“Enough has now been said to prove the general law of perception, which is this, that whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us, (part) always comes out of our own head.” — William James, from The Principles of Psychology (1890), “The Perception of ‘Things.’”
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The Truth is Always More Complicated Than You Think
Counselors are taught to think that they know important things because those who pay for them are looking to hear important things. But what is important and what you think are important are different. If you’re confused, conflicted, or disturbed then your problem almost certainly relates to the mistakes you’re making in deciding what is important.
As a client, you’re looking for valuable guidance, and as a therapist you want to believe you can deliver it. It’s natural that an uncertain need will buy an uncertain product because you’re attracted to what fits. From an exchange point of view this is a positive collaboration, but from the point of view of growth, learning, and insight it’s a failure.
Most psychotherapy doesn’t create change. The client isn’t looking for real change and the therapist is trained in delivering what’s normal. Not that much different from an A.I. learning model. But a successful therapist learns through exceptional encounters with what can’t be explained. A successful therapist learns, but institutions cannot be built on what can’t be generalized.
Counseling can succeed because the client or counselor may doubt their story. They may doubt themselves as well, but it’s really the story that needs to change. Doubts provide cracks in the facade of coping strategies and comforting behavior therapy. The point where one or the other party admits ignorance is the juncture between the old and new story. That’s where progress starts.
Being Driven By Our Thoughts
Thoughts are cars on roads that do not lead to your destination. Of course, your thoughts do lead somewhere, but they keep you in a neighborhood of common ideas. The thoughts that take you forward will travel on unfinished roads or, in some cases, on roads that don’t yet exist.
People who experience a mid-life crisis sometimes buy sports cars. Sports cars are sold at inflated prices, require high maintenance, and can only drive on well-paved roads. They’ll get you to your destination faster, but the destinations they can reach are those that are the most well-traveled. Sports cars are for reliving the past, they won’t take you into the future.
This is a metaphor for what many of us do when faced with life problems: we buy a sports car to travel faster on well-paved roads to places we’ve already been. It is possible to plot a path to a new destination, whether that be in thought or location, but a fashionable vehicle that best drives in circles is one of the least practical ways of getting there.
What you need to do is set off on foot. The conceptual meaning of that is to engage at a simple, physical level. A level at which you can see your decisions with the most time and the finest resolution. Your progress will be slow and you’ll encounter obstacles that will seem incidental, but they’re not incidental because the details are of your own creation, and you need to deconstruct them.
Birds Are Real, but Goals Are Not
Living things speak various languages and most of these languages lack words. Words create picture stories that abbreviate the things being spoken of. Having more words helps, but no amount of words can recreate the full experience.
All living things have bodies and bodies engage, interact, and learn. I was going to say they understand, but the concept of understanding is a word trap. If to “understand” is to stand beneath the workings of the situation, then it is self-referential. To “stand under” presupposes there is something else for you to stand on that is above or beside the situation; something that you already understand or presume to.
In this sense, the word “understand” refers to an infinite sequence of ever finer appreciations that culminates in complete knowledge. But we never have complete knowledge, not even close, so we never really understand.
What we do is learn, and that’s a process not an endpoint. You can begin learning and stop learning at any point. We’re taught to learn things in sequence, but this is a manipulation designed to have you think along certain lines and, by this means, to come to predetermined understandings.
Incremental Appreciation
Learning is the process of incremental appreciation, it is never complete and it has no set sequence…
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Learning is what we do and appreciation is what we get. It’s a process that does not require language. You learn from encountering obstacles that you can penetrate, surmount, demolish, or circumvent. Think of problems as multi-sided blocks with entrances and exits on many sides.
The only problem that you cannot learn from is a problem of infinite hardness that presents itself in only one form: an obelisk. A problem with no solution leads nowhere and teaches nothing. It isn’t really a problem, and it may not even be a thing. Many of our existential “problems” are things of this sort, like birth and death. We’d like to say we come from and then go to somewhere, but when taken literally, such ideas are inventions, metaphors we’ve created because we cannot imagine ourselves terminating into or originating from nothing.
I suggest the concept of love is such a problem. The proper way to approach love is as a process rather than a destination. Those of us who abandon a relationship because it did not produce the desired results are really abandoning a process of learning. You may say, “That’s fair, but sometimes we engage in the wrong process.” That may be true, but there’s a greater danger in making the wrong judgement.
If you abandon the right process because you think it was the wrong process, then you’ll almost certainly find yourself back in the same process once you start over. For example, if you’re burned because you picked up a pan from a hot stove, then you could blame the pan and say you picked up the wrong pan. After that, you’ll go on to pick up another hot pan and burn yourself again. The real lesson pertains to the creation of heat, not the expression of it. Or in emotional terms, how is love created not how is love consumed. Such a confusion of direction seems to be the case in most relationship struggles I’ve witnessed.
