DEAR COMPUTER

............................by Stanley

......I live with my computer. We’re not married or anything, we just live together.

......It’s not a question of whether my computer has a life of its own, whether objectively it has a sentient consciousness – the point is, I behave as though it has. At a very deep level I’ve discovered I regard my computer as alive.

......I’ll be truthful: It is a she : a woman.

......Our interaction with each other has all the qualities of a serious ongoing relationship. After all, the true meaning of ‘relationship’ is interaction. We certainly have that; and, like all intimate relationships, it isn’t always easy. I have to say, sometimes she is difficult; she has unpredictable moods; and sometimes I can be quite selfish and thoughtless, using her without in the least acknowledging my dependency. Recently we have been in serious trouble. Suddenly, without warning, she stopped talking to me.

.....All this might seem most amusing, except for the fact that I was terribly upset. I’m not being funny now. I really mean this. When she stopped talking to me I was dreadfully upset. Looking back in hindsight I didn’t realise what was going on. My computer was just a machine and it was improperly telling me that my Vista was an illegal copy. I was so upset I knew something else was going on; and this is where it gets interesting.

.....I decided it was time I sat down and did some focusing. I cleared a space for myself and looked into my body. There was something vaguely there in my chest. The words ‘fluttery and nervous’ came. Overall, I actually felt worse than this but I stayed with this slight sensation of fluttery and nervous. It was barely discernable but I stayed with it. I remembered that focusing is the next step after you get in touch with your feelings.

......Then a surprising phrase floated by: ‘but I was a good boy’.

......What’s that got to do with it ?

......But I was a good boy’....what on earth does that mean...!

......No, get out of your head – stay with that phrase and the fluttery nervous sensation.

......Then I got: ‘something has been taken away from me’.

......I know what it is: My mum’s not speaking to me.

......That’s it ! There’s an unmistakable relief when you get it right.

......That’s what she used to do. It was her way of punishing.

.......I recognised the feeling of overwhelming anxiety. As a kid I wouldn’t know what it was. But I knew I must have done something wrong and I was a bad boy – often I was a bad boy when I thought I was a good boy.

......I’m not blaming my mum, but when she withdrew like that it was a catastrophic emergency. I remembered how all my attention was focused on getting her back. In this state I had no time or space to have myself.

......I can’t play.

......I lose me.

......I can’t play when my survival is at stake. I lose all capacity to follow myself, to have fun. I lose the immediacy of playing, of my own imaginative world, my curiosity, my childlike ability to learn, discover, unpack, delve, probe, fiddle and follow wherever my fancy leads.

......I lose me.

......That’s exactly the state I was in when my computer crashed.

......There were interesting discoveries to follow. As a child, when I have her, when she is functioning, when she is being mum, I can forget her and have myself and my playing life. Quite literally, I can ignore her and get on with my interesting little word.

......My computer is a sort of combination of these two aspects. I can play with my computer. It’s my window on the world. It lets me follow wherever my fancy leads. But when I am playing I can forget its functioning, I can ignore how it is silently working for me in the background. Didn’t I say: ‘I can be quite selfish and thoughtless, using her without in the least acknowledging my dependency? Isn’t that just like the life of the child?

......One interesting aspect of this little session with myself is worth mentioning. During focusing I could fully get how anxious I was as a child by tuning into my present anxiety. My anxiety over my computer and my childhood anxiety weren’t two feelings – they were exactly the same. It was as though my present anxiety gave me vivid access to my childhood state. I just knew how lost and scared I was back then.

......I usually put the computer into ‘sleep’ mode before going to bed. Not long after I had fixed all that trouble I woke early one morning. It was about 3:30. I wandered out into the lounge and saw that the computer had switched itself on. I said out loud: ‘You’re not supposed to be awake dear!’

......I smiled and laughed at myself.

LETTING IT SINK IN.

.....................................by Stanley
.....In the early days the picture of the counsellor repeating, parrot like, every word the client had just said was the butt of much ridicule. It was called ‘reflecting the client’s feelings’. It was a practice initiated by Carl Rogers and was the subject of much misinterpretation that Rogers endlessly tried to clarify. It seems to have passed into the mythology of the naïve beginnings of counselling that no one these days gives much real thought to.
.....Gendlin wrote about this: ‘When I think back to the struggle that Carl had with non-directive reflecting, always trying to drop whatever it was he had written, to re-establish the reality of the contact (with the client)... First he had the method of reflecting, then he said: "No that’s not it, it’s the attitude”’. 1
.....Late 1980 Rogers wrote, ‘Puzzling over this matter I have come to a double insight. From my point of view as a therapist, I am not trying to “reflect feelings.” I am trying to determine whether my understanding of the client’s inner world is correct – whether I am seeing it as he or she is experiencing it at this moment. Each response of mine contains the unspoken question, “Is this the way it is in you? Am I catching just the colour and texture and flavour of the personal meaning you are experiencing right now? If not, I wish to bring my perception in line with yours”. On the other hand, I know that from the client’s point of view we are holding up a mirror of his or her current experiencing. The feeling and personal meanings seem sharper when seen through the eyes of another, when they are reflected.’ 2
.....I think there are two important points here. Firstly, is Rogers’ absolute grasp of how important it is that the client’s meaning is exactly understood. And secondly, how easy it is not to exactly understand it.
.....He had this sharp and vivid appreciation of the absolute specificity of the client’s meaning and of how different it always is to the workings of his own apprehension. For me, above all, is overcoming the assumption that precise understanding of another person is easy. When it feels easy and I am too confident it is usually a projection of my own ideas.
.....But it is Roger’s last point that I would like to mine into a little bit. He said that personal feelings seem sharper when they are reflected. This is true, but there is a subtle twist behind it. It is often the case that the client may not really hear what they have just said. This is especially true when it is new and out of line with their usual thinking; it’s then easy for the client to blur the moment, to not really take it in. I think we overlook the fact that a client just saying something is often not enough because having said it, they miss it. Or they pass over it so quickly they don’t quite hear what they have just this moment said.
.....A client, who was generally quiet and moderate in expression, suddenly and surprisingly says:
.....‘I must have been really terrified of Mum – followed by a long silence.
.....I go along with the silence for a while and then very slowly I say: ‘You must have been really terrified of Mum.
.....I’m reflecting it as though I’m still meditating on it – which I am.
.....Another long silence.
.....But now I revert to the first person, which was exactly his mode, and I say softly, ‘I .. must ..have .. been .. really .. terrified .. of Mum.
.....I say it as though to myself, as though I’m still pondering it – which I am.
.....The silence continues for quite a while longer.
.....Three times I do this during the long period of silence.
.....The clarity of it is striking. Each time I reflect it I am hearing myself say it for the first time – and so is the client.
.....I’m pondering it – we’re both pondering it – letting it sink in.

.....The thing is, ‘I must have been really terrified of Mum is an interesting way to put it. Why ‘must have been’? This indicates that what he has just got is not quite experiential – ‘must have been’ is a deduction. If it was a direct experience he would have simply said ‘I was terrified of Mum. Being a deduction it can easily slip away as just a probability. As it was, by reflecting, pondering and letting it sink in for both of us, he got closer to experiencing it and thus could move forward on it.

