THE UNSAYABLE 

Life is unsayable.  Making words is a part of that unsayable  process, not something separate from it. We are driven to say the unsayable because unsayability makes us anxious. But a word is an anchor chain without an anchor on the end. We are adrift.

Resistance is a word. Clients do not experience resistance. They come to us to get better and that isn’t easy. The process of getting better is largely unsayable.

I use language here. If we are both attentive there is a fair chance that, reading this, your thoughts and feelings will resemble mine.

There is no way to prove this but we do not need proof.  All we require of language is that it works at the required level of efficiency. Example: I am now in a restaurant and  have ordered a turkey and bacon salad. If it arrives, language works.

Clients require more. Words like projection, transference, unconditional positive regard, ego, consciousness, etc., operate at about the same level as turkey and bacon salad.

Clients come for help with the unsayable. We begin with words but if we stop there the work stalls. Words make us think the world is made up of batches of identical things, experiences, and people. Dropping beneath the word level requires the courage of the mariner without a map. There is no map because no one has ever been where we are going before.

A  mother watches and responds to her infant in ways she will never be able to speak of;  we sit with and respond to clients. The language we generate together is new language. Old words, but new language. This is as close as language can come to saying reality. And still there is a limiting frequency beyond which words may not be tuned.

The rest of it, the unsayable, we can acknowledge but not speak of. We can say ,’Words don’t work very well here, do they?’ To try and force more out of them distorts what they actually do and also denies the existence of the anxiety we feel when we encounter unsayability.

What happens, with the client and elsewhere, never repeats itself. Once only and never again. When it seems otherwise we are probably in a word-trance, a coarseness of tuning. Words are the glass in the glass-bottom boat, not the life moving in unrepeating patterns beyond.

My turkey and bacon salad arrives. Delicious!

THE PROBLEM

If we look at the problem we learn about the problem. But what is it? It is the reason something good is not happening. If we look at this something good we learn about it. If we look closely we’ll learn where it is already happening. There will be a trickle, a whisper, a seeping or a hint of it that is already happening somewhere.

So what then? Sometimes:

                   “Look! There is it already. Make it bigger,”

                             is enough. Often not. Sometimes when it has been pointed out the client still can’t see it. Sometimes a client sees it and then forgets. Sometimes this happens many times before the client remembers. This is because the real problem(not the problem the client originally talked about) is not being able to notice the something good.

Why not? Is it scary? Does the client feel undeserving of it or that it really ought to go to someone else? The relationship of the client to something good is an important one because it contains the solution to the problem. How do we encourage this something good to grow?

There is the gentle, fleeting attention that touches the whole person like breezes. It puts the surface of the client together. This surface will include the something good. Then there is focussed attention that clings to the something good as fire clings to wood. It produces light but does not consume the fuel. This establishes the something good firmly as a part of the client’s self and world. There is womblike attention that holds and nourishes. The whole client, including the something good, grows and becomes stronger. And finally there is fulfilled attention. Like a lake that holds all that has flowed into it, it brings an awareness of the process that stretches across time. These correspond to the three feminine trigrams from the I Ching, and the hexagram of The Receptive.

Working with an awareness that the desired outcome is already happening makes a difference. The alternative is to grapple with the problem in the hope that, once it is out of the way, the desired outcome can begin. Why wait?

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THE MYTHS OF DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE

This is the standard picture: We emerge from the womb into total dependence, then develop our way to adulthood and independence through a long series of difficult and challenging steps.

The standard picture does not include interdependence. This is important. Adding interdependence changes the whole picture. Try it. Try sticking interdependence onto the end of the original. It doesn’t quite fit. In fact, it calls the whole scheme into question. If I am interdependent now, what was I before?

Interdependence means that no man (or woman or child or cat or gnat) is an island. Everything affects everything else. This happens on all levels.

Awareness of interdependence ends the struggle for independence, for the goal is impossible. There can be no failure in not achieving independence if independence doesn’t exist. It also brings a further and deeper sense of connectedness.  It is the disconnectedness implied by the dependent/independent model that feeds anxiety. A person who realises the interdependence of all people, of all beings and finally, of all things, is more likely to feel at home in the world. This person is more likely to respect herself and others.

In short, the realisation of interdependence changes the way we conceptualise our place in the universe. But there is a further step and that is the realisation that dependence is equally as false a concept as independence. Start with the infant. The depending is not one-way. Whilst the infant’s life does depend upon its carers the life of the race depends upon infants. This is interdependence, although thinking in this way involves switching from the individual level to the level of the collective.

