by Halko Weiss
Even more strategically, we may steer the flow of the session by contacting some element we, as clinicians, assume or guess is present. “There’s probably something familiar about this tension . . . [?],” we might offer, or—guessing at the underlying meaning of his story—guide the client toward his deeper need by stating, “So what you really want is to be respected. . . [?]” Like a good tennis player placing the ball in a particular part of the court, a skilled therapist can use contact to direct the session and the client’s awareness toward deeper or more inclusive aspects of his process.
Of course, as always in Hakomi, we are careful to track diligently for the impact of our attempts to suggest and steer. We are hoping our attempt at guiding his flashlight of awareness evokes a deepening curiosity in the client, but we are fully prepared to back off and reorient if we get hesitant responses to our suggested direction.
Most of the time, more than one kind of experience is present. In the above example, we are tracking both the verbal and the somatic: the complaint story and the tightening shoulders. We may also be aware of affect (client seems cranky) or breath (shallow and rapid) or facial expression (determination) or any number of other emergent features. As practitioners, any or all of this may be the best to focus on, including umbrella statements, such as the simple “So there’s a lot going on. . . .” As a part of accessing, we need to develop the skill of intuiting (Marks-Tarlow, 2012) where the energy seems to be, the complexity of experience, and the need to somehow keep things simple enough so that the client can proceed without distraction.
Step 2: Ensure Mindfulness
As discussed previously, mindfulness is central to Hakomi, which has pioneered its use in psychotherapy since the early 1970s. If we are to assist clients in studying their experiences, so they are enabled to notice the internal sources of those experiences, then awareness will be absolutely essential. When we are accessing, once we have invited the client into some present experience, we need to be certain that she is in the proper state of awareness that will allow the careful investigation and revelation of all that is actually happening. Just as it would be fruitless to enter a dark cave without a flashlight, so engaging experience without awareness typically yields only superficial or rote insight into its qualities and origins, and tends to reinforce its habituated nature.
So, as our second step of accessing, we want to be sure the client is sufficiently embodied in the state and skill of mindful self-observation. We do this by tracking for signs of self-attention, verbal quality and content, and a sense of energetic settling (however simultaneously activating the presenting experience may be). If we are not satisfied that mindfulness is present, and sufficiently deep to examine experience carefully, it is our job to help the client get more fully induced into mindfulness. There is no point in proceeding toward accessing core material if the client is not able to observe, as opposed to being carried away by, the organization of her experience.
This monitoring of mindfulness is an ongoing task throughout accessing that we refer to as managing consciousness. Clients may be fully mindful one moment, and then pop out for any number of reasons: they are more comfortable reporting in conversational mode; they got distracted; they became anxious about what they are finding; and so on. Therefore, we need to stay diligent about tracking the level of mindfulness present in the client at any moment, and attend to maintaining a suitable depth of awareness as the session proceeds.
Step 3: Immerse Fully in the Experience
The third step in the accessing formula is to have the client be completely immersed in whatever experience is pursued and studied. We want him to embody fully the richness and nuance of the experience or experiences that have been contacted. If it is tight shoulders, then we want his entire world at the moment to be anchored in the sensations, movements, and details of holding tension in those shoulders. If the client is sad, we want her to feel that grief deeply, purely, attentively. We’re about to study that field of experience with great care, and so we want the person fully in the field, not on the edge, not looking from above, but so fully grounded in that field that every blade of experiential grass, every breeze that shakes that grass, the size and smell and sounds in that field are all available for recognition and investigation. Imagine the difference between trying to describe the taste of chocolate right now, and how much more specific and nuanced that description would be if you put a piece of chocolate in your mouth and then articulated its specific subtleties while letting it dissolve there.
The immersion into an experience is achieved by the use of what we call accessing directives. Accessing directives are suggestions and commands that lead a person toward mindfulness of a specific activity, focus, or event: “Go ahead and turn your attention toward that sadness. Maybe let yourself really feel how that sadness lingers inside of you.” “Take your time, and just let this sadness be here. Let yourself really sink into this feeling. . . . Notice how it registers in your body.” These are examples of accessing directives.
Because we are directing clients toward an experience they hope to deal with or learn more about, such commands and suggestions are usually met with compliance. They tend not to be experienced as forceful control of the client’s will, because we are actually supporting his own organic wish to do the work. If I hold out a glass of water to a person crawling out of the desert, and say, “Here, drink this!” he won’t reply, “Don’t tell me what to do!” because his need and the directive to drink are well aligned. Of course, if I tell a client to do something that is not in her interest, or that feels like a promotion of my agenda as opposed to an interface with her, then I will likely get resistance or tense compliance that needs to be contacted to get back on track: “Oh, exploring the chest sensation is not quite right. It would be better to . . .”
