Carol Hadlock, my long time supervisor at Process Therapy Institute, wrote an article which expresses views very similar to my approach to psychotherapy. Since the article is now unavailable on their website, I chose to reprint it here with Carol’s kind permission.
It is my belief that all humans are naturally and steadfastly moving toward the resolution of their issues. I also suspect, that were you to live long enough, you would quite naturally and without help from anyone else, heal from your childhood trauma, work through your existential issues, and eventually make peace both with the laws of physics and the nature of the universe.
Therefore I perceive psychotherapy as a regularly scheduled opportunity for you to be intimate with yourself. It is not something you necessarily need, but it is an opportunity for you to focus on, intensify, and shorten your psyche’s inherent journey toward healing.
To start with, no one knows exactly how psychological healing occurs. Everyone has a different theory, and every psychologist uses a different metaphor to think about or describe consciousness and its relationship both with the organism that carries it around and the universe in which it lives.
So if it turns out that my metaphors don’t work for you, let me know. Together we’ll find a compatible way to communicate both about your psychological goals for yourself and my suggestions as to how you can attain them.
During our sessions I will generally invite you into the “here and now,” even if you are exploring the past or the future. For example, instead of asking you to tell me what happened yesterday, I may suggest you tell the events of yesterday as if they are happening right now. Inviting you into the “here and now” is one way I encourage you to connect with yourself and your internal experience in this moment.
In session I often suggest activities that, at first, might seem a bit odd. I might suggest that you allow a particular object to symbolically represent something else, such as an emotion or a part of your psyche. I might pull up an empty chair and ask you to speak as if someone else is sitting in it. I might ask you to move around the room, or do a particular task. These are ways I invite you to engage your non-intellectual mind. Here’s my reasoning about that:
First of all, your cognitive mind knows more about you than my cognitive mind could ever hope to know. Secondly, if any intellect could come up with different solutions (given all the circumstances) for the issues and problems to which you seek resolution, your brain would already have done so. Your cognitive mind (your intellect) cares about you and has done for you what it can. You come to psychotherapy now, not because someone else knows the answers, but because it is within the connections to your inner and perhaps non-conscious self that your future solutions lie.
Your Commitment
For most people, effective psychotherapy requires a shift in lifestyle and involves a commitment to be curious about and connected with your internal-Self. During your psychotherapy sessions, I will encourage you to pay attention both to your inner and your outer experiences.
From the moment you enter the room, everything you experience is relevant to your healing: thoughts, memories, ideas, fantasies, emotions, desires, concerns, movements, discomforts, physical responses, itches, twitches,…everything. As you move toward the resolution of existential, developmental, and personally traumatic issues, expect to experience a wide range of emotions both in and out of session.
In session, when I say something like, “Let yourself feel that,” I’m inviting you to experience yourself with awareness. Try to breathe and pay attention. No, not to me—to yourself! Start by acknowledging any hint of fear, anger, sadness, shame, or joy that accompanies your words. Your organism communicates with you in many non-intellectual, non-verbal ways.
I often suggest a person observe himself like a scientist or detective might. Be curious. Find yourself fascinating. Notice everything. The goal is to become more comfortable with, and less embarrassed about, your own complex mix of responses.
Remember, there is nothing you can think, feel, want to do, or imagine, that is not completely human in nature, or that countless others have not already thought of, felt, wanted to do, and imagined many times before us.
Outside of your regular appointments, you can facilitate your psychotherapy by actively involving yourself in your personal growth. Here are some ideas:
• Spend some time being aware of your breathing. Breathe consciously. For example, as you breathe, think, “I am breathing right now.”
• Move in the direction of becoming more mindful. This means as often as possible take a moment and think to yourself: “What I notice about myself right now is…” (Fill in the blank.)
• Become more aware of your dreams. Bring them in to session as topics to discuss.
• Keep an on-going journal. Now and then, read previous entries.
• Perceive your emotions, thoughts, physical sensations, and images as gifts to you from your unconscious mind.
• Give yourself permission to be aware of your experiences.
• As the therapy progresses, pay attention to how your behavior changes, or stays the same.
• Cease struggling and surrender to what I call the self-flow. Like your physical body, your psyche has a natural healing rate, unique to you and complementary to your inner rhythms. Let go of how you think you should be and allow your unconscious to heal itself in it’s own time.
About Emotions in General
I define emotions as biochemical responses generally experienced as physical sensations, inside your skin. The things you do with your arms, legs, body and mouth are called “behaviors.” Our culture sometimes teaches that emotions and behaviors are irrevocably bound together. I, on the other hand, will be inviting you to learn to separate your feelings from the actions they encourage you to take.
Emotions generally fall onto the categories of mad, sad, glad, bad (as in shame) and scared. Other internal responses include but are not limited to thoughts, memories, ideas, images, physical sensations, and biochemical responses.
