10

You Tell without Telling

Death Is Better Than Parting

After Andersen’s visit, the Brattleboro approach to both clinical work and teaching went through a period of confusion. We were betwixt and between expert and collaborative postures, but while the back feet of the inchworm were fastened firmly to the leaf, its front feet were waving in the air, searching for the next good spot to land. We did agree on a few things. Instead of either instructing or manipulating people, we were trying to step back, make space, evoke. We no longer made systemic assessments and avoided giving tasks and interventions. In this way, we tried to stay true to the objectives of continuing the conversation and taking a not-knowing stance.

However, we had picked a bad time to do this. There was beginning to be criticism in journal articles and at conferences about the moral relativism of the social constructionist position and the ethical deceptiveness of not-knowing. We believed that making therapists into society’s policemen was counterproductive and distanced us from the people we were trying to help, but ours was not the received wisdom of the time. Then along came two persons who tested our position: a white American woman with an American Indian husband came knocking at our door and put their story of violence in our lap.

Let me set the context for this story. The Brattleboro staff therapists—Judy Davidson, Mardie Ratheau, Dario Lussardi, and Bill Lax (again, I will use first names)—had decided to use a reflecting team format for all intakes. One particular interview became a type example for us all. Mardie was in her Brattleboro office one day when a woman called up and asked if anyone there could see her. Mardie gave her an appointment for that afternoon, and Paula, a thin, attractive woman with long black hair came in and announced, “All the psychiatrists in this town are out to lunch.” She meant it literally because she had tried calling them at lunchtime. The next thing she did was to stand on her head. Explaining that this was the way she cleared her mind, she said, “I used to be a contortionist.” Mardie has a high threshold of imperturbability, but even she was surprised.

Paula told Mardie the following story: six weeks before, her husband of only a few months had gone without her to a party at the next-door apartment. They had quarreled, and she was so angry with him that she shot three bullets through the door—all through the same hole! She was a very good shot. Her husband, Mel, was a building contractor who drank too much, and their frequent arguments and her mounting anxiety had prompted her to seek help. In the meantime, she said, Mel had quit drinking. Mardie gave the couple an appointment, and the other three members of the Brattleboro group were present as a reflecting team. I was not there, but I watched the teaching tape that was made of this interview many times. I should add that not everything in the session was included in the tape, so there are a few gaps in this version, but nothing substantial.

The couple were in their forties and carried on like the newlyweds they were. Mel was a short, thickset man, and very humorous. Paula flirted and joked with him the whole time, and he, in turn, seemed like an affectionate bear with a teasing princess on his back. Mardie asked Mel how he had taken to Paula’s idea of marriage counseling, and he said this was a first time for him. He said he probably didn’t need it but “every idea is a good idea.” Mardie filled in, “Every new idea is possibly a good idea,” and Paula added, squeezing Mel’s neck in the crook of one arm and laughing, “Anything new is too weird for him.” Mardie asked Mel what he had perceived about Paula’s state of mind before the shooting incident. He said he knew something was coming on because she kept snapping at him. He added, “I watch every move she makes.”

Mardie asked what had decided Mel to come in for couple counseling and he said that Paula had told him that their marriage depended on it. Mardie asked him to describe what Paula thought were the issues between them. Mel mentioned Paula’s temper and the fact that he was “wicked jealous.” Mardie asked if things were better since he had stopped drinking, and he replied that this had cut down on the violence. When Mardie asked him to describe what the violence was like, Paula replied for him, saying that it would be easy for him to kill her. He agreed, saying, “I’m powerful for my size. Grabbing her is like grabbing a paper bag. I don’t want to kill her, but the power in me probably could.” Paula said, “It’s not like me to call the cops except to save my life—I’d rather beat the shit out of you.” During this exchange, she was giggling and giving Mel playful shoves.

Mardie observed that they hadn’t been married long, and asked when they had realized there was “a violence factor.” Apparently, it was on the occasion of the first time they had gone away from home together. They took a bottle of liquor with them, and Mel got angry and began “beating up on” Paula. Paula said philosophically, “Alcohol is a catalyst for anger.” She had forgiven him for this episode and for a number of similar incidents, explaining that after she divorced her first husband, who had also hit her, she had lived alone for twelve years. She said, “I waited a long time to be with Mel.”

