Stephen Gilligan: The Courage to Love

Stephen Gilligan: The Courage to Love

Charles Holton, CCSW

Usually our Summer Newsletter features a literature review of the work of our upcoming Spring Conference presenter. This time we are fortunate to be able to preview a soon-to-be-published work by Stephen Gilligan which reflects both his roots as a teacher of Ericksonian hypnosis and psychotherapy, and the current evolution of his Self-relations approach to psychotherapy.

The book is The Courage to Love: Principles and Practices of Self-relations Psychotherapy, due out in Spring 1997 from Norton Professional Books. Love is a skill-based discipline necessary for a healthy adult life and essential for the practice of psychotherapy. Courage is required because it is a risky, even dangerous proposition to hold an attitude of love in a world full of violence. The following discussion is based on a draft of the first two-thirds of the book (which he shared with attendees of a recent training group), the upcoming article “Living in a Post-Ericksonian World,” and my attendance at three training workshops over the past three years.

What strikes me as unique about Gilligan’s writing, and his approach to the practice and teaching of psychotherapy, is its light touch. He brings to his task the learning of the academician, the discipline of the martial artist, the seriousness of the holy man, and the humor of the rebel. He knows this is serious business, but he has seen enough theories rigidified as fundamentalist tracts to avoid a dogmatic or even exclusively intellectual discourse. Privileging felt experience to theory as he does, he might be expected to slip into sloppy logic, sentimentality or familiar clichés. Here is where his intellectual rigor and integrity pays off. His ideas make sense, are consistent, practical, discerning and illuminating at once.

A flavor of the landscapes he samples can be gleaned from the writers he quotes throughout his text and teaching: poets T.S. Eliot (especially the burning mysticism of the Four Quartets), Rainer Marie Rilke, and Ortega y Gasset; Buddhist teachers Thich Nhat Hanh and Trungpa Rinpoche; Jungian therapist Marion Woodman, analyst Erich Fromm; philosopher Martin Buber; physicist Neils Bohr (“In shallow logic the opposite of a true statement is false. In deep logic the opposite of a true statement is equally true.”). He identifies as his own personal mentors Gregory Bateson and Milton Erickson. From this rich variety of sources he articulates a sensibility that synthesizes, informs, and guides; contains but does not constrict.

“A tender ‘soft spot’ exists at the core of each person. ... Your attention can move away from your center, but it always remains.” This notion of a tender center liberates us from the tyranny of “the unconscious” as the primary metaphor of hypnotherapy. It also liberates us from intellectual construct as the primary medium of therapeutic understanding and experience. “With soft eyes and ears listening to the tones of the words, I listen to the story but I feel for a place in the body where the story is deflecting attention from. Once I feel it, I begin to gently ‘lock in’ to its presence. It is like tuning into a drum beat or an energetic presence.” Gilligan lists numerous exercises for developing one’s ability to fine-tune this felt-sense. I like to call it “lower consciousness.” The resonance the therapist can create with this often neglected aspect of the client’s experience models the holding of that experience for the client; it creates the possibility of the client’s relatedness with this aspect of himself. Gilligan uses the term “sponsorship” to describe this gentle welcoming guidance, and it fits both the relationship between the therapist and client, and between the client’s dominant experience of himself and the tender “soft spot.”

Criticisms have been leveled at many schools of post-Ericksonian therapies as being too intervention-based, too outcome-oriented. The client, and sometimes the process of therapy, is lost. Here is another domain where Gilligan’s ability to join with clients, and to describe, value and teach that holding of another’s suffering is a refreshing balm. In The Fruitful Darkness, Joan Halifax writes, “The process of initiation can be likened to a ‘sacred catastrophe,’ a holy failure that actually extinguishes our alienation, our loneliness, and reveals our true nature, our love.” Similarly, Gilligan sees the complaints clients bring to therapy not merely as problems to be solved, but as opening doors to transformative experience. The development of the ability to hold deep feeling and process it is the point of therapy, not simply symptom relief. Holding this attitude precludes rushing a client through their problem-description to “get to the intervention.” The quality of relatedness between the therapist and the client is the intervention.

His gift for elegant simplicity enhances rather than replaces other models. For example, his description of the relationship between the “hypervigilance” and “intrusive symptoms” of clients suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Since we are always processing material, the way to stop processing difficult material is to go into “neuro-muscular lock” -- to freeze up with vigilance and cut off relatedness with our processing of that material. This works until we relax, or fall asleep, when the material shows up again: as flashbacks or nightmares, which frighten us into hypervigilance again, perpetuating the cycle.

A keen distinction he draws that plays out in important clinical ways is his question “Is intelligence ‘in’ the unconscious?” If so, why does the unconscious produce symptoms? The answer lies in his notion of self-as-relatedness. The relatedness between the conscious and the unconscious is what produces healing and unexpected solutions, not the dominance of either one alone. With relatedness as the key to understanding the experience of self, many therapy interventions can be understood in a new light: it is not the mindless venting of child ego states that is healing for clients, but rather the connection of those child states to the mature adult presence with which the client can hold those experiences. Similarly, the “unconscious” does not have to be the Mecca toward which hypnotherapists orient their clients. It is merely one of an infinite number of aspects of the self -- and of the world outside the self -- that is complementary to personal ego and intellectual understanding. The endlessly fascinating question becomes, what kind of relatedness is called for here?

When he is helping clients identify messages that hurl them out of a sense of centered relatedness, he often calls these “attacks by aliens” and admits he uses an Irish wink and grin when he advises clients “You are possessed by aliens.” And in the best tradition of deep logic he is not only joking. But the humor reminds us these are, after all, metaphors, fingers pointing toward the moon, not idols -- or even ideas -- to be worshipped.

In this small space I cannot do justice to the Self-relations approach Gilligan has spent over twenty years developing. Hopefully in touching on some of its primary themes I can convey a sense of its promise. I want to commend readers to check out The Courage to Love when it appears. In the meantime, “The Fight Against Fundamentalism: Searching for Soul in Erickson’s Legacy” appears in Jeffrey Zeig’s Ericksonian Methods: The Essence of the Story (1994, Brunner/Mazel) and “The Relational Self: The Expanding of Love Beyond Desire” appears in Michael Hoyt’s Constructive Therapies 2 (1996, Guilford). I will be interviewing Gilligan for the Winter Newsletter, and he will be presenting at our 1997 Spring Conference.