Immersion in experience is not a familiar construct in Western culture. Our expressions of experience are not typically met with invitations to plunge into and marinate in them. “I’m scared, Mommy,” is more likely to be met with, “Come here and let me hold you” than it is with, “Oh, that must feel yucky. Go ahead and be scared and notice what your body starts to do. . . .” As a result, there is usually a learning curve for practitioners to develop the habit of immersing clients fully into their experiences before invoking the more seemingly glamorous interventions of inquiry and problem solving. “I’m sad” will likely evoke something such as, “What are you sad about?” A reasonable, though left-brain, question, but in the Hakomi framework much better asked after the client has been invited to feel his sadness mindfully. That way, the client will be responding from full access to the exactness of the sadness, and not from some possibly abstracted or less specific place, that is, from a more experiential, right-brain place. He will be reporting about his sadness from within the sadness itself, just as the actual eating of the chocolate will yield a greater source for its description.
Step 4: Study the Experience (Deepening)
After contacting, ensuring mindfulness, and immersing the client in her experience, the final step is to have her explore the experience for its connections within herself, either to relevant information or to linked experiences that are summoned by association.
Any experience that is personally or psychologically significant will be laden with details, nuances, and meanings. An obsessive thought, for example, cycling at a particular speed, may seem to be happening on the right or left side of your head, or may, upon examination, reveal itself to be in the voice of your third grade teacher. If your palm is sitting face up on your leg, studying it may clarify whether it is reaching out to give, or waiting to receive something. Focusing on your excitement about a new job may surprise you by the way it stops abruptly at your belly, below which there is a kind of dark emptiness.
One function of this accessing step is to bring such information into awareness, which is moving from accessing (inviting mindfulness) to deepening (maintaining mindfulness). Not only is it an integral, if often unconscious
, aspect of your experiences, but it begins to complete the picture of the world in which you live and operate. Something from third grade is still shaping your current life. On a subtle level, you are hoping that someone will give you something important, even though you don’t trust that can happen. You can’t just celebrate life, for some murky void undermines your joy. Through accessing, the contact statement steered you toward this experience; the mindfulness gave you the inner frame to discern it; the immersion took you fully into the unconscious’ “file” on this experience and now the study phase lets you read what time has written and stored in those archives. Again, we call this part of the process “deepening.”
Details and meanings
Some of the information accessed and deepened into may be details about the nuances of how you are organized: the specific location of somatic events (“It’s on my right side, just below my shoulder”); the subtle flavor of your sadness (“It’s more wistful than grieving”); or the intensity of an impulse (“It’s like just the tiniest pulling back from you”), to name just a few examples.
Equally necessary, some of the discovered information may be about meanings: the subjective psychological significance an experience holds or expresses, its importance or relevance, the “why” beneath the “what.” You keep your right hand on top of your left hand, because you need to hold your anger back. You don’t finish your sentences while speaking, because you don’t believe anyone is listening. You’re anxious all the time, because your family was reckless and insensitive, and you need to stay alert to avoid otherwise inevitable disaster. That shallow breathing? Perhaps protection from letting in love and losing your freedom.
It’s crucial to note that Hakomi’s pursuit of meaning through deepening seeks natural revelations from within the immersed study of experience, and not from analytical inquiries or theories about the experience. We don’t typically ask the client, in conversational form, “Why do you think you’re anxious?” or “How come you breathe so shallowly?” The aspect of self that might answer those questions is likely to be somewhat removed from or lacking access to the full psychological significance of the event. Such questions, in the abstract, often lead to guesses: “I think it’s because . . .”; “Well, my astrologer says . . .”; or to partial understandings: “I don’t want anyone to know” (while lurking underneath, we later discover, is, “I really need help . . .”).
The meaning-experience interface
As we work with a client, we typically move back and forth across what we call the meaning-experience interface. We’ll study a present or evoked experience for its details: “Notice exactly where that tension starts and stops. . . .” or “Is that voice angry, or stern, or just determined?” Then we shift over to evoking the experience’s meaning: “From inside that tension, notice what it’s doing for you. . . .” “As you hear that voice, how does it feel about you that makes it need to tell you this all the time?” When meanings begin to seem more distant, we deliberately return to studying the experience itself, so that the work remains a continuous exploration of the experiential rather than just the interpretive realm: “Oh, so the tension is creating a wall between you and others. So take your time, really be mindful, feel the tension and the need to have a wall, and let yourself notice if this wall is completely solid, or can you find places where something can get through?”
