Clin Soc Work J (2009) 37:190199 DOI 10.

1007/s10615-009-0215-3

ORIGINAL PAPER

Becoming Each Other: A Single Case Exploration of Relational Consciousness in Couple Therapy
Maryhelen Snyder

Published online: 28 June 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract The concept of relational consciousness has gained increasing attention in the last decades in the elds of philosophy, sociology, and psychotherapy. Yet human consciousness with its concomitant awareness of self and other as distinct is linguistically and culturally situated in the individual mind. This article explores the lived experience of shared consciousness in the practice of becoming the other with a focus on therapy with one couple. The historical development of our understanding of consciousness as a relational phenomenon is addressed with particular attention to the observations, insights, and practices of Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, and Gregory Bateson, who have each contributed substantially to our understanding of mind as relationally experienced and constructed. The article explores implications for practice and future directions this methodology might take. Keywords Couple therapy Empathy Relational consciousness

(Penn 1993) touch on its distinction from ordinary cultureembedded ways of understanding ourselves, each other, and the world. Gregory Bateson wrote that the loss of the sense of aesthetic unity as a way of experiencing may be the most severe loss our culture has experienced in moving away from ideas of metaphysical truth, reality as knowable, and God as transcendent. The word empathy as applied to the therapeutic relationship can rst be found as an alternative translation of Sigmunds Freud use of the word Einfuhlung. In 1913, Freud wrote in his essay On Beginning the Treatment: It remains the rst aim of treatment to attach [the patient] to it and to the person of the doctorIf one exhibits a serious interest in him,he will of himself form such an attachmentIt is certainly possible to forfeit this rst success if from the start one takes up any standpoint other than the one of[Einfuhlung] (1913/1958, p. 140). According to an informative article by Shaughnessy (1995), Einfuhlung was mistranslated here by James Strachey as sympathetic understanding, a mistake that in Shaughnessys view has had an immensely negative effect on the eld of psychotherapy. Fortunately, Strachey translates the word more accurately as empathy in two earlier (1905) articles of Freuds. The word had only recently been introduced into the German language by Theodor Lipps, a German psychologist who, in 1897, had used it to describe the phenomenon of becoming completely absorbed by, or attuned to, an external event or object (such as a piece of sculpture). Ein, meaning into and fuhlung, meaning feeling combine to make Einfuhlung equivalent to the Greek empathiea, (to feel into). The word emphasizes personal resonance and the necessity for theoretical models and interpretation to be suspended.

I hold to the proposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake. I believe that this mistake may be more serious than all the minor insanities that characterize these older epistemologies which agreed upon the fundamental unity. (Bateson 1980, p. 19) The mysterious nature of accurate empathic attunement continues to be explored and described. Phrases such as aesthetic knowing (Bateson 1980) and poetic intelligence
M. Snyder (&) 9672 Farmside Place, Vienna, VA 2182, USA e-mail: mel33@cox.net

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In 1912, Freud cautioned that both thoughts and feelings can interfere with the fullness of attention required for Einfuhlung. [The] most successful cases are those in which one proceeds, as it were, without any purpose in view, allows oneself to be taken by surprise by any new turn in them, and always meets them with an open mind, free from any presuppositions (1912/1958, pp. 111 ff.). The insight that listening is an artistic activity in which the listener must not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind, but rather must feel his way into the mind of the other (see Shaughnessy, p. 227), is prevalent in Freuds (1913/1958, p. 112) writings. Rainer Maria Rilkes perception of what it means to be an artist reveals Einfuhlung at work in the aesthetic domain and throws light on its applications in human relationships: Rilke wrote a series of letters to his wife Clara in which he describes the experience of viewing the work of Paul Cezanne during 4 days of immersion in a posthumous exhibition in 1904. Rilke wrote: Ideally an artist should not become conscious of his insights; without taking the detour through his reective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition (Rilke 1985, p. 51). This statement of Rilkes parallels Freuds (1912/1958, p. 111) caution that it is not a good thing to work on a case scientically while treatment is still proceedingto piece together its structure, to try to foretell its further progress, and to get a picture from time to time of the current state of affairs, as scientic interest would demand. Freud believed that there must be an immersion in listening so complete, that therapy is in a state of ow with the scientic, analytic mind suspended (as with art). This article describes how that immersion is enhanced by the method of becoming the other.

Becoming the Other The art of therapy is developed on a foundation of empathic attunement. Toward this end, I have been using and teaching the method of becoming the other with my clients in individual, couple, and family therapy, as well as in training and supervision for over a decade (Snyder 1995). The power of the method is deeply moving in two senses of that word: Clients and therapist are frequently moved in the sense of experiencing emotional catharsis, and they are also moved toward change in the sense articulated by Anderson and Goolishian (1988) as the evolution of new meaning in dialogue.

