From the dark of isolation to a dawn of mutuality

On 30 June 1979, my younger sister and I climbed into the back of our new Chevrolet Malibu station wagon with our milk chocolate M&Ms in hand. My mother took her customary seat as the front passenger, and my father tossed our luggage in and drove us off. It was the start of our three-day road trip from our humble home in Eastern Canada, and it took us all to an opulent house in Leawood, Kansas where my aunt, my grandparents, and my three cousins, George, Paul, and Philip, all lived.

I discovered my cousin George had amassed an enormous collection of comic books, and we spent that summer devouring one after another. One character eclipsed all others: the Amazing Spider Man. I dreamed of being bitten by a radioactive spider, and with the superhuman abilities this would surely grant me, I would save the world from its many threats: authoritarianism, corruption, nuclear catastrophe, and environmental crisis among them.

To no one's surprise, I've yet to be bitten by a glowing spider (or any spider for that matter). But I do believe that as clinicians, we have an opportunity to save our world by shaping it though the practice of psychotherapy…

Consumer culture's harm

As clinicians, we recognise our clients' wellbeing depends on nurturing, protective relationships with fellow human beings. This is based on our understanding that humanity is a relational construct: We are born relationship-seeking and thrive in what British researchers Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby referenced as secure attachments.

However, the larger culture our clients have grown up in and inhabit is, in sharp contrast, defined by a rigidly individualistic construct. This consumer culture shouts out and endlessly echoes a cultural script in which the hero is the individual producer/consumer. The culture spends one trillion dollars a year reciting this script through advertising. It is shared so persistently and persuasively that it drowns out every other tale — it overwhelms the relational poetry alive in all of us.

This script tells our clients that safety isn't found in each other's arms, but instead in the construction and growth of their own private success stories and the increasing piles of belongings this success will secure for them. They must find safety on their own in the acquisition and expansion of power, property and prestige and not in an intimacy born of vulnerability and trust with fellow human beings. This is a script encouraging narcissistic self-absorption, trading in innate longings for relationships for the promised spoils of individual triumph.

This narrative, lacking a balance between personal ambition and collective responsibility, results in our clients consciously and/or unconsciously colluding with a consumer culture driven by unrestrained growth. This leads to many collective losses, including deforestation, loss of biodiversity, excessive waste and carbon emissions, and the existential threat of global warming. The relentless push for individual and collective growth also creates inequitable wealth distribution, resulting in a persistent poverty where impoverished regions and populations across the globe suffer most from growing resource scarcity of water, food, and living space.

A new clinical model

I want to present a clinical model not only returning our clients to their innate relational natures but also taking our clinical work a step further. We must support our clients' capacity to create relationally-based subcultures (intentional communities; micro-cultures of connection), interrupting the narrative of 'individualism at the expense of mutuality' that characterises the larger consumer culture.

In doing so, we accomplish two tasks simultaneously:

• We no longer doom our clients to experience relational richness in our offices but otherwise spend the majority of their lives in a predatory world encouraging narcissistic tendencies. Instead, we support our clients in gradually creating community, allowing them to enjoy relationally rich lives both within and outside our office walls.
• We create cultural webs of connection in the wider world, serving as a slowly expanding counterbalance to the runaway growth of the consumer culture, and interrupting the many losses accompanying it.

In so doing, we psychologists become change agents, the Amazing Spider-Men and Women who transform our world.

There are three parts to this model, beginning with…

The clinician, the client and the culture they co-create

Regardless of modality, clinicians begin working with each client by building a respectful, co-constructed relationship, one offering security, validation, and dependability (Wampold & Imel, 2015). We accomplish this by meeting our clients with a mindful presence, welcoming each of them just as they are here and now. We bring a compassion to everything they elect to share with us. We can refer to our stance, borrowing from Rogers' person-centred approach, as unconditional positive regard.

In this relational space, we engage using a thoughtful inquiry into our clients' present-day lives and their historical experiences. As feelings and relational needs organically emerge, we greet each one with a complimentary response, meeting our clients' anxiety with our reassuring presence and words.

This combination of a safe space, a gentle yet engaging inquiry, and attuned responsiveness to whatever arises, invites our clients to fully touch into what is happening and has happened to them, enabling rich contact with their present and past experiences. Their memories, traumas, and sorrows now arise not only as cognitive recollections, but also as visceral, felt, and sensory-level experiences.

