If you want to help a client understand herself, be moved and changed simultaneously, you can use infinite regress minus one, which I made up yesterday. It's just a path to Gendlin's Focusing process which, as I said in "Rabbit hole,"* avails the person of "bodily nuanced feeling. One senses inner truths that the here-and-now head, with its brand-name labels for feelings and attitudes as platitudes, is not in touch with." Because "the feeling is the fact," digging down to buried feeling reveals and frees the true self.
The process is simple. State something you believe or feel, then ask yourself "why?" or "what does that mean?" Answer each question, then question that answer and do this over and over until you get past your explanatory thoughts and ideas to the feeling core. Here is an example:
Depressed client says: "I like being a nurse." Why? "Because I like helping people." Why do you like helping people? "I like to be valuable, to make a contribution." What does that mean to you, to be valuable? "It means to be of service." Why is that valuable to you? "It makes me feel good." What is the 'good' feeling? "It makes me feel important." 'Important' is not a feeling. There is no emotion of 'important.' What is the feeling? (At this point, the client is brought to what Gendlin calls a "felt sense" – an actual chemical-emotional sensation that she has possibly never questioned and has never read.) "I don't know. But it does make me feel good." Look. Sink into these felt senses: 'good,' 'important.'
(Long pause.) "The feeling is actually not good, but I think it is. This is strange." A longer pause, during which the client has gone inside the molecules, then: "I'm not actually a helping person. I've never been helped my whole life. I've built this needy shell into a giver. My patients love me for ten minutes, an hour, but they love the persona, the giver, not the real me." Why don't they love the real you? "Because it's not there."
If readers are getting the bizarre, absurd notion that this deep-sensing facility is the key to all human self-understanding, they would not be wrong. It's the paradox where great thoughts, Shakespearean thoughts, are false elements, screens, while the nuts-and-bolts material, our nuanced experiences inward, are the greatest wisdom.
Does that feel disenchanting?
Another example:
Client, with her husband, moved from New Jersey to Nevada and lives ten minutes from her parents' home. Why? "I like the neighborhood." Oh? "Convenience."** There are hundreds of thousands of nice houses and good neighborhoods all over the U.S. Why did you move near your parents? "They're getting old. I'd regret missing their golden years." What do you mean by 'regret'? "I'd feel guilty. You know my mom was abusive to me and my sister. But my stepdad was my ally." Don't you have to have done something wrong to feel 'guilty'? Did you do anything wrong? "No." Sink into the guilt sensation, the regret sensation. The client does, and an underground world of need, of feeling like a "little child," of "pull" to a self-enclosed and never-giving parent, of hope for love, opens up.
Regressive questions can draw forth the hues, tints, tones and shades of the psyche, the insides of the interior of a soul. But be careful: ". . . when you clearly felt-sense a door, it opens."*
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** Actual responses!
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.