Breakthrough Moments in Arts-Based Psychotherapy

A Personal Quest to Understand Moments of Transformation in Psychotherapy

Aileen Webber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367103514
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429911569
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In psychotherapy clients sometimes experience breakthrough moments - profound moments in which their world and how they view themselves is changed for ever. But what exactly occurs during such moments? In Breakthrough Moments in Arts-Based Psychotherapy the author shares her very personal journey to discover what might be happening at these pivotal moments and demonstrates their importance for clients' change processes. Filled with examples from her own practice, the book dips into the worlds of chaos and complexity theory, neuroscience, quantum physics, and theories of change, in order to show how the use of arts-media in psychotherapy - visual images and drawing, drama and music, sand-tray and enactment - can encourage the arrival of these dramatic breakthrough moments. The aim of this unique book is to shine a spotlight for the first time on a deeply profound aspect of arts-based psychotherapy in an accessible and engaging way.

Part I
Setting the Scene

Chapter One

The first breakthrough

Iwas seven years old and sat at the kitchen table by myself eating breakfast. I was staring absentmindedly at the cartoon image on the back of a cereal box and perhaps daydreaming about the day ahead, when suddenly I was arrested by something about the image I hadn’t noticed at first. The image was of Mickey Mouse holding a bucket and spade, which was not sufficient in itself to halt the wandering attention of a seven year old, but I now noticed something else about it: on the bucket that Mickey was holding there was a smaller version of the same image of Mickey Mouse holding a bucket, and on that bucket there, again, was the image of Mickey Mouse holding a bucket, and so on and so on, smaller and smaller, as far as my eye could see.

It was my first vivid encounter with the recursive phenomenon of mise en abyme—a formal technique from Western art history in which a given image contains a smaller copy of itself, in a sequence that appears to recur infinitely. My seven-year-old imagination was enchanted and bewildered by the mind-boggling effect. Mickey and his bucket were getting smaller and smaller until they were so small I could see nothing at all. And yet still I imagined him going on and on.

Even now, some six decades later, I can recall how radically and dramatically my way of viewing the world seemed to shift in that moment. I was awestruck, confused, excited … breakfast was abandoned. I had stumbled upon the single most important thought I had ever had and with it came endless new questions: Do these Mickey Mouse images go on forever? What is forever? And if an image seems to go on forever then where does it end? What would the end of forever look like? I did not have the vocabulary for concepts such as infinity or eternity. My mind hurt with trying to think about all these things, and I became aware for the first time of another person awakening within me. A deeply questioning person. In fact, this was so far beyond my usual experience that I felt as if I was an entirely different person to the one who had sat down to breakfast. I mentioned it to my parents, to my brother, to my friends and teachers, but no one seemed to share my wonderment.

When people ask me when my fascination began with breakthrough moments in therapy, I always come back to this striking moment my young mind was blown open by a seemingly infinite series of Mickey Mouses. It was my first clear memory of thinking about the unthinkable, which was to become a lifelong obsession. Ever since that moment I have yearned to increase my understanding and satisfy my curiosity about existential mysteries. I recall thinking in my seven-year-old mind that this was something vitally important and that seeing as other people didn’t share my conviction it must be up to me to pursue it.

This is a book about breakthrough moments in arts-based psychotherapy. In this first chapter I look at how I first became fascinated by charged moments in therapeutic relationships and how they led me to train and practise as an integrative arts psychotherapist. I will present a number of examples of the sorts of moments I am referring to, from the perspective of both client and therapist. I will explain how I came to understand and classify them as breakthrough moments and how I ultimately chose the research methodology for this book.

My Mickey Mouse experience was a turning point. My seven-year-old self was forever changed in a single moment. I had a new, previously unformed belief that there is infinitely more to this world than we can ever know, and that the most fascinating and compelling way to live one’s life is to question the things we take to be commonplace. From this point onwards, one part of me carried on with mundane everyday existence while another part got lost in impossibly big questions: Why are we here? How did we get here? What does it mean to be alive? Where do we go when we die? What is my purpose in life? Thanks to that cereal box I have had a continual dialogue with myself about these existential questions for many years now. These questions challenge me, possess me and often unsettle me, but most surprisingly perhaps, they are comforting. They remind me there is far more to this life than first appears and that our journey on this earth is wonderfully steeped in mystery.

