Hakomi Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy

by Halko Weiss

  These kinds of misunderstandings can happen at any time. What is key is having a collaborative relationship in which misunderstandings can be cleared up and repaired (Barstow, 2005; Goldfried & Wolfe, 1996), and also being in tune enough with our clients so that we sense when something has gone wrong. As has been said in previous chapters, the most important thing is our relationship with the client. This is especially true when we are engaging such profoundly deep material. It is also true that Hakomi processes are self-correcting. If something comes up that was unintended or not taken as intended, this can be contacted, and once again the process gets on track as the two-party dance continues.

  Following an experiment, we continue to engage the basic repertoire of Hakomi skills: tracking, contact, accessing, deepening, and processing in mindfulness (see Chapter 21). We use these skills to integrate what has emerged from the experiment: insights, questions, newly discovered capacities, and the reowning of formerly split-off parts of the self. We also work to reaffirm and maintain our role as caring witnesses, midwives for our clients in their extraordinary process of self-discovery.

  Conclusion

  A client is deeply immersed in mindfulness. The therapist softly says, “I’m going to say a phrase to you, and your job is to notice whatever you experience when you hear the phrase. It could be a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’ It could be a sensation in your body, an impulse, or a movement. It could be an image or thought in the mind, or a shift in mood or emotion. Or you might not notice anything at all. So give me a little nod when you feel ready. . . . All right, notice what happens when you hear the words, ‘It’s okay to rest.’ ”

  Hakomi experiments in essence engage the two basic dimensions of core-level psychological organization: What the client’s deepest yearnings are (for example, personal wholeness, connectedness, authenticity) and how the client organizes protections against the vulnerability that accompanies these deepest yearnings.

  Experiments in mindfulness provide Hakomi therapy a richness that is palpable to both therapist and client. Clients learn to explore their deepest organizing patterns with curiosity, acceptance, and fluidity. Core material is evoked through experiments in awareness, which is why Kurtz (2008) sometimes referred to Hakomi as the method of evoked experience. As this journey continues, clients will report much greater degrees of choice in their day-to-day lives, in relation to when they want to engage familiar defensive strategies, and when they discern they no longer need to in a given situation. For a Hakomi client and therapist, this is a profoundly rewarding experience leading to in-depth transformation.

  CHAPTER 17

  Exploring the Barriers: Hakomi Perspectives on Working With Resistance and Defense

  Jaci Hull

  SINCE THE LATE 1930s the field of psychology has evolved in its understanding of how the body relates to psychological process. The concepts of defense and resistance have been important factors in the study of human behavior, becoming key elements in virtually all strands of psychodynamic therapy.

  “Body armoring” (Reich, 1949) was the term used in body-oriented psychotherapy for how a person uses muscle tension or physiological numbing to protect himself from experiencing or expressing challenging emotions and impulses evoked by external stimuli. Over the past five decades, this concept has been refined by numerous leaders in the field of somatic psychology. Alexander Lowen (1958) and John Pierrakos (1990) further elaborated on the idea of body defense by including more than just the musculature of the body. They saw that the whole of the personality could be found in musculature and energetic flow. Early painful events that caused armoring affected not only body stance and freedom of movement but the entire organization of a person’s experience—behaviors, life choices, reactions, and so on. Lowen (1958) went on to develop a character theory based on common patterns of behavior, emotion, and body stance.

  Ron Kurtz incorporated these theories but emphasized a particular perspective that set the focus of his work apart from that of his antecedents. He showed that in the therapeutic process, clients seem to defend against the very thing they long for, such as safety, help, good news, or the possibility that they deserve something beneficial to happen to them. Clients came to therapy often describing a stuck place around a lifelong yearning. When Kurtz would experimentally offer the freedom to move beyond the stuck place, the client would often dismiss the offer, respond with adverse emotions, tighten up, shut down, turn away, or freeze.

  Realizing the significance of such automatic reactions, Kurtz proceeded to study the dynamics of avoidance and rejection. By having his clients report to him from their mindful, present experience, he was able to hear descriptions of what was happening beyond the automatic response. He heard beliefs, memories, voices, images, and other aspects of what was mostly unconscious yet self-organizing material. There seemed to be a number of behavioral ways in which clients would attempt to avoid the anticipated negative impact of the very experience they longed for. Nourishment had become toxic. Kurtz learned that when a person is missing a certain essential nourishment in their lives it is because it either doesn’t exist in their environment or they are keeping it out (defensively, for instance, in order to avoid the pain of losing it again). Thus, Kurtz generally interpreted defensive patterns as intelligent measures of the client’s adaptive unconscious (Wilson, 2002) to protect him from further harm.