We can view what is unfolding in our offices as the creation of a micro-culture of connection, a miniaturised ancestral village culture, birthed within the larger consumer culture. In many of the tribes of old, when grief or trauma befell a member, the tribe ground to a halt, interrupting many lives, and they gathered together to gently dissipate the resulting pain and sorrow. Villagers guided one another to the knowing that their traumas and losses were deep encounters with the essential experience of being human and that these encounters would allow them to be shaped by life instead of defined or destroyed by it.

Within the walls of our offices, we offer our clients this village experience, in contrast to the outside culture that has encouraged them to push their griefs and traumas into the recesses of their minds and deep within their bodies. We are liberating our clients from the relentlessly accelerating rhythms of the modern world, allowing them to move at the 'rhythm of relationship' (instead of the 'rhythm of production'), a slower rhythm in which deep contact with self and other emerges.

Here, as our inquiry invites past traumas to the surface, our clients become fully activated. Repressed dimensions of our clients' traumas emerge along with their cognitive memories, and past experiences become felt by our clients emotionally and physiologically. As clinicians, we greet this with the 'village experience' of welcoming presence and gentle compassion, creating a juxtaposition in our clients' minds:

Our clients had been, recently or long ago, left alone attending to their traumatic experiences. Perhaps they were shamed and humiliated when their trauma happened, and perhaps this continued in the aftermath of its happening. As our clients summon their experiences from repressed holding spaces inside their bodies, hearts, and minds, the emotional and bodily sensations of shame, humiliation and/or isolation (among others) rise up along with their emotional memories of anger, sadness, sorrow, fear, anxiety, and grief. Our clients anticipate being missed yet again (or worse) as their memories of suffering alone in a marketplace culture wash over them.

But this time, this is not what greets them. Not at all. They are met instead with our loving stance of unconditional positive regard. This juxtaposition sits at the heart of their relational and emotional healing, transforming our clients very experience of themselves, creating experiences of integration and wholeness.

We support our clients' recognition, on both a cognitive and affective level, of the simultaneous experiences of (a) their trauma and the humiliation, pain and heartache that accompanied it, and (b) the unfamiliar, unexpected appearance of our presence and compassion alongside it. This allows the process of memory reconciliation to unfold (Ecker et al., 2012). Our clients' synapses encode the new experiences (created by our presence and compassion) into emotional memory, softening their perceptions of the trauma. This has been shown time and again to create what psychologists call 'effortless permanence', with no emotional reactivation in response to what once triggered the trauma.

I recall one time, as a participant in a therapy group, when I was sharing an experience I felt a great deal of shame around, emoting sadness and fear as I recounted the tale. The entire time I was sharing, I was (unknowingly) gazing at the carpet below me, fearful of the judgmental gazes surely awaiting me if I dared look elsewhere. When I finished talking, Wayne, the therapist leading our group, invited me to look around the room.

Sheepishly, I looked upward, and what I saw in the eyes of my six fellow participants amazed me: empathy, kindness and compassion. Wayne invited me to slow down, take my time, and take all this in. My old emotional patterns had been activated, brought into spoken and affective awareness, juxtaposed with the unexpected gentleness surrounding me, and this experience was the catalyst for transformation.

As clients find liberation from their traumas, they also begin to free themselves from the unhealthy life scripts these traumas create (Erskine, 2010). (By life script, I am referring to the collection of relational patterns that form in response to traumas (acute and cumulative), unconsciously driving responses to here-and-now relationships.) Our psychotherapeutic process empowers our clients to move through past relational traumas and losses, freed from spending their lives re-experiencing them in scripted fashions.

Over time, traumas heal, life scripts begin to fade, and the healing stance of our unconditional positive regard gradually but inevitably finds its way into our clients' lives: Our clients continue within themselves what began within our office walls, internalising our tender stances toward them, benefiting from self-created experiences of unconditional positive regard (Frankel et al., 2012).

As all this takes hold, our clients inevitably increase their capacity to regulate themselves. They spend more time within the zone of tolerance.

A familial culture of connection outside our office walls

Now, we encourage our clients to stretch their newfound abilities, inviting them to engage fully with the people in their inner circle — their spouses, their children, and their closest relations. This will be the testing ground where our clients take the culture of connection we have co-created with them within our offices out into the wider world.

They return to session and share with us what happened when they did so. Together, we explore the hyper and hypo regulated moments that inevitably arise with new relational contact. We might discover hidden traumas or unexplored dimensions of life scripts, and we continue our work of attending to these.

