Time in Our Lives

Time is the wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Rabindranath Tagore (1)

Introduction

Time permeates this existence, yet one may scarcely notice it, much like a fish not noticing the water of its environment. Rather as the Sufi poet Rumi wrote of God being closer than our aorta (2), so too time is intimately close, mysterious though it is. Since time is so inextricably bound with existence, it would hardly be surprising if one’s relationship with time has a huge impact on one’s life, and therefore that the problems that one experiences in life – whether practical or psychological – reflect issues in one’s relationship with time. However, I believe that, with the obvious exception of boundaries and the ending of counselling or psychotherapy being linked to issues of temporality and mortality, the issue of the client’s relationship with time is too easily overlooked, whereas that relationship may be fundamental, and therefore exploration of that relationship could be very fruitful in psychotherapy.

I have a particular longstanding interest in time, in the contexts of physics, cosmology, culture and philosophy as well as in psychotherapy, and indeed my Psychotherapy and Counselling MA dissertation is on the theme of one’s relationship with time (3). In this article I outline some concepts of time and time-related issues in therapy, and give an overview of my approach to exploring and working therapeutically with the client’s relationship with time and temporality.

Concepts of time

In Nature there are astronomical, physical and biological clocks – the cycles of the seasons, night and day, heartbeat and atomic vibrations. However, since the development of mechanical timepieces, technological clock time has increasingly dominated western society, and is increasingly dominating other societies too. That kind of time is rigid (notwithstanding quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity), consensual and considered to be objective. Technological clock time is the time used in science, transport schedules, broadcasting, education timetables, the workplace (with possible exceptions such as agriculture, based more on the more variable Earth-and-Sun clock time). Even the therapeutic frame is tied to the law of the technological clock (not in Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, where the end of the counselling session depends on when a point of understanding is reached (4)). By contrast, lived time – time as experienced – is subjective, fluid and elastic. It is precisely the experience of time that can be explored in psychotherapy.

To read the whole article, please click on the link:

http://www.bacp.co.uk/docs/pdf/15328_therapy%20today%20june%202013.pdf

Beginner's Mind

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities...         Shunryu Suzuki (1)

 The Role of Theory

What should be the role of theory in counselling and psychotherapy? To what extent does theory support and enhance therapeutic work, and to what extent can theory hinder the therapeutic encounter? What exactly should be the connection between theory and practice, how to link ideas, concepts, interpretations and understandings with what the therapist actually does in the room, sitting there engaged with a client in some kind of verbal or non-verbal dialogue. How many of us have not wrestled with these deep and challenging questions?

I don’t believe there is one definitive answer. Rather, there are multiple answers: different answers for different therapists or for the same therapist at different times in their career, or with different clients. Or perhaps a unique answer for each moment, just as exactly what is happening in my mind moment to moment is a vast and unique world, and I am sure that is equally true of what is happening in my client’s mind and of what is happening in that co-created phenomenon of the therapeutic relationship.

To be sure, the integrative model which I’ve been developing resides there in the background, providing me with a framework to understand my clients and the relationship with them, helping me to make sense of them and their material, and offering me guidelines on how to work with them. However, when I’m there in the room, how much do I consciously think theory?

During a client session some months ago I did think of the four stages of therapy that Jung identified – confession, elucidation, education and transformation (2) – and it was quite useful for me to think of that in terms of thinking about where the work with the client could go (he had been referred for six sessions). And at times during my sessions with clients I certainly do think of mindfulness-based interventions, gestalt-inspired role plays, visualisations drawn from psychosynthesis, and also both gestalt and Jungian ideas in dreamwork. Moreover, I may have ideas of clients’ attachment styles or temporal orientation (focus more on the past, present or future, or a balance of these) or the existential givens which they may be facing. However, when I am sitting with the client, theory tends to be more in the ‘ground’ (in the phenomenological sense (3)); it is more ‘figural’, playing a more explicit role in my preparation ahead of a session and in my reflection following a session, as well as in supervision. Theory provides a lens through which to understand my clients, their material, my relationships with them, my way of working in practice, the impact of the work on me, and the processes occurring during and between the sessions. This understanding can then feed into my preparation for the next session, so my use of theory is both retrospective and proactive.

Beginner’s Mind

Unquestionably, theory inspires and informs what I do. I believe, however, that it is ultimately my ‘being’ qualities and quality of presence that are most essential in the therapy – the combination of qualities of openness, curiosity, non-judgement, and present-moment awareness, what in Zen Buddhism is called beginner’s mind. One of the classic Zen books is Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the opening of which contrasts the multitude of possibilities in the beginner’s mind with the lack of possibilities in the mind of the expert (4). Beginner’s mind is a mind that is open, fresh, curious, present here and now, natural, free and uncluttered, and Suzuki considered it a prerequisite for Zen practice. It is a mind characterised in the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s poem Poetry as having the ‘pura sabiduría del que no sabe nada’ (pure wisdom of one who knows nothing) (5). Transpersonal psychologist John Welwood refers to beginner’s mind as ‘unconditional presence’, this being the ability to face experience as it is directly, and not through the lens of any ‘conceptual or strategic agenda’; in other words, it is an openness to lived and felt experience (6). Notwithstanding what I said earlier, much of the time I find my work involves a ‘beginners’ mind’ attitude towards theory.

To read the whole article, please click on the link:

http://www.bacp.co.uk/docs/pdf/15221_june_14_tt.pdf