Get some rest!
The doctor can see the problems in the form of objects, like a psychic, or guess their location from the weak signals or detect them by testing or infer their presence in many other ways not unlike famous detectives. On the other hand, psychocatalysis specialists will refrain from the open use of their brilliant abilities and their trained clinical machine. During work sessions with patients, they will leave their knowledge and intuition out of the equation, trusting the abilities of the mentee. By answering questions, the patient develops the ability to visualize and can even find a path to enlightenment. Questioning is of crucial importance to the process of somatopsychotherapy.
Of course, this does not negate the importance of the training of an «assistant. Both clinical and psychological preparation is extremely important. Understanding the human character, the peculiarities of nosology classification, the dynamics of experience significantly accelerates the therapy: the ability to ask relevant questions is a great art. However, trust in the patients ability to respond in any case remains truly relevant.
One of the components of the internal training of the questioner, including the key to their ability to withstand the intonation, to provide the choice of an answer to a patient, is the understanding that the patients are able to determine their own feelings. This is one of the postulates of therapy through questions about body sensations.
The research tool
The technique of the «objectification of feelings falls under the category of indirect methods. This means that it «includes the initiative of the patient and activates his ability to determine and change his state. The solving of this problem is based on the amazing, but usually unused human ability to self-diagnose their own condition as specific images of objects.
This process is called psychocatalysis, by analogy to a catalytic chemical process: there is a «substance that can change its state a petrified emotion and there is a psychotherapeutic influence (the catalyst) without which this process is difficult, slow or stuck. When they are combined, a «miracle occurs.
The patients attention is the main active element but is expedited by the catalytic effect of psychotherapists questions.
There are two main questions in the diagnostic phase: WHERE and WHAT.
Obstetricians
Socrates, with his skill of midwife, more than 2000 years ago showed the effectiveness of asking in a philosophical conversation: People, when being asked right questions, decide themselves what is necessary12». The discovery of the role of questions as birth attendants is perhaps as significant in the field of interpersonal communication as the discovery of the wheel in technology.
The effectiveness of questioning, instead of stating, was noticed by many wonderful masters not only in philosophical circles but also by the medical «maieutic. (The Socratic Method, also known as maieutic is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas).
I mean not just ancient the Zen Buddhist teachers with their unanswerable questions («How does one-palm clap sound?»), or the Sufi sages, or Orthodox saints, who, by asking questions, revealed the «soul problems of their disciples, spiritual children, no worse than a surgeon with a scalpel reveals ulcers. I am also talking about the masters of psychotherapy.
It would be difficult to describe their work here. After all, even a benevolent silence, a willingness to encourage and to support the mental movement of a patient is also a kind of a question silent and at the same time the deepest one. «Tell me anything you want.» When I talk about such silence, I mean the empathic acceptance of Carl Rogers, creating a space for safe expression of a client, or a «gap, the willingness to patiently wait for the manifestations of a patients activity, of Arnold Mindell, as a fisherman waits for a bite13. A question creates an area of negative pressure that is ready to take into its form what it is waiting to be let out. The task of a psychotherapist is to model capacities for meaning.
Questions are a natural part of the life process
We are going to talk about the questions that people can ask their body, but I have no doubt that the body itself is able to ask questions. In particular, with the help of dreams. Wakefulness is the answer to dreaming. The dream poses a problem and real life serves its solution. You can say the opposite: a dream is a response to wakefulness. The life itself is questions and answers.
Psychotherapy and somatopsychotherapy, as part of our life, does not invent anything unnatural, it does not deal with something artificial. It only cleanses and gives patronage to everything natural.
The terms «facilitation and «amplification are well known. I use the term «psychocatalysis. The fact, that psychocatalysis applies to the inner body sensations, became an important opening of the Russian school of BEST by E. I. Zuev and the basis of the development of this «question therapy.
«Ask me questions,» a patient often says, dropping themselves into a therapists chair (as if surrendering»). Who will do it, how will it be done, and what for?
The Key question
We can say that each system of psychotherapy has its own key question. (This does not automatically mean that it works by questions and yet)
The question of clinical psychotherapy: dynamics of what constitutional genetic type manifests itself in the experiences and events of this persons life?
The question of psychoanalysis: when, under what circumstances, what affection of Id and prohibition by Super-Ego encountered in Ego and provoked the complex?
The question of Jungian therapy: what kind of distortion in the conscious life of the patient makes their subconscious mind «to take measures to equalize the situation» and «what exactly should a person do to regulate their relationship with the unconscious?14»
The question of Gestalt therapy: what is the need of the body which makes the «figure now, what is the «background, what prevents the Gestalt from «closing, what unfinished actions prevent a person from living «here and now?
The question of NLP: in what modalities and submodalities there is the information that affects a person, how they «manage to be upset or, on the contrary, spirited. And so on.
The SPT question
At the diagnostic phase of SPT, a charge that deranges the patients consciousness focusing the energy of the body on itself (the substance heat-heaviness) is found.
The question that helps to find to this «charge is usually very simple: where is the sensation associated with a particular episode of life, with a particular fragment of a dream, with a particular picture, which the patient drew on the instructions of the doctor? At the level of head, chest, abdomen, or anywhere else? Is it something big, small, light, or dark? What is it «made of? And so on.
