In the last month I have attended two trainings : Personality Adaptations with Dr. Elinor Greenberg and Zero Balancing with Phil Greenfield.
Both courses have taken me deeper into my quest to be able to understand difference and to respond to meeting the unique individual.
Or from my heart, my quest to learn to love better.
Learning to love better involves loving people in a way that is meaningful to them rather than giving what I find helpful myself.
In Elinor’s workshop I remembered how empathy is experienced differently by different people. I like to know someone is connected with me so I like responses from people, especially those that involve the other person, to know they are excited or saddened by what I am saying, for example. I like to feel a connection, an inclusive response. But this is not true for other personality types – they may find my response intrusive if it involves my reaction or response, or they may experience this as taking the focus away from them, or even feel responsible for my feelings. Empathy for many is giving them space, silence or using exactly their words and may involve more holding back than inclusiveness. Conversely, those who like inclusiveness can feel abandoned by a therapist who is predominantly silent.
As an example of how our intention to love and interact can be taken differently by different styles, I remember annoying my partner on holiday once, by reminding them to take suncream to the pool, this was perceived as controlling or critical. Yet later that day, they suggested I take a cardigan out to dinner in case it was cold and I felt loved and cared for!
Person centered counselling encourages us to meet a person where they are, and if we go bouncing in enthusiastically (as I am prone to do, given that I love people and love relating), this can close doors, as soon as open them. It is essential to stop and think about who the person is in front of us. I have had to learn to think deeply about how to meet people, how to love them, yet at the same time I don’t wish to lose who I am or to inhibit my genuine nature.
I am grateful for my optimistic nature which means no matter how much I’ve been hurt by some encounters with people in my life, that I am always happily ready to engage with more! One of my strengths is my ability to wait a long time, sometimes years, for those who are scared of contact to emerge. This type of interaction combines my thinking about their style and understanding of their perspective, with my own belief that underneath everyone’s defences lie the treasure of the true person and that they are worth waiting for  and worth seeing.
How can we know whether we are meeting a person in the right way? Well often they tell us or withdraw.
Zero Balancing offers a way of finding the meeting place, the moment of non verbal contact, this is called ‘the blue line’. While trying to explain the feel of the blue line is difficult in words, I actually can find the blue line much easier with people non verbally when practicing Zero Balancing, than I can sometimes in conversation. The blue line is the right amount of tension or pressure to make contact with the person you are engaging with, and this has to be discovered uniquely with each person, because everyone is different (and more complicatedly one person may be different in different moments).
We sometimes experiment with ‘finding the blue line’ using scarves, I call it the ‘hello moment’. We hold a scarf, one person at each end and slowly tug the slackness out of the scarf until we feel the other person there and they feel us – this is the blue line, or the ‘hello there’. Different people need a different amount of tug to make meaningful contact. I have taken to using this technique with couples in therapy. Sometimes the non verbal discovery shows more than words, the mismatch between one person’s idea of ‘hello’ and another persons’. Some people are subtle and others may not be able to feel the other person is there.
The more we learn about our style of meeting and the style and needs of others with different personalities, bodies and energy, the more we can find a meeting place of meaningful contact
Loving well requires attention in the moment, which is everything and nothing. Effortless and committed.
 
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