On Speaking

 

Speech as performance

I don’t talk when I haven’t got anything interesting enough to say

This puts speech on something of a performative, competitive basis, that there is a certain bar to enter, and if you can’t get above that you need to be quiet.  Interest level I guess is determined by those there, or maybe by one dominant person, the queen in the court for instance.  As you speak so they hold up their cards and if your speech is interesting enough then it is allowed, without disdain or ridicule.

It then partly leaves speech as an objective performance, in the court of the people, speech almost becomes like music which is enjoyed or otherwise.

The threat of under performing would presumably range from a reduction in social status through to being ostracised.

 

Reasons to speak

There are other reasons for speech apart from a performance for others.  Firstly, that you want to work something out, so for instance, you’re confused if what you said to your partner is reasonable, and you can ask those around you what they think. Secondly you want to connect with other people to deepen your engagement with something, did you see that show\sunset etc, wasn’t it amazing, then you can both enjoy the event together.  Thirdly there can be the function of speech, to entertain, to comfort, to show off and garner admiration, to be superior, through informing or to connect to another.

 

Being interesting.

On one hand we are all unique perspectives on a shared experience.  So, we can communicate, and whist much is shared, there is also an inalienable difference .

So, on one hand just to give your unique perspective on our shared experience can brim with interest, if the thing you are talking about connects with others. I guess that is the real key.

Interesting seems about connection to other people’s interests.

 

Being uninteresting

To do this you can talk in a disengaged way with your experience, which might result in talking in cliches. Or talk about something you really don’t care about, so you’re actually forcing talking when you should be listening.

 

Not speaking when you want to

You may not speak when you want to as you fear that what you are interested in other people won’t be.

You might fear that other people will be critical of what you have to say.

Thinking about this there could also be a quite number of reasons, procrastination might be one, fearing connection another, and I’m left thinking there may well be others!

On Being a therapist

 Therapy

A client comes to you with some problems.

You make a warm and welcoming space for them to allow them to be with their problems.

In doing this together you may explore their problems which can make new sense of them

In engaging with their problems in a different way, they will move.

 

As you are doing this, if it feels right you may offer some ideas, of other people who have had such problems. This might be helpful, for this client as they can take something, or it might not be as this is their problem and no one else has had it

You might at times offer something that has been helpful  to other clients with a similar problem.

This might be helpful, for this client as they can take something, or it might not be as this is their problem and no one else has had it.

 

So the essence then is to be with the client to allow them to explore their living, so they have more awareness of it and so allow them to take choices that best suit them.  Within this there can also be the offering of ideas and techniques to help this process.

Some clients at some times, offer passivity to the therapist where they want to be fixed by the other. They may lay down with their feet in the air like a cat wanting a pat to let the therapist do therapy to them to make them feel better. Other clients as some times may sit very still and demand that the therapist do therapy to them to make them feel better.

In both instances it I guess to be useful to notice this, and to explore and offer therapy as above, so the topic changes from the problem brought, to the desires in bringing problems

 

Repetition, frozen structures and differentiation

Summary

Client’s present with frozen structures (OCD, GAD, Substance misuse) where a trigger, results in distress and a response to the distress creates more of the distress. This cycle is maintained as the trigger and distress and undifferentiated, they have singular descriptions for instance “That was unfair”, “I am angry”, which result in singular responses, “I drink to lessen the anger”.

Through differentiating them into a more intricate description then it  encourages different responses.  It does this via de-associating trigger and distress as they are experienced differently post differentiation and also by encouraging different responses to all the differentiated parts. To work with a client to differentiate their experiences can be aided by a therapist attitude of both a gentle tentativeness and the belief that experience is always richer than our description of it.

 

Article

There seems something clients often present with which is repetitive thoughts\behaviours where there is a feeling of being stuck somewhere, the process that they are part of seems something of a frozen structure, repeating itself over and over, like wriggling a key in a lock without the door opening.    These presentations may be substance misuse, OCD, GAD to name but a few.

There seems something that can be in common throughout all of them:

 

There is a trigger (e.g. a situation where I’ve been working hard, or not had the outcome I want etc).

There is distress (e.g. anger, disappointment, boredom etc).

There is a response to this that gives short term relief from this (e.g. substance use, ritual, worry).

But the response produces more triggers\distress (e.g. hangovers, increased anxiety, self-criticism) and it doesn’t develop any more useful ways to deal with the initial distress/trigger.

And so the cycle begins.

 

It seems then two things can be helpful for clients:  to have more understanding of the components of the process and the process itself and to use different ways to manage the distress, or the trigger.

To get a deeper understanding we differentiate. We start with the single description of the experience, say anger, and we differentiate it into all the differing aspects of the experience.

