How A Psychotherapist Listens

Such events, precious in our lives, help us to be more present and aware in the world around us. Chaos and complexity theory can do that for us too, if we'll let it. At least, it does that for me. And it helps me stay present with patients, especially in the most taxing experiences with a person with PTSD in a flooding stage.

I'll share with you my own process of getting to this place in my thinking and clinical experience.

I met chaos theory through Gleick's book, Chaos: The Making of a New Science, in 1988 or 1989. I heard about it at a psychology conference at the Saybrook Institute in Northern California. I bought the book. It was my companion for a week out of ordinary time as I drove from Half Moon Bay to Los Angeles through the magnificence of the California coast through Big Sur.

It's strange and wonderful that we never know what little thing we may do or experience that will have a powerful impact on the rest of our lives. There is so much that is sensitively dependent on initial conditions. The book changed the way I saw the world.

In Chaos Gleick introduced me to Manlbrot's question: How long is the coast line of Great Britain? I walked on the beaches of Half Moon Bay thinking about how long the coast was. I could measure by straight lines and get one number, or go through each bay and inlet and get another, or carefully climb over each grain of sand and get another. My way of measuring and evaluating was arbitrary and subject to challenge from an infinite number of differing perspectives. Wow.

I sat on the beach and watched the sea glitter with twisting and colliding currents under the sun and wondered about unpredictable yet orderly chaos.

I saw long, faint, orderly dark lines in the sand and couldn't identify them. Yet they made me think of fractals. I followed the shoreline and saw the lines become more sharply defined until I saw leaf patterns, all almost identical, but not quite. I saw that the waves lifted the kelp and dropped it on the soft wet sand. Then other waves rolled in, lifted the kelp and brought it back to the sea.

Strips of kelp outlines remained and developed the etched pattern on the beach. I was fascinated with the steady repetition of movement and shapes and the low lush sound which all were never quite the same and familiar and unpredictable at the same time.

I drove down coast slowly. I'd stop the car, read a few pages and then look around to see if I could find what these nonlinear scientists were talking about. I sat at the base of a 30 foot waterfall deep in the redwoods and watched the water cascade into a calm, black water pool. I marveled at the simplicity of knowing that all the water up there would wind up at the bottom, down there, but that no one could tell where one particular drop would be at any given moment. I marveled at the sudden change between the torrent hitting the water and the calmness of the pool.

And it being 1989 or so, with people still smoking in public, I watched steady rhythm break into unpredictable turbulence in cigarette smoke.

I returned home with new eyes. Over time I found myself enjoying the comfort and reliability of fractals, chaos and turbulence, and simple beginnings leading to complex behavior. It was as if nature had been playing this wonderful game all around me, and I just found out about it.

I began painting, experimenting with inks, watercolors and paper to see what kind of flows and repetitions, turbulence and organization would happen when I played with the materials.

And somewhere along this immersion process I began to think abut all living organisms being complex adaptive systems. And from this came the thought that the workings of the mind may follow the principles nonlinear science was discovering.

That thought led me to a more expanded, calm and even joyful approach to the seemingly chaotic, turbulent emotional experiences of my patients, particularly when they were in a flooding stage of PTSD. I was getting listening and presence training from kelp, waterfalls, cigarette smoke, waves crashing on the rocks in Malibu and more.

I looked at the stem of a rose and examined the leaves, so similar and yet each different and each with the potential for change. I wondered at what point did a stem change its energy and form a leaf? At what point did a leaf reach its maximum size? When did a rose burst forth, and at what particular place? And what was going in the invisible but present root structure that affected what I saw. Everything around me - I have a full and varied garden - looked familiar and unknown. Each plant was following it's own inner integrity yet developing as it interacted and adapted with everything else in the garden including the light, temperature, humidity, animal life, me and forces I don't know about. And the other forms were interacting and adapting to everything else at the same time: cooperation, competition, coevolution.

The more I thought about this the more I felt that it would be very odd if the workings of the mind were not following these same basic principles in nonlinear science.

The person, the fragments of the mind, full of life energy, adapting within itself and with the external world, yet following some inner integrity of the uniqueness of the particular human, was working continually to protect itself, nourish itself, create itself and evolve. Like anything alive it had to cope with inner and outer environmental forces, adjusting, adapting and influencing within its abilities to survive.

Perhaps it sounds simple when I say it. But steeping myself with natural images and appreciation of turbulence and fractals, holding the element of surprise and wonder, feeling the certainty that I can know and yet not predict, becoming aware of the existence and patterns of strange attractors, all help me to remain present for my patient's experience.

When a therapist can genuinely stay present that certainty of presence is communicated to the patient. Then patients can stay present a bit longer for themselves as well. Their tolerance for their own experience increases.