PRACTISED WISDOM
•Maturity
•Craftsmanship
These last two streams encapsulate everything that has gone before. We are back to the 10,000-hour rule that I mentioned at the beginning (see page 15). Achieving and living from this state of practice wisdom takes real time. Like fine wine there is a fermentation process that happens inside the well that one day will begin to produce something closer to vintage wine rather than simple water. Often by this stage the practitioner is guiding others in their journey as well as working with their own clients: as teachers, lecturers, training supervisors, researching, writing, presenting at conferences and workshops – passing on something of the embodied and hard-won practical wisdom they have forged along the way, acting as a guide and mentor to the next generation of eager, naive, excited and terrified travellers.
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
Henri Bergson
Accepting our experience is not simply a matter of owning our subjectivity, as if it could exist hermetically sealed in and cut off from all else, but rather is a matter of owning the intersubjectivity that allows everything to influence us, and us to influence it.
Look at the faces of older people who have reached some wisdom and you will see the blows etched on their face, but in someone who has weathered this, seen it through, rather than fleeing it, these very rents are marks of dignity, beauty, strength and compassion. They embody survival and endurance. Compare these faces with the vacuous, shiny, pretty pleasantness of the people used in advertising; the pinned-up smiles are masks over emptiness and far from being persuasive, the happiness suggested is shallow and empty. Such faces convey a living that is ‘above it all’, or ‘out of it’, and thus lacks both the gravitas and understanding that remaining with experience bestows. Shallowness and vanity versus depth and gravitas is what we are considering in this stream.
Schopenhauer (2000) in The World as Will and Representation notes that in almost all languages the etymological root of the words describing vanity – in Latin vanitas – originally meant ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ (p.205). To fill up the well of the wise practitioner with water that is both practical and meaningful we must strive to leave vanity and surface behind. Another stream considered for this book was Humility (but I had to draw the line somewhere). The end product of having walked through territory 10,000 times cannot be mainly driven by vanity, ego, superiority or disdain for those less experienced. Compassion, empathy and love cannot spring from such brittle and rocky ground.
The therapist going through the motions, feeling more ennui and resignation in meeting a new client than curiosity and tenderness, must surely ask themselves some serious questions about whether it is time to do something different. The wonderful writer and therapist Dorothy Rowe once gave a very honest newspaper interview (2002) in which she talked about why she had given up practising as a therapist.
Working as a therapist is a tremendous responsibility because you interfere in people’s lives. I don’t see clients anymore because you get to a point where you feel you’re not doing your work very well. There aren’t many new plots in people’s lives and when someone starts to tell you a story and you know how it’s going to turn out then you stop really listening properly.
This shows a real professional being honest with herself about where she is on her journey and acting on her awareness in the best interests of both her clients and herself. I also know of practitioners still working in their seventies and eighties who are as enthusiastic and passionate about their client work now as they were 30 years ago – we are all different.
MATURITY
•Do you feel like a mature person? Really?
•Try to access the parts of you that still feel small, unsure, playful, silly and spiteful, and just want someone else to do it!
•We tend to add layers of maturity around this core – and naturally what I consider mature behaviour may be seen by you as the height of immaturity.
•Even the best of us dip in and out most of the time – if what we mean by maturity is responsibility, selflessness, thinking through consequences, delaying gratification, working hard – I don’t know anybody who personifies those qualities 100 per cent of the time. Actually I wouldn’t want to – they wouldn’t be much fun to hang out with!
Mature working within therapy is a matter of the therapist appreciating, from within their own experience, the personally different yet humanly common experience of the client. The therapist’s job is to stay with the emerging energy of the client, paying close attention to what they are experiencing to help reveal the blocks, and sore points, of the client’s energy. This, in turn, enables the therapist to direct the client’s attention to their own experience, and to facilitate an exploration of it. The therapist must not be overpowered, seduced or terrified of the client’s energy, surrendering to its neurotic demands by colluding, avoiding, refusing to challenge where needed or stand their ground when they must. Neither can the therapist take up the opposite posture and simply observe and interpret the client, at a safe, clinical, uninvolved distance, refusing to experientially feel the client or connect deeply with their individuality.
