibly understand what she had been through? Would it not be easier to have somebody from an African background to empathise with this particular client? And, most importantly of all, how was Mary feeling having to talk about such sensitive issues in front of a white man, raised in the UK?
After working for several sessions, Mary was being fairly quiet one day, and this set of thoughts was playing on my mind. Luckily I found the courage to put the question to her. She laughed and responded immediately, saying that she had been very relieved when she was allocated a white counsellor. The stigma of being HIV within the refugee community was still huge, and she was worried the news of her status would leak out if she’d been working with a black or African counsellor. My assumptions about what was going on in her mind were completely wrong.
These days, if there is a clear difference between us I try to make sure that I name it fairly early on in work. Recently I began working with a lady in her mid-seventies. I am currently in my late forties. I knew from the initial assessment that she had lost a baby as a young woman, back in the early 1960s. This was around the time I was born. So at two levels my presence as her therapist could have been provoking some deep feeling. First, because many of her issues were to do with ageing and the growing awareness of her own mortality. Secondly, because the baby boy, had he lived, would have been roughly my age. Eventually I asked Grace how it felt working with a therapist my age. At first, she was very polite, as most clients are, and said it made no difference to her at all. After a little gentle digging, however, she said that it had reminded her of the son she had lost and she’d been curious to know in what year I was born. Eventually I disclosed this to Grace, and we were able to use these feelings as a platform for a much deeper exploration of these old, calcified feelings of grief.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
DIFFERENCE
Most of us claim to be at ease with difference. It is politically correct to do so. Any discourse voicing unease with the difference of others is frowned upon. The truth is most human beings have mixed feelings around difference. We may be curious, excited, stimulated and enlivened by it whilst still having residual feelings of threat, anxiety, judgement or anger. With one type of difference we may be fully relaxed whilst another brings out the very worst in us.
All these feelings are likely to emerge in the countertransference in therapy. Pretending that the darker side is not there is unlikely to be helpful. We must be willing to explore our fear or unfamiliarity, embrace our judgements and examine their validity and above all be patient – we tend to be at our most uncomfortable with difference when dealing with people on a surface level. The deeper we go the more we tend to see of the common humanity which binds and connects us rather than the gulf of difference that may separate us.
When I was still training – and practising in a prison setting – many of the uncomfortable feelings outlined above would haunt me and even cause me to wonder whether I was made of the ‘right stuff’ to be a good therapist. Luckily for me I had an incredibly wise and wonderful supervisor who introduced me to the idea of ‘separating the person from the behaviour’. Even working with paedophiles, rapists, murderers and arsonists I could feel much clearer about profoundly disagreeing with some of their actions – even being repulsed, angered or frightened by them – whilst still retaining some connection to the human being in front of me who had made such dark choices.
There is no one you cannot love (at some level) if you hear enough of their story. If there is I haven’t worked with them yet.
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The Key to DIFFERENCE is – very simply – empathy. If I can get in touch with those times in my life when I have felt teased, shut out, unfairly judged, misunderstood or vilified because of something different about me – it becomes easier to extend that understanding and empathic attunement to another. Ultimately empathy is an act of imagination carried out with a loving purpose behind it – we can learn to become better at this even if the place we temporarily imagine ourselves into is not somewhere we would choose to stay. |
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
There are so many levels of complexity within the therapeutic encounter. Trying to deal with these and stay present with your client (or even to stay sane) is frequently very tough for training therapists. For instance, trying to decide just how many people are present in the therapy room is a little like the old religious debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In physical terms, of course, there are just the two of you, unless you are working in a couples, group therapy or systemic context. From a psychological standpoint, however, things get much more complicated.
Let’s start with the children in the room – the inner children. If, as a basic, we accept that each of us has a wonder child and a wounded child carried within us (see the Inner Child stream for a reminder of this) we can add two extra people onto each side: two for the client, two for the therapist. In reality, inner child work is rarely this simplistic, as there may have been several points during the developmental process when clients were blocked or repressed or when they had to edit their personalities in some way. We may meet several sub-personalities or parts of the self, which represent the client at age four, eight and 15 and carry very particular psychological baggage. And whilst this is true for them, it is also true for us. Let’s now take a look at the parents present: first, the client’s mother and father. Even if this person did not grow up with their mother or father there will still be a fantasised or wished-for parent present in the room. That’s two more people for the client side. We also have to add our own parents, of course. From the countertransferential perspective, our parents also make themselves known, at times during the therapy process. And no parent is one-dimensional. So the loving, seductive, chaotic, critical or distant elements of those people will leak out into the process itself too. We are rapidly running out of chairs. Current or former partners of the client will also have a strong psychological presence in the room as will anybody that has left a very deep mark on us emotionally. We can add to this: siblings (if we have them), children (if we have them – or our feelings about the children we do not have), influential work colleagues, bosses and teachers, friends and enemies. In fact, the more you look at it, the more crowded the room becomes. And for the therapists we also have influential teachers and supervisors, their own previous therapists, particular founding fathers or mothers of their preferred models – plus their partners, children and so on. Luckily all these people are not present physically otherwise our sessions would need to be held in the Albert Hall. And yet the fact that we cannot see them does not mean they are absent psychologically, emotionally, spiritually or intellectually. So we cannot ignore their vital role in shaping the process, the relational space or the internal emotional world of the client or the counsellor, our defensive structures, blind spots, idiosyncrasies, fears and fantasies.