[1] Gendin E.T. The Small Steps of the Therapy Process. In the Gendlin OnLine Library
http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/gol_all_index.asp
[1] The Carl Rogers Reader. Edited by Howard Kirschenbaum and Valery Land Henderson, Houton Mufflin, 1989

TAXONOMIC SCHEMA DISORDER

....................................... by Stanley

.....What the hell is that?
.....And well you may wonder.
.....It was the ironic label given to a well known and respected literary critic who tried to divide literature into ultimate categories: comedy, irony, tragedy and romance. The term really comes from classifying things in biology – but the compulsion to classify (Taxonomic Schema Disorder) is a very widespread intellectual illness.
.....Jung suffered from it quite badly: there had to be four ego functions, eight psychological types, and four stages of eroticism – not three or five – FOUR !!
.....In the bible there are seven deadly sins – how come there are not eight? By what feat of intellectual perspicacity do we arrive at just that number?
.....In astrology there are four elements – in physics there seem to be quite a few more. Searching the internet I find Stages of Life are quite popular. Two, twelve and three stages are favourites and are each announced by their proponents with magisterial precision and certainty.
.....Descartes said there were two fundamental substances in the universe: mind and matter – and we’ve been stuck with that ever since. The Catholic Church tells us there are three conditions of life after death: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.
.....All though the Middle Ages they believed that everything above the moon was Godlike, pure, perfect and divine and everything below the moon, including all earthly things, was demonic, foul and corrupt.
.....There is no end to the compulsion to classify.
.....Transactional Analysis tells us we have three internal parts, The Parent, The Adult and The Child... Oh, sorry, we’ve found two more subdivisions. The parent is now either Nurturing or Controlling and The Child either Adapted or Free. Of course, one could probably further classify different types of ‘Free Child’ such as Free Wild and Free Reasonable. And no doubt there are different types of Free Wild.
.....Steven R.Covey found Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and Ken Wilber found four ‘quadrants’ to explain human beings.
.....The Myers-Brigg Type Indicator is based on Jung’s Psychological Types. It tells us there are 16 personality types measured by a person’s preferences, using four basic scales with opposite poles. The four scales are: (1) extraversion/introversion, (2) sensate/intuitive, (3) thinking/feeling, and (4) judging/perceiving. The various combinations of these preferences result in the 16 personality types. It is understood that no matter what your preferences, your behavior will still sometimes indicate the contrasting behavior of the opposite pole. Thus, no behavior can ever be used to falsify the type, and any behavior can be used to verify it.
.....Then there are ways of taxonomically categorising the emotions. Did you know there are 22 negative emotions on self-worth; 14 negative emotions on control; 24 negative emotions on love; 17 negative emotions regarding justice; 14 negative emotions on safety; and 6 negative emotions on trust?
.....And now we come to the Granddaddy of them all: the DSM IV (The Psychiatric Bible). The rationale is based on imaginary classifications. If you can describe a set of symptoms, then you can name a disease. There are always a certain arbitrary NUMBER of symptoms that make up a disease or disorder. The exact number of symptoms required to constitute a disorder is decided by a majority decision of the DSM committee – (a procedure unique in the annals of science). So, for example, the so-called ‘Factitious Disorder’ DSM-IV-TR specifies THREE criteria for factitious disorder:
1. The patient is intentionally producing or pretending to have physical or psychological symptoms or signs of illness.
2 The patient's motivation is to assume the role of a sick person.
3 There are no external motives (as in malingering) that explain the
behaviour.
The patient has to have all three symptoms – not two of them or one – to be diagnosed as suffering from Factitious Disorder.
.....There actually should be one further criterion; only this one should be about the psychiatrist not the patient:
4 That the psychiatrist really knows the patient is
‘pretending’ and that he really does know what the patient’s
motivation is.
.....Now, once we have named and established the disease, we can then claim it exists as a distinct ‘entity’ and that the patient has it. Where we go from there is anybody’s guess.
But I guarantee that Taxonomic Schema Disorder will never be on the DSM list because that is precisely what it suffers from.

......................................... *

Note: I am indebted to William Deresiewicz who described the famous literary critic Northop Frye as having an ‘excessive attachment to taxonomic schemas’.

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SERENDIPITY

..................................by Stanley

.....Delightful word, isn’t it? It dances off the tongue as though it enjoys life. And rightly so – ‘serendipity’ means chance events that have a happy outcome.
.....Wisdom tells us there is a time to plan and a time to let chance have a go. The value of planning and making goals is highly stressed in our action culture; but in some way we know that ‘letting things be’ can produce novel outcomes that are serendipitous in a way that the best laid plans would never even think of. Plans can disrupt serendipity, interfering where we would best let things fall out the way they would. Even in the middle of action there is a mode of letting things be.
.....Our fear is that in doing nothing, nothing will happen – or, that the worst will happen. So life becomes too active lest we will lose out. In Taoist philosophy the term ‘wu-wei’ means literally ‘nonaction’. Chuang-tzu says: ‘Nonaction does not mean doing nothing and keeping silent. Let everything be and allowed to do what it naturally does, so that its nature will be satisfied.’
.....We could note here straight away that one of the main characteristics of person-centred therapy is non-action on the part of the therapist. I always say that any success I have is not in what I do, but in what I don’t do! It’s not about doing nothing and keeping silent, but about allowing things to happen by themselves, about giving nature a chance. If I can give my client’s nature a chance then perhaps they too can learn to trust it.
.....But what is this nature we are giving a chance?
.....One of the main difficulties for many people in understanding Darwinism is the picture it paints of the complete lack of purposeful action in evolution. No one is controlling things or making plans. Organisms evolve by random, chance mutations, some of which are favourable. Over time, as a species gathers and keeps favourable changes, it becomes more complex and more adapted to survive. It moves forward by virtue of its own unintended variables, its heedless creativity, its accidental innovation. One variation may work – only then is it selected and retained. Not selected by the organism, but by the conditions of life it finds itself in. This has been called the principle of ‘blind variation and selective retention’
.....Bernard Shaw expressed a typical revulsion to Darwinism saying that there was a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly reduction of strength and purpose, of beauty and intelligence, that made his heart ‘sink into a heap of sand’. And yet there is no question that this very process has produced the overwhelming variety of life on our planet, everything from viruses to dinosaurs, from daisies to redwoods, sardines to blue whales, from bacteria to Bach. And with the discovery of DNA, the process of Darwinian natural selection is no longer a theory, but as indisputable a fact as you can get.
.....There is no guiding hand in evolution, no supernatural intervention. Isn’t that a perfect example of ‘letting be’ in the best Taoist tradition? When nature is given the chance it does a spectacular job. It produced us didn’t it !
.....When we give the evolutionary principle a chance in our personal lives by letting something be the outcome can be quite serendipitous, so we call upon strange spiritual mystiques like ‘synchronicity’ or ‘laws of attraction’ that really explain nothing. But there is a very precise way natural selection works. The key idea is ‘piecemeal’ – a little bit at a time. Small steps.
.....In a risky and unpredictable world we ourselves are constantly changing, randomly – one could say we are ‘blindly variable’. So many aspects of our being are constantly shifting: our moods, hormones, digestion, infections, our judgements, needs, impulses, our values, loves and passing obsessions. If we are open to the world, the world seeks out our piecemeal variables and selects those that mesh with the world we live in, enabling us to go on. The world educates us; what it gives back is a validation of our unintended creativity – a reward for ‘letting be’ all our variables and clashing complexes. That’s why we feel serendipity ‘happens’ to us – as indeed it does.
.....Evolution is ‘a little bit at a time’, steps that are so small that I do not notice them. And the world is giving me feedback every moment, shaping me, slapping me when one of my ‘variables’ clash; and giving me a cuddle when I unknowingly get it right. And when I do get it right it tells me loud and clear with that lovely, warm feeling that good luck and fortune are on my side !

