Pergamon The Arts in Psychotherapy, Vol. 22, No. 4, 315-328, 1995

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EXPERIENTIAL SUPERVISION THROUGH SIMULTANEOUS

DRAWING AND TALKING

WARREN R. LETT, PhD*

My perspective on thera~utic work is an experi- ential one, an experiential, interactive, intersubjective learning activity for clients and therapists, a mutual opportunity for self-discovery and the increased un- derstanding of personal meanings. Although thera- pists’ self-knowing is more private, a heightened level of self-awareness is a continually required condition of their being. It is from this knowing that they en- gage empathy, sustain their potential for staying with their clients, and minimize contaminating self-pro- jections. They know that at times they have accessed their own parallel experience and can keep this within the bounda~ of containment in a compassionate sep- arateness and deep connectedness.

Increasing attention has been paid lately to the in- teractive dimension of therapy. Goldberg (1993, p. 159) has commented: “Practitioners’ self-examina- tion is crucial to patients’ progress because it enables therapists to recognize how their own issues may be interfering with their reception and understanding of what their patients are reporting.” In arguing for greater attention to therapist self-discovery, he con- cluded that “self-analysis is an indispensable, but poorly understood guide to the practitioner” and that it “should become a prominent component of the practitioner’s personal therapy, as well as integral in his supervision and training” (p. 161). Dosamantes (1992) contended that there is no possibility of ther- apeutic neutrality and that “each interpretation of- fered is tinged with their own subjectivity” (p. 364), requiring that “therapists must be in touch with their

own subjective experience, which includes somatic, imagistic and private thoughts.”

Safran (1993) reviewed the transition from early notions of transference-counter-transference to the more current relations-inte~rsonai perspectives in which “the alliance has come to be conceptualized in transtheoretical terms as a prerequisite for change in all forms of therapy” (p. 12). He cited the Vander- built 11 study (Henry, Schact & Strupp, 1990) as demonstrating therapeutic ineffectiveness to be re- lated to therapists becoming “blocked into negative complementary cycles with their clients” and re- ported that therapists were trained to work through such cycles. He emphasized the significance of such learning for training and the need for clarification of the theoretical mechanisms through which resolution of such problems occurs. In the present study, an alternative perspective is taken in which researching the phenomenological experiencing of the trainees provides illuminating descriptions of relearning, rather than the usual path of theory building.

A comprehensive overview of current views of re- lationship across major therapeutic systems is pro- vided by Kahn (1991). He concluded that the single and most universal requirement of the therapist is to be as fully present as possible to the client. This sense of the valuing of the participation of the therapist with self-aware presence lies very much at the heart of this study.

To explore ways in which trainee therapists be- come more interactionally self-knowing was the gen-

*Warren Lett is Reader, Graduate School of Education, Faculty of Social Sciences, La Trobe University, Austrafia.

31.5

316 WARREN R. LETT

era1 question of interest in this research. Continuing previous research into supervision (Lett, 1993), a phenomenologic~-expe~ential approach was utilized within the framework of multimodal experiencing of the self and other. The methodological task was to find a way in which reexperiencing of therapeutic work could be accessed to allow a form of phenom- enological indwelling, which could be described in such a way that understanding of how the supervisees participated in the therapeutic work could be achieved. Thus, there was a certain openness (Van Manen, 1990, p. 162) as to techniques of experienc- ing that constituted part of the creative opportunity in the research.

There was no formal phenomenon or construct to be studied as is usually the case in phenomenological research. This research was a study of a lived expe- rience of being, not a study of a predetermined single construct about being. It was directly experiential in the phenomenological sense of maintaining an inter- active continuity between the first experience with the process of staying in it, reentering it and so recreating the experience and carrying it forward. The subject of study was the experiencing self of the trainee therapist in supervision as he or she considered and reflected on their way of being with the client. Getting back into the experience of being as a therapist, as naively and simply as could be achieved, was what was sought in order to see it, reexperience it, indwell it, describe it and come to know experientially what some of the meanings were to be understood from within it. The data will represent the emergent experiential themes (Kidd & Kidd, 1990) that will become the basis of clarifying the personal meanings of the therapist’s lived experience as constituted in this context.

The Procedures for Therapist Self-Understanding

The present report derives from supervision of psy- chologists in their early post-training period and was conducted as a weekly group process for five trainees, with an experiential orientation, using holistic or mul- timodal perspectives including the use of the arts as the vehicles of exploration of therapeutic encounters.

The group established an emergent methodology of its own in the first session. This was when seated around a table with art materials and a tape recorder, to present their clients through the simultaneous mo- dalities of drawing and talking and then to explore what arose creatively. The other participants also re- sponded to the presentation by drawing and talking.

Any form of arts therapy process was available to be chosen for exploration, but the entry was always to be of this kind. Such processes did include reflective withdrawal, painting, movement and dramatization, verse and poetry writing, group intersubjective col- laboration and reflection. This procedure was adopted and maintained throughout the half year of weekly supervision.