Mardie asked when Paula had first thought of calling in outside help. Apparently, even before the shooting, there had been an incident when she asked Mel to go to couples counseling. Mel said he had resisted the idea, and added, “I’ve always done things on my own. Me going for help means someone’s better than me. I’ve got that bad attitude: Why should this guy help me? Means he’s smarter than me.” Paula lunged toward Mel’s neck in another mock attack, asking, “What if he is?” Mardie then said to Mel, “I can’t imagine you’ve lived your lifetime without giving help to someone.” Mel was taken aback, and said, “I’ve helped a lot of people but …” He paused, then added, “I never thought of it that way, that me helping somebody means I’m any better than them.”

Watching this piece of the tape, I was impressed with the way Mardie had turned Mel’s remark around; it seemed to have got him thinking. Mardie then asked him, “What was the difference between the time before New Year’s, when the shooting happened, and now?” Mel explained that Paula was more mixed up then: “She was like an up and down person and now it’s like she’s going in a straight line. She seems to be feeling better about herself lately.” At this point, Mardie decided to take a break and see what the team had to say. They switched rooms, so that Mardie and the couple could listen from behind the screen.

Judy spoke first, remarking on the warmth between the couple and how much physical affection they showed. Dario agreed, saying that they were a touching couple and also that “As much as she touches him, he eats it up.” But he had one question: “As loving as they can be, how do they go from being a loving couple to one where they could literally threaten death to one another?” He wondered about the gun incident, but was more concerned with what could trigger “that kind of flip.” He also wondered which of them would be more likely to kill the other. Bill then said that he was particularly struck by the poetry in Paula’s language, citing her phrase “that vale of tears called Brattleboro,” and her statement that she “couldn’t show any diminished responsibility,” an allusion to her upcoming court appearance. Bill pointed to the issues around control—who controlled whom, or who was out of control. Finally, he commented on how important the marriage seemed to both of them.

At this point Dario asked what it was about Mel that made Paula take such a big leap of faith in marrying him. He wondered if this were due to the strengths she saw in him. He also brought up the question of “Who’s the Indian and who’s the Chief?” and said he’d like to know how the couple divided up these roles. Bill spoke next, commenting on Mel’s wish to stay in control, even though he sometimes lost control because of drinking. He remarked that perhaps Paula was more in control in regard to therapy, but even she couldn’t control the situation when she tried to get help, because no one had been immediately available, and Mel gave away some of his control just by showing up.

The group launched into a discussion of issues like reaching out versus doing it yourself, the honeymoon problem of deciding how to be a couple, and the question, “Is it going to be your way, my way or a third way?” Bill suggested exploring how the couple’s differences could lead to fights. Judy noted that if Paula and Mel were too different, that might mean they couldn’t stay together. And Dario ended with a somber question: “Given the investment in the relationship, particularly on Paula’s side, is death better than parting?”

The groups exchanged places again, and Mardie asked Paula and Mel what rang a bell for them. Mel said, “Control—it’s all about doing things my way or her way.” Paula said, “I can bend,” and Mardie remarked, “She can bend a lot—she’s a contortionist.” Then Mel said, “Who’s the Indian, who’s the Chief? A lot of our conflicts are like that. You do everything I say, we get along good.” Paula said, “You wish.” Mel said, “I can bend a little,” and Paula said, “Like a teepee.” Ignoring Paula’s teasing, Mel went on: “ I tell her everything that goes my way goes good. She’s always fighting against me like that.” Mardie remarked, “You’ve had quite a history of things going like that.” Mel agreed: “Everything ran smooth till I ran into Paula.” Paula said, “Everyone who runs into me it’s the same thing. I thought I warned you; if there’s a maniac in the neighborhood, it’s me he’ll walk up to; if there’s a famous person in the neighborhood, I’ll be the only one to see him. There’s something in my soul that attracts the unusual. All I have to do is breathe in and out.”

