by Halko Weiss
CLIENT [looking at his fist]: Huh, I didn’t even realize I was doing that.
THERAPIST: Why don’t we pay some attention to it, and see what comes up?
CLIENT: Okay. . . .
THERAPIST: Great. So your hand is making a fist. Go ahead and turn your attention inward. Let yourself start to move into that part of yourself that can just notice things. . . . [Seeing the client settling into mindfulness.] Yeah, that’s it, just settle into noticing yourself . . . and begin to notice your fist. Just go ahead and really clamp your hand down like that, press your fingers into your palm, all that tension in your arm, really feel exactly the way you experience it. . . .
CLIENT: Hmm, it’s really intense. . . .
THERAPIST: Yeah, you’re really clamping down. So just stay really focused . . . paying careful attention, still holding your fist like this, just being in this place where your fist is so tight, go ahead and let yourself notice anything at all that starts to happen here by itself—a thought, a feeling, something your hand wants to do, anything at all. . . .
CLIENT [after several seconds]: Huh, it’s weird. I start to get this sense something bad is happening and I have to fight. I have to fight or I’ll die or something. Something like that. . . .
THERAPIST: Yeah, so it gets even more intense, life or death. Urgent.
CLIENT: Yeah, urgent. . . .
THERAPIST: So let’s hang out here. Really staying aware, focusing, feeling into your hand and your arm, and this sense of needing to fight—it’s urgent—and study carefully, what is the rest of your body doing[?]
CLIENT [nodding]: Yeah, my jaw is tight. I’m starting to lean forward, just a tiny bit. . . .
THERAPIST: Great! Your jaw and your body are starting to get involved. So just let all that happen, your fist and your jaw and leaning forward, and paying very careful attention, go ahead and scan around in front of you, and see or feel what’s out there—is there something, or someone or anything out there with you[?]. . . .
CLIENT [breath stops, slight shudder]: Yeah . . . something. . . .
THERAPIST: Take your time, sense your body—you know something. Feel into that space in front of you, and just let anything at all that wants to show itself to you . . . begin to show itself. . . .
CLIENT [long pause]: I see my mom. She’s walking away. . . . She’s getting into the car. . . . [Starts to cry.]
In this example, the therapist:
1. contacts the client at each step (“You’re really clamping down.” “It gets even more intense”),
2. returns several times to keeping the client in a mindful state of focus and awareness (“Go ahead and turn your attention inward.” “So just stay really focused. . . paying careful attention. . . ”),
3. consistently encourages the client to immerse himself in his experiences (“Go ahead and really clamp your hand down. . .” “Feeling into . . . this sense of needing to fight. . . .”), and
4. then uses a combination of accessing directives and questions both to flesh out details and meanings (“What is the rest of your body doing?”), and also to encourage the unfolding of further material (“Let anything at all that wants to show itself to you just start to show itself. . . .”).
By following this basic accessing structure, the client deepens readily from presenting narrative to core revelation.
In addition to using relatively simple accessing questions and directives by themselves to elicit details, meanings, and unfolding in the fourth step, Hakomi also works experimentally to evoke core experience in more sophisticated ways. Using the first three steps precisely, the therapist can also create and offer what we call little experiments. These provide situationally appropriate, momentary explorations through which the client’s innate experiential structure will further emerge (see Chapter 16).
Fourth-step interventions
To summarize, there are four kinds of fourth-step interventions Hakomi uses to evoke experiences and deepen toward core beliefs. All use the groundwork of contact, mindfulness, and immersion in direct experience. Each provides essential elements that synergize with each other, both to allow and to pursue, to make space for the client’s own structure to reveal itself, and to permit the practitioner’s wisdom and expertise to impact the process. The four kinds of fourth steps are:
1. We ask and direct to uncover details and nuances.
2. We search for embedded meanings.
3. We encourage innate, self-generated unfolding through patient self-association within the network.
4. We design and employ little experiments to evoke complex experiential constructs.
By embracing both allowing (that is, trust in the client’s organicity and neural network self-activation) and pursuing (the willingness to take charge, pursue, and help the client stay with exploring significant elements), Hakomi accessing maintains a balance between the organicity and unity principles, and between the client’s organic wisdom and the therapist’s learned expertise (see Chapter 12).
Issue, Theme, and World
The basic four-step formula and its component techniques yield powerful evocation and exploration of experience. However, simply evoking experiences does not guarantee an efficient path to arriving at the core. Often, simply applying the techniques, even in a skilled way, can lead to a kind of rambling—a serial awakening of related, but not transparently connected, incidents. A bodily tension leads to an abstract thought, and the thought to an image of a field, which in turn summons a different tension. When we add a sense of strategy to the unfoldings and evocations, we minimize the randomness and optimize the capacity for focus.