The participants knew that their process was to be taped and that from this they would be provided with a verbal text within the week, and that from this text they would be required to conduct their own indwell- ing and reflection toward understanding. They also received reflective responses each week from all other participants. They knew that the research was de- signed to assist them to become rese~cher-practi” tioners who could constructively reexperience and re- flect upon their own process and that the group pro- cess was designed to assist this through collaborative effort. They also understood that there would be an attempt to stay directly within the experience itself and to avoid theoretical stances and inte~retations. They sought to respond in a direct empathic, inter- subjective way, giving their own responses to the ex- periences being shared, seeking to understand by vir- tue of their own intuitive knowing the meanings of the therapeutic experiences.

Thus, within the first session, two research ques- tions were isolated for the researcher:

1. How can the naive experience of the therapist’s self in action as therapist be located and de- scribed in arts therapy supervision?

2. What is the nature and function of simultaneous drawing and talking for the therapist about him or herself as therapist?

For the purposes of this report, two of the five participants’ work have been selected to illustrate this form of phenomenological-experiential inquiry. The researcher created the verbal text weekly and made it available to all participants. Each participant was also asked to respond in writing, each week, to the text by selecting the material that seemed most significant for them and by making an intersubjective response to this. They were also asked to identify and state the main themes they saw as being held in the materials, seen through the text and the artworks, and their responses.

After the conclusion of the supervision, the re-

SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING AND TALKING 317

searcher then engaged in an extended indwelling of the materials, selected two with which to work and produced a thematic summary and statement of es- sential meanings drawn from all the materials. These were then transacted with the two participants to a level of advanced approximation to agreed meanings. Sections of this procedure are provided below. The two participants are named Ken and Jane. The super- visor (researcher) is referred to as S.

KEN

Session 1

Ken presented a female client with whom he said he was stuck and disappointed. After several indwell- ings of the text, the writer selected those sequences that seemed to capture the core reduction of Ken’s experiences in what seemed to be a natural order. Although the text is reduced, the words are not changed.

Segment 1

Ken: There’s a few things. In our last session we looked, in drawing form, at her sadness, when she would have an impulse, from her stomach, knowing how she felt about something, but getting it scram- bled, then giving up on herself and getting confused. As I say this I keep thinking, well that’s my sadness, I give up on myself. S: Would you like to stay with this or cast around a bit more? Ken: What I’m experiencing now is a familiar expe- rience-of feeling pressured to come up with some- thing rich and valuable-that’s what I feel when I’m counselling. S: So let’s stay with that-the pressure to have to come up with something. Ken: I have to be clever or move them on in some way. I have this image of screws going through my brain, and I feel silly.

An enactment took place in which Ken gave lines to the participants to deliver and develop, such as “You’re no good; you’re a fake; a professional fail- ure, you should know more.”

S: How do you feel at this moment? Ken: Great relief-I’ve stopped pushing my head. S: What do you want to do out of this relief? Ken: I’ll sit alongside my client for a minute.

S: How are you feeling? Ken: I’m feeling safe here. I’m more at a distance, but still engaged. S: The pressure is somehow getting in the way of making a real connection. When you step out of that pressure-to be clever enough and have the an- swers-you do something that feels connecting. You both feel different. So what is it that you have actually done? Could you not answer that now, but take it away with you and doodle, draw or write and come up with something so as to go on?

While Ken reflected and drew, the participants stated their own understandings of their participation. These are presented in their written summaries later.

Segment 2

Ken returned. He held up his drawing (Figure 1) and talked to it. The verbatim commentary is presented.

Ken: I drew this first. (half red circle on the left). Not a color I pick very often, but I found it very satisfy- ing. I had the feeling this was me. And then I drew this over there, which is my client (circular shape on right with blue vees in the center), which flowed on from colors I used last week. Then I started drawing these orange dots-1 didn’t know what they were at first and I thought they were probably stepping stones in a garden. Then I enlarged it; I was getting a lot of satisfaction out of doing this and using colors I don’t normally use, fairly rich colors-a really nice expe- rience. And then I drew this, which was me reflecting back to my client how I was experiencing her (grey pastel fill). And I couldn’t work out why I kept com- ing back to this; I kept adding a bit more of it all the

Figure I

318 WARREN R. LETT

time and I realized it was me working on myself. Then when I got much of that, I started shading in all of it, filling it in from this side to that, filling in all the space between us. These (blue vees) were drawn early, the small bits of my client that remind me of me, where she reminds me of myself. I found it very, very satisfying to do. S: If you were to go physically, straight into this and move around in it, where would you go? Ken: I’m very drawn to this (center, right-client). There’s a nice swirling freedom to it. S: Could you turn that into something physical? Ken: This swirling freedomdrawing-but also all around too. When I do this, my arms are just sup- ported there-vigorous drawing-I enjoy the move- ment, its flow. And my chest is open. But even so, there are still moments when I might close off, or maybe not closing off, just gathering myself together.

Segment 3

Focusing questions led to clarification of several other issues in the drawing.

S: Could you tell us something about the blue again. Ken: The blue represents the coldness and the sharpness. S: Where is the sharp edge? Ken: Part of it is happening now, like when my client is talking, there’s something inside of me and I don’t know how to express it. So I was thinking, I know what that’s like. When I view that now, I’m part empathic and part judgmental. I’m viewing them so differently. There’s this wonderful, succulent peach inside, with a furry skin on it, that’s the part that can’t be expressed. But I can also see the lump of dough that just sits there. S: What is it that brings you out sharp with the client, Ken? Ken: The doughy ball, though she is both doughy and sharp, but I start to get into a doughy posture.

