One of the most powerful, and most challenging, characteristics of Reality Therapy, is Choice Theory. When you are suffering, or upset, it seems pretty normal to use what William Glasser calls External Choice Theory and blame somebody for it. But, as he points out, in all circumstances we have choices. Bad things still happen, and Choice Theory does not mean that we choose to have bad things happen. However, in any circumstances we can choose between different actions, and we can choose to change how we think about something. (There’s something here in common with Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy I think. He said that what matters is what “stand” we take – how we respond in the various situations which we find ourselves in, and what actions we take)
It’s strange how challenging and apparently harsh it can seem to focus on making choices. I think there is an assumption that if you can make choices then you must have chosen the suffering you find yourself experiencing, but I think this is a seriously misguided interpretation. There’s a world of difference between making choices and being in control of everything. The world is not only full of random events, from accidents, to earthquakes, tsunamis and floods, but it’s also full of other people, all following their own agendas and taking their own actions which affect both other people and the environments in which we all live. Making choices as a continual process is an incredibly empowering exercise. It’s the use of external choice theory which paralyses, despairs and makes victims of us all.
So, next time you’re not so happy about something, instead of looking for someone to blame, think what you’d like to do now instead – in other words, focus on not only making choices, but seeing them through. It feels completely different to do something positive instead of complaining and blaming!
Looking up towards Bonnieux. There are hundreds of lovely hilltop villages in France. I think the Mistral-driven wisps of clouds above Bonnieux made this view particularly lovely.
Down in the fields below the hilltop villages in the South of France there are typically lots of vineyards. At this time of year the vines look small and wizened but they’ll soon flourish!
One thing which struck me here was how higgledy-piggledy (oh dear, I’m sure that’s not a real word!) the village is. There seems to be no order, just buildings on top of each other, crowded together in irregular streets. Really a chaotic and apparently random pattern. And yet, it was built by human beings. It didn’t just grow. Then down in the valley the order imposed on nature shows the straightest, most even lines of vines you could imagine.
So, here’s my dilemma. Why have people imposed such order on plants, but not on the buildings and streets they live in? (I mean the people responsible for these two views of course!)
I think you can understand what health is by considering the three main characteristics of healthy organisms – adaptability, creativity and engagement. In France, probably every town and every village has its “boulodrome” – a patch of sand where people play “petanque”. It seems completely informal. Just a space to use by whoever wants to use it. I think it’s a great example of designing social engagement into the spaces where people live.
Look at these guys enjoying themselves. It’s not hard to understand the importance of social engagement for human beings, is it?
From the driveway up to the place where I’m renting an apartment in Provence I can see Mont St Victoire –
And just down the road a little I can see it more clearly –
Mont St Victoire was a huge inspiration to Paul Cezanne. Take a look at this lovely (silent) video of some of his paintings of this spectacular mountain.
The other night there I had a strange dream. I was trying to diagnose what was wrong with a patient but his symptoms kept changing. They didn’t change one by one, but in whole sets. It was like he was flipping from one disease to another over a matter of minutes, making it impossible to pin down what was actually wrong with him. I was thinking (in my dream) that I’ve often seen rapidly changing and vague collections of symptoms but this was different. Then I realised there was something additionally strange about this man. At one moment he seemed to be distant, aloof, faraway, as if not in this world at all, then the next he would be fully present, talking and answering questions. It was as if in addition to his rapidly changing sets of symptoms there was a flipping in and out of the world. At that point in my dream I heard a voice inside my head (you know the way we do sometimes in dreams – a clear voice but without an obvious source, a voice from within your own head but somehow everywhere around you at the same time). The voice said “He’s got dimensional slippage”. Pardon? “He’s got dimensional slippage. I think this may be the first recorded case” Well, then that other thing happened that only seems to happen in dreams – I knew exactly what the voice was talking about (suddenly I had knowledge I hadn’t had before). I knew in that instant that the problem this man had was that versions of himself from parallel universes were seeping into each other; that “normally” parallel universes are inaccessible from within each other and not only did this man have something wrong which had undermined those normal boundaries of existence but that his very illness was a proof of the existence of a multidimensional multiverse. (Bear with me here. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, believe me, they were unfamiliar to me too – well, not totally of course, but at that moment I couldn’t have explained to you, had you asked me, what it meant to have more than 4 dimensions in the universe, what a parallel universe actually was, or what the term “multiverse” really meant!). That’s the point where I woke up. Now, normally I probably dream every night but only have that knowledge of dreaming that we often wake with, a knowledge that is totally absent of detail. But every now and again I have a vivid dream, and every now and again (much less often) that dream comes with a feeling of significance. I wake thinking “that was an important dream”. But, of course, I’ve no idea why! That’s the feeling that dream gave me. I feel it was important but I didn’t understand it and I don’t know why it’s important.
