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Paradoxical and confusing.
He opens the door to me and right away he begins with, chit-chat.
Years away from this (2023) - and I have many hours' experience of finding people who have arrived to talk with me, lost outside the building; in the rain, the sun, the wind. Some are anxious, some are smiling anticipating telling their story and needing to feel better, many people are confused - all just people, and hopes and fears.
And then into the peace of the therapy room...
But I never begin with chit-chat about me.
Ever.
So what is happening?
Of course I enjoy it, he's talking to me about him. Like I'm being let in, just a tiny, tiny bit. And then he sits down and we are back to my research proposal, hooray! And he is very clear in his mind that a trauma in the present, confirms the trauma of the past. A reanimation, that occurs not to resolve it - but to confirm it - because it feels normal.
This is like watching someone trying to assemble something from IKEA in the wrong order. Of course the present feels like the past, I want to yell! The present can only be understood in terms of the past because everything is a reconstruction of memory. We don't feel overwhelmed and powerless only because we weren't loved enough as children. Loss and grief occur because we exist in relationship with people, and with the symbolic and actual reality of everything! The problem is now, and we have no idea how to change the situation. Reparative relationships can only be a sticking plaster over the wound - I would have enjoyed saying that - a therapist wont be there when you need him, his words of kindness wont change your situation. Doing the Kohuts is another red-herring, and in my view a therapist consciously and purposefully trying to be what the client needs, is making therapy all about the therapist! Instead let's undo the psychic time-slip so that the present can be changed! And this is done by re-entering the negative memory and retrieving the power and love, the fragments of gold under the rubble - the moments when you can remember how brave and strong you really are, now - and this is done by asking the person how they do being brave, how it feels to escape, to be the person who got through 'all that!' And then to ask, what is needed now...
He is talking about events (and events are, in Kit's view 'meaningless in themselves') being interpreted as trauma. He is stating that trauma is an individual event. In effect, Kit does not believe in inevitably traumatic events, so anything you have ever read about restrained animals suffering so much more than animals who are free to run away from say, electric shocks, can be discarded. He doesn't take onboard that my research proposes that high levels of adrenaline and cortisol, and other neuromodulators amplify the interpretation and significance of events, and this excitingly crazy mode of perception will crystalize new meanings. Not always better ones, but usually the person's interpretation is symbolically true.
If there is a resonance.
But he is not interested in this and I've given up explaining so...
He - "What I have come across many times is, when you dig deep into somebody's trauma it is actually affirmation of the way the world works, because that's why it hit them so hard - because 'my parents didn't look after me I'm not safe in the world, and now I've got sacked for something I didn't do, and now I'm going to lose my home' it is all affirmation that 'the world's a shit place which I knew from the age of five' see what I mean? Where as somebody brought up with a sense of themselves as positive of being supported might still be in a situation honestly, where they are given the sack for something they didn't do, but they handle it differently because its not affirming what they already thought - and it might not be necessarily traumatic...because although there is that sense of 'why did this happen to me, I didn't do this, I'm OK' they are much more likely to say ' I just need to sit down with them and explain - because I'm not the sort of person who could do this sort of thing - and once they understand surely we can sort this out' whereas someone with a trauma background will be up in arms and go into a rage and want to show them what for 'why am I always treated like that' you see..."
OK - so is this about us? Is he saying that I think 'surely we can sort this out' whilst for him 'the world's a shit place which I knew from the age of five'?
It occurs to me that in his view, the body and the subconscious are somehow absent in meaning-making; that they do not play any part in 'trauma'. For him there is only - only what? The filter and the phantasy? Clearly I disagree with this. But not here, not now. I don't engage, and so we are moving on, joking and laughing and getting along fine. But 'it's becoming a theme Kit' his much repeated statement, dogma almost, that 'trauma' is an affirmation of how the world works'.
I'm not arguing. I don't even disagree, I have already said that there is so much more to it.
Eventually I say - "What is important is, we can all change at any point."
He - "If the central question is what heals, and I think that is what is implied in your research - which is that when there is a developmental deficit, we adapt to the deficit and therefore we prevent ourselves from receiving what heals...."
Oh, that statement strikes so deeply into my heart, certainly I disagree, but the shock comes from his tone of voice. I hear conviction. And that is the right word, a prison sentence enforced through repetition, recitation of words and feelings radiating from numinous beliefs. I step back and out, away from the barbed wire net of meanings that trap and hurt.
He - "..and when we are in a situation where it is presented to us, we don't see it because it is either filtered out, or we see it and we don't want it because it is scary.
'We' or he? This sounds like a direct statement related to his experience - his experience of me, here and now? I wish I knew.
He - "It is what Richard Erskin called juxtaposition. The ideas that here's the thing I've always wanted developmentally and logically we might say 'yipee!' but we don't. We say <angry voice> 'How dare you offer me what I've always wanted!' You know, we are angry with it, or full of tears because I've never had this and I'm scared because how can I ever accept this because it can be taken away. So there is all of that. I mean psychodynamicly people would talk in terms of attachment style or RIGs or what ever it might be. But what they are all saying is essentially we are formed by our primary experiences and our expectations are formed by that. So essentially I don't think that the modalities are saying anything very different - I mean in Gestalt it is unfinished business. For people in TA it is a wound in the Child ego state, and so on and so on and for Rogers it would be an inability to self-actualize, or what ever language .."
