Relationality – INTEGRA CPD

Enactments: are these to be welcomed or avoided? (CONFER 2016)

Michael - Presentations — Sat, 24 Sep 2016 23:00:00 +0000

This is the presentation given CONFER at the conference entitled "Enactments: are these to be welcomed or avoided?" The main aim of the presentation is the following question: If I want the enactment to become transformative of deeply ingrained, unconscious characterological patterns (which, according to one definition, is what enactments are a manifestation of), what principles help us in practice? To prepare the ground, I establish some historical markers in terms of how the concept of enactment developed (Martha Stark's "Modes of Therapeutic Action" and my three relational revolutions). A central aspect of the presentation are two lists: different definitions and attitudes towards enactment; and different attitudes towards the recovery from rupture or enactment. This prepares the ground for the image that enactment is like being pulled down a vortex, and that in order to survive enactment transformatively, we need to surrender to it rather than struggle against it.

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What Supports the Sustainability of our Practice as Therapists? – Part 2 (2015)

Michael - Articles & Papers — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 23:00:00 +0000

After some years of not writing very much, I have written a substantial article on this crucial topic: mainly based on years of supervision experience and seeing supervisees' practices struggle or flourish, I explore the key factors that influence how we process the 'emotional load' of our practice (which in turn affects its sustainability). The article includes some of the basic principles of an embodied-relational perspective, e.g. an awareness of relational stances as underpinning theories and techniques, the notion that the therapist will need to be drawn into the client's internal conflict (simplistically described as the client's 'habitual mode' versus 'emergency') and the therapist's habitual position. These ideas are foundational ingredients in the particular broad-spectrum integrative approach I teach, and thus a good introduction, as well as addressing the theme of the article. In its current form, the article is missing its conclusion - I will complete this during 2016, in preparation for publication in the BACP Journal 'Private Practice'. In the meantime, I welcome any feedback you may have, which may help me improve the final version and make it clearer and more accessible. The fourth and final part will be published later this year (2016).

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What Supports the Sustainability of our Practice as Therapists? – Part 3 (2015)

Michael - Articles & Papers — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 23:00:00 +0000

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We Are All Relational, But Are Some More Relational Than Others? (2013)

Michael - Articles & Papers — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 23:00:00 +0000

Discussant Paper in response to Ray Little: "The New Emerges out of the Old - An Integrated Relational Perspective on Psychological Development, Psychopathology and Therapeutic Action”. Building on Ray Little's integration of humanistic TA with both traditional and relational psychoanalysis, this paper explores both shared ideas and assumptions as well as reflecting critically from the vantage point of a wider broad-spectrum integrative perspective, with an emphasis on TA's sister tradition of Body Psychotherapy. The problems, inconsistencies and contradictions within the integrative project are discussed, with particular reference to our humanistic origins during the 1960's and their “partially reactive - differentiation against psychoanalysis, which leaves us with unresolved legacies in the form of fixed assumptions regarding both theory and practice, and key concepts like 'ego' and 'working alliance'. Taking the key notion of the therapist's 'equidistant position' between the 'needed' and the 'repeated' relationship as its starting point, this paper works towards 'enactment' as the central notion of relationality. In the process, a multiplicity of diverse therapeutic kinds of relatedness is affirmed as valid, and different notions of the 'relational' and inconsistencies and ambivalences in our integrative formulations are addressed. The aim is a more solid and robust integration which is grounded in a bodymind understanding of enactment as the paradoxical essence of therapeutic action.

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The Relational Paradigm Shift in Psychotherapy – is it ‘Complete’? (CABP 2007)

Michael - Presentations — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In a joint session with Joe Schwartz, the relational psychoanalyst, we tried to chart the history of relationality in psychotherapy, to set out the basic issues and controversies around it as an introduction to the CABP Conference "The Client and I", intended as a meeting point and dialogue particularly between relational Body Psychotherapy and relational psychoanalysis.

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The Therapeutic Position in the Conflict between Colluding and Objectifying (1997)

Michael - Handouts — Tue, 03 Mar 1998 00:00:00 +0000

This handout is the original formulation how the client's internal conflict necessarily puts the therapist in conflict. The client's chronic conflict is formulated here in generic terms as a polarised split between 'habitual mode' and 'emergency' (usefully alluding to both the client's denied sense of emergency as well as the idea of emergent process). At any point in time in the therapeutic interaction, which of the two mutually exclusive polarities is the therapist going to champion and side with? If the therapist sides with the emergency, s/he is drawn into urgent action and objectifying interventions that override the client's habitual mode. If the therapist sides with the habitual mode, s/he is drawn into collusion that further ignores and denies the emergency. In this way the client's conflict necessarily becomes the therapist's conflict. The therapist's conflict can be understood as the pressure to take the therapeutically necessary capacities for both identifying and differentiating into their apparently countertherapeutic extremes (i.e. colluding and objectifying respectively), implying a loss of therapeutic position. However, from a relational perspective, we understand that supposedly countertherapeutic loss of therapeutic position as an avenue into transformative process, where the therapist is drawn into an enactment of the client's wounding.

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The Client’s Conflict becomes the Therapist’s Conflict (1998)

Michael - Handouts — Mon, 03 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000

This handout is a later version of the original formulation how the client's internal conflict necessarily puts the therapist in conflict. The client's chronic conflict is formulated here in generic terms as a polarised split between 'habitual mode' and 'emergency' (usefully alluding to both the client's denied sense of emergency as well as the idea of emergent process). At any point in time in the therapeutic interaction, which of the two mutually exclusive polarities is the therapist going to champion and side with? If the therapist sides with the emergency, s/he is drawn into urgent action and objectifying interventions that override the client's habitual mode. If the therapist sides with the habitual mode, s/he is drawn into collusion that further ignores and denies the emergency. In this way the client's conflict necessarily becomes the therapist's conflict. The therapist's conflict can be understood as the pressure to take the therapeutically necessary capacities for both identifying and differentiating into their apparently countertherapeutic extremes (i.e. colluding and objectifying respectively), implying a loss of therapeutic position. However, from a relational perspective, we understand that supposedly countertherapeutic loss of therapeutic position as an avenue into transformative process, where the therapist is drawn into an enactment of the client's wounding. The arrow at the bottom is meant to indicate how the process of losing the therapeutic position is related to the three kinds of contact (see other handout).

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