by Halko Weiss
These ideas have reshaped my vision and the way I work. And while there have been radical shifts, some things have not changed at all or at least not very much. Though new techniques have been added, the old techniques remain central. The original underlying principles—of unity, organicity, mindfulness, mind-body wholeness, and nonviolence—also remain, though my understanding and appreciation of them have deepened. The core of the method has not changed.
The essence and uniqueness of this method remains a simple combination of two things: the client’s state of mind (mindfulness) and the therapist’s ability to create experiments that trigger reactions while the client is in that state of mind. These reactions are indications of unconscious assumptions. (These assumptions are not verbal, but are implicit in the habits that express them.) The therapist looks and listens for signs of these assumptions and tries to discern the nature of the emotionally nourishing experiences the assumptions are preventing. The therapist makes a guess about this and uses it to create an experiment that will trigger a reaction. The experiment is simply an offering of some potentially nourishing statement or action, something the therapist guesses will be automatically rejected. The experiment is done while the client is in a mindful state. The client notices the reaction. The reaction, when it is allowed to unfold into an integrative process, provides an opportunity to access and examine the operations and assumptions of the adaptive unconscious that produced it. It provides an opportunity to complete, in a positive way, the old, painful experiences that led to those assumptions in the first place.
Mindfulness entails a change in the quality of attention. Attention is directed inward, toward the flow of present experience; it is receptive, open, and allowing. This quality has been described as “a change in the quality of attention, which passes from the looking-for to the letting-come” (Depraz, Varela, & Vermersch, 2000, p. 126). This combination of an open, vulnerable client and a therapist who is attempting to trigger reactions is exactly what makes the method work. Of course, clients know that this is the process. They understand what can happen. The procedure is voluntary and a completely cooperative effort. If the therapist is adroit enough, a client’s reaction will be a source of insight—long-buried feelings and memories will emerge. If the therapist is compassionate, then new experiences—of comfort, safety, hope, and happiness—may become possible.
An example of an experiment might be a simple statement such as, “You’re completely safe here.” Or it could be the client looking away and then looking directly at the therapist. The variety of such experiments is effectively infinite. The experimental statements or actions are always positive and are meant to offer something emotionally nourishing. “You’re a good person” is another example. If the therapist has guessed well, the statement will run counter to the client’s implicit beliefs and foundational experiences. It will be the kind of emotional nourishment that the client has never been able to receive. It can evoke a longing that the client suppressed (another word is “encapsulated”) long ago. Offering such a statement can trigger strong emotions, painful memories, and the realization of what’s been missing. At this point, new beliefs about what is possible can be entertained and new experiences—the missing ones or something close to them—become possible. This simple process is the core of the method.
Several other important elements of the method support this core process, including:
1. the client’s commitment and ability to enter into the process consciously and willingly, and
2. the therapist’s ability to be present and compassionate, and to
3. understand nonverbal expressions as signs of present experience, and to
4. notice and understand the client’s nonconscious, habitual behaviors as indicators of implicit beliefs and formative experiences, and to
5. create experiments that will trigger reactions, which can lead to emotional release and self-understanding, and to
6. enable positive emotional experiences that were previously extremely rare or entirely missing.
The Client’s Commitment: Mindfulness and Honesty
I give prospective clients a document that makes clear what will be expected of them. It says in part:
This method is not about talking out your problems. There won’t be long, speculative conversations about your troubles or your history. This method is designed to assist you in studying the processes that automatically create and maintain the person you have become. It is a method of assisted self-study. It requires that you enter into short periods of time where you become calm and centered enough to observe your own reactions, as if you were observing the behavior of another person, a state called mindfulness. The therapist assists your self-study by creating “little experiments” while you are in mindfulness. These experiments are always nonviolent and basically are designed to evoke reactions that will be reflections of the habits and beliefs that make you who you are. The implicit beliefs and relationship habits with which you meet the world automatically shape your present behavior. Aspects of your behavior, the aspects that reflect your deepest beliefs, are what the therapist uses to create the experiments.
The document goes on to say:
The process works best: (1) if you can follow and report on your present experience; (2) if you’re able to get into a calm, inward-focused state and are relaxed enough to allow reactions; (3) if you’re willing to experience some painful feelings and speak about them; and (4) if you have the courage to be open and honest about your experience. That courage will be your greatest ally.
