Based on the therapeutic assumptions presented above we can now focus on some tasks or ‘attention points’ for the facilitator during the course of the activity. (see Table 1). Some of these points are pointed out by Greenberg (1994), others come from personal experience and theoretical influences from Zinker (1974) and Ringer (2000)
3.1. Heighten the interpersonal safety of the relationship (Greenberg, 1993)
The heightening of interpersonal safety will reduce the intrapersonal anxiety. A person will find more trust and safety within him/herself when trusted and trusting and feeling safe within his/her environment. This will then result in the increase of the processing capacity of that person. When feeling safe, we can more easily open ourselves to new information and to new input that can be threatening in its potential capacity to urge us to change.
3.2. Facilitate the ‘here and now’ experiencing of the participants
Often we see that participants are involved in the activity in a ‘result-oriented’ way: they only look at the top of the climb, the end of the passage, the other side of the bridge and then move as fast as possible, with ‘their eyes on infinity and their mind on zero’. Another way in which participants tend to keep away from the actual experience is by deflecting their attention to other features. For example by starting to talk to the belayers while climbing the pole at a ropes course activity or by whistling or singing (like the seven dwarfs!) when entering the cave in an caving activity. This focus needs to be shifted to the experiencing of the actual situation. This stimulation of the here-and-now experiencing can be done in different ways. This includes pointing out those mechanisms when introducing the activity and inviting them not to do so; by bringing it to their awareness if we see it happen during the action; by slowing them down if they hurry through the action and/or looking for ways to force them to slow down and heighten their experience. A good example of this is participation in the pamper pole, where after climbing the pole participants first have to turn around on top before jumping off. This reduces the possibility of stumbling on and jumping of in almost the same moment, in an attempt just to ‘conquer’ that pole, without being fully present. Similar to this, Hovelynck (1999) argues that facilitators should support heir participants to make a shift from task success orientation to a frame orientation.
Thus it is not necessarily the task success that provides the learning, it can sometimes even be the opposite. A major failure as a vehicle to change.
An example out of a high Ropes Course activity that is called the ‘Team Beam’. Two persons, each standing on a unstable log, suspended by cables, depend on each other to make it to the other side. Two participants choose to do this activity together. Their motivation is different. Anna wants to try to clearly verbalize and respect her own boundaries in relation with someone else. Laura wants to experience to trust a partner in the commitment they have made together. As the moment of action comes closer, Anna gets scared and wants to withdraw. She asks Laura to not do the activity. At first, Laura reacts furious. She feels, once again, betrayed by the commitment of someone else. She tries to persuade Anna to keep her engagement. Anna is crying. She says she can not do it without going out of touch with herself. Which is what she does not want for herself anymore. So she decides not to go. After a 15 minutes of personal reflection time they come back together. As Laura verbalizes that she is not angry anymore and respect Anna’s decision, the latter is profoundly relieved. ‘This is almost impossible for me to accept’ she says. ‘ I break my promise in choosing for myself and I do not loose your love for me. This activity could not have been a greater success in any other way. A task success could never have given the same quality of learning outcome.
3.3. Direct the attentional focus to actual features of the experience (Greenberg, 1993).
In directing the participant to the actual and appropriate dimensions of the experience it is necessary to confront the participant with what is happening at that moment. By, for instance, sharing your observations: ‘I can hear you breathing slowly and fully’, ‘hey, I don’t see you looking around and yet you say you are in search of a handhold. Or even by imitating movements (making a fist while saying I am not angry) or sounds (sighing).
The way in which your participant will respond to these interactions will of course be determined by the relationship you already have established. Part of this relationship is the permission which as a therapist you have obtained to intervene on a therapeutic level. Which is of course not a simple answer to a request but the unspoken result of the respectful development of the therapeutic relationship.
3.4. Stimulate and evoke schematic emotional memory.
In order to evoke schematic emotional memory we should not try to avoid the behaviors which are subject to change, we do not want to enforce an artificial positive attitude towards the activity, oneself and each other, where participants do not encounter their problematic behavior. Indeed, we want to welcome the dysfunctionality, because when visible and alive it can become subject to change as Greenbergs (1994) suggests. In order to change dysfunctional behavior the according scheme must be “up and running” , that is the behavioral pattern fully present and acted by the participant.
When the course experience is nothing but a series of success stories and a chain of positive feelings towards one another it may be hard to link it with other life events. It will be more like a dreamlike holiday on another planet.
In my opinion this is a strong plea against some types of full value contracts where all of the negative labeled conducts are on beforehand forbidden. The participants on beforehand agree not to put someone down, try with the best of their capacities, not use discouraging language etc.
Whereas the aim of such a contract should be to create and maintain a safe working atmosphere it sometimes seems to become a set of imposed behavior rules to serve the facilitator’s well being and not getting out of control of the situation. Furthermore, it must be difficult for a participant to judge the sincerity of his other group-members in such a situation. So if I for example succeed in getting through a hole in the Spiders Web and my fellow group members applaud I will never be sure if they applaud because it is part of the contract, or because I behaved in a way that spontaneously urges them to applaud’.
