Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy

by Halko Weiss

  Since research shows that the client is the most potent variable affecting outcome of therapy (Wampold, 2001), it is essential that as therapists we remember that we are supporting someone to have a positive experience. This means that therapy

  • must be a collaborative process,

  • demonstrates that the client’s experience guides and directs the process,

  • uses experiencing and mindfulness to access the limbic system,

  • sees the client as primary agent and the therapist as a support person,

  • is experimental, rather than directive or mechanical,

  • stays with experience to allow insights to arise,

  • respects the needs and goals of the client,

  • adjusts for the reactions of the client to the therapist and the process,

  • places nourishing self-study, exploration, and self-discovery as a priority, and

  • realizes that insight is not enough, but seeks the missing experiences that can counteract and transform previous limiting experiences.

  Our ways of perceiving, receiving, and responding to the client, through what we call tracking and contact, form the basis for the therapeutic experience in Hakomi. They are how we show up for the client, and they help to create an alliance that is a powerful context for healing.

  CHAPTER 15

  Accessing and Deepening

  Carol Ladas Gaskin, David Cole, and Jon Eisman

  Consciousness: a reflexive aspect of mental process that occurs in some but not all minds, in which the knower is aware of some fraction of his knowledge or the thinker of some fraction of his thought.

  GREGORY BATESON, Angels Fear, 1987

  “ACCESSING” IS A word borrowed by Kurtz from the vocabulary of information technology. It describes a phase in a typical Hakomi session, which progresses from the opening phase of establishing an interpersonal therapeutic alliance to the intrapsychic phase of exploring in mindfulness. It is a move from ordinary consciousness to mindful exploration of emergent, unconscious experience (Kurtz, 1990a).

  In the field of information technology, accessing refers to data retrieval from memory storage or from a source remote from the processor. Its metaphoric meaning within Hakomi refers to language and actions initiated by the therapist with the intention of helping a client attend to previously unattended-to experience. By “unattended-to experience,” we mean thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, desires, and impulses that exist outside the client’s normal purview of awareness. In psychoanalytic language, we are helping clients become aware of their “‘pre-reflective unconscious’—the shaping of experience by organizing principles that operate outside a person’s conscious awareness” (Stolorow et al., 1987, pp. 12–13). In the language of neuroscience, we are providing a way for clients to access core organizing beliefs (see Chapters 7 and 19) embedded in implicit memory (Schacter, 1992, 1996).

  In order to understand this, we might imagine client and therapist exploring a dark landscape together with a flashlight. Prior to the accessing phase, the flashlight of the client’s attention has been drifting in habitual patterns that inform a limited cognitive map of the client’s internal world, a map based primarily on habituated and stereotyped patterns of attention (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). Through the skillful use of language and the interventions described below, the Hakomi therapist invites the client’s hand gently to alter this automatic scanning pattern, and bring into the light experiences that are otherwise consigned to darkness.

  This redirection of attention—sometimes surprising, painful, relieving, or refreshing—gives clients access to new information about their inner ecology (Schwartz, 1995). Accessing in the context of safety and support leads into the deepening phase that helps clients come to understand and take ownership of previously unconscious interpretations, decisions, beliefs, agendas, and positions thought of by Ecker and Hulley (1996) as including emotional wounds, presuppositions, and protective actions. Kris (1982) and others have suggested that possible organizers of experience could be frustrated desires, forgotten fears, rekindled injuries, internal conflicts, memories of relationships, or enduring character traits.

  In Hakomi, we are helping our clients study how they have unconsciously organized experience, usually with regard to certain areas of concern, such as unwanted behaviors, constraints, and forms of suffering or perturbation, that motivate them to seek help.

  Hakomi’s Constructivist Roots

  What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.

  CARL JUNG

  A personal past that acts silently to make someone repeat patterns at any and all scales and in any and all conditions can only feel like an intrinsic constraint reducing the degree of freedom in the present.

  DANIEL STERN, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, 2004

  Hakomi has a constructivist view of human psychology (Mahoney, 2003). Hakomi therapists operate on the premise that human beings are active agents in at least the cocreation of a world of meaning and experience. Not only do humans consciously and unconsciously interpret their experience and give it meaning, but they also organize and manage it. This organization and management places some things in the domain of conscious awareness, and consigns others to the forgetfulness of the unconscious. For example, Siegel (1999) writes that implicit memory carries emotionally loaded memories such as those experienced in disorganized or chaotic attachments (Karen, 1998). They are stored in the limbic brain and are often preverbal memories or experiences where insight is blocked. These memories when retrieved have no feeling of being a memory. In a sense, a great deal of experience is organized outside of the mind’s limited scope of attention into the domain of the unconscious, where it continues autonomously to influence affect and behavior in the interest of perceived self-survival and self-fulfillment.

