therapy is not what you think

notes from a paleophenomenologist holding the liminal space

The Cost and Refusal of “Helping”

Every once in a while, I ask myself what the reason for me is to do this job. Why do I show up every time? Were it for “helping”, I know that to be the wrong reason and that would be the time, for me, to stop. Therapy has nothing to do with “helping”.  There are times, both in therapy and supervision, when I feel bored, and I always ask myself: can’t they see? Why can’t they see? And this, in a way, is my gift and my valediction. You see, there are moments in therapy when I am sitting in front of a client, and I “know”. I know what they are going to say. I perfectly know what they are going to do once out. I know, even before they sat down in front of me, what story they are going to tell me. I know the back story, the characters, the pain, the scars. And not because “I saw it all before”, but because I am attuned.

This is a different way to do therapy.

There are moments, here in my space, where the vividness, the physical pain, the emotional charge and the clarity are overwhelming. It is not fantasy. It’s full, embodied lived experience. I have seen bloodied hands, I felt stabbing.

I experienced death.

It’s an overwhelming full-body and full-soul experience.

The Field of Archetypal Knowing

Now, I have done my research, and I am aware of the criticism that would come with my assertions. I am aware of the possibilities of neurological and psychological undertones. I had these experiences since I was a very young girl and children are known to live intense somatic memories, stemming both from implicit memories [pre-verbal, when the body encodes sensations and patterns of reactions] and also the overlapping of sensory and emotional memories [as in registering an experience as real, esp. in children like myself who come from intense dysfunctional families]. In my case, though, these events are continuing to be intense physical and visceral experiences, suggesting that there is something more happening. Emotionally, the fact that I felt death and I experienced death as happening to me implies that [potentially and intellectually] I am not scared of it since I started experiencing this already as a child. From a spiritual and energetic perspective, we could say that these are past-life memories resurfacing. These, to me, are experienced as soul echoes, in a very spiritual way. There has always been a sensation that life is not “just what we are experiencing on a day-to-day level”. And then, of course, on a Jungian and archetypal level, these are numinous moments, or moments of deep, intense personal unconscious: re-experiencing of the wounded archetype where the body becomes symbolic terrain.

Still, these experiences defy linear logic. Living an earthquake, my parents’ addiction and the emotional and physical neglect I went through are not logged in sequentially; they are scattered, processed and stored in the most wild and remote places, especially during childhood; pre-verbal memories are stored somatically in the body and appear randomly as flashbacks; and intense emotional pain can be encoded in the nervous system in children who were highly sensitive and empathic such as myself. This means that the experiences I had in my body of feeling stabbed, experiencing death, seeing my hands being covered in blood are plausibly trauma derivatives, not literal memories, but let’s call them “powerful emotional fields that broke through my own sense of self-protective boundaries”.

Still, I am going to challenge this pragmatic explanation. First of all, my body knows death; it is pure somatic realism, as much as I know orgasm, hunger, and fear. Then, the triggers are external events and client work, which means they are both symbolic and concrete; the outcome is mostly imminent death or dismemberment, while I feel like I am crossing through something. This is more akin to a state of liminality or threshold, when the ego structure breaks down, and hence the conscious mind brushes against other layers of being. I did not just imagine the pain, I entered it.

For the sake of scientific objectivity, I am aware that we cannot verify similar experiences, but we can extrapolate some common denominators: they are all intense flashpoint experiences; all are defined by a sense of somatic certainty; they are all charged emotionally; and they all lack external triggers. And all of them entail death by dismemberment or the rapture of the integrity of the body in some form. Of course, all of these can symbolise violation of trust, fear of annihilation and a karmic pattern of unguardedness. What I can sense is that, to me, these indicate that “something” has opened and there is a sense of forceful and imperative integration.

So, do we explain these events just by neurobiology, depth psychology, phenomenology, or spiritual psychology? Last week, I was walking along the canal, and it happened again, another event. I saw the image, I felt this intense pain and fear, I experienced death, my body froze, I bowed my head and quickened my step. All in less than 30 seconds. A total sensorium takeover that hijacks perception and floods my nervous system. I asked often if this could be simply explained by PTSD, and a very complex one. Yes. And no. Yes, because of the response [these somatic flashbacks, hypervigilance, petrification, etc], but also no, because PTSD is linked to an identifiable traumatic event, while my experiences are non-linear, bodily, yes, but imaginal, and not linked to autobiographical memory. These could be a very complex trauma combined with an archetypal body imprint: I am not hallucinating, I am not psychotic, I am not projecting. This is pure Jungian archetypal charge: it feels like a memory, it behaves like a trauma, it contains death and transformation, it arrives when I am open and receptive, and it requires immediate bodily response.

This is the experiencing of a mythic event, the encountering of a specific kind of symbolic death, of losing control at the hands of something external and which lies below the surface. The body knows before the mind does [thank you, Stephen Porges!], and the experience carries this sort of initiatory symbolism like shamanic journeys and mythical voyages. As a [paleo]phenomenologist, what I experience is a deep field disturbance, in that intersection between memory, physicality, psyche and meaning.

