LOVE & WAR part 2: our better nature

by Stanley

As civilization evolves our modes of living change; social practices that were once acceptable, like harsh corporal punishment of children, are no longer tolerated. And things that are ordinary to us, like having teenagers, would have horrified our forefathers. No doubt in the future ‘same sex marriage’, which causes so much heated debate now will, in the course of time, be quite unremarkable.

We are marginally different from what people were like fifty years ago. And if we read a Victorian novel, their drastically controlled manners and their censored emotional life is quite foreign to us. Taking only a slightly longer view, we are unimaginably different from what people were like in the Middle Ages; if you could be suddenly transported into that time the shock would blow you away – the disgusting smell if nothing else. We not only live in a different world, we are different people. One of the biggest differences is the amount of lethal damage we afflict on each other.

A good question is to ask is: Am I more likely die by the hands of another man now than say 100, or a thousand or ten thousand years ago? What would be my relative chances of scraping though life without being knocked off in one way or another? We have to look at the historical and archeological records to find out; and the evidence is that the probability of death by violence has been diminishing dramatically over time; my chances, and yours, of getting through life without being strangled, shot, executed, hung, blown-up, stabbed, killed in battle, mutilated, buried alive, raped, decapitated, lynched, assassinated or burned at the stake, are better now than at any other time in human history.

Even in our two recent world wars (including all the combatants) there was only a quarter the violent death rate as in the earliest hunter-gatherers societies; and the same is true of those groups that exist today, despite all our romantic imaginings about ‘indigenous cultures’. If we crunch the actual numbers, it turns out that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. In proportion to population, death by violence has been diminishing over historical time.

This thesis is hard to swallow because we watch the nightly news and pass on the pessimistic memes of current opinion. But no one has ever actually counted or crunched the statistics or done the thorough historical research. If death by violence in the last world war had been the same order of magnitude as it was in Neolithic times, the figures in our most recent wars would have numbered in the billions, not millions. In the West at least, by all standards of measurements there is an observable evolution, a civilizing process that has distinctly speeded up since the 17^th century; and this goes for all the areas of human violence: homicide, capital punishment, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, slavery, human sacrifice and superstitious killing.

Steven Pinker’s monumental new book, just published, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is a long overdue recognition of our better nature. It turns out that violence is not a single instinct, but a strategic response to circumstances. And the fact is, our cultural and social circumstances have changed out of all recognition over time and we have changed in synchrony with it. The interactive network of modern society could not exist with the mindset that existed in feudal times, prior to the emergence of the nation state. In most of Europe it was the nation state governed by the King that brought an end to the factions of squabbling feudal warlords.

This pacification process didn’t require a set of new genes because sympathy and empathy are also part of our evolutionary heritage, though on a smaller, family scale. The emergence of the nation state favoured these cooperative evolutionary adaptations. The gradual expansion of commerce and the interactive social networks we call trade, both within and among nations, made these inherited characteristics more dominant, since trade and commerce are functionally based on trust. And as our society got more complex, we depended more and more on each other. As my trading partner you are worth more to me alive than dead, however much we disagree.

Pinker shows, with an enormous amount of historical and archeological research, that violence has been on a variable but steady decline. He shows this, not by taking absolute numbers, but by calculations proportionate to the size of populations. This is obviously the only way to calculate because the greater the population, the greater total number of deaths by violence. Remember there are six billion of us today. The only measure is not the absolute numbers, but the proportion that die by violence.

There is a ‘New Age’ view that the ‘good old days’, where we lived in harmony with nature, was somehow better. But I’m afraid Thomas Hobbs had it right: life in a hunter-gatherer tribe was indeed ‘nasty, mean, brutish and short, quite unlike Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’; a theory that would have us believe that civilisation made us worse.

In biblical times and even in Greek Classical times whole cities, every enemy man woman and child, would be put to the sword as a matter of course; and this behaviour was given divine sanction. Normal life then was a constant fear of attack, rape, pillage and plunder. And it all goes down the sink-hole of fictionalized history on the TV screen – we don’t really believe it.

Later, in the Middle Ages, life was violent too. The myth of the heroic and gentlemanly knights of old is a fairy tale. The Barons were more like Mafiosi gangsters running incredible protection rackets – not unlike the bad old days in mob controlled Chicago, where the city was divided up into areas, each controlled by a mobster. The emergence of the central state where the King ruled over the Barons, although repressive, was an improvement and certainly less lethal.

It’s true there has been a long history of glorification formal war, as Hillman shows us, but war has lost the glamour it once had. In 1914 young men eagerly flocked to the colours, today they are more likely to burn their draft cards. War has become distinctly distasteful; and between nation states it is recognisably a zero-sum game – no one wins. ‘The kind of patriotism that enabled the people of Europe to endure two world wars now appears as archaic as the feudal loyalties that it had displaced’[1]

Today, the only popular reflection of the glorification of war is what we call ‘sporting events’. But these are surely an improvement on the games of blood that were played out in the Roman Coliseum.

Human nature has certain fixed characteristics, and yet it is malleable. It can be conditioned by circumstances and upbringing. Sure, we are wired for aggression, but also part of our biological inheritance is the capacity for love, cooperation, care and empathy. How these are all balanced is determined by the quality of the society in which we live and with which our human nature is inextricably interwoven.

