by Halko Weiss
Referencing the Neutral: Exaggeration
This experiment is basically the opposite of peace with gravity. Here the therapist invites the client to exaggerate habituated postures, movements, or sounds, more in line with classic Gestalt work. Again, the therapist must make sure that the client is enacting only in small increments, and with a keen and spacious mindfulness. Exaggeration can be used in combination with peace with gravity to take the client back and forth between defensive structures and organic yearnings—termed “rocking” in Hakomi. Especially in the integration phase of a Hakomi session, rocking consciously between old defensive structures and new, more open organizations can create more fluidity and control for the client to navigate between these polarities.
Physicalizing
In this experiment, the therapist invites the client to turn an internal experience into an external physical experience. For example, a client says, “I just want to push everything away from me.” The physicalizing experiment might be to have the client push against something, and to study that experience in mindfulness. Or the client might say, “The whole thing is such a burden.” The experiment could then be to let the client hold up a weight while studying the experience. Likewise, if the client feels pulled in two directions, this can be physicalized. Sometimes physicalizing calls for strenuous exertion, but normally with the aim of coming back to subtle movements that can be mindfully explored for their wisdom.
Verbal Equivalence in the Mind-Body Interface
In these experiments with deepening, the therapist invites the client to turn a physical experience into a verbal meaning. Equivalence is somewhat opposite to physicalizing, as the therapist will ask the client to express in words the meaning of what his body is doing. For example, a client feels his throat tighten, and the therapist has him find the words that express the tightening. “I have to hold my feelings back,” the client reports. Or a client averts her gaze repeatedly, and when asked to find the words that go with it, she discovers from a mindful place, “I need to avoid contact.”
Equivalence is typically used when a client is immersed in her kinesthetic experience and the therapist senses that by using words, the client may more fully own her experience. It is similar to focusing (Gendlin, 1982), where a client is first immersed in a felt sense of an issue physically, and then allows words to come up that have a felt sense of congruence. Equivalence functions to engage the client’s cognitive capacity to get the meaning of an event. As Johanson (1996) notes, words can bear the birth or death of meaning. Hakomi therapists have an ear out for when words are alive and expressive, and when the words are becoming abstract and distancing, signaling that clients should immerse again in the physicality of their experience.
Slowing Down
This experiment is used informally in most Hakomi sessions since slowing down is a general characteristic of mindfulness as a state of consciousness. Hakomi therapy is sometimes called “slowing down therapy” informally, and a therapist will often ask the client to slow down and notice her experience more carefully, more receptively. As a formal experiment, slowing down is used to study a movement, gesture, or voice tone that is happening automatically in the fast pace of ordinary consciousness. As in the earlier case example, the therapist will get the client’s permission to study the experience, guide her into mindfulness, and then invite her to be aware of what she observes. Slowing down allows clients to access the experience more deeply, whether it is something edgy they typically avoid or a new internal resource that their body is waiting to show them.
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments are similar to experiments with verbal probes. While probes are normally addressed to intuited core beliefs, Kurtz (1990a) used acknowledgments to slow things down and address the emotional import of what the person was saying. Most people habitually name and gloss over some aspect of their story as they continue in ordinary consciousness to another part. They are talking about their experience, as opposed to being with it and reporting from it. And they rarely expect anyone to really get, acknowledge, and honor the emotional meaning of what they are saying (Schore, 2003). So Kurtz would politely interrupt someone, ask permission to experiment with an acknowledgment, set it up formally as above, and use words that summarized the poignant significance of what the person was saying. The effect of such an experiment was often to make a profound level of contact (see Chapter 14) and to deepen into (Chapter 15) the person’s core issues. Some examples:
• I know you tried hard.
• You really had to be strong.
• It is really a great grief.
• It meant a lot to you.
• You were really scared.
• You really struggled.
• It was really confusing.
• You couldn’t find anyone to help.
• You were left having to figure it out by yourself.
Creativity
The previous nine possible experiments are standard Hakomi possibilities, but only suggestive of the infinite opportunities that can come from creative collaboration with clients. In Hakomi training, it is often said that what define Hakomi are the principles. Techniques are secondary and are often invented within a session. For instance, there is the famous Rainer Scheunemann probe, invented in the south of France: “Notice what happens when [pause] . . . I eat your cookie for you.”
When We Do Experiments
We do experiments only after we have established three foundational elements. First and foremost, we need a solid and trusting relationship between therapist and client (see Chapter 9). Everything we do in Hakomi requires this. At the neuroscience level, we cannot access the emotional patterns held in the limbic brain and its linkages with the right prefrontal cortex until we have first established a right hemisphere– to– right hemisphere connection with the client (Badenoch, 2008; Cozolino, 2006; Fosha, Siegel, & Solomon, 2009; Schore, 2003; D. Siegel, 2010). At the colloquial level, “People ain’t going deep if they don’t trust you.”
