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Conversation with Eric Wolterstorff
Serge Prengel (00:00)
So I'm with Eric Wolterstorff Hi, Eric.
Eric Wolterstorff (00:02)
Hi Serge
Serge Prengel (00:03)
So you have a training program about the Trauma Integration Protocol and a lot of the focus is on transference and noticing it in a somatic way.
Eric Wolterstorff (00:14)
Yes. Yes. Just so. Would you like me to start with an example?
Serge Prengel (00:17)
That would be great.
Eric Wolterstorff (00:18)
Sure. So.
When when when we're working with a client we may notice I'm going to give an example of sort of Kind of transference triggers in the moment that are coming from the client So I'm I'm remembering about 20 years ago working with a client a young man who Whose father well had been in Vietnam and in
and seen a lot of one of the people who was actually in the front lines and saw a lot of death.
And his father, his father was triggered, would suddenly attack his son. So from the time that he was three or four or five, he would just in memories of just all of a sudden his father would just grab and throw him across the room or something like this. And he learned how to defend himself.
through boxing and by the time he was 15 or 16 he got to the place where he could defend himself against his father and then the violence stopped. Okay, I didn't know that yet. We had just begun work and he had just dropped into a state of mindfulness. We were doing some basic resourcing work and for some reason he trusted me enough to close his eyes while he did that.
Serge Prengel (01:25)
you
Eric Wolterstorff (01:29)
And when his eyes were closed and he was dropping it internally, I felt something I have never felt in a session with a client before since. I felt such an urge to jump across and punch him in the face as hard as I could.
I was just... I mean, I had to hold myself down. I wanted to so much. And I went, wow, what is happening right now? Is this inside me? Is this coming from him? Is this something different? That's neither. What's happening right now?
And as we went further and we learned more, we began to learn more that, yes, this is the dynamic that he had grown up with as a child. He becomes vulnerable and in the moment of vulnerability, he's suddenly violently attacked by someone whose job it is to take care of him.
Serge Prengel (02:14)
So the beauty of it here is that the counter-transference that you experienced, wanting to punch him and sensing the violence in the room at a body level, because you really felt your whole body wanting to do that. ⁓ And so you had the space.
Eric Wolterstorff (02:29)
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Serge Prengel (02:37)
to contain it and to stay with it. So what happened as you were containing it?
Eric Wolterstorff (02:38)
Yes. Yes.
Well, first I want to say at that time, I was not containing it because I had any degree of expertise and transference. I had basic ethics, professional ethics, and I had common sense. I shouldn't punch this person. That's the only thing that stopped me at the moment. was, was, there was, when I say that, when I wonder was that transference, counter transference, actually that's...
That's a thought I would have had much later. In the moment, I couldn't have had that thought because I didn't know what transference or counter-transference were. Yes.
Serge Prengel (03:10)
There was just an unexplained thing about yourself to say,
I'm noticing something very strange about myself that I'm not usually somebody who punches my clients, but I have this irresistible urge to punch him.
Eric Wolterstorff (03:17)
That's right.
That's
That's right. That's right. So what in the heck is going on? So I contained it and we just
kept going with the session and we worked along and that was fine. I didn't say anything about it. We went along later and we took a history later and as we took the history, I began to again with no particular expertise and trauma or transference or how it works or anything. I just went, so he grew up with this and that's kind of happening now. Those things related in some way.
I don't understand, but now I think I know where it came from because I didn't have that history. I didn't have a history of being suddenly struck or suddenly striking. wasn't that wasn't part of my direct past. The boy was a part of his. So.
Serge Prengel (04:05)
And was it in any way related to the reason he was seeing you for therapy or was it totally?
Eric Wolterstorff (04:11)
He was working, he came in with what we would call now complex trauma. So there was a whole mixture of things together. was not, my life was okay except that my father was violent. It was like my life's confused. And I have all these symptoms.
Serge Prengel (04:25)
So you had really nothing to hang on to with that strange feeling that you experienced.
Eric Wolterstorff (04:30)
Shall I keep going? Another story?
Serge Prengel (04:32)
I would be kind of maybe take this story to continue a little bit about what's of interest to me is the birth of the insight. You know that there is something, I'm feeling something, what I'm feeling is not necessarily just me, it may be something in the situation. What is it in the other person that might have provoked it? I'm kind of curious to see
Eric Wolterstorff (04:33)
or no.
