HEARING YOURSELF

Hearing yourself speak out is very different from thinking. To voice something you’ve been thinking about is like giving body to what might otherwise just be tortuous worrying. This is especially true when dealing with difficult emotional questions. The truth is that most of our emotionally tinged thinking is very confused by conflicting ways of looking at a problem. Before any consideration of solutions, how, in fact, should I look at the problem in the first place. Should I regard the problem as important or not; is it the real problem; is it my problem or his; is it that I am not being fair or that I am not being treated fairly; am I too soft or too judgmental; is the real problem that she wants everything her own way – or perhaps it’s me that’s too critical. What really is the problem? And so on – round and round! 

Momentarily I might think I have arrived at a steady conclusion, but then another viewpoint intervenes and I’m back on the merry-go-round. Ruminating like this goes around in circles, always arriving at the place one started. The internal critic, the Mad Judge, is usually hard at work. Every thought, before it can be fully thought, is contradicted by an opposing viewpoint; which itself is stopped short by yet another contradicting viewpoint. It’s a battleground where nothing is vanquished and no way of thinking gains the upper hand. No single thought-line gets the chance to fully express itself. There is no way I can know what I think where every possible viewpoint is squashed before it has had a chance to fully express itself. In this state much of my deeper thinking is unknown – like the iceberg, most of it is below the water-line. 

This is where ‘hearing-yourself’ it comes into its own. When you let a viewpoint speak out it seems to find more energy to follow through and is more immune to internal criticism. Hearing myself say it gives it strength to follow all the implications of itself. It finds its voice. I find myself saying more than I had yet thought or felt. I’ve heard it said many times, “I don’t really know what I think until I hear myself saying it.” It’s always a surprise and sometimes quite a shock when what was just a weak idea suddenly finds its voice. Hearing yourself speak out gives you courage.

But however forceful and convincing, it will be only one of the many voices within struggling to be heard. They are not all one’s own voice either, but the voices of others that have been adopted. Impinging on the problem-at-hand are all kinds of viewpoints that have gained a foothold in the psyche, bits you have read, lectures you have been given, advice, unwanted criticism, as well as the urges of our animal instincts. When speaking out like this you may find yourself taking a tour of them all; first one line of thought gains ascendancy then another, a veritable medley of contradiction as you switch from one to another. But the difference is that now you are more able to judge the worth of each viewpoint because you are actually hearing them speak out with greater force, as they battle for supremacy. Each one now reveals itself for what it is actually worth. The various viewpoints will now interact with each other and encourage new ideas, modifications never contemplated before. Instead of ruminating in the shadows, the thinking-mind gets out there and lets off steam in full view – somewhat like a rowdy brain-storming session. 

Hearing-yourself fully will also include the changes of emotional tone as you express yourself and shift form one aspect to another: the sounds of your impatience, exasperation, groans and grumbles; physical gestures of futility, annoyance, resignation or amusement; the stamp of your anger with yourself and others. These physical gestures also need to be heard and recognized.

It would be easy to say that eventually you find your own true voice and with it your own reality and undying self.  It certainly does appear this way because the final outcome of hearing-yourself seems eventually to settle the conflict and you arrive at a certain steadiness and rightness; and with it an ability to act more decisively. As moderator, you will finally have heard enough of the conflicts and have reached a settled conclusion.

As an analysis of what goes on we could easily leave it at that, but the truth is a little more complicated and less romantic. Ideas and viewpoints undergo a process very much like that of Natural Selection in biology. Even in the narrow compass of one’s personal life, why do some viewpoints survive and others go extinct. Why do you come out of this process feeling that you have at least settled what the problem is about ?

The answer is similar to that found in the natural world: some ideas are more conducive to survival, more able to flourish in a changing environment, whereas others are not. The battle between our viewpoints and ideas is a battle for survival that goes on in our personal, emotional life, taking all factors into account: my own interests, my family, my group; and, last of all, perhaps, way out there, what is best for human kind and the planet – in roughly that order of importance. This is the way evolution has designed the emotions that motivate us. 

But we must imagine survival as not merely the ability to exist, but to flourish. The right solution to even a personal problem is the one that gains dominance by virtue of its ability to secure the survival of all that is dear to us. Of course, the style of survival will take into account the group within which we live; and these, of course, vary a great deal.

But on a basic individual level, the practice of ‘hearing-yourself’, as we have described it, is the process of bringing out into the open all the ideas and viewpoints that battle for dominance in one’s mind; and provided you have a good listener, hearing-yourself is a wonderful tool. And it is how and why person-centred therapy works.