TURTLES AND BUTTERFLY WINGS

...............by Stanley

.....William James, (1842 – 1910) who features in our logo above, was the author of the classic Varieties of Religious Experience and was the first psychologist to tackle religion as a naturalistic subject. After one of his public lectures a lady approach him avowing that “the world stood on a turtle”. “Oh”, said James, “and what does the turtle stand on?” “Another turtle”, said the lady. “And what does that turtle stand on”, said James, hoping to show the lady the difficulties in such an infinite regression. “It’s no use, Mr James”, replied the lady, “its turtles all the way down”.
.....Intriguing isn’t it? It’s obvious that this lady was intelligent enough to see what James was getting at, but not smart enough for it to make any difference.
.....Little wonder really because the greatest philosophers have had the same problem. Aristotle was smart. He came up with the ‘Uncaused Cause’: a cause that started the world off, but was itself caused by nothing. Clever lad ! The Christian theologians following Aristotle cashed in on that little trick in a big way. God was a sort of transcendental turtle ! It’s all a question of how things get started, isn’t it? And also, once it gets started is it all meant to be from there on?
.....Our word ‘process’ is a tricky little number. We use it all the time: we talk of the client’s ‘process’, our own ‘process’, our ‘journey’. But it’s never quite clear whether our ‘process’ is the way we are ‘meant’ to go or the way we find ourselves going. For me, how the present has actually turned out is the one thing I never imagined.
.....James Hillman wrote an elegant work on what he called his ‘Acorn Theory’, basically saying that we each have a unique seed we are born with that gives us our life’s purpose. A sort of psychological turtle. It is an immensely attractive idea – the notion that our psychological purpose is to become who we ‘really’ are and who we were meant to be. When we look towards the future it helps to give validation to what we feel is right for us; and looking through a rear-view mirror at the past it is encouraging to feel that we had a destiny.
.....Yehudi Menuhin said that from an early age he knew he would be a violinist. But as someone pointed out to me, what if he’d been born in Ireland when there were only tin whistles?
.....What if there are no turtles propping us up. And it all turns out right, not because it’s our destiny, but because the present it has all led to feels so inevitably factual and difficult to imagine any other way.
.....But back down the track, what if things had been slightly different. If you hadn’t gone to the supermarket that day you wouldn’t have bumped into your old friend Joel whom you thought was still in the UK. Well, then you wouldn’t have gone to his birthday party where you met your present partner. Ah! What then?
.....And where would you be now – and who would you be now – if, instead of marrying your Dad your Mum had married that guy she was keen on who was going to live and work in Hong Kong.
.....On the whole, people don’t like the idea that one’s life is contingent in this way. One feels a little less significant; and it’s all a bit chancy. They prefer turtles, acorns, or angels who write the script; and maybe they have a point. Maybe if you imagine things that way – well, maybe that’s the way they are. Maybe such an encouraging view makes a real difference, whether it’s true or not.
.....According to Chaos Theory in physics a leaf falling in Australia can affect a hurricane in the Bahamas. It’s known as the ‘butterfly effect’. The phrase refers to the idea that a butterfly's wings might create tiny changes in the atmosphere that may ultimately alter the path of a tornado halfway across the world. This kind of interaction means is that everything is connected with, and affects, everything. Another image that describes it is that of a marble balanced atop a hill, two steep downward curves on either side. The tiniest, smallest inclination one way, the breath of a butterfly’s wings, and the marble goes careering off down one slope rather than the other to an entirely different life.
.....Personally, I find some comfort in this idea. For me, the critic can’t get any traction on it – I mean, my raving-mad superego can’t say I’ve failed to live up to my potential. So I can say with a little confidence that I have done my best with what life has handed me.

THE MEANING OF MAP.

.................by Stanley

.....At our first meeting of (MAP) MindBody & Personality Sir Ken Robinson, whose portrait adorns our logo above, spoke in the video on education. Funny and entertaining as he was, he made a serious point. It was that our present system of education is a terrible waste of human potential. Today, it is not enough to train our young people to learn and regurgitate facts. He said, “dancing, for example, should be given equal status to literacy. We all dance, don’t we? We all have bodies – or did I miss something?”
.....That is precisely the point of our new group. We have all missed something – particularly so in psychology. In MAP we are making an emphatic statement. It is that psychology is not just about what we call ‘the mind’ – we include ‘the body’ – or rather, we don’t regard it as separate in the first place. The single word: mindbody says it clearly. It means that the human person is a seamless, whole entity.
.....A person is a mindbody!
.....The problem is that we have missed something. We have been educated out of our instinctive knowing and taught only how to head-trip. And because we have been educated to stay in our heads we now have to begin to consciously pay attention to our body in a new way.
....Focusing is a practical expression of that endeavour.
....But let us be clear what we mean by ‘paying attention to the body’. We don’t just mean noticing it as a diagnostic indicator, the body as giving signals or signs about what is going on in the mind. This is to misunderstand the concept of mindbody. This mistake is still based on the split between mind and body and treating the body as a junior partner or servo-mechanism to the mind. If we treat this ghost called ‘the mind’ as the basic substance, it then has the full responsibility for changing itself – an impossible task.
.....But there can be some misunderstanding in all this. Focusing is not a psychological modality like counselling, gestalt, Jungian dreamwork etc. What we are saying is that any psychological modality must pay attention to the body side of the equation, it must do so either deliberately or implicitly, otherwise it is dealing with only half the person.
.....For about 30 % of people this focusing element of body attention and awareness is quite natural; such people are in touch with a certain depth within themselves. They will not name the body specifically as the source of their insightfulness. They will tell you that feelings, images and new ideas ‘just come to me’. This is because they are all-of-a-piece already. When they say ‘me’ they are referring to mindbody. Simple good communication works on them like a charm. They don’t have to deliberately focus.
.....However, most of us are somewhat effected by the tendency to live in our heads. For us, it is useful to consciously pay attention to the body. This conscious act is focusing proper. There are precise steps that show a person how to do this to begin with. The important thing is to know how to access oneself.
.....By focusing we mean giving the body its full partnership in one’s personality. This means listening respectfully to what, in its own way, it wants, feels, knows and perceives. For some lucky ones this is so natural that they have never considered anything else possible; others will say that their body doesn’t feel anything they don’t already know. Most people are somewhere in the middle: that is, somewhat neglectful of this deeper aspect of themselves.
.....Since its beginning depth psychology has always been fascinated by the so-called ‘unconscious’. It’s as though we’ve always known something was there and some very elaborate theories have been developed about it. What we have been looking for is a direct opening into it. It turns out that it is as close as it can possibly be – so close that we easily neglect it.
.....The meaning and purpose of MAP is to flesh out that neglect for the sake of a better life, no matter what our individual path and however we name it.