Sure.
Serge Prengel (04:57)
you know, the birth of seeing things differently.
Eric Wolterstorff (04:59)
Yeah, that's great. So.
The insight came through me as I was studying and learning about group dynamics in the following years. And more and more, I began to understand what happened in a traumatic event and somebody's memory of it as like the script of a scene in a play.
So when that young man was with me, it's not as if his memory was being suddenly struck and that was his memory. It's much deeper than that. His memory was...
Okay, he has a memory of being struck, but then this man struck him. His father struck him. So with whatever empathetic capacity he had at three or five or 10 or 12 years old, that empathetic capacity was trying to figure out his father. What is my father thinking? What is he feeling?
We have, right, this empathy very different from sympathy. Empathy is simply, can I imagine what you're thinking or feeling or where you've been or what you might do? And a lot of times empathy is connected with sympathy, but this is simply what are these other people thinking and feeling? And you can see why that would have been so important to that boy because the better he could understand his father,
this better chance of seeing it coming, heading it off, doing something so that his father might not do it. So a lot of his mind is trying to make sense of it. And a way that we make sense of a situation is we try to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling. so and he's so so he's dreaming into the role of the perpetrator, because he needs to understand that role.
Serge Prengel (06:21)
Yeah, just trying to make sense of
Eric Wolterstorff (06:38)
He's also dreaming into the role of the bystander. Why did his mother never stop this? Sometimes she was present, sometimes she wasn't, but she knew about the dynamic. Why did she not stop this? So as hard as he can, he's trying to imagine his mother. What is she feeling? What is she thinking? Why does she not come in and help her child?
So, and in this particular scenario, there's not a savior. Kind of he becomes the savior when he learns how to box and box very well and box well enough that his father couldn't hit him anymore. So the savior is yet to emerge a decade later. So in his mind, he's got this memory and the memory is not of what happened to him. His memory is of the scene of the crime. Here is the child being hit.
by the father while the mother distances herself there is no savior that's the script
Serge Prengel (07:26)
Right. So
the two, and the two people who love me or should help me or should love me and help me, one of them, the father is hitting me. The other, the mother is like staying as a bystander and doing nothing. So what is happening? And all the emphasis is on empathy, but empathy brings him nowhere. And it's only 10 years later when he learns to fight that he actually finds a solution to it.
Eric Wolterstorff (07:30)
You
Yes.
Right, right. Now, he might have found something through empathy that could have helped him to manage it. Right? Well, let's go to that in a minute. But he did not. So over time, he developed his own solution to this threat of his father. And the solution was to become so
Serge Prengel (08:01)
Yes. Okay.
Eric Wolterstorff (08:13)
strong and fast and physically skilled that his father could no longer attack him because he could knock his father out before his father touched him. So he developed his own role of a savior in that situation. The reason I bring that up is I'm going back to when I was in the therapy room with him and I had the impulse. What was he signaling to me?
He wasn't simply signaling to me, I'm a child who was struck. I've worked with a lot of children who were struck. A lot of people have been assaulted. He was remembering, no, I was struck suddenly and violently by someone whose job it was to take care of me. And so...
So his transference was casting a spell into the room. He was like the director of the play and he's okay I'm going to be the the victim again because I'm doing this therapy work and I need to be the victim. Well I need a perpetrator and a bystander. Okay which are you willing to be?
and
Serge Prengel (09:12)
Okay, so what we're talking about is that it's not that say his body language was aggressive and insulting and you responded to it by feeling agressed and insulted and wanting to strike him, which would have been in a way your own thing, but that in some way he was pulling the strings and ⁓ you became a character in his play. ⁓
Eric Wolterstorff (09:33)
Yes.
Yes.
Serge Prengel (09:38)
caught into
the, in a way just like the psychodrama and you filled the role in the psychodrama.
Eric Wolterstorff (09:43)
Yes, exactly,
exactly. As it turns out, part of my responsibility was to hold that role without acting on it. And if I had had much more skill then, then we could have begun to work with that more directly. All I did was manage to feel the role put on me, but not strike him, which was OK.
Serge Prengel (10:04)
Yeah.
But so in a way also not making it a central piece of the therapy, because if I understand you correctly, it was, this is an inconvenient moment. And what I mostly have to do is to prevent myself from acting out, but it was not the live part of the therapy.
