Process Work

Process Work (also known as Process Oriented Psychotherapy) is a psychotherapeutic model that meets a person on the soul’s terms. Care is taken to work holistically with each individual, in the full context of the life being lived. Diagnostics are replaced with hypotheses and tested with 360° listening that picks up the multiple channels of perception.

Rather than following a structured method, this work trusts in the movements of the moment, probably best articulated in the ancient Chinese world as the Dao. We listen for changes in atmosphere, signals and double signals from the body, shifting channels from visual to proprioceptive (embodied) and even listen to how the surrounding environment is participating in the session.

In this way, Process Work can move into all levels of life: practical changes in the surface world, altering our orientation in the dreamworld, or even a deep connection back to the essence from which all things emerge.

Let’s take a detour and explore a lived example

Dave has trouble with his boss. He feels belittled, under-appreciated, underpaid. Time and again he desires to take a stand for himself. Time and again he shrinks away from the challenge.

We drop out of the surface world (Consensus Reality) and enter Dreamland. A child cowers in the corner as a King-Kong like figure rampages through the city.

We imagine what it must feel like, to be King Kong. We stand up and embody the shape. We begin to trash the city with big sweeping blows to the buildings. We throw cars. We get big. We terrify.

We explore, also, the felt sense of the child. We become the weak, quivering one. We become terrified.

We begin to understand the fear.

We descend further to the essence level. Here we can see that these figures emerge from the same place. They have something in common. Perhaps they both feel out of place. Perhaps they are both, in some way, scared.

When we return from our journey and look at Dave’s trouble with his boss, a new way forward has been revealed.

A Little More about the Work

Arnold Mindell, and his partner Amy, were the pioneers of this work in the late part of the 20th Century. Mindell was originally a theoretical physicist who followed a hunch that the quantum field had deep implications in the psyche of human beings. This hunch led him to the Jung Institute where, amongst other teachers and mentors, he received tutelage from Marie-Louise von Franz.

As he made his way out of Switzerland and back to his home in Portland, Oregon, he realised that the body was largely missing from Jung’s work. He asked the question: What is the dreamlike nature that underlies physical symptoms? How can these be explored for deeper healing (in the sense of ‘becoming more whole’)?

This search opened up new doorways in which to work with the psyche, or perhaps more accurately; rediscovered old doorways that had been long barred by the rationalism of the Western mind. This took Mindell back to indigenous cultures and ancient, shamanic ways of viewing the multiple layers of reality. To (perhaps over-)simplify, he started to work with a three-fold structure of reality: Consensus Reality (the layer ‘we’ ‘all’ agree upon; eg that is a chair); Dreamland (the more mythic/symbolic layer underlying and influencing CR); and Essence Level (the layer from which all things arise and eventually return).

His wife, Amy, was instrumental in bringing to the work a focus on the nature of the approach of the therapist. Her term, ‘Metaskills’, helped to return the focus to therapeutic basics such as deep listening, empathy and how we dream into being the potentials of the one we speak to.

To get a further anecdotal sense of this, read one of my fellow Alumni’s articles describing the work here. Deeper still, this is a process we unfolded together in our training.

In Practice

The structure of a session, like the Dao, is a formless form. It’s a collaboration between practitioner and client as both embark on an expedition of discovery into the unknown parts of the psyche. A deep respect for what is permeates the field as each symptom, reaction and disturbance is allowed to be explored.

There is often an invisible hand guiding the session as troubles and concerns are given their space. Unlike traditional psychotherapy, there is a certain vibrance to the work; one minute we might be sitting and talking, the next we’re up role playing in the archetypes, the next we’re drawing an ‘energy sketch’, the next we’ve entered a dream and are imagining ways in which it could be re-dreamt.

As such, Process Work is a dance between the creative and the receptive, a dance that moves to the rhythm of each individual soul. In the background is the premise that, as living beings, we are all constantly changing and evolving. Behind this is the sense that each disturbing force that arises into this space is a part of the desire of the self for more wholeness; the allowance of more and more parts into one’s totality.