Two Poems About the World PCE Conference Athens 2024

Note: For me, poetry is a way of speaking truth, sometimes painful truth. In this entry, I offer two poems about my experiences of the World Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling Conference in Athens, September 2024. I thank Gillian Proctor for the diffraction image used in the second poem.  I hope that readers will find something in them that resonates.

 

1  The Honouring of Ornery Elders

 

As the conference opens, I hear:

-- We honour the elders, past and present

 

But I want to protest:

-- I didn’t ask for this.

I want to go back to being

A bright younger,

Full of anxiety and promise.

 

It seems only a second ago, I complain,

-- How did I get here?

 

And answer myself:

-- Like everyone else, I guess:

One year at a time.

 

But time’s forest fire

Has burned through this community

Of the children and grandchildren of Carl Rogers,

And the remaining tall trees

Are rarer every year:

The elders are passing.

 

Those of us who are left

Are more brittle and cranky

Each time we meet.

 

We ask ourselves:

-- Is this the last time?

A final time to be heard?

 

And we reply to ourselves:

-- If few listened before,

Why should they listen now?

 

People look at me, talk about me,

As someone whose kind is in short supply,

Some kind of ghost

Of a lost, brilliant, golden age.

 

And I, newly retired, am aware

Of my own new fragility:

The osteoporosis, the fading vision,

The stiffness to stand;

I take the amphitheatre’s descending steps

Slowly, carefully.

 

Though I hate it, I inhabit the part,

The role into which

I find myself cast, unwilling.

 

 

2  The Sharp Edges of Our Differences

 

The light that shines

Through these approaches

To the healing of souls

Is split into a spectrum of colours:

Person-centred, emotion-focused, focusing-oriented, and more.

 

These make space for many ways of being

With ourselves and our clients.

Like a deep gene pool,

Filled with many waters,

To equip us to meet

The many challenging moments

That lie in front of us.

 

And yet this rich variety

Can be difficult and challenging,

Leading us to wish

For simplicity and an easier life.

 

Holding these tensions can make us tense,

Can hurt and be hurtful to each other.

 

And so, in deep conversations

With my therapeutic siblings

I hear with sadness how some

Feel diminished and pained

By my beloved ways of working,

By focusing and chair work.

 

Perhaps at times I proclaim these things,

Too loudly or too proudly,

So my fellows hear me as belittling them,

Leaving them behind, judging them,

Threatening their beloved ways of working,

 

They tell me that this

Makes them doubt themselves,

Imagining themselves from my point of view,

Imagining me as a critical audience

To their ways of working.

 

I can well understand

How this erodes

The firm ground they need

To be present to their clients:

My active, intense ways of working,

Such a function of who I am,

Are sharp edges for them…

And these sharp edges hurt.

 

Of course, it’s in our nature

To turn hurt to fear,

And thence to anger, contempt, and judgement:

More sharp edges, like broken glass,

That can hurt me and make me feel unwelcome.

 

Because of this, I have

Often tried to make myself smaller;

Hoping I’d be less threatening

If I put away my EFT hat,

And spoke instead of research:

 

Research is a thing I love

For its methods and craft,

Its findings, by turns

Enriching and perplexing.

As I tell myself yet again,

“The facts are friendly”,

I hope that this is true.

 

But for all my love of careful study

I am also an EFT therapist,

Who sometimes doubts his welcome here,

And who sometimes, without meaning to,

Makes others feel unwelcome too.

 

I don’t think this is what any of us want:

To dismiss or to be dismissed;

To hide ourselves, or to make others hide.

 

We know well what it feels like

To be sent way or overlooked

In the wider world of psychotherapy,

When all the while

We could be keeping

Each other company

And shining with all the colours of rainbow.

