Truth, Trust And Relationships

Healing Interventions In Contextual Therapy

Barbara R. Krasner, Austin J. Joyce

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134862054
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The authors identify direct address, a dialogic way of address and response, as the fundamental means of healing in relationships, especially in the family, viewing residual trust as the keystone of the dialogic process.

PART I

Roots of Relationship

1

Here Am I

Let us consider the most elementary of all facts of our intercourse with one another. The word that is spoken is uttered here and heard there, but its spokenness has its place in “the between.”

—Buber, The Knowledge of Man

THE REALM OF THE BETWEEN

In this chapter we mean to illuminate the ontic roots of relationship, trust, truth, loyalty, and justice. In the beginning infants are born into a context in which they require care and direct address. Eventually they are called upon to offer care and direct address to those who people their world. Loyalty to those people is generic, genetic, and binding. Justice between them is predicated on fair give-and-take. Trust is the basic requirement of justice. And speech-with-meaning creates truth that elicits trust. These ontic dynamics are at play in what Martin Buber has called the realm of “the between” and Paul Tillich has called “the really real.”

Buber uses the term “dialogical” to describe how the sphere of the between unfolds. The psychological, he says, that which happens within each person's soul, is only the secret accompaniment of the dialogical. The meaning of dialogue is found not in either one or the other of the partners, nor in both added together, but rather in their interchange. Friedman writes that this distinction between the “dialogical” and the “psychological” constitutes a radical attack on the psychologism of our age. It makes manifest the fundamental ambiguity of psychologists who embrace dialogue as an ideal but tend to identify this dialogue as a function of a person's self-acceptance rather than as a value in itself (Friedman, 1985).

The dialogical unfolding of the between has its primal origins in the transgenerational realities of a person's dynamic family legacy. In that sense dialogue is never simply an interchange between two unrelated persons. While Buber's notion of healing through meeting can occur any time that two people are fully present to each other, their capacity to be truly present is influenced in great measure by how each of them was addressed in their family of origin. We mean to argue then that the philosophical anthropology undergirding contextual theory and therapy is founded not on esoteric concepts but on concrete, living moments that are the bedrock from which truth and trust evolve. How a person has been addressed or dismissed, heard or silenced, acknowledged or discredited, constitutes the cornerstone of his or her wholeness, uniqueness, and courage to face the world.

We mean to argue that at base committed relationship can prevail only between the unshakable poles of truth and trust. Commitment is rooted in a will and a call to dialogue that reverberates back to Adam himself—when he is asked, “Where art thou?” And however tentatively and with whatever fear and trepidation, Adam finds a way to respond, “Here am I.” Here in the very genesis of the world as (wo)man encounters it, (s)he is faced with a mandate for dialogue. Dialogue is a reminder that something can happen not merely “to” us and “in” us but also “between” us (Buber, 1965b, p. 102). This then is the starting point for dialogue about dialogue.

The most common presenting problem of adults coming into therapy is their inability to say, “Here am I.” In our experience, few people have cohesive ground under their feet. In general, people typically do not know what they want and do not want what they know. Their basic stance tends to be reactive, implicitly blaming of spouse, parents, children, employer, the “system,” and friends. Anyone will do. Initially impelled by fear of pain, given or received, people actively opt, by omission and commission, for hurt withdrawal, imposition, and other well-entrenched barriers and dismissive defenses of monologue. “Adam, where art thou?” is never a question for monologic humans. “Here am I” is never their response to life's call and demands. But a choice for trust is inevitably a choice for dialogue, dialogue as method, process, and way.

A Fundamental Conviction

At base, dialogue is relationship's catalyzing tooi, its fundamental conviction, its creative process, and its healing and redeeming way. As a method, dialogue, with all of the fear and trauma it inspires in family members, is empowered in the therapy room by the existence of residual resources in almost any given context. The therapist's capacity to catalyze dialogue is strictly mandated by the fact of a preexisting mutuality of commitment among family members who may or may not present themselves in the therapy room. Dialogue is endowed with a revelatory function that is wholly dependent on catalyzing its two stages: self-delineation and due consideration (see Boszormenyi-Nagy & Krasner, 1986, Between Give and Take, p. 75–81). Peoples' willingness to disclose their ground and to offer consideration to the truths of another can invariably be linked to the in-built human longing to hold and be held accountable for justice owed and deserved. As a method, the therapist's use of dialogue is a pointer without context, a guide to an undisclosed way.

