Snapshot 1: The First Time is Always Scary
INTRODUCTION TO BECOMING A WISER PRACTITIONER
Science is organised knowledge, wisdom is organised life.
Immanuel Kant
Most of us have largely been schooled in the Western educational tradition of acquiring bodies of knowledge, applying them to problems and to finessing a critical, analytic eye to be applied to the claims of science, research and argument. When training as therapists, counsellors and counselling psychologists we are introduced to the various models of psychotherapeutic practice – from Freudian and Kleinian, through object relations, to cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), humanistic and existential – and gradually learn to employ one or more of these academically informed approaches to understanding the aetiology and maintenance of human psychological distress and how we might go about trying to relieve it as practising therapists.
The approach this book champions invites practitioners to temporarily suspend these purely intellectual and abstract faculties and to begin exploring a different kind of intelligence – one shaped in the real world during down-on-the-ground, embodied and deeply felt experiences – to explore what happens to theory when it meets real life. Many therapists struggle to let go of the models-led theoretical approaches at first, dominated by fears of failure, anxieties about being out of their depth and sturdy conviction that the books, the research, the theories – the others – must know best. This is wholly understandable given that most of us have been trained to think this way since early childhood.
In exploring how to become a wiser practitioner my starting point is that people learn mainly from experience and from doing, that people encountering real life phenomena in the field gain something valuable they cannot acquire in purely academic settings or via cognitive, abstract processes. The body and the heart need to learn too. Real expertise, competence, even mastery, never come from slavish obedience to the dictates of a theory, but depend crucially on the way in which the practitioner refines and improves their ‘situatedness’ with reality. Many practitioners think of it as situated action: a term first coined by Professor Lucy Suchman in her 1987 book about human–computer interaction. Perhaps the oldest labels for such experiential learning are from philosophy: Praxis and Phronesis. The notion of praxis is ancient and has been considered by Plato and Aristotle, as well as St Augustine, Immanuel Kant and Sigmund Freud. It is concerned with the realities of applying abstract ideas in the real, grounded field of the world. What happens in the relationship between theory and practice? Aristotle (1962 [4 BC]) felt that the end product of praxis should be action – action that is embedded and embodied in real-world territory. He saw it as a radically different form of knowing from theoria (theory) which was aiming to find ‘truth’. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition (1958) offered a critique of Western philosophy as having become too contemplative, too far removed from real active living. She saw praxis as a ‘mode of human togetherness…participatory democracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratised and elitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch’. This is a powerful evocation of what the best therapeutic relationships can do – we practitioners are rarely at our best when strangled by bureaucracy and rigid rule following; they can cause us to lose sight of the humanity of the person we are working with and to lose touch with our own innate creativity, intuition and emotional responsiveness.
Aristotle in Book VI: Intellectual Virtue of his Nicomachean Ethics (1953 [4 BC]) goes on to distinguish between sophia (theoretical wisdom) and phronesis (practical wisdom):
although the young may be experts in geometry and mathematics and similar branches of knowledge [sophoi], we do not consider that a young man can have Prudence [phronimos]. The reason is that Prudence [phronesis] includes a knowledge of particular facts, and this is derived from experience, which a young man does not possess; for experience is the fruit of years [emphasis added]. (p.124)
To honour praxis and develop phronesis in our students my colleagues and I teach a Reflective Practice module, where students begin the never-ending, exciting, frightening and empowering process of coming to trust their own intuitive, experientially acquired knowledge – and developing a sceptical, questioning and critical eye towards therapy models and their implicit claims about how the real world operates. We1 help them to understand that this way of moving from the apprentice state towards craftsmanship – in any field – is ancient, celebrated and understood across cultures and across time.
Intelligence alone is not enough for acting wisely.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
THE 10,000 HOURS – OR THE 10-YEAR RULE
Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success (2009) tries to work out what factors contribute to exceptional attainment in any field. Historically people have suggested natural talent, genetic inheritance, even divine intervention as explanations for exceptional achievement. His main answer to this question is something far more prosaic – extraordinary amounts of practice in the field – something approaching 10,000 hours. Examining the development of expertise in chess, Simon and Chase (1973) found that no one reached the level of international chess master (grandmaster) ‘with less than about a decade’s intense preparation with the game’ (p.402) – roughly 1000 hours of operating within the field of chess for each of the ten years.
Anders Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Romer (1993) looked at the journey of those training to be violinists at the Music Academy in West Berlin. They found that those considered to be elite players had engaged in about 10,000 hours of practice since they first picked up a violin; those ranked as less able players about 4000. One might expect that certain ‘natural stars’ would be able to shortcut this long process and reach mastery much more rapidly. Interestingly they did not find this: there were no real shortcuts and less truth than commonly supposed in the idea that natural ability will always shine through. Continual practice over a long period of time seemed to be the key to achieving brilliance and reaching the elite ranks of violin players.
Robert Greene in his recent book Mastery (2012), which topped the New York Times bestseller list, defines the elements that explain why so few human beings reach a genuine stage of mastery in life. He argues that one necessary dimension is spending much time in the ‘apprentice stage’, analogous to the 10,000 hours.
