Welcome to the first edition of our new GestaltPress website feature “Dialectics and Dialogue,” where every couple of months we’ll have a new guest conversation host, joining and facilitating the conversation that emerges! I, Deborah, want to open this first D&D conversation with the largest of topics: love itself.
The great thing about tackling an enormous topic like love, in a blog format: we don’t have to be comprehensive, we don’t have to make finished, essay-like statements that hold up to anonymous peer review. We are our own peer review — that’s what a blog is, right? I can pursue something that intrigues, attracts, troubles, mystifies or nourishes me about love — and love does pretty much all these things — and just put it out there, and
see what that stimulates, excites, or turns off in you (hmmm – dare I ask, is this like lovemaking?!)
When Leonard Cohen sings “It is from love that we are born, in love we disappear” (Boogie Street, from the London Concert) I hear a recipe for something that sounds wonderfully human (although the conception and birth of a baby invokes many other complicated issues, as does the loss of a beloved, I love Leonard’s simple construct). Reflecting here on learning to love as an organizing purpose in (my) life. This feels also an important aspect of counseling and consulting practices.
Learning how to love includes the passion of love, not merely some abstracted disembodied concept. And knowing this passion as part of who I am is essential to seeing the client who sits down in my clinic as a fully impassioned being. I’m not now focusing on the erotic field nor the ethical ways we attend to it, but neither am I comfortable implying some sort of not embodied love as the object of my lifelong learning program!
Experimenting with the premise of learning to love as an organizing life principle and reflecting back on 29 years of experiencing Gestalt, this approach has also taught me how to be more open to receiving love. We need the experience of being loved in order to love. This acknowledgment pulls us back to pre-verbal infancy, and not only our own but that of each of our parents and grandparents. We now know we are ingesting emotional messages from the earliest days and we bond or attach variously depending on that environment. These experiences, part of the ground of our being, have contributed to our emotional capacities and habitual limitations. As we work later on our coupled relationship, or with our growing children, or on fine-tuning our skills at mutuality we learn more.
There are situations ripe for loving contact and those less suited for such vulnerability or intimacy. Sonia Nevis and Joe Melnick speak of intimate and strategic systems, but these are also temporal factors – any system may emphasize one dimension or another in different situations. The times when we don’t dare reveal how much we care provide the grist for Gestalt’s shame and belonging work — we are only shamed when we care too much, or when the other does not respond with a sufficient degree of engagement.
The foundation of daring to care may be a secure attachment history, developmental years of being met with adequate attention and interest in our internal world. Or the therapeutic healing of an absence of this. From that base we can construct expectations for intimate satisfaction and long-term well-being.
What I’m reflecting on are practices of responding to our world, to my part of the world, in ways that support and encourage deep caring, emotional growth, and healing. And how do we then build empathic communities to meet the wounded and preclude some of the future wounding? These are questions that arise as I reflect on learning how to love and live better, sustainably.
Gordon Wheeler describes (S. Hausner, Even If It Costs Me My Life, 2011)
“Figure/ground both historically and methodologically, is a key concept in Gestalt.And yet over the years we have often devoted much more attention to understanding “figure”…than to … process structures of “ground.” We know that relational ground, which is a map of our own attachment history, conditions and informs every attentional figure we form, and how we may energize and actualize those figures in living.”
My energy is for attending to love as the ground of my Gestalt practice. This must emerge from relational systems I’ve known, that have supported me to make this meaning from my experiences. This might include — managing and conducting a bodywork practice for 23 years; feelings of support I’ve received in my professional Gestalt community including GestaltPress, my Systemic Constellations training, the Esalen Institute community, the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, The Relational Center of Los Angeles, and the Gestalt International Study Center; and perhaps, from something earlier, more essential in my attachment history.
I’m curious – do you use the word love in your counseling or consulting practice? Would you say you love your clients? Or does this sound like heresy?
Hi Deb, thanks for raising such a richly provocative subject! It’s one that’s close to my heart – and in answer to your question, the word “love” absolutely appears in my consulting practice, on my website, in my blog and in the organisational work I do (I hope more than the word! It is not a marketing slogan!). However, it is a word and an approach to consulting and coaching that polarises my client base – I’m sure many avoid me for using such loaded language and probably as many are intrigued.
