THE PROCESS OF BECOMING:rewriting the past

  .............. by Stanley

...Alfred North Whitehead, who died in 1947, was an upmarket Harvard philosopher who wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of science, physics, metaphysics and education. He co-authored the epoch making Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell. Quite an influential joker.
...Whitehead said there are two different ways we perceive things, two different ‘modes of perception’. The first is simple raw data, how things just seem to the immediate senses, what he called ‘presentational immediacy’ – ‘a barren display’ of things, where everything is just as it presents itself: a chair is just a chair, a mountain is just a mountain, a telegraphy pole is just a telegraph pole.  The second is more primitive. It is our feeling of connection with the whole, of the interconnectedness of everything, past and present. It doesn’t have the clarity and definition of presentational immediacy. It is vague, undifferentiated and fuzzy. Whitehead said, it is ‘heavy with the contact of things gone by, which lay their grip on our immediate selves’.
...This more basic mode perception you will recognise as describing exactly what Gendlin refers to as the ‘felt-sense’.  Gendlin’s original contribution is his emphasis that this sense can be directly accessed in therapy.
... How Whitehead’s more primitive mode of perception can work in therapy, Neville Bernie writes:

'Causal efficacy is an immediate, direct, non-sensory connection with our client in a universe in which all things are interconnected. The whole past experience of the universe flows into us in each moment. We may recognise this in our gut feelings, in our intuition, in emotions which do not seem to be related to anything we can observe in the present moment, in occasional experiences of knowing more than our senses can tell us, in premonitions of what our client is about to say, in instinctive behavior which responds to a moment of crisis without time for reflection. Through this mode of perception, which has been seriously undervalued and denied by modern science, we experience our client directly and internally, and acknowledge that vague tugs on our awareness may be meaningful.'
...One consequence of this primal mode of perception is that the distinction between past and present becomes fuzzy. It alters the simple way the past seems to effect the present. To common sense it seems as though the past stamps its mark indelibly upon the present, as when a person has something in their life they can ‘never get over’.
...Whitehead had something interesting to say about the whole problem of ‘time’ and ‘causation’. Put simply, there is a sense in which the present ‘causes’ the past. He said that the active ingredient in our experience cannot be the past. The past is dead, it’s gone. It is over and done with. It cannot be active or creative in itself. It has done its dash. It’s inert. ‘What is active is not the past, but the present actuality which is in the process of becoming’.
...Our present experiencing is where it all happens, where the action is. Although the past seems unalterable, this does not mean that it irretrievably shapes the present. There is a sense in which the past is passive and indeterminate; we can only view it from the present, a present that is always dynamic and actively changing. The past is like a piece of clay that can be moulded. I can tell stories about my past. I can say that my father died when I was three years old, and that my marriage broke up when I was thirty-five. But these facts are the bare bones, they have the quality of raw data – incidents that happened – full stop. All the consequences and infinite ramification are hidden, they radiate out into the cosmos, yet they are no less real than the bare events themselves, each considered as singularity.
...The past only has meaning in that it lives in the present with me, changing colour as I change. Shift viewpoint a little and you have a different past, a different story. The stories I tell about my past are much more determinative of my future than the singular facts upon which I weave my story.
...But the bare bones of my past I must never neglect because somehow they will always feature one way or another as my life goes forward. In fact, without them I can never be truly creative. Without the details of my past I would be lost in space. They are the materials of my imagination. Without them I have nothing to reflect upon, no stepping stones to my depths. And sometimes in my best moments the bare bones of my past come alive and flesh out with a life I never knew they had.
...Only such ideas, or something like them, makes therapy possible. How else could I ‘rewrite my childhood’ as Bachelard suggests. It is my present ‘becoming’ that shapes things. But the essential materials of my art-work are those ephemeral ghosts of the past. However gruesome, I depend upon them.  I grow directly out of them. I need them like a plant needs compost. I know I cannot shape my life just as I fancy, so that I never get carried away too far by my creative abilities.
...Looking deeply, there is always more to the a past than one thought – always more to it. The past is not simply a set of facts like the pebbles on a beach.  What we call our past is a slanted story that somehow got fixed; and it all depends on who spins the story and what mood we are in when we tell it. 
...When a person has been in therapy for a while we realise there is a certain situation in the past they regularly return to. Each time they revisited it the story changes, sometimes dramatically, sometimes subtly – but enough to gradually make a difference as their assessment of past people and situations change.
...Let’s say that way back there was an event that has always haunted me. I was hurt and it seems like an immovable fixture. There is no changing what happened or the effect it had on me – and still has. In therapy I find myself revisiting it as I have done many times. But I notice that each time it changes slightly. It is never the same twice – not exactly the same. I’m surprised that my story begins to involve other things I never suspected. And the more times I revisit it the more it changes, as though someone had revised the play when I wasn’t looking. New slants appear that throw a different light. This seems to be the process we are talking about – rewriting the past – the process of becoming.
...In therapy it’s not just my present possibilities that unfold; you could equally say my present unfolds my past. In that sense, the present, which is always in the process of becoming, is like an act of digestion that chews up the past and reconstitutes it for my present needs and purposes.