When you choose not to experience your internal responses, perhaps not even to be aware of them, your organism invents indirect ways for these responses to be expressed. The part of your Self of which you are not generally aware, i.e. your unconscious, decides whether this expression of self manifests physically, emotionally, cognitively, or behaviorally. Internal examples include experiencing a headache, depression, anxiety, inappropriate anger, unwelcome thoughts, “Freudian slips,” or disconcerting sadness. External examples include hurting people you care about, driving aggressively, and indulging in your addictions.
Without a doubt, your organism will get it’s expressing done. So if you want a vote in how that takes place, consider choosing awareness.
You can choose to stuff down your emotions and let your unconscious decide how they get expressed. You can choose to act out your emotions but never really resolve what causes them. You can choose to experience your emotions obsessively, getting stuck there as if you were swimming in them. I invite you to choose yet another option. I invite you to experience your emotions in their fullest—then let them go. Here’s a metaphor that may explain what I mean.
Imagine you are in the middle of a vast ocean followed by a determined storm. Since this is my metaphor, I define this storm as made up of your stored-up, unfelt sensations such as sadness, annoyance, disappointment, and fear. As soon as you become aware of this impending tempest, you hoist your sails, turn around and speedily move in the opposite direction. After a long while (perhaps decades) and much maneuvering, you notice that running before this storm doesn’t effect any change. The storm simply follows you relentlessly and because you have had to focus on it (in order to avoid it) the storm manages to influence almost everything you do.
So, after you try everything you can think of, you put in a call to me. I suggest you do something completely different. I suggest you do the exact opposite of what you have been doing. I say that the way to deal with this storm is to stop running, and instead, move toward the storm and directly into it. I invite you to take down the sails (your defenses), stay aware, and allow the storm (your internal experiences) to go through you. Once the storm has moved through you, I encourage you not to hang on to any of it. Instead, I direct you to be curious. Let go, I say, and wonder what you’ll find on the other side.
Grief (melancholy- sadness – sorrow – grief)
Humans get attached to many things. We attach to other people, to material objects, to illusions, to our many habits. We also attach to negative things, such as inharmonious relationships, habitual anger, perpetual comparison, or living a victim lifestyle. Mostly we attach to wanting everything to stay the same. As you no doubt have noticed, change happens a lot in a person’s life. And whenever change occurs, we have to give up the way it was. The eternally reluctant part of our psyche then grieves for what is lost.
Grief isn’t just about crying. Grief is what a human being experiences every time there is a loss, no matter how small. Grief is about letting go.
Most of the time we experience grief even when change is positive. Even when one part of us is glad we are no longer attached, another part is likely to miss the connection. Sadness is normal and healthy. Allow it. Feel it. Let it go.
Fear (concern, anxiety, fear, terror)
This planet (heck, this whole universe) is a dangerous place. Sometimes the fact that you are afraid indicates you are solidly hooked into reality.
Sometimes fear can be your friend. Alternatively, fear can paralyze you. Here’s an experiment. Starting immediately (given that you are not in imminent physical jeopardy), interpret all forms of fear as your inner warning system saying, “There is danger somewhere.” My suggestion is to trust that. Even if it seems silly, even if you don’t know where the danger is coming from, even if it isn’t rational, find a way to protect yourself. Right now.
In session, let me know when you are afraid. Sessions can be a handy place to practice taking care of yourself. As you begin to be more conscious of your Self, and as inner rage and grief are acknowledged, allowed, experienced, and released, you may find that you are less afraid of your fear, more comfortable with its intensity, and grateful for its communication.
Guilt
There is an emotion related to sadness that I call “healthy guilt.” Healthy guilt involves your response to your behavior. Suppose you behave in a way with which you (not someone else) feel uncomfortable. Or perhaps you do a certain thing that is not in harmony with your own (not someone else’s) philosophy or value system. In both these circumstances you may experience the unpleasantness of “healthy guilt.” Should you pay attention to this inner communication and allow it to guide you, this healthy guilt may assist you in deciding not to behave that way or not to do that thing again.
Shame
When you behave in a way with which others feel uncomfortable, or do something that violates other people’s philosophy or belief system, you probably experience some version of shame. Thought processes get distorted, and behavior gets mixed up in your mind with the Self. For example, you may or may not perceive that the Thing-You-Did is bad, but somehow you definitely perceive that you are bad.
Most people learn shame at an early age and for most of us, learning to separate behavior from spirit is a long journey which, in the best of all possible worlds, guides us from a life of defendedness into a life of acceptance of the Self. While I’m on this topic, I guess I’d better warn you that I will be inviting you to free yourself from the bonds of shame and to acknowledge, accept, and even celebrate your dysfunctions, perversions, and imperfections. In my opinion, much of mental health is giving yourself permission to be just the way you are.
Next to fear, shame is one of the more frequent blocks to self-discovery. And like depression, shame can be a way you manage not to experience fear and grief. In session, when you experience an emotion on the “I shouldn’t be the way I am” scale, usually the most useful thing to do is to let me know. And often the best way to let me know is by directly saying so.
Embarrassment
We generally do not feel embarrassed if no one else is around. Therefore embarrassment is, I suspect, another name for shame.