Mardie turned to Paula for her impressions. She said she liked Bill’s comment about the poetry in their relationship and was also struck by Dario’s idea that death was better than parting. She said to Mel, “I’ve thought of that many times. I feel that strongly about you, that if we couldn’t work it out, I wouldn’t want anything. I think you probably do too.” Mel nodded but said, “I’d hate to think of that happening.” Mardie now asked, “If things were to get so complicated and difficult between the two of you, and if that ended up as the unthinkable solution, who would be most apt to take that solution first?” Paula said, “Probably me.” Mel said, “I don’t know—I don’t even like the thought of it.” Mardie then said, “Maybe it’s too unthinkable to talk about, but perhaps we could just talk about it and say, well, it’s been talked about.” In retrospect, I saw that Mardie’s remark was a wonderful example of the “telling without telling” the couple brings up at the end.

After a moment of silence, Paula said, “I don’t see that there’s anything you can’t talk about—if you’ve thought about it, you can talk about it. That’s why we’re here.” She said to Mel, “I’ve thought about it, and I think if it were to happen I would get you first.” She lunged at Mel and pulled his glasses off, saying, “See, you look away, you’re naive, so I get your glasses every time.” Both were laughing uproariously. Mardie tried again. “What you say makes me think of what happened six weeks ago, the shooting I mean, when things heated up.” Paula said, “He did the unthinkable so that made me do the unthinkable. My temper was aroused to the point where I don’t think I would have cared until afterward. When I lost it, I lost it. I’ve never picked up a gun against anybody.” This statement segued into an account of when she once picked up a hammer to hit her sixteen-year-old son, but refrained from using it.

Mardie asked them, “Who do you think is more apt to be able to stop the other from his or her own violent outburst?” She caught herself, saying, “That’s a pretzel,” but Mel said he understood. He thought that she would have a better chance of stopping him than the other way round. Paula put in, “Unless you’ve been drinking,” while Mel said, “Nobody can control her when she gets mad,” and Mardie asked, “If she passed over that fine line, and you were drinking, would it be very hard for her to stop you?” Paula answered, “He doesn’t know what he’s doing or care what he’s doing. I’ve never seen anyone lose control as much as Mel when he’s drinking. He’s reached such a high tolerance level that any alcohol at all pushes him over the line. “ Mardie asked Mel whether he had given up alcohol on his own or had sought the help of AA. Mel said he had stopped drinking on his own.

Mardie now broke for another team reflection. Judy started off by remarking on the couple’s amazing honesty, and their recognition of the problems around drinking and control. Dario said it was a good sign that the couple were able to talk about personal and even embarrassing things. He wondered if they could go any further today, but said they seemed to have started and that the team would be glad to be there for them. Bill wanted to know their thoughts about continuing with Mardie and asked whether everyone was reassured that drinking wouldn’t become an issue before the next meeting. Dario added, “Or that there might be another episode of violence.” After a short pause, during which “the unthinkable” hung heavily in the air, they got up to leave and the two groups switched places.

Mardie asked for the couple’s impressions again. Paula said that everyone was afraid of another violent episode, but she felt that the meeting that day would probably defuse things. Then she surprised Mardie and the team with the following compliment: “I liked your approach. It tells without telling, says without saying. That’s good for both of us because neither one of us wants to be told what to do.” Mel said it felt very new to him too, and that he would have to think about whether to come in again.

Mardie saw the couple the next week and Paula alone the week after that. It was only then that Mardie found out that Mel was not the only person with a drinking problem. Paula was a habitual drinker and had been drinking during the sessions, including the first one. She agreed with Mardie that her habit was definitely not helping and told Mardie that she had decided to join AA. As there were some weeks before her case was to be heard, she went down to Florida to visit a friend, leaving Mel behind. Six months passed, during which time Mardie never heard from her. When she did come back, she came in to see Mardie and told her that she and Mel had broken up for good. She and Mardie had a few more sessions around her drinking problem, and after that she vanished.