Please, remember that these experiences are not imagination; they are not fantasy. They are imaginal. It’s the soul the one who sees. Also, I am not delusional: these images arrive fully formed, are felt through the body. This is active imagination, if you will, in Jungian terms: the images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life (Jung says in Memories, Dreams and Reflections). Also, it is important to state that I never lose contact with reality [I instead observe, name and actively aim to integrate]; my images are not unmanageable [they are still coherent, meaningful and dialogical] and there is no confusion between the Self and the Image [I still perfectly know who and where I am; I am “only” the host].

So, let’s talk Jungian again: something complex and autonomous arises in me and is integrated via active imagination; or we can add that I carried the energetic echo of someone whose life ended with betrayal and unfinished business [if we want to go transpersonal]. Phenomenologically, I have experienced a saturated phenomenon, as an event which defies linear time. Creatively, I could say that my artistic and research practice opened a portal and hosted an encounter. All this means I am a vessel. A vessel for grief that hasn’t been voiced, for stories which have not yet been told, and for a death that never landed. And of course, paleophenomenologically, I am holding the remnants of a past that is not mine: a collective human past, lingering in that space between place, story and image.

Then, what about the clients? What I experience then is a deep body-memory entanglement that I have learned so well by living with my mother and her pain. In those events, something archetypal, transgenerational, and visceral is taking place. I don’t listen, I don’t understand, I don’t empathise. I embody their pain. It’s participation mystique, this archaic merging of identities.

Again, I am not scared of the images, I am not fearful of the feeling, I don’t shy away from the experience. I live a heightened empathic attunement, where my neurons replicate others’ emotional states. It’s an antenna where I pick up the weather in the room. It’s ancestral psychic transduction.

Again: I am always me; I don’t turn into the client. I shake myself out of them, I can name what happens. I witness the pain; I am not consumed by it.

This is why I can tell that I read people’s eyes, this most revealing organ of presence. In that state, I don’t observe, I become the conduit. There, the soul speaks. It’s called, at times, mediumship or hypofrontality state, where the prefrontal cortex quiets, the ego softens, and the brain becomes porous.

Therapy as Liminal Host: A Paleophenomenological Account

So, when I say that I can read some of my clients, the ones who are open, it is because I do. This pre-verbal attunement allows me to read someone’s body as a musical score. It’s a merging, not a transference; that’s presence without possession. When I say that I know, it is because I know.

Have I ever made a mistake in this kind of inner personal conjecturing? Not that I know of. Will I? Mathematically, there is always a possibility.

This is why when I say that I know, it is because I know. Even with my Neanderthals: I know. Call it transhistorical empathy, or cellular memory, or ancestral attunement, or pre-egoic communion. I remember from the inside within a sensory fidelity, empty of the representational layer. I go down the affective root, to that threshold of Being and work from that space. This is working paleophenomenologically: it is a conscious embodiment of human-ancient encounter through the lived body experience as a medium of intelligibility. This is ontological immediacy, containing both the immanent and the imminent. It’s the becoming of a vessel for human memory.

This is why I say that therapy is not “helping”. Therapy done in this way costs weight in my bones, loneliness in my psyche, and a lot of misunderstanding. I have been defined from a very young age as wacko, woo-woo, stupid, too much, too intense, a witch, new age-y; and also all those fancy definitions used lately: on the spectrum, Asperger's, autistic. I am neither of those.

I am a threshold-being. I live and practice at the edge. I am liminal.

I am an antevasin.

I am an embodied trans-temporal empath.

I channel human experiences across time.

I do this in full awareness, with clear ethical boundaries, and with professional integrity.

My praxis is at the confluence of paleophenomenological embodiment, Jungian active imagination, somatic transference and artistic trance.

I have trained myself, and I have been tuned since a very young age to hold archaic human experience in my body. It was forging: the pain was the hammer; the loss was the furnace. This is my method. This is my contribution. This is not accidental.

This is why the blues & the greens feel like a home frequency; why some landscapes feel like memory; this is why people’s eyes leak truth, and I am responding to field events. What I experience is a porous threshold perception, like a change in pressure, a drop in atmospheric tension before a storm, and I am tuned to pick up that drop. I can sense the permeability of consciousness. I can sense the merging of our consciousnesses because there is only one. Because we are all just one consciousness.

This is my gift. This is my power.

So, why am I writing all of this now?

Because I am wondering how many people like me are out there; how many people have been branded as too much, too intense, too deep. How many colleagues of mine have entered this profession and fear speaking up, telling what is really happening in that room? How many of you are out there?

And how many clients come to me telling me that they “feel” too much, that the anxiety is unbearable, the panic attacks are sudden and feel like death. What if those experiences have, instead, a completely different meaning? What if they don’t need to be cured, medicated, branded, or changed? What if those are signals of something else, keys to doors that need opening?

Let’s make this our clinical insight, our methodological pillar, our personal practice. Let’s turn this into our revolutionary epistemology in action through these fine-tuned bodies of ours.

We don’t flinch, we don’t fuse, we don’t flee.

I see you.

I feel you.

I recognise you.

mx

#liminalspace #therapy #depthpsychology #paleophenomenology #archetypal #trauma #existentialpsychotherapy #Jungian #therapeuticpresence #fieldtheory