Reality, Fantasy and Politics (v2)

As psychotherapy down the decades has emphasized, we find growth, satisfaction and authentic relationship, indeed sanity itself, through attending to what is real. The real is always, “what is”, in the “here and now”. Often, we get lost in fantasy, in wanting the world to be different from the way it is, in projecting our non-acceptance onto ourselves or others. Most of us, it seems to me, are to some extent lost in our own stories about ourselves and the world. Stories which have their roots in our insecurity, which flows from the pain, hurt, fear, distress, defeatedness, or whatever it was that was too much to bear, that sits unresolved and as yet un-faced  in the depths of our hearts.

It is also, I think, important to understand that the way we experience “Reality” is through two streams, one is the world of the Relative and the other is the world of the Absolute. The world of the “Relative” is the world of our ego, it is the world of Plato’s cave, the world where every stick has a good and bad end, a world of attachment and avoidance, of hope and defeatedness. It is a world of polarities and all points between. The “Absolute” is the world of “Goodness, Beauty and Truth”, a world without opposites, where, in the depth of the “here and now”, we have the possibility of our minds embodying the Absolute as “Consciousness”, our hearts as “Love” and our bodies as “Energy/Sensation”.

If we are to fulfill this potential, we need to find a way to encompass both worlds so that the Relative is increasingly informed by, and held within the consciousness, love and energy of, the Absolute. When not held in this way these two worlds seem paradoxical to each other, but when the Absolute embraces and holds the Relative, the Relative can flow like the Tao, unfolding as it has to according to the slowly unfolding laws of evolution.

It seems however that whilst our evolution is slow, it is accelerating. Changes in societies consciousness that took millennia, then hundreds of years, are now taking decades. China is an incredible example, but I accept that globally it could all go into reverse very quickly given sufficient trauma, as we’ve seen in Syria. Maybe over optimistically, I do see the recent rise of the conservative Right as just another temporary backwards step in the dance of our evolution, which is slowly taking us from societies based on power and violence (ego) towards ones based on Consciousness and Love.

Much change can take place through repairing our ego and this is absolutely necessary. But, change that enables us to live closer to the Absolute, to those qualities of being that only exist through connecting more deeply with the “here and now”,  needs to come from opening and connecting to this other level of life. This is about living with more Consciousness, more Love, more embodied Energy. We each need the support that comes from these connections to helps us face our insecurities, as we also need an increasing appreciation of the Absolute on the societal level. We need to understand that our personal and societal development come from embodying and integrating this stream of life that has ultimate meaning. That it is these connections that facilitates our unfolding in line with our deepest desires, both personally in liberating us from our ego towards Love and Consciousness, as well the transformation of our society and its institutions towards increasingly facilitating ever higher/deeper levels of Being.

Where politics is driven by dogma and beliefs that are based on compensatory ego needs, the results are always negative, full of the results from the laws of unintended consequences. The best politics emerges out of the practical and pragmatic, but this needs to be, as above, held within the frame of the Absolute as much as possible. As the cognitive scientist George Lakoff (The Political Mind 2009) has argued, human nature is fundamentally empathic and caring, this confirms to me that “Goodness, Beauty and Truth” are our essential nature. It has been clear to me for a long time that all our negativity and destructiveness comes from trauma and the insecurity it creates.

So, our politics needs to reflect our fundamental values, which are obviously not just about economic growth and wealth creation. These values revolve around knowing that we are developmental creatures who, deep down, want to live increasingly in the “here and now” with increasing fluidity, satisfaction, spontaneity, freedom, understanding and choice. Our potential here  is to be increasingly aware of ourselves, our consciousness aware of our consciousness, our hearts increasingly open to ourselves and others, together with being supported by our physical presence with consciousness of our breath, energy and sensation.

