I will list here a few things that were relevant to me from these articles. First - about walking meditation: "take a peaceful walk, not thinking about anything". If this is so, that means that I lived half of my life in meditation without knowing it, because I was alone and I had no things to do, so to speak my mind was always idle and thought-free, until I found myself suddenly tortured by some other thoughts after my father's death, when I was 35. Never before, though I had a psychiatric diagnostic. But those were clearly not my thoughts and even now I can apply some effort in order to banish the aggressive intruders, who were never there in my youth. I alone never think of things as if talking in my own mind which seems to be nonsense. I never did this and my thoughts while walking, or preparing food, or reading, or while doing any other simple activity are always deeply kept within my unconscious, they never show up. And it is peaceful and a serene landscape. My thinking process is enacting only if I have some intellectual task to accomplish, like writing something, solving a math problem etc. and this thinking process is not the same as the wording process.
"authentic connection is neither being silent, nor nodding for the sake of peace". Once again, I have my reserves about this. What if my authentic ego is at ease only when I nod or stay silent? What if I am more on the accepting side than on the disagreement wasteland? That's how I was almost always and - who knows? - maybe some people believed that I was not authentic although I clearly expressed my disagreement, but only it was really necessary or true. " kind of dreamy listening, more akin to listening to the music rather than to the sober words of the client." This is possible because the human voice, luckily enough, is endowed with sounding abilities, it is sound, not noise and one can feel this in a pleasant way. Yet I disagree about this approach, unless the therapists are in the meantime self-aware and aware of the other non-verbal and verbal dimensions of the counselor-client communication. Because this perceptiveness of the music in any situation - which is also being open to the unknown - can be present every time we talk with someone. It can be inside us, but it is not good to leave us meaningless and not attentive to the words themselves. "Safe and sound" is a good expression to remember.
"self-ridiculing humor is employed at one's own expense in the hope of entertaining others." Then this was my most important weakness - I did this many times, when I was distressed, and much later I realized that it could make an awful impression. It was a kind of self-defense. This kind of humor was present too in my opinion in the film La vita e bella, which was given as example.
I have to add a few things about things that captured my mind. About meditative techniques. The sacred syllable OM means the human person both in French and in my native language. It is also the unit for the measure of electric resistance. It is a nice metaphor - we are resistant as human beings, our humanity is beyond other temptations. This happens, as Professor Mia said: "because everything is united beyond time and space." I see the human language as the electric net on which we are circulating with all our meanings or other personal and subjective occurrences. We should accept this.
I agree that extreme isolation and asceticism are not good ways for self-acceptance and self-love. The story about the hermit who lived walled-in near Jerusalem reminded me about a similar story written by a Jewish Nobel-prize winner, Isaac Bashevis Singer. And the movie La vita e bella reminded me about another kind of humor presented in the film Amelie. All the language- expressed connections that we make while connecting with books and other people too, are ways of linking the broader reality into meaning, which is the opposite of chaos and groundlessness.
17. What helps you to develop nonjudgmental listening? Reflecting on your own experience of close relationships and times where you feel hurt or anxious, to what extent do you use specific strategies to disconnect from others (when you might be better off staying in connection)? You can reflect on this question with the help of Mick Cooper’s “Disconnection Inventory”.
Until now I could answer sincerely and fully to the questions in each section of this course. Now, these two questions don't make sense at all to me. I am alone, I was forcibly isolated while being empathetic, good to others, and so on. I never had the tendency to blame others, but some psychologists accused me of doing that. On the contrary, I was maybe a little bit too conscious of my responsibilities. For the first question - my answer is that I always was prone to listen to others in a nonjudgmental way, and the facts that helped me do that were: the sense of wonder for this chance of encountering others, the respect and reverence for the human being as a fantastic and wondrous being, the happiness of meeting someone (compared with my day to day confinement), the joy, the love for life itself.
The second question is irrelevant to me because I am and I was almost always alone since I was 13 and brought to my parents' home - I mean that I don't even have a few superficial contacts with others, let alone in-depth connections. I don't live in a world of my own in the psychotic sense of the world, I was always like I am today although others say that I am psychotic. Everyone rejected me with some kind of distrust or aggressive behavior, even my psychology colleagues - one of them said that I need therapy because I did not have money for food or anything else and I complained and begged for at least some superficial relations to others. Alike him all the other people in my life, but they were anyway only a few people in my life, throughout my whole 50 years' existence. I experienced relational depth only a few times my whole life, when for a short time some people acted towards me as if I were a human being and directly talked with me or helped me with money, such as tears of gratitude really came into my eyes. I don't have a hint about where to go in order to find a few people in my life. I went everywhere in vain and some medics and psychologists lied about me. Only a few superficial relations at least would have been enough for my well-being, I wouldn't have asked for more. My older relatives whom I visited and cared for and talked with are dead a long time ago, some of them at a very old age. If someone would have accepted me at least for petty work or activity... Only my mother stayed with me, and it is too little only one person an entire life, even if I go beyond the fact that she was an abuser. Now I live with her and I try to get along and it is slightly better from the financial point of view. (I had only one close friend, a girl who was bench mate in high school and then other 4 similar connections)