The principle is simple and must be engraved deeply in your mind: the goal of an apprenticeship is not money, a good position, a title, or a diploma, but rather the transformation of your mind and character – the first transformation on the way to mastery. You enter a career as an outsider. You are naïve and full of misconceptions about this new world. Your head is full of dreams and fantasies about the future. Your knowledge of the world is subjective, based on emotions, insecurities, and limited experience. Slowly, you will ground yourself in reality, in the objective world represented by the knowledge and skills that make people successful in it. You will learn how to work with others and handle criticism. In the process you will transform yourself from someone who is impatient and scattered into someone who is disciplined and focused, with a mind that can handle complexity. In the end, you will master yourself and all of your weaknesses. (p.65)
This long journey toward mastery has been recognised world-wide in very different cultures for thousands of years: various forms of apprenticeship were seen in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome and had to be completed in order to enter many of the trades, professions and crafts. Versions of this set-up existed in ancient China, India, in the guilds of the Muslim nations. Whether it was the training of shamen in Korea, goldsmiths in Venice, classical gardeners in Japan or stonemasons in Medieval London there was an old, well-understood path for those entering the field to follow. A period of apprenticeship to a master craftsman (often around the seven-year mark, starting at maybe 13 or 14 years of age), was followed by a period as a journeyman, usually employed on a daily basis for simpler jobs, and eventually upon demonstration of your skills, knowledge and ability in your field admittance to a guild as a master craftsman in your own right. Some guilds required you to produce a ‘masterpiece’ of your own as the price of entry to their closed world. In this way the traditions of the craft were passed on to the next generation and the professional standards of the profession were maintained. This framework was tested and proved across many decades, centuries and millennia all over the world. To return briefly to Aristotle: ‘the moral virtues we do acquire by first exercising them. The same is true of the arts and crafts in general. The craftsman has to learn how to make things, but he learns in the process of making them. So men become builders by building, harp players by playing the harp’ (1953, p.56)…and of course we become therapists by ‘therapising’. Repeated embodied experience is the seat of becoming that which we wish to become.
However it is true to say that this way – the slow and purposeful building of practical wisdom – is becoming increasingly drowned out in the modern fields of education, training and, for our particular purposes, the training of counsellors, psychotherapists and counselling/clinical psychologists, where form filling, funding worries, top down bureaucratic control and rigid models-led training hamper the individual’s gathering of practice wisdom. The aim of this book is to make a small contribution to the restoring of balance and to offer some insights gleaned from time spent walking on the road. In many trainings today the number of client hours needed to qualify is ever shorter, the time spent in personal therapy and supervision cut, the length of the training programme itself squeezed – meanwhile the student’s expectations and fantasies about how one obtains a state of mastery seem to demand faster, easier, simpler routes with which providers feel pressured to comply. In such environments it is no wonder that the slow acquisition of lived skill needed to practise well can be skimmed over. The modern world does not help, addicted as it is to immediacy, novelty, intensity and speed, with ever more complex technology replacing more and more human interaction. Taken together all these forces only exacerbate the natural tendency of younger humans, uncomfortable with any sense of waiting, of rushing too fast towards the destination and missing most of the ride.
The book is aimed at all of us travelling from apprenticeship to mastery – wherever we happen to be on the journey right now. It encourages us to slow down and pay greater attention to the ancient sense of progression towards master practice. There was – and is – great wisdom built into that framework which is why it survived for so long. I imagine this work is likely to be of interest to students of counselling, psychotherapy and psychology, those who teach and supervise them, and to those already practising – be it for one year or 40. The same principles apply to any journey towards craftsmanship and wisdom – it is not unique to therapy. The substantial elements of this book are set out as essential ‘streams’ of practice wisdom. They represent the skills, knowledge, experiential awareness, personal qualities and existential attitudes which typify both the better sort of student and the highest forms of mastery in practice. The streams are an attempt to deconstruct practice wisdom out of the field and give shape on the page to something primarily lived down on the ground.
Many of the university students I have taught this material to find the streams as relevant to their wider life as to the part of it specific to therapy – I hope you will too. The best therapists naturally apply the wisdom of living to their work – there should be no artificial separation. Each of the 34 streams of practice wisdom contains a mixture of reflections, client stories, associated knowledge, and ideas for the practical application of skills, quotes, images and excerpts from students’ writing. Each stream has a ‘Reflection Point’ box with some ideas about how the stream might show up in your non-therapeutic life and a ‘Streams in the Consulting Room’ box, which explores how the stream may manifest subtly in therapy space and how to engage with it when it does.
In developing practice wisdom the journey never truly ends until we do.
A FIRST DIP IN THE WATER
Rumi (1207–1273), the Persian Sufi poet, argues that there are two kinds of intelligence, different as chalk and cheese. Rumi’s claim is central to this book.
There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorises facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.
With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining
information. You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.
There is another kind of tablet, one
already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness
in the center of the chest. This other intelligence
does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through the conduits of plumbing-learning.
This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.
