1. You are referring to your own therapy form as the "self-relations therapy". Does this mean you are seeing the cause of psychological problems in disturbed self relations?

Yes. Let me briefly explain. We emphasize that there are two very different intelligences that operate within each person-a cognitive-social intelligence that tends to live in the head, and a somatic-archetypal-emotional intelligence that lives lower down in the body. When these intelligences are working together, good things tend to happen. When they are opposed or disconnected, bad things tend to happen.

We see examples of somatic intelligence in mammals such as horses, dogs, and cats-e.g., the intuitive relatedness, the need for belonging and nurturance, the sensitivity to subtle cues, and so forth. This same somatic intelligence can be seen in humans, especially in children, artists, athletes, exceptional performers, and the like. In humans, this somatic intelligence is joined by cognitive intelligence, as seen in culture, social systems, intellectual and symbolic languages, and so forth. It provides narratives, ethics, meanings, and values.

What we look at is how a person has come to relate these two intelligences. You could have an antagonistic relationship, where the intellect tries dominate or suppress the somatic intelligence; or a dissociative one, where the intellect is unaware of its somatic base. Or you could have an enmeshment or undifferentiated relationship, where mindfulness or self-awareness isn't possible, such that a person just acts out whatever they're feeling. These are some of the imbalanced relationships that lead to symptoms and sustained suffering. What we try to do in self-relations is identify these two systems, identify the relationships between them, and see how a person can connect with each simultaneously, thereby allowing a mutually helpful connection between them. It is the balanced, reciprocal connection between them that awakens what we call the relational self.

2. In self-relations you say " the problem is the solution" or "the symptom is the gift". What do you mean by this?

Self-relations emphasizes the positive potential of problems and symptoms. It sees such disturbances of the "normal order" as evidence that "something is waking up" in the life of a person or community. Such disturbances are double-edged crises. On the one side, they are (often hidden) opportunities for major growth on one the one side. (Most of us can recall negative events-a death, divorce, illness, or addiction-that led to significant positive change in our lives.) On the other side, such disturbances can very destructive-we can get lost in depression, acting out, or other problematic behaviors. Self-relations suggests that the difference is in whether a disturbance can be "sponsored" by a skillful human presence. When they are sponsored, the problem becomes a solution.

The principle and practices of sponsorship are the cornerstone of self-relations. The word "sponsorship" comes from the Latin "spons", meaning, "to pledge solemnly". So sponsorship is a vow to help a person (including one's self) to use each and every event and experience to awaken to the goodness and gifts of the self, the world, and the connections between the two. Self-relations suggests that experiences that come into a person's life are not yet fully human; they have no human value until a person is able to "sponsor them".

For example, a man was very depressed and suicidal after his young son drowned in the backyard jacuzzi tub. It had happened while the man was working in the yard, so he felt especially guilty and responsible. He was hospitalized after one suicide attempt, and was on "suicide watch" on the ward. Attempts to reach him didn't work. The attending psychiatrist, a student of mine, tried a different approach. He allowed himself to sit with the man in deep silence, welcoming the "depression" into a safe place within his being. This compassionate "holding" of the "problem" allowed him to sense the "depression" as an important and valid feeling of the father's sense that he had died, too. After a while of this sponsorship process, the psychiatrist found himself saying gently to the man, "There's another death that hasn't been acknowledged." The man became very absorbed and burst into tears as the psychiatrist continued to gently acknowledge both the death of the son and the "psychological death" of the father. This acknowledgement included different aspects of sponsorship-receiving a negative experience, holding it in a sanctuary, properly naming it, touching it with kindness and human presence, and so forth-that allowed the man to stop fighting the "problem." Instead, the man began a grieving process that gradually brought him out of the depression. He became quite active in helping others to deal with the loss of their children.

Another client was a woman who had been sexually abused as a young girl by the next door neighbor. As a young adult, she joined the Marines and became a demolitions expert. She had access to very small and very powerful bombs. She began to fantasize using the weapons to go home and "blow up" the sexual perpetrator. Her therapist, a student of mine, was frightened by the fantasies and tried unsuccessfully to introduce relaxation techniques. I had her bring the woman into our consulting group. The client arrived, looking shy but interested. As we talked, I casually noted that I heard she wanted to "blow some motherfucker out of the water". She looked surprised, giggling before turning away in self-consciousness. I continued to gently repeat the idea, and she became very absorbed in my communications. I suggested that there was "a presence within" that was filled with rage, and that was a real sign of integrity and healing. I elaborated how that "inner presence" needed a safe place, a validation, a deep listening to, a recognition of her value. We began a process of learning how she could safely sponsor this "inner presence filled with rage," gradually sensing what external actions she could take that would allow her healing to occur.

