INSTINCT AND THE FELT-SENSE

...................by Stanley
Let’s start with a simple observation. There is a difference between our ‘head-take’ on a situation and our ‘body-take’ of the same situation. Put very simply, our head-take is how we ‘think’ about a problem; our body-take is how we ‘feel’ about it. Quite often the two are distinctly different. We often say colloquially, ‘my head tells me one thing and my heart something else.
....I am going to use the term ‘head-sense’ to stand for our, analytical, cognitive, thinking mind; and ‘body-sense’ for what we have come to know as the ‘felt-sense’. ‘Body-sense’ and ‘felt-sense’ I shall use interchangeably – they are the same thing.
....Lets clear the deck first. When I speak of the body-sense I do not mean ‘the unconscious’. You can have a direct and immediate awareness of your body-sense; this is not what is classically meant by ‘the unconscious’. Psychoanalysis has its place, but not here. I want to link two other disciplines: the psychology of focusing and evolutionary psychology. I want to examine how the felt-sense may have evolved during our long history.
....In therapy we focus on the felt-sense to discover our feelings on any issue. But we have to clearly distinguish between the felt-sense and the practice of focusing on it.
....Focusing is a deliberate, intentional action. The felt-sense is not intentional, but rather the body’s instinctive, immediate perception of any situation. It works whether you like or not. This body-sense must have been an adaptation that was slowly developed over millions of years and it is always active.
....Here’s something that’s fairly obvious. Our body-sense is something we are born with. Being hungry or fearful or sexy are bodily reactions that are instinctual. We don’t have to learn how to feel these things; we are all born with the capacity to react in these ways. As we say, they are hard-wired. Like the felt-sense they are universal, meaning they come with our genetic makeup, our human nature.
....Our head-sense seems to be different. We imbibe the logic of our culture, our language, our ways of thinking and our family dynamics. These are not universals. Different family – different way of thinking; different culture – different head sense.
....Our animal nature evolved according to Darwinian natural selection. 98% of our genes are the same as those of the chimpanzees. Six million years ago there was a speciation divergence that led to homo sapiens. What we call our body-sense is a gradual adaptation developed since then. During most of this time our survival depended upon skills that were non-linguistic, our mammalian body senses that were non-analytical non-cognitive, but highly effective.
....For any organism awareness of what is going on in the environment is vital for survival. I am suggesting that the felt-sense is our basic animal awareness of the environment primarily geared for survival in the broadest sense. It was developed over those millions of years of our early history and is now hard-wired and an inherited characteristic.
....An organism is only connected to life in ways that are useful to it – that is, ways that promote survival. Purely as an organism it is not important for us to know that earth revolves around the sun or to perceive the molecular structure of a meat pie before we eat it. The smell of a pie, yes. We are biologically hardwired to be put off by the smell of bad meat. That has always been important to avoid.
....So there is a difference between the kind of environment we were originally adapted to and the one we live in today. But for the felt-sense there isn’t as hard and fast a difference between these two worlds as one would expect. This is a curious and puzzling fact and it leads us to ask: has the felt-sense also adaptively evolved?
....What we call our ‘environment’ is what is useful for us to perceive. I am suggesting that what we call our ‘felt-sense’ is a wholesale but biased perception of our environment that reacts to it instinctively. This sense helps us in the close encounters of the everyday kind as it did for our pre-human ancestors. But, as an organism, our relationship to the environment didn’t stop with the beginning of civilization; and maybe at the organismic level there have been evolutionary changes in what we call the felt-sense. For example, we know that the body-sense is very sensitive to being understood. We know very precisely that the felt-sense will reject any description of how it feels that doesn’t fit. You say, ‘I am angry… No, that’s not it. (consulting your body-sense) I am irritated. That’s it. I am IRRITATED !’ We are the only animals on the planet that have developed such a high degree of organismic sophistication; yet this body-sense is still anchored in its original holistic pre-cognitive nature.
....This would clearly suggest that the body-sense has evolved enough to grasped language as part of its environment. In other words at organismic level of functioning we also now have a very refined feeling for language. Even more remarkably, we can also have a feeling for science, a feeling that is different from the scientific mode of conceptual thinking. A scientist reports that the solution to a chemical problem about carbon rings came to him in a dream or the answer to a mathematical equation came to her in the toilet. But it seems that the body-sense still doesn’t think analytically – it retains its original ability for holistic survival sensitivity and for flashes of insight that are instantaneous.
