The hope of Love

In response to the recent trouble in Charlottesville USA from white nationalists, Obama, in a celebrated tweet, quoted this passage from Mandela’s autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom.

“No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background or his religion…

People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”

This is the message at the heart of the broadly humanistic understanding of our psychology. People are not born with negative or destructive tendencies in any shape or form. Love is indeed our more “natural” state, we are born “good”. So, where does all this negativity come from? How does it become so prevalent in human beings?

It is clear to me that what creates hate and all the negative aspects of ourselves is trauma. Even an ideal upbringing cannot be perfect, our developmental journey as humans is so long and complex that it is impossible for all its stages and transitions it be negotiated without ruptures at some point, and over so much time, accidents are bound to happen. Of course, most upbringings are far from perfect and far too many are horrendous. Hate begets hate.

Trauma is the process whereby deep wounds have to be repressed and internalised because they are too much to process at the time. Whenever this happens the self is left with some insecurity, there is a place inside us that is too difficult to face and therefore has to be avoided and defended at all costs. The power of this comes from the original self-protective reaction that could not face the trauma in the first place, there is bound to be much hurt, pain, anger, fear or distress there.

Trauma is behind every judgement (of self or other), every should or ought, every avoidance or angry reaction, every anxious or depressive reaction, every closing down or turning away or refusal to face the facts of life. It is behind all our insecurity and lack of trust.

But the “good news” is that underneath people are good, and as the quote above says, it is possible to be “taught to love”. This is the work of therapy and spirituality, to facilitate the undoing of trauma and our consequential insecurity, so that we can increasingly open to and live in our “natural” state of love. This has obviously always been the aim of therapy generally, but to me it is more explicitly and more clearly articulated by the emerging “psycho-spiritual” approach to human development. (See, Ken Wilber, John Welwood, Almaas, Richard Harvey, Jill Hall, Mary O’Malley, Relational Change, many within Gestalt and other therapy traditions, and many others.)

To achieve this goal of living closer to love, we need a combination of both psychological and spiritual work. We need to face our traumas and slowly heal ourselves as well as opening ourselves to the love and support that only the transpersonal can provide.

As a therapist, I do largely see generations slowly healing. Adults are not as badly traumatised as their parents; their children are not as traumatised as they are. The goodness at the heart of human nature gives me hope and optimism, as does the experience of connecting to the transpersonal level of life in the depth of our “here and now”.

Anarchistic Democracy

I recently watched a BBC4 Storyville documentary by Carne Ross called “The Accidental Anarchist: Life without Government” (23/07/17). I’m very grateful, the film “blew my mind” as the saying goes. It blew open the doors to seeing that maybe globally we are on the verge of a transition from old fashioned ‘hierarchical democracy’ with its roots in the middle ages and beyond, into non-hierarchical or ‘anarchistic democracy’. I find this profoundly exciting.

It corresponds to my understanding of human nature around how people are fundamentally good and self-repairing. We all need a bit of help from time to time, but the impetus within us is so strongly towards health, towards growth and autonomy and freedom. What holds us back are often all the legacies of authoritarianism, of power and control which created, and still creates, so much of the trauma in society. From this come all sorts of internalised de-powering shoulds and oughts and insecurities and self-restrictions.

Our old-fashioned hierarchical democracy in many ways still embodies the pre-democratic structures of power and wealth. Everything is top down and designed for control. This is still the legacy of kings, of the aristocracy and religion, it is still the legacy of the privileged selfishly hanging onto wealth and power by controlling people through violence. Still the legacy from “people are born evil and have to be made good”. That people cannot be trusted and will turn all to chaos and violence and degeneration if left to their own devices. This is a profoundly patronising and entropic view of human nature, which I am sure is not true. Life and human consciousness are not entropic, it is trauma and its consequences that causes the appearance of this at times. But trauma can be, and is being healed, and the freer society is, the more it can support this. It is clear to me how hierarchical perspectives are quite simply becoming more and more untenable to post-modern consciousness, to people re-claiming their freedom. It is amazing to suddenly see so clearly how the old perspectives are crumbling before our eyes.

This film argues for, and shows, that it is possible for us to trust human beings to organise ourselves in healthy and creative ways. Real democracy is so near, we just need to stop believing in top-down power and then suddenly “the emperor has absolutely no clothes”. Local community action can take power away from the centre so quickly and easily in the right conditions and circumstances.

