Twig's SE Reflections

Play Episode 94 Here

This does not cover every last thought I have on Orientation and what is required to ensure smooth meaningful participation when you're asking people to "allow their eyes to go where they want to go." But this 2-hour episode is probably the last thing I'll say about Orientation on this podcast project.

You may need to approach this in rounds and I've left a few things out that would have been helpful to say...but this is what we've got. Please make use of it as you like. I think you'll see that I put some effort into this for you.

Play Episode 93 Here

Smoothing out the rhythm of our sessions is an ultimate goal. From the back and forth between us and our clients to the in and out of our client's attention with the environment and their experience, much of this rhythm is cultivated by whether we encourage lingering or moving on.

From calculating how long we can linger, to making sure we don't over stay, developing the skillfulness to know what kind and how much intervention is necessary at what choice point takes time. And it can help to think about the dynamics involved.

Here's an episode that breaks down some elements inside the perennial question: should we linger here...or move on.

Play Episode 92 Here

CAUTION: This episode includes several strong curse words.

Identifying, naming and explicating a client's experience is rarely as effective in Somatic Experiencing sessions as is joining in a more empathic, visceral and reflective (i.e. mirroring) way. Of course there are times for clarifying what you know about a client's experience and describing its values. Yet, nothing moves a felt sense experience forward like having the right amount of emotional reflection infused in the room.

That's why, on occasion, we need to be willing to curse in our sessions.

Play Episode 91 Here

Our SE work is motivated by the desire for change and animated by bearing witness to changing experience. As we cultivate our appreciation for Pendulation and all things "in flow" we can find it confusing to see what to do with client's who report things "just being stuck".

How to help the stuck thing move again is central to our work and thus bigger than this hour+ long episode but herein lies some empathy and solidarity for the practitioner who feels frustrated and alone in their stuck sessions. Included are suggestions on contracting, language adjustments, invitations to prime the sense of change and background reminders to us all on what's at play and why we can't just "want it to be different."

Play Episode 90 Here

Here's a longer episode reviewing 10 of the Comedy Improv games and their associated SE lessons that form the spine of my super fun SE refinement workshops Practicing Our Lines.

Each game is covered in-depth with layouts of how you can perform the game in a group and what insights SE Practitioners can take from them.

Games Reviewed Include:

Wordball/Nameball60 Second Life StoryPatternsPolyvagal Family PortraitsSpeech of a Life-Time in Numbers from 1-100What-Cha Doing Now?Copy/Paste for Cutting Back the PhraseSlow Motion Ninja RiotTiger-Alien-CowCounting to 20

This episode will probably work best if you break it up game by game.

Play Episode 89 Here

Techniques and technique generally is key to our success as SE Practitioners. Being able to identify what is happening for a client, what that indicates about what is coming next, having some sense of what to ask for next, all of these are necessary to move sessions in the right direction.

And yet, other times there will be a dramatic unfolding that happens simply because the Practitioner has "A Feeling" and follows it. In those moments, technique likely only gets in the way!

Play Episode 88 Here

In SE Sessions, some things are associated, while others are not. Practitioners need to see these relationships for what they are and decide if there's enough differentiation amongst associated pieces to create the context for penduluation. If so, off we go to see what happens next. If not, various differentiating, mitigating and directing questions will be necessary to help bring about that swing.

In this "treading water" episode I borrow the audio version from Chapter 33 of Twig's Guide to the SE Language to share some thoughts on "seeing the Pendulation Terrain" (limits and opportunities of associated experiences) and prime listeners of this podcast for an upcoming episode on priming successful pendulation.

https://vimeo.com/164844929

Play Episode 87 Here

Dynamic sessions that move toward productive change rather than maintain the status quo regularly introduce new things.

These include: experiments (also known as excercises), Practitioner behavioral changes (like increasing or decreasing pace of reflections) and trying on of different channels of attention for the client (such as turning toward sensation or image).

In this episode I encourage SE Practitioners to try new things out "once" so that they can read the feedback of how it went and adjust their next interventions accordingly. Simple like that.

Mentions:

I reference a few older SE Reflections episodes this time around, including:

e.38 - It's a Try It Out Kind of Thing (in which I encourage your to, well, try things out)e.01 - The Importance of Spontaneity (a critical metric for successful movement in sessions)e.43 The Formula (how to attend to the storyline without getting caught in the negative parts of it)e.77 - Will this Be an "I Can" or "I Can't" Moment (not mentioned but it could have been.)

Some Added Thoughts:

Sessions are dynamic, not rote experiences.

The new SE client doesn't necessarily have a complete understanding of the SE session process, nor are they likely to be familiar with the kinds of experiences they'll encounter in your presence. There's going to be a lot of new things coming their way.

That's part of the point of doing therapy in general: To find new ways of being rather than just repeating old ones. Thus Practitioners are going to offer a steady stream of "new" ideas, observations, requests and so on.

