Now the individual will face another and higher task, that of disciplining itself and choosing such aims as are consistent with the welfare of others and the common good of humanity.
—Roberto Assagioli
A deep theme throughout these chapters on spiritual empathy, on the death/rebirth of the therapist, and on empathic resonance is the issue of power. In realizing a spiritual connection, in dying to self, in managing their own resonances, therapists seek to place their power—their will—in service of the unique individual and his or her own unique path of unfoldment. Therapists dedicate their training and experience to the service of the client, not to their own personal needs or professional agendas.1 Altruistic love demands altruistic power.
It is not, note well, that the therapist becomes less powerful than, or even equal in power to, the client; indeed it is crucial that therapists recognize the power imbalance inherent in their role as designated “helper” vis-à-vis “the one in need.”2 Therapists who pretend to less or equal power are apt to ignore the client's vulnerability and so transgress the client's autonomy, forcing the submit-or-resist dilemma discussed in the prior chapter. Unconscious uses of power lead to unconscious oppression.
For example, ignoring the power and impact of the therapist can inadvertently open the door to hurtful humor, unwanted advice giving, indulgent personal curiosity, and inappropriate self-revelation. This type of familiar, casual interaction works against a holding environment that can support the discovery and expression of the client's will—that can support the client's liberation. Eventually such lack of attention to the power imbalance may cause the relationship of agape and spiritual empathy to wander into other types of love, such as friendship (philia), romance (eros), or parenting (storge). These countertransferences of love can be quite subtle, leading to what might be called micro-oppressions:
When my client said he'd have to cut back on therapy for financial reasons, I told him no problem, I can lower my fee. But I realized later I acted too quickly, not giving him a chance to talk about his feelings about the whole issue. A lower fee was fine with me, true, but my affection for him overrode my seeing him and helping him find his way.
I kicked myself. As my client was leaving I just had to give her advice on how she needed to be more careful about men. Ugh! As if she were my daughter or something! But she caught it—said thanks, if she ever wanted that type of advice, she'd ask for it. I felt like an ass, caught up in an image of her instead of seeing her for who she was … a false image of myself too, for that matter.
Yeah, I hear it. It's almost like hitting on her. It didn't feel that way at the time, and yeah it's true, I'm attracted to her. But yuck, hearing me on tape saying: “You must be getting looks from the guys.” One second, that's all it was … the smallest, tiniest, damn thing! But, harmless? No way. That spin, that yucky tone, like I was one of the guys. It felt sleazy. She was embarrassed.
The proper use of the therapist's will in psychosynthesis therapy is to serve clients and their unique unfolding journey through spiritual empathy. Remember, survival personality is formed by the misuse of power; it is the result of domination by a nonempathic environment. In order to survive, the person internalizes the survival unifying center and thus distorts or disowns significant dimensions of themselves. Primal wounding—whether abuse or neglect, overt or covert, well-intended or not—is a misuse of power by someone who holds power over us. This understanding of wounding as oppression is quite coherent with Rogers' client-centered theory that takes the position: “psychological distress is based on internalized oppression” (Proctor 2002, 84).
It stands to reason then that wielding power against or over clients can only re-traumatize, repeating the precise dynamics that brought them into treatment in the first place. Spiritual empathy, however, provides a context for another, ethical use of the therapist's will; it allows this power to be placed at the service of the client rather than to be used in further oppression, as happens when therapists become identified with their own agendas, techniques, diagnoses, and treatment goals.
Spiritual empathy in fact demands the fullest use of the therapist's will; it requires intention and choice from deep within the person of the therapist, from a place ultimately beyond the trappings of the professional persona. Here is where the therapist's personal power and professional authority can be employed as a force for liberation and not oppression. There are at least four uses of therapist power that seem important to spiritual empathy.
1. Creating a Safe Place. This first use of the therapist's power has been mentioned in the section When Worlds Collide in chapter 4. Here therapists acknowledge that without this safe place there can be no therapy. This includes being clear about the agreement for therapy, including such things as fee, place, time, and confidentiality policy. But more, safety is about therapists firmly knowing that the empathic intimacy offered in the relationship rests on the foundation that this relationship is not, nor is it expected to become, anything other than therapeutic. Here therapists use their power to resist the temptation, the inner pull, to enter into other types of relationships such as friendship, romance, business, or parenting.3
It can happen that in experiencing the depth of relationships with clients that therapists may begin to assume that this depth is simply a function of their personal ability to quickly and easily create intimacy, empathy, and trust, forgetting that this depth is absolutely dependent upon the safety created by the limits that define boundaries for the relationship. Accepting this can be painful for a therapist, of being deeply intimate with someone yet not a part of that person's life (likewise, it can be painful when the therapist, having fallen into a social relationship with the client, realizes that the empathic depth has been lost or perverted).
