8 THERAPY

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
Robert Bly, The Kabir Book


So what can we do about all this? About the tension and defensiveness, the illusions and pretences, the inability to face life and pleasure? The ideas about people which we have outlined have not been plucked out of thin air: they have developed through the experience of giving and receiving therapy, and in turn they have led to new therapeutic approaches.

This book is not a How To... manual. Reichian therapy can't be learnt out of books, and some of our detailed techniques could be misunderstood or mishandled by someone who had only read about them and never seen them in action. This is not to say that everyone has to rely on specialised experts with elite knowledge. There is very definitely a role for self-help, for peer therapy sessions exchanged between ordinary people, and a part of our work is teaching people how to do this. But such teaching, we feel, has to happen face to face and heart to heart. What we can do here is describe the background to the practice of therapy, and also communicate some of the flavour of the experience.

There is a central emphasis in Reichian work on contact: contact between client and therapist, contact between the client and her own inner life. As therapists, we are in a sense always offering ourselves to the other person - offering our attention, our aliveness, our heart: always working to clear away the blocks on both sides against heart to heart connection. We are coming from our own core, that central place of love and wholesomeness we described in Chapter 6; trying to reach the core of the other person, their essential, undamaged health.

This necessarily means that each therapist works in their own style, expressing their own nature. And this style has to adapt itself in response to each client, meeting them in a way which is appropriate for this person at this moment. The wholeness of an individual can be expressed as energy, as thought, as emotion, as body, and it may be right to meet them on any of these levels in a given situation, depending on where they 'live' within their self, which of these channels they are able to experience.

This does next mean that we always work with a person's preferred channel, of course! A 'thinker' may be challenged to feel, a 'body' to connect with life energy which is not simply physical, and so on. But the emphasis is on finding contact, which means starting from what is, from the points of openness and closedness in the relationship which begin to manifest as soon as two people are together.

Let's look in turn at how our therapy operates in each of these four spheres: body, emotion, thought and energy: remembering that the distinction is somewhat artificial, but also a useful way of bringing out the essence of the therapeutic relationship.

Body
Many people who have heard of Reichian therapy think of it primarily as 'bodywork'; Reich was certainly the first psychotherapist in modern times to focus primarily on the body, reminding us that this is where and how we live. Most Reichians are strongly oriented towards breathing, muscle tension, posture and touch, but we are not primarily trying to 'correct' someone's armouring, as for instance a remedial massage practitioner might do. Our bodywork is aimed essentially at awakening the life energy in the body, trusting that once awake it will know what to do, how to heal.

So we encourage our clients to breathe, not according to an ideal pattern, but simply to breathe more deeply, more freely, with less control than they are used to - to 'let breathing breathe'. People's customary style of breathing varies enormously: what for one individual would be a deep breath may for another be normal, or even shallow. Similarly, different people tend to breathe with different parts of their body - you may see one person's belly rise and sink with the breath while their chest stays almost motionless; the next person may expand and contract their chest without moving their belly at all.

Exercise 21
Try this with a few friends: let each person in turn lie on their back and breathe, without trying to influence their breath at all. Look for the differences in depth; in comparative strength of in and out breath; in which parts of the body move with the breathing. You may be amazed by how variously we perform this most basic of activities! Remember that this is an exploration, not a competition ...

We start from where each person is, encouraging them to move a little way towards a full breath that spontaneously stirs the whole body. Whatever form of work we are doing, part of our attention will on the clients breathing, but for bodywork as such we generally ask them to lie on their back on a mattress while we sit or kneel beside them.

Then we watch, in touch with our own breath and our own naturalness, which is the only way to encourage it to manifest in another person. After a while we perhaps start to feed back what we see; to point out where the breath moves and where it doesn't, how one person, for instance, breathes in more strongly and out more weakly, or vice versa; how someone moves their lungs only from half empty to completely empty and back again, never really letting them fill up; how another person never really lets their lungs empty, how someone's outbreath catches in their throat rather than sighing out freely. Whatever we see we feed back, helping the client to become aware of what they do, and if possible to relax a little way into a fuller, freer breath.

In a while, we may perhaps put our hands on the person's chest and belly, encouraging the outbreath to deepen by leaning gently into them, then taking our weight back as the breath returns. We might rock their body from side to side, or massage the chest and shoulders, all as part of inviting a relaxed, easy but strong breathing to develop while at the same time offering the implicit reassurance and challenge of physical touch.

For many people, a few minutes' conscious focus on their breath is in itself enough to create powerful new sensations and emotions, as the stronger breath puts a stronger charge into their body. If we are loose and relaxed to start with, the experience can be pleasant, empowering - even ecstatic. If there is a fair amount of tension, though, more difficult and perhaps alarming feelings appear as new energy hits the muscle blocks.