Eric Wolterstorff (10:23)
Well, I think that for his unconscious, it was the live part of the therapy. But the response of my unconscious was, I'm sorry, I can't go there. I can help you in other ways, but I can't open that door. Or he opened the door and I said, I'm sorry, I can't walk into that room with you. I don't know how to walk into that
Serge Prengel (10:33)
Yes.
Yes.
So
in some ways, you were both the mother and the father. You were the father in the sense of wanting to strike, but you were the mother in the sense of a bystander who could not really help.
Eric Wolterstorff (10:52)
Yes, that's right. That's right.
Yeah.
We help as we can.
Serge Prengel (10:55)
Yes, yes, yes, only as much as we're able to at the time, yes.
And so now, knowing what you know and revisiting this, what happened, could happen, how do you revisit in a way what happened in light of what you now know.
or what you wish could have happened.
Eric Wolterstorff (11:09)
I can't say,
well, I can't say what could have happened in terms of a particular intervention because I can think of like a half dozen right now. But what would have been happening immediately is I would have been imagining that scene in the past.
as I sat with him at the moment and felt my impulse and then there could have been many things that I could have done either to have raised his awareness of it maybe to have
This is one of the reasons why it's so important to take a history. And I know it's becoming very popular these days not to take a history to say everything's in the present moment in the body. But there is a whole map of where and how to work that we can do such things with if we have a history. So without a history, I don't know that I could have done anything more than I did. We were already working on the...
on resourcing, we were already working on emotional resonance in the relationship. But with the history, we would have been playing that scene in the past with his father would have been alive while we were there in the moment in the room. And that gives us an opportunity to ask questions maybe about when what was his father like when his father wasn't violent.
Was there a moment that his father ever held back from attacking him? What was it like when he was older and he could defend himself against his father? Was there ever a moment that his father expressed regret or self-awareness? Because, if this is the point of this, his memory isn't simply the memory in his unconscious of being struck.
He has the memory of his father being out of control and violent. He has the memory of his mother being disengaged and not protecting her child. So all three of those are alive in his psyche and all three need to be mastered and integrated as part of the maturation and healing process.
Serge Prengel (13:04)
Yeah, yeah. So, so it's it's he has three perspectives.
his father, his mother, and himself. And there is something that doesn't quite make sense. And what you're talking about when asking specific questions is bringing to the nitty gritty so that it goes from staying in that trauma capsule into connecting to lived experience.
Eric Wolterstorff (13:27)
Yes.
Yes. Yes.
Serge Prengel (13:31)
all the nuances of lived experience.
Eric Wolterstorff (13:33)
And we would do that with all three people at that moment, all three roles. We would work through everything with his mother. What could his mother done? What would he do with somebody under his care? What has he seen someone else do? Can he reimagine the scenario with his mother stepping in in some way and moving from the bystander to the savior? We could do the whole thing with his father in his father's role and we could do the same thing in his role.
And so much of therapy, even when we work with transference, I'm going to take a half step towards something else. Is that all right?
Serge Prengel (14:05)
Sure.
Eric Wolterstorff (14:05)
is a kind of a trap that we can fall into is saying this is a healing place. This is a place for the Savior and for the victim. And as a therapist, I'm going to help you as the victim. And then once you've got that down, I'm going to just support you and empower you until you're a Savior and you don't need me anymore. And that's beautiful. But the problem with that is
As we work through various scenes of the crime, we are inviting these whole scenes to come out. And when the client leaves the session, the client now has a perpetrator role and a bystander role that their therapist refused to take. So they're going to start to look for who in my life can take this.
And so we can end up, the family therapists talk about this all the time, where we can create a beautiful love affair between the client and the therapist of mutual aid, mutual understanding, and mutual support.
And then you watch as the client's marriage gets worse, as their relationships with their friends and their colleagues get worse, their relationship with their parents and their children get worse, because they've got all of this extra alive, awakened energy from unintegrated, unmastered perpetrators, unintegrated, unmastered bystanders that are looking for a place to go. Please.
Serge Prengel (15:22)
Right, right. So let me just put my own words to check
that I understand you. So something about the trauma doesn't just involve the victim of the trauma. The trauma involves the whole situation in the sense the perpetrator and the bystander. And that only focusing on the victim and the healing does not address all of the others unanswered questions.
and as they remain unanswered, they continue to act out. And so what you need to do is complete the business of understanding and completing the purpose of these actions so then they can be integrated.
