Romancing the Relational Mind

Background and Development

Twenty five years ago I was working in my private practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as a Gestalt and trauma psychotherapist and if there was one thing I knew then, without a doubt, it was that deep and truly effective therapy is all about contact. The methods were useful and increasingly effective, however, nothing can heal deeply and thoroughly without the heart and mind of the coach or therapist meeting the heart and mind of the client.

In 1987 the internship I had chosen in graduate school was working with Vietnam veterans at the Veteran’s Administration Post Traumatic Stress unit. There I saw men who had faced the unthinkable and had come home with their minds and hearts fragmented, much like the bodies they saw torn apart by shrapnel that flew all around them in the nightmare of that far away Asian jungle.

We helped them as best we could by encouraging them to repeat the traumatic visions, thoughts, experiences. Over and over, the theory went, until they started to lose their tenacity, their sting. This was called the Memory Method. We were about 45% effective in helping them to live inthe present, without nightmares, flashbacks and violence brewing in them without warning.

At this facility, I was blessed with a fantastic supervisor who pushed me gently and firmly to all of my limits, bringing out levels of courage inside me that I didn’t even know I had. I have always felt that this beginning experience as a fledgling therapist enabled me to cut my teeth on some of the hardest and most frightening encounters that most of us face in the client-therapist relationship.

Two years later, encouraged by supervisors and more experienced colleagues, I began a private practice with my best friend, also a psychotherapist interested in trauma. By then we had both enrolled in an additional training for three years further to earn the title of Gestalt Therapist. In this education we were introduced to a deeper level of meaning about what makes contact-contact.

The Gestalt Contact Cycle, developed by Fritz Perls is a beautiful way to understand both what happens when we come together and when we interact with the environment or our thoughts and feelings. How we come and go in and out of contact in healthy and unhealthy ways. This way of knowing about how we humans connect and disconnect has been one of the strongest pillars upon which I have built my expertise and practice as a psychotherapist.

The second pillar for me was, and always has been, the importance of early childhood attachment with a safe and loving object. In this case, I am referring to Margaret Mahler’s (and Bowlby and Winnecott, among others) theories about what is known as object constancy. The ability of the infant and later the growing child, to take in the love and emotional nourishment offered by the mother and father, making it a constantly held basis upon which to launch the developing self. The consequences of incomplete or destructive/unsafe attachments seem to me to be at the bottom of most of the so called ‘disorders’ that I was seeing in my office.

With these excellent sources of knowledge and wisdom in my awareness, I felt well equipped to be with my clients, whatever they were bringing into my office. However, as it appeared that more and more colleagues, friends and former clients were sending me complex cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Disorder, these tools, while very successful in terms of developing safety and trust and insight, were not resolving their trauma to the extent that I intuitively felt it could be resolved and healed.

At about that same time, I began to hear about a new method being used for trauma called Eye Movement Desenzitization and Reprocessing - EMDR as we know it. At first I dismissed this information, thinking it was just another fad among therapists with no patience for slow steady work. However, as the reports started coming in, and having seen the research that Francine Shapiro (who discovered EMDR) had been conducting with my beloved Vietnam Veterans for the past 10 years, this new kid on the block became more and more difficult to dismiss. They were achieving an 85% cure rate for these emotionally wounded men. From 45% to 85%! This really got my attention!

My colleague and I started to look into EMDR training. We saw that there would be a weekend Level 1 training held in Ohio, but that this same training would be given over a week in Mexico at a holistic retreat centre where we would have time after class to be in one of the most gorgeous places on the planet, that is, the south of Mexico. This was not a hard choice!

Here we experienced EMDR Level 1 in the way that Francine Shapiro had trained her teams. I was very excited because this felt like a further step towards being able to break the hold of trauma for people who had been suffering far too long and too deeply. Level 2 came later, taught by Francine Shapiro herself. She was an amazing teacher and ignited our imaginations and hopes about what we could do for people with this revolutionary method.

Inspired and loaded with new insights and techniques, I began to transform my practice and to see faster and deeper results. After a year or so, I noticed that I still felt that something was missing in the use and practice of EMDR with clients who had complex trauma and attachment issues. I decided to take further training from Maureen Kitchur, a Canadian trauma psychotherapist who had taken the EMDR protocol and inserted it into a model that appealed to me on many levels. She incorporated attachment theory and a cutting edge understanding of how the therapeutic relationship can be used to deepen the work into what she calls the Kitchur Model for EMDR.