The method and its theoretical underpinnings are supported by the work of many of our elds philosophical and methodological forerunners and contemporaries (see Snyder 1995). Among those who have inspired the theory and practice of becoming the other are: Vygotsky (1978, 2000), Mead (1934), Moreno (1947), Rogers (1951;1996), Bateson (1980), Buber (1988), White (2006), Tomm (1992), Bernard Guerney (see Snyder and Guerney 1993), Siegel (1999, 2007), Stern (1985, 2004), and Weingarten (1991). Among those using this specic method in their current professional work are Rob Scuka (2005) and Mary Ortwein. Ortweins program, Mastering the Mystery of Love (Ortwein and Guerney 2008) was developed to serve under-served populations from widely diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. The method can be mastered by people with no particular training or education. It is demonstrated in its elemental form by very young children (Quann and Wien 2006). The listener gives all his/her attention to listening, continually setting aside all habits of interpretation, analysis, preparation, judgment, sympathy, even reection. All there is listening. Young children who have been blessed with a supportive environment generally nd this quality of listening much simpler than adults because they naturally listen to the whole, the environmental, behavioral, relational, and verbal context of a self-in-world (Snyder et al. 2003), their own internal process, and the moment-bymoment shifts that occur in lived experience. My clients continue to reveal that this method is possible under extreme circumstances of emotional reactivity. In my 1995 article, I describe the man who rst taught me therapeutic effectiveness of speaking as another. As he listened to his partner describe her perspective of an argument they had had the night before, his face and body revealed intense anger. His jaw was tight, his neck red with protruding tendons, his eyes, from where I sat, steely and unempathic. I did not think he could be empathically attuned to what she was feeling while his body was revealing so many intense feelings of his own. When his partner was nished speaking, he turned to me and said, I think if I speak as her it might work. I had taught them this method of speaking as their partner only as an initial way to demonstrate the meaning of empathy as being in the shoes of the other. Although this client was physiologically reactive to what his partner had said, he had apparently listened attentively to her words and body language. In other words, his brain had been able to stay attuned to her even while being activated with his defensive thoughts and emotions. As he spoke to his partner as her, the tension visibly left his body. When he was nished, she expressed wonder and gratitude that he understood her more clearly than she had understood herself until he spoke. In a similar vein, he said

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that he felt as though he were understanding her perspective for the rst time. I have now observed this break-through of attunement in myself and others hundreds of times. It tends to be experienced by both people involved as a miracle. How is it possible that we can understand each other so well even when our neuronal pathways, and therefore our whole organisms, are re-stimulated by the already existing meanings and memories that our brains have on record? How is it that this understanding is radically intensied and claried by the activity of speaking as another? How is it that this radical form of listening brings about change in the listener as well as the person who is listened to? Brain research tentatively reveals the neurobiological processes involved in empathy (Stern 2004; Siegel 2007; Fishbane 2008). For example, mindfulness research supports Brachs (2004) focus on what she calls the sacred pause between our emotional reactions to a relational moment and our response. This gives time for the brain to apply intentional awareness (a pre-frontal cortex activity) when the amygdala and other areas of the limbic system are reexively activated. Sterling (1991) asked her psychotherapy supervisees to speak as their clients when they reported an impasse in the therapy. In the 6 cases described in her doctoral dissertation, they reached a moment in speaking as their clients when they reported fear of continuing. They observed that they did not want to feel what they were beginning to feel as their clients. As they continued to speak in spite of this fear, they experienced a deepening and catharsis of their own emotions. Most signicantly, they understood how to break the impasse in therapy. Buber described this moment of felt risk as the moment of inclusion of one consciousness in another: this way of frightened pause, of unfrightened reection, of personal involvement, of rejection of security, of unreserved stepping into relationship, of the bursting of psychologism, this way of vision and of risk(Buber 1988, p. 96)a bold swinging, demanding the most intensive stirring of ones being into the life of the other (Buber 1988, p. 71). One client described it this way: I felt as though you had joined me in my mind and there were two of us together there.

