Self-acceptance and Self-rejection

http://ift.tt/2zNHKVo

I want to begin with a quotation from my old teacher Fritz Perls, who developed Gestalt Therapy:

It is obvious that an eagle’s potential will be actualized in roaming the sky, diving down on smaller animals for food, and in building nests. It is obvious that the elephant’s potential will be actualized in size, power and clumsiness.

No eagle will want to be an elephant, no elephant to be an eagle. They “accept” themselves; they accept them-“selves.” No, they don’t even accept themselves, for this would mean possible rejection.

They take themselves for granted. No, they don’t even take themselves for granted; that would imply the possibility of otherness. They are what they are what they are.

How absurd it would be if they, like humans, had fantasies, dissatisfactions and self-deceptions! How absurd it would be if the elephant, tired of walking the earth, wanted to fly, eat rabbits and lay eggs. And the eagle wanted to have the strength and thick skin of the beast.

Leave this to the human—to try to be something he is not—to have ideals that cannot be reached, to be cursed with perfectionism so as to be safe from criticism, and to open the road to unending mental torture.

—from Fritz Perls’ autobiography, In and Out the Garbage Pail.

 

Discovering and Understanding Hidden Self-negation

As we interact with other people, we are always responding to each other, and some of these messages will be liking and disliking aspects of what we and others do. As long as these messages are freely given and received, with no demand to be different, and with no threat to our well-being, there is no problem. That is the same as liking some food or art better than others. The expression of our preferences is one way that we come to know each other. We may even ask for this kind of feedback information in order to know someone else better, and whatever they express—positive or negative—is accepted as useful information. As Fritz Perls used to say, “Contact is the appreciation of differences.”

This free give and take becomes transformed into something very different when someone has negated themselves in some way. This inner negation is often obscure, making it hard to realize what is going on. For instance, many people are concerned with wanting to feel that they deserve to have a good life, or they want to have “self-worth.” Others seek “acceptance,” a “secure place in the world,” or “a right to be here,” and all these goals sound positive. However, underlying these desires is thinking that they don’t deserve to be happy, or feeling a lack of self-worth, that they are not accepted and don’t have a place. These are all negations, and they can negate a relatively small scope of the self, such as intelligence, beauty, or confidence, or the much larger scope of the entire self, “You are garbage.” “I wish I had never been born.”

When babies are born, they certainly aren’t concerned with “self-worth” or being “deserving,” “accepted,” or “finding a place in the world.” Like other animals, they have needs and desires, and they are very direct and emphatic about announcing their presence, and demanding satisfaction of their needs. They don’t show the slightest doubt about their “right to be here” or “deserving to have what they want.”

Then parents and other adults send them messages, first nonverbally and then verbally, about not being worthy or deserving, not being accepted, or not having a place, and the child learns to think that they don’t belong. All these have the same structure: negation of the natural functioning of the child, a negation of part, or all, of who they are. These experiences continue as memories, which can be in any or all of the different sensory modalities. Although this could be primarily an image or a perceptual feeling, for simplicity in discussing how this works, I will assume that an internal voice negates: “You don’t deserve it.”

Then when someone seeks to counter these negations with reassurances that they do belong, are deserving, are accepted, or do have a place, that is actually an attempt to negate what is already a negation. “I’m not undeserving.” “I’m not unworthy,” etc. This sets up incongruent categorical opposites within the person: “not self-worth” and “self-worth,” “not deserving” and “deserving,” etc. For simplicity, I will use the word “reassurance” to refer to any response that affirms something that someone has already negated.

If you’ve ever tried to reassure someone, you probably discovered two things. First it’s futile, and second, if you think you succeeded, it didn’t last. Reassurance feels good in the short term, but over the long term, it doesn’t solve the problem, and it actually increases the incongruence between the negation and the negation of this negation. This happens in several different ways.

First, no matter how much reassurance someone gets, this doesn’t regain what the small child began with, and what they really want: total and unquestioning being who they are, without a hint of either non-acceptance or acceptance.