This intrigues me as I have felt sure for some time that the deep inner work necessary for human development in leaders and managers, consultants and coaches, is impossible without self-love – our inner critic is far too harsh on us. And no organisational or social transformation can be effected or sustained without a loving intent and the creation of a loving context.
I once asked a colleague how she achieved the results she did in her work with corporate clients. He answer was immediate and heartfelt – she said, “I love them.” Of course, as you point out in your blog, such love is more about ground than figure – but staying exquisitely present to love as the ground of our work is surely worthy of more attention in organisational consulting and social transformation practices? This is not to support the false splitting of systems into “strategic” or “intimate” categories (however useful in some circumstances that important discrimination is) but to enquire more deeply into how kindness, compassion, care, and other forms of loving contact and connection in organisational life can perhaps speak more to the social fractures of our time than singular attention to the balance sheet (which patently is not working).
There ARE organisations that make love figural – check out the Love at Work Foundation and the Conscious Business approach of Fred Kofman (although he avoids the word ‘love’) for example. But such approaches are far from the mainstream. But “Love” comes with a lot of baggage and is easily idealised. For me, this is where action enquiry comes in, enabling me to remain open to learning about love at work (even in the face of apparent disconfirmation) and deepening my embodied practice and experience of love in the personal and professional domains of my life – as well as the important space between…
Hi Deb… Ty… Gordon…
I find myself speaking of love and passion both in reference to my “beloved community” that has a life of its own. I can feel when I am loving that life, when my commitment to its sustainability and robustness powers my actions and pulls me through periods when I am rather tempted to drop off or ignore some individuals within my community. It’s my love of the community itself that compels me to stay engaged with difficult, maybe even tedious episodes with certain community members, or in relation to a specific task or project I have taken up on the community’s behalf.
I have also found that when my love is directed very specifically to one or two people, the community that surrounds us wants to be included. And when we don’t attend to this by working out a way to “spread the love”, things seem to unravel. So I have come to make a distinction between the affections I feel for certain people and the devotion I have to the whole ecology that makes it possible for me to feel those affections. The words don’t matter so much to me as the differences in meaning.
Clearly I have love for the community that gives rise to your invitation to add me to this blog! And my willingness to contribute to the blog is a show of that love.
Love to all,
Mark
Mark – only four years to consider my reply here! I am really attracted to your point that a committed or focused love between, for e.g., a couple actually draws people in, people want to be near, we spread the love, unless an impermeable wall goes up, then things will likely unravel.
I’m especially interested in ‘the beloved community’ or communities we share, how the whole ecology of this can be infused with empathy and respect. With BLM, #Black Lives Matter, we are seeing non-violent actions spring up across the country and still a black behavioral therapist from a group home is shot on the street in Miami when attempting to help an autistic man who was lost.
Was it Marvin Gaye who sang, “only love can conquer hate”? Yes, in ‘What’s Going On?’ But the conquering isn’t spontaneous or guaranteed in each hateful situation. However working upstream to change the culture is what’s going on in the US and UK today, and Australia and countless other places where young and older activists are taking to the streets to sing us into a new beloved community, one that encompasses our entire human family and really the stream of life going back almost 4.2 billion years on our planetary home. People surviving natural and human disasters (think 9/11, forest fires, floods and tornados) find that we all self-organize and pull together to address the crises and the fallout. Race and religion tend to disappear in instances of bloody, heartbreaking disaster, until the state steps in with top down organizing mandates.
Thus, to return to your comments, Mark, “the devotion I feel to the whole ecology that makes it possible to feel (those) affections”, the ones toward other people, this is what matters. And for me to practice and strengthen the tools that build this sort of ecosystem in schools, in communities, I do need to lean on my relationally attuned community or I come readily unraveled!
I hope to find some of you to lean on at the grand 2016 EAGT/AAGT conference in Taormina, Italy.
Until then, I’ll be leaning on you virtually.
