Suddenly, I became aware of my clinched jaws, my shoulders tensing up and my hands forming into fists. I remember being shocked when my therapist told me to try not to relax. Instead of giving into my urge to relax, she invited me to pay attention. I could then actually get a sense of my tension and there was space for it to develop into a sensation that I could register as a feeling. In other words, I became available to the information my tension was holding, which paradoxically led me to feel relaxed.

When we respond to our tension by trying to relax:

• We are not available to potential information our tensions hold. There can be a myriad of emotional undertones – be it anger, anxiety or loss - embedded in our stiffness. Thinking of our tension as information is not easy, especially when we are in the middle of feeling it. Yet, if we are not able to recognise and give space to our tension, we are left to orientate ourselves based on other people. By gradually becoming desensitised to our own truths, we end up behaving based on pressures – real or imagined - we feel from others. 
• There is no space to unpick who the tension actually belongs to. By rushing to relaxation, we individualise our tension, making it our problem, whilst we are interconnected. Meaning, whether we like it or not, we do have a part to play in each other’s tension. When we tense up, we do it in response to something, which often makes complete sense when understood in its context. When we view and treat tension in isolation, it becomes much easier to pathologise it, to make it something we need to cure or get rid of.
• The implicit message our tense part gets is that it should not exist. By responding to our tension not with attention, but a technique, we continue to divide ourselves into parts that are acceptable and parts that are not.

When we respond to others’ tension by telling them to relax:

• It communicates that we have no interest in giving space to their tension. Although often well-intentioned, we can end up shutting down a meaningful conversation that could have only emerged out of the reality of our friend’s or loved one’s tension.
• We can become (intentional or unintentional) oppressors. When someone shares their tension with us they give some of their power up in the act of doing it. By not attending to how we use our power in response to their sharing, we can end up restraining who they can be with us.
• We can end up playing into our society’s agenda to relax us. Men have been given far more permission to be in touch with their tension and develop it into anger whilst women are consistently given less leverage when it comes to giving space to their charge to be developed into anger. Likewise, it suits a white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative social structure to not let racial, gender and sexuality diverse people develop their tensions into expression.

 
What can we do with tension?

• Aim to contain, not to relax. Learning to tolerate the inherent tensions of living is crucial in getting to a place where we can orientate ourselves based on information we hold in our bodies. Once we give space to our tension safely, there is the possibility for it to serve us in some way. It is not our tension that works against us but the phobic attitude we have developed as a society against it, which ultimately results in charges within us that are trapped.
• Aim to be with, not to make better. It is a most human of responses to want to help, to want to ease another’s pain. This seems to happen though when we meet each other in that tension. To meet is to connect, not from a place of ‘let me make this better for you’ but from a place of 'let me be with you'. My experience with the people I’m working with has consistently shown me that a sense of calm tends to take care of itself once I have been available with as much of myself as I can to the tension that is being articulated. ​
• Correct our ideas around movement. When we intentionally calm and relax our loved one or a friend, we are working from the idea of trying to move them on from their stuck tense positions. This is, though, precisely how we contribute to their sense of feeling stuck as the embedded information of their tension stays embedded. When we are interested, when we aim to hear out without giving into the urge to make better, there is space for the emotional undertones to emerge. Emotion (e-motion), as the word suggests, is meant to move us. Actively experiencing emotion, as opposed to trying to prematurely relax, is the agent of movement we have overlooked, the instrument that can support us to mobilise action.

The idea that relaxation is good for us is not something that needs protesting against. We now know that being relaxed can soothe us when we are overwhelmed, that it can regulate our emotional responses, that it can support our breathing. What seems to get missed is that relaxation – a bit like joy – works more as a side effect rather than something we need to aim for by direct means.
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Responding to our own or other’s emotional expression or tension by trying to relax ourselves or them can fuel alienation. Moments of connection, which we so desperately need, can be undermined by our attempts to relax one another. We would achieve just that, only if we stopped trying.

As published on welldoing.org 

British Gestalt Journal © Copyright 2019 by Gestalt Publications Ltd. 2019, Vol. 28, No.1, 5–14
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Summary 
Codependency seems to capture a more specific, addict–addict’s partner dynamic, whilst confluence would simply refer to the process of merging with one another.
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Suffering partners of people with addictions would be less stigmatised if therapists from other approaches and society were to understand and adapt the term ‘confluence’. The problem occurring between substance-misusing people and their partners could then move from a heavily localised and pathologised issue of codependency to a more general and normalised understanding of unaware merging in relationships.

Introduction
As a practising Gestalt counsellor, I noticed that I had an increasing number of clients who are not misusing substances themselves but are partners of people who do. I was struck by how little dialogue there is around this generally in the field of counselling and psychotherapy. The main support available to partners of people with addictions is support groups, but there is little understanding or consensus on how they may be understood and best supported in the counselling room.

A UK-based research group contrasted six different perspectives on understanding the dynamic between partner and substance- misusing other, which were co-dependency, psychodynamic, systems, stress-coping, feminist, and community (Velleman, Copello and Maslin, 1998). Looking at this from a Gestalt therapy theory perspective has generally remained unexplored. This small-scale research paper is a result of dialogues I had with three Gestalt therapists who have had experience supporting a partner of a person who suffers with addiction.

