INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY, 64 (3) 2014 MORRIS RESISTANCE AND MY FAVORITE PATIENT
Resistance and My Favorite Patient JANICE M. MORRIS, PH.D., ABPP, FAGPA, CGP
My favorite patient is: me. This is as it should be for each of
us. The more we know about ourselves, the better able we are to use ourselves as instruments to guide the work of psychotherapy. With this idea in mind, I will tell you how my particular journey to self-understanding has helped guide my understanding of resistance and my work with my therapy groups. Twenty-five years ago before I was pregnant for the second time, I began to be aware of pain that was developing along my left shoulder blade. First an annoyance that disrupted my enjoyment of sleeping late on a Saturday morning, then a noticeable and persistent pain during the body-changing experience of pregnancy, and finally a chronic pain that spread to my neck and upper back, this pain became my constant companion for years. Professionals of all stripes had their theories and treatments. The chiropractor attended to spinal alignment, the physiatrist to weak ligaments, the Feldenkreis therapist to movement, the physical therapist to the asymmetric position of my shoulder blades, the traditional physician to fibromyalgia, the nutritionist to the imbalance of nutrients, the osteopath to neurological disruptions from various surgeries and scar tissue, the massage therapist to muscle spasms and circulation, and the Alexander Technique therapist to balance and movement. To chronicle 25 years of pain and treatments in one paragraph is a bit mind-boggling, at least for me. Each of these treatments
Janice M. Morris is in private practice in Austin, Texas and Faculty at the Center for Group Studies in New York. A version of this article appeared in The Voice, the newsletter of the Austin Group Psychotherapy Society in the fall of 2013.
391
392 MORRIS
helped a little and none of them cured me. What interests me especially for the purposes of this article is that for many years I never allowed myself to consider the idea this pain could have psychological underpinnings or that the key to better health lay in interpersonal connections. I thought what was going on with my body was entirely physical in nature, both in its origins and in the solutions offered in the one-to-one relationship of healer to sufferer. Perhaps being rear-ended by a Kenworth truck in 1986 was the starting point. We will never know. Regardless of the cause, there is no mistaking this pain had psychological effects. It was depressing to be in pain all the time, to have my sleep disrupted, to have my work day affected by the constant throbbing or jabbing pain in my shoulder blade, to have the pain migrate and radiate to my neck, back, and chest or trigger systemic fatigue. Travel plans, gardening, exercise, work and play, all had to be carefully considered with the cost of pain in mind. After a number of years of talking with my therapist about all manner of emotional issues, I casually mentioned my battle with chronic pain. To my surprise, he was intensely interested in the history and the details of my experiences. At first I was skeptical that there was any point to telling him this long sad story other than the gratification of being understood and hoping for a little sympathy. My therapist, however, was listening to my words and considering the idea that this pain could be understood as a preverbal communication of emotional experience, and to my astonishment, as a resistance. Not that he used the word resistance, but he employed his understanding of the unconscious to explore what the pain was communicating in preverbal language, and study the way it was blocking my progress in life. The work in therapy, in Hyman Spotnitz’s (see Sheftel, 1991) words, is to “just say everything,” which includes translating preverbal phenomena (tears, twinges, nausea, headaches to name a few) into language. My therapist had the freedom of imagination to ask me questions like, “Has anyone assaulted you from behind?” “Has anyone been stabbing you in the back?” Crazy questions like this opened my mind to consider the emotional ingredients of this physical pain, and to consider what words were bound up in these spasms and aches. Hold this idea in mind for a few paragraphs while I digress.
