metanymous в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)
Of course these three kinds of positive intent are not mutually exclusive; a single critical comment could include two, or all three, kinds of positive intent simultaneously.When this is the case, it is useful to sort out the different aspects of intent, and deal with each appropriately—ignore it, modify it, or rebalance it.
Most current “parts work” or “internal family systems” work is similar to Gestalt. Either they don’t use positive intent, or they use it imprecisely, limiting its usefulness. Many other approaches either oppose a part, or try to eliminate the part altogether, which is even worse.
With the understanding that all aspects of a person (feelings, behaviors, thoughts) have positive intent, conflicts can be resolved much faster. Rather than have a client act out the two sides of a conflict overtly by switching chairs, I now often ask clients to close their eyes and have an internal dialogue with someone, or some part of themselves, with only occasional guidance from me. Since the client only needs to reveal the general character of what occurs in the dialogue, they don’t have to report, or act out, aspects of themselves that could prove embarassing, making it much easier to achieve mutual understanding between conflicting parts, and eventual integration.
Although I have learned many, many specific distinctions, interventions and ideas about therapy since those long-ago days, there are certain core principles from Gestalt that continue to underlie and guide everything I do with a client:
Every aspect of our experience is a part of ourselves. Any attempt to eliminate or destroy any part of our experience only perpetuates and escalates conflict.
Since every experience we have is a part of us, attempting to eliminate any aspect of it is doomed to failure—and if it were to be successful, that would make us less whole, less capable, and less human.
Every aspect of our experience needs to be acknowledged, understood, and utilized in the contexts in which it is most useful, integrating it smoothly into the fabric of our lives.
After ten years of being deeply involved in Gestalt, I discovered neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Again there was the heady excitement of learning a radically new way of helping people change, with all its challenges, frustrattions, and discoveries. NLP offered very specific ways to elicit and verify a client’s internal experience, as well as a multitude of ways to alter that experience in order to resolve problems. The field continues to evolve, often far beyond its stumbling iconoclastic beginnings in the early 1970s, when Richard Bandler and John Grinder first developed it. What’s next?
An interviewer asked a famous songwriter, “Of all the songs that you have written, what is your favorite?”
The songwriter replied, “The next one.”
Although Gestalt was quite good at revealing the dynamics of internal conflicts, and eliciting alienated behaviors, it was not nearly as effective in resolving them. The client kept switching back and forh between the two parts of the dialogue until integration occurred. Sometimes this took a long time, and it often involved a lot of broken furniture as they acted out their anger and fantasies of revenge on the empty chair.
This was primarily because Gestalt didn’t include the presupposition of positive intent behind every behavior. Assuming positive intent makes it much easier for us to accept an alienated part, and be willing to identify with it and learn from it. Gestalt took a small step in this direction by assuming that every alienated part had a valuable power. No matter how troublesome or destructive a behavior was, it was a resource that could be integrated and used in more positive ways if it was acknowledged as part of the self. The only real choice was between the present state in which the alienated part would express its power in whatever way it wanted, or identifying with it, taking it into the self, and gaining some degree of choice about how the power was expressed.
However, acknowledging the power in a troublesome aspect of behavior is not nearly as convincing and liberating as realizing that an alienated part is already performing a positive function that can be acknowledged and celebrated, building a positive alliance with the part. For instance, a parent’s withering criticism might have the positive intent of motivating a child to succeed, as well as the positive intent of expressing the parent’s feeling of helpless frustration.
Since the child also wants to succeed, the parent and child are now in agreement about the intent, so they can now explore together how to alter the problematic behavior to make it even more effective in achieving the positive intent. Once this alliance is established, it is relatively easy to work together with the part, instead of battling with it.
There are actually three fundamentally different kinds of positve intent, and they can be illustrated in a familiar scenario in which a parent or other important person criticizes a child, and the child understands this behavior as meaning something about the child. Often a criticism is a clumsy overgeneralization like, “You’re stupid,” or it’s loaded with unuseful presuppositions like, “Why won’t you ever grow up?”
