When someone is trying to understand you there is
already a disjunction. If there were empathy between you there would be no need
to try to understand. The empathy would be enough; they would immediately grasp
how you are and what you mean.
When someone says ‘I feel understood’ the emphasis is
on the feeling of empathy. When someone says, ‘My doctor understands my case’
the emphasis is on his diagnostic discernment – any feelings of empathy are
irrelevant.
Someone trying to understand you is on the wrong
track. To understand you is to place you in a set, you are this or that. You
are a characterised, diagnosed. All the terms that could be used to describe
you are alien. Descriptions always feel foreign. They have nothing to do with
how you are for yourself. Someone who ‘understands’ you in this sense has no
idea who you are.
This is because understanding is an action of the mind
that thinks, the intellect. Personal relations require something more than
this. We somehow have to grasp a person’s being. You don’t have to understand,
you have to grasp their state, to directly perceive their state of
being.
Having made this distinction, we have to give this
ability a special name. We could call it ‘intuition’, but I am going to call it
prehension. “Prehension is the basic, extrasensory awareness, or grasping, … One
might call it the super intuition on which all conventionally recognized
extrasensory perception and sensory perceptions are built.” 1
To grasp a person’s
state of being is, first of all, to grant that it exists. This is not a
cognitive comprehension, but a prehension which is grasping the being
of a person. You can understand a person without prehending them: in diagnosing
me, my doctor understands me (or rather my case), but he does not grasp me. An understanding of me is not me, it’s a
category. Granted, you may say it’s about
me, like my medical diagnosis, but it’s not me as I am for myself. There is me
myself – that’s one thing. Then there is the category you put me in – that’s
another thing entirely.
Understanding my desire for chocolate is not my desire
for chocolate itself. Understanding why I desire chocolate is one thing; the
actual desire for chocolate is something else. It is essential to recognise
this distinction. Understanding alters nothing. The desire for chocolate is
still what it is – whether understood or not.
To reduce prehension to understanding relates all
perception to rational cognition and denies the possibility of non-rational
perception; but we know from personal experience there are many things I don’t
understand that definitely exist. I feel
things I don’t understand, but I still feel them.
If I ask myself, ‘do I want to go to the movies with
John?’ I find myself saying ‘no’. I can invent all the reasons why not, any one
of which is understandable. But what I find in myself is simply ‘no’. That ‘no’
is more authentic than any of the reasons. Plausible reasons are invented
afterwards. I don’t want to give John reasons or explain. Discussions, one way
or the other, won’t make any difference. It’s still ‘no’.
Self-assertion is not about being able to clearly
explain one’s position. One can do that, of course. But explanations are sensible
sounding excuses for one’s illogical state of being.
One’s state of being is always unlikely, like a mood,
it’s always outside the square; it doesn’t leave a calling card or an address –
irrational because my mood doesn’t arise from the mind or intellect or
conscious decision. One finds oneself in it. Self-assertion is the affirmation
of one’s mood.
Like a mood, a state of being is what it is, like a
stone or the weather. The weather asserts itself by simply being the weather. It
does not explain itself.
As a person, you actually cannot help being assertive
because there is no way you can not
be what you are. You are always exactly what you are in any given moment. You
always assert yourself whether you know it or not. The only question is whether
someone else can pick up what you are being. This is what prehension is: it is simply picking up at depth what a person is
being.
*
Most of the time person-centred counselling relies on
a person prehending themselves. This is what we call focusing. It is extremely
workable 90% of the time. But the longer I have been in practice the more I
realised that much can depend on my being able to tune into what my client is
being. It’s like a sixth sense. Only then can I ask the right questions.
When you are relating intimately with someone there
are dozens of questions you could ask and be curious about. How is their
health, their work, how is their boat project coming along, how are they
getting along now with their mother-in-law? But to ask the right question may
be none of these obvious issues. The right question would be one that engages
immediately with the other’s present state of being. A prehension, a hunch, might make you ask something out of the blue
that engages them at a deeper level and is more true to where they are at.
Incidentally, those of you the read my last blog on Sense and Sensibility might realise that
it’s about prehending the environment. You can prehend a tree and tune into its
being; you can prehend your dog – and
this is probably what he does to you too.2
1
http://websyte.com/alan/prehen.htm on ‘Prehension’ in Alfred North . Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, 1929
2 Rupert Sheldrake: Dogs the Know When When Their Owners are Coming Home
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264.
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