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DEEP-FEELING CONTACT |
Helpers with deep feelings contact noncommunicators emotionally by means of the deep feelings and the deep feelings only. And virtually all deep-feeling contact takes place through the difficult deep feelings rather than the consoling ones. (Only once have I used a consoling deep feeling, surprise, to contact a noncommunicator emotionally.)
Appendix 1 presents the complete list of difficult deep feelings. Even though consoling deep feelings are unimportant in this section, Appendix 2 presents the complete list of consoling deep feelings.
Below, the difficult deep feelings are arranged in order of decreasing importance for making deep-feeling contact. In the section on deep-feeling acknowledgment, their relative ranking is changed.
Simultaneous embarrassment has underlain at least half of all successful deep-feeling contacts between helper and noncommunicator. After embarrassment, the next eight difficult deep feelings produce deep-feeling contact regularly:
These last difficult deep feelings could support deep-feeling contact but seldom if ever do:
Except for body-to-body touching, the adjuvants of deep-feeling contact resemble those of any intimate situation: a comfortable, quiet environment, eye contact, face-to-face positioning, face-to-face proximity, privacy, spending time together, talking and withholding medication that interferes with emotional interaction such as antipsychotics and antidepressants.
Make sure that noncommunicators can see your eyes. If they wear contact lenses, ask them to substitute ordinary eyeglasses during the deep-feeling contact session. (Contact lenses distract people from their deep feelings, especially if tears come and threaten to float the lenses away.)
Before you begin, ask noncommunicators to keep eye contact with you no matter what happens in the session. The preeminence of embarrassment for making deep-feeling contact necessitates this strategy. Embarrassed people tend to look away and side step deep-feeling contact just when it is about to occur. So keep the noncommunicators looking at you.
The core of noncommunicative status is that the noncommunicator has never experienced deep-feeling contact with an adult human being. The abolition of noncommunicative status is that the noncommunicator experiences deep-feeling contact with an adult human being, usually you, the helper with deep feelings. What you must do is have the noncommunicator experience the deep emotion of an adult BY MEANS OF the noncommunicator's own deep emotion. There are six somewhat different ways to accomplish this.
Listen to the noncommunicator and read the noncommunicator's eyes; guess what deep emotion the noncommunicator is feeling; name that deep emotion for the noncommunicator; ask the noncommunicator to feel the deep emotion that you name. Now, as quickly as possible, name the deep emotion that you are feeling and INSIST that the noncommunicator look at it.
Repeat this sequence as often as necessary. When you succeed, the noncommunicator will experience a little jolt which tells you that he or she has experienced deep-feeling contact with an adult for the first time. Also, a diagnostic check of the noncommunicator will show that he or she has become a communicator.
Notice that you guess what deep feeling the noncommunicator is experiencing. With practice, your guesses will become more accurate. It is all right to guess. As long as you guess and name a deep feeling, the noncommunicator will give attention to his or her own deep feelings.
But the noncommunicator's attention to deep emotion will last for a few moments only. So you must quickly reveal the deep emotion that you are feeling so that the noncommunicator can experience your deep emotion by means of his or her own deep emotion.
Needless to say, the deep-feeling contact will fail unless you are honest about the deep emotion that you are feeling at the moment. Rogerians beware: if you merely reflect or mirror the deep emotion that the noncommunicator feels, deep-feeling contact will fail every time.
Note carefully that your feeling and the noncommunicator's feeling must both be deep but there is no need for your deep feeling to match the noncommunicator's deep feeling or even be compatible with it. For example, the noncommunicator will be emotionally contacted if he or she experiences my terror while he or she is feeling lonely. However, over half of deep-feeling contacts occur when the noncommunicator experiences embarrassment and simultaneously perceives the embarrassment of the helper with deep feelings.
You will probably need to tell the noncommunicator that your deep emotion has nothing to do with him or her. This statement eliminates the guilt that the noncommunicator may feel for "causing" your deep emotion. And that guilt, a surface feeling, will block deep-feeling contact. (Appendix 3 presents the surface feelings.)
