Interview
A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE HAKOMI METHOD (Transcript)
Interview of Ron Kurtz Craig Comstock
Taped in 2007
Craig Comstock: What are some of the differences between ordinary psychotherapy and Hakomi?
Ron Kurtz: The main difference is in the philosophy, in the concept of what’s going on. In psychotherapy you’re using the medical model and ordinary psychotherapy thinks of itself as a branch of medicine.* Therefore they’re looking for or trying to diagnose some kind of illness that the person has. Assisted self discovery just looks at, is conceived of as helping somebody who wants to understand him or herself. It’s not about sickness, it’s about understanding yourself. The basis for that is the idea that we don’t really know ourselves. We think we do but we don’t.
C: So what you’re describing is not so much an adjunct to psychotherapy as an alternative.
R: This is definitely an alternative view, an alternative conception. But the techniques and some of the methods are very useful in any healing relationship.
C: So what makes Hakomi unique against this background?
R: OK, yeah. The unique contribution of the Hakomi method is this. The method contains as a necessary element precise experiments done with a person in a mindful state, the purpose being to evoke emotions, memories and reactions that will reveal or help access to those implicit beliefs influencing the person’s non-conscious, habitual behaviors.
We want to evoke reactions that demonstrate to the person how they’re organized, how they experience, how they organize their experience. How do you organize around my taking the weight of your shoulders? How do you organize around my telling you in a soft voice, “I’ll help you.”? Do you get a thought that says, “No he won’t”? Do you get sad? I don’t ask these questions, but that’s what’s unique about it. You want them to know there’s nourishment out there that you’re not taking in. [Voice in the background says, "I love you] And I say to the client, there are 8 billion people and at least some jerk could love you, come on. (Laugh) They have these crazy beliefs and they cause suffering. It’s a change in attitude; it’s a change in roles. The client’s role is changed and my role is changed and that’s a radical difference. The techniques look very similar but the roles are different. And because the roles are different, process unfolds differently. All the spontaneous stuff that goes on with the client unfolds better when I’m not trying to control it.
C: So once the person decides to do the work with you, what kind of commitment do you ask of him or her?
R: Well, I don’t think we talk about that typically. It’s not a commitment such as, you have to go 10 sessions. It’s not that kind of commitment. I just need the person to be committed to their own self-study. I need them to be committed to understanding themselves and have the courage and the capacity, the courage to understand it, to really look at themselves and the capacity to be mindful.
C: When you work with a client, what are your first steps?
R: There’s a general sequence of events. There’s the therapist bringing themselves into loving presence. And there are some moves, several moves that help the client become present with their own experience. There’s a search for indicators. Like what are we going to do an experiment about? Then there’s an experiment. An experiment is designed to evoke a reaction, usually an emotional reaction. If it evokes an emotional reaction, then you just follow the process and then integration is spontaneous. So there is this process from setting the emotional context, finding something to experiment with, to processing the outcome of experiments, which is very simple; then you just going keep going and providing another kind of containment, a containment for integration. So there’s containment for the whole process, which is loving process, and then there’s containment for integration, which is comforting, basically.
The first thing I want to do, which I typically do, is I’m looking at them for something I really like about them. I’m looking for something I feel good about. I’m looking for something that will sustain me, sustain my compassion and my inspiration. What makes me want to work with this person? What makes me want to help them? I’ve got to find that first, and it’s easy to find. Especially if you don’t have the mind set that you’ve got to control the process, that this person is sick and you have to make them well. In your head, you’re looking for what’s wrong with them. I’m looking for what’s right. I’m looking for their strength. And sometimes it’s physical beauty; sometimes it’s there capacity for emotion. Whatever it is, there’s something about their humanity. This is my species. So, the first thing I want to do is get my mind and my emotional system tuned up to that. Loving presence. I want to be in this state of being.
C: How do you tell whether they can go into this state?
