Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 12 Number 1, April 2011

___________________________________________________________________

Psychotherapy as Spiritual Performance

Anita Hammer (University of Oslo) interviews Psychotherapist Paul Bailey (New Zealand)

INTRODUCTION

In February and March 2009, I conducted two in depth interviews with psychotherapist Paul Bailey. Bailey is the former President of the NZAP (The New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists).  Bailey’s psychotherapeutic practice draws on the therapeia tradition, involving Ron Kurz’ concept of Hakomi, as well as his own personal journey through this practice. At the time when these interviews took place, Bailey was in the process of closing up twenty five years of psychotherapy practice in a small city/semirural community in New Zealand. This situation set off a whole chain of reflections on the core issues of this practice, a work that all in all is situated around a performative situation involving both individual and communal life conditions. My purpose of the interviews was to encircle some themes relating to the therapy as situation of performance. The conversation departed from a performative approach to the therapy situation, and came to give some in-depth descriptions of insights into awareness of communication that to me seems extremely valuable as perspectives on participation in performance in general. Bailey’s description of approaching the other seems to me a valuable source of insight into how to respectfully enter into “common ground” ethically and with awareness. The issues touched upon here are therefore, to me, highly relevant to the many facetted situations appearing in new, innovative and interactive forms of performance that has as an explicit or implicit agenda to make a change, or transform, the participants in ways that goes beyond the performance situation itself.  Important concepts in the conversation is mindfulness, play, prayer, character, openings and closure, dramaturgy,  spiritual presence and the presence of ancestors in the therapy situation. Bailey stresses the importance of the meeting between the inner worlds of the participants of the meeting in psychotherapy as one of mutual participation which also includes openness to acceptance of the otherness, related to cultural and personal background. This is the first of the two interviews, conducted in Napier New Zealand 6.february 2009. (Some parts of this interview has been published in the book Between Play and Prayer: The Variety of Theatricals in Spiritual Performance).

Anita:

Psychotherapist Paul Bailey is going to talk to me about mindfulness, about performance as between reflection,-and maybe creating something new, and about dramaturgy in psychotherapy. Paul has been working as a psychotherapist for thirty years, and with supervising other psychotherapists as well. The last twenty five years of his practice has been in the Hawkes Bay in New Zealand.

Paul:

When you sad earlier that mindfulness was the spiritual side of psychotherapy. My view is that mindfulness is a word that is started to be used more again now, and I think that is right at the heart of the history of psychotherapy. Mindfulness is the doorway to what Freud was talking about as the unconscious. He talked of dreams as the royal road. I think Freud and Jung and each of the people of that time were attempting to find techniques or ways of being that would access the underlying experiences of human beings. And now we call that experience mindfulness, when we move out of ordinary consciousness and go beneath the surface to find out: What are our beliefs? What operates, what runs our own personality structure and our own way of being in the world? Jung and Freud would call that: Attending to the unconscious.

In a communication situation, the movement between being in the here and now, and reflecting upon it, I see as three processes, in a psychotherapy relationship. And the two people decide which of the three processes they are mainly engaged in. And those three processes in my view are related to the layers of the skin. So we have the outer layer, the ectoderm, and for me that is when people face each other. That layer, for me, is more about the ordinary, linear consciousness, some linear, ordinary relationship. That is what I call “therapeutic alliance”, that is where contracting and the ordinary conversations that happen, - like going to the theatre or going to the booking office,- or finding a seat.

The “facing”, that outer layer, is not only the therapeutic contracting; I think there is a contract that covers all three layers. “Facing” is the level of feed back and inquiry and where trust is built. I think “trust” is built on all three layer, but I think that what is must obvious between two people is what I call “facing”. It is what we see and reflect on. So in the “facing”, as I therapist I notice what is happening. “This is how you appear”,- and reflect that back. So compared to the other two, (and I will give you a sense of what I mean by that,)- the “facing” , the middle layer the mesoderm, the middle skin I see as how a person is related to the world in a very physical way. Are they somebody who is not very confident in their body? At this layer I am much more looking at their body, and their tone of voice. So, are they someone who is a strong, intact human being, or are they quite vulnerable and weak? Can they stand on their own two feet or do they collapse? Are they some body who take up a lot of space in the room? Are they bullying, or do they invite the opposite? So it is something of the physical structure, and the feeling of them. And this is a reflection that I am doing also while the communication of the first level is taking place. And that can be explicit of implicit. I can either hold that information or I can reflect I back at any moment. That again has to do with the sort of alliance that is made. If a person wants to explore that it will become obvious as the person comes into the room, like any character comes on stage, how they are. We know without them even opening their mouth, what sort of person they are. So on that level of “grounding”, - while I called the first level “facing”, the second one is “grounding”. How incarnated, how “grounded” is this person? And in what way are they grounded? And what is ungrounded? What still needs to incarnate?

