Working with Individuals
People come to see a therapist for a wide variety of reasons. In general, their lives are not as enjoyable or satisfying as they would like them to be. For some reason, their lives do not have the richness or the choices that they would like to have. When working with individuals, Rob will meet and talk about what is happening in the person’s life that is unsatisfactory to them and to explore what they would like instead. It is especially important to be thinking about this in terms of what the client wants rather than what the client does not want. For example, if I ask a client how would you get to Victor Harbour from Adelaide the person is most likely to say “get onto South Road and keep driving until you get there”. The person does not generally say “well you know Mannum you don’t go there”. This is very important because it is much easier to move toward something that you want rather than away from things you don’t want. This can be a tricky concept for many people but worth the effort because we are so used to thinking about things in terms of what we don’t want that we never pay attention to what we actually want. The client may say they are having too many arguments with their child but what they would really like is respectful and peaceful relations at home.
Having established where the client would like to go we then start to explore the things the person might need in order to get there. They might need more information or skills that they don’t currently have. They might need to do some work around their early life experiences which present barriers to the journey now. For example, someone feels lonely and depressed because they haven’t got the things in their life that would enrich it. They might say they would really like to work in a new field but what stops them getting there is every time they think about it they hear their father’s voice telling them they are too much of a loser to have a job like that. In the therapy, we would need to do some work to clear that experience so the way would become open for them to get what they need. There are a variety of easy and powerful techniques that we can use to bring about this change.
Working with Couples
I have never been told at any stage in my career as a relationship therapist that partners woke up one morning and said to themselves “I think I’ll ruin the rest of my life by marrying Fred/Mary”. No! Most people say they woke up one morning and said to themselves “I think I’ll marry Fred/Mary and then my life will be perfect. We will work together on our shared life goals and dreams and life with him/her will be so much better than being on my own”. So how does it all go wrong?
Fundamental to working with couples is understanding each person’s early attachment experiences. When a person forms an intimate relationship with another they inadvertently, and mostly unknowingly, inherit their partners early attachment history. If these early attachment experiences have been positive, nurturing and supportive then, generally speaking, as adults, they will manage to work out their difficulties with relative ease. In general, they have each other’s backs, they act respectfully to one another, they mutually attenuate any negative emotions and promote the positive ones. They tend to operate as a team. Problems arise, however, when less than optimal childhood attachment experiences remain unresolved and are re-enacted within the relationship dynamics causing painful feelings of misunderstanding and miscommunication. In this situation, the people involved tend to operate as individuals with each experiencing the other as uncaring and/or selfish.
Relationship therapy frequently involves unpacking client dynamics and helping each party to offer the other the experiences missing from their early life. In so doing our relationships begin to operate securely no matter what our earlier experiences might have been. We learn to give each other the secure interaction that we missed out on when we were growing up. This work can be as straightforward as information giving, to practising respectful communication strategies, through to working with early relational trauma if necessary. We can learn to share our dreams again. Rob is well-trained in all these possibilities.
Working with Trauma
Working with trauma requires a specialised set of skills. Modern trauma therapy has acknowledged that trauma is primarily a physiological response to a highly stressful event rather than a cognitive one. Highly stressful events trigger brain centres that have been adapted for dealing with threat and danger. When these centres perceive threat they initiate what we call the fight or flight response. The body’s first response to this kind of danger is to flee and if we can’t take flight we will turn to fight. This response is subcortical meaning thought processes are not involved. For example, imagine you are walking through the bush chatting to your friends and having an enjoyable day when suddenly you stop and your attention automatically goes to a spot on the ground. “Is that a stick or a snake?” Your threat system did that. It is always on, it never sleeps, it is always on the lookout for danger. When it identifies something dangerous it triggers a set of actions called the alarm response. One of those responses is to stop whatever you are doing and pay attention to whatever it has identified. If we cannot flee or fight because either of those actions might make things worse in some way the body goes into another automatic system called freeze or shutdown. When these processes occur, they can sometimes get stuck in the on position so the client experiences being constantly activated or shutdown or both, on the lookout for danger, can reexperience intrusive memories of the events, and other difficulties. Trauma therapy involves being engaged with these “stuck responses”, giving the person a set of positive resources, and allowing the body to complete the actions that it was unable to complete at the time of the danger. When the body is able to do that it calms down and the person’s life becomes more comfortable. Rob has trained in a number of specific techniques which can bring this change about including mindfulness, EMDR and a variety of somatic all body-centred interventions.
If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse.
If I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming,
I will help you become that.Goethe