Ken Davis (22 July 1950 – 27 January 2024): Colleague, Fellow Trainer, Contributor to the Development of EFT

 

I learned a couple of days ago that Ken Davis, my friend, EFT colleague, and fellow trainer, has died. Here, in his honor and memory, I’m going to share some of my personal reflections on who Ken was and how I think he was important to me and to the development of Emotion-Focused Therapy.

Ken was instrumental in the development of Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy research and training at the University of Toledo in the late 1980’s and through much of the 1990’s, and even into the early 2000’s.  He had quite a bit of prior training in humanistic-experiential psychotherapies and co-led PE/EFT trainings with me.  He was a natural group facilitator and often had to remind me to slow down and pay more attention to the relational processes in the group.  Ken was a key member of the team at Toledo that developed an EFT approach to crime-related PTSD in the early to mid 1990’s, and he went on to help me run the Friday afternoon EFT training workshops that ran for years in the sometimes-challenging environment of the Psychology Department. 

 

Based on these experiences and his interest in psychotherapy training, Ken was originally part of the writing team (with Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, Les Greenberg and me) for the first edition of Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy (APA, 2003).  Unfortunately, his personal circumstances made it impossible for him to take part. (This was primarily due to the untimely death from breast cancer of his wife Deb and the subsequent demands of private practice and being the single parent of their young son.) However, his interest in training group process and on how students learn EFT is part of the DNA of the Learning EFT book and in EFT today. (See in particular the last chapter of the Learning book, where we discuss our understanding of what EFT training should look like.)

 

Ken was both a colleague and a friend.  On the occasion of his 1992 wedding to Deb Smith (who was the great love of his life), I wrote the following little poem:

Flocking of flamingos

emergent property

as each one follows desire of heart

to take wing together.

 

For his PhD dissertation, Ken took on the challenging task of developing a measure of therapist response modes in EFT, analyzing a collection of significant therapy events identified by clients in the Toledo Experiential Therapy of Depression project. Probably his most interesting finding had to do with content directive responses, like advice-giving and interpretation.  He found that on average EFT therapists used these responses about 1% of the time, that is, about one per session; nevertheless, these therapists were clearly doing EFT.  However, one of the therapists in the study used these responses about 5% of the time, and it was quite clear that they were not really doing EFT at all.  Ken colorfully described this therapist as “a CBT wolf in process-experiential sheep’s clothing.” I still tell this story today when I cover the EFT therapist response modes in trainings.

 

Over the past two years I’ve numerous occasions to look things up in Ken’s dissertation as part of various recent projects.  If you are interested in learning more, here is the citation and a link that I hope will take you to more information about it:

Davis, Kenneth L. (1994). The role of therapist actions in process-experiential therapy. University of Toledo, Department of Psychology. 

https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/role-therapist-actions-process-experiential/docview/304145150/se-2?accountid=14116

 

In all my many moves over the past 18 years, I have lost track of the data set Ken used for this study, so about a year ago I reached out to him to see if he still had the transcripts and recordings from his project.  I thought this might be a nice excuse to reconnect with him.  He eventually said that he thought data was around somewhat but he wasn’t sure where and was having trouble getting around to try to locate it.

 

I’m not sure whether my reaching out to him had anything to do with it, but I was delighted when Ken signed up for one of my zoom-based Advanced Empathy Attunement trainings last August through the EFT Institute of Southern California, organized by Lada Safvati.  I don’t think that he really needed the training, but when asked why he signed up, he said it was fun for him to revisit EFT and see what is happening with it today.  He told me that he had a neuromuscular disorder that had really slowed him down, but even so it was lovely to see him.  After that, together with his sister Carla (who is currently studying counselling), he signed up for the Level 2 that Ladan and I ran in December. However, I think he was not well enough to participate, because he had to withdraw after a day or two. The last time I saw him was the first day of that training.

 

I remember Ken as gentle, wise, funny, kind, determined, and as deeply grounded in the body.  He was trained in massage and worked with folks with neuromuscular conditions. I remember how one time when someone said they were having back trouble, he got down on the ground, analyzed their stance, and offered a set of useful suggestions.  I remember another time when he and I had him put his allergies in a chair and have a dialogue with them.  Certainly, working with him gave me more appreciation for the bodily dimension of EFT, so I think that’s another influence he’s had on the development of EFT.

 

I also remember how he supported me while I was having a hard time with some colleagues in the Psychology department, as our relationship evolved from student-professor to colleague-friend.  And I remember how in the early days of managed care he used to complain about poorly trained staff mis-managing psychologists who were working with complicated, fragile clients who needed more than 10 sessions of CBT.