In deepening an understanding of the parts of this cycle, it enables new possibilities. The old cycle says for instance when angry then I drink. As we differentiate the anger, it changes and the anger becomes anger with other aspects, the injustice, the tiredness, the need to achieve and the like. Now with a different stimulus the client can more easily disconnect from their habitual associated response and look for other more helpful ways of responding. Likewise, as anger has been broken up into its component parts, then it becomes easier to manage as the bits are smaller and also calls for different responses. How do I respond to the unfairness, my tiredness, my need to achieve?

 

To differentiate then we can explore the phenomena and experience of the trigger and distress somatically, cognitively, and emotionally.  Both trigger and distress can be understood independently and as we get new information about one of them, it can in turn aid to an increase of understanding in the other.  They are two sides of the same coin. So as a cognition from the trigger arises: “he shouldn’t have treated me like that”, then this can in turn point to some emotions, maybe disappointment, expectation, sadness etc. As an emotion arises from the experience of the distress, for instance a feeling of sadness along with the anger, this can in turn point back to the trigger to open up the thought of  “he treats me like that because he doesn’t value me”.

 

To find the differentiation within the trigger or the distress then what you are looking for is an edge which can provide an entry to the experience, so the client engages more with it.  One thing you may well notice on either trigger or distress is that the client describes them in singular ways, for instance: “I was treated unfairly” and “I was angry”.  The frozen structure above needs to have the same pieces to be able to continually repeat itself. So these singular ways of description,  ”unfairly” and “angry” are key to keeping the structure frozen.

To find an edge, to go further into this singular description,  is predominantly something you will best understand with your client, but some general ways that seem  useful to do this is  to give time in reflecting and also use tentative language to encourage the client to go further, for instance “so you feel it rather unfair”. Using this slightly uncertain language can encourage a clarification from the client, for instance: “No it’s not just unfair, its uncaring too!”

It can also help to point at the client’s experience of this. So as the client engages with their sense of this situation, then you might say “you’re noticing that part of it feels rather unfair”. In doing this you both encourage them to engage with their experience of the situation and to imply by the word “part” that there’s more there. This being the process of disidentification.

The therapists attitude here also helps, being tentative, having a gentle explorative engagement, which encourages the client likewise. In some ways the therapist joins the client as they both engage with the client’s experience; they both sit on a log together and wonder about the nature of the client’s experience.  This attitude says there are always at least three people in the room.

 

So, using a phenomenological and focusing attitude then we can differentiate the respective understandings of trigger and distress.

The same approach can be used to explore the response. This time we can also supplement this with understanding what the function of this behaviour is and then to also pick out secondary gains which may then point to an unacknowledged trigger.

Then with the understanding of the component parts developed, an understanding of the circularity can be developed, showing what the reinforcers are that stimulate the repeated behaviour.

As much as the differentiation weakens the connection between trigger and distress, distress and response, so this can then be supplemented with other ways to manage the distress, which this time will be related more finely to the presenting situation.

In summary then, to thaw frozen structures, it is a case of developing the intricacy of experience on from singular descriptions. This in turn enables a client to disidentify with the description of their experience as there is always more to experience.  As experience is understood with more nuance this then encourages a range of response.

 

Objectifying humans

Human objects

Science was invented in the renaissance and three of its main contributors were Copernicus, Newton and Descartes. Together they put together a way of seeing the world that enable power to them and to people that used scientific approaches. They wrestled influence away from the philosophers and the church as a way of seeing the world.

The combination of Newton and Descartes sees the construction of what Gendlin calls the unit model. The world is composed of discrete things, each of which has an indubitable essence, which are connected by external forces. Change happens by rearranging of these essences by the external forces. So as far as objects go, we have a perfect Laplacian system, in that all objects are determined in their interactions with each other from the beginning of time to eternity.

The key premises are that objects are definite they are what they are, there is no ambiguity. We can understand them by breaking them up into smaller and smaller pieces to find their essence. Mathematics is the central method in Newtonian science.

So whilst the world of science has created some truly amazing things, protected us from the elements, from disease, extended our life span, created unparalleled abilities of speed, and connection, where it falls short is when we apply it to ourselves to the inventor of science.

Humans are different from objects in this Newtonian way of thinking.  Firstly, we are not discrete, we are not just what we are. We have desire and want something else, not only that but we have a catalogue of desires and worse than that they conflict or can do. So, there is an essential incompleteness of humans that always directs to the future wanting something more. We never are discrete.