There is one more aspect of ‘hearing-yourself’ that I can only touch upon here. This not about working through ideas that oppose each other, but ideas that compliment and can cross fertilise each other; this is more about the smoldering, but disconnected ideas in your own mind that need only to hear each other to light the spark of novel invention. But more about this in another bog.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

A PHILOSOPHICAL ROMP

                      
                      
      I want to start off by asking a ridiculous question: “How much of me is me?” My crazy question is prompted by a recent discovery in neuroscience that our freedom of choice in life could be an illusion. For an experiment they chose a subject to whom they gave two simple pushbuttons. He was to hold one in each hand. Now they told him “Just push the buttons, one after the other in any sequence you like, completely at random.” Then they put him in a (fMRI)  Brain Scanner to do it. When he chose the left button a certain spot in the brain lit up, when he chose the right button a different spot lit up. But the time sequences were different. They found that six seconds before he made a choice the brain lit up the appropriate spot. In other words, his brain made the decision six seconds before he consciously chose. The experimenters could then predict which choice he would make six seconds before he consciously chose – every time without exception.
        Consternation among the proponents of ‘free-will’ and those who claim we are responsible for our choices. The idea of responsibility and free-will rests on a simple proposition: that you could have chosen differently from the way you actually did. This is impossible to verify. As with any choice or decision there is no way you can go back to the time before you made a choice and choose differently. It is just impossible to know whether you ‘could have’. The claim is untestable in principle and is therefore meaningless. You may feel as though you ‘could have’, but there is no assurance in that at all. 
       The above experiment seems to validate determinism, that we are simply the effect of brain functioning over which we have no control. Freedom of choice is an illusion, in spite of it being a very convincing illusion. How can we possibly be so wrong about something so immediately obvious to our firsthand experience?
        If you consider the brain is one thing and you are something else the implications are disastrous. It means that you are being controlled by a mechanism that is totally beyond your control. You are an automaton. Which brings me back to my crazy question in the beginning: how much of me is me? But if I consider the brain and all the complex process of the body as me, if I include them in what I mean by ‘me’, then the problem disappears. It simply means that there is more to ‘me’ than I thought.
       There is no way I can be consciously aware of all the huge volume of computations that go on when any practical decision has to be made. All I need is the end result – I only need to be aware of what I have finally decided. All we know is that something is going on in the body that makes a decision before I am consciously aware of it.
         But this is really nothing new. It is already obvious in focusing. Using the felt-sense is precisely feeling into that area that is active prior to conscious awareness. As a conscious being I am the recipient of answers; all the work goes on under the bonnet; I am more than just a conscious being. In focusing I attend to answers that are forthcoming from me. As in the experiment, I experience a choice after I have made it. To put it another way: ‘I make a choice subliminally, then, seconds later, I have the experience of making it. That’s the feeling of coming to a conclusion.
         In Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex the god Apollo prophesied that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother. To avoid any chance of this happening Oedipus moved away from his parents, right out of the district. What Oedipus didn’t know was that he was, in fact, an adopted orphan and that the town he moved to contained his real parents. So, in an effort to avoid his fate he moved right into the path of it. Later discovered to his horror that he had, in fact, killed his father and married his mother. But what has always puzzled scholars are the last words that Oedipus spoke in the play: ‘I am responsible, but the god made me do it’. This sounds like a contradiction until you realise that Apollo and Oedipus are two aspects of the same person.
In the play the delay between the subliminal decision and the conscious realisation of it was considerably longer than six seconds; but the principle is the same. Crediting the decision (prophecy) to the god Apollo is Oedipus projecting himself outside himself. 

BRIEF ENCOUNTER 

        One of the best questions to ask in a quiet moment is: ‘how am I’.  A good question, but a difficult one – difficult, because unless you are in an unusual state, it is hard to tell. You just feel ordinary. And ordinary is – well, just normal, just like usual. But if you and I could do a miraculous switch, if we could swap places, if I could feel just like you usually do, and you could feel just as I usually feel, we would both have a great shock. It would seem utterly strange and unfamiliar to both of us. I would say, “Good God! Is this how you normally feel?” And you would say, “Is this what you call ‘ordinary’ – you can’t possibly always feel like this, surely!” We would both be either pleasantly surprised or horrified. 

        Does this mean that we are condemned to be totally blinkered, never to really meet anyone outside ourselves – to never really know anyone? Well, not quite. There are windows where we can see outside our own goldfish bowl. These are usually treasured moments that stand out in one’s memory; and, no matter how long ago, we never forget them.  Often centred on a certain time and place, for an instant the world opened up to reveal something much bigger. Something happens, like a momentous release. Hard to say whether it is oneself that opened up or the world – probably both. Certainly the experience is so emotionally stunning that we are gobsmacked. Falling in love is a universal high that everyone knows at some point in their life – and with it the world looks completely different,   

If you are lucky you may have many such high points in your life, what Abraham Maslow called ‘peak experiences’. Maslow thought that, aside from the use of psychotropics, the two easiest ways of achieving a peak experience is through sex and music. Peak experiences can last a few seconds, to hours, to weeks. Usually the more intense they are the briefer the encounter.