Second, reassurance from others is actually “other worth” rather than the “self-worth” that they want and seek. Since people differ in what they approve of, someone will need to do very different things in order to get reassurance from different people. That usually results in a strong involvement with others, which can extend to “chameleon” behavior, attempting to satisfy different people in different ways. And since some people are almost impossible to get approval from, this may sometimes result in extreme behaviors like “acting out” or a suicide attempt.

A somewhat different way of getting reassurance from others that they are OK is to follow a particular set of social or religious teachings, so as to get reassurance from that group of people. This is more stable, since someone is always attempting to satisfy the same standards in order to get reassurance, rather than different people with different standards. However, it can lead to less contact with other people, since matching a set of abstract standards doesn’t require attending to the responses of individual human beings.

Third, when someone seeks reassurance from others, that is inevitably conditional rather than unconditional. It is conditional upon the behaviors that the person uses to ask for reassurance, and it is also conditional upon the willingness of the other person to provide it. If someone stops asking, or if other people stop responding, they will no longer receive reassurance.

Fourth, reassurance from others is temporary, because it doesn’t eliminate the underlying negation; it only opposes it and offsets it. The internal voice will continue to negate the person’s being, lovability, acceptability, or place in the world, etc., and they will need to repeatedly seek acceptance to counteract it.

Fifth, each external reassurance that “I am worthy” will tend to elicit an opposing “No you’re not” from that internal voice, escalating in the same way as an argument between two people, increasing the incongruence. If someone has an internal voice that negates who they are, and their lives seem to confirm this by being relatively unsuccessful in their job, relationships, etc., that is very unpleasant, but at least it is congruent.

But if someone has the same internal negative voice, and they are successful in work, relationships, etc. the contrast between their internal voice and the outward success will be much greater. They may have a much better life, but at the cost of greater incongruence. The more reassurance they get from others and worldly success, the larger the incongruence between the internal message about not being worthy and the external message about being worthy. Their internal voice will contradict and nullify any amount of external success.

Seeking approval from others is like using make-up or any other artificial behavior to attract someone. The more you use, the more it contrasts with what it’s covering up, and the more you know that the other person is responding to something that is not real, rather than to who you really are. This greater incongruence causes instability, and a loss of the external success may result in someone collapsing into mid-life crisis, depression, or suicide.

Sixth, there is an interesting parallel between the voice that says someone is not deserving, and the assurance that says that they are. Both are based on the opinion of other people, not the person themselves. Whichever voice someone attends to, they become slaves to someone else’s opinion, rather than attending to their own experience.

 

Resolving Negation

If reassurance doesn’t work to counter negative feelings of self-worth, what can someone do? The answer to this puzzle is to make the original negation clear, and find a way to eliminate it, so that someone can return to their original state in which they neither deserve, nor not deserve, they just are.

One way to do this is to listen carefully to those internal messages of negation, and realize that those messages are about the adult who said them, not about the child who heard them, a change in scope. These messages came from adults with limitations, people who couldn’t just say directly, “I’m overwhelmed; I can’t (or won’t) provide what you need and want.” Instead, they said in effect, “The only way I can deal with what you ask for is to tell you that you don’t deserve it. That way you won’t ask for it, and I won’t have to provide it.”

A slightly different way to elicit the same realization is to first collect and list all the internal rejection messages that the client has accumulated, including the emphasis, tempo, and tonality in which each statement was made. “You’re no good.” “You’re stupid,” etc. Then ask the client to visualize themselves as a newborn infant or small child, and ask them to say each of these messages to this child, including the volume emphasis, tempo and tonality. This shifts the person’s perceptual position from being the receiver of these messages to being the sender. From this position, usually it quickly becomes obvious that this is totally inappropriate and ridiculous. Their response to the rejection messages changes from taking them seriously to hearing them as messages about the parent’s limitations and inadequacies, rather than their own.