  Given the limited capacity of the human mind to be reflexively aware of experience in a present moment, at any given time most of what we know is known unconsciously (Stern, 2004). Also, given the difficulty humans encounter when they deliberately try to change habitual patterns of behavior—dieting, getting more exercise, managing temper, learning to be less judgmental, or learning to slow down, even when that behavior results in frustration, failure, pain, and discomfort—one must assume, as does contemporary science (Lipton, 2005), that what is unconscious has a far greater capacity to motivate behavior than what we consciously know, want, or desire. It follows that by making the unconscious conscious, we render it less powerful and less likely to determine our feelings, thoughts, and behavior. As Ecker and Hulley (1996) suggest, clients normally present in an antisymptom way that desires the riddance of a symptom. However, a little experiential work, such as accessing and deepening in Hakomi, inevitably reveals a prosymptom level where the presenting problem makes perfect sense in terms of fulfilling unconscious needs with originally limited resources (Johanson & Taylor, 1988).

  Or, as Watzlawick has often put it in books and lectures, consciousness is the problem (Watzlawick et al., 1974). The inherent predicament with many talk therapies that occur in ordinary consciousness is that consciousness is already organized. Both perception of and response to external and internal stimuli have already been organized by the core filters, beliefs, schemas, or maps of our unconscious imagination by the time we are perceiving and responding. While verbal discourse can provide many things such as support and analytical insight, it is basically recycling already known material at the mercy of unknown organizers (Wilber, 2006) influenced by subtle but powerful social-cultural as well as personal-familial forces (Paniagua & Yamada, 2013; Sue & Sue, 1990; Thomas & Scharazbaum, 2006). This is why Watzlawick and others opted for paradoxical and/or hypnotic methods in therapy to negotiate this conundrum of consciousness.

  If these presumptions are correct, then accessing the organization of experience through mindfulness is indeed a powerful way for human beings to relate and interact (Fisher, 2002; Grayson, 2003; Siegel & Hartzell, 2003). Within the ther
apeutic interaction of a Hakomi session there is born a capacity for freedom that exceeds the freedom an individual can achieve through acting alone, even through meditating alone (Wilber, 2006). The attention of the individual acting alone is constantly constrained by these unconsciously determined patterns we have been naming. The therapist equipped to facilitate accessing nudges the hand that holds the beam to break the self-reinforcing patterns of attention that sustain habitual ways of thinking, interpreting, and reacting.

  This is so because the basic assessing move toward mindfulness induces a shift in consciousness away from simply talking about one’s experience or simply acting it out in some expressive way and toward talking from direct, present-moment experience. The mindful qualities of slowing down, letting go of agendas, becoming open, receptive, exploratory, and befriending experience as opposed to changing it allow us to be present to immediate, felt experience in a way that opens a place of mysterious not-knowing that makes possible the discovery of new material (Chapters 10 and 15). At the same time, bringing bare awareness to our present experience allows us to take it under observation or disidentify with it (Kegan, 1982). No longer being fused or blended with our experiences, we now have them instead of simply being them, thus achieving a freedom that overcomes Watzlawick’s problematic. A short answer, then, to the question, “What do you do in Hakomi?” is “We manage states of consciousness,” in a way that helps us access unconscious experience in a mindful state.

  We suggest that this accessing movement is a coconstructivist endeavor in which client and therapist conspire in the creation of freedom to act nonreactively, thereby honoring complexity, diversity, and response flexibility. As Stolorow and colleagues (1987) point out so clearly, everyone, therapists and clients alike, creatively organizes experience. This means that therapy must indeed be intersubjective, since neither side can claim objectivity in our postmodern world. In Hakomi, this translates into working in a radically collaborative way that always honors the organic wisdom of a client’s experience (Duncan, 2010).

  The Unconscious Is Organic, Knowing, and Close at Hand

  Living things are called organisms because of the overriding importance of organization and each part of the pattern somehow contains the information as to what it is in relation to the whole.

  ROBERT O. BECKER, The Body Electric, 1998

  The accessing metaphor connotes that the needed unconscious information is close at hand and can appear quickly once the right accessing code and context are discovered. Indeed, in Hakomi, we believe that the unconscious figuratively shines through the conscious persona like flakes of gold in the ore of the present moment. It is right there before our very eyes wanting to be discovered. There is an impulse, which manifests in multiple ways, of the organism to heal—to move toward greater wholeness (Monda, 2000). As Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for discovering (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), there are not only entropic forces in life that tear things down, there is a negentropic force that moves parts toward increasing complexity. Gendlin (1996) thinks of this phenomenon in terms of “the life-forward direction,” while Fosha (2008) refers to it as “transformance.”

  Gold-accessing codes are often revealed in body posture, which can be employed for efficient retrieval of normally unconscious information. For instance, a therapist reflected with curiosity to a client he was working with while standing:

  THERAPIST: I notice your left foot is not parallel with the right, but pointed out a bit[?].

  CLIENT: Oh, yeah.

  THERAPIST: Are you curious about that?

  CLIENT: Yeah, it makes me wonder.

  THERAPIST: Okay, how about just bringing your awareness to it, and maybe notice if there is any movement associated with it.