Institutions can transform and the ones that are ripest for this, it seems to me, are state run institutions, especially schools. Schools are surely some of the craziest and most anachronistically dictatorial structures in our society. How do we expect our children to blossom in such madness? Teachers and pupils could just turn around and say we are going to change this school into a democracy and just do it. What an exciting and creative education might then be possible, showing children how real democracy can work. Much of the stupid hierarchical pressures of control through testing and leagues tables could be let go of. Who would care where such a school was in the league tables if it was buzzing with fun and creativity and learning how to learn, rather than the emotional and intellectual straightjackets of the present arrangements. Teachers enjoying their work, pupils really engaged … “heavens forbid!”.

Schools are perfect because property ownership is not such an issue and they are to some extent self-contained units. Universities are also good candidates but more difficult because less localised, hospitals would be trickier but surely not impossible. Police service, prisons and armed services are also ripe for change. But the heart of change though is surely within local communities. This needs a re-visioning of local government structures, as for example what has been happening with Frome town council. Local government can be transformed by local engagement and activism fed by the creativity that comes with taking back power from centralised control. Local communities taking back control of looking after those in need within it, sorting out local problems, local power generation(?), finding ways to support creativity and connection. Online networks are already forging the way, with the net ready and able to scale things up and share best practice.

Power is energy! By re-claiming or taking power, we gain energy. The inner and outer are intimately connected, each effects the other, and we obviously need to attend to both.

Does God Exist?

This question that has been with me for many years, and has again come into renewed focus, it is, does God exists? It may sound trite and as old as the hills, but it goes straight to the heart of so much of our philosophy and approach to living, and the orientation that therapists take.

Perls and Goodman’s (“Gestalt Therapy” 1951) trust in “organismic self-regulation” and their reference to the ultimate freedom of ‘being’ that the Tao represents, points towards their sense of there being a ‘something’ that motivates our souls and to which we can eventually ‘tune into to’. No one who has experienced deep, therapy, meditation, group-work, nature, falling in love, hitting a tennis ball perfectly, ‘aha’ moments, etc. etc. can doubt that we can we can inhabit very different levels of being. The energy that can be so clearly felt in groups when those present share a deep connection, is palpable, as it is when we are able to integrate our head, heart and body deeply in the here and now, with openness, acceptance, love and embodied awareness.

The question is about what is happening in these situations? Is it simply that areas of brain are being activated that we don’t normally access, and that we can train ourselves to live closer to these pleasurable experiences? Or does the sense of meaning that fills us from these experiences come from their connection to some ultimate meaning that exists independently of us? Are Love and Consciousness just logical semi-chance creations of Evolution? Or is Evolution and the emergence of Love and Consciousness the creation of a force that is still beyond our scientific understanding?

This also comes down to the question of whether or not we are alone? I see clearly how so many people avoid their self-responsibility through believing in ‘something’ (whatever word fits best) in one form or another. But this in itself does not mean there is not truth there. We all misuse whatever we can at times to avoid what is almost unbearable within us.

From one point of view this argument doesn’t matter very much. The reality of our development journey and its trajectory maybe does not need an answer to this question. We can still have a very full sense of what our potential as human beings is, i.e. this enormous journey of reconciling our ego towards being able to live ever closer to the here and now in presence and freedom.

But there is something here about being supported to be able to really open our hearts. I am not sure how possible this is without some sense of “not being alone”? This is where I am at the moment, living with this question. Do I need to sense / experience / see / feel that somehow God is supporting me in order that I can let go and really trust life, really let my heart open and let my old ego defences melt away? Or is this just a fantasy, an archaic wish to be rescued that I need to grow out of? Are the spiritual aspects of our experience connected to some reality, or are they illusory epiphenomena? The difference matters if either facilitates or hinders the liberation I intuit is possible.

I have a friend very painfully dying from MS just now, struggling desperately to come to terms with the un-imaginably un-bearable. I know the profundity of “what’s in the way is the way” and I’m also reminded of Frankl’s ultimate sense of choice. I only hope that she can somehow transcend her awful situation, or maybe that grace can somehow provide her that transformation? But then I hope that we can all transcend our fear, a task that seems far too huge at times, and yet a possibility so full of love it surely has to be hung onto.

The age-old question still hangs there – how can God possibly exist in world so full of fear, hate, violence and suffering? Yet surely those movements into understanding, reconciliation and opening that I see every day with my clients speaks to the deep “organismic self-regulatory” desire for Being that can only come from a level of life where we are profoundly connected, a level beyond our ego and rational intellect, i.e. God? Maybe one day science will understand how it all works?

