Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy

by Halko Weiss

  A simple but important sign to track for is the client’s readiness to speak, when ready to express her experiential truth, at which point the therapist needs to stop and listen. We also track for when the client is doing work inside, which also signals us to wait. We let the client follow her internal process, find congruent thoughts and ideas that arise from emotional states, and come up with her own insights and answers. We must track for the difference between the client falling into old trances, which we need to interrupt, and doing important inner work, which requires that we wait patiently for a signal that invites us to engage. We watch for signs of social engagement. We also pay attention to our own feelings and bodily experience. We learn to track and to trust the degree of limbic resonance that is happening between the client and ourselves.

  Tracking Nonverbal Indicators

  Once we are observing what the person’s moment-to-moment experience seems to be, we begin to detect nonverbal indicators of core material. These include signs of how the person is organizing experience—things that seem significant or characteristic about the person. We want to notice something that suggests how the client sees himself, how he sees the world, what he expects from others. We remember that all we can actually do is guess about this. We don’t need to be right, but we want to collect some possible ideas as hypotheses for experiments, and to check them out when the time is right. We are looking for patterns of emotional management behavior, of meaning making, and of social engagement skills.

  So we learn to pay attention to the client’s eyes, postural habits, gestures that repeat themselves, the expression etched in the face (the default expression), patterns of speech—anything that goes with the client’s unique personal style. We want to continually see these characteristics in the light of loving presence, not to pathologize them or make them a problem in terms of the person’s being. To foster this, we might take on the characteristics of a person’s style the way an actor would, not to caricaturize or mimic them, but just subtly embodying them to get a more compassionate sense of what the client’s world is like. We are interested in inhabiting the client’s world in order to understand his fears, his needs, his experience of life, his ideas about himself and others. The result of this kind of understanding is a natural feeling of warmth toward him, of compassionate appreciation. Barasch notes, “Being able to feel our way into another’s soul, to sense what is going on behind their social mask, is the passkey to kindness” (2005, p. 58).

  There are many possible nonverbal indicators of how people organize their experience and model their world. Just the voice alone offers these possible indicators: tone, intonation, cadence, intensity, loudness, speed, long pauses, word order, editing, laughing, swallowing, whispering, repeating words or phrases (“you know,” “because,” “uh . . .”), using past tense, saying “you” instead of “I,” repeated throat clearing, and so on.

  We could notice, for example, that someone tends to speak quickly, in little bursts. We could imagine or guess that this habit might go back to a situation where the person as a child wasn’t listened to enough, or with enough patience. We then hypothesize a generalized belief the person might have that others have limited attention available for him—that he needs to speak fast or the listener will be gone before he gets it all out. We could contact this possible dynamic by saying, “I notice that you seem to speak quickly,” with an invitation to curiosity implied in our voice. We could also suggest, as an experiment (see Chapter 16), “Notice what happens if you speak slowly.” Or we could just leap in with our guess about a missing experience and offer a statement like, “I’m listening to you. I’ll stay while you finish saying what you want to say.” Or simply, “I’m interested in you,” while closely tracking the client’s response for parts of him that agree and parts that might not.

  Other indicators include facial expressions (as so delicately researched by Ekman & Rosenberg, 2005), such as position of the lips, licking the lips, biting the lip, chin forward, chin up or down, jaw tension, blushing, smiling or not smiling, furrowed brow, eyes wide open, looking up, direction of eyes, no eye contact, eyes seem forward or pulled back, narrowing of the eyes, dimming of the light in the eyes, movement of the eyebrows—there are perhaps hundreds of these little signs that can serve as indicators. Significant nonverbal indicators might also include body gestures, postural tendencies like curling inward, turning away, or leaning forward, raised shoulders, shrugging movements, rigidity, rocking, hand movements, position of the feet, containing (by holding arms in tight to the sides), rubbing fingers, stroking a leg, covering mouth while speaking, incongruent gestures, facial expressions, or speech—all those outward signs of internal experiences that body psychotherapy has explored for decades (Marlock & Weiss, with Young & Soth, 2015).

  Tracking is one of the ways that Hakomi therapy is present centered—the skill of paying attention to the outward physical signs of the person’s present experience. Nonverbal indicators are usually outside a person’s conscious awareness. They are habitual, reflecting the core material that organizes a person’s experience, as well as her sense of self. One of the main goals of the Hakomi method is to bring this core material to consciousness. The first step is to notice the signs of implicit beliefs in the way someone expresses her experience. Tracking allows a therapist to do this and not ask unnecessary questions or wait for the client to tell him.

  Contact

  Once we have an idea of what the client is experiencing, we can make explicit contact, though hopefully we have been in a nonverbal level of contact all along. Verbal contact is naming the client’s present experience. We contact something we have tracked—something the other person is doing, feeling, or focusing on in the moment. It can be something the client is conscious of, or something that is outside of her awareness. We generally avoid contacting the content or story unnecessarily, beyond letting the person know we are listening and following what she is telling us.

