PREHENSION: the sixth sense

When someone is trying to understand you there is already a disjunction. If there were empathy between you there would be no need to try to understand. The empathy would be enough; they would immediately grasp how you are and what you mean.

When someone says ‘I feel understood’ the emphasis is on the feeling of empathy. When someone says, ‘My doctor understands my case’ the emphasis is on his diagnostic discernment – any feelings of empathy are irrelevant.

Someone trying to understand you is on the wrong track. To understand you is to place you in a set, you are this or that. You are a characterised, diagnosed. All the terms that could be used to describe you are alien. Descriptions always feel foreign. They have nothing to do with how you are for yourself. Someone who ‘understands’ you in this sense has no idea who you are.

This is because understanding is an action of the mind that thinks, the intellect. Personal relations require something more than this. We somehow have to grasp a person’s being. You don’t have to understand, you have to grasp their state, to directly perceive their state of being.

Having made this distinction, we have to give this ability a special name. We could call it ‘intuition’, but I am going to call it prehension. “Prehension is the basic, extrasensory awareness, or grasping, … One might call it the super intuition on which all conventionally recognized extrasensory perception and sensory perceptions are built.” ¹

To grasp a person’s state of being is, first of all, to grant that it exists. This is not a cognitive comprehension, but a prehension which is grasping the being of a person. You can understand a person without prehending them: in diagnosing me, my doctor understands me (or rather my case), but he does not grasp me. An understanding of me is not me, it’s a category. Granted, you may say it’s about me, like my medical diagnosis, but it’s not me as I am for myself. There is me myself – that’s one thing. Then there is the category you put me in – that’s another thing entirely.

Understanding my desire for chocolate is not my desire for chocolate itself. Understanding why I desire chocolate is one thing; the actual desire for chocolate is something else. It is essential to recognise this distinction. Understanding alters nothing. The desire for chocolate is still what it is – whether understood or not.  

To reduce prehension to understanding relates all perception to rational cognition and denies the possibility of non-rational perception; but we know from personal experience there are many things I don’t understand that definitely exist.  I feel things I don’t understand, but I still feel them.

If I ask myself, ‘do I want to go to the movies with John?’ I find myself saying ‘no’. I can invent all the reasons why not, any one of which is understandable. But what I find in myself is simply ‘no’. That ‘no’ is more authentic than any of the reasons. Plausible reasons are invented afterwards. I don’t want to give John reasons or explain. Discussions, one way or the other, won’t make any difference. It’s still ‘no’.

Self-assertion is not about being able to clearly explain one’s position. One can do that, of course. But explanations are sensible sounding excuses for one’s illogical state of being.

One’s state of being is always unlikely, like a mood, it’s always outside the square; it doesn’t leave a calling card or an address – irrational because my mood doesn’t arise from the mind or intellect or conscious decision.  One finds oneself in it. Self-assertion is the affirmation of one’s mood.

Like a mood, a state of being is what it is, like a stone or the weather. The weather asserts itself by simply being the weather. It does not explain itself.

As a person, you actually cannot help being assertive because there is no way you can not be what you are. You are always exactly what you are in any given moment. You always assert yourself whether you know it or not. The only question is whether someone else can pick up what you are being. This is what prehension is: it is simply picking up at depth what a person is being.

*

Most of the time person-centred counselling relies on a person prehending themselves. This is what we call focusing. It is extremely workable 90% of the time. But the longer I have been in practice the more I realised that much can depend on my being able to tune into what my client is being. It’s like a sixth sense. Only then can I ask the right questions.

When you are relating intimately with someone there are dozens of questions you could ask and be curious about. How is their health, their work, how is their boat project coming along, how are they getting along now with their mother-in-law? But to ask the right question may be none of these obvious issues. The right question would be one that engages immediately with the other’s present state of being. A prehension, a hunch, might make you ask something out of the blue that engages them at a deeper level and is more true to where they are at.