An enactment then is developed around these two images of sharp and doughy. This gives way to continuous enactments, discussions and further enact- ments cued in by key phrases: “I’ve got to cover myself up; sitting alongside her I don’t need to be closed up; the giggle bothers me; my frustration, her ambivalence, her games.” This is followed by a fur- ther discussion. Then the supervisor (researcher) asks Ken to “talk to the sharp parts of her in you.” Ken

improvises these-her ambivalence, her game play- ing, giving up her emotions, fear of being seen, being a tease, being attractive-seductive, ambivalence. The participants remain in dialogue with Ken and give him feedback from how they have experienced being parts of him, being the client and their understandings.

Subsequently to the session, as soon as the text was provided within the next week, participants were asked to complete their own indwelling of the text and communicate back to the presenter with their re- sponse. Ken’s indwelling of his own experience and the text is used for the reduction below, by the re- searcher, expressed as thematic material.

Ken’s Themes

1. Self-doubt and carefulness versus self-trust and spontaneity.

a.

b.

C.

d.

The client’s difficulty of not trusting her own good impulses is also mine. I have a need to “get it right,” which makes me fear being wrong and being seen, so I present carefully, correctly. I am not emotionally spontaneous for fear of being judged. My client and I are in this same parallel process. My client struggles to stay in the sessions, which is her struggle to be present, to stay in her head, not her bodily self. I have the same struggle working with her.

2. Joining the client frees the expert.

a. A drawing reflects me shooting myself through the head, in the pressure to come up with some- thing, and the resulting sadness (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING AND TALKING 319

b. I remember the good whole body feeling of being centered and flowing when I joined the client, like the swirling freedom of the draw- ing, no longer the expert.

3. The power of experiencing connectedness.

a. When I see the client as a doughy ball and experience her sadness, I understand her defen- siveness and move from criticism to compas- sion, freeing me to feel the flowing movement in my body.

b. The sharpness my client and I feel ultimately result in a power struggle through similar game playing. This awareness leaves me uncomfort- able but more connected to my client and to my own experience.

c. A drawing synthesis in reflection (Figure 3).

Verbatim: “The drawing I have done in conclusion shows a large furry peach with a solid yellow ball at its center. This represents my own center and solid- ness as well as warmth. The sharp bits of blue inside me are within the peach, but spread around the peach and facing different ways. On the other side of the page is a doughy ball that has its sharp bits coming toward me. The ball also has a few drops of blood and tears that are running down it. The blood and tears represent the vulnerability that my client is starting to show. The space between is covered in green, which represents the fertile ground we are both now on.”

Collaborative Verification

The other participants submitted their own reflec- tive reviews from their indwellings of the text and

Figure 3.

experiences. Reductions were made by the researcher from their materials as part of the text, but are omitted here. They provided an important source of intersub- jective verification of thematic material and essential meanings.

Researcher Comment

These comments derive from my own indwelling of the experiences and represent my understandings as they develop.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

A simple therapist dilemma-stuckness with a client-led the group to find a process of ex- ploration for understanding. The stuckness was first explored through a simultaneous activity of drawing and talking, by the presenter, and the participants also drew. This led to a discussion and some enactment (Segment 1) in which the therapist moved to sit alongside and ‘join’ his client. The researcher focused this move and asked the trainee to step aside and stay with his movement and draw his state of being at that moment in order to distil his understanding of it. On his return, the trainee made an intersubjec- tive dialogue with his own artwork (Segment 2), developing an understanding of his stuck- ness as he talked with and into the drawing. This led to a further segment (3), in which an isomorphism was revealed among colors, feel- ings and cognitions, the unity and meanings of which were discovered by the continued dia- logue with the metaphors and elements of the artwork related to the study. Participants also made his journey and their own, as found in their drawings, their part in the enactments and their own comments to him, both in session, but also in their post-session reviews from indwelling their artwork and the text. These were fed back to Ken and became part of his own indwelling, which resulted in his response text, leading to the statement of his thematic understandings. The procedures combined the use of the arts as modes of exploration, but chiefly brought is- sues into focus through the interactive drawing and talking. In addition, the creation of texts led to indwellings, which, in an adapted phe- nomenological style, provided comparable statements about the understandings of themes

320 WARREN R. LETT

in Ken’s work as a therapist, from all partici- pants as well as himself. Thus, a reduction is provided and the structure of his experiencing constructed in this conjoint, collaborative pro- cedure. This structure is not reduced to one essential construction (though it could easily have been), largely because the process of su- pervision was incomplete and the process as such needed to be left free of premature closure at that time.

6. In the process of focusing the issue of stuck- ness, amplifications of Ken as therapist also occurred, suggesting that this dilemma has a number of experiential themes attached to it. The practice of focusing one issue oscillates with the process of an amplified search as re- lated dynamics within the pattern present them- selves for sorting and for understanding.

7. In the first drawing, Ken identifies a feeling- sadness--exhibits his own pressure to under- stand as connecting him to this feeling, goes into enactment and experiences a feeling shift. This gives him a change of perspective, enables him to empathize and join with his client rather than work on her.