  In Hakomi, we consider it more skillful and clinically useful to contact the experience the person seems to be having while she telling us about it: “That brings up some feelings. . .[?]” “You’re remembering it now, huh. . . [?]” “That makes you happy. . . [?]” A contact statement is actually a short phrase that lets the person know (1) that you are listening and really present in a heartfelt way, (2) that you’re interested and in a nonjudgmental state, and (3) that you understand her feelings and internal experience. A contact statement is open ended, almost like a question: “That was intense for you . . . [?]” “Hard to talk, huh. . .[?]”—so the other person can easily accept, reject, or modify it. Contact, therefore, invites the client to slow down, explore deeper, be more specific, and find out what is really going on inside.

  The Practical Skill of Contacting

  While the verbal skill of contact is quite simple and is sometimes used by people intuitively in everyday life, it needs a background of the therapist “being in contact.” This means that through tracking and by being in a state of mindful connection and awareness of the client’s present experience, the therapist can empathically sense what is going on behind the words and other expressions of the client (Marks-Tarlow, 2012). Since many therapists are trained to focus on the story being told, the state of the client may become lost as secondary. This change of focus from story to storyteller often takes therapists long periods of relearning. With this way of being present in place, contact flows without any effort from the therapist, if no other conflicting factors are in play.

  When we teach contact in the Hakomi method, we focus our behavior on the following guidelines that tend to become second nature after some practice:

  • A contact statement addresses only one aspect of the client’s experience—a simple, one-dimensional observation—nothing that invites complex mental work. It is meant to be easy to grasp and to lead to deeper internal observations.

  • Contact statements use the present tense and rarely address the content of the verbal exchange.

&nb
sp; • The statement is short, sometimes only one word, like, “sad. . .[?],” “nerve-wracking . . . [?],” or “confusing . . . [?].” More often it includes a small number of words, such as, “several parts here . . . [?]” or “hard to stay present . . .[?].”

  • A contact statement isn’t a true question, but has a questioning tone and is open-ended enough (indicated by the [?] symbol) to let the client know that the therapist is guessing and not attached to being right. The therapist’s tone invites curiosity and slowing down. That gives the client the freedom to search inside himself, to confirm, reject, specify, reflect, or add, because there is nothing in the therapist to resist that takes the client's attention away from his own process. Ultimately, this supports a deepening exchange in which a client can feel well understood, and trust that he is on a collaborative, curious search together with the therapist, mining the wisdom of the client's experience.

  • Full diagnostic questions are avoided because they lead the client, and create a doctor-patient system (Chapter 22) where it is implied that the doctor is going to magically or scientifically do something with the response. Questions such as, “Did you ever feel this before? Why do you think you are feeling this kind of emotion?” often trigger left-brain efforts in clients, and encourage them to come up with a theory about their experience rather than immersing themselves mindfully in it. Questions can be used skillfully to keep clients in a mindful exploration: “Oh, some emotion comes up with that, huh. . . [?] Why don't we hang out with that longer? What does that part of you seem to need?”

  • Skillful contact statements might not even be noticed by the client. The therapist is very simply demonstrating understanding to create attunement in and for the therapeutic relationship. Later on in the process, a contact statement can be used to shift attention to something the client could then study (only if he or she becomes curious). It is an invitation for the client to become aware of or go more deeply into what is arising in him with the therapist coming along as a companion. It can often bring attention to something the client has not been aware of, and opens the door to the assisted self-study which is the main characteristic of Hakomi.

  Using Contact

  We may contact something in order to help the person be more aware of some part of his experience, or to help him stay with an experience: “Your breathing starts to change as you think about that, huh. . . [?]” “So, that feeling is in your chest. . . [?]” “Maybe you notice some tightness in your jaw . . .[?]” “Your hands seem to be saying something. . . [?]” At some point, we want to shift the person’s attention to one of the indicators of what we imagine to be core material. We want to do this with good timing, sensitivity, and grace.

  Contact serves several purposes in a Hakomi session. It is part of building the relationship and, as such, it must be an expression of the therapist’s state of mind—loving presence. Any hint of a critical attitude or implication of something wrong can jeopardize the relationship and compromise the therapeutic alliance. The therapist doesn’t need to verbalize the experience she is having that evokes in her a spontaneous state of loving presence, such as the client’s sweet nature or determination or courage, but she could at times: “I am so touched by the courage you show.” But the conscious intention to be seeing the client in this way not only influences what the therapist can perceive, it also gets communicated in the tone, energy, and words the therapist uses whenever she makes verbal contact. Being in loving presence, of course, does not mean we cannot be curious about countertransference reactions that are evoked in us by the other, which can also give us clues about how the other is organized (Feinstein, 1990; Natterson, 1991).