This is both a perception and a feeling that the therapist has. And it is also auditory, because we hear the person’s voice, the voice tone. So it is the tone and the quality of voice. And listening to the person talking in a certain way, and then, suddenly, they say something that is almost inaudible. What I call grounding: They want me to hear it or don’t want me to hear it. And I am always intrigued by those moments. Then it jumps into me: How grounded are we in our relationship to the earth, with each other? And what happens to me with the relationship to where they are in the room?

We are one. We create a space where my ordinary sense of my world changes, and I become in relationship with them. Much like a mother and a child, in a way,- or lovers, or I look at the experiential experience that is happening between us. Am I experiencing more like a mother or a father with this person, or is it more like a relationship between two adults? Is it more in a “facing” way. Who is this person? How are they attaching to me? And what are they inviting from me?  So I would say that the “grounding” requires of me is as a therapist to be aware of their body tone, their physical self, which embodies their spiritual and emotional way of being. Listening to that voice tone, the way they walk, the way they sit, the way they contact with me. And it is not only with me, but it is with the room as well. Yes, grounding and character is most easily read on the second layer. One can reflect on that as well.

So the third level I call the “sutra”, the centre, which is where mindfulness exists. And centring to me is to do with the breathing, of being in the present and to do with the emotional tone of the person and the relationship.

I watch, first of all, and so, some people, many people, are hyper ventilators. They live in a state of anxiety.  So I will see as they come into the room, and I will, somehow, frightened or protective. Or they come into the room full of aggression, and I will suddenly feel something different. Or they come, as many people do in psychotherapy, within the first few seconds the tissues are out, and they are crying. Because they have been waiting for this moment, something is pouring out. They do not have any words for it, there is not done any “facing”. There is a lot unknown yet, and so they are crying. So that is the way it is expressed. Some people are so withdrawn, I can feel that. It is my own body and my own feelings that give me the information. And I don not think that happens only in psychotherapy. I think all of us do that all the time when we meet any human being, even in the middle of a main street, we pick up emotional tone, all the time.

Anita:

But the situations of psychotherapy is something that is framed off from everyday life, and there is a purpose for it. Is mindfulness a sort of presence that watches what happens?

Paul:

Yes, it is. Many people, in different traditions, say that it is the observer, it is what observes what is happening. So, we have the interaction, and we also have the observer self, watching. The technical “me” and “the other”. The difficulty for me in calling it the observer is that often it is not a visual experience. I think a lot of where mindfulness happens, in psychotherapy, in meditation and in the spiritual traditions, is in the kinaesthetic, and the physical feelings, as well. And in the emotional experience. We can also be mindful in a very auditory way. We an say that we observe how the person is speaking, but of course it is not an observation, it is auditory, - and we cab do it in the writing,- finding the right words to describe these experiences. I think that word “observation” must have been pushed by people who were, themselves, very visual.

Anita:

Can mindfulness be described as a certain kind of presence? We are out there in the world acting as characters, and then we also have another kind of presence?

Paul:

Yes. Rumi, way back in his time called this being in the world “the witness”. And many other traditions as well, talk of “the witness”. It is like in the New Testament in the bible, being in this world, but not of it. That is, being in the relationship, and also being outside of the relationship. It is the meta communicator, the one who is in the experience, but is also curious of what the experience is about.

In the lover relationship it happens all the time. The two lovers are intimately bound up with each other, and also outside. Both in and out of a relationship, I think mother and child are, the mother is holding the child, loving the child. It is so much in the loving, but it is also separate. That is what we are talking about in mindfulness. We are in the experience, and we are aware of the experience. This is different from conceptualizing the experience. That is a different form of awareness again. In conceptualizing we put judgement and discretion and analyses. Mindfulness can easily move to conceptualizing. In the process of mindfulness one of the characteristics of the people that use mindfulness is a non judgemental way. It is a quality of acceptance of what is.

So it is a present focus of un- judgemental acceptance. In Zen one could call it bear witness, so different spiritual traditions have used these words for thousand of years, and modern psychotherapy finds those words and uses them. The witness or observer is a limited one, because it does not include the others. Even non judgement is a difficult one, and yet I think that is the quality that we are all talking about. Because as human beings that is an aspiration we have around awareness or mindfulness. I do not believe that we can easily be in that non-judgemental space. The mere fact that we are putting words to the experience puts a judgement that changes the experience.  The terms in themselves carry something.