Here was attachment theory brought into what had been essentially developed as a cognitive behavioural treatment. Francine Shapiro is a cognitive behavioural psychologist, so it stands to reason that her new treatment modality would be built around that theoretical body of knowledge and its techniques. Kitchur took this amazingly powerful tool and brought it into broader and deeper application. She ran a Canadian government sponsored project for criminals who were court mandated to have therapy, who were traumatised and who were really angry about being there!

The results of this short term treatment were very impressive. Kitchur was a good teacher. Clear and concise, packing a great deal of information into a training that gave us much more than I had expected. Now another piece of the puzzle was added in for me in my work. Her model provided a safe and broader container for clients that I felt had been missing with the basic EMDR method.

Over the years I have deepened and developed these incredibly effective tools into a model of my own. Adapting the protocols of EMDR and Kitchur’s Model together with Gestalt, Relational and Attachment therapies. I emphasise awareness of the relationship that each person has with their self and their body. After all, this is who we live with 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. I invite people to listen to and learn the emotional messages spoken by the body and I guide people to discover the many parts of themselves along with the ways in which these parts work together in a healthy harmony or against each other in destructive or disruptive ways. I find that this complexity of selves is true for all of us and not only for people diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress or Dissociative Disorder. In addition, I am not afraid of exploring the issues of soul and spirit with clients who are open to this.

In the end, though, all of these theories and practices need to be embedded in the capacity to make true contact within, with others and with our environments. Learning to face into fear and discomfort, turning towards the shadowed, most feared parts of ourselves, we can find new courage and strength. After 32 years of working as a psychotherapist, it’s still the eye to eye and heart to heart that brings my clients home to themselves and to their relationships and lives.

The Model

Romancing the Relational Mind

Most of us spend our conscious, waking hours using our reflective or left brains to scan the environment, gather information, analyse data and eventually make conclusions. We scarcely spend time with the unlimited and endlessly creative relational or right brain. The reflective mind can only work with what it already knows. A wonderful “servant", (Albert Einstein) it takes the already existing mind maps, thoughts, probabilities and beliefs and keeps them in order or rearranges them to bring further clarity. However, it never creates or innovates.

In contrast, the relational mind has the capacity for limitless possibility, which enables us to come up with something new, something previously undreamed of and unknown. In the case of trauma, this mind enables us to know what we have hidden from ourselves, what we know deep in our hearts and bodies as the truth of our experiences, but have not been able to bear knowing in our conscious minds.

Perhaps the most important part of my work with those who come to my office, is what I have come to think of as romancing the relational mind. With each session of EMDR, after giving a specific historical or relationship starting point or guideline, I invite my client to allow his or her relational mind to bring forward what it instinctively and intuitively knows is needed for processing and healing. This is the opposite of analysing, the opposite of figuring it out and the opposite of thinking it through or trying to remember, which we find in most traditional therapies.

This new way of relating to our minds creates new neural pathways and in most cases creates a new take-home behaviour that can be used in all aspects of the client’s life. Innovation at work, new possibilities in relationships, new ways of self-soothing and therefore much more satisfaction and success.

In contrast to the more cognitive, behavioural EMDR protocols, influenced by the Kitchur Model, we begin with the first experiences of every human being on the planet. That is, the experience of the child coming in to the atmosphere of the relationships they are born into. Mama and papa, sisters and brothers have relationships and this creates a field of sensory experience for the child. I think of it as the soup you are dropped into when you are born.

Beginning here, previously unknown and unthought of material emerges. Often the primary traumas my client believes are responsible for their coming into my office and for disrupting their life turn out, in fact, to be the secondary traumas. Quite often, the traumas of attachment are primary. Being known, being seen, being understood, being given the right to exist are among the primary needs of the child, along with oxygen, food, water and safety. Allowing the relational mind the space to bring forward what its innate intelligence knows, my clients find new awareness, new meaning and eventually new insights into how life can feel free of the traumatic stranglehold.

The Structure

Making the Map of the Territory

*Chronological map

*Developmental baseline

*Three generations: grandparents, mama, papa, siblings

*The Shift List: where the symptoms go

*Comforting Place: anchoring and calming

*Breathing and Body Scan

More Tools

*Seeding: Using Eriksonian language to soften the fearful and defensive barriers

*Healing Trance: Language which introduces the inevitability of healing

*Attachment and Attunement

*First Order Processing: Early childhood fragments: Body Centered processing, nonverbal, sensory experiences

*Use of special imaginary box in my office for personal traumatic material