On Listening to the Story - Hymie Wyse

Mature Wisdom
Sitting down to summarise the talk Hymie gave us on Saturday, my main fear is of somehow leaving the heart out of it. Hymie gave us so much of himself and his experience and that is hard to put into words. He does indeed have a mature gentle wisdom and a warmth that came through everything he spoke about, making this a special afternoon.

Journey of Discovery
In contrast to the familiar model of therapy, where the client and therapist sit and talk, only standing together when the client arrives and then getting up when it is time to finish, Hymie described a piece of work that was informed by observation of how the client walked and stood, where the energy was held in the body, how ungrounded and fearfully tense this young client was. Using his own body, and asking the client to walk about during the session, Hymie enabled the boy to look afresh at himself and his world, and to begin a journey of discovery. Hymie described the body as a temple, which holds the individual’s history and can, by becoming grounded and in touch with itself, find a path to recovery. This is difficult to write about because words, and being ‘in the head’, go against Hymie’s model of understanding and working with clients as they are in their body, ‘the word made flesh’. He began by describing his approach as ‘re-discovering the obvious’ and encouraged us as therapists to own our vocation as what we were created to do, to be ourselves in a spontaneous way with clients, trusting our senses, and working from who we really are. Quoting Wittgenstein, he said “Don’t think, just look.”

Four Steps
Hymie described his methodology as having 4 steps: experience, the search for understanding, reflection and lastly decision. We need to look within to make sense of experience, and not fall into the trap of jumping from experience to a decision without reflecting on what might lie behind what we see and hear; to see knowing as ‘an ongoing dynamic creative experience’ rather than something set in stone. He said it is important to separate the story and the storyteller, so that the client does not get stuck acting the story instead of getting in touch with who they really are (a real danger in our society where it is fashionable for ‘victims’ to sell their story and it can become their identity) He spoke too about the need to differentiate between the person reflected in the mirror and the person looking into the mirror – the person in the mirror is framed, the face composed for that moment of looking, whereas the person looking into the mirror is bounded by no frame, and has an awareness of what’s happening behind the eyes and in the body.

Hymie also reminded us about the potency of silence, silence as a presence, and how there are times when silence can be our only response. “All explanations have to come to an end sometime.” There are some situations where words fall far short of what we wish to communicate; when we need to allow “the emptiness than contains everything.”

These are just some of the thoughts that Hymie offered to us in what was a rich and nurturing afternoon.

Margaret Overington
May 2008