From the archive of my former Russian website. Edited for this website.
The practitioner's feelings
Why might it matter for a Process Work practitioner to voice their own feelings during a session? Does this mean following only their own process rather than the client's?
During a session, we inevitably come into contact with the client's field, in which a conflict between roles has emerged. In other words, the field expresses itself through everyone involved, not just the client. In my understanding of Process Work, the practitioner's sensations can offer one way of exploring the relationship and its different roles. This is a hypothesis to check together with the person, not knowledge to impose on them.
What if the client's and practitioner's different fields create a conflict? What happens when the client denies that the practitioner's feelings relate to them and says they belong entirely to the practitioner's own process?
Of course, each person has their own field. But people also share many different fields.
Once the topic of a session has been identified, we can explore the experiences and relationships that arise through the idea of a field—one of the perspectives used in Process Work. Both client and practitioner begin to express different parts or roles of that field: present roles, ghost roles, their beliefs, the relationships between them, and patterns of behaviour.
Exploring different roles and feelings can sometimes help a person see a situation from a new perspective. Relief does not, however, arise automatically or have to follow a prescribed sequence.
Transference and past experiences
Why does a client feel anger or other uncomfortable feelings towards a practitioner? How does conflict arise between them?
Psychology uses the concept of transference. Mindell also describes what Process Work calls dreaming up.
Transference belongs to the psychoanalytic tradition. It describes how old hurts, unresolved conflicts, and traumatic experiences can affect relationships in the present. To illustrate it, we might adapt a saying: someone once burned by hot milk may subsequently see hot milk in every glass of water.
Transference involves moving emotions, feelings, desires, fantasies, attitudes, or defences from the person to whom they originally belonged onto another available person. Often, feelings connected to someone from the past are transferred to someone in the present.
For example, a client may relate to a woman practitioner as though she were their mother, experiencing negative feelings during the session that belong, in part, to their relationship with their mother.
Subtle signals and shared responsibility
Dreaming up refers to the process by which people transmit and pick up double signals and react to them. For example, a practitioner may convey power through signals they are unaware of. The client picks up those signals and responds, also without awareness. Within this perspective, the practitioner is participating in the client's dreaming up.
The client, in turn, may make a transference and begin to communicate with the practitioner as they would with their mother, for instance. Recognising these processes matters.
For me, the relationship that develops during the work is an important space for exploration. Yet anger or disagreement cannot automatically be explained as transference: they may be responses to what is happening here and now. The practitioner needs to recognise their own contribution, respect the person's boundaries, and make room for disagreement.