Viewed through the lens of trauma and transference, we support our clients' capacity to freely engage with others, relating transactionally and not transferentially, i.e., relating from a here-and-now naturalness instead of from a script formed long ago (Erskine, 2010). When this fails to happen, our ongoing clinical process attends to and uproots the causes behind these regressions.

Viewed through the lens of cultural transformation, we are supporting our clients as they break away from the consumer culture norms of rushing through their days and spending their nights with a television or cell phone or computer as their sole companion. We are encouraging our clients to slow down, making room to open-heartedly talk about their days with the people who love them, making time to share and listen to each other's experiences with laughter and tears.

Our clients, sharing more of themselves with vulnerability and tenderness, are discovering there is more room for their naturalness in their world than they had imagined. It is now when most therapy ends, having worked relationally both within the self and within the circle of family and close friendship.

Birthing pocket villages within the larger consumer culture

Our clinical model takes therapeutic work further out relationally, encouraging clients to lean into a growing number of relationships, supporting our clients in becoming creators of cultural pockets of connection within our larger consumer culture of individualism.

I propose that you and I, as clinicians, encourage our clients to bring their growing presence, compassion, and naturalness into relationships with people they might otherwise label acquaintances. We support them in making the repeated decision to consciously slow themselves down into present relational awareness with more of the people colouring their world. We invite our clients to make a decision consistent with the research showing hurrying together disrupts social capital, whereas slowing down promotes it.

Specifically, we encourage clients to reach out to and make time for the people they might otherwise limit their engagement with, the 'background characters' of their world. We ask our clients to begin by making room to lightly engage, perhaps inviting others to participate in simple shared activities, or playfully connecting and joking around.

We invite them to gradually take greater risks as these relationships progress, to communicate more affectionately and to talk in greater depth. 

As familiarity grows, we encourage more time spent authentically catching up, with a willingness to be genuine and vulnerable. This gradual engagement is eased by our clients' growing ability to self-regulate and maintain a present, aware and compassionate stance.

We are supporting our clients as they transform a growing group of acquaintances into lasting connections, and we encourage them to bring these lasting connections together – intentionally and slowly – to foster community. Here, we are accomplishing two goals simultaneously: helping clients create a community that in turn supports and nurtures their continued growth; and, creating 'modern villages' within the larger marketplace culture, villages offering mutuality in place of individualism.

This creates a ripple effect expanding into the larger world. It is my hope that our clients' touch the lives of their newfound community through their loving stance, just as we once did for them. As this unfolds, members of our clients' villages are themselves inspired to reach out to the people around them, each one creating their own community/village, and then each of these community members reach out… and on it goes, until the whole world exists as pocket villages in a shared marketplace, and safety is now found not only individually but, more importantly, in each other's arms.

A beacon of hope

What we propose for our clients is a lifetime of work, but the simple act of recognising this work and beginning it changes everything. Our clients practice liberation from cultural scripts teaching them to survive on their own and to define their worth using the measuring sticks of individual production and consumption. Gradually, they earn hard-won freedoms from unhealthy scripts that turned them away from people and toward busyness.

As our sessions transform them – as our clients return to valuing mutuality as much as they were taught to value individuation – we support their efforts to reach out and join with the people around them. Each client becomes the change they long to see in the culture. What happens with each of our clients, on this small scale, reverberates out, a beacon of hope for the larger universe.

Carl R Nassar, PhD, CIIPTS, is a writer, researcher, clinical supervisor and trainer, former university professor, and practising clinician. www.carlnassar.com

He thanks Dr Paul Hokemeyer for his help conceptualising this article and for his editorial input.

Key sources

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss: Vol. 1 Attachment. Penguin Books.
Ecker, B., Robin, T., & Hulley, L. (2012). Unlocking the emotional brain: Eliminating symptoms at their roots using memory reconciliation. Routledge.
Erskine, R.G. (2010). Life scripts: Unconscious relational patterns and psychotherapeutic involvement. In R.G. Erskine (Ed.), Life Scripts: A transactional analysis of unconscious relational patters (pp. 1-29). Karnak Books.
Frankel, M., Rachlin, H., & Yip-Bannicq, M. (2012). How nondirective therapy directs: The power of empathy in the context of unconditional positive regard. Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies, 11(3), 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/14779757.2012.695292
Rogers, C.R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357
Wampold, B.E. & Imel, Z.E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes therapy work. (2nd ed.). Routledge.