RESISTANCE AND MY FAVORITE PATIENT 393
Long, long ago in my high school physics class, I was handed a sealed cardboard box with an object inside. My job was to identify what was in the box without seeing it. I could hold the box, shake it, tilt it, or do whatever else I could think of to assess the shape, weight, and composition of the mysterious object inside. The business of psychotherapy is not unlike that physics class project. People come to us with emotional difficulties and the desire to feel better, and our job is to understand them. In order to understand who they are and what needs to happen for them to get better, we are lending ourselves to a relationship with them and trying to understand the objects inside, the forces we cannot see that are both the elements of suffering and the keys to healing. The more transparent our patients are, the better we and their therapy group can understand them, and the more likely they are to grow and progress in life. This invitation to be transparent is highly objectionable to most people, to say the least. If people have been shamed, frightened, rejected, abandoned, emotionally suffocated, or controlled as a result of being seen by the people closest to them, then no way are they going to readily risk this pain again. I was no exception. Thus we encounter resistance. Resistance was a term used in the study of electricity long before Freud introduced it as a psychological phenomenon in the late 1880s. To understand psychological resistance it is useful to understand how it works with electricity. Here is what www.physicsclasssroom.com says about the electrical version of resistance: An electron traveling through the wires and loads of the external circuit encounters resistance. Resistance is the hindrance to the flow of charge. For an electron, the journey from terminal to terminal is not a direct route. Rather, it is a zigzag path that results from countless collisions with fixed atoms within the conducting material. The electrons encounter resistance—a hindrance to their movement. While the electric potential difference established between the two terminals encourages the movement of charge, it is resistance that discourages it.
Picture a bunch of electrons traveling through a wire and powering a light bulb. If there is not enough resistance to regulate the charge, the light bulb could explode. If there is too much resistance because, say, you cut the wire from the battery and recon-
394 MORRIS
nect it with a section of string, the bulb will never light. Thus, resistance is necessary for energy to flow with the proper amount of regulation, like a dimmer switch controls the brightness of a light or a circuit breaker stops a power surge from a lightning strike. The same is true for people, both as individuals trying to make sense of their inner experience and translate it into words and groups of people trying to connect with each other. Too little resistance overloads the connection between members. In a group, this might look like one member overwhelming another member with aggression that is too intense. Too much resistance slows or blocks the connection. In a group, this might look like the silent member, or the member who “throws a circuit breaker” by looking away when the connection gets too intense. Most importantly for this discussion, the study of resistance in people is a window to understanding and a potential pathway to healing. When we invite a group of people to come together, agree to a contract, and engage each other in ways that will help them develop intimacy, we are asking them to do something quite terrifying, really. Tell a group member you love her? Tell someone you are hurt, angry, or jealous? Risk being vulnerable, doing damage, feeling humiliated? God forbid. Rosenthal (1987) invites us to keep in mind that our group members employ every protection they know to maintain equilibrium, avoid shame, and prevent pain. How do we identify resistance? Modern analysts have a contract for group members in which they agree to arrive on time and stay till the end, refrain from socializing outside the group, take their fair share of the talking time, pay their bill at the end of the month in the right amount, and keep things confidential. We also place a premium on verbal communications that are in the moment, emotional, and progressive. In other words, communications contain feelings directed toward each other, and, rather than being repetitive and stagnant, these reveal new personality features. Deviation from this contract is considered resistance and is expected. Rather than trying to overcome it, change it, or correct it, we study it and help our group members understand its purpose well enough that it eventually becomes unnecessary or can be regulated to be something more functional. Lou Ormont (see Furgeri, 2001) said that everything you need to know
RESISTANCE AND MY FAVORITE PATIENT 395