Martin Buber put it this way: “I have no teaching,” he wrote, “I only point to something. I point to something in reality that had not or had too little been seen. I take him who listens to me by the hand and lead him to the window and point to what is outside” (Friedman & Schilpp, 1967, p. 698). That, I think, is our mandate and our task. We too point to something. Contextual theory and therapy have foliowed Martin Buber's lead. Here the method points to the content that a cliënt and his or her context bring. The therapist, impelled by courage, conviction, and repeated investments in dialogue, points to the signs of relational failure that underscore the absence of dialogue, relational failures that have been presented unilaterally. Methodologies that create options for ethical reengagement can be explored at many levels. Multidirected partiality, rejunction, therapeutic expectations, inclusiveness, timing, crediting, and eliciting are all complex and catalyzing leverages for helping family members reengage (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Krasner 1986).

MONOLOGUE

The “Norm” of Family Life

The fundamental premise of dialogue is that there is always some validity in every person's side. I may disagree with you. I may feel injured by you. But I cannot eclipse your reality. You may react to my stance. You may feel rejected by me. But you cannot use monologue to invalidate my reality.

Monologue is often the norm of family life. People talk at many levels, but deep loyalties typically silence family members from fairly raising hard questions with each other. The task of contextual therapy is to initiate dialogue. Dialogue offers the option of merited trust. Monologue imposes blame. Dialogue offers due consideration and acknowledgment. Monologue undercuts, discredits, and negates. Dialogue offers the option of multilateral truth and shared opportunities. Monologue is blinded by one-sided truth and forces people into unintended isolation.

The story of a father's ability to connect his truth with his son's truths powerfully embodies the living reality of truth and trust between the generations. Mark, a man of infinite sensitivity and loving concern, carries shame and regret over his impulse to be angry at Jeremy, 12, his only child. “Why couldn't you just get dressed?” Mark asks Jeremy in a family session. “You knew we were attending your cousin's First Communion.” Turning to the therapist, Mark continues, “I was frustrated as heil at Jeremy's dawdling and refusal to get dressed. And his mother was so patient! She told him that sometimes you have to do things in a family that you don't want to do.” “It occurs to me, Mark,” said the therapist, “that what you describe as your wife's infinite patience is simply the opposite side of the coin of your knee-jerk annoyance. One of you is indulgent, the other dismissive. In neither case does anyone ask what's happening to Jeremy.” “What does that mean?” asked Mark. “Jeremy,” said the therapist, “can you teil your dad what kept you from getting dressed? What did you expect of this family event?” “It was going to be boring,” he said, “and Fd have to stay indoors all day.” The therapist asked, “If you could have stayed at home, what might your day have been like then?” “I would have played outside and hung out with my friends,” replied Jeremy.

Mark sat there shaking his head. “When I was growing up, my father told me what to do and I did it—no discussion. Nobody ever asked me why.” “Do you teil your father what's happening to you, Jeremy?” the therapist asked. “No,” he replied. “But you're able to talk to your mom?” the therapist pressed. “Yes, it's easier,” he replied shyly.

An indulgent mom, an angry dad, a silent child. Truth withheld, trust untested, connections disrupted. Caring people trapped in monologue. The move from monologue to dialogue offers family members new ears to hear, new eyes to see, and a new voice with which to speak and respond (Krasner & McCabe, 1987).

DIALOGUE

A Relational Paradigm

Dialogue stands at the heart of contextual therapy as it stands at the heart of life itself. The basic premises of contextual work, that is, the paradigm that informs us in all our complexity, are to be found everywhere under the surface of all kinds of historical, political, cultural, class, and religious realities and phenomena. It is our view that dynamically every entity is born or created in a given context:

• That all relationships, political, philosophical, and cultural, are shaped by loyalties to their origins and carry balances of freedom and responsibility
• That loyalty, inertia, stagnation, custom, and convenience operate to maintain these balances, even in the face of injustices, exploitation, injuries, and general dissatisfaction
• That when these injustices tip the scale intolerably, for even one person or simultaneously for a number of people, the ethical dimension of existence is engaged and inevitably forces a reconsideration of the dynamic equilibrium by which the members of any system live out their day-to-day lives
• That the primary methodology for engaging the ethical dimension of existence begins with identifying the sources of one's own victimization, feit and real
• That utilizing the first stage of dialogue (self-delineation) has to do with disclosing particular grievances in either a radical (a revolutionary) or a conservative (an evolutionary) mode

To put it in other terms, a person's capacity for independence and interdependence essentially emerges from a premise that justifies individual freedom, interpersonal justice, and a reconsideration of ethical balances. These balances are weighed on the scales of merited trust. They contain the reasons why family members or members of any loyalty group revolt against self-isolation, cutoffs, impositions, and retribution. They motivate us to overthrow stagnant burdens in an effort to regain, again and again, fresh balances of give-and-take.