The “how” of this, both personally and politically, is about our need for both support and challenge in order to travel along this developmental path. The absence, or surplus, of either creates problems. We all need support, empathy, understanding, love, all of which have their roots in the Absolute dimension of life. We also need to face the often difficult realities about ourselves and the world, which need our choice, our discrimination, assessment and discernment. We need to take responsibility for what we think, for what we feel, for our bodies, as well as our environment. These qualities come from the Relative dimension of life. Apart from “choice” that is, which is the extraordinary and amazing final piece that was needed for the universes’ whole thirteen billion year old plan to work. The Universe created ever more complex matter, then ever more complex life, then ever more complex consciousness so that eventually Consciousness could realize its creation of Consciousness from matter. As I understand it, choice emerged from the volume of consciousness that evolved in us and it is essential to the process of our actualizing “self-consciousness”, the crucial last step in the creation of Consciousness and the fulfillment of the Universes’ purpose. Not surprising then that choice is so difficult, it is about a vital process of transformation.

The “Absolute” has a difficult reputation, God had to “die” for us to get past “magical” and “mythic/religious” stages of consciousness (Wilber 2017), the future is not about going backwards into those stages, into some pre-rational belief dominated consciousness. That is the last thing we need. This is all about understanding and developing our experience of the truth that lies at the heart of all the great religions, but not from a position of belief. We need modernism’s rationality as well as postmodernism’s understanding of the relativity of everything. It is only by having gone through and integrated these stages that we can again approach “God” / “The Absolute” from this more sophisticated and holistic standpoint.

The more I understand, the clearer it becomes to me, that our development, with its expansion of our minds, opening our hearts and embodying our energy and breath, is towards our potential to live at an extra-ordinary level of “being”. It is towards embodying the “Absolute”, however we define it. How many of us, get to what stage on this journey, is obviously totally unknown? But the point is that it is this journey that brings meaning, satisfaction, joy, etc., etc. to our lives. So, let’s acknowledge it and celebrate it and hold it as our aim, both personally as well as politically.

There is of course this profound paradox of living with an “aim” to live more in the “here and now”. But this is just another aspect of the fact that we live these “two streams”, the “Relative” and the “Absolute”. We develop over time, to being able to embody the timeless.

To return to the political and Lakoff’s ideas, which are what prompted this piece, (his book was a Christmas gift), he looks at how our political views are generated by largely unconscious prejudices, what he calls “frames”. He argues that the conservative “frames” are generated by the obedience to authority and that the “progressive” frames are much more about the inherent human quality of empathy. I agree with much of what he says, and he opens the door to understanding politics in new and exciting way. However, I think that the fundamentals are not quite as he understands them.

The split in our nature comes from the way that our reality has these two streams of the “Relative “ and the “Absolute”. On the one hand there is support, love, empathy, understanding, the roots of which are in the “Absolute” dimension of life, here we are not separate, our consciousness, love and energy are all profoundly connected to the universe, our deepest nature is that we are part of “God”. On the other side is our “Relative” reality, and it is here that choice and responsibility are paramount.

So, on the one hand we have what is “given”, and on the other hand we have choice, to accept it or not. As I always say, change, development, healing, growth, all require both support and challenge. We cannot become aware of any aspect of ourselves without first at some level taking responsibility for it, and we cannot take that self-responsibility without first becoming aware of it. The two processes need to work together for our development to progress. No amount of increased awareness can in the end help an addict change, there has to be choice and struggle, and we are all addicts in the sense that the vast majority of us live with some level of insecurity.

So, there is a truth in the Conservative’s perspective and that gives it the power it has, and I do not think Lakoff quite grasped this. Choice and self-responsibility are paramount, but the Left are, of course, also correct, support is paramount. This really is a case of both, not “either or”. The trouble is though that we live in world that is conditioned by trauma of all sorts and on many levels. This means that we still need lots of strong boundaries because there are still many people who are deeply negative and destructive. The power of the refusal of self-responsibility flowing from trauma is enormous, it is scary. To avoid facing our pain we will do almost anything at times in our desperate blind refusal, kill ourselves or others, cheat, lie, distort, rob, bully, abuse, abandon, hate, blame and so on. So, we are naturally frightened of our own and others negative power and it is this fear that the Right plug into so readily, with their call for more control, more boundaries, more authoritarianism.

