Having no agenda is the right agenda

My experience is probably no surprise to any feeling-centered depth therapist, but I want to mention it as I’ve had two worthy moments in two sessions in two days. A twenty-seven-year-old man and a twenty-seven-year-old woman. Both presented as opaque, one appearing not to have, one denying, any depth (“there is no ‘child’ in me”). The man actually looked intellectually deficient, with his flat mannequin expression, surface sentences and dully watchful manner. The woman, bright (studying physics in grad school), chatted nicely but kept her frozen smile and anxiety on guard, to prevent any entrée to her feelings.

This is not to say they were emotionally mute. Anger and anxiety were their “presenting problems,” and they could describe basic symptoms and a narrative history.

It was time to bludgeon them in order to forestall any more time wasted in sessions. I mentioned the Focusing process, described in an earlier session, to “subliminally” attune them to the feeling zone. Then I asked them to sit back or lie back, eyes closed, and dwell inward, letting any feeling coalesce. Sit in it for a while. Then (after some untimed silence), make a doorway that lets the feeling come up and out in words. Both clients complied and sat back in complete silence for a long time, five or more minutes. Somehow that was all it took to enable them to fall into a never-known place. The man talked to his parents about their killing him with rejection immediately upon their divorce. He then talked to his wife about his sense of failure and his failure to her. I could see he was in an almost-hypnotic place, and at the sweet-spot perfectly gifted moment when he had painted the doom he was giving his family, I suggested he tell her what he can do “instead.” He spoke words to save himself: what he would do now to change, what he would do for them. It was actually thrilling to witness it.

The woman, after her period of silence, lost her guard and said to no one how she had fucked up her life and how it has taken all these years to create some solidity. She decried that her mother had never been a strong and wise resource for her. She told her how desolate it had been when she graduated from high school and there was no parent “to tell me what to do,” what to do in college or with her life. Afterwards, we understood how regressive this was, she still was, the child needing to be told. Something she had never realized.

Though I’ve done a hundred similar processes over the years, somehow I don’t recall doing this simple one much at all. But it’s probably the right way to go, maybe most of the time. No subject of the hour. Just go inside, close your eyes, sink, and stay there for a long time until your real life finds you.

Honing the idea a little:

A few years ago I wrote a post (https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2016/01/theres-no-place-like-home.html) proposing that the deepest and most moving therapy could be based on the client’s questioning himself: Who am I? He

“would sink into the question miles deep, in head silence, before letting a response emerge. This is because we can read the pieces of our real self – all the elusive and quiddity truths of it – by presenting the body with open-ended questions. ‘Who am I?’ ‘How is my life going right now?’ ‘What do I care about?’ ‘What does “care” mean to me?’ The body knows – because it owns – the infinitude of historical feelings that make the facts, far more than our idea-generating, safe-guessing head knows what’s ultimately real.”

But now I believe even that is too much of an agenda. Start with nothing, only a place of comfortable discomfort, and with all the time in the world. (Or so it comes to seem.)

A second honing:

An hour of mostly silence can be vastly superior to half a year of talk.