Therapy Today: Questionnaire John Daniels asks Michael Soth

Therapy Today: Questionnaire John Daniels asks Michael Soth Soth, M. (2010) Therapy Today. BACP Journal The BACP Journal 'Therapy Today' has a regular column where established practitioners get interviewed and are asked both personal and professional questions. This is the longer, online version of an interview/questionnaire published in December 2010. "Michael Soth is passionate about the possibility of a new integral and relational practice which draws on all therapeutic approaches, and brings a new conception of the mind-body relationship." What made you decide to become a psychotherapist? There is a well-known quote which I like that is relevant to this question. It is from Dr Ian Suttie, an early object relations psychoanalyst. He said: There is only one kind of person attracted to this work [he meant psychoanalysis, but it s true for all therapy], and that is somebody in pain. Once they have been attracted to it and trained in it, there are two kinds: those that deal with it and those that don t. Although I don t agree with the rather too categorical formulation in the second part, Dr Suttie s statement succeeds in making an important point. The first part is certainly true for me my attraction to psychology and to devouring books on therapy in my late teens was all driven by my own pain, in equal measure seeking to explore it as to deny and overcome it. I started training as a therapist in the early 1980s, and it was not at all a conscious and deliberate decision, more a progressive sliding into it. In those humanistic heydays we were primarily into it for our own personal development rather than a career. Having now been involved with training psychotherapists over the last 20 years, I have come to appreciate just how many students are unconsciously driven by the idea of trying to fix themselves and their families. With hindsight, I began to realise how true that had been for my own decision to become a therapist. Later through the image of the wounded healer and the distinction between power-over and power-with and power-within - I began to consider that my pain was also a gift, and that it had precious vulnerabilities and sensitivities within it. I then understood how my family, as well as inflicting pain on me, had also needed me to carry the pain that I had been constructed both as the receptacle as well as the potential transformer of that pain. My family had needed me to function as a therapist all along and moulded me as such. Amongst trainers, we later used to quip that for most of our students we were only providing their second therapy training, the first and most influential one having been provided decades earlier by their families of origin. Typically, our students had been used and needed as listening ears, precocious confidantes or pawns in a battle between their parents as little family therapists - and had absorbed the emotional undercurrents. For most of us, this was usually more than a child s loyal, loving and malleable psyche could process. Becoming a therapist, therefore, is a double-edged decision: it often involves succumbing to an unsustainable identity bestowed upon us by our families of origin, thus ensuring that our eventual professional identity perpetuates an overwhelmed, helpless and regressed state a perfect recipe for burn-out. This first training as a therapist by our families engenders a habitual position a fixed therapeutic stance which is limiting and detrimental to our clients and ourselves. It is part of the pain that Dr Suttie as in mind as what needs dealing with. However, much of our training simply feeds into and exacerbates such pre-established habitual positions. And much of our therapeutic theories and guidelines are used to rationalise, enforce and maintain these fixed positions. Here, a Reichian understanding of habitual, fixed positions as character the embodied frozen landscape of our biographical wounds and self-protections is helpful in understanding our own dogmatisms as therapists. We thus inherit the wounds of our family ancestors and our parents as well as our therapeutic elders and the forefathers and mothers of our approach and tradition. Many students engage in therapy training instead of doing their own therapy simply because they cannot trust anybody enough to allow them to function as their therapist they resort to learning all about it in the vain hope they can figure it all out for themselves. For other writings, publications, presentations by Michael Soth, see: www.soth.co.uk For CPD courses and events for therapeutic and helping professionals, see: www.counsellingpsychotherapycpd.co.uk

I sometimes wish there was more appreciation of the extent to which therapy, therapy training and all our perfectly valid and helpful therapeutic theories are being used defensively, as implied by Dr Suttie s statement. As regards the second part of his quote: of course he is being polemic by phrasing it as an either-or dichotomy. We are all dealing with the pain as best as we can, in degrees, and of course it is an ongoing journey, inspired by the image of the wounded healer. As to what that pain actually is that needs dealing with, as the process continues, we keep discovering deeper layers and contexts, even beyond our personal and early developmental ones. So dealing with it becomes not so much a question of how long is a piece of string but similar to Mandelbrot s question: how long is the coastline of Britain (for details google Mandelbrot coastline Britain )? What gives your life purpose? I do not think of anything particularly giving my life purpose, it s more an implicit experience of it inherently having a purpose which seems to be unfolding, without me doing or knowing that much about it. John Lennon used to say: Life is what happens to you while you re busy making other plans. Well, the less frantic the plans I am making, the more purpose is tangible. What is your earliest memory? My earliest conscious, explicit visual memory is lying in my cot, seeing the wooden bars and plastic toys tied to them, as well as the material surrounding it and the sky above. In the 1980s I was