"Grief" - 25th and 26th July 2021.

25th July 2021.

Notes

A day full of physical panic, my body full of crawling spinning electricity. 

Not a nice feeling, not nice at all. 

Then suddenly I was washed through and through.

And the weaving, spinning, churn stopped.

 I stood for a precious moment in the still point at the centre of the Sun - and I felt love once more.

Mostly the laughing, that we laugh together...

And that I am culpable. 

It stops the panic. 

Stops me waiting for the hammer to fall 

 Stills my expectation of a coming time, my trial by language.

What is my worst fear?

More hours, weeks, months of blaming myself for feeling anxiety. 

So, more of the same then! 

I could tell - when my husband was lying.

My anxiety was well founded.

Just no information...

What do I want to know?

Only good and positive things. 

I'm beaten up.

The greater my need for positive, 

the harder it is to accept there can be negative consequences 

for honesty... 

26th July 2021. Discussion.

There is that cough - he tells me not to worry, it isn't Covid.

He -"Do you want to start with grief"?

I say - "Games - what I think - from putting things together - the way that you describe games -as if a person is trying to create their home-system, with disallowed emotion. A feeling they don't like, but if they can get you to have it there is something familiar about it. So there is the con and the gimmick - it's projective identification, really. Person A, will be the gamer - and person B is unsuspecting, has favoured and non favoured feelings. A starts off saying something that sounds reasonable, and person B picks up an implication from this first line of the conversation - if it has for B an emotional 'fizz' to it, and so they respond, they are hooked in because they will respond in an emotional way and Person A is evoking an emotion in B that I want to say, is 'behind the screen' for both of them, and I think this is at the heart of it - you described it as trying to get back to home"

He -"Yes..it isn't...emotions are involved of course, emotions are part of the payoff. And it may be about banned or allowed emotions but I think that's not the heart of it. Depending on what perspective you are reading, it is a way of reinforcing the phantasy (with a PH), or the RIGS (Stern) representation of interactions that have been generalised (the concept of how things should go). So a game is a way of reinforcing your phantasy or your RIGs, or in TA your script which is always running in the background, so in a way a game is an extreme version of something which is happening all the time but with a game it is far more noticeable and I'm trying to be ever so careful with my words. Because it is obvious. It's obvious that there has been a relational rupture, but it's not noticeable in the sense that the person who is playing the game, will have no idea that they are doing it, They just think 'I feel awful, why do I feel like this', or very often and this is the easy way to tell a game, people will say things like why does this always happen to me, why are people always like this, um...why can't I ever get what I want. Universal statements - and that makes it the game, if you like, it's the mountain peak of something that is happening all the time

I found it weirdly enticing to feel the undertow of my past creating coils and loops of disaster as I feel the shattered edges of my life; my son's psychosis, an errant husband. And I'm in improbability drive at the still centre of a chaos star, looking at all options, all possibilities available to me in this very restrictive, restricting and restricted space. I don't need this to be easy, though that would be nice. I just want it to be open and playful.

I feel like I'm in a field with a bull!

I say something in reply about being in sync and out of sync, but I don't know where I'm going there is no rope for me to fix to this cliff; in sync means to use words as in jazz, to play, to follow the rabbit down multiple holes, and let the mind associate and create something new and of this moment - to turn towards knowledge - to turn around within one's own ignorance, to turn away from appearances. I'm trying to describe epistrophe...

"Epistrophē implies return to multiple possibilities, correspondences with images that can not be encompassed within any systematic account. The particular virtue of the psychological mind is its twisting of the given; seeing through, hearing echo and implication, turning back or upside down. The psychological mind makes the given imagistic, fantastic. Hence its affinity with both the pathological and the poetic, and hence, also, its distance from the programmatic of action and the formulations of the sciences. Where scientific abstractions seek to posit what is really there in the given, substitutive for it and constitutive of it, our abstractions seek to drop the bottom out of the given."

James Hillman.

I fail to say this in any recognizable way...

He continues -"we are back to the filter again, because this is the filter, this is everything. What I mean by the filter is really what in TA is called the Script, it's not quite the same but there's not much difference.

I say (optimistically) - "The organizing principle"?

He talks over me - "Because it tells us who the world is, and who am I in relation to the world so it's really basic stuff. The thing about the script is it's easy to miss, because we can get caught up in trying to be too complicated and the script is always very, very simple because it has been decided by a child. I will give you an example. So little Carol comes home from school and says "mommy, look what I made" and mother says "Do you never shut up!" oh god, ok so she goes to daddy "Daddy look what I made" " Not now love I'm too busy, go and ask your mom". Now this becomes a daily reality, so she is very hurt, very missed. These are, a mother who is labelling the child as someone who never shuts up and all she's got are the normal needs of a child so this is a mother giving her stuff to the child, of course she doesn't think that she is doing this, she just thinks that it is an annoying child. Dad doesn't understand the needs of a child because for whatever reason, he thinks oh this is more important than attending to my child wanting a bit of attention, a bit of love. This is a child who is really really missed and this becomes a chronic thing. So from her experience she understands the world's a pretty hostile place. Not in a big dramatic way, in an ordinary, everyday…

Me - "Her fundamental needs will not be met"

He - “So what she learns is 'I can't be noticed' 'my emotional needs can't be met' and 'I'm not allowed to talk' that becomes the script."

At this point I'm under his spell. I have 'a thing' about having to keep quiet which relates to blacking out when I was attacked, and the impossibility at the age of 14 and in 1970's Britain, of telling anyone what happened to me. And then later, in my 20's once again I had to repeat my personal gagging order this time to save others. Ultimately the first experience strengthened my resolve and ability to cope, and so I didn't black out. But the memory of both incidents is heavy. And I'm identifying with Carol...But even if I'd had the perfect childhood! We are hard-wired to freeze in relation to overwhelming threat, and that's what I did. But I learnt from my experience and when I was in a far more terrifying situation years later, this time I remained aware of exactly what was happening. In fact the first experience empowered me for the second - and so no one died. I like to believe my ability to stay calm made that critical difference.

He - "And then what she does, and this becomes the precursor of the game, she'll 'collect stamps'".

Me -"So each time it happens…

He cuts me off.

He -"You can't have a game without stamps - it goes back to the days of Green shield stamps."

Me -"A lot of TA I see as a map, this is like learning the rules of ...ok yeah."

He - “No, no I'm just giving you an illustration of how it works…"

Me - “Sure”

He - “In Games people Play...it's not a case that there are a fixed number of games. You know what game someone is playing by sitting and listening to them because the game is according to their biography. So if you and I played a game, well no one has ever written a book about me, and I guess no one has written a book about you. So if I play a game or you play a game it will be peculiar to your biography. So I think having a book of games is all very well and helps us understand how the mechanism of a game works, but it's not a handbook that I can flip through the pages and find your game, it doesn't work like that.

I try to explain how my husband would repeat the same emotive situation; one which he could be sure would lead to me feeling bereft and hurt simply because it always did. My husband would then become angry, or as I came to see it, he believed that he had a legitimate right to be angry with me. I couldn't understand that he didn't love me on any level any more, because it didn't make any sense, because he said that he did! But the what I now see as goading (bullying) was truly, truly awful, my heart was shattered again and again and I thought it was all my fault - until I listened to the recordings I'd made.

As I remember, as I describe trying to fathom that memory I am feeling echoes of the pain of those days and evenings and...he ignores this.

He - “So little Carol, she’s had this really terrible experience with her parents - not anything you would call social services over. Just ordinary everyday emotional neglect really . So she goes back to her relationships and what she is going to do is collect stamps - like you know, you collect stamps, put them in a book and when it’s full you cash it in, and in this case..<He and I are of a similar age - Green Shield stamps, and the blue Co-op ones. Evidence!>…you cash it in for a game. So her particular stamps would be little everyday occurrences which she can store up one by one, of not feeling listened to, of feeling emotionally neglected, of feeling dismissed and they are more likely to be connected with the people who mean most to her. So it will be her relationship with her family, if she’s got one at this point , and when she’s got enough stamps she can play the game - of course this is all unconscious, but what she will do is, pick someone she can play the game with, because otherwise there won't be a gimmick to pull the person in."

Me -"A belief a person has about themselves that’s precious to them and it is being confronted at his moment."

He - "“Yes, the best person to play a game with in this instant is somebody who is like a parent, somebody who isn’t a very good listener, somebody who just talks about themselves. So this person anybody else could recognise as you don’t have a conversation with this person because they can’t do it - but she will pick this person and try to do it - and then she can get the pay off. Let’s say she is with a group of friends and they are all talking about X, and she says well I’m going to talk about Y, and they are all talking about X so they aren't listening because they have already been talking about Y for ten minutes. So she deliberately, though unconsciously talks about Y, and so she can then go ‘‘Nobody listened to me, I’m sick of this’ and storms out. Leaving her friends going ‘ What? What just happened? Now I don’t remember Berne or anyone writing this - but the next bit that happens, when you have emotions which are disproportionate, partly that’s a judgement call - but I’m talking about something that is really obvious like this event with her friends, you know for sure the person is in the Child ego state, and almost certainly they are playing a game."