attunement, heard in his clients speaking the edges of insight and possibility that are integral to consciousness. He empathized at these edges, thereby inviting the client into further discovery. Unconditional positive regard is not only regard for the individual, but for an emergent and co-constructed humanity. Empathy is not only for what is being said or felt at a given moment; it is attunement to movement-in-relation (Miller 1992). The method of becoming the other is particularly felicitous in allowing the growing edges of understanding and possibility to emerge naturally from the listening. As the therapist, I routinely use this method to take my own understanding to levels I can never predict. I hear the absent but implicit, to use Jacques Derridas phrase (quoted by White 2006). I hear the intensity of feelings that the client is historically cautious about expressing or even noticing. I hear the values and longings that the client may habitually understate. This is not a matter of interpretation; it is a matter of listening. It requires a position of not knowing, a practice documented back to Socrates and Lao-tzu. In becoming the other, one always asks for permission and for continual feedback about the accuracy of attunement. This feedback is likely to come anyway in its non-verbal forms. By staying connected to the clients face and body language, the therapist or partner can know instantly whether the empathy is accurate, and can invite correction, or try out alternatives. It is often precisely at this point, where the empathy is experienced as not quite, that the listener must take an additional emotional risk as described by Buber (1988) above and Sterling (1991), as well as in my previous article on this method (Snyder 1995). The effect of the method is virtually always a surprise no matter how often it is used. The listener in the act of becoming the other wonders where is this coming from, this depth of attunement I didnt know I had. One moment, the listener can be experiencing confusion, uncertainty, disagreement, interpretation, criticism, even disgust. And the next moment, speaking as the other, the listener suddenly feels a depth of clarity with its concomitant compassion and exhilaration. The person being listened to in this way is similarly surprised by the experience of thoughts and feelings being accurately heard that hadnt actually been said. And both listener and speaker tend to experience that intimacy that Weingarten has described as the co-creation of shared meaning (1991).

The Edge When one reads transcriptions of Carl Rogers therapy sessions (1996), one is struck by the way in which his active empathic attunement is always operating at the edge of awareness. Rogers, operating as he did from a perspective of unconditional positive regard and empathic Guidelines for Therapists and Couples in Becoming the Other Listen carefully with the intention of experiencing the others life-world (its content, feelings, values, intentions, growing edges).

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Do not analyze, judge, compare. Attempt to suspend (set aside) your own perspective as you welcome the perspective and experience of the other into your consciousness. Introduce becoming the other with words something like this: If its okay, Id like to speak now as though Im you. I wont be doing it like a tape recorder. Ill probably say things in a different order and I might say things you did not sayso Id like you to interrupt me if I say anything at all that doesnt t for you. As you do the becoming allow yourself to deepen what the other person has said. This involves risking the stirring of your own being. It is different than analyzing, interpreting, guessing, or role playing. It requires allowing yourself to be moved by the other person. If the other person does interrupt you (even with a facial expression that indicates that something doesnt t), you can say, I didnt get that quite right, did I? Can you help me? (or Let me try again.) When you come to a stopping place, say something like: Does that feel right? Is there anything youd like to correct, or add? If the other person says something like: That was pretty good, its best to assume that you left something very central out of the becoming. Perhaps they will tell you right away what it was, but the other possibility is that if you become them again and take more risk of deepening the feelings (the bodily felt experience), you will get it more fully. After no more than one addition (but all corrections that might be necessary), switch listeners. Before switching, ask the other person what that experience was like for them, and tell them what it was like for you.

It is not within the scope of this article to describe the skills involved in speaking subjectively and empathically, but I teach these to couples as well, according to guidelines developed primarily in Relationship Enhancement Therapy (Scuka 2005) and Non-violent Communication (Rosenberg 2000).

Dialogue There is a radical shift in dialogic interaction when the quality of empathy described here exists. There is a mutual unfolding of meaning which is no longer lodged separately in an I and a you. Ideas and meanings and personal histories move up against each other in the sense that the perspective of the right eye moves up against the perspective of the left. Mikhail Bakhtins insight into the necessary open-ended unnalizability (Bakhtin 1981; Seikkula and Trimble 2005) of dialogic meaning making is a deeply felt reality. Bakhtin observed that in order to have meaning, every human utterance requires a response. This response, of course, can be in literature, in thought or in imagination, but it must exist. Furthermore, this response, if it is to be relevant and merit the name response, requires that there be attunement to what has already been uttered. Attunement, in turn, requires an emotional dimension of felt experience. As Seikkula and Trimble note, this is particularly challenging when the emotions of the speaker are partly the effect of very early experience which is stored in non-verbal bodily memory and not in words (Siegel 1999). For the words to be found the feelings have to be endured (Seikkula and Trimble 2005, p. 468). In using the method of becoming the other, the listener joins the speaker in nding the words. The listener, therefore, also has to endure the feelings. Healing and co-creative relationships of any sort require this depth of relating in order to move. Problem solving and dissolving become relatively simple once this level of empathic and dialogic process is achieved. As Marshall Rosenberg has noted (in various presentations), the average 6 year old could solve most couple problems [and perhaps many world problems] once mutual empathic understanding is achieved and the real issue, if it even continues to exist, is thereby claried. Becoming Each Other Becoming Ourselves Becoming The phrase becoming each other becoming ourselves becoming arose during a ride with my friend Carl Stern in his pick-up truck into the mountains outside of Albuquerque. Carl and I had been practicing the method of becoming the

