Analyzing the Verbatim - Essay Example

Analysis of the Verbatim Nelson’s apology at the beginning of the session made me want to reassure him that it was fine to be late. I was well awarethat I was not there to reassure him, but I also knew that I was not there to be sadistic either. My response (T1) to his delay came from a positive feeling that I had about the importance that the client was investing in the therapy. It was, on reflection, an appreciation of the latter rather than telling him it was okay to arrive five minutes late. I also wondered if this had something to do with me being pleased about him taking our work so seriously. In the previous sessions, Nelson displayed very little body language. However, some changes where becoming noticeable or at least I was becoming more aware of the minor changes in his ways of communication. For me, body language is a very important tool to make sense of other people’s worlds. I have been aware of this form of communication since my childhood, as the words spoken to me did not necessarily show the truth. I had to become familiar with another form of communication that did not use words, hence my interest in this mode of communication. After my intervention (T3), Nelson smiled and looked into my eyes. His body remained still, although his hands opened up and showed me both of his palms. In his slow movement and exposure of his palms, I felt a sense of vulnerability, and this is not something I feel regularly. I learned in a matter of seconds that Nelson was able to quickly move from one extreme feeling to another. After informing me of his happiness of managing to complete and present his work at university, he called himself useless (5N). I felt that a very positive beginning was turning in something else, as the mood in the air had shifted from joy to sadness; the sadness was also felt by me. This sadness I felt came from a place of compassion that I had towards Nelson. I felt his struggle to remain positive. I also wondered about our therapeutic relationship and if it was also useless in his eyes. Ernesto Spinelli (1989) and his phenomenological work came to mind when I was trying to make sense of Nelson’s way of being. I felt as though the one way that would give me an insight of his world would have been if I approached Nelson by staying with the phenomena (5T) and by not trying to force Nelson to explain the latter but to describe it. Moreover, I could have made him understand the latter in the intersubjectivity of that experience (7T). I was both surprised and interested at the intervention (9N) that the client had made. I wondered if by telling me that he finally managed to talk to his partner about him coming to therapy was also a way to inform me that he was not so useless after all. Although I felt happy that Nelson managing to tell his partner about him embarking on therapy, I also reflected on the possibility that he told me about Jonathan to prove that he was not so useless. The fact that he mentioned it so soon after he called himself useless made me wonder about it even more. The low self-esteem that Nelson was experiencing, and subsequently voiced to me, resonated with some ideas that Sullivan illustrated in his work. He said: “people who have customarily low self-esteem may minimise their anxiety by concealments and social isolation, may channel their anxiety and disjunctive motivations in interpersonal relations by exploitative attitudes and substitutive processes, or may manifest them in dissociative processes” (Sullivan, 1997: 351). The idea of Winnicott (1971) to create a secure space for the client to build in him a sense of trust so that changes and an exploration of his concerns and issues would occur was what I tried to offer to Nelson. I felt that Winnicott’s ideas, which I began to embrace, were showing some results in our therapeutic relationship. I felt very pleased for what Nelson had said to me (14N). However, I was also aware about him wanting to be liked and loved. Who I was in the therapeutic relationship came to my mind, but I could not give an answer to that question. What came to my mind was again an idea from Winnicott: ‘holding’ did not simply represent the mother’s “actual physical holding of the infant, but also the total environmental provision” (Winnicott, 1960: 43). I was not sure about my intervention (14T) technique; it sounded more like I was seeking my own reassurances. I reflected on this and in retrospect I would have chosen silence to deliver my appreciation and acknowledgment of his comments or I would have invited Nelson to explore what it meant by being understood. The prize of feeling understood came just before something very poignant the client disclosure (15N). For the first time I noticed that Nelson’s body language reflected the strong feelings he had just expressed to me. A few seconds later his usually composed position shifted to a "chaotic" one, as his left foot started to move constantly sideways. He was lying back in his chair while agitatedly using his hands to stroke his hair. Nelson lying back in his chair created a space between us. For a second I felt the physical distance between us widening. I felt discomfort in the room, but it was not coming from me. An intervention that followed (17T) made me wonder if I could better understand Nelson through exploring with him what he meant by “better death.” This would have allowed the client to stay with what he was feeling in the “here and now” rather than diverting his attention to a scenario that required greater mental work. There was still a lot of work to be done with Nelson, specifically to explore further about identity crisis, different cultures, and sexuality to name a few. Thanks to the work of Ernesto Spinelli, Donald Winnicott, and recently Harry Stack Sullivan, I have been able to make more sense of Nelson’s world. So far they have been helping me in this journey with the client; however, the most important encounter from which I have learned the most was with Nelson himself. I will end this process report with one of Spinelli’s quotes from his book ‘Tales of Un-Knowing’. This quote is something that I try to keep in my mind every time I see Nelson, or any other client for that matter. “Within the specific context of therapy, the idea of ‘un-knowing’ suggests the therapist’s willingness to explore the world of the client in a fashion that seeks not only to remain accessible to, and respectful of, the client’s unique way of being in the world, but also to be receptive to the challenges to the therapist’s own biases and assumptions (be they personal or professional, or both) that this exploration may well provoke” (Spinelli, 1997: 8). In conclusion, due to the limited number of words available for this process report, I could not thoroughly look at all the aspects of the sessions that I otherwise would have. Read More