An Introduction - Gaie Houston
Hazel Cawood
The rumour was that the theme of our one-day conference in Bristol would be around neurodiversity, neurodivergence, communication, Gestalt and creativity. What a mouthful. It has now been advertised as “Neurodiversity and Gestalt – Creative Relating”. I need to decode this title.
A very few ideas can only or most quickly be expressed in technical language. Therapyis best described and done in simple words. What is now in this context called relating means Getting on with people. Relating can mean being a relative, being a son or aunt or whatever. It can also mean telling a story. What makes us extend the word to cover how we are towards each other? How we get on How we treat each other. These are not very technical, professional, expert phrases. They have been in use for more than a thousand years. Does this make them old-hat, not modern or clever? Which is easier to understand? Creative Relating? Or Better ways of treating people?
Neurodiversity and neurodivergence are words that have come into the news only, for the most part, in this century. They are portmanteaus, suitcase words to describe many conditions already familiar to people working in this field. The intention of the inventors was to take the stigma out of words like autism or ADHD.
Some definitions of neurodivergence include self-harm, and even stretch to depression and anxiety. A stack of distressing ways of being are re-named and put in the suitcase in the hope that a new word will take the stigma out of them. That seems worth a new word. However, the word neurotypical has been coined by the same inventors, to mean what in less hypersensitive days was called normal. To be neurotypical then begins to sound desirable, rather than to be neurodivergent. The stigma has not gone away. It has just acquired a few syllables in an attempt at sanitisation.
Perls and whoever helped him write, put on paper many valuable ideas, even though they were writers in general far from being masters of clear expression. Perls himself was very clear, though, in telling therapists to resist categories, in other words to resist labelling people.
In searching for some framework for better understanding new clients, then talk of categories can sometimes be a useful shorthand in supervision. It can be useful to realise that a new client who flies off the handle at you, and talks of self-harm, may well suffer from what has come to be called borderline personality disorder. But she may not. Perhaps you provoked her to fly off the handle. Perhaps an awful scene at breakfast that morning had sensitised her to some word you said or action you performed or omitted. Whatever is going on, good Gestalt or any therapeutic behaviour is to stay in the present. The present for you the therapist is furnished with awareness of this being a first session, with awareness of how the client came to be with you, and of the effect on you of this first time of meeting her in person. Alongside this, as therapist you are likely to feel a need to be in charge, to show competence and begin to merit the trust of the client.
A safe way to do this is to be yourself. The temptation for some therapists is instead to signpost expertise and dazzle the client with polysyllabic utterances. Better to stay here and now and comment on what is going on, the concrete, rather than retreat into abstract language. Very often, what I cannot say in simple language, turns out to be something I have not fully understood. I have just been swimming around in a warm pool of second hand platitudes.
In an age when, alongside a demand for free speech, many words, innocently uttered, turn out to be likely to condemn their speaker as unacceptable, I apologise for making what may seem more nit picking requests about what to say, and at the same time I hope this observation reinforces your clear thinking and effective work with clients.
There is a quotation I often use as a supervisor. Until I use it, most people I meet have not remembered it. To me it is of fundamental importance to getting anywhere with a client. This needs to be the starting point of any episode of Gestalt therapy.
The “endgain” must not be forgotten. It must remain in the field of consciousness. It must stay in the background, but guarding and planning the different “means whereby” which are temporarily in the foreground. Under no condition must the “means whereby” become isolated and lose their sense as means to an end. EHA p.328 1992
Have you noticed? The key words in italics in this quotation are from Anglo-Saxon. The same writer who manipulated the word contact to make us let it describe the subtlety and huge variety of all we say and do to each other, has for now abandoned Latin and gone back to old English. Relating! Contact! Contact styles!
How utterly estranged those words are from what they mean: How you spoke to me: how I smiled at him; how we both burst out laughing and looked at each other; how she hit me. For goodness’ sake, not ‘Contact Styles of Relating’, just ‘How we get on with people.’
Thanks for reading this.
Gaie Houston is Emerita Adivser to the Gestalt Centre, is a writer, and also a supervisor, and trainer,
This piece stresses the importance of simple language in therapy, where the temptation can be to use diagnostic labels and set of initials in a way that may well be inaccurate, and is certainly likely to mystify or alarm clients.
