Relationships: Speed Up Or Slow Down

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

Evgeniya Rasskazova

Gestalt therapist, psychodrama therapist

If you want to be with a person together, it is important to join their pace. Maybe it's even more important than joining the content. Sometimes you need to speed up, sometimes you need to slow down, and if you are trying to get into the pace of another, then after a while you can feel that from the two “I's” it has turned out to be “we”. We met.

To explain what this means, I will tell you a story.

A woman named Nina, a government employee, turned to overcome her stiffness. She wants to be with people cheerful, free, but she does not succeed. It is especially difficult for her to communicate with colleagues who behave overbearing. She suffers from their impudence, but cannot defend her borders.

Nina told about her mom. Mom was doing technical work and apparently her colleagues did not respect her too much. It seems to Nina that her mother passed on to her this inability to communicate. She was unable to teach her daughter how to be socially successful, how to behave with dignity. At the same time, mother and father broadcast to Nina: "You will receive a higher education and high status."

Nina really got a higher education, and she works not with mechanisms, but with people, but she does not feel herself either status or successful. In the service, she endures boredom and periodic attacks from others. Sometimes she has a very difficult time when a particularly tough leader appears (bosses change every now and then), but not once in twelve years has she thought about leaving her job.

I asked if it had ever been different. Did she have a sense of freedom in dealing with people. Nina said, yes, it was, 3 years ago. Then one next boss came and began to oppress her: she deprived her of her bonuses, forbade her to go on vacation at the scheduled time, and loaded her with someone else's work.

As far as Nina knew, such actions of the bosses were dictated by the rule to fire people who worked for too long. The fact is that such people can claim some kind of social benefits. They are being pressured to quit themselves.

Once Nina worked 18 days seven days a week until late at night. She wrote to senior management that she was out of strength and needed rest. In a surprising way, this letter had an effect. Her boss was removed, a different leader, more humane, was appointed. It would seem that you need to rejoice, because she won. But this did not please her. Instead, she lost her sense of freedom in dealing with people.

I began to think about what was so traumatic in her story, and what exactly we can do in therapy to help her regain her ability to communicate. I wanted to offer Nina a role experiment, I figured out how to put it in our small office. I was already ready to invite her to start a conversation with one of the characters in the story, but at that moment she turned away, smiled and began to tell the following situation.

I got a feeling of impatience, I really wanted to get up, start moving, do something. And she looked away and developed a new plot. To myself, I noted my condition and decided to put it aside for now and try to turn my attention back on. My energy went to the fact that I got up, walked around the room and sat down in another place.

Nina said that as a child, when she told something, her relatives laughed with some especially humiliating, destructive laugh. She looked away from me and smiled as she told the story. The smile did not match the tragic meaning of the words at all.

I understood that I again want to make a turn in our work, change activity, move from talking to action. You could put on a children's scene, try to understand what was blocking it for her. I took a breath again and prepared to invite her to take action. But Nina did not see me. She turned the other way, smiled again, and began to remember another new situation.

I thought, I wonder what is happening now, literally now I suppress my spontaneity and my desire to make contact with her, and just continue to listen to her. How did it happen? I seem to be repeating her mental process. It happens during sessions that the therapist can begin to feel and reproduce the same thing that happened to the client.

I needed to understand, but what is happening to me, what do I want? I realized that I want to rush her, at the same time, I feel embarrassed, I am even a little ashamed of my impatience, and therefore I do not interrupt her. And she, in general, unfolded in front of me a picture of her life. We have been working not so long ago, just over a month. When a person has a hard time communicating, he needs someone to just listen to him, and thus stay with him, find out what kind of life he lives.

I realized my impatience and my shame, noticed myself in my feelings, and it calmed me down. It became clear to me that right now it is important for me to be with Nina, which means to be at her pace. I have ceased the desire to rush her and the ability to pay attention has appeared. I began to hear Nina better, notice more details and an ironic style of her story. I relaxed and laughed.

Nina smiled at me and laughed too, and then readily said that she would like to stage a scene of a conversation with this woman, an employee, just as I suggested some time ago. As if just now she heard my remark.

She sat down on the chair that she had set for this employee and showed how this woman was calling Nina herself when she passed by: "Nina-Nina-Nina-Nina!" Patter, squeaky voice, very, very fast. Hearing how they call her in such a voice, Nina all tensed in response. An adult calls her as if she were a child. For Nina, this was a violation of her boundaries, she was experiencing severe discomfort.

The employee did not understand that she was not a close friend, not a sister or a relative to call her so importunately and unceremoniously. It did not occur to her to remain in a formal working relationship.

I invited Nina to play the role of herself in that scene again, to listen to the phrase of the employee. And imagine that now there is more time, time has moved apart, so that she can notice all her sensations at this moment. I had a hypothesis that she did not notice all of her sensations, that there was no room for something.

Nina went to the role and after the employee's call began to immediately answer her: "Please, do not address me so harshly, I, in fact, an employee is much more valuable and smarter than you to hear such an appeal from you!" I said it was very good, but what she is doing now is attacking this boss.

And she suggested that she take her time, go back to this scene and, before attacking, to notice what was happening to her, to her body and her feelings right at the moment when the boss turned to her. Nina listened to the employee's phrase again, paused and said that she felt in a state of powerlessness, humiliated and insulted.

Here she fell silent and looked at me. It was a special state, as if for the first time Nina felt what was happening to her at this very moment, when she was addressed. I felt a thrill and realized that now we are close with her, together. We both stopped rushing. I repeated after her: "You were powerless, humiliated and insulted." And we were silent a little longer.

By the end of the session, I told Nina about myself, about how I noticed a desire to hurry her up, and then I chose to be at her pace. She replied that it was important for her to hear this. She said, "I think we have done so much today." As she said goodbye, I saw that the tension on her face was gone and it smoothed out. Nina smiled, her hands and body came to life, her voice became louder.

In childhood, we are so demanding and told a lot: "Do it, quickly!" It seems to me that the ability to find your own pace and stick to it means noticing yourself and treating yourself with love. And then the person with whom you are in a relationship will also notice you, your reactions and your feelings.