about a patient’s history is in the resistance. We welcome resistance as manifestation of what the patient has been doing all his life, and how he has been depriving himself of the intimacy he claims to want. Back to my chronic pain. Zeisel (2009) observes that there are three pathways for the expression of feelings available to human beings: visceral (somatic expressions), acting out (feelings are expressed through actions), and psychic (feelings are discharged through language). As my therapist began listening to my pain, he proposed I share with my therapy group my experience of pain whenever it became apparent to me, inviting me to report these visceral communications with language. I could not imagine how this would help me, but I cooperated. As I committed to this transparency of self, wondering when the group would grow tired of hearing it, wondering how I would be pathologized, wondering how I could endure the shame of reporting an experience that felt so far out of my control, what I discovered in the telling was breathtakingly different. The more I shared, the more the group joined me in investigating this experience. The group leader treated my communications of bodily experience as potential pathways to understanding what in me and in the group was not being expressed in words. If I reported that my heart was pounding, or my shoulder was aching, group members responded either with their own physical complaints or with their ideas of what aggression, sadness, anger, or irritation was felt but unspoken in me and in themselves. One member noticed that my pain, rather than being constant in one part of my body, seemed to move around in relation to what was happening in the group. Sharp pain, stabbing pain, aching pain were like many different melodies of emotional expression. He expressed optimism that I could get better once we understood their meaning. These were startling new ideas to me. Suddenly, what I had treated as an enemy of my well-being became an asset, a window into understanding myself and others. This discovery is what we hope for with each and every one of our group members, that they can develop a friendly interest in what lives and breathes inside of them, and value the communication of these experiences for better connection to themselves and to each other. For me, pain was my somatic language for all sorts of emotions…anger, fear,
396 MORRIS
and anxiety just for starters. These emotions were not fluently expressed in my constricted, inhibited family of origin. Remember Ormont’s statement that everything you need to know about a patient is in the resistance? Ask my mother how, as a tender young sophomore in college, she got the news her mother had died. She will tell you her older brother called her to deliver the news, but she was not told by anyone that the cause was bone cancer until years later. Matters of the body, especially disease processes, were shameful malfunctions to be hidden from society, even one’s closest family. My inheritance from my mother was the idea that mind and body are separate and alien. Physical experience starts in the body and stops at the neck. No wonder I had neck and shoulder pain, the result of my own personal don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. Body-oriented therapists understood the ramifications of this belief system long before I did. Modern analysts and neurobiological researchers have helped me to know that the better I am at putting these experiences into words and discovering what emotions are harbored in these aches and pains, my experience of physical pain changes. Within the brain, putting the primitive danger signals from the limbic system into words gives the cortex, and the language it holds, the chance to know and metabolize these experiences in constructive ways. As a result, the whole body benefits. In the well-functioning group, the members become co-regulators, so that resistance can function in the most effective way. Most of the time when I put my pain into words, the pain gets smaller. It took many years of individual and group therapy to come to these realizations. For me, the process of traipsing through the offices of healer after healer and ultimately arriving at a deeper understanding of my pain in individual and group therapy has been enlightening every step of the way. Though I would have liked to feel better sooner, I am in a much friendlier relationship with myself as a result of this work. Oh, and my pain is less, too. It is not cured, but it is manageable, and I know much more about the benefits of expressing a broad range of feelings, be they anger, pleasure, fear, or anything else, instead of suppressing them. I now know something about what my pain communicates to me, and how the body-to-mind connection can be honored in the ser-
RESISTANCE AND MY FAVORITE PATIENT 397