       They occur in circumstances you might expect, like standing on a mountain top or arriving in a new country or a rendezvous at the Brighton Library. But they can also occur in the most unlikely situations. These encounters always feel as though something is coming from the outside, as though something is being given; they carry a sense of absolute reality. They can’t be earned or prepared for; and they can happen at the most unlikely times and places: walking down an ordinary street, or whilst making an omelet or sitting on the toilet, or perhaps, more understandably, whilst making love or feeding the baby you have just given birth to. There is a sense of revelation – that this is what life is about, what I was born for. There is the conviction that this experience makes sense of everything without in the least worrying about how it does. If anything is fulfillment, this is it.

       James Hillman observed that peaks and highs say nothing of the worth of the person having them, for they can occur among psychopaths and criminals. Soldiers experience a high in battle and so does a crowd at a lynching. This is perhaps a little unfair; there is surely a distinction between the buzz of killing someone and being transported by a tree in blossom. 

       We can attach all kinds of labels to these peak experiences and this can lead us off into the misty realms of metaphysical speculation: are they spiritual moments; can we regard them as religious, transcendental, psychological, chemical, hormonal or mystical? Do they give us an insight into ultimate reality or are we just looking deep into our own navel? Here the intellectual question is: what are we going to do with them, where are we going to place these experiences in the vast panoply of explanatory claims. It’s almost a matter of take your pick – it depends on your partiality, whether you are ‘spiritually’ inclined, or have more ‘naturalistic’ leanings. For myself, I incline towards the latter because anything religious or spiritual makes me nervous, and because I see these things as part of the natural world. 

In one important respect these brief encounters, these peak experiences, are different to ordinary life in that they come as a gift - you are not called upon to make any effort. This is what that makes them unique and worthwhile. It seems like a miracle that for once I do not have to try. Whatever is happening is being done and as such is outside my control. The amazing thing is that this is not frightening. Giving up control seems like a wonderful relief. It actually seems possible to take my hands off the steering wheel without coming to grief. I don’t need to drive, to steer my way through every circumstance in life, negotiating other people’s every move, watching out at every intersection, obeying the rules, I don’t have to watch all the signs. I can let go and let life carry me. And after my brief encounter do I still believe this? Not really. It never seems that safe to do so. And it very likely isn’t. We didn’t evolve our cognitive faculties for nothing.

      There is no way we can layback as though life is total gift, but is there anything we can gain from peak experiences, these brief encounters with freedom? The best might be to consciously value them, keeping them at the back of one’s mind, knowing what one’s real values are and, in doing so, maybe just touching on the felt-sense of how it actually felt when it was fresh. This can help keep things in proportion and inspire a little more trust; and subliminally it will help steer one towards better choices in life. Real values do that.

      In these brief encounters something is given to us. It’s as though they come from outside the ego, that they are being done and, as such, outside our conscious control. This made our ancestors curious. If it was ‘being done’ who was doing it? The ultimate ‘who’ of course was God (or gods). Maybe spirits were responsible; or some supernal cosmic consciousness; or maybe The Ground Being (whatever that is). But maybe all this is looking in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s our biological nature, or some aspect of it, that we give over to in these brief encounters. Our recent research into focusing does suggest something of the sort. Whatever that aspect is, it is something even more marvelous and unknown than any of our divine astral imaginings.

        Before 1700 just think of all the disastrous ideas we had about the nature of things – and all the things we didn’t know; and we knew nothing at all about our biological nature. We do move forward and today we are beginning to understand that these unknowns, all that happens in these brief encounters for example, are open to enquiry. What we have in our favour, what we didn’t have in times past, is a consciousness of how much more there is to know about the human species and the way it has evolved. 

PIXILATED PICTURES[1]

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The painting above is by Jackson Pollock, an American artist who was a deeply tortured and angry man, prone to severe bouts of alcoholism, depression and violence. Only when he painted did he find a sense of peace and release from his anger and sadness. His way of painting made use of the lucky accident. He would lay the canvas out on the floor and, walking around it, he would use his brushes to drip, fling and fire paint at the canvas. Someone drolly called him ‘Jack the Dripper’, but his work was no joke. At only 44, drunk, he died in a car crash. What’s for sure is that his work was the only place where he could evade the mental torture of his life: art as the ultimate therapy of escape.

In stark contrast to his anguished life, imagine the confidence he must have achieved when painting. He worked in a way no other painter had done before. A friend described it. “A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor ... There was complete silence ... Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot we were there.” All of his most famous paintings were made like this, yet all are very different, each with its own kind of uncanny internal consistency. In 2000 a film was made of Pollock’s life with Ed Harris as the artist. Well worth seeing if you ever get the chance.

