Category: Podcasts

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EFT, RLT and another perspective – Encounter

I’ve just listened to this episode of The Couples Therapists Couch

 In this episode, Emotionally Focused Therapist, Figs O’Sullivan, conceptualizes a case from the standpoint of working from the EFT perspective. Relational Life Therapist, Shane Birkel, talks about how an RLT therapist would work with the same couple. Figs and Shane talk through some of the similarities and differences in the two approaches and how they view couples cases that come in for therapy.

I’m immediately drawn to the conversation, and want to participate.  I appreciate the value systems in both models.
Continue reading “EFT, RLT and another perspective – Encounter”

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The American President – (Movie)

The Hero’s Journey Podcast‘s next effort will be The American President. I’ll watch it and make notes here, hopefully *before* they do the podcast. Watch this space.

This is the guide I use while watching:

Wednesday, 28 February, 2018

I’ve seen the movie and I’ve made some notes. I’m a bit sloppy as I did not like the movie that much.

Ordinary World

Day to day in th Presidents world – his life. His colleagues. The lobbyists. His daughter, dutiful dad.

Then there is a bit of a build up to election stuff – but that is ordiary for the President.

There is a call for the president to do the right environmental thing… he sort of refuses.

Then the soppsed “pitbull” comes on the scene Sydney Ellen Wade. The is on for an adventure and a fight for the environment.

But these are not the calls.

The call to Adventure

The call is that they fall in love. Well Pres. Shepherd falls in love and there is no refusal in sight… For a while. He pursues with gusto.. And she accepts his calls – litterally and as a hero. Both have ftiends alleies and enamies.

Love is the special world and they fall over the threshhold despite the threshold guardians each have. Is the dancing the moment they are truly in? Or the kiss?. Earlier really as the first whif of romance is in the air. So much for the pitbull.

Refusals

Then there is his refusal – he opts for the crime bill and not the environment. This cop out is also one where he refuses love. And his refusal here is matched by hers. “You have lost more than me, you have lost my vote.”

Seizing the Sword

But then in a speech to the world he accepts the call – the environment, even if he might not win her back. But she flies back faster than a speeding bullet. the adventure has gone on for a while so this might be more the seising of the sword.

He finally gets her roses and the elixer is true love prevails

And a big nod to liberal values.

Relationships, Romance and who is the protagonist?

I think they are both heroes, or maybe love is the protagonist. The trouble is that he is the main hero… He has all the power, it is a patriachal story. How might this have played out if it was not partiarchal? The relationship being the protagonist and each of them having a hero’s journey fully matched? It would be nice to speculate. Could it even be a romantic commedy then? I hope a much better one.

Are there any such dramas?

Reflecting on this it is clear that there are three elements in any relationship – each of the lovers, and the relationship. Each has a full life, i.e. the dramatic circle of the hero’s journey. Relationships are not 50/50. They are produced many 100% moments. How well can that be portrayed?

This question of how to put a relationship on the stage is a burning question for me!

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“Relational” TA and psychoanalysis, psychodrama and the relational paradigm 

I have been looking up anything to do with the relational paradigm  and keep bumping into relational psychoanalysis and relational T.A.

They seem fine. I’m surprised these branches of the tree are even needed – I would have thought that psychoanalysis and T.A. Were already “relational” in this way, i.e. Valuing of the relationship between the therapist and the client. Understanding attachment and early relationships as primary. Apparently not.

However I realise I’m in a different school altogether. One that see the relationship as the therapy, but not only the relationship with the therapist but the relationship people have with each other out there in the world. The marriage or committed loving relationship is the dominant one. I’ve come to understand that, especially in individual therapy, the relationship with the therapist can undermine the potential of the committed loving relationship with a partner. If there is no such relationship then the relationship with the therapist can be a surrogate, or if possible a way of facilitating the search for a mate. The rest of the time the therapist is there to facilitate the consciousness that will enable a committed loving relationship to be therapeutic. They are not naturally so – though they have a natural propensity to be so.

With this relational paradigm  more and more fully grasped of late I see that psychodrama has something of this philosophy well developed. Moreno speaks a lot of “in situ”. I think of that as working with the actual here and now relationships in a group.

Psychodrama does not require a theatrical setting, a frequent misunderstanding; it is done in situ – that is, wherever the subject is found.

Who Shall Survive? (1978) P86

However Moreno is not clear on this – Later in the same book he speaks again of therapy in situ

… it can take an immediate form, in situ, that is, in the course of all activities in which the individuals are en- gaged, in the home, in school, at work, for instance the handicraft shop, steam laundry, carpentry shop, department store, etc . The situations of living and working are at the same time used as therapeutic settings. We have found, however, that the analytic and activistic forms of group psychotherapy are not applicable to the deepest disturbances of the individual and the group; they require the application of deep action methods in the form of psychodrama. But they are applicable to social problems of the group in a setting in which, during the treatment, the group is artificially cut off from the community as if the rest of the community were non-existent and as if the influence coming from it could be disregarded.

