Surprise and Change
This post had originally been written back in mid-August, but I had somehow failed to hit the “Publish” button and only noticed it as I was doing some site maintenance recently. Not entirely relevant to the main body of the text, but the piece where I talk about things happening in my life “at the moment” has certainly changed 6-months on, and so a brief disclaimer felt warranted. Hope you enjoy…
There is a kind of moment I find myself chasing after in the process of doing therapy. It’s a moment I am hungry for the moment a session starts, but must patiently and thoughtfully await. It’s a moment that is unlikely to come too early in the work, as its possibility is rarer with someone whom we are just finding ourselves getting to know. Its real impact comes later on in a relationship, when some foundation of understanding and assumptions about what it is we do or do not know in a given therapeutic context can be seen as a kind of mirage, or one assumption among many of what is “really” going on here. It’s a state that can overcome either patient or therapist, or ideally both, in the course of any given interaction, evoking a sense of being that had so far been little explored. I am talking, of course, about a moment of genuine surprise.
Surprise is a topic that arises periodically with my clients, though this particular piece of writing was prompted by a discussion with a client about a struggling family member. Although, to be honest, it was a thought that emerged in a moment of connection between what the client had been sharing about his experience of this family member to experiences of my own that have been cropping up recently. I could speculate as to why it is happening seemingly all of the sudden and much more so than I can remember at other points in my life (a few that hold some amount of water: being on the cusp of 40, second child on the way, new professional opportunities manifesting that I’ve long aspired to), but I have lately found myself in awe of where my life is in comparison to where it might have ended up had I stayed on the course I was on 10-15 years ago. Which is not to say that I’m standing back in a state of glowing gratitude and absorbing some sense of easiness about life. To be sure there is some of that at times, but life still carries its challenges and that is not quite the quality I am talking about. Gratitude—a phenomenon psychotherapists talk to often—is quite different from a sense of wonder—a phenomenon which psychotherapy seems to avoid. But I think it is this subset of phenomena—wonder, awe, and surprise—that are the real basis of psychotherapeutic change.
I don’t think the specifics of my story are relevant to understanding what I am talking about, but perhaps useful to share it anyway. And in some ways, though idiosyncratic as these things often are, the story is not that remarkable for its novelty. I allude to it a bit in the “About” section of this website and other posts. Late 20’s, working in a job that I found unfulfilling and expressing that lack of fulfillment in the ways people are sometimes prone to doing, moving in and out of phases where that particular combination could feel especially debilitating in terms of my outlook on life, and feeling at the time like I had little to no recourse to do much of anything different about it. I was living out a life that felt featureless beyond how cumbersome and uninspired I found it to be. And beyond that, there was some knowing that I had been trying to be different for a long time despite the fact that I just sort of kept doing slightly modified versions of the same old things.
Much of that changed slowly over the course of many years. But undoubtedly it transformed over a series of surprising experiences that could not have been predicted based on my or anyone else’s understanding of the map I had both laid out for myself and which had been laid out for me. Less productive hobbies gave way to rekindling an interest in philosophy and psychoanalytic interpretations of human psychology that was incidental to a couple blog posts I discovered while searching for what was essentially entertainment news and criticism. Investment in these interests suddenly had me feeling enough urgency and agency to consider them a possible career path. An abrupt career change and the flexibility needed for school landed me at a psychiatric hospital working the overnight shifts and primarily interacting with folks who might be classified as being the most disturbed, having deep and meaningful conversations with individuals who had no sense of the idea that reality should be a consensual phenomena. My approach to the graduate school application process (which is to say starting it late after a failed bid at a couple doctoral programs) landed me incidentally at a school with much more of an appetite for the humanistic and existential approaches than most other programs seem willing to entertain, surrounded by faculty largely informed and motivated by the relational underpinnings of this work. Hell, even the COVID-19 pandemic, which locked down most of the country months before my anticipated graduation from school, played a significant role in my landing in the world of forensic psychotherapy and pursuing classes with the Institute of Existential-Psychoanalytic Therapy. Which is not to undermine the amount of agency by which it all unfolded, but certainly something about each of these turns felt unanticipated, causally disruptive, and essentially unfamiliar. With each pivot I learned something about who I was and who I could be and became confronted with the responsibility of trying to figure out how these two phenomena, namely my past and future, could be more effectively lived into and through.
