The Power of the Paradoxical Turn
We often treat “stuckness” as an enemy—a blockage in our productivity or a flaw in our
character that needs to be eradicated. In our rush to move forward, to “fix” the issue, or
force a solution, we can bypass the only place where change can actually occur: the present
moment.
There is an acute difference between thinking about a problem and making contact with the
reality of it. When we rush to a solution, we may be operating from a place of avoidance.
We try to drive out of the blocks but with our shoelaces still untied!
Present moment experience has always been a key edge of my work with people as a
Gestalt therapist and now even more so using a micro-phenomenological method of inquiry
backed by neuroscience in DBR. Regardless of the modality, the work requires the
application of the “Paradoxical Turn.”
As I often remind my clients:
“From where I am located now, I can choose my orientation. I turn away from
the source of the problem or I turn towards. Through making space to ‘be with’
my lived experience, I can disentangle – what flows from this is the power of my
creative intelligence.”
But what does it actually mean to “turn towards”? And why does stopping to look at the
blockage result in flow? The answer lies in the intersection of human evolutionary wisdom
and modern neuroscience.
The Biology of “Turning Away”
To understand why we get stuck, we have to look below the level of our thoughts and
emotions, a deeper dive into older structures of the brain—specifically the brainstem and
midbrain.
This is the territory of Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR).
Your internal GPS locates threat:
Long before you have a conscious thought about a stressful situation (e.g., “I am excited or
worried about meeting this person because…”), your brain has already reacted. It happens in
milliseconds. Your Orienting System, involving the Superior Colliculus (SC), detects threat
and opportunity in the environment and instantly prepares the body for subsequent action.
Let’s take the example of the meeting, above – as the SC registers the environment, or
internal turn towards the environment, it creates a micro-tension—a tightening of the neck,
a forehead tension, and a subtle pull to look toward or away. This fresh response to
orienting from the SC helps us to consider what we need to do next. However, the orienting
response can often be valenced (overridden) by old experiences that have become stuck, for
example, the rollocking we had by a boss, the disappointed look of a friend, the absence of
the presence of our mother, or the rejection by a previous partner – all grist for the SC mill.
Instead of going with the immediate ‘where and now’ flow, we register the environmental
stimulus, feel the split-second tension, then immediately react! This could be a “turn away”
into distraction, intellectualization, or busying self with work. We try to sprint past the
biological signal.
Valencing at the level of the Superior Colliculus is the immediate, pre-emotional assignment
of survival value to a stimulus. Before you have a thought (“That’s a snake”) or an emotion
(“I’m scared”), your Superior Colliculus has already done two things:
Salience: It noticed something changing in the environment (“Something is there”).
Valence: It instantly tagged that change as either Positive (Approach/Reward) or
Negative (Avoid/Threat).
In DBR terms, Valencing answers the primitive question:
“Is this safe to orient towards, or must I orient away?”
The process goes something like this:
Input: Sensory data (eyes/ears) hits the Superior Colliculus.
Valencing: The SC, consulting with the Basal Ganglia (memory of past outcomes),
assigns a “Negative Valence” (Threat).
Output (The Reaction): The SC fires a signal to the Periaqueductal Gray (PAG) to
initiate a defence response (Freeze/Flight/Fight).
Awareness (Too Late): Milliseconds later, the signal reaches the Cortex. You register,
“I feel anxious,” but the body is has already reacted.
The “Stuckness” issue is when trauma creates a Fixed Negative Valence. Or in Gestalt terms,
a Fixed Gestalt – when a natural need becomes distorted, exaggerated, denied, or displaced.
For example, the need for care that is retroflected as a process from the experience of
denial of the need when a child.
The Neuroscience of “Being With“
When we skip past the orienting phase, the energy mobilized for action gets trapped in the
system. We become “stuck” because our biology is frozen in a state of incompleteness and
subsequent alert.
This is where a Gestalt approach and Neuroscience align well.
By slowing down and choosing to turn towards our physical sensation of tension, shock, and
emotion —by simply “being with” the phenomenology of our here and now experience, for
example, tension in the neck, the tightness in the chest or the, fear in the belly, without
trying to fix it—we can work through the threat response to clear the stuckness and send a
signal of safety to the midbrain. We allow the Orienting Response to complete its cycle in
safe territory. In Gestalt terms, completing a Fixed Gestalt.
When the brainstem realizes the threat has been seen and acknowledged, it releases the
“brakes.” The energy that was used to hold the tension is suddenly liberated, becoming
available for creative flow.
This brings us to the Gestalt paradox – we cannot leave a place until we have fully arrived
there. To get to the ‘Flow,’ we must first fully orient to the ‘Stuckness’.”
Three Vignettes
Vignette 1: The “Empty Chair” (Attachment & The Absent Mother)
Orienting to the void rather than trying to fill it.
Maya” visits her mother every Sunday. Physically, her mother is in the room, but
emotionally, she is vacant—scrolling her phone or deflecting deep conversation with
superficial pleasantries, all the while not making eye contact with Maya. Maya leaves every
visit exhausted, having spent two hours frantically “performing” to get a reaction—telling
jokes, sharing achievements, trying to sparkle enough to be seen.
The “Turning Away“:
In this scenario, Maya is turning away from the pain of her here and
now reality of an absent mother. Her orienting system is seeking a connection (a “safe
haven”), but when it meets the blank wall of her mother’s disinterest, Maya doesn’t process
the shock and the grief. Instead, she enters a hyper-aroused “fight” response, trying to force
contact where there is none, projecting a fantasy mother onto the real woman in front of
her.