Bless him - of course I know this feeling "'How dare you offer me what I've always wanted, scared because how can I ever accept this because it can be taken away" but I don't listen to it because it is madness! Life destroying even - so what if a partner (like mine) turns out to be 'no good'? I've got over my husband's infidelity and leaving much faster than getting over Kit (clearly I have not got over Kit!). I kind of knew my marriage would end as it did - possibly heightened neuromodulators give insight! And I know that I'd have been so wrong to have given into fear, to have been sensible and not to have taken that chance, to have said no to all that joy and love! Oh certainly Prince Charming was out there (I'm laughing as I write that! Basically, life is short and I loved the man I married) The choice is simple, do you want love, then be brave, open and vulnerable - or no - then stay safe, shut up, and shut down, and demand that others do the same to keep you safe.
And then he is talking about the Gloria films, where Gloria is talking to Carl Rogers about her difficult relationship with her father - and Carl replies that she would make a lovely daughter. Kit explains that Gloria can't accept this love from Carl, because what she experiences is the emotional reaction Erskin calls juxtaposition...I think she is seeing an old man actually, and he is way out of order!
He - "Her response is not 'how lovely' it's 'but you don't even know me'....and his response was, 'I know my experience of you now and I would like to know you more' and she didn't accept it...but she did later but not in that particular session. and again, there's an important thing because very often I see, well - two things happen - the client will tell you what they want and if you don't listen they will keep telling you until you listen, that's one thing, if you miss it they will keep telling you. But it also happens the other way around - you try and give a client what they need, what they clearly need and it's invisible to them, they can't see it because they are filtering it out, and you keep giving it to them until they say 'OK, I'm ready for it now. And I mean you don't keep on giving it to them and they are resisting and then they bolt out of the door and never come back. I mean you keep having it in mind, and giving them a little bit more until it looks like they might be ready for it...For example I had one client for was it three years..."
He tells me that she sat where I am sitting.
He interpreted her body language as saying '
"I'm not going to accept any love from anyone at all least of all you".
And then he says - 'after three years she reached a point where she 'completely transformed.'
How would you interpret what I've just heard?
Here is Kit's view.
He - "And again there's that juxtaposition, I'm coming here for stuff that I want. But don't you dare give it to me. Because it is fear, that developmental fear 'I'm not allowed to be loved, I'm not allowed to be accepted' but I desperately want it. And there's - it's what my supervisor called 'the client's dilemma' which I think is a wonderful phrase, because everybody has their dilemma that they bring to therapy. In other words the internal contradiction that is keeping them stuck - and very often the answer is, 'I want you to help me to heal by giving me what I didn't have - but don't you dare give it to me. Is all this adding up?"
I can never know exactly what she went through.
But I can imagine and the word ordeal comes to mind!
Three years is a long time and a lot of money to sit here and feel what?
As I feel perhaps?
What made her come back, week after week if it is true that her body language said that she wasn't going to accept anything. Well, this is Kit's interpretation, and I'm frantically asking myself is this about me? Or put another way, am I going mad? In my head I'm asking myself, was she in love with him? Was the 'completely transformed' moment when she realized that whatever is going on here in this therapy thing, it is just too messed up and plain too weird to fight against? At which point I like to believe her sanity intervened, flipped the switch and she left! Saying to herself, 'it is time to leave, but do it gracefully and do not under any circumstances let him know what's happening! That is after all, the safest ways out of the client-in-love-with-the-therapist dilemma.
As he related this tale to me I was thinking, but she probably needed your arms around her and the promise of a future in which she could tell you how much she loved you! Three years! What did she want? What made it worth her while to sit where I now sit? The reasons why I'm not sitting here tense is only Wim Hof method, that I practice controlling my autonomic responses. I've been educated by my counselling training to stay in touch with whatever I feel and, more importantly I don't beat myself up.
But if she felt as I feel? Poor woman - just tension and silence, if she was too scared to reveal her need for this charade to end and reality to begin, that makes total sense in this therapy room! In this room pain is gloved and delivered softly. But in almost every therapy room any invite from the client indicating a need for the therapist to be a whole person is deflected with kindly meant words. 'I'm wondering what this means to you - to feel this need to know me - where do you think it may come from...'.
In short, the communication or ability to create dialogue by a client in the therapy room, is traditionally restricted by convention and skewed by theory.
I expect that if they had met in a bar every week - she wouldn't have greeted him with the clenched fists and tension, he describes.
The therapy situation can feel inhumane, restrictive and wrong.
But perhaps this situation wasn't as I imagine - who knows!
I'm clearly seeing her as a sister!
And now he's telling me that for years, Gloria and Rogers would write letters to each other, and she would address him as my therapeutic father.
I think her daughter Pammy said that Gloria called him 'my ghost father'. His problematic body only words, Air and Aethyr. No masculine intrusions, even of the ectoplasmic kind!
He says - "So she accepted what he gave to her, but not straight away. He was a surrogate father for her, and that's rather wonderful....which is where Heinz Kohut who was really psychodynamic but thought he was humanistic - Self-psychology, and I don't think that he said much that was useful but one thing that was useful was the question of who am I to the client which he called transference needs....."
And yes, we have been here before...And if we had ended with an invitation from him for me to keep writing to him? Well gentle reader, you wouldn't be reading about my sessions. I would have felt respected and valued, instead of SPOILER ALERT!
Demonized as a Toad Queen, l33t hacker!
He - "And that's all keyed in with, what is it that the client needs to hear, what are the developmental deficits. The only odd one out I think is going to be CBT which goes, I don't really care what is happening in the past, think yourself better! Well that's not going to work is it...."
I am tempted to be equally as brutal as I begin to answer this, and then stop myself!
And I'm left with this problem:
His faith in the theory that clients are only ever tense and stuck because of their developmental issues, raises a lot of questions about therapists, therapy techniques and dogma.
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