The couples who practice at home once a week at a scheduled time and place, and then whenever they experience a major impasse in conversation, integrate it most fully into their ways of speaking and thinking. It would be difcult to know if the potential for greater intimacy is what inspires some couples more than others to practice the method, or to what degree it is practice of the method that enhances the greater intimacy. Most clients nd it useful to start each becoming session with an expression of gratitude or appreciation. It is helpful to always ask, May I become you? before doing it since it is vital that both people be willing participants. And many couples have found it very benecial to process the experience of using the method after almost every interaction (as described in the handout). In the beginning of learning this method, defensive emotions may get in the way and it is best to stop the practice session. I ask the couples I work with to audio-tape their sessions so that I can give them feedback.

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other for a number of months as a way of forwarding our thinking. On this particular ride, we hadnt yet begun to use the method. I expressed some thought I no longer recall, after which Carl said, I dont agree with you about that. I noticed an immediate visceral response. I prepared mentally to defend my position against his position against my position. But what was my position? I wasnt sure I had one. I asked him to talk a little more about what he disagreed with. As he spoke, I suspended my preparation of a response and simply listened. I found myself completely interested in what he was saying. I asked him if I might become him. We continued to do this for the rest of the ride, becoming each other until the other person felt fully understood. The experience of agreement vs. disagreement disappeared. Our thinking kept clarifying, expanding, and shifting into new paradigms. It did not belong to either of us.

primary in time and in fact. The individual aspect of consciousness is constructed as derived and secondary, based on the social and exactly according to its model (Vygotsky 1925, 2000, p. 20). The separation we experience between my consciousness and your consciousness is articial and misleading. True, I alone am privy to my own unspoken memories, thoughts, and emotions, but every one of these is a construction of my social experience and would not otherwise exist. At the same time, a sense of reality exists without language; initially unformulated, unmediated and unfragmented (Stern 1985, 2004). I have found Daniel Siegels description of the interplay of the left and right hemispheres useful in understanding the two quite different dimensions of attentiveness that are involved in empathic listening (Siegel 1999, 2007). The verbal, physical, emotional activity of becoming the other not only brings into play the linguistic and reective capacities attributed primarily to the left brain, but also requires that level of attunement we tentatively attribute to right brain activity in which experience seems to pour into us, to use a favorite metaphor of Rilkes. We know this type of attunement in the presence of nature, music, art, and poetry. We know it as well in the experience of intimate relationship. In his poem Death Experienced, Rilke writes, When you died, there broke onto this stage/a beam of reality straight along the crack/you left by: Green that was really green,/real sunshine, a forest that was real (see Snyder et al. 2003, p. 169). This experience of the real precedes and supercedes language (Stern 1985, 2004). Without language, we could not say it to each other. But without the experience itself, which involves an aesthetic knowing or poetic intelligence, a statement such as green that was really green would make no sense. In performing the activity of empathic attunement, we know each other directly. This is invariably experienced as a mutual act of intimacy (see Weingarten 1991). It can feel virtually impossible to express this adequately. Clients often use the same word, real, that Stephen Mitchell uses in his translation of Rilkes lines above: Our relationship seems real in a bigger way. You became more real to me. When you became me, I felt more real. Newman and Holzman (1993) subtitle their article Beyond Narrative to Performed Conversation, In the beginning comes much later. Their central point is that meaning is derived from activity, from the performed life, not the other way around. In the practice of becoming the other, we cannot predict what we will perform as other. This is performance-in-the-making. Our relational attunement combined with our creative intelligence leads the

Intelligence as a Relational and Performatory Event It is in our capacity for empathic attunement that intelligence emerges, not only so-called social intelligence, but intelligence itself. George Herbert Mead (see Snyder 1994), an early fore-runner of social constructionism, wrote: It is generally recognized that the specically social expressions of intelligencedepend upon the given individuals ability toput himself in the place of the other individuals implicated with him in given social situations; and upon his consequent sensitivity to their attitudes toward himself and toward one another. These specically social expressions of intelligence, of course, acquire unique signicance in terms of our view that the whole nature of intelligence is social to its very core, that this putting of oneself in the places of othersis not merely one of the various aspects or expressions of intelligence or of intelligent behavior, but is the very essence of its character (Mead 1934, p. 141). Lev Vygotsky, in his investigation of consciousness a decade before Mead, reveals a similar insight: The mechanism for knowing oneself (self-awareness) is the same as the mechanism for knowing othersWe are conscious of ourselves because we are conscious of others, and in an analogous manner, we are conscious of others because in our relationship to ourselves we are the same as others in their relationship to us. A direct consequence of this hypothesis will be the sociologizing of all consciousness, the recognition that the social moment of consciousness is