Many people never outgrow the child. The wounded, defended, adapted part of their psyche stays in charge long after they are living in an adult body. The parts of the self that experienced arrested development are easily triggered in the present day, and the acting out, projection and denial of negatively charged transferential material creates a never-ending parade of new psychodrama, conflict, self-loathing or damage to others. They may demand ‘primitive merger’ with lovers, unconsciously use their own children as security blankets and block that child’s own individuation-separation process, or they may compulsively repeat the same tired scripts of anxiety, depression, relational tension and existential avoidance. These are people who still long for life scenarios with ‘happy ever after’ endings, and the like, angry and frustrated that life is not constantly happy, fulfilling, entertaining and indulgent. Letting go of the child’s fantasies and defensive positions is tough but necessary if we are to genuinely grow up and become an adult. Mourning the loss of the perfect object – the perfect me, the perfect life – is part of the work of therapy.
But what are the adult’s consolations for losing the fortunate child’s lot of protection, safety and relative ease? These are more to do with the ego: ambition, triumph, success, public display of one’s power and status. This does not demand merger or happy endings or refuse to enter adult power games, but it too relies on certain psychological and behavioural crutches. Existence must be a puzzle that can be solved by sufficient effort, intelligence and power. The illusion that sustains the adult’s ego is ‘power over’ fate, and therefore the capacity to create one’s own destiny out of one’s own forcefulness. The child’s evasive myths are of one kind, the adult’s evasive myths of another.
In either case, existential reality is shut out. If the child must give up dewy-eyed romanticism, the adult must give up hard-boiled scepticism, or existential reality remains held at a very long arm’s length. The child fantasises being in the arms of benign powers, like adoring parents; the adult fantasises the ego as a tough guy, standing alone, capable of blasting through every obstacle and overcoming every challenge.
Letting the adult’s consolations die is horrendously difficult, and few people do it. This is why Irvin Yalom (1989) refers to himself as ‘Love’s Executioner’. He does not mean it is his job to kill all love, thankfully. Rather to kill the need for the adult to believe in ‘the perfect object’ to come and rescue them, the prince, or princess, who will come from over the horizon and end their aloneness, that feeling of being misunderstood or not held. In many adult lives that fantasised rescuer can show up as friend, child or hero as well as the more obvious form of lover or partner. Such relatively mature adults may not need merger and happy endings, but they need predictable order and reliable control, they need measurement of outcomes, they need the definiteness that puts everything in neat and tidy boxes, or they cannot ‘play the game’. Some adults just follow the rules that are pre-set, and some adults play the game to win even if they have to stretch the rules. This is why models will always have their seductive powers until we get wise to them. Yalom (1989, p.13) says that all therapists must be able to tolerate and work with a great deal of uncertainty. This quotation sums up the approach to situated functioning brilliantly:
the public may believe that therapists guide patients systematically and sure-handedly through predictable stages of therapy to a foreknown goal, but such is rarely the case: instead…therapists frequently wobble, improvise and grope for direction. The powerful temptation to achieve certainty through embracing an ideological school and a tight therapeutic system is treacherous: such belief may block the uncertain and spontaneous encounter necessary for effective therapy. (1989, p.13)
Between Chaos and Clarity
Part of what changes over time as a therapy practitioner is your relationship to chaos, the unknown and anxiety. When we begin our journey towards experience or craftsmanship, in any sphere of activity, we are often seen as ‘green’, and we usually feel very green too. The canvas in front of us is largely blank, the world is full of exciting freedom and possibility yet concurrently drenched by gripping fear, anxiety and the terror of failing, being found out, getting it all wrong. These are the feelings outlined earlier in the book in my account of a first ever therapy session and in the first few sets of streams.
