Beyond our Upper Limit
January 11th, 2012 adminSpaces are still available for my new 1-3 year certification program, Intensifying and Integrating Deep Affect. Check out the link to my site. Please fax your registration form to 818-704-1986 ASAP. If you have a serious interest in the training but aren’t sure about committing due to lack of knowledge about it, you will have the option to come to the first meeting and then decide (fee: 195.00). The material is powerful, which is what inspired me to teach it. If you haven’t yet been exposed to it or if you have, you will benefit from this opportunity!
Save June 9, 2012, for a special one-day event to be announced soon. I’ll be teaching a model that I’m now calling Dynamic Emotion Focused Therapy. This is my personal blend of ISTDP’s Central Dynamic Sequence with an emphasis on empathic engagement and neurobiological attunement (attention to body language, facial expression, eye gaze, and tone of voice). It includes a style of defense interruption that emphasizes compassion for self, vivid language and metaphor to bring the therapeutic process to life, and interventions utilizing the latest research on hope.
I’ve been very curious at the small percentage of therapists who pursue post graduate training. I see talented therapists who develop exciting new skills and report the impact on their clients yet become debilitated and discouraged: “My patient had a breakthrough and got better and worked out big problems with her boss but then she got depressed again. I feel terrible.”
An accomplished therapist in STDP training who gave me permission to share his comments emailed: “I have struggled sometimes with what to do with resistance, though I have gotten better at recognizing it. I get breakthroughs to rage eventually sometimes, but often helping people to see the triangle of conflict clearly and realize that they spend a lot of time quite anxious but have been unaware of it, often leads to quite significant changes. Most clients seem to get to anger but have difficulty going past a portrait at best.”
“My dad often raged around me so I think that I have difficulty with patient’s rage some times. I have noticed difficulty in bringing out a patient’s feeling in the Transference, especially if it is rage. I feel I don’t know where to go with it to help them get to the impulse. So often their defenses quell the anger before I see a clear motoric impulse and I don’t seem to have the language to help spur them along at that moment.”
I was struck that his point that his new skill level “often leads to quite significant changes” was barely noticed or relished. He is saying that even without major breakthroughs, he is a far better and effective therapist. How sad that we take little notice or pleasure in the enormous gift of a therapeutic relationship growing deeper!
It was heartening that he could make the observation: “I could easily tell you whether I was seeing a response of Feeling, Anxiety, or Defense, which type, where we were in the Central Dynamic Sequence, whether or not the client was projecting will/Punitive,Superego or stuck in identification with a previous aggressor, etc. …So I expect too much sometimes of myself as I am learning.
Ah, yes…”expecting too much as I am learning.” Familiar anyone?? If I may free associate, one of the most riveting conferences I can remember was one I attended many years ago, “On “Death and Dying.” The presenters were some of the leading scientific researchers in the world on near death experiences (including Dr. Raymond Moody), who reported on studies of thousands of people of all ages from a great many cultures. I was especially fascinated with the “life review.” From Wikipedia, “A life review is a phenomenon widely reported as occurring during near-death experiences, in which a person rapidly sees much or the totality of his or her life history in chronological sequence and in extreme detail, a ‘flash before the eyes.’ …A reformatory purpose seems commonly implicit in accounts.” Significant numbers of survivors report a transformation after experiencing a “life review” when they recover because they were in a state of complete acceptance, without judgment, able to comfortably observe their life experiences. From a place of safety, they looked at how they hurt or overlooked people and how they missed opportunities to connect and to love and these revelations influenced their lives. Keywords: “From a place of safety.”
In our everyday lives, we often do not make it safe to look at our “messes.” To do so, we must pass through the halls of shame and self-degradation, being whipped by the Furies for our transgressions, blindness and unnecessary losses and we fear being banished. It’s painful to look, and yet how do we truly change anything if we don’t look? The STDP therapist is in the most uncomfortable position of drawing attention to the ways in which the elephant inside the patient stomps on him. As the therapist in training told me, ““I would say that learning ISTDP is far more provocative for the therapist than any other form of therapy I’ve learned. We so directly and pointedly violate a lot of social strictures and rules that it takes time to settle in and see the good that this kind of direct care does people and learn to trust it.”
He further observes how he can stomp on himself, “After all, ISTDP is very complex in its moment-to-moment perceptual tasks and decision-making. I also go after myself for not “seeing” what is happening with a client and then get stuck. I tend to want to see everything in the big picture and to talk with the client in that fashion when they just need their new understanding built up from here-and-now micro-observations done together. … I also see that this may be a defensive stance in which I don’t act until I feel I can excel. … I also tend to intellectualize too much; both a defense against intimacy that was prized in my family of origin, a badge of quality, and also just a habit borne of too much academic training (and probably the same basic defense).”
Yeah, I get it. It’s easy to see why therapy that works with our core is painfully activating and can be the “road less travelled” for patients and therapists alike. And so it becomes imperative that we do everything possible to create safety for our patients, our colleagues and ourselves… so that we can all continue to learn and grow and truly break through our self-imposed upper limits that hinder our professional advancement.