The emotions that have been 'held' in the muscle armour use the breath energy to push for expression, while at the same time the blocks themselves are taking up some of the new energy in order to push back. The whole contradiction which armouring embodies, between expression and repression, is intensified, which can be very uncomfortable both physically and emotionally.

Thus the client will need careful support through this part of the process. Above all, they need to know that someone is there with them, and that what is happening is basically okay. We will also encourage them to let movement happen wherever there is a sense of stuck energy; to express that charge, maybe by stretching, wriggling around on the mattress, hitting out at the mattress with hands or feet, screwing up or opening wide the eyes, bouncing with the pelvis. Often it's a matter of noticing and amplifying the slight movements that are already happening. At the same time, we remind them to keep breathing and to make a sound.

The voice is very powerful, perhaps essential, for the release of held tension. It focuses our awareness like a spotlight on the area of the body where we are working. It encourages us to breathe and to 'push'; and, of course, it also directly expresses the held emotion.

Often the person isn't immediately in touch with the feeling that is being held in. If we persuade them to make a sound, it will start as a flat, toneless 'Aaaaaaa', then begin to take on emotional colouring. Without making any conscious effort it may become a yell of anger, a scream of fear, a cry of pain or grief - even a roar of laughter or a shout of affirmation. Once this point of connection with and commitment to a feeling has been reached, the whole sense of stuck tension in the body suddenly turns over. The energy has peaked in this act of expression and remembering - the bodymind has become whole again. As the storm passes there will generally be a sense of release, relaxation and spaciousness.

How easily such a point can be reached depends on the extent and the nature of the body armouring. Very often, breathing without bodily expression of feeling will create a situation of extreme held tension. The person will start to feel a stiffness and uncomfortable tingling in certain areas, often the hands and around the mouth, and will find it hard to stop breathing deeply - a state which, if left to take its course, would gradually become both excruciating and terrifying.

This state is known medically as 'hyperventilation', and is seen as something to be avoided, which in a sense it obviously is. Yet hyperventilation is the dragon which guards a rich treasure. Physiologically, what is happening is that the person is 'blowing off' carbon dioxide with the outbreath, altering the acid/alkali balance in the bloodstream and thus sending muscles into spasm. This is why an easy and mechanical way to bring someone back to normal is to make them breathe in and out of a paper bag, reabsorbing their own carbon dioxide.

Some medical people draw the conclusion that it is therefore dangerous to breathe deeply! Yet thousands of people have discovered that it is possible to confront and complete this process of over-breathing, so that it will not happen again no matter how deeply and strongly we breathe. Overbreathing is a gateway into a world of greater power and sensitivity, and the way through is to dissolve the blocks against expression which set up the tingling and cramps. This is the energy level of the process, however we understand it physiologically.

Hands need to grip, to let power move through them, to hit out or to hold on; if they don't they will become cramped, twisted, powerless claws. The voice needs to shout, the mouth to pump the sound out, to say in one way or another 'I'm here, I exist, I feel!'. Over-breathing is about losing control: either we lose control to paralysis and pain. or we surrender to the free flow of energy and life.

So when over-breathing begins to manifest, we reassure the person that this is a natural healing process, and encourage them to let life flow through the stuck areas. If the stiffness becomes painful, they must yell and groan about that pain! We encourage them to grip on to a blanket with their hands, committing every ounce of their strength, letting power flow down their arms, using their voice to help them grip. As the natural process takes over, sound and movement become natural, spontaneous, releasing. Usually, great waves of pleasure and energy now flow through the previously stuck areas; for a little while, the person floats free on the ocean of being. Such experiences can lead to lasting changes in the bodymind.

At these and other times, some Reichian therapists will use their hands to press on tight muscles in the client. These may be the breathing muscles themselves - the diaphragm, belly and chest - or they may be armoured areas elsewhere in the body which are holding back expression. Pressing, poking, tickling, stretching tight muscles can help them 'overload', so that the charge of feeling spills back into expression. This sort of stimulation usually hurts - and this itself provides a route to expression as the individual reacts to pain with anger, fear or crying. The emotion which comes up will be the one held in the muscle tension.

Pain is a powerful tool in therapeutic bodywork, but it also carries complex implications - about power, for example - and is bound to affect the relationship between client and therapist. Only a few Reichian therapists feel easy about using heavy pressure as a way of starting release, though for many clients, as they become more experienced with the work, there are times when they will directly perceive their own holding-on and welcome the therapist's help in releasing it, even if it does involve pain. The whole area is a complex one, and current realisations about the theme of abuse in life and in therapy make it even more complex - we will look at this issue again in the next chapter. We should perhaps say that the two authors have very different attitudes to strong physical work: Nick at the moment uses it, while Em doesn't.

However, there are many other forms of direct physical interaction which come up in bodywork. As the client follows the sensations and emotions which arise, they often need to push with hands, legs, head, shoulders, pelvis; to hit out at someone (the therapist will hold a cushion in front of herself); to pull against a person's strength; to hold and to be held. In this form of work, the therapist is present with her whole being, body as well as mind, offering herself as a resource,, creating an intimacy which, outside sex, is almost unique in adult life.

