Category: Clinical Practice

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The nocturnal therapist: An argument for turning toward our dreams

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Dreams have inherent therapeutic value. Why don’t we tap into them more?

By Dr. Leslie Ellis

Dreaming is therapeutic. Is there a way to make it more so? Unequivocally, yes. Much like therapy, the more we invest our time and energy into our dreams, the more helpful they will be. This is not a new idea, but one that is gaining a broader spectrum of supportive evidence, moving beyond clinical case studies to include the realms of neuroscience and traumatology. Our brains and bodies have a natural tendency towards health and wholeness, and dreams, even the so-called bad ones, are implicated in the process of maintaining our emotional and spiritual health.

There are the obvious cases. For example, a few years back, a client was having a particularly difficult time in her life and feeling wholly unsupported by those closest to her. She dreamt that a large bear of a woman gathered her up in her lap and held her close, rocking her and telling her everything was going to be just fine. This dream was vivid and visceral, and she woke from it feeling soothed and hopeful.

Most dreams are not quite so obviously helpful. For example, this summer, my beloved cat Shadow disappeared and I have not seen him since. Shortly after his disappearance, he came to me often in my dreams, at first so realistic I felt I could reach out and touch his silky fur. Later, his dream presence was more distant, his image starting to break up. These dreams are more like how therapy really is – helpful but painful too because it brings us face to face with what we are up against. Therapy is typically a process that allows us to consider, feel deeply into, and ultimately accept and move through aspects of life that we find challenging. Therapy includes many supportive moments, akin to the bear hug woman, but it is rarely as simple as that.

I have spent more than 20 years as a clinical therapist who welcomes and explores client dreams as an intrinsic part of the process. I have also paid attention to my own dreams. I understand first-hand the tremendous value dreams have in alerting us to what we need to attend to. I have been astounded at times by their wonderfully creative way of offering us new perspectives on tired old situations. But rarely are they clear and simple like the bear hug woman dream. Instead, their helpfulness usually comes in two ways. One is an automatic sorting and emotional processing that goes on in the background while we sleep. The other is via active engagement with dream images, a relational process that takes time and effort on our part. We can do this dreamwork on our own or in the company of a dream partner, group or therapist, or do both: begin exploring on our own, and then with the help of others. I recommend both.

My point is that while dreams are naturally therapeutic, we can greatly enhance the help they bring us if we spend a little time and make an effort to engage with them. And yet so many people ignore this nocturnal resource. Why is that?

I can offer several possible reasons. First, dreams often feel too mysterious and unapproachable. For example, recently I had a dream where there was a clear felt sense that I had been searching the world and had finally found what I was looking for. The rest of the dream is more vague, and only partially recalled… but my holy grail seemed to be in the clear turquoise waters of a shallow lagoon in some faraway place, and maybe was a school of fish. Then I was a disembodied watcher floating above the dream scene looking down on a white car with strange gull-wing doors flung wide open. This image has a spiritual feel to it, the white car reminding me of snow angels.

The dream also brings to mind my very first and most vivid lucid dream — I was swimming underwater and the realization that I didn’t seem to need to air sparked my lucid awareness of dreaming. To process this dream, I had a meandering conversation with my dream partner, and gained a better sense of how this dream might be “just what I was looking for.” Some helpful pointers: the car was floating, a vehicle, a mediator of sorts between the air above and the water below. I made plans to draw the image to engage with it further. Rarely do dreams offer up clear and easy answers.

Then again, this is also similar to therapy, at least in the way I practice it. I do not see myself as in the business of providing opinions, solutions or answers. I am an active, empathic listener, and a supportive advocate for my clients. But this support comes in a way that ideally enables them to hear their own voices more clearly, to plumb their depths, to face their demons and if needed, to metabolize embodied trauma and memories that may be holding them back. But I don’t view therapy as an excavation project in which we search the past for sources of pain. I believe the best working material for therapy comes from the present, and attending to what arises now that needs attention (which of course will include the past). Dreams very often bring up what’s most salient, emotionally-charged and related to current challenges. They can also point the way forward.

This brings me to another reason I believe many people turn away from their dreams despite their inherent therapeutic value. It’s the same reason clients often arrive in therapy only after they’ve reached a point of desperation, their inner demons shouting too loudly to be ignored any longer. We tend to dream of what we repress, those aspects of our lives that can be difficult to face. When we wake from a dream, I expect there is some level of awareness that the dream is telling us something we need to hear but don’t want to hear. Dreams are like homeopathic medicine – a small dose of what is ailing us, a direct experience of our problem. They are an irritant that has the potential to begin the process of response, and ultimately of understanding, metabolization and healing. But first we need to turn toward them and have the courage to let them in.

 

Dr. Leslie Ellis offers dream exploration courses online to clinicians and anyone interested in engaging with their own dreams. She is author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy, and many articles and book chapters on embodied experiential dreamwork and focusing. Join her for a free talk on dreams and therapy Jan. 16, on the Jung Platform’s Dream Summit.

 

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Getting answers while you sleep: How incubation seeds helpful dreams

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If you are wrestling with a particularly challenging issue and no amount of effort yields an answer, sometimes ‘sleeping on it’ can bring insight that eluded you during the day. If you deliberately ask your dream-self to help you solve problems, the help that comes from such inquiry offers multiple and surprising benefits.

 

Some notes on the history of dream incubation

Dream incubation has a long history, far beyond the scope of this blog. But there is some wisdom to be gleaned from the past. According to Patton (2004), the dream incubation rituals of the Ancient Near East and Greece had three main elements: intentionality, locality and epiphany. Without at least two of these elements, a dream can’t be considered incubated.

Intentionality is the understanding that the dream incubation was entered into deliberately and for a specific purpose, most often healing. There was often a ritual preparation, cleansing, possibly supplication to the gods for a therapeutic dream. It was understood that such dreams were coming from the gods and not the person dreaming them. Patton wrote that “incubation is a process one enters deliberately, intentionally, on one’s own behalf, with an eye to hatching dreams of power” (p. 203).

Locality speaks to the fact that dreams were considered to be in relationship with the place one dreams them. Dreams were originally seen as “place events… the dream’s setting is radically connected to the place where the dream is dreamed” (p. 204). Dreamers attending the ancient temple of Asklepios, for example, would sleep in the abaton with all the other people hoping to have a healing dream. The places chosen for such rituals were understood to be where the veil between the material and spiritual world was more permeable.

Epiphany involved the realization of a dream incubation and subsequent sharing of the dream encounter. Successfully-incubated dreams were seen by the Ancient Near East and Greeks as visitations from the gods, marked by the appearance of the actual god in the dream, or another form which the god often assumed, i.e. Asklepios as serpent. The process was often completed with some kind of offering or artwork commemorating the dream and offering thanks. After a dream in which the gods paid a visit, they were understood to inhabit the dreamer for a time, or for a lifetime, bringing about fusion of the larger and smaller self.

Patton writes eloquently of the relationship between the dreamer and the gods:

“Although incubated dreams certainly do not “belong” to human beings any more than any other dreams do, they are far from impersonal. For our part, we are far from passive receptacles for the self-expression of the gods through dreaming. We contribute to the incubation a delicate yet powerful web of experience, memory, will, fear, awe, and desire where the divine dream can take place. When the spirit of place hatches dreams through mortals, it also dreams about us and for us as individuals, as a tribe, and as a race.

Thus the process of incubation, viewed through this phenomenology— or constructive historical theology—emerges neither as conjuring magic (whereby the dreamer is all powerful) nor as a kind of slavery to the night terrors sent by a celestial despot (whereby the visiting dreamed god is all powerful), but instead as a delicate relationship, as paradoxical and symbiotic as any other two-sided affair.”

 

Dream Incubation Goes Beyond Problem-Solving

Whether or not you ascribe to the view that dreams are messages from the gods, it does appear that dreams bring us many gifts, especially if we make a point of deliberately asking them. Dream incubation research shows that the resulting dreams go beyond problem-solving and can bring insight, lift mood and point to health concerns. In a controlled experiment by White and Taytroe (2003), 96 frequent dreamers rated waking and dream moods over ten days and recorded their most vivid dream for each night. Half incubated a dream before sleeping and half upon waking. Night dream incubation participants were more likely to report that their distress around their problem was reduced, and that it felt both more solvable and improved in some way. Night dream incubation also improved mood, reducing both anxiety and depression over ten days relative to the control group.