(From The Essential Rumi, trans. C. Barks, 1995, p.178)
The container for the intelligence that Rumi metaphorically describes as a fountainhead I have come to refer to as ‘The Well’. Years ago during my clinical training, when I would worry excessively about whether I was doing therapy ‘properly’, I realised that no matter how scared, self-conscious or blocked I was feeling just before I stepped in to see a client – something happened to me once I was inside the space. Things – feelings, thoughts, words, images, bits of theoretical models, bodily sensations, flashes of intuition – just seemed to ‘show up’ when I needed them. It felt almost like an empty bucket going down into a well – coming back to the surface full of water. Gradually, when I felt that stab of anticipatory anxiety about my therapeutic skills, especially right before exams, supervision sessions or seeing clients, I learned to say to myself, ‘Don’t worry, the bucket is empty now – but the well is getting fuller every day.’ Every book I read, every lecture I heard, conversations with colleagues and mentors, every client session and its accompanying note taking, each log in my reflective journal was continuing to fill a well that was already more plentiful than I had ever realised (after all I had lived 30 years in this world before I came to study psychology). The key for me was to trust the existence of the well of practical wisdom inside me and to know it was there when I needed it.
The well is inside every person, and operates as a holder and delivery mechanism for an intelligence which is concrete and grounded, rather than abstract and theoretical. What the modern Western education system now calls intelligence is sometimes limited to cleverness and calculation, built out of facts, theories, proof and scientific evidence. From a young age we are encouraged to value such knowledge – and the intelligence required to understand and reproduce it – as the only true form of intelligence needed in the world. Wisdom developed from doing, from feeling, seeing, listening, imagining and living tends to be under-valued – at various times in the past 300 years it has been categorised as being more native or primitive, more female, more childlike or more working class. The elevated ways of understanding the world have come to be those understood as more Western, more scientific and more male. They are viewed as firmly adult and dominated by the educated and economically powerful classes who then pass this life approach to their own children. It is important to be clear from the outset that this book is not attempting to jettison scientific research and its associated discoveries. To do so would be foolish. However I am proposing that this abstract way of knowing about and being in the world tends to become ever more removed from down-on-the-ground practice over time. It can become overly concerned with categories, measurement, targeting and proving one side right and the other wrong. It certainly tends to devalue wisdom acquired mainly from practice in real-world territory. Put simply it values the map far more than the terrain.
It is useful for ‘mind-obsessed’ Westerners to realise that the kind of intelligence they revere, and is increasingly built into their institutions, is not geared to respond to the here and now, the particular, the shifting sands over which people actually have to walk. To help one travel through the forest or the desert, a map of the place is not enough – as many have discovered to their cost. A human guide that really knows the territory has access to many forms of knowledge that can never be scribed onto paper and they have usually developed them over time during repeated visits to the same terrain. They have been tested by it, schooled by it, come to know it. I would argue that any walk of life is much the same – and that the same thing applies to the practice of therapy. Thus, situated – as opposed to abstract – intelligence is, by definition, ‘practical’. This takes us precisely back to the outline of phronesis from Aristotle discussed previously.
In study after study it has been shown that no particular…therapy model proves itself more or less…than any other. The obvious conclusion from this is that theory is not the key ingredient to effective practice. It is far more likely that the crucial factor is something highly personal [in] what [a therapist knows] about himself or herself and the client, and the present happening between the two, which is the creative factor. This has…been referred to as ‘practice wisdom’. (Altheide and Johnson 1994, p.488)
We encourage students to critically question the claim that theory always drives practice. Indeed, we have reached the conclusion that there is a kind of theorising which, in fact, positively blocks the effective practice of any complex activity, such as a way of life, a vocational calling, or even a relatively straightforward skill.
People too wedded to theory do not make effective practitioners. They may be able to talk the walk, and this sounds very impressive, but when it comes to actually walking the walk, they turn out to be clumsy, ponderous, inflexible, and thus ineffectual. People tend to neglect how often theory fails to work out in practice, and they avoid asking why this might be so. Instead, they search for another, better theory – how to build a better mousetrap.
If theory is poorly placed to teach us about reality, then the alternative is to learn directly from reality itself. The practitioner’s focus is on the actual terrain where their activity takes place, not on the theory in their head. I will therefore speak of the ‘situated practitioner’. The alternative to practice being driven by abstract theory is practice being driven by the concrete situation.
However, caution is needed here – situatedness is not a matter of overturning the clarity and discipline of theory just to indulge the emotive or the anarchistic. We cannot move well on the ground by relying on superstition, prejudice, opinion or self-indulgence, and ‘anything goes’. Situatedness is a process with its own ethos and dynamic, and its own discipline. In our teaching we encourage students to begin experiencing this process for themselves and this book invites you to do the same – no matter how long you have been practising already.
The therapeutic encounter, like any intimate relationship, is full of mystery, surprise and unpredictable turns. No matter how well trained in therapy [theory] and technique, the encounter with another human being who seeks relief from suffering invariably challenges them [the therapist] in ways that their training has not prepared them for. (O’Leary 1995, p.54)
Models-led cognition and action is top-heavy with anticipated knowledge of and anticipated control over situations. Situated action accepts that real-world contexts are not predictable and not controllable in any straightforward sense. We do not and cannot know in advance how really ‘the land lies’ and what might be an appropriate reaction to ‘prevailing conditions’. Such knowledge must be discovered in the situation, by a certain way of opening up to and wrestling with it, and thus action is always exploratory, and constantly being revised.
