Working Along the Vertical Line

Content for this blog post was originally published in Sessions, Three, Four, and Beyond, and Present Moment Contact.

Moving Up The Mountain

You will be surprised at the number of clients who start moving toward the life they want immediately after doing their first matrix in the initial session. Some people are just able to get the work going and remain flexible with little effort. They may come to see you for a handful of sessions and notice that they are ready to end treatment on their own. Other clients are stuck deep into their loops and see little movement toward a life that matters to them.

Nearly every person takes an immediate understanding to the concept of toward and away, but some have difficulty putting it into action. They can rattle off what actions are toward moves and what actions are away moves as well as how they function for them after the fact, yet in the moment they keep finding themselves caught up in that loop. It’s as if they are understanding the logic of the matrix but not connecting it to their own life. They may have thoughts like “I know what I need to do, but I just can’t do it.”

During these times you may find yourself feeling stuck as the clinician and you might even get caught up in a loop of your own, but never fear, the matrix is designed to help you and your client in just this sort of situation. When clients have a great working understanding of the horizontal line (i.e. they understand what moves would be workable and what moves would not be workable yet they can’t seem to engage in any real change) the only move you have is to shift the work to the other line of the matrix.

Nine times out of ten when I am facing a client who is deeply stuck it is not just that they are stuck, but rather that our work together has been too unbalanced in favor of the horizontal line and not enough work has been done along the vertical line. If the horizontal line represents the relationship between a person and their own actions, then the vertical line represents the relationship between a person and their thoughts, feelings, memories, images, and other inner stuff. The two lines must work in tandem to create a context of valued living.

I conceptualize this as similar to climbing a sheer rockface of a mountain. As a rock climber analyzes the hand and footholds available to them, they must find the route which works best in the aim of getting where they want to go, conserves the most energy, and allows them to move within their own ability. Climbing “up a mountain” does not involve steady progress in one direction. Rock climbers must exercise a vast repertoire of behavior to accomplish their goal. In order to move up vertically, a climber may have to move horizontally to better position themselves into the range of a workable path. Other times a climber may have to move down vertically to access a path on the horizontal plane. The horizontal and vertical axes become a coordinate plane which allow for movement in any direction.

So when a client is stuck or hits a plateau in progress, it is likely that they simply must now move along the other axis of the matrix in order to open up new avenues. Making these reads of when it is appropriate to switch from one axis of the matrix to the other comes with experience, though you may do yourself a favor by keeping a rough estimate of how much time you spend along each axis with your clients. Some sessions may be all horizontal line, others may be all vertical line, and still other sessions may flow back and forth between the two axes.

Working Along the Vertical Line

Traditionally the vertical line of the matrix represents the distinction between our inner experience and our outer experience, however, in practice our inner world and our outer world are in a constant interplay with each other. Consider the word EMOTION. If you use your finger to cover up the letter E in that word what does it leave you with? This is not a coincidence. In the original Latin this word meant to “move out” or “push away”. Our physical motions and our emotions are partnered intimately. We cannot have an emotion without it affecting us physically in some basic sense, and we cannot move through the world without it provoking emotion. All of life is learning to respond to this.

The vertical line then is the continuum between our motion and our emotion. The matrix as we draw it in session is balanced evenly along each axis, but take a look at the following matrix and consider what a person with this kind of imbalance along the vertical line might look like.

This matrix indicates a very limited awareness of what’s going on inside both in terms of cognitive and emotional experience, as well as what’s truly important. As a result, this person may be all action or inaction or an alternation between the two. We have all met people like this. This is a person constantly driven by physical desires, someone who has few or no deep personal connections with others let alone a connection to their own self. An underdeveloped sense of who and what are important can lead to endless exhaustive searching or experimentation.

Think of the clients who find a job, leave a job, find a job, leave a job, sell their car, buy a car, dye their hair, shave their head, gamble their money away, drown their sorrow in liquor and do it all over again the following day.

On the other hand a disconnection from what’s going on inside if severe enough becomes dissociation, anhedonia, empty efforts to feel something, anything, at all.

Now let’s take a look at an imbalance on the other end of the spectrum.

Think of the clients you’ve seen with this kind of imbalance. They’re all emotion, overwhelming, intense, unbearable emotion. The highly sensitive person. They’re one constant rumination playing in an endless loop. They love deeply and crash hard. A never-ending fire hose of internal experience that won’t slow down, but on the outside they’re frozen, engaging in only very, very, very small acts of movement.

Looking at both of these diagrams and you can easily begin to sort out these behaviors into diagnoses in terms of the DSM. It’s in this way that the matrix helps to conceptualize cases, but there will be more on that in a later chapter. For now, let’s stay with the vertical line. We can see how finding a healthy balance between inner and outer experiencing is vitally important to living. Seeing the interplay between our inner experiencing and our outer experiencing in this way hopefully also illuminates how much suffering comes from being stuck in these loops.