Some of these will be transparent to the client, some of them will be more behind the scenes.

On the transparent side will be clear request to try something out, such as "I wonder if you'd be willing to try a little experiment with me here?".

These are generally best offered invitationally, as something approaching "an experiment", with attention given to the curiosity of what is found during and after trying this new thing.

It's probably also best if they're done with a "beginning, middle and end" with a check-in/evaluation time afterwards to see how it went (also known as "a round").

Also, it's easier to manage the expectations from these experiments if you diminish or remove the sense of profundity before the fact. This can be super necessary if, in then end, the experiment doesn't go anywhere.

What is discovered then helps inform both the client and practitioner of what can be expected next.

Was it easy? Simple? Difficult? Scary? Successful? Productive? Annoying?

Did "tyring that thing" increase intrest, engagement and participation or did it thwart it?

This feedback – from both Client self-report and Practitioner observation – is critical for determining if the request should be titrated up or down, simplified, repeated at the same level or, as is the case sometimes, abandoned altogether or shelved for later.

Then there's the less transparent side of things. These include behaviors, questions and requests from the Practitioner that are simply layered into the session behind the scenes. We might try to mirror a client's behavior, comment on positive elements of experience or even ask for internal sensation reflections as in our classic line "Can you tell me what you notice now?"

If the introduction of any of those slows or stalls the session rather than move it forward with more spontaneously, we're best off reading that feedback and adjusting how we do things next time to garner more ease and acceptance of the new thing.

For example, when a client has a difficult time answering the "What do you feel now?" question, it may be necessary to:

Clarify the question next time (don't assume they know what you're asking for)Make it smaller (titrate it down)Ask a more oblique question ("If someone else had a response to that kind of thing, what might they be feeling right now?")Offer an external reflection ("I notice as you say that my hackels go up, I don't know what happens for you, but I can feel my back just get all up in arms!")Or even abandon the request for an internal reflection from the client until other things fall into place where it becomes easier for them to answer with something productive rather than continuing to ask the same "stupid question" over and over getting the same non-productive response.

In that way there's a relatively easy pattern to follow:

The practitioner notices something they'd like to try or call attention to, such as:

Have less eye gazeRelax more into their chairAsk more questions, ask fewer questionsAsk for felt sense reflectionsAnd so on...

The Practitioner looks for the moment to "try that once" and watches for the feedback from the client. Did things become:

More spontaneous or less?Move things forward or sideways?Confuse or clarify things?Engage more interest or less?Fill in your own metric here...

From there the Practitioner can choose:

Do I want to do that again?Can I say with that with more clarity next time?Offer more distance in the question next time?Titrated it up or down so the request is scaled more appropriately?Put that idea aside for another time?

This "trying it once" and paying attention to how it went can happen over and over in a session, particularly as new clients are becoming familiar with the SE session process and the Practitioner and Client are getting to know each other.

By trying things out, paying attention to the feedback and responding accordingly you can adjust your interventions for less stall, frustration or repetition and toward more success, spontaneity and momentum.

A Few Words of Caution

You can easily try things out that shouldn't be tried. It's easy to get ambitious or demand that you "do SE" and cause sincere disruption to the process or unduly annoy or stress your client.

Therefore it's important to work from the perspective that when trying new things, even just once, some basis for working together should already be established before trying new terrain.

Issues of having a mutual contract (or developing one), ability to stabilize things if they go sideways and the williness to absorb mistakes and make repairs should all be present.

With those in place...sure, you've got an idea of something to explore: Why Not Try It Once!

I know I'd prefer a softer landing. How about you?

Play Episode 86 Here

Some of our clients have been "going, going, going" and are going to continue doing so until they "collapse." When we can see that coming it's often worth introducing the idea of planning or preparing a time when they can permit themselves to "not do more" but instead allow their bodies to try to rest and restore a little.

Obviously not a solution to overarching activation, unsustainable lifestyle choices or classic nervous system disregulation, the "planned collapse" can help soften the challenge of an exhuastion that threatens to make things worse.

Toward the end of this episode I role-play an introduction to offering these ideas to a client: complete with mitigating language, preempting the Red Vortex, menuing, and titrating toward the Yes - any of which might be cut out when they're unnecessary due to a client's relative interest or resiliency. These are all communication issues that I cover indepth in Twig's Guide to the SE Language.

Mentions:Although I flail when trying to remember Marjorie Shostack's name in this episode, her book Nisa is a classic ethnographic exploration and well worth checking out sometime. Here's a cliff note style review.

We're all about following and permission. Yet, when that's going to lead to a client getting hurt, it's time to come in and do something.

Play Episode 85 Here

There are times in sessions when movement becomes increasingly free and involuntary. It's a special thing to watch the body "come out of freeze" like that. And there are cautions: like being attentive that a sharp angle on a joint doesn't cause damage for later. To avoid this practitioners need to monitor the range of motion for even as we support it to "do its thing" we don't want to let it become too extreme.