Becoming a therapist

As I emerged from childhood to adolescence I dabbled with different religions and schools of philosophy but none were ever able to present what felt like satisfactory answers to the recurring questions that haunted me. One of the biggest of these questions was always: what is my purpose in life? I kept changing my mind as to what might be the answer. I became a teacher of children with disabilities, an advisory teacher for children with special needs; I studied the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. I even dabbled in art, creating my own paintings and drawings. And I had two children of my own. And for a while this felt enough.

But when my three-year-old son started grappling with big existential questions of his own I felt ill-equipped to satisfactorily answer him: “What is beyond the stars?” he would ask me, or “Where does the universe end?” One day he said simply, “Why am I me and not someone else?” I did not want to be intellectually dishonest with him and felt compelled each time to answer, “I don’t know”. As an adult himself now, my son assures me that the fact I never ended his stream of “why?” questions with a false answer or a “because I said so” was deeply important to the development of his own inquisitive mind. He recalls that together we would revel in mutual wonderment about the fact we simply didn’t know and that this ultimately led him on a lifelong quest of his own to pursue the impossible answers for himself.

It was seeing the same burning questions begin to arise in my son’s mind that strongly reawakened them in my own. I decided to find a fulfilling new career—one in which I could acknowledge and somehow live among these existential questions. I wanted to help people engage with how to live their lives in the most satisfying way possible. And so—alongside no doubt many other unconscious motivators—I found myself embarking on training to work with children and adults as a gestalt psychotherapist.

Gestalt therapy is a humanistic-existential therapy concerned with a client’s awareness of what they feel (about their issues, lives, and behaviour) in the present moment. Intellectual explanations and interpretations (from client or therapist) are generally considered less relevant. One of the first requirements of this training was to find a gestalt therapist to work with me, as well as an experienced trainer. I was fortunate enough to find two of the most exceptional practitioners, and the trajectory of my four required years of weekly therapy was extraordinary and life-changing. It took me to places and emotions I had never experienced. It enabled me to delve deeply into my unconscious and begin to understand how much of my past was still there, in my present. But as amazing as all of this was, it was not the thing that astounded me most.

What arrested me most about the work was the mystifying arrival of sudden and unexpected moments within a therapy session—moments in which the ground beneath me seemed to shift and the therapist and I were transported to another realm of experience, much like Ben’s experience with the orangutan postcard. These profound moments, which occurred time after time, had the power to bring about new realisations that changed everything I thought I knew about myself and my way of being in the world. There were many such moments; one that I remember particularly vividly involved the acting out of a dream I had had in which I was carrying my red bicycle up a spiral staircase. In the dream I was trying to manage the contortions I had to put my body through to carry out such a difficult feat. Whilst I was engaged in acting out this impossible task, I looked up and caught the eye of my therapist. We both spontaneously burst into laughter and seemed to meet each other in a new way.

The humorous side of the moment was just one aspect of the experience. It was also the first time I had viscerally felt how the contortions in my life (at that time) were being physically and analogously represented by the contortions I was putting my body through as I attempted to carry my bicycle up the spiral staircase. I realised my dream was a powerful metaphor that seemed to contain the message: why do you make your life more complicated than it needs to be? Within this new, felt understanding was the genesis of what would later become a profound change for me. It felt like a genuine moment of transformation.

This pivotal moment with my gestalt therapist stayed with me. Every time I felt life twisting me up in knots, I remembered that ascent up the spiral staircase. It would make me laugh and I would look anew at whatever was the current set of circumstances. Time after time, as a result of this realisation, I would metaphorically put down my bike and just climb up the staircase. It was as if thinking about leaving my bike at the “bottom of the stairs” allowed me to leave unnecessary details and difficulties of a situation behind and just get on with it.

In short, this one, dramatically potent moment ultimately led me to change my entire habit of overcomplicating my life. The end result being that I was irrevocably changed in a way I was extremely grateful for and continually surprised about. But what was it about this initial moment that had brought about such a profound change in me? I can remember feeling a buzzing in my head and the sensation of being in a dream or trance. This was accompanied by a sudden and powerful moment of clarity. It felt like an overturning of my previous thoughts, feelings, and ways of behaving. At the same time it held the potential for change and the possibility of a new way of encountering and dealing with problems. Like the best possible kind of eureka moment, it felt as though I could never not know this fundamental truth about myself again.