Me “- Seems so cruel to call all this ‘games’ it brings me a feeling that ‘People should know better’. Berne speaks from…it’s almost as if he is on a pinnacle (looking down). The word ‘game’ feels unfair. The person isn’t aware that they - in Berne’s terms - are playing a game …the scientist part of me asks, is this true."

He - “Absolutely, I see it again and again. Especially if you ever see couples, they are all collecting stamps from each other. But you see it with individuals . See I’m very firmly of the opinion that theories are great because they are limited, and not about you or me, and the thing to do is to wear theory lightly. The person who is sat in front of you will always tell you what they need if you know how to listen to them. That’s not about theory, that’s about the relationship . And if you miss it they will keep telling you until you listen. Every time, every time! And I think, any therapist who says to a client ‘This is what is happening to you, I’m the expert on this, listen to me!’ is being borderline, not even borderline, abusive. Therapy is about empowering the client. So when I talk about games with a client…I’m never sitting there going ‘This is a game, you don’t get it! Let me tell you about it’ And sometimes you see the magic happen when you offer a framework, or occasionally a client will go ‘no’ and I might have got it wrong, or I might have got it right but the client isn’t ready to hear it yet. But either way - maybe they will pick it up later. But it’s always important to give the power to the client, that’s what it is all about."

Me - “To go back to what we said before; people don’t necessarily know…to take the hypothetical example of the woman who marries a man like her dad because she needs to change her past in the present. It doesn’t feel true to her, to believe that she cannot make him change. And in TA I get the feeling that there is a belief that everyone knows ‘the truth’ really - that you can't change others - and this may well be true (!?) I don’t know (I think the whole point of therapy is to help people change themselves, I don't see why that enabling capacity is restricted to a 'therapy relationships'). But I also think people can be completely deluded and go to their graves completely deluded. A person’s belief that they can change someone; there are a lot of stories, be they simply fiction or fantasy, narratives that give the impression that this is possible. So I don’t put so much responsibility on the person, they may be making a mistake, but I can understand that a person can have a really strong and solid belief that conflicts with mine."

He - “But I think it is important to understand from the client, where that comes from - I mean we did some of this work"

Me - “And I thought…you do not understand where I am coming from. You were assuming that I can’t let go of my fantasy. But it wasn’t a fantasy, I was fighting for a real person - the person I am married to. I saw my husband’s actions as like a massive tantrum, understandable in the light of what we had been through, and people do things they will regret later. Also it is better to negotiate, so I was holding the door open for that. After twenty-five years of marriage, it isn’t black and white. I was saying that our relationship is at it's worst, is at least 60 - 70% good, we are friends, we get along and so I believed there was something we could reclaim. At the time I thought you (Kit) don’t get where I’m coming from. I give people chances, until I know from them what’s happening, and when I know, then I make a decision. "

And that statement - that I only make decisions when I have all the facts, or enough of them to assess and to judge, is integral to my identity. It is integral to what is happening here in this session, and it integral to why I am opening up the black box, it is why I'm writing this blog.

Kit ignores what I've said and offers me his misinterpretation...

He - “In my mind it goes back to that image of you as a girl, pouring your dad’s drinks down the sink. The original relationships in our lives, the family, the setting, the blueprint for how life is - because it is important. So when you are not giving up on your dad, you are making sure that you are not going to let him pour himself into oblivion. So you are pouring his drink down the sink instead. That’s setting up a pattern".

Me - “Yes, I’m not powerless. I will do what I can, until I know that this is their choice" .

He - “Because it raises some very important questions for your future self, because there are going to be times when you can’t help a client. There are times when the paradox is they have come to you for help that they don’t want - and it usually comes out in the first session - they have been sent, or they sent themselves in order to convince somebody else. And the convincing is appearing in front of you. Or, in the choice between the known ways of dealing with emotions such as alcohol, cocaine or promiscuity, or actually having a look at themselves, finding out what’s there. Don’t want to know - cocaine it is then. There will be clients like that and you won't be able to save them <expectant pause>

So why is he dumping this on to me? Whose concern is it that there are 'clients who don't want to know'? This certainly isn't my concern. I generally ask, 'Seriously, what is so good for you about cocaine/sex/alcohol - because we are hard-wired to want more of those things for sure, so it makes total sense to me that you would want more. But cocaine and alcohol in particular will have negative consequences, so I'm just wondering - what is it that they are helping you to feel'? And then we talk about the good feelings and how to get more, and from that place of safety the conversation can go into the sadness, or anger or wherever! Kit has missed that for me all that matters is that I do something, that I engage, that I don't look away or walk away until I know that the other person doesn't want me to intervene.

And in the room now with Kit, I just hold the silence. 

He - ….I’m aware that we started off with games and we’ve been all over the place"

Me - “That’s fine, that’s the way it should be”.

He - “So do you want me to put it back to games”?

Me - “Do you want to put it back to games”? Erm…I’m here and I’m paying. The meander around subjects is fruitful …

He -”There is a wonderful cartoon I meant to print out - it shows ‘the switch’ in the Game beautifully, it’s a beautiful illustration of it. A couple who clearly have just moved house and they are getting stuff out of boxes into the kitchen. And the first panel ‘Darling would you come into the kitchen and help me unpack’ and the second panel, he’s getting something out and he’s putting it somewhere and ‘No! Not there!’ And the third panel, ‘No! Not there darling’ and the next panel ‘No!!! Not there!’ you know in increasingly big letters and so on. Of course, in the end what she does is explode on him ‘Don’t you know anything! Don’t you know where anything is supposed to go!?’ while he’s got a picture out that he is ripping apart…and there's the original invitation ‘Darling come into the kitchen and help me unpack’.

Me - ‘‘So I can discharge my frustration on to you and shout at you"

He - “It has nothing to do with the present tense, it is clearly a game. He was invited in with the ulterior motive. That’s how it always starts. There's a cover story that somebody always tells themself. I mean in the cartoon this is a new kitchen, there is no right or wrong place. There can’t possibly be a right place”

Me - “But why isn’t he saying, ‘where would you like it to be’?

He - “Oh, I thought they were a couple, her being in charge and him being the servant!”

Me - “So if he said, ‘where would you like it to be then he would be a servant’?

He - “Well it’s their kitchen isn’t it, surely they are a couple"?

Me - “Ah, but she is clearly emotionally invested in the position of this object - clearly she must have somewhere in mind to perceive that it is being placed wrongly. Or he could say, ‘No, I really like it here’ and then they could have an argument. ”

He - “The point is there will be a story here, it’s part of her script, it’s replaying - probably - a parental relationship”.

Me - “But is he not also stuck in a parental relationship…”

He - “No, he just thinks it is an innocent request. But his gimmick is…

Me - “I’m a kind and loving man…”

He - “Of course, of course.

Me - “So, he’s being a servant. But it matters to him to make her happy. But as to why he doesn’t say ‘OK, where do you want it…puts it there, and then does something else!

He - “Well possibly the parental relationship that built up to the RIGs is that “Nobody can meet my needs”

Me - “So if he said to her, ‘where would you like it, wouldn’t that just drain the energy”?

He - “When somebody is playing a Game, if somebody crosses the game, the person plays the Game harder. So if he said. ‘Where shall I put it’ she would say ‘over there’ - and then, ‘No, not there. I meant there!!!’ and so on”. And somebody in this cartoon script might turn up in therapy, ‘Why is my marriage so bad - why does my husband never listen to me’? And the best thing to do is to look at her part in it, he’s not here - she is, And that’s how we are going to discover Games in therapy, generalities are never going to get there. And what I do is, I slow it right down, second by second. And I want to know three things really - physically what was happening, cognitively what were you thinking, emotionally what were you feeling. Because the power for the game is usually physical, cognitive and emotional. So for example, this little girl whose ‘stupid parents never listen to her’ and that will have been real - then storms off to her bedroom, shouts at her parents and has a good cry, in all likelihood the power for the game will be precisely that, cognitively, emotionally and physically in the place of trauma which gave rise to the game in the first place. So it just repeats on a loop. And then she will have dispensed all of that, by storming off, or not talking for three days, or whatever she is going to do - and then she will start collecting more stamps. That’s how it works …And the thing I love about it, anybody can understand Parent, Adult and Child. And the other thing is, if you read the DSM and some psychodynamic writers, who will give you a label, you will have this sort of disorder and that sort of disorder - it’s bullshit really. What that is doing, it’s saying look I’ve got this person in front of me, what category do they fit, so what you are doing is trying to ram a client - but the thing about Game theory and ego states is the opposite of that, you are saying I have an empty framework, what material can the client give me, which is entirely personal to this person ”

Me - “So it gives a structure to describe a person’s reality, and this allows a person to have power over it - there is no such thing as ‘ego states’ but it is useful and it works. It gives a name for ‘it’ as a handle to shift the problem”

He - “Berne said that we are always interacting with people in a way that measures the minutiae of people’s responses to us. Even the word ‘hallo’, so a person can feel aggrieved when another responds with less than a hello, than they gave to them - even that is a transaction, or it could be a stamp!”

