December 2024
It’s interesting that often we know a whole lot more than we realize we know something. Herein lies an important key to effective counselling. Very often the client comes for their first session and effectively tells you – without realizing it – what is missing from their lives and also how they might incorporate that knowledge into everyday experiences. The art of therapy then is to bring to awareness that unawareness. It’s a very subtle thing, and needs to be approached without fanfare. Awareness cannot be forced.
A clinical supervisor of mine once described this as like stealing a client’s watch and then returning it to them, gently. We therapists must be very attentive; listen very closely to everything a client says and does. We need to bring awareness in as though this knowledge has arisen from the client own source of knowings (which it has). Their knowledge base is their resource, and in sharing with us, ours as well. Therapy, after all, is a shared conversation, and a very creative one.
I have just done a hypnosis with a client of mine. To prepare for this, as I always do, I listened and talked with him about the discoveries and insights he has had during the week. During this first half hour (my sessions are 60 minutes), I discovered not only the main topics that have preoccupied him, but also key elements and strategies for the next half hour, that of the hypnosis itself. I listened, effectively, for the shape and design of his unconscious processes, aiming to bring to consciousness and realization that which is implicit in what he has said.
Hypnotherapy is a playful way of approaching the process of realization. The therapist casts aside traditional linguistic order to play with ideas, words and images. The purpose is to stimulate client resources, implicit in the way that person approaches the world. Again, this requires very close attentive listening to them.
One exercise, I remember from studying clinical hypnotherapy umpteen years ago in Sydney, was to ask the client to identify their personality and also list all the animals they particularly loved and then to incorporate reference to those animals in the hypnosis session. My client said, they liked meercats. They also said they were a scaredy cat. I played with her words, saying things like “no mere cat, not scared, but a lion.” The words were already there, as was the intent and direction for therapy.
Now, had I said these things directly, the client would well have brushed the words off, instead re-emphasizing her unhappy state of mind. My playful approach may well have been received quite differently, loosening resistance and allowing humour to introduce a deeper understanding and, effectively, releasing the lion within. Lions, after all, are not mere scaredy cats, and are not to be messed with.
The shift from unconscious knowing to realization is the start of all knowledge, including the physical. A dancer, or gymnast, already uses their body like everybody else, but have brought particular skills to certain sets of movements. One could say, that skills are realized body knowledge.
It’s when knowledge remains unconscious, unrealized, that problems arise. Again, thinking about body knowledge, sometimes pain sets in and learning how to move differently through something like Feldenkreis can release the pain – such is the purpose of realized movement.
Psychological pain is similarly created when we keep on doing the things that creates our pain, forgetting our own knowledge that there are other ways of being and feeling. It’s then that the subtle work of psychotherapy comes to its own. Sometimes, doing more than talking about it really helps too. I remember a client years ago who was clinically depressed. I discovered that what she used to do when feeling low was go out dancing. I encouraged her to turn on the radio once a day and just let her body dance. She did, and the next time I saw her, she glowed. Everything changed for her as she realized her inner resources for a good life.
