Attuning to the darkness
Private Practice, September 2023

Sarah: Tell me something about the journey of how you became a therapist.

Suzanne: It started early for me. The way I think about, teach and facilitate therapy is all around the embodied experience. I see the Gestalt approach as less of a theory, more of a blueprint for living an embodied life – a philosophy for cultivating aliveness. For many of us, that vitality was dimmed when we were young. And then the dimming of the light was reinforced by society, by the societal norms and mores that we feel compelled to live by.

I felt my losses as a child deep in my body, and one way I would manage this was to go into nature. I was lucky enough to live in a town surrounded by heathland. So I would go out into this heathland at all hours when I could. Sometimes I’d be out there at 10 o’clock at night, up on a hill overlooking the town, and I’d be embodying an intense, romantic character from a Thomas Hardy novel, like Eustacia Vye. Those Victorian English novels were the only ones we were taught at the time – Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and so on. Now my reading has expanded, but back then, I was a character from Thomas Hardy: out in the wilds, dealing with my inner emotional turmoil. From an early age I was very introspective and interested in Eastern mysticism, as well as in other cultures I never got to read or hear about at school. I did A-level psychology, but it was very much about a behavioural understanding: ‘This is the way to make behavioural change happen.’ Whereas I was interested in the whole of human experiencing; not just, ‘If you do A and B, then C happens, and you’re fine.'

Sarah: That’s the way of trying to understand the psyche via ‘rats and stats’, as someone once described the academic psychology approach to me.

Suzanne: Right. And Pavlov’s dogs and all that stuff. It wasn’t the right path for me. I did a lot of travelling, and lived in different places. I lived in Peru for a year. I explored what it was like to be based in other cultures, and this showed me how other people lived much more closely to and with nature. In Benin, for example, I noticed people had a really strong connection to the land, and to their culture and community, supported by spiritual practice. There was a sense that people needed one another, and they needed the land, and to commune with each other and the land to continue their culture. And they did, even though there was a lot of pressure from social media and television, and historically from the politicians who wanted to take people’s land to utilise it for capitalist venture. Yet people still wanted to embody their connection to the land, and to make sacrifices for it, through ritual.

Sarah: That reminds me of the phrase ‘paying the land’, which is the title of a graphic exploration by the journalist and illustrator Joe Sacco of the land around the Alberta tar sands in Canada, and the conflict between some of the indigenous people there, and the massive oil industry forces who are taking oil out of the ground on an enormous scale.¹ The Dene people have a tradition of paying the land back, of saying ‘thank you’ to it and making offerings, when they take from it. Which is in stark contrast to the ecological damage caused by the oil industry that has little sense of repaying the earth or saying ‘thank you’ for what’s been taken.

Suzanne: I used to work for a social prescribing organisation called Time Banking. It centred on the idea that we have what we need, if we use what we have. The essence of it is that people are enabled to swap their skills, and it is not necessary to exchange money. This was on an estate in South London, where people were cash-poor and time-rich. And when you can swap your skills with someone, to get goods and services that you wouldn’t be able to pay cash for, you’re in a position where you’re not relying on money, and you’re not always just being given to, but you yourself are giving, are contributing. This enables you to feel you have value and worth, because you’re the one who’s sometimes giving, and not just always the one who’s dependent and taking. It fostered an important reciprocity, which is something that often isn’t easy to find in city living.

Sarah: So after your A-levels you went a-wandering?

Suzanne: After my A-levels I went to university. I wanted to study anthropology, but I ended up studying politics and government. The last year of that degree course allowed me to indulge my real interest, which was how life is lived in other in other parts of the world, other cultures. And that was part of my yearning to explore, which I believe is an ancestral thing – to feel a pull to wander the land, to be seeking something. I think of the Brazilian Portuguese word, saudade, meaning a mix of longing, yearning and nostalgia. That longing when we don’t even know what we’re longing for; that sense of a hope or a dream for something, that’s somehow linked to what we may have already lost, even if we don’t fully know the loss.

