[Martin Taylor 950828 15:30]
Bill Powers (950828.1112 MDT)
Perhaps one difference (that doesn't really make a lot of difference) is
that I conceive of this primarily as the _patient_ exploring the
patient's model. The onlooker (me) really gets only a very sketchy view
of what is going on in the other person (the tip of the iceberg and all
that). I've even done this, with apparently happy results, with a person
who decided he didn't want me to know exactly what thoughts were
occurring to him, so we just called it "X". A strange episode, where
about the most I could do was to ask "Are you aware of any thoughts
about what you're looking at?" Just having me be there as an implicit
outside viewpoint seemed to help.
...
And the rest of an extraordinarily insightful posting--or at least so it
resonates with me 
A personal note: I spent about 4 years in the early 80s in some kind of
psychotherapy--I don't know what formal variety it was. It involved a
lot of talking about thoughts and feelings about thoughts. But the main
effect that I now remember (apart from the end result of winding up
feeling somewhat better than previously) was a perception of crumbling
substructures. Nothing in the sessions bore any formal relation, but I
felt and saw, internally in a way that is very hard to put into words,
breaking concrete over black bottomless pits, very scary. I perceived
that AS BEING my own structure breaking, leaving me with no place to
hold. It lasted perhaps days, perhaps months--I don't remember now. I
do remember one moment (I was in a phone booth in Frankfurt railway
station) when the perception was particularly acute and devastating to
the degree that I felt I might collapse. But that strange perception,
one that came as an uncontrolled disturbance, was critical.
As I now see what was happening, what I perceived was probably a perception
of the roeorganizing process that was mapped onto things I knew how to
perceive. We have no perception of our own selves... But the control I
needed was to eliminate that terrible self-perception, and the mechanism
was probably an effective reorganization. But one cannot perceive oneself
as "behaving differently" at the time one is behaving. One perceives only
what one has perceptual functions to perceive, and if they change, the
change is not itself perceptible. One can perceive oneself to be happier,
calmer,..., but only by explicit reference to history can one perceive
oneself as "changed."
I had a great experience a few years ago at a
cybernetics meeting in St. Gallen, Switzerland. I was listening to a
young fellow giving a paper on a subject I don't even recall. He started
talking rather theoretically about being an observer of thoughts, and
then being an observer of thoughts about thoughts, and finally, of being
just an observer.
...
... called "The Helper." It seemed that they
had been finding people who had developed, or were developing, some sort
of hard-to-describe point of view from which they could come to
understand themselves better and even bootstrap themselves out of
anxiety and depression
Perhaps something of the kind was going on...dealing in the therapy with
my thoughts, and then thoughts about thoughts, and then observing, without
the therapist, something happening that I knew not how to observe, but
that was very real to me.
Maybe it's not at all what you were talking about, but yes or no, your
posting hit home.
Thank you.
Martin