R: Ah, ha, I ask them to do it. I encourage them to do it and I speak in a certain way. I say something like, “why don’t you go into mindfulness” and just kind of relax, and then I say, I’m going to do an experiment. You see my voice is different (softer, quieter, lower tone). “I’m going to do an experiment and all you have to do is notice what happens when I do it.” And it could be, if I need to talk longer like this, I might say, “it could be that a feeling will come up or an image or a memory. It could be nothing happens. It’s OK to have nothing happen”. I’m talking them down to this state if I have to. But when somebody is an experienced mediator, they have no trouble at all doing it. There are external signs — there’s a kind of stillness that comes over the person. I think I’ve already mentioned this. You’ll see their eyes fluttering up and down underneath their eyelid. That’s almost a sure sign that they’re in mindfulness. They are mindful at that moment. And then I would say, if you’re ready, please notice what happens, or tell me your immediate reaction when I, then I would say something like “you’re safe here” or “you don’t have to be perfect.”
C: So the indicator that you’re looking for, the physical indicator, is mainly for the purpose of choosing what you are going to experiment with, that they can’t take in.
R: Right. Either say it or do some experiment.
C: And they have to be in mindfulness because then…
R: they’ll notice their reaction. We’re looking for the automatic.
C: What is usually unconscious.
R: Yes, what is usually unconscious. It’s automatically organized. Experience is organized and it’s organized by habits. That’s part of our foundation. I want you to see how you are organized. I want to hold up the mirror to your behavior.
C: So if someone goes like this (folds arms tightly across his chest) it’s fairly…
R: that’s momentary, generally momentary. But if it’s always like that, then that’s an indicator. And I would say something like, “You can trust me” but I would set it up as experiment so that when they hear it they would notice that their mind goes “don’t do it, don’t do it” (laugh). One of the most remarkable things about this method, think about it, I get an idea about somebody, I test it. I do an experiment and if my idea is right, I get feedback that tells me it was right. And I’ve been doing it for 30 years.
C: So this is an extension of your background in science. Doing the experiment.
R: Experimental psych. Get the data. I tell my students, get the data or get out. (Laugh)
C: Or hit the road, right? (Laugh)
R: I say, “You’re a good person” and the client will go, “You know when I was a kid, I remember I went to Chicago” and they start telling your some story and you never get to know what happened when you said that. So, you stop them and say, yes that’s very interesting but what happened when I said that? Get the data or get out (laugh).
C: So you tell your students not to have a conversation.
R: I have a little chapter somewhere called “Psychotherapy as the art of not having a conversation”. You don’t want to get your information that way. The butlers are not going to talk to you. The butlers are not busy explaining things to you. So the information you want is not in what the person is saying, it’s how they’re saying it. It’s their posture, it’s their tone of voice, it’s their little gestures, it’s their facial expression. It’s the unconscious commentary they’re making all the time. That’s the information you want. And if you’re focused on the conversation, you’re going to miss some of that. You’re better off you know, one part of your mind listens a little bit and every once in a while you hear something radical and you notice it like, oh you killed your mother. Oh, I didn’t know that. (Laugh) You know, something like that you want to pay attention to, but it’s not where the information is that you need to access the implicit beliefs.
So I look for these nonverbal behaviors and there are hundreds of them. There is postural behavior, tone of voice, speech patterns, facial expressions, gestures, suppose I’m working with somebody who has a habit of looking at you this way (demonstrates expressions) or this expression is “I don’t understand” and this one is “I don’t believe you.” Just the angle of the head can be an indicator. So if I say something such as, “You’re a good person” or something like that and they say “Ugg”, I know it didn’t go in. They’re avoiding it. They’re avoiding taking in this idea that they’re a good person, or taking in some kind of encouragement or, a common one, taking in the belief that other people care for them. Something they are avoiding. And then when we bring it up deliberately in an experiment when they are in mindfulness, they could be overwhelmed with sadness. I would say to a person something like “I trust you” or “I want you to trust me”. But when they’re in mindfulness, that sentence triggers, it evokes, or can evoke an emotional reaction. That emotional reaction will lead back to the memories that set up the habit that avoids the feeling.
