CH: It seems there are so many factions of psychotherapists, each claiming paradigm shifts and unique perspectives, and attacking other positions as philosophically untenable or clinically ineffective. Since Self-relations work is both very open-ended in terms of how technique is directed but also clear about ideas of healthy functioning, I'm wondering if you've had occasion to respond to criticisms from pathology-focused clinicians who might find your approach not specific or detailed enough, or from the utterly different position that a clinician bringing any agenda to therapy is an oppressive abuse of power?

SG: The question as I understand it is twofold. One is do I, in fact, favor a generalist position, and, secondly, how would I respond to critical comments from two different wings of psychotherapy - what we might call the right wing of psychopathology and the left wing of narrative approaches. On the first point of whether I favor a generalist position I'd say emphatically yes, partly as a student of Milton Erickson. I was really influenced by his premise that each person is unique, and so each person is their own theory. While it's a general ideal to strive for, it doesn't mean that you don't need a coherent theory. I think you need some coherent principles that generally don't specify a single text about why people get the way they do or how they get better. You need multiple texts. Everybody's got a piece of the pie. Different pieces of that pie might be helpful to one client or another. At this point I don't think I'm out of the mainstream. I think the general surveys have shown that the majority -- something like two-thirds -- of therapists define themselves as eclectic. Then there's the question of whether the eclectic practice has a coherent theoretical position. I think that's possible, and that's what Self-relations is trying to do.

On the question of how I would respond to a psychopathology point of view, I think that psychopathology makes some helpful contributions, particularly in talking about how people try to protect what I call the tender soft spot: how they get hurt, and how they try to protect that hurt, and develop a whole lifestyle out of protecting and defending that hurt place, and how that leads to a problem-defined identity. At the same time, our greatest resource as therapists is to hold and convey the truth to the person that they are more than their pathology. So effective psychotherapy should be based on a person's human-ness or personhood rather than any single aspect of their life. In that regard, I would emphasize that a diagnostic language is distinct from a language about how to develop solutions, a point that Steve deShazer has made very well. And while pathologists, starting with Freud in particular, were able to articulate a language of how problems develop, they were not very good at developing language where solutions develop, about how we get out of these pickles, if you will. So it needs to be bigger than the pathology point of view.

The other point of view is exceedingly disingenuous and/or naïve, which says that it's possible to be neutral in a therapeutic conversation, if indeed that's what they say. My criticism of narrative stuff is that it's basically a communist point of view. It's not entirely bad, it's a piece of the pie, but it's a partial truth. The communist point of view basically emphasizes the communal or collective or social aspect of life experience. If you read Ken Wilber's recent writing, he proposes an interesting model in which he suggests that experience exists in four quadrants simultaneously. One quadrant is an individual interior point of view, which psychopathology emphasizes. Another point of view is an individual exterior, which behaviorism emphasizes. Another quadrant is the interior collective, which refers to Jung's collective unconscious and culture and things like that. The fourth quadrant refers to what might be called the exterior collective point of view; communism emphasizes the exterior communal or collective life and it tends to invalidate or deny the interior world as completely irrelevant. I think it's very, very dangerous to do that. Everybody has their biases. Hopefully you realize that you're biased, and you open your heart and encourage people to find their own biases.

CH: I think you deconstructed deconstruction.

SG: I worry that deconstruction embraces two dangerous trends: the cynicism of our generation, and the commercialism that is the understructure of American life. Basically commercialism gets you so involved with what James Joyce called kinetic art, which is this fast-paced, moving-image, always-changing sort of art, that you can't feel through to any interior world or any quiet world. It's a constructed world. And you get the feeling that for the deconstructionists, all they know is the constructed world. I think, again, it's a helpful contribution, but there are parts of life that are not constructed by what people say. And that's another piece of the pie.

CH: I like how you view the usefulness of each of those perspectives. You don't have to contradict their points, but place them in a broader perspective. Self-relations seems to have that overarching quality that doesn't replace other models but provides a structure in which other points of view can be understood.