However, none of us ever forgot either of them. There was much affection in this work, and much life and wit between the couple. The use of the reflecting team, if only for that one session, took us far away from our previous concerns with making hypotheses and delivering messages and interventions, and seemed a much more collegial and spontaneous enterprise. In view of the life and death issues the couple presented, I remain in admiration of the balancing act everyone took part in, and the fact that the only casualty may have been the marriage. At least we hope so. Mel and Paula (not your real names), wherever you are, thank you.

Teaching without Knowing

In regard to instructing others how to practice a reflecting team approach or, as Goolishian had suggested Andersen call it, reflecting process, we were in the country of experiment. Rules were minimal and how-to’s were scarce. We were trying to let go of the extremely knowing mind-set of the Milan approach and adopt the not-knowing stance of a more Egalitarian style. The reflecting format was an ideal teaching arrangement for this project because, as our couple had pointed out, it said without saying and told without telling. However, we were a little nervous about trying this format with trainees and so at first stuck to our old format. It took a crisis to push us over the edge. What happened was that Dario and I were co-directing a Milan-style team that included two trainees who had been working with Dario and one who had been working with me. I would have one suggestion for the interviewer and Dario would have another. I would think up one message to give the family, and Dario would think up another. This made for a very bumpy ride.

One day a trainee of Dario’s was the therapist for the family, and Dario and I again came up with conflicting messages. The trainee felt so stuck between us that she went mute and couldn’t say anything, so we decided to switch to Tom’s reflecting team. We were both amazed at the impact of this simple move. All voices were welcome. The supervisors didn’t have to compete. Most importantly, the family was drawn into the process in a far more active way than ever before. I could see where a reflecting team might improve therapist morale, but I was flabbergasted when, in session after session, the families began finding solutions to their own problems.

But it was Bridey who convinced me. Bridey was a twelve-year-old girl who, because of night fears, had become used to going to sleep in her parents’ bed. Her mother would sit with her until she slept, then sometimes move her back, but if she woke up, she was capable of keeping everybody up until she got her way. So the parents took the path of least resistance. The mother put Bridey in their bed and shared it with her, while the father, who worked till midnight, went into his daughter’s bed when he came home. Then Bridey, because of her sleeping problem, had to decline an invitation to a sleepover. The mother saw that this problem was interfering with her growing-up, so she decided to call the Brattleboro clinic. Bill Lax, myself, and a reflecting team of four trainees began seeing the family, which also included a six-year-old brother.

What I remember most clearly about our first meeting was that during the reflections one of the trainees wondered about the meaning of Bridey’s name. If it was a nickname for Bridget, did it mean that she was some kind of bridge? Although Bridey’s little brother poured scorn on this idea, we learned later that a bridge did feature in the story, one that had recently been closed down, so that a lengthy detour was the only way to get from the grandparents’ house to the family’s house. The grandfather’s health was too poor for them to drive such a long distance, so the grandmother now only saw her grandchildren on state occasions. In addition, news of a serial killer in the area had recently hit the papers. Being champion worriers, the mother and grandmother shared their fears during nightly phone calls.

True to our new format, we started by asking about the history of the idea to come to therapy, and learned that the mother had heard of the institute from her sister, who had a good experience there. I remember we spent a lot of time gathering information: the history of Bridey’s sleeping pattern, the influence of worries about the serial killer, concerns about the health of the grandfather, and so on. True to our self-imposed mandate, we refrained from trying to change the “family system” by giving messages or tasks; we simply asked questions and listened—and as far as I was concerned wandered aimlessly all over the map. This was so contrary to my therapeutic upbringing that I was ready to go back to the old conscious purpose ways.

Perhaps due to our inaction, the father came in after three sessions saying that he was fed up with coming home at midnight and having to sleep in his daughter’s bed. He accused his wife of giving in to their daughter. This was the first time we had seen this mild-mannered man take a stand. As a result, the mother told Bridey that she would have to sleep in her own bed that week. The father went on to complain about their social life, since another casualty of the sleeping problem was that the mother always had to be around for Bridey’s bedtime and they could never go out. The mother agreed to go out for dinner, too.

