‘Therapeutic’ experiences outside formal therapy - with Chris Cleave

Wed 19-04-2023, 19:00

We are delighted to announce that our next talk will be from Chris Cleave, a New York Times #1 bestselling novelist, a therapist in private practice and a final year doctoral student.

Here’s a true story: a determined and physically fit professional woman, who ran five miles every day, got a full-body cramp while swimming. She sank fast and very nearly drowned, on holiday in Hawaii. She was saved by a giant turtle, who held her up in the water long enough for her son to dive down and save her. To get on with
her life she suppressed her feelings so effectively that many years later, when she wanted to learn paddleboarding, she unexpectedly discovered an overwhelming terror of open water that had lain dormant ever since. When she faced her fear of the ocean by standing – trembling – on a paddleboard, she experienced the
sudden insight that the whole of her life had become occupied, invisibly and insidiously, by fear in many forms. As she slowly learned to name this thing as fear, it lost some of its power and her life opened up in extraordinary ways. This didn’t happen in therapy – it happened in the shorebreak of a West Country beach.

Also true: a man and a woman lost their child, stillborn. For the man, a brilliant and highly articulate scientist, the trauma was beyond words and beyond the reach of talking therapy. But he discovered, quite unexpectedly, that if he stood in the crowd at a football match, waited until the other team scored, and screamed in misery when everyone around him did the same – until his throat was raw – then something shifted deep in his being. His emotion still had no words, but at least now it had a sound. A long healing journey became possible. And
again, it didn’t happen in therapy – it happened in a North London stadium.

These are just two of the people I’d like to present to you in this talk: people I’ve interviewed in my doctoral research into ‘therapeutic’ experiences that happen outside formal therapy. My project aims to invite Everyday voices back into the debate about what therapy ‘is’, by temporarily parking the hallowed idea of therapeutic‘approaches’ and, instead, carefully listening to people describing how they have incorporated experiences as ‘therapeutic’ outside psychotherapy, in their Everyday lives.

My work is inspired by du Plock’s ground-breaking identification of the Everyday as an important therapeutic locale, and it is driven by Husserl’s paradigm-shifting admonition that we must continually “go back to the things themselves” – including the thing itself that is psychotherapy. I’m a practicing therapist, I believe wholeheartedly in the process, and my research is emphatically NOT anti-therapy. On the contrary, it uncovers some subtle ways in which therapists can be sensitive to the ontological significance of their clients’ own Everyday journeys. I hope to present it for you in an engaging way that uses
existential and phenomenological ideas, but requires no prior familiarity. I especially look forward to hearing your own responses, insights and reflections!

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