Knowing It In The Body T-Thou' In Therapeutic Encounter

Abstract

This paper focuses on Buber’s notion of an ‘I-Thou’ relationship, and the mutuality within it where both client and therapist are touched and moved by each other as being central to therapist meeting client, and its relevance to existential therapy. This paper also explores bodily felt, nonverbal experience of being with client in informing the quality of the therapeutic relationship, which may be known implicitly at the sensory level, but may remain beyond full articulation. My motivation for writing this paper One of the central notions in existential-phenomenological therapy or research is to make explicit our own basic assumptions, and know how they influence therapy or research. In view of that, I share my motivation for writing this paper, making explicit ways in which my own beliefs based on my experiences influence the writing of this paper. This paper is an outcome of a very personal experience of human encounter. In the summer of 2005, my father suffered a massive heart failure which he survived. While I was by his side in the hospital, I noticed how the many nurses, both male and female interacted with him. While he received excellent medical treatment; in terms of care from the nurses it was a very variable experience for him. There were those nurses whose compassion touched me greatly. The care, concern and gentleness that they brought into the way they interacted with him as they performed their routine tasks of taking the temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure was in stark contrast to others who seemed to regard him as just a human body to be medically treated. While they too performed exactly the same tasks, their presence and way of being made my father feel anxious and tense. On one such occasion, while he lay asleep, a particular male nurse who I experienced as overbearing and insensitive on earlier occasions came into the room. As he took hold of my father’s arm to take the blood pressure, at this nurse’s touch, even in his sleeping state, my father’s body went into a spontaneous spasm of shaking. I appealed to the nurse to please be gentle and asked him to hold off for a bit. As the spasm of shaking continued, his eyes still closed, I gently stroked my father’s arm and chest where the shaking was still persistent. It was a gentle and loving touch. As I stroked his arm, his shaking subsided. 343 Jyoti Nanda Did my father perhaps sense the presence of this particular nurse through his touch even in his sleep/semi-sleep state that co-created a situation in which his muscles tensed up into a spasm of shaking? And perhaps similarly, sensing a co-created situation involving himself and I, his daughter’s loving touch and presence which helped to cease the shaking? For me it was a first hand experience into seeing how our way of being affects others, how presence may be sensed at a sensory level, and how emotions manifest in the body. It showed me in a dramatic manner, what I already knew implicitly, that it is not only what we do in caring for others, but rather how we can be with others that has a healing effect. Indeed, this hospital experience has been a lesson in humility for me. I realise that caring for others can be an exhausting experience, which may well have a de-humanising effect on us. We need to be able to attend to our own needs as well. I have wondered what is it that enables some of these nurses to have so much care and compassion for their patients in the way they attend to them. Aware of my own feelings of exhaustion, at times just wanting time out for myself, I have wondered how these kind nurses have not succumbed to compassion fatigue! It also illumines for me the wide spectrum of what it means to be human. That perhaps we all have the capacity to be both greatly compassionate as well as the capacity to be de- humanising towards others. As existential therapists, can we then utilise choice in how to be with others? In this paper I wish to explore Buber’s notion of ‘I-Thou’ in therapeutic encounter, and its implicit aspects of how we can be with clients. Our way of being with others can be one of the most crucial aspects in therapy (Nanda: 2005), an aspect which has however been given little attention in relation to the great emphasis placed upon the verbal interventions in therapy (Frie: 2003). While I acknowledge the role of speech in therapy, I explore the sensory, bodily felt, nonverbal aspects of experience in therapeutic encounter which are known implicitly, and how being present to our bodies informs the therapeutic relationship.