Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome back to the Teaching Hypnotherapist Podcast. My name is Susan Wallace, and today I want to talk to you about gestalt contact work and how that can help us hypnotherapists to see what so many other therapists might miss.
[00:00:17] So tell me, have you ever sat with a client who's experiencing anxiety and you notice that they can tell you what they want, they understand their anxiety, they know where it began. They can describe the freedom they want. And they could imagine how life will be different when their overwhelming anxiety is gone.
[00:00:38] But then you start doing the work, and you're getting close to something that's real, something sitting within their body. But then something happens. Their breath becomes shallower, their shoulders rise, they make a joke or. Or they start talking about somebody else or something else, or they give you a really intelligent explanation, but it takes them further away from what they were just about ready to feel.
[00:01:10] You sense the change.
[00:01:12] The session has reached something important.
[00:01:15] But the energy, the energy has turned in another direction.
[00:01:21] Well, that moment is where gestalt contact work becomes extraordinarily useful.
[00:01:29] It gives us a way to recognize the pattern beneath the presenting problem and to see what is happening between the client's stated intention on one side and then their body response, their lived response on the other side.
[00:01:49] Right. So in gestalt, contact describes the meeting between the person and their experience.
[00:01:59] Think that point of contact where you have your two index fingers and you bring them in front of your face, and that point of contact with the two tips touch off each other.
[00:02:11] That is a point of contact.
[00:02:14] And contact with feelings, with body sensations, with needs, with the environment, with other people is what we're really talking about.
[00:02:24] So life is about needs and wants and fears and longings, isn't it? So when a need emerges, the energy organizes itself around that need. And then we run this pattern from start to finish.
[00:02:43] So we become aware of something we want, we mobilize, we take action, and then we make contact with the thing that we need.
[00:02:54] We complete that need and we move on.
[00:02:58] That's it. That's the simple chain of contact.
[00:03:01] But sometimes.
[00:03:04] Sometimes we get in our own way, don't we? Because what happens is we can change the direction of that energy, and we never get to complete what we have started.
[00:03:15] So in gestalt work, we call these interruptions to contact.
[00:03:21] Now, the language I know is probably a little outside of our comfort zone as hypnotherapists, but it's really that simple. It is the interruptions to contact.
[00:03:31] Now, Altogether, there are six of them, and I want to teach you all six of them right now.
[00:03:39] And I want to make it super easy for you to get.
[00:03:43] Now I'm going to introduce you to six words. They're not difficult words. They're ordinary words. But if you really focus on the word, you'll find the direction of the energy is actually visible inside the word.
[00:03:58] And once you hear the direction of the energy, you're going to start accumulating an amazing skill to be able to do soma focused hypnotherapy work. All right, so the six words that you're going to master are deflection, introjection, projection, retroflexion, confluence, and egotism.
[00:04:23] In order to get those into your brain and into your muscles and into your hands as movements, we're going to have to learn some Latin.
[00:04:32] Isn't it amazing where hypnotherapy can actually take us? So, as I said, these are not difficult words, but we do have two Latin verbs that are doing a lot of the work. So I want you to think of one word.
[00:04:47] Flex. It comes from flectere. To bend, to flex.
[00:04:52] F L, E X, F, L, E, C, T E R, E. To bend.
[00:04:59] Fleck. Fleck. Think of it like that.
[00:05:02] And then jacquere is to throw.
[00:05:05] G, A, C E, R, E. To Jacqueline. Carry. Yes. To Jack. Carry. To throw.
[00:05:13] Everything else is simply a prefix to the word that is telling you which way the energy moves.
[00:05:23] Now, depending on what kind of hypnotherapist I am, I might have put you to sleep straight away. So it's time to get out of that trance, and let's actually start using our hands and creating some movements. The very first word, the very first interruption you're going to learn is deflection. Think about it. It's such a simple word.
[00:05:45] Deflect. To move away. Fleck. To bend, to bend the energy away. That's what the word deflection means, is to simply bend the energy away.
[00:05:59] You say it in England, in English language all the time.
[00:06:03] He deflected the question.
[00:06:05] The bullet was deflected.
[00:06:08] And what is that movement? If you were to deflect something, what would you do? You would sweep your hand sideways. You would simply push it away.
[00:06:18] That is the first of our interruptions. It's deflection to simply push aside. The next one we have is introjection.
[00:06:28] Intro. What does that mean?
[00:06:30] Inwards.
[00:06:31] Intro and decere. Decere is to throw. So to throw something back inwards.