A sore point for me...he would start a session with 'how are you?' and I'd be stuck, wanting a deep conversation! [+]

Me - “but with me, I’m usually perfectly fine in this situation - and I’m different in different situations. So the question “How are you” is a request for a status report. And how I am is different in different environments. So moving on from that, to ‘Family Systems’ - we choose partners and friends who could be a member of our family. Is that true?

He - “ it was first done in the 1970’s and done many times since with the same result. And I think it explains a lot, because all that’s happening is we are picking up signals from people without knowing we are doing it. And in early years it is a matter of personal survival, because if a child feels safe in their parents company, they will watch in a particular way that says ‘I feel safe, I don’t have any ongoing concerns’ a child who is scared of their parents will be observing in a very different way. I find that people with traumatic backgrounds tend to be much more aware, of their own observing, but not always where it comes from but very aware of their observing. And often picking up signals in an exaggerated way, because if you are used to loud noises meaning that you are about to be attacked, or sudden movements" which mean I’m about to be attacked…sudden movements. And really the family systems experiment is just an experiment that asks, what do we think of people when we can’t talk, what do we think of them"

Me -” it just seems unscientific, let’s start with that".

He - “Why is it unscientific”?

Me -”I’d need to see the results - the papers - myself. I’m not disagreeing as such.  I believe in a concept of 'kin’ , that people chose someone as a partner who feels like kin, there is kinship there. That can be the main part of it, but it could be that you have decided to be someone else, different to who you were. But thinking of my sons, both have fallen in love during recent weeks with very different, really different girls - but each fits who my son would say he is - both sons had a similar upbringing, so it’s sort of strange if you see what I mean.”

He -” Family systems is exactly as scientific in the way black holes are”

Me - “ They are explanatory…”

He - “We do the same experiment and get the same result and we don’t know why, so from all the information we have what is the theory that would explain why we always end up with the same result”

Me - “My partners always seem to reflect who I am at that time, there may be a core in me that is the same, but I’m not the same - but let’s take the screen idea - I don’t disagree that families have preferred names for responses to an event. So one family behaves to an event and they run around like chickens, while the same thing happens to another family and they get really angry perhaps. So there are preferred reactions and emotions, emotional tone.”

He - “ In families people are assigned different roles”

Me - “Bowen family systems, where the family dump all their anxiety on the ‘preferred / identified patient’ and blame ‘the black sheep’ if they worry about me it solves this crisis. 'Identified patient' is an interesting one. I've thought about that a lot in terms of my husband’s family. It provided a workable model for his family, explaining what I was seeing - which was unbelievable…

He -” There is a lot of magical thinking, I think there is nothing in there, or useful that isn’t better written in other places…."

Me - “was it Jodorowsky, he was talking about - when you ask a group of people to play the part of your family, but you ask them to stand in a position that feels appropriate to the closeness you feel to them..." [+]

He -”it really doesn’t matter that you have never met these people and will never meet them or what your impression would be if you did meet them because what matters is who are they to the client, and you will know that because the client tells you. And again it’s getting inside the client’s filter, knowing how the client sees the world, because there is no real world just the way the client experiences the situation. And if ever you are going to do something, and therapeutically you need to do this sometimes to undo the way the client sees the world because it is keeping them stuck. You don’t impose, you offer the client tools, you ask ‘how does it look when you use this framework’ and then the client will do all the work themselves"

Me -” they want to be out of their pain, and as soon as you have heard (your self say) an idea it becomes a part of you"

He -” because you can’t do it for the client anyway, and that’s <laughing> I wonder why this always springs to mind in some point of our conversations, that’s why I’m not Gestalt because there's no manipulating. And that’s a word Perls used, manipulating the patient".

Me -”Well Perls is Perls but underneath, I will put him on to that chair - ‘Perls, you and I get on fine because you remind me of many consultants - NHS - I have worked with who were complete bullies, really….but I could cope with them. Perls was like a lot of consultants. He took knowledge from other people and put it together. Was he doing therapy or not? Possibly abusing, possibly manipulating but me I’d just laugh and say ‘ yeah Perls, that’s an interesting idea’ . But there is important stuff in there, so instead of the PHantasy and filter, there is the Ground and ideas arise from Ground and the clearer the figure formation the more awareness of the whole the person has - then the person can move on and experience in a new way. Then it’s back down to the fertile void, the Dharmakaya level and then ideally new concepts will arise in association with actual need. So in awareness of one’s reality, one’s needs, actions and ideas will arise to create a really clear figure. So the figure arises from the ground and it becomes clear. When people are stressed and their emotional state is chaotic because of the adrenaline, then the figures.<interrupt>."

He-”Absolutely”

Me-” are all over the place, they are not clear and they are competing. The point of Gestalt is to allow the person to get in touch with the primal feeling, or whatever is unfinished - and from there questions arise about how to move, through play, through feeling, through recognising the edge of awareness feelings into completion. I love the openness of that. But Perls to Gloria ‘Are you a little girl’? He wanted her to say back to him ‘so what if I am trying to manipulate you too!’ The argument is fine with him."

He -”if the client in front of you is a little girl, what a therapist who is actually compassionate will do is look after the little girl.

26th July 2021.
Notes:

He didn't come out to wait for me.

Mostly I remember his green socks, and feeling lost and hopeless.

But I am really tired.

Nightmare last night.

So glad I have a week to process all this.

Psychotherapy: Eros and magic.

Plato believed that Eros would take us into a Higher truth and mystery, and Jung agreed. But Freud grabbed the scissors snipping cruelly at Eros until there was nothing but blood and feathers falling around him like rubies and snow. 

I am certain that many of psychotherapy's best theories and explanations are a continuation of much older concepts and ideas - repackaged so as to appear new. So when Kit talked about fantasy 'with a PH'' I was trying to recall Ioan P Couliano's book: Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. 

Couliano, looking at the works of Bruno in particular, explains that Eros was understood as the aspiration to transcendental Beauty.  But in our time,  Freud describes Eros as chthonic, wingless, primal desire (libido) demanding in an inarticulate way, that the outside world satisfies our desire; the energy of Eros (id) is blocked and redirected by the numerous twists and turns of our internalized representation of our culture, our family, and moderated (repressed) or re-directed (sublimated) by the Super-ego. 

Viewed this way, Freud appears to see Eros as the unsocialized, inner child we become when we - to use another of his reifications - regress. Freud's ignorant Eros is continually tricked via advertising's fantasy representations of life, society and society's norms. In psychodynamic therapy, awareness of the regression and denial allows us to know what Eros is up to, which helps to stop the tantrum, and undo future self-deceptions. Then we  - the ego - can allow the Eros child to walk hand in hand with reality and stop making a fuss, be a good citizen. 

But Plato had placed Eros as the link between physical existence and spiritual essence; we fly with Eros. 

[[QUOTE.

Born in 428 BCE, the philosopher (Plato) was among the first generations of young boys who were systematically taught to read. He was also destined to conjure up one of the top-selling metaphysical notions of all time, a notion that irrevocably marked the rationalism, religion, and mysticism of the Western world: the theory of the forms. Plato held that another world exists beyond the realm of temporal flux and gross matter that we perceive with our senses. This otherworld is a pure and timeless realm of perfect ideas; the sensual things we perceive around us are only faded Xeroxes of these ideal forms. Davis, Erik. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.]]

The Platonic view describes body and soul - much in the same way that we now describe brain and mind. In the contemporary understanding of biology we see millions of synapses conveying K and Na ions, transmitting information about body and world; a potassium and sodium cascade so that the brain can integrate information to create the imagined, the virtual symbolic representation of us, the world and it's systems - which we experience as both real and as the mind. 

So, what is spirit? 

Couliano translates spirit as made of the same stuff as stars, pneuma. The Spirit is body shaped, but it is made of such subtle stuff that it can represent the finer, more ethereal soul to the perception of the body. This works the other way around too, spirit represents the body to the soul; thus allowing both some awareness of each other. Without spirit, soul would be blind to the outside physical world and without soul the body would simply be earth, air, fire and water set to disintegrate! 

So, to recap: the sidereal pneuma, spirit, the body made of stars translates the sensations, sounds and images from the body's senses into a format that soul can read, and vice versa. 

For the soul cannot grasp anything that has not first been converted into phantasms. And the soul communicates to the body through pneuma.

Pneuma is the inner sense, translating between soul and body. 