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performance. We must let ourselves be surprised as in improvisational theater. Case Exploration When they came to me for therapy, Jean and Adam had decided to divorce after 20 years of marriage. This decision was nalized about 3 years before, after considerable couple therapy with several different therapists. They had been waiting for their second child, Alice, to graduate from high school at the end of the next school year before Jean moved into the second house they had purchased and were currently renting out. The goals of the therapy, like the goals of dialogue and of the three individuals (myself and the couple) were continually in a process of movement-in-relation in which sometimes surprising shifts occurred. Jean invited Adam to learn the method of becoming with me so that they could use it with each other. She was explicit that her purpose was not to change, or even work on, the decision to divorce, but rather to enhance their ability to understand each other. She had witnessed this method in a class she was taking where I had been a visiting presenter. She had practiced it during a class demonstration and then later in the day in a session she had with a suicidal woman at a crisis center where she was doing her internship. In both situations, she was very moved by the process. She was careful to dene her purpose in suggesting to Adam that they come to me to learn this way of listening and speaking because it has been a long and emotionally painful process to nally arrive at the decision to divorce. They had arrived at a place of acceptance (or resignation) that the divorce was necessary. They were both active in their parenting of their two children, Ted who was beginning his rst year of college away from home, and Alice who had one more year of high school. The family had continued to do things together, including going on occasional family vacations. Jean and Adam each had the maturity of behavior that on the whole creates a civil atmosphere at home. Three years before the onset of therapy, Alice had asked her mother at dinner one night if she still loved Dad. Prior to this, the couple had been attempting to protect their children from their marital struggles. Jeans answer, No, elicited in Adam a physical shock, the disintegration of his life-world as husband and family man. Until then he had held to the hope of saving his marriage. It was shortly after this that their children were made aware of the likelihood of the eventual loss of the family as they had known it. I think it was useful that there was no agenda of staying married when Jean and Adam came for therapy. I

had never worked with a couple in which there was not an explicit or implicit interest in a result that would x their relationship with a goal that was separate from the means. At the time of our 8th couple session, Jean and Adam had been using the method of becoming the other in home practice sessions at least once a week. They had developed a practice of processing these practices by describing their felt experience of using the method to each other. At this point in our work together, the therapy sessions and the home practice sessions differed only in the availability of my coaching and my witnessing of their process with each other. What follows is an edited transcription of segments of our 8th 2 h therapy session (M. stands for myself, Mel): J: (turning to A) Id like to hear you talk more about habits. You often say you are a creature of habit and I get the feeling sometimes that your habits can be more important to you than I am so Id like to understand more about what you mean. M: Is it okay if I become you, Jean, and give somewhat different language to asking Adam about that? [She assents. I move a chair beside her where she sits on the couch so that I also am facing Adam.] I long for more closeness with you. I know how that closeness feels. And some of your habitslike watching television and reading the newspaper and being by yourself when you get homeseem to take you away from me. I miss you. I am wondering about whether the comfort of those habitsand being a creature of habit could it be about fear. All I know is that I want more of you. I get lonely. [As I speak, Adams body relaxes noticeably, and Jean appears moved. As will be seen in what follows, Jean experiences her body, as well as her vulnerability. When I deepen her feelings, Adam becomes more open to hearing them. Laughter (and/or tears) often accompanies this vulnerability. One way to view this discharge of emotion is as the release of fear when the embodied brain allows the vulnerability to occur that it has habitually defended against.] M: (to Jean) Does that feel right? Is there anything you want to change or add? J: Yeh, thats right. As you were speaking I could feel my body below my head. I feel vulnerable. There is something I want to add. (To Adam) Saturday morning I know we usually each do our own thing, but last Saturday I broke the mold and it felt scary. Instead of going to StarbucksI guess thats a habit of mine A: (smiling) Ding. J: (laughing very hard at this) Before leaving the house, I thought Im going to see if Adam will go with me to the other house to work on the garden. And then you said