 

                        -Athens/Pleasanton, September 2024

No Literal Labyrinth at Knossos

 

Over the course of almost 60 years, I’ve written quite a few poems about labyrinths, first about the mythical Knossos labyrinth in ancient Crete, and later about the real labyrinth my parents built in in the late 1980’s on their property outside Santa Andreas, California. They built the Murray Creek Labyrinth after their visit to Glastonbury Tor, in Somerset, England, inspired by the set of ancient terraces on Glastonbury Tor, which form the pattern of a seven-circuit caerdroia, or turf labyrinth, of a type found in sites all over the world, from paleolithic times on. One of these earlier labyrinth poems can be found at: http://www.murraycreek.net/par50poe.htm

 

I wrote this labyrinth poem after finally visiting the ruins of the real city-palace of Knossos, just south of Heraklion, Crete. There is nothing like actually visiting a place to overturn one’s fantasies about that place.  In it I invert many of the themes of the earlier poems, while exploring the labyrinth as a living archetype of the process of emotional-psychological-spiritual transformation.

 

 

There is no literal labyrinth

at Knossos Palace:

The sun beats down on broken walls;

Arthur Evans’ phantasy reconstructed frescos

Lurk in the shadows of ancient rooms,

While the real stuff sits

In the big museum by the harbor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the house of the double axe, the labrys,

Is real enough, a sprawling ruin

Of tangled rooms and workshops:

Plenty of maze to get lost in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today, not Mycenaeans

But we barbarian hordes of tourists

Trace the repaired paths,

While the ancient ghosts

Of our imaginings

Process to the central courtyard:

 

Dolphins play in the Queen's chamber

Courtiers strut, each bearing

A single twist of long black curl

In front of their ears;

And bull dancers fly over sharp horns

Like Olympic gymnasts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, deep in the labyrinthine

Caves hidden in the Cretan countryside,

It’s obvious to me

That the snake goddess,

Jacket pushing up

Her bulging, bare breasts,

Is not just a fertility symbol,

But is also sacred to us psychologists:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her upraised arms

And snakes held high

Form the Greek letter psi (Ψ),

Referring to the human mind,

the greatest, most tangled labyrinth of all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No literal labyrinth, then,

But plenty of metaphorical labyrinths:

The many-layered city on a hill,

Many times built, wrecked, and rebuilt;

Four dimensional maze

Of interconnected rooms,

Dancing back and forth through time

On Ariadne’s dance floor.

 

And the seven-circuit Cretan labyrinth

Mirrors our human brains, cortical folds

Of labyrinthine brain tissue,

Defying anyone to find their way through

The miraculous tangle of neuron,

axon, synapse, astrocyte.

 

 

 

Then, too, the labyrinths of our psyches,

As we trace our paths from birth to death,

Full of double-mindedness that cuts both ways.

We are torn on the horns

Of our wavering ambivalence

About the important things in our lives.

 

Here in this labyrinth of our spirits,

There are layers of emotions to be traced,

Patiently and empathically

Following the golden thread,

Dancing the dialectic of head and heart.

 

It is a journey to the centers of our hearts,

Our deepest truths,

Our most essential selves,

Our core pain and its heartfelt needs.

 

And there it sits: sad, lonely minotaur,

Pasiphaë’s abandoned child,

Torn between its two natures,

But waiting for understanding,

Compassion, and love.

 

So: this ancient place

Still lives in us:

We are the labyrinth at Knossos;

We are the sharp-horned sacred bull,

And the dancers somersaulting over its horns.

We are the double-spirited minotaur

Whom we no longer need to fear.

 

We are the open-breasted snake goddess

Arms held high;

We are abandoned Ariadne,

Finally rid of her false lover,

Colonizing Theseus;

We are heart-broken and heart-healed,

Dancing the sevenfold path to freedom.

 

                        -Crete/Athens/Pleasanton, September 2024

 

From 1969: Two Prayer-Poems for a Catholic Mass

(From the archive: Written with the encouragement of Lynn Valek for a Catholic Mass, Crown College, UC Santa Cruz, December 1969)

 

1  (Prayer, of an Ultimate Nature)

 Lord, make open our eyes:

The sea is your blood,

The mountains your bones,

The air that we breathe

            your breath.

The earth is your flesh,

The fruits of the earth,

Which we eat – yours also.

Lord, make us to see:

All flesh is your flesh.

 

 

2  (Prayer, for the time being; a haiku)

 

Treeless, we are leaves,

            Fighting as we

            fall. Do not

Blow us away, Lord.