Eric Wolterstorff (15:46)
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Yeah, so that's one example of one kind of transference that arises in sessions. So it's not really beginning with counter-transference. It's not, and it's only a particular kind of transference, but that's one kind and it's very strong around traumatic transference.
Serge Prengel (16:11)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah. And so I understand there can be others. And is it fair to say that then the process is about bringing out more explicitly in the room in a way that it can be worked from all of its angles, all of its perspectives.
Eric Wolterstorff (16:38)
Yes.
Yes. And it's usually easiest to fully integrate the Savior role first. That can be very empowering, very resourcing.
Then to do the victim role second. It doesn't needn't be this way, but on average it's easiest this way. And then to reach out and do the bystander role next. And there's a whole range of bystanders, right? There's bystanders who feel like victims and they would like to help and they can't. And then there's bystanders who are just disengaged. They just don't.
Serge Prengel (16:55)
Yeah.
Eric Wolterstorff (17:08)
that they just withdraw. And there's bystanders who are cheering them on, who are cheering the perpetrator on. Those are all bystanders. So we work with the bystanders next. Usually that's next easiest. And then finally we go to the perpetrator's usually the most difficult. They tend to have the least mindfulness and self-awareness, which is one of the reasons they're taking those actions.
Serge Prengel (17:32)
Yes, and so of course when we're talking about the bystander and the perpetrator, we're talking about the internalized role of the, you know, just it's happening inside one person. Cool. Really nice.
Eric Wolterstorff (17:39)
Exactly.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Serge Prengel (17:49)
Well, it's just, I have a sense of that drama that hyper concentrated and the unfolding it and giving space to unfold and play out in a way that it can finally just, you know, be seen, be felt and integrated.
Eric Wolterstorff (18:05)
Yes.
Yes. Yes. I've not done it. I've participated in all sorts of different ways of doing psychodrama. In particular, Arnie Mendel's wonderful work. We lost Arnie this last year. But Arnie's beautiful work. Max was my main teacher, Max Schuppbach, and then Arnie and Amy and Yuta also.
Serge Prengel (18:19)
Yes.
Eric Wolterstorff (18:26)
with Mocks when I studied with them. But they have a beautiful way of working with these group processes and giving a space to every place. They tend to work, at least they did 20 years ago, with a lot of drama. And we really want to minimize the intensity when working with trauma, right? Because there's already so much bound up intensity in the event that we want to create a strong, firm, gentle container and be really precise as we invite this
unfold. So we don't need
But the inclusiveness of Arnie's approach to create space for every role that was there, perpetrator, victim, bystander, savior, to really bring all of those voices together. I think that a very gentle focused version of that for trauma would be a lovely way to work. And I've thought about it for a long time and I've just not organized or done it. But it's sort of because it would be easy
than doing it one-on-one. You can do it one-on-one. It will be actually easier and more supportive for the client if the container was set up well they would feel much more support if it was set up right.
Serge Prengel (19:21)
Yes.
Yes.
it felt like a good place to end. I would asked you if you have something else you want to add,
Eric Wolterstorff (19:35)
I guess I'm going to add by saying there's...
There's transference and this is kind of what I would call episodic or event memory, sort of shock trauma transference with the scene of the crime. But there's also the Bowen roles of the overfunctioning, the under functioning that happened in family systems and therapists bring those in as well as just general concerns about counter transference.
You know, I ask participants to read Michael Sussman's A Curious Calling, which I think is a beautiful, approachable book on counter-transference and some of the attractions of being the therapist and how people can find a way to play out their own unconscious, unresolved issues with clients.
Sex in the Forbidden Zone by Peter Rudder is a sort of a specific kind of case study phenomenon on this. Anyway, it's so beautiful. I guess my final thing I want to say is that when I started practicing therapy, I'm going to exaggerate this, but it was was almost as if I was a mechanic and I was learning how to work on the other person who was a car.
And then it took years for me to come to what Jung said, right? Which is a place, and therapy is a place where two souls meet. Where it becomes what happens in this very, very rich, multi-multi-layer connection and back and forth between two people. And just the beauty and the power of that's, I love it.
Serge Prengel (21:01)
Great, what a wonderful quote. Thanks, Eric.
Eric Wolterstorff (21:03)
Ha
Serge, thank you so much for having me here. Always a pleasure.