One particularly admirable aspect of Gestalt Therapy was Perls’ willingness to record his work on film—when it was far more expensive and difficult than it is today. Now anyone with a smart phone can record events with the tap of a finger—and without the bright lighting that filming used to require. Virginia Satir, Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers, and a few others also made film and video recordings, so that others could see and hear exactly what they did in therapy sessions. That kind of openness is still very rare in the field; most therapists prefer “private practice.” I have often tried to locate videos of prominent therapists, so that I could see exactly what they did in sessions. But usually all I can find are lectures about their work, and their theories, not the work itself. Some prominent therapists have made “therapy” films based on actual cases, but using trained actors—producing only a distorted caricature of what actually happens in therapy.
The main reason often given for not videotaping real client sessions is client confidentiality. However, I think that “client confidentiality” is more often protection for the therapist, rather than the client—a way for therapists to avoid revealing what they do—and how long it takes for them to make any progress at all. I have found that most clients are quite willing to be videotaped if you tell them that no public use will be made of the video without their written permission. Even when they have this absolute veto power, very few have exercised it.
Another valuable aspect of Gestalt was that it usually occurred in groups, so all group members could observe the struggles of the person in the “hot seat” who was actively working with the therapist. The benefits of observing others ranged from simply becoming familiar with the process, and the typical benefits of the process, to complete “piggybacking”—stepping into the shoes of the protagonist, and getting personal resolution for themselves.
When a client had fully identified with a rejected and alienated part, s/he was often asked to go around to the other people in the group and act out that part in relation to each person. For instance, if a “dark side” part was arrogant or insulting, the client would be told to be arrogant and insulting to each person in the room in turn. Usually their insults would vary in interesting ways as they responded to the personality or behavior of each person, targeting their individual weakness or sensitivity. The insult to one person might be to their appearance, another’s intelligence would be demeaned, while a third’s social status would be scorned. This combined expressing and owning the problematic behavior with making authentic contact with others in the group. This provided a behavioral richness and texture far beyond the word “arrogance,” making it very clear exactly how pervasively someone’s “dark side” was expressed in their interactions with others.
Although these processes were quite useful, they required publicly acting out aspects of their personality that were often embarrassing to clients. Some were understandably reluctant to do this, a significant obstacle that prevented some from benefitting fully, or at all.
Someone, or something, in the real world might be very difficult to deal with, but in the context of a two-chair dialogue it became inescapably clear that the real conflict was between two (or more) parts within the client. When someone is yelling at a parent in the empty chair, but the parent is nowhere near—or may be dead and gone long-ago —it is obvious that they are actually yelling at their internal image of the parent, something that Virginia Satir was also very clear about.
As the client successively acted out each side of the conflict kinesthetically, they identified with each, implicitly agreeing that each was a part of their own behavior, even if it was labeled “father” or “mother” or someone else. Each time they switched between parts, the transition from one to the other overlapped, and this tended to blend and integrate the two sides of the conflict. When integration was successful, that made it possible for the client to own and use all their personal behaviors and skills to deal with the external conflict in the real world.
Like any other process, the usefulness of awareness in the present moment in the limited context of therapy can easily be overgeneralized to become a universal panacea. If someone noticed that we need to breathe in air, and then declared that we should always breathe in, their error would be apparent to most—especially if they tried to actually do that.
However, the same fallacy is true of the doctrine of being aware of the here and now in contrast to the “there and then” of the past or future. While it can be very useful to be able to redirect attention from past disasters and future anxieties to the present moment, particularly for people who tend to overplan, the reverse can also useful. Many people already spend most of their life in the present moment, untroubled by past mistakes or future consequences. Those who overeat, abuse drugs, or engage in risky behavior of all kinds could benefit greatly from expanding their scope of time in order to pay more attention to the past and future.
Images of the past and future can be very sustaining, and even life-saving, especially when the present is horrible. Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi death camps by vividly remembering being with his wife, and planning the talks and writing he expected to do after the war was over. Happy memories and exciting future goals are part of the experience of being human. Without the past and future, our lives would be as restricted as a chimpanzee’s.
If you think that being in the here and now all the time would be wonderful, spend a few minutes watching a YouTube video of Clive Wearing, who has a memory lasting only 7-30 seconds, and you will soon be released from that particular delusion. Jill Bolte Taylor provides another very interesting report of being in the here and now in her TED talk, “My stroke of insight.” She loved being in the present moment—what she called “la la land”—but it made her incapable of making a simple phone call to save her from the stroke that intermittently shut down her ability to understand and use language.
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