  Our attitude in working with our experience or our client’s remains crucial. Just the tiny shift of saying, “That was really frightening, huh. . .?” instead of “You were frightened?” conveys a different message to the client. Therefore, the skillfulness involved with contacting the client is less about getting the words right than it is about the state of mind from which the therapist does or says anything. It comes back to working on our own presence and habits of perception. It comes down to, above all else, the practice of loving presence.

  In the last part of a session, we often contact the parts that are working well, and the nourishment that is going in (“You feel a little more relaxed now. . . [?]”) whereas earlier in the session we might contact what seems to be in the way (“Hard to let that in, huh. . . [?]”). Contacting the shifts in the client’s experience toward nourishment and transformation helps him anchor these shifts in his conscious awareness and felt experience, so that he may find his way back to them in his daily life outside of the therapy room.

  Mastering Tracking and Contact

  To develop mastery in the Hakomi skills of tracking and contact, it is most helpful is to practice:

  • Staying calm

  • Staying present

  • Staying aware

  • Opening ourselves (being accessible and receptive)

  • Loving presence

  • Listening (to the body—our own included)

  • Responding wisely and compassionately

  In short, this means that the therapist needs to be practiced and experienced in being in a mindful state while being present to another person.

  Listening—deep listening—means listening to emotions, to the body, to embedded attitudes and themes, to more than just the verbal story someone is telling. The philosopher Heidegger (1966) talked about “releasement” (Gelassenheit)—the capacity to be available to what is in a way that lets things be just as they are. In deep listening, we release ourselves to the reality we are encountering, waiting for it to come to us while letting go as best we can of our preconceptions. In Hakomi, listening to emotions skillfully means we specifically try to learn to tell the difference between emotions based on limiting ideas and beliefs, and the natural feelings that are an authentic response to the painful experiences of life. The indicators of someone’s inner experience and world are mostly nonverbal. Our own body is also constantly communicating information about the mutual experience we are having as we resonate limbically with another. We may even consider that the heart might be a kind of brain with a large “energy field” that receives and sends signals to and from the immediate environment (Barasch, 2005). From this perspective, we learn to release ourselves to listen to and from the heart to get the best chance of understanding someone’s experience in a way that allows us to be helpful.

  Responding wisely is the act of verbally or nonverbally expressing what the other person needs from us. It may require staying quiet or speaking, moving away or closer. A wise response moves a client nearer to her own truth, strength, goodness, and freedom. There is no formula for a wise response; it comes from clarity and kindness, wisdom and compassion, courage and sensitivity. However, there is a maxim in Hakomi that says, “When in doubt, collaborate” (Duncan, Miller, Wampold, & Hubble, 2010), and a training exercise called “doing therapy the easy way.” In doing therapy the easy way, the therapist collaborates with the client by putting out whatever she is wondering about and allowing the client to choose what is most alive for him in the moment. “We could deepen into this doubt we are contacting, or stay with the image of your brother you noticed. Do you have a sense of which one is best for now?”

  Tracking is a kind of loving attention, offering our presence and perceptual skillfulness to another. We demonstrate that we are paying this quality of attention by our demeanor, our nonverbal expression, and by verbally contacting the experience of the talker so that she realizes we are a loving, curious witness. We are always tracking to notice the client’s reactions to how we are being. If anything seems to disrupt the limbic resonance or disturb the relational field, we want to name it and shift it if possible. We could do this simply by changing our posture or facial expression, or by contacting what seems to be happening: “So, something doesn’t feel quite right here . . . [?]” (see Chapter 22).

  What we contact
is what we draw the client’s attention to, and it demonstrates where our own attention was drawn. In this way, it expresses our state of mind and influences the state of mind of the client. It has the power to direct the flow of attention and in this way to direct the unfolding process of the client and of the therapy session.

  The way we do contact, as the outward demonstration of what we are tracking and understanding, as well as of our state of mind as therapists, either invites the process with the client to unfold toward pathology or allows it to move in the direction of nourishment and expanding growth. It determines the degree of nonviolence, nonforcing, and nonjudgment that is possible in the therapeutic relationship. What and how we contact has the power to move the process in the direction of what is now being called “positive psychology” (Johanson, 2010b; Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) or to be held by the historical perspective of “damage repair.” It either perpetuates clients’ ideas that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, or it shifts them in the direction of remembering their wholeness (Monda, 2000), of becoming interested—in a mindful and accepting way—in what and how they do things. In Hakomi, inviting mindfulness is an affirmation that the person was at least cocreative in organizing his experience in the first place, and retains the creative potential to reorganize his life in new, more complex, satisfying ways now. Mindfulness and what Lewis and his coauthors call the love that “is the tether binding our whirling lives” (Lewis et al., 2000, p. 222) empowers clients naturally and respectfully in the direction of finding the kind of emotional nourishment they need at this point in their lives.