by Halko Weiss
In this example, the therapist has engaged in an experiment called taking over, in which the therapist offers the client support in doing something the client is already doing herself for self-protection, self-cohesion, or in service of another core-level need. When we use taking over, the client no longer has to fight by herself to maintain her protective strategies. Rather, her defenses are actively supported by the therapist. This allows the needs underlying the client’s tension to emerge, with all their vulnerability, authenticity, and beauty.
Both of these types of Hakomi experiments are paradoxical in nature. One supports the organic yearnings in order to evoke the defensive structures. The other supports the defensive structures as a way of evoking the deeper yearnings. Each offers a powerful opportunity to study the organization of experience. In working with clients using the Hakomi method, we often find ourselves alternating between one type of experiment and the other; as if, like yin and yang, the illumination of one side supports the illumination of the other. Here we often see the possibility of a third category of experiments, those (like physicalizing or equivalence) that allow us to gently explore either side of the continuum, or to shift back and forth between the defensive structures and organic yearnings, creating more fluidity between them.
Let’s now look to a case study to illustrate the use of experiments in the Hakomi method.
Case Study: Experiments in Mindfulness
Ariel is a 39-year-old physical therapist. She is recently divorced and just starting to date. She is telling me, in a very hurried way, about the latest developments in her dating life. She complains about how anxious she is with men, how desperate to get responses from them. It is our fifth session, and I am noting that she has talked very quickly each time we’ve met. I bring this up gently (being careful not to shame her), and wonder if it relates to her anxiety around men.
In earlier sessions, we have done a few simple mindfulness exercises, which Ariel has enjoyed. “I like getting to slow down and really feel myself,” she told me at the end of one session. Today I ask her if she would like to use mindfulness to study the theme of trying so hard to get attention. She agrees, and I guide her into a general experience of mindfulness of sounds, body sensations, and breath. I ask her to report on her experience, and she tells me that she can hear the tree leaves rustling outside, and that she feels her lower back against the couch. Satisfied that she is fairly mindful, I ask her if I can say a statement to her as an experiment in awareness or mindfulness.
First, I tell Ariel, “Your job will be to notice whatever comes up—an emotion, a sensation, an impulse, an image or thought, a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ or nothing at all—in response to the statement.”
When Ariel indicates she is ready, by nodding, I set up the experiment by saying, “Notice what happens, Ariel, when I say the words [pause] . . . I’m here to listen to you.” At first, she takes this in deeply. “It feels very good.” But then she also notices a strong impulse to push me away. I invite her to stay with this impulse, to notice all the sensations, tiny body movements, and images that go with it. She observes her hands wanting to go up, as if to block me, and she reports her belly feeling very tight. Suddenly an insight emerges: “I am pushing people away through my barrage of talking. I tell myself I want more contact with people, but I am also putting up this barrier at the same time!”
“Yes, you’re having an insight that feels so valuable here,” I acknowledge. “I also see that your hands have come up in an important way. . . . Why don’t you let yourself really feel your hands making this barrier in front of you? Take your time, and let the movement happen slowly, with mindfulness.”
Ariel looks at me with curiosity, as if ascertaining whether creating a barrier between us is actually fine with me. She lets her hands go up a little more, and they now push outward. “I hope it’s okay to say this, but I feel better knowing I can push you away.”
“Sometimes it’s important to know that,” I suggest, and we both laugh. There is now a deep sense of connection between us.
“You know, this is interesting,” I say. “You’ve set a boundary with me and now we both feel so at ease with each other.” We continue to integrate what has just happened, in a relaxed way, until the session ends.
We see two experiments in the above example. First, we see a verbal probe in mindfulness, “I’m here to listen to you.” I choose this experiment because I predict it will conflict with Ariel’s core-level belief that people are not really going to listen to her. The words, at first, evoke a sense of deep nourishment, but, as commonly happens, this sense of nourishment quickly becomes eclipsed by a defensive response that emerges to protect Ariel from the vulnerability associated with the nourishment. In the Hakomi method, we see defenses as organic attempts to manage experience according to felt safely needs, and so I invite Ariel to study the experience by bringing her awareness to it.
When Ariel studies her experience in mindfulness, she deepens into an insight about herself: that despite what she likes to tell herself, she is often pushing people away in relationship. This insight is not an analytical speculation, but something that emerges from the experience itself (Johanson, 1996). We do experiments precisely because we want meaning to emerge from experience. Here Ariel has discovered something about how she organizes herself in relationship to others.
Notice that while I honor Ariel’s insight, I also invite her to return to what her hands are doing. An intelligent process is revealed through her body (Kurtz & Prestera, 1976), in this very moment, which I don’t want to lose by going too far into the cognitive realm. Here I am experimenting with slowing down, an essential aspect of mindfulness; directing Ariel’s awareness to a movement that her body knows it wants to do, and seeing what happens as she slows it down, feels it, and gives it space to unfold. When Ariel allows herself to really feel her hands pushing me away, she notices how good it feels to create this barrier in a conscious way. She also gets to experience something new: that she can consciously set a boundary while still feeling connected to others, paradoxically even more so.