Virginia Satir’s “family reconstruction process” provided a vivid dramatization of what a client’s parents had to deal with from their parents, and how that created their limitations. In this process, the parents’ bad treatment of the client is seen as a consequence of the parents’ limitations, and had little or nothing to do with any limitations in the client. Their previous thoughts about “not deserving,” etc., were all a result of a mistaken scope.

When you realize that your understanding was a mistake, you can easily shrug it off and move on. Of course, some people will blame themselves for making the mistake, but that is also a mistake, at a more general logical level. The same kind of process can be used to elicit this realization. “See yourself as a tiny infant or young child, and scold them for making this mistake in misunderstanding their parents.”

Another way to work with internal negation is with Connirae Andreas’ Core Transformation process, in which someone is guided to a realization of what they really want, which is an experience of being, uncluttered by “not deserving” or “deserving.”

When “not deserving” disappears, there is no longer any need for “deserving” to negate the “undeserving.” Unpleasant things and pleasant things happen to each of us, and that’s a fact. We can be sad about the unpleasant events, and grateful for the pleasant ones, and realize that we didn’t deserve (or not deserve) either one. That allows us to return to simply experiencing whatever is going on—including our responses to what is going on—free of any thought or question about deserving it or not. This is something that sages and saints have described for centuries, using various terms like “enlightenment,” “waking up from the world of illusion,” or “simple acceptance of what is.”

Many people who actively seek spiritual or mystic experience are driven by an underlying negation without realizing it, seeking bliss and oneness without first neutralizing the inner negation that keeps them from returning to their original integration and oneness. This is even more likely to be true of spiritual teachers and gurus who become invested in the status and importance of their employment, and have to uphold their role of being “enlightened,” a sure sign that they are not.

Now let’s examine “deserving” in more detail, to find out how people get into this kind of mess in the first place. The meaning of the word “deserve” is a condensed version of “I think I should have/get something because I have a right to it.” Whenever a word is a condensed and shortened form of a longer communication, it is usually packed with hidden or poorly recognized meanings that can become a trap for the unwary—both speaker and listener.

There are both pleasant and unpleasant versions of deserving, as in “She deserves a medal for what she did,” or “He deserves to be hung for that.” So “deserving” is an expression of reward and punishment, established by someone’s judgment of what ought to be.

Usually the word “deserve” is used without any additional information, “He deserves it.” That kind of statement is called a “factive,” because it is stated as a fact, not to be questioned. Even when deserving is stated as someone’s personal view, “I think he deserves it,” the reason for deserving is often omitted.

When people say that they “deserve” something, usually the implication is that someone else should give it to them without their having to do anything to receive it. Their reason is usually because they are “entitled” to it, and often this is because they are special, more important than someone else who doesn’t deserve it—a version of the “divine right of kings” and the nobles that the kings “entitled” by giving them titles.

In NLP terms “deserving” something is an outcome that is “ill-formed,” because it is not under the control of the person who has the outcome—someone else should provide it. Since we have no direct control over what someone else does, this puts the person who “deserves” at the mercy of someone else’s ability and willingness to provide what they want. When someone else doesn’t provide what someone “deserves,” they usually complain, rather than taking useful action themselves.

 

Appropriate Deserving

If someone has made an agreement that specifies what they are to receive by that agreement, then they do deserve to receive whatever was promised—no matter how silly or ill-advised the agreement itself might have been. Like the word “fairness,” “deserve” only applies to agreements, a limited scope, and what someone deserves is specified clearly by the agreement.

However, many people go far beyond this appropriate scope, thinking that they deserve things that have nothing to do with any agreement. They often act as if they had some kind of written agreement with God, or nature, or the universe, specifying what they should receive. For instance often people say, “A child deserves a loving home,” or “I deserve an opportunity to succeed.”

I certainly prefer a world in which everyone has an opportunity to satisfy their needs, and has a loving home and opportunities to succeed, etc., and I do my best to move the world in that direction, but that is based on my desire, not an imaginary agreement.