Second, we need to establish and monitor the client’s capacity for mindfulness. Hakomi experiments rely on mindfulness to elicit data from the experiment. We might tell the client, as a verbal probe, “You don’t have to work so hard.” This experiment will register completely differently depending on whether the client is mindful or not. If the client is not mindful, the statement will most likely be heard and responded to by the left hemisphere’s abstract thought and semantic centers (McGilchrist, 2009). “Oh sure, I know that,” might be the mental experience of the client. If the client is mindful, the statement will more likely impact the right hemisphere, with its linkages to the limbic brain, where the emotional “operating systems” are running. The client may experience a dropping of the shoulders, a leaning forward of the head, followed by a tightening up in the body accompanied by anger. For experiments to be effective in this way, we must be able to use mindfulness to immerse clients deeply into their experience. A collaborative culture around immersing into experience in this way can take time to develop, depending on the strength of the therapeutic relationship and the client’s comfort with turning inward. But once we have this shared intention, the therapy can go significantly deeper.
Third, and most important in determining when to do an experiment, is the therapist’s attunement to the client (Marks-Tarlow, 2012; Siegel, 2007). Experiments work when congruent with the client’s rhythm, energy level, and in-the-moment needs. The therapist may have a great idea for an experiment, but it will fall flat if the experiment is out of sync with the client, for example, if the client feels a strong need to talk about other things in that particular moment.
How We Choose an Experiment
The linchpin of doing a Hakomi experiment is choosing what experiment to use and when. The big question is this: Of the countless aspects of our client’s presentation (voice tone, hand movements, posture, story content, facial expressions, and so on), how do we know what to make the launching point for the experiment? And how do
we choose among all the kinds of experiments listed above?
Ron Kurtz (see Chapter 3) used the term “indicator” to denote an aspect of the client’s presentation that warrants special attention. An indicator can be almost anything: voice tone, hand movements, posture, facial expressions, foot movements, changes in breath, eye movements, a pattern in the client’s relationship with the therapist, or a way the client talks about a particular person, just to name a few. An indicator catches our attention because it seems to stand out energetically. The client brightens, dims, opens up, closes down, gets more intense, relaxes, or appears stronger or weaker. The indicator also appears to be a manifestation of a person’s core organization; as such, it can be used to help access the core level of psychic process that generated it.
In the earlier case example, a particular indicator preceded each experiment. The first indicator was Ariel’s pattern of talking quickly, as if pulling for my continued attention. Using that indicator, I offered the verbal experiment, “I’m here to listen to you.” The second indicator was when Ariel moved her hand in front of her body, in a way that somehow felt important. That was when I invited Ariel to slow down the movement and to explore what emerged next. This brought her deeper into an authentic experience of herself and her own boundaries.
The therapist’s own subjective sense, coming from a place of emotional attunement with the client (Fogel, 2009; Siegel, 2007), is the most critical factor in deciding what may be an indicator and thus worthy of more attention. For one client, tapping her feet may seem minor, but for another client the same kind of tapping can be very important. The therapist is working from his own intuition. If the therapist senses something important is going on, he can say without attachment, “Something important seems to happen as you tap like that. . . . Can we stay with this tapping a little while?” Bringing attention to an experience is itself an informal experiment, and oftentimes, just this attention alone takes the session in a new and important direction. In this way, a Hakomi therapist learns to trust his own subjective sense of what may be an indicator, trusting that by paying attention to the indicator, the right experiment will begin to emerge organically. There are a few key types of indicators that therapists can look for as sources of potentially fruitful experiments.
Indicators of Physical Effort
Physical effort can take any number of forms. A client might be holding his head in his hands, or leaning on his forearm, or pushing against the couch, or pushing out his feet, or embracing himself tightly, or extending his head toward the therapist. It can be helpful to think of these efforts as ways of holding the self together, protecting the self, or reaching for support.
Our task as therapists is to bring a new level of consciousness to the activity of making effort, and Hakomi experiments help us do this. In situations of physical effort, we will often choose taking over as our experiment: after invoking a mindful state, we provide the support, holding, or reaching that the client is trying to do on her own. As discussed earlier, these experiments often open the client to the organic needs that had been previously been invisible, but lingering just beneath the effort.
Indicators of Closed Systems
A closed system is defined as a network of information and relationships that relies on rigid patterns and excludes new inputs. Each of us does things in highly patterned ways—from mundane tasks to how we conduct relationships—that from the outside appear fixed and limiting. Closed systems (see Chapter 22) restrict fluidity in expression, communication, and internal experience.