 

Burned into my memory are also images of him and Deb and their son Josh, and then him and Josh at Deb’s memorial service.  So in looking through the remembrances on his Tribute Wall it was especially poignant to see the photo of Ken, wearing his academic regalia, hooding his son Josh at Josh’s graduation with a doctoral degree in Physical Rehabilitation. (I love the legend at the bottom: Hooder: Dr. Father. Kenneth Davis).

 

So I’m left with a set of memories of our time together running EFT trainings when it all felt new and sometimes like we were making things up as we went along.  It was an exciting and challenging time, and I am grateful to have had Ken’s company through much of it. I’m also left with some regret that we weren’t able to do more together, for all the time of being disconnected after Diane and I moved to Scotland in 2006, and for not expressing to him the extent of what he meant to me.

 

In our time together, Ken and I published two book chapters together on the crime-related PTSD study.  I’ve listed both below, with links to versions of them listed after each. The first one is only available in a pre-publication version, while for the second one there is a photocopy of the published version:

 

Elliott, R., Suter, P., Manford, J., Radpour-Markert, L., Siegel-Hinson, R., Layman, C., & Davis, K.  (1996).  A Process-Experiential Approach to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  In R. Hutterer, G. Pawlowsky, P.F. Schmid, & R. Stipsits (eds.), Client-centered and experiential psychotherapy: A paradigm in motion (pp.235-254).  Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Peter Lang. 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/a67k8zf739ac7v1lc4sw2/PTSDEXP_994.docx?rlkey=bez558e2uj626h3o8n6zvs88f&dl=0

 

Elliott, R., Davis, K., & Slatick, E. (1998).  Process-Experiential Therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Difficulties.  In L. Greenberg, G. Lietaer, & J. Watson, Handbook of experiential psychotherapy (pp. 249-271).  New York: Guilford.  https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/r3plx64nw1fil9u6379zr/Elliott-Davis-Slatick-1998-EFT-for-Crime-Related-PTSD.pdf?rlkey=ncw8wnd453m1fndfkfug39f34&dl=0

 

Fare thee well, Ken: my old friend and colleague.  Your kind, compassionate, gentle spirit lives on in EFT today, and exemplifies what is best about it!

Science My Mom Taught Me

Entry for 14 May 2023 

Note: For Mother’s Day this year, I thought it would be appropriate for me to bring back the poem I wrote for my mom for her 75th birthday nearly 20 years ago, April 7 2004. (At that time, she exclaimed, delightedly, “I get a poem… and I don’t even have to be dead!”) Although she passed on eleven years ago, in 2012, and I’ve written plenty of other pieces for/about her in the meantime, this one I think best captures what she has – and continues – to mean to me. 

Further note: I’ve been going through old files lately, and last night I found the “Robert Jr” folder my mom kept about me, full of old poems and letters, along with a few photos. Amongst all this stuff about me, on small pieces of paper, I found a series of hand-written, undated affirmations that she wrote about/to/for me at one time or another. In them she wrote that she loved me, and God loved me, and that I was going to be all right and would do good things in my life. I never saw these handwritten pieces, did not even know they existed until now. Small prayers, tucked into this folder and perhaps forgotten, but still: messages, angels, blessings down the years. 

 

1. Science as Love and Relationship

 

A good place to start is that ancient photograph,

Recently rediscovered, from 1950:

 

There the two of you are, the same age

As the youngest of my grad students. 

Both of you are tall, almost toothpick thin.

He is looking at the camera, tight jeans and shirt,

Like a rebel with cause to smile.

 

But you are looking down, through large glasses,

Your face framed by billowing hair,

With toothy grin, and your arms

Awkwardly but carefully wrapped round

A very small bundle.

 

The two of you look like nothing

So much as a couple of computer nerds

From half a century in the future.

Code geeks, rolling out your first promising program,

Ready for beta-testing.

 

But the code is genetic,

The language is life,

And the program is … me.

 

2. True Science is Risky

 

Although I learned magic from my dad,

It now seems clear to me that it was you

From whom I first learned science,

To which I have now devoted so much of my life.

 

But yours was never the normal, safe kind,

Digging away at the coal face

In the mines of knowledge,

Like Disney’s happy dwarves.

 

No, not that kind, but instead

The one that goes off to Far Tortuga,

Toward distant Galapagos unknown,

In search of the evolution of the human soul.

 

For you, big ideas have never been too big:

The nature of reality; the journey of the soul;

Jung’s famous paper on flying saucers;

The archetype of the Mandala: As without, so within.

