Psychotherapy: A Sacred and Subversive Act. Frontiers Friday #161 ⭕️

Setting apart an intentional space, and why psychotherapy defies the norm.

Nov 17, 2023

I often think about this profession of psychotherapy.

It's crazy. I mean, what the heck are we really doing?

In the early days, I tried to explain to a friend what I do for work. After listening to me fumble for several minutes, he said, "So...you can't prescribe medication?"

"That's right," I replied.

"So all you do is just talk?"

"That's right—well, not quite."

I didn't have a proper response back then. It felt as if what I do is so abstract that I can't even explain what I do in the privacy of a therapy room.

I'm going to try to articulate not so much as what psychotherapy is, but what the practice of psychotherapy means to me, and why perspective this matters.

(Please be advised this is not the conventions of what you might read on PsychCentral, Psychology Today and the like.)

TLDR: Psychotherapy is a sacred and subversive act.

Sacred

Conversation is one of the highest art form. It is an emergent reality that happens from the meeting of minds, the sharing of hearts, and the 'not yet' discovered possibilities, which is about to reveal itself.

But therapy is not 'just talk.' It is a particular kind of conversation.

When something is sacred, it means to be 'set apart.' The conversation that happens in this space that is protected from the world outside, is dedicated to the person in need of a deep encounter with another human; someone to guide them in this process.

This process entails the permission and possibility of speaking the unspokens. When a therapist can actively guide the process, perhaps the person can be listened into speech.

To speak in such a manner, and received by another, leads to a process of un-shaming. Shame wants us to retreat and hide. Yet, the innocence emotion of shame needs to be received and loved.

Only when there is a sacred space that is 'set apart,' that welcomes all the multitudes of selfs to come out and play, explore, and interact, would one take the risk to reveal the inner life.

Seen in this light, psychotherapy is a unique kind of conversational ritual. This type of special place to hold such an exchange sets the stage for potential healing and growth.

'Sacred,' 'rituals,' etc. are not a shorthand for religious talk. As mentioned, sacredness (I keep mistyping sacred as "scared"!) is to devote something as special and different from the ordinary. Rituals serve to enact this out.

Rituals are three things:

Intention
Attention
Repetition

What does each of the above mean?

Intention:

Figuring out where the person is, where they want to go, and why.
This is the structure that we provide. Without this scaffold, we can easily lose try of our client's intentions
At times, for some clients, the intention is to figure out one's intentions before we can proceed further.

Attention:

Simone Weil's says it best, "Attention is the purest and rarest form of generosity."
When we provide an "unmixed" and undivided attention to someone, coupled with the arrowhead of one's intentions to guide us, we give something that many of us are craving in our daily lives: To be seen, heard and felt by another person.

Repetition

When a therapist starts the day, she prepares to encounter people who will walk into this room either for the first time or a subsequent visit.
When a client returns for the next session, she comes in roughly knowing what to expect, because of the contained environment and process of the work.
If we imagine our work as providing something for our clients, a ritualised (not rigid) conversation acts like a cup to hold these elements.
In a previous piece, I wrote,

Without the solid presence of rituals in the face of what sociologist calls “liquid modernity”, we are left hungry and thirsty. Not that there aren’t things to nourish us—too much in fact—but rather, we have no place to hold our intentions.
When there isn’t a place to hold our intentions, our attention goes astray. And that gets repeated.

Someone Gave Me a Sacred Space

I remember one of my first sessions in therapy as a young adult. I never thought I would speak of certain events in my life, because in my mind, I thought it was "no big deal." So I didn't think I would be emotional talking about it. Instead, I was in tears. I was also deeply moved that the sharing of my story affected the other human in the room, i.e., the therapist.

As I was talking about certain significant events, I found myself floating into the memory, dissociating from the present. I felt like I was beginning to be lost at sea. Thankfully, my therapist was not a passive listener. She was actively with me, each step of the way. Her voice, questions and prompts pulled me back into my body. Like an anchor, I was able to hold the juxtaposition between then and now, the past and the present.

That night, I slept like a baby.

In his book, The Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer described the following:

If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of a tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance. We may see it only briefly and only out of the corner of an eye - but the sight is a gift we will always treasure as an end in itself.

When we do not 'set apart' the conversation, or mistake that therapy as 'just talk,' not only do we cheapen the endeavour, but we might just scare the soul away.

Try a simple thought exercise:
Install white and bright fluorescent light in your therapy room. Speak in a firm and loud voice all the time. Type as you talk with your client, like a family physician would. Minimised eye contact.

Subversive

What is psychotherapy for?

The politician would say the aim is to be an active citizen of the country.

The economist would say the aim is to be a productive member of society.

HR would say that the aim is to have less sick days.

The psychologist would say... it depends.

At the heart of it, I think it is appropriate to see psychotherapy as a subversive activity.

Why the notion of 'subversion' when thinking about psychotherapy? Isn't therapy about simply helping someone feel better?

Jiddu Krishnamurti said,

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”

What we need to do is to hold space and call into question what is the norm, what is to be expected, what is the status quo, that could possibly be maintaining, or downright contributing to the psychological problems.

To subvert means not to make someone fit the 'norm,' whatever that is, because variation is the norm in nature.

Role and Soul

By subverting these, we invite the person's role and soul to meet.

This encounter of a person's role and soul, when it is at odds, can be confronting. If our role and soul are not playing together, we may begin to notice an existential dread, sometimes loosely defined as depression, lack of meaning, apathy, etc.

Adults in the 30's to 40's are prone to this malaise because much of "adulting" tends to focus on achievement, financial stability and status. The consequence of this oftentimes leads to a loss of play, which is a fundamental nutrient of a soulful life. A lack of play, says the leading researcher in this area, Stuart Brown, "should be treated as serious as malnutrient."