  It became clear that in order for it to be safe enough to explore these defenses, the therapist had to be open and curious about anything that emerged spontaneously in the client. Guided by the principles of mindfulness, nonviolence, and organicity, Kurtz emphasized the importance of using an experimental attitude when working with defense systems in the client. Rather than attempting to fit the client into a previously established category of defense and personality theory that would suggest a certain set of treatment goals, he stayed open and curious toward what the client presented. Not only did this attitude assure clients of a safe and unencumbered exploration of painful material, it also had the effect of encouraging them to approach the investigation with the same kindness and openness given by the therapist. Together, therapist and client could cocreate an environment where defenses could be appreciated, respected, understood, and reevaluated.

  From this perspective, a defense is an intelligent way in which a person keeps out a potentially nourishing experience because it has become associated with painful memories, such as neglectful or abusive parenting or a tragedy. The adaptive unconscious has learned to expect more traumatization and pain and makes sure it will not happen again. This is very different from a defense against internal drives, as in Freud’s (1900, 1938) concept of the struggle around a “primitive wish.”

  Working With a Barrier

  A pragmatist, Kurtz renamed these habitual defense patterns barriers. The Hakomi therapist sees a defense as an indicator that a psychosocial, developmental task was interrupted, causing an inability in the individual to easily move toward needed nourishment, freedom, or growth.

  Barriers are made up of several physiological and psychoemotional components. In the Hakomi session, both therapist and client work together to identify and define the barrier and its components, and in so doing they accomplish three tasks:

  1. make conscious the unconscious manifestations of internal wounding,

  2. create a sense of choice around future responses to life events, and

  3. explore new options in the experience of painful material within the safety of the therapeutic relationship.

  The Hakomi therapeutic stance involves, again, a sense of openness about the barrier. In order to fully understand a barrier, its meaning and function, there has to be enough safety in the therapeutic relationship for a barrier to emerge and to be observed, explored, named, and validated without fear of judgment or of having the same offense occur that created the barrier in the first place. The particular principle the Hakomi therapist invokes that helps her create this environment—the principle of organicity (Chapter 5)—allows
for three things:

  1. The therapist anticipates that the defense will arise and so is not thrown off when it does. In fact, the therapist recognizes that the client’s mindful study of the barrier is one of the important steps to transformation.

  2. The therapist’s expectation is held within a window of compassion and curiosity, meaning that compassion and curiosity already exist as part of the attitude of the therapist before a particular defense has even appeared or been named.

  3. The therapist knows to meet this defense with a kind of acknowledgment that will evoke little or no added defense in the client.

  The therapist then slows down the process, interrupts the sharing of content, and gently directs the client’s attention toward the verbal or nonverbal indicator of the defense to study and explore it in mindfulness.

  Case Example

  Jim, a 34-year-old accountant, came into my office saying that the new job he’d gotten required that he do some public speaking. He noticed that when he thought about it, his anxiety became overwhelming. He was terrified of his first public speaking event, and it was beginning to affect other aspects of his work and his personal life. To begin exploring this issue, I asked him to imagine himself at a public speaking event in order to evoke the mental, physiological, and emotional components of his anxiety. After some time spent in mindful exploration of the sensations and feelings involved—the tightened shoulders and jaw and a sense of feeling younger—he had a memory of being humiliated by an elementary school teacher during a reading lesson when he was having trouble pronouncing a particular word in the text. Long-forgotten feelings emerged as well as the implication of the teacher’s actions, which he interpreted to mean, “You’re ruining this for all the other students because you’re not keeping up. We can’t wait for you.” We explored this further, acknowledging the pain he felt and the unconscious belief he had established about himself: he was not good at speaking in front of others. He would fail, annoy everyone, and be left behind.

  I then created an experiment by offering an experience that was clearly missing at that time: patience and support for him to learn. I offered a probe (see Chapter 16), saying, “Notice what happens inside your body and your being when you hear the words . . .‘You can take all the time you need.’” Jim tightened his shoulders, stopped breathing, and frowned, indicating a defense or barrier against this kind of relieving, but seemingly impossible, perspective. Having designed the probe to elicit such a barrier, I then said to Jim in a very gentle way, “Hard to believe, huh?” and told him of the body changes I had witnessed. “What does your body seem to be saying with that response?” I asked. Jim studied this response and heard an internal voice that said, “Don’t cry—it’ll get worse. You’ll be humiliated. Don’t be stupid.” Again, I gently contacted his feelings and watched his shoulders loosen up as he took in the compassion in my voice and words. Small tears appeared in his eyes and, with quiet sobs, he released the internal pressure he’d been holding onto, including the frustration he’d been directing toward himself all these years. His breathing became more full and regular and he began to relax.

  We continued to deeply explore the experience and the memory that had been buried in his unconscious but was now uncovered by staying with the initial tension, still somewhat alive. He became very aware of how this barrier was made up of body tensions, movement, memories, and thoughts—that when he needed to muster up the courage to speak in public, this was what interrupted that process. As we talked, Jim began to feel two things: (1) anger toward the ignorance of the teacher who shamed him in a learning environment, and (2) a disengagement from the identification with the old negative introjections he’d been holding about himself. The habitual self-organization that reflected those beliefs started to relax, and a new perspective of possibilities became alive inside. He began to feel that he now could succeed at public speaking.