Some people even say that something is a “God-given right.” But if it were really “God-given,” then we would all have it, and certainly no one could possibly take it away from us! Once I observed Fritz Perls smoking in a school auditorium where he had just given a demonstration of Gestalt Therapy. A woman approached him and asked, “How come you have the right to smoke when all the signs say, “No smoking”? Perls responded, “I don’t have the right, and I don’t not have the right; I just do it.”

As far as I know, life is a gift, and it comes with no agreement or guarantee except that it ends in death—usually much sooner than we would like. Making sure that all people have opportunities to satisfy their needs is a job for us all. It is not based on any kind of “deserving.” It is based on what we want to have happen because we think will work best for all of us, and it is up to us to create and maintain the kind of personal agreements, society, and government that support that.

Excerpted from Six Blind Elephants, volume II, chapter 2, “Negation,” pp. 43-49.

 

E-cigarette flavorings may impair heart muscle function

What can excessive drinking do to your looks? Study investigates

Video Review – Techniques for Moving Couples Toward Secure Functioning (Stan Tatkin)

http://ift.tt/2z2TKBW

BT16 Clinical Demonstration 11 – Sewing Partners Together:

Sewing Partners Together: Techniques for Moving Couples Toward Secure Functioning – Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT One hour video download $29.95.

Videotape Review/Commentary

I like to watch videotaped demonstrations of therapy any time I can, to see what I can learn. Very few therapists are willing to make complete sessions available, and usually I find them disappointing — despite very low expectations. Often my response to viewing a demonstration is to think of what I would have done differently, and sometimes this helps me develop more clarity about what does and doesn’t work to elicit personal change. Much more rarely I find a session that demonstrates a high degree of exceptional skill, sometimes mixed with gross incompetence.

What is most striking about this clinical demonstration is Stan’s ego-free, complete and gentle and warm nonverbal engagement with the couple. He is present, caring, spontaneous, and appropriately humorous. The speed of his acknowledging responses clearly indicate all the above — you can’t fake that kind of speed consciously. I wish he could “bottle” his mode of being and provide it to others, because most therapists desperately need it, and without this solid foundation of rapport, even the most appropriate interventions won’t be very effective. Most therapists give lip service to “entering the client’s world,” but few are able to actually do it well. Stan is right up there with Erving Polster in this regard.

 

What needs to be done?

I understand this couple’s needs to be twofold:

1. They need to resolve the immediate distressing problem, which is their shock and grief over their foster grandson’s violent suicide, which they learned about at noon on the day before the session with Stan. Judy says, “It’s heartbreaking, very, very, and we thought he was going to make it. He came so far; he had some wonderful years. We gave him a life that he never could have had, that was hard to sustain when he became an adult. We bought him a car; he wrecked the car. We do things for him — maybe that doesn’t work — setting clearer boundaries. So he went back to his family of origin, who had abused him sexually, physically, in every way, and he got caught up in that system again, and that’s where he died.”

There are strong indications in Judy’s statement that there may be additional troublesome “unfinished business” responses that need to be clarified and resolved. There may be anger at the grandson (“How could you do this to us!”). There may be guilt (“What did we do — or not do — that caused this?”). Bruce or Judy are both therapists, so there may be shame. (“We should have been able to prevent this.”)

Bruce and Judy are also still grieving in response to the earlier murder of a young nephew 15 years ago (“We still suffer from that.”) and the earlier suicides of two other close friends of one of their sons. These old unresolved wounds may also have associated “unfinished business” aspects that need to be resolved.

2. Judy and Bruce need to learn how to find better ways to respond to each other as a couple when dealing with this, or any other, difficult life issue — specifically, Bruce’s tendency to “close down and withdraw” in response to trouble, and Judy’s strong fear that Bruce won’t come back from this “depression.”

 

Intervening

Stan made no intervention in regard to their grief other than acknowledging it. Ideally both the grief and the relationship would be changed. I would have focused first on the couple’s shock and grief, because it is so intense and immediate. I would have used the phobia cure method on the traumatic manner of the grandson’s death, and I would have used the resolving grief method on the grief/losses, each of which usually takes only one session or less. If there are additional responses of anger, grief, shame, etc., those would also need to be resolved, using appropriate methods. Each of these interventions would have changed the structure of the memories that elicit their distress, so that they would automatically have much more resourceful responses to each other in the present.

