Being a Healing Presence

Being a healing presence for our clients is one the central ideas for Somatic Energy Therapy. It suggests that therapists can learn to cultivate a way of being that itself, helps our clients learn, grow, and especially heal. This is not a new idea. I first heard of such a notion sitting in a training with Jeff Zeig, master therapist and famous student of Dr. Milton Erickson. He talked about how it was his contention, too, that simply the presence of the therapist could be the vehicle by which clients healed. He talked about his experience with Dr. Milton Erickson who, in many ways, made everyone his client simply by the way he interacted with them. Nowadays this might furrow some brows of licensing board members, but it speaks to a shift that’s occurred in psychotherapy overall. Where therapists were once regarded as much mysterious sages as well-trained practitioners, today they’re seen more as – in the words of my mentor, Jim Krieder – “technicians doing techniques.”  In short, we’ve lost our identity as enigmatic healers and thus stopped striving to be so.

 But what if we could find this identity once again? What if we could remember that the practice of psychotherapy is as much an art as it is a science. Again, back to Jeff Zeig; what if we could understand psychotherapy once again as a phenomenal improvisational experience? No matter how well you’ve memorized the steps or protocols of your favorite therapy modality, if we’re honest, once our client has sat down for a session all bets are off. We can’t possibly think we can prepare for or even manualize such an unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, sometimes amazing, sometimes…well, you get the picture. Each session, no matter what your treatment plan may say, it’s still a big step into the unknown. How does anyone prepare?

 Is it any wonder that new therapists gravitate towards therapies that outline the process like an engineering blueprint? Say these words, do these steps, and vwallah – your client is cured! Well, maybe. It certainly makes therapists feel better, having everything mapped out, neat and tidy. And whether it’s because many clients are just not experienced at therapy, are desperate and therefore willing try anything, or are simply just nice people who want to get along, they usually go along with what we therapists suggest. The problem, of course, with memorizing a blueprint is that our attention is not on what’s happening with their client, but on getting all the steps right. And if we’ve learned anything about helping people in the few hundred years psychology has been around in some form, it’s that if you want to help people you must focus on understanding them.

 So, if helping people heal isn’t about memorizing steps, what is it? Being a healer, for Somatic Energy Therapy, is about your very presence making a positive impact on your clients. How is this possible? We’re talking about energy. That the energy of your very being makes a difference – a big difference – in your client’s ability to connect with themselves. Wait, with themselves? Isn’t therapy about them connecting with us? Well, yes and no.

 The study of good psychotherapy has rightly focused on the therapeutic alliance, or relationship as the primary variable in whether or not people get better. If the alliance is strong and the client feels heard, understand, validated, and connected to the therapist, we’ve learned this is the most important part of therapy working, regardless of what kind of therapy you’re doing. But, in a lot of ways, the study has stopped there, and we’ve come to believe that the therapeutic alliance is somehow intrinsically helpful. I want to suggest, however, that beyond its intrinsic value the therapeutic relationship also offers a model for how the client might relate to themselves, as well. In other words, how we are with our clients – our very being – invites a new way for our clients to experiment with being with themselves. And while a lot of this can be boiled down to behaviors, the structure below our behaviors is our energy. Okay, so what is energy?

 It is beyond the scope of this article to completely explain and define energy as it relates to psychotherapy. And if the term energy turns you off immediately, I get it. It did for me too, initially. So, feel free to scratch that word if you’d like. But whatever you call it, the idea is that our presence – actually, everyone’s presence – has a feeling. (The concept of energy goes way beyond just presence, but that’s what we’re focused on here, so it’s where we’ll stay.) My experience is that whatever you believe, most of us can agree that people give off a vibe. It’s totally subjective, it can be hard to name sometimes, but it’s there, nonetheless. The study of energy is then about getting into what might be going on when it comes to these vibes.

 To be a healer or a therapist we want our vibe to be helpful. This means, more than just connecting with us, we want it help invite our clients to connect more deeply with themselves. Why connect with themselves? Because you’re not always going to be around. Therapy has a beginning and an end, so no matter how kind, validating, or understanding you are, unless you’re planning on moving in with your client (which will do much more than furrow the brows of licensing board members) eventually your client is going to have to figure out how to go it alone. So, we want our clients to learn how to connect with themselves, first and foremost, because that’s who they really need to work with in the end. In other words, we’re always working our self out of a job. Not all therapists, I know. Some therapists work diligently, consciously or not, to foster a lot of dependency in therapy as business model. Get 40 clients dependent on you and you’re set for life. But that’s also unethical and harmful to people. So, instead we’re trying to help people help themselves.

 Therefore, I want to suggest to you that the energy of our presence shows our clients who we really are no matter what our behaviors are trying to show. This means you really can’t hide. It also means that being a therapist is not just a job, it’s a lifestyle. If you’re telling your clients to do one thing, but living a lifestyle that’s the opposite, they are going to feel the incongruence in your energy. They likely won’t know what their feeling, but something will feel off. Now, many clients will initially blame themselves for this, as though they’re the problem. But that off-ness about you won’t go away. So, to be a good therapist means to practice what you preach, if anything, because it’s going to show up in your energy anyways.

 What energy is healing for clients? To some extent that specific to the client and their issues, but generally it’s an energy that invites openness and connection – again, not with you – with themselves. But how do you accomplish that? Well, this now has to do with your relationship with yourself. So, if you’re avoiding yourself with substances or behaviors, or relentlessly judging yourself inside, or not dealing with your own depression, anxiety, trauma, or whatever it might be – that’s all in your energy. Which means that’s also the model you’re setting up your clients to follow.

 Don’t get me wrong, I know this message isn’t a popular one. I mean, come on Jake! Therapists aren’t perfect. We can’t be expected to be flawless, that’s not realistic. And it’s not. I am not saying that first you must deal with all your own stuff before your energy is helpful enough to see clients. In fact, that’s not even what creates a healing presence, because that is impossible. What I’m saying is, if we’re going to try and help people heal, we must also be working to heal, ourselves. When we are engaged in our own healing work with a therapists or healer, our courage and conviction to connect with our own selves in a healing way shows up in our energy. And our client’s pick up on it, almost like their body says, “Oh, you’ve found the courage to do the hard work with yourself? I wonder if I can do it too.” There, we resonate in a shared journey of healing. It’s unsaid, but part of the energy.

 There are two variables that have been found so far to be necessary for healing – especially from trauma. The first is not being alone. The second is feeling what we’re avoiding. You can’t get the second without starting with the first. But the not being alone, in my opinion, can’t just be about being with anyone. For it to be helpful, that other person has to get it. They have to know, on a personal level, what it means to connect with pain we’ve been avoiding. And they have to be doing it themselves, so they can appreciate the heavy lifting that healing really is. This is not accomplished simply by going to school and getting a license. It’s about doing your own work too; continuously being willing – looking for, actually – places where you’re stuck, where you need healing, and where you’re avoiding. This may be the central requirement to be a good healer – so that the energy of your very presence supports your clients on their healing journey.

 Thanks for reading,

Jake