WHY RHIZOME?

As any gardener (or social activist) knows, a rhizome is the part of an underground plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes develop from buds that in turn can form their own shoots. Rhizomes grow horizontally underground, and vertically above ground.

Any part of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and it operates in terms of multiplicity rather than a central “centre”. Rhizomes can break and regenerate themselves but they will remake themselves differently to how they were before.

In many respects therapy is a rhizomatic process: the therapist and client meet and form a system to solve a problem or problems. But both parties are connected to a myriad of other people, places and spaces, many of which will remain “underground” yet influential during the time they meet together. When we meet, we are always in the middle of many other things. The “work” in therapy often involves figuring out how different parts of the problem connect to each other above and below the ground of conscious awareness in order to generate new possibilities.

CBT works vertically and arborescently, focusing on the intensity of a problem and how to modify it using tools and techniques. Therapy however, works horizontally and rhizomatically, like a mycelium network. The aim is to shift between or deconstruct established explanatory narratives of a problem, so that emergent alternatives grow up in order to open spaces of change.

Likewise, therapy also involves co-regulating nervous systems to increase safety, and establishing new neural pathways in the brain. Therapy is an engagement with multiplicity that attends to, and regenerates both client and therapist, by changing them.

Connection, multiplicity, mapping territories, working with heterogeneity and difference, self-repairing ruptures, and moving from theory to practice are all themes that frame the therapy work. The French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari wrote extensively about these non-linear processes in all sorts of contexts including psychotherapy.

After formal therapy ends, the rhizome continues to connect, change and regenerate as therapist and client go their separate ways, and the space of therapy breaks off or dissolves. Both therapist and client will be engaging with many other healing modalities too.

In this sense then, the rhizome is an ideal metaphor for the multi-rooted, decentred, co-created “container” of therapy, the complexity and messiness of being human, and the emergent approach that I take in clinical practice.

You can read more about rhizomatic praxis as described by artist Lauren Sanders here.

Psychotherapist Scott Cooper discusses Rhizomatic Practice in relation to his Narrative Therapy work.

generative somatics (gs) are also exploring the links between therapy and social change.

Click for more information about my approach to therapy and my values.