Photography has largely replaced the influence that painting once had. Being a somewhat mechanical process you would think it offers little opportunity for the same sort of creative moment that art once provided. With photography how could you possibly do a Jackson Pollock and cut out an island of emotional confidence amid the turmoil of an unstable life. These days, a camera is part of everyone’s mobile phone; and every day millions of photos slosh around social network sites on the internet.

A photo is no more special than a doodle on the cover of a phone book done in a moment of forgetfulness while phoning. The covers of some phone books are literally covered with doodles as the owner has scratched away with a ball-point, filling in letters and making patterns, while engaged in a conversation with a friend or holding the line to a tiresome insurance company. A doodle is art that has fled to the margins.

In the early days the photographer was the inferior down-market cousin of the painter. A painter might be poor, he might live in a garret, but he had the prestige of belonging to a long historical heritage. The Victorian daguerreotype photographer was an upstart, cashing in on a craze that would soon lose its appeal. But it didn’t – it took over the image market and expanded into movies, television and advertising. In my 30s I worked hard for my Associateship of the Royal Photographic Society. The standard was high. I know the rigours of the trade in the days before digital: it was all about cameras, darkrooms, enlargers, developers, films and all the intricate combinations of these. Colour was just coming in and there were a lot of artistic choices.

Photography may not appear to have a fortuitous nature. After all, you press the button when you intend to. Nothing could be more mechanical. But here’s a question: why do you release the shutter at just that moment. That moment delivers a photo that reveals more than you saw. ‘Unintentionally, you caught the subject with a strange expression on his face. It reveals a reality that is not what you or he intended. We were all were laughing, but in the photo there is a suggestion that he is really bored; that strange half twist of the mouth is not how he should have looked at all – but its him ! And you caught it in a fraction of a second.

I take a photo of a child and it reveals whether I ‘look down’ on them or whether I am at their level. A good question to ask is: what effect do I intend to create when I take a picture, what impression do I want to make: family life as one long series of happy holidays? Are they for ‘pretend’ memories? Or do my pictures show the dump at the bottom of the yard, or my absurd reflection in a shop window, or the empty beach on a winter’s day, or Tommy’s face when he is moody? What’s worth remembering, life as a fantasy that it never was, or revealing moments of how it actually was?

Early on I taught classes in creative photography so, if I may now venture, here is some advice for non-professionals:

1. Never pose people for a photograph.

2. If you are among people, never compose a picture. Posing and composing freezes the subject(s)

3. Among people take so many photos that everyone stops paying attention to you.

4. At any gathering take so many pictures and so fast and so nonchalantly that people stop crediting you with anything serious.

5. Take everything and anyone indiscriminately, click, click, click – fast. Above all don’t hesitate.

6. If you want to capture a single subject keep them moving, talking, doing something – and again take so many and so fast they stop posing.

7. Creativity and quality control comes later on the monitor screen. Here be ruthless. Toss out 99% of your pictures. With the two or three that remain compose and crop carefully. You’ll end up with some good pictures. Certainly not the usual stuff.

REPETITION

Happiness is the longing for repetition. Milan Kundera

Repetitive behaviour has always been a bit of a worry. Freud worried about the way veterans repeatedly re-experience shell-shock traumas long after the battle. Then there’s the way people repeat failures, like hooking up with the same unsuitable type of partner time after time; or small things, like always misspelling the same a word, or always forgetting that particular person’s name.

Yet when you think about it, most of our lives are repetitious: the same habits year after year; the same breakfast cereal; same friends; same time to bed; same workspace; the same face looking back at me in the mirror; the same daily grind, the same pleasures, over and over. There are, of course, disruptions like the occasional earthquake, but we try to get back to the familiar as soon as possible. Occasional variations are OK – but not too much!

It’s not surprising, though, when you realise that repetition (or replication, as they call it in biology) is the basis of all life. The exact duplication of the DNA molecule each time a cell divides is a miracle. Without it life on earth would not exist.

It seems like it’s only in the context of repetition that useful change happens. It’s the slight variation in DNA, a minute variation from exact duplication, as it is passed from the parents to the child, that’s the basis of evolutionary change. And in therapy it’s the cumulative effect of small changes that count, always in the context of reiteration.

What got me to think about all this is how we look upon repetition in therapy; I mean the way we do therapy. The client has an hour a week for an indeterminate period. But how do you decide when therapy is finished. Freud worried about this too and wrote a paper called: Analysis Terminable and Interminable. There’s no simple answer, but I think we can gain a glimmer of light by looking at the nature of repetition in another kind of therapeutic endevour.