Incidentally, those of you the read my last blog on Sense and Sensibility might realise that it’s about prehending the environment. You can prehend a tree and tune into its being; you can prehend your dog – and this is probably what he does to you too.²

1       http://websyte.com/alan/prehen.htm  on ‘Prehension’ in Alfred        North                      .         Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in   Cosmology, 1929

²    Rupert Sheldrake: Dogs the Know When When Their Owners are Coming Home
     

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

  Can you remember an occasion when you were totally relaxed, perhaps lounging in the garden on a fine day, doing absolutely nothing – you put the book down for a moment and just looked at the garden.

You were doing something very good for you. But because of our lifestyle, doing nothing is suspect. You put the book down; but maybe you could allow ‘just looking’ only for a brief moment.

Here’s a little meditation exercise I call Sensing. It’s a way of getting more in touch.  It’s a great little pick-me-up if you are feeling a bit caved in or if there seems to be nothing else but work.

All you do is take a few minutes off and just sense the environment like an animal. Just stay with the environment for a short while….. look at it…. Don’t think, LOOK. Look around and see things. Feel the solidness of things. Actually feel their THERENESS  – their REALNESS… their weight and solidity, colour and shape – the walls, the floor, the table, the bookshelf, the windows and so on. Look at each thing in turn and get its realness.

Then, try getting the reality of, not just parts of the room, but the whole room at once – walls, floor, ceiling, everything. Have the lot in one go.

Sensing is easier to do while going for a walk, away from home. This is because everything in the home tends to send you a message: fix me, attend to me, clean me. It’s as though every household item issues a requirement, an order.

 There is no doubt that there are abusive houses that treat their owners abominably and keep them in a condition of semi-slavery, overworked and unappreciated !

Jesting aside, the truth is that we have lost our animal sense of connection with the environment. The planet and our bodies suffer from this neglect. Animals do not function well unless they are connected with the natural world; and the natural world suffers if we are not in touch with it.

Sensing is a way of recovering our animal senses. You can do it for a few minutes in your room. Get the walls, floors and furniture as real, solid, eminently THERE in their form and colour. Consider it time out for a few minutes meditating. Particularly get things as physically solid. Get the movement of the trees outside the window, anything that moves as well the solidity of the furniture. Move your Sensing around the objects in the room and through the windows. Have what you see. Keep it up for 5, 10 or 15 minutes

As I say, Sensing is easiest to do when outside walking. The constant change of perspective alters everything as you stroll and helps keep your attention engaged. Stay with what you sense each second. Have everything you see. Keep looking around at things. Don’t’ think – look. Keep it up, no matter the temptation to drift away into thinking. As you walk notice how perspectives change. Each moment yields a completely new aspect. Keep your looking fresh. The earth, the sky, the grass, each tree. Each moment look at things freshly – the first time you look you get the THERENESS of things. Make every look the first time.

I’ve done this at times in my life when I’ve been stressed out; and believe me, it starts to make difference in a few minutes. Your surrounding take on a new body, fuller, clearer and more colourful; the grass is greener and the sky bluer, like someone cleaned the windows – it will give you energy and the pressure of stress will lift.

If going for a walk normally makes you feel better, you are probably doing sensing anyway; maybe it’s what you do naturally when you go for a walk; and why you do it. But if you are a bit stressed, or too much in your head, it may help to do sensing intentionally.

This is why holidays are so vitally important. It’s not just the change of air, but the change of scene. You do more looking. And it’s why when coming home after a holiday the house feels kind of strange. You are experiencing your home minus the ‘do-me’ signals. For a while the house seems familiar, yet unfamiliar. Everything stands there just as it is, without the command signals.

Sensing People: here’s another good exercise. Sit in a public place, a park, a square, or a mall and just sense people as they go by. (Not somewhere too crowded or where people are in a rush). Take them in one at a time – have each person.

You will have seen people doing this naturally in the park and other places. It’s what they do with their spare time. It’s good not just for loners or losers. It does something for the psyche. Whenever I have done this I have had a night of dreams with lots of people in them. It must nourish the psyche’s populousness. It’s definitely not a waste of time.