When seen in this light, it isn't irrational to conceive psychological symptoms as "terrible gifts.". At this liminal space, when we are asked to cross betweeen worlds, from an old story to a new one, life is waiting for you to return, to come alive once again. These symptoms at times are the signals to the problem. The signal is not the problem. The fire is.

This requires the guidance of someone to help you question and entertain a world of possibliities in this new story ahead of you. Without subverting the business-as-usual, it often leads to more of the same.

Music historian Ted Gioia writes,

Music innovations almost always come from outsiders—slaves, bohemians, rebels, and others excluded from positions of power—because they have the least allegiance to the prevailing manners and attitudes of the societies in which they live. This inevitably results in new modes of musical expression.
...Kings and other members of the ruling class are rarely responsible for breakthroughs in music.1

Therapists are sort of operating on the fringes, helping clients who are suffering from their roles in society, or the lack of.

If therapists were blindly churning various evidence-based approaches and interventions in the therapy sausage factory, without calling into question the role and soul of each individual we meet in the sacred space of our offices/clinics/institutions, we run the risk of us becoming what Ivan Illich calls "A disabling profession."

What do we then need to enable?

Here are seven ideas:

1. From Consumer to Creator

Nearly every message, pixel, and soundbite beaming from our screens are calling for us to be consumers. In many situations, it's worse. We are actually becoming the product. We are being used, monetised, without any real value streaming back to us.

The journey is one of moving from the role of being a passive consumer to one of becoming an active creator in one's own future. (By the way, I am not referring to becoming a "content creator," or an "influencer"2)

Part of this process is an activation of the unrest within, so that the self wants for his role and soul to meet, greet, and come together to create something out this.

2. From Anesthetics to Aesthetics

A doctor applies an anaesthetic when she wants the patient to feel nothing. Anaesthetic leads to numbness. On the other hand, an aesthetic awareness is a door to wonderment.

So much of what we consume today is like anaesthesia. Yet, what is needed is aesthetics that un-numbs us, that provide us a “waking up” to the inherent beauty that is possible to be engaged with.

In our therapeutic endeavour, it is not just to help someone feel good—many cheap substances can do just that. Instead, it is to help the person feel again. To feel the beauty inherent in this world, to create the beauty, to fall in love again with the people already in your life. To taste the raindrop because you have forgotten what that tastes like while standing in rain.

3. From Comfort to Courage

We need to help others step out of their comfort zones. As my neighbour Samy used to say, our comfort zones can become our hell zones.

But step to where exactly?

Our learning zones. (For more about this, see this post, Circle of Development)

In order for us to take this step out of our comfort zone, we need courage. We need to stoke the ember of courage within our clients so that they take the next step.
Courage, as described by C.S. Lewis is

“...not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” There is no justice, no self-discipline, no wisdom without courage.3

4. From Wanting to be Liked, to The Courage to Be Disliked.

Since 2009, the invention of the 'Like' button was aimed to increase social media engagement. But one of the unintended consequences, as articulated by its inventor, Justin Rosentein, has caused a new insidious era of comparative anxiety and peer acceptance, and the constant disruption from notifications on our mobile devices.

If our thoughts were a train, it would have been a train wreck every 2 mins.

Part of the subversion is not to be caught up with counting how many likes your last post has, but also not relying solely on extrinsic factors to validate intrinsic values.

In other words, we need to have the courage to be disliked4. As the authors Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga said,

Afterall, to not be disliked is an unfree way to live.

5. From 'Me' to 'We'

One client said to me, "I've always found it anxiety and guilt-provoking to keep talking about 'me, me, me.''" I said, "I think you are mistaken. This is just 50% of the work. For the other 50%, you and I will try to help you leave yourself, so that you can do what makes you come alive." I worried about how he might have taken this idea, but his affirmative response, "OK... YES! Phew..." probably indicated that his soul recognised, and desires this type of journey that is ahead of us.

It is a mistake to think that therapy is just focused on the individual.
Most of the time, we mistake the Self as just the person in front of us. Therapy is often misconstrued as an individualistic enterprise. Half of the work is done when we help the individual in our office feel better. The other half is to help the person dance with life outside of the office; when the Self expands beyond the individual. When the individual is able to leave himself, because he now can, so as to bring their inherent and cultivated gifts to others.

”Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
~Howard Thurman5

6. From Conform to Reform

Much of the psychological ailments that some people have develop from trying to conform to what's expected in our sick society. Working 70hrs/week, and expecting to be a functioning member of the family, and not burnout.
The journey ahead is one that is not about how to better conform to the requirements of say, a capitalist livelihood, but instead one that is about reforming and rejigging one's orientation to life, based on the first principle and thorough examination of what matters most.

This type of conversation largely depends if the therapist goes there. If a given therapist is prone to not subverting these conventions themselves, it is less likely the road ahead might not lead to fruitful discussions about these matters.

7. From the Speed of Light to the Speed of Life

Most of us are traveling at the speed of light.

Therapy slows everything down—for a good reason.

We need to model ourselves to the natural world, and travel at the speed of life, not at the speed of light. Then we can hear ourselves. Then we no longer miss the life that is right in front of us.

Closing

*Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
~ Mark Twain

Does this mean that psychotherapy is "special" and "unique"? No. It isn't. If you stop to think about it, it is just two people or more in a room, having a conversation. Anyone who has cares enough, and have some social and emotional skill can engage in deep conversation with another.

But the fact that most of you reading this are in this helping profession, let's try to create such sacred spaces for far and wide explorations with our clients. It one of the spaces left for geniune conversations in our societies today.

Frontiers of Psychotherapist Development

Discussion about this post