ADMIRATION

Here’s an interesting question. What is it that makes a person chose a life-goal of endless struggle, to succeed in an ambition that is almost too much for them – perhaps to be a musician or a writer or a sportsman, not just any old artist or athlete, but up there among the best? Maybe they are born with a gift, but why do some of us who are thus blessed go through cycles of intense creativity, only to lapse into periods of inaction and apathy. Why the struggle?

As a young man I had the ambition to be a writer. Notice the way I put this: I didn’t say, ‘I wanted to write’, I said ‘I wanted to be a writer’. That gives the game away at once. It was the role I wanted, a way of being, something to shore up my faint and uncertain ego. I imagined myself in my home, sitting at my desk, my typewriter before me, looking out across a large lake. I wasn’t writing. I was being a writer. I was someone. Sixty years later I might have imagined myself as the lead guitarist of a group, a million star-struck girls screaming for us at the airport.

 I remember, too, our small postage-stamp-size backyard in the East End of London. I was playing an imaginary piano surrounded by a huge audience who cheered and clapped in admiration for my amazing performance. I must have been only 6 or 7 years old.

What on earth was I doing? Why these particular fantasies? I am convinced I was fulfilling something, giving myself something I needed. I think it’s the quality Carl Rogers called ‘unconditional positive regard’. There isn’t a word that accurately describes this quality. ‘Love’ is near, but it carries too much baggage. Roger’s term is clean and precise, although perhaps lacking warmth. ‘Applause’ perhaps. ‘Admiration’ is better. It’s a ‘free floating attention’, completely absorbed by the fascination of the object, the object as it is. Given that, then yes, you can say unconditional positive regard is ‘love’. But most performers discover when they are famous that this is exactly what is missing; all they have is an audience adoring a mock-up.

Rogerian style of free floating attention admires pure existence. If I may starkly drive home the concept: it is the attitude a botanist might have on discovering a new species of dung beetle and is filled with admiration for its originality and beauty. It’s not what the beetle has achieved or what it does that’s the miracle, but the fact that it is.

When you meet someone with this quality of free floating attention you feel seen and understood. It is not altogether a cognitive perception. You can remain unconscious of it because nothing is pushed. Nothing particular stands out; they don’t compliment or encourage – one just feels relaxed in the presence of a person who radiates this quality; its effect is extremely powerful. It is also the condition of all successful relationships; and, most importantly, it is the quality without which a child’s growth will be stunted. There is now ample evidence that a newborn baby picks up the presence or absence of this quality when the mother first holds the infant in her arms – and perhaps even before that.

This brings me back to my fantasy. It wasn’t encouragement I wanted. I got enough of that. Encouragement is not the same as acknowledgement. Encouragement set you off on achievement; I needed someone to acknowledge my existence, someone to see through the fantasies to who it was that was needing something.

 I set up those early goals so that I would become someone who was worthy. You can always tell when an ambition has this motive powering it. There is always a sense of audience present, someone watching one’s achievement. I know my mother was in that audience in my backyard performance as a child.

The trouble is, in the long run, this strategy doesn’t work. It has the seed of failure in it. Even if you succeed, you fail. If I became the great public figure I will get the admiration for the wrong reason; it will be directed at the wrong target: not at me, but the role I project. This is the Marilyn Monroe Syndrome: desired, wanted, admired as the sex symbol of the world, yet she is still little Norma Jeane Mortenson (her real name), desperately lonely and unloved. Her hope is that when she is famous little Norma can cash in on all the admiration. No such luck. In her heart she knows she is not Marilyn Monroe; and the more admiration Marilyn gets, the more the little girl gets pushed into the background, ending up lonelier than ever. Sometimes, at night, the truth breaks through. She is depressed, apathetic and worthless. The demands of  Marilyn and the world join up and ask too much. The day ahead feels like an impossible task. So heavy are they upon the child that sometimes she can’t even get out of bed and dress herself. She wants to give up, yet Marilyn demands that she go on; and the general public joins Marilyn in that overwhelming and impossible demand on the child that she is.

Anthony Summers, in his biography, says that Marilyn was in love with President Kennedy and wanted to marry him; she called the White House frequently in 1962; and that, when the married president ended their affair, she became even more depressed, and turned to Robert Kennedy, who reportedly visited Monroe in Los Angeles the day she died of an overdose*

*Summers, Anthony (1985). Goddess, The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Guild Publishing, London. 

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE QUICK FIX

A current piece of common sense says that the way I think causes my worries and upsets. My feelings are simply a reaction to the way I interpret a situation. In certain situations I habitually react with the same negative ideas; my thinking habits are what upset me.

If the thought actually produces bad feelings, the obvious thing to concentrate on would be the way I think. I can achieve a quick fix for this through hypnosis or operant conditioning. The flavour of the month is called: Solution Focused Brief Therapy – the ultimate quick fix, as easy as a pill and very popular just now.

