Three dimensions of communication in helping professional's practice

Human communication involves the constant exchange of vast amounts of information. When it comes to helping specialties, psychological work and psychotherapy, there is a need to operate all these signals in a targeted, effective and meaningful way. Professional training for psychotherapists involves, of course, mastering the many different techniques, principles, and approaches that should help to accomplish this task. However, experienced colleagues in psychotherapy, when asked why they choose certain words, methods, and techniques, cannot always give a reasonable explanation and refer to experience and professional intuition. This is reminiscent, at times, of how experienced and talented musicians talk about good performances: was it played with feeling, fullness, meaningfulness? The same notes, the same music, the same poems can be read and performed with different feelings, emphasis, pauses, giving different colors to your performance. Would it be possible to imagine some way to describe and explain how to master such a "sense of performance"?

It turns out that both basic science and art - visual, musical and literary - can come to the rescue here.

Let's turn to our school experience and imagine a three-dimensional space. At any given moment of communicating with the world and expressing ourselves we have an arsenal of tools at our disposal. Whether using words, music, paint, or cinematic imagery to express ourselves, we can structure our ideas in multiple dimensions. As a mental health professional, I will speculate about my profession, but anyone could extend this speculation to other areas of human communication.

Channels

The first dimension could be conventionally called the "width" of our communication, the spectrum of channels, tools with which we express ideas. The psychologist has at his disposal a whole range of channels for exchanging information. First of all, of course, it is words, the verbal channel through which we transmit ideas. I am using this channel right now, expressing my thoughts in text form. In verbal communication, however, we formulate our ideas in grammatical constructions. The verbal content of speech is the first thing we are accustomed to focus on in communication.

In addition to the verbal, textual channel of communication, there is a channel of non-verbal interaction. It can include everything that happens in communication besides words - facial expressions, gestures, body language, quality of voice and intonations, in short, everything that is so difficult to convey on paper, but that we intuitively pick up when observing someone in person. Each word will be matched by facial expression, body position, head tilt, tone of voice and many other non-verbal signals that express, complement or even completely change the meaning of the spoken words (imagine the phrase "Yeah, sure!" said with two opposite intonations).

In psychotherapy, we also distinguish another channel of interaction that most non-specialists probably do not think about or do not notice it in action. There are different names for it in different approaches, and it manifests itself in the fact that we seem to be able to grasp some feelings, intents, and even ideas without words at all - we seem to be touched by them, suddenly discovering in our imagination, in our sensations some response to what is happening to another person. Psychoanalysts call this "countertransference" and describe it through the mechanisms of nonverbal communication, which have their roots in early childhood and are responsible for the interaction of the infant with the mother. Many people may be familiar with the experience of suddenly picking up on each other's thoughts, when we can sense a change in the "atmosphere" in a room when a new person arrives, or a shift in sensation when we broach a topic that is unpleasant for the other person. Nothing is said yet, but we are already picking up something with our internal antennae that tells us about the state of the person we are communicating with.

It is interesting that we all master these channels of communication in the course of our development, and we use them both "to receive" and "to transmit" - at the same time we learn to express ourselves through them and to read the signals of other people. Some people find it easier to use the verbal channel, some are talented at reading body language, and others have an amazing ability to intuitively grasp people's moods and states. And in the development of each of these channels, targeted skill training is possible. So, reading and writing practices train the skill of verbal expression and perception, it is the first thing we encounter in our learning from childhood. But when it comes to non-verbal interaction, here we have to turn to the experience of artists - especially acting, music and visual arts.

Levels

But let's expand the communication space in yet another dimension. If the idea of channels is quite technical and can be easily represented as just a set of tools of self-expression, what happens when we start using them all? It turns out that through different channels we can transmit different signals, different ideas. Words can express agreement, while a voice can show doubt. A friendly smile on a face can be combined with an angry clenched fist. And we find that in addition to channels of communication, we also use different "layers", levels of communication, through which we can convey different messages.