Talking About the Body
The body learns without language, and it remembers without language too. Our bodies conceive of problems differently from our minds. Rather than puzzles to be understood, situations are opportunities to be engaged, avoided, or rearranged. The body does not understand situations in terms of a hierarchy of concepts, it understands situations as offering positive or negative consequences. The body does not need an explanation of the hot stove.
Our minds don’t understand things in the same way, and they don’t need to. There is a reciprocity between how the mind learns and how the body learns that builds appreciation from both ends of the spectrum, from the cerebral end and the somatic end. All of us always engage in this bicameral form of learning, but some of us get farther than others.
I see the trend toward somatic therapy as a trend toward new habits of engagement, and away from conceptual understanding. This is a healthy approach to resolving violence, but it’s only a beginning. The body’s understanding, such as it is, truly sits beneath what’s conceptual, but it does not replace it. The body learns to avoid the hot stove, but it does not learn how to cook.
Bringing Mind and Body Together
A good therapist spouts nonsense. That’s because the reality of what we perceive must not be confused with the constructions we conceive. We must recognize our perceptions as more fundamental than our concepts. We say, “Knock on wood,” or “Cross my heart and hope to die,” or “As God is my witness,” or “I feel it in my bones.” All of these are nonsense statements that mean we have some sense of truth that is beyond our discretion.
These statements are forms of integration. They connect the concepts with the percepts. In truth, both are subjective but the percepts are more reliably understood. Sensation is not all that real–we can easily confuse what’s burning hot for what’s freezing cod–so we need to continue to be alert to context. Despite such uncertainties, no one takes conceptual direction from the sensations in their bones. What we mean is that we are deeply committed to certain points of view.
A therapist should recognize this quandary. You do not have flexibility to rearrange the feelings you have in your bones. No amount of refitting your emotions, as if they were Legos®, will create a structure that replaces what you feel in your bones. What a counselor can do is destroy one structure at the same time as they present another.
Imagine you’re dangling from a helicopter with one hand, while in your other hand you’re holding the bag of all your hopes and fears. You feel your strength is failing, but how can you switch hands without dropping the bag?
Here’s where a counselor can help: they can make you drop the bag. They can do this by temporarily anesthetizing you against the pain of loss and, after you’ve dropped the bag, you realize you didn’t need it. Unfortunately, what counseling often does is simply take the bag from you so that you can switch hands. After you’ve reattached yourself to your previous attitudes, the average counselor will give you back your bag.
You need to get away from the bag. Your hopes and fear keep you circling around the same track. It’s also true that you’d benefit from a more useful vehicle, which means a change in your habits and situations, but that’s a different sort of change than releasing your attachments.
The School of Useful Nonsense
You must start with nonsense; you can only forge a new path by rejecting the idea that the old path was the only one that made any sense. The new path will seem to lie somewhere on the spectrum from uninteresting to outrageous, and the further it is from your old path, the more alien it will seem
This is why a good counselor is not replaceable by a Large Language Model of artificial intelligence. Such an A.I. will reassemble your conceptual pieces along the popular lines of other people’s expressions. But until people can describe the connection between their precipitating distress and their final revelation, the A.I. will not find a precedent for the change you need.
At some point in the future, when people understand themselves and their stories of self-transformation follow similar lines, Large Language Models may find the solutions to your problems in the archives of other people’s explanations. These will not be logical from the perspective of what you’re starting with. These new understandings only make sense from the perspective of the new thinking that they create.
What you need to do is throw away your rectangular Legos and get spherical building blocks. Obviously, you won’t be able to build the same structures as you’re currently struggling to build, you’ll be moving on a different path.
The skillful counselor introduces you to your spherical building blocks. The trick is that these blocks may make as little sense to the counselor as they make to you. The good counselor is not held back by a lack of sense because the path they see is felt in their bones. They just have more flexible bones.
Throwing It Out and Starting Over
What you need is a tool kit that doesn’t make sense. Tools whose fittings don’t mate with the elements in your bag of hopes and fears. How will they convince you? The only way I know of is to show you a world that you do not know, have not perceived, and cannot yet understand.
It would be a mistake to presume the counselor knows exactly where they’re taking you. They can’t because it’s not a question of rectangles versus spheres. Those are personal metaphors and everyone’s rectangles and spheres are slightly different. Certainly your attachments differ from those of another person.
The counselor is like the phenethylamines in MDMA or the lysergic acids in LSD. The molecules don’t know your problems or the solutions to them, but they break apart your mental structures and let your mind put them back together differently.
This is not within the power of current A.I. models, but it’s not particularly magical, it’s just less prescriptive or predictable than what these models produce. Psychedelics, like therapy, work because they can precipitate change. They don’t provide you with answers, they loosen your grip on what you presume were answers. You still need to prepare yourself. A counselor who is bigger than a molecule can provide preparation, but you need to recognize the need for it.
When this works, you’ll drop your bag of hopes and desires. What are you left with? Nothing. That’s always the most fruitful place to start.
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