For those of you who have had some experience with focusing, try sensing the environment while at the same time getting your inner bodily felt-sense. It’s quite a novel experience.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

RESTIMULATION

RESTIMULATION

One day I will write a little piece about my early encounter with Dianetics, the forerunner of Scientology, that super psycho-religious, money-making con-game that has since grown into a monster. But for now, I just want to tell you about an idea I learned in those early days when it was just new-hit psychotherapy. It was buttressed by a clumsy, over-simplistic theory, but one of its ideas I have since refined to suit my own observations. It is the simple notion of ‘restimulation’.

It occurs when a present-time event triggers a past moment of trauma so that the person reacts physically and emotionally as they did in the original incident. The memory of the past trauma can be fused and identified with present-time in such a way that there is little awareness that the emotion and physical reaction is coming from the past.

It can happen on a quite small scale. Let’s say some years ago you were going through a bad time – say a marriage breakup. There was an awful moment when it hit you just how bad it was. You were waiting at a cross-walk of a busy intersection in town – that’s when utter disaster of the loss struck you. Suddenly you felt a deadly fear. Years later, without really knowing it, every time you approach that same cross-walk in town, a bad mood overtakes you or a pessimistic dread drifts in – without knowing why. That exact geographical place is the trigger.

Another example would be how I always put off going to bed. It is eleven-o-clock and I feel tired, but I lie on the couch watching television until I drop off. At three-o-clock I’m still on the couch, reluctant to go to bed. If I ask myself, ‘what is it I am avoiding’. I remember as a little boy. I don’t want to go to bed. I’m afraid of the dark bedroom and the shadows in which I can see faces; or I might have my repeated nightmare of being buried alive in a coffin. I have learned since that this nightmare itself was the restimulation of an earlier incident: the terror of being trapped in the no-exit just before birth.

You can see from this that restimulations can occur in chains. In this last example, birth is the first no-exit, trapped situation. But throughout life there are many other instances of a similar nature. Some have only a remote similarity, but just enough to act as a trigger. Crowded buses, lifts, the compacted crowds at Concerts in the Park make me slightly uncomfortably closed in. But it’s really surprising how worked up I get when I’m trapped in a social situation and I can’t get out of it. I hate it.

There is one interesting device that that psyche uses to avoid restimulation. It’s a strange one. It is a maneuver I only cottoned onto recently. It has to do with comfort zones.  It’s about going back before an original trauma. That’s where it was most comfortable – before it happened. To move forward in time is to move into the trauma. So it is that one can get stuck at a level of mental and emotional development.

Let us say that the biggest trauma in this person’s life was the separation from mother at an early age because of the mother’s illness after the birth. For some reason the child never really recovered from this blow and grows up shy and withdrawn. Her only comfort zone is the warmth and protection before the mother’s illness. The child grows up but doesn’t develop. She stays at home, is never really present at school and avoids engagement with the world. Later, she has the most god-awful conflict between launching into life and staying at home, remaining in the comfort zone prior to the first trauma; but launching into life equals launching into what comes next. She knows what come next. After the comfort zone is the shock of losing your mother. After her warmth, loss and isolation comes next. The idea of moving forward is too much. The result is a breakdown. Her libido, her life force, is pressuring her to risk it and it precipitates her forward into the trauma that is waiting. The breakdown is her way forward.

 It is very easy to tell people that they should move out of their comfort zone, but if they are ensconced in a place prior to a trauma, only they know what comes next if they start to move forward. When they even think of leaving home or leaving a marriage, all they get is a subliminal terror they try not to notice.

Life is a minefield and comfort zones are scarce. So, hey, when you do find a safe and comfy patch – what’s the hurry !

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

WHAT NOW

I kept a personal diary during some of my difficult life transitions – like a breakup or divorce. Later, in calmer times, reading it back to myself I had one glaring impression: the incredible variations of mood I went through: everything from euphoria to the blackest despair of loss and all shades between; and how endlessly I rummaged around trying to identify the problem; and also trying to decide whose problem it was. Endlessly reevaluating.

As mine did, a diary of this kind will evidence a vast panorama of change, sudden twists and turns of opposite solutions, as each one successively presents itself as final. Each solution lasting only a few minutes. All this goes on in the shadowy backroom of the mind without any perception that the continual succession of ideas contradicts each other, because as each idea takes centre stage, it seems to be the right one – a moment later everything changes and the whole affair is reevaluated.