involved in rebirthing, and I was one of the people for whom that breathing process really worked, helping me release of a lot of stored-up pain and tension and engendering a flood of memories as well as dreams. I suppose these were later extrapolated into a narrative, but that s where memories get very complicated, and as Freud pointed out early on mixed up with imagination and mental elaborations and condensations. What are you passionate about? I feel passionate about the development of our profession forward into this new century (which is now already 10 years old!). I believe that counselling and therapy are in a better position to develop a genuinely helpful psychological practice than the associated disciplines of psychiatry and psychology. However, we are also falling a long way short of our potential as a discipline. I think our profession is still hampered by the birth trauma of its origins in the late 19th century, manifesting as confusions, denials, fragmentations and a pervasive disembodiment. The dualisms which were taken for granted by Freud within the zeitgeist of Europe at that time a period of positivism and the glory of the Empire are now severely out-dated, but they continue to haunt our profession. This severely limits and restricts our work and its scope and impact. I feel passionate about the possibility of a paradigm shift into what I would now call an integral and relational practice, drawing in integrative fashion on all the therapeutic approaches, and bringing to all of them a neglected bodymind perspective, a new conception of the mind-body relationship, as suggested by modern neuroscience (eg Damasio). That would be taking therapy into the 21st century in a similar way to how our sibling disciplines neuroscience and genetics have risen like a phoenix from the ashes of those antiquated dualisms (e.g. mind-over-body), drawing on complexity and fractal theory. I think such integral-relational practice hinges on the recognition of a fundamental paradox inherent in what sometimes is called our impossible profession: I think implicitly our profession has always struggled ambivalently with and against this paradox. From the client s perspective, some aspects of this paradox were recognised decades ago in Gestalt ( The Paradoxical Theory of Change, Arnold Beisser): Change happens when we accept what he is. The more we see the therapeutic relationship as a whole relational and intersubjective system, the more we need to include our therapeutic role in the inherent conflicts and paradoxes (e.g. is therapy treatment or relationship? ). For the last 15 years my focus and my growing edge has been around the notion of enactment, and the paradox inherent in the countertherapeutic aspects of enactment. A condensed formulation might be: the transformation of the client s negative patterns is inseparable from the enactment of these patterns in and through therapy, by and in relation with the therapist. How can a reenactment of the client s wounds in and through the therapy and the therapist be anything but counter-therapeutic? The recognition of this paradox enhances our awareness as therapists of the degree of conflict, tension, uncertainty and profound ambiguity and ambivalence necessarily inherent in the therapeutic position. The more we allow ourselves to become fully engaged in both conscious and unconscious processes in the therapeutic relationship, with our whole bodymind, the more we feel drawn into the client s conflicts and helplessly drawn into enactment of them. To my mind, such full engagement is necessary for intersubjective transformation. 2010 - Michael Soth: Questionnaire Page 2

I feel passionate about the potential of these recognitions to enhance and transform our discipline. Over the last 20 years most of my training work was within the context of the Chiron Centre and its community of practitioners. With the Centre closing this summer, I am organising all the various CPD events I am invited to and involved with in one place, and I will try and do that over the next few months at www.counsellingpsychotherapycpd.co.uk/ I feel passionate about evolution, about making ourselves available, opening our hearts to spontaneous experience, about the dance between fragmentation and wholeness and the creativity that comes out of nothing. Do you always tell the truth? That is a difficult question to answer when one of your fundamental truths is a profound adherence to a postmodern multiplicity of truths as they say: there is no truth, only perspective. It seems very true in my life that what was a truth at one point in my journey, seemed like poison at a later stage of consciousness. As far as I m concerned, truths are relative and fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your perspective) they do not remain static, but develop. Also, the more we delve into the complexity of our inner worlds, even at any one point in time there are simultaneous contradictory truths, but I usually tell one of them. How do you relax? I find that gardening is a profoundly transferencefree activity, which clears the mind, gets me in touch with nature, produces healthy organic food and gives me deep joy and relaxation. Being with other people in their process as they move through conflict, stuckness and transformation I find profoundly relaxing. I also love being in groups, and the sense of community that can be found and generated within them gives me a kind of satisfaction that relaxes my soul. Last but not least my wife, making love, humour and poetry as well as meditation. What keeps you awake at night? Writing articles, papers and interviews What makes you angry? Lots of things for no good reason. Plus some others for good reasons: racism, wasted potential, hypocrisy, plus my own pettiness and selfabsorption. Which person has been the greatest influence on you professionally? It s impossible to restrict it to one person. My various therapists over the last 30 years, my exwife, Wilhelm Reich without whom Body Psychotherapy would not exist, for some time in the early 1980s Ken Wilber, for some time in the late 1980s James Hillman (until I met him in the flesh rather than via his exquisite