....We know that the bodily felt-sense can somehow synthesise a new idea in an abstract field. Any scientist will tell you that discovery sometimes comes in a flash that doesn’t follow a rational step by step process - that comes afterwards as a confirmation. The body-sense can solve logical or theoretical puzzle by leaping, as we say, outside the square. Just how it does this is difficult to say. Of course, such a solution could not arise without the head-sense’s grasp of the theoretical problem in the first place. But what is clear is that the organism, as a bodily sense, contributed something vital. On the question of this cooperation between different parts of the self, evolutionary biologist Nicholas Humphries says:
What makes the parts of an oak tree belong together – the branches, roots, leaves, acorns ? They share a common interest in the tree’s survival… Then, here’s the question: What makes the parts of a person belong together – if and when they do? The clear answer has to be that the parts will and do belong together just in so far as they are involved in the common project of creating that person’s life… they are engaged in one and the same enterprise: the enterprise of steering me – body and soul – through the physical and social world.
....There is a good evolutionary reason why women generally are more in touch with the body-sense. Multitasking has always been necessary for the woman because of the nature of her tasks. The ability to multitask using intuition and instant response to novel situations is an attribute of the body-sense. For our ancestors, men had to be concentrated on specific tasks like hunting, building and defense. As a consequence, men may have adapted by developing a larger and more dominant head-sense that can more effectively concentrate.
....It might even be profitable to conceive that the head-sense is built on top of the body-sense as a continuous evolutionary adaptation. Yet still, we actually experience the body-sense as quite a different mode of being.
....In therapy we discover that our felt-sense shows us the immediate step in any situation – always in a life enhancing direction. Not a logical line forward – but the next step necessary. When we stop and focus on a problem we consult this body-sense; but we are not given an awareness of simply what is going on. The body-sense does not just give us raw data and leave it to our everyday head-sense to work out how to use it. The ‘take’ of the body-sense is not unselective. Precisely the opposite, it is slanted; it is always relevant to survival. In any situation not any move we could make will be appropriate. The body-sense always produces the next step – and that step is geared toward the broadest goal of survival: well-being, furtherance and aliveness – not only for oneself, but for those upon whom we depend. Indeed, this simple and pronounced bias is often missing in our head-sense of a situation. The head-sense can be so enmeshed in ridiculous cultural ideas that it often fails to cut through the crap. Much of the head-stuff we harbour are culturally transmitted viruses (memes) , such as toxic religions that are quite inimical to survival; and every culture is swimming in lesser adverse absurdities that compete to fill our heads.
....The felt-sense is there whether we turn our attention towards it or not. It is there because it is an inherited, instinctual part of our nature. The deliberate action of turning towards it is what we call ‘focusing’. This psychological ability is not instinctual, but acquired; and, as we know, individually acquired characteristics are not inherited. We don’t come equipped with a built-in ability to psychologically focus.
....Our environment is no longer merely the natural world as it was. We have developed an external environment that is structured and symbolic and our head-sense is part of that world. But make no mistake, this created world has been a crucial, perhaps the crucial factor, in our survival as a species. But at the same time, it can put us out of sync with our instinctive nature which was adapted to a quite different natural environment. Our instinctive survival nature – our felt-sense – has its own ‘take’ on this new environment and it is not so hemmed in by arbitrary and fixed rules and injunctions and thus it is more simple, creative and original.
....There are negative cultural factors that can fill our head-sense and divorce us from the bodies. The overblown work ethic and achievement fantasies of modern society are not helpful; neither is our education system that’s geared to promoting academic concentration that tends to sever our vital connections. There are also family cultures that are openly hostile to any manifestation of intuition and imagination and that fail to nurture the body-sense.
....We know that some people are well tuned-in to their body-sense and can make immediate survival decisions. Even such fortunate people have areas where their natural good sense, their felt-sense, has no input into their lives. They have to be shown how to focus on these areas so that their body-sense can help them take the necessary steps to go forward in living.
....We should not be dismayed by the idea that some of our basic psychological qualities are biologically inherited. Evolutionary psychology has done a great deal of interesting and valuable work that makes a lot of sense, extending enormously our idea of ‘history’ and what makes us tick. I’ve tried to show here how the relatively new conceptions of psychological focusing might be more understandable when looked at from the evolutionary perspective.

