"But you can't have resolution without understanding". 28th February 2022
I knock the door. Nothing happens! Feels like forever. I wait. He is making me a cup of coffee - before he opens the door.
He sees my surprise!
As I sit down I'm saying that I've had enough of writing my assignments, that I just want to be 'let off'
And then I'm explaining how our three years of assignments are squeezed into two years. I am exhausted, and on the verge of being insane. And I'm talking about Unit 13, counselling children and how much I dislike Erik Erikson (stages of development) and transitions.
I explain again - "The art is to work out what the tutor wants, how to make it fit what I think the question means and fit the two together."
He asks me 'what's wrong with Erikson'?
Erikson - Erik - describes age related life challenges. Even when we did this in college we were in fits of laughter as we described our life challenges, not described by Erikson! Basically, life presents problems is all we are sure of. Erikson didn't stop with children. At my age according to EE I'm heading for the integrity vs despair challenge.
Story of my whole life!
Bring it on..
And onwards.
Until I paraphrase Steve de Shazer:
"understanding a problem doesn't necessarily provide a cure.."
He says what so many people always say, 'you can't have resolution without understanding' and I argue back of course - "No, people need to know the outcome they desire - I don't believe I need to understand something when there is nothing I can do about the mechanism. It often hides a desire, such as 'if only that person understood - then they wouldn't do X'" knowing how to get to X, or what else could be X is it!"
I could have said that therapy works when a client does the problem differently and thus the whole problem dynamic changes. This sort of thinking drives him up the wall so I skim around and through the subject, keeping contact with the words alone, and I don't explain the real concept underneath. It is more important I synthesize something we can agree on.
The truth is, I'm never going to have understanding of what he really thought about me, so just as well I can tell myself that outcome is more useful than knowledge...
Me - "No, I stop with need - what is it that you need in this situation. I think most of the time, things are actually simple - you can disagree with me it's fine" I give an example and in so doing he finds that we are on exactly the same wavelength, just of course, our language is different...
Later we are back to one of our favourite frictions; the subject of Fritz Perls...Kit describes Perls as a bully - calling his clients phoney, probably calling everyone a phoney!
Me - "He was big on personal shame...But I understand where he is coming from and I would have liked to have had a few sessions with Perls because I think that he had a heart of gold. I know that you disagree with me!"
Much laughter from him!
Me playing upping the friction - "I think Carl Rogers had an iron fist under a fluffy bunny exterior. Because like the kids who scared the grandparents because they looked like hell-beings, the scary is on the outside. You can see it. But the kid in the suit with the neat tie, he's the one you need to worry about. It's the ones who seem normal - they are the scary ones! So Perls, I think Perls was quite vulnerable in many ways. He was human, he was very honest about himself - he wrote about himself just straight"
He - "Hum!"
Me - "Willing to be vulnerable is what I'm saying, whereas I'm not sure that Rogers was so honest"
He - "Oh, have you read much Rogers"?
Me - "Yes. I have. Sorry Rogers I've had enough"!
He - "Mmmm - I'm still not sure where this..."
Me - "Where this is going?"
It is pure Jungian!
Me - "I think that Rogers was psychologically quite tough. I'm not so sure that Perls was. I think Perls would break down quite a lot. Perls was very much about contact, and I understand that, I really appreciate that. And I think that Rogers took a lot from Perls and twisted it slightly. Perls was writing before Rogers, and if you read the theories ...I'm looking at your quizzical brow! It is difficult without being able to show you the references. The whole contact with experience"
He talks about the The Gloria films. How Perls says directly to camera that he manipulates the cvlient. Kit see's Perls as self satisfied he is, and how he enjoys it when Gloria gets very angry with him; that he Perls wants to rile her because he somehow thinks that this is therapeutic to actually poke somebody with a stick until they respond"
Me - "He would like her to realise that she is his equal - He says 'Are you a little girl'? that's the point because she isn't a little girl. And from his point of view she is being manipulative, she's practically saying in body language, 'let me off I'm just a little girl' and he is saying 'are you?'"
He describes Rogers as seeing the little girl in Gloria and how he treated it with love. And how when she was talking about her difficult relationship with her father - how she had always felt that her father disapproved of her, how Rogers says something like 'I think you would be a lovely daughter to have'
Kit sees contact, care and inclusion.
So much I could say; about the lack of contact with me when I've gone into feeling, with how I need honesty and truthfulness. This contact thing isn't going to be resolved.
I say -"But that's not the same thing as contact with her experience"
He doesn't get it, I'm not going to explain it to him. Contact is the immediacy and simplicity of the actual. For Perls, being able to experience what is new as new, is health! The contact boundary is the meeting place between the self and the world. The place where all expectation ends and experiencing begins - and this is where all psychological growth occurs, at the edge of the known, the beginning of knowing the unknown. Challenge in Gestalt therapy is important - to let go the security blanket of ideas that even though they might not be nice, they are familiar. But they can be changed. Perls would and did, challenge that security blanket in Gloria. Rogers didn't do that...
Me - "Instead of taking her deeper in to those feelings about her father, Rogers was colluding with her"
Kit explains that Rogers was taking her into something new, into a relationship she had never had with her father. And how Rogers and she continued a life long relationship with Carl Rogers. They would meet up occasionally and wrote lots of letters to each other.
Kit says that she used to address him as my therapeutic father.
My heart is aching as I type this.
Why were my needs for contact - in the Rogers and Gloria sense - ignored and dismissed. Why did he treat me as if what I'd said was totally out of order. The paradox is, he reminds me of Perls. But Perls had a better grasp of the workings of the human heart. Why doesn't it cross his mind that talking about maintaining contact with Gloria, accentuates the pain of not responding to me - or rather my feelings?
Because I don't play little girl, I guess?
And he didn't remind me of my father.
But he would have liked that more - if I'd been a 'vulnerable' 'little girl?
Doesn't make any sense to me!
And I'm saying again - "I would have gone to see Fritz Perls - it is hard to explain, because I do know Gestalt theory - but seeing him, not knowing the theory, because I agree with him that whatever it is that you are in, that's what you are in - and it isn't about the past - so, be it! It isn't about deficits and a need to be reparented (reparative relationship) . With Perls it is about finding the block, there is something about the experience you have not 'got' and you need to get that (whatever that is). Be it, embody it, fearlessly.
He describes this as making good the deficits.
I had used the word embodying...
Me -"Embodying it - it's not a lack - it sounds like your model is about deficits because a person needs to get an experience they have not had - so Rogers saying in effect 'I am the good father - now you are getting the good father experience'. With Perls it's 'You haven't got a good father, that's the way it is' there is no recovery by me, from me ' I'm not your father but I am with you as you feel what that is like - because you can get over it and through it. It is all of you and what you are'
So, zero contact with real emotion or feeling. One of us is failing to understand that grief is loss, and that the person who has lost their beloved cannot help but search wide and far, until the beloved's lifeless body may be taken care of, buried and life begins again... writing this is my equivalent.
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