​The Shared Reverie: A Therapeutic Mystery

​The Shared Reverie: A Therapeutic Mystery
Until you become a student of therapy, you may not know there are as many different types of therapies as there are fish in the sea. As a therapist, it becomes overwhelming, as the therapy “market” has expanded wildly over the past decade, with people creating, naming, copyrighting and branding their own versions of what used to be one, and only one thing: Freudian psychoanalysis.
Although I think it’s a grand thing that psychotherapy has grown—there are more ways of helping people than ever, many of them extremely useful— the amount of money being made off teaching and “certifying” branded therapies to therapists and even to clients—makes me angry. One version of couples’ therapy, which I practice and believe in, charges upwards of $7,500 for a training course leading to certification. I can’t resist a free seminar, which is how the marketing begins, with the result that my inbox is flooded with multitudes of offers to study therapies, each with their branded acronym, IFS, DBT, CBT,  RLT, ACT—to name but a few. How did we become so fragmented, a cluster of niches? What do we still hold in common?
The Early Analysts
In the beginning, there were medical doctors who specialised in disorders of the mind; the first psychiatrists. Although there were others before Freud, he was the one who configured, insisted on and actively promoted his theory of the mind and how to work with it. Freud tried to be as rigorously scientific as he could, but he often resorted to circular reasoning, and many of his premises were based on ideas that even he later realised were mistakes. Other ideas were pure genius, still called remarkable more than a century later.
Carl Jung began as one of Freud’s students, then pulled away, creating his own theory and practice, which veered into art, myth and mysticism—aspects of the human condition without which we suffer, grow cold and perish from ennui and meaninglessness. When a therapist refers to “soul”, you’re probably talking to a Jungian.
To this day, there are Freudian analysts who stick to Freud’s original model. As a patient, you may see your analyst 5 days a week. You lie on a couch with your therapist sitting behind you, unseen, taking notes. You are encouraged to speak freely about whatever comes into your mind and your analyst says very little at all, only occasionally offering an interpretation—an analysis of the unconscious motives s/he believes underlie the thoughts and feelings you bring to the session. This analysis often continues for years.
Jungian analysis is more interactive: the analyst more involved and less remote than a Freudian. The working model is more flexible, with patients seeing their analyst perhaps twice a week rather than every day.
As you can imagine, both “old-school” forms of therapy are expensive. You likely won’t find either available through the NHS.
But what works? Research in counselling and therapy continues to find that it’s not the style of therapy that predicts success for clients. It is the relationship between the client and the therapist that helps people change. It is feeling valued, supported, cared about, and (to use a therapeutic term), “held”. Oddly, it is feeling all these things in relation to someone you only see at a specified time and place, in a specified way, in a relationship surrounded by rules and expectations, a relationship utterly different and surprisingly similar to that of a parent, a friend, a lover, a trusted adult.
The time we spend in therapy is centred in ambiguity. As clients, we pay a lot of money to sit in a room and talk to someone, and there’s no guarantee of success, and we don’t know what we’re doing. If we ask our therapist, s/he is likely to say they don’t know what we’re doing, either. But we’re doing it together and somehow, it matters.
If you’re the kind of person who insists on knowing exactly what’s going on (which might be explained as someone who can’t tolerate the anxiety of uncertainty), such a process might send you running. People often tell me, “I tried therapy, but nothing happened, so I quit.” Usually, it was because “nothing happened” in a few sessions, and the connection with the therapist wasn’t forged strongly enough to give the client hope or curiosity enough to continue. Sometimes the experience is felt too intensely even from the beginning, and people leave feeling overwhelmed, before they can get any work done.
So, these are a couple of the reasons people leave therapy before they derive the good from it. But this is all background. I want to say something about what happens in therapy that research has a hard time picking up, that clients tend not to talk about because it’s nearly impossible to nail down, especially if it happens to you; that a few talented therapists have indicated in their writings, but very little, because it might sound like bragging, grandiosity or even delusion. Something that happens occasionally, certainly not in every session, not between every client-therapist pair. Some names define its boundaries, vaguely; attunement is one. Intimacy, understanding, a corrective emotional experience—all may indicate or foreshadow this experience, which for want of another phrase that describes it completely, I will call a shared reverie. It is, I believe, a kind of love.
