Process Work skills

Goals

The basic goal is to follow the Tao in terms of visible and subtle signals coming from people and events. This means respecting individuals and groups, and exploring the dream and essence levels of events, which often bring surprising solutions and resolutions to even apparently intractable situations.

Basic Skills

Besides, respecting previous work done in a particular application area by other schools and sciences, all basic process work skills are awareness skills. These include noticing and sensing:
1. Consensual and repeatable signals
2. Subtle, dreamlike signals and feelings
3. Flickering evanescent "flirt"-like, and evanescent or non-repeatable signals.

Susan and Sam on Roles

During our recent facilitator training seminars, Amy enjoyed presenting the concepts of roles, ghost roles, and role switching in a new and simple way. Here she recreates that presentation in the form of a fun comic strip called, “A Brief Lesson about Roles, Role Switching, and Ghost Roles”.

Download the presentation .... (1.4MB PDF document)

Notice Double Signals

We suspect that the Bart Simpson must have taken a process work course somewhere because of his advanced knowledge of double signals! See the picture of his teacher (Know your Enemy!). His or her primary process is being a good teacher, but the secondary process has a lot of other information, most of which he or she does not identify with. Good luck Bart. (see The Bart Book, Harper Collins, New York, 2004, ca. page 14.)

Feeling Skills

Amy defined metaskills in her book of that name as follows: "Deep spiritual attitudes and beliefs manifest in therapy and in every daily life.... Through their feelings and attitudes, therapists express their fundamental beliefs about life. These attitudes permeate and shape all of the therapists apparent techniques. Conceptually, I raise these essential underlying feelings of the therapist to "skills " that must and can be studied and cultivated. I call these feeling attitudes "metaskills"." In our minds, an important "metaskill" in all deeper, ongoing work is "following" ourselves and the sense of the Tao, that is events which are observable and/or intuited. The mystical side of process work follows things that cannot be quite said, while the concrete and realistic part deals with observable signals, unfolding these signals and letting them tell us what they mean.

Metaskill Discussion and Theory in the Japanese Journal of Clinical Psychology by Kiyoshi Hamano, translated by Kazuko Sato.

The following article was printed in the “Japanese Journal of Clinical Psychology,” Vol. 4, No.1 January, 2004, pp.145-148, published by Kongo Shuppan in Tokyo. The article appeared for the first time in that Journal series. It was originally written in Japanese and is translated below into English thanks to Ms Kazuko Sato.

Download article (40kb .doc file)