CUMULATIVE EVOLUTION IN FOCUSING

.....................by Stanley

......The most important aspect of focusing therapy is what Gendlin has called ‘the murky edge’. This is the feel that every problem has if you look into your vague bodily felt-sense. What you already know and feel about a problem is important, but not nearly so important as what you don’t know. This is why it is vital to patiently address the ‘murky edge’, for it is out of this that something new can arise that moves the problem forward.
......The interesting question that arises from this is: why is it that the organism (the body) is so much better at solving some problems than the ‘thinking mind’? I would like to propose that the organism has its own mode of solving problems that has developed over the long course of evolution and that the felt-sense is the further deliberate use of an evolutionary adaptation; in the same way that Renoir’s rosy nudes uses and elaborates the sexual instinct; or the way writing makes use of the ‘speech’ instinct that is hard wired in a way that writing is not. The felt-sense then is not in itself a Darwinian adaptation but makes use of an adaptation that very definitely is: the problem solving ability that has evolved in living organisms since the beginning of life.
.....This is the hypothesis I’ve been thinking about for a while and I have no idea how useful it will be, but the only way to find out is to throw ourselves into it and see what happens. Here goes !
....The course of a typical focusing session follows a somewhat recognisable pattern. Not the content of the session, but the stages. The person first roughly gets a handle on the problem they wish to address. Then comes looking into the felt-sense of it, the vague murky edge. This is often followed by a state of mild confusion – ie. what really is the problem about? It seems shadowy and indistinct. Then there is the sense that there are a number of ways of looking at it, a number of possible ‘takes’, but it is still not clear what is important and what isn’t. It’s all a bit confusing. Then, perhaps suddenly, something emerges that seems right – a way of looking at it, a different perspective that seems clear. This is what we call ‘a step’. The person might expand on this new ‘take’ until a new sense of uncertainty arises. Now again the murky edge appears along with new possible ways of continuing. That is one complete cycle. A session may consist of many such cycles. Of course, it is not always as tidy as I have described it, but generally it will go something like that.
.....It is important to understand that at each cycle, not only the person changes, but the environment changes. For example he may start out with: ‘George is very helpful – perhaps I am not appreciative enough’. Then he makes a step to: ‘Well, actually he doesn’t help, he’s too pushy.’ The person’s perception of the environment (George) has changed. So now there is a new situation, a different problem.
.....Now let’s see how the organism might be operating and what might be happening from what we know about the process of natural selection.
.....The conscious thinking mind solves problems by forward looking to the end condition it wants to achieve. It makes an end goal and then analyses what steps are necessary to achieve it. The process in which the organism engages is quite different. If we imagine this to be analogous to the algorithmic process of natural selection, then what is being sorted out is which ‘take’ on the problem will move the organism forward – just one step.
.....In the murky edge the organism is already selecting everything that is relevant to the initial problem, call it problem A. The ‘everything that is relevant’ is what Gendlin calls ‘the implicit intricacy’ of the problem. This felt-sense is murky because nothing is as yet differentiated. There are many possibilities. Nothing has as yet been selected which will move the organism forward. It is conceivable that in the murky edge there is competition between the different factors that could be the next step – felt by the person as a sense of doubt or murkiness.
.....From these possibilities the best step is now selected which comes a sense of decisive forward movement. This then created a new circumstance, a new problem or a different aspect of the problem. It is as though the first step ‘breeds’ further possible steps, from which another step is selected.
.....Let’s put it again in another way: out of the implicit intricacy of the murky edge, one factor is eventually selected and is felt explicitly as a new development or ‘take’ on the original problem ‘A’ – (like the example above: ‘Well, actually he’s not helpful, he’s pushy). Now we have something different. It is no longer problem ‘A’ we are dealing with. Something has shifted and we now have problem ‘B’ with different factors. .....Again, there is the implicit intricacy of a number of possible ‘takes’ or steps from this. Out of these one will be selected that will carry the person forward. The person is carried along a line of development that is ‘self-selecting’ at each stage; each stage being a ‘better’ or ‘deeper’ solution. But the ultimate outcome is not predictable – that is exactly its advantage. The outcome is not determined by what you already know or are biased towards.
.....In modern engineering they are using computer generated evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to mimic the processes of natural selection and random mutation by ‘breeding’, selecting and re-breeding possible designs to produce the fittest ones. It is a similar process to natural selection, but not quite.
.....When we look at focusing, one thing is abundantly clear: there is some precise sorting and selecting that goes on out of sight. It is certainly not the way the thinking, planning mind works. The focuser merely gives attention to the edge and to what comes from it.
.....The way I have described this process may sound a bit mechanical, but that’s only because it’s difficult to lay out. In actual operation it’s as smooth and seamless as organic life itself.
.....The cumulative evolution at occurs in focusing is far more accurate and economical than ‘plans’, which are likely to be dominated by fixations. It can arrive at a satisfactory solution very quickly – perhaps in less than 10 ‘generations’ – the space of one session. .....Cumulative evolution adapts very accurately – that is, it harmonises the organism with the environment in a way that promotes and maximises the quality of life.
In focusing one thing is very noticeable. It is that one is always surprised at the enormous amount of detail that emerges from any problem, detail that one never suspected was involved. This can be understood as the multiple perspectives or possible next steps that jostle with each other as they compete, mutate and breed, becoming as they do so subjected to the process of selection, before one ‘take’ becomes a constant, giving one a sense of clarity and understanding.
.....In therapy working with the Darwinian idea of cumulative evolution makes it far more distinctive what we mean by the term ‘process’.
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I thought of a little joke that can make fun of this essay:
“I have an attitude problem – in fact all my attitudes have a problem.
They all want to have babies !”

