Listening in Security, with Jeremy Holmes

My talk will focus on the initial and early stages of therapy, and how they form a template for subsequent on-going work.

I divide the session into 4 parts, typically sequential, but in a fractal way they also inform moment-to-moment interactions.

The first task is to establish connection, and to open a channel of communication, and thereby to establish epistemic trust. I try to do this by adopting a confident yet respectful and collaborative manner, and by the firmness of the therapy boundaries – time, place, freedom from interruption etc. 

Second come the ‘three listening’s:

a) listening to the client’s story, free associations, diversions, exaggerations, avoidances;

b) listening to myself listening (i.e. ‘counter-transference’, so often a clue to the client’s inner world);

c) listening to the way the client reacts to my comments – compliance, blocking, elaboration –  and shaping/modifying my language and comments in the light of this.

In the first or early sessions I will be interested in what specific symptoms which have brought the client for help, why now, why me, and what their expectations of a successful therapeutic outcome might be.

Third comes my attempt to hear, synthesise, and put into words the ‘second story’.  These are the ongoing themes of the client’s life that I hear behind their narrative  – pain, rejection, neglect, abandonment, anger etc. – and how these might play out transferentially in relation to me.

Finally there comes a moment of closure, where the temporal and emotional boundaries of the session are established, but within them a sense of hope, meaning-making, and of secure attachment.

I’ll illustrate all this with the pathway of a particular ‘difficult’ client and with the blockages which have impeded its smooth running.

Method of use

On-demand courses consist of recorded video lessons. Once purchased, you will find it available in your Reserved Area and you can follow it as many times as you like for 12 months from the date of purchase. From desktop, tablet, smartphone.