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Working with heavy friends. Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, In your own group
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Working with heavy friends
It took a near fatality for me to realize that all of these ideas about heavy people apply very much to friends as well as strangers. A casual friend came to see me in a very depressed and confused state, and I kept seeing him alone. It wasn't until he was in the hospital, almost dead from a suicide attempt, that I realized I had ignored all my own past experience when I related with him. There were several ways I had trapped myself and I want to share these as postscripts.
1. It's easy to get caught in a " snob trip" of thinking your friend is special because she is your friend and able to talk in a rational, intellectual way. If someone is acting dysfunctionally, she should not be cheated of the same good treatment you give others - particularly in the team approach.
2. Avoid letting friends " really communicate" with you because they can't communicate with their " traditional shrink. " Something gets messed up if a person communicates in the place where he isn't committed and can't communicate when he is committed. You need to help him/her get the two together to get a working contract with someone or with people generally.
3. When you have an historical relationship with someone, it's essential that you get an outside, experienced opinion because of your own blindness toward your own part in the interaction system.
At Changes, then, we have found that the Team " Heavy Interaction" analysis approach is valuable, because with the team's support you can work toward clearer understanding of what makes sense about a heavy strange person and deal openly with your own reactions of fear, confusion, and prejudice. You are much more apt to have the energy and desire to relate in a real, live way with the heavy person, without backing off and treating them as an “it”.
Note: This is a revised version of an article of the same title which appeared in Rough Times, July 1972.
Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks, In your own group
1. When the group is having trouble with someone, or you are having trouble with someone, set aside a separate time and arrange for a couple or three people to get with him. Let the purpose be everybody’s growth and straightness. Difficulties between people and in people don't hang up the work and living of a group if they're dealt with as such, in fact they make the group better. Any bad things that get resolved, and any growth a person experiences in the group, lets others feel the room and excitement that maybe they can do a process on theirs sometime. (But if it’s done as a mix between personal stuff and trying to get work done and living made possible, everyone is too uptight for listening and working out to be felt as a good thing. Instead, everybody’s living and working is held up. )
2. Of the people who get with a person whom the group or you need to be different in some way, one at least should be designated as having the special job of insuring that the person gets heard, that the way he feels and sees things is really listened to, repeated until everyone has heard it. This greatly helps him be willing and able to take in what bad feedback is also being given him.
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3. Credit another person with some good or seemingly good reasons for whatever bad things he says and does, even if you feel angry and think it unlikely. Apply here what was said in " How To Use Your Feelings and Thoughts of the Other Person" and " Interaction. "
4. Whatever you find yourself saying to others about someone in the group is something you need to say to him in some form, probably with the above ways.
5. If someone in the group isn't doing the work well, you don't need membership rules to get him out. Get with him as in 1) above; if necessary, many times. It helps everybody else feel secure and learn how to come on really straight.
6. When an interaction is bad and continues bad, for instance you've been talking for ten minutes and it's getting worse, stop. Put your thing down for the moment. Use absolute listening and what is described in " How To Use Your Feelings and Thoughts of the Other Person. " Then, when his side is cleared or heard, say you want now to do your side, and do it. Assume the person is trying to do some good thing, tell him that, try to get what it is and say it to him (even if you hate it. You can say you don't agree but only understand. ) Even if the person doesn't want to hear it, say your side before it's over, or sometime soon. Perhaps bring in someone who can help you be heard, as in 1). Be willing to spend ten or fifteen minutes just getting his thing (not: " You feel…”, but, “I…”) Then only, when that's really out, do yours if it hasn't already gotten changed.
Why give your life and work to a group and then not be willing for the couple hours it takes to work things through with a person? You begin by being scared to hurt his feelings and you end by trying to get rid of him altogether. Working things out can be good and exciting. Accept the fact that there will be certain characteristic negative feelings about whatever work or living your group is doing. It is bad for each person to have these in private, and worse if everybody is down on him when he has them. At one time or another you felt discouraged about the group, unwilling to do the work, anxious you weren't doing it right, or whatever. Give the person who is having these feelings today some support, even if today you don't feel that way.
If you can figure out what the issue is, be straight about it. Don't let the group go on discussing one thing when you know all the while that under it something else is the real point. Say that point, or ask, if you're not sure.
7. Not everything that happens in your group, or is done by it, needs to be OK or passed on by every member. Sometimes it helps to just let everybody go ahead and do what they will, and then if the group doesn't like it they can give them feedback later and see that it doesn't continue. That avoids some of the sticky business of endless haggling before anyone can do anything.
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8. It helps, in a group, to invite a person to speak who has made motions or grunts and didn't get in. Or, if a person said something heavy or meaningful and right after that a lot of more trivial things were said, or if he was asked irrelevant questions, it helps if you ask him to go on from what he began to get into.
9. The group or at least someone in the group, needs to support each person who is being criticised. When all are down on one person there has to be someone who is more interested in letting that person get heard, then in attacking him. Even if you feel very insecure or an outsider in a group, you can express your wish to hear more from him or to have him repeat something he said and didn't get responded for.
10. How to help with an interaction between two other people: if two or more are having a hassle, and you are not too upset yourself, you can help each person get heard. In a bad interaction, usually neither person can hear the other very well. If you respond with absolute listening to one person, the other can hear you respond, and can see the good process which then happens. His perceptions of the person change and become more accurate. Then turn, and respond to the second person's feelings. That lets the first one listen. (Don't mediate and decide who's right about what. Keep your view for later, or maybe say it fast and get back to them. )
11. Just about all of what we've written about absolute listening, and in " How To Use Your Thoughts and Feelings of the Other Person" and in " Interaction" can help you in your interactions with your own people. The difference is that you aren't ever only trying to help, you're also trying to live and work, so expect it to be much harder and slower. Accept it in yourself if you can't do as well when you yourself are very much involved. Don't be surprised if you can't listen well when you're being attacked. Although slower and harder, even trying these approaches gets people out of the bad atmospheres that often exist. Confronting, encountering, working through, growing, lets people feel accepted and elated at finding things in themselves that they want to change.
Even if at first this kind of process doesn’t go right, see if everybody can be into figuring out how it should go. That way everyone can do their own learning, which might be better than what we say here.
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