18. How and when do you experience that “embodied empathy” feels natural for you?
I remember precisely how I was when playing with my dolls in childhood. I had an overtly maternal attitude, as little girls do have. Then, in my youth, I felt the same - a kind of all-encompassing love for humanity which made me experience a motherly feeling, more or less inappropriate for my social background or the other's expectations about me. Anyway, through going older, some of the glitters of youth have been torn apart, and now I am still middle-aged, unmarried, and childless. I don't feel that motherly attitude as much as before. Being alone, I believe that my embodied empathy manifests itself sometimes when I care for and play with my cats or kittens. I adopted a black street cat at the beginning of 2019, and I cherished the moments spent with her. Somehow it was like a role-play, and I used to play or talk with the cat as if it were a human being, a child. It was the cat who responded with empathy and a strong bond, such as it came to me especially when I experienced a migraine or a pain in my joints or discomfort in my leg muscles, effectively sticking to my body, to the aching spot. The cat even woke me up in the middle of a horrible migraine and I felt grateful for that moment, being able to cope better with the pain that night. Overall, this empathetic being called cat became a little more humane maybe because of me treating her like that in our plays. For example, the poor cat does not socialize anymore with cats from my yard - they are temporarily here - and I saw her stretching her paw towards one cat as if she were playing with me one of the game we used to play inside and the other cat did not stretch his paw in return. I wondered if this is not sad or if there really was my unwanted guilt to humanize the cat, or if that stretching of the paw was also a normal cat behavior, like it is for us, humankind. When I was a student I learned a few things about zoopsychology, then I forgot. Maybe psychology is only a human thing. All that I can surely say is that this cat who was mimicking the movements of my hands is still a friend to me. This reminds me of the first level of developing empathy and acting as a mirror for the client.
19.Why is authenticity (not) important in your life?
What touched you when you read the case-study of the client with a “personality disorder”?
Authenticity was always very important to me, even if my relationship were few and short-timed. I simply couldn't act as if in a play - remembering Shakespeare's too often quoted words "the world's stage..." - I had to be myself. I know where is this personality trait rooted - the fact my parents abused me physically and psychologically while I entered adolescence. And, mirroring my parent's conduct, my classmates did the same. I was very young, I was 13 years and a half, thus I developed a more and more authentic self or ego as a result, it was a self-defense mechanism, entirely logical, I hope you can see this. Authenticity made me feel entirely true and less vulnerable and created a space for feelings of awe in the front of beauty or knowledge discoveries - only a few in my teen years, but making me going full circle back to origins in my mature age. Culture is what is left when everything else is forgotten - Edouard Herriot. Pedagogy means bringing out the best and adaptable potential of the developing youngster. Creating room for self-growth, gently leading one person farther. As if in Socrates' maieutic method. Psychotherapy can be a kind of pedagogical approach, and I think that this can bring in the open the necessary authenticity of the client. But what if sometimes it is not needed? I think that we have to assess the particular situation, especially if the authenticity or metacommunication or self-disclosure are mechanisms of defense through the years. If they are healthy mechanisms. In my own life, metacommunication or the need for self-disclosure were present mostly in my teen years, occasionally in my youth, and seldom after 35 years of age, when I began to write poems and texts directly or indirectly related to my life, although I don't like this thing, but for other reasons. You may think that it is not true because I revealed too much on this course, yet it is true. Authenticity was always there, because I am alone, it is like a cry of hunger. Moreover, I like authentic and direct people.
When I read the case study, I was impressed by the client's story more than by the therapy - the fact that he intended to kill himself, the fact that he forgot about aggressing his ex-girlfriend. The fact that he was afraid that other miserable things can happen if he thinks about some things. I suggest as further reading the novel Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, which presents the same case of maladaptation. By the way, Kafka was an existentialist writer, most people think so. Then I was impressed by the congenital blindness of the counselor, making her seem more vulnerable. Then I was impressed by her small steps towards a change.
20.I will share here a part of my own later thought process, though it may not be related too strongly with the questions here. I was sometimes wondering how can a poet create "art" using the tool of language - especially when he does not use rhythm or alliterations or other externally perceived techniques. The same works with therapy and I read in this course that therapy can be considered as an art. Words are gateways and poignant tools at the same time. psychotherapy is partly a wordy process.
It was a sentence somewhere - Your body is talking to you. Is there anybody there to listen? Thus the word body is repeated in the word anybody here. The same we talk about embodiment, body language, and so on. Or about the body of knowledge, an expression that was mentioned in the same article (corpus of knowledge - form Latin). Corpus is the origin of the word incorporate, with similar or even equal meaning to embodiment.I was talking about words - from the etymological, semantical, and syntactical perspectives - and this is also metacommunication. We should remember that these words mean objects and phenomena and that the encounter with words triggers body responses.