Emotion
It will be obvious already that the four spheres we are considering overlap with each other. Much of what we have said about the physical body also involves emotions, energy and ideas; once life force is on the move it functions in all modes at once. We are distinguishing only the different starting points for the process.

On the other hand, emotions and physical sensations have a particularly close link. The word 'feeling' can be used for both kinds of experience, and in practice during a therapy session the client may make no distinction between what they are feeling physically and what they are feeling emotionally. Other people, however, may find it very hard to link the two - it is a common expression of cut-offness to have bodily experiences with no emotional content, or vice versa. You can also find yourself in a separate 'witnessing' part of your being, coolly registering the experience, deducing, 'Ah, now my voice sounds angry/sad/ frightened.' All these are fine as starting-points; the goal is to re-connect with the unity of our experience.

Many clients do not feel ready or able to engage with bodywork when they begin therapy. The process seems too intimate, too invasive, perhaps even meaningless to someone who doesn't experience themselves as 'living in' their body.

Thus therapy will always start with the sorts of contact that are available, but with the long-term goal of coming to grips with whatever is blocking bodywork. This is not meant to imply that bodywork is more 'fundamental' than other approaches; the same will apply in reverse, for example, with a client who finds bodywork easy but treats it purely physically, making no emotional connections. With a number of clients, then, the starting point will be an exploration of their emotional world, during which the therapist is hoping to bring to their awareness how they resist specific kinds of feeling. Just as bodywork focuses on the muscular armouring against movement and breathing, so here we are looking at character armouring against feeling and expression.

In this sort of work it is crucial that the therapist be in touch with her own feelings and her own defences against feeling, in order to explore those of her client, just as in bodywork we need to be in touch with our own breath. One of our fundamental tools for understanding in this area is registering the emotions which arise within ourselves during the session. These feelings and attitudes will almost always reflect what is going on inside the client. To make use of this information, however, we must be clear enough to disentangle it from our own character, our own habits of feeling which will 'rise to the bait', this is one of many reasons why therapists need to receive regular therapy!

When two people are relating strongly, their emotional states are linked; a feeling in one will produce an echo in the other without anything being explicitly stated. So our internal reactions help us see how the client is resisting feeling, resisting expression. Often a client will insist that 'nothing is happening', no emotions of any sort are being experienced. If the therapist knows herself well, however, she may for example perceive a wave of sadness or of fear which doesn't come from her own process. She can then feed this back to the client: 'I sense a lot of sadness in the room at the moment, is that to do with what you're telling me about?'

What doesn't happen is almost more important than what does. A client may find it very easy to cry, for example, but almost impossible to get angry, or even assertive. The therapist must obviously validate and support the tears, but she must also notice, point out, insist on the 'missing feeling' which those tears may be covering up. An apparently inappropriate edge of anger or confrontation within herself during the session is an important clue to what is happening. It may also work the other way round: if I feel angry with a client perhaps they are expecting me to be angry, almost encouraging it - because this is what they are used to.

Little of the resistance to feeling will be conscious, of course. As we have emphasised, the purpose of armouring is partly to make feelings unconscious. But we still communicate those unacknowledged feelings all the time, and a therapist can be sensitive enough to mirror back the feelings her clients are rejecting in a way which validates their pain and defensiveness, but which also invites and challenges them to re-own their hidden self.

Exercise 22
You might find it interesting at this point to think about which feelings you yourself find it easy to express - and which ones are unacceptable or unavailable to you. Are you someone who 'never gets angry'? Or are you apparently 'fearless'? Or perhaps you approach most situations in the expectation of being hurt? After you have made your own list, try asking one or two people close to you how they see you; the result may be illuminating.

A slightly different way of seeing the process is that the therapist is throwing the spotlight on whatever behaviour resists contact. Character is a system of defence; it rests on the childhood realisation that the world is dangerous, and should not be approached with honest directness. In particular we should not be open with people in authority, which is how the therapist appears. She is dangerous, because she may - indeed, is actively trying to - open up dangerous emotions. Right from the start- we as clients are unconsciously trying to control the situation, to put limits on it, to make it less spontaneous and contactful, trying in fact to sabotage the therapy which is costing us so much money and effort!

A client may, for example, enter therapy with an apparent deep trust and faith in the therapist's ability to help them: a biddable compliance with all suggestions, and boundless enthusiasm for the results. Wonderful! The unwary therapist basks in the satisfaction of being admired and appreciated, yet somehow nothing seems to lead anywhere; there is no deepening, no discovery. Eventually the therapist is forced to realise that all this trust is inauthentic: the clients real message is 'I'm a good boy/girl, don't hurt me'. When the client can begin to experience their fear and suspicion of the therapist then something real can start to happen.

