February 2020
I am a stalker of shadows but not in any
vengeful way and not in any way associated with that lovely Old English poem,
Beowulf (where Beowulf stalked Grendel, the dragon in the dead of night), nor computer
games. I mean that I stalk the partly absent presences of others who enter the
room with each client, as a shaman might. There’s an inchoate back story that
runs parallel to the issues that the person brings and I am interested in that,
as it gives me clues to what’s up and how we can work together.
The voices of the past linger like
reverberations after a thunder storm or a very loud concert. Things that were
excluded, an unspoken death of child, an absent workaholic father, a severely
depressed grandmother, a traumatised soldier, an exhausted and emotionally
fragile mother, a jailed uncle, incest, a brutalised alcoholic aunt – though
never mentioned – replay out a horrid shadowy dance to awful music in the day
to day lives of many of us. I, for
instance, had a great-grandfather, on my father’s side, a brute of a man and a
jailer at Maitland Prison, who went mad and died when he burned his house down.
One of his daughters, my father’s mother, was a very prim and proper woman who
I met when she came for a week’s stay in Perth when I was nine. Knowing now her
past, I can understand why she held her emotional stuff so tightly to herself
and why my father was afraid of anger, and why I have had to work on my own
anger so extensively throughout my life. The past is continuous with the
present and the old shadows loiter on in some form or other.
In families, these excluded people, are
included somehow or other. We might make a deliberate attempt to erase the
emotional torture of family life by using another name, or moving across the
world, or pursuing lovers that seem not to bear any resemblance to our family
of origin, but someone, something or other, triggers a string of memories and
the pain comes tumbling back. It is as though the shadows we seek to avoid and
think we’ve successfully left behind, just sidle up beside us and continue
needling us.
Stalking shadows is subtle work and a
number of psychotherapeutic practices have been developed that aid the
therapist in identifying them and using that knowledge to further the
therapeutic conversation. The group therapies of Psychodrama and Family
Constellations focus in on giving the barely seen a voice. The shadows are
personified by members of the group and the participants and therapist-facilitator
is able to see, and amplify, the dynamic of family members portrayed in the
drama.
I’ve participated in a several Family
Constellation and Psychodrama workshops and also
did two years of training as a
Psychodrama facilitator in Perth before moving to Lismore, NSW. Though I don’t
do group work often, the insights that came to me during that time, remain and
enhance my individual psychotherapeutic work. I notice that when I’m doing a
clinical hypnotherapy session as well as a counselling one, the way I think has
definitely been shaped by what I learned when working with groups and stalking
shadows. It should be said,
however, that any work I do is not to remember factual details about a client’s
past, but how the shadowy figures play out their stories in the client’s
emotional life. I also do not do
regression work and this is basically because I am uninterested in influencing
my clients in believing something in their past that I may inadvertently have
created. My work is listening to my clients, not putting thoughts into their
heads.
The shadow stalker is primarily a
listener, a tracker of minute details and behaviours around and about the
shadow itself; someone who can change direction in a flash; someone who listens
in the cracks, who watches the fluctuations of moods, observes silences, faces
the barely comprehensible fearlessly and enjoys being there. Without this
element of enjoyment, I doubt the work could be done. Plainly put, I like my
work.
