working with stories

Stories have the power to reflect us back to ourselves. They can provide a framework to make sense of our experiences, offering archetypal images in which we might recognise aspects of ourselves and our lives. Our primal impulse to connect and make sense of the world is seen through our storytelling and artmaking across cultures and ages. Through folklore and myth, ancient and modern, a desire to find ourselves reflected back underpins our search for (and creation of) stories that we can relate to. This speaks to our desire for belonging and communion. Conversely, the stories we internalise through our upbringing and social conditioning can inadvertently become traps that bolster our defences and impede relationships, serving to perpetuate unhelpful patterns and beliefs. A large part of the work of psychotherapy can be understood as differentiating between aspects of one’s story that have become distorted, neglected, or stuck in some way. The Wounded Healer myth (Marshall, 2018; Sedgewick, 1994) reminds us that careful, mindful, contact with our own wounding is the well-spring that sustains our emotional availability to both self and others, connecting us all within a wider transpersonal field.

We are inherently meaning-seeking creatures. This affords us deep emotional connection and a huge array of complex feelings accross the emotional spectrum. The idea that we might be able to arrive at an ultimate truth and make sense of our experience entirely is certyainly a compelling one. It speaks to the anatgonistic nature of this very human desire for meaning. The notion of gathering together the threads of lived experience and transforming them into a coherent narrative is at once captivating and elusive - a potentially deeply meaningful and healing process, which can never be ultimately finished. The word ‘antagonistic’, from the Greek ‘anti’: ‘against’ and ‘agonizesthai’: ‘to contend for a prize’ (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2021), captures the oppositional dynamics at play between ego’s desire for clarity and self-assuredness, and psyche/soul’s ineffable, unboundedness. James Hillman says, ‘The difference between ego and psyche isn't only theoretical; it's in how you tell a story. It's in getting the subjectivity out of it, so the story, the image takes over’ (Hillman, 1983:100).

THE FIELD

The ‘field’ can be understood as a synergetic ‘gathering’ and ‘constellating’ of meaning; ‘…an experience of reciprocal encounter – of tension, communication, and commingling’ (Abrams, 1996:56). If the nature of experience is reciprocal encounter the real question is how our multiple, entangled stories collide, resonate and intertwine.ories of the ‘field’ in psychotherapy have developed from the psychoanalytic concepts of transference and countertransference established by Freud and Jung in the 19th century. Countertransference was initially considered a superfluous byproduct to be shaken off by the therapist in order to focus on the unconscious neuroses of the patient manifest in the transference (Mitchell, 2010). Jung, influenced by developments in the world of physics, found significance in the mutual process between therapist and client, using archetypal images to explore the nature of this communication (Jacoby, 1984). Einstein’s discovery of the ‘relativized field’ and subsequent developments in quantum field theory were influential in the growth of a Jungian psychology that prioritised archetype and image in the examination of ‘self’ (Mansfield & Spiegelman, 1997).

Mary Tennes compares early psychoanalysis with the attempts, ‘in almost poetic fashion’ (Tennes, 2007:510), of the first astronomers to rationalise the Earth’s movements in relation to the Sun, the Moon and the stars (ibid). Like Jung’s archetypes (Mansfield & Spiegelman, 1997), Tennes implies that the ‘model’ can be only an indication of ‘psychic probability’ as opposed to an objective truth. Supporting a relational expansion of psychoanalytic thinking, Jessica Benjamin emphasises the phenomenological co-creation of meaning in the mutual process between two subjects (Benjamin, 2018). Understanding that this establishes a space of ‘thirdness’, Benjamin offers ‘a useful antidote to earlier, often persecutory idealizations of interpretation’ (Benjamin, 2018:34). With Benjamin, Ewa Robertson speaks of the ‘third body’ as the emergent property of the relationship, ‘…no longer a separate me or a you but a shared system, an intersubjective third or We’ (Robertson, 2018:59). Vitally, this ‘thirdness’ opens the space for empathy and recognition within intersubjective relationship. And the question of wherein this is contained? That’s the realm of the field, to which we can attempt to orient and sensitise ourselves, thus enriching our understandings of ourselves and each other.

Themes of belonging, containment, fragmentation and connection are particularly significant in the vignette I shall now share. The Gestalt principle of inclusiveness – the idea that everything in the field belongs (Brownell, 2010), is helpful in framing the intersubjective, ecosystemic and transpersonal elements of the work.