Stan focused on the couple’s difficult interaction in response to this and other stressful issues, specifically Bruce’s tendency to withdraw in the face of difficulty, and Judy’s need to stay connected with Bruce, and her intense fear of his withdrawal into “depression.” This focus was consistent with the title of the session, “Sewing Partners Together: Techniques for Moving Couples Toward Secure Functioning.” (I have some serious reservations about the metaphor “sewn together” because if partners are sewn together, it’s very difficult to walk, much less dance.)

 

Cross questioning

Stan nicely demonstrates how to ask one member of a couple about their understanding of the other’s experience. For instance, after Judy says, “Whenever he gets depressed, I get really scared,” Stan asks Bruce. “Do you know why she gets this reaction, why she gets scared?” This method provides both verbal and nonverbal evidence of how well they understand each other, because it simultaneously elicits both Judy’s experience, and Bruce’s understanding of her experience. If there is any kind of mismatch, as there so often is when a couple is in difficulties, this provides an opportunity to clarify misunderstandings.

Understanding how a present behavior is actually in response to a distressing childhood memory, rather than the present situation, is a great way to give the partner perspective, and elicit empathy, and this is particularly useful with partners who are blaming and combative.

Rather than ask “Why?” which could elicit historical analysis, it would be better to ask, “Do you know what she experiences when you get depressed and she gets really scared?” because that would elicit a specific description of her internal experience in the present, in contrast to the past history that created it.

Their responses indicate that they understand each other quite well, and care for each other, so while this is an elegant demonstration of a very useful way of questioning, this couple doesn’t really need it. Judy and Bruce’s responses indicate that they already have this kind of understanding, probably developed in their previous therapy. They mention having therapy with well-known family therapist Frank Pittman “30 years ago,” when “she was a witch and he was a wimp,” and there are other indications that they have had additional therapy since then — perhaps quite a lot.

 

Eliciting positive resourceful memories

Stan also skillfully demonstrates how to inquire about positive memories to elicit resourceful feelings, something that Virginia Satir was so good at. He spends over eight minutes asking how they met, what attracted them to each other, what they liked about each other, etc. This is an intervention that is particularly useful with combative or distant couples, and it was clearly enjoyable for both Judy and Bruce. But since they already had ready access to these memories, it wasn’t any kind of “breakthrough” for either of them. So again it was an elegant demonstration of a very useful skill, but one that this couple didn’t really need.

 

Eliciting how responses in the present relate to personal history

Stan asks both Judy and Bruce if their current responses are related to childhood experiences, and they both agree. For example, when Judy was a little girl her father would “get depressed, seriously depressed, withdraw for weeks, and there wasn’t much anybody could do. He would close down and just go about doing things on the farm; he wouldn’t talk. And then he’d come back one day.” At these times Judy’s mother would weep and tell Judy, “I don’t know what’s wrong with your father; he won’t talk to me.” Bruce had parallel experiences that elicited withdrawal from conflict.

While it is likely that Judy has troubling images of her childhood in response to Bruce’s “going away” that elicit her fear (and most therapists would assume that) it isn’t the only possibility. Judy’s response might be anxiety about a future image of being alone and helpless, rather than a past image. Or she might be fearful in response to a panicked internal voice predicting disaster, such as, “I’ll never be able to survive alone!” Or her experience might be a combination of these possibilities, or something else altogether.

Each of these responses would be the result of her childhood experiences, but each would have a different structure in the present, and require a different kind of intervention. For instance, if Judy is experiencing anxiety about the future (rather than a past memory) an intervention called “spinning feelings” will be more appropriate.

Rather than making assumptions, it would be simpler to ask Judy, “When you see Bruce “depressed,” what goes on in your mind that makes you afraid?” That would provide specific detail about what her internal experience is, and indicate what kind of intervention might be most useful.