  Once safety has been established and is refined with each continuing session, the client and therapist can explore the nature of a given barrier. This may happen quickly or over the course of several sessions depending on the nature of the wounding. There are three main lines of inquiry for the therapist:

  1. When and how does the barrier arise?

  2. What is it composed of? (For example, movements, thoughts, memories, body stance, tensions.)

  3. What does the client need to experience? More precisely, what developmental needs does the barrier indicate have been missed?

  In answering the first question—when and how does the barrier arise?—the Hakomi therapist uses the techniques of tracking and contact. She is trained to notice any kind of change in the client’s nonverbal behavior and demeanor and to verbally contact present experience, techniques designed by Kurtz to encourage self-study (Chapter 14).

  To answer the questions “What is it composed of?” and “What’s the missing experience?,” the therapist most likely uses little experiments in mindfulness (Chapter 16) to complete the understanding of the barrier. As the client reports from inside his experience, and his barrier is being received with kindness and precise understanding by the therapist, he may begin to yield physically and psychologically to the nourishment being offered or go on to explore deeper levels of defense that reflect formative experiences that may need more time to be worked through (Chapters 15, 18, and 19).

  Referring to a defense as a barrier directs a more specific approach to character work, allowing the therapist to help the client see the ways in which he rejects potential nourishing experiences—not just conceptually but with his body, emotions, and behaviors. Having a direct, affective experience of one’s barrier draws it into the conscious realm, making it more recognizable and available for change. The less conscious the barrier, the less change can happen.

  Relating to the Defense

  Understanding a defense as a barrier and meeting it with compassionate curiosity also changes the therapeutic relationship. No longer does either party become frustrated by the client’s inability to change. No longer does the client have to go into the shame of resistance and the therapist into the dangerous role of pushing the client. Now the therapist can simply help the client explore her barrier, allow her to become aware of it, deepen her understanding of its meaning and function, and then see if this understanding opens up opportunities for new experiences that would create change.

  Case Example

  Mary, a 30-year-old wife and mother of two young children realized, at one point in a session, that she rarely allowed herself to feel really happy. After inviting her to go into a mindful state, I offered her the probe, “It’s okay to be happy.” Her arms and shoulders started to tighten up and she heard a voice say, “Yes, but what about the others?”

  “You are worrying about somebody, huh[?]” I inquired. She described a picture of her parents—her very unhappy parents. As we slowly proceeded to experience that relationship, we got clearer that if she were to feel happy, she would be seen by others and would feel herself to be selfish.

  At this point, as with any client, I encouraged us both to become curious about the barrier rather than get lost in a debate about its validity. Instead, I said, “Impossible to believe, huh[?] . . . You feel guilt when you imagine being happy[?].” Suddenly, we were into something deeper than whether or not Mary accepted my invitation to be happy. We were into the story of how happiness came to be experienced as toxic to her.

  Mary recounted instances of hearing her mother complain about her life, her unhappy marriage, and the life she’d given up by marrying Mary’s father. She remembered her mother’s sad face and drooping body, which made Mary tighten more and feel the hopelessness of a child who couldn’t help her mother to feel better.

  Further exploration, which included the experiment of taking over Mary’s shoulder tension (Chapter 16), showed her that tightening her shoulders yielded more distance from the oppressive unconscious beliefs. Mary realized that the burden of her mother’s sadness was too much for a little child to carry al
one. As she learned to take in support for herself, she was also more able to let go of her sense of responsibility for other people’s happiness.

  The more a client understands the origins of her limitation and is able to remove self-blame for defending herself, the easier it will be for her to embrace experiences that create the safety and support for risking new possibilities in therapy and eventually in the world (Chapters 19 and 20).

  The Sensitivity Cycle

  In order to map out certain types of metalevel barriers that appear to interfere with the growth process of the different character styles, Kurtz conceptualized the sensitivity cycle—a theoretical map of optimal life functioning emphasizing the need for sensitivity to one’s internal experience in relation to four essential stages (Figure 17.1). In this theory, it is the experience of freedom and ability available at each step of the cycle that the individual defends against or misses.

  The emergence of a defense is related to existential needs, which were left poorly met, often very early in life. These core life issues, referred to in the chapters about character (Chapters 8 and 23), show up as typical barriers within a character process.

  In general terms, the sensitivity cycle suggests that for a satisfying life an individual needs to:

  1. be aware of or sensitive to his own essential situation and needs,

  2. take appropriate action based on this clarity,

  3. experience satisfaction as a result of successful action, and

  4. be able to rest and regenerate in order to become aware and clear about what is needed next (a return to Step 1).

  Once the cycle is completed in a satisfying manner, it makes the next loop back to Step 1 easier. When sensitivity is impeded via a barrier, the loop is either stalled or becomes a shallow or unsatisfying journey (Kurtz, 1990, p. 177).