In contrast to the common methods of «healing in one day’ (such as the above mentioned «coding’ or «torpedoing’), this environmental approach gives much slower results, but is incomparably more reliable. The result of the club meetings is directed to the future, to the life of the descendants of the club members. This result is not limited to a period of 12 months or 5 years.
In connection with my participation in that Italian program, I thought of a «plant’ agronomic metaphor. What will the gardener take care of while planting beets in his garden? About the soil and light of course, but he will not try to grow it himself instead of a beetroot. Likewise, it is especially important to the doctors to understand the limitations of their competence and not to overdo it. In the end, the patients are saved by their own effort, not only by the activity of the doctor. This is my conclusion.
Get some rest!
The doctor can see the problems in the form of objects, like a psychic, or guess their location from the “weak signals’ or detect them by testing or infer their presence in many other ways not unlike famous detectives. On the other hand, psychocatalysis specialists will refrain from the open use of their “brilliant abilities’ and their trained “clinical machine’. During work sessions with patients, they will leave their knowledge and intuition out of the equation, trusting the abilities of the mentee. By answering questions, the patient develops the ability to visualize and can even find a path to enlightenment. Questioning is of crucial importance to the process of somatopsychotherapy.
Of course, this does not negate the importance of the training of an «assistant’. Both clinical and psychological preparation is extremely important. Understanding the human character, the peculiarities of nosology classification, the dynamics of experience significantly accelerates the therapy: the ability to ask relevant questions is a great art. However, trust in the patient’s ability to respond in any case remains truly relevant.
One of the components of the internal training of the questioner, including the key to their ability to withstand the intonation, to provide the choice of an answer to a patient, is the understanding that the patients are able to determine their own feelings. This is one of the postulates of therapy through questions about body sensations.
The research tool
The technique of the «objectification of feelings’ falls under the category of indirect methods. This means that it «includes’ the initiative of the patient and activates his ability to determine and change his state. The solving of this problem is based on the amazing, but usually unused human ability to self-diagnose their own condition as specific images of objects.
This process is called psychocatalysis, by analogy to a catalytic chemical process: there is a «substance’ that can change its state – a petrified emotion – and there is a psychotherapeutic influence (the catalyst) without which this process is difficult, slow or stuck. When they are combined, a «miracle’ occurs.
The patient’s attention is the main active element but is expedited by the catalytic effect of psychotherapist’s questions.
There are two main questions in the diagnostic phase: WHERE and WHAT.
“Obstetricians’
Socrates, with his “skill of midwife’, more than 2000 years ago showed the effectiveness of asking in a philosophical conversation: “People, when being asked right questions, decide themselves what is necessary…12». The discovery of the role of questions as “birth attendants’ is perhaps as significant in the field of interpersonal communication as the discovery of the wheel in technology.
The effectiveness of questioning, instead of stating, was noticed by many wonderful masters not only in philosophical circles but also by the medical «maieutic’. (The Socratic Method, also known as maieutic is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas).
I mean not just ancient the Zen Buddhist teachers with their unanswerable questions («How does one-palm clap sound?»), or the Sufi sages, or Orthodox saints, who, by asking questions, revealed the «soul problems’ of their disciples, spiritual children, no worse than a surgeon with a scalpel reveals ulcers. I am also talking about the masters of psychotherapy.
It would be difficult to describe their work here. After all, even a benevolent silence, a willingness to encourage and to support the mental movement of a patient is also a kind of a question – silent and at the same time the deepest one. «Tell me anything you want.» When I talk about such silence, I mean the empathic acceptance of Carl Rogers, creating a space for safe expression of a client, or a «gap’, the willingness to patiently wait for the manifestations of a patient’s activity, of Arnold Mindell, as a fisherman waits for a bite13. A question creates an area of negative pressure that is ready to take into its form what it is waiting to be let out. The task of a psychotherapist is to model capacities for meaning.
Questions are a natural part of the life process
We are going to talk about the questions that people can ask their body, but I have no doubt that the body itself is able to ask questions. In particular, with the help of dreams. Wakefulness is the “answer’ to dreaming. The dream poses a problem and real life serves its solution. You can say the opposite: a dream is a response to wakefulness. The life itself is questions and answers.
Psychotherapy and somatopsychotherapy, as part of our life, does not invent anything unnatural, it does not deal with something artificial. It only cleanses and gives patronage to everything natural.
The terms «facilitation’ and «amplification’ are well known. I use the term «psychocatalysis’. The fact, that psychocatalysis applies to the inner body sensations, became an important opening of the Russian school of BEST by E. I. Zuev and the basis of the development of this «question’ therapy.
«Ask me questions,» a patient often says, dropping themselves into a therapist’s chair (as if surrendering»). Who will do it, how will it be done, and what for?
The Key question
We can say that each system of psychotherapy has its own key question. (This does not automatically mean that it works by questions – and yet…)
The question of clinical psychotherapy: dynamics of what constitutional genetic type manifests itself in the experiences and events of this person’s life?
The question of psychoanalysis: when, under what circumstances, what affection of Id and prohibition by Super-Ego encountered in Ego and provoked the complex?
The question of Jungian therapy: what kind of distortion in the conscious life of the patient makes their subconscious mind «to take measures to equalize the situation» and «what exactly should a person do to regulate their relationship with the unconscious?14»
The question of Gestalt therapy: what is the need of the body which makes the «figure’ now, what is the «background’, what prevents the Gestalt from «closing’, what unfinished actions prevent a person from living «here and now’?
The question of NLP: in what