Alive Listening: The Power of the Unconventional in Therapy

In this article, the author describes the importance of “listening” in her own life, and in the practice of psychotherapy, detailing her own experiences as a patient from her late teens into her late 30s and how they have impacted her life and her work as a psychotherapist today, including the choice to become one. She focuses especially on how more embodied and unconventional forms of listening, confronting, and intervening in the psychotherapeutic process can be unexpectedly, but profoundly, helpful, both as a patient and in considering how to be effective as a psychotherapist. References are made to Reichian therapy techniques, in-session confrontation by a therapist, and Jungian concepts of active imagination and projection/internalization in the therapy relationship, including after a therapist’s death.