What have certainly changed dramatically are the values with which we regard violence and cruelty. A stark illustration of this is the way today we regard the brutality of the God of Old Testament. Taken as a reflection of the standards of justice and moral behaviour – as it obviously was at the time – we simply ignore that part of the Bible. Yet we know full well that Christianity has gone hand in hand with torture and persecution beyond description. So much have our standards changed that Christians today more or less disown the Old Testament – like it’s not really important. But the violent sadism of early Christianity speaks clearly enough through its central symbol: the cross – an instrument of torture; and where we cannibalistically eat Christ’s body and drink his blood. We prefer to think that all this is merely symbolic (incidentally, the Vatican does not) because our moral feelings have changed.

Today we deplore capital punishment and the long waiting lists on death row in the backward states of the US. But we forget that not so long ago death sentences in England were meted out after a trial of only a few minutes; and the methods of execution were ghastly. You could be hung, your body taken down before you finally strangled, stretched on the rack, after which you would be castrated, disemboweled and your four limbs torn from your body and burned while you watched, if you were still conscious; and your crime – saying a rude word about the King. The spectators watching these public entertainments would have enjoyed the show. In 1660 Samuel Pepys records in his diary of how he and his party were at a public hanging-drawing-and-quartering in Charing Cross Road, after which they all went to a tavern for a feast of oysters.

But still the attachment to pessimism about the human saga persists. It’s almost as though we dare not think that human society and our social feelings have improved – let alone speak of progress. Have our humanitarian sensibilities progressed at all over time? It is a crucial question, for resting upon how we answer it depends whether we regard any effort to improve human wellbeing as a waste of time.

In this regard, Steven Pinker has done us a signal service in debunking the fashionable shadows of misanthropy. It is quite amazing how the critical reviews of Pinker’s book are polarized. One critic wrote ‘I have not read the book, but I entirely disagree with its hypothesis’. Well done!

We must remember that we always judge the misdeeds of present with the sensibilities of the present age. If we use those same sensibilities when we look at the past we can only be appalled at unimaginable extremities of everyday cruelty and violence, and amazed too that, at the time, it didn’t occur to anybody to think it was wrong.

In the last analysis it is not a question of optimism or pessimism, but of facts. And it is a fact that over time, at least in the matter of violence, war and homicide, there has been an improvement in the quality of the human pageant. No guarantee that it will continue – history is full of unexpected turns, but the historical facts remain. And as Pinker says, perhaps it is time we looked at what we have been doing right, instead of all the things we have done wrong.

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[1] Howard, Sir Michael. The Invention of Peace. Yale University Press, 2001

LOVE AND WAR

by Stanley

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built upon the renunciation of instinct. Sigmund Freud.

Everyone knows that women are from Venus and men are from Mars, but not everyone knows the real story from Homer’s Odyssey. Venus is, of course, the goddess of love, but she’s not the sort of warm, fuzzy love-girl you might expect. She is a ruthless sexual predator with no respect for marriage or fidelity – or at least, that’s how the beautiful goddess is portrayed. Her husband, Vulcan, poor chap, is a lame and unattractive smithy, a blacksmith, of whom, she says, she can always rely on for fixing things around the house. In other words, although he too is one of the gods, he sounds a pretty ordinary sort of chap trying to do the best he can with his adorable, but promiscuous wife.

One of the best stories in the Odyssey is where she has it off with Mars, the brutal and handsome god of war. There’s no doubt that, strong though he is, he is no match for her overwhelming sexual allure. Funny isn’t it: in real life it’s men who are inclined to be sexually predaceous. But as always, the woman gets the blame. Obviously, Mars is innocent – she enticed him and led him on.

Anyway, it turns out that Vulcan, probably limping along after a day’s honest toil in the workshop, catches the two of them in flagrante delicto, red handed, as they say. Being a man (or rather a god) of technical ingenuity, Vulcan knocks up a strong net which he casts over them while they are actually doing it. Well, they are simply caught and can’t get away. To punish them Vulcan calls upon all the gods of Olympus to come and witness the scene. They all have a jolly good laugh and it’s all very embarrassing. Hermes, one of the more delightful of the gods, says he would endure any punishment for one night of love with Venus.

Much has been made of this story over the centuries. It was a favourite subject for allegorical paintings of the Renaissance. Both Veronese and Botticelli show Mars quite vanquished and docile in the arms of Venus. It has been said that the meaning is quite clear; she has defeated the god of war himself, or in other words ‘love conquers all’.

James Hillman made a quite different interpretation. The association between Mars and Venus signifies, he says, that man has an on going affair, a Terrible Love of War – the title of his last book. And the fact that the story is played out by the immortal gods means that our love of war is an eternal part of us, and we are not to expect any improvement in human nature, or expect that our practice of war will ever diminish. ‘There have been roughly two and a half wars going on for every year of recorded history’, says Hillman, ‘Can it be doubted that not only is war "normal", but that it is a manifestation of a force as powerful to our species as is Eros or Death, and far more permanent than the Peace it outstrips?”

I’m going to offer a completely different interpretation.

Freud was on to something when he said that civilisation is built upon the renunciation of the instincts; to be civilised we have to repress them. He also believed that instincts were discreet forces, psychic energies. We know today that the picture is a little more complicated. But for simplicity, just lets say that there is something called an ‘aggressive instinct’ and something called a ‘sexual instinct’. That’s more or less the idea in the myth. Venus = the sexual instinct and Mars = the aggressive instinct.