Strategically, by understanding the way in which psychological networks are logically structured, we can follow that structure toward its origins. The basic structure is this: core organizational beliefs and patterns develop around specific developmental tasks or, in practical terms, around themes. These themes describe the life resources needed for a person to thrive: belonging, protection, support, autonomy, respect, inclusion, and so forth. When one of these fails to lodge fully or successfully enough within a person, we say they have an issue around that theme. Issues describe the fragmented relationship a person has to a theme—the skewed perceptual frames we hold, the distorted meanings we have constructed, and the life problems we endure around that theme. A person who didn’t get enough early support will have an issue with abandonment or nourishment. If a child’s reasonable requests for attention and love are met with scorn, the child may have an issue with alienation or intimacy. And so on. Formative events can also happen in later life, like going to war at age 20, and often involve issues that require trauma processing.
Issues are what clients typically present; they are feeling the pain of not being well-resourced around some (often unrecognized) theme. Because the actual, necessary resources of the developmental learning are missing or incomplete, the person has had to create various adaptations: postures, voice usages, breathing patterns, beliefs, and so forth. (This process is described in Chapter 8.) These adaptations are the experiences with which we work in our sessions.
It follows, then, that if we pursue the issue shaping the experiences, it will lead us to the theme around which the issue formed. Together, the experiences, issues, and themes create a perceptual and behavioral world in which the client lives. This world is the sum total neural network around which the client operates in distress and for which he has sought help. We can track this world back to where the theme became an issue, back to its core history, woundings, latent resources, and needs, and begin the search for evolution and transformation—the purpose of the therapy.
This process of interfacing and untangling experience, issue, theme, and world—informed by various maps like character and the sensitivity cycle (Chapter 17)—provides the basic strategy for efficient accessing and deepening. To the power of the four-step techniques, it adds the wisdom of making informed choices in how to manage the otherwise semichaotic evocation of experiences. Instead of just di
gging all over the place to find the gold, we use sophisticated knowledge of inner geology to focus our combined efforts.
We make these choices in four ways:
1. Being curious about, tracking, and deliberately moving toward issue, theme, and world
Hmm, she keeps avoiding my input. . . .
What is the pattern emerging here?
What must it be like to have that thought all the time?
2. Recognizing them: understanding what are typical issues and themes; having a personal and clinical database about how people are and what they do
Hmm, he said he feels vulnerable. . . . That rings a bell. . . .
Tightening up is often defensive; he must be protecting against something. . . .
3. Fishing for them: deliberately steering toward, evoking, and naming issues, themes, and worlds
Let yourself notice what all this tension is doing for you. . . .
Is there something you wish you could do besides protect yourself?
So there’s a certain world you live in where all this is necessary. . . [?]
4. Using them as context as you process various evoked experiences, both to keep from rambling and to deepen into the core
Go ahead and protect yourself, have protective thoughts, let the tension in your hands protect you as much as you need to. . . .
So notice what kind of a world you live in, where you need love, but nobody cares about you. . . .
As we proceed toward establishing a sense of the world in which the client operates, we follow a particular sequence, deliberately shifting from level to deeper level: experience to issue to theme to world. For example, the following sequence, using contact statements and omitting all the necessary language, immersion, and study in between, demonstrates a typical progression:
You haven’t been feeling well. . . .
You’re noticing this is the third time in just a few months that you’ve been sick.
It’s a real problem being sick a lot.
And yet, as you feel into it, there’s something pleasurable about it.
It gets you lots of attention, huh?
You get sad when you think about the issue of attention.
You know you should be loved just for being yourself.
So you live in this world where you have to get sick to get attention, when all you really want is just to be loved.
There’s probably something familiar about this. . . .
Yeah, you remember being little and your mom staying home from work when you had a fever. . . .
To make these transitions, we specifically word our contact statements (in these examples) or fourth steps in a focused direction. “It’s a real problem being sick a lot” directs the client to the issue level: not just the event or particulars of the illnesses, but the way that having them impacts the client’s life negatively—he has an issue with it. Similarly, “You know you should be loved just for being yourself” invites the client to consider the underlying theme of being attended to without having to do anything. A statement tying them all together evokes the larger frame of a world: “So you live in this world where . . .” By working all four steps skillfully, we create a solid, mindfully immersed platform for study, on which we can then elegantly evoke, explore, and ultimately resolve the issues and developmental themes that have corrupted the client’s sense of self and world—and organized out certain currently realistic possibilities, limiting the client’s decisions and resources.
Time and Space
To do all this, we need to sustain dual frameworks in both time and space as we work. In terms of time, we need to be fully located in the present moment, working carefully and lovingly with exactly what is here right now, and we also need to be scanning ahead, anticipating both where all this might be going and how to nudge the process carefully and lovingly in that direction, all the while maintaining a complete, experimental openness to whatever arises, wherever things lead, in either time zone.
Spatially, we need to be able to access both horizontally and vertically. We need to stay with a present experience, going wide to extract every bit of relevant information, keeping the client carefully and lovingly immersed and involved with what is here. And we need to anticipate and then proceed toward other related or deeper aspects of the network, sliding from thoughts to sensations, sensations to emotions, emotions to memories, or memories to core beliefs. We are working here now, and we also know there is an entire network, framed around themes and issues, creating an experiential world in which the client lives, and it is our therapeutic job to evoke, engage, and reveal all of that.