Indicators of closed systems are usually the hardest to detect within ourselves. Most of us have learned to meet our needs in very indirect ways. We have learned to fish for compliments instead of acknowledging that we feel insecure, to act tough instead of asking for support, or to achieve great success at work to compensate for an underlying sense of unworthiness. Hakomi character theory (Chapters 8 and 23) helps us understand some of these common patterns. One thing that is common to all of the typical character strategies, as well as other closed systems, is a sense of disconnection—that something is split off from the whole. As Wilber (1979) suggests, some part of the mind is split from another part, the mind is split from aspects of the body, the mind-body is split from the fullness of the environment, or the autonomous self is split from the larger unity of all life. The therapist will perceive a disconnect within the client, or between herself and the client. In essence, the sense of disconnection reveals the indicator that can be employed for healing.
Hakomi therapists will think about and, more importantly, feel into what is missing for clients. What have they organized out of their experience or split off from as not possible? What are they not able to do that is realistically possible at this point in their lives? When we get a sense of what is missing, we can offer clients the potential nourishment they have not yet integrated, evoking in the process the underlying defensive pattern that pushes the nourishment away. This is where various experiments can be so effective. They allow us to move directly toward the client’s underlying protective needs. As we get to this level of the work, we experience the client’s authentic being: Now the client is engaging the truth of his fear, sadness, or confusion, rather than the typical pattern that manages his experience to avoid underlying pain. Here we also begin to feel more connected to the client, as both therapist and client usually feel that something very important is happening.
In the earlier case example, Ariel’s pattern of talking quickly made me feel more distant from her. This countertransference (Cooper, 1999; Feinstein, 1990; Field, 1989; Natterson, 1991) clued me in that a closed system was at work. I offered potential nourishment through a verbal probe: “I’m here to listen to you.” This evoked her underlying protective need: to be able to push people away, to set a boundary when appropriate. When we got to this level, we both began to feel more connected and more relaxed. Moving from the closed system to the underlying protective need, we were now able to access the frustrated, organic yearnings immediately beneath the self-protection.
Indicators of Resources
Resources can be seen as experiences of relative cohesiveness, clarity, fluidity, aliveness, and integrity. What is a resource for a given person is relative: for an anxious person, a resource might be an experience of calm; for a depressed person, an experience of aliveness; for an overly rigid person, an experience of being more flexible.
In the Hakomi method, we pay special attention to any gestures, movements, or postures that seem to indicate nascent resources. We might do this early in a session or early in the course of therapy as a way of building resilience for deeper work. When working with trauma, it is normally essential to begin with resourcing (see Chapter 24; Ogden et al., 2006). And we often do this later in the session, or later in the course of therapy, as a way of consolidating gains made in the work. With Ariel, for example, later in my work with her I suggested, as an experiment, that she try to imagine a challenging person in her life while holding up her hand to set a boundary.
Some of the other indicators of nascent resources include the following:
• A client who tends to be very timid, sticking out his chest with pride
• A client who tends to run from topic to topic, taking a pause
• A client who diminishes her value with men, shaking her head with “attitude” as she talks about not being taken in by a man’s lies
• A client who struggles with addictive tendencies, reaching out to a friend for emotional support, instead of the bottle
Notice that all these examples contain action verbs. Slowing down in Hakomi can be very effective in helping clients mindfully immerse in the actions that resource them, study how these actions ripple through the body and mind, and become more centered and grounded in larger self-states of awareness, compassion, and wisdom. In this way, these new action possibilities can firmly take root in our clients’ nervous systems, reinforcing new neural networks (Cozolino, 2010; Craig, 2003; Perry et al., 1995;
Siegel, 2003, 2006).
What Happens After the Experiment
Because experiments can be so evocative, it is essential that the Hakomi therapist hold a strong container for the emerging experience. Most important are the therapist’s intention and skills related to attunement, compassion, curiosity, and connectedness. When these elements are in place, the therapist is usually on solid footing. Often after doing an experiment, the therapist will want plenty of time to process the experience at all levels. The client may need time to just sit longer with his own bodily experience, to deepen into core material, to process the experience verbally, to integrate through associating it with other situations in his life, or to engage the therapist relationally. Kurtz (2006) often extolled the virtue of doing something and then waiting for the client to process internally, allowing the next step to emerge. Sometimes an experiment touches so deeply that the client finds himself riding the rapids of spontaneous emotional release (see Chapter 18). If so, the therapist must gauge the amount of time left in the session, making sure there is plenty of time to process what is emerging from the experiment. Some experiments might be relevant, but not indicated when close to a time boundary.
In addition, the therapist must make room for any dissonance that may have occurred as a result of the experiment. Once a client told me he felt “freaked out” after an experiment, in which I had offered the verbal probe, “It’s okay to trust yourself.” After the experiment, he had felt a notable aliveness throughout his body and, unusually for him, in his legs. I commented, “Your legs seem to know something important.” I had meant this to suggest that his legs knew what they wanted to do (to move, to run, and so forth), but he interpreted my comment as implying repressed abuse memories. We needed plenty of time to process his concerns, reassure him about my intentions, and collaborate on where the therapy was focused.