In other words, the majority of the field is unknown to you. All you have are the accounts of others who have journeyed in the field before you and come back with their theories, models and ideas (frozen in time) of what the field is like. And to most human beings a great expanse of the unknown is always a little terrifying, even as it may pump us full of adrenaline and generate the excitement of anticipating what is about to come. The situated approach to activity is to embrace that period of chaos and the treasure trove of understanding it can produce. It is not, however, good to stay in that place for ever – it is not a place of wisdom. As we journey into the field more and more, we start to build up (in our well) a plethora of experiences, responses, knowledge and memory. It is like being dropped down in the middle of an unknown city and getting 50 chances to walk in different directions. On each of those visits you will have learned some of the topography of this place. You will know that this street can lead on to this alley or if you double back it will take you towards the train station. You will have walked down the same street three times and hit a dead end. You will have experienced that magical moment when turning an unexpected corner led you to witness the most beautiful open vista across town.
Now the experienced practitioner faces a profound challenge: how to move along the spectrum from chaos to clarity, from the known to the unknown, all depending on where you may be with a particular client, and not cling to one end. So each time you encounter a schizoid client you will know something about what it feels like to live in the schizoid neighbourhood of town. To an extent you will know your way about. However, you don’t know what it feels like to be this particular person having lived this particular life. That is, and always will be, new to you and you need to take the time to find out. You must not be tempted to miss the exploration of the chaos and the unknown in this person’s story. You may be familiar with the neighbourhood, and even the street, but you have never been inside this house before. It would be arrogant, foolish and harmful to the client, were you to assume you have. They would not feel seen, heard, understood or held in any real sense. Likewise, it would not serve the client were you to have to start from scratch all over again each time. You do retain many useful things from each trip.
The Streams in the Consulting Room
MATURITY
What to say about being a mature therapy practitioner? You know when you have it and when you don’t – unless you think you have it when you actually don’t – or when someone else sees it in you but you struggle to own it for yourself – or when a run of poor sessions sets you wondering whether you’ve lost it if you ever had it in the first place.
This sense of oneself is never a fixed, solid, permanent thing – as very little is in situated territory. Others are often able to see it before you can recognise it in yourself. It creeps up on you gradually only to slip away during some of the toughest moments.
For me the only truth of the maturity stream is to accept that it may be a frequent walking companion the longer your journey goes but it will slip away and hide at times – don’t panic, accepting its impermanence is actually part of being mature.
Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun, says in her book, When Things Fall Apart (2005), that much of the current mental distress in Western life is caused by people desperately trying to run at full pelt away from anything too painful, challenging, anxiety provoking or risky. She likens this to viewing a garden from behind a thickened sheet of plate glass; we yearn to see, smell and feel the garden but are terrified of anything that might bite us, prick us, dirty our clothes or make us sneeze. This sanitised way of being in the world is close to the worst excesses of models. Mature therapists (and clients) need to do everything they can to avoid it and a sustained focus on how to practise in a more situated way is one way to help us do this.
The situated therapist must strive to remain in balance, somewhere between chaos and certainty, accepting that there will be moments of both and that both have something unique to teach us. To lunge desperately for total certainty denies too much of what constitutes life itself, whilst to indulge oneself in nothing but chaos loses the wisdom and craftsmanship that is built, shaped and finessed with every new walk into the wild. The journey allows us to find the necessary love to work with our clients, whilst our training teaches us the necessary detachment.
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The Key to MATURITY is the ability to relax in therapy space and accept the highs and lows as merely part of life’s rich pattern. Maturity frequently lets go of the need to control, yet is able to contain and direct when that is needed. It is balanced, flexible and honest – this stream draws upon so many of the ones that precede it and incorporates them into an extraordinary blend. |
Without craftmanship inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
Johannas Brahms
What we are calling craftmanship here can be given many other names: craftmanship, mastery, artistry, expertise, brilliance or accomplishment. However we may name this phenomenon its deepest roots lie in the building of practice wisdom – ability acquired through training, discipline and experience.