The researchers used Delaney’s (1996) simple dream incubation technique:

“Write down a one-line question, phrase, or request that expresses something you think is important for you to know or do in order to help you solve your personal problem. It is not a wish that something would happen to another person or to circumstances beyond your control that are part of your focus problem. Examples are:

Help me understand my friend _____,” “What is really going on between _____ and me?,” “Give me an idea for my physics project,” “How can I get motivated to do _____?,” and “How can I improve my study habits?”

You might think of several phrases before you find one that seems most direct and appropriate. Be as specific as you can to your focus problem.”

 

An Embodied Dream Incubation Practice

If you would prefer a more embodied method, here is one I developed based on focusing. While it doesn’t work for me all the time, on occasion it has produced profound dreams in direct response to my inquiry. Here’s a script to guide your incubation process:

Start by allowing your body to choose a particular topic or issue that you would like your dream to respond to. Check inside for what seems to most want your attention. Get a sense of how it lives in your body – where it is located, and how you would describe it. See if you can also get a sense of what it might be about. Spend a couple of minutes with this – an example might be: a knot in my stomach that seems to contain some anger to do with my relationship. Or a fluttery sensation in my throat that feels like anxiety about the pandemic. As you attend to this felt sense, ask your dream to offer something relevant, a way forward. Stay with the embodied question, and the actual felt sense in your body for a few minutes, ideally not too long before sleeping, and then let it go. You can do this for several nights in a row if your dreams don’t respond immediately. Treat all the dreams that come within the next few days as if they are responding to your query.

 

Dreams and the body: Early warning signs

In another dream incubation study, Harvard psychologist Dierdre Barrett (1993) examined the effects of dream incubation for creative problem solving. She found that among the 76 participants, roughly half of their dreams were deemed relevant to the question posed in the incubation process. Of those, about 70% of the dreams were rated, both by the dreamer and by independent raters, as offering a solution to the problem. Barrett found that incubation is most successful with queries of a personal nature, and that medical and body-related questions can also generate helpful dream responses.

There is strong support for the notion that the early warning signs for some medical conditions come to us first in our dreams. According to neurologist Oliver Sacks (1996), dreams are, “directly or distortedly, reflections of current states of body and mind.” Neurological disorders can alter dreaming processes in quite specific ways, and these can vary from person to person. Sacks gives the example of a patient with an occipital angioma who knew that if his dreams turned from their usual black and white to red, he was about to have a seizure. In other examples: the loss of visual imagery in dreams is a possible precursor to Alzheimer’s, and recovery dreams can presage remission from multiple sclerosis. Sacks hypothesized that the dreaming mind is more sensitive than the waking mind to small changes in the body, and so appears prescient because it picks up subtle early cues.

In some cases, this early warning provided by dreaming can be lifesaving. Dreamworker Jeremy Taylor (1992) offered the example of a woman who dreamt of a purse of rotting meat. The dream was so disturbing to her and her dream group members, the woman sought a diagnostic pap smear which turned out to be negative. She insisted on further testing which revealed she had a particularly aggressive form of uterine cancer that would have killed her had she not caught it in time. At the time of the dream, she had no symptoms and was about to go on a trip – she credits the dream and the dreamwork for saving her life.

Taylor said that all dreams can be read on many levels, but that every dream contains some reference to the body that is dreaming it. In some dreams, houses can be seen as analogies for the body – for example, the wiring is our nervous system, the plumbing our digestive system, windows are eyes and so on. This embodied level of the dream is always worth considering, especially if the images seem particularly ominous or insistent, like the purse of rotting meat.

However, dreams are not always so serious, and only very rarely are they warnings of something deadly. I am hoping that when you try these dream incubation practices, you bring a spirit of curiosity and play. Love and enjoy your dreams and they will often respond in kind, bringing new insights to old problems and lifting up your mood along the way.

 

Dr. Leslie Ellis is author of A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy. She offers clinical dreamwork courses online.

 

References

Barrett, D. (1993). The “Committee of Sleep”: A Study of Dream Incubation for Problem Solving. Dreaming, 3(2), 115-122.

Delaney, G. (1996). Living your dreams. San Francisco: Harper Collins.

Patton, K. C.  (2004). “A great and strange correction”: Intentionality, locality and eipiphany in the category of dream incubation. University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from: 075.080.230.207 on March 03, 2018.

Sacks, O. (1996). Neurological dreams. In Barrett (Ed.), Trauma and dreams, p. 212-216. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

White, G. L. & Taytroe, L. (2003).  Personal Problem-Solving Using Dream Incubation: Dreaming, Relaxation, or Waking Cognition? Dreaming, 13(4).

 

 

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Dreams of Bereavement: How Your Dreams Help You Grieve

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Bereavement dreams are common and they help us through the grief process. Surprisingly, dreams following the loss of a beloved person or pet are mostly positive.

Earlier this summer, already made more cruel by the distress and dislocation brought on by the pandemic, I lost my beloved cat Shadow, a massive Maine Coon that was so majestic he seemed almost mythical. He was an outdoor cat who made the rounds of the neighborhood and had many admirers. He left one day never to return…. except in my dreams.

While I still help out hope that he was just holed up in someone else’s home being showered with affection, I was also very concerned, especially when I was shown that a prowling cougar crossed the path of my neighbor’s security camera. In my dreams, Shadow came every night at first, sleeping in the crook of my knees as was his habit. But this dream-Shadow was a glossier, shinier version, the picture of radiant health.

As the summer wore on with no sign of him, I began taking down the posters and admitting to myself that I may never see him again. He still returned in my dreams, but he was increasingly distant and a more faded, tattered version of himself. It was as though he was moving on, and I guess, so was I. Admitting to myself that it was highly unlikely I would see him again, I even got another cat (who is never allowed out except on a leash). It feels as though the dreams helped me, especially the early ones – as though my cat was coming back to reassure me.

Dreams following the death of a loved one, be it a pet or a person, are quite common. They are not always comforting, but they do seem to move the grief process forward. A woman who I did some dreamwork with told me of her dreams after the death of her father, which was a shock made more difficult by the fact that because of her family religious tradition, she was not allowed to see the body and pay her final respects. She told me her father would come often in dreams, with no apparent idea that he was deceased. He would talk to her in these dreams as though all was well, and she would have to live through the fact of his death over and over again every night. Was this helpful? Her feelings about this are decidedly mixed. But she did feel that the dreams helped her overcome the shock of the loss, and to accept its reality.

Dr. Joshua Black studies dreams of grief and loss. He recently investigated the question: “Why are some dreams of the deceased experienced as comforting, while others are distressing?” In his study (2020) with 216 participants whose partner had died, he and his colleagues found that bereavement dreams appear to serve at least three distinct functions: they can assist with processing trauma; they can serve to maintain a bond with the deceased; and/or they can help regulate emotion. Taken together, these functions may “actively facilitate adjustment to bereavement.”

Black became interested in grief when he had a visitation from his father 3 months after his death. His dad had died suddenly, plunging Black into grief he described as numbness, as if all the color had drained from the world. In the dream, his dad had an uncharacteristic lightness about him. In an interview, Black (Bell, 2020) said, “It was the first time I saw him peaceful.” In the dream, he got to tell his dad he missed and loved him and after that, all the color in his world returned. This ultimately led to Black’s decision to research grief dreams rather than follow his plan to teach elementary school. In his dissertation (2018), he studied who dreams of the deceased and why, and found that the desire to maintain continuing bonds is a factor that was not previously considered, and that attachment styles may play a role in who dreams of lost loved ones.

Among Black’s other findings, one of the most surprising is that dreams following loss are not only common, but overwhelmingly positive. After the loss of a spouse, 86% will dream about them over the following year, while 78% will dream of their lost pet within 6 months of their death. More surprising is that 92% of those dreaming of deceased partners will have positive dreams, compared with 44% negative dream content. With pets, fully 91% will have positive dream content.

