Worth listening to

I love listening to podcasts. But only some! I have a selection I keep, and they are of value to me as they come from a list in Google reader I have pruned and added to over many years. Then from Google reader I select about one-in-100 podcasts that arrive. I listen to these on on the iPhone and delete most of those once I’ve listened. Then a few remain and I save them… I’ve put a few on the blog, and there are some below in this post.

I can’t even remember them exactly, but I’ll summarise these in this post. In each case I’d like to discuss them, to recall them for things I’m writing and so on.

Click to play & download
Helen LaKelly Hunt – Kim Hill

This one is relevant because she is the co-creator of Imago – the method that informs a lot of my work.

Click to play & download
The Pelagian Controversy – In Our Time

Simply here because I see such a parallel with the main controversies in psychotherapy today. We have the same debates in secular language.

Click to play & download
Leo Bensemann_ A Fantastic Art Venture – Nine to noon

Love anything about The Group. And of course these people were around even while I was at the university here in Christchurch.

Click to play & download
Peter Sunde _ file-sharing and micropayments

? Must listen again.

Click to play & download
Playing Favorites with David Vann – Kim Hill

? Must listen again.

MOW RIP

Chris trotter got it right here.  Note too that most of the MOW buildings did not go down in the earthquake.  But that old Government Life one in the Square certainly was NOT a good idea.

Maybe it is time for a revolution | Stuff.co.nz:

Did anyone pause to wonder why the huge snowstorm that cut the power supply to so many thousands of Cantabrians a few years back didn’t wreak more havoc on the region’s energy infrastructure?

No. Because we take the excellence of its engineering and the gold-standard quality of its construction completely for granted. It never occurs to us that a privately owned construction company – mandated to provide a healthy rate of return to its shareholders – would never have provided this nation with such a robust and reliable system.

The Rogernomes couldn’t get rid of the Ministry of Works fast enough – and for very good reason.

Die for the group and spread your genes

I enjoyed this essay:

Where does good come from? – The Boston Globe: Instapaper

On a recent Monday afternoon, the distinguished Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson was at his home in Lexington, talking on the phone about the knocks he’s been taking lately from the scientific community, and paraphrasing Arthur Schopenhauer to explain his current standing in his field. “All new ideas go through three phases,” Wilson said, with some happy mischief in his voice. “They’re first ridiculed or ignored. Then they meet outrage. Then they are said to have been obvious all along.”

Wilson is 81, an age at which he could be forgiven for retreating to a farm and lending his name to the occasional popular book about science. Over the past year he’s tried his hand at fiction writing, publishing a novel about ants — his scientific specialty — and landing a short story in The New Yorker. But he has also been pressing a disruptive scientific idea, one he reckons is currently in phase two of the Schopenhauer progression: outrage.

The idea is that if the group that benefits from altruism, the tribe will live to spread the genes. This “outrageous” idea by Edward O Wilson is not so silly.  Nor is it new.  It is the bread & butter of what I learned at the University of Canterbury in the 60s from Dr Bigelow.
I enjoyed his classes and book. He taught the simple idea that the unit of evolution is the “gene pool”, not the individual carrier of the genes. Amazon

Social cooperation, which leads to the Golden Rule and what we call the highest human qualities, was demanded by what we call the lowest of human qualities: the ferocity of human enemies. Shakespeare’s two opposed foes that still encamp us therefore evolved together. They were not even two different sides of the same coin, but were as intimately interdependent as our brains and hearts are. Cooperation was not substituted for conflict. Cooperation-for-conflict, considered as a single, hyphenated word, was demanded — for sheer survival.

page 7 & 8 The Dawn Warriors.

Researching this a bit more, it is evident that Wilson is adhering closely to Darwin:

It must not be forgotten that although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe, yet that an advancement in the standard of morality and an increase in the number of well-endowed men will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to give aid to each other and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection (Darwin, 1891, Vol. I: 203; italics added).

Found that quote in an interesting paper on the history of these ideas while searching for Robert Bigelow AND Edmund O Wilson: Human Evolution and the Origin of War: a Darwinian Heritage

[A fitting post for Easter Sunday!]