In the next session, they came in without the children, but they had much to report. Bridey had managed to sleep in her own bed for several days, but on the evening they went out, she waited till they had left and called her grandmother, who sympathized with her fears during a lengthy late-night chat. The next day the grandmother called her son and asked how he could leave his children with a babysitter—what about the killer who was still on the loose? The father told his mother that she must stop interfering with his family. After he told us this, he remembered that when he was a boy, he too had night fears and had slept in his mother’s bed until he was nine and was sent off to boarding school. We were used to finding patterns that repeated across the generation lines and took hope from the father’s success in overcoming his problems.

The sleep problem disappeared in Bridey’s family, too, except for one brief backslide. When her grandfather died, Bridey temporarily went back to sleeping in her parents’ bed. We saw the family through that crisis, and they stopped coming in and got on with their lives. But I was baffled. Despite our decision not to try to change the family, many changes had taken place. The father had stood up to his wife. The parents had got together as enforcers. The father confronted his mother. The daughter started sleeping in her own bed. Best of all, the daughter got to go to a sleepover party before she hit thirteen. All this happened without any conscious plan. But I was particularly struck by the way in which Bridget at least temporarily took the place of the missing bridge as the grandfather’s health declined.

The Vow

In this period, when new models seemed to be popping up all the time, therapists could often move at cross-purposes. This problem was highlighted when Bill and I started to make some training tapes. In one instance, a handsome young couple came in because the husband, in a fit of anger, had thrown his wife’s bookbag at her. This was doubly upsetting because of a “vow” the wife had made some ten years before. They were out driving and the husband had become angry and “elbowed” his wife. She had told him that if he ever hit her again, she would leave him. They went on to have three children, who were now all under the age of six, and in the previous year she had left her job to get a teaching degree.

The trigger for the recent incident, the husband said, was that she had gone to a weekend workshop, leaving the children with him. When she came home later than she had promised, he got mad at her and hit her with the bookbag. Of course, as the husband pointed out, there were extenuating circumstances: the fact that they were sleeping in separate bedrooms since the birth of their third child; the fact that he had lost his job due to a downturn in the economy; his feeling of being deserted when she went back to school. After the incident, he had driven away in the car while she just waited. On coming back, he said he expected to find that she had thrown all his clothes out on the lawn, but instead she sat, paralyzed, excoriating herself for her failure of nerve. That was the dilemma they brought in.

I didn’t know this, but Bill had just come back from a workshop on solution-focused therapy and wanted to try some of its methods. He decided to focus on the vow—a word you could just as well associate with a marriage as with a threat—and take the conversation in a more solution-oriented direction. So he wondered aloud if it wasn’t time to change that old vow to a new one. I remember being struck by the defeated, downcast look of the wife when she heard this, so when Bill looked to me for my response, I embarked on a tangential association of my own.

I said that when the wife described how she sat in the house after her husband drove off, I pictured one of those Victorian heroines who jump into the sea, or are shipwrecked, and are weighed down by their long, wet skirts. I said that when I was an unhappy wife with three young children, I had felt them dragging at my legs and weighing me down in the same way. The wife, beginning to weep, began to talk about how betrayed she felt, both by her husband and by herself. Later I went back to the meaning of the bookbag: was the husband “throwing the book” at his wife? This gave him a chance to air his own grievances, which he did, but at least she had a chance to present her side.

In that session I did something else that moved away from Milan neutrality. During the nineties, family therapists often found themselves handling domestic problems with legal implications, and were often pressured to become an adjunct to the courts. I was in a serious bind. I continued to think that taking sides in a family was usually not productive. Children, in particular, often had deep loyalties to family members no matter what those persons had done. In addition, family therapists usually had no legal means to keep families in therapy, and if we came on like moral arbiters, families tended to drop out. We were up against Satir’s old bugbear, the Morality Play. My solution was to make a 180-degree turn toward subjectivity but a situated subjectivity. As long as I tied my opinions, suggestions, biases, to their appropriate contexts, I thought I would be home free. I would frame an objection to some behavior as “my own bias” or “conventional wisdom,” or I would bring in authorities, like “the clinic director” or “the state.”