In our communication, there is always a level of text and a level of subtext. "Text" contains what we transmit and read on a more conscious level, "subtext" is that which, through hints, implication, presuppositions and other signals, expresses hidden meanings that can affect us as much, if not more, than the text itself. Metaphor is the key form of "packing" meanings into each other and simultaneous expression of several ideas, and human speech itself is metaphorical by nature. The nature of metaphor is explored by philologists and literary scholars, but psychologists are directly confronted with the practical application of metaphor when it comes to psychological work. Psychoanalysts learn to "unpack" the meanings of images and ideas that are heard in sessions from clients, manifested in dreams and stories, and the reverse process - the use of metaphor to convey therapeutic ideas - is used by professionals extensively, and is of course primarily associated with suggestion and altered states of consciousness. It is often the metaphor that becomes the main carrier of ideas that evoke emotional states, promote rethinking and inner transformation, because the subtexts embedded in metaphors have a greater influence on figurative thinking and generate an emotional response. One figurative definition of hypnosis, for example, which is given by the American psychotherapist Jeffrey Zeig, is a way of communicating ideas in an experiential form. Experienced practitioners of psychotherapy are sometimes distinguished by their fluency in the subtext of communication, their ability to "pack" ideas into each other and create a multi-layered flow. We take examples of this and learn from poets, composers and filmmakers, because we know that talented works are usually full of layers of meaning and messages, which is why they are interesting to revisit.

Sequences

If we arrange the two dimensions of communication described above horizontally (the width of our spectrum - communication channels) and vertically (the depth of our spectrum - communication levels), this leaves us with another dimension - the possibility of moving forward, and this is where time comes into play. Time allows us to form step by step sequences, chains, plots that form a more complex and multifaceted experience. Psychoanalysts know that sometimes a client's inner world does not unfold in the course of work overnight, but through regular and systematic encounters, in the form of repetitions, patterns and regularities spread out over time. Some early traumas and frustrations, sometimes inaccessible to memory, are reproduced only at the level of behavior, at the level of stories in which the client finds himself again and again, and the specialist's task may be to help the client to unpack the meaning of these stories and to identify the "messages" that the client has so far been able to express only through action. Here, the specialist's task is to expand the client's communicative range, to help him or her master all these dimensions of communication in order to make sense of his or her own experience and to express it in relationships with others.

The other side is equally important - the practical application of the time dimension by constructing chains of interventions, sequences of ideas that together form a multidimensional transformative experience. Here we use, for example, the mechanism of priming. We often see examples of this mechanism in movies, when the first frames of a movie contain in an encrypted form a hint of how the plot will unfold. Psychologists know that if it is necessary to cause a person to react to some stimulus, say, as quickly as possible to recognize an image among a rapidly changing sequence of pictures, it is enough to show him this image in an imperceptible, implicit (subliminal) form. The classic rifle in the first act of a play, which is to be fired in the finale, is also the very example of priming.

Sequences not only provide an opportunity to enhance the effect of the 'final scene'. They can themselves shape the emotional experience. In the example of poetic works, we feel that rhythm and rhyme - phenomena that make sense primarily in the temporal dimension - contribute to the effect of the work by influencing human perception itself, cajoling, hypnotizing, unsettling, and sharpening sensitivity to elements that we may not pay attention to in everyday life.

Each dimension of communication can be used consciously and purposefully, depending on need and opportunity. For example, Ericksonian hypnosis practitioners can flexibly utilize linguistic and non-verbal channels, construct suggestion chains, plots and stories that aim to activate a person's unconscious resources and redefine familiar aspects of life. Art therapists can address different aspects of imagery, bodily experience, music and rhythms, introducing clients to different ways of expressing themselves on the one hand and aiming to activate an emotional response on the other.

In mastering these dimensions of communication, as already mentioned, familiarity with the arts plays a huge role. Just as a musician can practice scales, analyze in detail one small fragment of a work, just as artists make studies to develop individual techniques and methods, psychologists and psychotherapists can independently train different elements of these communicative dimensions. The technique of creating artificial limitations is particularly useful in this: it is enough to try to perform a familiar and habitual action, having deprived oneself beforehand of habitual ways to perform it. For example, we intuitively tend to tell emotional stories with expression and feeling. But try to convey an emotion through a story about an everyday object without using facial expressions, without using gestures, without using intonation in any way, and without using direct indications of emotion in words. With the help of such exercises, we can gradually expand the sphere of awareness for the specialist and help him to become a bit of an actor, artist and poet, whose task is not just to teach and explain, but to touch people's hearts.