[00:06:40] So introjection means that you have Swallowed something whole. You didn't really chew it over.
[00:06:50] And that's usually how rules are taken in subconsciously. Sometimes we swallow rules whole without even thinking what they are. And that's exactly what interjection is. So the movement is your two hands literally stuffing something into your mouth, taking it all in, you know, just without really chewing on it, just swallowing the whole thing without really thinking about it. That's interjection.
[00:07:22] The next one is projection. Look, you know exactly what that means. So pro is forward. And gere again is to throw. To throw something forward.
[00:07:33] So you know this one from the cinema, the projector. The film is inside the projector. It appears on the wall in front of you. It looks like it is out there. This is where we project something from inside us onto others, outside of us. So it looks like it's outside of us, but really it's from inside us.
[00:08:00] So put your hands in front of your body, palms out, and push. Push something forward and away from you. Project it out. The next one we have is retroflexion. Retro is backwards.
[00:08:17] Flecteria again is to bend, to bend backwards. And retro is a really easy word to remember, isn't it? To bend that energy back. So you had this impulse, you had this amazing idea you were going to put it out there, but then something happened and that energy turned around and landed back inside you instead.
[00:08:39] So what's the movement? It is your two hands circling outwards, you know, spinning outwards, but then actually changing direction and spinning back in towards your body, turning that energy back inside you. The next word have is confluence. The word con actually means together.
[00:09:01] And fluence flore is to flow. So it is the flowing together energy. Flowing together. Think of two words. Two rivers meeting, the confluence of water. The rivers meeting.
[00:09:18] And once two rivers meet, you can't really say where the water came from anymore, can you? Because everything is merged together.
[00:09:26] So think about that. Bring your two hands together, interlace your fingers. That is confluencing. That is the merging of yourself with everything else out there. Not knowing, not sure where you begin and where something else ends. And then the last one you're going to love, this one is called egotism.
[00:09:47] Now this is the one that gets misunderstood the most.
[00:09:51] Egotism within the six interruptions has nothing to do with having a big ego.
[00:09:57] It's closer to the absence of an ego.
[00:10:02] Egotism in this context is the part of you that climbs into the commentary box and that watches yourself have an experience instead of fully having the experience.
[00:10:19] This is you being a spectator on Yourself.
[00:10:24] So bring a hand up to eyebrow level.
[00:10:29] Hover there as if you're peering out, looking, examining, spectatoring, reporting back on something, spectating from above.
[00:10:41] All right, so what we have here now is the different ways that the energy can move.
[00:10:47] The energy can be pushed aside, it can be taken in, it can be put out, it can be turned back, it can be merged, and it can be watched from above.
[00:11:01] So let's see how much you remember.
[00:11:04] So what is that word for to push something aside? I'll give you a clue. It begins with D. Yeah. To deflect, to swipe, to deflect. Energy.
[00:11:16] What's that? Energy. To actually take some in.
[00:11:20] Well, it's there in the word in, isn't it? To introject, to turn that energy inwards.
[00:11:27] What is the word? To send that energy out, to put it out begins with P.
[00:11:34] Yeah, cinema. To project it. And what is it if you go and turn that energy back?
[00:11:42] Well, think about turning something back. If you were to go back in time, let's say you decided that you loved 1970s fashion, what would you be? You'd be a bit of a retro person, wouldn't you? To retroflect, to turn back. To turn back that energy and then to merge. The next one is merge, and that is con, which is together, confluence. And finally, to spectate or to watch from above is.
[00:12:14] Can you remember?
[00:12:16] That is egotism. All right, now, each and every one of these six interruptions, I want you to know that they don't just interrupt contact, but that they developed for a very specific reason. Because somewhere along the line, each one of these kept somebody safe, or they protected a relationship, or they preserved belonging, or they helped a person to manage an experience that once felt unmanageable.
[00:12:51] So they happened and they developed for a very specific reason.
[00:12:56] And each of them are intelligent.
[00:13:02] They are adaptive ways that we learned to cope.
[00:13:07] And over time, the interruption becomes automatic, and the original situation can change, but yet the pattern can continue.
[00:13:19] So what happens is we have someone who, like a client, who is consciously moving towards change.
[00:13:29] But an old protective response is stopping or blocking or influencing what actually happens next.
[00:13:41] And here's the thing.
[00:13:43] Insight can feel like we're doing the work, but yet the pattern, the energy that runs beneath the insight, continues to run like a program, untouched.