C: So what are some of the spiritual roots of Hakomi?
R: Well you know I was a graduate student in mathematical models of psychology and I hung out with some of the weirdest people in town. This was Bloomington, Indiana, which has its share. And one guy just left a copy of the Tao Te Ching on my kitchen table. I don’t know whether it was deliberate or not but he had a copy and left it on the table and I picked it up because I’ll read anything I could get my hands on. And some of the statements in there were so intriguing. I thought about one of them for 10 years – “the best leader follows”. I mean that tripped my mind. What does he mean? And you get the flavor that it’s really rich. Another line I really loved was, “the way that can be told is not the constant way”. I love that translation, Penguin, I think.
So, I was influenced by Taoism. I did Yoga. This is back in the late 60s or so. Somewhere, 50’s, who knows? And Buddhism came a little bit later, but the Taoist influence is this whole attitude of letting things take their natural course. You don’t have to interfere with nature. And of course they’re part of nature, they don’t come out of the Western tradition that separates us from nature. They’re involved; they’re in it. So Taoism intrigued me at first. Of course I wasn’t a psychotherapist then, I was a scientist of some sort. And then later, when I was teaching at San Francisco State, I was hanging around with an old buddy of mine from graduate school who is now teaching also, Stella Resnick. She was a Gestalt therapist, she taught at San Jose and she introduced me to Buddhism. We went and saw Trungpa speak one night. That was San Francisco. And later we were back in Boulder together and I started studying with him. The Taoist idea of letting things take their natural course impressed me. Chuang Tzu says, “begin right and you’re easy, continue easy and you’re right.” Let’s take it easy here. That shows what I said before about control. You’re not controlling the process. Don’t think you have to control it. You go with it somehow, you support it, you know.
Another statement from the Tao is “when the sage does something, the people will say, we did it ourselves”. I like that, that subtle psychopathic stuff. With Buddhism I was very impressed with nonviolence. Nonviolence in psychotherapy is like honoring the healing power in the client — not pushing them, not forcing anything. There’s absolutely no need to force anything.
C: This is a quote from the Buddhist master Dogen – “To follow the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things.”
R: To the study the self. In the Buddhist tradition, when you go looking for the self you never find it. You find that there is no self. You find there’s only these experiences that arise and fall and rise and fall. So you can forget the self if you just watch that. And if you forget the self, that’s not just, that’s to say all the motivations, all the energy and behaviors that go into creating and maintaining a self. It’s OK, if they go away. If you forget them, then you are so open that you’re being taught all the time by the world. And even, I think those guys were talking about, when we talk about enlightenment by the myriad things, there’s some connection to the Akashic field. You get the kind of information most people don’t get.
C: It seems a very big departure from most of psychology that is about the great advances of ego psychology and precisely knowing the self, strengthening the self.
R: I forget who it was, but they asked the Dalai Lama to help them with the work they were doing on self-esteem and he said, why would you want to do that? (Laugh) The self is so expensive, you know. What is the most expensive item on your agenda, it’s your ego. That’s why you bought a Humvee instead of a Volkswagen. Costs a lot of money. (Laugh)
C: It’s like not directing the process; you talk about a lot of “nots” actually. Why don’t you want to direct the process?
R: Well, it hampers the spontaneity of the healing process. So, once the healing process begins, OK, you got to be able to recognize it and that part of the method is to evoke it, to start it. Once it begins you have to just support its movement. But you don’t give off the message that you’re in charge. It’s not like you direct all the time, we’ll do this, or… You don’t ask questions. Questions are a secret way of directing, right? Sneaky devils. I learned that in Gestalt. If you asked Fritz Pearls a question, he would ask you what’s your opinion. He was not going to answer questions. But he did direct. I don’t want to give the impression of directing because that sets up the client to be passive. And then in their passivity, they’re just waiting for you, waiting for you to do something, or tell them what to do and they don’t move on their own. You kill their spontaneity. And the healing process is a spontaneous process.