You must get in the noncommunicator's face with your deep emotion. Remember that he or she has no experiential knowledge that you have deep emotions. The chief cause of failure in deep-feeling contact is the timidity of the helper with deep feelings with his or her own deep emotion. So hit noncommunicators over the head with your deep emotion while they are experiencing their deep emotion.
If you fail at deep-feeling contact, you have done no harm. The noncommunicator still has no experiential knowledge that you possess and can handle deep feelings and that the deep-feeling communication channel exists. So, on another day, you can "blindside" the noncommunicator because you are "invisible" to him or her in terms of deep feeling.
Name the deep emotion that you are feeling and INSIST that the noncommunicator look at it. Now, as quickly as possible, read the noncommunicator's eyes, guess what deep emotion the noncommunicator is feeling, name that deep emotion for the noncommunicator, and ask the noncommunicator to feel the deep emotion that you name. Repeat this sequence as often as necessary.
Except for the order of mutual self-revelation, this method is the same as the first one. However, the second method leads us to the third one.
After the usual preparations, simply acknowledge your own deep emotion, name it for the noncommunicator and let it flow out of you so that it overwhelms the noncommunicator. Sometime during this flooding, you may want to draw attention to the noncommunicator's deep emotion as in the Reverse Method.
The Flooding Method offers the twin advantages of simplicity and effectiveness. In a helper's early career with deep-feeling contact, flooding is by far the most successful way to get the job done. Flooding may explain how deep-feeling contact occurs "accidentally" in ordinary psychotherapy performed by therapists who are unaware of the phenomenon. (Please see Frequently Asked Question 15, Deep-Feeling Contact.)
To its disadvantage, the Flooding Method demands that the helper with deep feelings harbor enough unresolved deep feeling in order to flood the noncommunicator with some of it. Because the practice of Learning Deep Feelings usually resolves the helper's deep feelings as well as the noncommunicator's, it is hard to have enough deep feeling "on hand" to flood the noncommunicator.
Because flooding is so effective and their supply of deep feeling is so quickly exhausted, some veteran helpers with deep feelings fall into the trap of using their "warm and fuzzy" surface feelings like care, concern, "love" or tenderness to flood the noncommunicator. Surface feelings are repeatable and therefore limitless in number. Unfortunately, it is impossible to contact noncommunicators emotionally by means of surface feelings. If this were possible, the population of the whole world would be communicators because there is no shortage of surface feeling in society. (Appendix 3 presents the surface feelings.)
In this method, the helper with deep feelings and two subjects sit in a circle. One of the subjects is a communicator and the other, a noncommunicator. The helper's intervention resembles describing a singles tennis match to the two players:
"Dana, feel your loneliness."
"Pat, let yourself feel your pain."
"Dana, feel your loneliness and look at Pat's pain."
"Pat, feel your pain and look at Dana's loneliness"
(Dana blushes.)
"Dana, feel your embarrassment and look at Pat's pain."
(Pat also blushes.)
"Pat, feel your embarrassment and look at Dana's embarrassment."
"Dana, feel your embarrassment and look at Pat's embarrassment."
And so on.
The quicker the helper moves back and forth between the subjects, the better the method works because the subjects have no time to shift their attention away from their deep emotions.
This method facilitates deep-feeling contact between spouses and between parents and their children. It also offers a way in which an experienced helper can coach new helpers with deep feelings by making them to contact their noncommunicators emotionally.
In my experience, a helper with deep feelings who is in training needs to contact between ten and twenty noncommunicators emotionally with coaching before the helper-in-training has enough skill to contact noncommunicators emotionally on his or her own. By watching videotapes of deep-feeling contact, a helper-in-training can reduce the required number of coached sessions to five. No willing helper-in-training has ever failed to learn the technique.
Prelingual, mute and unruly children require this method. The parent fixates the child's body so that child must look into the parent's eyes. With newborns, this is very easy. With older children it can become difficult and the parent may need assistance to immobilize the child. The helper with deep feelings positions himself or herself so that he or she can see the parent's eyes but not necessarily the child's eyes. Next, the helper draws attention to the parent's deep emotion and asks him or her to flood the child with that emotion. From time to time, the helper checks the child to see if he or she has become a communicator.
With older (mute or unruly) children, this method of deep-feeling contact can create intense emotional turmoil for the parties involved. A colleague of mine (Engeseth) observed that the child could become emotionally hurt, horrified or terrified by the parent's behavior.