This way of looking at our psychology is something a trap because although it seems as though the thought causes the feeling, it’s really the other way round. The thinking seems to come first because it is the first signal that gets through to me that something is wrong. I am numb to my whole physical-emotional response to a situation; so the first thing I am aware of is the effect on my thoughts. The thoughts are first, so it seem, and are therefore the source of the trouble.

Since I live mostly in my head I am only aware of my emotions when they are screaming at me and I can’t ignore them. Most of the time I am numb to my feeling and just think about things.  Let’s be simple and clear: when we say ‘thoughts’ we mean what I going on in your head; when we say ‘feeling’ we mean the emotion and motion in your body.

 Psychologically, thoughts are just the tip of the iceberg – useful only to discover what I have been feeling. Pure thought does have its uses, but not in the realm of self-discovery. But I am so used to living in my head that I have to be taught, coached somehow, to pay attention to what’s going on below the brain-box.

The head is solution-focused, regarding everything as a mechanical problem with causal connections. You have a problem; you find out what’s wrong and fix it; just like a problem with a car. The only test of your judgment is the immediate outcome. Immediate visible outcome is the only criteria: has the problem been fixed or not. Same with relational problems: not whether I am wiser, but whether everything behaves better. And I am better, but at the expense of a more anesthetised body. What this solution-focused method misses is that the body is the location of the unconscious and it is this that drives most of our relational difficulties. Like the following:

“My wife doesn’t trust me because I once had an affair.” That’s the problem. Solution: I must be more trustworthy and I must show her I am.   Right ?

Wrong.

My basic problem has nothing to do with trustworthiness, although it seems so. Worse still, I am operating on my wife’s idea of what the problem is; I am fixed, not only in my head, but in hers. I accept what she says because she is usually right about these sort of things. Also, I know she needs to be accepted; I understand what she says and I want the best for her. I am hooked on looking after her, so that she will look after me. And this little-boy dependency on ‘my mum’ colours my whole relationship with my wife and causes many more problems than just this one. But all this is unconscious, out of the range of my awareness. By deciding in advance what the problem is, and what the solution is, I limit the range of my awareness and exclude the complex of feelings and intentions that are really driving me.

I am not saying that my childish dependencies are a bad thing. In fact, they are an unavoidable and necessary part of any relationship. The strength of my dependency is not the point, but whether I am aware of it, whether I pretend a false maturity and complete self-sufficiency. It is the pretence that causes the trouble. This subterfuge confines my child to the unconscious and distorts and confuses my relationships. I live a lie, pretending to be something I am not.

By not allowing for unconscious factors, a solution-based therapy assumes that I am grown up and that my goals reflect my true self. This will keep me confined to my pretences and limit the growth of my awareness. What is also out of range of my awareness is that the intensity my wife’s concern with trust has roots in her childhood – and this is her problem, not mine. She projects this problem on to me; I buy it and my goal is then to make myself better.

That negative outcomes to my problems are caused by my fixed thinking is a tempting theory and you can certainly change behaviour using behavioural techniques; but we want more than to simply change behaviour. We are not training dogs or dolphins. Human psychotherapy should have a deeper purpose than this. And surely this would be to ripen my sense of soul and broaden awareness of the deeper reaches, not simply of visible problems, but of my imagination, emotional being and the hidden unsuspected connections with my past.

Setting goals for therapy keeps me to the subject, stops me from wandering in my account of myself. But it is precisely in wandering, in the off hand remark, the unimportant slip, the unguarded moment, that the gold lies. In psychoanalysis this is exactly what was encouraged. It was called ‘free association’. The so-called patient ‘talks of the things that trouble him as freely as he is able and begins to understand the ingenuities of the censorship he imposes on himself… What is said as aside from the matter in hand, what is said ‘off topic’ is where the action of meaning and feeling is’. ¹

Rather than set what goals should be achieved, the essence of therapy is that we have no idea what will open up, what will happen or where it will lead. I have some idea of what is bothering me. And this is where we start from, but no one can say in advance what will emerge.

Of course I can have no idea of what will happen. Of course I can’t say, because what needs to happen is unknown. I don’t even know. No one can – and certainly not my therapist.  That’s why conscious goals are so limiting; moreover, they usually turn out to be someone else’s goals or what ‘society’ says. Such conformity imposes an unnatural restriction and leaves no room for the unexpected and potential aspects of my individuality. Merely considering relationships, our emotional intelligence is far more competent at working out these complex problems than the top office. But we have to get out of the CEO’s chair in the executive suite and follow an inward sense that we will find is excited and uncertain about what may come.

