Sometimes parts of our life processes seem to go round in never-ending circles or have become a “frozen whole”, as Gendlin calls it. They do not answer to fresh and new inputs, and we cannot go to that inner experiencing place from which new meaning could arise.
Often our clients ask for help when their inner experiencing gets stuck in such process-blocking patterns. When those patterns are strong and have become a way of being, there seems to be no carrying forward any more. During our work together even our inner resonance as therapists is at risk of getting blocked. Our experiential responses seem to stagnate, and the intersubjective field, to which we both contribute, becomes structure-bound in manner too.To carry these processes forward, we have to refrain from simplifying causal explanations and develop a relational understanding of the nature of these stopped processes and how they could be resumed and set into a forward movement again.I want to offer some ideas using examples from my clinical work with clients suffering from depression and from chronic pain. In these cases, the forward movement involves not only working at the edge of understanding, verbalizing and reflecting, but also a commitment to the bodily interaction of both of us
Keywords: stopped process, experiential response, frozen whole, patterns, resonance, experiential response, intersubjective, depression
Christiane Geiser, Paper presented at the 21th Focusing International Conference, Japan, 2009