Indicators
Indicators
A therapy session requires that the therapist be doing many things at once. Besides following the conversation, getting and staying in lov¬ing presence, tracking the client’s present experience and making contact statements, there’s searching for indicators. We all need to train ourselves to the point where the adaptive unconscious will handle most of it. This need to multi-task is why it takes deliberate practice for thousands of hours to become expert in anything. , When the adaptive unconscious handles things, it leaves you time to think. In this case, to think about what a new indicator might mean and what experiment you can use to deal with it. Given that…
Working with indicators means: you are studying the client’s behavior for something interesting, something that might be connected to a core belief. Some indicators, you’ll already know about, from reading, practice, watching sessions and studying tapes. Others, you’ll discover as you go along. You get a feel for what’s interesting that way. You get to know what deeper material might be connected to the indicator.
This is how the process starts: conversation, loving presence, tracking and contact, getting a feel for the client’s personality and searching for indicators. This first phase continues for awhile (awhile being anywhere from a few minutes to several sessions). The process can’t proceed to the next step, finding indicators and thinking little experiments, until the first phase has done two things, (1) the client feel safe and has confidence in the therapist. And (2), you’ve gotten an idea about an indicator and an experiment to do with it. While you’ve been establishing that sense of safety and understanding for the client, you’ve been searching for an indicator. With a little experience doing this, you’ll be able to find lots of good indicators. The more experience, the easier it becomes. It’s mostly an intuitive process, sensing that there is a message in a piece of behavior and learning to read those messages.
Early in the process, the therapist must focus attention on the client’s habitual posture, tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, speech patterns and such. Many of these qualities are habitual nonverbal expressions of core material. They’re clues as to what sort of situations they were created to deal with, what adaptations the person made, deliberately or procedurally. I call them indicators.
As you may imagine, there are lots of possible indica¬tors. Some of them can be completely obvious as to what they say about the client. Some of them are, like language, learned through use over time, In Bioenergetics, for example, indicators are often postural. A sunken chest and locked knees for a Bioenergetic therapist would be indicators of “an oral pattern”. Given that pattern, the therapist has both a diagnosis and a way to proceed with treatment. Almost all methods of psycho¬therapy use particular sets of indicators this way, often referring to them as “symptoms”. We use them differently. We use them to get ideas for experiments.
As we interact and relate to others, we don’t normally focus on their little, seemingly insignificant habits. In an ordinary interaction, conversation is more important than shrugged shoulders or the angle of the head. We might not consciously think about such nonverbal behaviors. But often, at some level, they effect us. Though we might ignore the slight discomfort we feel when someone looks skeptical (head always turned to one side), odds are, even if we react to it, we probably will not consciously notice or think about it. That level of the in¬teraction is almost always handled by the adaptive unconscious.
In Hakomi, we consciously search for such indicators (and the turning of the head is a common one.) Through experimenting with it many times, I have come to expect that this indicator can suggests that the client had important, formative experiences of not being manipulated through false statements. Associated with that usually is a constant, underlying sense of doubt. The emotions it can evoke are hurt and anger. The belief is, “People can’t be trusted to tell the truth. So, I’ve got to remain vigilant about believing them.” Though their hurt is not being felt at the moment, the avoidance of it is one of the things that reinforces the behavior. The whole pattern is an adaptation which serves to keep the client skeptical about what people are telling her! The idea is don’t get hurt again. Though it’s not conscious, this belief is controlling present behavior and experience. Indicators are the expressions of process like this.
In Hakomi, we use indicators to create experiments that are designed to evoke reactions. This is a vital piece of the method. Our clear intention is to study a cli¬ent’s behavior not for symptoms of disease, but for sources of experiments. We anticipate that the experiments we carry out will bring the unconscious, adaptive processes driving that behavior into the client’s awareness. A therapist using this approach is thought of as having an experimental atti¬tude. We are evidence seekers, evidence gathered on the spot, evidence that cli¬ents use to understand themselves. The basic idea is this: the indicators suggest experiments; the experiments have outcomes (they evoke reactions); the reactions are evidence (for us and for the client) of the client’s way of organizing his experience and his interactions with the world and other people. Gathering evidence for this is what our experiments are all about and that’s exactly why we do them.
For example, with a client whose habit is to hold her head a little bit off center and turned slightly away, we might do this experiment: with the client in a mindful state, she slowly turns her head back towards center. When consciously doing this movement and noticing her experience, most clients with this indicator will experience a feeling of fear. This fear is about being emotionally hurt and is associated with memories of that happening. The deliberate turning of the head toward an upright, centered position is only one experiment that could be done.
Everyone has some indicators and with a large population of people, there are many possible in¬dicators. And, there is an equally large number of experiments that can be done. Finding indica¬tors and devising suitable experiments is one of the things that makes this work so interesting. It is a combination of searching for clues like a detective and testing them like a scientist.
Working with Indicators
Indicators are embedded in the flow of nonverbal expression. The key is: they’re habitual. They are repeated many times in a conversation. (In contrast, there are the microexpressions described by Paul Ekman. ) It’s not just what kind of experience the client is having right now. It’s something about what qualities define the client’s way of being and doing. It’s more general than those temporary signs of present experience. It is about the client’s individuality.
The way a man walks, the way he talks, the timbre of his voice, the cadences of his speech, his little variations in phrasing a thought — all have so much to do with individuality. The same thing is true of a man’s playing in jazz… his tone, the way his sound moves, his feeling for time. That’s why jazz is consistently fascinating. You could ask six guys to play an identical solo, but when you heard the results, you’d hear six different solos.