Anita:

In the theatre you frame a situation off, you create characters that interact, and you prepare for the outcome. In the therapy situation there is also a reflection, isn’t it, on the person’s life? But reflection is not enough, is it? It may also be expected that something may come out of it, a change?

Paul:

Einstein talked about that when we witness something, we change it. That is what he noticed, and I do not know how that happens, but I know that it happens. The mere fact of somebody coming into the therapy relationship and saying: I want to spend this hour/fifty minutes, in relationship with you. What they are doing, ordinarily, is inviting the “other” to relate to them in a particular way. So that is what you say. So what is this particular way? It is one of the few situations when there is no task, nothing specific needs to happen.

I think meditation is a very similar experience. The only task is: To be together. So something unusual happens, with that contract. So people can come to a psychotherapist and say: This is what I want to look at, or this is what I want to address, and that is only part of the story. That is the conscious expectation that one works on. The issues to be addressed are important statements. What the psychotherapist offers, primarily, seems to me to be: Being together. And that is in order to explore whatever the person who is the client, is asking for. But it is more than that. It is a particular way of being together.

In meditation we are with ourselves. In psychotherapy, the contract is for the psychotherapist to be available to the other- on all three levels that I mentioned earlier. So how does this work to change things? The three levels happen at the same time. There is the story, or the content, that the storyteller-client is telling the psychotherapist. Both people are attending to that. But that is not the psychotherapy contract, the contract has very little to do with the content. Underneath that there is a whole lot of things happening. What Freud might have called the unconscious, or transference, or projection, or dreams? Or what we could call a lot of other things. Then we access those other experiences through the process of mindfulness, as it seems to me. So we are attending to that, the content, etc. And yet, when we reflect back, we are not simply reflecting the content. And it is that: Holding both levels, that makes the drama of psychotherapy unique. We have a mandate to intervene or to respond from what is usually unspoken. Like: I noticed when you told the story, this specific word jumped out, and you started crying, then. That is a statement of a reflection. We put out that which we would not put out in an ordinary social convention. The mandate invites a different reflection. The curiosity about what neither person knows about the client. We address the unknown, rather than the known, and we create a safe mode of mindfulness and curiosity to explore the edge between the known and the unknown. And we wait for those moments of awkward unknowingness to be there.

The psychotherapist is waiting for those moments, the moments that would scare the person off, and yet, a person may be so frightened that they control the whole session, and yet, in one moment, they let something out that come from “the unconscious”,- and we attend to that, we respond to that. And when I talk about those three other levels, we do pick up,- that is our training as psychotherapist,- how the person is, emotionally, or how they put themselves together in terms of grounding. But we do not have any mandate to reflect that back until the person says, or waits and looks at us, and invites our response. Until what I call “the drama of the relationship” has reached a point where there is enough safety and trust when the therapist can go into those unknown areas.

Anita:

The client will be reflecting too, and have an awareness?

Paul:

Yes, the witnessing is not only carried by the therapist. Also the person may carry that. It is just as possible for the person who is the client to be more awake to the mindfulness than the therapist. So it is about creating a relationship with something else also. “A third” is created. There are two individuals, with their own skills and talents, and the very relationship creates something else. And if we are both mindful, and open to that, in mindfulness, those new “third” experiences come into the room.

Anita:

Would you ever describe mindfulness in the way of saying that there is a spiritual presence in the room?

Paul:

Yes of course I would describe this as a spiritual presence. When a truck passes by, and I am in the middle of a psychotherapy session with someone,- it is like an outside presence comes in, or for instance if someone in the neighbourhood has music up loud, I will notice that, because it is coming into the room, and we may both be curious of how come? So it affects us both. Or, if we sit talking, and something takes place,- that happened to me recently. We were talking about an earthquake, and then a small earthquake happened, right then, so than that came into the room. So if those, physical expressions come into the room, then of course spiritual experiences can. That is what people are attending to. If it comes into the room, we notice it. To exclude that from awareness would be a dis-service to the relationship. It is most obvious. And in this particular time we live in this country (New Zealand), with the bi-cultural, it so clearly, when meeting in psychotherapy, when a Maori person comes into the room, they are bringing their ancestors. It is always so clear. Some people also state that in the meeting. What I have done,- for decades now, when I start, when I sit waiting for the person to come, I have got into the pattern of imagining that I am in the room alone, and still I am not. I imagine that behind me are all the people who have loved me and have thought me, and inspired me in my life.  And I consciously imagine that at the small of my back there is a collective hand, holding and loving me. Is that spiritual? Yes, I think it is. Some of them are alive and some of them are dead, so it is emotional, slow and spiritual. So I am in that space anyway, before the person comes into the room. So when the person comes into the room, if they are aware, and if they consciously know their ancestors, they bring in theirs too. There is a meeting between my mind and theirs. But I would not introduce them to mine unless that was a mandate. I would not impose that on them.