This is where we all hope to end up when we begin our journey – so it is only right that craftsmanship should be the final stream in this book. No matter what you call it we all know when we see it and it makes us marvel at someone’s ability to perform something so complex with seeming ease and flair. Something in us knows that they have been practising and perfecting this skill, this craft, this art – for a very long time. Perhaps we feel awed and inspired – maybe completely terrified and daunted if we are trying to take our first fragile steps along a similar road.
This stream is closely related to Stream 7: Slowing Down. It harks back to a time when everyone understood that to be judged as capable within your chosen field took a great deal of time. One moved from a state of apprenticeship, very gradually, to become a master craftsman. This was true for goldsmiths, weavers, carpenters, builders, stonemasons, sailors, artists, architects – any role where a body of skill, knowledge and experience had been honed, polished and tested over time to the point where that person could be said to have developed expertise. Using our established metaphor – they have a deep well, overflowing with abundant, clear water.
Student Excerpt
The most powerful and fearful aspect of situated learning is the responsibility it places on individuals and this has important ramifications in therapy. Intensive therapeutic training fails to maximise on what both client and therapist already know whereas situatedness allows the client, and counsellor, to possess the answers to their own problems deep within themselves.
There is no ‘Reflection Point’ box, no single key nor ‘The Stream in the Consulting Room’ box for this final stream. What would be the point? No few words can do justice to something so incredible. We know it when we see it precisely because it is relatively rare in this world – most people do not have the patience, determination, courage and talent to stick with a path for long enough. We should also remember that mastery of our craft is never a single destination – we can go on adding to the mix, making it richer and deeper for as long as we live. In evoking craftsmanship we can speak of beauty, grace, glory, splendour and melody; it expresses qualities that seem to take on a life of their own – flowing, impressive, fluid and powerful. Like watching an accomplished jazz pianist, a skilled carpenter or a mesmerising actress it has the capacity to move and change the world. To catch even glimpses of it within ourselves is something extraordinary – worth every painful step of the journey to get there.
Instead for this final stream I want to try to share some tips and tricks for strengthening and deepening the wellspring of craft you carry inside you – some operational rules for using the well: a kind of handbook for the well-user.
It is tempting, if rather romantic, to think of the well as some underground wellspring of knowledge and intuition flowing up unaided from our unconscious mind. Certainly Jung would have been attracted to such an interpretation of this idea. For me this is too passive, starry-eyed and simple a notion. The water in a well lies underground. It will not climb its way up the side of the well of its own accord. There is nothing magical about it. Its truth is more prosaic. It requires a human hand and human strength and human intention to make it to the surface. We must, first, be conscious of its existence. If we are not, it is of limited use to us and to others. Second, we must wind the mechanism so that the bucket lowers, captures some water and then pull it back up again. Then the water is available for us to drink, or to feed our plants or animals. We must maintain the mechanism, ensuring the rope and the bucket stay strong and the well is unblocked.
If we don’t use the water in the well in an active manner, the wellspring underground dries up. Thus how we use the bucket and rope, to bring the water up, is crucial. The more actively you use the well, the more ready it is to ‘flow up’; but you are still consciously and actively involved in this ‘getting the water out’, at least initially. In explaining this concept to our students we often extend the notion of the well to include the metaphor of the fountain for how situatedness operates in practice.
When you are in a real situation and the flow begins from the well, what is often referred to as ‘getting into the zone’, you will begin to find that you no longer need to be so consciously aware of reaching down into the well for decisions about action, choice of words, stories, ideas or instant reactions to changing circumstances. This is when the flowing up from the depth of the well takes on the qualities of a fountain: sparkling, bubbling up and surging out of you into the surrounding fields. It is something like taking the cork out of a bottle of champagne; it carries its own energy and momentum. It feels exciting to be the source of this energy, but it is also thrilling and inspiring to be around it too.
When you are experiencing this for yourself, in a therapy session, on a stage, a sports field or in a business presentation, it feels truly extraordinary and something quite beyond you in many ways. This is what it looks like when any craftsperson in their field gets deeply into situated being. That is when it can start to feel like something magical is happening. But the truth is that people need time to develop such capacities. The beginner may have flashes of such brilliance but they cannot be relied upon to any great extent.