[1] Humphrey, Nicholas. One Self: a meditation on the unity of consciousness. Social Research,
67, no. 4, 32-39, 2000.
[1] Dawkins, Richard. Viruses of the Mind. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Dawkins/viruses-of-the-mind.html

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME.

.......................Louise and Ferdy: dramatic personifications.

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

....Are you missing your feelings? If so you’re lucky, for a long time I didn’t have any feelings to miss. Well, that’s not quite true. I did have feelings, but they were only for other people, not for me. I was known as a very feeling and sympathetic person. I could only feel sympathetic, sad or angry for others, on behalf of others, as it were. These days I am beginning to feel some of that compassion for myself, but for most of my life it never occurred to me. Even more so when I had children. Having children just reinforced my urge to self-sacrifice. I didn’t look upon myself as a good mother – although people used to tell me I was too good for my own good. I knew in a way they were right, but being that way felt natural. If you have lived most of your life without your own feelings it only occasionally seems like something is missing.

,,,,But now I know I also had a selfish reason for being so selfless. The first time I ever felt angry it surprised and horrified me. It happened in the kitchen when my husband criticized the way I cooked the potatoes. Small enough thing – nothing unusual. But there was a kitchen knife lying on the bench. Something rose up in me and I wanted to plunge the knife into his back. That moment in my mind I actually did it. I ran into the bedroom shaking with fear.

....It was after that experience I started therapy. I soon realised I did have a selfish reason for being so unselfish: I was afraid of myself – afraid, not only of my anger, but any sympathy I might have for myself. In my childhood they called it ‘wallowing in self-pity’. A big no-no. For me, feeling for others was a way of self-preservation. Deep down, the only way I knew to be accepted.

....In my sessions we did a lot of work on the feelings in my body. At first I didn’t know what my therapist was talking about. I got irritable when he asked me to look into my body to see how I felt. That irritability was actually the beginning of a feeling that was already there. Only it turned out to be much more than irritability – it was rage and sorrow.

....Another thing I found out was why I often felt so tired. Eventually I learned that to have my feelings I had to come home. Again and again I had to come home – I mean come home to my body, the place where you are supposed to live. I was always tired because deep down I didn’t want to live, I wasn’t living with myself, for myself. My body was my enemy. It had all the feelings I didn’t want, all the feelings that could have ruined me if they got out. I went through a period where I just couldn’t be bothered with the effort it took to stay alive and cope.

....The only way not to have feelings is to simply vacant. Now, when I meet a person like I used to be, I recognise that ‘no-one-at-home’ look. I feel sorry for them. They make a good show of being alive; doing all the right things; smiling and nodding at the right times. But that’s all it is – a show.

....When I was young I was taught a big lesson: having feelings was dangerous. Nobody said as much, but that’s how it was. I was the youngest with three bossy brothers, a macho father and a useless mother. I had to make a survival choice – hide myself and my feelings or face being ostracised and annihilated. That’s what it was like. Choosing to live took one sharp act of decision: leave home ! Home – the place where all one’s feelings are. Leave them all at home. Leave ones primary home whilst still living on in the family home. Strange isn’t it? One chooses to live and be good; set the body up to make the right noises and look OK – otherwise stand back and just watch yourself pretending to be in the game of life. Watch my body acting whilst having nothing to do with it. All the while knowing somehow one is hiding. I used to do that physically too. I used to hide in the kennel with the dog.

....Today life is much more difficult. Well, perhaps not so much for me, but for others whom I seem to puzzle. Some think I have changed for the worse. Particularly my husband Ferdy. He’s a good man, but he now finds me difficult. I feel sorry for him, but not so sorry that I will give up myself. My main problem with him now is he stifles me. The one thing he hates is me saying ‘I want some space’. I really don’t know whether  our marriage will survive and I don’t really know how I will feel if it doesn’t; but I do know I can’t go back to how it was.

 

 

HOW HUMAN NATURE BECOMES A PERSON

an excusion into evolutionary psychology
............................by Stanley

....The idea that all the great variety of cultures ancient and modern are built up upon a universally shared human nature has been out of fashion for quite a while. Instead we have had what is known as the ‘blank slate’ theory that says there is no such thing as human nature. You are born a blank slate and the habits, language and customs of your culture totally shape you – you live in it, you think with it. Culture is everything. This view is known as ‘post-modernism’. It is so called because it opposes what was a ‘modern’ view, starting with the 18th century Enlightenment, that there is indeed such a thing as objective ‘nature’ – human included. The post-modernists would insist that the whole of human history proves their point. Except that there is a small slice of human history they overlooked. 