Black said initial grief dreams tend to offer reassurance, just as Shadow did with me. He was glossy and felt so alive and present it was as if I could reach out and touch him. When these dream figures keep returning, it brings a sense of continuity of connection. And toward the end of life, lost loved ones often come to help ease the life-death transition. So while grief dreams can be painful, most often they help us through the pain of loss.

 

Some further resources:

Help for nightmare sufferers: CLICK HERE

A short focused course on nightmare treatment for clinicians. CLICK HERE

 

References

Bell, K. (2020). The Dream Journal Podcast, Sept. 26, 2020 episode with Dr. Joshua Black. Retrieved from ksqd.org/grief-dreams-with-dr-joshua-black

Black, J. (2018). Dreams of the deceased: Who has them and why. Dissertation, Brock University.

Black, J., Belicki, K., & Emberley-Ralph, J. (2019). Who dreams of the deceased? The roles of dream recall, grief intensity and openness to experience. Dreaming, 29 (1), 57-78.

Black, J., Belicki, K., Piro, R., & Hughes, H. (2020). Comforting Versus Distressing Dreams of the Deceased: Relations to Grief, Trauma, Attachment, Continuing Bonds, and Post-Dream Reactions. OMEGA – Journal of Death and Dying.

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No need to fear the Old Hag: Sleep Paralysis briefly explained

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Locals will warn you never to sleep on your back in Newfoundland, or risk a visit from the Old Hag. She steals in on the night fog just as you are falling asleep. She is an apparition that crawls up from the foot of your bed and sits on your chest so heavily you can’t breathe or move. Sometimes she may try to seduce you, other times, to kill you. These terrifying experiences are so common in Newfoundland, they have become the subject of a tv series aptly called Hag. They are also the subject of research into the relationship between sleep paralysis and folklore.

There is a physiological explanation for sleep paralysis. And there are good reasons these peculiar events feel like visitations by the Old Hag or some other kind of apparition. Sleep paralysis episodes are not limited to Newfoundland and in fact, are fairly common worldwide and throughout human history: roughly 8 percent of us will experience one in our lifetime, and some will have recurrent episodes. Students and psychiatric patients have a much higher prevalence of about 30 percent, likely because it is more common in people who are sleep-deprived and stressed. Sleep paralysis is not a nightmare, but rather a form of sleep disturbance, a parasomnia.

Sleep Paralysis is normal: terrifying but harmless

The most important thing to know is that sleep paralysis is normal. Having an episode doesn’t mean you are losing touch with reality or being visited by the ghost of an old sea witch. These legends, in various guises, have been around since Sumerian times as a way to make sense of those frightening occasions when we wake up paralyzed, unable to move from the neck down. What you may not realize is that we all experience sleep paralysis every night, but for the most part we dream our way right through it.

During the REM sleep cycle most rich in dreaming, our body releases a chemical that makes our voluntary muscles go limp. It’s our body’s way of protecting us from thrashing around as we fight our dream dragons. In fact, it’s more of a problem if the paralysis doesn’t happen – this leads to REM sleep behaviour disorder, the dangerous propensity to physically act out one’s dreams, and it can be a precursor to Parkinson’s disease.

If you suffer from sleep paralysis, it helps to know that this is just your mind waking up from the state of dreaming before your body, when it should be the other way around. Or your body drifting right into REM sleep, and your muscles going lax before your mind has truly shut down for the night. This can happen for various reasons, mostly to do with insufficient or irregular sleep, and most often it is a benign physiological event. Terrifying but harmless.

It also helps to know that sleep paralysis episodes are short, typically lasting about 20 seconds. It may feel like much longer if you are frozen in fear as the Old Hag bears down on your chest. If something like this happens again, try to take some long deep breaths and wait for the images and sensations to subside. Remind yourself that it won’t take long. If you also experience banging noises or flashes of light, this is another parasomnia with the colorful name of  exploding head syndrome. This is equally harmless and tends to last just a few seconds, so wait it out and try not to be alarmed!

Not everyone experiences sleep paralysis as an evil old hag. There are many variations of experience, and these fall into three main categories. First is the experience of an intruder, a malevolent felt presence that is sometimes visible and/or audible, but not always. The second type is called incubus, and this is experienced as a supernatural assault, a sense of being smothered, or of a great weight on the chest. These two types are well-known and often combined.

A third kind of sleep paralysis involves unusual bodily experiences (or vestibulo-motor phenomena) such as flying, out-of-body experiences or false awakenings, and some of these can be experienced as blissful. However, the vast majority of reported episodes of all three types of sleep paralysis are terrifying. Understandably, most people who wake up unable to move, and with a sensation of being trapped in their own body, react with fear. The fear itself may exacerbate the sensations of shortness of breath and chest pressure, as these are common features of panic.

What can you do about sleep paralysis

This is an area that has not been studied very well; there have been no formal clinical trials testing treatment. However, since sleep paralysis is correlated with disrupted or insufficient sleep, an obvious step is to observe good sleep hygiene: go to sleep and wake up at consistent times, no caffeine before bed, and avoid sleeping on your back. Sleep paralysis is also associated with hypertension, hypersomnia, sleep apnea and alcohol use. Not surprisingly, it is common in shift workers and others with disrupted sleep schedules.

Therapeutic interventions may be warranted if sleep paralysis is frequent and distressing enough to warrant the diagnosis of recurrent isolated sleep paralysis (RISP). Some anti-depressant medications can help, as can psychotherapy and psychoeducation, especially if it is underlying anxiety or depression that is contributing to the condition. Having a basic understanding of sleep paralysis can help; the knowledge that such episodes are normal and will end soon can make the event itself less scary.

Taking control

During an episode, you might be able to take charge of the dream state as one would in lucid dreaming. It is possible to realize that while you may not be in control of your body at the moment, you do have some control over your subjective experience. Try to remain calm and as curious as you can – this is a chance to observe yourself in the dream state. After an episode, or as a way to lessen the intensity of a future episode, you can try a version of imagery rescripting. This can set you up for a better experience should the Old Hag revisit. The idea is simply to re-imagine the experience, letting it become a different story, possibly with a different character or ending, and this may seed a more benign future encounter.

A caveat: much of the above is based on clinical literature. There are many other ways that people make sense of ‘Old Hag’ experiences that differ from this view. Some are culturally determined, and others are based on the beliefs formed through direct experience. There are those who welcome this altered state of consciousness. My desire in writing this is simply to help and inform, so use what you find valuable and leave the rest.

If you are interested in learning more about nightmares and their treatment, sign up for my short, focused online course. Because I feel this material is important to disseminate, the course is always open, is self-paced, and currently discounted during the virus crisis. Please ask your clients if they have nightmares, and let them know they are treatable. CLICK HERE for a free PDF for clients: What You Can Do About Your Nightmares. Or check out our Short Focused Course on Nightmare Treatment using THIS LINK.  

References

Cheyne, J.A. (2005), Sleep paralysis episode frequency and number, types, and structure of associated hallucinations. Journal of Sleep Research, 14: 319-324. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2869.2005.00477.x

Cox A. M. (2015). Sleep paralysis and folklore. JRSM open, 6(7), 2054270415598091. https://doi.org/10.1177/2054270415598091

Sharpless B. A. (2016). A clinician’s guide to recurrent isolated sleep paralysis. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment, 12, 1761–1767. https://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S100307

Solomonova, E. (2018). Sleep Paralysis: phenomenology, neurophysiology and treatment. In: Fox, K & Christoff, K. (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought: Mind-Wandering, Creativity, Dreaming, and Clinical Conditions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Are you a parent concerned about the frequency and intensity of your child’s bad dreams? Should you be concerned?
Learn more about Nightmare Relief for Everyone designed by nightmare expert Dr. Leslie Ellis, this self-paced user-friendly and accessible online course covers the very latest in science and research about what nightmares are, and what they’re not. Leslie offers some simple steps you can take to get some relief from nightmares and other nocturnal disturbances – both for yourself and for others, including your children.