So the notion of the well as simply unconscious is too limiting. In fact it operates across the unconscious and conscious spheres of our mind, both within and without of ourselves, intrapsychically and interpersonally. In other words it is truly intersubjective. Like the lungs, it takes air in from the outside, uses it, transforms it, then feeds it back again to the outside world. It is cyclical, fluid, ever changing and draws its content from a variety of sources, rather than one underground stream. That is why I often extend our central metaphor – so that in our well bucket there is not simply water, but soup: something richer, mixed with ingredients from different places that affect one another in a process of alchemy and transformation.
I launch myself into the therapeutic relationship having a hypothesis, or a faith. That my liking, my confidence, and my understanding of the other person’s inner world, will lead to a significant process of becoming. I enter the relationship not as a scientist, not as a physician who can accurately diagnose and cure, but as a person, entering into a personal relationship. Insofar as I see him only as an object, the client will tend to become only an object. I risk myself…at times this risk is very real, and is keenly experienced. I let myself go into the immediacy of the relationship where it is my total organism which takes over and is sensitive to the relationship, not simply my consciousness. I am not consciously responding in a planful or analytic way, but simply in an unreflective way to the other individual, my reaction being based on my total organismic sensitivity to this other person. (May 1991, p.54)
When people are drowning in the deep water of unknown and overwhelming experience they cry out for a model as a lifebelt, to save them. What they really need is to learn how to swim, not just to survive in the water but eventually to excel. The journey through these 34 streams, from the Leap of Faith to Craftsmanship, parallels all such learning journeys – whilst Stream 1 speaks to the scared, the unsure, the reluctant beginner within us, the craftsmanship stream speaks to the extraordinary within us: the Pablo Picasso, the Björn Borg, the Alan Turing or the Ella Fitzgerald. Few of us can sustain such heights – but we can get to the summit within each of us. People are models-hungry when in the novice state, and those who belong to models as an ego badge are only too willing to throw the drowning a lifebelt as a way of recruiting them to that model. The person flailing in the water does not realise that the lifebelt they gratefully cling to comes with a brand name on it and, sometimes, a lock without any key. They are prevented from ever learning to swim in deep waters. Fear convinces us we can never swim, and this is hijacked by true believers in models to enslave us to their structured and articulated system.
However we now know there is there is another way: developing and trusting practical wisdom. Once we have ingested the best, or most relevant, from a rough guide and its travellers’ tales, this goes into the unconscious and alchemically becomes mixed in with our own personal learning direct from the terrain – this mixing of instruction with experience fills the well. Externally located support can be taken away, sometimes lets us down or can be destroyed by events; but the well is inside us and can never be taken away. Zen says, ‘The Self is the real book.’ As I say to my students: the contents of the well can never be left on the bus, run out of battery charge or be stolen at the pub, it becomes an essential part of you and will be with you for the rest of your days.
The Alchemical Soup
When you make a bowl of soup for the first time it is likely you will follow a recipe. Maybe the combination of ingredients is the same one your mother or grandmother used. Perhaps it is a traditional recipe where one follows fairly rigid rules. Initially you will look for guidance outside of yourself in making the soup. And you will look at the reactions of those eating it to see if it tastes good. Over time this process changes. You may adapt your cooking style, picking up tips for adding some spice or different vegetables. Your taste probably adapts over the years. In any case you probably become more skilled at preparing food and if someone coming for dinner likes things a little different you can adapt your cooking process for them; indeed you enjoy doing so, it gives you the chance to experiment. Most importantly, you are the final arbiter of whether the soup works. You taste it, smell it, and watch as it bubbles on the stove, adding a little pinch of something here and there. When we taste the finished product we are sometimes curious to know the various ingredients that formed it. But we experience them together as one delicious whole.
