REASSURANCE AND ALL THAT.

.........................by Stanley

 

....If you are a therapist and a generous soul – as most counsellors are – then the temptation to give reassurance when the client desperately needs it, is almost overwhelming. 

....In listening-oriented therapy there is often a test moment early on when the client looks at you and is obviously waiting for you to say something. Maybe not to give her reassurance, but she obviously wants something from you. So far, she’s done all the talking – now it’s your turn! Maybe she is thinking: ‘what shall I talk about now’ and she is waiting for you to initiate the next move. That’s what conversation is – like a game of ping-pong. You don’t really initiate anything, you respond. You let what the other person says generate what you say next.

....It’s very safe if a session can be turned into a conversation. Maybe you can both have a tête-à-tête about why she is not such a bad person as she thinks she is. Or maybe you can try reassuring the client in some other way. Such conversations are nice, but relatively dead ends. And sometimes they turn into strenuous but affable arguments roughly along the following lines.

....I’m no good!

....Oh but…there are lots of ways…

....No I’m not.

....You are. Look at all the times…!

All of which is the standard ping-pong conversation the client has whenever she meets with another generous person.

....OK, so we’re not going to have this kind, or any kind, of conversation. So what is it about when the client is looking at you and waiting like that? Maybe she has simply run out of things to say and now faces a blank. In any case, there she is looking at you – waiting for you to say something. 

....This is crucial moment of decision. Do you help her out the easy way? 

....If you say, ‘Yes, go on’, she might reply, ‘Well, that’s it really’. Then you’re in a spot because now you have to reply; and here we go on a dead-end conversation – you’ve missed the crucial moment of decision. 

....What is this crucial moment of decision?

....It’s this: the client has to ask herself, ‘Do I have to look back inside myself to see what’s there now?’ 

.....The prospect of doing that continually for any length of time, not just talking, but looking moment by moment for what feelings arise is something the client is not used to. The only way to really help is to wait quietly for her to go on. If you don’t interrupt, if you don’t provide the distraction, the ping-pong game of conversation, there is no way out but for her to feel her way into what is coming up for her right now. 

....You might call this a beginner’s lesson in focusing; a good beginning, in one way, because it’s done by doing, rather than the more hazardous way of trying to explain.

 .....Of course, you could always say, ‘I can see you have come to a stop, but let’s just see what else is there for you’ (pointing her back to herself). That would be perfectly OK and it might work. It really doesn’t matter what you do at such moments of decision so long as you manage to put her on her own track of unfolding from within. 

.....Such unfolding always comes from the next unclear bodily sense of what has not yet formed into words, but yet wants to be said. We’ve called this the ‘felt-sense’. This is the looking into that murky  something, that a vague unformed feeling, that will give her the next step, the next image or idea, that will move her forward in the way she needs to go.

.....Each step always totally unpredictable. If she could have predicted it, or if she had known it, she would have already taken it. But she didn’t and she couldn’t – until the moment she stopped looking at you and looked into that fuzzy, indistinct sense of herself that she usually shies away from – especially when she is with other people. Only from this place will something come that’s surprises and moves things forward. 

...................................... *

.....Now we say that this entails looking into the bodily felt-sense. When I try to do this for myself I know I am working with an anomaly. I am doing something artificial, a deviation from my real state where there is no distinction between ‘me’ and ‘my body’. I am accepting the anomaly of how it has become for me in the course of my life; but when I came into this world there was no distinction. I was all one piece. As a child, for instance, when I wanted something, I wanted it with my whole being. I didn’t have to consult my bodily feelings to discover it. I yelled, I screamed, I reached out, my face went red, my blood pressure went up, I absolutely, damn well knew what I wanted. If you say that I had an idea – it’s true, but it was totally expressed in my physical being. 

.....Now for all kinds of reasons, as I grew up, I discovered this is not the way to go on. Yelling and screaming was non-productive. Splits and denials of all kinds finally resulted in ‘me’ not really quite knowing what I feel and what I really want. My body still had its own knowing, but now I am not quite connected to it. My body may even have become my enemy. So, at first, when I’m asked for my felt-sense it can feel all wrong. I am so used to living apart from it that asking me to feel it can seem very artificial. Yet being together with it is the way I once was in the beginning.

.....Still, anomaly though it is, ‘me’ has come a long way since then. I have grasped the world in ways that were impossible for me as an infant. 

.....There is a saying in Zen: ‘Before you start the practice mountains are mountains and trees are trees; when you are half way through the practice mountains are not mountains and trees are not trees; when you are through the practice mountains are mountains and trees are trees’.