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yes and it meant a lot to mebecause gardening is my thing. But you came and you seemed to enjoy it. Okay. Thats enough. A: Can I be you? (Jean nods). I want us to be closer. I get lonely when you withdraw into the comfort of television or newspapers. Im wondering if youre afraid. And Saturday, when I took the risk of asking you to go with me and you did and we had a good time, that made me very happy. J: (nodding her assent through this) Yip A: (commenting on the process as he often does) It was very helpfulMel modeling getting to your pain about this. J: Yeh, I could feel the shift. I had tried to be neutral. It left me out, kept me from experiencing anything from the neck down. A: I felt defensive when you rst spoke. Then the defensiveness went away especially when you talked about Saturday at the Hill Ave. house. I thought youre looking for what Im looking for.I think the becoming is work, but we accomplish it. Its almost magicalSaturday I had a hard time getting going, but it was a good morning just working togetherSome of my habits could be sharedsay TV, like when we watched Empire Falls,and other stuff too. Im a political junkie as you know, but we had a good talk about Iraq. We had strong feelings but we really listened. And you reading a book to Alice and yet interacting with me at the same time, I liked that. I like interacting with the TVor the dogafter an exhausting day; no need to please, no fear of being judged, a place of safety. Work has been so hard these last weeks Ive spoken way too long. J: It would help if I could become you A: Yeh, okay. J: (Becoming Adam, she uses different words that catch his feelings such as, It tickles meyou reading to Alice and interacting with me. After speaking for awhile, she takes a bigger risk.) I liked Saturday. Its safe for me when Im not the issue; were just going to be together. (Stepping out of the becoming for a moment): You did not say this, so tell me if its wrong: (as Adam) Its a little alarming to me when you want to talk about us A: Not that extreme, but its true. Just to be able to be together without the delving deep. We were relating beyond the becomings. J: (Becoming Adam again, she deepens his feelings about work and he nods.)So much of our lives, my life, is about pleasing others Anything you want to add? A: Yeh. Its very good working next to you quietly. Theres this feeling of side-by-side. Youre doing this gardening for youall the rest of your lifeand thats

okay. We both have passions. To be with each other in our passions is wonderful. Like for you, gardening and singing; for me sports, and particularly football. Its wonderful when you come into my passions. Like when you sit next to me watching a game, even for a little while. (He tears up.) J: (Becoming Adam again, giving words to his tears)It touched me having you there next to me. It felt warmbelly safe that you did it; its not your thing, but you did it. You feel heard? A: Yeh. Nothing you missed. (Hes crying.) Ive been living my life and this marriage in an isolation booth. Its so sad. And how good even a little bit of connection my own belly as a bowl of warmth. J: (Becomes Adam to his satisfaction, then asks to talk about her own feelings.) Im thinking of me as a judging person. Thats a piece of us being separated. I disguise my judgment with sort of neutral words. This is something I contribute to us being apart. If I cant have what I want, then Damn it! Ill be right! Ill be better! Its really not what nourishes me and I know it hurts you and Im sorry about that (Jean tears up). [Adam is crying now too.] My mother lives it, so its an old habit. A: (breaking the structure of the becoming method as she acknowledges that shes a creature of habit too) Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! You go to Starbucks and you judge me. Its a twofer. J: (laughing until she cries) Thats my attempt to go to a safety place. The old feeling is I cant be loved, then I cant be lovable. Then I ght hard, resort to habit to get out of it. And so fast! I chalk up, I do this, thats good; I do this, thats goodbut its never actually overthat way. I never actually believe I am better than the other guy. When she is nished, Adam becomes Jean. I (M) sit back in my chair, listening. J: (deepening Adams becoming her) Its really a survival place. Im putting down the person whose love I want. If Im better than you, then why would I want you so much. But I really do feel badly for you (tearing up again). M: Okay if I say something? (I let myself cry a little as they both turn toward me.) I am hardly necessary here except for this. I am a witness. That is a privilege for me and I imagine it is useful to you. If ever Ive witnessed an example of becoming each other becoming yourselves becoming, it is today, watching you two. A: Well it helped a lot the way you started us off. (To Jean) Its very therapeutic to hear the genesis of your judging. Youre judging. Im hunkering down. Youre telling me, Thats a bad habit; youre in a foxhole. Im going to Starbucks and re-load. (Jean is laughing hard

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as he talks.) When the judging goes away and I get to you, its wonderful. And I dont want to be in the foxhole. I like your mom and all, but you dont need to be like her. J: (becomes Adam. Then she speaks her own thoughts.) Its scary to shift into a vulnerable place. I had to make a choiceThe words hopeless and despair are there when Im vulnerableand the feeling Im not loved; Im never going to be loved. [Adam had to leave 20 min early for work. Before he left, he commented on how much the session had meant to him. And added, Its like we dont need to get anywhere from here. When were using becoming, here is ne by itself.]

