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.