But the levels of trauma in society are very slowly healing, which is what I see happening in my practice all the time, with generations struggling to be less damaging than their parents, who were less damaged than their grandparents. This process is confirmed by the general falling crime rates for example, just one of the ways that, as Steven Pinker’s points out, on the longer broader perspective the world is getting better, not worse. I’m hopeful that we can avoid the worst of climate change, and we do need to counter our inherent and pathological “negative biases”. When we are defeated and traumatized, we are like an addict that wants all those around them to join them in their addiction. This is not to diminish the problems we are currently experiencing, especially post the 2008 crisis, with the horrible increase in inequality. I still wonder if it would have been better to helicopter those billions to us all, rather than rescue the financial system.

As we develop and heal both personally, and as a society, we need fewer boundaries. Our motivations become more connected to the Absolute” level of life, connected to “Love” and “Consciousness” and “Energy/Sensation”. “Conservative” values are defensive and egocentric at heart and I think they are naturally losing their validity. To me the current upsurge in conservative authoritarianism, is like a “death throw”, it is as though there is the intuition that this perspective is becoming increasingly untenable, but this cannot be accepted, so there are increasingly desperate attempts to resist.

The main thrust of Lakoff’s book is that the Right have been very cunning and effective in their use of intuitive “frames” to such an extent that they have in many cases dominated the political discourse. Often in the primitive form of “are you for us or against us”, as in are you for “freedom”, “self-responsibility”, “those bad people / ideas”. So, the Left need to learn how to frame their arguments more consciously and skillfully, not as they have so often tried to do, in “old-fashioned Enlightenment logic terms”, but much more in “frames” that refer to, and appeal to, our natural empathy.

This is of course our current “culture wars”, which whilst new in this form, is nothing new in principle, after all civil wars have been happening for centuries.  Hopefully this one will not need violence to resolve it! As Ken Wilber has been so good at articulating, there have always been conflicts between different “stages of consciousness” and the different world views that emerge from them.

I love what Lakoff has done in this book in terms of expanding our understanding of the unconscious forces behind our politics. What I am saying is that we need to go further and see that empathy is just one aspect of a fuller sense of meaning and value that comes from the “Absolute” dimension of our lives. Yes, we need both support and challenge, but what we most need is to see the whole more clearly, to see the deeper reality, of what our lives are all about, of what we exist for. We need this awareness to increase across society, as it surely will as more and more people understand how we are profoundly developmental beings, with the potential to “be”, that is often beyond our imagining.

Best way to bring up children

Boundaries with Love – the best way to bring up Children

The ideal parenting, and indeed the ideal relational stance generally, is – reasonably consistent boundaries maintained with love.

With children this is relatively simple. We insist on our version of what the boundaries are whilst maintaining a loving attitude, even in the face of rebellion of what ever sort. This does not mean that a situation “has to be talked through” in an endless way, it is simply about as a parent insisting on getting one’s way, with love. Endless explanations for a young child can be another form of bullying. This ideal is obviously easier where there is time and space and energy and patience. Much more difficult when exhausted on a chaotic and rushed school morning. But the more that this way can be practised and brought into daily life the easier it becomes in difficult situations.

No child is born “bad” or “negative”, yes, they come with a whole set of characteristics, but these are just natural dispositions. Any persistent negative patterns that emerge are always the result of trauma of some sort (trauma in its widest sense). Negative patterns emerge when a child does not get the love, support, attention and boundaries it needs.