Conversation with Eric Wolterstorff
Serge Prengel (00:00)
So I'm with Eric Wolterstorff Hi, Eric.
Eric Wolterstorff (00:02)
Hi Serge
Serge Prengel (00:03)
So you have a training program about the Trauma Integration Protocol and a lot of the focus is on transference and noticing it in a somatic way.
Eric Wolterstorff (00:14)
Yes. Yes. Just so. Would you like me to start with an example?
Serge Prengel (00:17)
That would be great.
Eric Wolterstorff (00:18)
Sure. So.
When when when we're working with a client we may notice I'm going to give an example of sort of Kind of transference triggers in the moment that are coming from the client So I'm I'm remembering about 20 years ago working with a client a young man who Whose father well had been in Vietnam and in
and seen a lot of one of the people who was actually in the front lines and saw a lot of death.
And his father, his father was triggered, would suddenly attack his son. So from the time that he was three or four or five, he would just in memories of just all of a sudden his father would just grab and throw him across the room or something like this. And he learned how to defend himself.
through boxing and by the time he was 15 or 16 he got to the place where he could defend himself against his father and then the violence stopped. Okay, I didn't know that yet. We had just begun work and he had just dropped into a state of mindfulness. We were doing some basic resourcing work and for some reason he trusted me enough to close his eyes while he did that.
Serge Prengel (01:25)
you
Eric Wolterstorff (01:29)
And when his eyes were closed and he was dropping it internally, I felt something I have never felt in a session with a client before since. I felt such an urge to jump across and punch him in the face as hard as I could.
I was just... I mean, I had to hold myself down. I wanted to so much. And I went, wow, what is happening right now? Is this inside me? Is this coming from him? Is this something different? That's neither. What's happening right now?
And as we went further and we learned more, we began to learn more that, yes, this is the dynamic that he had grown up with as a child. He becomes vulnerable and in the moment of vulnerability, he's suddenly violently attacked by someone whose job it is to take care of him.
Serge Prengel (02:14)
So the beauty of it here is that the counter-transference that you experienced, wanting to punch him and sensing the violence in the room at a body level, because you really felt your whole body wanting to do that. ⁓ And so you had the space.
Eric Wolterstorff (02:29)
Yes. Yes. Yes.
Serge Prengel (02:37)
to contain it and to stay with it. So what happened as you were containing it?
Eric Wolterstorff (02:38)
Yes. Yes.
Well, first I want to say at that time, I was not containing it because I had any degree of expertise and transference. I had basic ethics, professional ethics, and I had common sense. I shouldn't punch this person. That's the only thing that stopped me at the moment. was, was, there was, when I say that, when I wonder was that transference, counter transference, actually that's...
That's a thought I would have had much later. In the moment, I couldn't have had that thought because I didn't know what transference or counter-transference were. Yes.
Serge Prengel (03:10)
There was just an unexplained thing about yourself to say,
I'm noticing something very strange about myself that I'm not usually somebody who punches my clients, but I have this irresistible urge to punch him.
Eric Wolterstorff (03:17)
That's right.
That's
That's right. That's right. So what in the heck is going on? So I contained it and we just
kept going with the session and we worked along and that was fine. I didn't say anything about it. We went along later and we took a history later and as we took the history, I began to again with no particular expertise and trauma or transference or how it works or anything. I just went, so he grew up with this and that's kind of happening now. Those things related in some way.
I don't understand, but now I think I know where it came from because I didn't have that history. I didn't have a history of being suddenly struck or suddenly striking. wasn't that wasn't part of my direct past. The boy was a part of his. So.
Serge Prengel (04:05)
And was it in any way related to the reason he was seeing you for therapy or was it totally?
Eric Wolterstorff (04:11)
He was working, he came in with what we would call now complex trauma. So there was a whole mixture of things together. was not, my life was okay except that my father was violent. It was like my life's confused. And I have all these symptoms.
Serge Prengel (04:25)
So you had really nothing to hang on to with that strange feeling that you experienced.
Eric Wolterstorff (04:30)
Shall I keep going? Another story?
Serge Prengel (04:32)
I would be kind of maybe take this story to continue a little bit about what's of interest to me is the birth of the insight. You know that there is something, I'm feeling something, what I'm feeling is not necessarily just me, it may be something in the situation. What is it in the other person that might have provoked it? I'm kind of curious to see
Eric Wolterstorff (04:33)
or no.