Doing Like Dad

To demonstrate our point, let's return to Mark, a caring father in active pursuit of his son. This is not an absentee parent, this is not a man of indifference, but a person invested in making sense of his own unreworked family legacy. Mark and Jeremy often play basketball after dinner. One particular evening they go outdoors, and after a few minutes a neighbor stops by and asks Mark to come over to see a newly acquired painting. He and his family are moving away soon, so there is some time pressure in the request. Mark hesitates, looks at Jeremy and says, “Sure, I'll come.” “Fm going with David,” he tells Jeremy. “T'll catch up with you later.” He invites Jeremy to come along but the 12-year-old refuses.

Jeremy is dismayed. It is not the first time that he has been ranked second best to his father's outside demands. He goes inside and tells his mother. She consoles him, trying to justify his father's actions, and the issue seems closed. “Why didn't you talk to your father?” the therapist asked. The boy shrugged, “Grown-ups can do what they want to do. There wouldn't have been any point.”

Mark recounted how caught he feit between his neighbor and his son. The therapist asked Jeremy if he were aware of his father's distress. He shook his head no. Mark repeated that in childhood, he was expected to do what his father required. The therapist asked Mark whether he might have deferred the visit to his neighbor. Might he have said, “Jeremy and I are playing basketball. I'd like to come over later. I'll call you after we are done”? “It seems too obvious when you put it that way,” Mark replied. “But I rarely operate as if I have a choice.”

Mark's father died suddenly several years ago and left him with a massive repository of anger and hurt. Still he missed his father and cried easily at any mention of his name. Over the past handful of years, he had tried to reconstruct where his anger belonged. Like many men in therapy, he wept easily at any mention of his father's name. Mark longed to know that he was cherished by his father. And Mark longed to cherish his son. The paradox here is that he was as quick to anger with his son as his father had been quick to anger with him. Mark had both idealized and stigmatized the father-son relationship. “When my son was born,” he recounted, “I was in the delivery room. When I saw that the baby was a boy, I said, ‘Jesus Christ, now the whole thing starts all over again.’” He carried an element of despair over whether he could address his son in a way that he himself had never been addressed. Still, Mark had increasing moments of awareness of what his father's struggles might have been. And as he was able to embrace his father's merit, he found himself increasingly free to embrace his son.

Constantly emerging declarations of independence characterize our personal journeys and pulsate in the loyalty groups called family. Our longing for autonomy addresses the fact that family members may attempt to overturn old balances, imbalances, abuses, injustices, and other destructive intermember behaviors and relational patterns through blatant or subtle unidentified activities. They may address the source of these patterns and behaviors, identify them as unreworked loyalties, and acknowledge that they are being dynamically informed. Paced by their own victimization, real and imagined, one or more family members may recognize the dilemma of destructive entitlement that characterizes their own existence and the existence of others. They may then choose, however tentatively and by whatever impetus, to grasp the methods of a trust-building way. That is, they may rejoin each other to establish and employ a dialogic form for the purposes of catalyzing new and untested options for equitable coexistence—the basic foundation of personal liberation and interpersonal responsibility.

POINTING THE WAY

Therapists may be intellectually convinced of the efficacy of dialogue. But they are often unable to catalyze dialogue in or out of the therapy room where ethics as well as psychology, commitment as well as emotion, are the loei of intervention. Intellectual affirmation of trust building is a far cry from the internalized conviction that frees a therapist to get out of the way of the client's context. Put differently, can a contextual therapist move beyond theory to differentiate clinically between the realm of psychology and the realm of “the between”?

In the face of a client's outrage and pain, can a therapist grasp the limits of empathy that excludes all family members but one? Most signifïcantly, perhaps, can contextual therapists rework their own personal status and condition as a parentified child, mate, parent, or friend in order to free themselves from the clutches of the impulse toward pastoral care or toward simple, supportive therapy? Can we help people grasp the implications of an action dimension in therapy because we ourselves know how to take action? In yet other terms, has the therapist's own inability to self-delineate transformed him or her into a victim of one-sided giving, which, taken in isolation, is just another monologic form? Our challenge here is meant to inspire freedom, not to pose judgment, to point to an ever-evolving and -deepening methodology, process, and way.

Our challenge is intended to normalize shame over roots that e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword by Maurice Friedman, Ph.D.
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• “This One’s for Me” by Alice Mann
• Part I: Roots of Relationship
• Part Ii: Ethical Tasks of a Contextual Therapist
• Epilogue
• Glossary
• References
• Index