Well, What Do You Expect__Part 2

How can I learn to meet other people where they are in life rather than where I expect them to be?

 If you’ve had pattern training, you will remember the three areas of patterns are Environment, Relationships, and Biology.

Environment and Biology are predictable to anyone who wants to look. Relationships are the bugaboo. Because each person can make decisions on their own, if they change, expectations change. If I’m comfortable with the old pattern, the way things were, I miss the other person’s growth. To form new relationship expectations requires seeing how the other person reacts and behaves, now.

 How do relationships become patterns? It depends on how I was raised and what I accept in relationships, in other words, what is my sense of Care, Support, Safety, and Boundaries. If I received everything I wanted from my caregivers, then I expect everything I want from other people. If I received nothing or inconsistent promises/lies from caregivers, I may want more, but I expect nothing or inconsistent love/lies from others.

 When I interact with others, I form patterns, which set expectations, and I live within the boundaries of those expectations to maintain the relationship. So what happens if one of us changes?

 When change happens, if I stay in the relationship, I have to find out where the other person is, who the other person becomes. If things change, one thing I can do is a relationship exercise to discover where my partner is now. It’s easy to do, but requires strength and commitment, because it can be scary. For this reason, don’t do it with someone you don’t trust. Don’t do it with someone you are afraid of. Don’t put yourself in a vulnerable position unless you know your exercise partner is safe.

 Arthur Aron seems to have perfected the exercise but I believe it was being used before him. I remember doing it back in the 70s. I do not remember the creator but someone will know and tell me. If anyone knows the source, let me know and I will credit her or him.

 In therapy, where to use it and when, is the question. Use it when it’s time. Techniques are a dime a dozen. Never confuse technique with treatment. A technique is used to move a person because they need to be moved at a specific time in treatment. Treatment is the sense of, the understanding, a person gains from a technique. Exercise: Set two chairs facing each other. Sit across from another person. Knees should be within a palm’s width of the other person’s knees. In other words, you are facing the person and close to them. Set a timer for four minutes. Look directly into the other person’s eyes. Blinking is fine but don’t lose eye contact. No talking, absolute silence. Monitor the feelings evoked in you. Experience the feelings of the other person. Simply be with them for four minutes. No expectations.

 After the experience talk about it, honestly. Tell the person what you experienced about them and what you learned about yourself? What is the ‘sense of’ your partner you felt.

 Here’s an example of when it could be used. I know a young woman who is growing and becoming healthy. She wants her mother to see her growth, to acknowledge it. She doesn’t need a showy reaction, just a simple acknowledgement. This is the exercise that could produce awareness in her mother.

 If you decide to do this exercise, remember the cautions above. When you finish, whoever your partner is, give them what you feel they need. Do they need a shoulder, a hug, a good cry, a smile, a joke? The simplest gift is the best.

Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness

In his book, an old book (but I’m an old guy), Thomas Szaz questions the basis of psychiatry. Either foolhardy or courageous, he makes a brilliant point. His premise is: if hysteria (the first recognized psychiatric disorder) is not a physical disease, why is it treated like one? Szaz does a masterful job of explaining the difference.

Charcot, Freud, and others diagnosed and treated mental illness as a physical disorder when there is no evidence to prove that it is one. In this way, medicine usurped social and relational problems into the realm of physical diseases. In doing so, they mimicked Abraham Maslow’s quote (1966), "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."

What does this mean to treatment? Treatment becomes a physical issue such as ice baths, insulin injections, surgery, or today, psychotropic medication. And despite the obvious, that the displayed behavior patterns were the diagnosis, treatment remains medical.

Of course, Szaz is right. It never changed psychiatric thinking but really twisted their knickers. So much so, I found an article within the last year attacking him again, using the same logic he defeated in his book. 

Today, we research each function of the brain. It makes psychology a biochemical process, but think, does depression create biochemistry or does biochemistry create depression, or does each affect the other in a way that involves mind. We understand the entire genome and brain structure, but we have yet to formulate a consistent theory of function, a theory of pattern for how a person works, but we are close.

The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961). Available on Amazon.

Pattern vs Diagnosis

Psychology, as with medicine, believes it needs a diagnosis, a singular explanation for a problem. To reach a diagnosis, doctors compile symptoms until they reach a tipping point. When reached, the practitioner declares a particular dysfunction (something is not functioning) to exist. Knowing the non-functioning process in the body, the healer can proceed with treatment.

In medicine, my body reacts to itself or the environment around it, like age or virus or toxins. In psychology, a problem comes from an individual’s past experience and has no parallel in the present, but I live as if it exists now. Work in psychology tries to match a diagnostic process by analysis of brain operation. Good idea-up to a point. My brain is in my head but my mind can go anywhere. To treat this problem, experienced years ago, as if it is a brain chemistry dysfunction, is that the answer?*

Physical symptoms are responses. I popped my back. The pain made it difficult to stand straight. It was hard to exercise. It put me in bed for several days. I took muscle relaxers, why, because the muscles try to rescue a painful area by tightening around it to avoid movement, which increase the pain. I took pain relievers, why, to stop my body notifying me of the pain. I used a heating pad to loosen the muscles. True improvement came from relaxing the muscles and movement to treat the popped back.

In Psychology, I have a trauma (same as the back). The trauma feels like a raw pain, a fear I can’t handle, a frustration I can’t control, or a problem I can’t solve. I buffer the trauma. I can do it many ways. Physically, I can exercise obsessively like the person in Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick. I can act out, blow up, harm others, or harm myself. The action (response) is me trying to make sense of the trauma, understand it, and problem solve it.

When the trauma first occurs, I lack the ability, knowledge, skill, or information to solve it. It lingers unsolved in my mind. Fear, frustration, powerlessness, lost control become a theme for me. I worry that the trauma will return. The knowledge of it is a memory but raw feelings remain attached. Any response I decide to institute that works to control the raw feelings becomes my answer. I act as if this solution will control the fear and never seek any other solution. I form a trusted pattern, no matter how unhealthy, that keeps the feelings away from me.

Healthy is the absence of dis-ease. If I am physically healthy, I feel good. With my mind entertaining trauma, I am not at ease. I am tense, upset, anxious, depressed, crazy, or plain miserable. These are the symptoms that the doctor treats.

A good therapist will locate the event, explain the feelings, and offer options for a new decision, one my mind understands. Once a new decision is accepted and practiced, responses change and feelings are eliminated because they are no longer needed. If I am emotionally healthy, I feel good.

I know my life events that cause me stress. When I find the pattern of how I fear and control the stress, learn to understand it, and don’t fear the feelings surrounding it. I am free.

*Psychotropic medicine is a positive treatment as a temporary respite.