THERAPEUTIC CONSULTATIONS
Paul van Heeswyk
My interests and approaches include:
Internal Family Systems ; Acceptance and Commitment Therapy; HeartMath; Positive Psychology,
Reexamining the Stories We Tell Ourselves - Working with Self-Narratives That Sustain Suffering
"The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts". Marcus Aurelius. (Yes, but we first give colour to our thoughts when we believe them to be true).
We all have stories that we tell to others and to ourselves, about who we think we are and about what we believe ourselves to be capable of; about how others see us and about how we see other people and how we see our relationships with them. Creating these stories may have helped us originally to make sense of our early experiences, but in continuing, now, to maintain our belief in the 'truth' and value of such familar stories, we surely restrict more opportunities for widening perspective and deeper development than we allow. When unexamined self-narratives have their roots in early experiences of pain, we may lock ourselves into fear- or shame-based patterns and habits. Where this is the case, our thinking stays mostly inside the box.
To assist ourselves to soften our hold on these limiting stories and to create new, empowering stories, it helps to:
Understand why we hold on to limiting narratives of who we are, even when such stories conflict with many aspects of our current reality .
Attend to the seemingly 'velcro and teflon' moments of our subjective experience; identify and address the sticking points that seem to hold our absorbed attention in the familiar narratives, even after we have seen that such stories no longer serve us.
Gently introduce flexibility into rigid thinking, especially where we are fused with the thoughts we continually listen to in our self-talk.
Collaboratively shape new, sustainable narratives that cultivate hope, agency, and emotional growth.
Services
Therapeutic Consultations, Coaching and Mentoring
Exploration of negative self-and identity- narratives; eg Perfectionism, Impostor Syndrome.
Individual and Group Courses
Resilience; Transforming Stress and Anxiety
REFLECTIONS
Paul van Heeswyk
"The first duty in life is to assume a pose. Nobody has yet discovered what the second duty is'". Oscar Wilde
It still seems to me, 30 years on from first coming across this startling pronouncement of Oscar Wilde, that a valuable and second lifelong 'duty' is to acknowledge and accept the 'poses' we have assumed, from interaction with those on whom we have depended, within the cultures into which we were born, and then to explore these 'identities', these faces we have made, these stories we now tell to others and to ourselves, in a spirit of compassionate scrutiny. It is the paradox of change. Through acceptance and understanding of who we believe ourselves to be, we can become, and be, somebody else and somebody more. We see this most clearly in the situations of those people at the extremes of distress - the heavy drinker must acknowledge that she is an alcoholic in order not to be enslaved to alcohol; the bereaved lover must say he cannot now survive in order to be able to live and love fully again. This is not a question of taking up positions that are merely contrary to those of our parents, teachers and trainers. That reaction keeps us confined and stuck, reading the same script of the drama but turning the pages upside down. It is more like having the courage to improvise, within those stories that we have anyway and always co-written, perhaps to discover, in the course of this journey of opening exploration, that we are creating and living other lives with, and among, other lives.
SOME THOUGHTS ON EMPATHIC ATTUNEMENT AND COMPASSIONATE WITNESSING
Paul van Heeswyk
Themes: Presence; 'showing up'; 'being with and being there'; 'standing out of the way'; watchful waiting, but mostly waiting'*.
Winnicott; Porges; Dockar-Drysdale; Siegal, Bollas, Milton.
"Inactive observation, without anxiety, on the part of the doctor, can hasten a return to health" DWW Winnicott
"When I look, I am seen, so I exist" DWW Winnicott
In an interview with Dr Scott Lyons, Stephen Porges says that in our culture we treat the expression of trauma pain from another person like a problem to be solved instead of as a communication that we receive and feel. In moving too quickly to diagnose or fix, we may inadvertently not honour whatever those people who have experienced trauma, are really feeling. Our role, Porges continues, is not to fix. Our role is to be there with other people as they express themselves in whatever way they do, because, without such expression, which can be in the form of behaviours or wordless 'symptoms; and without empathic/felt witnessing by all present, such people who have been traumatised may feel disconnected from important parts of themselves.