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Turning Toward Our Nightmares: How This Paradoxical Move Helps Us

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The surprising thing about nightmares is that there is nothing to fear. This is not to dismiss them. They feel absolutely real, and our heart-pounding response to them is also very real. But as frightening as the characters and situations nightmares depict may be, the dreams themselves are like paper tigers, playing out on the screen of our imagination. Believe it or not, they are trying to help us, not hurt us. The broad consensus among nightmare therapists and researchers alike is that dreams help us regulate our challenging emotions, and that nightmares are part of the natural recovery process from trauma. So rather than avoid them — the understandable response to something that scares us — we need to turn and face them.

Curiosity, an alternative to fight or flight

How we turn and face the fears represented in our dreams truly matters. For inspiration, consider the example of black blues musician Daryl Davis who spent 30 years befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. Person by person, through one-on-one conversations, Davis changed a relationship of hate and fear to one of mutual understanding. The more we know about the so-called ‘other’ the harder it is to hate and fear them. In the process befriending the ‘enemy’, Davis convinced more than 200 KKK members to give up their robes. This same act of turning toward the other with respect and open-mindedness is what I advocate doing with our dreams.

I suggest taking particular interest in the dreams that scare us because they hold the greatest potential for expanding our personal capacity and understanding. When I invite my dreamwork clients to explore their dreams in experiential ways, they are often surprised at what they find. They begin to understand, via direct experience that the monsters in their dreams are represented in such a way because the image is colored by their own perception of it. We tend to fear what we don’t know. As soon as we enter into relationship with something, the dynamic begins to change.

Consider Mary’s dream. In it she is standing on a beach and sees a tsunami coming. She tries to run and there is a sense that she is never going to make it up the slope in time. The wave is coming too fast, and will certainly bury her in its mountain of water. So she decides instead to turn toward it. When she does that, turns toward the powerful ocean and calmly holds her ground, it becomes a harmless wave that dissipates at her feet.

Also consider the dream of ‘Flora,’ a refugee who fled her native Congo due to political persecution. She had a recurring dream that a group of men with guns circled her and were going to kill her because they thought she possessed incriminating information. Like the classic dreams of post-traumatic stress injury, this dream was almost an exact replay of what actually happened to her. She was confronted and froze in terror, unable to speak. In therapy, she was invited to dream the dream forward; she stood and faced her attackers and found her voice. This empowering action changed her relationship to the dream, took away the charge. The nightmares that had been plaguing her for years simply stopped.

This idea of changing the ending of our nightmares is not a new one. Carl Jung was the first to suggest we engage with our dreams by ‘dreaming the dream on.’ Nightmare rescripting has now become the main method for clinical work with traumatic nightmares, and while it doesn’t always work as well as it did for Flora, it has been shown mostly to help and even when it doesn’t, it causes no harm.

Working with childrens’ dreams

The same technique can be used for helping children with nightmares, which is a good thing because kids have much more frequent nightmares than adults. You might offer a child this example from the movie Shrek: Donkey was initially terrified of the dragon, but when he turned and looked at her more carefully, and noticed her long, fluttering eyelashes, his feelings changed from fear to love. Cue the voice of Eddie Murphy saying, ‘Oh! I didn’t you were a girl dragon.’ And in that moment, everything changed.

Children are still immersed in the world of their imagination, so dream rescripting comes quite naturally to them. They can readily imagine their bed turns into a magic carpet that takes them up and away from danger. Or even better, like Donkey, they can turn toward their dream dragons and make friends with them. This is far more effective than telling them their dream is not real, because as we all know, the amazing thing about dreams is how very real they feel when we are in them. Telling them it’s ‘just a dream’ dismisses their experience without mending it.

A caveat. The underlying feelings need attention and this can take time.

While it is true that turning toward our dream dragons with curiosity and as much friendliness as we can muster is very often helpful, it is not a panacea. Dreams are a part of our emotional regulation process. Nightmares that we turn toward will help us understand and face our fears, and when we come to terms with the intense feelings they represent, our dreams will reflect a calmer landscape. This can happen immediately, but more often over weeks or months. It will take longer if the effects of trauma are ongoing, or the dream reflects a major loss and the grieving process is current.

The point is, no matter how long it takes, it is better to turn toward your dreams and the emotions that ride in on their waves than to ignore or dismiss them. In dreams, as in life, it is the things that we engage with actively and with open curiosity that can evolve and change. Ultimately, the message is a hopeful one. If turning toward the ‘other’ can transform the hate of hundreds of former KKK members, then surely we all can tame our dream dragons. Maybe, like Donkey, we can even fall in love.

 

If you are interested in learning more about nightmares and their treatment, sign up for my short, focused online course. Because I feel this material is important to disseminate, the course is always open, is self-paced, and currently discounted during the virus crisis. Please ask your clients if they have nightmares, and let them know they are treatable. CLICK HERE for a free PDF for clients: What You Can Do About Your Nightmares. Or check out our Short Focused Course on Nightmare Treatment using THIS LINK.  

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A Brief Introduction to Experiential Dreamwork

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Have you noticed that your dreams are more dynamic and intense during these uncertain times? You are not alone. Many people are reporting increased nightmares and disturbed dreaming, and want to know what this means and what to do with their dreams.

This introductory course in experiential dreamwork will give participants several simple yet powerful ideas about how to engage with dreams in a way that helps regulate emotion and constructively process the difficult feelings arising in the world right now. The course will include self-help exercises you can try on your own, and methods that will help inform your dreamwork with clients. It will include live demonstrations of the experiential dreamwork methods discussed, including finding and embodying help in a dream, entering into the subjective experience of dream characters and elements, and dreaming the dream onward.

Clinically relevant. There will also be information about how to use dreams as diagnostic, as indicators of clinical progress, and as a safe way to work with trauma. 4.5 CE credits offered.

Join dream expert Dr. Leslie Ellis for 3 Tuesday afternoon dreamwork sessions in July. During these 90-minute zoom sessions, she will introduce some fun and fascinating information about dreams, answer your questions and show you how to engage with your dreams in an experiential way. Sessions will include a brief talk about dreams, a chance to ask questions, and a live dreamwork demonstration.

This course will be of interest to mental health professionals who want to incorporate dreamwork in their practice, and to anyone interested in deepening their relationship with dreams. It is also an opportunity to try out a short version of Dr. Ellis’ courses. For those who want to continue on to the year-long Embodied Experiential Dreamwork Certification program starting in Fall 2020, this course fee will be credited.

Dates:              July 7, 14 and 21, 2:00 pm to 3:30 PDT (5:00-6:30 PM EDT)

Location:         Zoom

Cost:                $127 USD (or $87 for those needing a discount, no questions asked!)

Recordings:     Available to registrants

Questions?      Ask Leslie lae2317@gmail.com

Register here.  And bring your dreams…

Dr. Leslie Ellis is an author, teacher, speaker and clinical dreamworker. Her book, A Clinician’s Guide to Dream Therapy (Routledge, 2019) offers therapists a primer in modern, experiential dreamwork. She has written numerous book chapters and articles on experiential focusing and dreamwork. Her award-winning PhD research developed a nightmare treatment process for refugees. She developed her somatic, experiential focus through extensive study of focusing. She is currently president of The International Focusing Institute. She studied depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and her practice is a hybrid of Jungian and focusing-oriented approaches. She is also an expert in treatment of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress injury and developed and taught trauma theory at Adler University in Vancouver.

What former dreams students say about Leslie’s online dreamwork courses:

Leslie presents in a well-modulated, soothing voice that carries the recorded commentary sessions and the live interaction sessions very well.  She is a calmly-confident and organized teacher who is clear and concise in her outlining of concepts.  She demonstrates an excellent grasp of the broad swathe of dream literature her clinical training and work has taken her through…from Carl Jung to contemporary neuroscience.  Leslie is skillful in her facilitation of the live dream-work sessions, ensuring a sense of participant safety while encouraging and containing the group’s participation with an attitude of openness and respect.

I can highly recommend both Leslie’s book and this online course.  I have come away enriched and expanded by this learning opportunity.”