Vignette 1: Fragments and refraction

Freya was 78 years of age and had recently been diagnosed with kidney failure, resulting from the lithium she’d been taking for most of her adult life to stabilise her mood. She had attempted to stop the medication to disastrous effects and had decided the benefits of taking it outweighed the costs at this stage in her life. She wanted a space to process this realisation, acutely aware of her mortality. I felt anger as I learned about her treatment, and sorrow at the history she’d endured. Freya experienced her first psychotic breakdown in her twenties, following the hospitalisation of her sister who had a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Freya’s then husband had taken her to a psychiatrist who prescribed her lithium, and later, electroconvulsive therapy. The anger I felt was bound up in a knowledge of the disembodying, pathologising, and decontextualising of women’s distress in the history of psychiatric diagnosis (Uusher, 2011), alongside an acute awareness of the ongoing suffering perpetuated through social and institutional structures that draw demographic hierarchies across race, class, gender, dis/abilty, religion, sexuality to this day (Butler, 2020). Speaking of racial oppression and intergenerational trauma, Resmaa Menaken says trauma ‘starts to look a lot like culture’ (Menaken, 2020) when marginalised groups become further sidelined through the behaviours and strategies they develop as survival techniques in hostile environments. Whilst Freya’s experience of institutionalisation was unquestionably damaging, I was thankful to hear that on joining a women’s group after being discharged, she found refuge in a circle of radical feminist allies who continued to support her during subsequent episodes of psychosis and hospitalisation.

The room we met in was tiny, minimal, peaceful. There was a cherry tree outside the window, and Freya often gazed at its leaves moving in the breeze. Light, colour, vibrancy, and nature were in the field during our sessions. Sometimes this energy took on a different quality and Freya would worry intensely about social interactions with colleagues at the bookshop where she volunteered, fearful of perceived criticism. I had a strong feeling of wanting to gather Freya up, and I noticed each week that I habitually turned my palms towards her in a protective gesture as she walked ahead of me to the therapy room, as though energetically supporting her not to stumble. I found Jerome Bernstein’s perspective on ‘borderland personalities’ (Bernstein, 2005) illuminating in understanding the highly-sensitised character of my client in a non-reductive, ecologically-minded, compassionate way. Working with ecosystemic awareness, which, as Joan Crawford says, ‘expands the idea of the field to include everything – a bird at the window, a shaft of sunlight, a bee buzzing in the room’ (Crawford, 2018:133), I was able to attune with phenomenological awareness to the richness of the present moment with sensitivity to what Daniel Stern calls the ‘micro-momentary world of implicit happenings’ (Stern, 2004:2).

Connection and fragmentation were in the field, and it seemed she felt this too. Stephen Mitchell says the client’s inner world ‘is organised like a prism whose facets refract and disperse entering illumination into customary and familiar wavelengths’ (Mitchell, 1993, cited in Chodorow, 1999:14). This image of refracted light was especially resonant, as several times during our sessions we noticed the rain clearing, and bright sunlight illuminating a rainbow outside. In one session Freya noticed a picture on the wall, a collage, remarking ‘there are two birds, I thought there was just one!’ I looked too— ‘yes, you’re right; two of them. They’re not alone on that branch’, and I felt a deep kinship. Freya then revealed that collages were a hobby of hers. I had heard about her tendency to collect old letters, greetings cards, newspaper articles, quotes that she liked, but the image of her forming these into new pieces of art was intriguing. ‘Yes, I liked the way I could put things together however I liked— maybe that’s the rebel in me...but I liked it very much, seeing something forming from all the pieces.’

Shortly after this, Freya began talking about her sister, Ava, and for the first time disclosed that they were in fact twins. A twin myself, I was deeply impacted to learn that Ava had died of cancer thirty years ago. Her diagnosis of schizophrenia coincided with Freya’s marriage, and Freya’s own psychoses began after Ava’s first hospitalisation. They had been very close until their adolescence but the subsequent separation due to Ava’s hospitalisation and Freya’s marriage caused them to drift apart. The themes of connection, fragmentation, the two birds on the branch, Freya’s collages, my own deep resonance with her – all of these elements constellated with new significance. The collage became a metaphor of Freya’s longing for kinship, and for the synergetic field itself, resonating with Ervin László’s conception that we are beings in-form-action (László, 2004).