So much the better! The real obstacle here is the child's anger, rage or fury--all surface emotions which block deep-feeling contact. The task is to continue the procedure until the child's angry responses abate and leave bare the child's hurt, horror or terror. By means of these deep emotions, the child can perceive his or her parent's flood of deep emotion and then deep-feeling contact happens. If deep-feeling contact succeeds, then restraint has to be used once only.
In the five methods above, I have stressed eye contact repeatedly. However, I believe that eye contact facilitates deep-feeling contact but never causes it. For example, I have emotionally contacted people from behind. Consequently, deep-feeling contact is possible for noncommunicators and helpers with deep feelings who are either blind or going blind. Similarly, when the Restraint Method is in use, deep-feeling contact occurs even though the noncommunicator's eyes are tightly shut and full of tears from earlier anger and current pain, horror or terror.
Like eye contact, words facilitate but never cause deep-feeling contact. This brings us to the last method for deep-feeling contact.
I cannot recommend this method for general use because it is unreliable. However, I mention it here because, if you contact enough people emotionally, sooner or later you will emotionally contact one of them without using words. Rather than a step-by-step description of this method, I offer a first-person narrative.
Sometimes when I am very well rested or when I am tired or when I am "raw" from an intense session of acknowledging deep emotions, my deep emotions feel like they flow a short distance beyond the physical (Western-mind) limits of my body. My emotions never flow out haphazardly; instead they flow out toward other human beings, especially toward people I like a lot and people who are in crisis and expressing their deep emotions. Usually, I can control the "flow" of my deep-emotion "pseudopod." If my control is failing, I must leave the room abruptly. Of course, I have to tell noncommunicators afterwards that my leaving was not an act of revulsion with regard to their feelings but an act of protection with regard to their autonomy. Had I stayed in the room, I would have inevitably contacted them emotionally whether they chose to be contacted or not. This brings us to a difficult aspect of deep-feeling contact.
Some treatment systems (like Alcoholics Anonymous) demand belief from their clients; Learning Deep Feelings demands none. I have made deep-feeling contact with persons who openly doubted what I was doing, who clearly opposed what I was doing or who obviously had no idea what I was doing. Consequently, I made deep-feeling contact with these noncommunicators despite their skepticism, against their will and without their knowledge.
I derive this "power" to make deep-feeling contact with almost any noncommunicator from the nature of his or her noncommunicative status: Noncommunicators possess no experiential knowledge that I exist in terms of deep emotion. Therefore, as long as they remain noncommunicators, I have a "free shot" at them because I remain "nonexistent" to them until the moment I make deep-feeling contact with them. At that moment, they become communicators and any resistance is belated. Because power entails responsibility, I must consider what I am getting the noncommunicator into.
Deep-feeling contact causes the former noncommunicator's deep emotions to broaden, deepen and strengthen. This evolution takes less than an hour and plunges the former noncommunicator into an emotional crisis. Here's my advice: Be ready for the emotional storm and buy time whenever you can. Time is now on the side of the helper with deep feelings because the former noncommunicator's emotional core is an ally who is helping the communicator's intellect to alter his or her (formerly) impaired thinking, choices, behavior and socialization. The old saboteur--the communicator's formerly infantile emotional core--has disappeared forever. Lifelong infantile habits die hard but they do die, especially when a mature emotional core suffuses them.
Also be ready for criticism from your colleagues and coworkers. From them you will hear this comment verbatim: "What are you doing with So-and-so? I have never seen him/her look this bad."
Deep-feeling contact happens but once in a person's lifetime and requires only a moment to happen. And this new communicative state is permanent; that is, it never reverts to the noncommunicative state. In other words, no one ever needs to be re-contacted emotionally. Beginning at the moment of deep-feeling contact, the newly contacted person grows up three ways simultaneously: emotionally, intellectually and socially.
First, the person grows up emotionally, usually starting from an emotional age between one and two and ending at an emotional age equal to the biological age of the person's brain. Emotional growth can change all noncommunicators, takes just a few minutes to occur and follows the same sequence in everyone I've seen undergo deep-feeling contact. So I believe that deep-feeling contact releases a natural healing process that ordinarily lies dormant in every noncommunicative individual unless he or she experiences the extraordinary operation called deep-feeling contact. But emotional growth and healing mean little until they become integrated with the person's intellect and social life.