Boundaries maintained with anger are obviously less “bad” than trying to maintain them with violence or even perhaps where there are no boundaries at all. No boundaries leave the child in a very scary place that in the end leads to a deeply self-destructive sense of self. The child ends up behaving negatively because the parents don’t care, and it is alone when it needs their help, knowledge and attention. It doesn’t have the resources to get its needs met alone, and so ends up blaming itself for being bad. But anger and violence end up with the same result, with the child internalising that they are “bad”. But anger and violence and abandonment are themselves reactions to unaware unbearable feelings generated by trauma with all its insecurity and fear. An adult’s anger happens for many reasons, but often it is because there is no confidence of getting one’s way without recourse to escalating levels of intensity. There is not sufficient trust, or learnt skill, in simply insisting that “x” happens or ”y” stops, with as much perseverance as necessary, whilst still holding our heart open with love.

Real magic happens if this can be practiced. Children want boundaries, they want love, and given them, they are naturally much more cooperative. There is no absolute moral code that says what boundaries are needed, (apart from the Golden Rule of treating other’s as you wish to be treated). This is about personal preference. In their book “Families and how to survive them” Cleese and Skinner argue that more boundaries lead to greater conformity, fewer boundaries to greater creativity. I think there is some truth in that, but I think this difference diminishes when boundaries are implemented with love. This is the crucial aspect that allows the child to flourish.

Sometimes there needs to be the threat, or introduction, of consequences, but it seems to me that this is a last resort and represents something of a failure of love and a failure of the authority that naturally emerges from being able to stand in front of your child, with love, presence, trust and confidence, insisting on your “reasonable” rules. Obviously, to a point the fewer the rules the easier life becomes, but there is a balance here because too few and trouble develops, as above. Children who have experienced reasonable consistent boundaries find adjusting to the world much easier.

What is “reasonable consistency”? It seems to me that rules are made to be broken to some extent. To be obsessive about their implementation can give the message that they are more important than the child and they can end up feeling crushed by their weight. Not consistent enough and they become meaningless. So, balance in everything is, as usual, the key.

What gets in the way of us being able to treat our children with love, consistently?

The fundamental aspect to this is about how our own “trauma” leaves us with insecurity and this plays out in various ways. The more insecure we are, the more likely we are to find aspects of our child’s behaviour unacceptable. The other, (related) “Golden Rule” is that it is always those things that we criticise, reject or judge in the other that are what we have not yet leaned to face in ourselves.

The first and simplest form of this is that we tend treat others as we have been treated. If our parents shouted at us, the pain and hurt of those experiences get stuck within us waiting for an opportunity to come and be expressed in some way. The automatic, unaware, projection of this hurt happens when we shout at our children (or grandchildren in my recent case). If we can face this buried hurt consciously, feel it and allow it, we then heal it and our behaviour changes. Sometimes simply facing our responsibility for our behaviour is enough.

Another facet of this is how through having been wounded in our childhood, we took in the message that we are “bad” or not good enough in some way, then we become hyper sensitive to messages from the world that press this still sore wound. This includes when our child is rebellious or angry with us and we then over-react before we have time to think. It is amazing how many us react from un-reconciled childish places within ourselves. It might also be that a child is sulky or sullen or upset or lying or etc., etc., and we react angrily. Again, it is what we find unacceptable in them is what we have been punished for and what we still hold the pain of, inside us in an un-aware way.

We can struggle to trust our children and trust in their development, when we don’t trust ourselves. Again, this is about our own insecurities causing up to be overly fearful, anxious, reactive or controlling. Learning to trust in love takes practice, especially if we have not been shown it during our own childhood.

But what to do with our anger? This is often the big question. Here is where awareness is key. If we can really see that our anger is ours and that it comes from the hurt we have stuck inside us, we can let it go. No amount of “shoulds” or “oughts” or self-blame, or blaming others can help us, changes has to come organically, from seeing what is going on in ourselves and taking responsibility for it. Regret and apologising, as well as self-forgiveness, are healthy parts of this process as we slowly come to terms with knowing ourselves better. Through forgiving ourselves for being the way we are, we are letting go of the belief in our own “badness” (or whatever word fits best here). When we can forgive ourselves, we can forgive the other. Then, eventually we can stand in the face of situations, which previously would have had us over-reacting in some way, whilst holding both love and boundaries in a flexible and creative and adult way. Love is wonderfully creative given half a chance.