Preserving the therapeutic boundaries can mean, for example, entering a grief process at the loss of a client when they have terminated, or accepting that you may never hear from them again, or knowing that you will never find out if they ever got married, became a parent, or developed a career. Not your business. So this first use of the therapist's power is to create and preserve a safe, pristine—and, yes, thus somewhat artificial—space that allows a depth, focus, objectivity, and safety that few other relationships can provide.
2. Vertical Power (see the vertical connection between “I” and Self depicted in Figure 4.1). The vertical use of power involves acknowledging and aligning with the source of your healing empathic love, Self. You are not the ultimate source of that love but a channel for this, “an indirect but true link, a point of connection between the personal man and his higher Self” (Assagioli 2000, 22). Another way to say this is that you here use your will to surrender to your own deepest sense of truth and meaning, thus realizing your communion with the Ground of Being.
The paradox of surrender is of course that in surrendering you are merely relinquishing the illusion that you are your own source, that you are a self-sustaining isolated individual; you are simply acknowledging the communion with Self and so with all beings. So nothing true is lost in this surrender; quite to the contrary, the true fount of authentic personal identity—“I,” with consciousness and will—emerges as the communion with Self is realized.
Practically, the vertical use of power means using your will to nurture relationships with your own authentic unifying centers, whether attending to your daily spiritual practice, praying before you see clients, or imagining a figure of wisdom with you during sessions. In whatever ways you do this, you are keeping your connection to Self clear and not allowing “idols” or “false gods” to intrude, whether these are your supervisor, institution, insurance provider, or society itself. While the needs of such authorities may be respected, it still remains that you need to surrender to, to be founded in, and to act from, your own sense of deeper truth, values, and conscience. And the truth is that if you do not surrender to communion with your own truth, you will by default be surrendering to other authorities.
The all-encompassing nature of this use of power means that it demands a lifestyle choice. Here are not choices limited to the confines of professional practice, but choices that flow from a life in which one seeks to walk with Self on a daily basis. One cannot expect to realize a communion with Self in session unless this realization has been nurtured throughout your day, your week, in all your personal, professional, and civic relationships.
3. Horizontal Power (see the horizontal connection between “I” and “I” depicted in Figure 4.1). The horizontal use of power is akin to what Assagioli (1973b) called the “will-to-understand” or “intention to understand” the other. Here is a choice to allow oneself to be pervaded by “an absorbing human interest in the person one wills to understand. It means approaching him or her with sympathy, with respect, even wonder, as a ‘Thou’ and thus establishing a deeper inner relationship” (89). As with the communion with Self, the idea here is to use your will to keep the channel between you and your client clear, actively dispelling images or “idols” of the other that prevent you from seeing, meeting, and loving the other.
Teachers in the field of social transformation have defined oppression as: “prejudice + power = oppression” (Quiñones Rosado, 2007, 76). Since you as therapist already have more power, any preconception, any expectation, any diagnosis, any image that comes between you and your client—whether cultural or clinical, positive or negative—will entail oppression at some level.
As with the second use of power, this power cannot be limited to the therapeutic hour; how you hold your client in your heart and mind through the day will impact how you are with the client. Do you enjoy daydreams in which you finally get to give the client a “piece of your mind”? Do you speak of the client with sarcasm or condescension to colleagues? Do you indulge in sexual fantasies about the client? Do images of your clients build in you from session to session such that you cannot approach them with the wonder and awe befitting a unique mystery of life? All such images of your client arise from aspects of your inner experience that will prevent you from being with the client.
Of course—and here is an extremely crucial point—most of us, if not all, will experience such attitudes toward our clients; the idea is not to achieve some sort of purity here in order to then be “pure enough” to do therapy, but rather to recognize these attitudes as they occur and then work with them so that they do not negatively impact the therapy. Awareness of these attitudes is not to be avoided, but welcomed as an opportunity to work toward being able to love better. Such work may well involve an in-depth exploration of these attitudes in our own therapy.
4. The Dance. Inasmuch as these first three uses of power are operative, there will be a creative, empathic field—a power of Self—embracing both client and therapist. From the richness of this field will arise spontaneous intuitions and insights in both client and therapist about possible ways to move with the issue at hand—the emergence of Self-realization. Ideally this creates a “dance” between therapist and client, inviting each to lead and follow at different times, but always leading and following in the direction the client wishes to go. What can emerge is a rich interplay that allows clients the maximum freedom to discover and follow their own sense of direction, but also encourages therapists to draw upon their professional knowledge and experience to unearth, clarify, and facilitate this direction.