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Situated action challenges long-standing ‘rationalist myths’ (models-led claims) about human intelligence |
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Models-Led Claim |
Situated-Action Reply |
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Theory is superior to practice |
Practice beats theory in real-world knowledge |
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Theory rises above the mess and complexity of reality |
Intelligent action doesn’t always need maps |
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Theory provides blueprints for executing action |
Insight can be generated in the moment |
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Action cannot function well without theory to guide it |
Action can respond sensitively to change |
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Theory produces pure knowledge |
Situated action produces practice wisdom |
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Theory produces maps that the novice can safely rely upon |
Situated action encourages novices to think on their feet |
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Activity is concentrated away from the field |
Activity is focused on the field itself |
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Theory relies on contemplative distance from action |
Situated action relies on embodied presence within action |
Many therapists, and practitioners in other walks of life, will recognise ‘what we are talking about’, though they may never have given it a name. The reality it points to, which many share from their own practice, matters supremely – it is the wisdom derived from walking on the ground.
Naturally, rational systems have their place – in certain, limited settings they are the most effective form of operation. Without them the trains could not run on time, rockets go to a precise location in outer space, the light bulb turn on when we throw the switch. We would not wish our brain surgeon to be radically situated and working on intuition. Still it is true that not everything in reality is organised in this way. There is another territory that cannot be fully captured by the mind working alone – it is too wild, not at all reassuring, but exciting and interesting, and takes us ‘out of our mind’ and affects our heart.
In recent years we have seen the ever growing dominance of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), with insurance and drug companies driving an expanding number of diagnosable and categorisable mental health conditions. Publicly funded counselling interventions have been moving towards the shorter-term contract with an easily manualised set of interventions for the practitioner to work from. These are, after all, easier to research and cheaper to fund. A dangerous belief – that the rational capacity for abstract conceptualisation, orderly structure, reductive analysis, quantitative measurement and mechanical technique, will enable us to sort out another human being in distress and suffering – has taken hold. Therapy too is to be fully rationalised and turned into a science. The problem is – it does not work well when you try it out. It can produce very poor, and sometimes harmful, therapy. It leaves something out which really matters in the face-to-face meeting that is both the frame and engine of effective therapy. Living is meeting, so said Martin Buber (1923). Real therapy is meeting, geared toward healing.
If we are not careful, the patient, the diagnosis and the treatment become all too quickly mechanised – delivered by an increasingly mechanistic practitioner. But we are not machines – a suffering human being needs care, empathic attunement and compassionate responsiveness from a warm, present, engaged other – who in turn has suffered in trying to live fully in this world – if they are to find a space in which they can begin to take in transformational healing. If we simply throw a book full of abstract knowledge at a patient, why be there at all?
Nietzsche witheringly said of the rational vision abstracted out of life: ‘It is about as useful as knowing the chemical composition of water would be to a drowning man’. When learning to swim in emotional, embodied real world situations, as Blaise Pascal said ‘the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing’ (1660, Section IV Of the Means of Belief, 242).
Therapy deals in what human beings existentially and practically face in living. Therapy must face this unknown in the very way it helps people face it.
SNAPSHOTS FROM REAL LIFE
Here are six snapshots from real life that convey different facets of practice wisdom. The first story is an account of my very first therapy session with a real client when I was in training – the last is a famous account of the trials of acting. The other four stories have been circulating for a long time.
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Snapshot 1: The First Time is Always Scary |
Having just completed a three-year under-graduate degree in psychology and counselling, I was armed to the gills with ideas, theories and knowledge about counselling and how it worked. The course had been excellent and had encouraged us, through reflective practice work, role play, group experiential work and teaching, to try and place ourselves in experience-near situations. In other words we practised on each other, taking turns being counsellor and client, giving one another feedback on our presence, body language, interventions and style. I remember being very eager to get ‘out there’ and really begin proper work with a real client.
In the first semester of my post-graduate clinical training I had finally managed to secure a training placement with an organisation that worked with people who were living with HIV/AIDS. My first assessment appointment was scheduled for a wet Tuesday evening in the West End of London with a young man we will call Neil, recently diagnosed HIV positive. For me, the build-up to this moment, the years of preparation, had left me feeling fairly sure that I knew what it would feel like to sit in a room with a real person with real problems and work with them therapeutically. After all I had practised it dozens of times. And read accounts of it in many books. And I had, briefly, been in therapy myself some years before. All of these things gave me a ‘feel’ for what therapy terrain would be like.
What I hadn’t bargained on, however, was how I might change when the big moment came. My body, my senses and my mind started to react very strongly in the hour or so leading up to the first session. The wild horses were let loose: I was nervous. I suddenly doubted the things I had been taught. They seemed too simplistic and easy. Too clear-cut. My mouth was dry and during the walk down the stairs to fetch my client from the waiting room I would have given almost anything to be somewhere – anywhere – else. I felt like a fraud and I was scared I was about to be revealed as an absolute beginner who knew next to nothing. When Neil walked into the room for the first meeting I really could not say who was more terrified: me or him. It is hard to remember now but I suspect that Neil’s experience did not figure too heavily on my radar screen during that first session. I was too busy trying to focus on whether I was sitting right, asking the right questions, and trying to remember the rules on empathy, challenging, open questioning and the like.
Eventually, after what seemed like an age, it ended. We agreed to meet the following week. At the start of session two Neil asked me if he could ask some questions. ‘Of course,’ I replied. His two questions were the two most devastating I have ever been asked in a therapy session: how old are you, and what are your qualifications? To be fair they were perfectly reasonable questions. He had obviously gone home feeling unnerved; am I in the hands of some young amateur? Is this going to be useful…or even safe? He had clearly been thinking about this throughout the week and plucked up the courage to ask me. I was 30 and that had been my very first session. What was there to say? I felt caught out and deeply exposed. If memory serves me correctly I think I took the classic therapeutic tack when cornered of wondering why he had asked me those questions. I don’t recall much of the rest of the session.