At the diagnostic phase of SPT, a charge that deranges the patients consciousness focusing the energy of the body on itself (the substance heat-heaviness) is found.
The question that helps to find to this «charge is usually very simple: where is the sensation associated with a particular episode of life, with a particular fragment of a dream, with a particular picture, which the patient drew on the instructions of the doctor? At the level of head, chest, abdomen, or anywhere else? Is it something big, small, light, or dark? What is it «made of? And so on.
Below we will take a closer look at the options of talking to patients, depending on how they declare their problem.
In fact, SPT offers the patients to think about a simple thing: how are their sensations distributed when they solve this problem? Or simply: how are their sensations distributed? Is there anything that disturbs the optimal distribution of sensations in the body? Is anything missing to feel good?
Where does the heat in the arms and legs reach? Are there any uncomfortable sensations concentrated at the level of an area of the body?
I will allow myself a short historical excursus.
Do not wait for any hair to appear on a tortoise shell
Before somatopsychotherapy I had a few years of practice in clinical psychotherapy.
What are its obvious advantages? Firstly, it is the interest in the constitutional and genetic basis on which certain mental processes are developed. A clinical psychotherapist at the first stage of communication with a patient finds out the specific features of the mentality of the latter, and at the last stage they help a patient to see the world as a meeting of different forms of life, each of which has their own purpose. The ultimate achievement of successful clinical work is the patients inner peace and tranquility based on self-acceptance as a certain natural entity, endowed with their own character, accepting others as well! «Do not wait for any hair on the shell of a tortoise,» says Taoist wisdom, quite «clinical in its essence). This is a substantial part of the work of a clinical psychotherapist, but I would like to draw your attention to something else.
Storytelling
A clinical psychotherapist pays much attention to the baseline state in which the communication between a doctor and a patient takes place. Even the most correct messages can be received by the patients only when they have a free resource for this. The fact is that their resources are mostly spent on tension and neurotic experiences.
Johann Schultz is known to have researched and described the basic sensations that a person experiences in the process of relaxation. They were named «six exercises of autogenous training. A pleasant heaviness and warmth fill up the body then turning into a pleasant lightness and freshness. The heart beats calmly and evenly. Breathing is free and even. The solar plexus emits warmth. The forehead is slightly cool.
The state of the patients when «pleasant warmth reaches their fingers and toes, and the roots of their hair is healing in itself. In clinical psychotherapy it is also the background for the patients to accept themselves, the situation and to adjust to a successful way out of difficulties.
It should be noted that sometimes this part of the work is not the second, but the first one: instead of talking to the patient in their «abnormal state, the therapist invites them to the session, which is called «learning auto-training, «hypnosis or something else. Only after nonspecific calming in a cozy environment, under the influence of relaxing music, words of «comfort with the lulling intonation, and storytelling, the patient is «taken to more specific work.
The psychotherapeutic swing
At the early stage of my professional development my working combination was conversationplus relaxation. After discussing with the patients their important issues, I offered them to close their eyes and let the feelings to be distributed. Partly, that was the pre-system of the work I am describing now.
Conversation-relaxation-conversation this rhythm began to seem more natural and important. It is a kind of a psychotherapeutic «swing. The second part (hypnotic and auto-training) changed its tone in the process of «working out this practice. If, at first, I tried to imbue something to the patients at that phase (based on the material of the previous study of their problems), then later I refused to be directive and often offered just to observe the sensations after the conversation, to let them «lie down.
The questioning observation: question without question
Offering patients to observe what happens after a usual empathic hearing often leads to surprising results. Patients connect to their body sensations, fall into a kind of trance, and undergo a series of transformations, often spontaneously describing the process that, in fact, is organized by psychocatalysis in somatopsychotherapy.
The stones of unease can be detected and disintegrated, sensations can move actively from one area of the body (overfilled) to another (devastated), completely new and optimized contours of sensations can be formed. The convalescents get into the new spaces, from which they come back renewed. It is like auto-trainingwithout instructions. Conciliation, calming down, and rebalancing occur spontaneously, in accordance with the «program, which the body choses itself.
He sat down and began to describe
Recently, I was impressed by a kind of echo of my old mute practice (mute, because it has a minimum number of questions with maximum confidence in own healing process of the body). This story is about the transformations that a twelve-year-old boy began to experience, as soon as he sat down on a chair and heard the words: Close your eyes. Describe what you feel.
The boy had a weakened immunity of unclear genesis. He had been suffering from furuncles for a long time. The last two months he was continuously treated for submandibular lymphadenitis (there was a crack in the corner of his mouth, through which he, apparently, got the infection). Two operations under general anesthesia were unsuccessful. He underwent a lot of bandaging, and there was constantly a tubule for drainage in his wound. Of course, he had to forget about going to school.
The boy was brought to me just after he had been bandaged once again. He sat down on a chair and fell into a special state of connection with attention to inner sensations a kind of trance. He began to describe his sensations in detail without any instructions from me, except for the most general one: «Watch and describe.» The boy understood the main instruction perfectly, though it didnt say: «Heal.»
The movement of sensations was very intense. The terrible heat was gathering in his chest and there was the feeling of a huge furuncle.