The RPT program begins and ends with retreats where cohorts spend the weekend to train and connect with each other. As we settled into our chairs, Tingshas chimes sounded, and we began. But shortly after introductions, we began in a very different way. The trainers got up and a MAMAL consultation was started.
First MAMAL Experience
A lot occurred during this consult, but what struck me was the honesty in communication between the trainers. Conflict emerged in the group, but the conflict was used, in that the conflict was eventually linked with the client’s story and served to further the inquiry and exploration process of what was happening in the case.
I came away saying to myself, “These people are asking very different questions than I am”. The questions guiding the consult were not about finding what was “right” or “true” or “what the therapists should do”. They were saying things like “Where are you in that thought?”, “Ah, there you are”, “what’s your mind about that feeling?” “That sounds like the Mom” and “How are we pulled into the story right now?” There was a spirit of “what else is here?” rather than a sense of arrival and the understanding that the case will continue to work inside the members even as the consult ended.
I left the retreat torn. Being invited to practice being radically open to what I experience in my work and life, in general, stirred a deep ache of how I always wanted to live but also feeling infantile in actually being. And then came my questions, “Does any of this actually help anyone? Where and how does healing occur through articulations or being radically open to what I experience?”
Looking back two years later, I sense beneath these questions were the questions, “Can I bear to live like this? Can I bear to not live like this? What will this mean for my marriage, my friendships, my relationships with clients, and life as a whole?”
How the Model Continues to Work Me
It was and is an unnerving thing to consider the idea that the theory, the tools, and the techniques that I have amassed in my training over the years are both immensely valuable but at times could be keeping me from showing up, with all of myself, to the people that I sit with each day.
I have found a hidden wish beneath my pursuit of much of my training and reading was to be “bulletproof”. To be so knowledgeable, trained, and solid that I could know exactly what to do and what was happening with my clients at all times. To not be lost, to not be shaken, to not be affected…in other words, to not be vulnerable. It was my developmental trauma all over again.
As I have come to live with these questions, I have found embracing relationality to be both de-stabilizing but wildly intoxicating at the same time. Going to work with less pressure to “heal” and more playfulness of “I wonder what will emerge inside of me with my clients today?” Glimpsing what it feels like to be on the edge of my counseling chair, noticing what is awakened inside of me and between and playing with each clinical moment and how it is inviting me to come out of hiding and show up with my clients.
I had heard therapy described as a “gift” before but I feel I rarely experienced it this way prior to embracing relationality. I think I am sensing now the gift that this profession can be.
To let go and not force anything within me, simply being with whatever is there and bringing curiosity to it. To try to hold lightly my understanding, analyzing, and questioning and embrace what my gut is telling me and how it would have me be or do in the moment. To see the small sparks of a soul emerging and to fan that flame by allowing my own experience of them to be visible and played with. To hold my clients and myself as both wounded and wounder and to attempt to accept both. And to embrace, “in the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that changes everything”.
What a freaking gift, indeed!
Keep up the great work,
Alex
If you’re on your own relational path as a therapist—or as someone navigating what it means to show up authentically in your life and add in relational practice—I’d love to hear your story.
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