  CLIENT [Puts more pressure on the outward foot]: Oh! It is the beginning of a movement toward the door.

  THERAPIST: The door. . . [?]

  CLIENT: Yes, like that is my escape route.

  THERAPIST: Oh, escape. Like some part of you needs to know that is an option. How about making space for it, and allowing it to tell you more about itself?

  CLIENT: Uh . . . so . . . it is something about humiliation. If there is any form of disrespect, it wants to head for the door.

  THERAPIST: That sounds reasonable. Can you stay with it and sense into what it needs around that?

  CLIENT: Yeah. . . . It needs to know its opinions . . . its opinions won’t be shut down because someone thinks they are smarter.

  THERAPIST: All right then. So, let’s tell it clearly, from me and from you, that we really want to respect its opinions or hear about it if it starts to feel humiliated.

  CLIENT: Okay. Yeah, it’s getting that. It’s calming down.

  THERAPIST: Great. And I’m thinking it would not have that sensitivity if there were not some good reason for it. Would this be a good time for us to make room for it to lead us toward any foundational memories it might have in its consciousness around this issue?

  CLIENT: Yeah, this is a familiar one.

  This is an example of a therapist trained to relinquish a habitual fixation on the content of the client’s speech—the repetitious recital of stories, complaints, explanations, cycles of figuring out, and automatic systems of interaction. More positively, the therapist is trained to attend to the client’s present-moment experience as revealed by literally everything else the client characteristically does, including the placement of his feet. Various forms of body language—tone of voice, facial gestures, breathing patterns, hand gestures, speech rhythms, tics, and key words—may all reveal (Kurtz & Prestera, 1976) core narrative organizers, all of which can be used as a royal road to the unconscious (Johanson, 2015). This is also an example of accessing by going from ordinary consciousness to a more mindful state, and then deepening by maintaining mindful curiosity about what comes up next. The deepening process moves from an example of the client’s creation (placement of feet, in the example above) toward the level of the creator, the core narrative memories and beliefs organizing the feet.

  Preconditions for Success With Accessing Skills

  When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it.

  THOMAS LEWIS, FARI AMINI, AND RICHARD LANNON, A General Theory of Love, 2000

  Since a living, organic system has inherent, self-protective dispositions, accessing requires that the first agenda be that client and therapist become allies and collaborators in order to create a perceived environment of emotional safety (Chapter 9). It is important to move slowly as well as with sensitivity and respect. It is essential that we adopt an anthropological attitude—one that realizes the relativity of all systems of meaning and value, and refrains from expectations and impositions of external frameworks and absolute ideals and standards (McGoldrick et al., 1996; Paniagua & Yamada, 2013; Thomas & Schwarzbaum, 2006). Toward this end, the five foundational Hakomi principles of unity, organicity, mind-body holism, mindfulness, and nonviolence must constantly underlie all methods and techniques. In addition, Kurtz (1990a) has recommended somewhat overlapping, but worth repeating, guidelines for accessing: Create safety; concentrate on present experience; go slowly—always within a therapeutic bubble of loving presence.

  Essential Accessing Skills: The Accessing Four-Step

  All accessing in Hakomi follows a basic four-step formula:

  1. Contact experience.

  2. Ensure mindfulness is present.

  3. Immerse fully in the experience.

  4. Study the nuances of the experience or allow the experience to summon other related experiences.

  The information or summoned experience from the fourth step then becomes the subject of the next, first-step contact statement, and the sequence repeats. Each round reveals wider and deeper elements of the client’s experiential system, all the way down, eventually, to the core organizing material from which the experiences arise.

  While we may, for the sake of conceptual simplicity, describe the process in met
aphoric terms of up and down, in fact it is essential to hold the more accurate perspective that the client’s organization is actually holographic. More an interactive sphere than a ladder, our psychological-neural-somatic-emotional selves are held and therefore accessed using these four steps in a serpentine meander through an otherwise subconscious labyrinth.

  Let’s clarify each step.

  Step 1: Contact Experience

  Contact, described in Chapter 14, is used during the accessing phase for three main purposes. First, we want to demonstrate to the client that we understand his current experience. Such demonstration provides both acknowledgment and acceptance. “So you tighten your shoulders as you say that . . .[?]” lets the client know both that we grasp that this is happening, and, by virtue of our embracing tone, that we are interested in a curious way while not judging it.

  Second, contacting the client’s present experience spotlights the experience, and focuses awareness on this particular experiential location. By naming the tight shoulders, it supports the client tuning in more deeply to the nuances of that experience.

  And third, we can use a contact statement to steer the flow of the session in some ostensibly useful direction. There may be several events occurring, with some seeming more closely aligned with the client’s present or longed-for need. We may work more efficiently by directing the client toward some less aware or more charged aspect of his world. For example, the client may be talking about and focused on a complaint about his relationship, and we notice that his shoulders are tightening. By contacting the shoulders, we steer the client away from the exclusivity of his verbal focus to include a somatic element he may not otherwise have noticed.