C: So the answer is already in the client’s body and mind.
R: Yeah, and I’ve seen it so many times, I have total faith that it’s going to work. If somebody who hasn’t seen this watches me, they see that I’m just sitting there silently — it could be two or three minutes. Then the person will open their eyes and start taking about what happened, what they felt like, what they believed. Unconsciousness. That’s what we’re doing, going fishing for that. And like I say, once you get to the emotional, once the emotions are present, the rest is going to come if you let it, if you don’t interrupt it, if you don’t interfere. Silence is the best thing.
C: There’s a whole lot of not doing.
R: Yeah, non-doing.
C: Non-doing.
R. The sage works by non-doing. And it took me 10 years, 15 years, to even get a clue as to what he was talking about. What was he talking about? The best leader follows. And when I’m teaching, I’m following. What does this group need now? I don’t say, now we’re going to do this and now we’re going to do that. I don’t come in with a schedule. I don’t come in with a training outline. I’m going to do what’s called for. It’s a very simple sequence.
C: Simple, but it sounds like a falling away of the extraneous would describe your process.
R: Thirty years, 35 years dropping things that were unnecessary. I think that’s natural if you don’t get fixated on a method. If you’re always open to studying and perfecting and thinking and changing and making it better and noticing what works and what doesn’t. If you have that attitude towards the work. Yeah.
C: Which is an experimental…
R: It’s been thirty-five years and then, when was it, last year or maybe the year before. I think it was last year, I read something in Damasio and changed the work. Thirty-five years later, I’m still changing it. That’s a… I don’t know, a creative attitude. That’s why I dropped the things that are unnecessary.
There’s one last thing I wanted to talk about right how and that is following. When you give up control to the extent that I do, you can kinda pick your opportunities and you can follow, you know? In other words there are spontaneous events that are surprising to the client, such as “when you did that experiment, I felt like raising my arm”. Well at that point I could say, yes, please, go ahead, raise your arm and let’s see what happens. Following. I see that or I think of that as a signal from the adaptive unconscious about which way to go. The adaptive unconscious says, go this way. I’m following. And because I’m following, the process begins to move. It’s not being interfered with. Something in the unconscious recognizes this opportunity. I can go ahead now. I can keep going.
* It’s been pointed out to me, by my colleague, Bonnie Geiger, that what I’m saying here is not true of a lot of modern psychotherapy. She’s right, of course! Here’s what she said:
From Bonnie Geiger,
Feedback on Craig Interview Video
Hi Ron,
I’ve been thinking about the video I transcribed and I have some thoughts about your thoughts about ordinary psychotherapy being based in the medical model, primarily that there is an illness in the person that has to be diagnosed and treated by the therapist who controls the process. I think that has been true for some types of psychotherapy, perhaps even the majority, in the past but that increasingly many psychotherapists are moving more in the same direction you are. I believe your influence on the evolving philosophy and practice of therapy has been very profound in this regard, to me and lots of other psychotherapists. In addition there have been many other incursions, shall I say, into the medical model dogma by proponents of the belief that the healing process is located in the person and that we, as therapists, can help people contact or connect with that process. Carl Rogers and Jung were early advocates of this idea. Freud would love your butlers. More recently, the influence on psychotherapists of ideas from Taoism, Buddhism, including mindfulness & loving presence, as well as therapies which actually, oh dear!, include working with the body, have all been finding their ways into the practice of psychotherapy. Your precious gift to us has been to put these and many other elements together into a beautiful, powerful, gentle, kind and teachable, method which you continue to evolve. I guess my point is that lumping psychotherapy other than Hakomi practitioners as “ordinary psychotherapy” is making an unneeded division between the beauty of Hakomi and the beauty of psychotherapy that is well done.
So those are my musings of the day…
Love,
Bonnie