Someone with a lot of experience listening to music can tell musicians their styles. Ben Webster, tenor sax player, for example, has a unique breathy style. You only have to her a few bars to know it’s him. Does that breathiness say something about Webster’s personality? Could be. That’s his indicator. There might even be an experiment that would evoke the memories and emotions behind it. If we could do it. If he was still with us.
When you find an indicator to work with and have an experiment in mind, the next thing to do is shift the client’s attention to the indicator and set up an experiment. To make the switch, you may have to interrupt the client. You may be switching to something that the client isn’t aware of and that could be disorienting. It helps if the client has experience with the method and understands about doing experiments. I always make sure that clients do. When the client knows that the goal is self-discovery and that the therapist is there to support that, then switching attention to an indicator is not experienced as an interruption. Remember, don’t switch to an indicator until you have an experiment in mind! Otherwise, the whole process just hangs there.
The keys to switching are timing, tone and topic. Timing is about finding an easy opening, a place in the con¬versation where you have an opportunity to switch. Tone is about your sensitivity to the possible disruption you might cause, using soft tone and gentle language. Topic is about finding something that’s probably going to be interesting to the client. That usually depends on how significant it really is and how surprising for the client. Again, practice makes this step easy and useful.
There are many indicator-experiment combinations already established. There’s a list of the indicators, but no list of the combinations. (That’s a job for another day.) It’s also possible to think of several different experiments to do with the same indicator. With experience, you learn how to choose among them. All along, you’ll also be getting a feel for creating experiments on the spot.
To shift attention to an indicator, you can say something like: ‘You know what I notice about you?’ Or: ‘There is something I’m finding really interesting about you.’ Something like that. Whatever the conversation is about, when it seems right, shift attention to the indicator.
Here’s an example: you notice that the client always keeps her head tilted to one side or the other. You think it’s interesting and if you’ve had some experience with it, you know it’s a good indicator to work with. It’s usually about doubt and mistrust, with some memories of being betrayed and emotionally hurt. As an experiment, you decide you’ll ask the client to move her head slowly into the vertical. So, at the right time, you say to her, ‘You know, I’ve noticed something about you that might be interesting to experiment with. It’s that you always hold your head tilted to one side or the other. Can we do an experiment with that?’ She says, ‘Yes.’ You ask for mindfulness and a signal and you do the experiment.
With the woman I worked with recently, I noticed she was moving her hand, her left hand, with a jabbing motion, as she talked about her father. I pointed that out and as an experiment we took over holding her hand back. This technique, blocking an impulse, brings more awareness to it. That’s how we accessed her anger. That was our experiment: holding her hand back. The result was, she felt her anger and suddenly became very fearful, and she remembered being terrified of her. With that in consciousness, we helped her calm down and realize, she was no longer in danger from him. He had passed away years before. He was still living in my client’s mind and habits, still making her afraid of her own anger. So, the rule was: don’t allow anger. The belief was: it will get you a terrible beating.
Before you shift the client’s attention to an indicator, your have to shift your own to the “realm” of the indicators: the client’s present behaviors and nonverbal expressions. There are indicators that appear in the client’s story, like themes, attitudes, reports of intense experiences. But these are very likely to be well known to the client and very likely not the best routes to unconscious core material. Habits, which lie outside of conscious awareness and which are not controlled by conscious intention, are much more likely to reflect core material.
Therefore, some of our attention is on the story. We need to follow what the client is saying. To not do so to would have a disastrous effect on the relationship. You want to note highly charged words or phrases, and emotionally significant beliefs and memories. So, attention to the story is necessary and useful at times. It’s also something you can leave to your adaptive unconscious. It can be trained to give you a “poke” when something like that comes up in the conversation. We do this all the time. It’s natural. But more useful and absolutely necessary, are attention to the nonverbal aspects and microexpressions of the client. Microexpressions, those facial expressions and gestures that take place very quickly, some in less than half a second, can be indicators of at least of two things: one, they can be signs of the client’s present experience. As such, they are very useful for making contact statements. The second thing they can express is a conscious or unconscious nonverbal “comment” on what’s being said. Again, they’re good for making contact statements, but they can also be clues to deeper material and useful in experiments.
It’s especially important to attend to those nonverbal behaviors that seem to be habitual and a little unusual. These almost always have links to unconscious material. Because they’re habits, they operate outside of awareness. Since they do, the client won’t bring attention to them. The therapist has to do that, before an experiment in mindfulness can be done with them. That’s why we have to shift the client’s attention. But, before we can do that, we must have seen or heard it ourselves. So, our own attention can’t just be on the story. We’ve got to pay attention to the nonverbal behavior of the storyteller.
This kind of attention is exactly the kind one needs to create harmonious relationships. It’s being more concerned with the person, more attentive to the present, lived experience of another being. It is the foundation of limbic resonance and loving presence. It is concrete, timely, rich with feeling and direct understanding, and it is a primary source of compassion, humor and delight.
References
Brooks, David, Genius: The Modern View. New York Times, May 1, 2009.
Gladwell, Malcolm (2008) Outliers: The Story of Success New York: Little Brown
A few examples would be: ending verbal statements with the inflection of a question or an habitually sad looking face or tilt of the head.
One book precisely about this is: Depression and the Body: The Biological Basis of Faith and Reality by Alexander Lowen.
A good place to look is: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-look-tells-all
The late Art Pepper, jazz saxophone player.
For different cultures, like the Japanese culture, you may have to go more slowly and take a few other steps first, like acknowledging the theme of the client’s presentation, before switching to an indicator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microexpression