Iona's Interviews: Timmy Myers

28 May 2010

by Iona Fredenburgh

I first remember meeting Timmy at a Forum in East London, and getting a sense of him living in Zurich but having a long familiarity with UK, and also a long and rich experience of Process Work. I loved his humour, heart and enthusiasm, and something ... indefinable - maybe a bit of a shapeshifter. He’s recently become one of RSPOPUK’s Trustees, so it was my pleasure to interview him for Wave. We talked on skype for an hour, and it was fascinating, so I’ve squeezed in here what I can.

Timmy first heard about Process Work around 1986/7 when Roger Housden of Open Gate hosted Arny and Amy Mindell as part of its holistic conference programme. He had trained as a therapist with Nick Totton and Em Edmondson of Energy Stream, was himself recovering from serious disease, and was fascinated by Arny’s focus on working with symptoms. In 1988 he went to a seminar in London with Arlene Motulsky and Amy Kaplan! (Recognise their pre-married names?) “I booked for the seminar and promptly had a dream which was life-changing for me.”

Before the dream, he’d been with his supervisor, who had a black carpet with a big flower pattern; each petal had a different florescent colour - blue, orange, green, pink. She said ‘I see you don’t like that carpet very much’. He said no - he found the colour scheme gross. She asked: what did it remind him of? “At that point in my life I’d been a carpenter, a musician, a childcare worker, a therapist - I’d done all these different things and they didn’t seem to tie together. The colours of the petals seemed like different entities. In some ways I’d tried to hide one identity from another.”

“In the dream I’m travelling through somewhere that looks like Armenia or northern Turkey - like places I’d travelled as a musician. I come across a carpetmaker with his warehouse full of carpets. I don’t tend to covet things, but I can imagine coveting Islamic carpets. I’m wandering round, and the carpet-maker - a little old man who looks identical to Arny, with gold-rimmed glasses and no hair - comes up to me and suddenly I see the carpet belonging to my supervisor. He too says ‘I see you don’t like that carpet very much.’ I said no, and he said ‘Go away and find the carpet that you like the most’ which is of course an impossible task, because there are thousands of gorgeous Islamic carpets. But I do choose one eventually and he says ‘Aha! I thought you’d choose that one’ and I said ‘Why?’ and he said ‘Because I needed every colour from the carpet that you don’t like, to make the carpet you do like.’ Which became a life-changing dream for me. And then he took me up to the attic of the warehouse - I love attics and roof structures - and we’re going round this attic that’s very very, dusty as if no-one’s been there in 400 years, and there are these pictures on the wall. I realise when I blow the dust off them that they are sepia pictures from my childhood, which was pretty unhappy, and as I rub the dust off, they become no longer pictures but moving video in colour. For me this part of the dream was especially amazing, because what had been state-oriented becomes process-oriented - the process unfolds further. This and other parts of the dream became so life-changing that I wrote it down. Then I went to the seminar and Arlene and Amy adopted me; they got me to draw the figure from the dream, and they giggled and said ‘That’s Arny!’ and insisted that I study Process Work. I was just coming up to my 36th birthday, and I identify it as a very important moment in my life.

I didn’t sign up to be a Process Work student at first, but at the end of ‘88 I took on the role of organiser for a newly-formed RSPOPUK, and our first programme began in ‘89.

I asked Timmy if this dream still lives in him in some way, perhaps as part of his life-myth. He said that he associates the pattern of keeping aspects of himself from others with growing up in poorer estates, and later with emerging homosexuality.

I asked Timmy for 3 memorable moments connected with Process Work. The first was “Jean-Claude turning me upside down in a wrestling pose and holding me up in the air (its called a pile driver). He’s the only person strong enough to do that. In a way he did turn my life upside down and shake me. I need to be met in relationship, not run away from. I find this wrestling with relationship very attractive - I love it, am hungry for it, and certainly got it with JC and Arlene.

The second moment: “One of my ways of working is to put myself under extreme pressure. When I do it unconsciously I suffer, when I pick it up consciously I produce my best work. Working on it in the middle, putting pressure on a cushion, Arlene said ‘Do it to me’ so I rolled her up in a ball and squeezed her tightly. So wonderful: giving so much of herself, believing there’s something for all in that moment. I love to learn, be taught, teach - like that.” The third moment: was “giving a small speech at Worldwork 2008 in London, as part of our Hot Topic. I talked about intervening in one fight between youth gangs under some trees in a park in Zurich.” (This is also a strong memory for me, Iona - I was very inspired by it. You can listen to it on the Worldwork website)

Working with youth in conflict is a major part of Timmy’s work now. He started with the Social Services Department when he first came to Zurich, working with troubled youth, and with crisis interventions in children’s or youth homes and youth prisons. He now runs a business offering conflict work and is often consulted by the youth justice system. “One of his trademarks is to consciously involve as many parts of a system as possible. There was a joke in Leeds that if you worked with Timmy, you could bring your pets along, because it happened once. A bunch of neighbours saved up money so that I could work with one of the families in the street, because the family and their dogs disturbed the whole neighbourhood. So then I said: ‘OK, bring the dogs along, guys.’ I worked mostly on the conflict between the parents and the teenage offspring. Once that conflict was somewhere near resolved, the dogs lay down in a circle around us and went to sleep.”

“I teach - I’ve taught in various graduate and post-graduate courses for social workers. I supervise increasingly - staff of institutions which have to do with with others who are in extreme states, so youth homes, youth prisons. I teach teachers who work with kids who get violent. I write a lot about it. I sometimes speak at congresses.”

I asked Timmy if he planned to write anything in English about his work. Its a project he’s planning for the future: to anonymise cases from his carefully kept notes of the last 10 years, and publish. Other future plans include developing theatre and conflict work (he alludes to Artaud in seeing all of this work as theatre), including working on a show in Zurich next year with asylum seekers. “I’d like to do some more work on consciously combining the petals of the flower.”

And finally, I asked him what one thing he would say to students of RSPOPUK: “Welcome! I was a long time away, I’m slowly coming back, I like very much that you’re here and I want to be an available trustee. I’m only a skype call or email away.” -  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it