^{1  Phillips, Adam. Side Effect. Penguin Books, 2006}

THE TRUTH ABOUT JENNIFER

Nobody knows what it’s like to be Jennifer. She cannot be summed up. Even how Jennifer sees herself is not the real truth. She is more than even she knows. Some would say, as in a eulogy, that she was generous, open hearted, a good mother and neighbour; others, that she was somewhat self-centred and dominating; or that she sometimes drank too much. But none of these categories tell the truth. To get some idea of the whole person, she has to be seen as her story unfolds in context – without judgment or philosophizing, just as she appears in all her multisided contrariness.

Perth, Western Australia, in the 1960s had hardly immerged from the prewar Australian mindset. At parties, women and men hung out separately and there was something about the atmosphere that was still vaguely out-back Victoriana. As a teenager at this time Jennifer had advanced ideas. She was rebellious and sexually adventurous. She would let it be known that she would sleep around with whomever she fancied. And before long this news reached a tutor at her night school who, as it happened, had divorced his wife some two years previously and was suffering from a certain feminine deprivation. An illicit liaison soon developed. After a suitable time, of course, Jennifer’s family found out; there were almighty ructions and the police were called in since Jenifer was under-aged.

Not to be outdone, the couple maintained contact through a mutual friend and arranged that they would elope to another city on the very day she turned 18. That day came and they found themselves together on the other side of the continent in Sydney. Amazingly, the relationship worked in spite of the age difference. He got a job in a clothing factory and within a year she bore him a son – within two, a daughter. The birth of her firstborn, Simon, was difficult and Jennifer came out of it with a hatred of the infant. After a fashion, she mothered the boy, but had as little to do with him as necessity would allow. He was bottle fed from the word go, often left alone with the bottle propped up against a pillow. As the Simon grew, Jennifer maintained a covert hostility towards him, at times ignoring him and at other times domineeringly helpful. He had a mother, though. She was always there, a sort of absent presence; it was reliable, but he was in a permanent state of waiting for something else, waiting for what was missing. When you are very young and waiting like this, you don’t even know what you are waiting for. So that later in life, when what you want is available, when it’s suddenly right before you, you can’t recognise it because you are waiting for something that’s missing. Whatever is actually there, is never it. Permanent waiting blinds you to what you are waiting for. In much the same way that you can’t see your keys right in front of you because you are looking for them. Your keys are invisible because you’ve lost your keys.

By the time her daughter left home, Jennifer was in a second relationship, this time she married a successful corporation man who turned out to be severely dominating and towards whom she became a submissive wife. At parties he would move briskly around, chatting here and there, with Jennifer trotting meekly behind. Within two years he had died of cancer leaving her a wealthy widow.

Now she was living alone with Simon, her son who, at 25 had become a recluse, attached to his mother by an invisible and unacknowledged bond. He had a job which he hated and spent his spare time in his room reading about the history of warfare. He was highly intelligent, analytical and depressed, a combination that fanaticized the world as a complex, malignant and hostile ordeal. He had no friends; or rather he lost them as soon as he made them, invariably finding them incompatible. There were one or two girlfriends who had put up with him for a while, but they very soon went the same way, causing him long periods of conflict when he would analyse the situation and himself to destruction.

Over time, Jennifer’s attitude to her son changed. In her heartfelt empathy for his suffering she tried to show him that he should change his lifestyle, get out more and give up smoking marijuana, but he was hostile to anything she tried to give him. What he did take from her he took without recognition or acknowledgement.

Jennifer was not blind. She knew that his suffering was at least partly due to what she could not give him as a child. It could be easily said that her worry about him was driven by guilt, but she had discovered something in herself that was more than this, even though it was guilt that uncovered it. It was something she had never really felt before. It felt like love.

Jennifer discovered that there are heartbreaking lessons to be learned from loving. The hardest of all was giving up trying to change someone for their own good, to drop one’s fantasies for them, to give up generosity whilst staying true to one’s care, to abandon hope whilst hoping still, denying oneself the relief of detachment.

Prior to this transformation Jennifer had been driven by guilt to help her son. For so long this had continued the old relationship, only with the roles reversed: she was the one neglected whilst her son did the rejecting. This reversal of roles might appear to be a sort of psychic justice where each now experienced what the other had suffered all those years ago. Perhaps it was a sense of nemesis – each enduring what they had once inflicted on each other. But effectively, it was the same old relationship with a flip.

At last, Jennifer realised that it wasn’t just Simon that was difficult. Her very concern and helpfulness had a part in maintaining the statement. This insight in her was enough to break the deadlock, not only for herself but, though osmosis, for her son as well. Something subtle had changed, holding some promise. He still lived at home and smoked too much. What was most welcome, however, was a relationship between mother and son that allowed some movement.