......2.5 million years ago our ancestors, hardly recognisable as human, began a long journey through time that ended 12,000 years ago – a period roughly co-incident with the Pleistocene geological era. Someone from the end of that period you would recognise as fully human; and they would be in every sense – biologically and psychologically basically the same as us, with the same potentialities as ourselves. But it took evolution and natural selection over 2 million years to do it. 

.....In that ‘small slice of history’ human nature was formed and it remains basically unchanged in everyone today no matter what their culture. 

......Interesting to us are the more personal aspects of this. Some years ago when I first encountered evolutionary psychology I didn’t like it. I didn’t understand it because I had no knowledge of evolution. It seemed to me to be one of those dead-head scientific theories that would spoil my Jungian view of the world. I thought it could never account for the human imagination. I was wrong.

.....But still, a more pertinent question is this: if our inherited human nature make us all basically the same, the problem for us in person-centred psychology is how and in what way each human person is different; for us this is a crucial question. We are not asking about cultural differences – but the differences between you and me.

.....In our work, the concept of ‘the person’ is most important. Somehow we have to account for it. I believe what we are referring to is a continued development of a long evolutionary trend. What we call ‘the person’ is a refinement of our inherited ability to respond to the specificities of the environment. 

.....The more an animal can respond to the specifics of the environment the greater are its chances of survival. The ability to differentiate changes in the environment and respond appropriately is the key to the success of all the more highly developed mammals. The lower animals cannot do this so well. In  order to lay her eggs the female wasp (Sphex), first digs a hole in the sand, then goes out looking for a caterpillar which she stings and drags into her hole so  that her young can feed upon it. But first she leaves the caterpillar on the edge of the hole while she checks to see if the hole is OK. If you move the caterpillar while she is checking the hole she will go through the whole procedure again. No matter how many times you move the caterpillar while she is in the hole checking it, when she finds the caterpillar again she will go back and check the hole again. She never gets past this repetition if you keep moving the caterpillar.

.....Compare this to the ability of a cat chasing a mouse. The environment and the mouse are constantly changing and the cat responds to each specific change in present time. But far more complex is George at an interview with a board of examiners where he is trying to get a job as an electronics engineer. Not only is George facing a barrage of complicated questions coming from people who also emit shades of subliminal feelings towards him, he is also dealing with all his associated memories: the maths teacher who was sarcastic to him at school, his father’s heavy goals for him, his imagination and fears for the future, as well as his whole training as an engineer. All are present to him; and all are involved in answering the next challenging question from the examining board. No one in the world has ever been in exactly the situation George is in at this moment. And no one in the world will answer the next probing as George will. There are no existing patterns that will help him. His response in present time will come out of the total person George is. George is definitely no mere behavioral, stimulus response organism. He has come a long way from that.

.....Some evolutionary psychologists maintain that our value of the human person is a direct result of evolution and natural selection. I suppose you could say that the intrinsic value we place on the ‘person’ is the secular equivalent of belief in the soul which must have had, because of its ubiquity, some sort of adaptive advantage in evolutionary terms. 

.....All of which would have been laid down in our development during the Pleistocene some 2 million years ago. Evolutionary psychologist Nicolas Humphrey has said that we, and to some extent gorillas and chimps, have evolved to be ‘natural psychologists’. For good reasons we developed the ability to second guess the minds of our fellows, giving us, as a species, a survival advantage. 

.....From this beginning we became ‘a society of selves. The idea that everyone is equally special in this way is extraordinarily potent – psychologically, ethically and politically…  And from the beginning, it will have transformed human relationships, encouraging new levels of mutual respect, and greatly increasing the value each person puts on their own and other’s lives. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that it marks a watershed in the evolution of our species.’ 

..

..

DARWINMANIA

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

....To talk about the ultimate value of the individual seems absurd set against the 3.5 billion years since life began on the planet earth. Religion has fought hard not to get swamped by it. The question is: are we in the same boat. Does triumph of Darwin pose the same threat to a valid psychology of the person?

....That is seems to do so indicates that we are not at all as sure of ourselves as we might be. Biology seems set to have it all wrapped up. It seems our only recourse is to say that there are things about which science knows nothing. Of course, a good scientist would agree. ‘Certainly there is much we do not know’, but he would add … ‘yet’.