So, what did I do?
Well, I started to try and find out what more than 4 dimensions would look like, because I really wasn’t sure I’d grasped that idea very well at all. And I did a bit of reading to see if I could understand the concept of multiple parallel universes – “multiverses”.
First I found this short video –
then, this fascinating interview with Lisa Randall –
So now it became clear to me that when mathematicians and physicists talk about dimensions, they are referring to dimensions in space. And as Lisa Randall points out, there’s really no way for us to picture more than the three dimensions of space (up/down, right/left and back/forward) along with the fourth dimension of time.
But somewhere in my musings about the dream I got to thinking “what is a dimension anyway?” Isn’t a dimension something we represent with an axis on a chart? Every axis represents a spectrum, doesn’t it? Thinking that way, consciousness is a kind of dimension. Every day we move up and down the axis of consciousness from sound asleep to awake and aware. When I thought of my dream patient becoming more or less present, I thought of a dimension of presence. People are like that, aren’t they? They move back and forward between being fully present and having drifted off, as if to some other planet. What if each of us moves back and forth along an axis of presence? And what if, just like visible light is only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the visible body is only a small part of the axis of presence? Then maybe we fade away, as old people often seem to, and, maybe ghosts (if they exist!) are people beyond the visible part of the presence spectrum? Hmm….
There are many dimensions we can imagine this way. I know, of course, this is not what physicists mean by dimensions, but if co-ordinates along a number of axes situate an object or a person, then maybe imagining where we are beyond the spatial and temporal dimensions, gives a different way of considering our lives here and now.
I thought of the dimensions of consciousness, of presence, of emotions like happiness/sadness, and of a 3 dimensional group (like space is 3D) of body/mind/spirit.
Which dimensions would you consider important in your life, and where are you along each of them now?
Maybe my dream was just a way of getting me to think about the multiple aspects of a human life, and to consider that we are all in a constant state of flux and change, moving back and forth, up and down and along multiple axes or dimensions. And maybe the diagnosis I was looking for wasn’t “dimensional slippage” but the dis-integration of the whole self. After all, that’s probably the closest I get to understanding what illness actually is…..a dis-integration of the whole self.
Phil Wilson, has a superb post on his blog about a lecture he recently attended in Brighton. It was a lecture about creativity and was delivered by Margaret Boden, Research Professor of Cognitive Science at Sussex University (in fact her whole department sounds both fascinating and exciting!). I highly recommend reading his whole post, but let me just highlight two of the main ideas he describes – first is Boden’s classification of creativity – combinatorial creativity (the making of associations between concepts or things to create something new); exploratory creativity (which comes from practice in an area and develops new methods, concepts etc from doing – skills increase this way, and then from a highly skilled perspective, new methods arise); and, transformational creativity (which emerges out of exploratory creativity but which changes the whole way of seeing something). Each of us has a greater or lesser tendency to use one or more of these not mutually exclusive methods. I think, for me, the combinatorial method, is key. I’ve always loved diversity and seeing the links between things and ideas. I like “synthetic” thinking which brings together different observations and thoughts to create new ideas. I like taking discoveries in one area of human endeavour and seeing what they can teach us about another area.
How about you? Do any of these three kinds of creativity strike a chord for you?
The second idea he highlights is that thing that happens when we get stuck with something and the solution only emerges after we go and do something else. He postulated that the something else was a kind of latent phase, but Boden says she thinks its about rest. That got me thinking about that old saying “a change is as good as a rest for the brain” (does anyone know where that saying comes from?).