Sure.
Serge Prengel (04:57)
you know, the birth of seeing things differently.
Eric Wolterstorff (04:59)
Yeah, that's great. So.
The insight came through me as I was studying and learning about group dynamics in the following years. And more and more, I began to understand what happened in a traumatic event and somebody's memory of it as like the script of a scene in a play.
So when that young man was with me, it's not as if his memory was being suddenly struck and that was his memory. It's much deeper than that. His memory was...
Okay, he has a memory of being struck, but then this man struck him. His father struck him. So with whatever empathetic capacity he had at three or five or 10 or 12 years old, that empathetic capacity was trying to figure out his father. What is my father thinking? What is he feeling?
We have, right, this empathy very different from sympathy. Empathy is simply, can I imagine what you're thinking or feeling or where you've been or what you might do? And a lot of times empathy is connected with sympathy, but this is simply what are these other people thinking and feeling? And you can see why that would have been so important to that boy because the better he could understand his father,
this better chance of seeing it coming, heading it off, doing something so that his father might not do it. So a lot of his mind is trying to make sense of it. And a way that we make sense of a situation is we try to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling. so and he's so so he's dreaming into the role of the perpetrator, because he needs to understand that role.
Serge Prengel (06:21)
Yeah, just trying to make sense of
Eric Wolterstorff (06:38)
He's also dreaming into the role of the bystander. Why did his mother never stop this? Sometimes she was present, sometimes she wasn't, but she knew about the dynamic. Why did she not stop this? So as hard as he can, he's trying to imagine his mother. What is she feeling? What is she thinking? Why does she not come in and help her child?
So, and in this particular scenario, there's not a savior. Kind of he becomes the savior when he learns how to box and box very well and box well enough that his father couldn't hit him anymore. So the savior is yet to emerge a decade later. So in his mind, he's got this memory and the memory is not of what happened to him. His memory is of the scene of the crime. Here is the child being hit.
by the father while the mother distances herself there is no savior that's the script
Serge Prengel (07:26)
Right. So
the two, and the two people who love me or should help me or should love me and help me, one of them, the father is hitting me. The other, the mother is like staying as a bystander and doing nothing. So what is happening? And all the emphasis is on empathy, but empathy brings him nowhere. And it's only 10 years later when he learns to fight that he actually finds a solution to it.
Eric Wolterstorff (07:30)
You
Yes.
Right, right. Now, he might have found something through empathy that could have helped him to manage it. Right? Well, let's go to that in a minute. But he did not. So over time, he developed his own solution to this threat of his father. And the solution was to become so
Serge Prengel (08:01)
Yes. Okay.
Eric Wolterstorff (08:13)
strong and fast and physically skilled that his father could no longer attack him because he could knock his father out before his father touched him. So he developed his own role of a savior in that situation. The reason I bring that up is I'm going back to when I was in the therapy room with him and I had the impulse. What was he signaling to me?
He wasn't simply signaling to me, I'm a child who was struck. I've worked with a lot of children who were struck. A lot of people have been assaulted. He was remembering, no, I was struck suddenly and violently by someone whose job it was to take care of me. And so...
So his transference was casting a spell into the room. He was like the director of the play and he's okay I'm going to be the the victim again because I'm doing this therapy work and I need to be the victim. Well I need a perpetrator and a bystander. Okay which are you willing to be?
and
Serge Prengel (09:12)
Okay, so what we're talking about is that it's not that say his body language was aggressive and insulting and you responded to it by feeling agressed and insulted and wanting to strike him, which would have been in a way your own thing, but that in some way he was pulling the strings and ⁓ you became a character in his play. ⁓
Eric Wolterstorff (09:33)
Yes.
Yes.
Serge Prengel (09:38)
caught into
the, in a way just like the psychodrama and you filled the role in the psychodrama.
Eric Wolterstorff (09:43)
Yes, exactly,
exactly. As it turns out, part of my responsibility was to hold that role without acting on it. And if I had had much more skill then, then we could have begun to work with that more directly. All I did was manage to feel the role put on me, but not strike him, which was OK.
Serge Prengel (10:04)
Yeah.
But so in a way also not making it a central piece of the therapy, because if I understand you correctly, it was, this is an inconvenient moment. And what I mostly have to do is to prevent myself from acting out, but it was not the live part of the therapy.