Sexuality
Sexual issues often come to the forefront during psychotherapy. You may feel sexual in session and/or sexual issues may come up. Again, usually the most useful thing to do is to let me know these things as they occur.
Depression
When depression is psychological, depression is usually the result of protecting yourself from anger, over-whelmedness and grief. Depression can be habit forming. Protective in intent, it is most certainly destructive over time.
People who are addicted to depression are often reluctant to give it up. If this describes you, well that’s okay with me but when you get tired of being depressed, let me know. As a first step, I may invite you to learn to connect with and experience your anger, and perhaps your fear.
Anger (dislike, frustration, annoyance, anger, rage)
Everybody gets angry. Anger is that uncomfortable, sort of heated feeling we experience anytime we don’t get what we want. Expressing anger is different from experiencing anger. At first, learning to experience anger often involves connecting with anger kinesthetically (using your muscles). Dysfunctionally expressing anger often results in the abuse of yourself or the abuse of somebody else. I will be inviting you to learn to experience your anger in a way that no being (that includes you) and eventually, no thing gets hurt.
As you build up a trusting relationship between your intellect and your unconscious, your body can learn to breathe, open up to your experience, and let your anger exit without actually doing anything at all.
Re-decision
As a child you defined yourself in relationship to the world you knew. The adult you are today was not alive at the time, and your child-self did not know that you had other choices. These childhood decisions were learned on a deep level and affect your adult life in many ways. Low self-esteem, self-destructive behavior patterns, re-enactments of the relationships present in your family of origin, and the attachment to negative perspectives are examples. It is possible to return to events of the past and to offer your unconscious other options. You cannot change what other people did, but you can change what your child-self decided about you and that, in turn, can affect many of your automatic responses to the experiences of today.
Taking Responsibility
Much psychotherapeutic healing takes place as you begin to take responsibility for your emotions, reactions, perceptions, assumptions, and thoughts.
Taking responsibility is not about partitioning out blame or finding out who is at fault. Taking responsibility is about acknowledging the part you played, the actual behavior your body did, or even the intent with which your psyche approached a certain event. It also means letting go of taking responsibility for the things other people did, the part they played, or their intent.
Taking responsibility means feeling sad about the things you did that you didn’t like (healthy guilt) and allowing others to feel sad (or not) about the things they did that you didn’t like. It means confronting yourself honestly about what you do. For some, it also means being a little less greedy about hogging negative attention and taking on responsibility for the parts that other people play. For all, it means acknowledging that everything that happens around you isn’t necessarily about you.
One way to begin taking responsibility is by understanding that you are in charge of your own emotions. For example, the sentence, “You make me so mad when you say that” is not only blaming and untrue, it is Not-Possible. Nobody can reach inside your brain and regulate your biochemical reactions. They cannot make you mad. Should another person say something they know usually upsets you, what they are responsible for is their intent, i.e., their wish for your discomfort. But you are responsible for how you end up feeling. The truth in this instance is more like, “I respond with anger every time I hear you say that.”
A good place to start taking responsibility is by changing your language a little. Begin to use phrases that take ownership. This means taking your attention off the other guy and focusing on yourself, instead. Your conversation will become less about what the other person did, and more about how you respond. Below are some examples:
“He did this disgusting thing,” becomes some version of, “As I watched, I felt judgmental.”
“Whenever I do that, you should see the awful look she gives me,” becomes something like, “Whenever I perceive she disapproves of me, first I shame myself and then I beat myself up.”
“I only yelled at him because he did it on purpose,” turns into, “I assumed he did it on purpose, and instead of checking it out, I just got angry and tried to hurt him back.”
“I was so bored,” changes into, “I made myself stay there when I didn’t want to and then I blamed somebody else.”
“What you’re doing makes me angry” might become, “I guess I need to be angry right now and what you’re doing is perfect!”
“He always makes me do it,” becomes, “I’m afraid because whenever I think he might be angry, I temporarily become about four years old and perceive that I have to do what he says.”
Improved Relationships with Others
As you move toward consciousness, rather than being at the mercy of response habits you’ve had since childhood, your intellect can learn to assist you in deciding how to respond in stressful situations. Should another person do something they know usually upsets you, instead of being upset as usual, you might choose to perceive the entire interaction as absurd.
Or you could experience sadness that a person you care about is choosing to do something they assume will result in your discomfort. Another idea is to not to take what they say personally. For example you might respond with something like, “Are you okay? You seem to be having a Really Bad Day.”
In Conclusion
For me, “expansion” is a better word than “change” for the psychotherapeutic quest. As I see it, the goal of psychotherapy is not to “get fixed,” but rather to give yourself permission to move toward wholeness. From my point of view, much of psychological healing consists of acknowledging and recovering long-ago abandoned parts of yourself. Therefore, I will be inviting you to reconnect, not with a different you but with more of who you already are. To that end I will be encouraging you to introspect, to trust yourself completely, to pay attention, to take responsibility, and to connect fully with your experience in the moment, right here, right now.
Carol Nichols Hadlock