In each of these cases, the "problem" or "symptom"-the "depression" or 'homicidal rage"-is seen as a positive resource that is trying to help a person to heal. Under proper conditions of sponsorship, such seemingly negative experiences can be realized as positive contributions to a person's life. Of course, this is a dangerous process anyway you approach it, so we are not speaking flippantly or acting carelessly. On the contrary, we are emphasizing the serious nature of creating proper ritual space that can receive, hold, and transform extremely difficult experiences that life has given a person. But as they say in homeopathy, that which doesn't kill you will make you stronger.

3. Is it, in your opinion, possible to assess the effectiveness of the self-relations therapy?

Of course. Simply stated, it can be assessed by seeing how well it performs in terms of symptom relief and therapy satisfaction by clients. We have at this point many anecdotal reports of therapists, in terms of how helpful this approach has been. We look forward to further validation of its effectiveness.

4. There are initial attempts of a virtual psychotherapy. Can you imagine a self-relations therapy via computer?

Not really. While there may be a limited place for such activities, self-relations is based on both the therapist and client developing and maintaining a connection with a "felt sense" of what's being talked about. A basic idea is that if this felt sense is lost, the conversation tends to be just words being impotently thrown about. So it requires presence in the moment, connection to the body, and connection within a relationship. It's like a performance art, in that way. And just like it is difficult to think of doing a vital artistic performance in virtual reality, it is similar with SR.

You know, in part SR is a response to the growing disconnection of thinking and communication from the natural world. It sees the dangers of a "television-computer" consciousness to emotional well-being and community happiness, and tries to return consciousness to its natural roots. It is wary of the postmodern consciousness that ignores its somatic and natural roots.

5. What, in your opinion, was essential in establishing self-relations therapy as another therapy form?

I initially started, some 25 years ago, as a student of Milton Erickson, the legendary psychiatrist who pioneered new approaches to hypnosis and mind-body healing. I learned from him the value of creative trance states, how to trust an intelligence other than the intellect, how to welcome and worth with symptoms and problems as "gifts" to be realized. Along the way, I also began studying the martial art of aikido and some Buddhism. They showed some alternate ways of doing these things that Erickson could do so beautifully-how to sense love as a skill to be used in the face of adversity, how to find a calm center within oneself, how to be at peace with one's self.

At some point, my challenge was to grow beyond Erickson's influence. One of the things that being married and becoming a father taught me was that I couldn't just go into a trance to deal with problems-I had to learn to stay connected in relationship, to work more skillfully with my emotional states, to stay present with others even as I centered within myself. So self-relations took Erickson's approach and made it more embodied, more relational, and more spiritual.

6. In your book "The courage to love: Principles and Practices of Self-Relations Psychotherapy" you are describing the loss of patients "felt sense".

This term was introduced by Gendlin in 1981 when finding out during his psychotherapeutical studies, that the best indication of a successful therapy is, when a client had a "felt sense" - a perceptible understanding - of his problem in his or her body.

The loss of this "felt sense" leads to a state where clients feel trapped in a way of thinking that is both painful and unsatisfactory to them. In which different ways can this "loss of balance (center)" be noticed?

Two ways. The first has to do with being too much "in the head"-overintellectualizing, being lost in ideology, overcontrolled in thinking, obsessive, not able to calm down or slow down, needing to be "right" all the time, and so forth. The second has to do with being overwhelmed by somatic experience-lost in depression, frozen by anxiety, preoccupied with insecurity, overwhelmed by rage or resentments, numb with lifelessness, and so forth. The point is that human consciousness is an emergent property when these two systems-somatic and cognitive intelligence-are mutually supporting each other. When you tilt for any length of time toward one or the other, you've lost the centerpoint of balance that allows "felt sense" to be present and helpful.