Eric Wolterstorff (10:23)
Well, I think that for his unconscious, it was the live part of the therapy. But the response of my unconscious was, I'm sorry, I can't go there. I can help you in other ways, but I can't open that door. Or he opened the door and I said, I'm sorry, I can't walk into that room with you. I don't know how to walk into that
Serge Prengel (10:33)
Yes.
Yes.
So
in some ways, you were both the mother and the father. You were the father in the sense of wanting to strike, but you were the mother in the sense of a bystander who could not really help.
Eric Wolterstorff (10:52)
Yes, that's right. That's right.
Yeah.
We help as we can.
Serge Prengel (10:55)
Yes, yes, yes, only as much as we're able to at the time, yes.
And so now, knowing what you know and revisiting this, what happened, could happen, how do you revisit in a way what happened in light of what you now know.
or what you wish could have happened.
Eric Wolterstorff (11:09)
I can't say,
well, I can't say what could have happened in terms of a particular intervention because I can think of like a half dozen right now. But what would have been happening immediately is I would have been imagining that scene in the past.
as I sat with him at the moment and felt my impulse and then there could have been many things that I could have done either to have raised his awareness of it maybe to have
This is one of the reasons why it's so important to take a history. And I know it's becoming very popular these days not to take a history to say everything's in the present moment in the body. But there is a whole map of where and how to work that we can do such things with if we have a history. So without a history, I don't know that I could have done anything more than I did. We were already working on the...
on resourcing, we were already working on emotional resonance in the relationship. But with the history, we would have been playing that scene in the past with his father would have been alive while we were there in the moment in the room. And that gives us an opportunity to ask questions maybe about when what was his father like when his father wasn't violent.
Was there a moment that his father ever held back from attacking him? What was it like when he was older and he could defend himself against his father? Was there ever a moment that his father expressed regret or self-awareness? Because, if this is the point of this, his memory isn't simply the memory in his unconscious of being struck.
He has the memory of his father being out of control and violent. He has the memory of his mother being disengaged and not protecting her child. So all three of those are alive in his psyche and all three need to be mastered and integrated as part of the maturation and healing process.
Serge Prengel (13:04)
Yeah, yeah. So, so it's it's he has three perspectives.
his father, his mother, and himself. And there is something that doesn't quite make sense. And what you're talking about when asking specific questions is bringing to the nitty gritty so that it goes from staying in that trauma capsule into connecting to lived experience.
Eric Wolterstorff (13:27)
Yes.
Yes. Yes.
Serge Prengel (13:31)
all the nuances of lived experience.
Eric Wolterstorff (13:33)
And we would do that with all three people at that moment, all three roles. We would work through everything with his mother. What could his mother done? What would he do with somebody under his care? What has he seen someone else do? Can he reimagine the scenario with his mother stepping in in some way and moving from the bystander to the savior? We could do the whole thing with his father in his father's role and we could do the same thing in his role.
And so much of therapy, even when we work with transference, I'm going to take a half step towards something else. Is that all right?
Serge Prengel (14:05)
Sure.
Eric Wolterstorff (14:05)
is a kind of a trap that we can fall into is saying this is a healing place. This is a place for the Savior and for the victim. And as a therapist, I'm going to help you as the victim. And then once you've got that down, I'm going to just support you and empower you until you're a Savior and you don't need me anymore. And that's beautiful. But the problem with that is
As we work through various scenes of the crime, we are inviting these whole scenes to come out. And when the client leaves the session, the client now has a perpetrator role and a bystander role that their therapist refused to take. So they're going to start to look for who in my life can take this.
And so we can end up, the family therapists talk about this all the time, where we can create a beautiful love affair between the client and the therapist of mutual aid, mutual understanding, and mutual support.
And then you watch as the client's marriage gets worse, as their relationships with their friends and their colleagues get worse, their relationship with their parents and their children get worse, because they've got all of this extra alive, awakened energy from unintegrated, unmastered perpetrators, unintegrated, unmastered bystanders that are looking for a place to go. Please.
Serge Prengel (15:22)
Right, right. So let me just put my own words to check
that I understand you. So something about the trauma doesn't just involve the victim of the trauma. The trauma involves the whole situation in the sense the perpetrator and the bystander. And that only focusing on the victim and the healing does not address all of the others unanswered questions.
and as they remain unanswered, they continue to act out. And so what you need to do is complete the business of understanding and completing the purpose of these actions so then they can be integrated.
