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8.3.16

POEM TO MY FOUR SONS AND DAUGHTER-Because you are so beautiful by Anthony Dougan

BECAUSE YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL

Because you are so beautiful, the world
will cast dark veils between you and your dreams;
And so your dreams will rage like horses through
 the midnight square, and fill with screams
 the dreams of all the good folk and their brood.
They’ll chain you to your books in musty rooms:
Ensure that your rebellion is ‘put down.’
Your burning lamps will cast a furious glow;
how they will hate to see their souls revealed-
Those covered portraits stored in hidden cells.
 Priests will bemoan your wolfish ways
and all the flock will jostle in their cage.
Blood beneath your claws:  Blood-driven rage.
Because you are so bright and beautiful-

They’ll crucify you with their fear my CHILDREN
!

6.3.16

Who is this person I call my therapist? By Jim Davis

ALTEREGO:  Who is this person I call my therapist?

About twelve years ago I went for my first session with a new psychotherapist, who worked in a large psychotherapy centre.   The chair wasn’t good for my back and I asked him if he had a cushion I could use.  He said he didn’t and so I asked him if he could get me one from somewhere else in the centre.  I don’t remember exactly what he said, but essentially he replied that it wasn’t possible, in what I remember as a brief and seemingly indifferent manner.  I felt surprised and irritated but also curious – why wasn’t he willing to go and find me a cushion, didn’t he care about my comfort, what therapeutic rationale informed his response, what sort of person was he?  My questions remained un-asked and unexplored, and whilst I wondered about him in this way, my therapist showed no interest in my curiosity about him.
In any therapy room there are at least two people intensely interested in and wondering about what’s going on inside the other, but only one of them gets paid for it, and they’re called the therapist.  The client does it for free, which is maybe why it’s generally given relatively little attention.  The therapist’s curiosity is called diagnosis or attunement for example, whilst the client’s is usually labelled projection, transference or script.  
Stephen Mitchell tells a story of a female client and her curiosity in what was going on for her therapist.  Since he was never particularly forthcoming about himself she became increasingly interested in his squeaky chair.  She imagined, probably with some degree of accuracy, that the squeaks betrayed the therapist’s discomfort.  She used the squeaks to guide what she said, or didn’t say, sometimes changing what she was saying when a squeak occurred or, alternatively, defiantly continuing!  These stories – mine and Mitchell’s, illustrate the therapeutic significance of the client’s irrepressible curiosity in the therapist, even if ignored.
I hold Sigmund Freud responsible for this state of affairs.  In the late nineteenth century beginnings of psychoanalysis he was very keen on his new method being seen as scientific, and in distinguishing it from its precursor, hypnosis, in which the influence of the hypnotist was fundamental. To accomplish both these aims the influence of the analyst had to be minimised, but along with the bath water of the therapist’s unwanted influence out went the baby of the patient’s interest in the analyst.  He, as a person, was supposed to be irrelevant, hidden.
I’m talking here about the client’s interest in, and perceptions of, the therapist not just in terms of the client’s transference onto the therapist, but about their interest in the person of the psychotherapist, including of course the therapist’s script, defences, transference, and in the role of the therapist as the initiator of interactions in the co-created therapeutic relationship.  From this perspective we can understand the client’s process, resistance, games etc as an attempt to manage the relationship with this particular therapist.  From this point of view the client’s interest in the therapist becomes central.
We learn about ourselves, from birth, through our interactions with others. It follows that we are fundamentally interested in what’s going on inside the other, and particularly in how they are impacted by us.  For example, effective empathy is not simply about the giver, but also has to include a recognition in the receiver of how the giver is impacted – their emotional resonance, understanding, fellow-feeling.   As Carl Rogers puts it, for constructive personality change to occur it is necessary that the client perceives the acceptance and empathy which the therapist experiences for him.  In TA language, for recognition hunger to be received it has to encompass a recognition of the giver’s subjective experience, ie it has to be mutual recognition.
Likewise, intimacy is partly co-created out of the repair of inevitable ruptures in relationships.  This happens, for example,  where we can be fully, angrily, differently ourselves and experience the other as responding without withdrawing, collapsing, retaliating, or placating.
In retrospect I wish my therapist had shown an interest in what I had made of his response to my request for a cushion.  I would have liked him to have been open to exploring his part in our interaction, and to have accounted my reluctance to initiate that exploration - could he deal with it, crossing a boundary, too exposing of his vulnerabilities?   Writing about this now I wonder what his attitude was to self-disclosure, although now I would be less interested in him verifying or refuting what I imagined about him, since it would most likely have simply closed off both a mutual exploration of what happened, and how I made sense of it.  And anyway his self-disclosure was inevitable, in his actions and ulterior transactions.  In responding in the way he did to my request for a cushion he revealed himself, but something got lost in that we just didn’t get to talk about what was hidden. 
Who knows now but like many therapists he probably struggled with intimacy and being known.  We spend most of our time with clients listening and exploring their experience whilst remaining relatively silent and hidden.  Our clients’ interest in us can raise our anxieties about being seen, and touch our struggles around longings to be known and defensive temptations to hide. 


However, as is often the case, paradoxically, I have learnt a lot with him, not only from who and how he was but from who and how he wasn’t.  Thanks Alan.                                                                                                      

7.2.16

Some thoughts on 2016 so far!