A rough journey like this highlights the kind of process that goes on in ordinary life, only less dramatically. All difficult problems, great and small, go through the same process of change. It all seems to happen in that unknown realm we call the imagination. Like a psychic incubator it gives birth to a constant stream of possibilities. Feed a problem in and it begins to ferment a wealth of responses.

But new ideas and feelings, new attitudes, don’t suddenly pop up fully clothed; they have a dormant period; and not all novel ideas that lie simmering in the twilight will see the light of day. They are potentially emerging, but may never make it. It is as though there is a selection process taking place below consciousness, ideas and feelings vying with each other to see which will take centre stage, a contest to decide which attitude is ‘fittest’ to survive, which one will serve one’s overall needs and purposes.

As one’s perception of the environment changes, so what seems allowable to surface will change. In a receptive environment feelings can emerge that would normally be censored. Some environments facilitate change, others do not. It is undoubtedly true that in the presence of certain people it is impossible for you to move with imaginative freedom. They give you no space in which to do it, they interrupt the sequences by invading the process. They never allow a silence to think, not do they acknowledge your clarifying moments.

Suppose you just said, ‘I really don’t know what to think about this – I’m confused’. Paradoxically, this is a moment of clarity. You said it, didn’t you? In that moment it became clear to you that you were confused and you expressed it very clearly. Now, instead of letting that stand in its own space, allowing the next moment to emerge from it, they make some suggestion. They might try to solve your confusion. It is then that you struggle to hold on to yourself. Their input disrupts the sequence that was developing. For whatever they suggest, it will not be what is emerging for you in the next moment. You can disagree with them or not, but whatever you do, once you have engaged, your own process is lost – you’ve forgotten that precise feeling of confusion. That’s where you were cut off. That precise feeling was the necessary jumping off point into what would have been about to emerge.

Our inner life, our psychological life, has been described as a ‘stream of consciousness’, an uninterrupted flow of images, ideas and feelings. But in fact it is not at all like the smooth flow of a river. It has episodes. The initial phase is what is just about emerging into consciousness; the second phase is what has become fully present.

The first phase has all the feelings and ideas etc that are hovering in the back of the mind.  It’s like a holding room of possibilities.  When one possibility has moved fully forward it clarifies consciousness (second phase) and has become, clear and sharp. Suddenly, one knows what one is feeling, what one wants to say. One can now express it emphatically and definitely.

*

There are some interesting aspects to the transition from internal feeling into expression. For example, you will have noticed that some people’s flow of consciousness is like an open book. When they do stop talking it is only to find some idea that is emerging. They may pause to feel into it because they are not quite sure; or they may pause to find the right word, but once they have it, they say it – then their flow moves on. Listening to them, one is never at a loss to know what is going on; their feelings also, as part of the episodic stream of consciousness, are equally expressed. Their process of change is visible.

 At the opposite end, there are those of whom one rarely knows what is going on. They have a flow of consciousness, but it is never revealed – only perhaps the conclusions they draw from it. This gives no indication of how they arrived there. Mostly, their inner thoughts are concealed; only occasionally they will speak with minimal reference to their internal experience. Emotion too is hidden and muted, so you have to make an educated guess as to what they are feeling. How a person arrives at a certain conclusion tells you more than conclusion itself. Conclusions are tidied up versions of the emotional flow with all the guts edited out. This state is not their fault. It usually comes about because their early life has been one where it was dangerous to reveal oneself. It is very similar to folk who are aware of their flow of consciousness when they are alone. But when other people are present it is as though they go blank. Asked about what they are thinking, their answer is usually ‘nothing in particular’.

Some people need a lot of time in the ‘emerging phase’. When they are searching for what they feel it takes a while. It is as though they have bad eyesight in the dark. Feelings are dim and fuzzy. They can’t recognise them. They need time, a lot of space and patience. It may sound strange, but recognising what you feel is far from a universal ability.

