By Kari Gleiser, Ph.D.
Amid the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, certain moments stand out in sharp relief: moments of deep connection or moments of unexpected beauty that give us pause. The emergent landscape of these moments, rising above the monotony of repetitive routine, shapes our memory and gives our lives texture and meaning. Such moments occur in therapy as well: moments of illumination, moments when we, as therapists, are moved to tears or rage on another’s behalf, moments of richly shared experience that is a unique product of two individual minds meeting on common ground. Dan Stern has written an illuminating and meditative exploration of this phenomenon in his book The Present Moment.
According to Stern, present moments are characterized by heightened awareness of raw, spontaneous felt-experience (not the verbal account of this experience, which is reconstructed post hoc). They are brief punctuations in time, although they have a definite temporal contour. Present moments are also heavily loaded with psychological significance and strongly inform our subjective sense of ourselves. In fact, when dissected and analyzed (which Stern has done in research), present moments can reveal microcosms of intrapsychic functioning: mini-universes of overall patterns of being in the world.
So why is this of interest to us as trauma therapists? Stern is interested less in private, intrapsychic events than in shared moments of awareness between individuals. He writes at length about intersubjectivity as the basic substrate for empathy and for mental attunement with another. Stern posits intersubjectivity as a primary motivational system (such as, for example, attachment) designed to enhance social group formation and cohesion on a global scale, foster intimacy and resonance within dyads, and engender a sense of belonging and being deeply seen and known on the level of the individual.
The intersubjective matrix is paramount in the treatment of chronically traumatized individuals, for whom pervasive alienation, isolation, and the shadow of the past often loom large. Stern shows how present moments and deep states of “mutual interpenetration of minds” foster healing by harnessing the transformational potential of directly accessed reality. By embarking on “shared feeling voyages” in real time the therapist/patient dyad give themselves over to an implicit process, marked by unpredictability, spontaneity and what Stern affectionately terms “sloppiness.” The pay-off is an opportunity to forge new ways of being-with-another, and to write over old scripts with new, co-created experience. This is the stuff of experiential therapies, but in a new, purer form. What Stern is suggesting requires profound courage and centeredness in therapists: to let go of our security blankets of theory, technique, and explicit content; to abandon, at times, all maps and navigational tools, and jump headlong into unknown terrain (sounds an awful lot like what we ask our patients to do all the time!). Therein awaits creative potential, “moments of meeting” that are the harbingers of deep and sudden change for our patients and for ourselves.