BOOK I'M READING:
 'INTO AFRICA' By Sam Manicom-Great conversational style by a very gentle motorcycle adventurer giving a warts and all description of his first ride into this crazy, beautiful continent.

BEST BLOG POST I'VE READ:  Without doubt it has to be Tom Allen's post on being a nomadic creative.  A superb share on the meaning of life and work and the best thing I've read this year.  Highly recommended.
http://tomallen.info/how-my-location-independent-lifestyle-works/

BEST RESOLUTION:  50 DAY NO ALCOHOL CHALLENGE-  DAY 27!  Easy peasy!  But why do we drink so much and so regularly?  Other things are that it complicates life so much.  For example:

NEGATIVES
  • It's ridiculously expensive unless it's absolute gut rot.
  • It's incredibly heavy to carry.  Alcohol weighs a ton!
  • You can't buy it when the shop is shut.  Stress etc...
  •  It has millions of calories and most of us drink right up to just before bed.  Isn't that dumb?
  • It gives you a massive floppy belly!
  • You can't actually drive or ride anywhere after drinking because it's not safe.
  • You can end up having sex with people you really don't like, and fighting with people you do! Then you don't even remember it!
  • Drinking too much alcohol is like whacking your fragile brain a ton of times with a stick.
  • It dulls your senses.  Alcohol is for enduring the pain of a meaningless life, not transforming it.
  • Too much of it, too regularly, is really, really bad for your health.
POSITIVES
  • A bottle of good wine with a meal is pretty cool.
  • Going to the pub with your mates occasionally can be great fun.
  • Some very fine whisky and cognac can transport you to some far off internal place.
  • Getting completely pissed occasionally in a safe environment can be actually quite fun...initially!
  • A good cocktail can be like meeting an interesting person.
  • Sometimes, just occasionally you really need to whack yourself over the brain with a big wet fish!
  • Sometimes you need help to endure the pain of a meaningless life because you're just out of juice!
MUSIC I'M LISTENING TO:
 Bowie is gone!  His final album 'Blackstar' is great and strangely prescient.

PODCASTS I'M LISTENING TO:
The Tim Ferris Show-can be slightly infuriating sometimes but overall is very useful.
Adventure Motorcycle Radio-I love this podcast.  Highly recommended if you are into independent travel.
The Daily Evolver-A great introduction to all things integral.

AUDIOBOOK I'M LISTENING TO:
'Spiral Dynamics Integral' by Don Beck.  I love it but then, I'm weird.

FAVOURITE QUOTE AT THE MOMENT:  Under construction!

ESSENTIAL PRACTICE:  Daily meditation/ Keeping my Journal/ Minimum 20 minutes daily exercise/  Salute to the Sun/ KEEP IT MINIMAL!

RELEVANT PHOTO OF THE YEAR...SO FAR!


 THINGS COULD GET SPOOKY IN 2016!  BE PREPARED!












17.1.16

Some predictions on 2016 from John MIchael Greer

Strange that one of the most sophisticated and thoughtful commentators on the transition out of fossil fueled industrialised society should be the American Archdruid but there you go...His predictions are fascinating and worth some thought;
The explosion of the fracking bubble
The election of Donald Trump as Republican candidate
The flattening of the American economic recovery
The extinction of the Saudi State and its replacement by warlord chaos...
The explosion of the wildly overvalued tech bubble
The continued fracturing of American society into extremes
Business as usual in terms of the long descent into the post industrial state for which preparation has been non-existent
It's a scary read!

10.1.16

NOTABLE BOOKS FROM 2015

FROM THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS NEWSLETTER


As previously mentioned, The New York Times Book Review chose Magda Szabó'sThe Door (NYRB Classics), as one of the NYTBR's "10 Best Books of 2015."

Alexander McCall Smith chose Edward Mendelson's Moral Agents (New York Review Books) as one of The Guardian's "Best Books of the Year" for 2015.

Nicholas Lezard chose Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century as one of his "Best Paperbacks of 2015" in The Guardian.

Renata Adler's After the Tall Timber was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, as announced by Lit Hub.

Sakutarō Hagiwara's Cat Town (NYRB Poets), Renata Adler's After the Tall Timber(New York Review Books), and Sasha Sokolov's A School for Fools (NYRB Classics) were all selected for Flavorwire's "50 Best Independent Press Books of 2015."

Elissa Gabbert, contributing editor at Open Letters Monthly, chose Antal Szerb'sJourney by Moonlight for the OLM 2015 reading round-up.

The House of Twenty Thousand Books was recently featured in The New Yorker's"Briefly Noted" column.


I'm surprisingly really enjoying 'Don't shoot the dog' by Karen Pryor.  Not only great for getting down and dirty with your puppy but a brilliant intro to behaviourism.

I'm getting on with 'Congo  The Epic History of a People' by David Van Reybrouck-it's a big book!

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is a continually amazing book as is Seneca 'On the shortness of life'.

The Essays of Montaigne remains one of my most inspirational reads.

'On dolls' edited by Kenneth Gross is charming.

My own writing seems to have nose dived and is something to explore this coming year.

The Tim Ferris Podcast and his '4 Hour Body' have been great for inspiration.  The Adventure Motorcycle Podcast is totally brilliant as is 'Radical Acceptance' and guided mediations by Tara Brach-highly recommended!

1.1.16

Happy Christmas and a Transformational New Year!


A very happy Yule and a massively healthy and transformational 2016 to all my readers and their loved ones