[00:14:01] So until we work at the level of changing that somatic energy, recognizing how we push things aside, how we swallow ideas whole, how we project onto others, how we turn energy back on ourselves, how we end up merging with everybody else, or how we end up spectating on ourselves and making ourselves uncomfortable. By that kind of criticism, things will never really change.
[00:14:36] So let me put this back into anxiety work, because that is where most of us will use it.
[00:14:44] And you already know that anxiety is rarely experienced as a thought alone.
[00:14:51] Anxiety, you know this. It moves through the body, doesn't it? You know, it moves through breath, it moves through, through posture. You know, we can see it in the facial muscles, we can see it in the muscular tone of the body, in the voice, prosody.
[00:15:12] And we can also tell it from where a person puts their attention.
[00:15:18] And anxiety shapes the contact we have with ourselves and with the people around us.
[00:15:27] So a client can throw their fear forward, they can project it, and it can come back to them as a certain judgment of other people.
[00:15:40] A client can bend an impulse back in on themselves until their body ends up carrying permanent tension.
[00:15:50] And they can no longer really tell you who they're angry with because they never got the opportunity to express that fully.
[00:16:00] Or you might have a client whose moods flow with the moods and the needs of everyone around them to the point that they can no longer locate their own needs, their own moods, their own feelings.
[00:16:16] Or you can have a client watch themselves so closely that every sensation in their body becomes evidence of danger.
[00:16:29] So once you recognize which of the six patterns is running, then you'll be able to understand how their anxiety is being organized.
[00:16:42] And then you can calibrate that, the pace of the work from there. And what does that mean? It means that you can ask very precise questions.
[00:16:55] You can help the client to become curious about a sensation, about a movement, about an impulse. And then with that information, you can build hypnotic suggestions that arise or that come directly from their own words, from their own embodied discovery, Rather than you having to try and write some kind of anxiety script.
[00:17:23] Instead, you're working with what is real as they make contact with the energy that is stopping or blocking them from achieving their goals.
[00:17:33] So this is how this work is going to help you to see and to do what so many other therapists overlook.
[00:17:42] It brings the pattern into view, and it allows you to work with the energy as it is flowing or blocked.
[00:17:53] Now, here's where the fun happens, because we're going to turn it around, because you as a therapist, well, you know, you've got this energy too. You have this point of contact, and there's stuff that you want to be able to do.
[00:18:10] Your hypnotherapy practice, you have a goal, you have dreams, you have visions of where you want your practice to go. And I'm going to guess that if you're anything like me, that every now and again you get somewhat stuck, stuck, blocked. The energy's not moving in the direction you want.
[00:18:27] So we can take those same six interruptions and we can use them and apply them to your hypnotherapy practice.
[00:18:37] We can take a look at two really common challenges that we all face, including me, pricing and visibility.
[00:18:46] All right, so let's look at the first one, which is deflection.
[00:18:51] Deflection is easily summed up with a response like, ah, sure, it's grand, isn't it? Sure, it's grand. That's a wonderful way to describe deflection.
[00:19:03] So a hypnotherapist that deflects might notice that the bookings are dropping and so she decides to redesign her website. Oops.
[00:19:15] You know, a colleague might ask what the plan is for business for the next year and she describes the new logo she's creating.
[00:19:26] Or he might see a gap in the diary and decide to go and take another course to fill the gap.
[00:19:37] So what's happening with deflection is that the energy of the actual problem is pushed aside.
[00:19:48] Okay, introjection.
[00:19:51] This is the subconscious rulebook.
[00:19:55] So you have the price ready for the new package, but you go and you quote the old one because you cannot charge that much for helping people to change.
[00:20:10] Maybe you're ready to announce the workshop, but you don't because there's a subconscious rule there that good therapists shouldn't need to sell.
[00:20:21] Or you want to run a training and you hold off because you need just one more qualification and then you're going to do it.
[00:20:30] So the energy of your subconscious rules.
[00:20:36] You've taken them in and you have simply swallowed them whole without questioning. That is interjection.
[00:20:45] And next, then we have projection.
[00:20:49] This is where we all play the role of the mind reader.
[00:20:53] So, classic examples.
[00:20:56] You don't post the offer on social media because you think your followers are not interested in hearing from you.
[00:21:03] You don't approach your local GP practice because you think that they think that hypnotherapy is, you know, airy fairy or some kind of non scientific approach to change.
