The Eyes Have It! ... Or Do They?
By Michael Brennan, MFT, CBT

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When this needed support and attention to the ocular segment is not sufficiently provided, the client leaves the session and therapist with a particular experience or sense of isolation, regardless of what else has happened in the rest of the client’s organism. It, therefore, becomes easy to create new or maintain old beliefs that are character-structure- based projections.

In my experience as a client and a therapist, terror is the most difficult emotional expression to risk tolerating and making eye contact with another person while feeling. However, terror is also the emotional experience that one is in most need of support for in order to tolerate and maintain eye contact with another person while feeling the terror! There is frequently a great deal of fear of being alive with anxiety, fear, let alone terror, in us humans, in my experience. When this dynamic is ignored, the terror maintains a quality of entrapping the client in an internal state of isolation, which compounds the terror. Not only does misery love company, I submit that each of our repressed feelings require company! It is the company of compassion through the eyes and heart and vitality of another person. Otherwise, we remain relationally imprisoned in an isolation established years, decades, ago and that compounds the charge of every emotion that is trapped inside our character structure. All the emotions need the consistent support of seeing and being seen. This need is intensified even more when working with one’s sexuality, given the powerful effects sexuality generates in the organism.

It continues to be important to me to closely attend to the emotionally energetic experience of the ocular segment of my clients for it is my experience that the healthy functioning of this segment determines the difference between being more deeply or fully connected to the flow of life in another being or being isolated or disconnected from the other human even while having one’s own degree of vitality. One does not have to always have one’s eyelids open to feel connected and be connected to the other human, but given the complexity of this segment and its inhabitant, the brain, this segment does have to be sufficiently unarmored to be able to participate in the expression of one’s organismic life in order to be connect-able. As the scared, angry, sad, joyous, loving/needing-to-be-loved and sexual human that I am, my life experience is indescribably enriched when I and the other human can tolerate and reveal, if not express, through the eyes, what is happening to the life inside us wondrous spirited organisms!

Michael Brennan is a Bioenergetic Analyst in private practice in San Diego, CA. He can be reached at (619) 282-6911.

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