The 'Lasso' Effect
Do you remember those cowboys’ movies where the young and handsome man shows off in front of her sweetheart during a rodeo? He would be riding his beautiful, powerful horse and moving up in the air his lasso. Suddenly focuses on the animal he is chasing, throws his lasso and, if successful, jumps off the horse to quickly rope the calf. The animal will lay on the ground, his legs tightly bound and becoming eminently trapped and, momentarily, defenseless as it will be unable to move.
The cowboy wins, the calf loses......
What does this really mean?
I brought this image up to you as a means of introducing a concept that, some time back, came up in a session with a client who at the time was feeling frozen, anxious and trapped in a situation that he felt he was not able to change. His level of internal reserves and resources seemed to be pretty limited, just enough to manage life. This was making it difficult for him to see and to connect emotionally with his surroundings. He would describe his emotional condition as one where he felt he was unable to move, desperate, and having difficulties to regulate his emotions. He said ‘I feel like being tied down and immobilized, just like those poor calves that are used in the rodeos’. We elaborated on that image and we agreed to call his difficult and painful state of mind as ‘The Lasso Effect’.
Perhaps it is a good opportunity for me to mention the fact that, in the therapeutic process, I enjoy using as well as fostering, client’s creativity. Mental pictures have the power to help the internal world to somehow reveal itself into a visible form that may result as a metaphor for difficult situations, emotions as well as conflicts the client may be experiencing. Symbolic images are a good starting point to explore deep and painful issues that are too complex to be explained with just words. The process in itself can be associated with one of the aspects of the healing journey.
A bit more on this...
Let’s elaborate further on the idea of the ‘Lasso Effect’. Sometimes the building up of stress at work, home, relationships etc…may lead to a point where you simply cannot cope with everything else, i.e. you have too much ‘on your plate’. In other words, you are having a ‘rough ride’…....
You feel like a heavy load has been put on your shoulders and you find it difficult to endure the conflicting emotions these situations are putting you in. The calf in the rodeo feels overwhelmed by anxiety and fear, knowing it is trapped in this ring, running left and right to try, in vain, to escape. In our case, however, we feel that we are stuck in an inner dialogue (the ‘closed ring’) and feeling emotionally beaten.
The latter may spread rapidly affecting and distorting other ideas, situations, or events, distinct from the ones with which it was originally associated to. The emotional response will feed the distortion and vice-versa, creating a dysfunctional vicious cycle. Falling into these ‘dark places’ is quite common but how we cope and manage to get out of these, is particular to each individual’s process.
Do these feelings sound familiar to you?
I am aware that we are talking about depression and anxiety however, this time, I chose to avoid using the technical words because I want focus on the experience proper. Defining a condition is helpful for the treatment plan. Unfortunately though, sometimes the diagnosis becomes a label that gets stuck in the client’s mind to the extent that they feel defined by the illness. This complete identification makes them say things like ‘I am a depressed person’ or ‘I am an anxious person’, rather than saying “I suffer from depression’ or ‘I suffer from anxiety’. Sadly, the former way of expression shows no differentiation between the person and the condition. But they are indeed totally different!
How can therapy help in the 'recovery' process?
Each client brings to therapy his or her own story and struggles, identity, relationships with significant others and the external world, his place in the wider society, his past, present and future. The combination of all the above makes the therapeutic process particular and unique to each individual.
When clients are stuck in a painful and dysfunctional vicious cycle as described previously, I believe that the intervention should focus in two layers, i.e. the symptoms and the causes. Intense symptoms can be very disruptive, distractive and draining for the individual, eventually leading to neither the desire nor gathering the energy required to explore the conflict itself and its roots. Working with symptom relief helps lessen this intensity, thus opening a space in therapy to work at a deeper level.
‘Symptom's relief’ is addressed through cognitive processes leading to a change in conscious-coping strategies such as:
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Registration of, and attention to the stimulus produced by anxiety, fear, stress or depressive feelings.
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Identifying their degree (depth and span), trying to manage or containing the distortions.
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Initiating a response and ‘cope’ through the use of certain mechanisms, to which I will refer to more in detail in a future article.
The ability to open oneself to exploring unconscious processes as well as to the existence of 'the inner conflict’ is key to the effectiveness of the psychodynamic approach in therapy. The exploration and identification, understanding and working with the root causes, lays down the foundation for reflecting and eventually discovering alternative paths in the ‘recovery’ process. The therapist, through the therapeutic relationship, enables and encourages the client to get in touch with that inner conflict which, sometimes, may be experienced as ‘unthinkable', 'unspeakable' and even 'incommunicable’. The conflict and repressed feelings in general, feed distortions which in turn, feed resistance and so on… This creates a dysfunctional vicious cycle of pain and depression.
Sometimes small changes in our perception or awareness of the situation produces or induces a shift from a vicious to a virtuous cycle, enabling the healing process to begin. It is a gradual process that helps us to explore and challenge those distortions by articulating thoughts and emotions about being alive, the world around us, and the world within. Getting in touch and expressing them allow us to make cognitive and emotional sense of the experience in a different way. When words make different connections within and between them, there is a shift in the emotional sense of the experience. A sense of wholeness is attained the moment we manage to bring together 'the thinking' and 'the feeling’ aspects of an experience.
The process of examining, understanding and focusing on what needs repairing, sorting and discarding, protecting and/or nurturing, helps changing our internal structures. This change, that can be achieved through working on the enhancement of the emotional ‘repertoire’ as well as on the avoidance of repeating old dysfunctional patterns helps us, in a healthier way, to deal and come to terms with the fact that life, life as beautiful as it may be, it can be just as unfair.
The healing process takes time, courage, faith and hope. Jerome Frank stated that 
Hopelessness can retard recovery or even hasten death, while mobilization of hope plays an important part in many forms of healing. Hope, it seems, is essential to life and is therefore a fundamental human need. Without hope, despair and depression take hold with devastating effects. But what is hope? One simpler definition is that hope is a confident expectation of a good future. Without a belief that good things and good experiences are still available to us, hope is lost and despair sets in.