Aristotle viewed intellect as phantasm, much as we today regard thoughts. And soul is energetic, it is the vital force that animates. Now we find the parallels with Freudian concepts. 

Freud regarded his talking cure as psychodynamic - he should have called it pneuma -dynamic, but pneuma is already taken by lungs and air. In Freudian psychodynamic therapy Eros is usually, no always the cause of the patient's problem!

In Freudian theory, energy (affect - sensation and outcomes of the emotion) is invested in an object of desire. The person longs for the other, thinks about them all the time! This process is called cathexis. If that energy is blocked because it is transgressive to want that particular person (such as one's therapist for instance!) or because the person has died or can no longer be contacted, Freud explains that the cathected (blocked) libido (life energy) will express itself as regression, aggression, or obsession, until other outlets are found. 

This diagnoses grief as something we have to get over; and unbearable, catastrophic distress as a disorder. Freud is thinking in terms of energy only, not about relationship and identity and the shattering of one's world. The cure for loss - according to Freud -  is to shift the energy, to fall in love with someone else, and move on. 

I imagine Freud and Sinead O'Connor in the Underworld. Sinead is singing 'Nothing compares to you' Freud isn't moved. He pauses, feels obliged to dispense wisdom and then proclaims that her singing is an attempt to cathect her libido.. 

Anyway, Couliano goes on to explain that the Pythagoreans spoke of vital pneuma circulating in the blood. Students at the school of 5th Century Empedocles of Agrigentum believed spirit to be a subtle vapor moving in the arteries of the body. The heart was therefore the central reserve for pneuma, and phantasy, and this is why the heart is so affected by love.

There is still a belief that phantasy is more attractive than real life! 

And this way of seeing underlies a view of addiction; that people become enraptured by phantasy. For we place our starry phantasm within the other. And as phantasy is star-stuff, far more beautiful than muddy, messy, chaotic real life, we are addicted to the radiance that is actually our own projection (I mean the language - projection being a psychotherapy term!).

This ancient way of understanding also predicts that the physical real body of the beloved can never be as beautiful as our projected starry-phantasm, that we believe is the beloved. So love can't be forever because what we love is us! The phantasm of the beloved is nothing but one's own pneuma! 

In this explanation a real other person is evoking desire, creating phantasms made of our pneuma. As advertising tries to do, to capture our own energy, to sell us the phantasy. Or so runs the Platonic explanation now conflated with Freud! 

Though it seems mostly harmless the theory leads to ideas such as if you wear the wrong clothes, the rapist can't be held responsible for the effect and his actions. He was enraptured by the effect on his pneuma. This bad explanation is usually, but not always, aimed at women who are then treated as dangerous and disruptive.

A more common psychological variation of this power of phantasm concept, imagines that there is a problem stopping a person seeing through their phantasy. 

The phantasy becomes psychological diagnosis:

They only fell in love with me because...

- because of their script.

- because they projected onto me

- because of  their transference....

- because they are a narcissist'.

- etc.

Meanwhile Plato's theories also lead to the concept of courtly love with its "vocation of suffering" . In this modification, the power of the phantasy is harnessed and used as the path to wisdom.

A vocation of suffering is chosen by a true believer to create the path to wisdom by a purposeful withdrawal from the beloved before any physical consummation, or satisfaction can occur - so it is too late if you have had sex, or if there is any real love and partnership! For then, it is said, desire may never be quenched...oh dear. But, fear not. There are other theories! This directs us to look East, towards Mircea Eliade (Couliano's mentor) and towards Tantra...

Face to face. 20th July 2021.

20th July 2021.

So, here it is. 

The day after. 

I'm never going to forget it, seeing you.

You were looking up the road, looking for me. 

Waving. 

I waved back my most graceful wave and slowly raised a hand to shield my eyes from the powerful sun that was fizzling my world into glitter. 

That walk.

Oh I was slow, considered, graceful, I am beautiful - I try to believe that. 

Feel, it.

Know it...

Trust.

It took me hours to reach you.

Slomo.

Closer .

Then I followed you, simply not seeing. 

Totally gone. 

I wasn't there. 

Really!  

I went to sit in the wrong place, therapists always sit closest to the door. 

But there are two doors?

And so I shifted as you said, 'sit anywhere' but I felt you move to the seat closest to the other door - my wordless interpretation is so fast!

Outside of here - the hottest day. 

Inside - here - your room. 

Wooden floor. 

We are cool inside an old house. 

You asked me if I wanted a drink, I asked for water. 

You asked me if I wanted some cider vinegar in it. 

I thought 'what is this! 

Like squash?! 

Hope my face didn't betray my thinking. 

My mind was spinning like a tiny twig caught in the swirl of water spiraling, as I hear you run the tap.

What I imagine between words, will break me, 

Because the last four years make me feel as if I've been shot in the head and I'm going to say the stupidest things. You will now see in real-world clarity how I'm not a fit person for the team.

And I can't do a damn thing about it! 

Except try to slow my mind down. 

Come on! 

Surely here, now! 

 CALM FOR GODS SAKE! 

BE CALM!!!

+

Back home, trying to write. 

The night dissolving into darkness, as my mind's rusty gears trying to turn memory into narrative - a beautiful moth flew in to the living room, perching on the painting high up on the wall. 

I caught it!

A delicate, beautiful lunar moth!

I put it outside. 

But about 15 minutes later another, or the same one, flew into the room, perching even higher up the wall.

I caught it 

Put it out 

Shut the window.

The night like a heavy woollen blanket. 

I went to bed. 

2. am. unable to sleep.

First face 2 face session. 19th July 2021.

14th July 2021.

Notes:

A book on attachment theory glows under the afternoon sun, 

by my left knee, 

as I sit here on the sofa.

The sun hot on my neck. 

I'm so sleepy. 

Monday is finally face to face, covid restrictions lifted - and I've got used to this safe distance, this abeyance, this kicking it into the long grass, this avoidance! 

And I'm overstepping the mark in my own, quiet way .

.

But I'm still here, having stated very clearly that I am not your client - and I'm reading your  email - saying that you are so glad I have asked for the sessions to be more in line with what I need... 

Genuinely I am in a fog. 

If I was in your role I would ask 'my client' about her feelings

 unless I didn't want to know! 

OK. I'm cracking up! 

And I've got to be rational, patient and strong. 

And right now start practicing what I need to say. 

OK, it goes like this. 

 I didn't realise that you mattered to me until I felt that I would break apart into a mess of dislocated sorrow to say goodbye. 

As I write this I feel worse and worse... 

You trusted me, so do I now feel untrustworthy? 

Yes, I haven't said directly how I feel about you, 

and because I harbor hope. 

Hope is part of limerence.

Talking only on zoom is like being inside a Faraday cage, no sense of electrics.

And now I'm scared.

Scared that there will be no electricity.

Scared that there will be electricity...

I want to say that I just want to know you and you to know me.

29th July 2021.

I honestly didn't know what levels of openness and honesty to dare, that day. The sun so hot, the cross over from virtual to real promised more information...but the experience was overwhelming.

I had wanted to see how it felt. 

Chemistry - I wanted there to be chemistry.

I had sat in the car for about twenty minutes, noticing that practicing Wim Hof Method really had changed my tolerance to hot as well as cold. 

One cannot arrive early for therapy, or leave beyond one's time. 

Boundaries! 

Then I got out of my car, took my bag out of the boot and set off down the road. 

Everything was dazzling. The sun bleaching my vision. I was floating in pretty sandals, no heals, slightly Goth, black leather with bronze studs! I had on my grey jeans, my black shirt. On my head a nest of dreadlocks, a Medusa swirl. I'm not slim, I'm not fat. I felt that I looked as good as I can for someone so old, who has just sweltered in a hot car for too long, now walking under a too hot sun, down the too hot road, crossing the road and seeing...Oh my goodness! Is that him? Standing on the pavement watching for me. I keep walking, slow and so mindful not to mess this up - the sandals can't be trusted - and I want to appear super cool, super calm, super collected. 

He waves, and I wave a slow, languorous wave back. 

My eyes are fixed upon him; white shirt, dark trousers, his energy, the way he moves.

This is real!

Inside his room, darkness and silence. I open my bag and take out the super perfect vegan chocolate biscuits bought especially for this day. He made a comment about dogs, and not being able to stop eating, and so the biscuits go back in my bag. And my shields (think of a star ship) were up and failing; his first question scattered across my skin like buck shot, and into my mind ripping my intellect and words into babble.

He - "Well we have been meeting for over a year now, what's it like being face to face"?

I said a lot and nothing - I said that normally at home I sit on the floor, that I'm used to VR and crossing from virtual to real is better. But my heart and mind were speeding, all the time trying so hard to work this all out.

He - I was a bit surprised by your email about the article I wrote (see previous post).

