The Art of Depth Psychotherapy
Jung -Alchemy- egg
The Value of Depth Psychotherapy in Today’s World.
I was inspired to write my reflections on this topic as I am quite often asked :what is Psychotherapy? In this short piece I put down my own reflections as to what Psychotherapy means for me as a Soul Centred Psychotherapist.
In our fast-paced quick fix world I want to spend time reflecting on the values of depth Psychotherapy as it honours the innate time of something/someone takes to heal – Kairos time (in the time that’s right for you) Not linear time but internal time. Where Deep change can happen, and the client has access to more inner choice of how they respond to self and to the world allowing a sense of inner freedom and well-being.
The time it takes
Whilst the more popular version of therapy in today’s world is a set of 10-20 sessions and this may very well be what some clients need however there is a lack in talking about the value of something taking time. The negative beliefs patterns and behaviours that brought a client into therapy didn’t happen over three months or indeed a year. They developed a long time ago perhaps even transgenerational and became more and more habituated as they grew up. It makes sense then that we take our time to respectfully work with theses long held beliefs and defences that initially came into being consciously and unconsciously for good reason and now are not serving the whole of who the client is any more. It takes time and trust. For the Therapist It takes sitting with all the gamut of emotions that come up during the sessions the clients and one’s own and the ability to ‘be with’ what arises in the session from a place of curiosity. It’s vital to work towards strengthening the client’s ego self (building the scaffolding around the wound/trauma) so that over time there is ego strength to manage what comes up and it be tolerated and integrated in a way that works better for the whole of they are now. Like in Alchemy where one would heat up the vessel just enough to melt the metal/ lead into gold without shattering the container this takes fine tuning and patience before transformation can occur sometimes we need to lower the heat a little . Many hours in the lab. The results are hopefully long lasting and can be fully integrated and embodied by the client.
Case Study:
A client I was seeing for 5 years came to me inItially for Anxiety she was 18 years old at the time. What presented in fact was a young woman very shut down with complex trauma and completly agrophobic .She was able to articulate that she wanted to feel better and stop suffering however due to a huge critic and feeling completely trapped by this she was un able to take up much of what was offered on the sessions. My task I realised was to be with her as long as she needed (yes I did still keep using gentle process along the way)however I needed to let her know it was safe and she wasn’t to much for me. I had to ‘be with’ This went on for almost a year. Many sessions felt excrutiating and like nothing was happening but it was . We were buildning trust. eventually I was able to bring to her my observations that led to belive she needed to get assed for ASD. she did and it revelaed what I suspected. she was on the autisem spectrum. knowing this aliviated feelings of blame she had towards herself for not get better soonerr. Something unlocked in her psyche and life was able to come in. She is now doing her Marsters at Uni. This took 5 years of working together. its was such a rewarding rich experience and she i ssuch a wise young woman. It was a priviliage.,
The therapeutic relationship is key
The therapeutic relationship can be like a microcosm of the outside world offering the client a safe space in which to work through those early developmental stages were they experienced the wounding either by parents or other significant others. having the time to build trust is paramount and this can take more than a few months of working together.
I would say from my experience that Having a myriad of trauma tools and techniques for working with anxiety, depression, affect regulation ect are so useful and much needed however they really come in to play effectively when the relationship between client and therapist is established and the different parts of the client can start to trust in this relationship. For some this might be straight away and for others further down the track. What does matter is the ability of the psychotherapist to continue to Be with whats arising, pacing and attuning to whats needed for the client. all of this is part and parcel of modelling good enough parenting and relationship.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/bowlby.html https://www.allanschore.com/pdf/SchoreAttachHumDev.pdf
Sitting in the chair
There are many different modalities of Psychotherapy and whilst they may vary in technique and focus, they all I believe have something in common which is the Psychotherapist ability to work in depth with the complexity of the human condition. This has to do with rigours training and hours spent in therapy before one step’s into the chair to help someone else and can truly be comfortable offering a space to explore and work with the transferences and counter transferences in the room rather than pathologies them.
As a psychotherapist I keep coming back to what I experience is the corner stone of being able to sit in the chair with a client and attend to the therapeutic relationship. When describing one of the core elements of Psychotherapeutic practice we must turn to the quote below by Kathleen Riordan speeth who talks about therapeutic attention. This is a fundamental quality that Psychotherapists develop over time as part of their training and indeed in the years of sitting in the chair with clients. It’s an essential part of depth work.
“In real psychotherapy, as opposed to a sympathetic conversation that merely looks and sounds like psychotherapy, the therapist sustains the inner stance of impartial observation, as if from outside the interaction, or above. While allowing most of the attention to play freely upon what the client is saying and doing, and what associations I have to it, how interested and how empathetic, I reserve just a little attention to notice all this flux. I allow my attention to play freely or to zoom into deep identification, yet it of myself above it. When I am immersed, I watch my almost total immersion; when I am engaged in evenly hovering attention, I watch that.@”
Kathleen Riordan Speeth: On Psychotherapeutic Attention.
What does she mean by this?
Simply that we as psychotherapists must develop the muscle to move in and out of the different positions of attending, speeth calls it the three-point attention.
Focused attention, panoramic attention, and witness attention. This is one of the hardest skills to learn and can take a lifetime to develop because we are working with the complexity of the human condition both our own and our clients. If we get this right it allows for us to attend to what is being said and what is not being said in the room by the client at the same time. We are hovering with an eagle eye above the story as well as being completely absorbed in the story allowing us to stay in the relationship with the client from a place of curiosity. We develop the muscle to move easefully between the different attention points with an ability to come back to centre.
The demand on us as a psychotherapist is to be able to have witness to our own noticing’s, sensations, emotions that are occurring for us as well as for the client and be able to notice the transferences and counter transferences that are occurring in the room. We are trained to hold to what emerges for the client without trying to fix it or problem solve it. We can only do this if we are able to have ‘witness’ to what is happening for us at the same time as we pay attention to what is happening for our client and hold to both using our noticing’s as information and data about what might be happening for our client without judgment but with seep curiosity. No small feat.
In the end There many be many reasons why a client might seek out psychotherapy as a therapeutic process, initially perhaps because of an acute issue or crisis presenting in their lives to and find them selves to wanting to develop and deepen the relationship with their inner world and get to know all the different parts and aspects of themselves or both . This is a rich and rewarding journey of inner discovery and potential.
Marie Louise Von Franz: That’s just it. Jung once said you can cure a psychotic patient if you can make him creative. In other words. If what is destroying him within can be brought forth in writing or paining or some other form, then he can be cured. What we try to do is help people bring forth the self.