But where does Vulcan fit in? Doesn’t he stand for the containment, the capturing of the instincts? It is significant that Vulcan is the technician, the workman; he is domesticated and a skilled toolmaker; bringer of culture, invention, trade and eventually globalisaion – in fact, everything that Freud meant by ‘civilisation’. Vulcan puts the instincts to shame, exposing them and demonstrating how disruptive to civilised domesticity they can be. Granted, Vulcan is lame in his domesticity, but it is the lameness that goes with the repression of the instincts – the price, Freud said, we have to pay for civilisation.

Falling in love and succumbing to the allurements of Venus is, by itself, not enough to contain war and the chaotic mayhem of the undisciplined instincts. Without Vulcan and his influence Hillman is right; there is nothing to stop the excesses of those two primitive instincts. With Vulcan, and an intelligent accommodation with growing modernity, we can and do gradually move forward into a more peaceful life. But it takes the ‘civilizing process’ to do it, something we used to call – before it was unfashionable to use the word – progress. Self assertion and lust are valuable human assets. The problem is not how to renounce them, but how to refine their expression.

The first stages of our civilizing process in the disciplining the instincts was a pretty rough sledgehammer repression. The mediaeval church taught us how to do that in a big way: masses of sexual guilt and obscenely cruel punishments for disobedience. But rough as it was, it was a step towards a more discriminating and intelligent society. The next stage was the 18^th century Enlightenment, the beginning of science and the beginning of a more psychological and human understanding of the mind.

We’re not doing too badly really. Our sex lives are probably freer that they have ever been without he need for the spoils of war: ‘rape all the women and kill all the men’ – a customary practice in the good old days.

Certainly the raw sexual instinct has to be curbed, but there are clever, discrete, artistic and harmless ways of sexual expression without making it bad, disowning it, and then being sadly deprived. And, as for aggression, we now have courts of law instead of duels, suits for defamation of character instead of honour killings, divorces instead of marital death by attrition; and our aggressive instinct is now reduced to watching The World Cup on the telly. Life can still be rough, but it is much less lethal than it used to be. War, as we have known it, is a casualty of human progress. It is more clearly recognized now that we can realistically no longer afford it – the ‘markets’ would be upset – and that would never do!

I think the fact that one can make so many different interpretations of the Mars/Venus/Vulcan myth demonstrates something about mythical interpretation in general. It seems that what one gets from a myth is a picture one has already arrived at. My perception does not derive from the myth itself or from any fancy archetypal footwork, but from a more reliable kind of research; that, I will tell you about in my next blog.

IN MEMORIAM

by Stanley

Our psychological community has lost two of its elders: Harry Cohen and James Hillman.

Harry was an old colleague of mine with whom I shared many supervision sessions along with Bridget Lee Nicoll. Working for many years for the Prison Service and in private practice, he was a psychotherapist of the old school. I remember him for one dogged piece of profound wisdom which he never tired of promulgating. Most psychological problems, he would tell us, derive from the early relationship with the mother and particularly with breast feeding.

Old hat, you might say. Well, maybe, but it is a hat we would do well to wear and remember. Why? Because breast feeding isn’t just about feeding, it's about love-making, it’s about our first experience of intimacy – or lack of it; it’s about all the anxieties, fears of dying, the exhilaration of living, and all the twisted fantasies that later haunt our intimate and sexual proclivities

What is transmitted to the infant in those first new experiences is the whole convoluted history of our culture’s attitudes to relationships, to sex and intimacy of which the hapless mother is the carrier and child is the wide open recipient. Thank you Harry for your tireless dedication to an important truth.

And then, James Hillman has departed too; not so local as Harry, for he never visited New Zealand, but his impact on us was nonetheless considerable. Hillman graduated in the school of C.G.Jung, eventually distilling the essence of Jung, founding what came to be known as archetypal psychology. Jung was always in the grip of Christianity, an obsession he never got over. Using mythological language Hillman rescued depth psychology from monotheistic spirituality, freeing depth psychology into the realm of pagan mythology which, as Hillman said, is much closer to the true nature of the soul. Hillman also rescued the term ‘soul’ from Abrahamic monotheism, giving it a polytheistic twist, showing us that there are as many places of the human soul as there were pagan gods before Constantine and his creation of institutionalized-state religion.

Hillman invented a whole style of language, combining scholarship with the vividness and imagination of the old classical writers who used mythology as a psychology without giving it that name. For that matter, they wouldn’t have known what ‘mythology’ was either. For them, as for Hillman, what we call ‘mythology’ was an accurate depiction of the human condition. The gods, with all their twisted excesses and blind passions, was human life writ large. It was all projected on the screen of immortality – for the gods were immortal – implying that our pathologies and theirs are unchanging and that we, as individuals, carry the whole conflicting circus within our breasts – each and every one of us.

It was this acceptance of the gods and ourselves as irredeemably pathological, the acceptance of our pathology as normal, that helped us be more tolerant of the way people are and to realise that the only desirable outcome of therapy is ‘congruence’.

Harry and James, thank you both for your unique and very different insights into the many mansions of psychology.

THEN

by Stanley

There were these upsets with my partner. Afterwards I’d feel bad because I would start to lose my cool. I wasn’t very well behaved…. Ah! That phrase rings a bell: ‘not well behaved’. Reminds me of when I was a kid: wanting something from my mother and her not giving it to me. Even now, I’m not sure what it was I wanted from her, but whatever it was she couldn’t give it and I would get angry and obnoxious. It’s the same family game. I don’t know whether I wanted something from my partner and she couldn’t give it or whether she wanted something from me and I couldn’t give it. Probably both. In any case, I’d get obnoxious.