Me - "yes, I gave you a glowing review"

He - "My intention was, based on our conversations about how trauma isn't about the event, its about perception..."

And I'm trying so hard now to use his concepts and to hold onto my own view, and I'm drowning. Nothing I've said has been followed up. And now it is absolutely clear that he doesn't want any form of closeness with me.

He - "...and therapeutically what matters is the filter, not the event, which is what the article is all about really".

Me, echoing -  "what really matters is the filter not the event"

I try again. I don't agree with him! And I no longer have the email. I know I wrote about his clarity and insight, and other flattering things. But (and I must have been coming to my senses at this point) but ultimately this - our session - is supposed to be about my research!

Me - all the people in my focus group will have experienced trauma, whether it is trauma in the sense you mean is another matter, they felt it was trauma - but I guess this needs questioning as it invalidates everything from here on - if it isn't trauma <nervous laughing!> but I'm not going to ask them - because the point is, they all say that they would not have avoided the traumatic experience because as a consequence they feel more connected to others. What I'm looking for are the experiences that transformed their trauma..

He - "therapeutically?"

Here is a language problem I never imagined - how is therapy separate or different from any other experience?  What does he mean, therapeutically? 

I tell one story of transformation...

He - "There's all sorts of important things in there I think. Not everything that is therapeutic happens in therapy, I mean it can't because the therapist is who we are, and not every therapist can offer everything - and some things are just not doable in the therapy room."

Ah, a dagger has just struck deep into my heart! He is right, what I need from him is negotiation, navigation and probably a separation of three years. At the time of this meeting I was a trainee, I hadn't even begun my 100 hours placement. Now, as a qualified therapist myself, I see this moment very differently. I've felt some clients stepping over the edge of love or limerence with me and I feel at those times the echoes of how I felt this day. I trust my experience of this pain, this day, to make me kinder and wiser. 

Back to the room!

He - "And that's a wonderful story of non-verbal connection - I think non-verbal connection is a key part of what happens in therapy. These are my books and they are full of words, they can't be full of anything else because they are books. But those words in every therapy book I can think of are words about other words...and wordless experiences are also possible to write about, and they are just as important so...And I wonder just so I'm on the right lines here, is this a conversation where we're just exploring what's what, or is there a particular question in mind"?

I try so hard to bring us both into the same space - to approach the question "what is it like being face to face".

I say - "So much of this is re-centering, this is different, it is 360, the whole thing - that maybe this will be the whole focus. But I do have my piece of paper, but there is no real question...whatever comes out, whatever is interesting, we will go towards those

He - "underlying all of this there is a key question...because for some clients, the client doesn't know for a while explicitly - some do - so the question I ask, the tone of voice, the body language all of that, if somebody is talking to you as daddy or mommy because that's where the deficit is, developmentally. And if somebody is seeing you as adult to adult sorting things out together, that is quite a different session"

Is he talking about the here and now - me!?

He - "And you have got to know, because if you are talking at cross purposes, therapy isn't going to happen"

At this point the dark waters go over my head. We most certainly are talking at cross purposes! I speak from where I am.

Me - "I don't see myself as a client, and this is a fizzy grey area, I feel I'm acting illegally. I don't see myself as a client, I think what is most useful for me is to learn from you...so, how do  I see you? I don't see you as my dad, do I come over as a child, do I appear childish"?

He - "No - I think there's been a bit of a cross here...."

For me - the heat outside, the darkness in the room, the strangeness of water and cider vinegar - which I didn't accept - and I'm trying to talk about my feelings, because actually, I prefer to talk about how I feel, but I've got it all wrong - and this is my overwhelming feeling - all is wrong. Metaphorically, my brain starts oozing out of my ears, I'm lost, befuddled, can't be honest. "Wordless experiences are also possible to write about, and they are just as important"...I tried. 

He - "because my assumption was, this is the new thing...I almost called it coaching, but that's not what you called it is it?"

Me - "mentee and mentor.."

He - "So really my question was about - when I'm doing therapy, when you are doing therapy, the question we need to ask of the client is - not addressing you as the client, us together looking at client x - it is important to know what we see"

It's no good, the floor has fallen away, I'm in a void of ambiguity, no sense of direction! I need, I want to say how I see him. I want to be straight, I want him to know! It was the ambiguity of the words - "not addressing you as the client" - I wanted that to mean - addressing you as an equal, an ordinary person, as you. "Us together looking at..." us together, in this moment, not in a hypothetical situation.

I'm gone.

Me -  " So how do I see you, how do I..."

He - "No, no no....the question is - when I'm doing therapy the question is, what does the client want of me. The implication is, when you are being the therapist you need to know what the client wants from you."

And then I tell him a lot of what I really think - which is that his kindness when I was a client was important to me. He asked me to say more, and I skittered away to say truthfully that I find his descriptions of the filter and phantasy a bit frustrating  - because since 1991 I've been 'postmodern' as it is a totally Buddhist way of viewing things. I get that reality is without inherent meaning. I understand that meaning is a construct, and arrived at through a process of meaning-making, limited or facilitated by language and the reactions of others. And I want him to see that I'm his equal in terms of this! To stop explaining to me as if I should be amazed. I can't be amazed! 

Why doesn't he get that we are on the same page?

I feel so frustrated!

I see now, it wasn't my amazement he expected - it was my agreement that deficits are remedied by a subtle reparenting process. I neither agreed or disagreed then. But now when it's me as a therapist I certainly don't assume that developmental deficits or needs are ruling the client's roost. I ask them! Courageous, collaborative dialogue is important - this is the lesson I gained from this session.

I also hear in my voice the seeds that grew into a problem. I had hurt his feelings, and for whatever reasons investigating, reconfiguring and re-creating back to where we were, wasn't an option. I was, in his terms, discarding and discounting what he said - paradoxically as he had discounted the importance I place on transformational experiences.

He - "I don't really know what you are referring to - you get frustrated when I talk about fantasy...?"

Me - "You are explaining something that I've really got an understanding of"

He - "when do I do that, talk to you about fantasy"

Me - "we are on the same page I reckon"

He - "But I don't remember"

 I named the writer - Josephine Kleine!

He - "Oh fantasy with a PH!"

So I explain my understanding of how information is organised within the mind...and my interest in how strong beliefs can be altered; seeking an answer to my question - what are the optimum conditions for this? Are Carl Rogers '6 necessary and sufficient conditions enough - but I've seen that there are other and surprising routes to better.

He - "And the key thing about that in therapy is that for most people most of the time they will be unaware of the problematic experience as old stuff, and it is experienced that way (experienced as a new thing in the present) because it is fitting something that is pre-conceived and the original conception was conceived long before it became problematic. Again, that's what the article was intended to convey. And so it is important for - and again I want to be more explicit - for you and I to be aware of what our stuff is."

Well, here's a conundrum. I am very aware of my feelings in this moment. I am aware of my stuff. I have no way to know what his stuff is! I'm aware of the rules of therapy. I chose to behave informed by my knowledge of how vulnerable I feel right now.  Compassion for myself is paramount so I can't do anything to risk our connection at this point. I'm simply not strong enough. I don't know how he feels about me - but I'm not strong enough to take a direct rejection, and curiously I'm not strong enough to deal with complete acceptance. 

Why I feel as I do about him, is easy to decipher - it's his intelligence, his energy, the way he moves...and there is that aspect of him I will come to call 'the brother'. The unconstructed, 'real' person who forgets his therapeutic persona.

He -" because we will do the same to clients, we will look at a client and think 'yeah, I can see what's going on here' but it might also be our stuff - and I think, going back to your email that's where I can forgive Eric Berne, but I can't forgive, I can't forgive Fritz Perls because - and I just thought that this was worth mentioning..."

Ah Fritz Perls, a subject that never failed to deliver joy and mirth to both of us! I am a fan of Perls, I would happily have argued and fought with him as my therapist and never worried about saying the wrong thing. But here, in this room I feel constrained, as if I have to follow a tight and narrow, invisible and pre-defined line. He defines Perls as 'a thug' and that there is nothing in Gestalt that isn't better defined through other perspectives. I disagree. I had needed Perls' perspective so often. Perls deals with issues around power so well, calling out the absurd dynamic and challenging his clients to take back their power!  

He -"And I'm sorry - no I'm not sorry! To bring it back to that article because the more I think about it - it is the basis for everything. And this is why as practitioners we need to step back and to know where our own filters are, because if we don't we will miss things" Or rather, we won't be prepared for our own reactions to clients, unless we understand where those reactions come from.

So here it is - this is why I'm in mandatory therapy, to know about my own filters, because I'm doing a course that uses the concepts he is so patiently and painstakingly explaining to me. A few months ago, I asked my boss how he listens without 'a self' - and he said "I  took a lot of acid when I was younger". I said, "I do no self because I sat for hundreds of hours doing Tibetan Buddhist practice".  Fundamentally we don't beleive that our thoughts, beliefs and feelings are key to understanding what other people think, believe, say and feel. 

