In-house #15: Does a surgeon determine in advance exactly how long a heart operation will take?

 

Some therapy sessions could be three hours and work great. I’ve done an occasional hour-and-a-half, and much more rarely a two-hour. These were not scheduled to be that long, but the time was available. My sense of the rightness of a much longer session has been duplicated in some Empty Chair experiences. A client imaged a parent or long-term girlfriend in the chair. He first opened up with some powerful expressions of angry grief, grievance and need. After ten or twenty minutes it would subside. Then, instead of rejoining him in the here-and-now, I wait, sitting mostly stone-still, hand casu­ally up to my face sometimes so he can’t feel any pressure from my eyes. He is still looking at the chair or inward as many minutes pass. The atmosphere is not dead, but pregnant. I continue waiting, know­ing, hoping, assuming that the floor he stood on is softly dissolving beneath him and a subter­ranean continent is opening up. The next statements and feelings, the face, the gestures will say so much more about himself, hidden and rare and critical information. He has found a new world inside him, an origi­nal world.

And even more time given, he will sink to a deeper continent.

This is what Empty Chair can do if the stars are aligned. A long-extended session does some­thing related but different. It intensifies the therapeutic encounter while chang­ing therapy into depth familiarity. There is something perfect about losing the feeling of the structured, “official” hour. Here’s what it’s like: A child needing the caregiver’s time­less patience. Rare unboundaried sessions are the Platonic ideal of therapy.