7. How would I have to imagine my personal balance (center)?

Well, an important thing to realize is that it is not an imagined state; on the contrary, you must let go of the imaginary world and re-enter the real world. In martial arts, for example, if you are dealing with an attacker bearing down on you, you better wake up and get out of your imaginative mind and feel what's really there! If you're driving down the autobahn and need to respond quickly and correctly to road conditions, you better not be imagining the road, you had better be sensing it instead!!

One of the major ways to sense one's center is to practice some form of mindfulness. To engage in what the Chinese call "wu-wei", or "active non-doing", so you can relax deeply, let go of compulsive reactivity, and enter into a receptive silent mode. Without this receptive calmness, centering (or any direct sensing of the somatic self) is impossible.

Of course, a centering practice is not supported by the dominant approaches to consciousness in our culture. On the one hand, you have commercialism and consumerism, which says that you have no center and that the way to satisfy that empty aching in your body is to consume-sex, drugs, rock n' roll, big cars, computers, etc. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this stuff, but if we use it in hopes of gaining the spiritual well-being that comes from centering, we're in a lot of trouble! On the other hand, you have fundamentalism and authoritarianism, which says that the truth comes from above, from the text, and so you better not reference your own inner wisdom. So the support for sensing and cultivating one's center is a bit dim in mainstream circles.

8. In which ways can both therapist and client come closer to the center (personal balance) of a client?

We think of two major paths- (1) natural states of well-being and (2) symptoms (or states of ill-being). For example, you might ask a person, when do you most feel like yourself? Or, what do you do to get "back to" yourself? Answers might include things like taking a walk, or taking a bath, listening to or playing music, meditating or breathing, reading, talking with friends, and so forth. These are what we call natural states of well-being. When you ask a person to sense that state of well-being, and to sense and touch where in their body they most feel the core or center of that state, most people touch their belly, solar plexus, or heart. These are places where one can locate one's center-in the traditional chakra states that Eastern philosophy talks about. Interestingly, we now have Western science showing that there are brains in the belly and heart, in support of chakra theory.

We can connect a person to their center also by inquiring about their symptoms. For example, ask a person describing a problem to sense where in their body they most feel the center of disturbance, the most core place of ill-being. Interestingly, the centers of ill-being turn out to be the same as the centers of well-being! Based on this and other evidence, we suggest that the symptom is actually a state that is trying to awaken new energy from a person's center. That is, it is archetypal energy entering a person's somatic intelligence through their center, trying to come into their life to help them in some way. If the cognitive self turns away or otherwise negatively treats this energy, it seems to have no human value (which it doesn't, because it hasn't been valued YET by humans) and becomes a state of ill-being. Self-relations suggests that by having the cognitive self "sponsors" or forms a positive relationship to this negative energy, it transforms into a solution state of well-being. This can be a very challenging skill-I'm not saying it happens easily in all cases-but it is worth the effort, especially considering the alternatives.

9. You have been stating that the basis of a client's persistent suffering is the rejection, ignorance, and denial of what his or her center is expressing. This is done even though the inner self is already guiding the client in a positive way. How can a process that is actually very positive in itself, become so negative?

Well, again, for the simple reason that the experience from the inner self is not realized as positive until it's "sponsored" by the cognitive self. The New Agers have it right when they say that life gives you everything you'll ever need; what they don't mention is that the experiences aren't "cooked" yet. In German, you have these two words for eating-essen and fressen. As I understand it, "fressen" means to eat like an animal, to "pig out", so to speak; whereas "essen" is to eat like a human being. If we generalize that distinction, we say that the inner self starts in "fressen", an important but uncultivated state of consciousness. It is the challenge of culture, family, and individual self to find ways to "sponsor" these "fressen energies", and thereby transform them into "essen forms" that have positive human value. So we say that if a behavior or experience seems to have no human value-e.g., a symptom like a depression-it is an unconscious experience that has not yet been sponsored into its positive form.

10. You are writing that a reaction that is not integrated, repeats itself until it is integrated, and that a negative experience has to be made again and again until it is integrated with both, love and acceptance, by human perception. How do I have to picture this dynamism?