Also, as Alan Watts used to say, all is only as it can be at this moment because every thing, event or situation is connected to everything else, right back to the beginning. So, changing our self changes the universe! Yes! … but … perhaps it’s letting go and surrendering to God’s will that changes the universe? But then perhaps God’s will is about us owning the choice we have been given to take full responsibility for ourselves (such a huge task!) in order that we can then fully let go?

So many questions.

Our need for Philosophy

There was a lovely article today (9th Jan 17) in the Guardian arguing for philosophy to be taught in schools. It is from the point of view of enabling and teaching the young to think in preparation for a working life that will increasingly need flexibility, due to many factors including the computerisation of so many jobs.

I’m enthusiastic about philosophy generally because I see it as being about taking responsibility for ourselves on the intellectual level. By this I mean it points towards the possibility of understanding ourselves, our lives and the world as a creative process, one that integrates with our physical and emotional perspectives into a meaning whole. Philosophy separated from these connections becomes sterile and meaningless, it loses its way disappearing up its own backside in over-intellectualisation.

It is through understanding the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of our functioning, through seeing what it is that drives to do what we do and be the way we are, we start to understand our nature and its developmental potential. So, I don’t see philosophy as separate from self-reflection, we can only understand human nature and how societies work by understanding our own nature.

When we get down it, our ability to live with understanding and purpose and intelligence and consciousness, is about finding our way to living ever closer to this present moment. The alternative is to live un-aware and asleep caught up in lots of mechanical compensatory compulsive processes which come from our conditioned past with its fear of the future.

If we are to live free from self-justification, self-recrimination, making the other or self ‘good’ or ‘bad’, living as a victim always wanting more, or something else, or always wanting to escape from our lives, living in fantasy or regret, unsatisfied and defeated, then we need to find a way of changing. And change only comes through the paradoxical process of support and challenge, or self-awareness and taking self-responsibility, of desperately wanting to change but finding ourselves almost powerless to ‘do’ change. The forces which keep us away from living in the here and now are powerful and it only through deepening our awareness of them, of facing them, that we slowly work our way to the freedom of living here and now.

Through this process, we see that all our experience is meaningful, that there is cause and effect, that every difficulty can be used to make another step towards greater consciousness, that we do have the potential to develop towards freedom and that life is amazingly meaningful as we more and more glimpse the possibility of ‘Being’.

An essential part of this process is the need to live in question, to live questioning our experience and challenging our assumptions and pre-conceptions and our attachment to them. This is where a training in philosophy can be so beneficial. Being challenged to think for ourselves is such an exciting and liberating process. Instead of schools being about learning boring ‘known’ facts it has the potential to be a wonderfully creative force in adolescent’s development.

We relate to the world through our head (intellect), heart (feelings and emotions) and through our bodies. School could provide a training in using all three and especially in how to connect them up. Each needs the other two in order for the experience to be full and meaningful. What is the value in physical training without understand and feeling, emotional development without understanding and embodiment, intellectual training without feeling and practicality? Philosophy is interesting when it relates to our experience of living, to real questions that affect how we live and relate and how the world is structured.

When ideas are studied in this way they have the power to change us. We are inherently hugely powerful meaning making machines and given the resources of a holistic joined up self (i.e. not too much trauma which splits the connections between our parts in its need to maintain unawareness), development in one area will affect the whole of the self.

So, I am all for joined up, thought provoking, philosophy in schools. How can we have a well-functioning democracy without people being able to think for themselves? We are currently seeing the danger of moving towards a “post-truth” world of prejudice and reaction. We need more leaders who openly engage in this task of philosophy, in attempting to articulate what the meaning of human existence is and how it relates to our social priorities and to our amazing potential for development. The West needs to develop a culture that is more passionate about philosophy than it is about consumption.

As Maslow made clear, this is only possible after our basic needs for security, food and shelter have been satisfied, and for too many the basics are not safe enough. But there is also a chicken and egg problem here, as there is with any process of change, where because of our trauma we mistake life difficulties for emergencies, which then causes us to get stuck. I just hope that our inherent Goodness will find a way through.

What a Year!

Syria, the migrant crisis, France’s terror attacks, Brexit, Turkey, Trump, Italy, Aleppo, all against the background of our climate’s inexorable warming and the increase in inequality in many parts of the world, makes for quite a year. The later seems to be partly emanating from the nature of capitalism and how the wealthy have benefited from the financial crisis, partly from the strains of globalisation, partly from technology that is still fast gathering pace. There has also been amongst family and friends several horrible illnesses and some very sad untimely deaths.

I guess the first point is about accepting the chaotic nature of life, huge complex systems are by nature chaotic and accident is a powerful force our lives. But Looking up at a recent beautiful sunset and then the huge moon in a starry sky, it seemed that within the scale of earth’s history and our place in the wider universe, our difficulties are just tiny ripples on the surface.