Further on in the session I am describing, the husband began to blame the bookbag episode on his wife. It seemed that after the birth of their third child she had asked for separate beds. He had three theories about what he described as her physical rejection of him. One, she was frigid. Two, her mother didn’t like sex. Three, she was a covert lesbian. His wife was mournfully agreeing with all this, so I interrupted him and said that I was going to make a “citizen’s protest.” I said that I felt so strongly that I was going to break in here, despite the fact that as a therapist I didn’t generally feel that giving advice or delivering personal judgments did much good.

So I said to the husband that I felt it was important to share some information of which they apparently were unaware. I said that when I was a young wife, I too blamed myself for the difficulties in our marriage. I went to all the bookstores in the city where we then lived, only to find accounts that treated my disinterest in sex as an indication of “genital immaturity.” However, as the years went by, research on couples told me that another reason for becoming turned off to sex was when disagreements between partners went underground. By framing my account as “only my story,” I was not handing down a judgment, or at least I hoped I wasn’t. The husband accepted this alternative explanation and the wife seemed glad to be off the hot seat. The couple came in one more time and after that Bill saw the husband alone. The upshot was that they got divorced.

However, after our session, Bill and I discussed how we came to be at cross-purposes on the matter of the vow, and he told me about the solution-focused workshop he had attended. This explained everything. I still thought we had moved too quickly to the what-to-do and had not given enough attention to the how-it-felt, but my idea of including emotion-talk was still in bud at the time, so I didn’t mention it. I showed some of that interview at a small gathering sometime later, and writer-therapist Virginia Goldner mentioned the “heavy skirts” story and said that my demeanor had struck a chord. She felt that I was doing something different, although she couldn’t say what. I think it was the fact that with my metaphor of the drowning heroine, I had attempted to play back a picture of what might be going on emotionally inside the wife.

But now I want to move to an event that surprised me. At this late date in my therapeutic education, I saw for the first time a videotape of an interview by Carl Rogers. It was shown by psychologist Maureen O’Hara at a conference on brief therapy in New York. I was shocked to realize that if you set aside Rogers’s (1961) person-oriented, humanistic theories, and watched the work itself, it would bring to mind the style of attentive, quiet listening that I described in the last chapter.

The Stillness of Carl Rogers

When I saw this tape of Rogers doing a consultation with a young woman at a workshop, I was amazed to see that the way he held himself resembled what I recognized as a reflecting posture. He leaned toward his interlocutor as a sailor might lean into the wind, but remained nearly motionless as he questioned and reflected back. As a result, his style differed vastly from the impression left on me by phrases like “active listening” or “unconditional positive regard.” The interview was taped in 1984 during a conference on humanist psychology. On this occasion, Rogers was speaking with a young married woman who had miscarried and lost a set of twins. This event haunted and obsessed her. Now she was pregnant again and didn’t know what to do. She was asking herself, “Did I make a mistake? Did I start having babies too late?”

Rogers said that he thought she might be the kind of person who liked to win, and that in this case she had played and lost. The woman agreed with him. She said she tried hard to please other people. Rogers remarked that she must feel cheated, since she had lost something that would please other people. She replied that she hadn’t even told her husband or mother about the miscarriage. Rogers responded, “That must be very hard.” There was a long silence, and Rogers didn’t move. The woman finally said, “If you don’t tell anybody you lost it, you lose it alone.”

Rogers then said, “You think,‘Could I have done something differently?’ You were the keeper and you did lose it.” The woman responded that part of her really wanted to have the child, and that she felt she had everything but that one important thing. Rogers commented that at some level she must feel like a failure. He said, “Some things one can control and some things one can’t.” The woman said, “Well, there must be something wrong with me.” Rogers said, “So this body of yours, in one respect, you can’t control.” The woman agreed, saying that even if her doctor said that her body was doing fine, she would still worry about control.