It is important that we don’t artificially shut down our anger in a repressive way. It almost certainly better to allow it than squash it within because of some “should” that anger is “bad”. This just leads to it leaking out in other pernicious ways. It is healthier for children to see spontaneous behaviour, rather than overly controlled and managed behaviour which can cause deeply confusion and double messages. Children also need to see that actions and behaviour has consequences, even if they are over-reactive consequences at times. Stopping our anger consciously and taking responsibility for it with self-compassion is a very different process that flows from awareness, not repression.

Our over-reaction might also be in the form of the withdrawal of love, or to impose some other punishment or other. The same applies here, awareness is the key. Really seeing what we are doing, or want to do, and where that comes from within ourselves, is what makes the difference between reacting with a closed vengeful heart, and bringing love to heal the situation. First, we need to start healing ourselves, then it is possible to heal any rifts between ourselves and our children (or grandchildren, or any other relationship).

This is all about our journey towards finding our confidence and trust in our own being. The only solid ground to build this on is self-knowledge. When we are no longer afraid of what we have inside us, we can face the world with greater equanimity, we can love ourselves and our children more authentically and unconditionally. The same goes for respect, so often our children become projective functions of ourselves, we interpret them as if they were the same as us, a part of us and we judge them as we judge ourselves, we don’t respect their difference. When we respect ourselves, we can respect the other, we can respect and allow difference.

Another look at politics

Another look at politics prompted by George Monbiot’s book – Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis

I am very sympathetic to George Monbiot’s ideas in his new book about the need for local community to emerge as a force for social change. How this change needs to come from the bottom up, and how such change always reflects a change in general consciousness, and as such is permanent and integrated. I agree with much of his analysis about how so many of us have become lonely and isolated, through many causes, especially Protestantism and Capitalism and Consumerism.

I also think that it is to do with our current Postmodern zeitgeist, through which it is inevitable that we all believe different things and assume that there is no “Truth” or “Reality” beyond our subjectivity. There is no understanding or general acceptance of any values which might bind us together.

What I hope, and think, is emerging though is in effect a new religion, or rather a new psychology/philosophy/religion. All the great religions started as a means of realising human potential, but what happened is what happens to all institutions it seems, they became dogma ridden, power obsessed and fossilised over time. The new psychology/philosophy/religion that is emerging is partly being articulated by Ken Wilber’s “Integral Theory” and in his recent book “The Religion of Tomorrow”. It combines the understanding of our need to “grow up” as well as to “wake up” on our developmental journey towards Love and Consciousness.

The process of how we “grow up” has been continually refined for over a century now through the development of psychology with its slow convergence amongst all the different approaches about how we mature throughout our lives. There is still much to be done in freeing ourselves from our scientific / medicalised legacy, but I believe this is happening. There is also still much to do in freeing ourselves from our Postmodern defeatism which fails to see the huge ongoing potential for development we have towards the objective meaning and truth that somehow exists.

My life, our lives, Life and the Universe, are not completely relative. Relativity is obviously a huge part of everything, but it is not the whole story, Meaning and Truth and Love and Consciousness exist, even if we can never fully know them. I know this because I can see from my own development, and that of my clients, that this development has a trajectory. This is towards freedom, towards embodying our expanding consciousness and the opening of our hearts to Love.

This potential to “waking up”, is not so well understood and accepted in our society. But we do have the possibility of developing through a series of “stages” and “states” of consciousness where we move, in steps, towards living more and more consciously, in an open-hearted embodied way, into ever greater connection to the ‘here and now’. The ‘here and now’, this present moment is Consciousness and Love at its core. This miracle is, as I understand it, at the heart of Christianity as well as all the world’s great religious traditions.