Another client may begin therapy in a truculent, suspicious and complaining way. Nothing the therapist does is right, no session ends in a satisfying resolved way. It's always left uncertain whether the client will come back next week. Nevertheless they do keep coming back, they must be getting something out of it Could it be that what they want, yet are fighting, is to surrender, to be small and trusting and looked after?

These are just two examples of the many ways in which people's conscious feelings on entering therapy can be contradicted by deeper motivations. Part of the therapist's job is to look beyond the surface presented to them; not in a distrustful and cynical way, which would simply represent their own character armour, but with heart contact and an awareness of when and haw whatever needs to happen isn't happening. Our basic belief is that everyone enters therapy in order to become open - however hard they may resist that openness! As therapists we seek to ally ourselves with that wholesome and authentic aspect of our client, by revealing the wholesome and authentic part of ourselves.

Working to uncover a client's deep feelings involves being in touch with what their bodies are doing, especially their breathing and posture, it means listening to the unconscious messages which may utterly contradict the words they say - 'I feel happy and relaxed', yet my shoulders are tense, my arms folded and my breathing shut down. It also involves looking at their current life situation, often in consider-able detail. But even though we expect to do a good deal of counselling in the course of our work (in the sense of helping people develop better strategies for managing their lives), therapy is not counselling; our main concern with current events is how they illuminate a person's fundamental patterns formed in childhood and earlier, their basic expectations of how the world will be, which function like scripts to direct the course of their lives.

Thought
What we have just been saying about feelings clearly concerns a person's thought processes; their ideas about how things are. Generally, however, we are less concerned with someone's explicit ideas than with their silent assumptions: 'You can't expect to get what you want from life.' 'Everyone lets me down in the end.' 'If I want love I have to earn it,' 'Anger only gets you hurt,' 'Women are born to suffer,' 'A real man never cries.' These are a mere handful of the common assumptions people make about life - any one of which will have fundamental effects upon how they go about things, and therefore upon what happens to them.

Our assumptions tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies. If we believe that everyone is out for themselves, then we will act in a suspicious and self-centred fashion which discourages other people from being open and sharing with us. If we believe that anger will get us hurt, then we can easily create that hurt - by punching a wall instead of a cushion, for example, or simply by the way in which our fear makes us hit out clumsily and awkwardly. If we expect not to get what we want, then we want things we know we can't get And so on.

Exercise 23
Try to make a list of all your habitual, favourite assumptions about reality, on the lines of the above examples. Do this down one half of a page - quite fast and without thinking about it too much; then opposite each statement, write a contradictory statement Try saying these out loud, and see what it feels like!

It could be said that this kind of thought is fundamentally a memory. Our bodymind remembers the existence-threatening situation which stamped a certain view of life onto us; the tactic which allowed us to survive then becomes our basic strategy for confronting life now. But life changes all the time - we are constantly meeting with new experiences, if we can let ourselves recognise them. Through therapy, we can open up a certain spaciousness in our lives, which involves among other things the capacity to think more clearly; to perceive, to reconsider, and often to change, our lifelong assumptions about 'how things are'.

Of course these are not merely intellectual notions: their power comes from their intense emotional charge, which is always anchored in the structure of our bodies, in the ways that energy is allowed to move in us. Yet there is a definite role for the mind in therapy. There are times when it can be crucial to understand the logical flaws in our approach to existence - if for no other reason, to motivate us to carry on with the work despite its uncomfortableness.

This is the constructive aspect of the way in which thinking, operating from our heads, distances us from the immediate authenticity of feeling and sensation. Our capacity for analysis enables us to step back to gain perspective, to witness our own process rather than immersing ourselves in it.

The question is whether this distancing effect is voluntary or involuntary; whether it is simply a flight from the anxiety which feelings and sensations can bring up in us. Many people come to therapy needing to 'get out of their heads' - they have been affected by our culture's emphasis on sterile and exaggerated rationality, and have lost touch with their emotions. As we have stressed, feelings are not open to argument: they are simply there, to be lived through and completed.

But other people - or the same people at a different moment in their lives - may be excessively involved in their feelings in an addictive or a flooded way, going round and round the same emotional cycle rather than completing it and moving on. At such a point a therapist might well say 'Yes, that's how you feel, but what do you think about that? Do your feelings reflect what is actually happening in the here-and-now?' The client is thus invited to use their powers of analysis, to clarify and peel away fossilised emotional attitudes.

Feelings cannot be changed by thoughts. If we try to do this we simply repress them, and throw ourselves into an illusion. But thoughts can help us to understand where feelings come from, help us open up a space between the reality of the feeling and the reality of the situation so that we can start to understand that the feeling refers to things in the past rather than in the present (if this is the case). Knowing this, we are encouraged to work out, express and let go of the old emotion, rather than confusing it with current reality and unconsciously trying to make reality match our feeling.