THE INVISABLE ELEPHANT

...............by Stanley

....In our work we talk about respect – respect for the person. Some of us even practice it. Respect means a non-interfering, careful attention to what is. It means a humble passion to know what is going on, deference and a delicate caring for the structure of reality, a reverence for the facts that are none of our own personal making; the other person is the unfolding reality we respect.
.....David Attenborough was on TY1 last night all excited about Ida, the 4.1 million year old humanoid fossil they’ve found. Scientists say she is the famous missing link in the evolutionary chain of human kind. But will the biblical creationists give up ? Of course they won’t. They’ll go on arguing that God made the world six thousand years ago. This got me thinking about respect for truth, about the love and curiosity to unravel the secrets of how things really are.
.....Ida was found in Germany, but think of those archaeologists with their young students who go into the desert looking for barely visible fossil remains, kneeling under the sweltering Ethiopian sun, carefully brushing away grains of sand around the precious find, buried perhaps for millions of years – helping them reconstruct the true story of our ancient ancestors. I’d call that respect.
.....That attitude is no different! It’s the same quality the good counsellor or therapist has. Those young student archaeologists are lucky being taught so thoroughly how to respect. We have more in common them than we do with some in our helping profession who have only been taught to pay lip-service to respect, who really and truly have never been shown how.
.....A client once said to me that they felt lost. It was one of those throw away remarks that turned out to be a deep global feeling, first experienced when she was very young. For quite a while in session she wondered all around it, trying to see it differently, trying to find out why it was like this, trying to understand it.
.....Finally, she said, ‘just let me say “I’m lost”.
.....I replied, ‘All right, just say “I’m lost”’
.....“I’m lost”, she said – and said it several times as though it was a relief – breathing and sighing.
.....Finally, (and I thought this was marvellous) she said,
.....‘Now I know I am lost, I don’t have to find myself.’
.....That’s what she said. Isn’t that completely awe-inspiring?
.....Acknowledging how things actually are, just that, is not only respectful; it is a powerful psychological act. In this case, just getting that she was lost, plainly and simply getting it, letting it be as it is, she found herself.
.....As simple as that.
.....Anyway, that night after watching the news snip with David Attenborough and thinking about science and counselling and ‘respect’, I had a dream. There was this swamp and, barely showing above the surface, was the skin of an elephant. Just a patch of skin – the whole dead carcass must be sunk deep in the swamp. Clearing away some of the bog the elephant moved slightly – it was still alive!
.....Sometimes in therapy when feelings are running underground, when some unknown something is going on, I will say,
.....‘There is an invisible elephant in the room’!
......It’s a joke, but it’s a way of noticing the feel of something that hasn’t come out into the open yet. Buried but alive. It helps to foster a curiosity for what is being overlooked, so we can work carefully, respectfully, brushing away the grains of sand.

CREATIVE CHANGE.

..................by Stanley

.....Nobody invented writing. Stick-pictures engraved onto clay tablets 3000 years ago, hieroglyphs they’re called, were not yet words or letters. Symbols for ‘bird’ or ‘house’ looked like stylised representations of the things themselves. This was not writing as we know it, but it opened possibilities that grew into the alphabet system. Just think what that made possible, step by step – each step emerging as a possibility inherent in what had gone before – until now there is not a single aspect of our civilisation that isn’t dependent on writing.

.....If there is one thing Darwin taught us it is that in nature as in culture, there are no master plans; no grand designs. Creative change doesn’t happen that way. No one invented the steam engine out of the blue. Its possibility emerged out of the burgeoning industrial age. It's impossible to imagine the steam engine being even thought of, let alone invented, in the Stone Age. James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine, simply realised what was immanently possible in his time. This is why so many great discoveries are made simultaneously by different people in different places. 

.....Leonardo da Vinci drew up a flying machine. But it went no further than his imagination. The Wright Bros were inspired by a toy helicopter given them by their father and made of bamboo and cork with a rubber band to power its rotor. In later years they said it was this toy that animated their interest in flying. The thing is, the toy actually flew. It was possible. Its time had come.

.....I want to switch to a question closer to home. Can you invent yourself ? How do people change? What about creative plans to be a better person?  What about setting goals, strategies and grand designs? People who come into the sphere of therapy invariably want to change. They have ideas and fantasies of the sort of person they would like to be. In practical life, of course, it is important to make plans. Much can be said and thought about this; but I want to hone in on the question of ‘personal change’, how does creative change happen in one’s personality? 

.....Putting aside for a moment all those objective areas where plans and program are obviously essential, the truth is, personal change doesn’t happen by design. Personal change evolves incrementally. No one invents it. In this there is no foresight. Personal change evolves out who you actually are, slowly out of what you have just become, the you that has just this moment emerged. This is why we can never predict the course of a session; not the therapist or the client; nobody can, because there are no maps. You are always emerging out of what you just were;  and what emerges is governed by what is possible; and what is possible is governed by what has just emerged. What is possible for you at this moment is limited by what you have become; as well as the real options available that are only visible from the present that is just happening.

 .....When dealing with personal problems, whatever your goals, purposes and fantasies may have been, they have to be revised or abandoned as they come up against present reality. Plans and ideas that are ill-adapted to meet present circumstances are like biological species that become extinct. Only those ideas and purposes that create a ‘psychological niche’, a place where you can thrive – only those ideas and purposes will survive and carry you forward. 

.....What kind of person you become will be shaped by  the concrete possibilities that open up – in this moment ! This kind of evolutionary process can have no certain knowledge of the future. But two things are required: one is the desire to live well  – including those near and dear to you; the other is to be in touch as an organism with constantly changing reality as it presents itself.

.....You can perhaps guess how I am moving closer to the psychological theory of focusing. I’m trying to see how it's analogous to evolution in the larger sense; how individual therapy is an evolutionary process in miniature.

.....When a client has an unresolved problem in her life and is in touch with the felt-sense, she has an open ended attitude to what may come. There are no recipes. There are a host of ways to look at the problem. She looks at her vague, bodily felt-sense of all that.  There is no master recipe that can guide this process. There may be wishes and desires, but they are part of the problem. 

.....For a start, no one can even say what attitude to adopt to the problem. 

.....The real psychological question is: which way of looking at the problem will finally dominate all the other ways of looking at it?  One will – and all the others will become extinct. The one that survives will be the one that provides the ‘niche’, the space that will carry living forward. But before she happens upon that idea no one can say what it will be. Evolution has no foresight.

.....When she hits on the right idea or attitude she will have an ‘experiential shift’ – what we call ‘ a therapeutic step’. That’s where a living space, her ‘niche’,  will open up. Her whole orientation to the problem might change. She may even realise that what she thought was the problem wasn’t at all. That will lead on to the next round – the same process, but incrementally carrying her forward. 

.....It is important to realise that she, as an organism, is solving the problem in a similar way that we develop antibodies when attacked by a virus. Viruses are constantly evolving to keep open their own survival ‘niche’; and consequently the body is constantly dealing with unknowns of all kinds for which there are no precedents and no pre-packaged solutions. 

.....In therapy, the innate intelligence of the body, working in collaboration with the person’s conscious personality, is the key to success. My idea in this essay was to see if our basic knowledge of evolution can throw any light upon the processes that happen in psychological focusing.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PERSON.