SG: I think probably one of the great questions of our time is how we deal with difference.

CH: Mostly it's dealt with with violence.

SG: Right, and this is escalating. Part of it is we're having such a convergence of different possibilities, different truths, different cultures, different ways of knowing and being - and acknowledging that multiplicity is one of the things postmodernism does well. So you have this question of how you deal with that. Self-relations suggests that there are three basic positions one might take. You can lapse into fundamentalism - "my way is the only way" - which is a recipe for violence because it involves ultimately eradicating the other. Fundamentalism can arise within any approach, including among therapists. Anyone who says "My theory, my approach is the only way" is into the violence of fundamentalism. Secondly, you can deal with differences by just ignoring them or by going into commercialism or consumerism, in which you really don't find a place to hold the differences. Third is what I would call love, or the skill of love, the practice of love, which is kind of a funny word because it's been so misused. But it really has to do with the mature skill of being able to hold differences, and being able to allow some relational self, that connects the differences, to occur. Obviously, if as therapists and healers, if we can't do it among ourselves, it's going to be hard to encourage the larger community to develop non-violent approaches to dealing with their differences.

CH: It makes it even more important for us to do that with our theoretical and clinical disagreements. It sounds like the fundamentalist holds too tightly or rigidly to a position, where the descent into consumerism involves a lack of holding a position, but just numbing and shifting.

SG: It's what we call the Errol Flynn Principle. When the great movie actor was asked, "How do you hold a sword?" he would answer that he always imagined holding a bird when he was holding a sword. If he held too tight, the bird would die; if he held too loose the bird would fly away. The basic relational idea was, "Not too tight, not too loose." This notion, how do you attend, what kind of attention involves non-violent reconciliation, is really crucial to self-relations psychotherapy. And particularly, it's based on the observation that Western approaches are big on theory but generally not so good on practices. So it really tries to articulate practices as equal to, if not more crucial than, theory. And so if you're talking about practices, whether it be art or the practice of raising a child or doing therapy, the whole question of attentiveness -- how to attend in a way that not only makes room for somebody else's reality, but also engages them at the same time -- is really important.

CH: I find that I become more and more aware of and interested in the quality of the relationship in the therapy setting, and less focused on particular kinds of interventions or techniques. I'm wondering what kind of a personal balance you have found between those two aspects of therapy. Do you teach specific techniques like three-point attention to help clients try out a different position for dealing with difference in their lives?

SG: I think one of major traps we get into as therapists is the delusion that the healing comes from us. It doesn't come from the client either, for that matter. It comes from life. There is a healing principle present in life. It's trying to help the person. Life is alive and it's trying to help a person develop and grow. So the first position is how the therapist can try to open up to that, feel that and sense that at a more immediate level. And then how to invite a person's attention to note that in their own experience. And that's a skill. It's a skill that needs to be learned. I think the therapist, in acknowledging that the healing principle is in life rather than in the therapist, also acknowledges that you receive it through skillfully being able to do things like develop receptivity and centering to stabilize your attention, to be able to listen to how life flows through you. A therapist needs to have some expertise in how that happens. There are many, many, many different traditions. They're practices, they're not dogmas. It's like, "Here, try this." As in training an artist, the art here is how to listen and receive and express life moving through you. Then, obviously, there are some things that make it difficult for a person to do that. So the second type of expertise is the ability to see where life is not flowing through the person. And to have not only some practices but some specific therapy procedures that will allow experience to process through. The EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) model is one clear example of describing how this might happen. EMDR is very similar to meditation and hypnosis in that it emphasizes that life flows through you, and hopefully, you can just let it happen in some attentive, responsive way. It also emphasizes that certain events occur that may be so overwhelming or traumatic that the nervous system shuts down in its processing of them. EMDR has been helpful in emphasizing that for life to move from an experience to a learning it has to move through multiple levels of processing in the nervous system. At any point that processing or metabolizing can get blocked. And then it just remains there until either the person relaxes, at which point it begins to process through again, which makes it very scary for the person to relax, or whenever some of the cues of the original situation are presented, and then it starts activating again. So a therapist has to have some of these skills of being able to help a person process experience. I try to look for where people shut down and then see what's happening and how I can help life flow through them once again. On the one hand, you realize that you're serving life, trying to humbly sense and support the healing principle. On the other hand, you know that there are specific practices that really facilitate that process.