Afterwards I felt flattened and was sure I had made a massive mistake in trying to become a therapist. It was clear that I was so transparent that my inexperience and nervousness was flashing like a warning light. The next week, session three, approached and I was sure in my mind that Neil was never coming back, having had a near escape from being mentally damaged by this eager newcomer. Surprisingly, he did return and we went on to do some reasonable work together.
In many years of practice since, and in thousands of other sessions, no one else has ever asked me those two questions in that way again.
What was the knowledge which I lacked when facing my first client? Why had all my academic study over years not prepared me for this moment? I was well versed in theories and techniques, and even had experience-near rehearsal in therapy role plays. Yet in the event of ‘meeting the real thing’, I suddenly felt completely at the mercy of powerful forces that undid my preparation.
What was there about this moment that was so challenging? Why was practising therapy with a real human being so different, and unique, such that no conceivable prior learning could wholly ready anyone for it? Even in training which is near to the reality, the consequences of our action are muted. When suddenly confronted by the reality of the mystery of another human being, the consequences bite. What enables us to both risk and weigh up such cost of action?
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In 1959, Johnny Weissmuller (the actor who played Tarzan) was in Cuba to play in a pro-celebrity golf match. At the time Fidel Castro’s communist rebels were fighting Batista’s soldiers for control of the country. Thus, his car contained not only a group of friends, but a number of bodyguards. On their way to the golf links the car was suddenly surrounded by a gang of armed guerrillas, who promptly disarmed Weissmuller’s protectors, and pointed their guns at him and his party.
What would Tarzan do when faced with such danger? Weissmuller gallantly got out of the car. Rising to his full height, he beat his fists on his chest, and let out Tarzan’s famous yodel. At first the guerrillas were in total shock, but then recognised the jungle hero from his movies. ‘Tarzan! Tarzan!’ they cried. ‘Bienvenido! Welcome to Cuba!’
What was about to become a kidnapping, or worse, suddenly turned into an autograph session, following which ‘Tarzan’ and company were triumphantly escorted to the golf links.
What enabled Johnny Weissmuller to think so quickly in the face of the sudden physical danger looming over him and his friends? To come up with an instant and simple way to diffuse the tension and win the armed men over to his side was crucial to survival, and without any time to ruminate on what he should do, he ‘just did it’.
To find himself in dire emergency was something Weissmuller could never have anticipated when he set out for what seemed an enjoyable and undemanding interlude; and, probably, if he had been granted foresight, and the time to think about the most appropriate response beforehand, it is unlikely he would have produced something so risky and creative, and yet perfectly attuned to the situation as it developed. The ‘fit’ between the problem posed by the situation and the solution in the ‘heat of the moment’ was profound. We call this ‘hitting the target’, or simply ‘that was spot on’, but just how extraordinary it is gets taken for granted.
We are able to knit together the most viable inner resource with the specific demands of the outer world, and do this knitting together spontaneously. What is this ability to think on our feet, and improvise, in order to be appropriate to the moment?
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Snapshot 3: Small Details Can Make All the Difference |
During the opening lap of the 1950 Monaco Grand Prix, Juan Manuel Fangio, an Argentinean racing driver, was approaching a particularly dangerous bend for the second time when he suddenly became aware that something was wrong. The faces of the spectators, which he usually saw as a whitish blur as he drove down the straight, were all turned away from him.
‘If they are not looking at me’, Fangio instantly realised, ‘they must be looking at something more interesting around the corner.’ He braked hard.
As he carefully rounded the bend, he saw that his split-second assessment of the situation had been accurate. The road was blocked by a pile-up of most of the other cars in the race. Fangio, who was nicknamed ‘El Chueco’ (‘knock-kneed’) or ‘El Maestro’, had saved his life.
What was unusual about the kind of attention Juan Manuel Fangio used to save his car and his life? What is this ability to be diffusely yet acutely aware of the world all around us, so that we can pick up even very small alterations in it, and adjust our ongoing action accordingly?
We are able to change course if the circumstances change. What is this ability of ‘situational awareness’ that allows activity to remain so sensitive to its surroundings that it can revise itself as it goes along?
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Snapshot 4: Turning Disaster into Triumph |
While leading his men ashore at Pevensey in Sussex during the conquest of England in 1066, William inauspiciously stumbled and fell. Immediately his deeply suspicious and horrified men cursed the bad omen. However, William rose with a handful of soil.
‘By the splendour of God, I have taken possession of my realm,’ he cried. ‘The earth of England is in my two hands!’
Passionate cheering spread throughout the ranks and the invasion was back on track.
William the Conqueror faced disaster of a different kind when, upon first treading on English soil, he tripped and fell. This might have been regarded as almost a judgement of God, declaring William’s unsuitability for kingship over the land he was about to invade. As with Johnny Weissmuller, he had to spontaneously improvise some response in the moment which turned a potentially catastrophic situation to his resounding advantage. He had to not only think on his feet (or in this instance, flat on his face), but also think outside the box, reversing a king’s humiliation through hitting the dirt into a king’s befriending of the soil he will rule over.