Think of it in the following way. Each of us is in an ongoing process of becoming more of a human being. Events occur that allow us to do just that, by requiring us to "grow" new resources/patterns. For example, a person starting in an intimate relationship needs to learn skills such as being visible with vulnerability, protecting boundaries, holding different truths simultaneously, giving/receiving, etc. In response to this need, life sends archetypal patterns to the person, but in "uncooked" or "half-human" forms. For example, a person needing to develop good boundaries may find themselves experiencing anger or even rage. In its primary form, this experience isn't fully human or helpful; it needs to be received by the cognitive social self and worked with, so it assumes a helpful, healthy form. So a fully human, integrated experience goes through two steps: it is activated within the somatic self and then sponsored and integrated by the cognitive self. If the cognitive self does not sponsor it, it remains within the somatic self in unintegrated form. It reactivates whenever a person reenters to the same or similar situation, but also simply when a person relaxes, because relaxation is an evolutionary sign to the nervous system that "danger has passed and it's now safe to integrate/heal any wounds. So the old experience of say, rage, returns, in search of a human presence that will receive it and transform it. If there is no sponsorship, it just waits and returns later. On this point nature is eternally patient and perhaps cruel: it lets you take as long as you need to integrate a human pattern. While you can let it come forward into your life and thereby transform it, you can't send it back. So it's stuck in the "neurosis" or "no-man's land", between non-existence and existence, just waiting to be integrated. We try to create the proper conditions so it can safely come forward and be integrated and transformed into its fully human form. So in the case of anger, that energy can turn into fierceness or clarity or good focus.

For example, a client of mine was married with a young son. He started an affair with his secretary and left his wife, while developing a gambling addiction. (This is all before he came to see me!) His new lover became rather dominant and angry, taking over all control for disciplining the boy (now 7), constantly cursed and berated him. She also often screamed at my client, escalating to the point where she started to physically hit him. He grew up in a violent family, so this accessed a lot for him-he ended up closing his eyes and "meditating," a fancy way of saying he was numbing and dissociating.

When I asked him what fierceness looked like in his family of origin, he described a violent father and screaming mother. He remembered making a deep vow that he would never act like that-he would be a gentle person. So here you have a very "unsponsored" experience and understanding sense of fierceness-that it always comes out as violence. We worked quite a bit on the different forms of positive fierceness-assertiveness, centering, drawing boundaries, protecting one's self. He learned to effectively challenge his girlfriend's violence, and the two of them came to therapy together. Our major focus was transforming the archetypal energy of fierceness from its unsponsored negative forms to its sponsored positive forms. Of course, every couple faces the challenge of how to fight constructively; this pair has gradually learned how to do so.

11. What makes you so sure claiming that any person wants to recover?

I have never said that every person wants to recover. I maintain that each person has the capacity to transform their life. They may, for various reasons (most notably, ignorance or fear) think that it's in their best interests to maintain the status quo. Part of our work is helping people sense the difference it makes to practice centering and sponsorship of negative experiences.

In therapy, one of your greatest allies is a person's suffering. Without the intense suffering, most people wouldn't want or need to change. So the suffering inherent in a symptom is life's way of telling a person that they need to change. We try to help them deal positively and constructively with the symptom, by sponsoring it, so they both alleviate suffering and increase their happiness. Whether or not a person does it is ultimately up to them.
Most of us talk a good talk, but are actually very conservative-we only change when we need to. If you look back over your life to the times when you made major identity shifts, you will likely find that it involved some real suffering. So we try to have a positive attitude toward symptoms and suffering, recognizing them as giving birth, under proper conditions, to major identity change and growth.

When we look at when in a person's life symptoms tend to occur, we find something very interesting-they are most likely to occur when a person is involved in major life transitions due to death, a birth, marriage or divorce, leaving home, changing jobs, retiring, illness, promotions, and so forth. We might say that each of these transitions means that your old identity must die and a new one must be reborn. For example, who you are as a single person-how you carry yourself in the world, how you think about yourself, how you express yourself-is very different from when you're married. Or when a parent dies, no matter what your relationship is to them, your sense of yourself goes through some unexpected changes. In each such transition, you must move from an old identity to a new one. In traditional cultures, this transition is guided by rituals. In modern cultures who have lost touch with rituals, the identity transformation process still occurs, albeit without ritual containers. In this sense, symptoms are ritual processes that are happening without ritual containers. They are attempts for deep change that don't have the appropriate ritual sponsorship to hold them and guide them. From this point of view, therapy can provide a ritual space and ritual means to allow this death-and-rebirth process to occur in a safe, effective way.