Our role is closer to Holy fools, we know nothing.

So we listen, we ask the question.

Certainly personal stuff has the potential to alter the dynamic in the room, but we work in someone else's language, I don't need to know what their word means, simply put I just need to be able to use it correctly according to them. 

But here really is a paradox - right here right now in this room, why is he missing what I think is so patently obvious?

And I end the session describing the kitten carousel, an experiment that corroborates or underpins the Gestalt understanding - that we develop through interaction - linking it to the later work of Rogers of course, not Perls. A plea, really - to join me in exploring the edges, to step out of the known, to use experience, not conjecture...But that kitten carousel, it is ironic that it is still relevant for me, albeit for a different reason. I had quit my psychology degree many years ago, over that kitten carousel - one animal experiment too many!

But certainly it is an apt metaphor for where I feel myself to be right now.

Re-enactment. 5th July 2021.

A conversation via Zoom.

And so it began - very well! He told me how much he had enjoyed our conversation in the previous week, and how pleased he was to continue in this way, so pleased that I'd decided to change our contract, that I'm no longer a client - now a mentee.

He said -  "you know for a while I thought what are these sessions for really, a piece of paper to pass a course! Could be so much more than that..."

Well, my ideas had been steamrollered in the previous dialogue, for sure. But the emotional price I was paying was worth it; he had enjoyed talking to me so my skill in conversing with a person as if from within their world-view is validated! And I had learnt a lot about standard, counselling theory which would be used in writing my assignments. The cost to me, well it felt more like a challenge than actual cost. I felt as I have felt in many lectures or computer games, that I am not good enough, can't do it, I'm not clever, fast, intelligent or knowledgeable enough and should just shut up, nod my head and give in. 

But I don't. 

The cost to oneself of speaking and receiving a reply to a different statement or question, is self doubt. Following a year of being lied to by my husband, and then discovering that everything I'd imagined was actually true, I trusted myself and I trusted my feelings. 

I wanted us both to slide into the waters and swim to the other side of so much more.. 

I began our discussion from where he had left it; the word re-enactment defined as a memory that has a numinous quality, a feeling of being dragged into a whirlpool, entrapment. 

Now he heard me

He - "Entrapment, that’s a really good word for it - and I have to say, this distinction between memory and re-enactment isn’t in any book. This is the language I use because I find it useful...There are many books on trauma and I find them a curates egg. Many of them contain an unhealthy dose of magical thinking - like just go and do some EMDR which is the height of magical thinking!

I genuinely wish to discuss this, but obviously - in his tone of voice - this isn't something worth following up right now. He explains that he has clients coming to him telling him that EMDR has retraumatized them. I think - but I don't say - if it works for someone they won't seek a different therapist, so you will only see people for whom previous therapy hasn't worked.

I say -  "You feel strongly about this"

I'm asking about his feelings - he ignores me and continues:

He - “Which brings me onto something - if trauma is going to be your main focus.."

Me - "No, its part of the journey, I'm taking this opportunity, anything to be explored.."

He - "I think that answers a key question I wanted to explore with you - about your last email, because I thought, there are some things in it which are PhD level!"

As flattering as this statement is, I have to disagree. I thought I'd been very clear and concise - and as terms can have multiple meanings it is useful for us to agree how we are going to use words. And then we are talking about Don Cupitt and the episteme shift. Oh pure joy of discussion here, perfect! Yet what I'm hearing is someone explaining that meaning is constructed from reality perceived through developmental biases - while I am proposing bias is changeable, based on more than childhood experience.  

And right now for sure I am experiencing someone describing reality biased by something. 

I always found that something so interesting. 

Factor X

He believes developmental biases  are key, therefore it is vital to ask a person how they made their assumptions about reality - and  for Kit this means seeking their understanding of their developmental biases. 

He - "Because these influence their perception. If one remembers one's childhood as being victimised and powerless, and then goes through life replicating that. One hopes that when they finish therapy, their past will have changed, they will no longer relive those events as victim - the child who was helpless, who did have things done to them, who is no longer the child who is helpless can now have the power to make his own choices.."

Therapy as a mission to rescue the victimised child. 

My view of re-enactment relates to the present as a kind of resonance. 

I explain:

Me - "re-enactment feels like a  whirlpool, numinous - something operating - things going wrong in the present, It is like warning lights on dashboard saying no oil! But warning messages are not always accurate - especially on computers! I believe that when a person starts remembering the bad stuff, there is something similar happening to them in the present, it has the same emotional tone as the past. Definitely for me, I thought the feelings were about the past. I was stuck on the form, the images of the past. The emotional tone was the same, but all I could remember were the images, the events. But truthfully - I  was failing to recognize the same (external) dynamic operating in the present."

He continues - "I think this is why Transactional Analysis so important. Most of what happens to us we forget. What we remember is about our identity, and that’s where the ego states come in. All are present tense, always about identity.."

Is this the crossroad, is this where we really agree and disagree? 

Identity - we agree I think - operates as an organisational template about who and what we are and do. But - and this is where we disagree - I don't see  re-enactment as regression. I see it as a heightened awareness of wrongness, interpreted as if it is an echo of the past. The template one has at present, is out of date, updating it - seeking the location of power, the true nature of threat and experiencing one's own meanings, is vital.

Again it sounds as if we are so much in agreement, but there is a difference. 

We are taught that clients keep repeating the past, keep on making the same mistakes because the past has caused damage. Certainly bad memories are compelling, and it can seem as if bad memories are almost gluing themselves to good ones to create a cascade of despair, detachment and behaviour that leads to further alienation and pain. 

Postmodern therapies assume that the 'damage' is a tangled network of 'bad memories' - activated by the present and sets about constructing a better version. There is no intermediate theory of ego states, or concepts of damage or causes except those described by the client. There is no search for 'the smoking gun' unless a client wants to do that. The Dhammapada (and The Stoics) stated that 'with our thoughts we create the world'. Steve de Shazer went further ' with our words we create our thoughts'. Words are the keys to deconstruct and, reconstruct meaning. Dialogue - for SFBT - is biased by curiosity, courage and hope. And change comes through doing the problem differently!

Meanwhile, intrusive bad memories need a safe shell to be placed around them before they can be re-contextualized; this is the 'externalising' and 'mapping' processes of Narrative therapy. First task, to find the words and images that encapsulate the problem as something a person has, rather than something one is...let's look at it. What is happening - how are power, and threat operating in your life right now....

I say - "Counselling, it is as if it is always up to the individual what happens to them. But sometimes it really is the others, sometimes the external situation really is that bad. So, thinking in terms of a continuum, sometimes I think a client can be held too responsible for how they feel. And in PCT therapy I would reflect back a person's concerns about real world events and that can have devastating consequences - that magnifies the person's expressions of powerlessness and fear in the name of helping them to accept their feelings; in effect creating a horrible feedback loop that will drown out any hope."

There is a long pause here followed by:

He - "Yes <pause> I put a new article on my website, all I'm going to say is it is based on all we have talked about. Have a read and see what you think. It is about the depth of perception and how we respond to things."

Me - "You used the term depth of perception - are you saying that it is like ultimate and relative truth?

He - "What I mean is the depth of one's perception of an event is ultimate in other words, the event doesn't exist in itself, it exists as something perceived by the perceiver and that's all the person has, there can't be anything else. And so one of the key things in therapy is to ask how did a person arrive at their set of perceptions, in other words their biography which led them to a set of assumptions about reality and those assumptions about reality will be brought to bear on whatever it is they are perceiving at any given time. and if all goes well by the time they have finished therapy sessions their perception will not be the same as when they started."

At this point - as he goes on to talk about childhood and how memories are changed in the present I believe that I  hear personal memory - his memories - I hear an emphasis on developmental impact. But mostly I feel it, and  begin to see myself a privileged position...should I be annoyed, or concerned? 

That I hear more about him than he hears about me.

The black box - seeking factor X.

When I began processing my therapy sessions last year (2023) my aim was to understand how my feelings for Kit came about, and why it ended so badly.  And the end really was bad. I don't honestly know how I had the strength to walk out of his room, I felt so defeated, so crushed.

To understand and answer these questions I re-entered the dialogues, my thoughts and feelings, and over the year 2023, I documented the therapy sessions 2021-2022. Most of them, not all. Some are too boring, or I accidently missed one out. And they are now being published every Monday - as the contents of  this blog.

2024 is the process part of the blog.

The fascinating thing is, that as I went through the dialogues I became aware of a factor X! And isn't X what a black box is really all about? In this case, X is the something, underlying Kit's entrenched beliefs. I can see the effect of X in the dialogues, in the way that it is as if Kit was unable to hear or consider the validity of my theories, and X - if found - will help explain why his responses to me were as they were. 

Also I think there could be more to X.