Coming from parents who were economic migrants, I always felt in my soul the loss they had experienced in leaving their homeland. I just sensed it deeply in their energy – that rupture they’d endured. It rarely got spoken about. My parents just had to get on and orient themselves to busy London life, where you need to make money, be in a hurry and pound the concrete pavements, so poignantly depicted in Andrea Levy’s Small Island.

Sarah: So painful. Neuroscience is helping us understand how profound the wrench is if we’re suddenly removed from things like the smells that are familiar to us, the type of bird song we’re used to hearing, and so forth.

Suzanne: Yes, incredibly painful. We’ve always known this, deep down; we don’t really need neuroscience to know this. We have a human need to be in touch with our land. My father had an allotment; he called it ‘a plot’. And there he could be in touch with the land. I didn’t know why, but as a child I always accompanied him, and we would be together there, and find a quiet solace, tending to the land. We watched the plants grow, and we nourished them, and that put us in touch with something so fundamental about the earth, about knowing that if you support the life that’s there, then you can benefit from that: you can eat what’s grown. And then that returns to earth again, through the body’s ingestion, digestion, excretion.

In her book belonging, ² bell hooks speaks to this. She left her home in Kentucky, where there was a community of black people and poor working-class white people. They had – not exactly a reverence for the land – but an ability to work in tandem with it: to know its rhythms and cycles, and to protect it and only take what they needed from it – not too much, but enough to sustain. And when she left Kentucky and went to live in the city, she suffered a depression and a longing. She didn’t feel a sense of belonging in the city; she only felt that in Kentucky. Because that’s where the stories of her ancestors lived, and that was where the belonging she needed was rooted. It was about being part of a community of people she had descended from – enslaved people, who had passed on knowledge and experience, and a felt sense of what it’s like to live on the land. They’d passed that on to her, and when she moved to the city, she felt a rupture from that way of living very deeply.

So, coming back to why I was interested in psychotherapy, I always knew in some way that this was the work I was going to do. But I also knew I wasn’t ready at a certain point, and that I wanted to explore other possibilities first. I ended up training at the Gestalt Centre because I was really drawn to the experiential, phenomenological approach, which is so central to Gestalt theory, where the body and mind meet. Drawn to the notion that, yes, the past is important, your history is important, but that we’re always in process. We don’t have to be purely defined by our past. And because we’re always in process, there’s always a possibility for movement and change. In the therapeutic space, I’m looking for the structure of a situation in terms of what’s happening right now, in this space, moment by moment, between you and me. Being able to slow right down and look at what’s happening in the space between people, and how that can help us understand what outdated patterns clients might be re-enacting out there in the world, as well as right here, right now.

Sarah: That makes me think of James Hillman³ pointing out that this postmodern, industrialised culture is the first one in the history of humanity where it’s accepted by many that you can explain all your woes in terms of where your parents/carers let you down. In all other times and cultures, it would have been accepted that there could be more to a person’s unhappiness than what can be simply laid at the feet of Mum and Dad; that somebody’s unhappiness might be explained by thinking they may have displeased some deities, or offended the ancestors, or gone against nature. He argues there can be an infantilising helplessness in believing that what’s happened to us in our early life has definitively wounded us – and that’s just, ‘end of story!’

Suzanne: Yes, that end-of-story-thinking can be so limiting. Where are you supposed to go with that?! If we pay attention to the present, we can certainly acknowledge the ‘That was then’, which is so important, but we can also make space for, ‘And what’s happening now?’ as well as, ‘And what next?’ And the place of ‘What next?’ is the place of so much aliveness. I’m not saying this is easy to do, or that it’s the answer to everything. But it’s a place the client can be, where they may feel some sense of possibility, of some potential in a pause, in a space, in a place where it’s OK to reflect on ‘What’s really going on here?’

Sarah: Coming back to your journey – you went to university and then travelled and explored, before coming back to this country to train at the Gestalt Centre?