Actually, taking a complex adaptive systems perspective, think of it this way – one of the characteristics of a CAS is of “attractors” – these are like points which suck everything in their environment towards them. Basically, they become like the stuck points of the system. Thought can be like that. A thought, or a chain of thoughts can get stuck in a place or a loop and it can then be hard to make any progress. One way to break free of these “attractors” is to change the environment in which they exist. How we do that is change our environment for a short while – take a walk, (yes, Phil, stand under water in the shower!), take a holiday, engage in something else. There are many ways to change the environment of the day, or part of the day. I think what that does is releases the stuckness, frees you from that “attractor” then something new emerges……a new thought, idea, solution – (creativity is the emergence of a new state in CAS terms)
What do you do to release yourself from these “attractors”? How do you let go of things to help the solutions and creative ideas emerge?
I can’t remember how I stumbled over William Glasser’s Choice Theory or his Reality Therapy, but when I did I was interested enough to buy his “Choice Theory. A New Psychology of Personal Freedom” ISBN 978-0-06-093014-1.
I really enjoyed reading this book. It appeals to my personal philosophy in relation to psychology. One of the basic tenets of this book is that digging over the past to recount and relive old wounds and hurts is not helpful. Instead, the author claims, it is better to focus on your current relationships, your current thoughts and actions. His idea of “total behaviour” is holistic and highlights the connections between aspects of mind and aspects of body which enables us to make a better understanding of illness. It’s a psychology of hope because it rails against the dominant stance of “external control theory” – this is what most people do, most of the time – when things go wrong, people who use an “external control theory” feel like victims. This paralyses, disempowers and demotivates, and seeks to blame others for personal experiences.
Here’s the summary from the last chapter of Glasser’s book –
The only person whose behaviour we can control is our own.
All we can give or get from other people is information.
All long-lasting psychological problems are relationship problems.
The problem relationship is always part of our present lives.
What happened in the past that was painful has a great deal to do with what we are today, but revisiting this painful past can contribute little or nothing to what we need to do now: improve an important, present relationship.
We are driven by five genetic needs: survival, love and belonging, power, freedom and fun.
We can satisfy these needs only by satisfying a picture or pictures in our quality worlds.
All we can do from birth to death is behave. All behaviour is total behaviour and is made up of four inseparable components: acting, thinking, feeling and physiology.
All total behaviour is designated by verbs, usually infinitives and gerunds, and named by the component that is most recognisable.
All total behaviour is chosen, but we have direct control over only the acting and thinking components.
How we figure out what other people think or how they are likely to act is a complex phenomenon, but here’s one interesting aspect of it. There’s a technique being used quite a lot these days to try and understand how our brains work. It’s called fMRI – which stands for functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. This is a scanning technique which allows us to see which parts of the brain kick into action when we are thinking or doing certain things. A Harvard team have used this technique while getting volunteers to answer questions about how strangers might think on the basis of having been given short descriptions of the strangers before hand. The interesting thing is that there was a clear difference in which part of the brain was used to answer the questions depending on whether or not the volunteer thought the stranger was similar to themselves or not. When the volunteer thought the stranger was similar to themselves they used the same part of the brain to answer questions about what the stranger might think, that we all use for thinking about ourselves (the areas we use for introspection, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC)).
In summary, we are more likely to refer to our own experience and ideas of ourselves when trying to guess how another person will think or act, only if we consider that person to be like us. If we don’t think they are like us, we have to use other cues – and those other cues, most psychologists think, come from observations and society’s rules, not from personal reflection.
This isn’t a huge breakthrough in understanding but I’m sure it does say something about why we are able to be more empathic with some people than we are with others, and probably also why communities are wary of strangers. It’s the basis of that old “you’re not from round here are you?” question which indicates the stranger is thought to be, well, strange!
I welcome constructive criticism and suggestions. I will not, however, tolerate abuse, rudeness or negativity, whether it is directed at me or other people. It has no place here. ANYONE making nasty comments will be banned.
Heroes Not Zombies 