....That little ‘yet’ is threatening. It suggests that eventually he is going to snuff out your soul because he will have found out about all that stuff. Explained it all away. No room for feelings or mystery, or personality, or the great ambiguity of life. You’re gone. Old Egg-Head will claim he has worked it all out. What on earth can we possibly mean by a ‘person-centred psychology’, let alone anything we call the soul? 

....This is a paranoia based on our fragile grasp of what we are doing.  In fact, biology is not our enemy but our friend. True science is a state of wonderment, the same kind of wonderment that stands out on every page of Darwin’s notes as he voyaged around South America in H.M.S Beagle. “The day had passed delightfully”, he wrote. “Delight itself however, is a weak term to express the feelings of a naturalist who, for the first time, has wandered by himself in a Brazilian rainforest”.

....There is the true naturalist’s openness to nature. In that sense we do no less than Darwin did and as every genuine scientist does. We stand before nature in the same way, with the same sense of awe – only with us, we stand before human nature.  

....There is no need to retreat into the supernatural in order to hold on to our realities and our values. We don’t have to invoke spiritual agencies, astrological influences, crystal balls, clairvoyance or the gods to escape the clutches of materialism. Neither do we have to fixate on quantum physics to reassure ourselves that even the scientists have passed beyond nature. Science is not about materialism or any kind of ism. It is about humility and a respect for nature as the great unknown. There is no need to create a realm that science cannot reach, because there is room enough in nature to accommodate our most valuable asset: our sense of the infinite vastness of what we do not know.

.....In Darwin’s time the accepted doctrine was that in the beginning God made all the species exactly as they are now. To doubt that for a moment was to face the unknown. It was to doubt what everyone knew. That Darwin did so was an act of great self-confidence and at the same time an act of supreme humility. He was confident enough to humble himself before nature and let it teach him.

....Perhaps the highest human cognition is ‘I don’t know’. This is not the same as the existentialist’s ‘nothing’. It is not the perception of nothingness, but rather that there is a something one does not know. That’s very different. And, more importantly, it is an unknown something that presses to be known. This pressure does not come from another realm, but precisely from what is observably there. Neither does this sense come from dwelling on a realm of unknowables like God, or spirit, or ‘the unconscious’, rather it comes from that which we directly know, what is directly before us. One example: for Darwin it was from the direct observation of the finches on the Galapagos Islands. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know what caused the variation in their beak size, but in looking at this obvious fact, there was something pressing to be known. Species change over time and place; that was obvious. But how? Why?

....It isn’t anything outside the observable that this unformed something presses its demands on us like this. It comes directly from what we observe.

....Also, whatever it is, this something cannot be derived from what is observed – it cannot be derived in the sense of ‘deduced from’. The observed form does not directly tell us what the unknown something is that’s pressing to be known. In this situation one’s present knowledge, by definition, has no way, no language, no concepts by which to formulate it…yet. 

....For Darwin, there was something about those finch’s beaks – something that wouldn’t let him go. It was a something which was as yet unformed, not even an idea. But by paying attention to it, a new idea comes. But how do you pay attention to something that isn’t yet an idea? 

....It’s no use saying that the unconscious does it. That just puts the same problem back one step: how does the unconscious form an idea from something that isn’t yet formed as an idea. The fact is, at this point, no one has the idea. 

....This is a philosophical problem and it presses on us to give it attention – which we are doing right here.

....Let’s look at some other concrete instances: if you have a problem, say a machine breaks down or let’s say you don’t know how to write a difficult letter or you don’t know how to finish an essay. What you do is attend to the problem in a certain way; the old thoughts and solutions don’t work, so now you attend to what is before you with a certain openness. Then suddenly the answer flashes on you. Where did the answer come from? Not from you, not from beyond. All we can say with certainty is that it comes from attending to the problem in a certain way, a contemplative looking at the situation rather than thinking. Just the way Darwin observed nature, out of which, eventually, came a new idea that shook the world of science.

....Incidentally, for those who are interested, this is where we part company from post-modernism.

....You may realise that this is the essence of what we call ‘focusing’. Focusing is all about how you attend to an unknown, unformed something in this certain way. 

....However, it is helpful to recognise that the scope of this idea is much broader than that of a psychotherapeutic tool. It is also what we do in good science and philosophy and why we should celebrate Charles Darwin who was, quite naturally, very good at it. Very good at it indeed.    

