“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.”
Benjamin Franklin
Hi Everyone
I think I ended my last blog with the words:
“ … my next post will concentrate more on Mindfulness, as well and offering further personal perspectives and actual humorous clinical interventions which emerge in my group sessions.”
For openers, have a glimpse at the elderly couple above.
Do they seem miserable to you?
Are they just hating life?
Clients often present in somewhat like fashion – their lives feel out of control, they are anxious, angry and dissatisfied, and most of their days and interactions look and feel like the pic above.
Well, as therapists, our aim is to go through a process with our clients in order to guide them into turning things around for themselves. They are not sure what, if anything is ‘turnable’ but we just keep connected, curious and interested.
And so we begin our journey with them, and along the way, things often don’t make sense and feel strange. And they feel uncomfortable and disorientated in themselves as they negotiate their shifts.
They feel higgledy piggledy …
Like this:
They are not sure about much but perhaps they begin to feel that some change is happening, if only because their perspectives seem so strange, so unfamiliar. And they perhaps begin to glimpse more – that things aren’t quite what they seemed, and that perspectives can shift in new and unexpected ways.
Just imagine what might happen in their lives if the process continued – if their perspectives were allowed to find alternative places to rest in. Who knows?
How about if they could land in a place like this?
How can perspectives get to alter so radically?
One of the ways to effect this perceptual shift in clients is to engage with them in humour and absurdity since both lead to shifts away from rumination and to contact with the present moment. And give clients the feeling that they have some agency in their lives, even if just for the moment. It is a glimpse.
A few posts ago, I spoke about changing names in a group setting.
Of the many creative ways to engage, what helps to change mood and perspective is to remove the earnestness or weightiness of the therapeutic process. I have a colleague by the name of Theodore and he is often invited into the therapy room (with clients’ permissions of course), and Teddy is given a seat to sit on in the chair and is invited to be the therapist for a while.
Here is a picture of Theodore.
Teddy is a far better therapist than I could ever hope to be. He has more empathy than I have, is more intelligent and has a wicked and zany sense of humour. He also has an amazing ability to get people to open up.
In ending, just a little something.
I opened by talking about saying that I will talk about Mindfulness as well as offering some personal perspectives.
I don’t think I spoke about Mindfulness.
Hhhhhhmmmm.
I suppose I should add something.
Maybe re-read the post again together with the various pics and be mindful of what comes up for you. A laugh, anger, irritation, boredom, judgement (corny). All these responses are interesting objects of mindful awareness.
And, finally, how does the possibility of a binary optical illusion as offered above, actually mirror my binary choices of ‘mindfulness’ or ‘humour’ for this blog?
If you didn’t quite understand my question above, don’t fret. I don’t quite understand it either!!
Michael Cohn – 11th May 2015
