Hungry Leg

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

When I was no longer an intern, in a large psychiatric hospital in the center of the city, and opposite in a large psychotherapy center, opposite the local Kremlin, this story happened to me. Once a close relative married his girlfriend. She could not pay, being disabled. And I could not refuse such a "gift". We agreed to limit ourselves to one session. But the session turned out to be marvelously indicative in terms of gestalt therapy for psychosomatic disorders, which I plan to turn to again in my group in the near future.

At the very beginning of the gestalt session, which was originally planned as a one-time session, a nice detail emerged. The client saw her main problem as a fracture that had not healed for 5 years. Repeated surgical interventions have already brought her to disability. And getting to know the medical records would take my entire working day. But I followed this path doomedly. And he quickly discovered that the session time was catastrophically coming to an end.

Out of despair, I resorted to a method familiar to me from communicating with occultists who sat down in one of the chairs in our regional hospital. True, during a long-term training program on the clinical application of Gestalt therapy, they tried to convince me that a dialogue with an organ is quite therapeutic. But our teacher showed such a mixture of complacency and incompetence that he did not want to take any of his words on faith. His favorite manner was to ask the teacher how he felt when he asked a methodological question. And respond with a boring lecture to any question about feelings. But that's another story.

But back to the course of the session. I suggested that the client enter into a dialogue with the sore leg. I will not describe the original technique of 2 chairs, but believe me, the modification for a man on crutches looked quite amusing.

The leg responded willingly. to the call to make contact with the suffering part of the client. And told her that she wanted pea soup. I explained to the client that the part is always more stupid than the whole. And do not strain your leg with questions about the prospects of employment and the group of disabilities.

But even to questions:

-What hurts or how do you take care of you?

- I want pea soup, - the leg insistently insisted

- Don't you eat peas at all? - I asked

-On the contrary, I'm a strict vegetarian! - answered the client with pride

-???!!!

-Why do you care so much? - she asked

-Yes, in general, for better bone healing, a special diet is recommended

- Yes, they gave me calcium supplements. I ate so much, already creaks on my lips

- And none of the doctors asked you about your vegetarianism?

A small digression is needed here. Bone is made up of not only minerals but also protein. And the latter is found mainly in animal food. Of the plants, legumes are the richest in protein, including peas. And the additional amount of calcium, on the contrary, can increase the fragility of bones. Explain all this to the client, I convinced her to radically change her diet for a while. With active cooperation, the legs.

What did we do in terms of gestatlt therapy?

This is almost a classic Perls shuttle technique developed for dreaming. But convection symptomatology is such a dissociated altered state of consciousness, which is on the background of wakefulness in the "container" of the symptom

"Shuttle" is when the client moves alternately from the inner zone of sensations to the intermediate zone of thoughts and relationships. But this process also has certain stages, described by Perls for working with another phenomenon of the intermediate zone, the dream.

1. At the first stage, a certain change in the projection mechanism takes place. The dream image, like the symptom, for all its projective nature, has a peculiar partial and internal character. A part of the soul is alienated, but some kind of formal connection with it remains. Perhaps we are talking simply about a more primitive and, therefore, ancient phenomenon of projective identification, which in Gestalt is designated as a combination of projection and retroflection.
2. At the stage of reconstruction of the personal context, it is possible to substitute the client's ego function, which may be necessary at the stage of partial reversal of retroflection. This is justified when the actualization of the counter-symptom slowed down and reduced the sensation of the symptom.
3. At the stage of assimilation of the projection, this fusion occurs as a sign of the client's full contact with her anger, most often found when working with psychosomatic symptoms, or less often with other feelings.
4. But, the completeness of the appeal of retroflection in the form of technical testing of the newly acquired responsibility does not always occur during the session.