Accessing questions
Notice as you examine the above examples that, in terms of technique, we use three main language structures: contact statements, accessing directives, and what we call accessing questions. We have previously described contact statements (“You start to smile . . .”) and accessing directives (“Stay with that smile and see what else you notice . . .”). Accessing questions are questions that can be answered only by immersing in and studying the present experience. The opposite of abstract analysis, accessing questions require the client to move more deeply into the present constellation of events to discover the embedded information. In fact, we will pose such a question only after we have established mindfulness and immersed the person in the experience. We can ask a miner on the surface where he thinks the gold will be found, but we won’t know exactly where it is, or even if it is there at all, until we are down in the dirt, digging slowly and carefully, headlamp turned on bright. Accessing questions are among our most useful shovels, once we are inside the mine.
Here are some examples of accessing questions:
• Where exactly in your back does this pain start[?]
• How is your body participating in this sadness right now[?]
• Which of the two feels bigger right now: your fear or your desire to speak[?]
• What impulses show up when you talk about your brother this way[?]
• As you turn your head, are you turning toward something or turning away from something[?]
All of these questions can be answered only by examining carefully the present experiential circumstances. (The [?] symbol, once again, indicates the tone of the therapist’s voice that invites the client’s own mindful curiosity, as opposed to a doctor-patient interrogatory tone that implies the doctor is going to do something with the information requested.)
Unfolding
As important as gathering such information is to the understanding of ourselves and our core organization, the fourth step provides an additional essential function: to summon up or deepen into related experiences. As discussed in Chapter 8 on character, experiences happen because a specific collection of brain cells (neurons) fire in concert with each other, activating thoughts, emotions, bodily events, and so on. When they fire, a link develops among them, creating a network. Even after the firing ceases, this link—like a kind of channel dug between the cells—remains.
When we immerse in an experience, the links between that experience and others in that network slowly become activated in concert. The more we sink into an experience, the more we fire the neurons associated with that experience. As those neurons become saturated, they send messages along those established channels to other linked neurons in the network. It’s like pouring water into a system of channels; gradually, the flood moves from the original location to inundate another. The original neural activation begins to flood connected neural structures. As those linked neurons begin to fire, they generate further related, but distinct, experiences. In the above example, the person complaining about work automatically began to tighten his shoulders. Remaining with a particular experience in mindfulness causes related events to erupt. Staying with the way I point my finger while talking may evoke first a sense of determination, and then gradually a memory of trying to convince my dad about something. Submerging myself in my tendency to sigh may yield a feeling of collapse in my chest, and then a great sense of hopelessness. One distinct, heavily invested experience leads to the arousal of another, linked experience and a fuller sense of the network’s organization.
We call this process “unfolding.” Like a long ribbon of scarves in a magician’s pocket, tugging on any one experience in a neural network gradually pulls all of them out—they unfold piece by piece until the entire system is revealed. Honoring unfolding is the ultimate expression of faith in the client’s organicity. We trust that keeping the client mindful and immersed in one aspect of his being will gradually reveal his entire world. Because present experiences are organized by the core images and beliefs that we hold, a seemingly banal experience on the surface of awareness—your palm, say, turned up in your lap—is actually the gateway to a path that leads down into the deepest psychological wellsprings of your being.
As a fourth step, we promote this unfolding by encouraging the client deliberately toward allowance and unforced connection. Rather than seeking details (“Where in your body do you feel this?” “Notice if the voice is coming from inside or outside of you. . . .”) or meanings (“What does turning away like this do for you?” “Study what’s so important about keeping your eyes open. . . .”), unfolding uses directives to encourage the w
hole network to wake up: “Go ahead and let whatever wants to happen next, just start to happen. . . .” “Follow that feeling and let it take you where it wants. . . .” “So as you hang out here, without trying to do anything else, notice whatever starts to come up all by itself.” We are using directives to encourage the awakening of all intertwined elements of the neural network, gradually spiraling from expressed conscious events down into unconscious core material.
Actually, all four of the steps in the accessing process serve this unfolding function. Contact steers you into an experience. Mindfulness lets you dwell upon it, further activating the neurons. Immersion with its intention of summoning the full experience directly seeks neural arousal, and then fourth-step directives to unfold finalize the process by enlisting the client’s cooperation to just allow the unconscious to lead us where it will.
The overall combination of (1) unfolding and (2) pursuing details and meanings allows Hakomi to be potent and comprehensive. In a typical sequence, the therapist may patiently invite unfolding (after contacting, ensuring mindfulness, and immersing), and then explicitly explore details of what has unfolded. She will likely then return to unfolding, excavating, if you will, another corner of the psychic web, followed by more detail work on the new unfolded piece. Here’s an example of such accessing:
CLIENT: Every time she turns away, it drives me crazy.
THERAPIST: It’s really aggravating.
CLIENT: Yeah, I just want to . . . [trails off]
THERAPIST [noticing fist forms in the left hand]: Looks like your left hand has something to say about it.