Judy says, in regard to Bruce, “We’re joined at the hip!” suggesting “enmeshment” that would make Bruce’s absence or death particularly difficult for her to cope with. Perhaps they are already “sewn together,” contributing to the intensity of Judy’s fear. If so, that would indicate another important issue to explore in more detail and resolve.

 

Understanding dynamics vs. making changes

Understanding that Judy’s present fear is more in response to her history than to the current situation relieves Bruce of at least some of the responsibility for Judy’s present distress, and Judy’s understanding of Bruce’s childhood will do the same for her. Unfortunately, eliciting historical reasons for present behavior also implies that the present behavior will be hard to change. Fortunately, there is a flip side to that same implication, namely that if you change their experience of their history, that will automatically change their responses in the present.

It’s very important to make a clear distinction between understanding how something happens and intervening in order to change what happens. Many therapists make the mistake of thinking that understanding or “insight” alone is curative, but it isn’t. At best, understanding provides good information that can be used to select an appropriate change intervention. In medicine, knowledge that a fever is a result of a virus or bacterial infection may be very useful in selecting an effective treatment, but the knowledge is not a substitute for the treatment, and knowledge without treatment is of no use.

None of Stan’s many skillful interventions were directed at changing the implicit procedural memories that are the basis for this couple’s automatic and unconscious troublesome responses in the present. (Daniel Kahneman’s “system 1.”) Stan presupposed that Bruce and Judy would continue to respond with withdrawal and fear; his interventions were directed at how they could cope with each other’s troublesome responses.

To summarize, this couple’s childhood memories elicit problematic responses. Rather than attempt to change the memories that cause their difficulties, Stan attempted to change how they dealt with the troublesome symptomatic responses that resulted from the causes. Treating a symptom is only appropriate when there is no way to treat the cause.

In all fairness, treating the symptom rather than the cause is very widespread in therapy. For instance, the symptoms of anxiety (hyperarousal, tingling, fast breathing, etc.), are generally (perhaps always) caused by an internal voice predicting some kind of disaster, such as a plane crash, or being abandoned and helpless. Most therapies, and most therapists, focus on trying to change these symptoms using relaxation, deep breathing, repeated exposure, paradoxical intention, etc. At most, they try to change the content of what the internal voice says, by arguing with the voice, which is counterproductive.

However, the main cause of anxiety is not the content of the internal voice, but the fast tempo, loud volume, high pitch and strident sound of the voice. You can easily verify this in your own experience by saying an innocuous sentence like “I’m going downstairs” in a loud strident, “anxious” voice. Slowing the tempo of such a voice automatically lowers the volume, pitch and strident quality, and these changes elicit feelings of security instead of anxiety. Another way to change the nonverbal aspects of an internal voice that elicits anxiety is demonstrated in this short video.

 

Changing past memories in order to change present responses

There are a number of different ways to change troublesome implicit memories. Most therapists try to eliminate them with some kind of amnesia, distraction, or replacement, but it is much easier and more effective to modify them so that they are no longer troublesome. As Milton Erickson said of therapy, “Your task is that of altering, not abolishing.” Furthermore, altering always involves adding to the memory in some way, rather than subtracting. For instance, eliciting the positive intention behind someone’s harsh criticism changes its emotional impact by adding to your experience of it.

One of the most straightforward ways to change a troublesome childhood memory is to have a vivid dialogue with the younger self, in which the client imagines being with the younger self at the time of the troubling memory, and uses all their adult skills to advise and comfort the younger self in whatever way is appropriate, both verbally and nonverbally, using nonverbal visual, auditory, and kinesthetic feedback to verify when the younger self has, in fact, been comforted and reassured. One particularly useful piece is to point out that, “I am from your future, and I know you survived this,” because it is so incontrovertibly true.