For me therapy is much the same. The well inside of us contains an ever-changing, ever-moving alchemical soup of ideas, theories, therapy models – the experience of others filtered – and importantly our own beliefs, joys, losses, wounds, resilience, learning and reflection. The need to separate and categorise these things out is an outgrowth of a models mindset. In the consulting room, when the well bucket dips down into the soup it captures something unique each time. Needing to chemically analyse the soup to find out how many grams of each ingredient it contains may well be an interesting exercise but is it a useful one for the experienced therapist? Not usually. Rather the wise practitioner knows that their training in particular models has provided much of the base for the soup but the things that make it special and tasty come from them.
Trusting in your own well and its contents lies at the heart of therapeutic confidence in the field. I encourage you to take on this knowing, no matter what stage of the therapy experience you are at, and be guided by it. Develop your awareness of just how rich and magnificent is your well. Learn about its continual and growing presence inside you. Intuition, trust and the ability to be present in the moment, flowing inside your own creative response to whatever the territory sends your way, will all help you to make the contents ever deeper and more complex.
And in order for the soup to be edible it must be cooked. We often refer to a therapy session as a kind of stew or soup with our students. In much of our teaching of counselling and psychotherapy we artificially separate out such phenomena as empathy, transference, countertransference, self-disclosure, reflecting, challenging and the therapeutic relationship in order to help students get a feel for them. They are necessarily taught in separate lectures. But a real therapy session is not experienced in that way, we do not finish a session and say to ourselves, well, that one was about countertransference or empathy; boundaries or self-disclosure. All of these things are happening often at the same time. Multiple streams of emotional, physiological and intellectual information are flowing through us, around us and between us throughout the session. Much like an airline pilot we have to keep our eyes on many dials and screens at the same time, which is why juggling and complexity are two of the streams. It is being able to move gracefully through this complex flow that is the main challenge.
For me, situated action is much the same. I have outlined 34 streams of situatedness which I feel are vitally important aspects of this approach to mastering any field of human activity. Yet we know that they will be experienced in the real world of territory in bunches: story and dialogue, immersion and awareness all at the same time. In any case, 34 is an arbitrary number – why stop there? By now you may be screaming at me (metaphorically) about how could I have missed out such and such? There is no defence against such accusations – this list is partly driven by subjectivity and partly by the requirements of a relatively brief book.
So the differentiated streams are the ingredients of the soup but we taste the soup as a whole. Time acts as one of the heat sources cooking the soup – that is why the streams of the journey and slowing down are so vital to understanding the situated way of being; and why I stress, again and again, that situated action is not anti-models. Disrespecting complex terrain by pretending you can walk into it totally unprepared is naive, arrogant and in some cases, like those French mountaineers earlier in the book, possibly fatal.
If a casserole is meant to stay in the oven cooking slowly for five hours it is no good taking it out after five minutes and serving it up to your guests. It will be raw, lumpy, cold and indigestible. For the alchemy to work it needs time and heat to allow an exchange to take place between the various ingredients, for them to affect one another, be changed and transformed, to release their flavour and colour over one another and become something completely different from what they were when they were thrown into the pot. Mastering any craft or practice in life is much the same. The stuff (experiential, theoretical, anecdotal, emotional, philosophical) which goes down into the cooking pot that is the well inside you often re-emerges looking and feeling very different from how it did going in. Indeed this is why we are often surprised by something that comes to us in a moment of inspiration when we are deep inside real-world territory. Afterwards we say to ourselves, slightly shocked, ‘Where on earth did that come from?’ or ‘I didn’t know I had it in me!’ And that is one of the wonderful truths of the well. We don’t have to keep a running inventory of everything that it contains. We don’t have to run an exhaustive administrative audit every six months. Its richness, once cooked, is there for us for the rest of our lives. We can draw upon it time after time, and yet still be delighted by some new element of it that has not been seen before.
Cream of Alchemy Soup
So not only must we be conscious and active to get the water flowing, it is also true that many of the soup’s ingredients come from outside, through immersion in the terrain. As the well breathes in and breathes out we draw things in from outside, as well as tapping into latent powers from the inside. The outside and the inside cook together.