 

Instead of Aristotle … Plato’s forms;

Instead of Archimedes … Pythagorus’s numbers;

Instead of Moses’ law … the Kabbalah’s secrets;

Instead of chemistry …alchemy’s transformations.

 

Oh, you did chemistry, too, at least early on:

You would disappear for hours,

Into your laboratory at the back of the house,

Full of strange smells and odd bits:

 

Broken glass, mosaic pieces,

Rolls of wallpaper, bolts of cloth,

Cans of precursors and catalysts,

When plastics was new technology.

 

And you would emerge from your lair,

To confront your family with some new concoction,

Sometimes lovely, or quirky, or primitive;

At times, a disaster, but always something new.

 

No, for you, science has always been risky:

Working at the edge, making something new,

You have become an expert in the peril of experiment,

And I have followed you, where I could.

 

 

3. Science as Inspiration and Passion

 

Your mother (my grandmother) taught me many things:

How to travel and how to be in a new place;

The importance of hard work and getting up early;

The ninety-nine percent of sweat that makes up genius.

 

But you taught me a far more valuable lesson:

The one percent of inspiration that redeems all the rest,

The moment of epiphany, the pattern opening,

The intensity of the new connection breaking through,

 

The science of cutting to the center of the world,

Of seeing what others don’t choose to see,

Of waking to awareness when others sleep,

And the flow of following the spirit far into the night.

 

When I see these things in myself, I recognize you.

The passion of discovery is too powerful to resist,

Even if we wanted to; the daemon must be honored;

It is ours, and we must let it speak through us or die.

 

 

4. Science as Always Starting Anew

 

I find it odd that I describe my dad in a series of narratives,

But you as a set of ideas, a paradigm, a model.

There is, however, one story that is always you,

The story in which you are always re-inventing yourself:

 

Child of the Depression with a single mom;

Big city girl; prep school party-er;

Young, anxious mother and seamstress;

Small town society woman in a flat land.

 

But your life makes a strange turn: You take up philosophy;

You quit smoking just because you feel like it;

You return to religion and start teaching Sunday school;

You become a small business owner and a writer.

 

Years pass: You’re CEO of a large and raucous family,

With the habit of taking in strays (both human and animal);

And you’ve gradually evolved into a spiritual leader

Of a small but loyal group of friends.

 

Then, your life turns again:  Warned in a vision

Of the impending end of civilization, you become

A gentle survivalist and take your family

Into the mountains, like Noah waiting for her flood

 

You seal several tons of wheat into cans,

Which are still there after twenty-five years.

Well, we can’t get everything right, but now you live

In a beautiful little valley: Murray Creek.

 

Now you are matriarch to three generations and 60 acres.

A combination of Ariadne, Daedalus and Theseus,

You become a labyrinth designer and unwinder

Of ritual journey spaces of stones, words and image.

 

Reading widely and deeply, you map the interweaving

Stories of your own and humanity’s spiritual development,

Join a religious order, become a spritual director,

And finally, start a Crone Circle of wise women.

 

Curiously, all these things somehow fit together:

Clearly, you’ve never stopped starting over;

For you, science is leaving behind what no longer works,

A selfsame process of adding on, differentiating, elaborating,

 

Just as you are always the same person,

The passionate, intellectual adventurer, the one

Who keeps transforming herself, like an endless succession

Of butterflies, emerging one from the other.

 

 

Focusing on the 2016 US Election Results

Entry for 10 November 2016

Ann Weiser Cornell's latest piece (https://focusingresources.com/2016/11/09/finding-potential-possibility/), which my friend and former student Catherine Cowie has also picked up and commented on, has moved me to try to put into words my experience of this week's US election:

When it finally became clear early yesterday morning (UK time) that Donald Trump was going to be the next US president, against all apparent reason or sense, it took a while to even begin to process my feelings.  Over the next few hours I was able to mostly distract myself as I attended graduation for the recent cohort of our counselling students, proudly applauding them as they walked across the stage in front of me and later posing for photos (me in my garish American academic cap and gown) with the happy graduates.  I welcomed the distraction because it left a part of me free to continue processing what had happened.  What gradually emerged was in Focusing terms a bodily sense of physical injury, as if I had been punched in the middle of my chest. Then, as I stayed with the feeling and talked about it with supportive colleagues, who were also struggling but still able to give me space, I was able to really feel the anger in the blow that had left me feeling wounded. 