CH: Are there particular practices that you're thinking about?

SG: Yeah. They're particular to my sensibilities and training. I think it's inevitable and great that different therapists will have different ones. I use hypnotic work, EMDR work, I use meditation with people, I use a lot of the Self-relations work that looks to address what we call the sponsorship of the fressen energy that moves in the body.

CH: Fressen?

SG: There are two German words for eating. Fressen means to eat like an animal, and essen means to eat like a person. You watch a kid, and it's amazing how long it takes for them to cultivate essen skills. You can generalize that as we do in Self-relations and say that fressen energy is all the stuff that is uncultivated by human presence. It's feelings that flow through you, it's basic processes like eating, emotional responses. Some of them are unpleasant to be in the presence of, some of them are incredible to be in the presence of. The spontaneity and innocence of a child is fressen energy. The point is, in order for them to enter into human beings, they need something else, some mature human presence to be able to touch them, to see them, to bless them, to hold them, to cultivate them. And you could say that until fressen energy is touched by human presence it will seem to have no human value. So we see that kids don't know how to name their experience, they don't know how to hold it. One of the things we do as caregivers for kids is we help them learn how to sponsor their experiences. And that's a long process. You might say that learning any art is learning how to sponsor these particular spirits that move through you. A writer is visited, if you will, by certain characters in a story. And a writer first has to receive these characters, hold them, express them, and touch them with human presence so as to cultivate them into what we might way is the essen form, which is a good story.

There again, there are three general relationships one can take to fressen energy. The first is you can dominate it, beat the shit out of it, and completely control it, and we see that a lot. That's more the fundamentalist approach. We see it in clients trying to use will-power, trying to use control with themselves or with other people. On the other hand, you can just let it run rampant, and it's out of control or wild, and we see that a lot. We see a lot of kids who are not getting proper sponsorship these days. Or you can take this middle position of what effective sponsorship might mean, which is how to bring human attentiveness and love to something in a way that allows its form to change into what might be called essen forms, but in a way that preserves and, indeed, encourages its fressen energy. So from that point of view, we can say that any symptom is fressen energy without essen forms. It's unsponsored experience. When it's present, the feeling is that it has no place in the world. It feels like it has no human value. Both to the person experiencing or expressing it, and also to anybody in the vicinity, including therapists. So our general attitude is, we have to get rid of it.

CH: Take a violent, fundamentalist position toward it.

SG: Exactly. So we try in Self-relations to take more of Erickson's position, or the position of aikido, which is how to be able to blend with it while not being overwhelmed by it. This is part of what we would call the mature skill of love.

CH: I saw an interview with Scott Turow talking about how whenever he writes a novel, there's always one character that wants to take it over; that sounds like his particular description of what you're calling fressen energy.

SG: The whole notion of a relational self from that point of view is not one in which you have parts over which you have some executive, controlling function. But it's an interesting sort of relationship between each part of the human system - what I would call the cognitive self, on the one hand, and the somatic self, from which feelings and archetypes and spirits and ancestors and all sorts of interesting "others" come from. I would say a creative life, whether it's in a formal art or in the art of becoming a person, is about some sort of relational connection between those two basic psyches. And I think that is a mature skill. It's what growing up is about.

To get back to the question you asked about what specifically I do with clients, the basic position is life is coming through you, and it's bringing you everything you need in order to become a human being. What people need to learn are some skills about how to listen to it, how to sense it, how to stay with it, how to be guided by it, while also giving it some form. It's a major way to think about therapy. Is it the only way? Of course not. Is it the "right" way? No. I'm perfectly fine with other therapists saying, "Well, no, you should think about it this way." I don't think that Self-relations work is going to be around in fifty years. And if people read it in a hundred years, they'll probably think, "My God, what a bunch of crazy crap!" But that's the nature of the work: we're generating temporary art forms. Or essen forms to try to humanize this fressen energy that is coming straight from life.