Suzanne: It wasn’t quite as linear as that. I’ve always woven in times of travelling and wandering and exploring through different phases of my life. And in those years before training, as well as travelling, I worked in the field of mental health, always in the voluntary sector, with people who were often at the margins of society, and often who didn’t have much money. One thing I noticed when I was living in other countries, in places where spirituality is at the fore in the collective, was that I experienced this different way of being quite tangibly: when there was a culture in which spirituality is an integral part of everyday life, I could really feel this as an energy, a vibrancy in the – not exactly the air – more just, all around in and of the environment. Especially at night, as dusk, as night approached. This felt particularly evocative in Mali and Benin.

Sarah: That makes me think of a small church I visited a few months ago in East Sussex that’s very old; so old that it’s depicted in the Bayeux tapestry, so it’s Saxon, pre-Norman conquest.

And you can feel when you go in that people have been praying and singing and worshipping and believing inside, for hundreds of years; there’s an atmosphere there, as if something is emanating from the very stones of the walls.

Suzanne: It will be, in a way. Gestalt field theory would say that people and objects are not fixed entities with immutable properties, but rather that they are processes. Everything is always in process, even if that process is invisible to the eye. So those stones will have soaked up voices and energies. They will have taken in and be giving out. And that’s such a beautiful way of thinking about the world, because it allows for a way to be in touch with the numinous, and with what we experience beyond the external borders of our bodies.

Sarah: And encourages us to acknowledge that we are all more permeable than we’re often aware of, in our ego-encapsulated consciousnesses. One of the things during the pandemic that affected those of us who train others to become therapists was that, when all the training had to happen via video platforms, we couldn’t meet in the rooms where the training usually happened, and so we lost the support that those physical spaces offer. Those walls and pictures, furnishings and carpets that had been present with so much emotion over many years – had helped to bear and contain so much grief, joy, terror, love and rage. And when we couldn’t be in these physical spaces with students, it’s as if we had lost a co-facilitator. The building itself, with its contents, did such a lot of holding, and stood for the felt sense of, ‘Here it’s all right to let go, to go deep, to want to know what lies within’, and it was such a loss for us all not to have that, as we did the work of training others.

Suzanne: I noticed during the pandemic lockdown that, like many people in our profession, when I worked for hours online and couldn’t have regular access to nature, I ended up in quite a debilitated state. My eyes really deteriorated: they dried up, and I had to start wearing glasses for the first time. It was after the lockdown that I trained in Nature Allied Psychotherapy, which is the model I follow, devised by Beth Collier. It was wonderful to spend six months immersed in woodland, restoring and healing my own relationship with nature, which is fundamental to the training.

For me, it was a lot to do with connecting to and attuning to the darkness. When you can let yourself be in the darkness, you can see differently: you develop night eyes, and your fear of the dark and the unknown lessen. Then I became a facilitator at the Nature Therapy School, and I love it. I just love how people come into the woodland with some wariness, even hypervigilance, and then they start building community together. We help people learn bushcraft techniques, so that they can build shelter and make fire, but there are certain things that they need to do in community – to make shelter, prepare food, create stories and memories. So they absolutely must rely on each other, and you can see the process of participants developing trust in each other, and because of this, drawing closer to each other. And to be part of a group that begins to connect with the ways of the ancestors is special – people can feel moved to sit around the fire, telling stories, singing songs, and to deeply bond. It’s where I can be most creative, where I can fruitfully lose myself in the sense of Fritz Perls’ statement, ‘Lose your mind and come to your senses!’

Sarah: You find the work very inspiring.

Suzanne: I do. There’s such support in nature, it’s such a container. So much is possible with it and in it. These days, when I walk and when I work with clients, I can follow where nature leads me intuitively, and trust that. Gestalt therapy theory is a foundational place where I can feel a sense of direction, and the work with nature is in me as well as out there, and it feels like there’s no separation.

Sarah: It sounds like you’re in a personal and professional place where you have deeply absorbed the training and education you’ve been offered and made it profoundly your own.

Suzanne: Good work is about finding out about ‘the rules’ and knowing about the books and knowing what there is that we can refer to, when we need to go back to the source. And then it’s about letting go of all that. In the end, you know the ideas, but they become part of the background, because you must almost become the book.