The Process of Becoming an EFT Therapist in Action: Brief Book Launch Talk

Summary: I wrote this brief talk for the launch event for the Greek translation of my book, Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action, co-authored with Les Greenberg and published by Sage in 2021. It was translated by Agathi Lakioti and Christina Michael and published this month in Athens by Topos Publications.  In this presentation I first describe how I became an EFT therapist before there was any such thing as EFT, including its appeal to me and my personal journey in the development of EFT while developing as a therapist at the same time. Then, I briefly turn to my recent interest in how people learn EFT and what I have learned about how we can do a better job helping people learn it. Throughout, I hope share my excitement about EFT and its importance as an key psychotherapy in the 21 century. For more information, go to: https://www.eft.cy/greek-translation-of-the-emotion-focused-counselling-in-action/

 

Ultimately, I became an EFT therapist because of my deep curiosity about other people’s experience, a curiosity stimulated by my father’s emotional guardedness, my loneliness and insecure attachment style, and my youthful desire to write fiction.  In addition, my Mother and Grandmother were avid followers of Jungian psychology, and so psychology was a key interest in my family’s home when I was growing up.  When I was 17, at the suggestion of my creative writing teacher, I read Karen Horney’s Our Inner Conflicts (1945) and had what can only be described as a conversion experience: I decided I wanted to be a psychotherapist, so I could understand and help people.

 

However, my road to EFT had many sources, as well as several twists and turns.  As an undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the late 1960’s I was exposed to a wide range of humanistic approaches to psychology, studying with Bert Kaplan, Frank Barron, and most importantly, Ted Sarbin.  I read Norman O. Brown (who was also at Santa Cruz), Søren Kierkegaard, William James, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Campbell, and Jerome Frank.  I wrote a senior thesis on metaphors for death and rebirth in radical personal change processes.

 

My interest in humanistic-experiential approaches to psychotherapy was further fed during my graduate studies at UCLA, where I received training in Client-Centered therapy from Jerry Goodman, a student of Carl Rogers.  Goodman also encouraged my interest in therapy process research, and I began a career-long exploration of clients’ experiences during therapy sessions.  At the same time, during my graduate training I was also studied and practiced systemic and contemporary psychodynamic approaches.

 

Then, in 1977, I heard Laura Rice and Les Greenberg present their work on Evocative Unfolding and Two Chair work at a conference at a conference.  It was an electrifying experience.  I immediately began incorporating experiential tasks into my work as a therapist, later adding Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing method, along with Empty Chair work.  Thus, by the time I completed my Ph.D., I was an eclectic therapist who conceptualized clients in psychodynamic terms and preferred a combination of psychodynamic interpretation and experiential tasks.  During my early years at the University of Toledo, in the US state of Ohio, I also continued studying client in-session experiences and began developing qualitative research methods to represent these more sensitively.

 

In 1985, while on a sabbatical year in England, I was giving a conference workshop on qualitative therapy research when a psychodynamically-oriented audience member confronted me with a contradiction:  He noted that in therapy I interpreted my clients, but in my research I attempted to stay as close as possible to the client’s reported experience.  Why didn’t I interpret my client’s data psychodynamically?  The very thought scandalized me, and this intervention had the opposite effect to that intended by the questioner:  I realized that understanding the client’s internal experiences was a more fundamental value for me than the thrill of coming up with clever interpretations for my clients.  I felt that I would be effective as a therapist (and researcher) if I were more deeply and consistently grounded in a particular therapeutic tradition and theoretical approach that centered itself in the client’s immediate, lived experience.

 

Upon on my return from England in 1985, I began working with Laura Rice and Les Greenberg to develop the marker-guided integration of Client-Centered and Gestalt treatments that eventually became Emotion-Focused Therapy.  First, however, Laura Rice helped me cure myself of my habit of interpreting my clients: She pointed out that no matter how clever my interpretations were, the insights developed by my clients were never quite what I had hypothesized; instead, my clients’ eventual self-understandings always made more sense and fit their idiosyncratic experiences better than what I had originally offered.  Why not get out of my clients’ way and let them go ahead and develop their own self-understandings?