So, the possibility is of developing communities that consciously have as their aim this combination of “growing up” and “waking up”. There are people currently working hard to include Wilber’s “Integral Theory” into Christian and Buddhist approaches as well as “Integral” itself trying to establish a path towards realising our potential. Gestalt, the therapeutic modality I trained in, is in many ways very close to this philosophy, as are many approaches that describe themselves as “psycho-spiritual”.

I cannot see how lasting communities can form and develop without there being a shared deep sense of meaning, a shared recognition and understanding that it is through the ‘here and now’ that we connect, in some way or other, to meaning, consciousness and love. “Integral” theory provides a very inclusive and comprehensive ‘map’ which could support the establishment of a common understanding to support such communities. It provides the space where any point of view can be understood, and its relationship to the whole seen. Religion was the glue that bound communities and societies together, and what we need now is a new global emergent consensus about the meaning of human life and how human development is about both “growing up” and “waking up”. Both these processes intertwine and support each other in the journey of human development towards its wonderful potential to increasingly embody Love and Consciousness as our ego is first healed and then let go of.

Yes, I’m sure in time this new approach will become institutionalised and fossilised and need to be revolutionised. But that is human nature, with its essential components of choice and evolution and involution.

I deeply question at times whether there is any point in attending to politics? The forces at work in the unfolding of societal levels of consciousness seem to be so far beyond any individual input. The cacophony of the noise of ideas feel so loud and chaotic and the law of unintended consequences so strong. Surely the only action it makes sense to embark on is changing ourselves.

Yet I do think that I can see how the developmental forces of the universe are working away in the background, our collective consciousness does develop, the values of our society are constantly changing towards greater openness, honesty and fairness. I can also see how my defeatedness around politics comes from my personal conditioning. But how this movement into creating meaningful local communities can happen in the short to medium term, I still can’t quite see.

The move to a decent minimum wage and the exposure and rejection of sexual abuse and sexual harassment are recent examples where the developing social consciousness have led to change. The ongoing process of women’s liberation, and of racial equality and LBGTI liberation are also examples. From earlier in my life it was the hopelessness of bureaucracy and the denial of self-responsibility emanating from state industries and the trade unions that led to the Thatcher revolution’s emphasis on personal responsibility. The pendulum swung much too far into a mad neo-liberalism, but that is now hopefully in the process of moving back into some new creative synthesis.

It is the emergence of need into consciousness that is always the prelude for conscious motivation and action. So maybe patience is the key, that this psycho-spiritual developmental perspective will become sufficiently established, in tandem with its relational counterpart of our deep need for community and wish to share our journey, for it to change our society’s structure.

What is Psychotherapy?

To me, the basic premise is that people are good. All our negativity and destructiveness, needs to be understood in terms of compensatory processes emanating from our insecurity, which is, in turn, caused by trauma in its widest sense. Many of our difficulties revolve around our inner conflict, which is the direct result of this trauma which happens when pain, hurt, fear or distress that was too much to bear is repressed. This process splits the self into parts and we are then cursed to live in conflict ourselves. Depression, anxiety, anger, addictions and compulsions of all sorts, relationship difficulties, all flow from this basic insecurity of the self, created by trauma.

Accepting this view means that psychotherapy is about helping people to slowly heal the splits in the self and undo the compensatory insecurities caused by trauma. It is about helping people to find their freedom through supporting greater awareness and understanding of how things are along with taking increasing self-responsibility. Therapy works with nature’s healing force to help us become who we really are underneath our insecurity. It is about being supported to become the fullest, most integrated and appropriately mature expression of ourselves we can be. The aim implicit in this is to live increasingly consciously in the here and now and in tune with our deepest nature.

I think the question of what our “deepest nature” is, is the biggest question in psychotherapy (as well as philosophy and politics). I see this as being about Consciousness, Love and Energy and how they are the basic constituents of the ‘here and now’ and our ‘being’. The ‘here and now’ is a transpersonal space full of Goodness and mystery, full of the essence of life itself, full of our connectedness to every aspect of our environment. It is this that provides our sense of meaning.

