When I hear his truth, there is contact. 22nd November 2021.

I'm wearing my purry, furry, fake leopard coat. 

He says

It reminds him of his childhood...

Both of us laughing.

He tries it on. 

And then he says the strangest thing? 

"I've never seen a coat like this in the flesh"

Then - oh my heart! - he remarks so deliciously on my warmth seeping from the coat into his skin...

"Goodness - you're warm!" 

Just for a few seconds it is as if I have held him, breathing animal heat and a golden radiance into the void of darkness and separation, confronting the narrative that fixes us in time and space.

And then, the spell is broken. But talking instead about music...lost music. As if heard in fairy hills...And then my assignment. He is telling me that the presenting issue a client brings is often like a thin crust over the real problem. And in response I divert us down an intellectual worm hole pursuing the importance of paradox in therapy - and more to the point - what would a meta-dox be? 

Here now in 2023 my ability to be tangential as a therapist, is a key skill in collaborative interaction. I juxtapose - I use that word in the ordinary sense not his definition of juxtaposition - through dialogue, I'm tangential and contrary to bring different interpretations of reality forward with the aim of synthesizing something new. Creating collaboration is key to this...

And then I'm talking about Leon Festinger and Mrs Keech, how disconfirmation through paradox may also cause people to create a more fantastic work-around story ( as long as it is a more functional narrative - that counts as good enough for now!) - but how in Gestalt therapy, disconfirmation through feeling how a feeling really feels, instead of believing an habitual interpretation -  is in my view - core to therapy.

I'm talking about the process of making meanings (finding relative truth) in ultimately meaningless (ultimate truth) reality.

He explains that for him this is best expressed in the metaphor of ego-states. 

This seems tangential to what I've just said. I'm talking about the process of meaning-making, but I enjoy difference, so lets follow his tangent!

He -..because things can be true in the child, but they are not true in the parent, and not true in the adult depending on which part is coming forward. and again, you use the word paradox, the paradox of the person being in the present - which we all are literally speaking - but behaving as though it is the past because the child ego state is now in operation. And they are behaving in disproportionate ways because they are responding to something now as if it is something back there'. And how to respond to the Child in the adult. Which is why, in terms of time-lines, there is no past, present or future. It is all past, present, future all the time on the ego state time-line. and again, there is the crossed transaction where you ask someone something as an adult and they respond as a child.. And you can see it in front of your sometimes, you can see the body changing. The body gets smaller, the knees go together, and you see them becoming a little girl or a little boy right before your eyes. The voice goes up, and <he whispers> the head goes down. It's amazing! and then, there's the thing. You address them as a child. No, don't address them as an adult because there is something important happening here! And I suppose that is a bit of a paradox, that we can be different things all at the same time, but actually the different parts don't talk to each other <pause> so yes?

I disagree in the need for this layer of metaphor, but I'm in his space and I'm using his world view. 

I enthusiastically say - "Yes, I see what you mean"

Because I do, when I chose to see through his eyes. 

The shadow for me here is I perceive something I'm not comfortable with. And I have a bad habit of always wanting to know more when I come across subterranean eddies and currents...it is a lot like dowsing! But I like to know more and so yeah, in my own life I got to marry Bluebeard, and all would have been fine except I simply had to disobey orders and open the door to the locked room! But here I am picking up again on something, something with too much energy in it. The dowsing rods cross. This prizing of The Child again, this fetishization process almost. As if adult emotions are but a tarnished and impure reflection of a 'pure' childish state ...? 

But no I do get it - to let go of a meaning created in childhood, requires in his view a person to speak from the Child ego state and for the Child to meet the nurturing parent. For me there is a problem in this way of seeing, it is as if sadness or any emotion really, cannot be adult.

So no, I'm not sure, I'm not sure about this at all.

The tone of enlightened exhilaration I put into my words regardless of my unease, is my response to feeling the ring of personal truth in his voice. 

Inside 

I'm 

like

a 

cat 

on 

catnip. 

When I hear his truth, there is contact.

And I'm allowing my mind to slipstream past the things that would otherwise make jagged this smooth ride of bliss. I don't go back to: "and they are behaving in disproportionate ways because they are responding to something now as if it is something back there". He and I agree that the energy of what he called the 'disproportionate' occurs when a memory is activated in the present.

But most importantly, if we are going to do collaboration - and that is my preference - then I can't challenge his language.

Labelling a reaction disproportionate is in itself a reaction to a reaction. 

I'm reacting to the power dynamic here about who gets to define the appropriate energy of a reaction!

But I'm not speaking up or out. I have agreed not to be contrary.

Instead I ask more questions. 

He continues to explore, and appears to be - because I can't trust anything of my view of this - making new associations and connections in his own mind, as he describes his theories....

Until he notices that he's exploring, and returns to 'the session'. 

And then forgets, because it is more fun to really think and to be at the brittle edges of one's cherished theories!

As we return to words and meanings again - now I have to break the fourth wall. The diagnosis thing is too much for me. I explain that all this about Parent. Child, Adult only makes sense to me as I view it through the lens of the Berne universe - but I don't feel inclined to really agree with Berne. And then as gracefully as we both can make it, we gently and determinedly return to the same (non TA ) game of complimenting each other and laughing a lot...

But, as I seek to continue opening a dialogue that includes him...he turns it around with a guaranteed disrupter, a  'look over there' strategy. He starts to talk about Perls. I enjoy this game - in the best sense of game -  and it is guaranteed to get an emotional reaction from me, and lots more laughter.

He - Goodness me, it's been really interesting today

Me - "Because if I'm allowed to go off at tangents, this is how it is! Because reality is big, and ideas are connected in all sorts of idiosyncratic ways. And this reminds me of computer games"

He laughs nervously - I'm not even pretending that this isn't tangential! But the key subject in his last remark - really interesting - is too hot - dangerous as in radioactive -  to pick up and carry forward. It felt like contact, it felt that he was able to let go of roles enough to ask himself questions. I wasn't doing kinship with any alternative motive, but was he? This felt authentic, as if we both enjoy the same kind of dialogic enquiry? 

I can't ask. 

And so I explain the old arguments from gaming forums about how a story is told; and the problem and debate around making a game 'too linear' vs 'open world'. So my 'tangential' interjects are paradoxical, and I  hope that they open up new ways of seeing! And he says that he remembers reading an article that described linear point making as a very patriarchal way of thinking, and that the endless circles and circles and circles, lead eventually to a much more complex picture - a much more, non-patriarchal, woman way of thinking...

So, was that a recognition and authentication? Describing my tangential process as a gender difference rather than the outcome of childhood injunctions, scripts and ego states? 

And then I'm talking about phlogiston, oxygen and Lavoisier to indicate that words can create compelling stories that prevent better explanations! Only conjecture and refutation will lead to a more accurate version of reality. 

Paying him whilst saying - "Thank you for the conversation". 

Feeling that this hour was too short, and surely, surely we really could continue talking and laughing, playing with ideas forever....

Back to earth.

What actually happened? 

Was this the dreaded Kohuts in action? 

Including the  "Goodness me, it's been really interesting today"?

I left the room weighed down by ambiguity, an unknowing - the feeling of a locked door and I'm trying to find keys, or more accurately as if there is something under the surface, as if gravity is wrong. Something needs checking.

Unfinished business....