Let’s take a long standing and reputable method like meditation. In its present-day secular form, known as Mindfulness, it has gained a lot of medical and scientific recognition. It works. But how long should you do it. An hour a day? Five minutes a day? Once a week? For a month, a year, a lifetime? Repetition of some kind seems to be necessary. To me, one thing is fairly clear: a little and often is better than a lot seldom.

The main problem with meditation is how to keep going. In a monastic setting or on a ten days retreat, keeping going is decided in advance. After all, doing meditation is why you went there. Keeping going might be difficult, but you do it. It’s when you are home again and in your usual surroundings that meditating for an hour a day is more onerous. Of course, you can do it, but you don’t. And the reason you don’t or can’t is because you are asking too much of yourself. The process has to be adjusted to the limitations of your actual life-style. Otherwise, trying to do too much ends up with doing nothing. On the other hand, a little and often gives you something you can do without strain: ten minutes a day is about right.

I’ve been working on a slightly different form of meditation which I’ve called ‘Bodyminding’. It owes something to focusing and something to traditional meditation. I’ve discovered that it’s very important to limit the amount of time you spend doing it, otherwise it locks into something you should do. As soon as this happens the practice gets on the wrong side. The practice period becomes an opponent that requires something of you; and before you know where you are a resistance develops which only gets stronger the more you persist.

You have to be very strict with the time. You finish dead on ten minutes. And there must be no suggestion that the meditative state is how you should live your life – contrary to Ancient and Modern Spiritual Idealists. The ten minutes must be separate and special; otherwise everything gets conflated and mixed up. In order to work it has to be a time that’s special, something you look forward to – otherwise it is useless.

And this is where it gives us a window on counselling and therapy. In the same way, the therapy session has to be special, separate and distinct from usual life; and it has to be something you look forward to. As with meditation it is repetitious: same day of the week; always for one hour, same therapist, same room, same process, same appointment time.

This limitation is a great advantage. It creates a special ‘mental set’ every time you walk in the therapy room. Within the compass of that ‘set’ insights happen that would never occur to you in the outside world. This ‘mental set’ builds up slowly over time. The therapy room becomes a place where something different happens. That’s part of the enjoyment. Mental sets are have a powerful suggestive effect and can change your whole psychological state – like stepping into another country. It’s as though the therapy room, the setting, takes on a special ambience. It becomes more than just what you do in the room, but rather all that’s happened for you in that room builds up into this slightly other-worldly home, like walking through the looking-glass. I have known people who stopped therapy simply because I changed my consulting room. It is a powerful phenomenon I’ve never seen discussed in psychological literature.

So far as the duration of therapy is concerned, I have to completely disagree with the way this is managed in most counselling agencies. In the classical days of psychoanalysis the duration of therapy was measured years rather than weeks. But all that is out of date now, and modern counselling agencies are obsessed with ‘goals’, ‘throughput’ and ‘outcomes’, achieved in the minimum time, all annotated in reports, forms and clinical reviews; very satisfying for the administration, no doubt. Administrators love paper. Not the client, but the paper work is what counts. Who for? Why the government ministry that supplies the funding, of course. In the midst of all this paper work the client, the person it’s supposed to be about, is lost. In truth, the forms and details, pretending to be helpful, are a vast distraction. For me, they are so unimportant I sometimes forget to get the clients telephone number. As for therapy goals – I never ask. It’s a red herring. I want to know how the person is now.

How long should therapy last? What are the real criteria? The most important one is, again, it has to be a time you look forward to. Not in the sense that you hope it will do you good eventually. That’s OK, but it’s not the crucial factor. The only thing that counts is the enjoyment derived from the process itself, the pleasure of having a place where you can unfold yourself. If you enjoy it, it’s doing you good. Other factors may determine when therapy ends, but in my experience the more successful therapy is, the longer it can go on with benefit. There are no rules; and certainly no arbitrary time limits.

In any kind of serious relationship real intimacy can only be achieved through repeated cycles of connection. Intimacy between two people is a quality that develops. Intimacy is cumulative. For example, first whirlwind of being in love is, perhaps, not real intimacy because you only know a fraction of the other’s personality. It takes being with them in all kinds of interactions, all the many moods that arise, all the complexities that the relationship evokes – and that takes time. Lots of times.

One difficult problem in life is when too many bad things have happened that must not happen again. Too many losses, too many failures, too many humiliations, too many disappointments. Repetition becomes a threat. Then, when things start to ‘happen again’ the feeling of repetition provokes a kind of anxious boredom. The search for something new takes on a driving compulsion. Certainly, a life based on the avoidance of boredom is no way to go. The constant effort to escape repetition can drive you crazy.

And to end with, that mad and provocative philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence… Would you curse the demon or crave nothing more fervently?”

In spite of my advocacy of repetition I have to admit I can’t get my head around that one !! Moreover, I know many people for whom such an idea would be the worst nightmare they could imagine and who would curse the demon.