told him in our session about her fear that he would interpret her love as the desire to stay married to him. Although Adam understood theoretically how one could love without choosing marriage, his longing for an intact marriage and family became more apparent after this point in the therapy. Their relationship history with intimacy and autonomy came into greater and greater visibility. It was through each others listening to each others embodied speaking and acting and through the activity of becoming the other, that they gradually came (and continue to come) to know each other and themselves more fully. This knowing is also a constituting and creating. Follow-Up

Unconditional Love When Carl Rogers examined for himself the question of the necessary and sufcient ingredients for healing and change, he initially came up with three: Unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence. It is not unlikely that were Carl Rogers alive today he would be aligned philosophically and practically with the ongoing thinking about the cultural-linguistic confusion of locating intelligence or mind in the individual (see Snyder 2002). Nevertheless, unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence might well remain his candidates for the necessary and sufcient elements of healing and empowering relationships. Almost always, accurate becoming elicits the natural deconstruction of already existing meanings, a deepening of inquiry into ones own felt experience, and an interest in exploring alternative possibilities. By the third session with Jean and Adam, they were experiencing and expressing a deepening love for each other. This presented them with a possibility and a complexity. The love they felt is the love we naturally feel for each other when we experience each other mutually and co-create meaning. I decided to introduce the possibility to Jean and Adam of committing themselves to this love they were experiencing for and from each other. This commitment, I suggested, could be separated from whether or not they chose to stay married. They were moved by this idea and readily agreed to it. Many intense feelings ensued from this commitment to notice their already existing unconditional love for each other. For Adam, the grief and fear that emerged almost immediately from this commitment stemmed from his recollection of that moment when Jean had responded with no to her daughters question, Do you love Dad? Jean

Six months after terminating therapy, Jean told me that they still were frequently using the method of becoming the other when they felt disconnected from each other. Although they still fell into habits of distancing, when they achieved closeness, they felt totally close. The method of becoming the other generally produces a profoundly intimate experience in the activity of doing it. This experience tends to have carry-over across time and into other domains of intimacy according to self-report from numerous couples. However, when a couple has difculties with intimacy, they are less likely to use the method at home and when they do use it, they may have difculty staying open to their own and each others vulnerability without the support of the therapist. For this reason, it is useful for clients to know that the door remains open for follow-up sessions and ongoing work when an impasse is encountered in their ability to meet each other.

Discussion and Implications for Practice In my experience as a trainer, supervisor and therapist, this method of becoming the other is best learned by experiencing it rst, on both the receiving and giving ends, with ones peers. It is in the lived moments of this practice that transformative shifts in perceptions, thoughts and feelings occur. I cannot know what I am going to say when I become the other. As the various authors referenced and quoted above have reiterated, starting with Sigmund Freud, the act of empathic attunement involves surrendering to the listening process, and therefore setting aside habitual ways of seeing our clients through a diagnostic, interpretive, and prognostic lens. Freuds choice of a word from the domain of art to describe the mysterious activity of feeling into the life world of another is telling.