Many people who carry trauma have never been given safe opportunities to share their truth and to 'feel felt'.
The behaviour of a child, who has experienced developmental trauma, may be the child's unique way of asking for something he or she really needs. This 'something' may be a missing relational experience of being seen, listened to and heard; appreciated and enjoyed (loved). The missing relational experience may include those occasions where a child's movements towards (and contributions to) important others are demonstratively valued by the others and therefore seen by the child to have had a positive effect. (Perhaps the child, when being fed, moves to feed the parent which the parent joyfully accepts. Or the child sees that some gesture or action of her own has 'made' the parent smile). Such relational interactions may be interactions the child feels he or she never experienced, or, at least, never received reliably enough; or the child may feel that opportunities for these experiences were taken away prematurely. The so-called 'nuisance-value' of the behaviours or symptoms, could reflect the felt urgency of the continuing grieving for the missing relational experiences, combined with an understandable insistence that a carer pay full attention, RIGHT NOW! to repairing these felt ruptures of relationship, since nothing else has such immediate importance.
Compassionate Witnessing and 'Feeling Felt'.
Daniel Siegel uses the phrase “feeling felt” to describe what happens when people feel that others are deeply and authentically attuned to them—when the empathy and understanding of others is fully experienced by all people present, heart to heart, body to body, moment to moment.
Standing out of the way - The great Tao....and then what?
Pupil: "Master, what do I do in the face of the suffering of another?"
Master: "Stand out of the way"
I (PvH) connect 'watchful waiting' and 'standing out of the way' with the last line of the sonnet by John Milton:
"They also serve who only stand and wait".
Only in one narrow sense are 'standing' and 'waiting' equated with ‘doing nothing’ and that is when they are not recognised as important states of 'being'. What we are talking about here is presupposed in the old joking command: "Don't just do something! Stand there!"
Watchful waiting, but mostly waiting*.
" I FEEL THAT… PUNISHING A CHILD " for some damage caused by the child, writes Dockar Drysdale, "THAT IS TO SAY, ENFORCING RESTITUTION IN SOME FORM... MAY NOT MEET THE PARTICULAR CHILD'S NEEDS. The child has, in fact particular things he needs to give as well as to receive: by enforcing the specific form, the grown-up may be replacing the process of atonement natural for this particular child by an artificial form. It is not really necessary for the grown-up to know just how the child will make amends, if he can accept the fact that this will inevitably take place, sooner or later, in some form or other.....Since 'make the punishment fit the crime' is a well-established slogan, we would suggest to teachers and parents this alternative, 'let him who does damage in his own way make good in his own way".
Mrs Drysdale is describing here how the adult's act of punishment in imposing restitution is what Christopher Bollas calls "extractive introjection". The adult's enforced intervention cuts across the child's agency and blocks the child's own burgeoning processes of, in this case, atonement, or repair of damage done. It inhibits or replaces these blossoming self-led developing processes within the child by something external or alien to the child. When John Milton writes about standing and waiting, he is referring to the state of being open to seeing the unfolding of God's plan, without knowing beforehand what this plan will be. For Winnicott and Dockar Drysdale, 'cure' at its root means 'care'. Their message is that the therapist and carer must demonstrate a capacity to hold and contain any felt conflicts of the child (or client) and to wait for the steps towards the personal resolution of these conflicts in the child or client, instead of anxiously looking around for an external fix or generalised cure. The question then becomes: What is here, right now, in this individual person, that is waiting for recognition and acknowledgement?
* I always believed that the original quote, which I understood to be - "Parenting is watchful waiting but mostly waiting" - was by George Bernard Shaw, but I have been told it was not. If anybody knows the true author of this quote, please let me know. as I really like it.