Of course, some people look for deeper feelings and need more time for them to emerge.

Space is perhaps the greatest gift you can give another. Your accurate understanding is vital, but it is useless unless followed by the gift of space where the person can look within. What will follow when they do is their next moment. Not yours, THEIRS.

In therapy each moment of consciousness is a moment of choice and transition: what to relate, where to go next, what idea to follow up, which emotion to ignore, what is too much for me to remember, and if remembered, what is too much to reveal? What’s important and what not? Where do I go from here? Should I say that I don’t know what I am supposed to say?

This is the selection process I spoke of. It must be allowed to take its own time without interference.

In our work it is a profound truism that nothing can replace your own process. Right or wrong. Wherever your own imagination leads you, it has to be acknowledged. You must be allowed to go there. We are not talking about acting out. What you actually do about things is secondary. Of primary importance is being in touch with the flow of your internal life and being able to reveal it how and when you choose. That’s how you move forward. If you are in touch like this, what you actually do about things will take care of itself.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

DARWIN AND THE JANITOR

Two months ago I decided I wanted a beagle. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps it was because I fell in love with a picture of a beagle on the net and nothing would do but I had to get one.

There he is in the picture above, just two months old. Thinking about a name for the puppy, I thought of Charles Darwin’s epic journey in HMS Beagle. I could have called him Beagle, but then he is a Beagle – so I just called him Darwin. Irrational as the association may be, the name stuck. So, that’s Darwin, but what about the Janitor? Well, actually – that’s me. You might think I am the proud owner of an expensive pedigree. In reality I am now just a toilet attendant for, as you know, all puppies do is pee, poo, play and sleep. When he is awake I simply follow him around with a bucket and a cloth.

It got me thinking about pets in general. By the way, the latest thing is, you don’t call them pets any more, but ‘animal companions’, which is interesting because it lends them a ‘human’ air and points to the truth that they have become inexorably entwined in our psychology. All the diverse phenomena we know about human relationships apply, especially what we know about the transference. The transference is where an infantile or childhood fixation is projected onto a present time person, more especially someone who has become an intimate. The classical case, where it was first discovered by Freud, is the patient who falls in love with the therapist, bringing with it all the longing, conflict, pain, love and anger of the original parental complex. In the projection of such an intricate emotional situation onto a pet it is no wonder that many owners actually sleep with their cat or dog?

Since Darwin has come to live with me I have to admit that I don’t know whether I am the parent with a child or whether I am the child with a canine parent. At first glance, the latter would seem to be unlikely. How could I possibly be a child with a four month old puppy as my parent? The answer doesn’t lie in the objective circumstance, but in my half unconscious fantasies.

There is a belief that somehow the animal will look after you. Dogs are renowned for their faithfulness, sticking by you no matter what; even sitting on your gravestone until they starve. It has been known. There are many sensible people who will swear that their cat knows when they are feeling unwell and will come and sit by them in a caring way. Now, whether the cat really does have such feelings, it remains true that it serves a fantasy of the owner. I’m not saying that the cat’s solicitude is merely a projection of the owner. I’m saying that whether it is or not, it satisfies the owner’s fantasy, their desire for such devotion. And that is precisely the kind of devotion that a good parent has for the child.

There can be no doubt that animals provide ‘transitional objects’ very much as the soft blanket does for the baby. Thumb in mouth, while grasping in the same hand the well worn cuddle blanket, carries forward the original attachment to the mother, just as the favourite teacup or cigarettes does for an adult – not to mention comfort eating. Naturally, a transitional object is preferably something you can put into your mouth.

Stories abound about the faithfulness of dogs. A German Sheppard in Brindisi, Italy, has been attending her owner’s funeral every day since she died. The dog arrives at the same church when the bell rings to mark the beginning of service. The priest allows the dog to sit through the service, as he has done for years.

Whether true or not, the veneration of such urban myths testifies to a deeply felt human need and a truth I myself need to recognise, rendering my new life with Darwin more dramatically poignant, making his widdles on the lounge room carpet fill, as it were, a larger canvas.

Happy Christmas,

                                 Stanley.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

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