books), RD Laing, Donald Winnicott, Stephen Mitchell, Arnie Mindell I have no idea how to quantify these influences. I have written about the varied theoretical influences on my development as a therapist in my chapter in the book edited by Linda Hartley (2008) Contemporary Body Psychotherapy: The Chiron Approach. How do keep yourself grounded? Digging my allotment, meditating, eating homegrown organic food, keeping chickens, and doing Tai Chi. What are you reading for pleasure right now? Kim Stanley Robinson s The Years of Rice and Salt, according to Wikipedia a work of alternative history that concerns a world in which the Black Plague wiped out 99 per cent of the European population (instead of the actual generally estimated 30 percent), leaving the world free for Asian expansion. It covers 10 generations of history, focusing on the successive reincarnations of the same few characters as they pass through varying genders, social classes, and, in one notable example, species. I also recently read, with great pleasure, Theory U by C. Otto Scharmer, a German interdisciplinary leadership and organisational consultant who is developing a model of integral social change that resonates with an understanding of psychological depth. One of the privileges of being a therapist is that I enjoy my work, and that there is not much difference between work and pleasure that manifests especially in my reading. Do you fear dying? One thing I have come to understand over the years especially from some of my clients who want to escape their pain in living and who speak of suicide is how much we all project into death. Our fears and hopes of death are drawn from deep, unconscious layers of the psyche, and often from very early pre-reflexive and infantile states of mind. Therefore, primitive fears and fantasies as well as omnipotent wishes are easily projected into death and the process of dying. The more I learn to surrender in everyday living, and experience minideaths in the process, the less I am afraid. However, there are a few things I d like to do before I m ready. 2010 - Michael Soth: Questionnaire Page 3

I do not see any reason why things should be that different before and after death, putting me in mind of this poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez: I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see; whom at times I manage to visit and at other times forget. The one who remains silent when I talk, the one who forgives, sweet, when I hate, the one who takes a walk when I am indoors, the one who will remain standing when I die. What would you have written on your tombstone? There s no way out, only a way in and he found it (in spite of himself). What do you feel guilty about? Using planes they really wreck my otherwise rather enviable carbon footprint. However, with my wife s family living in the Middle East and her getting seriously depressed by the English weather, I have some good reasons to indulge my own profound enjoyment of sunny weather, clear seas, minimal clothing and a simple outdoor lifestyle. What makes you laugh? One important reason to leave Germany and prefer Britain (apart from escaping the lingering depthpsychological after-effects of fascism and the holocaust) is the English sense of humour. Where would we be without Monty Python? The longer you practice as a therapist, the more you appreciate that the absurdity of neurosis is a very funny business. You can t begin to imagine how difficult it is for a German to lose his idealism and seriousness, and start to appreciate irony, paradox and general silliness. For me, fun and humour and truth be told: at times even sarcasm are crucial ingredients in therapy. Ask my clients and the groups I work with: as far as I am concerned, therapy is not mainly certainly not only a serious, painful business. Where will your next holiday be to and why? See what I feel guilty about: Crete. If you could change anything about society what would it be? I believe that any future for our planet and humanity will need to involve an unprecedented degree of creativity, synergistic co-operation and emotional competence. Socially, locally, nationally and globally, we are facing huge challenges in terms of climate change, alienation, psychosomatic dis-ease and global justice. At some point, in order to develop what used to be called basis democracy (i.e. a big society that is indeed inclusive and involving from the bottom up), we will need group processes informed by psychological depth. If we don t want society to be run by what Bion calls basic assumption groups the most paranoid, blaming, scapegoating common denominators of collective psychology we will need emotionally competent group facilitators. There will not be useful social evolution unless we can bring to bear on the body politic our experience gathered in the relative safety of our consulting rooms. I am inspired by the work of Arnie Mindell in this area (see: Sitting in the Fire - Large Group Transformation Using Conflict and Diversity ), working towards Deep Democracy. So the thing I would want to change is how groups, meetings and organisations are run and facilitated. In all meetings I would want to distinguish the tasks and content on the one hand from the intrapsychic and interpersonal processes on the other, and bring depth-psychological facilitative skills to both content and process. I d want to instigate a cultural revolution as far as people gathering in groups is concerned, and want young people to learn facilitative skills throughout their education, as part of becoming responsible citizens. For my 50th birthday last year I organised a community event in Oxford called Thriving Sustainably (see www.thrivingsustainably.org.uk), bringing together a variety of activists and writers from the ecological, sustainability and transition movements with eco-psychologists, facilitators and therapists. There was such enthusiasm and inspiration arising from the cross-fertilisation between psychology and social and community development. What is your idea of perfect happiness? Generally speaking, I have more faith in wholeness than in perfection, invest more energy in imagination than in ideas, and am very reluctant to split happiness from pain, or creation from destruction. I am inherently suspicious of those imagining life as a mountain to climb, or as a straight race, and feel uncomfortable with an emphasis on anything linear. Linear development is a mental abstraction, and the idea of perfect happiness is just that: an idea. I m with Chao-Chou on this one: The Way is not difficult. Only there must be no wanting or not wanting. You cannot have light without dark, pleasure without pain: you pursue one, you get the other as part of the package, as these are dualistic mental constructions we impose on reality in the first place. 2010 - Michael Soth: Questionnaire Page 4