Once I had discovered firsthand this powerful way in which therapy can assist a client to change, I was sold. I had intuitively believed therapy could help a person, but this moment and others like it had shown me it could have a profound, mysterious power to heal beyond anything I had previously imagined. I became very excited. If I could steer my own clients to (and through) such profound moments, I felt sure it could make a difference to their lives in deeply significant ways. But here was the problem. How could I ever hope to enable my clients to experience similarly resonant and mysterious breakthrough moments when in truth I had no idea how my own had really occurred? Perhaps only experienced therapists were able to provide a setting in which such moments could occur. Perhaps they knew some special trick or technique that made them arise.

No amount of pondering on the subject gave me an answer and I began to sense that my own clients might never experience something akin to my bicycle-staircase moment. I felt deeply disappointed. If moments like these were the most important and transformative part of my own personal therapy, it would be a sad lack if my clients never had the chance to have similar experiences of their own. Just as I was beginning to feel that such a moment would never arise for one of my own clients, on an otherwise ordinary working day, a small but promising example occurred that helped me reassess my opinion.

Jade’s story

Jade was trying to explain to me how desperate she was feeling one day. This young female client of thirteen years said that a fury had erupted in her when she was told to take her jacket off in class. The only way she could feel safe enough to be in the classroom was if she wore her jacket with the hood up. Why couldn’t her teacher understand that? She was becoming visibly exasperated as she recounted the experience (despite the fact that she was wearing the jacket in question at the time, her face half hidden by its large hood). I was understanding of her point of view and deliberately did not present any opposition. In fact, I found myself thinking the jacket was indeed necessary for her, as it was a form of defence against what she experienced as total vulnerability, both in her classroom environment and now here with me, in her therapy session.

I asked if Jade could describe what it had felt like to be told to remove her coat. She thought about it for a while and then, hesitatingly, said it was as though there was a volcano hidden inside her jacket. I asked if she could describe it further and she began telling me about the colours, the noise, the rumbling and the eruption of the volcano. As she did so, she seemed to be going through some of the stages of the actual experience. I could see this in her body but made no comment as I did not want to break the spell of what was happening for her. “People always annoy me!” she said petulantly but then, sitting back in her chair with a triumphant air, she seemed suddenly to arrive at a new realisation. A breakthrough. She looked at me and it felt as though our eyes, our minds and our hearts met in a profoundly connected moment. In fact, this feeling between us was so profound that Jade quickly looked away. Loudly and in one big rush she suddenly said, all hesitation having vanished, “It’s like there is this fire inside me. All these people keep getting at me. In class the other day, it built up and up and the stupid teacher said ‘take off your jacket Jade!’” Her colour was reddening. “That was the final straw that ignited the whole volcano and then it erupted!”

I found myself picturing poor Jade disintegrating in a massive explosion—I had an alarmingly vivid picture of this actually happening. I was unsure what she needed from me, her therapist, and I rather inadequately said, “Wow! No wonder you felt as though you might explode!” Fortunately, it didn’t matter what I had said. The experience had already been so profound and her realisation so filled with new, visceral understanding that Jade did not require much from me. She needed me only to empathically attune to the magnitude of her feeling and accept her belief that the volcanic eruption of anger could not have been prevented. Up until now she had not been able to properly understand why being asked to take her jacket off had resulted in her screaming and swearing at the teacher. Now she saw it vividly. She had shown herself, through the use of the metaphorical imagery of a volcano, what had been taking place within her at this time. Her breakthrough was the realisation that it was a build-up of all the previous times she had been told what to do that had led to her explosion. Her teacher’s command to “take your coat off, Jade”—which was after all just a reminder of the school rule about not wearing coats indoors—was the final straw in a long line of previous demands made upon her.

* * *

Jade’s breakthrough moment was the first that I witnessed as a therapist. It had slipped magically into the session and in truth I had done very little to encourage its arrival. I found myself wondering if moments like this just wondrously arose in all therapy. It wasn’t long afterwards however that another such moment occurred, one that was even more strikingly transformative for the client involved, and one t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PROLOGUE The story begins …
• PART I: SETTING THE SCENE
• PART II: EXPLORING THE PRESENT MOMENT
• PART III: THERAPIST–CLIENT–ART RELATIONSHIP
• PART IV: TURNING TO THE SCIENCES
• PART V: THE END OF THE JOURNEY
• EPILOGUE The story ends …
• REFERENCES
• INDEX