Reflecting on Rankism, I am getting wonderful insights and I see a problem. Robert Fuller makes it clear that there are illegitimate situations of rank, and legitimate ones.
I follow up with a few thoughts and some quotes from Robert Fuller.
Rankism
Rankism Knol article Robert Fuller
Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies
Reading & listening to Robert Fuller got me thinking how he connects to the Marshall Rosenberg NVC, and all the dialogue material. I want to integrate!
Fear of banishment, need to be included, primal, we need to belong to the trib or we die.
Fuller is an expert on this major human need. Understanding needs is vital, and he seems to get this one. Needs are the missing link in psychotherapy – Maslows contribution is major – but it seemed the last word, and was not integrated into any modality that I know of.
Blue pill or Red pill psychotherapy
Perhaps you are almost falling out of the consensus world, and becoming more conscious, challenging those around you in ways they don’t like. Maybe you are getting closer to the underlying truth of your life. You don’t need to obey, and nor do you need to harm others to be who you really are. But you may need to *develop new roles*, it could be hard, unpleasant. Maybe you are not very good yet at getting around in the place where you are more real.
How will therapy help you?
Ease you back into the matrix? Help you into the more authentic world where you will feel more vulnerable?
Which way do you want to go?
I think most psychotherapists will ask you that question – after all sometimes the easier more pleasant path is all you can manage for now. For now… inauthentic life is not really an option is it?
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How do the social scientists measure the effectiveness of psychotherapy? Or more to the point how do insurance people measure it?
Synchronicity
There is a strange synchronicity at work! I have become more reflective about my work as a psychotherapist. The new posts here may reflect that. The couple dialogues I facilitate are powerful and impact me as well as the clients.
What are the exact roles that are involved in those dialogues, and the place of language in those roles? The ideas of Hendrix and Rosenberg are important to me. Are they really right that only one partner needs to make a commitment to dialogue?
I return to my roots in Psychodrama. I am doing that in many ways. One is that I will be a trainer in the CITP next year, and also furthering my own training as a Trainer, Educator and Practitioner. I mean roots! What is the nature of the method? The psyche, the drama, roles, and mostly what is the sociometric method. What is the place of healing. I am such a thinker. I have previously written about sociometric criteria for group explorations. See Moreno in Wikipedia for a good summary.
I was inspired listening to Richard Moore, and “Dynamic Facilitation” which they distinguish from Bohmian Dialogue.
And then Pscience, which leads to Bohm via another route, though I had forgotten he even exists.
And Bohm, leads to creativity. He is vitally interested in that subject, like Moreno. He wrote several books on creativity. Which makes me feel like my passion for art is tied in with this larger project. I am so pleased with my couple of years of intensity in that dept!
I am delighted by the unity in my work, the coming together of threads. Even my old interest in politics is included.
So, more on all this will follow.
Pscience
I just made a new Category for my blog. Pscienc. There are heaps of posts back in the past that will need to be categorised.
Psychology and science as a unified field.
I wonder if anyone else has used the name? Plenty, but none that use it in this way. Political science, and there is a band.
Here is the first post I’ll add Murray Gell-Mann
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Here are some pscientific questions:
What can we learn about binary stars by doing intentional dialogues with a life-partner?
Should we use the term gravity or will Eros do?
Is there such a thing as psychic energy? Libido? In psychology is energy a metaphor? What if it were a metaphor in physics as well?
Was Jung right to think the law of thermo-dynamics applies to psychic energy?
What can Moreno’s “social atom” for the smallest social unit needed for survival teach us about the structure of the atom in physics? And vice versa.
Is a social dyad like a quantum phenomena in that once observed the phenomena is transformed?
Does isomorphy, i.e self-similarity, work all the way from the big-bang to a synapse in our brain?
Ideas, stories and metaphors impact on on the world. They are real in their consequences. Therefore God is real.
Proof in maths is different from proof in physics. How do you prove you love someone? What if we applied standards of proof from one context in another? We already do: The theorem is true because it is elegant.
More?
Dynamic Facilitation
Here is a Manual for Dynamic Facilitation.
Jim Rough’s book:
Societys-Breakthrough-Releasing-Essential-Wisdom
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The online manual is pretty good!
A sample follows.
Alan Lightman
Alan Lightman is a novelist, essayist, physicist, and educator. Currently, he is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
I got interested listening to him being interviewed, with the first part of the interview mainly about the relationship between art & science.
Heartening because he & Kim were able to broach this interrelationship at all. That is what makes this such a treat to listen to. He is a writer & a scientist. He is married to a painter.