In the second drawing, carried out in withdrawal, he identifies with blue vees as part of the client being parts of himself. As he sits with the drawing and reflects into it, he gets an energy flow, feels his chest opening, comes up with two metaphors, the peach and the dough, and works at filling in the grey space between them-a ground now becoming fertile. He is able to draw and describe these experiences, as seen in his own summary. His understanding progresses through all the reflections, memories, reexperiencing, drawing, talking, enacting, feeling, thinking and in- dwelling. It is a cumulative, multimodal knowing. Though begun always with spontaneous drawing and talking in which visual metaphors occur, are repre- sented and explored, it is essentially a holistic process of experiencing.

Session 2

Extracts from Ken’s second session, which took place one month later, give a sense of continuity and development in time in his experiencing of himself as therapist.

Segment 4

Ken: This is what I do at home when I listen to the tape-sit and listen with my crayons. This is the client

I worked with before (Figure 4). I actually started drawing a whole heart and I realized that it wasn’t right. So I’ve just got a half heart here. This is a small M who plays games and hits the ball round the coun- sellor. And since we’ve last worked together there’s half a heart appeared, sort of two halves of the same heart, and I’m-much more kicking the ball back to her now. And this warm heart (his) brings about a different look on her face; its softer, eyes more fo- cused, she doesn’t look away so much; she seems more content to sit. I’m wondering what my question is. It is to do with the heart, how I’m changing my relationship with her. Do I feel I’m not being appreciated? She has devel- oped a stable relationship with a male now. I’m want- ing, I don’t know if its my own need, to keep building our relationship. S: What is it that you’re doing to improve the relationship? Ken: I’m challenging her much more now about what she’s doing here with me. She got angry with me because I accused her of playing games. She should have been angry with me long before then! S: Could you draw that, you and the client with her accusation? Ken: (keeps drawing). I’ve got this dented and flat- tened face--I’m a bit taken aback-but the room hasn’t fallen in-you can still express this anger to- wards me and things are still okay, but I’m still think- ing about myself (laughs) (Figure 5). S: Have a look at this drawing again. Ken: It seems featureless and embryonic. S: Can you speak with it? Ken: I’m starting to go hazy-I’ll draw again-Yes, I think I get bruised and raw-draws-I actually find it painful to hear my difficulty-so I’m pissed off

Figure 4.

SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING AND TALKING 321

Figure 5.

with you (client) when you think I’m playing games. S: Where is the bruised and raw in the drawing? Ken: There, it’s more at the face (reinforcing the pushed in lines behind the face). S: This is where your energy was, just behind the face? Ken: Mmm-You never (client) equate the good things happening in your life to our relationship. Also there’s-urn-a level of fear behind my eyes-if any client is angry with me-they’re going to go, I’ll have lost them and I’ll have failed. S: Could you put both of you in a space?

Ken continues to draw and we talk as he draws. Each new aspect is explored as it appears. Examples of images suggestive of meaning are:

S: I see you’re putting up a little balloon? Ken: It’s that I must be fully engaged with this client if she’s getting angry with me. S: What’s written on the balloon? Ken: The first thing I think of which I don’t like is-bandaids S: Can we talk about this thin blue line? Ken: I have this image-I’m just doing this (filling in more purple behind the blue line) of congealed blood, and that’s sort of past batterings.

The exploration of bandaids continues to produce other drawings. The material is a reduction through what seem the core words and images having conti- nuity. These are a Popcycle (Figure 6) “a tandem bike, I see myself as a Dad, we’re on a sort of journey which is cyclic.”

Ken: I get dizzy and see parts of myself where the bruising and battering might be (puts in four heavy

Figure 6.

pink lines) (Figure 7). I take them with me, dropping land mines on the way. S: Could you give any of them a name? Ken: Writing. Whoah. Hell Fire. Troubled Sadness. Wanky.

Ken stays with these images arising from the four pink lines.

Ken: I keep moving between this-the face-and the hard edge of fear. Its like a steel plate in there. S: We don’t know, Fear of ? Ken: Fear of lots of things-not being enough, not being good enough, not getting what I want. Am I just pretending to be a good counsellor? Half-hearted, not challenging my client enough. I wish I could stay more with the relationship. Wanting her to do it.

The other participants then responded to Ken from their drawings and provided intersubjective dialogue in which all of the verbal and visual images were

Figure 7.

322 WARREN R. LETT

reexperienced from multiple perspectives. The sad- ness behind the eyes emerged at a new focus and Ken withdrew to explore that further. He returns with a poem of Fears:

Fears of not being a good enough therapist not being acknowledged by my client her not coming back and going further not being enough losing face-client finding out I’m no good her anger reminding me of mine getting stuck and her not needing me not being fed by my client or by the work of my creativity not being seen. How embarrassing eh? I could just keep on going. Another image has come Fear of not looking good.

Researcher Comment

This comment is in the form of intersubjective ob- servations from my own experiencing of the events.

