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| On Yelling and Bashing Cushions Peter Philippson "Emotion, considered as the organism's direct evaluative experience of the organism/environment field, is not mediated by thoughts and verbal judgements, but is immediate. As such, it is a crucial regulator of action, for it not only furnishes the basis of awareness of what is important but it also energizes appropriate action, or, if this is not at once available, it energizes and directs the search for it." [Perls et. al. (PHG) 1979 p. 128] A stock image of Gestalt therapy (apart from talking to mother on an empty chair) is of someone doing "Anger Work", i.e. yelling and bashing cushions (YABC), maybe with hands, maybe with a tennis racket or other implement. Somehow or other, this is connected with "discharging" emotion. Compare this with PHG's description of emotion as a "gestalt of exteroceptions and proprioceptions", the "regulator" that moves us all the way from sensation to awareness to energization to action, and their insistence that work with the emotions "must employ a unitary method which concentrates both on orientation in the environment ... and on loosening the motor blocks of the 'body'. Undue emphasis on either side can produce only pseudo-cures... if the therapist works with the 'body' alone, he may get the patient to simulate and express in the therapeutic session various feelings, but these, unfortunately, will not match up with or will be actually irrelevant to what he experiences his situation to be when he is away from the therapist." [PHG, p. 132] In other words, the primary aim is not to facilitate the client to feel more relaxed or comfortable in the therapy session, but to enable the client to reconnect his/her emotional response with contact needs and wants from the environment both in the therapy session and outside. This integration of the situation external to the client and the client's emotional response in turn leads to the client taking action in the external environment to change it. The work must therefore involve both attention to the variety of physical sensations, impulses and tensions which the client experiences and produces, and to the field context of the client's interactions with the environment. John Enright [1980] has added another basic dimension to the emotional equation: comparison. What do I compare my present experience to? More pleasant or less pleasant experiences of my past, other people's more or less pleasant experience, a fantasy of the experience I 'deserve'? "The quality of experience in life depends less on what happens to you, than on what you compare it with. I often comment to clients...that if they want to feel consistently bad, just make sure they regularly compare 'what is' with something better; if they want to feel good, compare 'what is' with something worse." In contrast, the discharge model comes from the early writings of Freud, e.g. Breuer & Freud [1895], and is based on what Freud called the constancy principle: that human beings seek for maximum quiescence and to avoid excitement, but that sometimes it is necessary to discharge stored-up affect in order to get back to that quiescent state. It is also implicit in the drive theory, where the environmental object of the drive is secondary to the energy dissipation of the drive itself. The associated clinical method of promoting abreaction of repressed affect later travelled via Reich into the body therapies, like bioenergetics. "Discharge of distress" is also an important part of the theory of co-counselling, and here the association with "distress" makes a further distinction: the emotion that is to be "discharged" is a "negative" emotion, which causes "distress". This is taken to be anger, fear, grief, but not joy, vitality, excitement, which are all regularly denied expression. So, in keeping with our unitary method, we need also to avoid evaluating some emotions as "positive", some as "negative". Let us look at the meaning of the main emotional clusters in terms of energisation for action: Joy : My response to my environmental contact is of attraction, wanting to deepen contact. My energy rises and flows to the boundary and out to meet the environment. Sadness : Once again, my wish is to make contact with a part of the environment that attracts me, but here contact is not possible. The person I love has died, the opportunity is not available. My energy rises, flows to the boundary and then outward in expression of grief or sadness; inward in communing with the memory or fantasy of the denied contact. Physiologically, unusable adrenalin gets released in my tears. Fear : Now the form of contact that is available to me is (or appears) dangerous to me. I energise, but that energy is to be used in my escape from the dangerous contact possibility. Anger : Again, the form of contact is one I don't like, but I perceive the situation as different to the one where my primary emotional response is fear. Either I have a sense of commitment to the environment: a person I want to keep contact with, a mountain I want to climb; or I am in a position where I assess that I can neither run nor hide, so I need to find a resolution with the dangerous environment. In a way, my energy moves in a similar way to that of joy, outward to the environment and beyond, but the