vice of greater emotional freedom and deeper connections with people. In the course of my work week, I can use my experience of pain to elucidate countertransference, and we all know by now how valuable our countertransference is in shedding light on what is happening in our groups and our individual group members. If I am feeling shoulder pain, heart pounding, a stomach ache, I can ask my group members if anyone else is feeling pain, pounding heart, or body aches, and chances are very good someone will speak up. Thus begins a conversation about the preconscious, about the way emotions and thoughts reside in cells, neurons, muscles, stomachs, or any other organs of our group members. This begins the process of reducing resistance and opening the chance for connection. This is therapeutic gold, when the study of pain leads to discovery of resistance and the verbal pathways through it. As I sit in my group and study the various resistances at play in my group members, I think about that cardboard box with its internal mysteries. I observe all the ways these group members are revealing or hiding their own internal mysteries, longing for connection yet attempting to protect themselves from pain and suffering. Like those zigzagging electrons, group members often travel every which way but straight across to each other. Rather than talk about their thoughts and feelings toward each other in the moment and why they have them, they talk about the past, they talk about the future, they talk about their trips, they ask fact-finding questions, they quickly change the subject if the connection gets too close, they stare out the window and think about what they’ll have for dinner. They may be sensing common ground with each other, even love, but nonverbal empathy is a cheap substitute for intimacy. Like my experience of pain, each one of these resistances can be understood as a message from history, the living example of our group members’ dilemmas when it comes to connection. Many writers on resistance, I have found, speak of “resolving resistance,” but I would argue that “regulating resistance” is a better way to look at it. Just as electricity needs some resistance to function effectively, we all need our own personal dimmer switch
398 MORRIS
to regulate our internal experience and convert it into constructive communication. We cannot be in an emotionally receptive condition at all times, completely open to what comes in or what goes out. That would be exhausting. The goal is not to be forever open, but to know our resistance, to love it even, and to work with it. As group leaders, we can help to accomplish this by bringing to bear our intuitions, our self-awareness, our histories, and our experiences from therapists, supervisors, and our own groups. We use bridging, joining, and many other methods to cultivate a group climate of open communication with the most functional, serviceable resistances possible. We apply our theoretical training and our personal artistry, in collaboration with the wisdom of our group members, to investigate and understand these resistances, help our patients see themselves through new eyes, and find the ways that this knowledge benefits them and others. Most importantly, we bring to this work our intuitions, our self-awareness, our histories, and our experience. To that end, remember above all: Be your own favorite patient!
REFERENCES Furgeri, L., Ed. (2001). The technique of group treatment: The collected works of Louis R. Ormont, Ph.D. Madison, CT: Psychosocial Press. Rosenthal, L. (1987). Resolving resistance in group psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Sheftel, S. (Ed.) (1991). Just say everything: A festschrift in honor of Hyman Spotnitz. New York: Association for Modern Psychoanalysis. Zeisel, E. (2009). Affect education and the development of the interpersonal ego in modern group analysis. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 59, 421-432. 8140 North Mopac Expy. Building 2, Suite 200 Austin, TX 78759 E-mail: [email protected]
Resistance and My Favorite Patient JANICE M. MORRIS, PH.D., ABPP, FAGPA, CGP
My favorite patient is: me. This is as it should be for each of
us. The more we know about ourselves, the better able we are to use ourselves as instruments to guide the work of psychotherapy. With this idea in mind, I will tell you how my particular journey to self-understanding has helped guide my understanding of resistance and my work with my therapy groups. Twenty-five years ago before I was pregnant for the second time, I began to be aware of pain that was developing along my left shoulder blade. First an annoyance that disrupted my enjoyment of sleeping late on a Saturday morning, then a noticeable and persistent pain during the body-changing experience of pregnancy, and finally a chronic pain that spread to my neck and upper back, this pain became my constant companion for years. Professionals of all stripes had their theories and treatments. The chiropractor attended to spinal alignment, the physiatrist to weak ligaments, the Feldenkreis therapist to movement, the physical therapist to the asymmetric position of my shoulder blades, the traditional physician to fibromyalgia, the nutritionist to the imbalance of nutrients, the osteopath to neurological disruptions from various surgeries and scar tissue, the massage therapist to muscle spasms and circulation, and the Alexander Technique therapist to balance and movement. To chronicle 25 years of pain and treatments in one paragraph is a bit mind-boggling, at least for me. Each of these treatments
Janice M. Morris is in private practice in Austin, Texas and Faculty at the Center for Group Studies in New York. A version of this article appeared in The Voice, the newsletter of the Austin Group Psychotherapy Society in the fall of 2013.