Just getting hold of this was enough to make me feel a little better. I hadn’t worked anything out. I hadn’t solved anything; and it was still confusing. But looking at the whole thing, I had paid enough attention to it to put some time and space between me and the past. It helped me locate the past instead of reliving it, like I did when was upset.

Of course, a single process like this didn’t turn my life around, but over a longer period of therapy I began to get into the habit dealing with myself like that. Over small things and bigger difficulties I began to handle myself by taking, as it were, a second look – a look that created a space for the past. Not that I was doing focusing continually. But whether it is a disturbing mood or a serious upset I am not stranded in present-time with it, taking everything literally; at the back of my mind I know there is always more to a mood than meets the eye; and just that, by itself, is often enough to defuse it.

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Your body is a dynamic organism with an evolutionary history measured in millions of years – it’s a powerful package set up to survive. But more than just surviving, we have the urge to live creatively toward the enhancement of wellbeing. However, we all know that these natural urges can be subverted by unfavourable circumstances – remembering that there are families and cultures that are not exactly incubators of human well-being. Then too, there is the unavoidable impact of bad times: illness, deprivation, loss, earthquakes. All of this, all of it, we can call ‘non-survival experiences’.

The common denominator of the non-survival experience is that it is difficult to live forward from it; and the more severe it is, the more difficult is to live through it unscathed. Months afterwards, people in Christchurch are still suffering the effects of earthquakes without quite knowing the emotional and physical costs.

So too, long ago trying to deal with tangled family circumstances you can get even more entangled in your own sometimes devious tactics to survive. To get through it one can twist oneself into an alien. Dysfunctional families are particularly damaging in this respect.

Bad times are situations where it’s hard move and function in ways that’s good for you – they tend to be times where you are frozen. Typically, there’s no way out, no movement. And the memory of it goes on not moving. In this way, we can say that some aspect of a person can be said to be ‘stuck in time’. Times when you successfully escape or fought back don’t count as ‘stuck moments’ – obviously, because you weren’t stuck.

Stuck moments manifest as physical tension. Even something as simple as not speaking up when I should, can manifest as a tension around my throat or a constriction in my chest. This was a time, perhaps, when it was too dangerous to speak up; maybe too dangerous even to be seen. Although I may not notice it, some part of my body goes on carrying the tension and stress. Physical tension is frozen motion that persists as bodily memory.

It’s as though someone had taken a flashlight photo in the midst of a real-time crisis, but this photo also contains recordings of my physical and emotional state at the moment of crisis. Of course, there is no separate photo recording – all this tension is mapped into my nervous and muscular system. This is the body’s memory.

The body’s memory is a physical repository of past experience. [1] The body’s memory has nothing to do with words, explanations, rational thought or insight. The body’s memory operates in a way that doesn’t need awareness. It is a necessary and instinctive response to what was once experienced as danger.

I can’t actually remember this physical memory as I would ordinary memories, like what I had for breakfast this morning. The body’s memory has nothing to do with actually ‘remembering’ in the way we understand this. We are talking about the body’s memory; and the body’s memory is not cerebral, but somatic. It is not literate, but organic. These are memories that are mapped into my flesh and blood. When the body’s memory is activated, I, as a conscious being, may have no idea of what is going on. But when it is re-stimulated it changes my mood and behavior.

Many of my moods are caused by my body being reminded of some past event that was non-survival. It reawakens the experience of stuckness. I then relive it without remembering it. When reliving a past event I am in it; it is literally happening again. (Although, not ‘again’ because there is no time in it, no space between me and the original event.) The event is not happening in the past, it is happening now. I relive the past as though it is the present. That is precisely what ‘restimulation’ is.

In therapy or counselling I actually create the past by putting space and time for the event to happen then. By calling it up I create a ‘then’. I separate the incident from present-time. Instead of reliving the past, I locate it.

This therapeutic locating is not the same as remembering what I had for breakfast. And, most importantly, locating is not ‘wallowing in the past’. Locating a memory is often felt rather than remembered in the usual sense. There is always an element of interpretation when we try to understand it. This is not to say we can’t have an accurate feel for it. The felt-sense of it can be quite definite. We learn to trust this different way of knowing – sensing rather than rationally knowing. But the important thing is, by touching upon it, however lightly, we locate it in a different space-time.

People sometimes feel that once they have told the story of a past event that it’s over and done with. ‘That’s it. I’ve said it all’. And indeed, many therapists today will actually discourage a client from remembering. It’s the latest fashion precipitated by the hasty application of brain research. This is a killer because it closes the door on all the infinite subtleties that stir the imagination. The past is never a series of simple facts; it is never done with – if only because the past is always stirring up something that newly reverberates with the present, slightly changing the scene. This is not repetition, but discovery. Locating a memory does not reinforce it, it unenforces it.

I can almost predict that someone will accuse me of being far too concerned with the past with the danger of ruminating and wallowing in it. People who go on about ‘living in the present’ don’t realise that their so-called ‘present’ is not crystal clear and pure, but contains large chunks of past of which they are totally unaware.

My analysis here does not, of course, exhaust the complexities of the personality and it may seem an oversimplification – and so it is. I’ve done this deliberately for the sake of laying stress on some salient truths of great practical importance.