Ken puts together his fears as a counselor elicited by the examination of his stuckness with this client, which, in turn, has connected him to old fears felt as the bruising of the self, sitting behind the interactive eyes and mediated in the felt meanings of his words-a pressure of doubt, a pressure of response and recognition, for reassurance in the relationship. These understandings emerge principally in the dia- logue with Ken with his inner ranging self, searching with immense honesty in the hard places of discon- nected experience and restoring them to patterned co- herence. The role of supervisor and collaborator is to question, to respond and give back intersubjectively their own sense of felt meaning within his journey. Empathic witnessing results in shared understandings, which, when focused, provide a form of structured and connected knowing. The inner dialogue is able to be externalized through the activity of drawing, talk- ing, reflecting, collaborating so that the elusive expe- rience of one’s own intentionality can be described, understood and stated in its simple essence. This seems like a natural and holistic process of attending, reexperiencing, representing, amplifying, focusing, reducing to sharpest essence of understandings and stating personal meanings.

The remainder of this process brought an image of Ken changing gears from the intellectual to the spon-

taneous, with a clunk, so that the working process could be seen. He felt exhilarated by an understanding of where he was and who he was in the process of his work. This was expressed best by one of the partici- pants who wrote to Ken: Spontaneity and responsibility May live together yet. His final word: “In acting there is always that part which is monitoring what I’m doing. There has to be, or you may be out of control-as in counselling, there is the monitoring part, that may become too judgmen- tal, but there is also a tension that has to be there-to adjust, is the word.”

The process here is similar. Ken produces more visual images, metaphors for representing aspects of the interactions. He draws half hearts, kicking the ball about between them, with a focused looking returning to their eyes. He intuitively draws a flattened face, his own, and, as he draws, identifies his own fear there behind the eyes, and sends up balloons and lays land mines, which have the names of his own fears acting as pressures on him and his client. He stays on in this process to extract his own understandings as before.

JULIE

An example of the drawing-talking process is ex- tracted from the work of Julie, another participant. It is taken from her second presentation. The words are verbatim, but they are selected from the text as rep- resenting the continuous structure of her felt meanings as they are articulated.

Julie: This client kept coming back into my thinking, so I’m going to present her. The main theme here is that she is a little girl, and wants desperately to grow up. She’s frustrating and blocking. I’m pulled and repelled by her. I’m pulled by her experience as a teenager put into a foster home and I’m repelled by her whining voice saying, ‘I’ve got a lot of problems.’ S: So its the whining voice you somehow don’t like. Could you give it an image? (Figure 8) Julie: The whining voice-frustration-(drawing)--- there’s a sort of block all the way round. I can’t get in, into the whining voice; it blocks off my feeling. S: The whine-how does it flow? Julie: Up and down, right up and down on the floor, disconnecting herself and blinding herself to herself. S: And where are you? Julie: I go out the door.

After some reflection clarifying the voice that repels, the supervisor asks her about the part that attracts.

SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING AND TALKING 323

Figure 8.

Julie: There’s a lot of naivete that is appealing, and humor; she’s easy to feel warmly about-she’s got a lot of anger, about her mother really. Getting her to express that feels a long way off. I’m aware of two layers of conversation. I’m aware that I’m talking about myself too. S: Could you doodle with that a bit, while you are starting to connect with this story?

Julie stayed with her drawing, adding a lighter, bro- ken black circular line over the thick black blocking line. She said:

Julie: This is me. I’ve had some of her experience. I can identify with some of this anger, but I didn’t have as much of it. S: Could you say something about the red, or to it or be in it? Julie: It’s the anger. I know about the paralyzing an- ger that closes me down; she doesn’t want to have her anger and there’s some I don’t want. I feel something happening (sighs) with this bit that’s mine, the okay anger (drawing), a feeling of powerlessness, closing me down, the feeling on the floor again. It usually takes me out the door, but at the moment I’m on the floor. I’m scared on the floor. S: I suspect you’re both scared. So we’ve got fear and anger here (in the picture). Would you feel you could do something with either?

Julie goes back to her drawing and writes “This is fear” on the client’s black circle. She adds an arrow to her own thin black line and writes a title, “A boundary of fear” adding “Fear of?” She then speaks of her wish to “reconnect to myself, and by under- standing this about myself, perhaps use this in some way to help her on.”

In seeking a process to assist this, the group makes intersubjective responses from their own drawings. Julie responds:

Julie: This is amazing. It’s like looking at some as- pects of part of my life here. This door is very pow- erful and this statement, ‘I’m a scared little girl fright- ened of growing up’ is in her, and that’s something I’ve moved on from, but I’m starting to have a real- ization. I need to get up and do something, talk from a different aspect.

Julie spoke of her teenage agoraphobia, with tears arising as she recollected her father, frightened, cry- ing on the floor, and running out the door in fear, and becoming angry with her client for taking her back to this supposedly sealed-off memory, and some ele- ments of those events not quite finished with. These we called loose ends.

S: You just might like to doodle a bit more until you get hold of the loose ends?

Julie agreed and started to draw and write (Figure 9). She said:

Julie: That’s the big one (tearfully), writing: “Would I have made different choices If I had been free of fear?” S: These are your loose ends, possible different life choices? Julie: I feel as if I’ve been afraid to say this for fifteen years. Now I’ve said it, it’s not so bad. S: That was a fear? Julie: Yes, that’s on its own. And the wasted years

Figure 9.

324 WARREN R. LETT

(writing). Her resistance has confronted me with these statements about myself. And the falling on the floor is like that, the feeling I have when she says “I’ve got a lot of problems. ” It’s like, we’re stuck, paralyzed again.