Immediately, I recognised this as the same feeling that 9/11 had left me with, and the whole thing began to open up for me:  I felt the anger in this vote, and then I was able to contact the sense of hurt, despair, and longing to be understood behind that anger.  As a therapist I have often accompanied my clients as they explored past their secondary reactive anger to the primary pain and sadness underneath it, and learned from them that even urge to strike out, to gain revenge, hides a longing for empathy: “I am going to hurt you, even if it injures me in the process, because that’s the only way you will ever understand how bad I hurt.”

So I am in mourning this week, like many of us in the privileged, educated elite, because Donald Trump has won and we have lost.  Nevertheless, as much as it pains me to write this, he has earned it, for better or worse: I could even go so far as to say that he deserved to win, because he was the only one who most understand the sense of hurt, brokenness, anger, and, yes, even longing for true understanding that is the core pain of the new minority of poor, struggling, working class people (especially older white males but not just them).  They recognised in him their own sense of injury and anger, understood and reflected back to them, and, grateful, they rewarded him by electing him President. 

Facing this reality is going to require a lot of us: Saying hello to and accepting the parts of us that are scared of what will happen next; supporting each other in honest, positive ways that move us beyond outrage and simply disparaging those with whom we disagree; accessing our hope, creativity and resilience in facing new challenges; and most of all listening to and offering empathy to our hurt, angry brothers and sisters.

Bill and the Toledo to Santa Cruz Move

Although our main home continues for now to be Scotland, for the past 9 and a half years we have maintained a house in Toledo, Ohio, as our US base.  In the meantime, our children finished university in Cleveland and went on to other parts of the US, leaving our old house as a kind of orphan. 

About a year ago, however, we decided it was time to think about getting rid of the Toledo house and moving our US base to Santa Cruz, California. Since last April, we have made five trips to sort through the possessions that we left behind when we moved to Scotland.  We gave away at least half of our books and all of our music CDs; we decommissioned 6 old computers and confidentially shredded psychotherapy data sets; we persuaded our children to return to the family home to sort through their boxes of old toys and school papers; and so on and so on. 

Two days ago, I arrived in Toledo from Scotland, with 13 hours of accumulated jet lag, having only two days before that flown back from Singapore.  There I joined Diane, who had been here for a week doing final sorts and packing.  We spent a very long day yesterday scouring the house from top to bottom looking for things we’d missed (these were numerous and sometimes surprising) and packing these up.  We finished up about 9:30 pm.

This morning, 12 hours later, Bill Frizzell and his bearded crew showed up to take the 100+ boxes and load them onto their enormous moving van, which he parked like a supertanker on our little street in suburban Toledo. Bill, who is driving our stuff to California along with 4 other loads, turns out to also be a former music minister and an occasional country singer, full of stories and at least one very nice song, which he pointed me to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4CiknL0Sjw . (Also, a song called "Shake Your Head", which he said has been popular in Scotland, even Radio Clyde, backed by his autistic nephew on drums and guitar.) He even stopped to help my neighbor whose tire was almost flat. From a European perspective, this might sound so working-class middle America as to almost be cliche, except that it felt wonderful. Somehow, I feel like our stuff, not particularly valuable but full of memories precious to us, is in good hands. 

Pilgrimage 5: An Emotion-Focused Therapy Interpretation of the Conflict between Israel and Palestine

--> Entry for 18-22 May 2015:

This is a continuation of my previous entry on the history of military occupation in Israel.

During the time we’ve been on pilgrimage in Israel, we’ve learned a lot about its ancient and recent history.  As part of this, I’ve reflected on my many Jewish friends and colleagues, whom I’ve known and loved over the years.  I’ve also read up on the history of the 1967 and 1973 wars here.

And I’ve been mindful of the many parallels between the history of Israel and that of the United States and the British Empire, their relationship to native/indigenous peoples, and my part in that as someone who lives within the privilege of a majority culture. For example, I’m aware of the claim (made in 2008 by the SNP) that in East Glasgow, not far from my office, the average life expectancy for men is lower than it is in Gaza (Channel 4 News, 2008). 

What I’m left with about all this is a sense of mutual tragedy and sadness.  My understanding of the psychological basis for this tragedy has several other sources:

• My work as a psychotherapist for many people with trauma histories, especially over the past 30 years of my practice as an EFT therapist;

• My work with people with social anxiety over the past 8 years;

• The study that my PhD student Robin Hinson and I did in the 1990’s on working with prejudice, which we carried using an experimental one-session EFT protocol for working with “difficult people”;

• Charles Eisenstein’s analysis of the ultimately self-defeating nature of what he calls the agenda of control in Ascent of Humanity (2007); and

• Psychotherapist Al Pesso’s analysis of the roots of terrorism in childhood exposure to narratives of injustice and cultural trauma (which I talked with him about last year in Berlin) (Pesso has developed a form of Empty Chair/Self-Soothing Work for addressing this.)

