Yesterday, I opened the back door to the porch and this guy was RIGHT THERE! With his head in the air. Yikes. I closed the door. QUICKLY.
As I caught my breath, I realized how quickly the thought, “there’s a snake on the porch,” became a story. For those few moments, that story felt REAL!
Many if not most therapists, coaches, spiritual directors would disagree on the value of the narrative in helping our clients.
Cognitive distortions may be the clearest view we can get on just how tangled up in a narrative we can all get. For those who journey with some variant of a mood disorder, these distortions can be debilitating.
The one thing most practitioners might disagree with about Acceptance and Integration Training (AAIT) is the value of our clients’ narrative. With AAIT, the narrative doesn’t serve as the primary filter, this principle does:
The core truths around which Acceptance and Integration Training (AAIT) is built are principles I have experienced first-hand in my OWN life. I have witnessed evidence of them in the lives of my clients, and the reports from other AAIT practitioners and trainees coupled with reports from their clients.
Therapeutic failures. Ugh. Rarely do we discuss them openly. Yet our failures can be one big playground on which we can discover and fortify leaps in skill.
I recently hit a therapeutic failure with a client. I don’t want to write about it. Sharing failure seems counterintuitive and oh, so wrong. Yet oh so right at the same time.
One of the participants in the AAIT Curate Your State program asked me how we know when we have FULLY accepted and integrated an experience. Such a good question. There are some indicators that make it pretty clear that we have lined up with acceptance and integration. The biggest one is that we learn to rely on the evidence of our own experience. AND AAIT has built-in mechanisms to direct awareness to that experience.
Those of us in long term relationships with a commitment to do what it takes to learn how to love each other know what a high game that is. There’s a lot that gets in the way of that. For therapists, our relationships are a rich playground for expanding our capacity to accept one another.
The imago dialogue is an intentional, refined approach to communicating. With practice, it can become a sweet effortless entry into real connection.
The last few weeks, I’ve been going the long way around answering a question raised by a talented young therapist, “What is the role of empathy in AAIT?” NOW, I think I’m ready to more directly answer the question.
Empathy is essential in ANY therapeutic relationship. It is crucial to developing trust which is critical to establishing a collaborative relationship. Collaboration is central to creating a solid crucible for transformation and is one of the five phases of AAIT.
We all have our challenges with empathy. There are a variety of emotional states we inhabit that inhibit our capacity to empathize with someone. Anything on the mad, sad, glad or scared continuum can stop us from pausing and reflecting on what it’s like to be that PERSON at that TIME going through that SITUATION.
In the context of our current political polarization, I often receive the question, how do we use AAIT with THIS? Aside from inviting an exploration of the shadow, I’ve been a bit at a loss. I KNOW that doing our deliberate practice has an impact on our state of being. What I don’t know is how that impacts those around us.