Another example - focusing. It comes from the Latin word focus which meant fireplace, hearth, and fire too. The hearth of our body or the inner core or center of our embodiment was contacted in the focusing technique, with the request of the counselor to stay there, besides the central inner part of our own body or in the middle of the body, transferring mindfulness there. But our body is built up not only through body-building techniques or everyday life physical exercise or physical environment, but also through sentences and words which are embodied in our unconscious. But we can work it out, if there are signs of maladaptation or not enough good coping.
Maybe the client's world is split, in such a way that the normal and bidirectional causal link between mind and body is disrupted. So, we cannot speak only about a crystal clear cut difference and compartmentalization of these classical two opposites. Focusing, as I see it, means to reach the inner felt sense by getting rid of the cerebral guardian and saying goodbye to words for a short time. It aims at switching from the less profound "from the outside looking in" to a deeper sense of feeling from the inside. Mind and spirit are submerged for a moment into our bodies. As I have read here, focusing requires an ability to give up control and to be vulnerable.
I wonder how's the relation between focusing and hypnotherapy - because it is similar to hypnotic induction: a kind of relaxation technique, a kind of body-scanning, and even eye fixation for some clients, because of the environment, e.g. the unfamiliar and strange wooden sculptures. My guess is that focusing is facilitated like this and that maybe these techniques are initially there in any kind of therapeutic encounter, because the professional has to dig out the pain and suffering from the client, by submerging into the unknown of the sub/unconscious. I, for example, when I feel low or confused, employ a strategy of waking up by trying to see the main architectural qualities of the building where I'm in, or by trying to guess if the windows face sunrise or sunset, etc. Then it is the wild and unknown environment that's talking to me and I try to guess a part of it, to place my feet steady onto the ground.
Can you identify a situation where you have felt a direct connection between experience and embodiment? How would you describe your “bodily felt experience”? I almost never experienced such a thing, at least in my adult years - to my knowledge so far. Only when I was a child, being timid in many social interactions at school, I felt that emotion of shyness in my body as muscular and overall tension. The same worked with awkward situations such as having my hand kissed when I was only 13 or then 15-16, when the reaction of my father was exaggerating and he retorted to the man who kissed my hand as if he thought that it was inappropriate. Or when I had to take a shower in the communal bathroom for students in a campus, when I was an adult, but I felt like walking on eggshells. But it was nevertheless a psychological experience and not an embodiment.
I read again in the map of body expressions about expressing one's inner core through drawings. I used this technique but not too much, in order to alleviate the feeling of solitude. Once upon a time, I had a shocking spiritual or connectedness experience through drawing. It made sense to me only after more than 10 years when I discovered that the thing I drew, in order to express some abstract thought and feeling was in reality present since a long time ago, since the 9th century AD - the Samarra spiral Minaret. I lost that drawing, but I remember how it was - except for the fact that I don't remember the spiral's direction - from left to right or conversely. My spiral tower was rainbow-colored. Otherwise, I used to like Rafael's Madonnas and I made some sketches with madonnas, and the reason was that I would have welcomed with great joy a child in my lonely existence, a thing that was not possible for me. Only today I checked and found that Raphael, an archangel's name, means "God has healed" in online sources. The next drawing expresses my sadness, through the head of an intentionnaly exaggerated frail and emaciated woman.
Almost everything that I drew was related to some meaning or symbol, consciously chosen. The last drawing I put here is one of a woman which represents to me the symbol of self-disclosure and inner feeling or felt sense. This was a new finding. As I said before, my drawing skills did not change since I was 13, because I did not cultivate them or because it was the ceiling of my aptitude. Through taking this course I was able to understand all three reasons for my abandonment of drawing. Before I believed that it was only because there was not art-teaching in math and physics high-school. Another fact that I am uncertain about is why did I cover with hair the right eye in my drawing below and closed the left eye. I surely wouldn't have done the opposite, but I don't see yet what were symbolizing within my soul the right and the left eye. Here is the case too about the easiness in drawing faces oriented to the left edge of the paper, though once I could draw, with some effort, the face of a madonna looking on the other side. Remembering my school years and seeing others drawing sketches, I may say that it is possible this preeminence for that vast majority, because of the domineering left brain hemisphere. I found on the net this assessment: " and surveys in European and American art museums have found that some- thing like 56 percent of men and 68 percent of women in portraits face the left side of the canvas and thereby show more of the left side of the face. Crucifixion scenes of Jesus suffering on the cross showed an even stronger bias, with over 90 percent facing left. (By chance alone, you’d expect closer to 33 percent, since subjects could face left, right, or straight ahead.)" Than it is almost double than chance.
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