Julie commented on three small yellow peaks break- ing through the light black circle of fear.

Julie: I see that as life force enlightenment. It’s also about the thinking part-the red is the feeling part. It feels like you can breathe through these openings.

Several quite long enactments then ensued to fur- ther the exploration of this material. Thus, the session moved through two major phases: the first comprised the accessing of the client-therapist shared materials through the drawing-talking sequences. The second comprised the amplification and exploration of the personal life themes of the therapist as accessed through the second mode, dramatic enactment. A new theme emerged in this process, the theme of Uncer- tainty, as the consequence of the balancing of unat- tended fear and anger. This led back to the therapist- client boundaries through reflection, described below.

Thematic Self-Report from the Text

The self-report by Julie extends the portrayal of her own understanding. She stated her themes in the fol- lowing way:

Stuck little girl, unable to move, in a fearful place Thick fear-Agoraphobia Thin fear-Uncertainty Youth-aging-maturity Anger Powerlessness Time-past and present Being Real-Playing it safe Life, energy-Certainty

She stated her own sense of the Essence of these themes:

Julie: The client presented as a little girl stuck in a fearful place. Her whiny voice disconnected me from my empathic feeling and put me on the floor and out the door, unable to access clarity and reality. Small and large fear were identified as holding in varying

degrees of anger. Present uncertainty was felt to be linked to past phobic fear. An experience of being centered, taking energy from anger and making deci- sions to be real led to movement away from the stuck place that fear and anger had held me in.

Several weeks later, in reviewing her experience, she stated this in a clearer, poetic form-a further approximation to meaning:

Little girl in a woman’s body, Why am I stuck here? Too many problems lead me here To the floor and out the door. Anger at mother Anger at father-at myself, Leads to powerlessness And fear and uncertainty.

Looking back Raises questions of Different choices, regrets And sadness

Which is the right way to go? No wonder I’m stuck In the middle, with uncertainty- This is the place I was caught in Between my parents.

The anger lives on But I can choose to use its energy To advantage To become, certain, centered, to move freely Between emotion and thinking And through the fear.

Commenting on her therapeutic understanding de- rived from the journey from client experience into her own, she said:

Julie: I am beginning to see that when I am stuck with a client, it could be because they have mirrored some- thing of myself to me that perhaps I have not worked through for myself. This will result in me becoming enmeshed with them. This is when I lose my ability to think. I merge and have only a narrow view of what is going on for the client.

Three different narratives have been investigated:the client’s, the therapist’s and that of their interac-

SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING AND TALKING

tion. The territory of the two inner narratives was entered through their blocked interaction; the seepage from the therapist’s own story made her feel uncer- tain, vulnerable, not strong enough to stay safely in that same territory with a client who is also fearful and resistant to going there. The issue of two selves at the boundary contacts is taken up by Julie in her further comment:

Julie: I can see more clearly how I make things more complicated than they need to be. I find it difficult to stay simply focused. I get us both in a jumbled state by being professional, being empathic, listening to the story, trying to be clever, reading body cues, checking my feelings, noting incongruencies, etc. Be- ing present and empathic, and yet distant or separate, is for me to know the boundary between me and my client. Merging is the cue for the need for inner ex- ploration. The more whole I feel, the more able I will be to contain my clients.

The Interactive Drawing-Talking Procedure

Julie wrote as follows about this process, from the transcript:

Julie: To draw a representation of a whiny voice-red jagged lines-felt fun, but this soon led to an under- standing that the lines were symbols of feelings of anger. Drawing the thick line in black around the jagged red lines surprised me and the simple ques- tioning that accompanied the drawing helped put me in reflective mode. I was curious about drawing my- self with the thinner line of fear at the time: the talk then was about the client’s anger with her mother, but I now notice that the large area of red lines in the oxbow cut off are about MY anger with my mother. Being asked to do something-make a choice to work with the red and black symbols of anger and fear enabled me to label, put words to the drawing and focus up emerging themes. Talking through the mean- ings of the words brought fearful memories of myself as the stuck and fearful child that my client was pre- senting to me like a mirror. In further dialogue, the words ‘on the floor’ and ‘out the door’ became sig- nificant metaphors connecting the anger to the fear, and the sense that the client had ‘made me mad’ re- minding me of these things. Questions about loose ends facilitated my writing my fearful and regretful statements on paper before the group, who felt very present to me. The realization that I had been carrying regret over the years of ag-

oraphobia was overwhelming and touched me deeply in a grieving kind of way. This felt a good thing to do. I also felt freed up to further explore the meaning and relationship of the fear and anger, which happened in the enactments and the written dialogue that followed.

Supervisor’s Statement of Essences

The push and pull of a client, as experienced by her therapist, was the starting point of exploration of the interaction that blocks off feeling. A gradual ac- cessing of the therapist’s distanced self occurred through the simultaneous activity of drawing and talk- ing. Representation of the whining voice contained within a strong band of fear led to a thin line of overlay-the memory of the therapist’s parallel expe- rience within her family of origin. Though this mate- rial had been processed therapeutically before, what was triggered by the client was a residual feeling of Uncertainty, in the therapist, a sense of powerlessness shown in the moments of powerlessness, on the floor and out the door, in the old memories. Separating herself from the uncertainty of “Which is the right way to go?” became a theme of her life and brought a deep sadness over wasted years and the possibility of having made wrong life choices out of fear, and a sense of anger at this uncertainty. She experienced this indecisiveness with her clients and came to un- derstand the need for a centered separateness, along- side empathy, in her work as a therapist.

