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This is the first time here for a long long time

Living on the Sunshie Coast for a couple of months means beach sun some rain cold mornings and mid to low twenties for six hours a day.

The beach at low tide has strands of creamy sand soft smooth and firmed by the waters. these days the result of scouring storms leaves the volcanic rock jumble of twists and jags a slow awkward journey to make along the beach. For three months the beaches were cleaned up and graded to mound new sand dunes and recover the rocks. Three days churning waves whipped up by storms beyond the horizon were enough to set all the work to nought. Since then gentle movements has sand moving back again from beyond the rocky reefs that skirt the beach.

I havebeen trying to recall a word I used to use in latter stages of role training. I remembered the word today that was eluding me. It’s “chunking”. From NLP I think and behavioural therapy in the seventies may be. I used it to have groups of men to “Harness Anger and Stop Violence”. In role training coaching as they took up the new role (or drew on an old role in a new context) “chunking” was the word that I used to name the irritating process of pausing them and describing in detail how they had enacted that chunk. They were quickly willing to have each chunk, a success story. Going a small piece at a time as the role is being integrated/developed I suppose assisted the role to be well formed and mindfully appreciated. It is a point in the development of role where role taking freedom is moving up to the next level of freedom (spontaneity) to begin to be role played. This level being about easy flow it is strange to break the flow into bits (chunks) which logically interrupts the flow. How it works doesn’t matter. It certainly does. I first witnessed this in Max Clayton’s work he didn’t comment on what or why he did it. The effect was obvious. He didn’t call it chunking. Leaning theorists might say each successful element is being reinforced. Paradoxical therapists could say that the interruptions are resistances that have the CNS work harder to bind the parts into a whole that is seamless maybe.

A prose-poem Not Rehearsal

In 1985 the five day Training Workshop ends. The trainer’s saying that “psychodrama is rehearsal for life” clashed with the vitality and immediacy of my experience. I went home and wrote a prose poem. I knew what it was for me. It was not rehearsal. Knowing what it is not for ourselves can begin our knowing of our own truth – a truth to a “self chosen path”.

I found this in my old notes. Gave it back to Walter who put it on his blog, and gave me a copy of the digital version.

Here it is:

Mirroring and Cybernetics

Here is a more recent one:

Engaging the Muse

Thinking further on reciprocity and groups, and reciprocity’s advantages and may be necessity for worthwhile, ethical and powerfully efficacious healthy developments, I have been remembering Jacob Moreno in his “sociometry” based “group psychotherapy”. He was “Doctor”, and “Doctor” was an identity of powerful influence, respect and status in the years of his lifetime (1889 – 1974).  In his groups he had everyone be “Doctor” and address each other that way. He knew they were the therapeutic agents to each other and that reciprocity is a community dynamic for health.

Thinking about reciprocity and psychotherapeutic relationships had me recal Cognitive dissonance and Carl Festinger Festenger, who recognized such dissonance as operating when imbalances that discomfort us are in play, and where immediate active reponses are, or appear, not to be able to correct imbalances in the social context. The response that is made is to view the events in such a way that the actual actions taken are logically unexpected. Other distortions are within the syndromes that occur when losses, limitations or changes are experienced. Grief includes processes that distort reality and give rise to creative even magical or superstitious thinking. Some distortions occur in relation tothe gaining of identity, as Tajfel discovered. The business of knowing or coming to integrate our beliefs about who we are as a person in the world or with a specific place in the world produces identity. In childhood we sweeten the limitating lemons by magnifying focus on the benefits we have, however mean, while souring or regarding less those advantages other children around us have or appear to have. Such distortions continue as identity is challenged or expanded through adulthood.

Language teacher on Niue in 1965 tought us to appreciate polynesian reciprocity. So careful for the stranger but taken for granted by the polynesian. What this mirrors to the western European is what it would mirror to Malaysian, Chilean or to be fair to any great ape or lesser ape or in some form all living creatures. Balance of relating and the importance in power management to mutuality, equity and efficacy in relationships and community are essential to self-direction, intimacy and self-esteem. This is not just self protective against being over powered it is societally significant in determining the sharing of power and ensuring the good health of communities and nations. Constitutional law is predicated on reciprocity.

In self-managing work-groups where productivity and quality and adequacy of service are crucial and where consensus decision making requires ensuring the place and influence of all members teams review relationships health and respect individual vulnerabilities and give assistance to each member’s ability to contribute adequately. Where vulnerabilities are owned and shared if the the relative vulnerabilities are not sufficiently balanced then sharing openness will diminish and well-being distress balances will be  hidden. In any such group, which can be seen to include family life, reciprocity is crucial.

