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metanymous в посте Metapractice (оригинал в ЖЖ)
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.