There was no time for William to think out, nor give, a lengthy peroration designed to explain away, or justify, his fall. Its dark foreboding lay heavy on him and his men, like a shadow that comes from nowhere to blot out the sun. But by just one apposite ‘word’, everyone was so struck that the situation was turned upside down. The shadow was banished to reveal the sun shining brighter than before.
What is this capacity to be spontaneous, and improvise in a manner that is not only appropriate to a situation, but actually boldly influences and shifts the total configuration there, creating ‘a whole new ball game’ out of the downhill direction in which the old situation had been going?
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Snapshot 5: The Shock of the Real |
Wilfred Owen, the English poet, set out for France on 30 December 1916. Nothing in his military training, and nothing in his fertile imagination, could have prepared him for what lay ahead in the trenches. He later described this as his ‘first encounter with the reality of war’.
After joining the 2nd Manchesters on the Somme during January 1917, he wrote home to his mother: ‘I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last four days. I have suffered seventh hell…we had a march of nearly three miles over shelled road, then nearly three along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, three, four and five feet deep, relieved only by craters of water…’.
Until he found himself in the situation of war, Owen could never have hoped to understand how it would affect him, physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. Much of the poetry he wrote during World War I tried to convey the sense of the real horror to a patriotic and fervent public at home who still delighted in stories of glory and honour. In the final stanza of his poem ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ he wrote:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick with sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children, ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum Est
Pro Patria Mori.
(From Poems with an introduction by Siegfried Sassoon, 1920, p.11)
The Latin phrase ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (‘it is sweet and right to die for your country’) came to seem like an obscene lie to Owen after even a limited exposure to the real ‘theatre of war’.
Wilfred Owen’s experience is testified to by many who have been in war. The consequences of the actions we perform, and the actions performed by others, are suddenly ultimate. War is the ‘limit situation’ (Marcel 1952) that reveals why everything dramatically changes when we must commit to action in the actual setting; action has a cost, for oneself and for others, and that cost can be hard to pay.
However empathically we read Owen’s poem, we cannot pace behind the wagon where that young soldier is battling for his life. We try to imagine its awfulness but part of the horror lies in knowing that we are touching but a pale fragment of the reality. Owen’s point is that experience is different; it changes us profoundly, it leaves its marks on us, we will never be the same again.
Why did Owen speak of the ‘shock of the real’ to describe what it was like when he first faced war? He is not merely making the point that no training can prepare a soldier for the reality of war; he is, much more basically, trying to tell a complacent populace that such reality is betrayed by idealised accounts of it that totally falsify its ground-level truth. Idealising any reality we must face on the ground betrays the truth both of what it is like, and what it is like for us to have to meet it face to face.
We have to stand up to many kinds of cutting edge in all our experience of the terrain, without running away or going under. What enables us to get stuck in, see it through, emerge out the other side, strengthened, and wiser?
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Snapshot 6: But I Don’t Know How I Did It! |
Laurence Olivier once tried something in his portrayal of Shakespeare’s Othello that by general consensus was, if not wrong-headed, then at the very least odd. Though Shakespeare calls Othello a ‘Moor’, meaning an Arab from North Africa, specifically Morocco, Olivier decided to represent him on stage as a Jamaican. Movement, gesture, facial expression, accent, were all carefully nuanced to be as authentically West Indian as a white man disguised in black paint could achieve. Though his sheer skill in pulling off this feat of mimicry was admired, some who saw the play felt the whole enterprise was doomed from the start. At a deeper level, this imposture just did not work, however technically adroit. Others took it differently. One reviewer called the performance poetic, primal, athletic, likening Olivier on stage to a great prowling panther.
Olivier must have felt this ambiguity in what he was doing in his bones, for it is said he used to suffer terrible nerves both before he went on, and during the play. But one night, Olivier shed his obsession with technical perfection, which caused some people to see him as slightly over the top and something of a ham actor, and came up with what everyone who witnessed it regarded as the greatest acting performance he had ever given. Indeed, some critics rated this performance among the greatest of all time. When an actor gets inside a character confined to the page and makes him live as if he were a real human being, expressing his inner life outwardly, and communicating this to the audience, something magical occurs. In ordinary parlance we hardly do justice to such events by saying ‘it all came together’.
Olivier was a creature of ritual. He would always formally acknowledge the audience’s applause with a stately bow. On this night, he bowed only perfunctorily to the rapturous clapping and shouts drowning the National Theatre stage, and then abruptly disappeared into his dressing room, locking the door behind him. His two female co-stars, Maggie Smith and Joyce Redman, were concerned by this very odd reaction, and even felt some guilt, because they had played a trick on ‘Larry’ earlier this night. Another ritual that he always followed was to drink a glass of champagne, left awaiting him in the dressing room fridge, in the interval between acts. But the two women had snuck in ahead of him, and drank all the bubbly. They were worried that Olivier had taken severe umbrage at their prank.
They approached his dressing room door tentatively, and knocked softly. ‘Larry, why are you upset?’ Olivier shouted out at them, ‘Go away.’ They called in to him, ‘Your performance tonight was simply superb, your best ever. We want to congratulate you. Please come out.’ Then, getting no word from within, they added: ‘We’re sorry we drank your champagne.’ There was an ominous silence. Then the dressing room door opened a crack. ‘Why are you so upset?’ the women pleaded with Olivier.