After a silence, Rogers said he believed that if there were any sacrifice she could make to have a child, she would certainly make it, but that she was still grieving over what might have been. She answered that she had thought of visiting the grave that Christmas. He asked, “So the grieving is still there?” She said, “It comes and goes.” There was another long silence. Finally the woman said, “You’ve made it easy to talk about. I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that I have to let go.” To which Rogers remarked, “But you still feel you’ve failed. That something could have been done.” The woman said, “Yes,” and placed her hand across her chest.

At this point Rogers said, “It’s a bodily feeling.” She again said, “Yes.” He said, “You’re not really fulfilled.” She said, “Not completely.” He said, “It’s a real sadness.” At that point, there was a palpable shift. The woman suddenly went on a new tack, saying, “But some good things emerged. I saw a side of my husband that was strong.” I was struck by the unexpectedness of this remark. Previously, the woman had given the impression that her husband not only failed to help her during her travails but also added to her burdens because she feared disappointing him. Now she seemed anxious to give him credit.

After the interview ended, before the moderator turned the discussion over to the audience, the woman and Rogers reflected together on the stage. During this exchange, the woman said she had found it easy to talk with Rogers because she didn’t feel that she was being judged. Rogers said that at first he felt clumsy getting into her world. He spoke of being privileged to enter into her feelings of loss, but the most important clue to him was when she put her hand over her chest, because this meant to him that something had shifted. He had just commented on her feeling of failure, and she had said that some good things had happened.

Rogers said that his intention throughout was to be a companion to the woman in her own world, with the hope that she would feel released enough to go forward. She confirmed his observation, saying, “I got in touch with the good parts when we were talking about failure. That’s when I put my hand on my chest.” Someone in the audience later asked about the silences, and Rogers made this statement: “Silences are okay, they can be working silences. But if it’s a safe place, a person may say something significant.” I was struck by the similarity between his use of silences and Tom Andersen’s, as well as their parallel use of bodily attentiveness.

Looking these notes over, I was amazed at how much this small piece of work contained. It seemed to express what a good reflecting conversation might aspire to. First of all, Rogers’s stillness encouraged the woman to share what she felt. Second, in the words of the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard (1996), he “spoke in order to listen,” as opposed to “listening in order to speak.” Third, by joining the woman in her frustrations, Rogers may have amplified them until she finally let them go. Haley used to say that a “reductio ad absurdam” could push people to such a far edge that they would have to bounce back. But I think this is what White (1995) would call a “thin description.”

Which brings me to Rogers’s much-vaunted empathy. As I watched the interview, I found his manner static and quite dry, despite its compelling quality. He made no positive remarks, betrayed no personal sentiments, was never affirming. He reflected what his respondent said, but did nothing to try to change her attitude. However, when she was asked about her impressions later, she said that while speaking with Rogers she experienced a feeling of enormous compassion and warmth. She seemed to be taking on this compassion herself by the end of the interview, when she finally found something good to say about her husband.

This consistent attention to body process is an aspect that links Rogers to the therapists whose work I have described in this chapter, as well as James and Melissa Griffith, who wrote that impressive book, The Body Speaks (1994). I went back to my notes to see what had happened just before the woman touched her own body. At that moment, as the woman was acknowledging her feelings of failure, Rogers continued to reflect back what she said except for one idea that he put in himself: her disappointment at not being able to exert control. As far as I remember, the word “control” was his. When she then said she was going to stop trying to control things, that was when her hand went to her chest. It could have been an instance of suggestion on his part, but there was no hint that it was deliberate.

In sum, Rogers’s video reminded me that the history of therapy contains many treasures buried in plain sight. We are often kept from using them because of an old feud in the field or because disciples have worn out the freshness of the ideas. In Rogers’s case, I think it is because the language of humanism is so oriented to the individual. But as I looked beyond the context Rogers operated in, beyond his personal theorizing, and beyond the writing of his adherents, I found that his practices, including the way he embodied his words, resembled what I think of as a collaborative working style.