CH: Well, you certainly model a peaceful and non-violent attitude toward other therapy approaches as well as a comfort with the ephemeral nature of the work we're all doing.

SG: One of my major aikido senseis is fond of going around during a practice and simply saying to people, "You're working against yourself." I think we really work against ourselves when we're getting into these criticisms about "my model is better than your model." It's not to me what the work is about.

CH: There are so many ways the idea of sponsorship plays out in therapy. I've been noticing the past couple of months a surprising level of peacefulness and calm in folks I work with when I use the image of calming a child frightened by a monster under the bed. It's such a common experience, and almost everybody has the experience of knowing how to do that successfully. They get the immediate sense, "Oh, I know how to do sponsorship!" It seems to generate a lot of confidence in their ability to stay with and hold uncomfortable experience.

SG: I really agree with that. It's really amazing that from the time a person has had to abandon their soul, or shut down their awareness to this tender soft spot that's indestructibly at their core, and they have gone out of the garden, if you will, and into the desert, that they have developed these extraordinary skills of nurturing and sponsoring other people.

One of the ideas in Self-relations is this notion of a relational self. One of the examples is re-connecting, or connecting sometimes for the first time, what we call the problem-defined, or neglected self, of the person with the cognitive self, or what we might call the competency-based self of the person. As we said earlier, traditionally therapy emphasizes the deficits or pathologies or problems. I think that's very important. That's a person's woundedness, or regressive sense of self. What Self-relations says is that these aspects of a person seem to have no positive value because they're not being sponsored by human presence. It then asks the question, "who is the best sponsor?" For a grown-up person, the response is clearly, the person themself. The recent approaches that challenge pathology such as the solution-focused, and Ericksonian work, and narrative work, are really helpful about bringing attention to the competency-based, resource-based aspects of a person's life. What Self-relations tries to do is, at a feeling level, to connect those two aspects of a person. And it makes the observation that usually they are mutually exclusive. Most of the time the person is not in their problem-self. They walk around, better or worse, they're okay, they're in a normal frame of mind. When the problem occurs, they go into a very different type of experience. When that problem occurs their competent self leaves. And when they get the competent self back, they neglect these wounded parts of themselves. So this notion of sponsorship means that we carry the idea from hypnosis - namely, that "there are two of you" - into a more general frame of mind, and say that every person is a relationship between two very different orders of being.

One of the primary relationships between the cognitive or competent self to the somatic self is that of sponsorship. So often the person has those skills, but often they haven't connected them up to themselves.

CH: What do you hope the folks who attend the workshop will take away with them?

SG: The workshop generally operates at a couple different levels. As the Buddhists like to say, in order to cultivate some presence in the world, such as love, you need at least a couple different things. You need an awareness of the Buddha-hood, which is this awakened self that exists within each person at their core. So the work is really trying to touch upon the tender soft spot, and have people be aware of that as a non-pathological center of their being. It also needs what they call a dharma, which is a description about how things work. There are multiple dharmas, but you need one that is coherent and consistent. So the workshop will emphasize a set of principles for understanding how experience is constructed, how problems may develop, and how problems may be resolved. The other things that are needed, on a more specific level, are the ethics about and the practices for generating some sense of wakefulness, as well as some therapy methods that really work to identify where a person is stuck, and methods that will help a person get unstuck. So there are these three interlocking levels of specifics in terms of the relational ethics, the relational practices, and the therapy interventions. Finally, the Buddhists emphasize that for this to work you need a sangha or community of folks who support each other in learning this. Hopefully the workshop will allow an opportunity for managed-care-weary therapists to find a little shelter from the storm, and to re-connect with why they got into this business in the first place. You want to sign up?

CH: Yeah, I think I'll be there. Steve, thanks so much for doing this. I look forward to seeing you in March.

SG: Likewise.