The Empty Chair -
no longer is it the couch.
Rob van Tol
http://bobodoll.blogspot.com
Recently wrote a posting titled, “Stuntz Multiple Chair Work and Me�. Multiple chair work is a psychotherapeutic technique. He discusses this technique with a personal statement about his experiences with it. It is used for many therapeutic reasons, one being an awareness or understanding of self. For instance he states,
“So it was import to access my Parent and deconfuse my Adult … Or, in non-TA terms, I didn’t have either a strong conscience, nor look after myself well. And when I think about the here and now I was (and can still be) influenced by the fears and decisions I made as a child.
It terms of awareness, I was just conscious of being, and unaware of the different intrapsychic conversations I had and how they could be categorised, or what their voices sounded like.�
Thanks Rob for being candid.
I will call it the empty chair technique, and you know what? When I began on this career path I was amazed that people could do it and I was even more amazed when I did it!!. So what is “it�. A person sits in a chair and then an empty chair is placed in front of the person about 4 or 5 feet away. They are then asked to imagine some person or some part of themself in that chair and start talking to them/it. Weird, I know. But people can actually do it. I know, I couldn’t believe it either until I saw it with my own eyes.
There is a thing people can do and that is called ‘Projection’. They can kind of put a part of themself out on to some one or some thing in the world. So a person who is angry can project that anger onto others and they will then see others out there as angry when in fact most of them aren’t. This is how the empty chair thingee works. People project some part of themself into an empty chair.
I have never seen such intense emotions of anger and hatred, fear and terror, sadness and grief, despair, love and affection and so on all expressed to a empty chair!! When first asked to do it most feel a bit odd talking to an empty chair, most get over that in about a minute and then project out onto the chair with sometimes such powerful emotions attached.
Lost child
People discover all sorts of things such as the lost child part of themself. Because one was abused, scared or maybe just consistently ignored sometimes the emotional part of ourself goes and hides away. A fairly normal thing for kids to do. If mummy is angry then a good, effective solution is to go and hide. Problem solved (in the short term). The problem is if it happens over and over eventually the child gets forgotten about. Our inner emotional self is lost, we forget about it. When that happens people start doing odd things because their basic needs are not met for a significant period of time. For example our need for affection is not met. A woman starts to find that she is being promiscious. Her needs for affection are not being met and she discovers that sex seems to somehow feed that need a bit and so she starts to confuse affection and sex. Empty chair sometimes allows this lost child to be found again.
Surviving via promiscuity
Sometimes there just seems to be no hope. Whatever you do is wrong. If you say yes it is wrong and if you say no it is wrong. Or mummy is just so preoccupied with her own ‘shit’ she just has no emotions left over for you. (This is not her fault as she proably had a mummy who was the same). You live in an emotional desert and you stave for feeling. Common in habitual drug users.
Other times it is the oppostie. Some one discovers in the empty chair that there is a happy, cheerful girl. The good girl. We get lots of mummy and daddy’s attention. They dote on me but there seems to be some conditions on such attention. It is conditional attention. I get lots of attention when I am happy and good and people notice me and say how sweet I am. Mummy and daddy like that. If I am not happy and not ‘performing’ then I either get told off in some way or just ignored. So in adulthood even when I am at my partner’s funeral I find I am smiling.
The good girl
Finally the other one is that distance between the idealized self and the real self. We all have an ideal for self in looks, in education, in sport, in popularity, in success, in being a parent and so on endlessly. Then there is the reality that is different from the ideal. For most the difference is not all that large. But sometimes people put the ideal in the empty chair and it becomes obvious that the difference is a fucking chasam, as big as Ayers Rock. These people suffer as they strive to achieve the unachievable. Often they are olympic atheletes. “If I win olympic gold then I will be a worth while person� is the magical belief. Even if they do happen to win it, it still doesn’t fill the void.
In search of the ideal self
The best thing that a psychologist can hear is a person say, “I am happy with who I am�. That is music to my ears. We are all fucked up a bit. That is human nature. If one can see the bigger picture and create a life for self where one can live with the good bits and the not so good bits then one has got it together. One is “cured�. If you can love who is in the empty chair, then my job is done.