Coming back to the idea of motion and emotion, we want to work with clients to practice new ways of responding to their inner and outer experience that are workable and serve to reinforce psychological flexibility. We set up contexts in which clients can succeed in having their emotions without being consumed by their emotions. We design experiments where clients can hold onto their experience without getting bucked off and trampled like a bull rider. The therapy room and your relationship to the client play vital roles in this process. As each client is different and has different needs you will have to work together with them to establish contexts that work in the service of their values. In general, this is the space where you can utilize experiential acceptance, self-compassion, and mindfulness exercises designed to help clients come into contact with their inner experience in new and different ways. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel here, many of the techniques you already know will be workable just so long as they fit within the framework of the toward and away system and pass through the filters of function in context.

Becoming aware of the patterns of responding when caught up in a loop is a first step in the process of working along the vertical line. Yet simple awareness is often not enough to get things going. The work in this realm requires experiential learning. Luckily for us as therapists clients are constantly showing us their loops. It is our job to not only point out patterns of behavior, but to intervene at times, and to allow the space for clients to intervene on their own behalf to practice disrupting their stuck loops. If we ask a client to point onto the matrix where their current experience is showing up this is by definition a new and different way of responding to their inner stuff as it is highly unlikely that they have ever done that “out in the wild”. Taking the time to slow down, think, sort, and point involves a ton of processes. There’s a lot going on there! Over time as they practice sorting out their experience in this way it becomes second nature and just like that their behavioral repertoire of how they respond to their inner experience has widened.

An important thing to note is that attending to and responding to our inner experience does not only include the stuff that shows up on the lower left quadrant it also includes everything that shows up in the lower right-hand quadrant. Our clients have people, places, qualities, and ways of being that are deeply meaningful to them, and at the same time, they may have limited or narrow ways of responding to that rich content. An equal amount of the work with clients is paid to clarifying, contacting, and opening up to what makes life wonderful as it is to learning how to identify, read, and respond to uncomfortable emotional and cognitive content.

If we strip away the horizontal line of the matrix we’re left with something that looks like this:

The vertical line represents the relationship between the self and experiencing along a continuum of outer experiencing to inner experiencing. The circle in the center which represents the self is not static, it has the ability to float up and down the line. Through matrix work we help clients purposefully shift their perspective along the vertical line in order to more effectively contact the present moment. When we are unable to move purposefully along the line we risk becoming stuck and overwhelmed by only a portion of what we’re currently experiencing.

Let’s imagine a person who perpetually ruminates about some past event to the point that they spend more and more time in their home. If you could see them as they are ruminating you’d see a person alone in their basement, a glazed look on their face, unmoving for hours at a time. Using the matrix to conceptualize this, would this person be stuck on the outer experiencing end of the vertical line or the inner experiencing end?

Now imagine someone who has a hair-trigger temper. They get in physical fights with anyone who looks at them the wrong way. When asked about their thoughts and feelings they have only one answer, they’re pissed and they’re angry. Other than anger they are unable to identify, name, or describe any other emotional or cognitive experience. If pressed, they lash out violently. Would this person be stuck primarily on the outer experiencing end or the inner experiencing end?

Finally, imagine a person sitting on an airplane. Some minor turbulence occurs and their stomach drops. Immediately all of their attention goes to their stomach, and then their heart which is racing quickly. A flash of thoughts and images comes into their mind, “We’re going to crash!”, fiery wreckage littering the countryside. A clanging in the cabin makes them startle, it’s the drink cart being pushed by the flight attendant. Then the sound of the person next to them putting up their tray table nearly makes them jump out of their seat. Soon this person is having a full on panic attack. In this scenario is the center circle stuck on either end of the vertical line? Or is it jumping back and forth frantically? The wild whiplash between inner and outer mirrors the frenetic energy of the panic attack, in reality it is the panic attack.

These three hypothetical people are not able to come into contact with and shift between their own inner and outer experiencing in a workable way. There’s no one to blame for this, no need to trek back into their past to find a fault in their upbringing, it’s a skill that can be learned and practiced at any time, and no better time than in the here and now.

Practicing this skill can be incorporated throughout the therapy by regularly asking clients to check in with what’s going on in terms of thoughts, feelings, memories, urges, in this moment, as well as asking them to check in with what’s going on externally in terms of where they are and what they’re doing in a literal sense. At any given time we are always somewhere, doing something, thinking something, feeling something, desiring something, and on, and on, all at once. We can collapse or expand our attention to what’s happening like an accordion.

The point of interest here is how this external experiencing and internal experiencing are happening simultaneously. We want to highlight this for clients. When they are in the depths of despair and hopelessness they are at the same time in a physical space, in a physical world, in a physical body, and are participants in these spaces. They have the ability to not only witness their pain but the rest of the context too. If we zoom into only the suffering and never take a step back we miss the context of the suffering. If we zoom out we can see our own suffering as it is, a part of a whole and a whole that we are a part of.

Getting in the rhythm of noticing our external and our internal world, then moving along the matrix strengthens our ability to connect to what’s happening here and now in a non-judgmental way.