An overarching image emerged out of these conversations which I will use to describe the process these Gestalt therapists have gone through with their clients, in the hope of initiating dialogue around this, in and outside of the Gestalt community.
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Keywords: co-dependency, affected family members (AFMs), addiction, Gestalt therapy, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), confluence, creative indifference.

Implications for practice
Seeing the client with a substance-misusing loved one as someone who is not a victim seems pivotal. Holding the challenging position of creative indifference and noticing when one gets too invested in a certain focus as an ‘it’ needs to be recognised as a process, which needs ongoing attention from the therapist. Losing creative indifference seems to be strongly coupled with becoming confluent with a client. Even though this may be true to working with any person, as Gestalt therapists, being active agents of non-confluence seems especially important with partners of substance- misusing people. This study indicates that attending to this helps to establish a relationship where therapist and client are extensions of contact, where the client can be in touch with their sense of power, integrate their disowned parts and rediscover vulnerability as a relational possibility.

Implications for further research
This study revealed areas in which future research is necessary. As I was making sense of the dialogues with the three Gestalt therapists, I found it hard to attempt to understand the clients’ situations without having direct contact with them. I became aware of my power and the discomfort I felt being in that position. It seems to me that seeking positions of responsibility, and not letting them emerge out of a co-created dialogue with the person who is actually involved in their situation, could turn into blaming from a superior stance. Beyond theoretical papers and practitioners’ reflections, like this study, hearing people who are directly affected or have been affected would be crucial.

Furthermore, I was struck by how lively the exploration with the three Gestalt therapists felt. There certainly is a lot that we, as Gestalt therapists, could say about understanding and supporting partners of people who misuse substance. Future research could focus on developing a coherent Gestalt theoretical understanding on the subject that is beyond the scope of this paper.
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Although previous research has demonstrated that ‘LGBT populations have the highest rates of alcohol use’, the literature review uncovered no existing research into the experiences of LGBTQ partners of addicts and/or practitioners who work with them (Kerr and Oglesby, 2017, p. 341). Papers and discussions seem to be centred around cisgender, heterosexual couples in monogamous relationship structures. Richard Velleman confirmed my findings when he stated, ‘virtually all of the literature is related to heterosexual partnerships and most literature is hetero-normative’ (private email exchange, 8 June 2018). All three participants in this study were reflecting on experiences with a client who was in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship. Future research should broaden the focus to people of diverse genders, sexualities and relationship structures.

Limitations
Although Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis acknowledges the subjective role of the researcher, I am aware that a different person might have foregrounded different aspects of the data. The research participants brought their rich and diverse experiences to the dialogue and there was difference in terms of gender. However, all three therapists have trained at the same institute and therefore the sample was rather homogenous. Even though generalisability is not expected with qualitative studies, it is important to note that the findings here should only be considered as an in-depth conceptualisation of the dialogues I had with the participants.

Conclusion
Being attuned to the relational field of clients with substance-misusing partners transpired as an important part of the three therapists’ process. The confluence that emerged on the contact boundary between clients and their partners became a fixed gestalt, which only shifted through a tipping point, in which all three clients became aware of their vulnerabilities. As they entered into therapy this fixed gestalt could have gone on, repeating itself and being co-created again, if the therapists were not attending to the immediate space between them and their clients. Particularly, in the beginning phases of the work, they colluded with their client’s focus on the substance-misusing partner. The participants’ tracking of their creative indifference and attending to confluence supported their clients to relate to them as other, not just a means to an end. Seeing them as other who is not confluent with them but has their best interest at heart supported clients to integrate relational experiences they have been deprived of.

The more I engaged with the subject, the clearer it became to me that partners of substance-misusing people are often represented as just that, partners. It is then not hard to see how we would have a part in contributing to their sense of insignificance. In the interviews for this paper, the three clients emerged as fully rounded figures in their own right. Having them in the foreground of our exploration pointed to one of Gestalt therapy theory’s important contributions, which is that backgrounds are not a given context to figures but form simultaneously with them. Recognising this led me to a sense of responsibility and with it came a yearning for ongoing dialogue so that we, as the Gestalt community, are not colluding with holding fixed perceptions these clients are up against.

This article developed from a qualitative research project conducted at the University of East London.

References
Evans, V. (2012). Challenging Stigma. Available at: <https://adfam. org.uk/files/docs/adfam_challenging_stigma.pdf> (Accessed 10 February 2019).
Kerr, D.L. and Oglesby, W.H. (2017). LGBT Populations and Substance Abuse Research: An Overview. In J. VanGeest, T. Johnson, and S. Alemagno (eds), Research Methods in the Study of Substance Abuse. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Available at: <http://www.readcube.com/ articles/10.1007/978-3-319-55980-3_16> (Accessed 12 December 2018).
Orford, J., Velleman, R., Natera, G., Templeton, L. and Copello A. (2013). Addiction in the family is a major but neglected contributor to the global burden of adult ill-health. Social Science and Medicine, 78, pp. 70–77.
Roubal, J. (2016) (ed). Towards a Research Tradition in GestaltTherapy. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Velleman, R., Copello, A. and Maslin, J. (1998). Living with Drink: Women who live with problem drinkers. Harlow: Longman. Reissued edition 2007, London: Pearson Education

British Gestalt Journal © Copyright 2019 by Gestalt Publications Ltd. 2019, Vol. 28, No.1, 5–14

A short clip with me from the UKAGP conference I attended. We worked around ideas on sustaining Gestalt theory and practice in a variety of contexts.​
UKAGP Promo Clip