We must remember too that our head is part of our body, and thoughts are a life function much like digestion or heartbeat. Moving into a 'thought space', with its flavour of cool, distant clarity, is accompanied by a shift in our breathing and posture. The breath tends to become more shallow, and focus in our upper chest rather than our belly. The energy focuses in our upper body and our head; the state of our whole head armouring, and our eyes in particular, will determine to a very large extent how free and clear our thought processes can be - how well we can 'see what's going on'.

We should also mention here the very major role in therapy of fantasy and imagination. Working in any of the ways we describe in this chapter, clients are likely to come up with spontaneous imagery about what they are experiencing - not just visual images, but using any of the sensory channels. To take a few random examples: someone might imagine their body as a tree, with a great snake coiling around the trunk. Or they might suddenly smell smoke, or taste blood in their mouth, or hear the sound of bells. Whatever the imagery that emerges, it will be rooted in that individual's history and life issues: we can see it as a message from the bodymind, couched not in language but in sensation. Working with these fantasies - either within the session, or on your own between sessions - can be a most fruitful way of developing communication with yourself.

Energy
In the last section, and throughout this chapter, we have shifted at times into talking about 'energy'. What we can perceive as bodywork, as emotional movement, or a shift of ideas, can also be perceived as a flow of life energy, of Orgone. A Reichian therapist may focus on this level, watching the energy shifts in their client as a favourite 'channel' for picking up information about what is going on. We may also work directly to affect the flow of energy, rather than doing this through acting on physical or emotional tension. We may use our hands, for instance, not to press or poke the muscles, but to help energy move into or around the client's body. This is an area where therapy overlaps with what is known as 'hand healing', 'spiritual healing', or 'subtle energy work'.

In fact, as most practitioners of therapeutic touch come to realise, there is no hard and fast line between bodywork and energy rebalancing. Hands that are accustomed to touching bodies become steadily more subtle, hinting and offering rather than insisting; out of this dance another form of interaction will flower, letting us realise that it has been going on all the time. It is impossible for two people, two energy systems, not to interact on an energy level.

Apart from focusing and channelling energy through our hands, we can use visualisation and imagery. If we imagine, for instance, a stream of clear blue water flowing through and around us, relaxing and clearing our energy, then this is what will tend to happen; or if we hold in our mind's eye the image of a hot orange sun blazing into our belly, or of a white rose slowly opening in our chests, then the appropriate energy shift is likely to occur.

Many practitioners and healing organisations work with energy while keeping quiet about it - it seems too weird, too unacceptable, to acknowledge openly. Reichian work has always acknowledged the direct role of life energy, and, as we shall see in Chapter 11, Reich even developed a series of devices for concentrating that energy and dissolving the blocks against its natural flow. He was also very much aware that a human being is an 'orgone device' - as is any other living being. Energy streams constantly through our bodyminds, at times pooling and condensing, freezing and stagnating, boiling and flooding. Working with energy is really no different from other levels of therapy; it is just a different emphasis of perception, employing the same fundamental concepts and directions as the other spheres. If the energy within us shifts, then our feeling state, thought processes and body awareness will also shift: the four spheres are all inter-dependent

Exercise 24
With coloured pens or crayons, make a picture of your body's energy patterns as you imagine them to be. Try to let yourself loose on this; use lots of different colours. You may want to have a body outline to work with - but remember that your energy also goes outside your skin. This is a nice exercise to do with friends, and to do occasionally over a period of time to see how your pictures change.

The therapy relationship
We have just described the terrain of the client-therapist interaction, but this is not the interaction itself. At some stage in the work - perhaps even right at the start - the emphasis shifts crucially from the content of the therapy - melting armour, releasing feelings, revising life scripts, channelling energy - to the form of the therapy, and the relationship between two people which that form expresses.

A client does a specific piece of therapeutic work; arrives at a new insight, perhaps, a new capacity for handling charge. This is the first level of the work, and essential and valuable in itself. But simultaneously, a second level is operating: the piece of work is also a transaction between client and therapist.

Is it, for example, an offering, like an apple for the teacher? Is it asking, for praise; or appeasing, trying to buy off criticism? Is there an unconscious goal of shocking the therapist, frightening her off with the horror of the material revealed? Is it a test? Does the client expect to be rejected if she shows her real self Is she calculatedly - but unconsciously - trying to produce the feelings the therapist expects - or to frustrate those expectations?

How, in other words, does the therapeutic work act as a container for the client's love or hate for the therapist for her fear or anger or seductiveness or need?

All this may seem a bit unlikely, a bit over the top. A therapist in touch with her own healthy core is not going around inviting her clients' love or hate. Yet over and over again, therapists since Freud (and no doubt since the dawn of time) have found these super-intense feelings manifesting in their clients, bending everything to their own ends. They have had the certainty that something underlies a superficially straightforward piece of work, something much more difficult and confusing, like a great dark star bending the light from a smaller visible sun. And, even more interestingly, we discover equivalent 'over the top' responses in ourselves; we feel an urge to praise or punish, seduce or reject, to need things from and do things to our clients.