                                                

                                                   *

Making up this tale was for me an experiment. I can’t stand psychological case histories. It’s impossible to tell anyone’s story – it’s always second hand and fraudulent. Just as a session is absolutely indescribable. A true story has to be a happening and you have to be a part of that happening. A true story is its own invention not someone else’s replication. The truth is the event itself. So I wanted to see if an approach like that of the novelist would help find a language and a medium to communicate what therapy – no, what people are really about. Was there a way of reaching greater fidelity without violating anyone’s privacy? Could a ‘person-centred’ event happen imaginatively, within the process of writing? I found that if you throw bits and pieces of other people’s stories together, it will create an original situation, and unique personality will emerge that is quite independent in its own right; it becomes a person; and the miracle is that she will develop a life of her own and suffer all the realistic happenings that would undoubtedly accrue to such a person in real life.

In my blogs I’ve experimented with fictional characters to illuminate a psychological point. I want to free psychology from psychology. What prompted me to go further was a piece I read by Julian Barnes:

“Fiction more than any other written form explains and expands life… Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy it and value it, how it goes wrong, and how we lose it. Novels speak to and from the mind, the heart, the eye, the genitals, the skin…” *

In our case, maybe showing us what it is like to be Jennifer.

*  Barnes, Julian. Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and one short story. Kindle Edition

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

  

LOVE IS WHERE YOU FIND IT

       Picture a man in his garage. He is polishing his vintage 1994 Ford Capri V4 as he has done every day many years. He has a soft cloth in his hand which he uses, not so much to polish his car, as caress it. He will touch the cowling with his cheek, smile and turn to kiss the silken paintwork. He is making love to his car. Indeed, we have caught him in the middle of what we might call automotive foreplay. It is the highpoint of his day. This scene is not derived from my perverted imagination. It was part of an episode of Taboo – on the Discovery Channel.

       In the same episode there was another man whose libido was released only when he was in skin contact with a fully inflated balloon. He wasn’t monogamously devoted to a single balloon, he had dozens of them in his lounge and he would play love-games with one and then another. As he blew up yet another balloon his hands would caress it as he would a beloved’s breast. He was unashamedly devoted to his fetish which, he said, gave him his greatest pleasure in life – and it harmed no one.

      There was another, very personable man, whose fixation was everything associated with feet: shoes, socks and, naturally, feet themselves. He had several good friends who allowed him to make love to their feet. He had a room with hundreds videos of people’s feet, both shoed or socked or naked. He had a stash of pairs of socks, each in small sealable plastic bag. He would select one and place it in the microwave for a few seconds to warm the contents and then open the bag and drink in the smell of the released aroma. This would enliven memories of profound sensual pleasure.

We do not choose how or in what way we love – love is where you find it. We love in the way we can. We suppose there are normal ways to love and we negatively judge anything unusual. Until recently there was something wrong and perverted with making love to someone of the same sex. But we’ve always loved our pets, we love the smell of a baby’ head, we love flowers and astronomy and even mathematics. But these latter ways are not sexual, you might say. Hold on. Not so fast. In truth, sexual isn’t always ‘sexual’; it has many shades of manifesting. Let’s not talk about the libido, let’s call it élan vital, life force, Eros, the flow of living energy that some have called Ch’i or Prana. Of course, sexuality, in the raw sense of our biological drive is very much a central to this. But this same energy also flows out to our imagination, to the stars, to other worlds and all that life may be.

     A person who is purely focused on raw genital sex has just as big a problem as a binge eater or the alcoholic. All the vital emotional avenues to life have been blocked, except perhaps one secret vice. But a single channel for the élan vital is too narrow. The life-force is squeezed through small valve like hot steam. It becomes a drive that cannot be contained; the pressure is too great and it’s then what we call an addiction.

     The question is not what the élan uses as its channel, but rather how many channels there are available. How scarce are the ways I dare to live? Do I only have booze or sex to give me that lift that tells me I am alive, or are there many avenues for me? Can I be lifted out of myself when I’m with nature or when I hear a Ravel quartet or when a friend’s kindness brings tears to my eyes? It’s much better that the whole of life is an addiction.

     It all depends on the variety of what turns you on. The more the better; but better a small, narrow valve than none at all; ultimate depression and death is when the last valve is completely choked off. If I’m not allowed to sniff my glue and there’s nothing else, the only alternative is suicide.

They say that nature abhors a vacuum. You could equally say that a vacuum longs to be filled. So it is with a human being who is empty. But if all the channels to fulfillment are blocked except one, the pressure on that point is enormous. The person experiences this as ‘I’ve got to have something’. And if that single something is a balloon or a car or booze or drugs or sex – anything that momentarily frees the life flow, no matter what the consequences, I’ve got to have it.

      There are those of course whose addiction is the search for an avenue, the quest for what will turn them on is what keeps them going. At least they have the conviction that there is something that will open the valve. Something, somewhere.