THE MORTAL SOUL

The soul is corporeal and, like the foot, is part of the body. Montaigne.

With the recent success of the wholebody workshops in the South Island, led by Karen Whalen, perhaps it is timely to look at our foundations. I think it is true to say that the ‘spirit’ and the ‘body’ have had an antagonistic relationship; or perhaps we should say that our ideas about these two supposed entities have been antagonistic. The soul or spirit is immaterial and the antithesis of the material body. Or so the story has always gone.

In antiquity, philosophers of the Ionian school were materialists; but the Platonic School saw the world divided between matter and spirit – the body was not of the spirit and very much the inferior partner.

Two horses draw the chariot (of the personality). One of the horses is good and the other one is not. The good horse represents spirit, is noble, well formed, handsome, and tending to behave magnificently. The other horse, representing the appetites, is crooked, lumbering, ill-made, stiff-necked, short-throated, with bloodshot eyes.[1]

It was the Platonic School that decisively influenced later Christian theology. And this view has coloured our whole culture ever since. As Christianity gained ascendancy, ‘the flesh’ was viewed as the source of corruption, evil and temptation. The body has had a very bad press. Today, the body is OK in the gym, but its imperious desires can still lead to trouble.

This leaves us in a difficult position. In focusing we stress the body, but we don’t want to be labeled ‘materialist’. So, in saying that the body has its own mysterious wisdom we are tempted to use ‘spiritual’ language. Or we fall back on New Age Romanticism (the body’s association with Mother Earth). Sometimes we resort to meaningless scientific clichés (like the body has ‘universal quantum wave forms). This merely underlines our plight. Writers on focusing, like myself, have a hard time finding the language to describe what we are doing. There is no community of discourse to which we can refer, no common language on which we can draw, no tradition in which we can comfortably place ourselves.

We haven’t yet seen our place in the big picture. For there is a big picture, a struggle that began long ago with the effort to free ourselves from religion and mythology that would place the centre of our life elsewhere than in our corporeality, displacing our physical existence. When Christianity took over we had One God instead of many and the focus on spirituality got stronger, the demonising of our embodied life even worse.

A significant turning point in this sad history was the Renaissance discovery of physical beauty. It was a time when our flesh and blood was affirmed after this long period of desecration. The change in artistic styles illustrates this graphically. In the Christian age before the Renaissance the human figure was flat, emaciated and otherworldly; Michael Angelo’s ‘David’ signals the big change. This work celebrates complete physicality, as does the work of most masters of the Renaissance. There have been ghastly backslidings for sure, like when the Pope decreed that all male genitalia in the Vatican collection of classical art should be fig-leafed.

The Renaissance was a breakthrough and many thinkers, poets and artists turned to the classics that espoused atheism and materialism, as did the poet-philosopher Lucretius. Some Renaissance thinkers, like Giordano Bruno, who was influenced by Lucretius, were burned at the stake; Galileo, almost! But the artists and poets of the Renaissance got away with it because they used poetry and images – harder for the Inquisition to nail down. Essayists like Montaigne hid their affinity with Lucretius in private footnotes. Not that there was an all-out revolt against the teachings of the church; this would have been personally very disturbing and highly dangerous. But a new vision was on the horizon.

The discovery of the body’s importance in psychology has been slow. I’m not talking about experimental psychology, neurology and bio-chemistry, but the discovery of our own corporeality; I mean the discovery of soul as physical existence

Why is this history so important for us? Because without it we haven’t been able to name what is happening. We cannot see that we are part of a monumental historical struggle to give physical existence its due place in the scheme of things. When we look at philosophy, theology, the practice and teaching of all the religions over the years, and even our attempt to import Eastern practices – they all stress, in one way or another, that the desires of the flesh are the cause of suffering or sin; and that all our noble intuitions do not come from our blood and brains, but from a ‘higher source’; that our true self is something other than the physical. All this is a bum steer. It disembodies us. For 2000 years we have suffered the body’s systematic degradation in the scheme of things.

For me, the turning point was the incredible story of evolution and Darwin’s monumental discovery of ‘natural selection’ – which Daniel Dennett called ‘the greatest idea ever’. Dennett went on to say that the ‘immaterial immortal soul’ is a crutch, and that Darwin replaced that idea with that of a ‘material mortal soul’. Very much like Montaigne had said all those years before, ‘The soul is corporeal and, like the foot, is part of the body’.

For people who work in or are interested in depth psychology and are following the turn we have taken, it is important to understand these historical changes and to realise the long struggle these ideas have had to find expression.

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[1] The chariot allegory from Plato’s Phaedrus

Contact – stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

03 891 2264

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TENDENCIES.