All of these have given me an acute sense that in some way the Tragedy of Israel and Palestine is something shared and deeply intertwined. 

Here is what is emerging for me: The peoples of Israel and Palestine are locked together in a deep, shared history of mutual trauma and injustice, leaving them feeling broken, violated, distrustful, afraid and angry.   Over millennia, each has suffered repeatedly at the other’s hands; and these events have been lovingly preserved and rehearsed from generation unto generation, without understanding or forgiveness. 

For example, in the case of Israel, there is very much a sense of national trauma going back for thousands of years, but reawakened in the 20^th century, first by the Holocaust and then strongly reinforced by the 1967 and 1973 wars.  Human beings are powerfully evolved to learn rapidly and often rigidly from situations in which their very existence is threatened.  One-trial learning is generally sufficient in this case to lead us to put strong protective measures in place so that such threats will “never again” happen.  In the case of Israel, such learning has happened repeatedly in living memory.

These traumatic events and the associated vulnerability have resulted in victims becoming perpetrators, over and over again (as I noted in my previous entry), thus creating a cycle of abuse, which I am hypothesising may have led to a deep sense of emotional and spiritual impurity, whose source is a vague sense of guilt that has been pushed out of awareness.

Instead, eternal vigilance and readiness to take offense have been the rule.  Each feels threatened at an existential level by the other, and seeks to both make themselves safe and to claim and control what they feel is theirs.  The more they seek to do this, the more they threaten the Other, causing them to become more vigilant and to try to gain more control over the Other.  It is this constant guarding and seeking control that is the heart of the problem, because it continually makes the problem worse by threatening the Other. 

In Emotion-Focused Therapy, with both individual and couples, such negative cycles between partners or between parts of the self are common and feel wholly intractable to those involved (and often to the therapist).  However, according to EFT “the only way out is through”:

• First, we offer a situation in which all parts of the self (or both members of the couple) feel deeply and credibly understood and validated. 

• Second, this enables the person or persons to slow down and become more deeply aware of their core painful, stuck emotions.  In this case, we have among other emotions, lingering anger at old injuries and fear of the Other as dangerous.  These emotions have to be understood and accepted, but by itself this is not enough to change anything. 

• Third, with seemingly intractable problems, it appears to be important to spend time developing an appreciation for the cost that maintaining a stand based on these emotions has had for the person. (I thank Laco Timulak for making this point explicit.) 

• Fourth, for emotional transformation to take place, there must be another step, to identify alternative, more adaptive emotions.  In this case, these include: curiosity about the Other and what they may have to offer; sadness at disconnection and separation; realistic fear at the long term consequences of one’s own intransigence; genuine empathy and compassion for the Other’s suffering; and perhaps even appropriate, motivating guilt for the role that one has played in the bringing about or allowing the Other’s suffering. 

• Fifth, by creating an atmosphere of mutual openness, this emotional transformation makes it possible to begin a process of negotiation and resolution. 

I’m not saying that such a process is easy; it isn’t.  But I’m not sure that I see any alternative other than despair and giving in to a continuing cycle of traumatising interactions, which only perpetuate and deepen the problem.

Wall Art, Wall of Separation, Bethlehem

References

Channel 4 News. (2008).  FactCheck: Glasgow worse than Gaza?  Retrieved 21 May 2015, from: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/health/factcheck+glasgow+worse+than+gaza/2320267.html

            Eisenstein, C. (2007). The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self.  Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Do Biological Explanations of Psychological Difficulties Reduce Empathy in Mental Health Professionals?

Interesting report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (USA) about a series of clinical perception analog studies in which mental health practitioners were given written vignettes of clients/patients with common mental health difficulties (schizophrenia, depression, social phobia), and then randomly given either biological or psychosocial explanations for the person's problems. (I thought the explanations were quite well done and evidence-based.) After that, they were asked to rate their feelings toward the client on 6 relational emotions (including "warm, compassionate, sympathetic"), labelled by the researchers as "empathy". 

Results: The researchers said that they had expected that the biological explanations would make practitioners more sympathetic to the hypothetical clients.  Instead, they were surprised to find that the so-called empathy ratings were higher when practitioners were given psychosocial explanations (e.g., trauma, poor living conditions, family conflict) than biological explanations (e.g., family history of the problem, MRI results.) 