In doing this, it is crucially important that the client take the active empowering role in comforting and reassuring the younger self. In contrast, in some “inner child” work the client is asked to take the role of the younger self, who is reassured by someone else. This is disempowering, since the “other” has the power, not the client, so it is ineffective at best, and infantilizing at worst. There is much more detail about this method of changing troublesome memories in this article.

A second method is somewhat more detailed and complex, and also more elegant. In this process the client is asked, “What experience could you have had earlier than that troubling event, that would have prepared you for that problem experience and made it easier to deal with?” Then the client is instructed how to create this experience in a way that is vivid and powerful in preparing them for the traumatic event. Finally the client is guided in carrying this new memory with them as they come up through time through the troublesome event — again transforming it by adding to it, in contrast to subtracting.

This new memory is carefully designed so that it changes the client’s internal responses. The choice of this experience, and the details of it, is content that emerges entirely from the client, so no content is introduced from a therapist, role-player, or other outside source. It makes no attempt to magically change the external events that happened in the traumatic memory, which would leave the power in the magic, another disempowering mistake that some therapists make. Again, there is much more detail about this method of changing troublesome memories in the article mentioned above.

Either of these two methods can transform the implicit procedural memory that used to elicit problematic behavior in the present into a response that is more resourceful and useful. When each member of a couple has more resourceful responses, the difficult symptoms no longer occur, so there is no need to develop ways to cope with them.

 

Eliciting responses to cope with symptoms

In contrast, Stan asks the couple to move closer and look into each other’s eyes, “for a minute,” which I think is deceptive, since he then insists that they continue to do this for the next twenty minutes or so of the session. He elicits how the couple can respond to their own, and their partner’s symptomatic behaviors, to “reach across the chasm” between them when Bruce withdraws and Judy gets scared. Stan gets mutual agreement and commitment to maintain their connection. Bruce agrees to move forward instead of withdrawing, and Judy agrees to be more active in insisting on contact if Bruce withdraws.

Although heartfelt, congruent and sincere, these are conscious-mind agreements (Kahneman’s “system 2”) that are slower, require effort, and presuppose that each partner will continue to unconsciously respond in the ways that were programmed into them by their childhood experiences. Stan’s interventions are directed at helping Judy and Bruce cope with their troublesome responses rather than changing their causes. The unconsciously generated “system 1” grief and the unresourceful coping behaviors that each of them learned in childhood haven’t been altered, and they will be much more automatic, faster and stronger, and will easily overwhelm the conscious strategies that they agreed to.

Bruce and Judy began the session with fresh, raw gaping wounds of grief, as well as several major older festering losses. They were also burdened with the problematic coping behaviors they learned as children when faced with insurmountable difficulties. All these responses — grief, withdrawal, fear, etc. — are elicited by unconscious procedural memories over which they have no conscious control — they can’t just consciously decide to respond differently. They left the session with the same injuries and limitations, poorly prepared for the task of dealing with the real life aftermath of their foster grandson’s suicide — the funeral, the others involved, and all that that entails.

Empathy and mutual understanding is a great foundation, but it is no substitute for effective interventions to change the causes of difficulties. This couple volunteered for a demonstration of how to “sew partners together,” but despite all of Stan’s many extraordinary skills, all they got was a band-aid with a smiley face on it.

 

Stan Tatkin’s Response

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

I was most impressed with Steve Andreas’ write-up and critique of my live demonstration at last Brief Psychotherapy Conference. I found it comprehensive, informative, loving, and more than a bit flattering. However, within the critique I suspected a possible misunderstanding.

The title of my demo was Sewing Partners Together: Techniques for Moving Couples Toward Secure Functioning. The title’s puzzling message may have implied something profoundly in-depth such as working through trauma, facilitating grief work, or otherwise modifying unconscious implicit memory patterns that maintained partner distance and misunderstanding. Alas, the purpose of the demonstration was infinitely more boring though the couple was anything but. I endeavored to show four techniques for quickly gaining information when interviewing a couple: cross-tracking, cross-questioning, cross-commenting/interpreting, and going down the middle. It just so happened that the volunteering couple, the lovely Bruce and Judy, received news of their foster grandson’s suicide the day prior to our demo. The “session” with them was raw and intensely moving for both myself and the audience.

