The word “crisis” stems from the Greek word krinein, which means “to judge.” This indicates that crisis is linked with (re)evaluation, values, and choice. So, crisis is not just a misfortune. Times of crisis may also be times of growth. In the face of change—positive or negative—our previous life patterns and understanding may turn out to be more or less inadequate. Extremely disturbing and anxiety-provoking as that may be, it may also be an impetus for growth and progress.
Crisis may be caused by a reduction of life’s possibilities, as, for example, when someone loses a body part or a close relative. But it may also be caused by the fact that we have expanded and have come to be greater or stronger, as in puberty or when we move away from our parents’ home. In both cases, we acquire eyes that see and ears that hear things to which habit had blinded us before. In both cases, the crisis calls for new visions and new creativity in us. Thus, crisis is not just an illness that needs to be cured; it is life that needs to be lived. To a person in crisis, help is therefore not a matter of treatment or the giving of advice. Crisis intervention is helping someone to grow according to his/her own capacities and values, and this is done by helping that person access those capacities and values through an increased awareness of them.
In considering how one human being may help to bring about that kind of growth in another, it is important to acknowledge that the helper can only do this in an indirect way. What is involved here is “the paradoxical theory of change,” as formulated by the psychiatrist and preeminent Gestalt therapist Arnold Beisser (see Chapter 10). It states that people do not really change as long as they try to be what they are not but only when they fully identify with what they are.
This implies that what you are is primary to and therefore more important than what you do. In order to facilitate full contact, it is important that the helper:
•is present and available as the helper he/she is; in practice that means that he/she is open about what he/she wants and does not want at any point in the dialogue
•respectfully attends to who the helpee is; in practice, that means being open to what the helpee wants and does not want at any point in the dialogue
•respectfully shares with the helpee relevant pieces of information about what happens to him/herself (the helper) during the encounter.
“Full contact” in the therapeutic sense is a contact between two people that is sufficiently based on their respective realities to have a healing potential. It happens when both parties are consistently clear about what they want to give and get at the contact interface. Fortunately, if just one of the two lead the way into such clarity, it will often encourage the other person (helper, helpee or any other important person in one’s life) to do the same. It takes two to manipulate but only one to stop it. If, for example, both insist that they are right and try to convince the other of that, they are having a war. If just one of them can live with being wrong occasionally, or at least with the difference of opinion between them, they have peace. Or, if both want to be “good enough” in some absolute sense, they have a war. If just one of them remains grounded in the observable fact that he/she is good enough to be alive in the world such as he/she and the world are, even though he/she is not good enough to provide what that person wants from him/her at that particular point, they will both have peace. Also, the dissatisfied one will probably have learned something important from the one who is basically satisfied with being better than nothing.
3ANXIETY AND PRIMARY FEELINGS
Anxiety as a result of repression
The experience of being in crisis is first and foremost one of anxiety. Part of that anxiety is caused by repression and will ease as the afflicted person discovers and identifies with his/her primary feelings (emotions) and wants (or “needs” as standard psycho-speak would have it) and makes relevant decisions concerning them. The primary feelings are glad, sad, angry (“mad”), and afraid. They are primary in the sense that one or more of them is involved in all the states of mind that we generally call “feelings,” often without distinguishing clearly between emotions, sensations, thoughts, preferences, opinions, intuitions, and attitudes. The primary feelings may be compared to the primary colors, which, in different concentrations and mixtures, make up all the other colors. The other components of our more complex “feelings” are cognitive materials, such as the memories, thoughts, hopes, and fears that arise when we think about the particular experience. The “feeling” of patriotism (love for one’s country), for example, is a complex phenomenon that like any other kind of love may contain any one, or any combination, of the four primary emotions. We are glad when we return to our country; we are sad when we have to leave it, and we are angry or afraid when others threaten it (see Chapter 12).
It is important to see, hear, acknowledge (“support”), and ask about primary feelings, both in ourselves as helpers and in those who are seeking help. Primary feelings indicate direction and intensity for the psychic energy and lead to the decisive question: “What do you want?” When you are aware and take responsibility for what you feel (not just what you ought to feel) and want (not just what you should want), and when you express it to your partner in a dialogue, then you are alive and present with that person. In this way, you automatically help your partner to gain a similar kind of awareness/responsibility for him/herself, which is a help in growing through the crisis.
Existential anxiety
Repression of primary feelings and of wants causes anxiety. This aspect of the anxiety eases when a person becomes aware of what he/she truly feels and wants and makes up his/her mind about what to do with it. Even the awareness of the primary emotion of fear is a relief compared with anxiety, because fear is concrete and relates to a specific situation, whereas anxiety tends to be unfocused, generalized, and exaggerated. However, there is also a part of the anxiety that does not disappear through consciousness-raising. This may be called existential because it is an unchangeable condition for our existence as human beings. Our time of life is limited and uncertain. Our contacts with others are at best partial, and we never know when we will lose them again. We have to make choices and carry the responsibility/guilt for them. And we have to do it more or less blindfolded, for we do not know the future circumstances that we are attempting to prepare for. How will the weather be tomorrow? What will our lover be like in 20 years?
My uncertainty about what I feel and want at a given moment might be diminished by dialogue in aware (“full”) contact (as opposed to an absent-minded, mindless party conversation, for example) with another person. This would do away with, or at least reduce, the part of the anxiety that arises from the very attempt to control it. However, an amount of uncertainty about the future will remain as an inescapable condition for our existence, even though this existential anxiety at times may recede into the background. In other words, existential anxiety is not a disease and there is no treatment for it. It is, on the contrary, a kind of sanity: it comes from having discovered just how uncontrollable life really is. All we can do not to drown in this awareness is to face it and commit ourselves to the life we have while we still have it. This gives a direction for helping the anxious person. The principle is helping him/her into his/her reality rather than out of it. When we try to repress existential anxiety, we only come to compound the basic problem with an effort that in itself gives rise to anxiety, and thus we end up with two problems instead of one. Anxiety comes from “not being where you are,” as the American psychiatrist and psychotherapist Fritz Perls put it.
The following chapter will explore more deeply what has already been said about a contact-enabling approach to people seeking help in crises of life and in more everyday situations of communication difficulties.
II