It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. Oscar Wilde

Many times I have poked fun at the modern obsession with making goals. It is particularly pernicious in some counselling and self-help books. According to these experts nothing is achieved in life without the careful constructions of one’s goals. But in truth, goals are ego-driven fantasies, often quite detached from the multifaceted nature of reality and, no matter how unrealistic they may be, we are encouraged to believe that the future is ours to fabricate as we wish. And to our detriment, the compulsion to make goals keeps us in our thinking-heads.

A more interesting question is to enquire about one’s ‘tendencies’. This is a much more delicate procedure and requires one to listen rather than dictate; and not merely to listen to the many voices within, but not to be too hasty in taking sides. Big questions are usually arrived at somewhat outside conscious awareness. Eventually, you find yourself going in this direction rather than that. Sometimes when you are agonizing over what to do, you are vaguely aware that something inside has already decided. You know what your inclination is and that it will win in the end – that is, unless some demon wipes out all your alternatives. Incidentally, I use the word ‘tendency’ in the same sense as ‘inclination’.

If you say to me, “Ah yes, but it’s not always wise to follow one’s inclinations, is it?” True, but not to follow a certain inclination is merely another inclination of a different kind. We have dozens of inclinations, all at cross purposes.

A tendency or inclination is quite different from a goal. A goal is idea you place in the future that is suppose to drag the present towards it. It is, as they say in philosophy, ‘teleological’ – what we call purposeful – like the complete design of a new car before the car is made. But a tendency does not create a future – it sniffs its way forward, feeling for openings. A tendency is opportunistic, staying close to what’s available, with a constant eye on what is going on. Sure, there are basic needs, but a tendency is governed by what is possible among the shifting sands of contingency.

A tendency has been described as a ‘seed, a sort of potentiality of the soul. Wherever you are destined to go, you will go. Whatever you are destined to be, you will be – like the acorn is destined to be an oak tree. But a tendency is more malleable than that, more adaptable. You can’t tell – an acorn might become a daffodil. There isn’t really an end goal. I definitely have a tendency to grow, but if the soil is more suitable to being a daffodil, that’s what I’ll be. I may have been an acorn to start with, but oak trees may not have been on the menu. In the natural world, of course, this cannot happen; an acorn cannot grow into anything else but oak tree. But we do not entirely live in the natural world. To a large extent we have built the world we live in. We have built lots of worlds to live in – they are called ‘cultures’.

If I had been unfortunate enough to have been born in Afghanistan the pressure of circumstances, the culture, might have made me a respectable paidup member of the Mujahidin.

There is no pre-programming in my soul to make me a typical westerner. They say there are a many ways to skin a cat – so too there are a many ways to survive – it depends where you wake up born.

It’s not that you come into the world as a blank slate upon which anything can be written, that your culture and family environment completely determine what you will become. You have a nature, but it is so malleable that it amounts to having a conglomerate of natures. I am quite aware that I would be just as fulfilled if I’d become a Master Plumber or an archivist in the Nature History Museum or a photographer for National Geographic Magazine. I’m sure I would have done reasonably well in any of these. As it happened, as a young man, I stumbled across a mentor who nudged me in the direction I have actually gone. But I can say with confidence that I was not born to be a therapist. I don’t mind that because I have become quite good at it.

Our tendencies are in conflict with each other, a perfectly natural competition. As we evolve as personalities only a few are picked out for survival. Those inclinations that survive the rough and tumble of our family and culture determine what we think are our ‘choices’. The truth is: we grope our way through life. And therapy, the person-centred way we do it, is a good way of groping. Just getting hold of that is a considerable relief. It means I can let go and relax a bit.

I can’t control what’s coming at me in the next minute, never mind next year. I cannot control life however I might want to.

Have you ever wondered why a drinker cannot stop drinking or a drug addict can’t stop using. We find this amazing. “But it’s killing you”, a friend might say, believing that such a reasonable point should make a difference. Both friend and the addict think this is true. It should make a difference, so neither can understand why the addict doesn’t stop. The friend feels impatient and the addict feels foolish and weak.

If the addict had enough confidence he might say to the friend, “Why don’t you stop living, it’s killing you!” – which is just as sensible.

PSYCHOSOMATICS

by Stanley

The term ‘psychosomatic’ was coined in 1860 to define a disorder having physical symptoms, but originating from mental or emotional causes; it is a compound word from the Greek (psyche) plus (somatos) body. The whole idea has had a long tortuous history with much disagreement as to exactly what this means. We are still a long way from overcoming the basic assumption that the mind and body are two different things, instead of two viewpoints of a single interwoven network. I am going to bypass the historical controversies and try to look at the question in a new way.