NOTICING THE BARELY NOTICEABLE

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

....Having practiced focusing, without even trying now, I find myself noticing small thoughts that before I would have overlooked. They are the quiet little thoughts that arise out of some mood I may be in. 

....I’m not what you would call a moody person, but what moods I have are so general, so pervasive, they don’t actually exist – not to me. Other people might notice my moods, but not me. They may ask me, ‘what’s the matter’, and I simply don’t know what they are talking about. 

....‘I’m just my usual self – nothing’s the matter !’  I’m irritated.

....Personally, I have a small selection of moods and I move from one to the other depending on all kinds of things. I’m like the weather. On any day the weather is just what it is, sometimes clear, sometimes a nor’wester, sometimes cool. Whatever it is, I’m inside the day’s weather, just like I’m inside a mood.

....A mood is definitely not an emotion; it’s hardly even a feeling. An emotion definitely gets you; a feeling you usually notice. But a mood is something different; it is not even a colour, it’s a ‘tone’, a subtle ‘shade’, it’s the ‘atmosphere’ of your being at any given moment. It often sits in the background behind an emotion. 

....A mood has its own thoughts. It has its own opinions and judgments entirely appropriate to it. But never make the mistake of thinking that the thoughts cause the mood – the thoughts are only the outcrop of a mood; but they always match the tone of the mood. They blend with it so much that they tend to be as invisible as the mood itself. From day to day you don’t notice the tables and chairs in your home. While you are having your breakfast, the house furniture is taken for granted. Just so, the thoughts of a mood are part of the mood. Taken for granted. Invisible as you go about your business.

 ....It all sounds so mild and harmless. So lightweight. But moods dictate the quality of life in ways that don’t overtly draw your attention. They don’t produce immediate crises, but over time they dictate the course life. They determine what happens and what doesn’t happen; who will put up with you and what you can tolerate; the choices you make and the one’s you can’t. Wherever your moods go you are likely to follow.

....The difficulty is that moods are so lightweight. And this is where focusing is so helpful. The one thing focusing does is train you to notice the barely noticeable. Once you get used to this you can suddenly get a vague sense of the mood you are in and the characteristic thoughts attached to it; thoughts you recognise as belonging to it. The mood opens up and reveals so much more. It’s like looking into developing dish and seeing the photographic image gradually appearing.

....As this happens you are no longer inside the mood, but looking at it. Outside it. It’s a very subtle process. But the key is paying attention to the barely noticeable, getting used to paying attention to what is only a vague bodily sense. 

....A mood turns out to be a non-verbal physical sensation. Paying attention to this is what we call focusing. The act of stopping and paying deliberate attention to the felt-sense of the body develops the mood’s presence more clearly and yields up what it’s all about. The body’s vague, murky, wordless mood/feeling/sense is where it’s all at. When you get this the mood opens up and you can move on. In future it’s much easier to recognise that particular mood at least. It kind of carries a red-tag from then on.

....A mood is like a finger print – there are no two alike in the whole world. I might tell you I’m sad, but that tells you nothing. It’s an empty label. It has no body. But that’s often how a mood feels when you first look at it. Bland. Featureless. A monotone. When someone tells you they are sad, that’s often what it feels like to them: like sadness without any content. That’s why it’s so easy to think you know what a person means when they tell you they feel sad. But believe me, you know nothing about it – and it’s likely they don’t either. 

....Because underneath my featureless mood there are intricate connections to the whole of my life that makes the quality of my sadness different from anyone else’s. As my mood unfolds it reveals a delicate network of meanings that stretch into the most surprising corners of my existence. Times and places that I may have given no importance, or, although I knew they were important at the time, are long gone. Irrelevant.

....This kind of work is very person specific. It has to be. There are no generalisations, no archetypal revelations, no interpretations, no big bangs, just the quite unfolding of a precise mood. And it is so exact. To watch someone going through this is to marvel at how absolutely original this person is, how completely, I mean completely, different to anyone else; and to realise too the utter inanity of all psychological labels and categories and programs.

THE PROCESS OF BECOMING:rewriting the past

  .............. by Stanley

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

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

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

REASSURANCE AND ALL THAT.

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

 

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

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

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

....I’m no good!

....Oh but…there are lots of ways…

....No I’m not.

....You are. Look at all the times…!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHO OWNS YOUR BODY?