The door was flung wide open, and with consternation on his face and exasperation filling his body, Olivier threw his arms in the air, and revealed why he had stormed off and locked himself away. ‘I know it was my greatest ever acting performance,’ he told them, ‘but I am upset because I have no idea how I did it!’
Why was Laurence Olivier so upset that he had given his greatest ever acting performance without knowing how he did it? Olivier was famous for being one of the most thoroughly rehearsed actors ever: his performances were marked by meticulous and detailed prior choreographing of every move, expression, inflection. He hated to leave anything to chance. But he was also capable of letting the here-and-now relationship with the audience, so potent in the theatre, move him such that he could infuse the manoeuvres he had rehearsed in isolation with an inspiration that lifted them onto a different level.
What enables us to make what is very familiar to us new and fresh each time we return to it, rather than settling into boring habit?
Obviously, improvising in the heat of the moment, and the freedom to be creative, is not possible if the person ‘sticks to the script’. But sticking to the script seems to guarantee a consistency in performance, even if this becomes more and more robotic and tedious, less and less moving and exciting. Olivier knew that perfectly well. But he was upset because he did not trust that this knowing what to do that wells up intuitively as we proceed, without our knowing how it is done, would return and be reliably available whenever he needed it. This intuitive support to action in the real world seemed too elusive, and possibly fickle. To count on it would be foolish, like diving into deep waters not sure whether we can swim.
So at the outset we must draw some distinctions between the models-led way and the situated-action way.
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Differences between the models-led way and the situated-action way |
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Models-Led Way |
Situated-Action Way |
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Is top down – one way |
Is bottom up – two way |
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Is about instructing and controlling the world |
Is about dialoguing and being with the world |
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Relies on technical skill |
Relies on craftsmanship know how |
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Involves repeatable and mechanical action |
Has exploratory action |
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Sees errors and failures as serious problems |
Understands they are the only way to learn |
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Gold standard: the same every time |
Gold standard: subtly different every time |
NOT ANTI MODELS, ANTI MODELS-LED
Therapy models are after-the-fact reconstructions of therapeutic practice in the field. This means they arose as ‘reflection on practice’. They emerged out of first-person accounts of discovery, made by many travellers, and their collective weight helps promote, encourage and facilitate new travellers in their discovery process. They do not provide perfect maps – that would be to abuse their whole point and ethos – but can offer signposts for helping us in our own walking. They are maps constructed by therapy pioneers ‘after’ their personal walk. Though we might wish to take this account of the ‘way someone else walked’ as a hard-and-fast instruction for our walking the same terrain, can the previously established route ever really be walked again? Given that the real world constantly changes it follows that whenever we return to it, we will find it is more or less different. No two clients are alike. Even single clients alter session to session, moment to moment. As practitioners we are constantly changing and evolving ourselves. Abstract models claim fixed knowledge of a predictably static and clear-cut world, but knowledge of an unpredictably changing and ambiguous world has to be more open and fluid as we have already established. ‘A’ map can never be the one and only map.
Accepting that the reported and abstracted experiences of others can only ever function as ‘looser guidance’ rather than definitive instruction opens up the necessity of reaching our own hard-won ‘practice wisdom’. Our walk through the terrain can never be their walk. The ‘rough guide full of travellers’ tales’ is a teaching of wisdom, and remains enigmatic, not fully spelt out. A degree of clarity and structure can crystallise out of reflection on action in the field and offer some guidelines but it does not pretend the landmark features on a map are any sort of hard-and-fast ‘failsafe’ of what to do when travelling in the real world. Such humble models realise that it requires ‘situated drivers’ to operate effectively on the ground.
The arrogant models, by contrast, foolishly and blindly believe that their retrospective account of walking through the terrain is to be treated not simply as a beacon of light to help us on rough ground but as unquestionable prescription, to be followed obediently and exactly by those who come next. They are a trap for the wary and nervous walker, new to the territory, desperate for some certainty and guidance. Gabriel Marcel, the French existential philosopher, expressed the essence of this relationship between knowledge and being: ‘knowledge is contingent on a participation in being for which no epistemology can account…knowledge is within being, enfolded by it’ (1952, p.84). Most models-led thinking fails to recognise this, indeed would mock the very idea of this being so; nevertheless it is fundamentally correct and many writers, thinkers and practitioners have acknowledged it.
To summarise the argument so far:
•The driving force of models-led practice, both philosophically and psychologically, is expectation.
•The driving force of situated action, both philosophically and psychologically, is discovery.
•In models-led practice, expectation operates through a monologue imposed on the world. In situated action, discovery operates through dialogue negotiated with the world.
THE MAP CANNOT ADEQUATELY REPRESENT THE TERRAIN
The map easily becomes too abstract. Abstract thought shelters from the real by preferring generality, but reality never presents itself to us in meeting it on the ground as just the ‘particular instance’ of some generic rule. You don’t meet on the ground the general-category cat, you meet a succession of particular cats, each unique. Plato and Aristotle used this example of ‘catness’ to explore their different philosophical approaches – with Plato favouring abstract conceptualising about cats and Aristotle privileging the actual experience of meeting with a particular cat (Howard 2000, p.41). Abstractionism tends to gloss over that the different cats have their own flesh and blood, their unique matter, personality and spirit which mean any encounter with them is never mechanistic or predictable.
