Yesterday was our teaching team’s annual “away day”. Impacted by the retirement of one of our senior faculty and the changes in the curriculum this would be necessitated, this year’s theme was coming back to the philosophical underpinnings of our psychodynamic and humanistic courses. I was delighted to have this opportunity to discuss the very thrust of my book and to reflect with my two humanistic colleagues about what are the foundation principles, the writers and theorists we would foreground, and the unique offering of our courses at Brighton.
As I share in the opening chapters of my book, my vision of a humanistic psychotherapy is one built on dialectic: the both / and of philosophy and psychology, existentialism and phenomenology, theory and experience. It is this view that permeates right down into the human experience; the both / and of being and becoming, self and self-ing, being a part and apart. The both / and is what brings our totality; to reach into both extremes knowing that neither exists without the other.
Coming into my 10th year of being on faculty, it seems a little surprising perhaps that it is only now I am formulating such a clear vision of humanistic practice; and yet, as I discussed with our team leader, it arguably takes this long to imbibe the theory and assimilate it: to know that unknowing is the key, to hone the instrument of the self at the centre of good, therapeutic practice. An instrument all the more at the fore of the humanistic art. And the bodily, indwelling of praxis is certainly from where I have, and continue, to find my voice and speak out my view. Remember, many of my colleagues were my tutors! It takes courage to speak my ideas out loud – these elders taught me “all I know”, and yet I have had to unknow what I thought I knew, de-create in order to re-create anew.
Ahead of the day with the team, I found a cafe to ponder how my book writing experience was sifting out the key principles of a humanistic psychotherapy. I had woken early: the concerns for my father on my mind and the excitement of the day to come. Both / and. As I sat in reflection, I felt a deep appreciation that I could sit and luxuriate in my contemplative life AND make room for the pain. I was journaling about the totality of experiencing as I was experiencing the totality. I left my hour of being apart to become a-part of the team deeply convinced I am in the right practice tradition for me; and a confidence in my own experiencing that I could speak from.
My day yesterday, from beginning to ending, made the choice of essay focus today a straightforward one…
Wisdom energies
At the time of collating ideas and writing this essay, much is being written in the press about the speed with which AI is entering our everyday lives. I’ll spend more time on this in later chapters. For now, its an entry point into more dialectic – knowledge and wisdom; or as it manifests – no amount of information can be a substitute for experience when it comes to maxing out the totality of our human being. We need a body to experience, it is here our emotional world is met; the body is in fact how we have a world!
Another foregrounded aspect of lived experience as I write this essay is both the joy of making a new home and the sorrow in witnessing my aging father’s health decline. I have shared how much I have come to understand my path through the construct of courage; and certainly this feels a muscle exercised as I open up my heart and make space for the extremes of my experiencing. If had known this was the process asked of me at the start of my path as therapist and as Buddhist meditator I might have done a quick about turn! Our clients similarly come asking for us to take the pain away; and somewhere in there is the belief that to feel is to be getting something wrong. That we take our pain and suffering as a personal failure, an indication that we lack in someway.
Yet, the existential-phenomenological bedrock of our humanistic tradition says “no, this is your fullness not your lack”. I imagine there will be a time in the future when AI replicates the experience of feeling and emotion; but for now, it is only our human fabric that can resonate to the full orchestral movement of life.
This is very much the thesis at the heart of Kirk Schneider’s more recent work. To be moved by life is to feel wonder and awe – and as we visited earlier, awe contains the awesome AND the awful. Some of the sensibilities Schneider (2023) has encountered (and developed) in his journey include the trial and creativity of being alone, the angst and sensitivity of experiencing sorrow, the paralysis and mobilisation of despair, the shudder and defiance in fear, the terror and humility through fragility, the distress and possibility contained in uncertainty, the bitterness and strength aroused in rage, the panic and curiosity prompted by disarray (pg 34). Note, the pulse of the emotion (e.g fear) and the two alternative polarities of the lens we can experience that pulse through (shudder and defiance).
What just came to mind as I thought about the paradoxical pairings contained within the total was how a windsurfer is able to harness the headwind to move into it by turning the board in a way that it can zig zag.
I remember as a cyclist knowing this counter-intuitive phenomenon – how some of my fastest course performances were when my disc wheel would bit hit by a side wind and not a tailwind. We too can tack through life by leaning into the energy of the emotion. In fact its only through the ordeal that we are inspired to exploration and inquiry (Schneider, 2023).
The American Psychological Association define emotion as “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioural and physiological elements.”; in other words when life “comes at us” (more accurately when we move through the world, the world moves through us, that intraconnected permeability to which Merleau-Ponty insistently points) there are three active components – subjectivity, energy, expression. We encounter the world, the energy ripples through our being, and we act. How we act depends on our relationship to the energy arising within. Pema Chodron, Buddhist teacher and writer, has her own invitation: don’t bite the hook and drop the storyline. When we feel emotion, stay with the energy alone. As it is with the energy that we can mine what we need to know within the situation. Emotion is but a messenger; and the story around it can distract us or indeed perpetuate rather than work through destructive patterns and life limiting scripts. To use our tacking analogy, leaning into the energy takes us in new directions.
We don’t have to adopt the phenomenology of the Buddhist teachings and meditation practices to make sense of the wisdom of emotions nor experience this tacking. We can think of inhabiting a still point in the way Rollo May called the “I am” of experiencing. Working with a client who had quite dramatic oscillations in affect, we developed an image of standing on the bridge. From here, not only could they get a better vantage point to see the swings in their experiencing (or the two islands they would visit) she could safely contact the flow of emotions, the river, without becoming disregulated. This is the key in helping clients access (know) and compost the energy into wisdom: to experience without suppressing or expressing. Again, it is the bodily experiencing that is the vessel of composting; knowledge about only becomes wisdom when we make full contact. Insight and understanding alone is not enough.
Our role as therapists in the conversion of confusion into wisdom (as the Buddhist texts describes such alchemy)? It’s the therapeutic heart that enables this wider reach into the client’s totality. Our Object Relations colleagues would describe this as an integration of both positive and negative aspects of relating without resorting to splitting or projection. In mature love, an experience we can offer to our clients, relationships endure the both / and: that we can breathe in and ‘tolerate’ more than we think we can. We stand on the bridge with them, the safe nervous system of the congruent therapist upon which they can attach and regulate through.
I have learnt that courage involves surrender. When we let go into love, or the I-Thou encounter, it is a depth of experience that has room for sorrow and joy to co-exist. These experiences develop our emotional palette over time. Recalling a moment with my father as he became incredibly ill and needed a life-determining operation, as we looked into each other’s eyes and said what I thought were our goodbyes, the sadness of loss opened a door to the preciousness of life. As Schneider remarks it is these moments that intensify contrasting feelings. This encounter with my father were a world away from my experience of shepherding my parents through the pandemic. Believing it was down to me to keep them alive, this is a narrative that has kept me gripping tightly in fear – and so living a muted, grey life. To break through to joy through the depth of my sorrow has updated my narrative. Being on my own bridge, being in the “I am” experiencing brings more intensity; one that is not always pleasant but it’s rich, I feel more alive now I have let myself know death. As Schneider comments our growth isn’t limited to life and death experiences as we greet such paradoxes in more delicately nuanced combinations: the sliver of fear in a loving relationship, or the hint of sorrow in a moment of glee, or the taste of envy in the most admiring friendships; it is arguably here that lend life its zest, its pathos and its intensity: its awe (2023).