I think that humanistic psychologists will not be surprised by these results, since this is consistent with what we have been warning of for years. Still, it is a sobering finding for those of us who do like to dabble in neuroscience (e.g., brain correlates of empathy).  However, I think that what is really going on here is that the psychosocial explanations provided a more coherent narrative for the person's problems, locating them within the person's life history and context to a much greater extent that the biological explanations did.  Empathic, caring emotions are much easier to access within a narrative context.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/11/25/1414058111.short 

Al Mahrer, Eccentric Humanistic Psychologist, RIP

--> Entry for 16 April 2014:

Word reached me today that Al Mahrer has died.  I can’t find any record of a birthdate, so I don’t even know how old he was, probably in his late 80’s, given that he got is PhD  1954.  Al was a wild & crazy guy.  Also quite annoying at times.  I suppose lots of people have Al Mahrer stories.  In one of his books, he claimed his therapy could cure cancer.  Some of my Al Mahrer stories I don’t feel are appropriate to record here, so I will just say that I was pretty outraged at the time.   

At the same time, tonight, as I reflect on his passing, I find myself wondering how it was in 1980 that he thought to invite Clara Hill, Bill Stiles and me to be part of an APA symposium on the future of psychotherapy research.  For some reason, he saw us as promising young psychotherapy researchers who might have something useful to say to the rest of the field. I don't think too many other people were paying attention to us then.  I didn't even know that about myself, until he slapped a grandiose title ("Fitting Process Research to Practicing Therapist"!) onto my untitled APA submission, a title that I then felt I had to live up to.

So, in spite of the nonsense, I also think he was brilliant -- and not just for "discovering" Bill, Clara and me.  He certainly changed the way I think about and do therapy and therapy research.  And I'm sure that his method of bodily resonation is one of the main sources of how I think about empathy as an embodied process in which it is possible at certain times to deeply enter the client's experiential process.  That means that every time one of my clients and I are able to do this, there is a wee bit of Al Mahrer there with us, in the room.  He was certainly one of a kind.

Saturday Adventure in East Lothian: Tantallon Castle & Dunbar

Entry for 1 March 2014:

I've been travelling or working on Saturdays a lot lately, so when a free Saturday finally rolled around this week, we were off east beyond Edinburgh.  Even after 7.5 years in Scotland we haven't lost our love of castles, so we thought we'd try Tantallon (accent on the second syllable) Castle. This is a large, dramatic sea castle, dating back to the 14th century and located on a small promontory that juts out into the outer end of the Firth of Forth, with small bays on either side.  Rather than the usual rectangular castle with towers at each corner or separate inner keep, it's basically very tall, thick curtain wall, punctuated with three sets of towers, with living quarters tucked just behind or even inside the wall. It was stormed several times (usually unsuccessfully), the last time by Cromwell in 1651.  It’s most unusual features are a central tower that features green volcanic rock originally favoured for its shock absorbing ability; and the view of Bass Rock, a mile off shore, a dramatic volcanic plug that is home to thousands of seabirds. Since the weather was surprisingly nice (mixed sun & cloud), there were plenty of visitors, mostly foreign, out to satisfy their hunger for large ancient ruined military-domestic installations.  

After that we headed south for Dunbar, arriving in time for visit to the John Muir Birthplace Museum in Dunbar.  The conservationist John Muir is practically the patron saint of California, the force behind the American National Park system, founder of the Sierra Club, namesake for countless California parks, public schools and trails.  He's not so well known in his native Scotland, but American tourists inspired the citizens of his hometown to refit the house where he was born in 1838.  It’s a lovely little museum dedicated to his life, which is presented in a kind of timeline as you progress through its floor, featuring quirkily-presented quotations from his writings. Among other things we learned that there is a sister site in Martinez, Calfornia, not far from where Diane’s mom lives; we resolved to match today’s adventure with a California Adventure to the John Muir Historic Monument on one of our upcoming visits.

California Leaving on Such a Winter’s Day: Review and Reflections

--> Entry for 4 January 2014:

Two weeks and a bit in Northern California: First, the amount and quality of the light, so much more and more intense than in Scotland at this time of year, dazzled us.  Then, the weather shocked us: clear, no rain, day after day after day, with large daily temperature swings: lows near freezing, highs near 70 most days.  California is in its second year of abnormally dry conditions but not yet willing to declare itself in drought: The hills are still as brown as in August: only one maybe two inches of rain so far this season, setting records for least amount of precipitation.  (In Murray Creek, my nephew Patrick reported more snow than rain so far.)  So it is a terrible beauty, this endless wonderful weather that threatens water-tables and the growing of crops in one the major agricultural regions of the world.  If rice or nuts or citrus or vegetables or livestock fail in California, the rest of the world suffers. Groceries will cost more in Glasgow.