This is all most alarming, or would be if we lacked an understanding of what is going on. Freud labelled this process 'transference' because, he said, the client is essentially transferring on to the therapist powerful positive or negative feelings which were originally called forth by the important adults in their childhood. The equivalent feelings in the therapist are generally known as 'counter- transference'.

The fundamental emotions about people which we had in childhood are the ones we tend to have about all the important people in our lives, not just our therapists. If we were afraid of our parents' anger, we will be afraid of our lovers' anger - whether they get angry or not' And so on with all our other feelings and relationships: rather than being able to see other people directly, we tend to treat them as a screen on to which we project old memories. In the therapy situation, however, there are important and creative differences.

The therapist is not, like most people, simply putting her own projections back onto the client In the rest of her life, she may project as readily as the next person, but she has learnt not to do so in the therapy session; or rather, to keep a distance from her projections, and to use them as information about what is happening within the client.

Also, in therapy both people are there not for any practical or emotional purpose, which would take their attention away from the projecting that is going on (and often sabotaging that main purpose). Theyare there simply in order to experience and consider what happens between them. There is plenty of space for projections to arise, develop, play themselves through. There is space for the 'transference relationship' to reveal itself, and thus to reveal the fundamental patterns and assumptions of our lives.

In classic Freudian psychoanalysis, the basic situation which arouses transference feelings is one of absence. The therapist distances herself from the client in all sorts of ways: by sitting out of sight and mostly in silence, by withholding all information about herself and her feelings, by responding with no expression of sympathy or concern. The psychoanalyst, at least in theory, is a 'blank screen' on to which the clients project their central feelings about people - especially about people who withhold themselves!

The basis of our own work is crucially different Although there are some important boundaries in our relationship with clients (for instance, we are offering only a specified amount of time), we are always moving towards contact. It is this active push for closeness, for deep disclosure, which provokes transference feelings - as a defence against the power and vulnerability of this contact.

Because it is the relationship with the therapist which provokes such deep feelings, as clients we find it easier to see them as responsible for our process; to see them as powerful, rather than recognising that the power resides equally in us and in the contact we are both experiencing; to see them as special - specially nice or specially nasty - rather than facing them as simply another human being like us. Contact is only truly possible between equals.

Transference feelings develop in the course of therapy as a last ditch defence against real, equal human contact. This is why it is such a positive and creative movement The clients' unconscious resistance, their character armour, is throwing everything into the battle, manifesting all its skills of defence, evasion and control. Anything is better than the aching vulnerability of spontaneous openness! If the therapist can unwaveringly hold out this option of openness, then the client is forced to see through their illusions about who the therapist is, forced face to face with the deep childhood hurt that has crippled their capacity to be intimate and powerful.

In this intense process the therapist is no unmoved onlooker, no 'objective' technician, She, too, will be stirred to the core; all her residual unwillingness to be open, equal and spontaneous will come to the surface, all her buttons will be pressed as the client with great unconscious skill and insight, tries to throw her off balance, to turn her from a healthy, contactful being into a manifestation of the client's childhood damage and adult expectations.

The counter-transference is the experience of being a puppet for the client's fears and expectations - usually both at once. What lays us open to this is our own unresolved childhood material; especially, of course, the distorted feelings that have contributed to our desire to be therapists in the first place - the need to help people, to have power, to be appreciated.

If we can stay in touch with our wholesome, rational core, we can see the counter-transference impulses for what they are. They then become a treasury of information about the client, as we realise that our tendency to fall in love with them, or bully them, or pass judgement on them, or feel inadequate with them, is something that they are doing: a familiar pattern which they are trying to impose on the situation. mainly because it feels safer than the unknown territory of openness.

So what we do with this information is, in one way or another, to feed it back to the client. The therapist's ultimate resource is her capacity to be honest - with herself, with her clients, about what is actually going on. This is really the only way to avoid becoming what the client fears yet tries to create - an oppressive authority figure, withholding knowledge as a source of power.

The therapist does not always need to be in control. We have both had so many experiences of losing our balance in a session, getting hot and bothered, being on the edge of panic, and have learnt that we can resolve the whole situation and return effortlessly to centre with some simple statement like "I feel confused, 1 don't know what's going on here". The client's transference reaction tries to make us into someone who always knows what's going on, for good or ill: a parent; someone unreal. Being honest and being real is a minimum condition for being therapeutic. In doing this, we are also modelling for our client the possibility of being fluid in one's approach to life, of moving between positions rather than attempting to freeze and rigidify.