In the accessing and deepening phases of the Hakomi process, we do all this. We use contact to focus, mindfulness to recognize, and immersion to stabilize, all so that we may help clients to use their flashlights to study experience, and in that study and revelation to access their organizational core. When we arrive at the core, our accessing and deepening is complete, and we move to the next stage of the Hakomi method: processing at the core (Chapters 17–20 and 23).
CHAPTER 16
Experiments in Mindfulness
Shai Lavie
EXPERIMENTS IN MINDFULNESS are perhaps the most signature elements of the Hakomi method. They can also be the most dramatic. Experiments allow the therapist to study the organizing schemas that underlie how a client relates to the world: how the client “does” relationships, work, nourishment, family, life purpose, and community. Experiments provide windows into the inner workings of the client: the deepest self-protective mechanisms and the strategies used to meet psychological needs.
Our ordinary consciousness is always already organized when we relate normally in the world. This means our organizing beliefs for experience guide our perceptions and responses to a large extent on autopilot, repeating and reinforcing our previous ways of perceiving and responding, resulting in what Bargh and Chartrand (1999) term the unbearable automaticity of being. Or, as Piaget might voice it, regarding important things that challenge emotionally charged tenets of our core beliefs, we tend to assimilate new material into the organization we already have, instead of accommodating our organizers to make room for the novel material (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969). Hakomi experiments transcend these powerful limitations by using a mindful state of consciousness that allows us to observe the automaticity of self-organization from a distance, which also allows for its eventual modification or transformation.
It is a crucial aspect of experiments that they also allow clients to try out and integrate new possibilities. A client, for example, can get to experience what it actually feels like to receive support in a new way, or what it feels like in her own body to experience both grief and connection with others at the same time. Experiments engage an experiential learning that is simply unachievable through cognitive intervention alone. Experiments give the Hakomi method a therapeutic efficacy that is emotionally cogent and undeniably powerful. Through the experiment, the client’s nervous system may discover a new experience of what is possible (Simpkins & Simpkins, 2010). The experiment can become part of the client’s inner repertoire, creating more options for how the client relates to her world (see Chapter 20).
There are many kinds of experiments in mindfulness: verbal and nonverbal probes, taking over, slowing down, acknowledgments, referencing the neutral, physicalizing, and others. Before we look at these particular kinds, let us first talk about their general function, and then see a case example.
Hakomi experiments generally function in one of two main ways. First, the experiment can appeal to organic yearnings, such as the desire to be loved and accepted, the ability to rest and be nourished, or the experience of being able to feel good in one’s own body in the presence of other people. By invoking these core-level yearnings, this kind of experiment usually has the paradoxical effect of engaging the defensive strategies that the client adopted for self-protection, usually in childhood, when inhabiting organic self-states proved problematic for the client. For example, a client
may never have felt loved for just being himself. As a child, this client learned he had to accomplish things in order to get recognition from his parents. The therapist might offer the client a verbal experiment called a probe such as, “You deserve love just the way you are.” Upon hearing this experimental probe, the client, in a deeply mindful state, might notice that he embodies a rejecting response, for example, shaking his head, sticking out his lower lip, and pulling inward, accompanied by a statement of disbelief or mistrust. This response, if studied in mindfulness, allows the accessing of the defensive strategies that have protected the client from painful feelings. Such theoretically positive probes in Hakomi are often designed specifically to address what the client has organized out as not possible, and thus immediately evoke the client’s core barriers to realistic nourishment.
A second kind of experiment works in the opposite direction: the therapist actively supports the client’s defensive strategies as a way of illuminating organic needs, yearnings, and potentials. The therapist might notice situations in which the client is working to provide a sense of protection or internal cohesion, and then actively support this effort. The magic of this approach is that the client gets to experience, often for the first time, what is beneath his habitual efforts. The client has the opportunity to feel the yearning for connection, for nourishment, for acceptance, the yearnings to release old pain or grief that are being held in the body, or whatever else has been just beneath his self-protective strategies.
For example, a client is grieving the end of a significant relationship. As she begins to feel more of her grief, she finds herself holding her torso with both arms. “I need to hold myself together . . . but I can’t get all of myself covered,” she says with a sense of desperation. “This is where I start hating myself, telling myself all the reasons I messed up, and why it’s my fault my boyfriend left me.” The therapist sits with her in her deep distress, staying empathic and attuned. At the right moment, the therapist offers her a blanket to wrap herself in. “Take a few moments and let the blanket support the holding you are trying to do. Allow yourself to really feel the blanket. Notice the places you feel warmth, the places you feel the blanket’s thickness or texture.” The client pulls the blanket around her and begins to feel her arms relax. She describes a huge sense of relief. “I feel my whole body settling, as if the blanket is telling me, ‘You’re okay right now.’”