Eric Wolterstorff (15:46)
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
That's right.
Yeah, so that's one example of one kind of transference that arises in sessions. So it's not really beginning with counter-transference. It's not, and it's only a particular kind of transference, but that's one kind and it's very strong around traumatic transference.
Serge Prengel (16:11)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah. And so I understand there can be others. And is it fair to say that then the process is about bringing out more explicitly in the room in a way that it can be worked from all of its angles, all of its perspectives.
Eric Wolterstorff (16:38)
Yes.
Yes. And it's usually easiest to fully integrate the Savior role first. That can be very empowering, very resourcing.
Then to do the victim role second. It doesn't needn't be this way, but on average it's easiest this way. And then to reach out and do the bystander role next. And there's a whole range of bystanders, right? There's bystanders who feel like victims and they would like to help and they can't. And then there's bystanders who are just disengaged. They just don't.
Serge Prengel (16:55)
Yeah.
Eric Wolterstorff (17:08)
that they just withdraw. And there's bystanders who are cheering them on, who are cheering the perpetrator on. Those are all bystanders. So we work with the bystanders next. Usually that's next easiest. And then finally we go to the perpetrator's usually the most difficult. They tend to have the least mindfulness and self-awareness, which is one of the reasons they're taking those actions.
Serge Prengel (17:32)
Yes, and so of course when we're talking about the bystander and the perpetrator, we're talking about the internalized role of the, you know, just it's happening inside one person. Cool. Really nice.
Eric Wolterstorff (17:39)
Exactly.
That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Serge Prengel (17:49)
Well, it's just, I have a sense of that drama that hyper concentrated and the unfolding it and giving space to unfold and play out in a way that it can finally just, you know, be seen, be felt and integrated.
Eric Wolterstorff (18:05)
Yes.
Yes. Yes. I've not done it. I've participated in all sorts of different ways of doing psychodrama. In particular, Arnie Mendel's wonderful work. We lost Arnie this last year. But Arnie's beautiful work. Max was my main teacher, Max Schuppbach, and then Arnie and Amy and Yuta also.
Serge Prengel (18:19)
Yes.
Eric Wolterstorff (18:26)
with Mocks when I studied with them. But they have a beautiful way of working with these group processes and giving a space to every place. They tend to work, at least they did 20 years ago, with a lot of drama. And we really want to minimize the intensity when working with trauma, right? Because there's already so much bound up intensity in the event that we want to create a strong, firm, gentle container and be really precise as we invite this
unfold. So we don't need
But the inclusiveness of Arnie's approach to create space for every role that was there, perpetrator, victim, bystander, savior, to really bring all of those voices together. I think that a very gentle focused version of that for trauma would be a lovely way to work. And I've thought about it for a long time and I've just not organized or done it. But it's sort of because it would be easy
than doing it one-on-one. You can do it one-on-one. It will be actually easier and more supportive for the client if the container was set up well they would feel much more support if it was set up right.
Serge Prengel (19:21)
Yes.
Yes.
it felt like a good place to end. I would asked you if you have something else you want to add,
Eric Wolterstorff (19:35)
I guess I'm going to add by saying there's...
There's transference and this is kind of what I would call episodic or event memory, sort of shock trauma transference with the scene of the crime. But there's also the Bowen roles of the overfunctioning, the under functioning that happened in family systems and therapists bring those in as well as just general concerns about counter transference.
You know, I ask participants to read Michael Sussman's A Curious Calling, which I think is a beautiful, approachable book on counter-transference and some of the attractions of being the therapist and how people can find a way to play out their own unconscious, unresolved issues with clients.
Sex in the Forbidden Zone by Peter Rudder is a sort of a specific kind of case study phenomenon on this. Anyway, it's so beautiful. I guess my final thing I want to say is that when I started practicing therapy, I'm going to exaggerate this, but it was was almost as if I was a mechanic and I was learning how to work on the other person who was a car.
And then it took years for me to come to what Jung said, right? Which is a place, and therapy is a place where two souls meet. Where it becomes what happens in this very, very rich, multi-multi-layer connection and back and forth between two people. And just the beauty and the power of that's, I love it.
Serge Prengel (21:01)
Great, what a wonderful quote. Thanks, Eric.
Eric Wolterstorff (21:03)
Ha
Serge, thank you so much for having me here. Always a pleasure.
