How deep is Your Love

Picture Credit: Lakshmi Ambady

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before!”- The opening words of the TV series “Star Trek” released in 1966.

There stands a challenge before every therapist. Before taking a client into deep waters, the therapist must first go deeper herself/ himself. Before a therapist becomes a guide, they must first become a traveller. The work of therapy is not primarily about techniques, interventions, cognitive scaffolding or somatic repair. Depth of work first begins in the body of the therapist. In the territory of their own unresolved memories, their own stalled survival responses and their own epitomal language of emotions which never got an outlet or a voice, just like their clients.

A therapist first needs to descend into their own unconscious before they ask their clients to walk down a particular path. Depth requires an apprenticeship under one’s own psyche. So, every therapist is inevitably faced with this question while training- How deep is your love?

Love demands the therapist to become intimate with their own nervous system. To know where it contracts, the edges, it fears, the sensations it avoids, and the emotional language it protects from expression. Because in every session with a client, the mind of the client scans not for some high level or deep expertise or knowledge of psychology or somatic modalities, but a client’s body and mind seek for permission. Permission to be safe. Every client is looking to feel and see- “Is it safe for me to go where I have never gone before?” and a therapist can only grant this permission if they have gone there first.

The nervous system of the therapist is a container for the client. Depth work is held by a therapist’s regulated body. Because a client just does not borrow psychological insights from their therapist, but they also borrow physiology. There is an exchange of co- regulation of steadiness between a therapist and a client. Hence for a therapist, exploration of their own fear, sadness, rage, grief, shame needs to be worked on. When this is possible without disintegrating, the client resonates with the possibility of survival of their own internal intensity. In the language of Somatic Experiencing®, regulation is transmitted and not explained, felt but not cognitively taught. Depth is about meaning, about loving oneself and about re-ordering chaos into coherence. A therapist must first learn to metabolize their own suffering until it becomes medicine. Only then they can discern the ancient dialogue of another person’s psyche.

A person going for therapy does not choose the scenes they explore in therapy. It is an unfolding that happens organically in line with resonance. For a therapist, a client’s fragmented inner world can also be a test to check the depth of their own psyche. A therapist can be triggered by the world just as their client is- only difference being the ability to stay embodied, regulated and unafraid when the soma and psyche reveal pain. Trauma can be shy, shame can be secretive, grief is capable of being ceremonial and anger can be selective. But each wait for a competent witness. This is how the mind functions. And unmetabolized wounds distort perception. Hence depth is not only about knowledge but mainly about capacity. It requires surrender on behalf of the therapist to surrender to the timeline of the body. The nervous system holds stories older than language. A therapist must learn to read these tales in their bodies first before they can interpret in another’s.

All therapists undergo a silent initiation. To first and foremost have a meeting with their own psyche. To meet the child, they miss and the rage of the parent they carry. To walk with the shadow that they avoid. To see the suffering, they defend. To acknowledge the animal instinct responsible for triggers. To meet the longing never admitted and the shake hands with that grief led to wisdom., Yes! A therapist goes through all this before your therapy can become an initiation for you, an encounter with your mind and a ritual with your body. Before taking their clients deep, the depth must be inhabited first. Only then can a client be regulated while descending and held during the ascent. So, how deep is your love?