aim is in some sense to overpower the energy of the other and thus to neutralise the disliked contact: "I will not let you do that even if you want to". This can be simplified (and slightly falsified) by saying: Joy moves toward an attractive environment. Sadness moves away from an attractive environment. Anger moves toward an unattractive environment. Fear moves away from an unattractive environment. Of course, we often feel a range or mix of emotions. We can fear our anger, or enjoy a fight. We can project ourselves into a fantasy where we can experience emotions - both ours and other people's - without relating to the present environment. We can move rapidly from one emotion to another, e.g. love to hate. Implications for Gestalt therapy We need to get away from a conception of work with emotions as a "vomiting out" process (with the therapist as the sick bowl). If the pressure cooker is under pressure, we must help the client to explore the flame under the pressure cooker, and also the weight that prevents the steam emerging. Emotion can arise from present concerns; from "unfinished business" from the past which we are reliving in the present so as to try to complete it; from energy deflected from another emotion (men often deflect energy from sadness or fear to anger, women from anger to sadness); or from conditioned emotional responses learned from families ("I must look happy") or therapy ("I need to find something to be angry about and shout about it"). We need to get to understand the client's conception of the world, the comparisons s/he's making, the expressive urge (the flame) and the repressive urge (the weight). By shuttling between them, a dialogue (either verbal or non-verbal) can take place, leading to resolution. We need to ensure that the client has enough energy left for this resolution. This means that the energy expended in expressing emotion must not be so much as to exhaust the client. To return to the pressure cooker analogy: if we ignore the flame and suddenly remove the weight, pressure will be released explosively, along with most of the liquid in the cooker, and there will be insufficient left to do any more cooking! We need to be clear what the client is learning about the world in experimenting with emotion, particularly anger. Is the meaning of anger with a work colleague or a parent really to energise us to smash somebody to pulp with fists or a blunt weapon? If somebody wanted to do that, I would at least want them to look at the pulped remnant in fantasy and explore what that's like for them. More likely, I would ask the client to explore what s/he is asking from this person, or alternatively to say "I have nothing more to say to you". I tell clients that to say "I am angry with you" is meaningless unless they add "...and I want of you ...". It demands mind-reading ability on the part of the other person. Or rather, the meaning is usually tactical: to put the other person off balance as they struggle to make sense of the anger. This is often useful to clients whose childhood experience (where they first learned about anger) was precisely of this keeping off balance. I will also introduce what for me is the most exciting bit of the much maligned 'Gestalt Prayer': "You are not in this world to live up to my expectations". Much of therapy seems to me to be about telling parents how to live up to the grown-up child's expectations! We also need to bear in mind that it is not unknown for people who are or have been in psychotherapy to kill or seriously injure other people. If someone talks to me about fear of anger or fear of love, I would want to know if they have injured people, and if so what were the circumstances. We must also consider our ethical and legal responsibilities: what if a client expresses anger in a psychotherapy session, then goes off and actually bludgeons someone to death? Has the therapist colluded with the client's equation of anger with violence or behaviour without concern for consequences? Joy is also often repressed by a learned comparison: "How can you be happy when everything is so awful/I'm so unhappy etc.?" It can even be redefined as a weapon, gloating at others' misfortune. Fear can be repressed by fear of fear: "If I show my fear, it'll be used against me/I'll look unmanly etc." Sadness is culturally often repressed by fear of pain, because sadness is painful. If I deny my connection, I will avoid that pain. Many people become involved in Buddhism and meditation for that reason. Others adopt a shallow, uncontactful optimism. For me, sadness and pain are part of life, and worse pain is involved in avoiding them. In all these situations, Gestalt therapy encourages us to explore both the expressive and the repressive energies, allowing for dialogue to develop across the splits, leading to resolution, not primarily intrapsychically, but via contact with the environment, and particularly contact with the therapist. References Breuer, J. & Freud, S. 1895: Studies in Hysteria. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2. London, Hogarth Press. Enright, J.: Enlightening Gestalt. California, Pro Telos, 1980. Perls, F.S., Hefferline, R.F., & Goodman, P.: Gestalt Therapy. Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. London, Pelican Books, 1979. Jan. 1993 |
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