The smart therapist recognises that we are working in a packed room and that there is wisdom in this crowd as well as trouble; that this multitude of invisible presences must be taken note of, felt, talked about and acknowledged.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
COMPLEXITY
In this stream I use the metaphor of the fighter pilot (see page 211). It’s a great metaphor but it can never do justice to the lived experience of the real thing. Real-world territory usually demands fast reactions and throws up unexpected twists and turns when we least expect them, it throws us off balance. Learning to roll with such rapidly changing conditions takes time and boundless compassion for the self.
If a self-critical voice within is too omnipresent – we will never find the space inside ourselves to learn, grow and develop.
Therapy space is a paradox – packed with multiple layers of meaning, feeling, memory and unexpressed emotion, suffused with the body and its storehouse of reaction, traumatic residue and yearning, full of relational dynamics and their fantasies and fears – and yet, at heart, it can feel like the purest, simplest, most honest space in the world.
We should not ignore the complexity present but never forget the underlying simplicity and beauty of human connectedness and being that lies beneath and beyond it.
Another central element of complexity is the ongoing debate about how many aspects there are to the therapeutic relationship itself. Whole books have been written about this. And, naturally, like most other psychotherapy/counselling phenomena no two therapists can truly agree about it. In the lectures I give at university on this topic I generally rely on the five relationship model, developed by Petruska Clarkson (2003). Many theoretical models tend to have a dominant focus on just one or two aspects of the therapeutic relationship. It’s probably fair to say that most therapists practising today accept that to focus too heavily on one element of the therapy relationship, whilst ignoring others, only gives us part of the overall picture.
Even the most basic counselling contract needs a solid working alliance in place. The alliance gives a platform on which any other therapeutic activity can rest. It means that the two parties involved understand and agree to certain basic rules and to stay within certain basic roles. Bordin (1979) refers to basic goals, bonds and tasks which the two parties must share. The broad psychodynamic school of thought has alerted us to the importance of the transferential relationship. In a nutshell, this says that human beings carry within them a set of rules or templates for how they expect others to interact with them and how they see themselves in relationship to other people and they may carry across old emotional responses, defences or attractions into present-moment encounters, often being unaware of why they are doing so. These models are shaped through early relational experiences and are added to throughout life, sometimes becoming stuck or habitual. One can argue that they form the core of what we call the personality. Most orientations recognise some sort of process that fits this basic type. In object relations, it may be called an internalised working model of relationships, in cognitive-behavioural therapy it may be referred to as schemas or scripts, and within traditional psychoanalysis it is interpreted as transferential or projected material. In essence, all are saying much the same thing, that human beings do not come fresh to every new relational encounter. We carry with us the joys, fears and expectations developed in earlier relational contexts. From a psychodynamic perspective, the most influential of these contexts will come from the first seven or so years of life, with the dominant figures of mother and father looming large.
Reflection Point
COMPLEXITY
•How complex is your present life? When you contemplate that complexity what feelings emerge?
•How does your body react?
•For many of us modern life produces feelings of being overwhelmed as we drown in ever more complicated layers of information, duties, caring roles and the never-ending administration of life.
•How do you manage the complicated tasks of your life? How did your parents’ role model that for you? Do you feel their lives were simpler than your own?
•Think of someone whose life seems more simple to you – do you have feelings of envy, pity, sadness or joy?
The third relational aspect referred to by Clarkson is the reparative or reparenting element (or the developmentally needed relationship). This idea emerged initially within the British School of Object Relations and the American School of Interpersonal Psychology, with themes connected to how we relate to other people. Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) exemplified this when he described the core need of human beings (from infancy to old age) as being for ‘interpersonal security’ (p.45) – thus rejecting the central premise of Freudian drive theory.