[00:21:22] You don't put your name forward to become a hypnotherapy instructor because you think other therapists will think that you're showing off.
[00:21:34] Projection is the energy of assumption.
[00:21:39] You put it out and you put it onto others without a shred of evidence.
[00:21:46] You're putting your own stuff and projecting it onto others.
[00:21:52] So next one is retroflexion.
[00:21:56] And this is over rehearsing.
[00:22:01] You want to run a workshop.
[00:22:03] You've written the pitch 15 times now, and you still haven't sent it to anyone.
[00:22:12] A client cancels for the third time.
[00:22:18] You have a boundary around this kind of behavior.
[00:22:23] You repeat it when you're boiling the kettle, but you still allow it to happen.
[00:22:29] You want to develop your own framework, but you criticize yourself because you haven't got one done already.
[00:22:38] You tell yourself that you're behind and what this is. This is the energy of everything unsaid to others turned back on yourself.
[00:22:49] That is retroflection over rehearsal. The energy of everything unsaid to others turned back on yourself or myself.
[00:23:02] Next one we have is egotism.
[00:23:04] This is the commentator.
[00:23:08] So a client of yours sends you a glowing message, and you reply, hey, you did all the work yourself.
[00:23:18] You have a workshop, it sells out.
[00:23:21] And you spend the evening reviewing every single part of the process, wondering what you should have changed.
[00:23:31] You're asked to speak at a conference, but you're already wondering how you're going to be exposed.
[00:23:42] The energy of your own experience rises above and spectates and comments in a critical way from the commentary box, not allowing you to actually immerse yourself fully into the experience.
[00:24:02] And then the last one we have is confluence.
[00:24:06] This is like the echo.
[00:24:09] So you charge.
[00:24:13] You charge what everyone else in the profession is charging. You offer what everybody else is offering, and you describe it the same way everybody else is describing it.
[00:24:25] Your website looks like everybody else's website.
[00:24:29] Maybe you want to teach hypnotherapy, but you're waiting until your peers actually say, hey, you know what? You'd be amazing at teaching.
[00:24:42] You're waiting for others.
[00:24:45] Maybe it's.
[00:24:47] You can't take a week off without checking to make sure every single client, okay, first, the energy of your own needs is merged into everybody else's.
[00:25:04] Now, I've used a lot of you.
[00:25:08] Hopefully it hasn't landed in any sort of accusatory way, because certainly these are all equally applicable to me.
[00:25:18] So. But if you felt something kind of hit home as I read out that list or as you go back over it again, well, then I want you to know that that's exactly what we do when we meet and we actually run this course, because this is such an important course.
[00:25:39] Because what it's going to do is to really to help you not just be able to recognize these six interruptions, but to help your client actually achieve their goals and also know what to do with the energy that is moving in the wrong direction.
[00:26:02] So if you decide to come and join me on the Gestalt Informed Certificate in Somatic Pattern Interruption, well, I want you to know that it runs regularly throughout the year.
[00:26:15] And you will learn how to identify the six different ways that your clients are interrupting change and to recognize what's actually happening when somebody wants to change, but they keep producing the same response. You're going to learn how to read the pattern in the body, how to track it as it moves, because it does move. And then you're going to offer what you observe tentatively and collaboratively while you support the meaning your client is making.
[00:26:52] And then you're going to learn how to use somatic interventions and hypnotic suggestions together so that you can build suggestions out of your client's own language, out of their own embodied discoveries about their energy blocks. And you're going to connect what happened in the session to what they want to happen in their everyday, ordinary life.
[00:27:23] So the course is the Gestalt Informed Certificate in Somatic Pattern Interruption. It's a mouthful, but the thing is, I run it regularly, and it is an amazing course. It's 15 hours of CPD.
[00:27:40] And the very first part of the course, I call it calibration, because you're going to work on your own patterns before you start looking at how to translate this into your clinical work.
[00:28:00] Because once you've actually identified your own patterns, once you've discovered how that energy is blocked and how to get that energy to move, well, then it's going to be great for your professional development, your business development, moving your career forward, taking your very next step. And then once you've actually had that vivid lived experience inside your own body, all of these six are going to make sense. You're going to understand deflection, interjection, projection, retroflexion, egotism and confluence in a really deep, personal and meaningful way in a way that's going to influence your professional career. And then taking it back into your clinic and using it with your clients who are experiencing anxiety is going to feel like you're coming home to your work. I'm Susan Wallace. I'm here to help you be the best, have the best, and give your best. Bye for now.