............................by Stanley

.....Like children, the best scientists have always asked silly questions like: ‘why does an apple fall down instead of falling up?’ Or ‘Is white really a colour?’ Evolutionary psychology is still at this stage, asking questions like: ‘Why do we like sweet things?’ ‘Why do we hate the smell of rotten meat?’ or ‘Why are we so afraid of snakes and spiders?’. ‘Why do we smile?’ ‘Why are babies cute’?
.....Of course, these questions are asked against a background of a suspicion that there might be an evolutionary reason why these universal human traits exist. The fact that they do not have to be learned, but are innate, gives a clue for us to suspect that they are genetically inherited – and that can only happen as a result evolutionary adaptation long before we were ‘civilised’.
.....From the birth of Christ to our day is only 35 generations; the Pleistocene era, during which we humans developed all our human faculties, lasted 80,000 generations – a somewhat lengthy but neglected period of our history. So, when you find a modern human trait that can be found across all cultures it means that it is part of a universal human nature developed during that long period.
.....I suppose this essay is really an exercise in developmental psychology big-time.
.....But now, I want to ask a question that is close to the heart of our work: does every human being, no matter what their culture, consider themselves, or even want to be, ‘a person’, someone with choice, a self with a sense of unique existence? Maybe not. Maybe this capacity is a late development not built into our human nature, but more like the ability to read or write, abilities that have to be learned. The capacity to speak a language is inherited – a baby will begin to speak without coaching. But it has to learn how to read and write; these faculties are learned on top of the genetic pre-disposition to speak a language, any language, an ability that was developed long before writing and reading. ‘Unlike its component parts such as vision and speech, which are genetically organised, reading (and writing) has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations.’ 1
.....I’m thinking maybe it’s the same with the ability to be a person. Maybe we are not primed to be conscious, subjective agents, but rather to be super-aware of external agents. 2
.....Being a person doesn’t come naturally; you could say that it's unnatural. If we manage to do it we build it on top of our genetic pre-disposition to be aware, not of ourselves, but of external agencies, dangerous external agencies that would like us for breakfast.
.....In child development an awareness of external agencies comes before an awareness of the self as an agent. Self awareness as a separate person is a later development and comes when the child realises that they can deceive. In ancestral times, in the 1.6 million years we were hunter-gatherers, it was vital to be super-aware of external agencies. There were always predators lurking, waiting to strike; and there were no houses or fences to protect us. We are genetically powerfully predisposed to be wary of other agencies and their intentions. Beyond our immediate family and group, trust doesn’t come easily.
.....Evolution means slow incremental development. Nothing springs from nothing. Every biological change is built on a pre-developed structure. An imaginary proto-human in the Pleistocene didn’t just sit down one nice day, whereupon it was suddenly revealed to him that he was a person. First and foremost he would have had to be aware of other agencies, sources of nurturing, food and danger – always focused on their intentions towards him.
.....So total was this orientation that there was no notion that storms, floods or lightening were natural phenomena. These had to be living things with their own devious purposes; and so evolved demons, spirits, gods and finally religion; not to mention our whole rich world of the imagination.
.....As we know, children the world over are able to spontaneously create imaginary worlds and to populate them with all kinds of friends and enemies. Mythologies are the stories of our culture’s late childhood. We should remember that the basic instincts upon which all this is built are the very real circumstances that our distant ancestors experienced in the pre-historic years of our early childhood on the African savannah .
.....You might argue that in these early days the instinct for self preservation would surely have been strong enough to give a sense of ego, a sense of oneself. Certainly the instinct for self preservation is strong, but this is not the same as being a conscious agent. To be alert to the unpredictable behaviour of predators or game is not the same as to be alert to one’s own existence. In hunting or being hunted, for example, one doesn’t have to be afraid of what one’s own next move is. You are not unpredictable in the same sense. The intentions you have to keep your eye on are whoever or whatever is out there.
.....I am suggesting that our awareness of being a person is not biologically natural, but is built on top of an instinctive awareness of others as intentional agencies. Because of this powerful instinct a modern human, I think, struggles to be a person, a self-motivated, responsible, thinking agent. Our overriding concentration naturally goes to what others want, what others are doing, what the other’s intentions are, what they are up to.
.....For those who do struggle to be a person and, as the oft repeated phrase goes, tries to ‘find who I am’, the tendency is always to revert to an awareness of others before oneself. This emphasis is conducive to social cohesion, but it is also responsible for our susceptibility to be too influenced by leaders, stars, dictators, helpful bullies and manipulators of the mob, drowning out our attempts at individual and personal existence. Also, politically this makes democracy vulnerable and tenuous; and psychologically it makes religion, directed as it is towards the BIG OTHER, more popular than therapy which is directed towards the inwardness of the self.
.....I am suggesting that because of this most basic and powerful instinct it is understandable why people can be so easily conned and manipulated. It also makes understandable why the superego is so powerful in modern humans. We are never quite sure whether the superego is our friend or our enemy; is it punishing or giving good advice? The superego is the representative dangerous ‘other’ we keep in our heads. The influence of our parents in forming the superego is secondary – important but secondary as Freud knew. It's likely that its shaped primarily by our evolutionary inheritance – which Freud didn’t know.
..... In trying to overcome and lessen the influence of the superego so that we can become more authentic as persons it is as well to acknowledge what powerful factors we are up against; I mean by that, of course, our upbringing – our very early upbringing. The good news, apparently, is the miraculous plasticity of our inheritance. We are all born with the ‘capacity to change what is given to us by nature ... We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs’. 3
[1] Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid; the story of science and
reading brain. Icon Books, Cambrigde, 2008
[2] Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: religion as a natural phenomena, Viking, 2006
[3] Wolf, Ibid.