391
392 MORRIS
helped a little and none of them cured me. What interests me especially for the purposes of this article is that for many years I never allowed myself to consider the idea this pain could have psychological underpinnings or that the key to better health lay in interpersonal connections. I thought what was going on with my body was entirely physical in nature, both in its origins and in the solutions offered in the one-to-one relationship of healer to sufferer. Perhaps being rear-ended by a Kenworth truck in 1986 was the starting point. We will never know. Regardless of the cause, there is no mistaking this pain had psychological effects. It was depressing to be in pain all the time, to have my sleep disrupted, to have my work day affected by the constant throbbing or jabbing pain in my shoulder blade, to have the pain migrate and radiate to my neck, back, and chest or trigger systemic fatigue. Travel plans, gardening, exercise, work and play, all had to be carefully considered with the cost of pain in mind. After a number of years of talking with my therapist about all manner of emotional issues, I casually mentioned my battle with chronic pain. To my surprise, he was intensely interested in the history and the details of my experiences. At first I was skeptical that there was any point to telling him this long sad story other than the gratification of being understood and hoping for a little sympathy. My therapist, however, was listening to my words and considering the idea that this pain could be understood as a preverbal communication of emotional experience, and to my astonishment, as a resistance. Not that he used the word resistance, but he employed his understanding of the unconscious to explore what the pain was communicating in preverbal language, and study the way it was blocking my progress in life. The work in therapy, in Hyman Spotnitz’s (see Sheftel, 1991) words, is to “just say everything,” which includes translating preverbal phenomena (tears, twinges, nausea, headaches to name a few) into language. My therapist had the freedom of imagination to ask me questions like, “Has anyone assaulted you from behind?” “Has anyone been stabbing you in the back?” Crazy questions like this opened my mind to consider the emotional ingredients of this physical pain, and to consider what words were bound up in these spasms and aches. Hold this idea in mind for a few paragraphs while I digress.
RESISTANCE AND MY FAVORITE PATIENT 393
Long, long ago in my high school physics class, I was handed a sealed cardboard box with an object inside. My job was to identify what was in the box without seeing it. I could hold the box, shake it, tilt it, or do whatever else I could think of to assess the shape, weight, and composition of the mysterious object inside. The business of psychotherapy is not unlike that physics class project. People come to us with emotional difficulties and the desire to feel better, and our job is to understand them. In order to understand who they are and what needs to happen for them to get better, we are lending ourselves to a relationship with them and trying to understand the objects inside, the forces we cannot see that are both the elements of suffering and the keys to healing. The more transparent our patients are, the better we and their therapy group can understand them, and the more likely they are to grow and progress in life. This invitation to be transparent is highly objectionable to most people, to say the least. If people have been shamed, frightened, rejected, abandoned, emotionally suffocated, or controlled as a result of being seen by the people closest to them, then no way are they going to readily risk this pain again. I was no exception. Thus we encounter resistance. Resistance was a term used in the study of electricity long before Freud introduced it as a psychological phenomenon in the late 1880s. To understand psychological resistance it is useful to understand how it works with electricity. Here is what www.physicsclasssroom.com says about the electrical version of resistance: An electron traveling through the wires and loads of the external circuit encounters resistance. Resistance is the hindrance to the flow of charge. For an electron, the journey from terminal to terminal is not a direct route. Rather, it is a zigzag path that results from countless collisions with fixed atoms within the conducting material. The electrons encounter resistance—a hindrance to their movement. While the electric potential difference established between the two terminals encourages the movement of charge, it is resistance that discourages it.