It is the wounds and deficits from the lack of love that cause our problems and disconnectedness from life and this shows how it is Love that is one of our deepest needs, and how Love underpins all human life, and indeed, somehow, the whole universe.

Our therapy journey is through symptom relief, to self-understanding, to self-responsibility, to realising that “What’s in the Way, is the Way” (Mary O’Malley), i.e. to being able to consciously use our difficulties to grow and heal in the face of each bit that crops up. Using our difficulties to grow rather than avoiding or tolerating them. This process of slowly healing through ever greater self-awareness enables us to find compassion for ourselves and others, to love ourselves. It is towards freeing ourselves from fear and eventually towards letting our hearts, mind and body open sufficiently, to enable us to let go of our ego. Then, even in the face of death there is no fear, only Love and Consciousness and Energy and we can let go into death fully reconciled.

Our journey is a psycho-spiritual-energetic one. To begin with we need to give a lot of attention to our ‘psychology’ to understand ourselves and our motivations. Our wounds and insecurity are often very deep and with many layers, taking potentially decades to get to the bottom of. For this work we need to allow our hearts to crack open to the depth of our hurt, we need to understand ourselves and the world, and we need the support that comes from developing our consciousness of our body, in whatever form it takes, e.g. meditation, yoga, Tai Chi, etc.

Perhaps most of all we need to practice the process of making what we are subject to (i.e. what we are experiencing emotionally), into an object of study and inquiry. We can only do this by attending to our here and now experience, our ‘what is’. Later in our journey, we can focus more directly on the spiritual dimension of increasingly letting ourselves go deeply into the ‘here and now’. The closer we live to this present moment, with our awareness, our open heart and our embodied energy, the more ‘alive’ and connected to life we are, and the more we can trust and let go of anxiety or whatever it is that keeps us avoiding, now. Connecting deeply with the here and now brings presence and spontaneity and trust and meaning.

We often try for all this prematurely, before we have really understood our psychology and its motivations. Then, it is our ego trying to obtain something for itself that is beyond it. This is usually part of an avoidance strategy referred to as “spiritual bypassing”, i.e. using a spiritual connection to try and avoid the difficulty of facing trauma of some sort. It then becomes something else that needs to be seen and let go of.

Through attention and care the three elements of head, heart and body can open and connect to each other, we need this to develop the self-support that we need to face and transcend the depth of our insecurity. We need both ‘push’ (as in working on our compulsiveness) as well as ‘pull’ (opening to the deep wish for, and resonance with, Life, Love and Consciousness within us). We need to “to do”, i.e. to work hard, as well as “not do”, i.e. to be and let go.

At what point psychotherapy ceases to be relevant on this journey is a piece of string question. Obviously, it is usually more needed at the beginning, but when it ends is unknown. As Kornfield made clear (in “After the Ecstasy the Laundry”), even those whose are lucky enough to have found great spiritual freedom can still need psychological help. Wilber (in “The Religion of Tomorrow”) describes how there are potential pitfalls all the way along our journey, until we reach full enlightenment.

This shows what Wilber and many others argue, that our journey is “psycho-spiritual” one, i.e. that our developmental processes is about both “growing up” and “waking up” and that these cannot be separated without huge loss. If we limit psychotherapy to helping people “grow up” we are missing a whole aspect of human experience. Just as when spiritual traditions focus solely on “waking up” they also lose an essential aspect of human nature. We need both, each supports the other in a full development. Attention on “waking up” to the here and now allows us to see and face our phenomenology reality, healing our trauma and understanding ourselves enables us to live closer to the here and now. As ever, we need both ‘doing’ and ‘being’.

This is my argument for Psychotherapy needing to embrace both “growing up” and “waking up”, which means that as therapists we need to be practicing both ourselves.

 

Jim Robinson October 2017

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