For me, I am creating that, just as I have plants in my room, and create a physical energy, so will I, in myself, hold a spiritual openness. So spiritual experience becomes the dominant moment. And if the other is open to that, I will reflect that.

Mindfulness itself, I would not call spiritual. We can be mindful of spiritual moments, and of the physical. For instance Tyger Woods, I think do a lot of mindfulness in order to get that gof ball in the right place, but I would not call that spiritual. One may ask: What is the purpose of mindfulness?

Anita:

It seems to me there is a consciousness, while performing, on stage for instance,  that is different from the task that you are doing. You can also be good at performing without being aware.

Paul:

I agree. Communicating, being aware, or being in the experience,- the most common human experience is to be in the experience without being aware in experience. The director of a drama is responsible for both. The actors and actresses need to be in it, they do not necessarily need to be aware of being in it. So the director holds the awareness of the audience, the characters on stage, the curtain rails, and I think the position of the director is very similar to the psychotherapist.  If you ask a Buddhist if mindfulness is spiritual he would probably say that it is, while if you ask Freud, he would say no, it is a human experience. The Buddha would say: we have suffering. There is a way out of suffering. In mindfulness we stop re-creating the past, and we create liberation. In psychotherapy we will say the same thing. The difference between psychotherapy and Buddhist belief is that psychotherapy would say: Our job is to create a self, and to create an integrated, healthy self. Buddhism would say: The self is an illusion. Our job is to dissolve the self, and to dissolve the illusion of self, to see the reality of what is. So those are the differences. Both traditions clearly use mindfulness, even the most non-spiritual psychotherapist uses mindfulness.

Traditionally the gift that psychotherapy has given to the world is the understanding of transference. And transference in order to work with whatever that ever that definition is, whatever that transference relationship is, - the access to it is through mindfulness. And I think, traditionally that is what psychotherapy has attended to, has been how we relate to it.

And the other gift that psychotherapy has developed in relation with psychiatry and some other fields is the realm of character, and to develop mental perspectives, and I think transference and character development are interwoven in the doorway that psychotherapy uses to both of those experiences, is mindfulness.

Regarding character, what we are attempting to do to the person, as psychotherapist: To be aware of the person in character. Paradoxically, the more we are aware that we are in character, the more we can be out of character.

Anita:

How does character relate to transference?

Paul:

I believe that most human relationship is transference and projection, and that a psychotherapist and a client are relating primarily through our developmental styles,- that is, what we have learned from the past. And my job as psychotherapist is to be aware of that,- of myself and the other, - and also to be outside it, which is where mindfulness comes in. If the person who is the client can also be mindful of how they are in character,- and out of it at the same time, then, what a dialogue we have together!

So how does transference manifest itself in the psychotherapy relationship? The psychotherapist, of course, is just as much in character as the other. The art, for both people, is to learn sufficient mindfulness, - to be in character, and to be able to meta communicate and talk at the same time: How are we relating together in the present? How is my history forming what is happening right here in the present? And paradoxically we are both, then, as free as we ever are, as human beings,- if we can hold that moment.  We are completely in character and completely aware that the character that we have been unconsciously entranced by, has the possibility, at this moment, of dissolving. And that we can do something completely different. That is to me the ultimate human freedom.

Merely reflecting back that we are living primarily in a trance, while there is a whole other world that we are not naming,-and how frightening and exciting that is for us all. And that is the human encounter. I think a baby comes into the world with that level of openness, and our job as parents is to restrict that openness,- by telling them to come to dinner on time,- to eat certain food. And we are teaching them words and concepts that is both restricting an liberating,- that allows that little baby to be part of a collective. The child develops certain ways to being that restricts the freedom of their ability to articulate experiences. And so,- there is, having grown up in new Zealand. Heaving developed in this language; I can not now pronounce language sounds that one can find in other language and culture. African tribes can “click” and make some sounds that I can not make, because I have lived to be restricted. As a child I could have been open to all that.  So the child, in my view, although they come with certain experiences, genetically and spiritually, is also incredibly open to what the world provides. So they see the world and experience the world primarily through reflection (reflecting it). They do not have an ability to integrate the experiences, initially. So they are “all experience”.  And so they slowly, in the western world anyway, were we have had a view of an individual self which many tribes and cultures say is illusory. However, in the culture I was brought up in, the child has a sense of who they are, primarily through the eyes of the heart of the “significant others”. So if they are annoying,- if the parent is annoyed with the child, or the child is in the way or not wanted, or if they are their “little princess,- that is what gets reflected back. That is what I mean by character. So “a little princess” comes into the psychotherapy relationship. And she knows that when she was a child she was a little princess, so she comes as a little princess, because in the world, and at school, she has always been the little princess. So I meet “the little princess”. And she may or may not know that she is “the little princess”. Then what are we doing? On a very simple level the problem is: Whatever brings her to psychotherapy,- it is the little princess that I meet. And I also meet her awareness of the “trance” of the little princess. She may have no awareness of it, or she may have full awareness. She may come in and say: I have always been the little princess,- and I am now finding it restrictive.

