Walter Logeman: Journal
I have a notion of “clean language’ as language devoid of blame or shaming. As in NVC. This is different. I am not sure I fully get it, but it is language that simply evokes the phenomenology in the client.
This is NLP, but I can overcome my resistance as I read stuff from David Grove. A New Zealand Maori psychotherapist.
Quotes follow.
Continue reading “Clean Language & David Grove”
Interesting write up on the Dunedin study.
A long-term tracking study of more than 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 32 suggests that people vastly underreport the amount of mental illness they’ve suffered when asked to recall their history years after the fact.
The problem I see with this is not in the study or the data, I have heard an excellent presentation on this study.
There is a problem though. Who decides what is mental illness?
Social, political & cultural problems, such as poor education, poverty, ignorance about relationships & parenting, disenfranchisement, advertising and trashy media, disinformation, excessive power of pharmaceutical companies, racism, sexism and society’s sanction of violence do lead to personal deficits.
The problem with calling those deficits illness is two fold: one it personalises the social & political deficiencies. Secondly it undermines seeking personal help as it comes at the price of being seen as ill.
The solution is not to make it more socially acceptable to accept such labels as the Mental Health foundation is trying to do. That is well intentioned and would be ok if there was a better culture around assessing what mental illness really is.
At the heart of many of the conditions that are not illness is the belief that one is not OK. Counselling often involves re-learning that one is OK. It is not useful to learn “I am ill, but that is OK” when that leads to a passivity and acceptance of an ill and depressed lifestyle. A belief that somewhere in my chemicals I can’t help it, when really no such chemical situation exists, at least not one that can be shown to be more at the root of the problem than the mental illness diagnosis itself.
Ideas on cyberspace and psyche follow, with reference to social networks, science, psychodrama and sociometry. I conclude with a quote from Moreno that led to this reflection.
Thoughts about the Imago dialogues. It is mostly intended for people who have some experience of this couple therapy.
I have just listened to a spectacular podcast. From 2006 – I missed it till I changed my system of managing podcasts – giving in to the iTunes default way.
Kevin Kelly – The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method.
Download: iTunes — Direct download
The textual summary is here:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly06/kelly06_index.html
I continue to discuss the podcast and relate themes to my own writing.
I have just been given some info about “Systemic Constellation work”
I want to follow up, two links that might be useful.
THE CHALLENGE AND PROMISE FOR PSYCHODRAMA
OF SYSTEMIC CONSTELLATION WORK
By Ronald Anderson and Karen Carnabucci
And this one, an Alert
Systemic Constellations Wikipedia.
Family Constellations More specifically about Hellinger. Interesting discussions on Wikipedia.
quoted in
The Philosopher and the Storyteller
By Charles R. Embry
The symbols do not refer to structures in the external world but to the existential movement in the metaxy from which they mysteriously emerge as the exegesis of the movement in intelligibly expressive language. Their meaning can be said to he understood only if they have evoked in the listener or reader the corresponding movement of participatory consciousness. Their meaning, thus, is not simply a matter of semantic understanding; one should rather speak of their meaning as optimally fulfilled when the movement they evoke in the recipient consciousness is intense and articulate enough to form the existence of its Human bearer and to draw him, in his or her turn, into the loving quest of truth.
I found it fascinating that through the words participatory consciousness the dialogue and archetypal psychology – with its notion of metaxy come together.
Careful reading of the passage points to the responsibility of the sender. Sending might involve beauty. In imago we are asked to listen to some ugly sends! Fair enough, but what if they were works of art?
Is it ever useful?
Ethical?
Sharing?
While directing or being a therapist?
When I was a social worker in the early ’80s and a person was waiting in the waiting room to see me, the receptionist would ring me and jokingly say your client system is here to see you.
Social Work has had a strong sense for a long time that the individual is always part of a system. This same systems theory was taught to me as being central to Psychodrama, specifically through an article by Lynette Clayton.
Recently I have read some good material in Imago Relationship Therapy : Perspectives on Theory, particularly by Randall C. Mason, Ph.D. who talks about the Relational Paradigm, and sees it as distinct from systems thinking.
I have been wanting to tie all this together, and Moreno’s contribution is significant. I love the way he sees the origin of our thinking of individual psyche ties in with the body as being the locus of treatment in medicine. What a fallacy it has been to continue to think like that in psychotherapy!
The opening of the Chapter on Sociometry in Psychodrama Volume one follows.
I’ve also added more notes on Sunday, 29 November 2015
