Client: Amanda – Working With the Child State
Core Experience: Relationship was never easy, always complex
Nourishment: Remember, it can be so simple.
Quote: “It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.” Winnicott
Hakomi skills that are illustrated by this session:
- How to begin a session with a new client
- Contact statements
- Holding the client’s focus on present moment experience, especially her somatic experience, rather than story
- Working with spontaneous imagery using experiments in the imagination
- Following the client’s experience and spontaneous behavior, in this case, images and memories
- Working with a child part
- Explaining the idea of different kinds of experiments in mindfulness
- Tension sequence is used to help her study her stress response in response to her father
- Taking over a voice
- When a belief about nothing ever being easy arises, I contact her – “such an old sadness”
- Using simple language in the presence of child states
Guides to Watching this video:
- There is a hint of the content early in the session with a mention of her upset tummy and her father
- We can use these hints to help us understand a client without having to use the whole story
- Notice how I contact her curiosity early in the session – we want a sense of curiosity rather than searching for a problem
- Childhood image arises early – I make guesses about the age of the child and she adjusts me
- When working with memory, use elements of the memory in a creative way. Don’t take memory as literal but rather as a creative process.
- Longing for her father arises with emotion – when I invite her to play with her father, a sense of relief and simplicity arises
- Her stress response was a surprise with the verbal experiment “Your father is still available to you.”
- Belief surfaces at 26:45 – Nothing is ever easy