     You don’t have to go far if you want to see a human being with all senses, all channels, open. You can see it in any infant, curious and hungry for experience. To begin with there are no blocks; and that, in a way, is a problem because there can easily be too much input – or the wrong kind. When you are wide open you are infinitely vulnerable to poisons.

      All that we do in therapy, at least in person centred work, is aimed at releasing the tedium vitae, opening the channels that have been closed down by bad experience or a life-negating milieu. This isn’t done be trying to imposed affirmations over the top of choked channels, straining forward in hope and the effort to change, but by freeing up the points of blockage, daring to look at the detail of what is still shutting off the élan vital.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

 FILLFULMENT

an after-dinner conversation.

Coffee ?

Thanks. But what on earth do you mean by ‘Fillfullment’

Oh, I just like playing with words – you start to think what words really say. Said rightly ‘fulfillment’ is supposed to mean the consummation of one’s desires and hopes, not just feeling full. But sorry, you were being serious before I started talking nonsense.

Yes, well, fulfillment is certainly something I haven’t got.

Why’s that?

 I’ve just ended a relationship and I am a bit worried about it – I mean, whether I’ve done the right thing. For so long I felt I was being used. I went along with it for ever, but I just reached a point where I couldn’t stand it any longer.

 So, what’s worrying you, I said? 

Well, the way I did it. So drastic. She wanted to discuss the problem. I wrote a letter saying that I didn’t want to discuss it. I knew that if we got into a discussion I would wind up agreeing with her – I always do – and we would be right back where we were.

So you cut the relationship. Just like that? 

Yes. And I keep going over and over it – whether I’ve done the right thing. 

How do you do your worrying, I asked.

 Like a knot of fear in my stomach. This decision is important, but I worry about silly things too. Like weekends before I get up I worry about whether I should do this job or that job. Then, when I’m doing, it I worry whether I should be doing something else. That’s what I’m like.

So, I suppose you’d class yourself as a worrier, then?

Yes. Not all the time. I have bouts of it.

I said, I’d just like to try something with you – try out an idea experiment. See whether it means anything to you. When you are in one of those states of worry is the feeling always similar ? 

Well, I don’t always worry about the same thing, he said.

No, I don’t mean what you worry about – I mean is the feeling similar whatever you worry about.

I don’t quite follow you.

Well, there are two things: on the one hand there is the worry and then there is what you worry about. Sometimes, if you look closely, you can see that whatever you worry about, the feeling of the worry is always the same. The subject of the worry differs, but the worry is always the same, it has the same tone, the same quality.  The last time you worried it was about something completely different – but that’s forgotten. But in fact, it was exactly the same feeling – the same state, the same kind of anxiousness.

I think I see what you mean, he said. Like the worry shifts from one thing to another. Like its floating around waiting to fix on the next thing to worry about. I’ve often thought that.

That’s right. It’s like being stuck in the present. You don’t see the whole picture. Everyone is so crazy about ‘living in the now’ it blinds them to what they are living in. The pure ‘now’ is an abstraction. Life isn’t like that. Emotional issues are seldom about the present only. It’s confusing for people. What we call ‘the now’ is really whatever is actually going on; and what is going on is also the past. The past lives in the present like a hidden ghost. The past is vital to the living, breathing present. The present always carries the past with it. The present cleansed of the past would be cold stone dead. If you were totally marooned in the now you wouldn’t recognise anything, not even your own mother.  

So, what you’re saying is: when I worry about something in the present my past is there too.

Sure it is, I said. And the presence of the past is marked by the same feeling-sensation it gives you. But instead of paying attention to the feeling, you fixate on the present object of worry. Most people do that. It’s like present time gets all the blame for the past. The concentration is too much. The whole weight of your past experience is focused on the now. The present moment can’t take it. People looking at you can see that you are over the top, that you are giving too much weight to the present difficulty. 

He said, that’s right. What people always seem to be saying is, ‘what’s he worrying about. It isn’t that bad. Why doesn’t he relax about it. Worrying isn’t going to help’. And I can see they’re right. But that doesn’t take the nagging away.

No, I replied, because that kind of advise doesn’t cut the mustard. You can’t ignore how strong it feels and how it absorbs you. But you can differentiate between the worry and what you are worrying about. You can, Just for a moment, separate the feeling of worry from its present object. Or rather, you use what you are worried about, to capture the feeling of the worry, the sensation of it, the specific taste of it. That’s the secret. Then it will open out into all the times in the past when you were in that precise state. They’re all present. They’re all ‘now’.

OK, so you see the difference between the worry and what you are worrying about, but how does that solve it, he said ?