Picture a bunch of electrons traveling through a wire and powering a light bulb. If there is not enough resistance to regulate the charge, the light bulb could explode. If there is too much resistance because, say, you cut the wire from the battery and recon-
394 MORRIS
nect it with a section of string, the bulb will never light. Thus, resistance is necessary for energy to flow with the proper amount of regulation, like a dimmer switch controls the brightness of a light or a circuit breaker stops a power surge from a lightning strike. The same is true for people, both as individuals trying to make sense of their inner experience and translate it into words and groups of people trying to connect with each other. Too little resistance overloads the connection between members. In a group, this might look like one member overwhelming another member with aggression that is too intense. Too much resistance slows or blocks the connection. In a group, this might look like the silent member, or the member who “throws a circuit breaker” by looking away when the connection gets too intense. Most importantly for this discussion, the study of resistance in people is a window to understanding and a potential pathway to healing. When we invite a group of people to come together, agree to a contract, and engage each other in ways that will help them develop intimacy, we are asking them to do something quite terrifying, really. Tell a group member you love her? Tell someone you are hurt, angry, or jealous? Risk being vulnerable, doing damage, feeling humiliated? God forbid. Rosenthal (1987) invites us to keep in mind that our group members employ every protection they know to maintain equilibrium, avoid shame, and prevent pain. How do we identify resistance? Modern analysts have a contract for group members in which they agree to arrive on time and stay till the end, refrain from socializing outside the group, take their fair share of the talking time, pay their bill at the end of the month in the right amount, and keep things confidential. We also place a premium on verbal communications that are in the moment, emotional, and progressive. In other words, communications contain feelings directed toward each other, and, rather than being repetitive and stagnant, these reveal new personality features. Deviation from this contract is considered resistance and is expected. Rather than trying to overcome it, change it, or correct it, we study it and help our group members understand its purpose well enough that it eventually becomes unnecessary or can be regulated to be something more functional. Lou Ormont (see Furgeri, 2001) said that everything you need to know
RESISTANCE AND MY FAVORITE PATIENT 395
about a patient’s history is in the resistance. We welcome resistance as manifestation of what the patient has been doing all his life, and how he has been depriving himself of the intimacy he claims to want. Back to my chronic pain. Zeisel (2009) observes that there are three pathways for the expression of feelings available to human beings: visceral (somatic expressions), acting out (feelings are expressed through actions), and psychic (feelings are discharged through language). As my therapist began listening to my pain, he proposed I share with my therapy group my experience of pain whenever it became apparent to me, inviting me to report these visceral communications with language. I could not imagine how this would help me, but I cooperated. As I committed to this transparency of self, wondering when the group would grow tired of hearing it, wondering how I would be pathologized, wondering how I could endure the shame of reporting an experience that felt so far out of my control, what I discovered in the telling was breathtakingly different. The more I shared, the more the group joined me in investigating this experience. The group leader treated my communications of bodily experience as potential pathways to understanding what in me and in the group was not being expressed in words. If I reported that my heart was pounding, or my shoulder was aching, group members responded either with their own physical complaints or with their ideas of what aggression, sadness, anger, or irritation was felt but unspoken in me and in themselves. One member noticed that my pain, rather than being constant in one part of my body, seemed to move around in relation to what was happening in the group. Sharp pain, stabbing pain, aching pain were like many different melodies of emotional expression. He expressed optimism that I could get better once we understood their meaning. These were startling new ideas to me. Suddenly, what I had treated as an enemy of my well-being became an asset, a window into understanding myself and others. This discovery is what we hope for with each and every one of our group members, that they can develop a friendly interest in what lives and breathes inside of them, and value the communication of these experiences for better connection to themselves and to each other. For me, pain was my somatic language for all sorts of emotions…anger, fear,
396 MORRIS