But still, how to make sense of it all? What hope is there to be found from so much threat and suffering and how to remain open and sensitive and in question in the face of it all? I’m also familiar with the extra bite to this challenge that comes with seasonal illness along with the pressure to get things done before Christmas. I try and remind myself that the “first rule” is self-forgiveness, it supports me to open my heart, accept my limitations and vulnerability and remain open to these challenges.

This year a friend’s honesty has helped me open a door concerning an aspect of change that I need to further embrace. I can see that it is about simply travelling further along the road that I have been travelling for many years, of attending to and facing my insecurity. So again, clarity emerges around how the process of change is through this combination of support and challenge.

From my current efforts at writing, I can see how this is part of the wider paradox at the heart of our experience of life, around choice and self-responsibility on the one hand and awareness on the other. How we can only take responsibility for what we are aware of and we can only become aware of what we take responsibility for.

The way through this paradox is connected to the huge mystery that surrounds the process of choice and our ability to choose. This I see increasingly clearly as being connected to the deep desire for freedom, consciousness and love that emerges from the goodness in the depth of all human beings. Without this ‘direction’ in the centre of our being we would be lost in this paradox without the possibility of escape. Lost in the mechanical compulsivity and blindness that trauma creates.

I see how this “desire” resolves this paradox in our individual lives through slowly supporting us to “dismantle the obstacles to love within us” which can then increasingly enable us to open to Love in its wider more objective sense. The challenge is then how to see this process working at the level of general consciousness within our society.

It seems to me that people are taking more and more responsibility for themselves, there is less and less tolerance of old accepted imbalances of power, unfairness is being challenged at ever deeper levels of consciousness, whether it is in class, gender, race, wealth or power. This may be a part of the Brexit and Trump story, but it is also clear that it needs to be recognised increasingly at a global level as well.

Whilst Brexit and Trump mike seem like backwards steps I also think that they can be seen as a loosening up of the status quo that will in time support deeper change. The path of development is never a straight line. We often need to go backwards to clarify where forwards is. Also, the consciousness of people globally is increasing dramatically through the openness that new technology allows. In time the obviousness of fairness and justice becomes I think more and more powerfully self-evident and we are in the painful process of change away the ‘certainties’ that came from archaic, trauma induced, attitudes of superiority and inferiority.

We, in the ‘West’, can so clearly less and less hold onto an attitude of “we’re alright, pull up the drawbridge” as we attempt to hide behind the protection that our Western wealth provides. Eventually, and if we have enough time, the only possible solution to so many of the world’s problems has to be through a vastly greater empowered United Nations and the greater sharing of wealth. Whether that leads to “Big Brother” or the opening and enabling of a deeper peace and creativity. Who know?

But one thing that seems clear is that societal changes happen because of changes in the consciousness of it citizens. Trauma and fear with its “fight, flight, freeze” responses can obviously create backwards movements. However, our strong negative bias means we so often fail to see the positive and creative power that continually emanates from the “Goodness” at people’s core and which enables development.

Christmas still has that tenuous connection with love and an opening of our hearts that resonates so directly with this essence, I hope, in whatever ways possible, it manages to infuse your Christmas and New Year.

Jim Robinson

US Election

So, why did so many white working class men vote for Trump? Why did so many women vote for Trump?

To me this is same question as why so of those who suffered the deprivation and abuse go onto perpetrate it. It is the same reason that those who have been treated harshly and in a very disciplinarian way go onto to treat others in the same way. It’s why those who went to boarding school put their own children through the same process. It is the same psychology as victims identifying with their abusers, the same as those who in post WW1 Germany thought that Hitler had the solution to their problems.

When we have been traumatised, be it from any combination of deprivation and harshness from whatever social class we come from, there is a tendency to identify with the source. We do unto others what has been done to us, unless we become self-aware. This identification helps us to avoid the pain, hurt, fear and distress of our own trauma, it is a defence mechanism which hides our trauma by making it ‘normal’ and which then has the strategy of projecting the (the un-accepted hurt, pain, fear or distress) onto the other in the form of ‘badness’. The immigrant, the bureaucrat, the politician, the ‘system’ become the ‘bad’ object.

It seems clear that a consequence of the financial crisis and the Wests’ response to it, which meant that the rich got fabulously richer and most got poorer, has been that those in deprivation have un- surprisingly become disillusioned with the political status quo. Hope has diminished and as is often the case, fear and desperation lead to knee-jerk reactions that are the opposite of creative and life enhancing, reactions which have lots of negative consequences.