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[1] We could analyse this in terms of neuroscience and brain functioning. But I am trying to say it in terms that we can understand using our psychological way of knowing.

BALLETIC FOCUSING

by Stanley

The first edition of ‘Focusing’ by Eugene Gendlin came out in 1978. Since then a great deal of work has been done expanding its basic idea[1], which is really very simple. It places the emphasis on the person’s own experiencing. But here ‘experience’ means something very specific. ‘It is the process in which the person gives attention to the ‘feel’ of a problem or situation as a whole and then attempts to articulate this ‘feel’. On encountering a problem or situation we bring our attention, not to the thoughts or emotions that arise from the situation, but to the sense, often physically felt, of ‘all that’’[2] It’s a process that can’t be hurried. At first, the sense of it can be quite vague, but as attention is given to the feel of it in the moment, the problem begins to open up, revealing new perspectives. And it is this opening up that moves living forward in places where it may have been stuck.

This appeal to the body’s ‘felt-sense’ is perhaps the most singular and original idea in focusing. The body can be the source of quite intricate intelligence, not merely in the management of its own homeostasis, but also in having an insight into the broader aspects of living. This goes against the current notion of what the body is. But it has never been given the chance. No one has really granted it that sort of intelligence. So that when we first look in the direction of the ‘felt-sense’ it does feel unknown and vague, largely because we are out of touch with our physical being. We have drawn such a wide demarcation between our ‘physical’ and our ‘thinking’ selves that we have cut ourselves off from perhaps the greater part of our being.

It seems as though the body can serve as the first barrier, the first line of defense, against a hostile world. Numb the body and you numb the effects of an unhelpful environment – it is to ‘toughen up’ as they say. The ability to feel pain or physical discomfort is no indication that one is in touch with the body. Beyond such primitive perceptions lay the full spectrum of our wholebody and with it the possibility of a much enlarged sense of self and wellbeing.

The working model of focusing has assumed that the most precise avenue of expression for the felt-sense is language. And this has proved remarkably useful. There is no doubt that when we know what we really feel and speak from the heart we are truly ourselves. This is what invigorates and gives our life movement.

But there are other forms of bodily expression that do not involve language and that are just as passionate and meaningful as words, and sometimes even more so. There’s the whole area of music and dancing. If you have ever watched a couple of Latinos dancing a tango or a stunning Spanish Flamenco dancer you will know what I mean – that wonderful combination of burning vibrancy fueled by controlled passion.

When the waltz was first introduced into Victorian society it was thought to be scandalously outrageous, vulgar and immoral. The wild, whirlwind of the music and the sight of a man holding a woman so close to his body in public was denounced as offensive by the church and all right thinking people. Naturally this was just what appealed to the young of the time whose spirit was busting to get out. Popular ballroom dance-forms in the west have evolved a lot since then. The Rock and Roll era seemed to end the tradition of couples dancing together, replacing this, as today, with individuals doing their own separate thing, although perhaps vaguely connected with someone else somewhere on the floor. And it’s interesting to note that today the dancing movements are free-form; one simply expresses oneself as it comes.

Now someone has developed a therapeutic form of dancing and called it ‘wholebody focusing’. It involves using the felt-sense to discover the style of dance that one’s body wants to express. It is only a little way-out to call it Balletic Focusing; and with it we are back to the pas de deux, only this time the couple are more like a focusing partnership where one person is the ‘listener’ while the other performs; but instead of listening to words, she ‘listens’ to your dance; and she does this with the same unconditional positive regard that you would find in a good person-centred therapy session – without interfering or joining in, she is with you in whatever way you tango.

What is amazing is how strong the guiding felt-sense becomes in this process. It begins to take over; and the more you trust it the stronger it becomes; and the stronger it becomes the more you trust it. Your movements morph into a work of art in which your body seems to work through long held tensions, moving though timeless psycho-physical blockages. It becomes a trance-like state and you only know dimly what you are doing and why. It all takes place below the level of consciousness, but you can feel something deeply cavernous is happening. Consciously, you are only aware that someone inside, some hidden self, is being satisfied and is smiling. Maybe because, for the first time in ages, one realises that one’s being is profoundly physical and, like a child, is delighted at being seen – a healthy exhibitionism.

It must have been at least ten years ago I had a bright idea. I had just come out of my morning meditation and I found myself yawning and stretching. ‘Now there’s a funny thing’, I thought, ‘why was I allowed to yawn and stretch only when I stopped meditating? I must have been sitting still ! That’s what you are supposed to do in meditation, isn’t it? I wonder what would happen if I paid attention to what my body wanted while I was meditating.

I began by giving up the rather up-tight yoga posture and, reclining back in a comfortable chair that gave my body room to move, I began to discover exactly what I have been describing above. I had no idea what to call it. It wasn’t meditation proper and it wasn’t focusing proper either. I decided to call my little private practice bodyminding. I thought this appropriate because it seemed as though I was the body’s minder.

When, a year or so ago, some people at the Focusing Institute in the States came out with Wholebody Focusing I was quite startled. And when I attended Karen’s workshop here in New Zealand last year I found that they had not gone exactly the route I had and there were certain philosophical differences. But they were on the same page as me – a case of simultaneous discovery. Quite encouraging.