Exploring dependency in this way breaks down the myth of one-way dependence. Children depend on adults, but  adults also depend on children to move us through our later developmental stages. Parenthood. Eldership. It is good to be explicit about this.

The final piece for me is the realisation that dependence and independence are equally false concepts, necessary for  a time perhaps, but a conceptual distortion later on. There was never anything but interdependence.

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THE DISCONNECTEDNESS OF MEN

Women come out of women. When they’re old enough they realise they are the same thing they came out of.

Men come out of women. When they’re old enough they realise they are not the same thing they came out of.

With women there is a line of direct connectedness that reaches back all the way to the first woman. With men there is no direct line of connectedness. But an entire patriarchal social and economic system has been erected and maintained largely to create the impression that one doesexist.

This illusion is powerful and functions to protect men from the anxiety and pain of disconnection by providing an image of a connectedness that does not exist. Letting go of it is hard, but it must be done before men can discover their true connectedness.

This is a developmental bottleneck for the whole race. Trapped by the illusion, we have a situation in which men are given the choice of two defective models of masculinity.

The first is the traditional patriarchal. It is by nature disconnected.

The second is the illusion of connectedness. To be completely accurate, it is only partly an illusion. The valid part is the idea that men can connect in a way that is real and profound. This is true. However, the illusion is that it is the same way that women connect and this is a denial of the fundamental disconnectedness of men

This is the trap in which the so-called “new man” is caught. He is not fully male  nor can he be female.  It is tragic and paradoxical because while it is fuelled by the healthy desire to mature and connect, it involves a backward step towards identification with the mother, a refusal, finally, to separate, differentiate and grow up.

Given that this is the choice presented to most men, and that there is so little awareness that there is a third choice, once the abyss of disconnectedness is crossed, is it any wonder that we are stuck?

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THE McTHERAPY HIGH-HORSE

“I never work with clients for longer than ten or twelve sessions since I discovered (fill in the blank with some form of brief therapy).  I get in there, do what’s needed, and get out.”

These are not students talking. The riders of the McTherapy High Horse are highly trained, experienced professionals. Almost without exception they started off in the humanistic tradition, then discovered some form of brief work. Now they believe that working for longer than ten sessions encourages dependence and that dependence is bad.

I’ve nothing against brief therapy. I use it when it’s appropriate.

I  know that some therapies drag on, rehashing the rehashed and leading nowhere. That doesn’t mean a therapy that lasts longer than three years must be exploitative. Some therapies run for eight crisp sessions, hold a tight focus, and end successfully (as far as the therapist is concerned.) Clients have come to me after such treatment with, “I knew that he wanted me to get better so I pretended.” Or, “I never felt seen.”

Responsibility for the McTherapy High Horse doesn’t rest only with brief therapy trainings. It would  help if they would at least mention the appropriateness of long-term therapy for some clients. But I think the real problem is in the humanistic trainings. I would expect them, if they did not require two or more years of personal therapy, to include a component on long-term therapy for clients with deep disturbances in their early developmental processes and some training in how to recognise them.

Rule of thumb: clients require longer-term therapy when work on the presenting issue(s) will not be effective until the underlying developmental issues have been resolved.

Brief therapy can work when there is no disruption to early developmental stages or severe trauma, and if the client is “ripe” for change. But usually there is no quick fix. I think a combination of three forces is causing the McTherapy model to be overhyped: ignorance, economics and fear. The appropriateness of long-term work for some clients is not taught in the humanistic trainings. The harder managers push brief therapy the more money they appear to be saving. And finally, therapists are afraid of being depended on because they have never experienced safe dependence themselves or been taught that it is a perfectly natural and desirable transitional state for some clients to pass through.

Please get off that high horse.

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LANGUAGE, a note on the use of

When language is important, and it isn’t always, use the client’s own. Where it is inadequate to express something the client is trying to say, work with the client to refine and develop it. You may, from time to time, suggest one of your own words or phrases, but don’t insist. Always accept the client’s preferences.

The client’s language is the one that best expresses the client’s life. The client is the only person who has an intimate experience of this life. The client is the only one who can decide the ultimate shape of that language.

When you enter the client’s world  you are a guest. Remember to abide by the rules you find there. These are the client’s rules.

If you do this well the client will leave therapy with a deepened understanding of self and world, as well as a language better adapted to express it. There will be nothing alien grafted on.

Curiosity is permitted if it is respectful. On the journey both you and the client will encounter experiences that are unsayable. Accept this as a natural limitation of language when you find it. Trying to say the unsayable results in inaccuracy of expression or compartmentalised thinking.