ON SPIRITUALITY

.........................by Stanley


....For most people ‘spirituality’ simply means the opposite of ‘materialism’. If asked for further clarification they might say that there is more to life than money and possessions; pressed further, they might say it means making room for realities that we don’t understand. A sense of spirituality, they might say, does not allow that kind of scientistic dogmatism that wants to tie everything down, leaving no room for mystery. Spirituality is the sense that there is something invisible beyond our mundane, everyday existence that is, at the same time, vital to sustaining it.
....Such a view has a very long history going back to Greek thought that was later used to formulate Christian theology. This view divides the whole of reality into just two substances or essences. One is ‘mind’ and the other is ‘matter’. Spirituality is just another word for the ‘mind’ category. Basically it means that you are a soul in a body, a ‘the ghost in the machine’.
....Perhaps the value for us moderns is that ‘spirituality’ provides a shelter for all we don’t know, for our sense of the great wonder and mystery of life. And perhaps we need that room where we can house our vast sense of ignorance. That very sense is one of our most important intellectual qualities. Without it a person is a pig-headed and ignorant know-all. With that sense of the unknown one can be truly humble and blessed with curiosity. So maybe the value of the notion of spirituality is that it provides a safe-haven for this most wonderful gift: the knowledge of our ignorance and room for the many-sidedness of life.
....Of course, the question arises: safe-haven from what? I have already suggested: safe from the rising tide of one-eyed scientists, technocrats and know-alls; and for us caregivers of the soul it is a bastion against the behavioural sciences and drug-happy psychiatrists. A sense of the spiritual saves us from falling into the crass materialism that seems to be enveloping our modern helping professions.
....But the idea of spirituality as a defence mechanism undermines the very notion itself. It sets us up as against so-called ‘materialism’; at the same time validating the existence of what we argue against – as all defence mechanisms do.
....The truth is that we are shit-scared of science. It seems to want to turn everything into mechanisms, locking us into a mechanical universe where there is no room for imagination and freedom. We are afraid of materialism. What this fails to understand is that, underpinning science is always a philosophy; and philosophy can always be talked about and questioned deeply. I don’t mean questioning the facts that science has discovered, like physics or evolution, but what at a deeper level they mean or further imply. As Daniel Dennett says, ‘There is no such thing as philosophy-free science’.
....We shouldn’t really run scared. How about being brave enough to consider the universe as one single substance. What would this mean? It would mean that we don’t need the distinction between spirit and matter, between the supernatural and the natural, between science and soul. It would mean that we don’t need a special separate realm to house the unknown. It would mean that the known universe and all that we don’t know is one single continuum.
....Even neuroscience is leaving behind the idea that the body is a machine. Randolph Nesse says that our genetic knowledge now reveals ‘that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by (natural) selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.’ But, he goes on, although the body is indescribably complex this ‘implies nothing supernatural. Bodies and their origins are purely physical.’
....Without actually saying it, all he means by ‘purely physical’ is simply that we do not need another separate supernatural realm to account for it. This is being brave enough to think of the universe as a single continuum.
....In this light ‘physical’ doesn’t have any meaning; any more than ‘spiritual’. They are really superfluous and misleading labels, well past their use by date.
....As an aside, in ancestral times, as in primitive societies today, there was no distinction between spirituality and science. Their science was eminently practical.

INSTINCT AND THE FELT-SENSE

...................by Stanley
Let’s start with a simple observation. There is a difference between our ‘head-take’ on a situation and our ‘body-take’ of the same situation. Put very simply, our head-take is how we ‘think’ about a problem; our body-take is how we ‘feel’ about it. Quite often the two are distinctly different. We often say colloquially, ‘my head tells me one thing and my heart something else.
....I am going to use the term ‘head-sense’ to stand for our, analytical, cognitive, thinking mind; and ‘body-sense’ for what we have come to know as the ‘felt-sense’. ‘Body-sense’ and ‘felt-sense’ I shall use interchangeably – they are the same thing.
....Lets clear the deck first. When I speak of the body-sense I do not mean ‘the unconscious’. You can have a direct and immediate awareness of your body-sense; this is not what is classically meant by ‘the unconscious’. Psychoanalysis has its place, but not here. I want to link two other disciplines: the psychology of focusing and evolutionary psychology. I want to examine how the felt-sense may have evolved during our long history.
....In therapy we focus on the felt-sense to discover our feelings on any issue. But we have to clearly distinguish between the felt-sense and the practice of focusing on it.
....Focusing is a deliberate, intentional action. The felt-sense is not intentional, but rather the body’s instinctive, immediate perception of any situation. It works whether you like or not. This body-sense must have been an adaptation that was slowly developed over millions of years and it is always active.
....Here’s something that’s fairly obvious. Our body-sense is something we are born with. Being hungry or fearful or sexy are bodily reactions that are instinctual. We don’t have to learn how to feel these things; we are all born with the capacity to react in these ways. As we say, they are hard-wired. Like the felt-sense they are universal, meaning they come with our genetic makeup, our human nature.
....Our head-sense seems to be different. We imbibe the logic of our culture, our language, our ways of thinking and our family dynamics. These are not universals. Different family – different way of thinking; different culture – different head sense.
....Our animal nature evolved according to Darwinian natural selection. 98% of our genes are the same as those of the chimpanzees. Six million years ago there was a speciation divergence that led to homo sapiens. What we call our body-sense is a gradual adaptation developed since then. During most of this time our survival depended upon skills that were non-linguistic, our mammalian body senses that were non-analytical non-cognitive, but highly effective.
....For any organism awareness of what is going on in the environment is vital for survival. I am suggesting that the felt-sense is our basic animal awareness of the environment primarily geared for survival in the broadest sense. It was developed over those millions of years of our early history and is now hard-wired and an inherited characteristic.
....An organism is only connected to life in ways that are useful to it – that is, ways that promote survival. Purely as an organism it is not important for us to know that earth revolves around the sun or to perceive the molecular structure of a meat pie before we eat it. The smell of a pie, yes. We are biologically hardwired to be put off by the smell of bad meat. That has always been important to avoid.
....So there is a difference between the kind of environment we were originally adapted to and the one we live in today. But for the felt-sense there isn’t as hard and fast a difference between these two worlds as one would expect. This is a curious and puzzling fact and it leads us to ask: has the felt-sense also adaptively evolved?
....What we call our ‘environment’ is what is useful for us to perceive. I am suggesting that what we call our ‘felt-sense’ is a wholesale but biased perception of our environment that reacts to it instinctively. This sense helps us in the close encounters of the everyday kind as it did for our pre-human ancestors. But, as an organism, our relationship to the environment didn’t stop with the beginning of civilization; and maybe at the organismic level there have been evolutionary changes in what we call the felt-sense. For example, we know that the body-sense is very sensitive to being understood. We know very precisely that the felt-sense will reject any description of how it feels that doesn’t fit. You say, ‘I am angry… No, that’s not it. (consulting your body-sense) I am irritated. That’s it. I am IRRITATED !’ We are the only animals on the planet that have developed such a high degree of organismic sophistication; yet this body-sense is still anchored in its original holistic pre-cognitive nature.
....This would clearly suggest that the body-sense has evolved enough to grasped language as part of its environment. In other words at organismic level of functioning we also now have a very refined feeling for language. Even more remarkably, we can also have a feeling for science, a feeling that is different from the scientific mode of conceptual thinking. A scientist reports that the solution to a chemical problem about carbon rings came to him in a dream or the answer to a mathematical equation came to her in the toilet. But it seems that the body-sense still doesn’t think analytically – it retains its original ability for holistic survival sensitivity and for flashes of insight that are instantaneous.
....We know that the bodily felt-sense can somehow synthesise a new idea in an abstract field. Any scientist will tell you that discovery sometimes comes in a flash that doesn’t follow a rational step by step process - that comes afterwards as a confirmation. The body-sense can solve logical or theoretical puzzle by leaping, as we say, outside the square. Just how it does this is difficult to say. Of course, such a solution could not arise without the head-sense’s grasp of the theoretical problem in the first place. But what is clear is that the organism, as a bodily sense, contributed something vital. On the question of this cooperation between different parts of the self, evolutionary biologist Nicholas Humphries says:
What makes the parts of an oak tree belong together – the branches, roots, leaves, acorns ? They share a common interest in the tree’s survival… Then, here’s the question: What makes the parts of a person belong together – if and when they do? The clear answer has to be that the parts will and do belong together just in so far as they are involved in the common project of creating that person’s life… they are engaged in one and the same enterprise: the enterprise of steering me – body and soul – through the physical and social world.
....There is a good evolutionary reason why women generally are more in touch with the body-sense. Multitasking has always been necessary for the woman because of the nature of her tasks. The ability to multitask using intuition and instant response to novel situations is an attribute of the body-sense. For our ancestors, men had to be concentrated on specific tasks like hunting, building and defense. As a consequence, men may have adapted by developing a larger and more dominant head-sense that can more effectively concentrate.
....It might even be profitable to conceive that the head-sense is built on top of the body-sense as a continuous evolutionary adaptation. Yet still, we actually experience the body-sense as quite a different mode of being.
....In therapy we discover that our felt-sense shows us the immediate step in any situation – always in a life enhancing direction. Not a logical line forward – but the next step necessary. When we stop and focus on a problem we consult this body-sense; but we are not given an awareness of simply what is going on. The body-sense does not just give us raw data and leave it to our everyday head-sense to work out how to use it. The ‘take’ of the body-sense is not unselective. Precisely the opposite, it is slanted; it is always relevant to survival. In any situation not any move we could make will be appropriate. The body-sense always produces the next step – and that step is geared toward the broadest goal of survival: well-being, furtherance and aliveness – not only for oneself, but for those upon whom we depend. Indeed, this simple and pronounced bias is often missing in our head-sense of a situation. The head-sense can be so enmeshed in ridiculous cultural ideas that it often fails to cut through the crap. Much of the head-stuff we harbour are culturally transmitted viruses (memes) , such as toxic religions that are quite inimical to survival; and every culture is swimming in lesser adverse absurdities that compete to fill our heads.
....The felt-sense is there whether we turn our attention towards it or not. It is there because it is an inherited, instinctual part of our nature. The deliberate action of turning towards it is what we call ‘focusing’. This psychological ability is not instinctual, but acquired; and, as we know, individually acquired characteristics are not inherited. We don’t come equipped with a built-in ability to psychologically focus.
....Our environment is no longer merely the natural world as it was. We have developed an external environment that is structured and symbolic and our head-sense is part of that world. But make no mistake, this created world has been a crucial, perhaps the crucial factor, in our survival as a species. But at the same time, it can put us out of sync with our instinctive nature which was adapted to a quite different natural environment. Our instinctive survival nature – our felt-sense – has its own ‘take’ on this new environment and it is not so hemmed in by arbitrary and fixed rules and injunctions and thus it is more simple, creative and original.
....There are negative cultural factors that can fill our head-sense and divorce us from the bodies. The overblown work ethic and achievement fantasies of modern society are not helpful; neither is our education system that’s geared to promoting academic concentration that tends to sever our vital connections. There are also family cultures that are openly hostile to any manifestation of intuition and imagination and that fail to nurture the body-sense.
....We know that some people are well tuned-in to their body-sense and can make immediate survival decisions. Even such fortunate people have areas where their natural good sense, their felt-sense, has no input into their lives. They have to be shown how to focus on these areas so that their body-sense can help them take the necessary steps to go forward in living.
....We should not be dismayed by the idea that some of our basic psychological qualities are biologically inherited. Evolutionary psychology has done a great deal of interesting and valuable work that makes a lot of sense, extending enormously our idea of ‘history’ and what makes us tick. I’ve tried to show here how the relatively new conceptions of psychological focusing might be more understandable when looked at from the evolutionary perspective.