Still, it’s been an eventful couple of weeks, with many visits with family and others:

Kenneth (fellow refugee from winter, in his case Iowa) and I went on long, almost epic runs; on one, having missed the main path we struggled 1200 feet up still bicycle trails to the top of Pleasanton Ridge and saw the valley spread out far below us and into the distance. 

On the Winter Solstice we drove over the Santa Cruz mountains to celebrate with Willy and his family in Soquel, marking the nadir of the year over a blazing fire bowl in his backyard, with sparklers and the passing of a cup of 18-year Glengoyne Whiskey.

For Christmas, Brendan & Mayumi flew down from Seattle with our grandchildren Mizuki (3½) & Yuki (4 months), who charmed and bemused us.  Mizuki affectionately called me “Vampa,” making me think of some sort of affable but spooky hyperparent.  On our adventure to Mount Diablo State Park she dragged Kenneth along everywhere, pulling him by the hand, up and down the jumble of sandstone boulders in Rock City; the next day he was sore all over.

On Boxing Day (not celebrated in the US as such but noted as the 2^nd busiest shopping day of the year), we made a pilgrimage to Murray Creek.  We found the place transformed:  Late last August, a goat-herding couple named James and Loraina had fled to Murray Creek to escape the Great Yosemite Fire with their herd of 27 goats and other animals.  After four months, the goats had (b)eaten back the encroaching army of star thistle and were well along in bringing the undergrowth under control. During the day we spent there, I visited with Joseph and his kids Ayla and Erhan and helped him with creative parenting; we watched James and Loraina herd the goats hither and thither, assisted by their big and enthusiastic white dog (who terrified Mizuki); we met the lonely llama in the upper pasture, mourning her dead partner and recently-miscarried baby; we walked the labyrinth with Mayumi and Mizuki; Louisa and Natasha blew in from Auburn for an intense visit, gift exchange, and meal.  Along the way, we discussed the future of Murray Creek:  Do we want to fill both houses with people who can help keep the place up and create a community/collective?  What happens when the family wants to visit?  Does anyone have a better idea?  No one really knows what’s best, but in the meantime, I think it’s great to feel the renewed energy and see what James & Loraina have been able to do.

On the penultimate day of 2013, we went into San Francisco to see the extensive and often-magical David Hockney exhibit at the De Young Art Museum, featuring primarily portraits and landscapes, many quite large or whole-room installations depicting the four seasons in the artist’s native Yorkshire.  Marjorie, Kris and I were quite taken by the room with the 4-panel X 16-camera video installation, each wall showing a drive down the same forest road in a different season, as if we were a giant gliding insect with many-faceted eyes, each oriented slightly differently from the rest. (This just made Diane and her mom queasy, so they moved rapidly on.) We’ve been following Hockney’s work since the 1980’s so it was very interesting to see the evolution of this protean artist, to be inspired by his continuing embrace of new technologies, and to appreciate his generative cycling between old and new media.

After a quiet New Year’s Eve, on the first day of the new year we drove down to Paso Robles for a brief visit with Anna, Jim and Luke, to catch up and mark the New Year.  Anna treated us to tortilla soup, while we brought each other up to date. Once again, I brought along my bottle of 18-year old Glengoyne whiskey, so we passed the quaich to mark the New Year.  The next morning we had patitsa, a favourite Christmas bread from our mother, which led to many reflections on times past.

Now we’re headed east again, for a bit of time in the frigid Midwest, dreading the large new snowfall and record-low wind chills predicted for Toledo over the next few days.  It’s been cold and rainy in Glasgow, but two weeks in gorgeous California weather have more than undone the winterizing effects of our previous Scottish conditioning, so now we are about to go, as you might say, Cold Turkey into the depths of Winter.

Looking back, there have been many high points to this visit to California, and it has been a surprisingly busy time.  No wonder I still haven’t finished reading that 800-page edited book on Gestalt Therapy that I’m supposed to be writing a book review on! 