Thanks, and love,
Deb
Ty – oh my – how you stimulate and excite my imagination on this! “Staying exquisitely present to love as the ground of our work” is indeed my intent/aspiration. And yes, embodied awareness and attending to love in my personal life are two practices I engage to avoid idealizing love as a professional resource. All of this in the interest of attending to the social fractures we see in every arena of our world. Would you say more about how you use action inquiry to sustain loving presence?
Beautiful stuff, folks…
Dare I say that I love you both?
I dare, I dare…
Your point here, Deb, is one that’s become more and more important to me in the last few years:
“The times when we don’t dare reveal how much we care provide the grist for Gestalt’s shame and belonging work…”
Yes and yes and yes, and the implications of our holding back from a strong felt sense of love–and from sharing that experience–are enormous. I’m glad to read your post because I think we need to go much further than we have (in both theory and practice) in exploring the moment-to-moment phenomenology of love–with our clients, in our lives, in every way that we can.
I agree wholeheartedly with that beautiful mad-dog of an Englishman (Francis) when he says: “Staying exquisitely present to love as the ground of our work is surely worthy of more attention.” Yes yes again. Even Freud understood–if vaguely–that the work we do is “a cure through love,” but even while our field has long sensed this, we have in some ways “understood” it without building in enough support for our bodies to risk EXPERIENCING it in a shared field.To really sink in and explore–in an embodied way–the emotional terrain of this most relational, most fundamental of human experiences–that is pioneer work, and delicate. It’ll require a great deal of courage and mutual support, but I can think of few things as important when I look around at the bloody, battered, and heartbroken world we’re living in.
I look forward to exploring this–and more–with all of you at the couples conference next March in April.
I love the idea behind this blog (dialectics and dialogue) because it seems to me that it allows for or invites the kinds of conversations we might have when we sit together sharing a meal or over a glass of wine… conversations that are creative and free-flowing, brim full of untamed ideas and arguments not yet fully formed. Conversations that are possible precisely because they emerge from the ground of love.
Is it heresy to speak of love in the consulting room? Like Ty I don’t believe so, but figure or ground, I don’t think conversations about love have come easily to us as therapists.
It’s less challenging (I think) to talk about creating spaces of hospitality and welcome for our clients, where compassion and an attitude of non-judgement create spaces that offer the possibility of healing. And not that creating these kinds of spaces for clients is necessarily easy, but it’s a description of a virtuous or charitable kind of love, and a kind of love that feels tidy and well-behaved. But what about love that is messy, love that pushes us into unbounded and chaotic places, what happens when this kind of love fills us or the therapy room?
These I think are more challenging conversations, but ones worth having. Conversations about how love lives as figure in our work with clients, or as ground in how we hold ourselves as therapists. Conversations about love in all it’s varied forms… love that is charitable and compassionate, love that evokes longing and passion, love that leads to gratitude and open-heartedness, and love that unsettles and disturbs…. the challenge is perhaps to risk conversations that lay bare that richly textured experiences that we label as simply as love.
What a great topic to open this blog on Debs!
I enjoyed the implicit reference to Tillich’s “Ground of our Being” and applaud your comittment to attend to love as the ground of your practice, making it figural. I find those “structures of ground” very exciting.
Your comment on shame caught my interest. We all differ, but my reaction to “non-engagement of the other” is not shame, but annoyance – if they seem distracted, or don’t honour agreements, or don’t turn up to meetings, or prioritise their cellphone when they do, I then WANT to shame them, to get their engagement, especially if they claim commitment to something I care deeply about. Which brings me to the nub of the issue for me – which is the shadow side of love.
For, while love gives meaning to our lives, once we care passionately about something, how far do we fight to defend it: The tigress for her cubs, the religionist for his God, the activist for her cause, the democrat for democracy. Thus “Make love not war” seems an oxymoron. We make war because we love.