And I’m pleased to tell you that Karen will be coming again to New Zealand in March of next year to conduct another weekend workshop of Wholebody Focusing and a five day retreat at Mokihinui Westport – a beautiful spot I’m told.

More information on this at a later date.

[1] To get an idea of the number of published books on focusing go to:

http://www.focusing.org/eShop/10Browse.asp?category=Focusing%20Books

[2] Purton, Cambell. Introduction to the Special Issue on Focusing Oriented Therapy . In Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies. Special Edition. Volume 9. Number 2. June 2010

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION part 2

Creative Change in Small steps

by Stanley

...We not only do not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen! Stuart Kauffman

Whenever you take action there is always the risk that you will get more than you bargained for; that ‘more’ may be welcome or not. But there’s a fair certainty that there will some surprises. It’s the nature of engagement with the world. Some surprises can alter the course of your whole life. Being the unadventurous type, it’s what makes people like me careful. Besides what is right theoretically, I have to take into account all my personal complexes, whether the consequences of my action will clash with all the curious things that are important to me. In any kind of future, what I can accept and make use of is constrained by what is possible for me by the facts of my psychology; I’m limited not just by situations, but by who I am and what I have become.

Let’s say I’m dealing with a difficult situation and I don’t know which way to go. I’m looking for a new way, a new idea. But I can’t know in advance what is possible until I begin to move forward. Gingerly, pessimistically perhaps, I try a new tack. I can guess, but I don’t know what will happen. But I do know that if I try something different it will lead to new developments, all of which I cannot foresee. Such consequences, some anticipated, some quite unforeseen, are what we could call adjacent possibilities.^[1] Some we are not aware of until they happen. Not only do we ‘not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen!’ In order to grasp this notion of ‘adjacent possibility’ let’s look at what it means in biology. My examples here may seem a bit way out – but bear with me.

Swimming fish evolved from spineless bottom feeders, segmented worms, sponges, and corals. They evolved into the first vertebrates. 400 hundred million years ago they began to probe the water’s edge and wiggle their way onto land. What they had developed as fins, they began to use as the first ‘legs’. Of all the thousand ways evolution could have gone, this was only one. It was a possible next step: an adjacent possibility. Before the development of backbones there was not even the remotest chance of moving out of the water. It was physiologically impossible. But having developed vertebrae and fins no one could have predicted what that would lead to – in fact, it led to us! Among other things.

The closest fossil relatives of birds were two-legged dinosaurs called theropods. They sported feathers but could not fly. Its common ancestor didn’t develop feathers in order to fly, but to keep warm. Having done so, some bright theropod found that using feathers he could glide. Gliding was an adjacent possibility which then evolved into flying – to birds, in fact. Until the development of feathers to keep warm, flight could not have evolved – feathers, as we say, was a serendipitous window of opportunity. Evolution is full of examples where a function that had evolved for one purpose revealed the possibility of a completely different use, opening up new and unforeseeable realms of creative development.

Evolution by natural selection is extremely slow, but incremental change, where adjacent possibilities are seized upon, is much faster. It is as though the main work has already been done. It’s only a question of seeing a novel way of using what is already there. It’s the same in our personal development and the same in the cultural sphere. Advances in technology are built upon platforms that are already established. ‘Alicia Juarrero, a philosopher, asks, ‘Could you cash a check 50,000 years ago? Think of the cultural inventions that have occurred to allow us to cash checks.’

In our lifetime we have seen computer technology race ahead, literally in leaps and bounds. Each step creates the adjacent possibilities necessary for the next step. When they were creating the first computer program in 1997, you couldn’t have said to Bill Gates and Paul Allen: “Hey, lets create the World Wide Web, then we can have Internet Banking and Twitter.” Even if you could have explained your far sighted vision of the future it would have been just hot air – interesting maybe, but useless. At that time it was not yet an adjacent possibility – but the first Microsoft operating system for an IBM was.

In a similar way, as we go through life we build platform upon platform. It’s called personal development. What is possible at later stage is not possible early on. We cannot ask a child to read philosophy; it is not an adjacent possibility. It may be one day – it may not. It may never be. What step can come next depends on what steps have gone before. For each step makes certain developments possible and others out of the question. And since we all have different experiences in life we build different platforms – gradually housing our unique personalities.

Now think of the therapist who suggests a new way of thinking or feeling to the client or makes helpful proposals. In all likelihood he will be advancing a notion for which there is no precise platform in the person’s psyche. It is possible to impose a change, but this is more like head-training than real growth. It is unintegrated and therefore does not provide a further platform from which to move forward.

Advice to a friend or client might be great. But if there is no platform already there from which it can take off, if it does not awaken an adjacent possibility, then forget it. But always remember, there is no right path forward. Looking back one might get the feeling that a certain development was inevitable – but that’s only hindsight.

The kind of development we are talking about is indeterminate, unpredictable, asymmetric and nonlinear, but nevertheless quite real. In sensing your way forward what comes next, the adjacent possible, may not be an ‘action’ in the literal sense; it may be an imagining, a dream, an idea, an emotion, a fantasy. We have to get out of our literal habit of putting everything in neat little boxes. An event is an event.

As for the good meaning friends who advise on a personal difficulty, it’s a good bet that anything they may suggest will not feel exactly right. It is almost impossible to guess a person’s adjacent possibilities in any situation. Therapeutic time is much better spent feeling for the adjacent possibilities that present themselves right now. No one can know the exact nature of those possibilities but the person themselves. It must come from them, from their felt-sense.

