04/22/2025
THE SECOND MIRACLE
As I worked with focusing, I noticed something very intriguing. As the “felt sense,” or the “underbelly”of experience as Gendlin sometimes calls it, is evoked, a unique quality of therapeutic relationship evolves—intimate, delicate and powerful—through which the client is not only able to be more himself but is able to find a new, more alive, more trusting, open and resilient self.
I wanted to know more, from the inside, about the intensity and vitality that an emphasis on the therapy relationship could provide and began a search for a relationally oriented psychoanalyst with whom I could have such an experience.
With this therapist, I was encouraged to take interpersonal emotional risks. I was invited to give voice to my need for loving contact, to my fear of losing myself in those needs, and to my conflicts about asserting myself when I was feeling dependent. In this risk-taking, trust-building process, I discovered fresh and surprising ways of being, that I recognized as a “new me.” I experienced first hand that the building of new relatedness is a birth process in which two people, working closely together, nurture new life as it unfolds.
I call this amazing kind of therapeutic connectedness THE SECOND MIRACLE.