Secondly, we haven’t got an essence. If you chopped us up into smaller pieces you would lose humanness quite quickly. We are humans in so far as out of the complexity of all us, we exist. The similarity exists with music. If you took a piece of music and reduced it to mathematical relations, you would lose music. In the same way if you took a cake and reduced it to its constituent components, of fat, and starch, water and sugar again you would lose the cake in so doing.

Thirdly and probably most importantly we are creative, we imagine, we compare, we learn and then we create. From this unity of time and activity we focus our attention and build the world in a way that we want to see. Again, this action is so very different to the world of objects. It has freedom, it has temporality which needs to move through time rather than be fixed points of nows chugging through (see zeno paradoxes). Indeed we create ways of understanding, we create objects and we created science, it was one of our myriad behaviours.

The thing is though we treat ourselves, well I certainly do, very much as objects. We define what is important in our lives from the values constructed from our friends, family, society, culture and epoch. Then we create goals to achieve. Thus, I must be a clever man, a rich man, I must own a house, car and have suitable friends with similar attributes. In this action we define the properties we must have and then seek to create them. We are like a factory that manufacturers ourselves as an object. I guess you can see this most clearly in goal directed behaviour, that will be accompanied by directives such as “must”, “should” and “ought”.

We then might ruminate when we have taken choices that didn’t lead to us being the object we were after or we worry about things that might happen to threaten them. Of course, we don’t stop there, and we compare ourselves with others and decide we aren’t good enough objects or have made the wrong choices.

I guess seeing ourselves as objects that we create is handy, it provides a simple solution to the question of how should I live, in the face of the yawning abyss of nothingness, that would be its alternative.

It’s also tough though, we are born in a neo-liberal post enlightenment society and objectness is what we face.

I guess though there are alternatives even if a fundamentally radical solution would lead to incarceration in one of our establishments be in medical or penal.  One would be listening to yourself being led by the intricacy of yourself and what feels right to do. I guess the second one is whilst you are pushing the great Sisyphean stone of your goals up the hill to give yourself little breaks and to engage with the world as you find it, outside of the your goals.

References

Laplace:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities^[65]

Gendlin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Gendlin

Zeno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

Loneliness

Loneliness

So both reading and having read some books on loneliness I wanted to think through some ideas about it.

Definitions

Loneliness seems to me not an objective state that we are, that one day could be definitively measured but rather a way of describing human experience that has a history which has evolved since its initial uses in the 18th century when it was a physical description more of being alone as opposed to the emotionally charged aspect of current loneliness.

The definition that I would like to use here is:

Loneliness is the pain you have when you don’t have connections with others you desire.

Therefore loneliness is both social expectation and social disappointment.

Types of loneliness

Loneliness varies in both object of social desire and duration.

The social connection sought varies from a single person: romance and best friends, to a loose social group like friends, or a tighter social group, like a religious group.

Loneliness can be chronic, situational or event based.  Chronic being felt all of your life time, situational being the outcome of a change of situation, e.g. a partner dies. Event loneliness is the loneliness we feel at certain events, for example at a party when no-one talks to us.

Phenomena and effects

I’d like to look at loneliness from 3 aspect within person, between people and its social context.

The within person aspect of loneliness seems to be the experience around  a persons being , valuing and understanding.

Validation

With another person your existence can get seen and validated. The process of your life can be offered back to you through the eyes of the other.   This offers two aspects to increase the understanding you may have of your yourself and your life and the value you have of yourself and within your life.

You know you exist as you are seen and you make a difference.  As much as you learnt about yourself and the world through the eyes of the others, so there is something seemingly ontologically fundamental about the being of the other in the forming of your being.  As you are validated thus you can make understanding about yourself in the world and its importance.

Valuing

Part of validation is valuing. Value seems very much a social concern, you could argue that the more people value something the greater its value has to an individual. Indeed value seems to be a relational concern. I do something for you that you value, you may repay me with something I value, so value is the common currency of importance between people. Thus whilst it seems logically possible for someone to value something that no other person could value, it seems it would weaken an individuals valuing if no one else valued it. So again we need another to be part of our shared value world, to see importance in what we see important and to put the colour back into our world. There’s a wonderful and twisted example of this that I read but now can’t remember the reference, but if you could be the richest\cleverest\most successful person in the world but you had to live on a planet of robots, would you take it?

Understanding

Part of validation is an understanding and perspective on the meaning you make in your life.  Following Wittgenstein’s private language argument, you could never have a private language as you would need a third party to let you know if you didn’t follow the rules.  Without the other your grasp on meaning weakens. In some ways I wonder if the same arguments around value hold true for meaning? Would it be the case that the more people that believe what you do, the stronger your belief in it would be and contrary wise? So as you are validated you can live in a more coherent and understood world.

