Stretching Into Process

Being in my own interpersonal process training group over years (many years!) has strengthened my capacity to sit with difficult feelings so I can help my clients receive their essential messages. 

Slow. Steady. So much stretching. I couldn’t tell you how it happened but I see more clearly now how, so often, when I go with the protocol, when I take the “common knowledge” of our field for granted, I miss my client. 

Through my own process work, I’ve learned I can trust myself and go another way. I am more flexible. I bring more questions and fewer assumptions. I laugh more. I let myself fumble. I meet the human in front of me with a here and now relational response. It can feel wobbly but sometimes, our methodologies are not what our clients need.

So what exactly is interpersonal process?

Interpersonal process is a thoroughly and intentionally unstructured space. No check in. No topic. No agenda. 

The lack of structure. The nerves, the meandering, the irritation is all by design. The open nature of this process work puts you into contact with your distinct, essential humanness and the humanness of others. It’s exposing.

You’ll grapple with: 

  • Your stories about yourself and others  

  • Your comfort and discomfort with different emotions

  • Your own and others’ visible and invisible identities

  • Your body’s legacies 

  • Your capabilities and your challenges

  • Your responses to difference

  • Your relationship to power dynamics

Or…

You won’t. Half of the work is sitting face to face with what gets in the way of effective self and other connectedness. Or what stymies your freedom to be yourself with your clients when it could be of benefit. Or what turns your care and curiosity into invisible eye-rolling or quiet fury or hopeless collapse.

It’s SO MUCH, right? Why the hell put yourself through the interpersonal process ringer when you could take the next level of IFS or SE or EMDR? Because THIS is what’s happening beneath the content of every therapy session.

If you are not paying attention to what’s moving under there, it bubbles up. The connection falters. The medicine fails. Your client keeps quietly going along or they blow up, or they disappear never to be heard from again and you’re left blindsided, confused or scrambling.

In an interpersonal process group, we listen. To what’s within us and to what’s between us. We talk and we’re quiet. In this interpersonal process training group, we build a space of support, aliveness, trust and conspiratorial community. 

Gather the skills in this year's Experiential Training for Group Leaders and Relational Therapists 

Everybody Wobbles

The most effective therapeutic work, leadership, training, organizing is relational first.
 
You know there are moments when technique isn’t what’s called for, when trusting yourself and the relationship will serve your process best. You wobble now and again. I do too. It's part of the work we do. What do I mean by, “wobble?”  Well… You know a wobbly moment when you feel one….

Here are a couple from my groups: 
     ~A silence falls over a group I've been working with for a number of years. It's smothering. It feels never ending.
     ~A client whose engagement has been expressive but measured starts hurling insults at the new one I’ve brought in. 

In individual:
~When a client tells me they can’t pay this week or 
~Something they’re saying starts tugging on my own shit.
 
I want to make a move but the right one isn't clear yet. The wobble is that place of uncertainty.
 
I have two choices, when the wobble shows up:

Pick up a tool. 

Implicitly, this is what most clinical trainings teach. A method. They provide a protocol. I can avoid the wobble. Technique is useful when it arises on its own. If I am searching for it, I leave my client. 

My other option…

Pause.

Before turning on my training brain, I can breathe. I can recognize there's value in this not-knowing moment. This disrupts left brain autopilot. Sometimes your client doesn’t need your tools. They need you.
 
The wobble is inherent to relational work and staying with it is its own kind of competence. It’s another kind of mastery. The mastery of staying present when there's no map. The mastery of trusting the relationship when technique doesn’t serve. The mastery of being human before being a therapist. It’s a capacity you can always count on. And it takes practice. 
 
The best setting I know for exercising and strengthening these muscles is interpersonal process. through participating in my own on-going training group, I've learned this bones deep and I'm going to hold a space where you can learn it too.