Towards the end of our work together, an image formed as I thought of Freya in supervision – the vibrant flash of colour of an autumn leaf in transition from the green of the tree, to a vivid yellow, now resting on the forest floor. I recalled the energy of threshold experiences, Chiron’s immortal wounding in the knee in the Wounded Healer myth – the animal part of him, connecting him to the wounds of humanity and the more-than-human world, integrating body and soul (Marshall, 2018; Sedgewick, 1994). The word eccentric sprang to mind, which I realised to mean ‘unconventional’ and ‘deviating from a circular path’… I recalled another image, this time from ‘The Wounded Healer’ training weekend at Re-Vision. During a visualisation I’d imagined my ‘pre-ego wound’ as a fragile white/green leaf-like shape, something like a cabbage leaf but bright, alive, vibrant. As I settled more deeply into meditation on the image, it became brighter and there was movement. I realised with a flash that this was a ‘cabbage-white’ butterfly. A memory of learning this name from my father in childhood surfaced, as I envisaged a bright, white butterfly illuminated by the sunlight in our garden. The butterfly is a cross-cultural representation of the soul, by virtue of its lightness, and the dramatic transformation it undergoes during its lifespan (Seigneuret, 1988), with the name of ‘Psyche’, Greek goddess of soul, deriving from the Greek for breath, life, butterfly (Venes, 2013).

Catching the Light, M. Hamer, 2010.

In the words of Ewa Robertson: ‘Understanding Eros from the perspective of soul, we come to see longing as a yearning for love, for what the Sufis refer to as the Beloved, our essential wholeness’ (Robertson, 2018:54). Through the synergetic field we encountered both eros and psyche – making contact with a shared kinship, and with soul’s yearning for wholeness. In the next vignette I explore another perspective on this sense of longing, as a pull toward the transpersonal threshold, against the undertow of the ego-familiar.

Vignette 2: In every step

journey: ‘a defined course of traveling; one's path in life’, from Latin ‘diurnus’: ‘of one day’

(Online Etymology Dictionary, 2021)

I began working with Jerry in 2018. Having previously identified as a lesbian, Jerry had recently come out as ‘trans’ to close friends, using the pronouns ‘they/their’. They were hesitant about broaching this with their family and were experiencing some feelings of panic, as well as arguments with their girlfriend with whom they’d travelled, studied, and were now cohabiting for the first time. Early on I was aware of feeling impressed, even envious, at Jerry’s knowledge on a broad range of matters concerning global politics, activism and issues of social inequality. I resonated with their political views, ruminated on issues they’d raised: the complex nature of power and oppression, and the way our use of language shapes our identities. Yet any inquiries I made into Jerry’s own experience of these issues were skilfully sidestepped. I became rather side-tracked myself. In supervision I reflected on the pronoun Jerry used, and my experience of having to ‘check’ myself, sometimes stopping in my tracks to avoid slipping up and saying the wrong thing. Not wanting to get stuck in a ‘doer/done-to’ (Benjamin, 2018) dynamic and realising these to be countertransference reactions, I turned towards these feelings with curiosity, attempting to stay with the ‘soulful uncertainty’, as Sarah Van Gogh puts it, ‘involved in being prepared to not-know, and the accompanying anxiety’ (Van Gogh, 2018:68). The impasse I found myself in was to do with my determination to connect with my client’s sense of ‘self’, yet, in striving to find them I was missing what was happening between and beyond us.

I found the courage in a subsequent session to bring this up. I had an image of myself as a child at school, wanting to fade into the safety of the background, and the associated numbness in my body. Thus, alerted through these ‘somatic’ and ‘imaginal’ phenomena (Mansfield & Spiegelman, 1997; Schwartz-Salant 1989) to a sense of disorientation in the field, I said, ‘I’m getting a sense of needing to get my bearings – I wonder if that resonates with you?’ Jerry was a little taken aback at my interjection; they had been complaining about a housemate who they were finding irritating due to their lack of contribution to household chores. Jerry explained that they felt they needed to get the ‘boring bits’, the ‘housekeeping’ out of the way before moving on to the ‘important things.’ We both noted this choice of phrase with a smile, and Jerry acknowledged that it did feel like a way of getting oriented, finding their feet. I ventured another question – ‘Has there been a time in your life when it has felt more difficult? To find your feet?’ I curled my toes as I said this, then found I was pressing my feet into the ground. ‘To feel grounded?’ Jerry thought for a while, then nodded. They told me that their parents had divorced when they were 10, and their mother had suffered from depression. Jerry was the middle child with two brothers, the eldest of whom had a learning disability. More recently Jerry had learnt that their maternal grandmother died suddenly when their mother was a teenager, and it was after discovering this that Jerry had started experiencing panic attacks. They expressed the feelings of shame brought up by wanting more attention from their mother, coupled with the fear that it would never feel an appropriate time to come out to her. I felt a wave of deep sadness. Jerry explained, ‘I didn’t want anything else to upset her, but I could never be fully… ‘me’. I was the one to make them all laugh, to bring them all together.’ I had a surge of feeling, wanting to encourage Jerry to finally forge their own path, to experience this ‘bringing-together’ for themself, and to break free from the internalised sense of shame accompanying this desire for recognition.