And in writing this, I find myself stuck, looking for a useful analogy. Let me try…Have you ever wished that you could really know someone from the inside, know what their shoes feel like on their feet, what it’s like to breathe through their lungs and see the colours of the world from the colour of their eyes? Have you ever wanted to be known so completely that you knew you wouldn’t have to explain yourself, or justify anything, that the other person would just know you as you are, and accept you without question, with no idea of measuring, assessing, comparing, judging you?
When we first fall in love, we may experience our beloved as seeing us wholly, accepting us completely; and for our part, we see that person with an open, trusting, adoring eye. They can do no wrong: we can do no wrong. It’s magical, temporary and ultimately mistaken. But in those first moments, it feels marvellous, alive, thrilling. Shared reverie has something of that thrill; perhaps quieter, unfamiliar, unnameable.
It happens, in a moment during therapy, we are so close to the other in mind that the separation between us, the sense of alienation that often pursues us, chasing us into therapy in the first place, suddenly dissolves. We meet each other in that space as Thou, leaving behind roles and ideas about power, leaving the mundane without any expectation or forewarning. It might be likened to a moment (also rare) in intense lovemaking, a brief, utter fusion where we momentarily lose our selves in a much greater mystery. Too temporary, sometimes followed by the deep sadness of loss, when the euphoria has passed and we, perhaps with some bitterness, regain our ordinary selves.
Like that moment, a shared reverie is…momentary, temporary. Perhaps some of its impact has to do with its ephemerality. But unlike the sexual reverie, which can be followed by  turning away or outright betrayal as someone tries to regain a solid sense of self by violently separating from the Other, the therapeutic reverie seems to retain a healing aspect, something that carries into the future. Again, I can’t say what that is, or why.
Some people have experienced fusion through psychedelics. It also might be compared to occasional mystical experiences encountered in deep meditation, although that encounter is between an individual and the cosmos or the divine rather than another human being. But the euphoria, the sense of rightness, and its fleeting nature, are similar.
So, what is it like? I can only point to it: you may have experienced it yourself and recognise it from my inadequate words. That I’m trying to say something about it despite not having the words for it should tell you of its importance. I can’t say it clearly, but I can’t not talk about it. I really want you to know about it because, for all its unknown aspects, it’s Important.
To try…to try.  It’s like flying without intending to. Like falling without any fear of falling. And the presence of the other person, flying or falling with you, that tells you both at some deep inexplicable level that things are all right. Is it possible to feel the presence of magic and a strong sense of security at the same time? The combination has a powerful, lasting effect, although it’s not a necessary condition for therapeutic success, or, I suspect a sufficient one. It may serve to weld us more firmly together in trust and agapeic love. If we’re talking about strengthening the therapeutic relationship, it’s certainly enough to be going on with.
The shared reverie can’t be planned or organised. It can occur in the first meeting or years down the road. You can’t chase it down: it’s an organic event, arising out of no-one knows where or what. There is no particular topic of conversation to follow, and no one therapeutic modality or situation that leads to it. There has to be trust between the therapeutic pair to share the reverie; this I know. Perhaps a mutual willingness to exist, however briefly, in wonder. Beyond that, I have no answers.
That it happens between two people who aren’t physically touching is part of the mystery, although neurological research is beginning to demonstrate how our brains meet other brains in something measurable that’s being called by the scientific name of “co-regulation”.  Our nervous systems, the neurology experts tell us, react to and interact with the nervous systems of others. We can wind each other up and calm each other down. We can connect neurologically through breathing together, through chanting, singing. We can measure the way we affect each other by looking at the brain in scans, at cortisol levels in saliva. Our plot lines rise and fall in tandem, like dancing.
Knowing that there is an empirically-demonstrated energetic/chemical/electrical elucidation behind how two people can share a deep feeling experience doesn’t lessen the magic for me; rather it enhances my sense that we are operating largely by intuition within a universe whose rules we cannot comprehend beyond the topmost, flakiest layer. The idea that we don’t know most things, much less everything, bothers some people: for me, not-understanding feels very safe. It bolsters my curiosity without imprisoning my imagination.
I have experienced it on both sides, as a client and as a therapist. I could go on for another thousand words and probably be no closer to describing the feeling of truly knowing and being known, of dreamlike clarity and timeless understanding. The sense of something completed and whole within the fragments of a life. In the midst of any conversation, on any ordinary day, shared reverie descends from who-knows-where; enfolds us, enlivens us, and deeply connects us in an irreplaceable moment of sheer, unmerited grace.