BH: When I was twined, twelve wears ago at this point. Psychology as a subject matter wasn’t touched at all. We had very Sophisticated judges of human character in the teachers. Some of that had to rub off but my question is, what’s happening nosy’ Now there is pre training, which wasn’t around when I was training. It offers an opportunity for doing Something, but what?

TL: Well. the potential for doing something in pre-trainings is definiteIy there and file actuality is a constant balancing act between what’s available in terms of resources and what we’d ideally like to give them. When I first started teaching the F.O.B in ’89 see had twenty-live hours of psychology.

BH: Wow. What was the curriculum for that?

“Basically, you need to know how to be in a relationship and handle relationships to do this work well.”

TL: There was, very little set curriculum. It was a troublesome spot in the training because there wasn’t a sot curriculum. It ices taught bi an outside teacher who’d conic in for a couple hours a week. Twenty five hours out of 25O total. Both teachers and students were having a hard tine with it. Various teachers would do different things, some would teach about transference, counter transference and others about emotional expression, but by and large it was the area that students felt the least happy with. I took the psychology part of it over in ’91 and reorganized it. The interface of psychological and structural work has been a big passion of mine, Bill, for years. My first training, before I did body work, was in different kinds of psychotherapy. And it was actually my Gestalt teacher who said, “If you want to know about people’s emotions, you need to go into the body.” Being right there at Esalen at the time, there were all sorts of resources for doing that.

BH: What time frame are we talking about? How long ago was this?

TL: ’83. The ways that structure and psyche are aspects of the same phenomena have always been one of my big passions. So anyway; when I reorganized the F.O.B Psychology Class, I asked, “lf they’re going to give me only this hutch lime to teach, what are the most important Things?” And it’s obviously not Freudian stuff, not an in depth training in psycho therapy. It’s not even how to do therapy in twenty live easy hours. It came to be a course essentially, in how not to do harm.

I started breaking that down into different areas like the proper use of power and influence, boundaries for both clients and therapists, and basic kinds of listening and facilitating skills. As Rolfers, generally our work has a kind of desired outcome, it’s not super rigid, but there is something we’d like to see at the end of a Session. Sometimes we have an agenda. That’s a tricky filing to combine with the agendaless attitude that seems to work best in psycho therapy, in the psychological realm. So dancing with that paradox has been a big thing in the class too. “How can I step hack and be wish someone?” That’s the complimentary skill that?s often needed, rather than how to press on my clients what I think should happen here. It’s a humility training too, at least at the F.B.O level because there’s two kinds of problem areas. One is the overconfident person who thinks, “Now I’ve got a few tools, I can go out and really help people psychologically.” without really knowing enough to be able to respect the client’s rhythm in the process. And the other one is being overly-cautious and stepping way back and freaking out anytime something emotional comes up. It’s steering toward a middle ground, giving people enough humility about the fact that there are limits to what you can help people with, you just have to be with their so that thee can do what they need to do. That’s the kind of philosophical slant it’s been taking.

A couple (it years ago we actually hanged the name front “Psychology” to “‘Therapeutic Relationship.” That seemed like a more accurate description of what we were teaching. If I were the king of the Rolf training, we would spend more rime on how to deal with motions specifically. or how to deal with psychological issues as they show up in the body. We get into some of that in the F.O.B, but it’s mostly about how not to do harm within that kind of relationship.

BH: Do you have like a toll fen do’s and don’ts?

TL: Top ten do’s and don’ts? No, that would be interesting to do. We have a bunch of resources, though.

BH: Don’t laugh when the clients starts crying. Don’t smoke a cigar.

TL: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I don’t think we’ve quite cooked it down to something that concentrated. We do have a bunch of materials the students go through and we hawse it divided up into topics.

There’s one other piece that happened about a year or two ago in this curriculum. There was pressure to make the training more competitive. At that time, the prevailing mood was to keep it as affordable and as short as possible. One of the areas that got cut as being not central to the training was the psychology part of F.O.B It was cut back to nine hours from (went live recently, it’s been raised back tip to twenty-two hours, as a part of a curriculum review. But that that mean) is having to cram a lot of the material into an even shorter tine. Unfortunately it’s less experiential and more theoretical, which is not how it should be. The real strength of the F.O.B. has been multi-modal learning where you can experience what you’re learning. We’re still able to do some of that in the therapeutic relationship class, but unfortunately there’s not time for all that we used to have. But here, let me tell you these subjects. There’s a whole piece about framework I borrowed that term from Nan Narboe that stark with her article. Finding the Lines and Curing the Frame, and she has a little list of do’s and don’ts. It’s a good article. She draws a hard line ill some areas. Are you familiar with that?

