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.