Meanwhile, as I write this I am well aware that I could make our non-resolved and cruel ending, worse - by requesting my notes from him, or by making a formal complaint. I think this says a lot to be honest. Proof that a lot went wrong. Clearly to just quote 'the ethical code' at me wasn't enough to solve a problem that I refuse to see as a problem! The ethical code does not prohibit navigation and negotiation. Resolution and change on both sides was the only way to prevent the crash. Why didn't that happen?

Seeking X is an interesting problem - and it is exactly what black boxes are for.

X made the difference between crash or fly.

My fixed position, as I begin to interrogate the black box, seeking the presence or absence of the X that blew the metaphorical plane to bits, is the belief that an avoidant and defensive stance from a therapist in response to a client's verbal expression of sexuality, blows apart everything therapy stands for. 

I can't argue with myself against this view. But I also wish to add I never said that my feelings were sexual - or rather, I didn't express those feelings. I had them! But I don't do 'flirting' or let those feelings out unless there is an invitation from the other person - I hid the bliss! Meanwhile, his refusal to speak from his own feelings, created a dissonance in me, and erasure. Certainly erasure isn't a technical term, I don't know how best to describe it; as if I didn't exist (because my feelings had to be hidden), as if it didn't matter if I existed or not (my feelings are most of who and what I am!) That nothing I could say mattered...

I needed to know how he felt about me, I didn't need a specific answer, only truthfulness, honesty. 

So X is nothing more complicated than his avoidant-defensive response? 

No, X is the explanation. 

His avoidant-defensive response is an observation, an effect of the X that froze his words, that made honesty a no-go area. I felt as if my declaration of love took him into the Zone (Stalker metaphor - The Zone is a landscape full of invisible danger, and ultimately the wish-fulfilling room). 

It isn't enough to know that the pilot flew into the mountain, we all want to know why it happened and exactly how such a tragedy can be prevented from happening again! This is the purpose of the black box. 

The verbal (word choice and voice tone) content, was how I came to feel dehumanized and objectified. And Kit either didn't understand this process or he chose to do it, this is also X!

X is his experience?

But X is also the defensive strategy?

X is something that happened to him and it is altering his perception and leading his responses.

The effect of expecting someone to be open and honest and finding that they are hiding and manipulating is dissonance, the open and honest person was absent. 

I understand 'identity' as a created within relationship - 'I' in relation to 'it' or 'thou' - and without his feelings 'I' had no reference point or way to assess why I felt as I did! His psychotherapy stance was inappropriate, and cruel actually. 

Feelings differentiate animate from non-animate, differentiate thou, from a thing, an it. I felt as if he viewed me as an 'it'. The shock and pain  was immense.

Our differences about psychotherapeutic theory is evidenced by the first dialogue - Kit does not consider that a shattering of one's identity is trauma. It is as if he believes that a person breaks only because they did not get the love they needed as a child. And so, he could not respond to the beating of my heart, my lowered eyes, my tone of voice - since I'm sure my feelings were obvious -  because his role is as he kept saying, to create a quasi-parental environment! 

To repair, by reparenting. 

I conjecture, that he interpreted my emotional response to him [confined to one mp3 - see transcript] as a symptom of my developmental deficits, and he chose / or believed (?) the theory that my feelings could not be interpreted as true feelings about or for him. I was not supposed to peak behind the curtain to see the real Kit, hiding behind the 'therapist'.

Well, if my conjecture is true - and alas, Kit choses not to refute...

Looking at it in that way - I was in effect, dragging him to the dizzy edge of something best described as psychic paedophilia. 

Wow - is that it?

Have I found X

So soon....

It makes sense of why I didn't enact 'love' for him in any obvious way. I trusted that the very fact that I returned to his room was enough. I felt that he would disapprove of anything embellished by the presence of Eros. I had to be so careful, that any subtle sign of longing was hidden, because it felt as if it would be misinterpreted; it would be loaded and crushed by unspeakable meanings. 

Psychic paedophilia!

Is this 'X' truly the reason why he continued to 'enact therapist' - though it didn't fit my behaviour, or language, it didn't fit anything that was happening! 

I was there because therapy was mandatory. I was there because I needed to love him. I found our differences fascinating. We just had hilarious conversations sometimes, fundamentally though I simply loved him as a man, and that was enough! 

And of course the promise of more would have been perfect! There were just two times when there was the most minimal possible physical contact - I experienced what I can only describe here as, a profoundly divine and unsettling gush of electricity. Very adult feelings indeed.

But if he had reciprocated then he would - in his view alone - be enacting psychic paedophilia?

It rings true.

Except?

What would make a psychotherapist hold onto that notion....there is more to this which I hope will become clearer through this blog.

Trauma - 28th June 2021.

25th June 2021

Notes:

I want to get to a place

 where we work together to do this mysterious, great something. 

A vision - walking the Camino 

to Compostela. 

A pilgrimage through story.

Exploring dark alleyways.

Oh my words to you 

I'm so bloody obvious. 

And I'm breaking rules... 

Aligning with truth and trust...

Discussion one.

Trauma -  28th June 2021.

The background.

I approached therapy with an open mind, and as if it was work. But, it was during the time of Covid lockdown and life took place on Zoom. My family were at home too. I felt restricted and stifled. 

I couldn't really talk. And after about eight sessions I was done. No getting out of therapy as a student. We agreed to talk about my course work, specifically in this session, about my research project. 

I would have left therapy if not for the course, but I couldn't face starting with another therapist - difficult to dig underneath my rationalizations, but I didn't want to explain even as little as an outline of what had happened to me again. 

Not yet. 

Nevertheless it felt deeply unethical for me to be his client. So I asked for our sessions to change focus, for him to be my mentor and I, the mentee, and this explains I think why we used his meanings and not mine. He took his role of mentor, to be teacher. That isn't really what I'd meant! But it was more ethical for me than being his client!

But yes, once I realised how I felt about him, therapy was done!

I fought hard to banish those feelings of falling for him, from my mind though. I called it an artifact of therapy, I called it transference. But ultimately I don't think that it is. And yes, that's a real problem. And in truth I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to do, because it wont fade. 

In August 2020 A boyfriend I used to go to gigs with in the late 1970s heard what had happened to me regarding my family; and got in touch. And he was so kind, so lovely to me and so integral to my recovery. It seemed to him as if we were meant to be. And it should have been a good match for both of us. There was a lot of joy and fun and electricity. 

Here is the thing, our experience of Eros set me free, his love allowed me to heal. 

So my first response was to step into his dream, and to dismiss my fuzzy, impossible thinking. But this isn't a fairy-tale and there isn't a happy ending. I simply couldn't love him. Actually, it felt like transference! Like stepping back into being a teenager, but with health issues! I stayed a weekend with him. But he didn't make my heart race, and what could we talk about? 

It was lovely to be wanted physically, but it was a kind of  - so what feeling - and that isn't good! 

I explained this to myself through other people's words: 'it's too soon for another relationship', 'I'm bound to feel apprehensive'.  

But it wasn't so. 

I wasn't apprehensive! 

I couldn't love him, someone else was in my heart. 

Meanwhile, he trusted his instincts and asked me if I was in love with someone else? 

I answered no - and as I said it, it sounded hollow to me. I didn't feel as if I was lying, I just didn't want to believe I'd do something so stupid as to fall for my therapist. So then I said yes, but the person doesn't know…

Despite saying it I tried very hard not to believe, and it was so easy for me to continue attributing the cause of my feelings to inaccurate thoughts. It took until December 2020 before a twist of fate, gave me the correspondence between intimations and reality enough to make sense of the impressions I'd formed - and the realization arrived with absolute clarity yet I continued to run though all the possible 'transferences' and reasons to consider this an anomaly, false, unreal. 

It seemed so reasonable to judge myself unable to interpret my feelings in any kind of accurate way. 

So once again I was denying the reality of my feelings, as I had with my husband and the reason was the same; the alternative, more true narrative is the unknown, unexpected and unknowable - Terra Incognita unmapped - undocumented. 

Plus I was experiencing hypervigilance, panic attacks, and I couldn't sleep. I had survived chaos, terror, destruction and then loss and grief, how could I be sane? 

I felt as if something had snuffed out my North star, and set the compass needle endlessly spinning. I'd lost my husband, my son and my daughter.

But, that 'I'm not sane' narrative isn't new.

Nor was it ever true. 

The session - via Zoom.

He - You seem to want to focus on what is trauma and how one gets beyond trauma?

Me - The real subject is altered states, I'm starting from the outcome - which is that post traumatic growth occurs. I think trauma creates an altered state of mind and during that altered state, given the right experience, positive changes occur in how a person perceives their life and the world - isolation and fear change into connection, acceptance and gratitude - reconnection can occur. So, for my research I will look at memories traumatised people report as opening up a profound turn around and change. I think that memories created during a traumatic period - because brain function is different - can be transformational. But this change ( self-reported by my focus group) occurred only because of trauma; the incidents would not have been significant without an altered state, without trauma.