Strictly from our point of view we can regard all physical problems as psychosomatic, not because we are ignorant of viruses and all the other physical causes of disease, but because whatever the causes may be, the ‘psychological’ aspect is always involved in some way. Put simply, if I catch the influenza virus and am suffering the usual symptoms, I also will have an ‘attitude’. I may think I am dying; I may be sorry for myself; I may bravely soldier on; or profit by being looked after; or, more subtly, it may revive body memories of previous illnesses and traumas – together with the ‘attitudes’ I had to them at the time. The past is invariably involved.

Now, it may seem that I have complicated things instead of simplifying them. Not really, because we are now free to explore the psychological side of the equation, putting aside whatever else is involved whether bacteria, viruses, accidents, injuries, fungi, dog bites or genetic predispositions. We are not disavowing the reality of these causes, but simply saying that we can address the psychological aspect for what it is. We are interested only in the subjective experience of body, the way we experience the condition. This allows us to refer to any and all the bodily sensations as simply: somatics. In this way we side-step everything else except the subjective experience of the physical sensation.

A somatic is any physical feeling/sensation. It doesn’t have to be bad or painful. Without distinctly felt bodily sensations there can be no pleasurable excitement or anticipation. Even the purest form aesthetic appreciation is a finely felt erotic excitement.

The term ‘somatic’ has a wider application than ‘felt-sense’ as in focusing – and it is used differently. There are similarities to ‘wholebody focusing’, but it has a different theoretical underpinning and a different perspective; one difference being an appreciation that the environment is not universally supportive. The struggle for survival is a continuous fact of life. We are guilty of New Age deception if we romanticize otherwise. Our immune system, for example, is engaged in a continuous battle with the hostile forces of nature.

Whilst fully acknowledging this, we don’t have to work out the material ‘causes’ of somatics when we are doing this kind of work. We don’t have to look into the etiology of a somatic. We are primarily interested in the reality of the somatic as we sense it and the effects of bringing it fully to consciousness without asking anything of it. Through this process we can unwind the psychosomatic aspect of any life problem whatever its cause. It can also unveil the ‘secondary gains’ of being sick.

Then there are other problems that have no physical cause whatever. For example, an emotional upset in the family. These will have psychosomatic consequences such as physical tension, or anxiety stomach, or a stiff neck.

However, it is quite normal to have a stiff neck and have no idea of its connection with the family upset. When you have an emotional problem, the somatic effects can seem completely disconnected. Indeed, to suggest such a connection is often felt to be ridiculous. A stiff neck is a stiff neck – that’s that! Probably due to the way I slept (which might be true). The solution would then be some kind of physical manipulation – which may, incidentally, work; but this will not advance a person’s deeper understanding of herself.

The sixty-four dollar question is: how do you come to know, how do you discover, the intimate connection between psyche and soma? Here’s one way to get it started. A strong feeling is usually accompanied by some kind of visible physical reaction. I may sit up in my chair; I may lean forward or shrink back. If it’s a pleasant feeling I may feel an excited energy in my chest. If unpleasant, I may pull a face with disgust or horror. Ask the person to repeat the exact physical effort involved, to do it again, in other words. Get them to pull the same grimaced face they had a second ago. They might discover that their shoulders also make the effort to hunch up at the same time. Then ask them to do it again and hold it whilst exploring what else it may lead to. Give the person time – in fact, tell them to take their time to explore.

This simple little dodge is one way into mindbody connections. Incidentally, this process is not about relaxation – quite the opposite. Bodily tensions – we will call them ‘efforts’ because they have an intention – are what the body is intending. Ask the person what the effort, the screwed up face and hunched shoulders, want. Exploring this will reveal a whole string of efforts and somatics in other parts of the body. Then the person might unexpectedly start thinking of a traumatic incident early in life – even of birth. This is the string of somatics unwinding. This process gives rise to many interesting conscious reflections that can be dealt with in the usual person-centred way of counselling.

There is no simple one-to-one correspondence between a somatic and an incident in life. A somatic effort has multiple references because you make the same effort in may different circumstances. It works like this: many times when faced with an actual or potential threat you react with the same body response. Whether it is a loud noise, or seeing someone hurt themselves, or a fight in the family, or when you were intimidated at school, or being interviewed – your stomach went anxious, you tightened your shoulders, your heart beat faster, and your anus squeezed up – a whole swag of your own precise and characteristic body reactions to a certain kind of trouble. The incidents may not seem similar, but they feel the same because of the same physical response to each of them.

As the somatic efforts unwind I don’t need to remember all the incidents associated with them – my body remembers them. I need to talk about them only when a memory or an incident arises. Otherwise, concentrate on the moving sensations and let the somatics unwind in their own way.

It is important not to get stuck on this form of bodywork (call it ‘bodyminding’) as a method. Not everyone can do it. One has to be fluid with it, adjusting it to the needs of the moment and the person. It should be introduced carefully. It’s a way of gradually learning how give way to one’s biological nature when it is right to do so.