Catherine Johnson, Clinical Psychologist, Trauma and Focusing Oriented therapist; Cape Town, South Africa

“Dreaming is a fascinating but hard field to explore. Leslie is an enthusiastic and experienced pioneer. Her book and course help me find a torch and a map. As a therapist, I use these tools to help my clients go into their experiences and hearts. Highly recommended.” – Sicong Cao, psychotherapist, Wuhan, China

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How Focusing Can Help During the COVID-19 Crisis

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There are countless resources being freely offered right now to help us all manage the stress and trauma of COVID-19. This article offers some specific practices that are based on focusing, a gentle, embodied way of sensing inside that is particularly well-suited for managing overwhelm. Focusing is a soothing practice for all forms of regulation: self-soothing, co-regulation in a dyad, and for connecting deeply in a group. It is also an exquisite way of listening that truly helps another.

 

Keep things moving!

If I had to name one overarching principle to help us stay regulated during this time of crisis, in a word, it would be movement. I am not limiting this to physical movement, although this is certainly helpful for burning stress and getting stuck energy flowing. What I mean, is when you take in the stress from the news or from a challenging event or interaction, don’t let it sit there inside. Jog it out, dance it, sweat it out if such physical options are available.

Movement can take many other forms, however. The breath is one of the simplest, most accessible ways to move energy through is. We can visualize breathing in calm and breathing out stress. We can lengthen the out-breath to calm the nervous system. And we can move heavy feelings out through visualizing, through the embodied imaginal steps of focusing. For example, of the accumulated stress feels like a great weight, our gentle attention can turn it into a feather that quietly floats away.

 

Focusing for self-regulation

In a recent video on how to manage during COVID-19, Dr. Bruce Perry speaks on thetraumatherapistproject podcast about the necessity to stay emotionally close even as we physically distance. He also speaks about the importance of self-regulation, not just once a day when we go for a long walk, but constantly, throughout the day. We need to take mini-breaks to just breathe, move our bodies, meditate briefly. Or we can clear our inner space using focusing to acknowledge and gently set aside the troubles we can’t attend to in the moment.

Focusing teaches us to sense inside and be open and curious about whatever we find there. It is a way of being present with ourselves in a non-judgmental manner that allows the body to speak, and thus to metabolize all that we take in that needs to keep moving through us. It prompts us to turn toward our own embodied selves and in doing so, to find the right next step forward.

 

Co-regulation in a time of physical separation

As mammals, we are designed to be soothed in the presence of each other. We are attuned to touch, and are now needing to find other ways to co-regulate our nervous systems. Stephen Porges, who developed the Polyvagal Theory, stresses how important it is for us to regulate each other, especially in stressful times. When we can’t touch, our voices are a fine substitute, especially they are calm and relaxed.

Vocal prosody is a way to communication safety and connection, says Porges. So when we are reaching out to our loved ones, it’s better to use video or phone than text or email. And it’s also wise to limit exposure to fast-paced, newscasts that raise alarm in our bodies. He suggests reading the news instead.

 

Co-presencing as an evolution of our responsiveness

All over the world, people are not only coming to terms with the enormity of the crisis, but they are also responding with love, and by banding together in small, online groups to connect and offer mutual support. Thomas Hübl, founder of the Academy of Inner Science, speaks of the need for co-presencing to raise the level of our collective intelligence. He said that when we are in co-presence, a field is formed that makes us all greater than the sum of our parts. It is from here that innovation comes.

In a video on how to find our resilience in a time of crisis and pandemic, Hübl suggests that the stress caused by the current crisis is triggering our past and collective trauma. And when we are in a stress response, we do not act from our best selves. We need to come together in a loving way to metabolize this trauma. And we have the embodied experience and resilience to do it:

“Many of the fears now are not related to the present moment, but stored in our bodies from our time as children or from the collective trauma field of our ancestors. This naturally comes up when things are scarce. We need to find resourced parts of our body. Our body (contains information that) is hundreds of thousands of years old. It contains the wisdom of the concentrated liquid of humanity.”

When asked how we should respond to the current challenge of our over-taxed medical system, Hübl said we need to stop looking for a long-term solution because we don’t actually know how the future will unfold. Echoing Perry, he advocates need to continuously regulate and stay present to what comes, to view this as a marathon, not a sprint. And the only thing we should focus on is the immediate next step.

“We have to let go of how the world was yesterday, that world is gone. Many things we had don’t exist anymore. The world changed in the blink of an eye. We need to release ourselves from what we know, because now we are swimming. We need to be present, we need to swim now. The things that are happening are a collective force, so it’s very important to look forward, not back… We need to look for the next step we can do that is doable. To look too far ahead paralyzes us.”

Here again, focusing is a way forward. As focusing founder Eugene Gendlin pointed out, inherent in our bodies’ felt sense is the way forward, the right next step. If we can truly listen inside and to each other, we have the individual and collective inner wisdom and embodied experience to move through this crisis with grace and love.

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Four Reasons to Work with Dreams… and at the risk of being dramatic, they can even save lives!

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By Dr. Leslie Ellis

The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of my recent book which outlines 4 excellent reasons to work with dreams. This list is aimed at psychotherapists, but holds true for all dreamers! So, why work with dreams?

They point to our most salient emotional concerns

It may seem that we don’t need dreams to do this, but that we are always well aware of our most pressing emotional concerns. However, human consciousness is not always straightforward or consistent, and people can be very good at unwittingly deceiving themselves. In fact, one of the most popular forms of therapy (cognitive-behavioral therapy or CBT) was founded on the premise that our mind leads us astray and distorts our experience in a number of ways. One example is rationalization, a habit of talking ourselves out of our feelings using ‘rational’ arguments, such as, “I’m not sad that she left; I didn’t really love her anyway.” We can often fool our conscious mind, but such a person may dream of losing something of great value and wake up crying. If they pay attention to their dream, they will realize that they are in fact very sad about the loss of their relationship. Dreams are like that very good friend who is willing to be honest with us even when what they have to say is not easy to hear.

Dreams can also provide therapy clients with a way to introduce important yet deeply personal topics in the course of therapy, subjects they may want to bring up but are reluctant to do so due to fear, embarrassment or cultural norms that discourage personal revelation, even in therapy. A researcher (Goelitz, 2007), who works with clients preparing for death, found that dream work brought the focus of the session to the deeper emotional concerns rather than the more typical discussions about physical symptoms and treatment. She noted that the dream work helped her clients feel less alone and better prepared for death. She was convinced that these discussions would not have taken place had they not been facilitated by a dream.

Dreams bypass our defenses and speak the truth

Dreams tell the truth, even when such truth is uncomfortable and defended against in everyday awareness. During sleep our prefrontal cortices, responsible for, among other things, rational thought and executive functioning, mostly shut down for the night. During dreaming, our internal editor, and our moral authority also go to sleep. That’s why our dreams can sometimes be bizarre and why normally taboo subject matter such as explicit sexuality and violence can often appear in our dreams. At times, it seems as though our dreaming consciousness is trying to get our attention by delivering its content in the most flamboyant or dramatic way possible. It helps to know that dreams are often metaphorical, not meant to be taken literally. For example, I had a dream that I was eating horseshit and kind of enjoying it even though I was well aware of how disgusting this would seem to the people around me. I laughed to myself when I understood the dream’s message might have to do with a lecture I had listened to a few days’ prior that I found highly entertaining and yet filled with ideas I considered completely far-fetched.  Because I liked the person, I was trying to remain open to their ideas, trying to take in and digest the material, but having trouble doing so. The dream captured the complexity of my feeling about the situation with economy and humour.

There is considerable clinical evidence to suggest that dreams carry emotional truth that is often difficult for the dreamer to assimilate. One of the major benefits I have seen in working with dreams is that it can help clients to see and truly experience an unconscious aspect of their personality or behaviour that is not congruent with how they see themselves or want to be. For example, a client I will call Michael had a dream that he was walking on a beach and came across a group of people sitting in a circle, and his cousin was there with them smoking a crack pipe. Michael had a strong judgement about this, as smoking crack was something he would never do. But if, as some theories suggest, characters in a dream represent aspects of ourselves, then Michael was like his dream-cousin in some way. In the dream-work he did, I asked him to ‘be’ his cousin on the beach, and when he imagined this, he felt an attraction to the pipe, and then a dawning of awareness that this feeling of addiction was familiar to him as it coloured the dynamic of his relationships with the women in his life. He was flooded with shame and a heartfelt desire to change which fueled transformation in his relationship and many other aspects of his life.