Him - I have a paradoxical point of view, that instead of opening up and changing one's view of life, trauma affirms it. Have I ever had a client where trauma resulted from questioning everything they knew....the answer is no.

Ah, he hasn't understood at all what I mean. I said that trauma alters a person's state of mind. I haven't said that questioning 'everything you know' causes trauma. 

I don't bother arguing.

I say it again in a different way.. 

Me - Trauma is the shattering of a person's working model of the world. If someone now gets the right experience which scaffolds and recreates meaning....

He - I think we are going to have to ask the question, is that trauma - this experience might be difficult, this might change a person's view of life, but is it trauma? Trauma is, in my view, where the person's emotional resources are not equal to the person's emotional responses to an event and a person becomes overwhelmed. It's when the emotional, cognitive apparatus is overwhelmed and it sort of breaks. And then we have to say, and why does it break?  Well, because everything is developmental.-   developmental process from an object relations point of view... 'we are formed by relationship'. A parent saying. 'This is so sad but it is going to be ok'...or another response of dismissal and rejection. These are profound developmental experiences...Then a car crash, exam pressure - they will respond in one of  three different ways: secure, avoidant or ambivalent/disorganised. Attachment is a profoundly foundational way of experiencing things. The person with a secure attachment goes home and says 'now I'm safe' gets a hug and has a cry! But the other two may well experience trauma.

Hasn't he just said what I said - more or less?

I'm trying to fathom his use of concepts here!

Me -  A pre-existing dent distorts the whole map of this new reality. Not enough resources, or useful memories.(struggling because I'm using my own theories!) There are experiences that no one can get through unscathed. I'm looking at the shattering of meaning. You are saying that if there are kindly memories from childhood a person will always get through, I'm not convinced. I am defining trauma as the outcome of severe and prolonged stress (not what is stressful or why)  I think prolonged stress leads to trauma.

He - No. Prolonged stress may lead to resolution.

Me - loss of meaning and resources no longer function..

Robert Sapolsky - hippocampus/cortisol. 

The reference library goes off line.

He - (a sigh of exasperation?) In object relations it is called phantasy -with a ph. Phantasy is the filtering of experience through our developmental blueprint. The developmental blueprint leads one to be prone to trauma or unlikely to experience trauma. Trauma meaning, our resources not being equal to the emotional task. This raises the question, what are one’s emotional resources? And the answer to that question is - it’s entirely developmental. Proof - line up 10 people and give them an identical experience, you get 10 different experiences! Because developmentally they will have developed different blueprints. I’ve taken to describing to people who have been traumatised the difference between memory and re-enactment. Memory is something that happens, that we can recall and it has emotion attached, sad or happy, but we are not emotionally invested in it (he’s describing autobiographical memory) we know it happened, past tense but it doesn’t affect us now except for a few minutes as we remember it Re-enactment is very different, it is in the fibre of our being (episodic memory). So if someone had a very difficult, unsupported childhood and they are robbed at knife point their response may well be traumatic re-enactment. They keep replaying the point at which they saw the knife, and realising that their life is in danger. They are remembering it now because of developmental experiences pre-existing when they did not feel safe and there was nowhere to turn.

In my own experience the narrative that pain contains a re-enactment  - loss of security in the present, joining up with unmet ‘developmental needs and vulnerability’ - seriously got in the way of resolving my current and real problems. Things really were as bad as they felt. Memories from childhood weren't the problem. Ways of responding from childhood weren't the problem. What was actually happening was the problem! 

Not being able to get a full picture of exactly how bad things were, was the problem!

I'm thinking of flight 447, in which the pilot kept trying to raise the nose of the plane to get out of the cold air freezing the air speed monitors, and the storm clouds, then to stop the plane decelerating, then to stop the plane falling! He fought to keep the plane flying, by doing what made sense to him because of habit. 

The pilot would not have done this with a full picture of what was actually happening. He would have counter-intuitively tipped the nose of the plane downwards and everyone would have survived...

He didn't fail to do this because of his childhood.

He fixated on what he believed would work, and in the panic, he simply tried harder and harder because nothing was making sense!

Perhaps it takes the intrusion of something strange and leftfield to bring creative thought back online?

Me - (paraphrasing his words as if they are mine - echoing his tone of voice) Clients have a narrative of confirmation…

He - Absolutely - they say, of course this always happens to me. I’m not safe anywhere. And then that sense of ‘I’m not safe anywhere’ becomes background noise, becomes everything in my experience. Which is a re-enactment 'and I'm going to get beaten from pillar to post again’ at seven years old having just come home from school. Am I safe/ not safe? That's what I call a re-enactment rather than memory.

Me - Default settings - your argument is about default settings.

He - Because for someone else their default setting is punching back. Someone brought up with a strong sense of their physical self - which may also come from a traumatic place - to always be ready to defend.

Me - It seems to be a deterministic view - my research is about experiences that patch, restore, mend..

He talks about how some people are fine or vexed, by silence?! Seeming not to hear what I've said, or what I want to discuss. Resolute that a person's classification or their meanings and narratives are determined by phantasy. Unpicking why an experience is transformational doesn’t seem to fit anywhere in this discussion! Yet the whole of Person-Centered therapy rests on the concept of healing through acceptance of denied experience. This is Rogers 101!

He - People carry on with their ordinary lives, then something happens and it breaks them open. But it was there all along.

Me -But this presupposes that if someone had a perfect childhood nothing would break them ever. I disagree fundamentally. There are experiences that are so overwhelming. Everyone breaks.

He - A person makes secure choices because they had secure attachment. They don’t have the basic fault. The event doesn’t make it trauma, the ability to process or not makes it trauma.

I disagree totally with what he has just said; secure people make secure choices! There is aways going to be a situation that is FUGAZI for us. Once dissociation and panic have set in, memory is not enough. The brain has to use another mode. I'd say experiencing a memory of ultimate security crumbling as reality shatters the world might be harder to return from for the 'secure' person - they have no memory of having to save themselves. We agree that an inability to process creates trauma, but secure choices require ultimate knowledge, no one has that! I let his statement go. 

Instead I return to what people have reported, because this is the interesting bit!

Me -Something out of the blue changes the way they see things

He - Problematic because it assumes that there is such a thing as an experience in itself

Me -I get that all is warped by perception, pre-existing/developmental experiences warp the experience.

He - I’m not sure it warps the experience, I think it is the experience. Because there can’t be an experience without the experiencer.

Me - But there is an external reality, it is not a solipsistic universe

He - Yes, but the external reality is meaningless.

Me -Yes - the external is meaningless but the perception of the person is changed - by other people's reactions, by events in the present - these change, or create new meaning

He -But experiences that are called trauma are a confirmation of the basic fault bringing out something that was already there, or a potential

Me -But meanings change..

He - Not in trauma they don’t, Secure attachment - and a child feels safe enough to experience the flow of life, to learn and develop. Able to be intellectually and emotionally challenged. An avoidant child can’t experience emotions. An ambivalent child is preoccupied, thinking will people like me? Abandon me again? And they miss the flow! A disorganized child has a chronological fear that something will attack at any time. Can’t learn because the internal; world is so loud, the external world never gets in! We develop better with less preoccupation.

Me - But children from awful backgrounds may go either way; become abusers or work ceaselessly to prevent cruelty!

He - Essentially (the role of the therapist) its quasi parental - the parent in the therapist meeting the child in the client and recognizing the blocks in that childhood experiences that stop them moving forward and recognizing the deficits in the child who was the client. Helping them to get the things they would have done really well to have experienced but they didn't, but they are experiencing them now and sometimes they can experience them with the therapist and sometimes they can't and the therapist can give them the encouragement to go out into the world and experience them with the people they can - that is the work of therapy -It's not about an event, it's about the structure of the personality and remolding a person to make them more whole essentially, so there's not a vertical split anymore because the problem can I think always be characterized I think as a vertical split. In other words there is some part of a person's experience they are denying, they don't want to be in touch with, because being in touch with it is too painful.

I don't disagree, but I go on to explain that all therapy is an interaction, and therefore what we reflect back is our selection and our choice of words. What we reflect is biased according to the modality we use. My research therefore is to inform my biases; when I know more about how meaning is changed I will be better informed...This evoked a strong reaction from him because - as we all are taught to say 'therapy isn't about changing people' . 

My words were wrong, my bad! I should have used his terms: re-parenting and re-molding...

Nevertheless this dialogue provided me with the language and building blocks I needed to pass my assignments, and much clarity on what many therapists believe therapy to be.

He - well, this has all been very enjoyable.

And, overall it was. It was tough, it is tough not being heard. I didn't think my proposition deserved to be ignored - and it was - but he didn't get it, and that was down to me to some extent. I just don't understand why he doesn't get it?