This week, I return to my pre-retreat project of running through the 14 couplets I see lie at the heart of the humanistic psychotherapy tradition. Last time around, we looked at our situated freedom. Now, we see how freedom to choose comes with responsibility….
We are constantly making choices AND we arguably have more choice (and agency to choose) than we see. When I was sharing my day of writing with my wife, and my approach of ‘couplets’ to tour the main concepts of this approach, she asked me how the recognition of a freedom to choose had changed over my life. Pausing, it felt like two things had shifted: firstly, I see the opportunity for choice more frequently. As an analogy, the moments the door is open, and I can choose to walk through (or not); and secondly, I am more aware of where it is possible to create opportunity – to see the door is slightly ajar and it can still be opened, or even the creation of doors themselves! I feel fortunate I have a life that allows such choice; and, I also credit myself being able to make the life I have wanted to live (although this has taken some time, effort, and some heart ache).
A fairly recent example of this was exploring how I might need to safeguard my health. I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue a little under (10) years ago. While I am “well”, I also know this “wellness” is through a monitoring of my energy levels and making choices that serve me. For example, how I structure my week and manage my client case load has to be with a sense of dynamic balance. I know the bottom line is with me: firstly, the way I chose to live the first half of my life undoubtedly contributed to arriving with this condition; and secondly, if I return to living at that speed, my body says “no Helen”. As anyone with a chronic health condition will experience, it is hard to let go of what we feel is our ‘normal’: the frustration of not being able to make the same choices (and get away with them, in my case!); and the anxiety of “will I ever get better?” And only we (I) could make those changes. I now craft the life to help me stay well AND, there are consequences to those choices. A “good choice” (cutting back work hours) means better energy AND it means less income; less work hours also allow more writing time; AND it means more time alone (which has its pros and cons). I hope this conveys what is intended – there is no right and wrong here; it is “simply” choice and responsibility for those choices. And as Sartre et al would concur – we ARE our choices; our identity and characteristics are a consequence, not a cause, of those choices. I am “well”, I am “a writer”, I am “alone”, I am “more present”. I add that last one because another consequence of choosing to see fewer clients is I am all the better a therapist for it. Bringing back to mind Rollo May (May, 1967) note that the “I am” resides – for me, this signifies something of the “decisions that are ultimately without any solid ground beneath them” (Cooper, 2003 pg 14). Our identity is the weaving of our choices; and underneath is the no-thing-ness of our being that remains.
Having shared the above personal reflections, two phrases that I acknowledge have helped me come to mind. The first being one I encountered almost simultaneously (one might say a moment of synchronicity) – I was embarking on my meditation teacher training and counselling course when these words (often ascribed to Viktor Frankl, but equally something the Buddha might say!): “Between stimulus and response lies a space. In that space lie our freedom and power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness”. Meditating helped me recognise the space, and the moment of being just ahead of an impulse forward into the act. The second phrase (this time ascribed to Fritz Perls) “Responsibility can also be spelled response-ability: the ability to respond, to have thoughts, reactions, emotions in a certain situation; the ability to be alive, to feel, to be sensitive. Now, this responsibility, the ability to be what one is, is expressed through the word ‘I’.” It is a word worth breaking down.
The freedom and the ability to choose and respond makes sense from a phenomenological position. From the outside as observer of others it might be possible to say human behaviours are caused or determined; but subjectively, we know most of our living is through choice-making (if we can slow down enough to see the stimulus and response). As pointed out by Cooper (2012), when we pay attention to our life as lived it is “peppered with the experience of deciding one thing over another…constantly I experience myself as making choices – as having to do one thing or the other – and of proactively engaging with the world”.
There is a very practical consideration for our client work here. To say there is always choice comes up against the search for (and explanation in) cause and effect. I know – from a long and deep therapeutic exploration of my own childhood – some of the causes and conditions at the base of my eventual arrival in chronic fatigue. And yet, what was true and real in that childhood environment might not be so definitive. More accurate would be to say the ‘little Helen’ made choices as to how she responded based upon interpretations of her environment and the messages she heard. Were they the best choices? At the time, maybe they were the only ones she was able to see – and because they worked in the immediate, she kept making them…until the consequences outweighed the survival (benefits). We will meet clients with more sensitive territory to navigate than the childhood story I bring: clients who were victims of childhood abuse and / or neglect for instance. How do we tease out how they continue to find themselves in abusive and / or neglectful relationships? The existential tradition encourages us to keep looking at possibility and choice: even in the most restrictive of conditions; even if this is happening at a level we are not entirely conscious of (Cooper, 2012). No better is this exemplified by the incredible attitude (again) offered by Frankl (1984) “In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on condition” (pg 157).
Opening up the recognition of choices made, and the choices that could be made, is at the base of many of the powerful interventions we have within reach as humanistic psychotherapists – and so, we will come back to these principles again. Before we move on, I would like to underline a couple of important things. Firstly, whilst bringing forth the “freedom that is ontologically given….[brings] a certain freshness [and] non-repetitious future” (Todres, 2012, pg 75) we most also hold that such freedom is scary. To us (from the outside) clients are clinging to old, unhelpful ways of being and the choice is obvious. Yet to make that choice is to give up a certain sense of security (remember Sartre’s double nothing-ness, and Perls’ fertile void). At the same time Heidegger was underlining the cost to our ‘ownness’ or authenticity (in his meditations on the ‘they’), he also underlined the cost of leaving our familiar – to do so opens up the twists and turns of what it is to confront an ethical and moral life (1927). Through the groundlessness of our being (no-thing-ness), developing values provides ‘ground’. “Freedom [therefore is] the foundation of all values” (Sartre, 1948, pg 51). As being-in-the-world, and with the radical freedom of openness, we turn toward the impact of our freedom on others. This might be helpful to keep in mind when exploring Heidegger’s ontological structuring of Dasein and his notion ‘care’ (see later, cf). There is a sense of this ‘care’ when we also fold in that every freedom (choice) has its price (Schneider and Krug, 2010). It feels like we need to ‘care’ (keep in our ‘concern’) that whatever we choose implies the non-choice of another possibility, maybe even “a thousand relinquishments” (Bugental, 1987 pg 230): and this might require the acknowledgement of loss and grief of what might have been. I remember starting my undergraduate degree and one (sport psychology) lecturer describing how university life offers three opportunities: scholarship, sporting excellence, and socialising “and you can only do 2 well”. This left me spinning for sometime – and I realise now how much earlier I might have relinquished one; and chosen a pattern for “wellness” much earlier on in my life. The role of a therapist is, in part, therefore “to help clients to respond to, as opposed to react against, panic filled material” (Schneider and Krug, 2010, pg 15).