 

Dreams can bring a new and wider perspective on a situation that is stuck

History provides many good examples of how a dream can bring a creative new perspective. The person who invented and patented the first lock-stitch sewing machine solved the main challenges to developing a reliable machine because a dream pointed to the solution that had long eluded him. Elias Howe, who eventually became the second-wealthiest man in the U.S., came up with the novel idea of putting the hole in the ‘wrong’ end of the needle from a dream of a spear fight between warring native tribes. In the dream, some of the warriors’ spears punctured the fabric of the tents, snagged loops of thread and pulled them back through with the tips of their spears. Dreams are the sources of many great inventions, including the periodic table and Einstein’s theory of relativity. For someone who has studied a subject deeply but who has become stuck in a fixed way of looking at the problem, dreams can bring the fresh creative inspiration that was elusive. Sometimes ‘sleeping on it’ can bring unexpected and creative answers.

Dreams are embodied, and present us with an internally-generated world that is detailed and appears very real to all of our senses. This total immersion brings us in touch with the magical quality of dreaming. A dream is a richly-detailed world that is experienced as entirely real while the person is dreaming it. Even for those who experience lucid dreaming and become aware they are dreaming while in the midst of it, the experience feels very real. This aspect of dreams is what makes them so compelling, and such a useful tool in therapy for assisting clients in stepping out of their ordinary way of experiencing or seeing things. A dream can bring a broader perspective, a new way of seeing, a shift from ordinary consciousness, or habitual ideas, a step toward change.

 

Dreams provide diagnostic information and can show clinical progress

There are many ways that dreams can provide diagnostic information about clients, although the subject is a complex one because dreams can be cryptic. According to Oliver Sacks (1996) dreams are, “directly or distortedly, reflections of current states of body and mind.” Neurological disorders can alter dreaming processes in quite specific ways, and these can vary from person to person. Sacks gives the example of a patient with an occipital angioma who knew that if his dreams turned from their usual black and white to red, he was about to have a seizure. Some other examples Sacks offered are loss of visual imagery in dreams as a possible precursor to Alzheimer’s, and recovery dreams presaging remission from multiple sclerosis. Sacks hypothesized that the dreaming mind is more sensitive than the waking mind to subtle changes in the body, and so appears prescient because it picks up subtle early cues.

In some cases, this premonitory aspect of dreaming can even be life-saving. Famous dreamworker Jeremy Taylor offered the example of a woman from dream group that met regularly who dreamt of a purse of rotting meat. The dream was so disturbing to her and the other group members, the woman felt unsettled enough to have a diagnostic pap smear which turned out to be negative. She insisted on further testing which revealed she had a particularly aggressive form of uterine cancer that would have killed her had she not caught it in time. At the time of the dream she had no symptoms and was about to go on a trip – she credits the dream and the dreamwork for saving her life.

Not only can dreams be indicative of potential health changes for better or worse, they can also be used to track clinical progress. Tracking shifts or progress via dreams can be an easier task for therapists than using a dream to make an initial diagnosis because it is often easier to spot incremental change in the pattern of dreaming than to decipher something completely new. It takes some time to get to know the unique world of each dreamer, and paying attention to a series of dreams will make it clearer when something significant has changed. For example, in my research into the nature and treatment of recurrent PTSD nightmares (Ellis, 2016), specific kinds of changes in dreams that had been recurring repeatedly, sometimes for years, appeared to coincide with trauma recovery. This observation is supported by research that sampled 94 trauma survivors and found the closer their nightmares were to replicating the actual trauma event, the higher their level of related distress. For trauma therapists who track dreams, the progression from concrete to less realistic, more imaginative dreaming can be seen as a sign of clinical progress.”

 

Dr. Leslie Ellis offers online courses in personal and clinical dreamwork, and is opening a dreamwork certification program in 2020. For more information see www.drleslieellis.com or join her email list  if you want to receive blog posts, and training opportunities.

 

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Gendlin’s Radical Impact on Psychotherapy: A summary of his top 3 papers

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What matters is that the therapist is another human person who responds, and every therapist can be confident that he can always be that. (Gendlin, 1968)

 

In honor of Eugene Gendlin’s lifetime achievement awards for contribution to psychotherapy theory (from APA, USABP and others), I have summarized his most important articles here. 

The radical impact of Gendlin’s philosophy: A summary of his most important articles on psychotherapy theory

 By Dr. Leslie Ellis

Back in 2011, Eugene Gendlin, the founder of focusing-oriented therapy, received his third major award from the American Psychological Association, this one for his distinguished theoretical and philosophical contributions to psychology. In 2016, the year before he died at the age of 90, Gendlin received lifetime achievement awards from both the World Association for Person Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy and the US Association for Body Psychotherapy. His work has made a significant impact on how somatic and experiential therapies are practiced around the world. However, many of Gendlin’s ideas were ahead of his time, and some of the potential impact from his ‘philosophy of the implicit’ has not yet made its way into mainstream thinking about the practice of psychotherapy. This article brings some of Gendlin’s radical ideas to light, summarizing his three most important papers on the theory of psychotherapy.

There are three articles that focusing teachers from around the world agree are Gendlin’s most important contributions to psychotherapy theory, and although they are decades old, the ideas expressed in them continue to have a ‘radical impact’ (Ikemi, 2017) on psychotherapy theory. Many of Gendlin’s ideas have filtered into the common parlance of psychotherapy in various ways: proponents of immediacy and mindfulness in therapy, and those who encourage clients to follow their ‘felt sense’ or embodied understanding of an issue are taking their lead from Gendlin’s theories. It has been incorporated into methods like Emotion-Focusing Therapy and Somatic Experiencing. However, there are some concepts which underlie the process of psychotherapy that have not shifted appreciably since the days of Freud. One such concept, repression, is challenged and advanced by Gendlin’s philosophy.

 

A theory of personality change (1964)

In this ground-breaking article, Gendlin (1964) makes note of how the therapy endeavour is often a conversation between the client and therapist about what has gone wrong in their past (their experiences, development, family of origin, etc.) that has made them feel or act the way they now do. Therapy brings new awareness to the client about their past situation, and a realization that they must have felt all of this all along but kept it out of awareness because it was unacceptable or overwhelming. The concept of repression originated with Freud and has not changed much in the past 100 years.

Part of the problem with this conceptualization, said Gendlin, is that it can only explain the personality as it is, and does not in theory allow for the possibility of change. It also operates on a ‘content paradigm,’ a sense that in their unconscious, people are holding a vast storehouse of fully-formed but forgotten experiences that must be unearthed so the client can understand how they came to be the way they are. There is the inherent assumption that this insight will bring change. What has been repeatedly observed, however, is that “knowing is not the process of changing.” Gendlin (1964) and many others have observed that in fact, personality change happens in the context of an emotional process, and in relationship.

Gendlin (1964) developed a theory for this change process that updates the concept of repression with something that seems more plausible. He would say that the past experiences that still plague our clients were not experienced and then forgotten, but rather avoided or stopped before they happened. These pieces of unfinished process are tangible in the body as a felt sense that carries rich, complex and implicit meaning. When we pay direct attention in the present moment to the sense we still hold in our bodies about these unfinished aspects of our stories, it will unfold and be fully felt. Often, attending to a process that has been stopped leads to painful realizations, likely the reason the process was stopped in the first place. But even when a person comes to realize just how hard this experience is to fully feel, the process of turning toward it and allowing it to unfold most often brings a sense of relief, an easing of the anxiety surrounding it. This is surprising. Gendlin wrote, “One would have expected the opposite.”

Another surprising thing happens as a result of attending directly to the felt sense of even the most intractable issue: “Even when the solution seems further away than ever, still the physiological tension reduction occurs, and a genuine change takes place. I believe that change is really more basic than the resolution of specific problems,” (Gendlin, 1964). What changes in this process is not the external situation, but the entire way the person holds the problem. What often follows such a shift is a flood of realizations, memories and new ways of making sense of old patterns. Gendlin said this dawning of insight is often mistakenly seen as the source of change when it is actually the by-product.