In this case example, the experimental probe appeals to the organic yearning to be listened to while paradoxically eliciting the defensive structure of pushing people away. Experimenting with mindfully slowing down supports the same self-protective impulse, which paradoxically evokes the underlying longing to feel more connected to others while embracing a need for boundaries.
The Structure of Hakomi Experiments in Awareness
There is a general structure for the many kinds Hakomi experiments.
1. The experiment begins with collaboration (Duncan, 2010), with asking the client for permission to do an experiment while carefully tracking to make sure the client is willing and not simply being compliant. “Is this a good time to explore the anger more deeply through doing an experiment in mindfulness?”
2. The next step is some form of induction or invitation into mindfulness. This induction is often longer for newer clients than for more experienced ones. “Notice what happens when . . .” “Study, be curious about what is evoked in you spontaneously when . . .” “Without effort or doing anything, just be aware of what comes up when . . .” Here the inductions are designed, following the wisdom of neurolinguistic programming (Bandler & Grinder, 1975), to open the client to a broad range of experience. Asking clients to notice what they feel or see narrows the field to feelings or visual material, which should only be done if there is some clinical warrant.Especially with new clients, it is sometimes helpful to orient them to the possibilities of a broad range of responses. “Notice what goes off or bubbles up within you . . . any sensations, tensions, feelings, memories, thoughts, images, or not much of anything . . . when . . .”
Next we describe the nature of the “when,” that is, the experiment to come. For example: “When I say these words . . .” “When I reach out and touch you on the shoulder . . .” “When I start walking and begin to close the distance between us . . .” “When you reac
h toward me with your arms . . .” “When I block your arms from going forward . . .” “When you imagine asking your boss for a raise . . .” “When you put this rope on the ground to symbolize the boundary between us . . .” “When I take over the tension in your shoulders . . .”
3. We then insert a pause between the invitation and the actual experiment to encourage deeper mindfulness. The instructions themselves cause ripples in the pond of consciousness and need to settle so that the client can study the specific ripples evoked by the experiment. “Notice what happens when you hear the words [pause]. . . . It is okay to take up space.”
4. If the client does not offer it himself, we ask for a report of what the result of the experiment was. A report is what the client witnessed about how he organized around the input. “I noticed a sensation in my stomach that had a quality of nausea.” A report is distinguishable from a reaction that is not mindful (for example, “That’s yucky!”). If the client simply reacts, the therapist can invite further mindfulness. Therapist: “So what signaled you that it was yucky? Was that a thought or feeling or sensation or . . . ?” Client: “Oh, yeah. It started like a sensation in my stomach that had a quality of nausea that flipped into a yuck.” There are many other possibilities for what can happen while working with experiments.
Types of Hakomi Experiments in Mindfulness
Having looked at one case example, let’s now get a general sense of the range of experiments we might use in the Hakomi method.
Verbal Probes
These are verbal statements, designed to be potentially nourishing and offered to the client in mindfulness, like the ones discussed above. There are countless formulations of such statements. Here are some general examples. In clinical practice, the specific words would organically arise from the client’s process—from the themes evoked or the nourishment being defended against.
• You’re safe here.
• You can ask for what you want.
• You don’t have to do it yourself/alone.
• I’ll listen to you.
• You’re important.
• You can show me who you are.
• Your life belongs to you.
• You can do what you want (and still be loved).
• You don’t have to prove anything.
• You’re lovable the way you are.
• It’s okay to rest/slow down.
• You can be your full self.
Nonverbal Probes
Instead of words, gestures, movements, or any number of nonverbal experiments can be offered to the client in mindfulness. Examples include extending a hand toward the client, offering an object to the client, smiling lovingly at the client, or opening one’s hands to the client. Often the best ones are those that emerge from the present-moment process. Classically in Hakomi, Kurtz (1990a) would build experiments around indicators (see Chapter 3) of missing experiences the client learned how to organize out of her experience (Johanson, 2015) because they were perceived as threatening.
Nonverbal probes, like verbal ones, are generally positive or neutral offerings. If they are designed around the opposite of a client’s core beliefs, they will usually evoke the barriers or the client’s defensive systems, thus giving the client an opportunity to study how he organizes around relevant themes such as being cared about, supported, opened to, respected, and so forth.
Taking Over
To best understand taking over, we can start with the very first time that Kurtz discovered its possibility. This encounter was, in fact, a beginning point of the Hakomi method itself, as Kurtz began to modify his approach from his previous training in Gestalt, bioenergetics, and other modalities (see Appendix 3). It showed Kurtz two essential things: the power of conducting experiments in mindfulness, and the power of supporting defenses rather than trying to break them down.