I feel comfortable in my asserting that surprise is a necessary condition for good therapy. In fact, our degree of surprise is perhaps the only metric by which we can accurately measure to what extent we are effectively engaged in the therapeutic process. I want to ground this discussion a bit in a book I have been slowly making my way through as of late, Making Contact by Leston Havens. I want to honor here that I am not doing so slowly because the text does not seem useful to the work or is not engrossing. It carries much of the same charismatic qualities I’ve come to learn about Havens from the wealth of material of his available on YouTube; rather, it is much more a condition of the number of plates I am trying to keep spinning at the moment and the fact that it is maybe third or forth on the hierarchy of things I feel like I ought to be giving my attention at any given time.
The book aims to be about the use of language in psychotherapy, which is to say it is about the hermeneutic relationship between listening and speaking and how that dynamic emerges in how we select the language we choose to use in the therapeutic process. Each of the modes, which Heston calls the empathic, the interpersonal, and the performative, are meant to do something which disrupts some interpreted way of being that characterizes the particular client. Empathic language locates, interpersonal language modulates, and performative language liberates.
In each section, Heston talks about how the language that performs these functions has some unexpected quality. The empathic and the interpersonal in particular seem plottable on a continuum between surprise of the other and surprise of the therapist. Empathy is in itself a reflection of the therapist’s adherence to the capacity to be continually surprised by the patient. Borrowing the language of phenomenology and Husserl, we might say that it is the attempt to hold the phenomenological reduction, where by we attempt by our best ability to see things in and of themselves. To see the client anew at every turn requires a capacity to hold any sense of a predetermined knowing about the client at abeyance. Conversely, interpersonal language usage attempts to reconstitute the experience of the client into something new. It is a quality of interpreting the interpersonal field to (hopefully) elicit a sense of startled curiosity on the part of the patient about the manner in which their assumptions and preconceived notions about what is happening are in some sense merely that. This is not to say that our job is to point out that the entire interpretation is an act of pure fiction. It is rather an attempt to invite the client into an exploration of how the subtleties of both the therapist and client’s personalities and beliefs about human relationships are playing out in the interaction, with the intention being that the client can use this experience to better inform their understanding of relationship dynamics more broadly.
To do this, surprise requires a softening of rigidly held beliefs about ourselves and who we are, as well as of others and who we expect them to be. This is why I contrasted surprise with something as seemingly benign as gratitude, which though noble in origin I think often risks a misuse that can have real consequences. Gratitude requires some level of eliminating ambiguity, a quality necessary for the capacity to be surprised. Gratitude simplifies and eliminates nuance in order to identify the thing for which one is meant to be grateful. That is not to say that a gratitude practice that nurtures a sense of subtlety, nuance, and acknowledges a kind of held tension cannot exist, but in the simple psychotherapeutic manner in which it is used, the “attitude of gratitude” as a technique of symptom elimination, it demands we first assume to know something about the world for which we can then be thankful. To be in awe, wonder, or surprise before the world insists upon holding a kind of anxious position vis-a-vis that of which we are in awe.
We invite this for the client, first and foremost, by letting them borrow our own. This dual process of oscillating between our ability to be surprised by them and inviting them to be surprised by themselves is a process that is benefited by our ability to be both inside (empathy) and outside (the assumption of the “inter-“ in interpersonal) of their lived experience, which means they then—through our reflections—get to be both inside and outside of their experience as well. A stance which honors the complexities of our perpetual being and becoming invites an authentic being with ourselves. This is not exclusively the purview of therapy, but therapists have a unique responsibility. Due to our position with relation to the other, we have the privilege of considering how we might use our skills to curate this kind of experience for the other. To cultivate an ethic within our therapeutic work which honors and amplifies ambiguity, uncertainty, interpersonal freedom and awareness, and the strange possibility of being repeatedly surprised by ourselves.