Fully 19 out of 20 people who have just been contacted emotionally will say that nothing happened. However, they immediately notice that they get along better with other people, especially with their own children.
So the emotionally contacted person experiences a sudden increase in social harmony which comes from the fact that noncommunicative people repel one another. After a person becomes a communicator, he or she stops repelling other people. But because so many people are noncommunicators, a lot of this repulsion remains in families and in society.
Other people will tell the person who has just been contacted emotionally that he or she looks more relaxed. The emotionally contacted person will also look somewhat preoccupied because of the integration of emotion and intellect occurring within. This integration is discussed next.
Second, the person grows up intellectually. The person's intellect integrates the emotional growth into the person's world-view. This integration takes between six weeks and six months to happen, depending on the person's age and complexity. Older and more complex people take longer to integrate their thoughts and mature feelings. By the way, this intellectual growth occurs automatically and almost unconsciously.
While the integration of intellect and emotion goes on, the person remains inescapably preoccupied. That is, part of the person's attention is split off, probably re-working past events in the new light of emotional maturity.
During preoccupation the person appears entranced or "out to lunch" to a greater or lesser degree. That is, he or she can never give full attention to external events. External events seldom require full attention from anyone except air-traffic controllers and race-car drivers. The disappearance of preoccupation signals that the integration between emotions and intellect is complete.
Third, the person grows up socially. That is, emotional maturity becomes integrated into the person's social life. Social growth takes two to eight years for an adult. The speed of social growth depends on two factors:
People who avoid their deep feelings and people who suffered a severe mental illness take longer to integrate their emotional maturity with their social life. For an adult, two years seems to represent the shortest possible period of social growth.
First, the former noncommunicator may suffer a collapse of his or her old personality. The former noncommunicator becomes completely psychotic, the equivalent of a babbling newborn who needs 'round-the-clock care. Medication has no impact on this psychosis. There is no particular danger to the former noncommunicator but he or she may need months of food, shelter and supervision while his or her new personality grows up "from scratch," which it always does.
Second, the brand-new communicator may turn his life around in a matter of days and become a whole, new, grown up person. This transformation dazzles everyone and, in the eyes of coworkers, marks the helper with deep feelings as a practitioner of black magic.
Now that black magic has come up, let me dispose of the three most common misunderstandings about deep-feeling contact. First, no body-to-body touching occurs at any time during ordinary deep-feeling contact. In fact, bodily touching would disrupt deep-feeling contact between adults. Second, deep-feeling contact has nothing whatever to do with hypnosis. Third, deep-feeling contact is far from magical, mystical, religious, spiritual or transcendental (or satanic). I can demonstrate communicators and noncommunicators among dogs, cats and horses. So deep-feeling contact is primarily biological in character and probably represents a species-specific, pre-symbolic form of communication.
For about the first 50 episodes of deep-feeling contact, the procedure exhilarates helpers with deep feelings. After that, it depletes them. After the first 50 or so noncommunicators, each new episode of deep-feeling contact makes the helper feel strange, dissociated and drained of energy. Some noncommunicators are more draining than others. As a rule, the younger the noncommunicator, the more draining he or she will be, except for newborns and psychotic noncommunicators. Newborns less than six weeks old drain almost nothing from the helper with deep feelings. And psychotics drain almost everything.
Of course, helpers with deep feelings emotionally contact newborns and children by the Three-Cornered Method with the youngster's mother or father making the deep-feeling contact. There is a reason why the helper makes parents contact their children by way of deep feeling instead of doing it himself or herself. When a noncommunicator becomes a communicator by means of deep-feeling contact, he or she develops a powerful emotional attachment to the person who made the deep-feeling contact. The helper with deep feelings guides the mother or father to make deep-feeling contact so that this emotional attachment stays within the family and excludes the helper, who will sooner or later have to leave the family behind. Even though a third person (the mother or father) is making deep-feeling contact, that contact still takes its toll on the energy of the helper with deep feelings. The mother or father seldom suffers any energy loss because her or his "contact count" is well under 50.