If parts of our personality had to go underground, in order to feel safe during childhood, to feel accepted, wanted, worth something or simply to ensure our physical survival, we may carry some deep wounds or places where it feels broken or shut down. On the other hand, certain other elements of the self may have been pushed to the front of the stage, if that made the people around us happier, less upset or angry or more likely to give us the kind of emotional nurturance we needed. We may have learned to be quiet, compliant, or to always say yes to someone more forceful than ourselves, so that they let us stick around. Our inner clown may have learned to be funny and self-deprecating so that people like us. Or we may have come to the conclusion that the only way to get ourselves heard was to be angry and violent. The reparative relationship within therapy therefore seeks to use relationship to help heal these wounds and to give these lost parts of the self a chance to re-emerge in an environment where they are welcomed, valued and supported.
The two remaining relationships that Clarkson points to are the real relationship and the transpersonal relationship. The real relationship speaks to that element of the contact between therapist and client, which comes from outside of our respective roles. It is those lovely moments of human-to-human meeting, something referred to by Martin Buber (1923) as the ‘I–Thou’ relationship. Incidentally, it is the real relationship that seems to be very highly prized by clients themselves. Clearly this is more likely to emerge in the longer-term pieces of work, in a four or six-week contract there is limited time and space for such a relationship to evolve. The final one of the five is the transpersonal relationship. In some ways it is the most controversial. It certainly refers to things which are traditionally seen as outside of the scientific realm. We may call it religion, spirituality or the personal belief system, but to many clients it is of central importance in their lives – and to some therapists too of course.
The fighter pilot is a metaphor that I originally came up with to describe how I felt at times during therapy sessions when I was still training. I remember in very early sessions trying to pay close attention to my body, sitting in a very open position, using good eye contact and trying to be aware of voice tone. At the time I was also trying to learn the various key psychotherapy models. Depending on which books I had read and which lectures I had attended that week, my focus might have been pulled in a more psychodynamic direction, towards Gestalt, or I might have been trying to embody the Rogerian core conditions. I would also remind myself to keep an eye out for transferential material. Then again, what about countertransference? Were the feelings I was having in response to the client’s material really about them? Or was it triggering feelings and memories from my own unconscious mind? Was this material getting in the way of me doing a good job? Then again, maybe these feelings were just straightforward empathy, the result of trying to enter into the client’s world and get some understanding of what it might be like to be them. It was also possible that I was completely off track and what I was dealing with here was more in the field of Kleinian projective identification! With this mass of plates already spinning in my crowded mind, was I paying sufficient attention to which aspects of the therapeutic relationship were currently being expressed in the room? Had I sufficiently built a strong enough working alliance? Were we in a reparative phase? Was there some profound transpersonal element taking place that I was completely blind to?
I recall trying to explain what this felt like in a supervision group. The best description I could come up with was that of a fighter pilot during World War II, under fire from enemy planes, and yet still trying to pay attention to the multiple streams of information in the cockpit of the plane I was flying: so many dials in front of me recording height, speed, air pressure and altitude, yet with one eye on where my crosshairs were focusing and thinking about when to fire. And all the while feeling a terrible responsibility for the other people on board the plane with me, fearing the whole thing might run off track and crash at any moment. If it was complicated enough in the 1940s, I would imagine any pilot flying a modern plane has to pay attention to even more streams of information coming into their mind at top speed. One may assume that in this modern technological world we may be very used to living in the midst of such information overload. However, to my mind, it takes a good deal of practice and experience to reach the point where one can assimilate all of these competing and powerful streams of emotional, non-verbal and intellectual information whilst still retaining a basically attuned emotional presence with the client – being in what I referred to earlier as absorbed in optimal flow.
As with any other complex set of skills which have been performed over years or decades, the really wise and experienced therapist will make it all look terribly easy. And yet we must allow ourselves to grow and assimilate the skills over time. Nobody can get to this point of deep experience overnight, it simply isn’t possible. The trick at the beginning is to gradually open up one’s perception to ever more complex layers of feeling and connection within the intersubjective therapeutic space. Including ourselves, with such permission, we can begin the journey of moving from trainee pilot to expert flier.
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The Key to COMPLEXITY is – ironically – simplicity. Getting too caught up in the complexity of things leads to burn-out, overload and disillusionment – it is part of why many clients come to see us in the first place. Whilst acknowledging the complex nature of life and learning to work well within it we must always try to hold on to the simplicity of every human heart with its needs for belonging, love, warmth, safety, meaning and connection. |