It should be clear by now that clients' patterns of transference will match their favoured character positions. Character is a defence against spontaneity and contact; it is the force in us which produces transference as a last ditch defence. So, for example, someone in the Boundary position will experience the therapist's offer of contact as a threat to their existence; will perhaps 'go away inside', be unable to hear or understand properly what is being said to them. In the Oral position, we will feel ourselves as needing to be looked after by the therapist - see them as provider or withholder of nourishment, a 'good' or 'bad' mother. Holding characters will expect to be rejected if they let their feelings show; Thrusting characters will compete for power; Crisis characters will try to stir the therapist up, to unseat or panic them, as a way of unloading their own intolerable panic about contact.

There is a special relationship between the crisis character and transference. since this position is about contact, manifesting a yes/no anxiety around the issue. When someone is strongly in this position at the start of therapy, then their relationship with the therapist will immediately take on a central role - sometimes within seconds of entering the room for the first time.

In a sense we could say that we all have to pass through this position as part of our therapeutic process. Therapy will stir up our tendencies to each character position in turn, but it is at the 'crisis stage' that the transference relationship becomes crucially important Can we move through to an Open character position in relation to our therapist? Can we allow our feelings and sensations, our thoughts and energy, to arise without making the therapist responsible for them? Can we allow the therapist to have their feelings without us having to take them on? If so, we have an excellent model for living a sane and creative life outside therapy - which, of course, is the point of the whole exercise.

Goals
That last sentence may beg a few questions. What are the goals of therapy? Clients may come to a therapist for all sorts of reasons, conscious and unconscious. What is therapy for? Where are we trying to get to through these practices and procedures?

The longer we work as therapists, the more we find our original goals failing away, revealing themselves as illusions. The first to go was an intention of 'helping people', 'making it better'. This soon revealed itself as not only impossible to achieve, but actually harmful to attempt: if I try to 'help' you, I am defining you as helpless, myself as helpful - a systematic disempowerment which undermines your attempts at freedom and independence, plays straight into the transference defence, and encourages me in my delusions of grandeur!

Nor is therapy really even about people getting better - if by 'better' we mean their physical or emotional ills failing away, their life becoming happier and more successful. These things do very often happen - clients gain in acceptance, confidence, creativity, capacity for pleasure in sex and life in general; serious physical ailments clear up; chronic pains disappear. These, of course, are the sorts of things people hope for when they start therapy.

However, we have to face the fact that all these things are essentially by-products of therapy rather than the thing itself. Occasionally a person will end therapy feeling that it has been valuable and successful, and their therapist will agree, yet the original problem, their reason for coming, may be quite untouched. It is not uncommon that during therapy a person's relationship may break up; a life situation which previously felt fine becomes intolerable; they can even manifest new and major physical ailments. Yet they may well still feel positive about the therapeutic process.

Is this a tribute to our powers of brainwashing? We don't believe so. Therapy helps people to face reality; it helps them discover what reality is, to let go of illusions. At the end of this process - or rather, at the end of this phase of a never-ending process - life may feel easier or harder, tragic or ecstatic. But the person will be more in touch with their own process, their own self. They will be in contact with 'what they came for', and working out the implications as fully as possible. Occasionally, as Arnold Mindell says, the successful resolution of a therapeutic process is for the client to die.

We don't have a lot of clients dying at the end of therapy, though it is true that a very extreme level of defence can manifest as a person's core starts to surface. The point we are trying to make is that although therapy allows a person's life to deepen, to become richer, it does not necessarily make it easier. They may have spent their lives ignoring and avoiding pain, both inside and out in the real world. That pain is real; heartbreak is real; exhaustion and death are real. In an initial interview with a prospective client, it may often seem that the therapist is trying to put the client off rather than encouraging them.

It may be better to speak of directions for therapy rather than goals - at any moment in the process of working with someone, our direction will be towards more honesty, more spontaneity, more openness, more energy, more space. Whether the specific experiences this brings out are 'good' or 'bad' is irrelevant, as long as our belief and our experience is that the core of a human being is loving, joyful and creative. As therapists, our work is to midwife the birth of this core.

Can therapy fail? Certainly it can. At times there seem to be so many layers of negative emotion around the clear core that we despair of ever reaching it, and this can be as true of ourselves as of other people. The world we live in is not exactly a welcoming home, or even a possible home, for an open character. People give up and leave; the therapist can give up and send them away. Yet even then who can say that the process is over? It often goes on working inside someone; they may come back to therapy or find some other tool, or simply live their lives in a different and more complete way. The idea of 'reaching the core' is really an illusion anyway: we are already there. If therapy is, or tries to be, a natural process, then like the rest of nature it is never complete, never wholly separate - never, really, 'good' or 'bad'.

Being a therapist; being a client
What we have said may make it seem that a therapist is a saint-like being, one who has resolved all her own childhood feelings and become a permanently open character. Luckily this is not the case, or there would be a striking shortage of therapists!