In Gendlin’s focusing language, the adjacent possibility, he would call ‘the implicit’. Both terms simply mean the ‘next possible step’. It also means that as you feel your way into a new possibility it may have completely unknown applications. Imagine the first fish saying to another fish:

‘Good God, I never realized these fins would be useful for walking’

‘For what ?

‘For walking.

‘Oh Yeah – what the hell’s that !!!

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[1] Stuart Kauffman, who coined the term Adjacent Possibility, is a biologist with a background in philosophy.

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION

INCREMENTAL INNOVATION:
creative change in small steps. Part 1

by Stanley

Encounter Groups in the 60s were great fun, although quite naive and over excitable. Amid a heap of pillows, maybe for a whole weekend, a dozen or so of us would challenge ourselves to be spontaneous and ‘encounter’ each other with a determined disregard for convention and politeness. We were trying to be ‘who we really were’. It was the time of the Counterculture, the Beatles, LSD and the demand for greater social and sexual freedom of expression. At the time, it felt like a social revolution was underway and the Encounter Group was very much a part of the scene. The simple philosophy that motivated us was the idea that the road to personal freedom was to be ruthlessly honest and to be able to show one’s real feelings. Sometimes riotously noisy, always youthful, often healing, but idealistically over the top.

The great solution was simple and obvious: be true to your feelings and true to others. And it did seem to be so simple and obvious. Time and again one saw someone suddenly release a pent up emotion they had long suppressed through guilt or shame. These were moments of transformation. The effect in a group setting could be startling, convincing us we were on the right track.

Much of the wisdom gained at this time has now passed into psychological common-sense. We know that if a person is upset it is beneficial for them to express their feelings in an atmosphere of acceptance. And we also found it was not helpful to just talk about one’s feelings, one had to experience the feeling in present time. The encounter group was suited to this because it was provocative in a way that one couldn’t escape into mere discussion. The focus of interaction was about people’s reactions to one another – right then and there. You were in at the deep end to start with !

We were learning what worked and what didn’t. At the same time there were things that were puzzling. There were anomalies. For example, sometimes, the expression of feelings or emotion was completely non-productive. It seemed only to confirm the status quo. Nothing shifted and the person was no better off. But because, at that time, we were stuck with our theory we used all kinds of tricks to get people into their feelings: beating pillows, kicking, screaming, crying. People would return over and over to their old familiar emotions. We do that in real life too. Situations arise that trigger the same emotional reactions – easy to be fooled into thinking one is ‘working through it’.

Exceptions to what a theory predicts are always interesting. But it wasn’t till much later in my reading of Gendlin and Focusing that the answer became clear. What we didn’t know in those days was that there’s a difference between feelings or emotions that are discovered and those that are merely repeated. Sincerity is not the point, rather it is whether there is a discovery of feelings or whether the feelings are just being replayed.

There is no question that the discovery of a new feeling is an exciting step forward. It can be the release of hidden pent up emotion or something as light as a new way of looking at an old situation. The new perspective releases new possibilities. But when a life situation always triggers the same emotional response it is a mistake to think that expressing it again and again is of any value, no matter how sympathetic and understanding your interlocutor is.

Perhaps returning and replaying like this derives from the hope that, like the first discovery of it, it will yield a similar expansion of one’s being. Sometimes, of course, it does. The same scene revisited, the same story, can be a goldmine. Here we have to recognise that what looks like mere repetition can contain tiny elements of change. It’s never quite the same story. We return to the old scene again: some circumstance in childhood, some abusive situation, a stubborn difficulty in present time perhaps – a place we know so well, but on each return there is a small shift of attitude, something that had not come to mind before, a slightly new slant that makes revisiting worthwhile.

It is the element of incremental change that’s important. Not the subject, not the material, not the sincerity or earnestness, but the emergent element. Sometimes recognising this is not so easy because what is new can be so subtle. Especially difficult if the person has a very critical side – they might castigate themselves for going over the same ground again, thus missing the minute difference from the last visit. So although we should be wary of repetition, at the same time we must be careful not to use this idea to clobber ourselves. The answer is to be very respectful of small changes of viewpoint that can be so easily overlooked.

To grasp the process of incremental novelty is the foundation of psychological awareness. Without this there is no appreciation that the movements of the psyche have their own direction or that there is any movement at all.

All counselling and psychotherapy is predicated on a need to respond to a life circumstance in a new way. The big question is: how does novelty arise? Where can a new emotion, a new attitude to life, come from. Apparently not from anything we are familiar with. It is as though we spend our existence within the confines of our own special house wherein we are familiar with every stick of furniture, the mantle-piece nicknacks, the junk in the attic, the kitchen utensils, the contents of every nook and cranny, bookshelves, the bits and pieces in every cupboard – the story of our life summed up in the bric-a-brac of the home-life in which we have been encapsulated for so long.

All so true, but out of all our tried and tested responses to life, out of all that is so familiar, how does novelty arise. Where does real innovation come from? This is not just a psychological question. With the same astonishment we stand before the spectacle of the evolution of biological life itself in all its amazing variety of forms. It is as though there is something in the very nature of life itself that rewards creativity and innovation. We know that creativity is remarkably serendipitous and that it incrementally forms itself out of chaos and confusion. Suddenly, out of the unruly disorder and the murky muddle of the ordinary, something never before seen comes together and life steps into another realm.