I realise you are talking more of love between therapist and therapee, but even in this case, how far does our commitment go? Would we continue if there was no exchange of money? What does love mean, and is it always good?
hmmm. stimulating evocation, Deb. sets me thinking. here’s what comes up for me: this is the realm where we get to/have to learn about attachment, belonging, love. by “this realm” I think I mean life, being here, this here-and-now thing. to learn about that, to get the here/now out of this experience, it seems like we have to also be separate beings, with some uniquely individual viewpoint. otherwise we’re not learning attachment and love — we’re just being in belonging — or in being, if you will. What’s interesting about life is that you/I am uniquely distinct, AND utterly embedded in belonging, attachment, love. Now I do understand that there’s attachment that enables growth and life– and there’s also attachment that constricts or constrains growth and life. that’s why I need to/want to learn about attachment, to understand this experience as i experience it, as much as I can – to get that right. or righter. or something. But I don’t want to deny or escape or transcend attachment — I don’t get that at all. I can do that fine, just by being either utterly isolated, or utterly subsumed in the All. Perhaps there are other realms of being or dasein (or nicht-da-sein?) where that’s what it’s about. but those are not realms of life, which is defined, seems to me, by the me/we dialectic — whether you’re a human or a bacterium….
Hi Deb.
What a wonderful warm and welcoming entry point you have provided at the start of this conversation. I had the visceral sense of stepping into a web of deep and heart stirring connections as I read. And I believe these are exactly the sorts of connections and conversations that are essential in the world right now for us to support and sustain meaningful and healthy life.
In my experience, love is a word I speak with careful awareness in my practice. Over-used it can lose significance and under-used it can evoke distance. Yet, in my body, it is an attitude of relating that I seek to constantly create and cultivate. To be with the other and with myself with love: surely that is the discipline of our work as humans right now. How that manifests in our work, lives, families, friendships, gardens, communities I suspect will be different and challenging. Yet to cultivate love in all our relationships I suspect will be the only antidote to the widespread sense of fear and ‘perilousness’ in the world.
Thank you Deb for starting with this foundational building block as a signal and signpost to future directions on the blog. I look forward to more.
With Love,
Sally.
Deb,
You for sure went for one of “the big ones” in your opening blog, I love it! And one of the great things about blogs is that I can write what is figural for me in this moment, and come back at a later time with some other figure.
I read your blog and has been mulling it over for a few days now. I have no idea how I would be able to do my job if I didn’t love my clients. And yes, as some of you have mentioned, the topic of love in the relationship between client-clinician is one that can be difficult to bring up. Perhaps because the deficiency in our language, where ”love” can cover my love for chocolate, my love for a good night’s sleep, my love for my friends, my love for my clients and my love for my partner. I think you get the drift by now. And working mostly with children and teenagers to state that I love my clients is just fraud with difficult explanations to be made. So I stick with ”I love my job.”
The truth though is that I love all of these traumatized kids and teenagers who by others are labeled oppositional-defiant or sometimes even conduct disorder, who have a probation officer even though they are still in middle school who are my clients. There is a passage from a book which I read in high school that has stayed with me and has become more and more valid the longer I stay in this line of work.
It was written back in 1905 by Hjalmar Söderberg:
Man vill bli älskad, i brist därpå beundrad,
i brist därpå fruktad, i brist därpå avskydd och föraktad.
Man vill ingiva människorna någon slags känsla.
Själen ryser för tomrummet
och vill kontakt till varje pris som helst.
And yes I can translate it for you….
One wants to be loved, in lack thereof admired,
in lack thereof dreaded, in lack thereof loathed and despised.
One wants to instill in humans some kind of feeling.
The soul shivers from the empty space
and wants contact to any price.
I get this rush of what I would call an embracing energy that makes my heart and chest feel like it will explode from time to time, but most of the time it is much less noticeable, more the ground than the figure. How do I know it is still there, even though as a ground? Well, the very few times when it is absent. The times when I meet a client to whom I can’t find that feeling, when every session becomes a struggle, then I know. When I can’t feel in me how their way of making contact with me is their best attempt at asking me to love who they are, is just that, their best possible attempt.
