Erickson reminded us that all our life we are learning. He also made practical connections between everyday life, problems, solutions, hypnosis, and psychotherapy in general.
How can we best learn to assist ourselves to learn to live, our clients to reconnect with their resourcefulness, our children to maintain their natural passion for curiosity and exploration?
There is a crisis in the way learning is experienced. Theories are emphasised at the expense of practical experience, and students are regimented and forced to comply with some abstract methodology. Some are classified into pathological categories to be treated – they are difficult, slow learners, suffer from ADHD or depression, etc. Classrooms look like funeral services.
Logos – the written word becomes the expression of Thanatos – the death force. Traditional institutions are devolving into factories turning out products for profit. Schools are run like businesses – and large ones. They are perpetuating a bastardisation process – “I went through it so you will have to.”
I invite you to explore an approach which values and respects an individual’s unique resourcefulness, supporting their learning, emphasising Muthos [from which “myth” derives] as the spoken word becomes the expression of Eros – the life force.
People who have experienced both are clear about the differences and their preferences. I want to foster this experience and want to speculate about how we might let people know about this? How we might offer the possibility to those who might be interested?
How can we best learn to assist ourselves to learn to live?
Maturana states that science is concerned with everyday living, and derives from everyday experiences. He illustrates his definition of a scientific explanation with a cooking example – how a cake rises during the cooking process!
The horror of September 11th, 2001 has led to pathologising, a retreat to fundamentalism with the glib categorisation of good and evil – with the powerful nations being good since they have the power to strut their stuff, and anyone who interferes with their hegemonic evangelism is by definition evil, and needs to be exterminated for the sake of good, and even for the sake of the recipients of this blind missionary zeal. The “terrorists” are demonised, and those terrorising are heroes.
September 11th is another anniversary – of the 1973 overthrow of the democratically elected government of Allende in Chile by a CIA backed military coup led by Pinochet. The 30,000 who were disappeared after that even are conveniently ignored while the 3,214 who were killed in New York are sanctified. Marxists are apparently bad, while Americans are good.
Could it be that both are people? Could it be that a war on terror is a part of the cause of the New York tragedy, not the solution? Instead of pathologising the “terrorists”, could we allow ourselves to wonder what might be useful as a way of healing the haemorrhaging gash between East and West, North and South, the haves and the have–nots, the powerful and the powerless?
I have been touched by three events which had the potential to heal similar rifts.
Several years ago when “The Troubles” were at their most insane, a group of women got together and formed “Widows of Ireland”. Each member of this group shared a common concern – they had lost a loved-one in the conflict. Though they were Catholic or Protestant, North or South, they got together and shared their human experience – that of the inhumanity of the situation.
The second led up to the Oslo Accord. Stoltenberg, a Norwegian diplomat, arranged for a secret meeting between the peace negotiators in the Middle east crisis. They each expressed their hatred of the other. They each expressed their love of the country and their people. They each heard that they were each saying the same things, and apparently they fell into each others arms and wept. Peace broke out, however temporarily.
The third happened on Christmas Day, 1914. The soldiers on either side of no-man’s land in the last of the “gentlemen’s” wars stopped their fighting and had their Christmas meal. During the quietness, each side could hear the others’ Christmas carols, and before long they were singing to and fro across the space between them. After a while, they came out of their trenches, and began to exchange hats, badges, food, etc. The next day, when fighting was due to resume, the British soldiers were not able to continue, and had to be shipped back home. Peace nearly broke out that day, but the organisation managed to avert it.
How much of our personal suffering would disappear if we could learn about our own civil war and make peace with ourselves, our families, our community? How could we learn to do this? What would be different in our experience if we were to learn this? How would our children, our families, our society benefit from such learning?
How can be best learn to assist our clients to reconnect with their resourcefulness?
Ever elegant, Jay Haley reminds us that the purpose of therapy is to get people out of therapy. I like to suggest to clients that the less they have to do with people like me, the better. I value medical assistance, and am alive today because of it, but do my best to keep away from doctors. When help is needed, let’s have it, but let’s not actively seek it out! In “The Medical Nemesis”, Nader makes a scathing appraisal of medicine’s contribution and claims that we in the west are living longer not because medicine, but because of the engineering actions of draining swamps to deal with malaria, and separating drinking water from sewage!
