When I hear his truth, there is contact. 22nd November 2021.
I'm wearing my purry, furry, fake leopard coat.
He says
It reminds him of his childhood...
Both of us laughing.
He tries it on.
And then he says the strangest thing?
"I've never seen a coat like this in the flesh"
Then - oh my heart! - he remarks so deliciously on my warmth seeping from the coat into his skin...
"Goodness - you're warm!"
Just for a few seconds it is as if I have held him, breathing animal heat and a golden radiance into the void of darkness and separation, confronting the narrative that fixes us in time and space.
And then, the spell is broken. But talking instead about music...lost music. As if heard in fairy hills...And then my assignment. He is telling me that the presenting issue a client brings is often like a thin crust over the real problem. And in response I divert us down an intellectual worm hole pursuing the importance of paradox in therapy - and more to the point - what would a metadox be?
Here now in 2023 my ability to be tangential as a therapist, is a key skill in collaborative interaction. I juxtapose - I use that word in the ordinary sense not his definition of juxtaposition - through dialogue, I'm tangential and contrary to bring different interpretations of reality forward with the aim of synthesizing something new. Creating collaboration is key to this...
And then I'm talking about Leon Festinger and Mrs Keech, how disconfirmation through paradox may also cause people to create a more fantastic work-around story ( as long as it is a more functional narrative - that counts as good enough for now!) - but how in Gestalt therapy, disconfirmation through feeling how a feeling really feels, instead of believing an habitual interpretation - is in my view - core to therapy.
I'm talking about the process of making meanings (finding relative truth) in ultimately meaningless (ultimate truth) reality.
He explains that for him this is best expressed in the metaphor of ego-states.
This seems tangential to what I've just said. I'm talking about the process of meaning-making, but I enjoy difference, so lets follow his tangent!
He describes how things can be true in the Child and not true in the Adult, standard TA stuff. The important part is his concept of transference as 'behaving in disproportionate ways, responding to something now as if it is something back there'. And how to see the Child in the adult, and how to respond - as if to the hurt child. I disagree in the need for this layer of metaphor, but I'm in his space and I'm using his world view.
I enthusiastically say - "Yes, I see what you mean"
Because I do, when I chose to see through his eyes.
The shadow for me here is I perceive something I'm not comfortable with. And I have a bad habit of always wanting to know more when I come across subterranean eddies and currents...it is a lot like dowsing! But I like to know more and so yeah, in my own life I got to marry Bluebeard, and all would have been fine except I simply had to disobey orders and open the door to the locked room! But here I am picking up again on something, something with too much energy in it. The dowsing rods cross. This prizing of The Child again, this fetishization process almost. As if adult emotions are but a tarnished and impure reflection of a 'pure' childish state ...?
But no I do get it - to let go of a meaning created in childhood, requires in his view, a person to speak from the Child ego state and for the Child to meet the nurturing Parent. For me there is a problem in this way of seeing, it is as if sadness or any emotion really, cannot be adult.
So no, I'm not sure, I'm not sure about this at all.
The tone of enlightened exhilaration I put into my words regardless of my unease, is my response to feeling the ring of personal truth in his voice.
Inside
I'm
like
a
cat
on
catnip.
When I hear his truth, there is contact.
And I'm allowing my mind to slipstream past the things that would otherwise make jagged this smooth ride of bliss. If we are going to do collaboration - and that is my preference - then I can't challenge his language. Labelling a reaction disproportionate is in itself a reaction to a reaction.
And I'm reacting to the power dynamic here about who gets to define the appropriate energy of a reaction. I'm taking against the Parental attitude?
But I'm not speaking up or out.
I have been defined as contrary - ands not in a good way.
Instead I ask more questions.
He continues to explore, and appears to be - because I can't trust anything of my view of this - making new associations and connections in his own mind, as he describes his theories....
Until he notices that he's exploring, and returns to 'the session'.
And then forgets, because it is more fun to really think and to be at the brittle edges of one's cherished theories! But, as I seek to continue opening a dialogue that includes him...he turns it around with a guaranteed disrupter, a 'look over there' strategy. He starts to talk about Perls. I enjoy this game - in the best sense of game - and it is guaranteed to get an emotional reaction from me, and lots more laughter. And then he says, goodness me, it's been really interesting today!
Me - "Because if I'm allowed to go off at tangents, this is how it is! Because reality is big, and ideas are connected in all sorts of idiosyncratic ways. And this reminds me of computer games"
He laughs nervously - I'm not even pretending that this isn't tangential! But the key subject in his last remark - really interesting - is too hot - dangerous as in radioactive - to pick up and carry forward. It felt like contact, it felt that he was able to let go of roles enough to ask himself questions. I wasn't doing kinship with any alternative motive, but was he? This felt authentic, as if we both enjoy the same kind of dialogic enquiry?
I can't ask.
And so I explain the old arguments from gaming forums about how a story is told; and the problem and debate around making a game 'too linear' vs 'open world'. So my 'tangential' interjects are paradoxical, and I hope that they open up new ways of seeing! And he says that he remembers reading an article that described linear point making as a very patriarchal way of thinking, and that the endless circles and circles and circles, lead eventually to a much more complex picture - a much more, non-patriarchal, woman way of thinking...
So, was that a recognition and authentication? Describing my tangential process as a gender difference rather than the outcome of childhood injunctions, scripts and ego states?
And then I'm talking about phlogiston, oxygen and Lavoisier to indicate that words can create compelling stories that prevent better explanations! Only conjecture and refutation will lead to a more accurate version of reality.
Paying him whilst saying - "Thank you for the conversation".
Feeling that this hour was too short, and surely, surely we really could continue talking and laughing, playing with ideas forever....
Back to earth.
What actually happened?
Was this the dreaded Kohuts in action?
Including the "Goodness me, it's been really interesting today"?
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 as if there is something under the surface, as if gravity is wrong. Something needs checking.
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