Oh my! From the client’s (children included) I find it hard to love, to the provocative – is it not love that brings us war?! I feel so moved by this ‘dinner party’ I expect to drink more wine than I’ll feel happy about in the morning! Returning to Ty’s early words in this d & d something about balancing our self-love with the strength of our/my inner critic is helpful for me to attend to — and as far as I work this edge, it’s arrived most explicitly from therapists, friends and lovers who’ve loved me despite the intense running discourse of things-done-wrong/poorly/verbosely/clumsily/chaotically/hideously. This returns me to Leannes brave invoking of ‘love that pushes us into chaotic places, evokes longing and passion, unsettles and disturbs’ in the clinical setting. Certainly it has been those relationships/communities where that inner critic/those nasty voices could breath the fresh air of being heard and held by others/another, that has broadened my ecology of self-love. Reading Mark’s words about beloved community and how this compels him to stay engaged with difficult, even tedious episodes with individuals, and ‘devotion to the whole ecology of the community’ reminds me of how often I want to move my individual clients into supportive resource-rich situations, and how often I struggle to find these. More for Arch, Gordon, Sally and about love in Couples practice later. love, Deborah
Still struck by Lena quoting how the soul shivers at the empty space and longs for contact at any price! Yes, I say as I return at last to this empty blog space!!! This place once a long time ago identified as a ‘web of deep and heart stirring connections!’
These reflections on love and love in therapeutic or consulting practice continue to bubble up as if from an underwater spring. And right now I feel under water in my life commitments – but it is summer season on Cape Cod and under water is a good place to be! However emotionally it disallows all but the most urgent responses, not the more deeply felt or thoughtful ones.
How do I summon those more empathic or compassionate feelings? I do manage to in the clinic mostly. One way I soothe myself to access more fully my relational brain is through embodied practices — receiving bodywork, being physically/therapeutically touched, practicing yoga which allows me to touch myself with compassion in challenging situations known as asanas. Another is in touching in with a community of loved ones, people who are out of physical reach but with whom I have some history, who know my vulnerabilities and are even so, or maybe because of these sharings, my friends, with whom I can explore what Leanne refers to as “ideas not fully formed.” And I hope this blog site can expand that community to include people I have yet to be in the same room with but will one day be if we’re lucky! And this site may be as intimate a place as we find together.
This topic of love matters to me most in re to feelings of isolation and curiosity about the me/we dialectic fundamental to all life forms Gordon mentions. Also the attachments that foster growth and those that deter it, as referenced by Gordon and differently by Jim.
Reflections on woundings, war, political polarizing, and deprivation bring me to the Holmes Brothers concert I participated in last night in a tent in Truro on a site overlooking the North Atlantic. Music, one domain in which I experience love, love of self/other/embodied experience – greatly energized sometimes erotic love! Gospel music and the blues (the stuff of said Holmes Bros) draw on different explicit uses of the word love but offer (for me, although not for someone with traumatic memories of tent revivals, probably) an experiential space not unlike the spaces of compassion we create in our clinical settings when we are in a dance with our client that can allow for the possibility of healing. I sometimes leave a concert hoping that since I’m not a musician, I can co-create with my clients a relational context, a song, a dance that promotes growth, belonging, creativity. I am especially tracking for this when I’m working with couples – in GestaltPress’s On Intimate Ground Penny Backman quoting Maturana and Varela describes an African Parrot that couples through the finding of common song, this develops during mating, one bird contributing a line, the other adding to it – unlike with humans this song remains constant for life, their own unique song. Of course we have glimpses of this with whales now too…anyone else have a melody that comes up?
This morning my blog reflecting shifts to thoughts of sound bites rather than songs. A prime time TV conversation on transporting tar sands from Canada, developing the Keystone pipeline for a new fossil fuel resource to keep our AC’s etc working w/o developing renewables or depending on ‘foreign’ oil — the writer saying if this goes through the carbon generated would be enough to destroy planet earth in terms of carbon output – this in Esquire Magazine. He spoke in short hand as if we all knew his argument, he only needed to remind us, while I hoped for a clear summary to persuade others. So frustrating! I hunger for quick summations of complex issues into memorable sound bites and I understand in the tainted world of mass media and polarizing politics, simplism is the enemy of sustainable policies – as in all aspects of our relational worlds! The consumerist, high-stakes political season is sinister in how it plays on our collective appetite for quick explanations which give way to short thinking and bad policies!
