The Best Conversations

A therapist’s work is built from the elemental unit of A Really Good Conversation, about 50-55 minutes in length. Aside from greater freedom with the time, my personal life is not so different. I’ve got a lot of tricks in my bag but a new set of ideas I’ve been playing with to guide in the art of conversation is a delightful mouthful of a word, “phenomenology” (I cannot say this word without thinking about the “Menomena” song from vintage Sesame Street.)

I couldn’t resist putting this here/didn’t want to

Long before the modern mindfulness movement, phenomenology was an effort by 19th century European philosophers to reorient knowledge to immediate experience. Away from abstract rationalism! Back to “the things themselves” was the battle cry of the phenomenologists, as coined by their chief theorist Edmund Husserl. This means taking individual “objects of experience” as distinct entities, with the notion that from individual encounters without preconceptions we can learn far more than from relying on abstract generalizations.

In the endearing tradition of grandiose philosophical projects, phenomenology began as an attempt to formulate a universal framework of knowledge. No big deal, right? Since then, it has been adopted for more humble purposes by the likes of social science researchers, art critics, and, ahem, therapists with a nerdy existential bent. What these groups share is a need for scaffolding that helps explore and as we explore, formulate…and then as we explore further, reformulate again. Rinse and repeat. A phenomenological approach in a therapy session means humble attentive presence to what is happening with the person in front of me, with background processing that coheres the themes and ideas that emerge into the next turn of the conversation.

This is a true thing.

Practicing phenomenology necessitates deliberately leaving at the door the things you think you know about specific situations, and taking each encounter anew. This knowledge might be and common sense, like knowing someone eats because they’re hungry, or sleeps because they’re tired. However, by eschewing these things we think we know, we might be better able to assess individual situations as they are. A phenomenological mindset might uncover that in fact, someone has been eating because they’re anxious, or sleeping because they’re depressed.

Applying this filter in a conversation helps me to hear a person in such a way that something new is always emerging. This stance involves receptive listening alongside an inward-looking sense of what wants to bubble up and express itself from my own self, in response. Years of clinical training and work come in here to guide this intuition. I notice talking a little more slowly. I try not to preformulate my words, instead choosing to feel my way through the ideas I feel the most gravitational pull from at the moment of speaking.

Edvard Munch’s “Two Children on Their Way to the Fairytale Forest”. This is how finding a path in a therapeutic conversation can feel when a phenomenological approach is in play.

The best conversations, to me, are those with enough focus to thoroughly explore something meaningful in the space between two people; alternating with enough emotional introspection see if we are getting at what wants to be said. The role of theory is to guide and the role of intuition is to test. “Is this what it means to you?” “No, not that…something more like this…” It’s something like a really slow game of catch.

Inspiring a balance of values, structure and freedom, phenomenology helps conversations in therapy stay purposeful without feeling so rigid that they deny my client the experience of turning up something new. This is something like a good parent, who guides but knows when to encourage their child to go and explore on their own. With every conversation we learn a little more together about the direction we are going in, and what it is that needs to happen next.