It seems to me that this is very similar to the dynamics of our Brexit vote. And is partly the price of globalisation that will continue for a while yet as third and second world countries lift themselves up to some new global norm, whilst first world countries are forced to shift downwards. Governments and bankers must take a chunk of the responsibility as well though, for facilitating such an increase in inequality.

This same process applies to the question of why so many women voted for Trump. Centuries of oppressive patriarchy have left a huge psychic wound on women and despite the progress over the last century of women’s fight for liberation, the scars are still there. Many women are still stuck at some level, identifying with the abuser, (e.g. the over identification with physical beauty and perfection) and surely the acceptance of, and support for Trump, makes this crystal clear. Sexist behaviour is accepted because it is part of unprocessed abusive behaviour that has been internalised, which leads to the so familiar, “it’s ‘normal’ and “it didn’t do me any harm” with its underlying rip tide of denied personal inadequacy.

My hope is that Trump’s power will be severely curtailed by the practical reality of politics, with all the checks and balances within the US system. The worry is that with sufficient support from the other arms of power in the US, he could cause some really troubling times. Bullies can become dictators.

However, I’m also aware of the inevitable generational swing from left to right in politics, with right wing reactionary forces currently gaining the upper hand. Makes me think back to Thatcher and Reagan era, and previous see-saws. I still hold out hope that the underlying growth of consciousness in the world will continue, no developmental graph is without its hiccups and this is a very long game, evolving over centuries and millennia. I feel confident that it will not be possible for Trump to turn into another Hitler, the circumstances are vastly different, the weight of embodied freedom is too great to be bulldozered away.

Therapy for Weight Loss

Yesterday (13th October) the BBC’s “You & Yours” Radio 4 program had a section on  the success of therapy for those wanting to lose weight.  It was a clear endorsement of therapy’s effectiveness in the long term, which is the “gold standard” for Weight Loss methods. All other methods have incredibly high long term failure rates.

Having a space where people can be supported and their strengths valued is in itself very helpful. A space where a person can be allowed to be themselves, where their negative aspects can be accepted and they can be helped to see that these are a consequence of their ‘wounds’ rather their inadequacy or ‘badness’.

There are nearly always unconscious or semi-conscious emotional reasons behind over eating. This can be feelings of deprivation and deficit that remain from an impoverished background  along with an associated lack of self-worth. It can be comfort eating to fill a huge hole left by abuse or neglect or some accidental happening which leaves such heavy legacies of negative self-value.

What is clear is that all our self-destructiveness comes from our wounds and if this can be made clear and seen for what it is the level of self-hatred diminishes and relapses can be accepted much more quickly and kept smaller. This self-acceptance builds new confidence in a virtuous circle, empowering the person to try taking small steps day at a time and building from there.

Self-knowledge is the way that change really happens organically and permanently. Therapy helps people to look at themselves differently and in a new way, a more objective way. The task is always to make an (non-engulfing) object out of what we are subject too so that we look at our reactions, our behaviour, our bodies, our thoughts and feelings in a more objective way that opens the door to self-acceptance and self-compassion.

To find this we need to be prepared to take responsibility for ourselves, and we need to be supported feel that we are worth making the effort for. Development is always a combination of support and challenge and growing through the middle of our insecurity is the challenge for all of us in some form or another.

 

 

More on “The Reality of Being”

Jean De Salzmann’s “The Reality of Being”

It is the work of therapy that resolves many of our emotional, and thereby intellectual as well as physical, ‘tensions’. The work of therapy is all about making our suffering conscious. The trauma (pain, distress, fear etc.) we have buried is supported to be faced and accepted and in doing so our wounds are acknowledged, felt and healed over time. Continue reading More on “The Reality of Being”

‘Problems’ really are opportunities

Because we have consciousness, and therefore choice, we are blessed (or cursed) to be inescapably tied to a developmental destiny, which is towards enlightenment, towards finding our reconciliation with death and therefore life.

If we can find our way to participate consciously in this process of life, then every “difficulty” or “problem” becomes a real opportunity for us to grow towards realizing our destiny. If we can’t, or if we refuse, then we are stuck in conflict with our nature and remain at odds with the world.

Very best wishes for 2016

Reflections on the Gurdjieff Work

I have just had a chance to catch up on a wonderful new book on the Gurdjieff work by Jeanne De Salzmann called “The Reality of Being” (2010). She talks a lot about two modes of being, that of our personal reactive, driven selves and that which is connected to a more “objective” consciousness with its experience of ‘Being’. Continue reading Reflections on the Gurdjieff Work