BH: Yes, she created a riot at the annual meeting in ’84 when slue said that Rolfers should never be friends with their client´s.

TL: Oh right. But it’s useful in tile classroom to look at that as a position, a provocative one, get stuff going so we can say, “Well wiry would she be saving that?” It gets the issues and concerns out on the table. In the class I draw, less of a hard line, but it’s a good place to start. We start with the value of the Rolfing relationship itself, which is formed by creating safety, by recognizing the difference in authority, power, and control within that relationship. I ask people to think hack about really important moments as a client, times when things really started to work for them and come together. And then we break it down as to what made that work, what made it special. And we do a big list lot different qualities, or factors. Then we go back and look at them and ask the question, “How does the relationship with your Rolfer rank in importance compared to technique, or any other factor?” It’s aIwa’ys upwards of eighty five percent that are very clearly, primarily relationship issues. Basically, you need to know how to he in a relationship and handle relationship to do this work well.

BH: Right.

TL: We discuss the power and control thing the accidental or inadvertent ways we disempower our clients, or define their experience for them those sorts of things. We go into the issues of transference and counter transference, all that’s related to power and control, so that people have an understanding that the feelings that conic up for their clients aren’t always about the present moment, though they have to be dealt with as kind of current event issues, and to allow the client to explain or work it out it problems come up. And to get the students to start to see that their own history or issues or feelings are going to be a teal relevant factor in the relationship too, they’re not just neutral.

BH: Right.

TL: We discuss boundary issues, how to allow your client to he separate front you: their pace and rate of change, their own agenda, their own desires, and how to slay separate from then. It’s both setting policies and setting limits but also taking carp of your self and not taking on their stuff. Separation is a necessary part of the functioning relationship. We do a little bit of developmental stuff at the point too. We look at how people develop a sense of connection or separateness and different gliches that happen along the way, in terms of different boundary styles. We get people to look at their own styles of either being toward the rigid end of setting a lot of limits to keep thing safe, or being too diffuse and going with whatever happens.

The next subject that conies up is broadly termed “contact.” It includes listening, empathy, matching, building rapport. We go through some basic active listening, how to help people tell their story without getting involved set it yourself. The basics of haw to let people know that you hear them are needed at this level. Some people come in with those skills naturaIIy, or they’ve learned them. But some people really don’t have the skills and really need them. Its as simple as how to he quiet and let the person talk.

BH: Right. I guess I shouldn’t have, said ‘right’ at that moment.

TL: All of this is a challenge to teach as something more than just technique. In terms of the classroom, we break it down to concepts, skills and techniques, but in practice it is much more of a human thing. We try to get enough practical stuff in there so that they get a feel for how to embody it rather than just understand it.

And the last pieces are sex, gender, ethics and emotions. We spend a day on what to do if your client cries, that kind of thing. prom the simple how to be then and give them Kleenex, to what if they’re spiraling into lull blown traumatic re living, re enactment kind of thing. And most of what’s taught there is how to stay out of their way and keep them company, unless things are spiraling to a point where it’s really out of the area of the practitioner’s expertise, or where they endanger themselves. We teach simple, non evasive ways to help bring people back into contact with the present moment.

Last we teach how to refer, when to refer, and sell care. How to get what they need in their learning process, how to get supervision. There’s a bunch of articles that I’ve selected over the years and also a workbook I’ve written lot’ them to go through and write about both their cognitive learning and personal experience.

BH: I’m relieved to discover that this is an area dial’s being handled responsibly and comprehensively. This type of training should nip in the bud the kinds of power trips a lot of the older, earlier Rolfers sometimes put on their clients.

TL: That’s interesting because the people I see it) FOR are already Self selected as people who the process worked for. But I still hear enough of those horror stories that it gets really tiresome. It’s getting better though, Bill, it scenic because we used to start all of the classes with a little writing project where the students would write about their Rolling experiences, what they learned in a positive sense and what they learned in a negative sense. There were questions that asked them about the transference issues without naming them as such; or anything the Roller might have done that disappointed or didn’t work for them. That exercise gave us a lot of stories and there’s been a noticeable decrease in those kind of power trips.

BH: That’s good to hear.

TL: Part of it is the Changing culture in general, but also I Think new Rolfers are less grounded in that tradition of “Ida knows best,” and have a little more understanding ,of our potential to do harm. I’m encouraged too.