Other helpers with deep feelings and I have needed to stop deep-feeling contacting for six months or more so that we could regain our composure and strength. So let the healer beware.
If you are a communicator, you have more than enough information to start emotionally contacting people immediately. The procedure is actually quite simple. So here are four warnings for readers who attempt deep-feeling contact.
First, I chose age 55 as the cutoff because people at that age and older sometimes died instead of going through the immense change that followed their being emotionally contacted. Their deaths were quick and painless but nonetheless disturbing to me as their helper with deep feelings. I still do emotionally contact people over age 55 but I first make sure that they show me some flexibility and willingness to acknowledge their deep emotions.
Second, the period between birth and six weeks of age is the best time to emotionally contact a child. The next best time is right at age 20. If an adolescent under age sixteen is already in great emotional turmoil, you will only add to it by emotionally contacting him or her. If he or she can wait until age 20, then wait. With adolescents, the risk-benefit calculation is a tough one. Suicide is always a risk. So is severe disability. Consequently, I sometimes go ahead with deep-feeling contact because a very upset teenager is better than a disabled or dead one.
Third, children should neither make deep-feeling contact with a noncommunicator nor even be present when deep-feeling contacting is being done. It is perfectly all right for adults to emotionally contact children of any age. But no child under 21 years of age should attempt the operation or be present during an operation directed toward someone else. I found that children who participate in deep-feeling contact but participate as someone other than the person being contacted either get physically sick or develop a very peculiar emotional connection to the person who was emotionally contacted. Of course it is perfectly acceptable for a mother under age 21 to contact her own children emotionally.
Fourth, by taking a brief medical, psychological, social, occupational and legal history, you can identify the twelve kinds of people who will cloak their deep emotion in especially destructive ways. Manics, psychotics, dissociative disorders, anorexics, bulimics, the persistently and intensely angry, and the psychosomatically ill are fairly easy to spot. The six other kinds of people on the list (addicted, alcoholic, "borderline," criminal, self-harming and violent) sometimes hide their problems because they have a character disorder. To identify hidden character disorders, simply ask family members (privately) how the person in question handles emotion and how he or she treats them. An old clinical rule will help you:
Neurotics suffer;
character disorders make other people suffer.
If you are a noncommunicator and if your noncommunicative child is over six weeks old, then it is impossible for you to contact your child emotionally. You must wait until you become a communicator through deep-feeling contact. Then you can easily contact your child, most likely by the Flooding Method. In the story about my grandson Jason, both Jennifer and Melanie are communicators.
If two adult noncommunicators work hard enough with their deep feelings over a period of time, will one of them eventually make deep-feeling contact with the other? The answer is probably NO.
The only way that ADULT noncommunicators become communicators is by undergoing deep-feeling contact with an adult communicator. After they become communicators, they may, in turn, make deep-feeling contact with more noncommunicators in a sort of chain reaction.
Because noncommunicators cannot make deep-feeling contact with one another, where does the chain of deep-feeling contact start? Answer: with the small pool of communicators who exist in everyday society. And where does this small pool of communicators come from? They come from the chance event of deep-feeling contact with a parental figure during the first six weeks of their extrauterine life.
Here's the catch: the parental figure who makes deep-feeling contact with a newborn who is under six weeks of age may be a communicator OR A NONCOMMUNICATOR. Consequently, if we had a population that was 100 percent noncommunicators, that population would, by chance, produce a small number of communicators. When these communicators grew up and became adults, they could make deep-feeling contact with noncommunicators in the population.
One more catch: If I, as a NONCOMMUNICATIVE parent, make deep-feeling contact with a newborn during the first six weeks of his or her life, then that newborn will be a communicator for the rest of his or her life. However, I REMAIN A NONCOMMUNICATOR. In other words, deep-feeling contact with a newborn (under six weeks old) makes the newborn into a communicator but never makes the parent into a communicator.
Remember that deep-feeling contact is only half the job. Following deep-feeling contact, we must insure that the deep-feeling communication channel remains open with the person who was just contacted emotionally. Keeping that channel open requires acknowledging deep feelings, which is discussed next.
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