It’s not a question of solving it, but of spreading the load. The real agony is the concentration of your whole past onto a pinpoint in the present. it’s like an acetylene torch burning a hole in your soul. Getting a reality on the whole time sense of it spreads the load. Once the load is spread the heat is off and you are being more real, more truthful. It’s easier then to accept just how your life has been and how it is. You realise that the feeling you suffer isn’t all about your immediate circumstances.

I guess this idea goes for more that just the problem of worry, he said. 

Yes indeed, just take the experience of loneliness. However strongly it is felt to be one’s present circumstance, loneliness is never just occurring in the now. Sure there had to be a first time you experienced loneliness. But I will bet there was a time when being alone was really serious, perhaps overwhelming. And it will have fired up over and over in many episodes throughout life; and every time it fired up it seemed as though it was only due to your present circumstances. 

Well, I can remember times in the past when I was lonely or worried or whatever. That’s fairly easy, but I can’t see how just remembering will make any difference. 

Quite right, it doesn’t. You can remember a time past, a time that was quite upsetting, but in just remembering it as something that happened isn’t enough. It’s distant. You know it happened. It’s a fact, but that’s all. It’s long past now. “Oh yes, one says, I used to get upset, but I got over it. I can actually recall it now and it has lost its power.”

I might feel I’ve dealt with it; but I suppose it can still affect me ?

 ‘You suppose’. You only suppose it still affects you.  That means it’s just data, memory stripped of feeling. In reality you haven’t remembered it all. If you really remembered it you wouldn’t suppose that it affects you. You would see that the whole feeling is here in the living situation again, exactly the same as was – and you’d get the real taste of how it was, if only for a second.

Remembering something as data and saying that you’ve dealt with it is a cop out, I said. Sure, you know it happened. The memory of it – as data – is quite clear. You’ve talked about it with your therapist over and over. You dealt with it. It happened. OK! You think it has lost it’s bite now. But the truth is, the experience of it – as a felt-sense – the real depth of it has been cut off. And so you have never related it to the whole string of times when it hit you again and again. In that way, your memories are disconnected and unreal. And it is the underlying feeling that breaks through and attaches itself to the trigger in present time – the way it always has done. The feeling attaches itself to the present rather than its roots in the past.

 Sounds like you’re saying that the solution to everything is in the past.

Oh no!  Living in the now is a good guideline so long as you mean to include all that is going on in it. 

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

  

ONCE WERE CHILDREN

For males in many indigenous societies what is known as the ‘a rite of passage’ into manhood has the effect of cutting a youth off from his younger self, dissociating him from his childhood – it is a ceremony that is painful and traumatic and felt to be necessary for the boy to become a  man. Among the Luiseño Indians, a boy has to ‘undergo severe ordeals such as laying on red ant mounds and not crying out from pain as they are repeatedly bitten over long periods of time.  Among some Australian Aborigine societies, a boy being initiated was expected to repeatedly hit his penis with a heavy rock until it was bruised and bloody.  He also had several of his incisor teeth knocked out with a sharp rock by the adult men who were instructing him in the duties and obligations of manhood and the secrets of their religion.’  1

As I said, purpose of these barbaric rituals is to dissociate the boy from childhood. In some aboriginal societies this is accomplished with such effectiveness that a boy will walk past his mother and ignore her. He is now a man, not a boy. She simply doesn’t exist any longer as his mother.

In western society a man’s break with childhood isn’t as complete as this. Over the decades things have slowly changed.  ‘Macho’ is now a derogatory label; but there lingers the powerful ghost of the old primitive image of what it is to be ‘a man’: a tough, fearless warrior, indifferent to pain and physical injury.

In our country the aggressive ‘rugby culture’, energised by our Maori people, has an enormous grip on the male psyche. Its Anglo-Saxon roots can be traced back to the bullying practices of the English Public Schools where men were trained in sports and the cool ruthlessness necessary to run the British Empire.  There are still the remnants of this traditional mindset even in the gentlest of nappy-changing New Age fathers. Powerful emotions can be switched on in front of TV sports programs, triggering a rush of war-like adrenaline. The primitive warrior loiters in the unconscious at the ready, like an archetypal savage. It has allied itself with the warrior nostalgia of the Maori with which the New Zealand sense of national identity has become conflated.

But the repressed child does not go away and for many men it unconsciously reemerges in the family situation, where the man, now a father, is emotionally tethered to the wife as his mother, without his in the least realising it – a situation he would vehemently deny and only becomes openly manifest when there is the threat that he may lose her.

It is strange, isn’t it, that the very emphasis on manhood produces men who are psychologically fixated in childhood. The internal child is repressed and with it the vital connection with the original self. Masculine bravado tries to compensate for this loss, sometimes going to enormous lengths to prove his mastery. Such men show all the outward signs of strength and competence, and indeed do posses these qualities in war, sport and the creative struggle for survival – but the price is an unconscious regressive streak that is weak and immature. The plus side, the pay-off, is the sense of power and the freedom from the pull of the feminine.