So the contract, from a psychotherapist point of view, regardless of what other alliance and contract we have, my contract is to be as skilled as I can be, in the mindfulness of the character and the transference. I do not need to know anything else much about anything else. If I can hold my awareness in those two realms, I am doing my job. And the mere fact of me attending to that as a selective perception, a selective awareness, changes what happens between us. Because the person, would merely in order for the transference and the characters style to operate,- it operates through habituation. If I stop habituating the responses, and stop being who the other expect the other to be, automatically there is a dis- structure in the experience, which creates uncertainty and anxiety, and yet an incredible freedom. “If you do not treat me as though I am the little princess, then how am I going to be with you?”

Especially,- when we said before about mindfulness being without judgement, I have no judgement or expectation. Awareness without expectation,- in that moment. If you are not “the little princess” I will not to know “who” we are going to be for each other.

The creative process is there all the time. I think that is the reality. That is the truth of life, and most of the time we are hiding from that, and in psychotherapy, in drama, and in art, and also I spiritual traditions, we open ourselves up to that experience of what is, again.

Anita:

Reflection and creating the new seem to be necessary parts of this process, not opposites.

Paul:

Yes. I think that layer of “the little princess”, is there in all of us in some way. Over the years, as a psychotherapist, I have learned to have a great respect for that layer, for that “little princess”. My job is not to dismantle, or to disturb, or challenge “the little princess”. My job is to wait, because as long as I hold myself in mindfulness, then the purpose of “the little princess” in this woman’s survival,- that is how she holds herself together,-  that is what keeps her intact and allows her to be in the huge human world, her incarnating. And yet, at the same time, to know that underneath that particular “role” that she has created, there is a whole realm of opportunity and freedom, and that being “only” in that role she restricts herself from what the call might be. But she does not have to come into it, in my view. Sometimes in psychotherapy all that the person want in their “terror”, is to be re-affirmed as “the princess”. And I have no right, in my view, to change that. And in fact, I think, half the world is still “incarnating”,- and my job is to encourage “the little princess”, more and more, because it is still “coming in”. One of my teachers, David Boadella said,- (and that is where I got it from); he said that his experience in psychotherapy is that half the world are children wanting to be adult, and the other half are so adult that they need to find the child again. And one of my other teachers, Neville Symington, spoke of “beyond”. He said that this man was getting very angry with the getting not getting beyond the situation he was in. He said: Why are we not getting beyond? Why have I come here? He walked up to the therapist and said: I really do not know why you are so angry with me. He then said: I am not angry with you. I am just trying to help you. There is this element for the therapist that there is nothing “to be done”. My job is to be holding the awareness of what is underneath the character style. And that’s all. And in order to understand that, I need to allow both the content of the story to unfold, and the relationship to develop transferentially,- in transference. So I allow it to happen, and at the same time reflect that this is happening.

Anita:

When you relate to a “story” that the person has when she or he comes to you, that also contains a drama, with beginnings, endings and the inbetweens. I know that beginnings and endings are of importance in therapy.

Paul:

Yes. Beginnings and endings are important. One of the tasks and challenges,- or skills that I as a therapist need to develop is to be open to the first few moments of the drama of the relationship. I think the drama of the relationship, or the beginning of the relationship almost always happens before the person comes into the room. Maybe through an answer phone message, or as soon as a person tells me their name, as I psychotherapist I have got a whole lot of associations with that name, from all the other “anita’s” I have met in my life, or other experiences,- so suddenly the relationship is formed, based on my projection. So I am aware that I am an adult, a psychotherapist, having a business relationship with someone over the phone, and I am telling them where I am, we are arranging a time, we are working out cost,- and while that is happening I am having this whole full emotional experience going on simultaneously,- of their tone of voice, their name, their accent. And my job is to hold that awareness as much as I can, possibly to hold it all, and at the same time be open, at this time in my life that this person enters my life by the phone. And then when they come, the very first meeting with the person, again, then how do I prepare myself to meet them? And as they come through the door, what am I picking up? What am I feeling? What am I noticing? And at the same time, holding the incredible humility of that I do not know anything about this person, so I will meet them without expectation, although I know I have already projected a whole lot on to them. And it is, suddenly becoming conscious of what I have projected on to them, - on the telephone, by their sound and their voice,- and now that they are in the room, now I see them physically, I have a lot of other associations,- of attraction, repulsions and emotion then. And of how I feel about them coming into my space. This is all happening in the first few seconds, as it does with every human encounter. And my job is to train myself and to be alert, and to feel safe enough to be able to pick that up, and to notice it, to experience it, to feel it. But also to know that that is the raw material, that those experiences are what I at some point reflect back on, and reflect back to the person, if the person wants it. So my job is to hold those transferential experiences of myself and theirs, and to put I back, not as an accurate interpretation, - because I do not know if what I am picking up is accurate,- or my own projection. For instance I could say: I noticed when you came into the room I suddenly felt physically unwell, and I do not know what was happening. But I would not say that until the person wanted it, until we have formed an alliance about: What am I here for?

Anita:

And let’s say that three months down the track you have a different view of this person? Would you make use of that looking back to the beginning?

Paul:

Sure. I think that those first few seconds that begins an alliance; they keep on coming back to my awareness. So much happens in those first few seconds, that I have learned to trust,- whether it is true or not, I have learned to trust that those first few moments encapsulates the whole relationship, how it is going to unfold.  And I think that non verbally and in such short time we give each other so much information. And what is unfolding more consciously as months and years go by, is an unfolding of what happened when we first met.

Anita:

How about the circumstances in which you meet another person for the first time in your social life? Would you give a different status to a relationship that for instance started by a car accident, or one that took place at a party with friends?

Paul:

It is not the interpretation, so much. It is more that quality of awareness that takes place in that first meeting. And as the weeks and months goes on, that awareness may be dulled. And if I can keep on holding my own sharpness of the beginners mind, then I am holding so much more of my own experience than the other. At the beginning of any relationship in general, that openness is so much more accessible, to all people. It does not mean that what we picked up at that moment was accurate or meant more than anything else. I am talking about the quality of awareness. And our job, or course, for both of us in this psychotherapy relationship is to keep on clarifying and achieving that awareness. But unfortunately I think it is most crisp at the beginning and at the end. And that is sad. But I think that is probably the case.

Anita:

When a person walks into your therapy room I guess they often tell stories, perhaps of the last ten years or last three years of their life for instance. Du you think of those stories as dramas, as dramatic dynamics?

Paul:

Yes I do. In the tradition of psychotherapy that I grew up in and trained in that is part of the ocean of how I see the world. It is actually called “psychodynamic psychotherapy”. It is all movement, all energy. That is how I see it. And so we are working with dynamics between the two of us, which is on three levels, the feeling, the grounding, the centring, which is to do with: How do I feel each time this person enters the room? Do I look forward to them? Do I feel: “Oh, no, them again”. That is all part of the dynamics,- which may say a lot about me, rather than about them. It may speak of my own history, so as a psychotherapist I will always,- as long as I hold that ritual space and the drama of the psychotherapy relationship, I always have a reflective space for the supervisor (supervision of other therapists). And what I am doing primarily then, is asking that question: Is the dynamic of what is happening,- am I controlling that, somehow, through my own history? Because they are bringing to me their trauma, and I perhaps not want to face it today, or I do not want to face it with them, because it is something disturbed about that for me, that I do not want to face, so I that I am keeping at closing them down, and they are wanting to open up. So I talk so someone ( My supervisor) to find out what it is, so that  I can be more in service of the other, letting the drama of the relationship unfold, rather than controlling it.

I always bring the relationship back to the awareness of the here and now, in the room, to the situation. This is what my teachers taught me, and this is the way I trust, for my training in Buddhist meditation, but also in psychotherapy. This is the paradoxes of how to hold the repeating dynamic, with awareness, so that I can be in the dynamic and outside of it, at the same time. 

Anita:

The relationship between character and drama?