Cafes

Working Best at Coffee Shops – Conor Friedersdorf – Business – The Atlantic:

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old water-proof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. ~ Ernest Hemingway

The post is an ode to working in coffee shops. I do it, love it! Pity I’m quitting caffeine, tho I must say decaf is just fine, it meets the ritualistic requirements

Meditation & Sam Keen’s Blog

I’ve just been on a walk for a few hours and recorded a meditation, on the psyche.  In some ways not unlike this one by Sam Keen, but the execution here is superb.  I might work on mine, I began with the notion that the meditation was just for me. Refining it might be a way to enhance it.

Here is a bit of Sam Keens meditation on the self, I like his references to DNA and to the macro & micro.
Continue reading “Meditation & Sam Keen’s Blog”

The relationship has the answer to the relationship problem

I like the related posts feature in this blog. Just noticed one that had this passage. Fits well indeed with the previous post:

… right here, now, in the relationship is the solution to the relationship problem. How to get there might be painful and hard, you will need to learn skills, make effort, but individual therapy or leaving, or searching for a better mate has all those problems and will lead to similar relationship problems, or to no relationship at all.

(me quoting myself)

Relationship and Attachment

How Do Attachment Issues Impact Adult Relationships?
Around twenty years ago we started turning our attention to the attachment system in regards to adult
relationships. Hazan and Shaver were two of the first researchers who postulated that attachment patterns play
out in adult romantic relationships. They developed a series of questions designed to isolate behaviours in adults
that mimic attachment styles in infants; secure, avoidant, ambivalent, dismissive, disorganised and reactive.
What they found was that not only were adults similar to infants in the way that these behaviours played out in
relationships, but that there was a direct correlation between the style in which someone was parented and the
attachment that person would develop later in life. Hazan and Shaver’s research was pivotal for the way that we
see relationships today, and their work ultimately led to the development of many assessment tools attempting to
gauge attachment styles in adults. One of the more popular tools today is the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI)
developed by Mary Main. Yet the field of studying attachment in adults is still vastly unexplored, and this leaves
many adults searching for answers and therapy that would address their issues.
Attachment disruption is one of the hardest problems to address by parents and professionals due to the fact
that solutions are often counter intuitive and that the symptoms often go unrecognised. Below I have compiled a
list of characteristics I often see in both children and adults with attachment issues. This is by no means a
comprehensive list, rather a cluster of symptoms to look out for when treating a client with identified attachment
problems originating from the first three years of their life.

This is a quote from Mark Coen’s paper presented at the NZAP conference this year (I was not there, but just found it on the website, here.) Copy: TheAttachmentContinuum.pdf

The quote is in line with my experience as a therapist, and he goes on the describe the various relationship styles, useful.

The guidelines for treatment, I’ve just checked again to be sure, do not mention couple therapy explicitly and there are no guidelines there for relationship psychotherapy.

This prompts me to present a relationship therapy paper, it is so essential that the relational paradigm is presented. And a paper won’t quite meet my other principle, that experiential learning is the way to make this case, not really papers. Maybe both would be best.

Greetings to all Save the Mokihinui supporteMokihinui

I just got this email from Debs Martin.

This is a cause worth getting in behind!!

~~

Greetings to all Save the Mokihinui supporters

(and apologies if you receive this email more than once),

Thanks for your efforts over the past few weeks to pass on the message to Meridian that damming the Mokihinui is unacceptable.  Over 2600 emails have been sent and numbers are still rising.  March 31st is the last date for sending an ecard – so let your family and friends know!

How else can you help us win the battle?
To assist with the Environment Court case, we have
just launched our Save the Mokihinui shareholding
campaign.

You can purchase one of 140 limited  edition shareholding
certificates (featured left) of $100 each – securing your
part in the battle to save the Mokihinui River.

img

Beautifully illustrated, the certificate encapsulates all that is valuable in the Mokihinui – from its enigmatic great spotted kiwi to its  earthquake-shattered limestone gorges.

We hope this certificate will be an important piece of Mokihinui memorabilia in years to come as a reminder of battles won!

To buy your certificate and virtual plot click  here.

Warm regards,
Debs Martin
Regional Field Officer
Top of the South
Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society of NZ Inc
03-989-3355

14/03/19