The Yin and Yang of Helping
El Yin y el Yang de Ayudar
A therapist asks about the painful pull into "doing" when sitting with distressed clients, and how to hold the role of helper without becoming identified with it.
The Yin and Yang of Helping
A therapist asks about the painful pull into "doing" when sitting with distressed clients, and how to hold the role of helper without becoming identified with it.
Things are softening, and I'm getting more stretches where separation isn't noticed here. There's just this moment and being a part of it. What I notice now is the ways in which I create separation. They show up in neon lights. I can see them so clearly, they stick out, and they're very painful.
I wanted to ask you about one in particular. When I'm with my therapy clients, there's this feeling of not wanting to disappoint them. I want to help them. I want to know what to do. Especially when there's a lot of distress in the client I'm sitting with, it's really noticeable because it pulls me into a sense of a doer, a sense of "now I need to do something."
I was sitting with it in meditation, and I noticed there was a kind of sweetness and innocence to it: a sense of just wanting to be helpful with somebody I care about. There's love there. But I also know there's something I'm not seeing, something I'm trying to push. Could you comment on that?
What comes up has to do with the frame through which you operate in your work. How is it that you imagine or conceive that you help? I know that's a rabbit hole of a question, and I'm not sure where to go with an answer because it's really a conversation for many sessions. But I think that's where the crux will be.
In a sense, an antidote will always be matching that with the understanding that you can't help. It's a balance. It's really not up to you, and there's nothing you can do. It's neither one nor the other. Holding both of those will keep the whole process of how you can help in check, so that it doesn't become too important or too self-involved.
It doesn't feel like it's about me needing to have success. It feels like I'm responding to something, and then it shifts into a doing mode. It doesn't feel like I need to be the savior. It feels more like I need to know what to do. It's an unconscious response to distress, or maybe to a sense of seeing the client failing.
The implication of doing
But it implies that there's something you can do. That's why I'm saying: bring into your awareness the notion that there's nothing you can do. Hold that as a partial truth, like the yin and the yang. It's going to balance all the energies of you being there to do something.
So you're saying it's both. I tend to go either/or with it: I can't do anything, or I'm doing everything.
The mind will want to pick a side, and then that will become the solution, the strategy, the fix.
It feels very visceral, very uncomfortable. There's a sense of contraction in the body, a pulling out into a self. It only happens with a few people, but the people it happens with are the ones who have more distress or who I'm worried might lose faith in therapy.
All of that is just the conditioning. All of the discomfort, all of those movements, the body, the energetics: that has to do with body, mind, and conditioning. It has to be included. You can't just push it away. But keep it in the balance where it's really not up to you, and it's not either this or that. Because it's all the mechanism of selfing, which you described.
Notice how you will tend to keep referring back to "but there's something else, but there's also this." That's the mind looking for some other path, some other thing to address, some other dynamic happening with the client. It's pulling you away from just presence. There is room and a necessity for you to engage, to speak, to do the art and the practice that you do. But anything that starts to move you away from the complementary reality (not the absolutely true reality) that it's not up to you and you can't do anything, that is where identification takes hold.
Or I'm not even doing anything. It's so clear, and yet there's still this pull.
You can't do anything, and it's not up to you. But that's just half of it. In the yin-yang, that's one side. If you drop one side and the other becomes more prevalent, you're getting pulled into mind identification, into a mind-body strategy.
Stepping into a role without becoming it
That's what feels so difficult: it is the yin and the yang. Part of it is that I am a psychotherapist working with clients. That's where it's hard to blend the two.
You're stepping into that role, but there's a difference. You're not that.
Right. But I'm saying in that moment, I am in that role.
I understand. In normal speaking, you would say "I'm a psychotherapist." But in this moment, I think it's important to be precise. During the session, you are in only one way stepping into the role. But if you then become that, it's identification. Then all of the aspects you're describing will become more activated and more in the way.
Ultimately, all you can do is be in presence. If there's no presence, no matter what you do, nothing will work. And what is presence? It's not identification.
But how do you be in the role, and this goes for all roles perhaps, when the role implies certain techniques and certain behaviors, yet you're not identified and you're in presence? Is it that the behaviors of the role just happen naturally when they need to?
I would say that's for you to explore. What I'm suggesting is to keep in mind, somewhere in your attention when that's happening, a pointer. Because it's going to be a mental pointer, in words: "There's nothing I can do. It's not up to me." That acts as a kind of short circuit to part of the process that's happening. It's going to push you to be in a constant balancing.
I can see that. I get it.
A seventh of your attention
If we keep talking about what it would look like and how to do it, we fall into the side of strategy and technique. So just keep this pointer. One way to think of it: keep a seventh of your attention in God. The idea being, in the same way that Sunday is the day for God in Christianity, instead of using one day of the week to pay attention to God and forgetting the rest of the days, keep a seventh of your attention in God at all times. It's a metaphor, a pointer. In a similar sense, keep in your awareness during the session this pointing: there's nothing you can do. It's not up to you. You have no power to help, fix, or change anything, and you don't need to, because it's not up to you.
That's only half. Because that itself can become an identification. That's why, in this metaphor, it's "keep a seventh of your attention." In what? What is God? It's mystery. It's what I cannot comprehend. It's what's beyond me. It's what's not up to me. It's the power that I do not have.
My attention is in presence. I feel that all the time, even in session. But that's different. You're saying it's about something else.
It has to do with how you operate. At the level of when you are navigating how to relate, what to say, and also what's happening in your body, in your energetics. To a degree you're already doing this, I'm sure of it. It's just a deepening, because of what's been happening and what you've been sharing.
The best times in therapy are when something comes out of thin air, something I haven't even tried to do. It just comes out. That's coming from a different place. I recognize that.
So that's really helpful: to keep in mind there's nothing I can do and I don't have the power to change anything. Just keep reminding myself of that in the sessions.
Also: you can never fully know or understand what is needed.
That's really true. So in a way, it's a bit of humility.
Freedom from both sides
Absolutely. It's also not that this is freedom, but it's the movement towards it. The humility is that as well. It's freedom from the belief that it's up to you and you can do it.
But I want to clarify: it's freedom from that because that's what's pulling you. For the next person, the pull could be "there's nothing I can do, it's not up to me." Freedom from that is: you can move, you can do a lot, a lot is up to you. The mind is very tricky. The ways in which we identify are multiple and complementary.
This is the middle way in Buddhism. They talk about views, meaning what perspective I'm stepping into. If I have the view that it's up to me and I have to do it, that perspective can become an identification. "It's not up to me, there's nothing I can do": that too can become an identification. Now, what's the middle path? Both are true, both are false. Yin yang. At some moment, in some situation, more of one is appropriate. At another, more of the other.
Right. They're both views. They both pull you into a view. Either one colors everything. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.