Do you believe in God? As Jung famously said: I do not believe I know! Maybe this needs qualifying by Ram Dass: We fight wars over which name to call the Nameless! I like the recent version of Wilber s integral approach to spirituality, based on the recognition that all people at all times are capable of being touched by non-rational and transpersonal states, but that these experiences are inevitably interpreted (and maybe mis-interpreted or reduced) through the person s dominant mode of consciousness. That dominant mode of consciousness is structured by individual history and embodiment as well as social construction and cultural embeddedness. Therefore, everything including God is inevitably approached through a perspective; like the seven blind men approaching the elephant. Even Richard Dawkins experiences awe, but vis-àvis what he calls evolution, or we might add cheekily the god of evolution. The question, therefore, as Wilber points out, becomes: what is our perspective, our methodology and language, and importantly: what is our relational stance vis-àvis our experience, including our spiritual experience (whether we use that term or not). Increasingly we realise there is no way around psychology and the psychological construction of experience, whether we talk about business, philosophy, cake recipes, therapy or God. This is what James Hillman has been saying for decades when he talks about fantasy and the poetic basis of mind. Here, an integral psychology that can embrace all the paths to God and all the masks of God (in Joseph Campbell s phrase) including agnostic and atheistic ones may be able to make an important contribution to the war between fundamentalism and humanistic secularism. To me, that seems a pretty crucial issue in global evolution in these early years of the 21st century. What s your most treasured possession? My body, and the bodies of my family, if they can be called possessions? What do you consider your greatest achievement? I feel privileged to have been part of the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy and its development. Unlike many other Centres, we did manage to hold it together for many years until its recent dignified closure (and the continuing work of the Chiron Association CABP, see www.bodypsychotherapy.org.uk), maintaining a constant creative momentum towards deepening and further integration whilst providing a stable and containing environment for our students. In this context, I was fortunate to be allowed free reign in the teaching, giving me a chance to follow my own creative process. This exploration took me into the shadow aspects of my own therapeutic training and tradition, and then beyond that initial approach into a voracious investigation and eventual integration of all the major therapeutic approaches, from NLP to archetypal psychology. I began to see how the therapeutic field in its contradictions, schisms and fragmentation reflects the multi-faceted, contradictory plural psyche of its clients and practitioners. Appreciating the particular gifts and wisdoms as well as foibles and fallacies of each approach eventually enabled me to work towards re-integrating psychoanalytic and Reichian traditions, which had been dissociated and split for more than 70 years. To some extent, this re-integration required a new language and led me to the formulation of some original concepts and ideas which cannot be considered exactly my achievements, as they would have never happened outside the context of the team and organisation I was part of. These ideas work towards the formulation of therapy in terms of the intersubjective phenomenology of the therapeutic relationship as a bodymind system, specifically in terms of the parallel processes structuring that system (something which I refer to by the term fractal self ). These parallel processes manifest via enactments multiple relational dynamics at all kinds of levels from the intrapsychic to the collective which both client and therapist are involved in and bring to their meeting as shifting, multiple identities or self states. The working alliance between client and therapist oscillates between rupture and repair, between getting lost in unconscious enactments on the one hand and forging a deepening relationship on the other. This nudges both of them along their trajectories in what Jung called individuation process. Enactments, therefore, are both what destroys therapy as well as builds the relationship, and I am investigating especially the pre- and non-verbal right-brain-to-right-brain bodymind aspects of this process. Much of this work is fairly recent (evolving over the last 10 to 15 years or so) and has not been properly published yet, but I m hoping that these achievements will eventually benefit the rest of our profession. Some indications and summaries can be found in various articles and papers, see www.soth.co.uk. 2010 - Michael Soth: Questionnaire Page 5

Michael Soth is an integral-relational body psychotherapist, trainer and supervisor with more than 24 years experience of practising and teaching from an integrative perspective. For his writing and presentations, see www.soth.co.uk; for therapy and referrals: www.oxfordcounsellingpsychotherapy.co.uk; for his CPD and training work: www.counsellingpsychotherapycpd.co.uk. He is also involved in organisational work via the Communitas Project and is currently preparing a training for group leaders and facilitators. 2010 - Michael Soth: Questionnaire Page 6