The “Turning Towards” (The Shift):
– The Intervention: In a session, I ask Maya to tell me about sitting with her mother.
We establish a microsecond activation – the moment my mum looks up and away
from me.
– The DBR process: After grounding in being here and now, where Maya sits with me
in space and time, I present the microsecond activation and guide her to her
Superior Colliculus response—the physical sensation of tension in her forehead,
around her eyes, or at the base of the skull. We locate this in the forehead and slow
down to establish an anchor, open the file of information, and work this through to
the stage of shock and subsequent pain/emotion.
– The detangling: Instead of rushing to “perform,” Maya is invited to simply orient to
the experience of her mother’s moment of disconnection from her. Maya is
supported to feel the shock and painful loneliness of sitting with someone who is not
there. This is painful, it is real, and it is stuck within Maya.
– The Flow: By entering the reality through the process of her slowed down
experience, the energy Maya wastes on “trying” is realised and slowly released. She
stops knocking on the locked door of her mother’s absent presence. She has found
her own ground, realising her mother is not able to do anything else, and she might
seek deeper connections elsewhere. The stuckness of the “chase” transforms into
the flow of grief and, eventually a relative freedom from pain.
Vignette 2: From Discombobulation to Where & Now Grounding in Being
When a professional’s stuckness is the key to the client’s lock.
James, an experienced executive coach, is working with a client who speaks in rapid, looping
circles about a chaotic work environment. Suddenly, James feels his mind go blank. He loses
the thread of the conversation. He feels a rising panic and a “fog” descending. He starts
scrambling internally, mentally flipping through his textbook for a “powerful question” to
regain control.
The “Turning Away“: James is turning away from the relational field. He views his confusion
as a failure of competence (shame), so he tries to hide it. He disconnects from his body to retreat into his “head” (Gestalt – the Middle Zone) to find a solution. He has abandoned the
Here and Now to manage his pride and reputation.
The “Turning Towards” (The Shift):
The Intervention: James realised his body was reacting to the client’s chaos and as
he sensed the client’s own dissociated panic. He was caught out and quickly oriented
to his own stuck experience – his fog. We worked with Where Self Orienting in Space
and Time to support James’ with a useful tool to locate himself in the present
moment at the level of the SC.
– The Neuroscience: Directing attention to the body in space, reorients a person to
their self experience at the most fundamental levels of self. What Bjorn Merker
names as the ‘pivot point’ – the point between the deep layers of the SC and the
PAG (Periaqueductal Gray). This draws James away from the “fog” in his prefrontal
cortex. He realises he is here and now, not back in his family of origin, and takes a
breath, allowing his own orienting and defence system to settle.
– The Untangling: James uses Where Self Grounding in Being to access the
“Paradoxical Turn”. He is able to establish safety and turn towards the ‘here & now’
and voice his reality. He says, “I need to pause us for a second. I notice that as you
tell this story, I’m feeling suddenly very foggy and disoriented. I wonder if that
sensation is familiar to you?”
– The Flow: The client stops dead. “That’s exactly how I feel all day,” the client admits.
By James orienting to his own discombobulation rather than fighting it, he names the
elephant in the room. The session pivots from superficial storytelling to deep work
on the client’s overwhelming environment.
Vignette 3: The “Resentful Yes” (Relational Impasse)
Orienting to the boundary before the behaviour.
The Scenario: “Elena” agrees to take on the task of cooking Christmas dinner for her large
family; a task she doesn’t have time for. Everyone on the group-chat says, “you are so
capable and the best cook among us”, she yields and smiles, and texts back, “Sure, I’ll do it
for you guys” but immediately feels drained and resentful. She is stuck in a cycle of people-
pleasing followed by burnout.
The “Turning Away“: Elena turns away from her own internal “No.” She overrides her
body’s signal of rejection to maintain the relationship (a social survival strategy).
The “Turning Towards” (The Shift):
– The Intervention: I invite Elena to revisit the moment the request was made. We
slow it down to the micro-second.
– The Neuroscience: In DBR, we look for the “pre-affective” shock. Before she felt the
need to please, there was likely a split-second orienting tension, then a ‘shock’ of
shiver or shudder, a flinch, a tightening of the shoulders, or a holding of breath.
– The Untangling: By turning towards this moment of tension and subsequent ‘shock’
she realizes her body was trying to protect her organism and her boundaries.
– The Flow: “Being with” the sensation of guilt allows her to access her “creative
self”—which in this case, is the ability to say, “I can’t do that right now,” with
authority rather than guilt.
Concluding Remark:
In every moment of stuckness, there is a hidden door—a microsecond where our biology
and our history intersect. The natural impulse can be to turn away, to sprint past the
discomfort with distraction, performance, or a quick fix. Yet, as both Gestalt therapy and
DBR reveal, the only way out is through. By having the courage to slow down and embody
the “Paradoxical Turn”—by fully orienting to the tension in your neck, the fog in your mind,
or the silent “no” in your gut—you can ‘work through’ stuckness and send a powerful signal
of safety to your deepest self. You stop fighting your own biology. In that sacred pause, the
energy once trapped in avoidance is liberated, transforming the static weight of blockage
into the dynamic, creative flow of your life.
