FOLLOWING THE CLIENT WITHOUT EGO-INVESTMENT

This question follows a piece of work with a client where Dick shifted to a different focus during the work. Dick used Bioenergetic typology in this work.

Cl: How much of your work is tailored to specific structures or are you are just playing off the cues mostly.

Dick: Yes (both), and playing off the cues moment to moment predominates. There is one thing I learned when I first began to learn about structures from Al Lowen. He said, "the only purpose for having a typology of a system of structures is one is makes for a system of communication." You teach this to your client and then it becomes like a technical language between you which you both understand. Like other scientific language, it is a short cut to explaining.

But it is also, as he put it, a jumping off place for a tentative diagnosis. And if you are working with that person and they begin to display other things that are other than the diagnosis that you made, then you change. Now what this means is that I have to work with you without being ego involved. If I look at you and say that you are an enduring structure, and then we start to work, and then twenty minutes later you suddenly are showing me an entirely different structure which indicates that my diagnosis is wrong, if I continue to try to force this on you, I am not going to get anywhere. So I have to continue to respond to what I see coming from you. And that is why he said he tended to have structure and he said, "I often tend to change my diagnosis of structure as I work with them." So the answer is both.

I very often start with this because I am very used to it after so many years that I see a way in, so I start there and if a way opens and widens ....fine.....and it's a quick way of finding an opening. On the other hand, if it starts to close in and starts to be a dead end, instead of batting my head, which is ego -involvement, I say, "Whoops, I took a wrong step here" and I turn around and look for something else.

Otherwise....Who was I talking yesterday about burnout with yesterday? You.......That's the thing, and when we work, we will probably work on that. That is the thing you have to guard against. Against the concern that maybe you are not being right. If you are not right, be glad when you find it out, because it can be that much quicker you can change what you are doing.

Yeah, feels good, doesn't it?

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