Shared Reflection
In Sacred Attention Therapy we work with shared reflection, which includes the client in the process of developing awareness on a mutual, equitable relationship. A final thought about emotional repression in therapy: you only feel strong emotions toward people you care about. This is important. Anger can bind you as much as love. The surplus of emotions your client is bearing in their psyche – many of them are related to people who really mattered to her when she was young. These emotions now bind her to those people. So, do not be surprised if she begins to have powerful feelings toward you – and they may well be negative ones.
When your client directs negative emotions toward you, simply try and stay out of the way and recognize the effectiveness of having these powerful feelings expressed now they are real and present in the therapy room. The connection to the important figures from early life will emerge; just trust the process… and when it does the source of the emotions will become clear and presage the healing transformation.
Excerpt from SAT Online Training, Level 1 lecture manuscript
https://www.centerforhumanawakening.com/SAT-Online-Training-Is-It-For-You.html
Serving your personal journey toward enlightenment
7 年The most perplexing glance (sometimes glare) I receive from clients in our introductory sessions is when I share with them that I give neither advice nor answers. Just one of the reasons I do not give advice or answers is that people actually do not learn anything by being given the answer—except, perhaps, that if they ask someone for an answer, they will get one. I have found in my therapy, both as therapee and therapist, that providing someone with an answer does little, if anything, to actually serve the client. The greater value in my experience is in a shared experience where the client arrives at their own answer, the one that is right for them. Shared reflection, as Richard Harvey speaks about in his article, is a miraculous-based experience that brings together the gift of shared divinity. The process may, and usually does, begin with an invitation for the client to consider and / or reflect upon something. For example, the therapist may say to the client “Are you open to considering and reflecting on whether there is a connection among your feelings of shame, your tendency to isolate yourself, and your expressed sense of low self-esteem?” The client may, or may not, respond initially. Perhaps the invited reflection will stay with them for consideration well after the session. But the initial invitation by the therapist may manifest in an exchange in subsequent sessions that allows a sharing of insights toward connectedness and synergy in realization. I often smile (inwardly) during sessions when a client will share an unintentional variant in speech that reveals subconscious feelings (what is commonly referred to as a ‘Freudian slip’). When the client is made aware of their Freudian slip, shared reflection can be both a revelatory and cathartic opportunity to heal. Where telling the client their Freudian slip really meant X or Y can often lead to resistance from the client, in my experience a simple invitation toward shared reflection can be much less invasive and far more accepting by the client.