Researcher Comment

Of course it is obvious that not all the understand- ing came because of the drawing and talking; and all the work done in the enactments has not been shown. The knowing is achieved holistically. Julie uses all the modes of knowing as they seem apt. But the si- multaneous drawing and talking as observed here does provide access, does engage a spiralling inter- action between her visual sense, her verbalization, her emotions, her bodily feeling self, bringing a gradually emerging connectedness of understanding as she stays in and continues to open herself up to layers of reex- periencing. This comment is made by observing the whole text and is observable in the descriptions. It makes no attempt to say why this happens from a theoretical point of view: there is no assumption about accessing the unconscious or resolving intrapsychic conflicts or invoking archetypal figures. This type of hermeneutic activity is seen as unnecessary for under-

WARREN R. LETT

standing. We try to stay with the experience itself to find out what it means for the participant.

In fact, exactly the same comments can be made of this work as were made of Ken’s. When experience is given visual form, it is there to be interacted with, and Julie continues to amplify her pattern of experience, making sense of it as she goes. She has certain pro- cedures to assist her in the process of understanding- the retention of the artwork, the provision of the text, the interaction with the supervisor and the group and their way of being with her and the periods of reflec- tion and writing about all of this. But staying in the continuity of living experience-reexperience, over time, processing this cumulatively and multimodally leads to the clarification and understanding of the meanings that were within the communications pre- viously experienced, but unexplored for meanings.

DISCUSSION

Four useful research issues that have emerged from the data can be identified as follows:

1. How can the naive experience of the therapist’s self in action be located and described?

2. What is the nature and function of simultaneous drawing and talking in the pursuit of therapist personal and interpersonal knowing?

3. How is understanding arrived at in these activities?

4. What is the dependability of collaborative dis- covery of personal and interpersonal meanings, as described?

In order to make this discussion, I have to step into my own perspective of understanding of the partici- pants’ experiencing. My discussion, then, comes from my own participation, my own immersion in their experiencing and their data, and constitutes my own intersubjective response-reflection and under- standing. It is as far as possible referenced to our shared experiencing, and the narratives I write are lodged within these frameworks.

The data segments reveal the nature of the process- content dialogue of understanding at a descriptive level. In Segment 1, Ken has a memory of his client’s confusion and sadness and has an awareness that his own process parallels hers. Immediately, when asked whether he wants to work with this, he connects with his characteristic style-the self-demand to be a

clever problem solver Enacting the “screws in head” pressure clarifies this as a general issue for Ken, which he symbolically “solves” by being with or beside his client. In order that he understand what lies within this, the supervisor prevents him from giving a quick verbal answer, but asks him to explore this material. In fact, the remainder of his work consists of the exploration of this material accessed in succession by the verbal, dramatic and visual modes.

Ken was actually asked to stay with the idea of connecting with his client, stressed or not stressed. His drawing was an exploration of this and in this instance he drew first and then talked about it (Seg- ment 2). As he reexperienced the moments of his drawing, he identified his thinking while drawing and developed both as he recalled. This process of focus- ing produces successive approximations to meaning, ideas and feelings being shaped in the interaction of his modes of experiencing and as he is questioned or has his attention drawn to aspects of the intermodal dialogue. The content resulting is about colors and shapes, about feelings of satisfaction with form and meaning connections arising intermittently: “It was me working on myself”; “The blue vees-the small bits of my client remind me of me”; “This swirling freedom-its flow”; “My chest is open.”

The exploration continued (Segment 3) through the supervisor’s request to focus the “blue vees. ” This is certainly a direction, but one which arises directly from his statement indicating the symbolic impor- tance of these for their interaction. A series of sym- bols was then produced by Ken, all visually drawn, which, when focused directly, disclose a number of factors in the space of their interaction, which are then expressed as verbal understandings deriving from their symbolic representations. In this case, visual images precede verbal expressions of understanding. Staying with the symbols, which arise more immedi- ately as raw knowledge, leads to both feelings and cognition: a holistic or multimodal process of under- standing is engaged.

Attempts to verify these understandings are also present in the interactive dialogue of supervisee and other participants as they see their own drawings and, later, their texts as vehicles for understanding and report. The presenter’s thematic analysis crystallizes the discussion and collects his experiences around three themes. The overlap of their and his material is substantial, but what matters most, both as supervi- sion and as research, is the phenomenological struc-

SIMULTANEOUS DRAWING AND TALKING

tural description of the essences of his themes that he has arrived at by staying with his own experience in this least contaminated possible way.

Successive approximations continue over time, a factor verifying the significance of the events in pro- cess. This is shown in the second session when Ken opts to continue his work on the same client and his material. All of this occurs through simultaneous drawing and talking. He incorporates thematic aspects into his discussion of the now changing relationship with his client-half a heart each in interaction and mutual kicking the ball around. But what emerges is built upon this understanding: anger masking fear, found behind the eyes in the drawing, focused and doodled, until further images are drawn, stayed with, explored-the bruised lines, the balloon, the band- aids, the congealed blood, the bicycle, the land mines, the four labelled pink lines, the steel plate.