I have come to recognize that the method requires these four things of a client. Of course, some clients won’t be able to do all this at first. There will have to be a “pre-study” phase in which other methods will have to be used. Such methods might be simply listening sympathetically without talking much, just indicating that you understand what the client is going through. It may take some time doing things like this to build the client’s trust and to gain the cooperation of the client’s adaptive unconscious, enough time to bring the client to the stage where he can enter mindfulness and allow reactions. I also tell clients about the rewards that are there for those who practice self-study. Zen master Dogen said, “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things” (in Keown, 2006, p. 109). Of course, the work we do is only a small step on that journey. And though the method is different, the attitude and direction are the same. Release from unnecessary suffering is release from an identity that includes habits and ideas that are not only old and outworn but fundamentally flawed as descriptions of reality.
The Therapist’s State of Mind: Loving Presence
The phrase “state of mind” has much more precise meaning nowadays than it had just a few decades ago. Neurological research has revealed much about exactly what states the brain can be in when people interact (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2000). Much has been written on the interaction of caregivers and the infants in their care (Schore, 2001; Gerhardt, 2004; Cassidy & Shaver, 2010). Adults in relationship also affect each other’s states of mind. For the very intimate relationship between a therapist and client, the therapist’s conscious awareness and deliberate control of his or her state of mind is essential. The effect of the therapist’s state of mind on the process of this method is without a doubt the single most important factor in its success.
To best serve others in their self-study, the therapist must be able to sustain both presence and compassion. The therapist has to maintain a constant focus on present activity and present experience, both her own and that of the client. That’s what presence means. A feeling of compassion is also essential. When presence and compassion are combined and constant, the therapist’s state of mind can be called loving presence. (In training people in this method, the development and practice of this state of mind have become primary goals.) This aligns the Hakomi method with the most universal spiritual teachings:
agape in Christianity, compassion and mindfulness in Buddhism, nonviolence and nonseparation in both.
In a very short time, loving presence can establish in the client a sense of being safe, cared for, heard, and understood. Self-exploration, especially when using mindfulness, places clients in extremely vulnerable positions. A therapist in loving presence helps clients to allow this vulnerability and provides the best context for assisted self-study to happen. Here’s a quote:
Loving presence is easy to recognize. Imagine a happy and contented mother looking at the sweet face of her peaceful newborn baby. She is calm, loving, and attentive. Unhurried and undistracted, the two of them seem to be outside of time . . . simply being. Gently held within a field of love and life’s wisdom, they are as present with each other as any two could be. (Martin, n.d., p. 1)
For the therapist to develop this state of mind, she must first look at others as living beings and sources of inspiration. As one therapist put it, “If you cannot see anything lovable in this person that you can respond to in a genuine way, then you are not the right person to help this person.” It is this intention and habit of seeing something lovable in the other that creates the feeling state necessary for loving presence. The first thing I instruct students to do is to create this habit as the primary thing in any interaction. Create it and sustain it throughout your sessions.
Any number of things will support this intention. First, one must avoid being drawn into a conversation about abstractions—ideas, explanations, the meaning of the past, and such. The first goal is to establish a relationship that will support assisted self-study; the habit of gathering information by asking questions and considering answers is not the way to do it. The therapist’s words and actions must demonstrate that he is paying attention to what the client is experiencing right now, cares about what the client is feeling, and understands what that means for the client. This connection through present experience is the key to limbic resonance. So the therapist searches for what there is about the client that is emotionally nourishing or inspiring of appreciation and connection. Another thing that helps build the right relationship is realizing the process as a cooperative enterprise where feelings of partnership, teamwork, and mutual respect are basic. The idea that we are not separate, that we are inescapably parts of a whole infinitely greater than each of us alone, is the root of loving presence.
Present Experience, Implicit Beliefs, and Procedural Memory
A picture has emerged of a set of pervasive, adaptive, sophisticated mental processes that occur largely out of view. Indeed, some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious will may be an illusion.
TIMOTHY WILSON, Strangers to Ourselves, 2002
All living organisms from the humble amoeba to the human are born with devices designed to solve automatically, no proper reasoning required, the basic problems of life.
ANTONIO DAMASIO, Looking for Spinoza, 2003
The one thing we most want to help clients discover and change is the habitual ways they create unnecessary suffering for themselves and others. The logic is this:
1. Experience is organized by habits that function outside of consciousness.
2. The most significant of these organizing habits are those that were learned early in life and developed in reaction to compelling, formative experiences.
3. Such habits are stored in implicit memory and are not normally accessible to consciousness.
Implicit memory [sometimes called procedural memory, sometimes emotional memory] involves parts of the brain that do not require conscious processing during encoding or retrieval. When implicit memory is retrieved, the neural net profiles that are reactivated involve circuits in the brain that are a fundamental part of our everyday experience of life: behaviors, emotions, and images. These implicit elements form part of the foundation for our subjective sense of ourselves: We act, feel, and imagine without recognition of the influence of past experience on our present reality. (Siegel, 2003, p. 29)
4. They are automated procedures, triggered by perceptions of internal and external realities, perceptions which themselves are influenced by organizing habits.
