Tom Andersen has long spoken of his fondness for and work with physiotherapists using essential physiotherapeutic principles for accessing emotional material. The core idea, he says is to understand that there are two groups of muscles, those responsible for extending or opening joints and those which retract or close joints.
"When feelings become too overwhelming, bending muscles become dominant When a physiotherapist grabs a retracted muscle and squeezes it, this [pain] produces an inhalation. If the exhalation comes as a sigh, it's a good thing In psychotherapy, our questions are like a pain-producing hand," he says. If they are not unusual enough, they produce no pain. If they are too unusual, they stop the conversation. But if they are unusual enough, they produce an inhalation which is followed by an exhalation, an expression that can be healing.
The open talk fork
The road divide for which Tom is probably best known is that of the reflecting team, a core concept expounded in his 1991 book The Reflecting Team: Dialogues and Dialogues about the Dialogues, which has now been translated into dozens of languages and is widely regarded as essential reading for family therapists.
Tom talks of the birth of this reflecting team concept as the day of open talks
"This was a very significant day, the day of open talks," he recalls, telling how he and a group of colleagues were observing a family therapy session one day in the basement of a building, when it occurred to him that the family may be interested to know what was being said about them in the adjoining observation room. After discussing the idea with his fellow-observers, Andersen switched off the lights in the therapy room and switched them on in the observation room, making the family invisible to the observers and the observers plainly visible to the family for the first time. The observers then began to discuss, in full view of the family, what they thought about what they had observed. It struck Tom how naked he felt being observed by an invisible family whose discussions about his discussions he could only guess at.
On starting a session
One of my first questions is 'How would you like to use this meeting?' If I say 'What would you like to talk about,' the implication is that this is place for work, not rest. If I say 'What problem would you like to discuss?' I implicitly assume that this is not a place for successes."
On bonds and Chico, the King Poodle
Tom shows a slide of a couple of pictures of Chico, his meticulously groomed King Poodle. "By nature, they are very intelligent and great performers," he says. "But they are not hunting dogs." Then, one day on a walk in the brief Norwegian Spring, Chico decided to try and hunt the birds which emerge with vigour at this time of year. "I called him back and said 'You are not a hunting dog. Make that part of your thinking.' But the smell of the stupid birds kept pulling him back. So I took a leash and put a bond between him and me. So, now we had two bonds, one between him and me and one between him and the birds."
正在提交中...
