The GSR system offers for professionals an in-depth and innovative view of the type of processes that occur in the human psyche as it moves and develops. To be able to perceive the dynamics of the human psyche in this way is valuable in itself, because correct estimation of the condition makes it possible to work with it effectively and bring about important, long-awaited change.
Thus, there are three basic “aggregate” states in which a person can be: failure, norm (balance) and resource. Accordingly, either a complex painful state is taken into work, or work is done to adequatize important processes, but when a person is in a resource, everything becomes less obvious. Although ideally, in the resource, of course, we move towards the goal.
Why is it not obvious with the resource?
First, the human psyche hardly identifying a resource and giving it a place. For most people it is unusual to be in the state of a resource, and the psyche has many mechanisms to get rid of excess energy as soon as possible – to invent a problem on an empty place, to merge into a disease, or at the worst to start feeling anxious that everything is well for a long time. It is understandable, it is habitual. A resource requires action, creation of new things, and this is much more difficult for people.
Secondly, the resource state often does not manifest itself as a direct filled state at all, but as a complex destructive state, because a barrier to the realization of this resource has already been activated in the psyche.
Barriers can manifest as very painful states, which can be mistakenly perceived as failures. And if in such a case one does not see the essence of the process and fixes the failure, the painful state will intensify and grow. As a consequence, a person will devalue the possibility of further work on himself, his current results, will feel the pointlessness of doing anything at all. Often barriers give strong psychosomatic manifestations – tears, spasms in the body, give a special degree of drama of what is happening. Often they are lived as a kind of blind spot – for unknown and inexplicable reasons a person simply stops going to the important, stops moving forward and does not notice it. Barriers also go side by side with aggression and resistance. And there is an explanation for this. In essence, a barrier is a process when a person’s resource falls into some limitation that the person is not able to realize and pass. He becomes irritable, nervous, tense, because his energy accumulates and cannot be placed in reality in concrete actions.
Some time ago I saw that I have learned (to the extent that I can) to perceive the energy of barriers. And I would like to share what I have learned about this type of process.
Specialists very often confuse a barrier with a failure, because, like a failure, a person feels bad in a barrier. He can also complain, cry, but he does it all on the resource! And if in a failure a person is weak, in a barrier he is strong.
It can be difficult for specialists to give space to the client’s power, to support them at that point, and to take them further because they have not developed their own skill in moving resourcefully. Specialists are also often frightened and stressed by resource states and do not have enough resilience to tolerate and process them. Moreover, in such states, if you start to show a person that he or she is in a resource, he or she becomes aggressive and says something like “what’s the use of being a resource, everyone already tells me that, but I can’t do anything anyway, there is no result, nothing changes, etc…” and this discourages the specialist even more, the devaluing energy of the person gives rise to a desire to close down.
In a barrier, a person may fall into the position of a victim and demand sympathy. But – and this is one of the keys – from a state of zero, one can notice that one does not want to sympathize with the person at all, nor does one want to give him soft, gentle support, unlike in states of failure. Because the flip side of the victim is, of course, tyrannical-aggressive.
In a barrier a person often does not understand what he wants, he cannot set a task or formulate a goal. He has already reached where he could have reached on the resource and cannot see the way further, because the barrier is usually made up of the energies of interruption of movement, sudden death, violation of safety and exclusion.
The barrier often manifests as sudden stopping, falling out and disconnecting from reality, freezing and dumbing down in the process of capturing the symptom.
It is also important to see that the client in the barrier often presents not the barrier itself, but the drain point of the available resource. It is very tempting to take it into work, but it will not just not give the person progress and results, but can further strengthen the barrier state. If we work through the barrier and form further movement for the resource, the drain points usually go away by themselves.
For example my client with whom we have already reached a stable resource state, came in with a problem with her relationship. She was waiting for support from her young man in a situation that suddenly happened to her, but he didn’t give it and she rolled into a state of unloved and excluded. I could see from the energy that this was just her habitual dumping point, so we didn’t work on it. We went into analyzing what energy she was generally moving in an important direction and why the movement stopped. We came to a characteristic barrier state where there was a breach of safety and an inability to make further moves. It was to be expected that after working through it, things moved and the idea of waiting for support from a man went away.
Another example is when another client presented a process of needing to be recognized by her husband. She was in a fairly even state of mind, and her contact with her husband was generally good, but there was no hope that her husband would understand her and see her the way she needed to be seen. So I supported this need of hers and asked what would happen if her husband gave her this recognition? Her condition swam, froze, she said: “nothing good will happen”. There really was nothing good about the symptom:) Unexpectedly, all the most urgent processes in which she lives came out, concerning money, relationships, “what she will be when she grows up”, and relations with her parents… the tendencies were the inability in the family system to manifest unconventionally, to realize her talent (and the client is a creative person), and on the surface she just wanted recognition from her husband!
In exploring a barrier it is very important to catch the resource on which the person was moving, to deeply and sincerely support the person in further movement of this resource and to reach the point where moving on is impossible. That would be the cherished symptom.
In my opinion, the energies in barrier symptoms differ from other symptoms in their special intensity and global impact on a person’s life. The shifts are bright, cardinal, no halftones. After – the person relaxes, the tension is released, he feels the possibility to go further where he subconsciously wanted to go so badly.
This is a very strong type of work. Unique, unlike anything else.
In closing, I am reminded of another case. The client was in a very resourceful state of extreme dissatisfaction with her partner and the relationship. Her dissatisfaction was about as old as the relationship. She sounded highly embittered, uncompromising, and demanding of her partner, as well as uncertain about what she wanted from the relationship. “Maybe I don’t want this relationship at all!” – she said depreciatingly, with a willingness to throw away her relationship like a garbage bag. So I asked with the support of her hard resource, “maybe you really don’t need them?”. She changed in her face, her state immediately trembled as if she had been caught red-handed. It was a very strong symptom and when I saw her after a while, I didn’t recognize her. In front of me sat a woman of a different quality – calm, poised, level-headed. And she said her relationship had become perfect…
©Translated for GSR World by Ruzilya Nureeva