When the first three uses of power are in place to create safety, to connect to Self, and to intend to understand the other, the therapist's training and experience can benefit the client tremendously. However, to the extent that these uses of power are not present, the therapist's training and experience will likely be intrusive, oppressive, or deadening, even if only in small ways. The effects of even small abuses of our therapeutic power over time—when unrecognized and unaddressed—will erode our ability to meet the other in a healing way.
Clearly, the only healing use of the therapist's power here is to “serve and protect” the client's unique consciousness and will, the client's own individual journey and continuity of being. Spiritual empathy is a force of liberation, not oppression. Not only is this liberating use of power essential to healing in the therapy, it is also the only ethical use of therapeutic power. If one is not meeting and serving the unique person, one is in fact not doing therapy as we understand it but rather engaging in social control and oppression—one is in effect simply acting as another survival unifying center in the client's life.
Thus psychosynthesis therapy considers the respect and support for the client's own unique sense of meaning and direction a fundamental moral principle that takes precedence even over “curing” the client. In this sense it would have been unethical for Philip (see chapter 3) to persuade Cindy to undergo a technique to make her less anxious, or for Claire (see chapter 4) to have convinced Robert to move out of his despair—however valuable these experiences might be in the eyes of Cindy and Robert. Any such use of power from within the therapist's frame of reference, however seemingly beneficial, is nevertheless an act of oppression because the client and the client's will are ignored. Yes, Cindy and Robert might feel better as they are impacted by such a power tactic, but they have lost themselves and their own power. This gives new meaning to the old medical adage: “The treatment was successful but the patient died.”4
I asked my therapist what his thoughts were, but he just said, “We don't give advice,” and asked me to focus on my breathing. I felt ignored. Irritated. But I decided to go with him. I had a nice experience, which was cool, but I never trusted him again. I left therapy pretty soon after.
I shared a dream with my therapist and she began analyzing the symbols. I learned a lot about my dream, and found it fascinating that some of my symbols were archetypes. I was stoked and even did some reading in mythology afterwards. Only I realized later all I wanted to do was have her hear my dream. It made me sad.
In talking about my boyfriend my therapist helped me see all these connections with my dad. We went into my childhood and I got amazing stuff about how I was relating to my boyfriend just like dad. It was intense, amazing really, but I never got to talk about what I wanted—finding a way to tell my boyfriend it's over!
This ethical principle also supports the ongoing awareness of the larger systems of oppression operating in people's lives—an aspect of the “psychology of the external.” Clients are not seen as suffering simply from some private inner turmoil with roots only in biochemistry, genetics, or the unconscious, but are understood as suffering domination from very real nonempathic environments in their lives both past and present. This understanding allows clients the freedom—if their path leads them there—to see and perhaps even engage these larger oppressive structures. It can also help therapists to empathically love their clients as they realize clients are victims or survivors of injustice rather than simply weak, stubborn, or ill.
Finally this ethical view leads to a stark realization of the larger sociopolitical context of the therapeutic relationship. Therapists who die to self, empathically connect to their clients, and serve clients with their power, are forces of liberation working against oppressive forces in the wider society. This can even involve standing against theories and diagnoses, techniques and protocols, or clinical systems and institutions that seek to treat clients as mere objects of treatment; therapists are ipso facto social activists and advocates for the oppressed.
Contrariwise, therapists who wield their power to make people feel better or “become adjusted,” without ever truly connecting to them, become tools of the larger forces of domination in the society. To persuade, seduce, or command clients to develop a happier, more functional survival personality—ignoring the unique person and path—is to add to their oppression and cover up the social injustices rampant in the society. Such therapists become extensions of social injustice, guardians of the larger survival trance.5
In the chapters thus far we have sought to demonstrate that embodying spiritual empathy involves the therapist dying to his or her world, realizing “I-to-I” communion in Self with the client, and then being open to the often-challenging dynamics of empathic resonance. These are the things that allow us to love others in Spirit and to enter their realm of experience, thereby supporting them in becoming increasingly aware and volitional within their worlds. In doing these things, therapists become authentic unifying centers, serving the larger process of Self-realization taking place in the client.
And as this journey of Self-realization unfolds for the client, it can be seen to take place in certain stages—the stages of psychosynthesis. Understanding these stages, therapists can be better prepared to recognize the terrain through which they walk with their clients. The remainder of the book will be devoted to outlining the various stages of psychosynthesis as they arise in psychosynthesis therapy.