Frustrating because he sees a gap between the sciences and the arts, creativity, that need not be there at all. I am thinking of the science that Moreno advocates, and I write about in my paper, see this post & link here.
He speaks about how the idea is more important in science than the presentation. But is it? Beauty & truth are more interrelated than that. Also the expression about the world is always a map, the nature of the correspondence between the map & the territory is varied but at this level e=mc2 is a map in much the same way as the Mona Lisa.
True, the terms are defined in scientific language. But language itself is also defined, with more fuzzy, and hence often more effective rules. Science has not learned the sociometric method yet. Just wait till it hits the world! The sociometric revolution is yet to come.
Good communication & Psychotherapy
I see two qualities as essential to psychotherapy:
- The crucible of the relationship. This is formed through the engament process and framed by purpose, time and money agreements.
- Attention to the unconscious. Work with dreams & transference (perhaps better but more obscurely phrased as the isomorphy of dynamics.)
I educate about communication in relationship. I have done it since the early 80s , but with my enthusiasm as I learnt to work more fully with the crucible & the unconscious, I took this aspect for granted. I have also wondered at times if I was too interventionist, thus creating unnecessary transference.
Right now I want to claim it as useful, important. It is right to teach cognitive psychological material if the client will benefit from that. Then comes the crucial question what to teach? What is in the manual? How to teach it?
Some principles:
Firstly the crucible, the therapeutic relationship and unconscious processes must come first, or there will be no sustained deep work.
The educative work can be integrated into the psychotherapy.
And what is worth teaching? This must be under constant review as just what is good communication an art.
Recently I discovered Marshall Rosenberg, the whole NVC system is worth learning. See my earlier post.
Dialogue process as taught by Harville Hendrix is worth knowing. Here is a description of the Intentional Dialogue by Dawn J. Lipthrott.
There are dozens of principles of good communication in Transactional analysis. They have become part of my being over the years but I leaned about them first in an out of print book by Hogie Wycoff. There is a paper on the net that covers some of that: The Theory and Practice of Cooperation. One that is central to this paper and good communication is the understanding of the Karpman triangle
One of the difficulties many people face is that rather than learning about effective communication they learn ideas about “positive thinking”, and even “assertiveness”. They so easily lead to problems. “Positivity” misused, can cover pain & lead to annoyance when others express pain. Such tools in the culture are readily used to cope, but they do not enable deeper connection, they do not allow needs to be clearly identified. “Assertiveness” misused, can prevent the attitude put forward by Rosenberg, that we focus the needs of both parties. Over coming the forces in the culture that foster poor communication is an essential part of psychotherapy in my opinion. As both Rosenberg and Wycoff point out many of these linguistic modes are based to sustain a culture of dominance and submission.
Teaching is most needed & relevant long before clients arrive for help. The arrive with psychological trauma of adverse relationships in their lives. They maybe in deep pain and not receptive to learning. Yet at those times we can model, re-frame in language that leads to insight. For example (and I’ll just offer one for now), when someone confuses think and feel, in the active listening the therapist can untangle it:
“I feel no-one loves me”
You think no one loves you, I imagine you feel sad when you think that.
The Hungry Duck
“Please only fulfill this request
if you can do it with the joy
of a small child feeding a hungry duck.Please do not oblige me if you feel
coercion of any kind, such as by guilt,
shame, punishment, reward, duty,
or obligation”
This is a card to hand out after making a request. Based on NVC – Marshall Rosenberg.
Been finding many more great resources:
Raising Children Compassionately
by Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D.
Resisting the Urge to Throw a Pain Ball
By Serena Fennell
An excellent summary on Wikipedia
Murray Gell-Mann
I want to quote one review from Amazon:
4.0 out of 5 stars The True Meaning of this Book, November 11, 2000
By Leonardo Motta
I decided to write this review because I thought none of the reviews really mentioned the main focus of this book. This is not a book about Quantum Mechanics, nor molecular biology, nor neurobiology. In this book, the great Gell-Mann exposes his ideas of why all subjects of science (from physics, to chemistry, to biology, to psychology) must be studied together, why they are related and also he shows models of how to do this unified study. He defends that reductionism is not the only way of doing science, in opposition of the philosophical ideas of Steven Weinberg and Richard Feynman. This book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, because there aren’t many books that are against pure reductionism written by reductionism defenders. Gell-Mann is not against reductionism, but against PURE reductionism; he think its nice to explain a complex phenomenon based on the theory of its contents but its also important to study the phenomenon in his actual level, studying the way that the complex works. Not only the simple. Thats the origin of the name: Quark, the simple, and the Jaguar, the complex.