by Pam Wernich
August 15, 2009
Pam Wernich’s rich and personal reflection explores the wonderful question of how the way we as therapists “keep company with ourselves” impacts on the client’s inner life and experience of herself, and moves the therapy forward. Pam is a student in the FORP program in South Africa and has a graduate degree in counseling. She works as a counselor in a women’s shelter and in her private practice in Capetown.
When I meet a client in her world, our meeting is shaded too by my own particular vantage point in mine, and I readily accept that in our relating, each is transformed. Concepts of intersubjectivity provide a theoretical strut for this sense that a reciprocal interplay is integral to our relating.
Viewed on the focusing landscape, what of the impact we have on our clients, and they on us, not-so-perceptibly, through the way we keep company with ourselves inside?
Here, that exquisitely “possibilityful” quality of presence comes to mind. What begins to emerge for me as I deepen my own experience of focusing, is how the way in which I keep internal companionship with myself, percolates up into the encounters I have with my clients. Presence, it seems, impacts not only within, but also in the space between.
If the presence that we allow forth in focusing has even just a tiny bit of potential to touch in somewhere near the mind states that Buddhists know as maitri (acceptance of ourselves with loving-kindness) and bodhichitta (the awakened heart that responds compassionately to the suffering of others), then indeed as focusers we are working in an incredibly rich space. And because we focus in community, and because we also bring this sensibility into our work with clients, we enter a space that is abundant in its potential for mutual enrichment.
Writing about mindfulness meditation, Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön suggests that “Attending to our present-moment mind and body is a way of being tender toward self, toward other, and toward the world” (The Places That Scare You: 2001: Shambhala Publications). Whilst meditation practice is clearly distinct from focusing in its intentions, techniques and origins – a discussion I do not intend to enter here – where Pema Chödrön’s observation strikes a chord with focusing is how the self-nurturing attitudes that are generated for self when cultivating presence, also have the potential to permeate outwards “toward other, and toward the world”. It would seem to me that when we work with presence, we reach deeply into the intersubjective realm, and this holds immense possibility in a therapeutic context.
These ruminations have come from a recent experience I’ve had in my work – one that has filled me with delight. In my private focusing I had been tentatively exploring the attitudes I might need to revisit an old trauma I had worked with in earlier pre-focusing days, but was left sufficiently ravaged to close it all up again, and rather prematurely I later felt. When I started to sense into how it might be to explore this issue afresh in an unhurried and careful focusing way, I touched in with an inner ‘something’ that made the whole issue begin to feel open to some further exploration after many years.
What had changed for me between then and now, in part the result of a lot of focusing, was being able to connect with a bodily felt sense of something firm and “bedrockish” located in the main frame of my body and offering a consoling sense that the fragility within can be adequately supported. And more than that, there is also the sense of something else that watches over it all – both the firm and the fragile – and that watching-over quality is what I would call presence. Gendlin talks about “keeping company” with things on the inside.
At the same time as this presence was making itself felt in me in this reassuring way, a client started to reveal some of her trauma that we’d both known about for some time, but mutually understood and appreciated that it was not yet ready to show itself. And then, here it was, being set out between us, and here we were, doing the previously undo-able.
I sat with a warm, rounded robustness filling my chest as I watched my client ‘being with’ the previously exiled parts of her experience, and doing so in a tentatively acknowledging way. She was aware of a shift and the beginnings of an open receptivity to herself, which she described as a “warming up to” things in her, and some sessions later she called it “a kind of compassion”. Attributable to deeper presence, or in different parlance, to an emerging maitri perhaps, this shift suggests how the focusing sensibility can facilitate a more direct and kindly way of relating with ourselves.
I am wondering now about how my own bit of forward movement, and giving the time of day to parts of my own deported experience, might have precipitated my client’s brave crossing-the-threshold into a zone of experience that was previously too frightening to enter. What feels significant here, is something about the “finding a new bit of plucky courage” that seemed to move, presence-borne, in the relational space between us.
Thinking about felt sense and presence now as I write this, what pops into my mind is Alfred Krozybski’s idea that “the map is not the territory”. I would say that focusing offers access to the territory, the map, and a something more that stands in relationship to both the territory and the map. When we sit with a felt sense of some piece of the territory of our experience, we may create a map to delineate and describe this territory for ourselves using the “handles” of focusing, and we may also make it knowable in this way to our listener. The map is not the territory, of course, but our best custom-built representation of it in that moment. But then there’s also the something more - a whole frame of mind about the territory, an entire atmosphere, a kind of perspective and way of looking-at-it-all that is more than the sum of the territory and the map. The particular quality of presence that is cast over the landscape at any given time is what I think we also communicate in the relational space. This is perhaps especially so when we relate from ‘felt sense places’. And in a therapeutic context, receptivity to presence is keenly tuned for both in the relating space.