However, the least expected of this winter’s California Adventures was my visit with Ann Weiser Cornell, who had sent me a message on Facebook when she saw that I was in California.  Ann is a well-known and highly talented Focusing trainer whom I’ve known for a while and whose formulations of focusing and self-critical processes I’ve found very useful over the years and particularly with the socially anxious clients I’ve been working with in Scotland for the past 6 years.  So it was that on New Year’s Eve, I drove over to Berkeley where I spent several hours of highly enjoyable and stimulating talk.  Ann proudly showed me her workshop in a converted warehouse loft space. We talked about training, large groups and all the different people who we knew in the Person-Centred-Experiential therapy world.  We discussed her new book, Focusing in Clinical Practice (2013), including the role of focusing in EFT and role of emotion in Focusing (it depends on what you mean by “emotion”).  After lunch at one of her favourite cafes, she drove me out to the Berkeley Marina; there we walked out to the end of the pier, where we could see the new Bay Bridge, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin and so on, and as we walked we talked about our lives.

On the way back to her office, Ann asked me about my sense of the coming year:  Recognizing this as a Focusing question, I paused, reflected, remarked that this was a very appropriate question for New Year’s Eve.  Then I said: First, to continue to take care of my health by resisting the push to overwork.  Second, to progress my long-delayed book Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action, which Les Greenberg and I have a contract to do.  And the, third, surprising myself, to move toward the emerging reality of retiring and leaving Scotland in 2.5 years and eventually (we hope) returning to California.

But before all that, of course, there is a concentrated blast of wintry weather to face.  Between the drought of California and the frigid cold of Ohio, I’m pretty sure we will be left feeling very glad to be back to the damp but relatively mild Scottish winter. Lang may oor lums reek!

Double Haiku for Winter Solstice 2013

After Scotland's long

dark, California gloaming

wakes me at seven,

Echoes old song with

extravagance of light on

such a winter's day,

Robert’s Personal Timeline

Entry for 22 Feb -2 March 2013:

[Note: Constructed for life history biography project being carried out by Barbara Hannigan, Trinity College Dublin.]

1927-1950: Parents both from broken families: mother’s by divorce, father’s by parental suicide

Chapter 1: California (First Saturn Return)

1950: Born, Stanford University, California

1950 – 1968: Childhood, Lodi, California

• Responsible oldest of 6 children: “family therapist” role, consulted by mother for advice on my siblings and myself

• Mother and grandmother Jung enthusiasts; Grandmother’s interest in parapsychology

• Parents involved in Christian healing/charismatic movement; later, father becomes a shaman

1967 (age 17): Turning point 1: Read Karen Horney, decided to become psychotherapist

1968 – 1972: University of California, Santa Cruz (Psychology)

1972 – 1978: University of California, Los Angeles (Clinical Psychology)

1973 (age 23): Married Diane Pearson

1975 (age 25): Realised that I could, with experience, become a competent therapist

1976 (age 26): Turning point 2: Attended first SPR meeting, met Les Greenberg & Laura Rice

Chapter 2: Toledo, Ohio (Second Saturn Return):

1978 - 1984: First job: moved to Toledo, Ohio: teaching research and psychotherapy; significant events research

1982 (age 31): First son, Brendan, born

1983 (age 33): Marital crisis: Realised that people are more important than work

1985 (age 35): Turning point 3: On sabbatical in Sheffield UK, decided to give up interpreting clients; after return to Toledo, began working with Les Greenberg and Laura Rice to develop what eventually became EFT

1985 – 1991: Toledo Experiential Therapy of Depression Project

1987 (age 37): Second son, Kenneth, born

1991 – 1992: Sabbatical in Toronto, Canada: Finish Facilitating Emotional Change; take part in PE-EFT training program run by Greenberg and Rice; beginning of humanistic-experiential psychotherapy meta-analysis project

1992 – 1999: Toledo Crime-related PTSD project; Director of Clinical Training, U of Toledo; Center for the Study of Experiential Psychotherapy protocol starts

2000- 2006: “Time of Turning”: “Every day is a gift”, Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy; conflicts at work

Chapter 3: Scotland (Third Saturn Return):

2006 (age 56): Turning point 4: Year of many changes: Father dies, youngest son leaves home, move to Scotland; new job, begin running EFT training in Scotland.

• High point of my life to date: co-officiating at oldest son’s Shinto/Christian/animist wedding

2006 – present: Scotland: University of Strathclyde; Strathclyde Social Anxiety Project; ongoing EFT training established in Scotland, followed by Netherlands and Belgium

• 2008 (age 58): Year of Awards: Carl Rodgers Award for Contributions to Humanistic Psychology; Society for Psychotherapy Research Distinguished Career Award

• 2010 (age 60): Prostate cancer: focused on letting go, identifying what is important (ie, doing the most good with the time I have left in my life)

• 2012 (age 62): Stayed with Mother during her process of dying from brain cancer