In a session shortly after, I ventured forward a ‘level-4’ intervention, naming the countertransference. My desire for Jerry to ‘forge their own path’ was strong, so I was astonished and delighted to hear that they were planning a walking holiday with their girlfriend. I felt excited and hopeful, yet Jerry focussed on the anxiety this trip was stirring up. They listed the many preparations needed for the expedition: the camping equipment, thermal clothing, cooking utensils and hiking gear. Jerry complained that their girlfriend was ‘unrealistic’, wanting to look at photographs and read histories of the places they’d visit, rather than focussing on the ‘practical’ things. I felt sad hearing this stern-sounding reaction from Jerry, and I reflected, ‘I’m aware that I felt excited for you, hearing about your trip, but I sense something getting in the way of you feeling this. How is it for you to be exploring your own path?’ Jerry looked at me with a pained expression. ‘Awful!’ Then, after an extended sigh – ‘not awful terrible, …awful…like, how the hell do I do this? Where do I even start? It’s so…overwhelming!’ I persevered, ‘it’s quite a metaphor, this journey you’re preparing for—’ Jerry was well-prepared for this insight too – ‘it’s almost too perfect, isn’t it? I know, I was thinking about what we spoke about. I never really had a chance to get to know myself at all. This is my chance – not just this trip, but the whole journey. The whole head-trip of coming out, of being ‘trans’. Of walking away from the old ‘me’, towards...who knows!’

Chris Robertson says the act of walking in nature ‘… opens a portal for our attention to switch out of the narrow focus of ego consciousness’ (Robertson, C, 2018:97). I felt we had entered into a ‘transitional space’ (Winnicot, 1971), a place of liminality, betwixt and between (Turner, 1967), and thus a place of uncertainty and possibility; in touch with ‘…border territories [which] require the therapist to be able to dwell in this twilight zone where their rational mind has no passport’ (Robertson, C. & Robertson, E., 2018:18). Feeling we were in contact with a mutual process, I shared a further observation: ‘I’m noticing the word you chose – “awful”, and how I thought you were going to say “awesome”—’

‘I had the same thought!’ Jerry responded without hesitation. We stopped for a moment, looking at each other, then broke into laughter simultaneously. There was a shared sense of wonder in the field; in that moment, no more words were needed.

Romanyshyn has described psychological language as a way of ‘speaking of meaning as a presence that is haunted by absence’ (Romanyshyn, 2013:29). In the failures of language to directly capture meaning there can be space for soul to emerge in the gaps. Thus, unexpected images can materialise just on the edges of our awareness opening us to the transpersonal by means of the synergetic field. Thus, ‘awful’ and ‘awesome’ can coincide to spark a mutual reverence, a stunned respect, a sense of trepidation and anticipation at the powerful energy revealed in transition…

awful: ‘worthy of respect or fear, striking with awe; causing dread’

awesome: ‘profoundly reverential…inspiring awe’

(Online Etymology Dictionary, 2021)

Conclusion

Perhaps this feeling of being awe-struck is especially appropriate to the exploration of unfamiliar terrain, not just in the realm of identity, but in the transpersonal realm beyond boundaries we’ve forgotten we invented. The reductive categorisation of identity that Judith Butler has termed ‘normative violence’ (Butler, 1990:xv) is symptomatic of the illusion of individualism in dominant discourse, which erases subjectivity and difference (Butler, 2020). To appreciate and address the intersecting differences (Crenshaw, 1989) that commingle in relationship, we must engage with the demographic and structural constructs that perpetuate oppression epistemically and institutionally (Butler, 2020; Cheshire, 2013). In the context of the health inequalities exposed through the current Covid-19 pandemic (PHE, 2020), a rise in divisive attitudes towards immigration and race catalysed by Brexit and the recent US presidential election, the global Black Lives Matter movement, and an increase in diagnosed mental illness internationally (WHO, 2021), it is starkly apparent that a paradigm shift is needed. The renegotiation of boundaries in our intellectual and social practices reflects a deepening understanding across disciplines, not just of the nature of identity, but of the nature of all matter, which, according to physicist Karen Barad ‘is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other."’(Barad, 2007: 393) Barad argues ‘[t]he queerness of phenomena unsettles the presumed separateness of questions of being-knowing-responding’ (Barad, 2012:81). This physics of entanglement (Barad, 2007; László, 2004) marks an epistemic renegotiation of the everyday divisions that we ostensibly ‘fix’ with language, radically expanding how we may conceptualise our relationships, and cultivate our ‘response-ability’ in a human and non/more-than human world (Harraway, 2016; Barad, 2007); bringing us into contact with a ‘field’ that resists conceptualisation, but in which we are all nonetheless held, and to which we can learn to attune.

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