It is all too easy to claim as part of your theoretical orientation that you have warmth and unconditional positive regard for all your clients but on the ground you always meet with a very particular human being, replete with all their quirks, foibles, distressing habits, defensive manoeuvres and unexpected responses. You must meet with, work with, dialogue with, love with – him or her.
To walk this in reality is much harder than to simply talk it. To really immerse ourselves in the emotional, psychological and energetic world of another living person is far more dynamic, terrifying, uplifting and moving than any written account (either before or after the fact) can ever capture. The map will always be drier, flatter, safer and cleaner than the contoured real world which is juicy, dirty, wet and dangerous. But we know that real food is tastier than the menu, climbing the mountain more satisfying than the outline in the guidebook and the breathing, moving, responding body touches you in ways a picture never can. It is also true, naturally, that the food can poison you; the menu cannot. During the climb you can fall; in the guidebook you cannot. The picture will not break your heart but the lover most certainly can.
The map feels safer, easier to control – and many retreat there to live something akin to a half-life. The terrain can potentially wound and destroy you but is drenched in colour, awareness, energy and change. It requires us to risk something, to be open to profound reshaping of who we are. Intellectualisation and defensive thought try to cut corners and eventually they deny reality, tending to ‘iron out’ the ground’s ambiguous patterns, so they appear more sensible and coherent than they really are. They promise to spare us from the lows whilst depriving us of the highs. The worst of this kind of thought pretends reality is like a crossword puzzle, presenting a well-defined problem that has an equally well-defined solution. This offers us the tempting and seductive illusion of safety. This may make us feel better for a time – but actually leaves us under-prepared and vulnerable when travelling on the ground. It is a form of shutting one’s eyes and hoping for the best. No matter how far we retreat into our cognitive mind we cannot remain there permanently unless we mean to avoid human relational contact altogether. For any practising therapist to do this is terrifying and wholly unacceptable.
Reality tests and pushes us, but moves us profoundly. This is why we must ‘try it out’ and ‘go through it’ for ourselves. The mystery, the pain and the joy of life is in the colourful, maddening, extraordinary details on the ground; but all this beautiful texture and depth, richness and quality, disappears in the too sweeping thought which prefers theorising because it does not want to deal with practical and existential variety. The discipline of reflective practice thinking is to never cut the tie to experience, since this is what immerses us in the terrain’s humanity. To understand a terrain, we must be affected by it, involved, interested.
Given its experiential and enactive dimensions, situated functioning is easier to teach to students in the field, or on the job, than to describe to a reader on the page. For example, the way in which several strands come together in action that is relevant to its setting is hard to state exactly. We say, ‘I finally got my act together’, and everyone knows what we mean, but this expression is a shorthand that suffices for a deeply complex process.
Any given therapy model – that of Freud, Jung, Adler, Rogers, Perls, Ellis, Beck, Fairbairn, Kohut, et al. – is no more or no less than a record of the route someone took in their walk through the terrain of therapising.
After their walk, they reflected on what got them through, what the helps and hindrances were, and tried to convey this by articulating it as a map and a plan. Some therapists did convey the lessons they learned in the field, and the organic ideas these sparked, in the thinking and language of reflective practice. Most founding fathers and mothers, unfortunately, developed their practitioner knowledge of the field into full-blown models with sets of precise directions and theoretical structures for others to follow. Some therapeutic practice by orthodox Freudians (especially after his death) typifies the very worst of what happens when the pure (and usually misunderstood) instructions of the founder are carved in stone. Whether in politics, religion or therapy practice what follows is often damaging or dangerous. The theorist is reified as a grand visionary, who can save their future followers from having to wrestle with reality themselves or develop their own practical wisdom. And, sadly, many are only too happy to give away their power, their intelligence and their agency to someone else who promises a shortcut, quick-fix, easy way to mastery.
Therefore, this book is saying to the situated practitioner: ‘Own the special quality of what you know by realising how extraordinary it is that you can know this. You are engaged in a practising that has its own existential and practical wisdom, its own poetic craft, and its own service of something ultimately valuable, all linked in an unbreakable fabric of interlacing threads’.
This being so, there is such a person as a wise healer, and there is such a thing as the wisdom of healing.
This wisdom grows over time, inside us, in the well – the portable, personal system of practical wisdom that will assist and guide us whilst in the terrain of working with clients. In reality we are our own well – it is our brain, our memory, our heart, spirit, body, energy, confidence and personality which holds this incredible resource for us, often at a level below everyday consciousness, in the implicit mind, in body memory. It is this location (outside of ordinary conscious awareness) which makes us doubt that the bucket will come up full this time when we move inside the territory. This is the source of all performance anxiety – in therapy, in business, in acting.
Over many years of discussing, teaching, living and working with this set of lived phenomena I have outlined a very useful metaphor for how the well fills up: a number of streams of living water that flow into the well and replenish its supply – the streams fill the bucket with that intangible something which appears when we enter the real-world territory of practice. I have encouraged students, clients, colleagues and myself to reflect on these streams, to discuss and to journal around them, to act them out, draw them and feel them – to practise them as frequently as possible so that we can recognise and understand their existence within the self. Eventually we can rely on and be supported by them in each new return to the living, breathing territory of client work. The next section sets out 34 streams that flow into the well.