In polynesia you give me I must give equal or more. Although come to think of it – it is not quite that simply regulated. Assessment is subtle and mutually appreciated wealth and material assets are precisely transparent through the community and every relationship has both sides able to assess differentials of need and resources and proportionality will be precisely judged by both sides so “more than” could be “less than” but according to resouce differentials “more than” proportionally! In 1967 the building workers as their custom was sat around a banana box and put their fortnights wages down for one man to have all that was available after each of them took out what was absolutely needed for him and his family that week. Needs vary week to week family size differs and each is happy that on their turn they will get what is there for the major expenditure which other wise they’d need to save for in a pot or a Post Office account. This was adjusted reciprocity and trusted community provision. No complaints.

What of reciprocity in psychotherapy or any contracted relationship of helping by one of another – whether entered into freely or under duress. “Differentials of power” are recognised to be crucial as are “transferences”. But, what if we explore this endeavour at base exchange realities of reciprocity and balance. Then cognitive dissonance becomes a key player. The first question is: is there sufficient equity to sustain the health of both parties and what are the leverages towards health where the focus, and the contract, are to one person’s health and not the other.

Barrack Obama in his first news conference as United States President Elect makes a couple of light remarks. One about the White House children’s dog selection. The other turning a titter at having said he had spoken to all past presidents. First he says “All living past Presidents”, then “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing”. Afterwards there were many things to deal with, tie up or follow up on. One has priority. He phones Nancy Reagan apologises and has an engaing and mutually satisfying conversation. A correspondent noted that it was not only flip it was innacurate. That former First Lady had consulted astrollogers. In fact the report continues it was First Lady Hilary Rodham Clinton who had spoken with the dead. A seance? no, not that. In a counselling consultation her therapist had guided her into a conversation between herself and her heroine First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

That may have been “guided imagery” or it might be “psychodrama”. In psychodrama the space that becomes the stage where encounters occur whether a space in our minds for creative imagery or a space cleared on a floor, within which to stand and be “self” and then to cross the floor turn and speak for and as “the other”. Active body movements and speaking free-flow out loud can release what we don’t know we know inside, and have us discover what we otherwise will fail to recognise.

Not then seances, but stars and planets for one, and being a star in her own psychodrama with her hero in “surplus reality” for the other. Hilary Clinton is not with a medium but a therapeutic guide facilitaing a warming her up to herself and her vision of her hero, her dreams and her own aspirations.  The psychodrama producer is a companion watching for the body cues that a person themselves wil not see so that Hilary or any client can be alive to them and gain motivation and confident flow towards making her goals a reality in her life. Psychodrama is not weired or spooky and nothing to do with letting all hell rise up and run loose. Psychodrama is about meeting and integrating ones own truths.

“Role” is a word that Jacob Levi Moreno took from his theatre experience and his fascination with staging, producing and creative acts. He coached children in freedom to be themselves in Vienese parks while first a philosophy and then a medical student. He created impromptu theatre with teenagers and Vienese actors. He produced theatre early last century as a newspaper in action. He explored stage craft and stage design devising stages that embraced and wove their way through an audience. He was challenged by the encounter of catharsis as the audience is moved and changed by the dramatic warm up and the human truth that is soul opening as each actor enters, plays and creates the role they have in a dramatic slice of life.

Having migrated to the United States in 1928 Dr Moreno psychiatrist wanted word “role” to carry a wider meaning that fitted the reality of the “stage” of life where women,  men and their children are the players. Players not of parts prescribed, or with lines contrived, but acting authentically in the reality of what is.

There are real social pressures and restrictions on each of us. There are also creative realities that arise in each of us. Our creative realities are constructed by our wilful, mindful and self chosen paths built on our visions, our hopes, our dreams together with our spontaneity to to be ourselves and act freely for ourselves as ethical and inclusive beings.

Role for followers of Morneno’s experimental enquiry is a dynamic concept to discover who we humans are and how we operate within ourselves and in community. Moreno recognised the societal moulding and structuring of our various places and responsibilities within any community. He saw that social apsects of “role” are how we develop to be who we are. He saw our personal individual life learning to become who we can be involving taking up role positions enacting the requirements and adding in our way of being to gradually learn to be who we are becoming. The self he said arises from the roles we bring to life, rather than that the roles emerge from or are constructed by the self. The self - our individual personality – is not a pre-existent entity. We act and therefore we are. We produce roles as we interact and encounter the worlds realities day by day and minute by minute and we in that create ourselves. Others play there parts with us as co producers in their power over our path taking. We ourselves co produce the interactions within the power differentials of our shared cultures of the smal or wider systems in which we are set. Original family is majorly influential. However so too is our dreaming, our imaginations, our wishes, desires, our humour and our fearfullness and our indomitable spirit.

My next blog turns from the familiar social cultural aspects of role to an aspect Moreno recognised had not been recognised and deserved to be seen not only as an aspect but as the foundational reality of “role”.