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Clin Soc Work J (2009) 37:190199 Ortwein, M., & Guerney, B. J., Jr. (2008). Mastering the mysteries of love. Frankfort, KY: Relationship Press. Penn, P. (1993). Aesthetic experience in the conversations of therapy. Presentation at The Loften Conference, Norway, June 2527, 1993. Quann, V., & Wien, C. A. (2006). The visible empathy of infants and toddlers. Young Children, 61(4), 2129. Rilke, R. M. (1985). Letters on Cezanne. New York: Fromm International. Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered therapy. New York: Houghton Mifin. Rogers, C. (1996). The psychotherapy of Carl Rogers (B. A. Farber, D. C. Brink, & P. M. Raskin Eds.). New York: Guilford. Rosenberg, M. B. (2000). Nonviolent communication: A language of compassion. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press. Scuka, R. (2005). Relationship enhancement therapy: Healing through deep empathy and intimate dialogue. New York: Routledge. Seikkula, J., & Trimble, D. (2005). Healing elements of therapeutic conversation: Dialogue as an embodiment of love. Family Process, 44, 461475. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.2005.00072.x. Shaughnessy, P. (1995). Empathy and the working alliance: The mistranslation of Freuds Einfuhlung. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 12, 221231. Siegel, D. (1999). The developing mind: Toward a neuro-biology of interpersonal experience. New York: Guilford. Siegel, D. (2007). The mindful brain. New York: Norton. Snyder, M. (1994). The development of social intelligence in psychotherapy: Empathic and dialogic processes. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 32, 84108. doi:10.1177/0022167894 0341006. Snyder, M. (1995). Becoming: A method for expanding systemic thinking and deepening empathic accuracy. Family Process, 34, 241253. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.1995.00241.x. Snyder, M. (2002). Applications of Carl Rogers theory and practice to couple and family therapy: A response to Harlene Anderson and David Bott. Journal of Family Therapy, 24, 317325. doi: 10.1111/1467-6427.00219. Snyder, M., & Guerney, B. J., Jr. (1993). Brief relationship enhancement marital therapy. In R. A. Wells & V. J. Gianetti (Eds.), Casebook of brief psychotherapies (pp. 221234). New York: Plenum Press. Snyder, M., Snyder, R. L., & Snyder, R. L., Jr. (2003). The young child as person: Toward the development of healthy conscience. Albuquerque, NM: Watermelon Mountain Press. Available from mel33@cox.net. Sterling, M. (1991. The experience of role-playing during psychotherapeutic training: A phenomenological analysis with practicing therapist. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Saybrook Institute, San Francisco, CA. Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books. Stern, D. (2004). The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. New York: Norton. Tomm, K. (1992, October). Interviewing the internalized other. Workshop presented at The American Marriage and Family Therapy Association annual conference, Philadelphia, PA. Vygotsky, L. (1925, 2000) Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior. Peter Lang Publishing [Online Version: Vygotsky Internet Archive]. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind and society: The development of higher mental processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weingarten, K. (1991). The discourses of intimacy: Adding a social constructionist and feminist view. Family Process, 30, 285305. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.1991.00285.x.

The mutual movement that occurs between speaker and listener does not lend itself readily to scientic or logical description. On the other hand, Bateson (1972) in his essay on The Cybernetics of Self, comes as close to breaking it down into its component parts, as any author I have ever read. In his personal experience of the emergence of intelligence in relational activity with each other and with world, he challenged the whole notion of a separate self, and even postulated a different denition of god. Becoming the other is a method for restoring the aesthetic unity that concerns Bateson in the quotation that begins this article. Whereas Carl Rogers client-centered therapy, Gregory Batesons fathering of systems approaches, and more recent social constructionist insights, all appear to be radical shifts in how we view our eld, it is clear that Freud himself saw what is necessary for change. Becoming the other highlights that it is not only the experience of being listened to, but the activity of listening itself and the inter-weave of the two, that moves and changes us.

References
Anderson, H., & Goolishian, H. A. (1988). Human systems as linguistic systems: Preliminary and evolving ideas about the implications for clinical theory. Family Process, 27, 371393. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.1988.00371.x. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bateson, G. (1972). The cybernetics of self. In G. Bateson (Ed.), Steps to an ecology of mind (pp. 309338). New York: Ballantine. Bateson, G. (1980). Mind and nature. New York: Bantam. Brach, T. (2004). Radical acceptance. New York: Bantam. Buber, M. (1988). The knowledge of man: Selected essays (M. S. Friedman & R. G. Smith, Trans.). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Fishbane, M. (2008). News from neuroscience; applications to couple therapy. In Neuroscience and family therapy: Integrations and applications. Monograph Series, American Family Therapy Academy, Winter, 2008. Freud, S. (1912/1958). Recommendations to physicians practicing psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 111120). London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1913/1958). On beginning the treatment. In J. Strachey (Ed. and Trans.), The Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 121144). London: Hogarth Press. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self & society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, J. B. (1992, October). Mutual empathy and mutual empowerment in the therapeutic relationship. Paper presented at conference sponsored by the University of New Mexico Medical School, Albuquerque, NM. Moreno, J. L. (1947). The theater of spontaneity. New York: Beacon House. Newman, F., & Holzman, L. (1993). Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary scientist. New York: Routledge.

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Clin Soc Work J (2009) 37:190199 White, M. (2006, October). Narrative approaches to addressing the consequences of trauma and the perpetration of abuse. A conference presented by Eastern Washington University School of Social Work, Oct 26, 2006.

199 relationship. She founded the New Mexico Institute for Relationship Enhancement Therapy and served as adjunct faculty at the University of New Mexico Medical School before moving to Virginia in 2004. She is also a poet and writer whose book No Hole in the Flame was recently re-published in an expanded edition by Wildower Press. Her website in www.onbecominghuman.com.

Author Biography
Maryhelen Snyder is a clinical psychologist and family therapist in Virginia. She is the author of numerous professional articles on

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