Here again, the central nourishing value of slowing down our process with each other. Yes, our lives call often for quick and brief responses. But no, best solutions are neurologically more accessable when we slow down together = the first tool of every beginning Gestaltist and still, after 29 years, my #1 relational Gestalt intervention. In this regard I received great booster shot from a weekend workshop with Susan Lord, M.D. on Ultimate Self-Care, part of the spanking new Summer Series at the Gestalt International Study Center on Cape Cod. Lord offers a half dozen meditation practices with some simple brain science, to be integrated into a busy life quite effectively! All offered in a warm relational context (albeit, a women-only group). She will return to GISC next summer — watch for it! Meanwhile John Griffin and others are offering an all gendered “Heightening Awareness: Mastering Brainwaves to Unleash the Power of Awakened Mind” on August 24-26. You can come to Cape Cod to cool down and experience the beautiful Edwin and Sonia Nevis Meeting House in the woods in Wellfleet, relax AND receive ceu’s – check out the website: http://www.gisc.org, Summer Series and consider Susan Fischer’s Writing workshop August 17 – 20 while there’s still room.
I’ll be checking in more briefly and daily this week – tomorrow on one way embodied awareness is a connecting essential to reclaiming our democracy. Gordon Wheeler will be picking up the ball in leading this blog site after next week. Gotta run! Any thoughts???
Weeellll — if you knew Pat Korb of the Gainesville Gestalt Center you’ll remember how she expressed long drawn out welllll’s, just to slow things down — slow is what we have here in our Dialectics and Dialogue blog site!
Also, it’s how I feel during the darkest days here in the Northern hemisphere we are just starting to emerge from on January 6-7!
With the words ‘mental health’ on the tongues of cable pundits, opinion page op-eds, and at every holiday gathering this new year season, after the crescendo of heart break from the horrific public school shooting in Cn, USA, what is it we as mental health practitioners have to contribute to the larger discussion? What supports are missing for families under financial and emotional stress today? What resources are available for identifying the need for urgent intervening before a lone gunman goes ballistic? How can we hold this awful event, we in the US esp here, as a way to initiate public policies that address the easy access to fast-firing guns and just guns galore, but also look at our collective psyche, and the crippling effects of isolation? How does all of this interact with what we, as Gestaltists, know from our understanding of human relational propensities and from working with Couples and Families?
Grateful here to be moving from the topic of love into a focus on coupling and Couples Relationships and announce if you haven’t heard about a meaningful chance to come together as thought-leaders and explore issues in couples counseling as we bring a new evolution-of-gestalt study conference (# 5) to Esalen in March!
This is a format that’s worked beautifully since the first Evolution of Gestalt Conference in 2005. We’re doing morning plenaries and follow-up afternoon workshops — A FEW SLOTS ARE STILL OPEN IF YOU HAVEN’T YET SUBMITTED A PROPOSAL TO PRESENT ON YOUR WORK WITH COUPLES — then evening sessions, looking at intersubjectivity with Lynn Jacobs, the evolving role of couples in larger systems, issues around attachment as expressed in what our client couples present, a look at couples in our transformational times, Systemic Constellations with Judith Hemming, how shame expresses itself in the intimate dyad of a couple, what role the embodied and/or erotic field plays in couples strengths and difficulties. Through the 5 days, the heart of our exploration is around “What is our growing edge as contemporary Gestalt practitioners doing Couples work that informs the larger field?” and “What is it we are learning from others in the larger field of Couples and Family Counseling?” All of this, of course, presented in the world’s most beautiful garden of well-being and nourishment — Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, USA!!
Meantime what are you thinking about re Couples, Families, Mental Health Services, Embodied Relationality and the growing edge of Gestalt??
More briefly here I’m wondering how your clients have been responding to the issue of violence against the innocents, not that these Stoney Brook 1st graders are the only innocents dying, but this event has had a profound effect on every client I’ve seen in the last 3 weeks, maybe because of geographical proximity — I’m writing from New England. I’m wondering how you’re meeting your people in the presence of what was evoked for you.
Other sharp minds and enormous hearts will be initiating dialogues on this site now. Do stay tuned! And do let us hear from you!!