When words are not important, the same guidelines apply.

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THE MAGIC SPELL

MAGIC AND ATTENTION

All magic is done by displacing the attention. The stage magician gets you to shift your attention so that she can do something with the hand you are not watching. You go along with it because you like to be entertained.  But what if a magician became so accustomed to doing magic that he/she forgot he/she was doing it, and even though your attention was being displaced it had happened so often that you didn’t notice it any longer? 

THE GENERIC SPELL

“You will never amount to anything unless you (an action goes here).”

It is the same whether you say, “get a job”, “grow up” or “quit drinking.”  It works by displacing your attention from what you are to what you must do.  It does it in two steps.

“You will never amount to anything unless…” disguises itself as the first part of a genuinely helpful sentence like:

“You won’t pass your maths exam  unless you spend more time studying.”

And the second part: “unless you.......” points the way out of the situation. It might be helpful if the first part was accurate. But it’s not. It is false: “At the moment you are not worth anything,”  is not a true account of your value.

Suppose that someone said to you:

“I have three things to say to you.  First, you are worthless.  Secondly, since you are worthless, you must do something or you will remain worthless.  And thirdly, the only thing you can do to remedy your situation is [blah blah].”

Most of us would probably manage some kind of protest:

“Hang on there, I’m not so sure that I’m worthless…”

But with the magic spell we can’t argue because the basic premise isn’t stated and our attention is shifted so quickly from the situation it implies to the remedy it prescribes that we don’t notice. Its cruelty shocks us into temporary loss of awareness.

BREAKING THE SPELL

Getting the implied assumption allows us to disagree with it. 

“I’m not worthless so I don’t need to do anything to stop being worthless.”

This counter-spell undoes the magic because it shifts the attention back to the place where the sleight-of-hand occurred.  We catch the magician making the switch and the illusion fails. In time we may even be able to wake the sleeping magician so that he/she stops casting the spell.

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THE MYTH OF BODY PSYCHOTHERAPY

All psychotherapy is body therapy because it takes place in bodies. Being unaware of our bodies when we sit and talk doesn't mean that we aren't doing body work. What it probably means is that we are doing body psychotherapy unconsciously--our bodies are right there, sending and receiving signals, processing thoughts and feelings, and expressing who we are in that moment as well as revealing our developmental history.

Language comes out of the body.  Not only do words come out of the body but the production of them is a process that always involves feeling. Feeling is always associated with physiological changes, shifts in the bio-chemistry of ‘the body.’

What is the effect on the language function when people feel strong emotion and hold themselves still? It’s like school. They begin to conceptualise themselves as minds and words. Their sense of embodiment fades. They split. They have shadow. They have conflicting drives. They develop ways of talking about the part of themselves they still recognise that disguise their anxieties arising from the denial of the rest of them.

Words are not the only things that come out of a body. Sweat, milk, farts and carbon dioxide are a few of the other things. If our ears don’t work, we read lips, using our eyes, which are parts of the body. The body moves and body responds to body. You scratch your chin and I find myself doing the same thing although I wasn’t aware of my itch until you discovered yours. The colour rises in the area of your face around your mouth and my gaze drops there from your eyes. The rhythm of your speech falters slightly as you react to what might be a lapse of attention on my part.

Since words do come out of mouths, the language of the body  is not all non-verbal. But most of it is. Bodies communicate in ways too complex and finely-tuned to be ‘said,’ that is, to be spoken about with any accuracy.

                   ‘What happened just then?’

‘Something went out.  I felt it in my legs and feet. Then the shaking... Then after, the flowing back in.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Good. Tired but good... Tired and good. I think I’ll sleep tonight.’

We could say, ‘Anger held in the pelvis was released and the body’s energy balance was restored.’ But we will not be ‘saying what happened’. Rather, we will be wording to mark the place beneath which  certain events occurred. Our words point in a general way to an area where it seems something significant went on and we hope that by formulating them and saying them we can be able to recall or re-experience, or in some way return to, the event.  Sometimes wording works in just this way. But it certainly isn’t true that we ‘have said’ what happened.

All psychotherapy takes place within the body. We may choose to focus only on the words a client says but those words come out of the client’s body. This doesn’t mean that such a choice is invalid. Each element of body process, including language, is like a hologram that contains the image of the whole. However, in order to read this image effectively we must recognise that we are working with an element rather than with the whole.

All psychotherapy is body psychotherapy.

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