On the contrary, away from a safe bottomline of necessary ‘ground rules’, participants should be able to encounter those aspects of themselves and others that are dysfunctional and perhaps even harmful and, in a dialogue amongst each other, formulate and develop their proper values and judgments.
3.5. Create and maintain a ‘reflective space’ (Ringer 2000)
Ringer (2000) uses this term to describe how a positive environment for reflections can be organized. In the same way I see something similar during the actions in adventure therapy programs. We can similarly create and maintain an atmosphere where participants will be facilitated to explore their experiences. This is not achieved by imposing a number of rules or a so-called contract (see 3.4) so that group members are for example silent not because they are respectful for what a participant does but because they were told not to talk when an individual is trying an activity. The reflective space will be build up by role modeling of the facilitator and by sharing the effect of the behaviors of others on ourselves. Like for example telling your group fellows that their ‘shouts of encouragement’ made you loose your concentration and had the opposite effect of what they meant.
3.6. Do not use descriptions or names that narrow or devaluate the proper experience of the participant
Calling a trust-fall a trust-fall is useful amongst colleagues as we then have a common language, but in interaction with participants it suggests that that activity is a matter of trust. That hinders other possible perceptions and experiences or the evocation of emotional schemes. Hovelynck (1999) supports this when he argues that, “a first principle of facilitation then becomes providing participants with space to enact their metaphors”. In his example, of a high horizontal beam on a ropes-course, he calls it “… being careful not to introduce the beam as a ‘balance’ beam too lightly”. By which he means that we might narrow the participants’ space too much when using the word ‘balance’.
The same devaluation of a clients experience may happen when facilitators point out the most difficult part within an activity or action.
This can be illustrated by a specific event on the pamper-pole (note that the name seems to imply that the activity is so fear-provoking that one needs diapers!). When a participant manages to stand up the facilitator says (from his or her own experience): ‘Very good, standing up was the most difficult part’. This statement was incongruent with the participants experience as it turns out afterwards in the reviewing session. Looking back on her experience the same participant describes that standing up was easy. ‘I trust myself and the moves I make, I felt very confident in doing so. It was being dependent of others that felt scary and even horrible. Jumping off that pole, belayed by the other group-members and being totally dependent of their actions was a nightmare for me’.
3.7. Encourage participants to contact directly what is anxiety provoking and was previously avoided
In order to allow participants to engage in the meaning of the anxiety experience invite them to interact with that which provokes the fear and see what happens next. For example do not tell participants who are afraid of heights not to look down during the abseil or rappel but rather the opposite. Invite the participant who is afraid to fall in a hole along the route in a cave to explore that hole, to actually try to move in the hole.
3.8. Set up and personalize activities to generate new experiments
In personalizing the activities, ‘grade’ the challenge in order to meet the participants ‘level of readiness’ to engage him-or herself more fully in the activity. The term ‘grading’ is used by Zinker (1977, 1994) within the use of Gestalt experiments. This helps the client to execute an experiment at the level at which he is ready to do so in a given therapy hour (p.132, 1977). Note that the use of ‘experiment’ in a Gestalt context does not have the same meaning as in the classical scientific setting. Within this context it is the acceptance of a challenge, the willingness to try something and being curious about the outcome. Thus, grading should be done, not only at the level of readiness of the participant, but also taking into account surrounding circumstances, such as the length of the program or group dynamic mechanisms. In this way standard activities can be engaged in at a personalized level for each participant. Figure two illustrates some different grades that could be applied to the ‘backward fall’ of a ‘trust fall’.
|
Fall down from a platform
Group mempbers will stand in two rows and catch you
|
|
Fall down backwards
A group member will catch you
|
|
Fall down backwards
A groupmember, alresady holding you, will support you
|
|
Stand straight and imagine falling backward while a group member will catch you
|
Up- and Downgrading of a 'trust fall' activity to meet the individual level of challenge
In this figure some classical trust fall activities are put in an order that up- or downgrades the level of challenge that it provides.
Top of the ranking is the backward fall of a platform of 1.7m high. Downgrading means that we try to lower the physical and psychological difficulty of that activity so that it becomes obtainable for that individual participant. This could physically be done by lowering the height of the platform or by a fall backwards standing on the ground with a fellow participant standing behind your back to catch you. If that participant holds you gently from the start this might also further downgrade the experiment. On the other hand an experiment might as well be too easy for someone and as such not present a challenge or a learning opportunity. In that case we must try to upgrade the experiment to a desirable level of suspense.
It is important to remember, even in this attempt to grade the activity this has to be verified with the participants’ individual perception of the scaling of the level of difficulty depending on the emotional schemes that are activated by this set-up of the activity. Perhaps being supported by one designated person is more fear evoking than a ‘anonymous’ circle of fellow group members.
Download hier het volledige artikel