The first time I took something over was at a workshop in New Mexico. I was working with a woman who was getting close to something important and charged with feeling. She was lying on her back on the carpet and, as we focused in on her experience, her back began little by little to arch. After a few minutes, her body was a bridge with only her head and her heels on the floor. I was still into Bioenergetics then. My approach to defenses was to force them to yield. Since I saw the arching as a defense, I was prepared to put a lot of weight on the woman’s abdomen until the bridge came tumbling down. In my mind, that would have been the logical, defeat-the-defenses approach. . . . [But] I knew how terrible it would feel if I tried to make the client collapse. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, even in the name of therapy. Instead, a light bulb went off, and I put my hands under her back—and I told her that if she wanted to, she could relax her back and I would hold her up. Well, she tested my hands a little, giving them some of the weight at first and then, little by little, all of it. This took a minute or less. As she let herself give the weight of her body to me, she also let herself feel and experience the things that she had been fighting against—a painful memory and the feelings and insights that went with it. She eased into that and we worked with it. . . . She let herself relax, slowly, at her own pace, into the experience she’d been running from. (Kurtz, 1990a, pp. 102–103)
Taking over is an intervention in which the therapist, assuming that there is organic wisdom in the defense, supports the client in doing what she is already doing to protect or manage herself. In doing so, the client gets to experience what is beneath the protections: yearnings, needs, or painful feelings that have been shunned from consciousness. People invest tremendous energy keeping underlying material from entering consciousness. Reich’s (1949) central teaching about body armor is that tension masks sensitivity. Taking over allows clients to temporarily give the therapist their protective strategies, thus providing the safety of the defense while freeing up energy and attention to study the underlying needs, feelings, and yearnings.
Some examples of taking over:
• The client is leaning her head to one side; the therapist offers to take over the support of the head so that the client can study more clearly what the head is doing or needing.
• The client is putting his hands in front of himself, as if to strike something; the therapist offers the client some large cushions to put in front of him that take over the worry about hurting anyone. When the client still cannot assert, the therapist takes over what is holding back the assertion by restraining the client’s arms, thus allowing the client to safely explore the impulse to strike out.
• The client reports a voice in her head saying, “You’ve got to do this right”; the therapist takes over the words, coached by the client to say them in the same tone, volume, and intensity that the client was hearing.
• The client feels an impulse to scream, but blocks the impulse; the therapist (working in collaboration with the client) finds just the right place to put her hands over the client’s mouth to take over blocking the impulse and sound, paradoxically freeing the client to follow through with the now-muffled scream.
As we have discussed, taking over typically has the effect of opening the client to what is yearned for at the deepest levels. A carefully chosen experiment in taking over, implemented with sensitivity, respect, and full collaboration with the client, can be one of the single most powerful therapeutic experiences. It honors and supports the defense the client obviously thinks he needs while trusting it to the therapist to maintain, thus providing the safety for the client’s awareness to explore deeper levels of his organization.
The above examples demonstrate both passive and active taking-over techniques. In Hakomi, the therapist is always active, doing something. “Passive” and “active” refer to the client. In the above example of the therapist supporting the weight of the head, the client passively allows the support while mindfully studying what is evoked. In the example of the therapist taking over the client’s holding back his arms from striking out, the safety is provided for the client to then actively explore his impulse to hit (K
urtz, 1990a).
In terms of signal-to-noise issues, taking over is an example of how Kurtz tended to lower the noise in a system in order for a signal to come through more clearly; this as opposed to trying to exaggerate the signal to come above the noise. This is also an example of the Taoist wisdom that Kurtz (Johanson & Kurtz, 1991) brought into psychotherapy, which serves as an Eastern example of nondoing and nonviolence that balances the more current Western impulse to do or to overcome. While Kurtz integrated a number of existing techniques into Hakomi in line with Hakomi principles (see Chapter 5), taking over represents a potent original contribution to the field of therapeutic intervention.
Referencing the Neutral: Peace With Gravity
Here the therapist observes how the client is using body posture, referencing an alignment that would be most at peace with gravity if no physical or emotional issues were present. The therapist then suggests an experiment that will work with a displacement toward that alignment, such as uncurling the shoulders, tilting the chin, shifting the pelvis slightly, and so forth. The therapist must make sure that the client only displaces in tiny increments, and with solid mindfulness, so that the internal changes can be tracked and explored. Large movements or displacements tend to produce too much noise in the system. Often if deep, core-level beliefs have been powerful enough to affect the voluntary muscles shaping posture, they will emerge in response to postural displacements. The therapist must be especially careful about anything that could feel shaming or judgmental toward the client. In addition, the therapist must keep in mind that any experiments that invite a shifting away from defensive structures or compensatory postures will tend to draw out those very structures and compensations.