This process is complementary to focusing; it is a process of experiential amplification. Images flow in a series that is ultimately connected to a focused emo- tion-fear. The construction of meanings in this se- ries of images is then able to be directly explored and stated, in moments of withdrawal for indwelling, and expressed verbally. These are the images occupying the space between Ken and his client, themes of the self in action experienced as inhibitions, pressures preventing openness and flow in their relating. They are the same pressures that operate in his ordinary being as who he is is all present, intensified, in the pressure of the therapeutic engagement. This ontolog- ical knowing occurs through the shifts of perspective of the experiencing self, through each aspect of the explorations leading eventually to a fully focused en- counter with the underlying organizer-the emotion of fear that was the source of discomfort contaminat- ing the images of the interaction and of his life. The insertion of the self into an old feared territory is a movement through images connecting because they belong together, connecting to an essential theme, which can be entered and can give up its torch-like meanings. This pattern of being is invoked by the complementary cycling of shared discomforting ex- perience of the two, between them, blocking both.

This particular perspective on supervision makes little difference between therapy and supervision. If, as supervisor, I had taken a more distanced, cognitive or theoretical stance on Ken’s work, I might have intuited his sense of combat with the client and en- couraged him to form a stronger alliance, listen more,

allow her more space, engage in more empathic con- frontation and so on. I suspect that this would have been useful. I think it highly unlikely that Ken would have gained the self-knowledge he did from the ex- periential method of supervision by a more formal, distanced, conceptual teaching stance as supervision. Telling him what I saw, theoretically, again seems unlikely to yield the degree of connected meanings contained in the living pattern of discomfort that he was containing and maintaining in a blocked way. Without his reexperiencing, I would have left myself at risk of imposing a theory upon casework manage- ment and working with cognitive understanding only, eliminating the holistic mixing of understanding.

There is no claim that Ken’s earlier experience has “caused” his present dilemma. This research cannot be cast in terms of causes and effects, but only as a search for meanings as this is its purpose, comparable to jhe description of phenomenologically observable dictates, which are meaning-oriented (Puhakka & Hanna, 1988). There is a description of the pattern of his lived experience in the present that is continuous with his life patterns: there can be no single event that has caused these patterns of living to be established. The fact that he continues to think, feel and respond within this pattern is the content we want to under- stand more. We expect that, in making meaning of the discomforting parts of this previously-learned com- plex of his being, he can make use of these meanings and be freer to choose different ways of being in relationships. This is why the description of the pat- tern, the explication of its mechanism and the deriva- tion of meanings are all required for understanding. The only specifically causal aspect in this process is the fact that their interactional patterns result in mis- understood and blocked encounters.

In the presentation of Ken’s work, I stayed within the adapted format (Giorgi, 1985) of the phenomeno- logical method of thematic analysis and pooled those of all participants, as illustrated by Reason (1988), but adapted to these circumstances. In the data for Julie, I developed an alternative format, which is a mixture of both phenomenological and heuristic tech- niques. It involves an intensive indwelling leading to a one-step researcher reduction to essence: a con- densed narrative of reconstructed essences where the perceived significant moments are woven together into a description with connecting commentary. It carries the essential structure of our collaborative ex- periencing, hence might be described as the experi-

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ential, collaborative text. Julie also stayed with a mix- ture of both methods, arriving clearly at her essential meanings.

Julie gives access to what discomforts her through the image of the whining voice. The supervisor asks her always to draw her images and, as she does, she talks and develops the images and, in the strong black line, finds the energy and spatial elements of “on the floor” and “out the door.” A second entry comes with drawing a lighter circle, “this is me,” the mo- ment of identification of the complementary negative cycles overlapping. Asked to comment on the red line, Julie begins the connecting process of amplifi- cation by retracing her own journey into the territory of past memories of fear. Thus, in this case access, and exploration of understandings occur through the simultaneous drawing and talking.

A further request to stay with her image by draw- ing is assisted by the group response and leads to a search for loose ends, another symbol of past discom- forts. Amplification of reexperiencing in this instance was through dramatic replay in which a new focus emerged as a further successive approximation to meaning: the life theme of Uncertainty. Coming back to drawing, life doubts are stated: wasted years and fear of choices, picking up the loose ends of a life lived out of fearful uncertainty. Her uncertainty with her client is their joint experience of helplessness in the face of choice and the fear of not knowing what to do. But technically, drawing and talking and dramatic reenactment are interchangeable as processes of dis- covery. It is a holistic, multimodal activity-moving across modes of reexperiencing. There is no apparent evidence, so far, that one mode can be advised as preferable to another or should be chosen at any par- ticular moment of discovery: these choices arise be- cause they are selected as appropriate as the mode

of exploration, at the time, by the participants intuitively.

Julie presents her data heuristically (Moustakas, 1990)-a portrait of her own emerging self- knowledge is given in poetic form and conceptually. She makes a statement of the interactional under- standing of her work with the client, deriving from her discovery of how their cycles of interaction are overlain with the effects of past patterns, which has triggered her fear into the uncertainty response as of old. She also provides the agenda for her own change better than a supervisor would be likely to do from a theoretical or nonexperiential perspective.

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