In therapy and meditation, small, new changes of consciousness are what we should value. We know that new relational attitudes arise from a vague bodily sense. It is an incremental process and there is a good deal more to understand about it. Just how something original and new can arise from the detritus of all too familiar – this I’ll look at in my next blog.

THE HOLISTIC RESPONSE

By Stanley

A gut-reaction is literally felt in the solar plexus. It’s something you can’t easily ignore. Often unpleasant, like my reaction to the wet kisses Old Auntie Doris use to give me when I was a boy; or later in life, like the tedious committee meeting that goes on and on until I am overwhelmed with frantic boredom: ‘I can’t’ stand this a minute longer’; some gut-reactions are pleasant like falling in love; some, like a gambler’s hunch, can turn out to be either inspired or horribly wrong. Gut-reactions like chronic anxiety can seem to have no present cause at all.

Why do I call these holistic responses? [1] Well, they are all sort of global reactions of the body, impossible to analyse. When questioned one is likely to fall back lamely on: ‘I just got this feeling’ . This difficulty is the hallmark of holistic responses of all kinds. Reasonable explanations are inadequate because what its about isn’t singular or simple.

If we question a gut-reaction we want to know what it’s about. And there’s the difficulty: I have a hunch about this person, but is it about me or about them; are they really mean or am I projecting my own meanness? Is my fear of authority about my Oedipus Complex or my Inferiority Complex; are the quarrels with my partner because I am too critical or because she is too sensitive, or both.

A holistic response is too illusive, too slippery to answer black and white questions like these. Whatever story you tell only rings partly true. You can never quite settle the matter because a gut-reaction is holistic. It is never about only one thing; and it is potentially mobile. The rational mind wants a simple story; but any holistic response is potentially a wider story. A holistic response wants to mutate. It has the impulse to expand and evolve.

If you go to the whole feeling of a gut-reaction – not going over this or that about it in your head, but to the whole feeling of it in your gut – if you stay with the whole physical sensation itself, focusing on the non-verbal feeling of it, interesting changes start to happen. Other connection will pop up; it starts to mutate, to widen, to develop sub-plots. You could easily say: ‘I change my mind when I think about it’. And yes, you can do this by thinking about it. But what I’m suggesting is precisely that you don’t think about it. If you give-over to the gut-reaction itself, always going back to the whole sense of it, a surprising and unexpected widening of the story begins to emerge. This process seems not to be directed by the thinking ego. So what does direct it? It can only be something in the gut-reaction itself. It seems to have a larger story to tell. It wants to evolve. This is astonishing! Why should stories want to evolve? But they do – and in a certain kind of way.

The Cognitive Behaviorists and Narrative Therapists are right about one thing: so much of our emotional life is tied up with the stories we tell about ourselves – optimistic stories or stories of failure and doom, stories of inadequacy and blame, reasons why we feel guilty or wrong, fantasies about who we are or want to be, stories about what others think of us. Some would advise us to simply change our stories, but we can’t just invent positive stories at will. We can try, but they don’t warm you at a gut level. If there is to be a different story the belly has to believe it !

Sometimes personal stories seem to change, yet really all have an identical theme. These are stuck stories. If you have ever been a worrier you will know how each different worry is really the same story in a different setting. If it isn’t one thing to worry about its another. Each new worrying story holds one in its spell until the next day – next day, new episode.

Some people have what are called ‘problem-saturated’ stories. Such stories can define a person’s identity, leading them to claim that they have always been nervous or self- conscious. Stuck stories tell only a single tale and will even limit a person’s memory to events that confirm their story.

What we call our moods each have a entirely different story to tell about what the day means, indeed, what life itself means. Each moods can seem like a different but parallel universe having little in common with yesterdays mood – that is, if you can remember what that mood was like. Moods have a way of vanishing when another has taken its place. Sometimes I think am like a travelling drama company with a repertoire plays. Depending on the audience, I know what drama to turn on. It’s second nature. As a kid they said I should have been an actor.

Stories are biological. They arise from our history as an organism, going way back beyond the origins of myth; and our personal stories arise out of own history – you could call them personal myths. There are plots within plots, plays within plays. We watch them dramatised as we grow up living in a family within a network of other families and friends. We watch how happy-go-lucky Dad is at a party and how angry he is at home; how bonhomie he is to mates and how mean he is to his kids. We watch Mum smiling at Mrs X and how she frowns about her to someone else. I can find remnants of all these dramatis personae in my own character.

Plots are donated to us largely through the family that brought us into the world, and we make the best of them we can. Some dramas we get drawn into whether we want to or not and we act them out unconsciously taking one role or another.

Most people who want to be better than they are do manage to filter out much the bad stuff. But much we get stuck with. And try as we will it is difficult to change. Complete ‘biblical’ conversion is usually fake and changing the major plot is never entirely possible. The idea that we have freedom of choice is greatly exaggerated……But

And it is a real ‘but’… as I said, stories do want to evolve. A holistic response is about a bigger picture than the tale we tell of it. The best way is to take your gut-reaction to a nursery, give it healthy soil, tend it, water it and give it room to grow – then, just see what kind of hybrid it turns into. You might be surprised.

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[1] The adjective ‘holistic’ has been sequestered by the Green Movement and New Age. I have invented the term ‘holistic response’ to designate a subjectively felt biological reaction. It could be called the ‘whole body response’; or, more colloquially, a ‘gut-reaction’.