Therapeutic Dialogues
The blog is also meant to give an ongoing picture about my practice, and the person leading it. Blogging about therapeutic dialogue(s) seems to fit that well.
I Talk To Clients About…
….Wanting and Choosing
Wanting is the verb of desire. Choosing is the act of commitment.
Wanting v. Choosing, a tension to manage. We get better at it as we age. This tension can create remarkable, resilient, self-aware decent people.
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The Commitment Anchor
Choosing is a vital, fundamental, essential, powerful. People typically lean toward the certainty of the various forms of commitment, of choosing partner(s) – in addition to the more fluid, variable, playful experience of wanting them. Doing both, consistently enough over time, is a challenge to peoples’ personal development.
The Tide Of Desire
Wanting must be constantly nurtured (by the imagination) and generally defended, as a priority in relational life. It’s highly perishable, needy. Yet desire problems drive so much breakup and divorce, mono and poly.
Who Wants to Be Seen & Known?
That’s understandable since most adults know that wanting powerfully reveals the self. Our sexual development is influenced by the fear of being seen and known, by intimacy we have to tolerate.
…Immunity
The term immunity comes from the study of biological life and health, of which psychology is but a subset. Immunity presumes exposure – to everything. To learn how to protect, it must fail often enough. But it copes well with each loss – it’s rarely fooled again by identical bacteria or virals.
Emotional immunity
Think of how that might hold equally true for your emotional life, and your relationship(s). As long as you are vulnerable enough to connect with your feelings, yet with a solid sense of self, you will learn much about who you are. (Attachment-centered therapists may see this model as an invite to an “auto-immune disorder”. I don’t.)
… Differentiation
The pursuit of a self, guided by thoughtfulness about intimacy and privacy (self-intimacy). Intimacy that’s understood to be both indulged (wanted) and tolerated (frustrated.) Right in that crease lives the kind of personal development that understands emotional pain (and joy) as part of ongoing personal development. That means balancing awareness with careful, accurate thought about your big picture.
….Mastery
Mastery speaks realistically to that core development process that we want in our work, and in life. This is a “modest and durable” module, grounded in the practical life of spirituality, gender and sex-role netural. It owes nearly everything to George Leonard. It can fit into just about any therapy approach – it’s like ‘behavioral support service.’ And all about practicing self-control.
A ‘practice’ can be built to reconstruct a life and a self. It orients and organizes, but understands full well — that there can be ‘practice without progress.’ The model is usually helped by a meditation or greater body conditioning.
…..Anger…
… which is not an emotion
The vast majority of my clients refer to anger as an emotion. I don’t. Anger is affect, emotion’s visible/audible ‘wrapper’. It’s driven by many different emotions. I ask clients to identify the emotions that fuel their angers, and there are often surprises on that ‘list.’ This starts a process of exploration, where before there was only a fear of losing self-control. The heat of anger leads to the light of clearer thinking about
….Eroticism
A missing element in many adults. Why? How you’ve been loved, or not (and just how so), truly surfaces in adulthood. Self-love (masturbation) migrates to & from the imagination, then expressed in adult relational play. Our erotic/sexual ‘template’ is a way to relieve worries (per Bader), to relinquish anxiety — to feel fully alive.
The erotic connection lovingly turns the world on its head. Relieved of of typical daily importance, familiars can safely be strangers. An endless paradox: taking for oneself — as a primary form of giving, of showing up, of wanting intimacy of all kinds.
…..Grief
Grief is the seam between life and death, where they “meet”. Through my critical incident practice, I’ve learned more deeply how to help those who have endured painful loss. While I think of grief as a system equally ‘elegant’ to gestation & birth, I also know that going through most of it is lousy. Sometimes with the feeling there’s little to no light at the end of the tunnel. When someone can make durable meaning from a significant death, the process ripens.
…..Kink Aware/Sex Positive Life
To credibly present these two credentials begins to heal the long history of professional mental health abuse towards the sexually, erotically and relationally diverse. That abuse has evolved into a fear of psychotherapists who either moralize, or refer clients they know they can’t relate to – after the therapy relationship has begun. Ouch.
I’ve worked with many clients advanced in the imaginative & playful living (or educating) known as kink. Their sex positive beliefs are openly practiced, even as they face nearly universal problems of intimacy and integrity.
You’ll be safe in this office with your erotic and sexual selves, exactly as they are.
To be continued…..