Echoes From The Therapy Room: Creating YOUR Recipe For Presence
you know the drill with our check in - inviting you to take a moment before reading ahead x
How am I thinking
what is the quality and content of your thoughts?
How am I feeling
what level of access do you have to sensation in the body?
How am I breathing
how at ease or not do you feel as you inhale and exhale?
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Echoes From The Therapy Room: Creating YOUR Recipe For Presence
Perhaps feel free to grab a pen and paper for this one. If you fancy, we are going to be doing a little bit of homework.
Expanding on the here-and-now work of my last newsletter, we are going to be building a recipe for presence. From a psychodynamic perspective presence can be viewed as the capacity to remain emotionally available to one’s internal world and to others — without excessive defence.
Psychodynamic theory assumes that much of our mental life is unconscious. We are influenced by wishes, fears, conflicts, and relational templates formed early in life. When these inner forces feel overwhelming or threatening, we develop defences — distancing, intellectualizing, overworking, pleasing, withdrawing (just to name a few!). These defences once protected us, but more likely than not, they are reactions that now keep us out of the present moment.
Presence, then, is not about eliminating defences. It is about becoming aware of them.
When you notice yourself going blank in a difficult conversation, shifting into problem-solving instead of feeling, or reacting strongly to something small — that is psychodynamic information. Something deeper has been activated. Presence begins with curiosity: What is being stirred up right now? Often the intensity of present-day reactions reflects echoes of earlier relational experiences.
Allowing ourselves to be present is also allowing ourselves to sit with the potential discomfort of our defences. I often find in my work my clients can’t articulate what it is to be present. I have started to think with a few of them about how we can create a recipe for presence. What is the ideal environment where they can be present – not free of defences, but free of judging them; an environment where they can sit with and really experience the world moment to moment.
Unsurprisingly, this was met with defensiveness. Frustration even, when they could not recall a moment where they were present or really even what that means. When building your recipe, I want to emphasise that everyone’s recipe (which is to say everyone’s defences) are different and just because your defences worked previously doesn’t mean they will work today – our pallet changes.
TODAY, if you were to sit down and think / feel into what might keep you present, what would that environment look like?
For some of us, we might instinctively say relaxation – but not know what makes us feel relaxed. We might say curiosity – but not be comfortable with uncertainty. We might say being outdoors – but not be able to distinguish if that mean’s at a pub garden or tucked away in the mountains. To create a recipe for presence, we must be precise. However, it is not formulaic. We are simply trying to create the conditions where presence feels like a safe option.
For me, currently, my recipe includes closing my eyes and letting my other senses give me information about my environment, self-touch of some sort – a handhold with myself will do, a desire to be where I am, prioritizing comfort – this might be what I am wearing, or being somewhere familiar etc. These are just a few ingredients, and I am sharing them because of that pallet change I just mentioned. Even just a month ago my recipe required discomfort, it required a bit of thrill and something that kept me on the borderline of what I could handle; for me to be present there had to be an element of risk.
You owe it to yourself to test your recipe.
Ultimately, presence is the ability to be in contact — with your feelings, your history, your desires, and your relationships — without needing to escape or collapse. It is less about stillness and more about honesty. And in that honesty, something stabilizing emerges: a deeper sense of self that can remain engaged with life as it unfolds.
With this deeper sense of engagement in mind, and with the goal of not needing to escape of collapse, what would your recipe require today?
Tips:
Head to the memory bank – see if you can recall any times when you felt truly present, what were the details of the environment and (if relevant) can you cash (cultivate) them in today ?
Prove it – If you are low on an ingredient, change it. As mentioned - if you are saying curiosity is key but you are uncomfortable with the unknown, why not substitute it for something relevant to your current circumstance?
Morality policing – No one thing that keeps you present is better than anything else. If it’s a certain physical activity that is considered “healthy” that is no better or worse than sharing an “unhealthy” meal over a glass of wine with friends
Breath – it is impossible to focus on the breath and not be present because your breath changes as the present moment does. Use it to ground you – this is perhaps the only unifying ingredient. As one of my teachers says, if you can breathe here, you can be here.
FOCUS>FEAR – focusing on our specific recipe for presence can relinquish us from fear of the defences that may arise in the present moment. So choose – perhaps via this recipe, what you would like to focus on.