What the activity does require is a practised ability to leave one's own material on one side for the duration of the session, except in so far as it becomes an important part of what is going on. People often talk about the therapist 'leaving her own problems outside the door'; in our experience it is much more a question of constantly owning up to and releasing the feelings which arise in us. Most of the time we can do this silently and quickly, but when we hit a bigger issue it is vital that we don't try to conceal it or unload it onto the client We must be able to own up to what is going on - and this is not so much a precondition for therapy; it is the therapy.

Thus giving therapy to someone else is a bit like giving it to yourself. It becomes a form of meditation, repeatedly coming back to clear attention in the here-and-now, to focusing on the other person's experience without ever giving up or denying your own humanity. The most important thing is that being a therapist is just an activity, like any other activity which is useful and satisfying.

What do we get out of giving therapy? Most therapists are rather nosy people, who like to know what's going on for everyone. Many of us have a tendency, usually reasonably well-controlled, to enjoy feeling important, bossing people around, 'helping'. Giving therapy can also be a very effective defence against our own therapeutic process - shifting attention away from ourselves and on to other people. A lot of therapists tend to reach a plateau in their work on themselves and stay there.

It is crucial that therapists continue to get regular therapy for themselves, so as to remain clear about their own motivations and their own process. We have noticed a distinct relationship between our work on ourselves and our work with other people: if one becomes frustrating, so does the other, and if one becomes creative, so does the other. Every therapist is also a client.

And being a client can also become a career! You can become addicted to therapy: use it in many subtle ways as a means of shoring up your defended character rather than challenging it. Every therapist meets the 'professional client' who has done a bit of everything, and now wants to add you to their trophies.

With therapy, as with every other human activity that tends towards liberation, there is a constant gravitational pull back into unreality, back into routine. The fact that we have to do it for money as a profession is one factor here - 'Oh God, back to work'. For clients and therapists alike there is the constant challenge to renew the process, to come back to the core, back to simplicity, back to naturalness, back to freedom.

Groups
In this chapter we have been talking essentially about therapy in the 'classic' setting - a one-to-one relationship, usually for an hour a week, and lasting for some months or years. There are many other possible settings. Reich himself worked like most psychoanalysts, seeing clients for an hour three or five times a week. Very few people could afford such an arrangement in the milieux in which we work!

Partly because of cost, partly because of other power issues which we shall look at in the next chapter, and partly because of other advantages, we do a great deal of work in groups: day, weekend or longer workshops, usually centred around people exchanging Reichian sessions in pairs, with the support and supervision of one or two leaders moving between the pairs.

The great strengths of this kind of work (developed by William West largely under the influence of the Co-Counselling movement, and also of Peter Jones) are that it is cost- and labour-effective, and it is empowering, proving to people that they have the capacity to care, to give, to share. Giving such a session can itself be an important therapeutic experience. Also, the sheer amount of energy generated in a room full of Reichian sessions tends to intensify the work and increase the likelihood of stirring and worthwhile things happening.

At the same time, it is obvious that this structure limits the sort of work which is possible. Generally speaking the emphasis will be on bodywork, because in this sphere the client is more 'self-starting' through focusing on the breath. The bodywork is inevitably reduced to a few clear, simple principles, since many of the helpers may never have worked therapeutically before; indeed they may never before have touched another person's body in a non-sexual way.

It might seem as though the structure of pair work would have less value than working with a therapist or might even be dangerous. This is by no means the case. The emphasis becomes one of 'being there': the helper's main role is to give supportive attention, to let the person working know that someone is with them and that whatever they are experiencing is all right Any further assistance depends on the skills and confidence of the helpers, some of whom may have attended several groups and be quite experienced and sensitive. The group leaders are always there to handle tricky moments and deal with stuckness.

Running groups is in many ways a humbling experience for a practising therapist. It puts our skills and theories back in proportion, showing us just how much can be done through the willingness to be open and to give attention. The distinction between 'therapist' and 'ordinary person' is a purely practical one - by earning our living at this work we develop a great deal of experience, but also lose out somewhat in freshness and commitment Running a group can be a bit like giving an exhibition of simultaneous chess! But at other times there may be nothing for the leader to do at all.

Especially during a longer group, the more verbal, 'character-analytic' side of the work will develop, through time spent with the whole group together, sitting in a circle, with people taking turns to share and explore what is going on for them with the help of the leaders and of other members of the group. The group itself becomes a resource for its members, a source of healing and growth, with its own inherent wisdom and sense of direction.

A group is also capable of very powerful negative and destructive feelings. On rare occasions, especially during long-term groups, a 'mob' atmosphere can develop as hostile transference feelings towards the leaders, or the scapegoating of certain group members, becomes amplified by positive feedback. This is the sort of situation where a therapist needs all her capacity for centredness and constructive honesty, yet the possibility of deep core contact is correspondingly amplified by the group situation, and many very beautiful and magical experiences can occur.


Next Chapter
Back to Intro