Erickson’s pioneering work has been furthered by Berg, de Shazer, and O’Hanlon and emphasising the natural resourcefulness of the human being, the nascent healing capacity that we all have shifted the focus from understanding causes of problems to exploring learning of solutions. A cataclysmic shift, and one which some clients who have been trained to be professional clients with labels like “Depression”, “PTSD”, “MPD”, “Anxiety Disorder” etc. can experience difficulty moving beyond the label. Some labels leave a kind of gunk behind even after they are removed – you can see where they were, and that there was something there. Am I the only person who has begun to remove a label from a jar, a videotape, a microwave, and as bits tear and remain attached, wonder if it might have been preferable to have left the label in place. It might be something like the experience of half removing a bandaid from a hairy part of the body.
The experience of relief, bordering on disbelief, on a client’s face when they see the possibility for the first time that they are more than their past, and their future hasn’t happened yet, to paraphrase Michael Yapko.
How can we maintain out mood of optimism in the face of such gloom? O’Hanlon wryly clams to be psychotically optimistic, and alerts us to a possible new item for inclusion in DSM IV – “Excessive Labelling Disorder”. My experience is that taking care of my mood and keeping it respectfully light is very helpful.
Haley recommends that we have an attitude of persistence with clients and let them know that we are going to stick with them until one of us dies. He observes that some clients, sensing this, give up and let go of their problem.
In the Psychotherapy Networker 2002, an article “The Coaching Boom” is subtitled “at last an alternative to the medical model?”. Erickson lives! Coaching is described as a legitimate conversation – one without the stigma of therapy or counselling. Who wouldn’t want to avoid being stigmatised by a pathological and pathologising classification system which, like any system, systematises a process and by necessity depersonalises and de-legitimises an individual human being? It seems that the coaching methodology in the new millennium might be catching up with where Erickson was in the 1950s.
My experience shows me that when I make certain assumptions clients are more likely to make their own connections. They are working with a person rather than a condition, and experience rather than a theory, a mood of openness rather than classifying, curiosity rather than certainty, ignorance rather than truth, possibility rather than morbidity, individuality rather than co-morbidity.
How can be best learn how to achieve this?
A colleague reported that the way to obtain a university degree is to keep your mouth closed and nod your head. We could add that it is also required that the official line is memorised and regurgitated at exam time. Many graduates entering the helping professions complain that they don’t feel confident. They don’t know how to apply their theories to the real world – the one populated by people.
I like to give a description of a certain approach or process rather than explain it. I prefer to show it rather than merely talk about it. I prefer to offer opportunities for interested students to practice for themselves so they can discover in their own experience what is helpful for them rather than demand compliance with some pro-forma technique. I prefer to provide an environment where someone can feel safe to make mistakes and respond to helpful reflections rather than requiring rigid standards to be adhered to.
I have noticed that an emphasis on each unique individual student’s unique individual experience rather then my importance, on questions rather than answers, on respect rather than a demand for deference to my authority helps the process.
How can be best learn to assist our children to maintain their natural passion for curiosity and exploration?
Following Echeverria, Flores, Maturana and Olalla, we can consider “knowing” as an ability to perform an action in a specified arena of action, and learning as an increase in this ability.
This demands an experience of acquiring abilities if we are to learn, and obviates any need to create a template, map or theory. Flores and Solomon wrote in “Disclosing New Worlds” about sensitivities as a desired outcome, and I am increasingly impressed with this as a way of enhancing our learning.
Rob, How eloquently presented and still relevant today. The Insurance companies demand a label in order to get reimbursed. As we are all challenged in one way or another, I simply put the label of " adjustment disorder." I hate it and yet I play along in order to be compensated.
Thank you again and again for your generosity and sharing your learnings with me. Each and every time I pick up a gem of wisdom from you and I feel blessed to have met you and have you as a special resource in my life.
Namaste,
Helene