Women are not subject to requirements that so severely cut them off from childhood and, because of this, and for other reasons too, women retain a more wholesome connection with their original self and are thus, on the whole, more psychologically skillful and mature.

The history of western society has been that of the ‘dominator style’, a man’s world – deeply cut off from nature. We are beginning to see the devastating consequences of this mindset.  We have bullied and raped the natural world and are now beginning to pay for it; and the life of a single man will also eventually reap the desolation of being detached, discovering that power and self-mastery are ultimately self-defeating.

To accomplish the rite of passage into ‘manhood’ the past has to be rewritten to fit the myth. A man’s fictional history becomes that of the warrior, ten feet tall, strong as an ox and who, like Heracles, Theseus and Odysseus can defy even the gods. The self made man. To make the fiction true a man has to accomplish masterful deeds. Our violent history has been littered with madmen like Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, the results of whose great deeds we know all too well.

If we look at our small New Zealand society we can see that this myth of manhood is not distributed evenly across the boards. It is culturally determined, but variations run in families. The hyper-masculine mindset, its particular style and strength, is handed down from one generation to the next. A style can persist in the family atmosphere across the generations without ever being explicitly stated – unconsciously endemic in the family ethos. And because it is never even thought about its hold on the soul is tenacious.

As a psychotherapist I have seen how much difficulty some men have with this affliction: the instinctive terror of weakness, uncertainty or vacillation: and there is a sort of pall of guilt hanging over it all, where any admission of childlike feelings is absolutely inadmissible. It is a terrible burden to carry. They struggle with what they are supposed to be.

We must understand that the macho archetype, if we can call it that, is not simply genetic, but rather epigenetic. This means that the genes involved can be switched on or off by environmental and cultural factors. Nobody chooses the kind of culture they are born into. But it is culture that greatly determines what we become. Cultures change slowly. Not as slowly as biological evolution, but change it does.

The way we each struggle with our culture is how we help create the future. It’s the difference between what we have been dealt with and what kind of deal we hand on.

1 http://anthro.palomar.edu/social/soc_4.htm

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

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THERE’S GOT TO BE SOMETHING MORE

  

At the height of their confidence and wealth something curious happened to the Victorians. Spiritualism suddenly became a popular a craze that swept both England and America. One late 19^th century critic described the outbreak of spiritualism as a ‘monstrous folly’. Folly or not, it had all the hallmarks of a similar outbreak in the mid-20th century: the New Age movement beginning with the popular use of psychedelic drugs and the pursuit of mystical insights and other worlds. The Victorian Spiritualist may not have practiced nudity and free love, but their séances had a moral subversiveness and occasionally a naughty slant to them. They, like their later psychedelic compatriots were searching for something.  

 These Victorian New Agers ‘tried everything - they attended séances, visited mediums, collected and researched hundreds of ghost stories. When members of the group started to die, they tried to contact each other from beyond the grave.’1 The ideas of spiritualism affected all ranks of society. The lower classes didn’t go in for fancy parlour séances, but they gaped at music hall performances of mediums like Daniel Douglas Holm, who demonstrated moving tables with ‘spirit hands’, musical instruments playing in mid-air, and body levitation. Many from the upper classes were converted to Spiritualism by the amazing experiences they had in their parlour séances led by mediums, usually large impressive women in flowing robes – experiences where they contacted their dear newly departed. And Madam Blavatsky and her Secret Doctrine was at the height of her theosophical influence.

From our vantage point, looking back, it’s easy for us to see that the Victorians were psychologically deprived by their buttoned-up style of society. But, of course, they couldn’t see it. They were in it. And that’s true of all real deprivation – it’s invisible to those who are in it. They feel it, but can’t identify it, so they go out on all kinds of tangents to fill the hole. Often the search is quite desperate. You can see how whole families and their descendants are psychologically deprived by a style of life that is endemic in the family tradition, handed on from one generation to the next like an inherited but invisible disease. Emotional attitudes are remarkably persistent across generations. A person brought up in a strong religious background may have drifted away from the church, but retain the same driven intensity toward another quite different area.

The search for something more can take on many different guises. A few years ago there was an amusing cartoon in the New Yorker. It pictured two meditating Zen monks – just sitting. The master is saying to the novice, ‘What do you mean “what’s next” – this is it’.

I think one of the most terrifying philosophical questions is: ‘Is this all there is?’ It speaks of a invisible vacuum. That question is the engine that drives one of the most stubborn and intrepid of human desires – the need for something more. It can kick in the spiritual search which, if ever it reaches its goal, ossifies into belief. But mostly, with spiritual seekers, the search goes on forever. Nothing quite fills the hole because the real deprivation has not been identified.