 

My previous work with the Unfolding and Two Chair work tasks had been self-taught; I now began a series of regular visits to Toronto to receive proper supervision and training on these kinds of work, as well as to develop the EFT model with Laura and Les.  As we developed it, I took it back to Toledo to apply in the Toledo Experiential Therapy of Depression Project, the first study of EFT with a clinically-distressed client population. Although I still had much to learn, for the first time in my practice as a therapist, I felt grounded and like myself. EFT’s mix of empathy, active work, and creative practice, fit me perfectly.  Les, Laura and I decided to write a book about the therapy model that was emerging, published in 1993 as Facilitating Emotional Change.  At first, I felt very much like a junior partner, sometimes mediating between Laura’s more conservative Client-Centered approach and Les’s more radical Gestalt approach.  They had the theory and the experience, but I was doing the depression study, had spent a long time doing research on client’s in-session experiences, and was good at organizing and clarifying ideas.  Thus, as we progressed, I began to make contributions to the structure of the therapy, developing the treatment principles, formulating the array of therapist responses, bringing in Focusing as a therapeutic task, and applying a standard six-step structure for all EFT tasks. The book was completed during a sabbatical year at York University in 1992-93, during which I worked intensively with Laura and Les, and went through their therapist training process. 

 

After that, I continued regular visits to Toronto to learn and share new developments.  Every time I went, I learned something new.  Having finished the depression study, my students and I developed and did research on a EFT for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Problems that my therapists had learning EFT for that study led me to examine the training process to see what worked and how it could be improved.  These learnings were incorporated into my book Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy.

 

In 2006, I moved to the Scotland, where I taught person-centered counselling/psychotherapy for more than 15 years. Working in this setting helped me deepen my interest in empathy and relational processes. With colleagues, I developed an adaptation of EFT for working with social anxiety, a complex client presentation that helped me further develop my EFT skills and thinking.

 

Up to this point, almost all my work as a trainer had been in the context of training small numbers of graduate students in clinical psychology. However, once relocated in Scotland, I discovered that there was a great deal of interest in EFT on the part of practicing person-centered counsellor/psychotherapists. At that point I began offering regular EFT training workshops, building in part of the training curricula that Les Greenberg had been developing. In addition, the strongly intellectual, didactic training methods favored by clinical psychologists were not a good fit for UK-based counsellors and counselling psychologists, who learned better using more experiential methods. Theory and didactic presentation were still important but needed to be slimmed down, focused and very clear. Fortunately, I enjoy a good challenge, and I had fun developing and constantly adapting training materials, including lectures and exercises.

 

One thing that has clearly emerged from my work as an EFT trainer is a sense of what is required of folks in order to learn EFT.  In the book I call this the “pre-flight checklist”; here is a very abbreviated, bullet-point version of it:

(1) Understand and draw on EFC emotion theory.

(2) Adopt a person-centred but process-guiding relational stance.

(3) Develop an active, exploratory way of responding to clients, characterized by friendly curiosity.

(4) Learn to pick up on client markers in order to offer clients opportunities for productive therapeutic work.

(5) Realise that the therapy is not about you; instead, focus on your clients’ personal agency.

(6) Build up your personal resilience and courage for touching into and staying with your own and others’ intense and painful emotions.

 

Today, I continue to learn from my clients (who have always been my main teachers of therapy), and from my students and supervisees.  The things I enjoy most about EFT are the opportunities it provides for getting inside another human being’s experience; the combination of relational and task-focused elements; and the excitement of helping to develop something new.  The difficulties I still occasionally run into as a EFT therapist are feeling that it’s up to me to make something happen; getting caught up in clients’ hopelessness; dealing with clients who have great difficulty accessing their internal experience; and my tendency to at first make things too complicated. These things constantly drive me to try to make EFT clearer and easier to understand while still honoring the complexity and richness of people’s experiences. I also believe that learning and practicing EFT is and should be exciting and fun.

 

I have tried to put all the things into this book, and to communicate them to readers.  I hope that you will experience this excitement and fun in reading it.