Viewing Volume 11 Issue 3 Autumn 2008
The Art of the Personal in Grief Therapy
By Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD
Grief therapy begins with who we are, and extends to what we do. That is, bringing ourselves to the encounter with bereaved clients, as fully as needed, is the essential precondition for all that follows, that distinctive blend of processes and procedures that broadly defines a given therapeutic tradition, and more specifically defines our own therapeutic style. But by this I mean more that the simple acknowledgement of the obvious – that grief therapy ineluctably carries the stamp of our individuality. Rather, in this brief article – a sort of prelude to a book nearing completion (Neimeyer, 2008) – I want to emphasize the foundational quality of therapeutic presence, the way in which the offer of full availability to the client’s concerns, undistracted by other agendas, ground the work by offering a reflective audience to the telling and performance of the client’s narrative of loss, allowing bother (or in the case of family or group therapy, all) participants to take perspective n current conundrums in fresh ways.
In this conception the presence of the therapist is not pre-emptive, it does not “crowd out” attention to the client, or even compete with it in a direct sense, as in implying that therapists should be particularly self disclosing about their own loss histories, or offer clients object lessons from their own lives. Instead, it more typically implies a kind of from-to attention, as the therapist attends from his or her sense of self to the person of the client. It is precisely this form of “personal knowledge” that is described by the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi (1958), in which the knower holds him, or herself in subsidiary awareness while retaining a focal attention on the other. For example, in a recent grief therapy session undertaken along meaning reconstruction lines (Neimeyer, 2001), I found myself conduction a (minimally) guided imagery exercise with a client who was grieving the loss of her mother. Inviting her to close her eyes with me, I asked her to scan her body for a felt sense (Gendlin,1996) of how she was holding the loss, showing the pace of my instructions to encourage a “loosening” of her meaning-making from the more clipped, “tightened” discourse of our previous therapeutic conversation (Kelly,1955/1991). What emerged was remarkable: with a beatific smile she quickly gestured toward the space around her head, and described a radiant, warm light that seemed to be coming to her from above, beginning to shroud her head and shoulders. Noticing tingles of warmth rippling down my own spine and into my body, I then invited her to allow the light to enter her and envelop her body more completely. As she did so, she brightened still more, nearly laughing, and described a delightful tickling in her abdomen, a sensation strongly reminiscent of how her mother would tickle here when she was a little girl. As we closed this period of inward attention she described the remarkable sense of peace and connection to her mother that she felt and voiced a clear conviction that her mother was with her still, but in an oddly spiritual/corporeal way. I would argue that my own sympathetic “channelling” of the client’s experience – something that occurs for me in the great majority of sessions of cognitive, emotional, and often palpably physical levels – represents precisely the sort of from-to knowing that usually orients me to the client’s positional and to potentially therapeutic “next steps” in our work together.
Although this sort of receptive presence might seem to have mystical overtones, it is surely amenable to being accurately rendered in other terms as well. Among the most adequate is Buber’s(1970) evocation of an I-Thou relationship with the other, which presumes an essentially sacred attribution of full personhood to the client, in contrast to an I-It relationship which casts the client as simply an object to be acted on, shows life is merely the context in which we deploy our techniques or theories. In more secular terms it also resonates with the cardinal role of therapeutic empathy, genuiness and unconditional positive regard given particular emphasis by the honoured tradition of humanistic psychology, and most especially by the cardinal contributions of Carl Rogers (1951). But I find Polanyi‘s description to add usefully to such formulations because it highlights the necessary presence of the self in the relational knowing that is therapy, as the implicit ground from which our awareness is directed to the explicit figure of the client’s words or actions. Interestingly, I think that the self of the therapist functions in a similar way for the client as well, as he or she attends from the therapist’s questions or instructions to his or her own material. Thus, for both the therapist’s presence serves as a clarifying lens that brings into greater focus (inter)personal patterns and processes that are more difficult to observe in the client’s private reflections. Moreover, I believe that this alert presence, with its focal dynamic of attending outward from the therapist’s self to the life world of the client, further implies a disciplines pursuit of personal clarity on the therapist’s part. Such a goal might be refined through the adoption of a Buddhist, contemplative, or other spiritual or psychological sensibility that promotes the practice of mindfulness as a basic therapeutic stance, albeit one that is more active than passive in its penchant for intervention.
By:A.T.