Did you know there is a Shopaholics Anonymous, besides an Overeaters and Alcoholics Anonymous and all the other Anonymouses - all trying to deal with the terrible drive for something more.

It makes you wonder what is the quality of ‘enough’.  As he was dying of cancer Aldous Huxley’s wife administered a dose of LSD by his request. When he was nearly gone she put a rose under his nose. After a few moments she said: ‘Is that enough?’

 He whispered, ‘It is never enough’.

Not a bad remark as a checkout to this life.

1 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3663243/Spooked-by-Victorian-spiritualists.html

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

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PERCEPTION

“Modern psychology has shown us that much of what we call ‘perception’ is not a straightforward taking in the world around us … but is strongly biased by our beliefs and conditioning so that our perception is slanted to validate what we already believe.(1)

         This is obviously very true; but not all perceptions are misperceptions; it is a matter of degree. My perceptual world may be more or less true of reality. At a very intimate level, between persons, there can be times when I do perceive how it is for another. There are times when I am in touch and times when I am hopelessly out of touch and my observations are biased.

       Let me illustrate this simplified view of perception. Say there is this great movie. It’s full of passion and intrigue, drama and humour, a colourful storyline full of fascinating characters. Now suppose you go to this movie and you are a bit deaf so that you miss some of the dialogue; or that you are worried and distracted; or that the gay relationships in the movie are against Bible teaching; or suppose the hero reminds you of a once hated schoolmaster; or maybe there was too much kinky sex. In any of these instances your perceptions of the film will be limited or distorted. You will edit out aspects, or simply miss certain subtleties of the film. The question becomes; how much of the total reality of the movie can you take in? How much does your mind act like a reducing value?

        Now lets say you, you yourself, are the equivalent of a movie: you have highly complex history. Like everyone you are a person of many characters and moods, each with a colourful and intricate storyline. Now let’s take a person who has known you, a friend, a partner maybe: they have witnessed hundreds of your performances – you have been on view day after day. They know you well we would suppose, but the crucial question is: how much of your total reality can they take in. How broad a spectrum of you can they get.  How much do they project their own feelings into your story, how much do they edited out, reinterpret or just neglect. Based on insufficient or distorted perception they can then make judgments that are equally inappropriate. Whatever their interactions with you, whatever they have to say to you, it won’t come out right, or their timing will be wrong.

          You cannot be in sync with anything you cannot fully perceive. Perception is the awareness of how things are. Put simply, when a person perceives how things are they will make the right choices at the right times; if there is distortion of perception then their choices and actions will be out of sync with the flow of events.

         When we perceive the total flow of life around us we make the right choices. When we are cut off from the environment then our choices are wrong. We think our choices are made by weighing up the circumstances – ‘weighing up’ as a thinking operation. But our choices are not made by thought, but by prior perception.

          You don’t need to be a good judge of life or worry about your decisions. It’s like when you drive a car, the rightness of your actions, your judgment, is totally dependent on the full perception of the moment to moment flow of traffic. Your perception flows directly into your action. To go straight from perception to action is the ultimate form of self-trust.

*

       Nothing marks off modernity so much as the evolving relationship between the sexes. We have come a long way since 1879 when Kate Sheppard campaigned for women’s right to vote; but as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement she would surely have been shocked to learn that 100 years later we are about to legalise same sex marriages.

        Different styles of relationships that are now acceptable have made traditional marriage merely one of many alternatives. As this social fluidity evolves it requires a much greater psychological sophistication to deal with it. And even within marriage there are alternative arrangements that were unthinkable in the past. We need a new psychological orientation that can cope with the fluidity of modern relationships. The psyche has to catch up with what is actually the case in modern society.

           As one generation replaces another, the established parental downloads gradually mutate and society as a whole changes. But the changes are not smooth. On the relationship level there is tension not only between partners, but between different parts of oneself. The battle is between the older unconscious orientations and the newly emerging ones. There can be tension too, as one partner moves psychologically faster than the other. A typical difficulty is the emergence of the woman as a person in her own right. The situation is seldom static. Within the same relationship there can be oscillating waves of regression and progression. It’s like the complex flow of the weather, unpredictable with sudden changes of mood.

          What struggles to emerge is a broader spectrum of perception. This broader perspective is everything we mean be ‘person-centred’. How you actually perceive the other person is crucial; how broad a spectrum of their actual being can you accept as actually existing. If your filter is such that you see the other as a role your perception will be limited to just that. If the person is only a ‘son’, a ‘wife’, a ‘mother’ calling up the old archetypes, then your present-time perception will be inadequate.

          Its not a question of being ‘judgmental’. Its about something much more basic than that – one’s very perception of people is already a judging. Unless, that is, you are really in touch.

[1] Tart, Charles T.   The End of Materialism. New Harbinger Publications, 2009

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