How is it that such a transformative process is facilitated by the presence of another person? Gendlin said when we are with another person, it changes our manner of experiencing immediately. Of course, the nature of the person we are with makes a difference. With a self-oriented, impatient listener, we are apt to close off to our experience more than we normally would. However, with a listener that allows us to “feel more intensely and freely whatever we feel, we think of more things, we have the patience and the ability to go more deeply into the details, we bear better our own inward strain… If we have showered disgust and annoyance on ourselves to the point of becoming silent and deadened inside, then with this person we ‘come alive’ again.” This quality of presence that Gendlin describes is one that we as therapists endeavour to cultivate in ourselves. Exquisite listening can move our clients forward in the places where their process has stopped, and the movement forward in these frozen places is what brings genuine change.

 

The client’s client: The edge of awareness (1984)

In this article, Gendlin (1984) differentiates feeling from the ‘felt sense’ and explains why following the felt sense, which is not as clear or intense as a feeling, is what leads to change. “People often have the same feelings over and over, quite intensely, without change-steps coming,” Gendlin wrote. Feeling things repeatedly does not discharge them as was previously thought, but actually reinforces them. On the other hand, the vague, murky felt sense leads to feelings and ideas that have not ever been consciously expressed, and this novelty is what leads to change.

Gendlin stressed that it is the immediacy of the felt sense unfolding now that gives it the power to transform, not a reworking of the past, which is so often the paradigm for therapy. “Therapeutic steps are not a re-emergence of denied experience. What matters most for change-steps is precisely the new implicit complexity of the bodily living.” The past is always contained in the present experience, but the important difference in focusing is that it asks a person to attend freshly to what the felt sense brings now, rather than speaking from a hackneyed, familiar script about one’s life experience.

Client-centered therapy encourages the therapist to follow the client’s lead, to come with no agenda and preconceived notions, but to allow the other’s process to unfold. And for a focusing client, Gendlin’s advice is to treat their felt sense the way the client-centered therapist ideally treats them. The felt sense is the ‘client’s client,’ (hence the article’s name). So as a therapist in this context, our job is the support our client to be gentle, open-minded, curious and respectful to the inner felt sense that is unfolding, to offer gentle reminders if they ever assume they already know what it’s about. (The same holds true in working with the dreams as people often make assumptions about their dream’s meaning.)

This way of approaching therapy changes the manner of the conversation in some striking ways. Clients will typically begin their session by describing all they know about their problems, while a focusing approach is more concerned with what they don’t know. As a focusing therapist, our job is to continually bring the client back to the inwardly-sensed ‘unclear edge,’ a place they may be reluctant to stay with. To encourage focusing, the therapist can inquire into the felt sense in such a way that the client has to stop and check inside.

Gendlin said, “There is a great difference between talking about and pointing.” An example he offers of pointing: when a client says something like, “I must not want to do this (get a job, meet new people, write an assignment) since when the time comes, I don’t do it.” The phrase ‘must not want to’ is speculation, an indication that the not-wanting is not directly sensed. Rather than simply reflect the not-wanting, the therapist can invite the client to sense it more directly by suggesting they stop and sense the not-wanting directly, to set aside what they think about it and see what is really there. This kind of redirection to the current sense of something can be done whenever you notice such speculation in a session. What comes from pointing to something that can be directly sensed is often surprising, and moves a previously stuck process forward.

From this kind of activity, Gendlin observed that “process-steps have an intricacy and power to change us,” and that, “we have to rethink our basic concepts about the body, feeling, action, language and cognition” to explain this. In the remainder of the article, Gendlin offers ten theoretical propositions in support of this major revision in thought.

In the first few theoretical propositions, Gendlin writes about the process of finding words to convey the complexity of ‘feelings-and-situations’ in which we human beings find ourselves. The words come first in our bodies, and point to implicit in feelings-and-situations. Like feelings, the words “must come or we don’t have them. We can remember them and believe they ought to be there. But to have them they must come. And this is always a bodily coming.”

Gendlin views feelings, thinking, actions and words all primarily as lived experience in the body, and each bodily event as implying what comes next. He calls this ‘carrying forward’ and said, “In therapy we change not into something else, but into more truly ourselves. Therapeutic change is into what that person really ‘was’ all along… it is a second past, read retroactively from now. It is a new ‘was’ made from now.”

From this new was, steps come that change one’s conception of the past entirely. For example, in my therapy practice, I often work with early-childhood trauma, and uncover felt-senses of traumatic situations that the person, as a child, could not assimilate. Their story of childhood, when they first enter therapy, is often that it was fine and normal, but there is a lack of depth and detail which tells me they are not truly in touch with their inwardly-sensed experience. When, as an adult and with a supportive other, they do attend to the felt sense they carry of this early time, it can open up what has been termed ‘repressed memory.’

Gendlin’s formulation feels more accurate, as those with a history of repeated trauma often dissociate from their experience. The trauma is not recorded, then forgotten, but not fully experienced in the first place. When, through focusing, the client’s sense of what really happened comes into their body, there is a sense of knowing, a dawning of understanding why they were so withdrawn, anxious or angry as a child. This new ‘was’ makes sense of both how they experienced their childhood and of many of their puzzling reactions in the present. It is a carrying-forward that leads to a radical re-conceptualization of their life situation, and it often precipitates a flood of feeling, insight and re-evaluation.

Gendlin carefully differentiates feeling from a felt sense. Feelings are often less complex, more recognizable and can be repetitive if nothing surrounding the feeling changes. A felt sense contains the emotion and the whole implicit complexity of a situation. It is “a much larger whole. The implicit situation as a felt sense is a single mesh from which endless detail can be differentiated: what happened to us, what someone did, why that troubled us or made us glad, what was just the also going on… and on.” If a situation feels familiar, repetitive and stuck, Gendlin said “the stuckness is a finely organized sense of why usual ways won’t do, and of what would.” So even our internally-sensed knowledge that something is wrong and feels like it can’t be fixed contains within it an implicit sense of what would carry the situation forward. When something entirely new is called for, the felt sense can lead to highly creative next steps.

There are many situations that call for novel responses to carry them forward, and the felt sense of this can be quite specific. “An odd situation’s implying is more organized than the usual routines and contains them. The novel implicit is not unrelated to familiar concepts, phrases, and actions. It includes these and exactly why they will not suffice,” (Gendlin, 1984). We can’t speculate but must allow the process to unfold, “like an unfinished poem that very finely and exactly requires its next line.”

 

The experiential response (1968)

This article provides clear guidance for therapists in how to help our clients find the equivalent of that precise next line of their unfinished poem. We need to learn to listen in an unobtrusive way that allows them to carry their own experience forward. This process is not a simple reflection of feelings expressed by the client, but rather a reflection of the intricate felt sense; it involves not just about picking up on emotional valence, but more gathering a sense of the whole of what the client is ‘up against’ (Gendlin, 1968), including the history of the issue, thoughts about it, all its complexity. If you, as the therapist, want to support the client in focusing, you need to respond not only to the words as expressed, but to the larger felt sense that underlies the words, and in a way that allows the client to inquire further into what they are sensing. You may try many responses that appear to lead nowhere. What is more important than being right about what might lead to an experiential response is to simply keep responding to how the client reacts next. Saying something like, “That didn’t seem quite right for you… can you sense into what would feel more right?” can help move the process forward as effectively as saying something exactly right, which we can never do all of the time. Saying the wrong thing can even make the felt sense more clear to the client, because they get a clear reaction from their body that says, ‘No, it’s definitely not like that,’ which then brings a sense of what is right.

The goal in this process is not deeper understanding or a clearer definition of the issue, but a sense of the experience moving forward toward an internal release that changes how the uncomfortable sense is held in the body. When this happens, Gendlin (1968) said there is “a very distinct and unmistakeable feel of ‘give,’ easing, enlivening, releasing.” He called this referent movement but the more current term is felt shift. This is the only reliable sign of progress, and it always feels good, even when what is discovered in the process is not so good.

After a felt shift, it may be easy to go back and make sense of the progress, but before the felt shift, this would not have been possible. The experiential process itself cannot be predicted and moves forward on non-logical steps. In fact, it is not unusual for someone who is focusing to contradict something they said earlier in the process and feel both were right at the time. Focusing can transform the felt sense of a situation so completely what was initially seen as a problem no longer seems to be one.