Paul:

Yes. In psychotherapy I would use very similar understandings that the relationship between the story, the characters in the story, and the storyteller. And on that level of psychotherapist and client, I am relating to them primarily as the psychotherapist to the storyteller. The client often is relating to me primarily through the story and character. And my job is to always hold an awareness of them as storyteller, behind the drama, and behind the character. In need to be fascinated, and accepting, and very welcoming of all the characters and all the drama, and to be curious. I wonder what is happening to the storyteller while this is going on. Always there is a drama on stage, and there is a character, and I am fully involved with that, and yet my dominant awareness is outside that. I am emphatic, and yet I am not lost. I can feel with the characters, and I know there is something more going on. And, paradoxically, when the person is angry, or crying, - when the characters are fully operational, I can feel and be-with, and yet, I can also hold the mindfulness. How is this fitting in to who this person is and what is happening right now? So that by me holding that mindful awareness in curiosity, that lives in the room, that frees the person also up, to be in a little of that experience of also having that curiosity. For character, I drama, I do not want them to do that. I want them to be lost in character,- I want them also to reflect on that, later, when talking to me as the director. But I don not want them to reflect in the middle of the play,- while the audience is there , I want them to be fully there with the others. Whilst in psychotherapy, I want them to be in the experience, and yet I am inviting, even when they are in that, a communication that is a meta communication, so that the storyteller and the character and the psychotherapist can be in a three way dialogue. It gets more like a rehearsal of a play, than what happens in front of an audience. And I think that what happens in psychotherapy is a workshop experience of drama. So the person can go out into their lives and be rehearsed.

My job is to let the person act out and be who they are. It is my job to be aware; I am not going to impose that on to them. If I am aware, their awareness can be invited in, and they more be more aware of it than I am, I do not assume that I have the hotline to that level of mindfulness. We both change, but that is my job, it is not the client’s necessarily.

Being in psychotherapy is where the character, on stage, in the workshop can look at the director and say: No, I think the play ought to be different, and I think that what you are doing as a director isn’t so ok. We are equals. I do not have any more authority than them. In fact, my job is to make sure of that. There are, in fact, two directors, because there is to stages happening. There is one more drama,- because I am just as complex as the other, which is where the drama-image falls down when we talk about psychotherapy. There are two dramas happening. There is even three dramas. It is yours, mine, and the third, that we are creating together. Who is directing the third? I think that primarily, the client is. However, the psychotherapist has a consecutive direction and control. “Now it is time to finish. No smoking in this room. I am not sure that I am a producer of that drama. Also, I am not sure that I am not the director. I think that what I am, is somebody sitting there, in the theatre, while the director and the characters are al happening. And I am the one holding an awareness in a particular way, that I reflect on. I think my role is a much more humble one than the director and the producer. I am only intervening when they look at me and say: What is happening?

As psychotherapist I am not meant to be in the middle of the drama of a person’s life. I need to be aware of holding the bigger picture of the storyteller, the context of what has been happening in the drama till date, and is this the right time to respond? And on what level do I respond? Is this person ready for what I want to tell them, that is, a reflection on how I see them now, and how I saw them when they first came into the room? Do they really want to know? And if I tell them,- what would be the consequences? I do not know the consequences. But am I willing to live with the consequences of what I reflect back? Because I know the reflection, automatically has a capacity to change what is happening.  So I have learned to be critically respectful of the reflections, even interpretations. I know that I do not have a hotline to the truth, so when I am interpreting, it may be so much more to do with me, than the other. And yet I have learned that that reflection and interpretation at times can dramatically change the life of the other,- and not necessarily in useful, helpful way. – That I could say something that activates them into a psychotic breakdown. That is the dramatic power of psychotherapy.

So I have an ethical responsibility that when I intervene with reflection, I can do it spontaneously and freely, and at the same time with an awareness of the moral responsibility I am carrying for both participants. And I think it is the same in a drama on stage. The director and the characters have so much courage, because they are holding and distilling so much human experience, that when the actor playing the character says to the director: No, - this is what needs to happen,-  if there is a dialogue there, then everything changes. If the director I s so defensive, and believes she/he has got a hotline to the truth, nothing is going to happen. And vice versa, if the actor does not listen to the whole ant think “this is all about me”, it is the same. That is the same in therapy.

Drama work does not necessarily have that mandate, while in therapy it does. There are certain traditions of drama that have that, and those traditions are the places where therapy and drama meet. But many drama lineages are about the director as the expert, and the actor has to obey. And I think there are forms that are called psychotherapy that are also from a different lineage. Like psychiatry and psychology, they are different lineages. Psychiatrist s and psychologists will say they do psychotherapy too. But it is not the same as what I am talking about. That tradition is much more from the Greek tradition of iatreia, which is “in expert”. The director is expert. My tradition is much more from the therapeia,  that tradition of the Greek that points to “two equals”, of humbly being on the Christophe’s of the unknown. And with all the magnificence and the danger which that encounter offers. And the other thing I would add, in terms of psychotherapy, which is different from drama, or for most drama, is that in drama there is a script that has already been set. The storyteller simply holds the script, the scriptwriter does. And the director and the characters surrender to the script, which holds the frame, and they bring that to life. But in psychotherapy there is no script. We invite the repeating script of the person’s life. The very encounter of psychotherapy encounters the script. So who is writing the script?