[1] Neville, Bernie. ‘What Kind of Universe? Rogers, Whitehead and Transformational Process. In Person Centred & Experiential Psychotherapies. Vol, 6. No 4. Winter 2007 
[2] Maclachlan, D.L.C.  Whitehead’s Theory of Perception. http://www.religion-     online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2839

REASSURANCE AND ALL THAT.

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

 

....If you are a therapist and a generous soul – as most counsellors are – then the temptation to give reassurance when the client desperately needs it, is almost overwhelming. 

....In listening-oriented therapy there is often a test moment early on when the client looks at you and is obviously waiting for you to say something. Maybe not to give her reassurance, but she obviously wants something from you. So far, she’s done all the talking – now it’s your turn! Maybe she is thinking: ‘what shall I talk about now’ and she is waiting for you to initiate the next move. That’s what conversation is – like a game of ping-pong. You don’t really initiate anything, you respond. You let what the other person says generate what you say next.

....It’s very safe if a session can be turned into a conversation. Maybe you can both have a tête-à-tête about why she is not such a bad person as she thinks she is. Or maybe you can try reassuring the client in some other way. Such conversations are nice, but relatively dead ends. And sometimes they turn into strenuous but affable arguments roughly along the following lines.

....I’m no good!

....Oh but…there are lots of ways…

....No I’m not.

....You are. Look at all the times…!

All of which is the standard ping-pong conversation the client has whenever she meets with another generous person.

....OK, so we’re not going to have this kind, or any kind, of conversation. So what is it about when the client is looking at you and waiting like that? Maybe she has simply run out of things to say and now faces a blank. In any case, there she is looking at you – waiting for you to say something. 

....This is crucial moment of decision. Do you help her out the easy way? 

....If you say, ‘Yes, go on’, she might reply, ‘Well, that’s it really’. Then you’re in a spot because now you have to reply; and here we go on a dead-end conversation – you’ve missed the crucial moment of decision. 

....What is this crucial moment of decision?

....It’s this: the client has to ask herself, ‘Do I have to look back inside myself to see what’s there now?’ 

.....The prospect of doing that continually for any length of time, not just talking, but looking moment by moment for what feelings arise is something the client is not used to. The only way to really help is to wait quietly for her to go on. If you don’t interrupt, if you don’t provide the distraction, the ping-pong game of conversation, there is no way out but for her to feel her way into what is coming up for her right now. 

....You might call this a beginner’s lesson in focusing; a good beginning, in one way, because it’s done by doing, rather than the more hazardous way of trying to explain.

 .....Of course, you could always say, ‘I can see you have come to a stop, but let’s just see what else is there for you’ (pointing her back to herself). That would be perfectly OK and it might work. It really doesn’t matter what you do at such moments of decision so long as you manage to put her on her own track of unfolding from within. 

.....Such unfolding always comes from the next unclear bodily sense of what has not yet formed into words, but yet wants to be said. We’ve called this the ‘felt-sense’. This is the looking into that murky  something, that a vague unformed feeling, that will give her the next step, the next image or idea, that will move her forward in the way she needs to go.

.....Each step always totally unpredictable. If she could have predicted it, or if she had known it, she would have already taken it. But she didn’t and she couldn’t – until the moment she stopped looking at you and looked into that fuzzy, indistinct sense of herself that she usually shies away from – especially when she is with other people. Only from this place will something come that’s surprises and moves things forward. 

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

.....Now we say that this entails looking into the bodily felt-sense. When I try to do this for myself I know I am working with an anomaly. I am doing something artificial, a deviation from my real state where there is no distinction between ‘me’ and ‘my body’. I am accepting the anomaly of how it has become for me in the course of my life; but when I came into this world there was no distinction. I was all one piece. As a child, for instance, when I wanted something, I wanted it with my whole being. I didn’t have to consult my bodily feelings to discover it. I yelled, I screamed, I reached out, my face went red, my blood pressure went up, I absolutely, damn well knew what I wanted. If you say that I had an idea – it’s true, but it was totally expressed in my physical being. 

.....Now for all kinds of reasons, as I grew up, I discovered this is not the way to go on. Yelling and screaming was non-productive. Splits and denials of all kinds finally resulted in ‘me’ not really quite knowing what I feel and what I really want. My body still had its own knowing, but now I am not quite connected to it. My body may even have become my enemy. So, at first, when I’m asked for my felt-sense it can feel all wrong. I am so used to living apart from it that asking me to feel it can seem very artificial. Yet being together with it is the way I once was in the beginning.

.....Still, anomaly though it is, ‘me’ has come a long way since then. I have grasped the world in ways that were impossible for me as an infant. 

.....There is a saying in Zen: ‘Before you start the practice mountains are mountains and trees are trees; when you are half way through the practice mountains are not mountains and trees are not trees; when you are through the practice mountains are mountains and trees are trees’.