Gendlin believed that the most powerful engine for experiencing is interaction, which is why focusing works so much better with another person (although it is possible to have an interaction between oneself and one’s felt sense). Our job as the therapist is to offer our authentic reactions to the client, not our theories or even our wisdom: “What matters is that the therapist is another human person who responds, and every therapist can be confident that he can always be that. To be that, however, the therapist must be a person whose actual reactions are visible so that the client’s experiencing can be carried further by them…. Only a responsive and real human can provide that. No mere verbal wisdom can.”

This does not mean the therapist’s reactions become the centre of attention; it is only the reactions to what the client is feeling, perceiving and implying that are expressed. At times, when a client has trouble sensing inside or articulating their felt sense, the therapist’s reaction can be the key element in moving the process forward. These responses to our clients don’t always feel clear or good. Gendlin (1968) said, “The therapist cannot expect always to be comfortably in the know. He must be willing to bear being confused and pained, to feel thrown off his stride, to be put in a spot and not find a good, wise, or competent way out.”

Gendlin felt that the therapist must be more open in their interaction than the focuser would typically experience, and give voice to anything that helps the client “see more clearly what he is up against.” For example, if a client’s responses typically result in rejection by many of those she encounters, the therapist must find a way for the client to succeed where she usually does not. For this to happen, Gendlin believed reassurance or “whitewashing” does not help. “What is bad must be expressed as just as bad as it then is or seems.” However, this honesty must be paired with a response by the therapist to the inherent ‘positive tendency’ Gendlin believed underlies every action.

Gendlin offered the example of how one might respond to being pressured by a client: “I am feeling pressured by you, and that makes me feel like pushing you away, but that isn’t how I usually feel or want to feel with you. So, we’ll do something to clarify it, resolve it, since that isn’t really how you and I are.” The point is not only to be honest about a challenging reaction, but also to then be willing to carry the interaction further “to a positive, life-maintaining experiential completion which was only implicit and had been stopped and troubled until then.”

Taken together, these three articles articulate some essential ways that therapists can engender an experiential response in their clients that helps them move forward in areas of their lives that were stuck or causing trouble. In addition, they go beyond mere articulation of method to explain the key aspects of the underlying philosophy that is Gendlin’s major contribution to the theory of psychotherapy.

 

*Akira Ikemi (2017). The radical impact of experiencing on psychotherapy theory: an examination of two kinds of crossings, Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 16:2, 159-172, DOI: 10.1080/14779757.2017.1323668

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14779757.2017.1323668

 

Links to the three articles that the world’s top focusing teachers agree are essential are found here:

Gendlin, E.T. (1984). The client’s client: The edge of awareness. In R.L. Levant & J.M. Schlien (Eds.), Client-centered therapy and the person-centered approach. New directions in theory, research and practice, pp. 76-107. New York: Praeger.

Gendlin, E.T. (1968). The experiential response. In E. Hammer (Ed.), Use of interpretation in treatment, pp. 208-227. New York: Grune & Stratton.

Gendlin, E.T. (1964). A theory of personality change. In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.), Personality change, pp. 100-148. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

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Strategies to tame the inner critic

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In our lives, and in our clinical practice, we have all encountered the inner critic, and it can be a true impediment to connecting deeply with ourselves from the inside. Although everyone has a different version, the basic experience is the same: that of a repetitive and demeaning refrain that knows our particularly sensitive spots and sends critical messages right to that target. Often just as we (or our clients) start to feel good and strong, an inner voice enters that deflates us, telling us we are not [smart/successful/good/good-looking/talented…] enough.

In my 20 years of clinical practice, I have encountered many versions of the inner critic and find that the more trauma someone has suffered, the more intense this inner voice becomes. I think it’s in part because as children, we rely so much on our caregivers that if something is wrong with the relationship, it is too scary to blame those we rely on for our very survival. So the badness must be inside of us. It is a protective idea that helps at the time but that outlives its usefulness. However, because it was acquired at a young age, it often feels ‘true’ and is accepted without question. It is a revelation to some to simply say, you don’t have to believe your inner critic. You might want to consider its origin and question its message.

 

The inner critic is an ancient survival mechanism

Neuroscience expert Dan Siegel says the inner critic originates in our internal ‘checker,’ the vigilant part of ourselves that enabled our ancestors to survive. Those who were most alert to danger, and to something being wrong were more likely to survive and to pass on their genetic heritage. However, unchecked, it can manifest in many unhelpful ways: OCD, anxiety and also as the inner critic. This idea normalizes the voice, and also gives us a bit of objective distance from it. The inner critic is not something to believe without question, especially as we now live in a world where physical survival is rarely at stake.

Siegel’s suggestions for working with the inner critic are: to get curious about the nature of that voice, notice what brings it up and what it wants for you. Or more often, what it doesn’t want for you. Then thank it for doing that and mutually try to figure out a better way to work together.

Thoughts are not the same as facts. Just because something enters our mind doesn’t mean we have to believe it’s true. This may seem obvious, but very often people in the grip of an internal attack do not stop to question the veracity of their thoughts. In depressed clients, I have often seen them make up a whole story that makes themselves wrong or bad, maybe involving other people they imagine are thinking disparaging things about them – and then react as though this entire fantasy is real.  I like to label these thought trails as fantasy. Then I invite them to use inner focusingto inquire into the origin of this felt sense, and to tend to it from there. When the source of the self-criticism is tended to, the critic tends to shift and soften too.

The critic often has its roots in childhood, and from that vantage point, the message might make more sense, because it actually was or felt like it was true at the time. Or it somehow offered necessary protection. I suggest my clients give the critic a new job. Update the critic on the current situation, enlist their constructive help. The critic can become an ally.

 

Reassign the ‘Loyal Soldier’

I like to use the story of the loyal soldier here. This is the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who refused to surrender after World War Two ended. He spent 29 years in the jungle on an island in the Philippines, engaged in his military duties (and killing 30 people!). He remained there until 1974, because he truly did not believe that the war had ended.

During his time on the island, he ignored search parties and leaflets sent from Japan to get him to surrender, dismissing them as ploys. He was finally persuaded to emerge after his ageing former commanding officer was flown in to personally relieve him of his duties. Still dressed in a tattered uniform, he handed over his Samurai sword and went home to Japan where he was greeted. He became a rancher and survival training teacher. He died in 2014 at age 91.

This story suggests many things I think are true of the inner critic: that the critic has good intentions and is protective in some way, that it is operating on an outdated set of orders that it will not easily give up, and that in order to shift its energy to something more constructive, it needs to be acknowledged, thanked, relieved of its duties and reassigned. It needs to know the war is over and it can put its sword down.

Because the inner critical voice is thought-based, sometimes cognitive techniques (in addition to focusing) can be helpful. Therapist and author Rick Hanson suggests thought-labelling: “Oh – anxiety. Oh – self-criticism. Oh – alarmist thinking.” This has been shown in research to do two good things in the brain:  it increases activity in prefrontal regions that are involved with executive control, and it lowers the activity in the amygdala, reducing the sense of alarm.

Hanson refers to an idea that originated with Jung: the concept of the self as a committee of various parts. “If the brain is a committee, the chair of the committee, roughly, tends to live right behind the forehead. So when you increase activation of the chair of the committee, who in effect is then able to say to the self-critical member of the committee, “Oh, we hear you already. We got it. Enough already. Hand the microphone to somebody else.”

 

Recruit your inner cheerleader

To combat our natural tendency toward the negative, I suggest finding the cheerleader or support person to sit on your ‘inner committee’ – and if you don’t have one, recruit one. Just as the inner critic is often a composite of all of the authoritative and judgmental aspects of important people in your life, you can find or create a composite of those who supported you most, or simply evoke a person or character that can be that for you. Then, when you notice the inner critic speaking, you could turn to the inner support person and ask for their opinion. It’s also like asking, what would the person who supports and loves you most say to that critical statement or idea? Let this sink in and be a counterweight to the critic. Over time, you will find that the inner world will become a more benign and supportive place.