If you add that together there is something foundational to a person’s being contained in their relation to the other and loneliness whilst can be episodic, or more long lasting can be understood as the pain we might feel in via our being, value and understanding. So loneliness in this view is something of a social pain in the ontologies…

Event loneliness

There seems another aspect of loneliness being the restriction of things you can do, things best done with another. Some relational being that loneliness can call for is the desire for care, play, feeling safe, touch, to be part of something bigger than self. Indeed attachment theorists would argue that an adult break of a secure base would add to the lonely experience with a feeling of not being safe.  Whilst you can talk about self-relation and how we receive our acts this would appear a glimmer of the effect that another can have.

As much as there are relational aspects that can be had fully without another, there are also events that are have a social expectation to them, which can provoke both an experience of loneliness and or an avoidance. These are some of the aspects of the stages of life,  parties, key birthdays, marriages, births and deaths. Society has constructed these in certain shapes, and these shapes involves friends and if you don’t have sufficient of them at these events, then the social pain you feel, for this lack can be loneliness.

Social Context and loneliness

Society seems to construct both our concept of loneliness and also the factors to produce it.  On one hand there is the post industrial neo-liberal society in which we live. As many of our jobs lead us to be cogs in a machine we can lose the meaningfulness either of our job, or of our interactions with others. Here we can treat and be treated like objects whose only worth is the quantifiable and competitively increasing output that we can make.  The style of work plus the quantity of things to buy the objects to make our work worthwhile, is a perfect breeding ground for loneliness. Where we might crave the I Thou relationship of Buber as opposed the factory cog banging I It relation.

Meta emotions and loneliness

To say there are meta-emotions to loneliness, would imply a simplicity of unity and causality of it that I do not believe in, however there is something in loneliness that can get constructed through social context.

In our society the general push is to success and popularity.  Both of these goals reciprocally intermingle with each other, the successful becoming popular, the popular finding power, or followers or customers which in turn can enable success. So in this society then to feel lonely, to have social pain and insufficient meaningful relations means there is something bad about you. In this light people can feel their loneliness and then mixed in with this is some unpleasant belief about self to explain this, I am unlikable, bad etc. Then on top of this thought and emotion of course will match explanatory view of other people who will persecute on this basis, who will judge on this basis.  Again the unpleasant cocktail of these meta-emotions can then add the experience of shame into the already heady brew of loneliness.

Causes and maintainers

Loneliness is complex so to there is no simple answer to causes and maintainers. 

Development

To construct loneliness you have to have a social history. Babies are social, children are social and it is on this background loneliness grows.

To have unsatisfactory relationships then this can be due to unrealistic expectations and inter-personal difficulties. This can then lead to being rejected, humiliated, scorned, bullied or ostracised. All of which can then lead to feeling unsafe.

To make sense of these unpleasant feelings and experience then people can develop unpleasant beliefs about themselves: “I am boring”, “I am unlovable”. This would then be an initiator to the chronic lonely. Likewise it can also generate beliefs about other people, they are judgemental, persecutors and not to be trusted and then in turn about social situations, which are understood to be scary.

Maintainers

The combination of beliefs about self\others and social situations will then lead to avoidance which can in turn maintain these beliefs. Likewise it can lead to defensively paying attention to self for faux pas, or for other in terms of attack which again can get in the way of the meaningful connection that is sought.

With a history of loneliness, the desire for social connection can also become so great that a level of social perfectionism forms which is in turn very difficult to satisfy.

Social beliefs form a part here. When we believed in God there may have been equal aloneness, but there was less loneliness, as you were always with God, and indeed aloneness allowed a better relation with God. Likewise belief in “The one”, your soulmate that will make  your life complete, will lead to a lot of dissatisfaction with prospective partners and can contribute to your loneliness for this person.

Beliefs about self likewise play a part. Seeing others as similar to yourself enables greater degrees of trust in the other to be formed, trust in others being a core component of creating meaningful relationships.

Trust

Whilst trust is a verb that needs an object it is a broad relation between people. Where it plays a part in loneliness, is a trust that other people will be kind to me, wont judge me unpleasantly, reject, bully, humiliate etc.  There is a correlation between beliefs in this type of social trust and levels of loneliness both at a country level and at the individual level as current research shows.

Indeed there seems something logical about this, as mistrust is handwork. You have to scan the actions of the other and yourself to defend yourself against the unpleasant behaviour that mistrust points to. Likewise to mistrust the other wont allow you or they to open in what is both a place of connection and also vulnerability.

Bibliography

Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Loneliness  Reaktion Books. Kindle Edition.

Cacioppo, John T.. Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

Bound Alberti, Fay. A Biography of Loneliness (p. 38). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.