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

......Whist still alive a person can abandon their body; and can do so for all kinds of reasons. Perhaps it is too painful, or is the repository of too many painful memories; or perhaps they have been seduced by an otherworld spirituality; or maybe they just detest the look of it. But I have become interested in another situation: when a person has given their body away and now someone else owns it.

......Why on earth would anyone do that – give away their own living body? Why would a person say to someone: ‘OK, you can have it’ – and forever after go on living a normal life – except that their body doesn’t belong to them.

......That’s right. Nobody would do this without some powerful reason. But perhaps it was the best thing to do if you’d lived in a poisonous family. It works like this: ‘nobody actually sees me. I am invisible. They really don’t know I’m here. They see me only as a physical presence in the family. I’m forced to behave and take part in their crazy games – I pretend, but it’s not me. The object they criticize and boss around is a ‘thing’ I inhabit.  I am angry with my body because they control it. It belongs to them It’s the symbol of my capitulation, of everything I despise. They hate it and I hate it too.  No one in my world talks about themselves, only about things. My body is just another object. It belongs to the world of them. A thing – well, I want nothing to do with it. It’s not me !

......The family knows ‘somebody’ is there, or rather they know a ‘body’ is in their space, but that’s all. It’s hard to believe that there are people to whom the existence of other subjectivities is quite unreal. Shocking I know, but they have no grasp that other persons exist in the way they themselves do. 

......But there’s a worse scenario – another nasty twist. When my body becomes the hated object, I switch over and adopt the family’s viewpoint and hate the ‘thing-body’, my ex-self, as much as, sometimes more, than they do. I am thoroughly on their side. Put graphically, I become part of the family that owns my despised body. I agree with them. I view it and hate it through their eyes. In such a family I tell myself: ‘everyone is beating me up, so I may as well beat myself up. Join the club. Let’s have a nice gang rape.’

 ......Years later the psychic situation remains the same. I may even insist that my family was always quite OK. But I find it strangely hard to take care of myself. I have this curious sadomasochistic attitude toward myself, particularly my physical being. I don’t even hate my body now, I just neglect it, use it with disregard. But my real dislike comes out whenever I look in the mirror.

......Childhood sexual abuse is another very strong reason a person will abandon their body.  I have seen some awful cases where, for a child, the physical and emotional pain of sexual abuse is so unbearable that they have simply given their body over to the abuser. It belongs to them; but it’s a body that is now disgusting. This is the psychic situation for the child – and can remain so for the rest of life.

......A consequence of any kind of evacuation of the body is a shortage of sensation. The body is the medium of communication with the world and we are hard wired to have all channels of perception wide open. Simply as an organism we need this to survive; as a human being we need it to enjoy the world. When the ‘doors of perception’ are wide open the grass looks greener and the sky looks bluer and the world comes alive.

......People who have experienced sensory deprivation in lightless, soundless floatation tanks will normally start hallucinating after a time. The mind makes up its own stimuli when the normal channels are shut down. 

......When I don’t own my body it has an anesthetizing effect so that I become sensation starved. I start to invent sensation. Self-harming is one way to satisfy this hunger. Pain is then somehow desirable. When you are deprived of sensation, any sensation is better than none. 

......Of course, since my real body belongs to the enemy, I can always have a substitute body like a shiny automobile that I make love to and masturbate in the garage every Saturday morning. But my real body is my primary home. If am a refugee from it, I can’t get back into it without help. Trying to do so by myself confirms that I can trust no one. And I will react badly to any manipulative therapy, simply because manipulation is why I left home in the first place. 

......If I am sensation starved there are all kinds of ways I can create some high powered input. I can always pick a fight with the wife or get paranoid about the neighbours. There is a thirst for excitement, the shot of adrenalin, the hit of drugs – anything that will open the doors of perception, if only for a moment.

......What do I really need?

......Some would call it human love. But it has to be of that rare kind that lets me be, that lets me own myself; the kind of connection with someone who doesn’t want to possess me or change me or make me a better person. As Carl Rogers said, I need that kind of regard for me as a person that is unconditional. I need someone who has an insatiable appetite to know who I really am, someone who doesn’t see me as reprehensible or ugly or deficient; above all, someone who doesn’t covertly try to manipulate me. And it will be someone who doesn’t even have to forgive me because there is nothing to forgive. But even then, it’s a long haul to trust again.