He comes close to a relational paradigm, and then moves away for “the deepest disturbances of the individual and the group” to theatre where psychodrama clearly becomes treatment of or via a protagonist. Yet he stays close, because as we know, … the protagonist is a protagonist for the group. (ref?)

The idea that the relationship itself can be the source and vehicle for growth and healing, is not explicit in psychodrama – it is there in most psychotherapy, but only in the relationship between the client and the therapist. Yet this idea that the protagonist is working for the group can be translated to the protagonist working for the relationship. That helps!

The relational paradigm  is still to have its major impact, like any paradigm shift it is hard to get from the perspective of the old space.

Imago dialogue is one technique for activating relational healing, one that is easy to teach to clients. However I think T.A. Has the potential for that, Marshall Rosenberg NVC, and psychodrama does as well… Concretisation, role reversal, mirroring and doubling are potent methods. Psychodrama is not so easy without a director. How make the method easily accessible is what I’m working on all the time.

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Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond — Mark Winborn

Shared Realities: Participation Mystique and Beyond

Screenshot

Heard about this on Shrink Rap Radio where Dr Dave interviews the author/editor Mark Winborn. Worth listening to.


Download 427 Exploring The “Participation Mystique” with Jungian Analyst Mark Winborn

I had to get the book, it is a sort of meditation on the nature of the relational space. It focuses on therapy, but this would be so relevant for those of us who consider that the marriage is the therapy.

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How language shapes thought – All In The Mind – ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

 

How language shapes thought – All In The Mind – ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation): “It’s been controversial for centuries but new empirical research suggests that language has a powerful influence over the way we think and perceive the world. Lera Boroditsky from Stanford University suggests that Japanese and Spanish speakers have a different sense of blame, and some Indigenous Australians have a different sense of space—all because of the language they speak.”

language-shapes-thought.mp3

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Shakespeare Sonnets – Evolution – Kim Hill – Brian Boyd (and relationship)

Loved this discussion:

Click to play & download Bryan Boyd Interviewed by Kim Hill

Here is the book:

Ref=sib dp pt

Kindle

I will read the book. But as I listened I was burning to join in on the discussion. I have since my days studying under Prof. Robert Bigelow in the late 60s at Canterbury had an understanding of “gene pools”. The concept makes sense of how some things might benefit the survival of a species even when individuals do not have more babies.

Brian Boyd touched on this lightly in the interview, I’ll be interested to see if he does this more fully in the book.

The point is this: if lyrical poetry (or anything else) is useful to the group then only a few need to have a gene for it, and even if they individually don’t have more babies, the group as a whole might survive and a neighbouring group who does not have that gene in their pool might not.

I’ve been thinking about this in relationship to the purpose of monogamy. It seems that it has a special place in healing wounds from childhood. But this typically does not happen till after the crucial childbearing years, in the second reflective half of life. I think of the powerful impact even one or two healing couples can have in a group. They can foster relationship education as well. They might influence psychological health, and more robust grandchildren.

PS

Bigelow’s book here: Amazon – The Dawn Warriors

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Archetypal Tendencies

I’ve been reading Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. One of the central thesis of the book is that evolution is not only driven by adaptation. There are two other forces at work: structural forces, ie the laws of physics and contingency, luck. What if Beethoven did not have a piano?

I’ll post the picture that impressed me again:

Camera Roll-47

This is a central idea (from the book):

The progression of inventions is in many ways the march toward forms dictated by physics and chemistry in a sequence determined by the rules of complexity. We might call this technology’s imperative.

What is stirring me to write this post is that I listened to a podcast today on Tech Nation, Moira Gunn interviewing Adrian Bejan – details

Click to play & download Adrian Bejan

It is uncanny, and totally in line with the Kevin Kelly theory of what is inevitable that these tow come up with the same ideas. This is the time when we make a shift from classical darwinism, to incorporate something marx might have called dialectical materialism.

More about & by Adrian Bejan here:

 

His book on Amazon:

Design in Nature.

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This theory, Bejan calls it “Constructal Law” governs everything. From his book:

The constructal law is revolutionary because it is a law of physics—and not just of biology, hydrology, geology, geophysics, or engineering. It governs any system, any time, anywhere, encompassing inanimate (rivers and lightning bolts), animate (trees, animals), and engineered (technology) phenomena, as well as the evolving flows of social constructs such as knowledge, language, and culture. All designs arise and evolve according to the same law.

What excites me is that the same law – or rules of complexity, a law about change really, governs the psyche too. I think Jung was onto this with archetypes. These structures are universal across cultures.

Saturday, 02 July 2022

I’m reading his “The Physics of Life — The Evolution of Everything”. Its at odds with what I’m thinking now. It’s not remotly dialectical. It’s all billiard balls. Nevermind. One day I may sort this out. Just annoying right now.

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