Tekka with Feathers

I should mention one other milestone while I was teaching at Brattleboro—the start of my work with writer and therapist Judith Davis, who became an important friend and partner. Judy’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts was on ritual in families, carried forward in her book, Whose Bar/Bat Mitzvah Is This Anyway? (1996), which is the best application of systemic family theory to a contemporary social ritual that I know After she finished at the Brattleboro training program, she and I began to see families and write about them together. On one occasion, we asked a family to collaborate with us. As we have published this article in another book, I will only outline the story here, but I do want to highlight one unusual feature. This article marked the first time we had asked families not only to reflect upon their experience at the time, but also to comment on the accounts that Judy and I wrote later on. I thought of this writing scheme as postmodern because it was composed of (1) personal voices rather than the passive voice of scholarly research; (2) a linked sequence of stories rather than an imposed coherence; and (3) multiple perspectives rather than a God’s eye view.

This article, “Tekka With Feathers” (1993), was about a young woman artist whom we called Tekka, not her real name, but suggested by her. She had been hospitalized for seemingly crazy behavior after she apparently tried to walk through the back wall of a subway station. After she recovered enough to return to college, her mother and stepfather asked Bill Lax to see all three of them because they wanted to get Tekka off medication. The fear of suicide was also in the air, as Tekka had dangled some clues that were alarming. Judy was the interviewer for the four sessions we had with them, and Bill and two of our trainees acted as a reflecting team. I joined the team during the last interview. Rereading the article, I am pulled in all over again by Judy’s description of Tekka:

The most striking thing about Tekka was her hair. Long and strawberry blonde, it was piled high on top of her head and cascaded down around her face in a combination of curls and matted dreadlocks that were interspersed with beads, bits of colored ribbon, and feathers. Dressed in a tie-dyed jump-suit with a fingerless black glove on one hand, and her nails painted with black polish, Tekka looked to me both exotic and exhausted.

What I remember most about the session (I sat behind the screen) was the fear expressed by Tekka’s mother, a social worker who worked with suicidal teenagers. She was worried that Tekka would take her life, and Tekka had a way of hinting about such things, as when her mother discovered that she had hung a “recovery doll,” noose and all, from the knob of the door to her room. In my reflection after that disclosure, I remember saying that nobody tells parents that every child they have is a hostage to the universe, and that they are vulnerable for the rest of their lives. Tekka’s mother said in her written reflection that this thought stayed with her during the following year. Luckily, all went well. Even though Tekka voluntarily went for a brief time back into the hospital, she was able to handle this event herself and it did not interfere with her year-end graduation.

Tekka’s written reflections on this experience were eloquent. In a critique of society’s ways of dealing with young adult anguish, she said:

To respond to the idea of a suicide rather than the act of expression gives the suicide even more power. For example, I felt very violated to have the topic of my “recovery doll” even be a topic. To me it was a very sensitive personal thing to begin with (the doll, that is) and to hang it on the door was my way of consciously expressing how I was feeling in relation to others. To have the “others” then react to it only perpetuated the feeling: the feeling of violation, oppression, infringement. So where does one go with that? It can become a vicious circle very quickly. (Hoffman & Davis, 1993, p. 195)

She then asked, what would happen if, when the black slaves sang of freedom, the white people’s response was gratitude or hopefulness rather than repression? Instead of reacting with horror to ugliness, why couldn’t they agree that it was real but do something about it. She ended by saying that if every artist who dealt with suicide or death were put on a suicide watch, we would be missing out on much of our culture.

I was grateful to her for putting our concerns into such a passionate framework. I was also grateful that events justified her optimism. That next spring, Judy and I were invited to the art exhibition at Tekka’s graduation. We decided to go, as we felt like substitute mothers by that time, and both Tekka and her mother welcomed us. It was a vivid event. We were stunned by the beauty, originality, and humor of Tekka’s work. But most amazing of all was Tekka herself. Instead of the tangled dreadlocks, she was wearing a yellow satin pillbox on top of a short boyish bob and a yellow satin tunic and trousers. She looked like the Russian boy from the firebird legend. I thought to myself all over again how stilted our descriptions become when we enter the clinical world and forget about the beads and feathers in the tangled hair.