What comes in from outside? Models do, but only as sifted, digested, excreted, by us in our personal experience – and they are useful in your well when they retain that fundamental tie to the experiential ground. Abstractionist thought only serves to poison the well. Far more vital in filling the well is our relationship with clients. All that we take in, assimilate and learn from the relationship with clients adds much living water to our well.
The well does add something powerful, in creativity and inspiration, to the limits of the conscious mind. It won’t do this, however, unless the conscious mind is conscious and active, in its own right. The surfer has to be a good rider of the wave, or the wave does not come.
So it is vital that we become conscious of the well’s existence, how to use it, and, crucially, to trust that it will work for us in moments when we are faced with the blank space to be filled or the unexpected tiger that rounds the tree. In that sense this paradigmatic approach to therapy is encouraging conscious activity in managing one’s well and its contents, rather than some wispy, fairy-tale notion of what situated practice is about. There is nothing soft about it. Whilst it questions over-dependence on models and notions of scientific objectivity it still demands discipline, rigour, courage and effort from the practitioner.
So regardless of whether you are brand new to therapy or have been practising for many years I want to encourage you to trust in your well and develop your awareness of it. Even if you are just starting out you can know that even though in your current tunnel you cannot presently see the light, you are moving towards it and it will start to appear. You must trust the process and keep walking. The aim of this concept, and this book, is to reduce overwhelming anxiety and fear in practitioners so they feel less compelled to swear blind allegiance to so-called ‘evidence-based’ practice and manualised approaches to therapy.
Imagine the sea and its different moods. On some days if you wish to swim you will have to deal with a tempestuous ocean. Waves will crash in and sweep you off your feet. Your head will be pushed underwater and at times you will not know which way is up. You will have to feel, or fight, your way back to the surface. On other days the sea is calmer and you swim more clearly, and with greater purpose, back toward the beach. You may feel at home in one type of water more than the other but we all have to learn to function well under both conditions, and move between them as required. Experienced therapists will do this naturally, seamlessly blending together their hard-won knowledge of the territory gained over many years walking and the confused, magical, shocking encounter with the very new. That is why balance is so important for the situated practitioner, and why this notion of the well contains a soup of so many elements.
The surface of the water gives us access to the clarity of the air; under the surface affords us experience of the deeper realm of feeling and mystery. The best therapists (or practitioners in any field) will, like the otter, the whale or the dolphin operate happily in either realm and move easily between the two. Once models have been digested in the system a person can become capable of clarity of a different kind when operating in the field (or under the water). They can take something from the land with them when they dive under the water and use it in a different way.
It was in this intersubjective arena that the child of the client was blocked, wounded, hurt or ignored. It was here that the child decided which parts of them were not acceptable, not special enough, felt unlovable or never seemed to be admired. They will have learned to deny, hate or camouflage those aspects of self that seem to anger, bore, repulse or distance them from others, which invite mockery or provoke teasing or the threat of exclusion from the group. They will have learned to feel ashamed of those parts of the self, to direct venom towards them, wish they were gone. A whole personality, and a whole lifetime, can be built upon trying to hide from the world those parts of your child self which you learned were not really wanted or good enough. And it is in this relational place (in therapy or without) that those parts may dare to come to the surface again to find some healing, some acceptance of the real self. Only then can clients take the control lever of their life out of the terrified, rageful hands of their wounded, battered child. Only then can they let go of the rigid defences of childhood which have become so maladaptive and damaging.
To be an effective witness and guide to this process, to see it, hear it, feel it, share it and shape it the therapist must be skilled, knowledgeable and wise, knowing when to step in and when to stand back, to communicate care, empathy and compassion, to be powerfully tuned in to what the person is feeling in the here and now and also to the terrors, pains, losses and confusions they may have felt as a child. To do all this well, session after session, is not easy and given that we are only flawed human beings ourselves we need support – the ideas, images and experiences shared in this book and its streams aim to be a good companion for those walking the road to mastery. I encourage you to recognise just how rich your own practical wisdom already is and to stay open to deepening it as much as you can.
Practice is the best of all instructors.
Publilius Syrus, Roman author