Anita:

Is therapy, then, between play and prayer?

Paul:

I am from the therapeia tradition, so for me it is. But if we make therapy both of these it can be anything, and then it is nothing. Because there is a tradition of prayer and there is a tradition of play, so it includes those two lineages, more than it includes psychotherapy itself. Many people talk about psychotherapy being a science and an art. But there is much more colour and richness, for me, in the integration you are talking about, the dialectic of prayer and play. That, to me, is an incredibly useful weaving of lineages. So, whether science or theory weaves into prayer and play? Both prayer and play are clearly experiences. So where does what we are talking about fit into psychotherapy? Psychotherapy exists between prayer and play, and it adds a third dimension which is the communicator. Prayer happens as an experience. The person praying does not need to be aware, or mindful of what they are doing. It can be a devotional exercise, a ritual. I distinguish between prayer and meditation. Prayer and contemplation are separate as well. So, psychotherapy fits more between play and meditation than between play and prayer. However, I like prayer because it is a relationship, whilst meditation isn’t relationship. Meditation is a different lineage to psychotherapy. But Psychotherapy is closer to prayer in that is a relationship. Prayer is a relationship between the human and the divine. I like that as a model. However, prayer by itself is not sufficient, because it is a power imbalance between the human and the divine and it does not require mindfulness. Play is there as well. So I think it is between prayer and play, with mindfulness. That is what I would add.

One more thing I would like to add: I was also thinking of the ending of a psychotherapy relationship, particularly in connection with prayer and play. The things we have been talking about as well, during the break. I am always intrigued by who finishes a psychotherapy relationship and how it is finished.

Because of the nature of psychotherapy there is a paradox inherent in finishing. The paradox, for me, is in that it never finishes,- and yet, there is a clear time-contact. So there is a contact of ordinary time. And there is a contract of timelessness. And my understanding of the ending of psychotherapy is simply to reflect that paradox. This is how it functions: Yes, we are finishing this psychotherapy. And how are we finishing? Some of what we were beginning together on that level of ordinary consciousness has been achieved.

So the client has allowed me the privilege to painfully walk alongside them this period of time. And in this time, what I have done, as much as I can, to be in relationship with them, alongside them as a storyteller, and to reflect my own mindfulness of the bigger picture.

And when you finish, all that happens for me and them, in my view, is that I become a part of their world and their lineage, and they become part of mine, so when I sit,- in my next psychotherapy relationship, they are then (there) behind me, and one of the people who I take with me to meet the next person.

So there was a clear finish. And I may never see this person again. And yet, they are with me forever. And I tend to finish psychotherapy relationships on that basis, with that acknowledgement.

The second thing,- if I am staying in the same area, that I tend to offer someone is: That I will hold this relationship,-   off you go, we are finished,- and if you find in time that you will come back,- I will hold this relationship and not go into any other relationship if in time you will come back. I won’t be a friend of yours, I won’t meet you socially, because I will hold our relationship in this way, as a contained, ritual space, for prayer and play, and whatever else we are doing mindfully.

For other people, they will say “great, this is the end”, and we will dismantle the mental structure that we have created. And they will never come back, and I will never come back with them, into that space.

The contract is dissolved. The stage is gone.

And the reason I do that is that some people will want a different form of contract. That contract, they may want to create a different stage, they may be come a colleague of mine, - or there may be meetings in other ways.

I think psychotherapy is different to psychology and psychiatry. Psychology is different. In psychology there is a problem that needs to be treated,- and there is a clue to where it will (may) end.

In psychotherapy,- on one level, there is an alliance to deal with a certain issue, and we do the relationship a dis-service if we do not address that issue, and as the pressure grows, we will do that. The contract is dissolved. The stage is gone.

And as it happens, I have worked in this village of about twenty five years. I now have people coming back to me who I worked with twenty five years ago. And I am amazed how,- they walk into the room,-  and although I haven’t consciously thought about their life and their biography in the meantime, Immediately, all the were there, how we spent time and what we did together, comes back into the room. And I like that sense of, that, in ordinary time, - we also have a doorway into timelessness, in mindfulness.

And at the end of a psychotherapy relationship, I say goodbye to the person, for the privilege of being together in timelessness. And we step, both of us, into ordinary time.

I think we do the same in both play and in prayer. When time is out the rules are dissolved.

If we are children we go back and play later on.  Children pick up the rules again immediately. They don’t even have to think about it.