and anxiety just for starters. These emotions were not fluently expressed in my constricted, inhibited family of origin. Remember Ormont’s statement that everything you need to know about a patient is in the resistance? Ask my mother how, as a tender young sophomore in college, she got the news her mother had died. She will tell you her older brother called her to deliver the news, but she was not told by anyone that the cause was bone cancer until years later. Matters of the body, especially disease processes, were shameful malfunctions to be hidden from society, even one’s closest family. My inheritance from my mother was the idea that mind and body are separate and alien. Physical experience starts in the body and stops at the neck. No wonder I had neck and shoulder pain, the result of my own personal don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. Body-oriented therapists understood the ramifications of this belief system long before I did. Modern analysts and neurobiological researchers have helped me to know that the better I am at putting these experiences into words and discovering what emotions are harbored in these aches and pains, my experience of physical pain changes. Within the brain, putting the primitive danger signals from the limbic system into words gives the cortex, and the language it holds, the chance to know and metabolize these experiences in constructive ways. As a result, the whole body benefits. In the well-functioning group, the members become co-regulators, so that resistance can function in the most effective way. Most of the time when I put my pain into words, the pain gets smaller. It took many years of individual and group therapy to come to these realizations. For me, the process of traipsing through the offices of healer after healer and ultimately arriving at a deeper understanding of my pain in individual and group therapy has been enlightening every step of the way. Though I would have liked to feel better sooner, I am in a much friendlier relationship with myself as a result of this work. Oh, and my pain is less, too. It is not cured, but it is manageable, and I know much more about the benefits of expressing a broad range of feelings, be they anger, pleasure, fear, or anything else, instead of suppressing them. I now know something about what my pain communicates to me, and how the body-to-mind connection can be honored in the ser-
RESISTANCE AND MY FAVORITE PATIENT 397
vice of greater emotional freedom and deeper connections with people. In the course of my work week, I can use my experience of pain to elucidate countertransference, and we all know by now how valuable our countertransference is in shedding light on what is happening in our groups and our individual group members. If I am feeling shoulder pain, heart pounding, a stomach ache, I can ask my group members if anyone else is feeling pain, pounding heart, or body aches, and chances are very good someone will speak up. Thus begins a conversation about the preconscious, about the way emotions and thoughts reside in cells, neurons, muscles, stomachs, or any other organs of our group members. This begins the process of reducing resistance and opening the chance for connection. This is therapeutic gold, when the study of pain leads to discovery of resistance and the verbal pathways through it. As I sit in my group and study the various resistances at play in my group members, I think about that cardboard box with its internal mysteries. I observe all the ways these group members are revealing or hiding their own internal mysteries, longing for connection yet attempting to protect themselves from pain and suffering. Like those zigzagging electrons, group members often travel every which way but straight across to each other. Rather than talk about their thoughts and feelings toward each other in the moment and why they have them, they talk about the past, they talk about the future, they talk about their trips, they ask fact-finding questions, they quickly change the subject if the connection gets too close, they stare out the window and think about what they’ll have for dinner. They may be sensing common ground with each other, even love, but nonverbal empathy is a cheap substitute for intimacy. Like my experience of pain, each one of these resistances can be understood as a message from history, the living example of our group members’ dilemmas when it comes to connection. Many writers on resistance, I have found, speak of “resolving resistance,” but I would argue that “regulating resistance” is a better way to look at it. Just as electricity needs some resistance to function effectively, we all need our own personal dimmer switch
398 MORRIS
to regulate our internal experience and convert it into constructive communication. We cannot be in an emotionally receptive condition at all times, completely open to what comes in or what goes out. That would be exhausting. The goal is not to be forever open, but to know our resistance, to love it even, and to work with it. As group leaders, we can help to accomplish this by bringing to bear our intuitions, our self-awareness, our histories, and our experiences from therapists, supervisors, and our own groups. We use bridging, joining, and many other methods to cultivate a group climate of open communication with the most functional, serviceable resistances possible. We apply our theoretical training and our personal artistry, in collaboration with the wisdom of our group members, to investigate and understand these resistances, help our patients see themselves through new eyes, and find the ways that this knowledge benefits them and others. Most importantly, we bring to this work our intuitions, our self-awareness, our histories, and our experience. To that end, remember above all: Be your own favorite patient!
REFERENCES Furgeri, L., Ed. (2001). The technique of group treatment: The collected works of Louis R. Ormont, Ph.D. Madison, CT: Psychosocial Press. Rosenthal, L. (1987). Resolving resistance in group psychotherapy. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Sheftel, S. (Ed.) (1991). Just say everything: A festschrift in honor of Hyman Spotnitz. New York: Association for Modern Psychoanalysis. Zeisel, E. (2009). Affect education and the development of the interpersonal ego in modern group analysis. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 59, 421-432. 8140 North Mopac Expy. Building 2, Suite 200 Austin, TX 78759 E-mail: [email protected]
