Neutrality.

Non engagement, 'keeping one's dignity' in the face of outrageous adversity, not 'feeding the trolls', keeping your head held high, and 'not letting the b******s grind you down, are each a time honoured strategy used to maintain one's power. 

Except it turns up as a client struggling with self attack and self abandoning. Silencing oneself because it is supposed to control others, often comes from anger. A feeling of anger indicates a need to protect oneself, playing dead - avoiding/disengaging - is a serious level of autonomic (dorsal vagal) affect. 

As an off the shelf answer it is avoiding your answer. Silence as a strategy to control others is a cold anger portrayed in movies as strength, yet it so often contains contempt, and it is dehumanising... I don't see strength there. I see a mouse overwhelmed by fear and paralysed, but not running away when fight flight (self protection) kicks in. 

Silence, a paralysis framed as neutrality, isn't neutral. And it becomes self attack because contempt preserves anger, and anger is about action. Inaction preserves anger because anger doesn't go away until the danger is over. Certainly distancing oneself is a way out, but non-engagement doesn't necessarily reduce anger. Anger is about creating change. 

A policy of neutrality, institutional neutrality avoids the inconvenience of truth. And when people can't allow themselves to express anger safely, with respectful assertion, if contact with emotions is impossible. If a person cannot trust themselves to be angry - they so often blame themselves, failing to let go the delusion that 'I am powerful enough to have caused everything that is wrong - nothing can make sense until a new understanding is found! This is an active process. Because nothing about a frozen, unmovable situation makes any sense, until something new is created.

On the other side of the therapy room, from the professional, we find - using Kendra's term - weaponised neutrality; a cultural artefact (rather than a proven 'good' for the sake of the client) of the mental health profession. It occurs when the therapist is disengaged from their feelings, especially when the client's feelings feel threatening for the therapist. Most often the threat is restricted to the professional's idea of 'good therapy'. The client is threatening the therapist's sense of themself as a therapist because the session isn't how it should be - from the therapist's point of view! And the therapist is heading towards self attack, feeling uncomfortable (anger hidden under a compelling explanation) unable to be the imagined text book version of a great therapist. 

So, in my SFBT way, let's put all that to one side and focus on the heart of the matter.

Language. 

Certainly other ways of seeing are always possible. And each way of understanding is a service station on a long journey along a very long road. 

But me, I think that language is the key. It is fundamental in creating or preventing the harm of neutrality. Neutrality is certainly harmful in therapy when it prevents the client's development of self-awareness and knowledge. The expression of genuine, honest unknowing by a therapist (which can include expressing neutrality) allows the therapist to stay in contact with the edge of awareness sensation of 'being out of one's depth' or feeling uncertain. How the therapist describes their unknowing  either locks the client inside a prison of inexplicable feelings. Or opens a different door to an exploration of the unconstructed, open space. To stay with the open, unconstructed space metaphor, it will be the therapist's role to guide themselves and the client back to earth. So a therapist who can't do that is always going to have to construct erroneous compelling explanations, to avoid stepping into the unconstructed and unknown.

Language wise, the neutrality of the non-reply is very different to the open space of honest engagement. When neutrality is positioned as 'the higher ground', the therapist is choosing a dissociated state. Here they experience the illusion of panoramic view (marigpa). From this lofty position, the ordinary world of love, loss, and all the messy feelings in-between shrink to insignificance. And the therapist congratulates themselves on seeing 'the whole picture' and of seeing so much more than their client, and being so neutral, so at peace, so stable, so...

So like a drug trip.

Sometimes, to value neutrality is to want to be able to prove again and again how bad the ordinary world is. And that really is a warning sign!

Meanwhile, I have now added writing a victim statement to my list of life experiences. And this blog, my version of the £4K's worth of therapy sessions - unless there is a reply forthcoming - is all that remains. Kit has silenced himself and there are no longer any recordings. Everything has been deleted except for this blog and my memories, yeah and the psychological playback. Not Muxia this time. Instead I have the rip tide feeling of being pulled under a drowning wave, or of being carried out too far away to ever return (dorsal vagal edge of paralysis) tempered with the knowledge that this is simply an ancient survival response, there is a clear space after this. There will be action informed by clarity. This follows relaxing into the dark waters of fear. 

A very Win Hof metaphor! 

I assume that the therapist's neutrality in this case is a 'mountain-top' - marigpa - dissociated response? In which case, it is literally beneath him to acknowledge the unkindness of denying information and his potential to do harm to others. And if that is so, it is likely that he has learned nothing.

May any good arising from my courage and tenacity and determination to continue exploring this theory be dedicated and returned to him.