[1] Humphrey, Nicholas. One Self: a meditation on the unity of consciousness. Social Research,
67, no. 4, 32-39, 2000.
[1] Dawkins, Richard. Viruses of the Mind. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

.......................Louise and Ferdy: dramatic personifications.

....................................................by Stanley

....Are you missing your feelings? If so you’re lucky, for a long time I didn’t have any feelings to miss. Well, that’s not quite true. I did have feelings, but they were only for other people, not for me. I was known as a very feeling and sympathetic person. I could only feel sympathetic, sad or angry for others, on behalf of others, as it were. These days I am beginning to feel some of that compassion for myself, but for most of my life it never occurred to me. Even more so when I had children. Having children just reinforced my urge to self-sacrifice. I didn’t look upon myself as a good mother – although people used to tell me I was too good for my own good. I knew in a way they were right, but being that way felt natural. If you have lived most of your life without your own feelings it only occasionally seems like something is missing.

,,,,But now I know I also had a selfish reason for being so selfless. The first time I ever felt angry it surprised and horrified me. It happened in the kitchen when my husband criticized the way I cooked the potatoes. Small enough thing – nothing unusual. But there was a kitchen knife lying on the bench. Something rose up in me and I wanted to plunge the knife into his back. That moment in my mind I actually did it. I ran into the bedroom shaking with fear.

....It was after that experience I started therapy. I soon realised I did have a selfish reason for being so unselfish: I was afraid of myself – afraid, not only of my anger, but any sympathy I might have for myself. In my childhood they called it ‘wallowing in self-pity’. A big no-no. For me, feeling for others was a way of self-preservation. Deep down, the only way I knew to be accepted.

....In my sessions we did a lot of work on the feelings in my body. At first I didn’t know what my therapist was talking about. I got irritable when he asked me to look into my body to see how I felt. That irritability was actually the beginning of a feeling that was already there. Only it turned out to be much more than irritability – it was rage and sorrow.

....Another thing I found out was why I often felt so tired. Eventually I learned that to have my feelings I had to come home. Again and again I had to come home – I mean come home to my body, the place where you are supposed to live. I was always tired because deep down I didn’t want to live, I wasn’t living with myself, for myself. My body was my enemy. It had all the feelings I didn’t want, all the feelings that could have ruined me if they got out. I went through a period where I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort it took to stay alive and cope.

....The only way not to have feelings is to simply vacant. Now, when I meet a person like I used to be, I recognise that ‘no-one-at-home’ look. I feel sorry for them. They make a good show of being alive; doing all the right things; smiling and nodding at the right times. But that’s all it is – a show.

....When I was young I was taught a big lesson: having feelings was dangerous. Nobody said as much, but that’s how it was. I was the youngest with three bossy brothers, a macho father and a useless mother. I had to make a survival choice – hide myself and my feelings or face being ostracised and annihilated. That’s what it was like. Choosing to live took one sharp act of decision: leave home ! Home – the place where all one’s feelings are. Leave them all at home. Leave ones primary home whilst still living on in the family home. Strange isn’t it? One chooses to live and be good; set the body up to make the right noises and look OK – otherwise stand back and just watch yourself pretending to be in the game of life. Watch my body acting whilst having nothing to do with it. All the while knowing somehow one is hiding. I used to do that physically too. I used to hide in the kennel with the dog.

....Today life is much more difficult. Well, perhaps not so much for me, but for others whom I seem to puzzle. Some think I have changed for the worse. Particularly my husband Ferdy. He’s a good man, but he now finds me difficult. I feel sorry for him, but not so sorry that I will give up myself. My main problem with him now is he stifles me. The one thing he hates is me saying ‘I want some space’. I really don’t know whether  our marriage will survive and I don’t really know how I will feel if it doesn’t; but I do know I can’t go back to how it was.