The 3lack 3ox.

After putting the recordings of sessions through his door. After facing it (a toxic brew of loss, grief, incredulity and outrage) through transcribing the sessions, then seeking some way to sort this out before publishing - the next part of this is to distil the lessons into something useful. The next set of posts will be my exploration of ideas! So what is therapy?  Basically therapy is a conversation during which one person needing to create a better state of mind, talks with another about their state of mind, their life, their hopes and fears with a view to understanding what has happened to them, to understand their own reactions and to start to feel better. The other person, as Carl Rogers explained, is able and willing to navigate their own states of mind, to show empathy, and able to regard other people. no matter what they have done or experienced, with the utmost respect and kindness. Another level is added by Steve de Shazer - after Wittgenstein - who points out that, wit...

I think it might be important to write something about therapy, to make my bias clear. Therapy has a very strange and unscientific foundation. Traditionally our role is shaman or showman (the only real difference between the two are the cultural beliefs underpinning the performance). It was Carl Rogers - following Jung - who introduced the notion that therapy isn't complicated, that healing occurs when one person is truly hearing and accepting another, and providing a safe space for that other, to speak openly and honesty.  Certainly Jungian theory seems complicated, but underneath it all Jung honoured his patient's process. He found significance and meaning in their words, he didn't pathologize. Also, despite Jung's love of the deep, and of 'depth psychology' and though symbols can be read ontologically (by asking what category of thing is this) Jungian psychology is also epistemological. The self functions as if it is split into types of thinking (ontology / a...

“Neither observation nor reason are authorities. Intellectual intuition and imagination are most important, but they are not reliable: they may show us things very clearly, and yet they may mislead us. They are indispensable as the main sources of our theories; but most of our theories are false anyway. The most important function of observation and reasoning, and even of intuition and imagination, is to help us in the critical examination of those bold conjectures which are the means by which we probe into the unknown." Karl Popper, 'Conjectures and Refutations'. OK, part 2. Part one was about the episcript [+] - which is a weird phenomenon! Part two is a descent even further into the murky realms. I'm going down into the place where the bad fishes swim.  Once again I wish to point out that this conjecture is only that. Without dialogue - who knows what was going on in his mind! I'd like to get clarity, but I don't see any way for it to happen.  [+] So...bad ...

From: When I hear his truth, there is contact. 22nd November 2021. I left the room weighed down by  ambiguity,  an unknowing. The feeling of  a locked door  and I'm trying to find keys,  or more accurately it is as if there is  something  under the surface. As if gravity is wrong. SUMMER SOLSTICE XXI-VI-MMXXII by The Shining Tongues So what did I pick up? When I voiced the the two most obvious feelings of ambiguity and uncertainty, I was taken aback by his response.  Being told that I'd crossed a boundary by being honest didn't and doesn't make any sense to me. Is this is a reaction formation? Who knows! I'm not a psychodynamic therapist. But we all speak human - and a reaction formation is a way to dump a strong emotional reaction elsewhere. It is usually an overly socially-correct response, the phrase methinks that he protesteth too much comes to mind.  The insane thing here is that no prohibition exists, or rat...

If you rewind back to here [+]  there is an image of me, on my knees, my husband's boot is pressed into my back - and it really wasn't an erotic experience. During that BDSM phase I partitioned the probability that his version of domination wouldn't reach me, whilst hoping that that it would,  eventually . Due to a really awful experience years before, a whole universe of catastrophically traumatic memories were locked in my body. I'd experienced the splitting that occurs when one's body reacts in a way that the mind cannot accept, and I wanted to go back there, to re-experience that with someone I trusted; to restore my sense of being able to chose, and to take back control.  So, all this is difficult to unravel, perhaps the most difficult thing for me to pick up on as I recall my experiences, is the role transgression plays. My guess is that the transgression has to break the submissive's rules, to create the altered state known as subspace .  Kit calling me ...

Bad therapy intrigues me at the moment.  Because none of us want to be bad therapists, and all of us have written thousands of words describing what good therapy is, and how to provide it. Bad therapy is a continuum, a lot of what makes it not good might be good for someone else, or seem too trivial to care about. But clients are often in an extremely vulnerable state of mind, and trivial can be the last straw. For instance one client may love sharing the room with the therapist's dog. But not every client will want that to continue - a person who is in therapy already feeling as if their words and emotions don't count won't, can't speak up. The task of the therapist to notice this - to use a sensitivity to how others might feel, and to be aware of the emotional tone of the other person's response. And then to ask questions in such a way to honour feelings, isn't easy. But it is important and it is our responsibility to notice discomfort. Timing is all, and timi...

Late last night I caught a video of him teaching. I could only watch for a few minuites before the ache in my heart made me shut my eyes in pain, powerless to stop my tears. I switched the computer off. Tried to walk away from the cascade of feelings and thoughts. And woke today, back in Muxia, on the Costa da Morte. The desire is the same, to just go there - as quiet as a hare, to curl up by his door, to hope that the cold stills my heart as a I sleep beyond waking... Contrary to what he said about suicidal thoughts, I don't use such thinking to make my days bearable, I don't need to look at my end to feel alive. It is simple, I don't want to die, but nor do I want to live with this pain. I just want it to stop! Muxia is the red warning light on the dashboard, it indicates that something is very, very wrong. The image of myself, dead outside his front door hidden from the street by the darkness of the stone passageway shows me how I truly feel. I was shut out once 'the...