When doing live demonstrations, one must adapt to the needs of the couple and work with the constraints of the agreed upon demonstration elements. In this case, it was to remain within the scope of crossing techniques, which is what I would likely use regardless at the beginning of working with this or most any couple. Why? Because gaining accurate information is key to understanding precisely who and what sits before me. I have often said that real time is too fast due to subcortical, memory, and implicit recognition patterns found in all interactions. Therefore, the therapist, before doing anything, must find out what is going on and who are the people sitting in front of him/her, determine what they really want, and what might they be up to in this moment or the next. Narratives often lie or are distorted for a variety of reasons and so the clinician, understanding the inherent challenges in getting accurate information, must endeavor to glean information through multiple streams of data, such as somatic feedback mechanisms as observed by monitoring microexpressions and micromovements, vocal or prosody shifts and changes, color changes in the face, changes in pupil size, response timing, and changes in striated muscle areas of the face and limbs. In other words, the main task for any clinician is first the discovery of “what is this” before attempting to do anything “about it.” That’s where crossing techniques come in.

Cross-tracking is a visual means of observing the face and body of the person who is not talking and then sweeping the eyes back and forth, up and down, to survey each partner’s somatic reactions. Because the talking partner is using up resources for language and speech, their face is best observed just after they finish talking, a time when resources are freed up and the face is more likely to show emotion and signs of stress previously hidden. Cross-tracking is a extraordinary method for catching partners in the act of being themselves.

Cross-questioning (based on the Milan Group’s circular questioning method) is yet another powerful technique for gaining information quickly and effectively from partners by asking one partner about the other. Again, the therapist is using this method to observe tiny shifts and changes in the face, voice, body, and timing as compared to narrative. The non-speaking partner is observed first and then the eyes travel back and forth, up and down. All the while, the therapist is also using their own somatic responses, thoughts, fantasies, and impulses as yet another data stream for discovery and understanding. Cross-commenting/interpreting, in a similar fashion, allows the therapist to gain both explicit and implicit information for later use in the session.

Going down the middle is a method of interpreting or confront the couple down the center so as to address the couple system without implicating either individual.

Having partners sit across from each other at a relatively close distance so as to activate the near vision system (ventral visual stream and the fusiform facial area), helps facilitate interactive regulation and attention to one another’s face and eyes, is a precondition for informal trance induction. Given the constraints of the demonstration, trance induction and deeper work in the implicit realm was not the focus of this exercise. Therefore, I had no intention to do concentrated work with the partners’ grief, trauma histories, or longstanding relationship issues.

The demonstration with Bruce and Judy satisfied both the advertised intent of showing crossing techniques and at the same time, only lightly addressing the grief and trauma of their recent loss as well as their history of interpersonal misappraisals and mismanagement. If this were a real PACT session, the methods Steve so eloquently described would most certainly be used, albeit, with methods familiar to PACT therapists. Each of these techniques – not demonstrated at the event – focus on implicit, procedural memory systems and make use of induction methods to facilitate co-created alternate states of consciousness (usually parasympathetic) to promote modification of deeply held childhood beliefs and patterning. We use movement, poses (holding positions) staging, and a particularly powerful, lengthy psychodramatic procedure called Lovers Pose in which partners are put into a trance. Thereafter, we continue to explore, discover, and heal unresolved loss and trauma through “bottom-up”, strategic techniques.

I had the delightful opportunity to speak with Steve Andreas for the first time long after the conference. I believe I found a kindred spirit, someone with whom I had previously been unfamiliar. I have some catching up to do regarding his extensive work with NLP and trauma. I look forward to learning more from him.

E-cigarettes may slow down your heart rate

Article : NLP and Sports - Where two worlds merge and the outcome is ultra high performance

http://ift.tt/2iUzziA

When thinking back to the origins of NLP in its early days, you would not be forgiven in thinking that NLP and Sports were polar opposites in society.