5. They are the functional equivalents of implicit beliefs.
These implicit predictions and beliefs exert a profound influence over everyday life without any simple, direct way to modify them. They influence all ongoing experience, whether it originates internally or externally, by producing the habitual reactions that result. They shape all manner of experience—perception, mood, thought, feeling, and behavior. Thus, present experience is a reliable, immediate expression of unconscious habits and beliefs. For that reason, we focus on present experiences and use them to bring what is normally unconscious into consciousness.
Nonverbal Indicators and Formative Experiences
Accessing the kinds of beliefs that pervasively and unconsciously influence experience requires that the therapist get ideas about what the client’s formative early experiences were or what implicit beliefs the client’s behaviors are expressing. To gather this information, the therapist focuses attention on the qualities of the client’s habitual posture, tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, speech patterns, and such. (Some examples include ending verbal statements with the inflection of a question or a habitually sad-looking face or tilt of the head.) Many of these qualities are habitual nonverbal expressions of implicit beliefs. We call them indicators.
As you may imagine, there are many such indicators. Some can be completely obvious in what they say about the client. Others require that the therapist learn them over time. In bioenergetics, for example, the indicators are often postural. A sunken chest and locked knees for a bioenergetic therapist would be indicators of “an oral pattern” (Lowen, 1975). Given that pattern, the therapist has both a diagnosis and a way to proceed with treatment. Almost all methods of psychotherapy use particular sets of indicators this way and usually refer to them as “symptoms.” In this method, we use indicators differently. We use them to get ideas for experiments.
As we interact and relate to others, we don’t normally focus on their little, seemingly insignificant habits. In an ordinary interaction, conversation is most important; we might not consciously think about a person’s subtle nonverbal behaviors. We might ignore a slight feeling of discomfort (about not being believed, for example) that results from the way the other person is looking at us with her head always turned to one side. Odds are she won’t be consciously aware of either the angle of her head or the skepticism it indicates. This level of interaction is usually handled by the adaptive unconscious. In Hakomi, we consciously search for indicators, and the turning of the head is a common one. Through experimenting with it many times, I have come to expect that it can indicate formative experiences of not being told the truth or not being understood. The emotion associated with it is usually hurt. Though the hurt is not being felt at the moment, it is an expression of an implicit belief: “I must be careful about what people are telling me! I could get hurt again.” Though not conscious, this belief is controlling present behavior and experience. Indicators are the external expressions of this process.
In Hakomi, we use indicators to create experiments, experiments designed to trigger reactions. This is a vital piece of the method. It is our clear intention to study a client’s behavior not for symptoms of disease but for sources of experiments. We anticipate that the experiments we carry out will bring the unconscious, adaptive processes driving that behavior into the client’s awareness. A therapist using this approach is thought of as having an experimental attitude. We are evidence seekers—evidence that is gathered on the spot, evidence that clients can use to understand themselves. The basic idea is this: (1) indicators suggest experiments; (2) experiments create reactions; and (3) reactions are evidence of implicit beliefs. Gathering evidence is what experiments are all about, and that’s exactly why we do them.
For instance,
if the client’s habit is to hold her head a little bit off center and turned slightly away, we might do an experiment where the client, while in a mindful state, slowly turns her head back toward center. Most such clients, when doing this movement deliberately and carefully, will react with fear. This fear is about being emotionally hurt, and it is associated with memories of that happening and beliefs about how to avoid it. The habitual turning of the head is only one indicator and the experiment only one that could be done. There are endless possible indicators and experiments that can be done. Finding indicators and devising suitable experiments are some of the things that make this work so interesting. It is a combination of searching for clues like a detective and testing them like a scientist. It is a long way from the “talking cure.”
Using Mindfulness and Little Experiments
The procedure that is used is as follows:
1. Find an indicator.
2. Imagine and decide what experiment to use.
3. In a gentle way and at a suitable time, shift the client’s attention to the indicator and ask if it would be okay to do an experiment.
4. If the client agrees, set up the experiment by asking for mindfulness and a signal from the client when she is ready.
5. When the signal is given, do the experiment.
6. Watch for and, if necessary, ask the client about the outcome. (I often have to remind new students, “It’s an experiment. So, get the data!”)
Several general types of outcomes are possible:
1. The experiment could have no effect whatsoever. In that case, either the indicator wasn’t significant, there was something wrong with the way the experiment was conducted, or, in some sense, the client wasn’t ready.
2. The experiment evokes an image, memory, or idea, but without an accompanying emotional reaction.
3. It evokes an emotional reaction. For each case, the process unfolds differently.