One of my friends and clients recently posed a good question to me:
“I have a technical question for you, Dexter. This came to my mind recently. You put tremendous emphasis in processing what the PC is experiencing, what he is “dramatizing” in PT, what is real to him here and now rather than any preordained set of steps decided beforehand, whether those steps were determined off of valid data or not. Now, I have a question in this regard. Doing this constantly would seem to be an awfully dangerous path to follow to me: i.e. one would be prone to merely Q&A with originations/comments from the PC before the earlier process was actually gotten to a proper termination, which may not lead to any case resurgence.”
My answer:
Think of it this way: It is perfectly natural to follow one’s train of thought and let it lead to what one is looking for, and needs to find. That is the “file clerk”, undisturbed. That is natural spiritual instinct, what I like to call your “spiritual compass”.
Sometimes it can be frustrating and disturbing when you want to talk about something with someone and take the conversation in a certain direction, but the other person takes it somewhere else, and you feel like you are being resisted in your effort to drive your point home. From your perspective, “that’s not the point”, and you want to control and direct the other person’s attention to getting and accepting your point.
Well, the same applies with processing, if you are pushing your agenda, rather than granting the client their following their instincts in relation to what their attention is naturally attracted toward as they progress through whatever they may be processing.
The entire Scientology “Bridge”, or “Grade Chart”, and thereby, the organized plans for every session, are preordained according to what Hubbard has set in stone to be followed. And he bristled at the occurrence of conscientious auditors honoring the PC’s “file clerk”, and the granting to the PC of letting their attention follow the path it is naturally taking, because Hubbard’s intention of what they “ought to be thinking about” is not being forced on the PC, and so he derisively labeled this “Q&A”, the “crime” of continuing in the direction of the PC’s answers. He called it a “disease”, in fact, “the disease of Q&A”, but really it is just a way of Hubbard protesting, whining about and stomping on the fact of his not getting his way in having his own cookie-cutter generalized directions being imposed on every PC by every auditor in every session, and it is why TR-3 and TR-4 are, in my view, mistraining, as they basically amount to ingraining (you could say “implanting”) this attitude of not accepting the PC’s natural spiritual responses in every auditor.
In my actual experience, in thousands of sessions, ACTUALLY paralleling the PC’s mind, (Hubbard gives lip service to the idea, but violates it by even instituting the term and concept of “Q&A”) the client then actually succeeds in accomplishing HIS OWN GOALS for the processing. As opposed to the ingrained (again, you could say “implanted”) goals of Hubbard’s “Grade Chart”- “Freedom from overwhelm”, “Cause over life”, “Total Freedom”, etc…and, keep in mind, while the Scientology techniques (“levels”) connected to these “EP’s” can bring about beneficial results, they do not actually achieve those stated EP’s for anybody. (Show me one “OT III”who is never overwhelmed by anything, for instance).
But I think the more important point is that an auditor should be there to help the client accomplishing his own personal goals for the processing, not what Hubbard put on the grade chart, as lofty as they may be. And helping the client accomplish his own personal goals for the processing, in my actual, long term experience and observation, isn’t done by not accepting where the client’s attention goes in session and forcing it elsewhere. I’ve learned that it is best accomplished by recognizing and honoring the power and infallibility of the individual’s own spiritual instinct, and not interrupting and redirecting their attention.
And so, one must re-examine, rather than unthinkingly accept the very idea of the phrase “Q&A”, and the intention behind programming auditors to follow a precise and unvarying systematized routine with a live and unique individual, and rethink accordingly.