Souped-up Empty Chair

 

Fritz Perls invented the Empty Chair technique to creatively and intellectually resolve conflicts and to deepen self-understanding. A person imagines and talks to someone, or to himself, or even to an object from a dream in the facing chair. Following a poignant monologue, he moves to the other chair, channel­s the inter­locutor, faces the empty seat where he was, and talks to him­self. I find this silly, too head-heavy and theatrical: enlight­en­ment by persona.

I bastardize the original process, though I’ve fraudulently kept the name: Empty Chair. My client puts a gravely important person in the opposite chair – mother or father usu­ally. I ask her to allow the full felt sense, the body “feeling of it all” to overcome her as she faces the other. I ask her to picture all the unsaid between them throughout their history. I suggest that while the par­ent may not be able to really hear you – mother or father may always have been deaf and blind – “at least they will listen. They won’t roll their eyes, they won’t argue, they won’t get up and walk out, they won’t apologize too quickly to get it over with. They will listen.” On a good day, my client will unload, for five minutes or for one-and-a-half hours as a woman in Cañon City, Colo­rado did in 2002. Tears, yells, clenched fists, snot, anguish, rage, the history of injus­tice and pain that was buried alive long ago.

Lately, though, I realized that I’ve bypassed some serious thinking about the process. Because observe: There could be one of three different persons facing the chair. It could be the adult façade talking, venting and shallow. Or the person some­what in touch with her history, her child­hood injury: Better, but still too buoyed by the here-and-now mind. Or it could be the adult regressed to her child or infant. That is theoretically and sometimes the best.

We’re looking at the potential of abyssal purging. At the fantasy height of it, the client would be bolt upright in outrage, yelling at her father, maybe kicking the chair, then collapsing in shambles, wailing, an eviscerated child. The momentum would be entirely unconscious and preconscious, as it was for the women in Cañon City. There was no way that she deliberately generated ninety minutes of coherent, articulate agony and justice. It was a natural river.

Whatever happens or doesn’t, the Chair can be a moment of truth. There are even times when it’s enough for a client to silently look at the person facing him and, in that place, to feel more Self than he has ever felt in his entire life. A few minutes of this can point his psyche to a new land he has never seen. Thereafter, he will not walk in the old direction again.