I rarely show early drafts of my work but I’m writing a piece for publication in the National Council of Hypnotherapy Journal and i’m very conscious of making potentially complicated and abstract concepts into relatively easy reading. I’d really appreciate feedback, as always. This is the first part of 3;

A Clients’ personal flexibility or how to ride your bike on the Underground.

My poor bike. It’s windy and I’m cycling through North London to Swiss Cottage Library. It’s a Saturday, and I generally take a break from seeing clients and have some self-reflection and study time. I’ve recently had a pattern of cycling to a random location and reading some of the work of Gregory Bateson – who the following musings are largely inspired and indebted to. Bateson was a anthropologist, cyberneticist and philosopher among other things. John Grinder, co-creator of Neuro-Linguistic Programmng often credits him as being an influence upon his thinking.
I’m not really thinking about these things as I’m cycling though, I’m more wondering why I didn’t just get the tube. Camden Town to Swiss Cottage is just a few stops, although I’d still have to deal with the wind when I came out of the underground and walked to the library. Whereas the beauty of cycling is that you can pull up right out the front door.
There’s a much more abstract concept at play here, though. Although such a simple decision isn’t necessarily a collarary into thinking about the nature of one’s own existence – it nevertheless exists inherently within it. It’s a principle that lies at the heart of Bateson’s posthumous work finished by his daughter Angels Fear – An Investigation Into the Nature and Meaning of the Sacred.
On the tube, there is a very definite route which one can go to in a determined groove. It will be fast and it’s pretty certain where exactly (within a small margin of platform difference) your destination will be. It doesn’t allow for flexibility though and the choice of speed or route is very much determined by an other (ie the tubedriver and in turn, the tube controller.)
On the bike, I have a huge range of flexibility (within reason if I’m choosing to stay within the confines of the law) and now within a much larger boundary, but a boundary nonetheless, I can determine my own speed and journey – presumably in relation to the traffic around me. Yet, even with an indicative map in my pocket, I have little idea of the terrain around me or the traffic on this particular day.
It occurs to me as I’m blowing in the wind that the tube seems so attractive today. I wouldn’t have to make the choice out of a couple of options that currently all seem like they all have a slight taint of the unattractive and weather beaten.
Dealing with those conditions, when the tube would have lead me to the same place anyway – but would it have been the journey itself that mattered?
It’s one of a series of questions that has plagued and excited philosophers, the religious, the curious and scientists for generations and I don’t intend to solve it within my brief two wheeled expedition. I’m too busy gripping on for dear life for that and avoiding unyielding black cab drivers who I’m convinced have a sole intention this morning of removing one more cyclist from the hoard!
It’s interesting when we place these questions within the context of the therapeutic work we do. So many different methodologies, practices, subbranches, principles, presuppositions, ideas and models – before we even begin to look at the diversity in the clients themselves. Accepting the idea that at least at an unconscious level, every client has an intention in being in this space with you (otherwise they’d simply be somewhere else doing something else,) what principles or ideas are going to operate at the level of deterministic thinking over free will? Are you going to encourage your client to ride the tube with all it’s rigidity but certainty? Or are you going to encourage your client to ride their bike with all it’s flexibility but overwhelming choice?
I think, only from personal observation, that there’s a left leaning liberal factor to being a therapist. It’s certain inherent in the original presuppositions of NLP and Korzybski’s ‘The map is not the territory.” I think it’s a wonderful premise to work from which is my thinking for a consequence for clarity would be to consider that the territory is not the territory either. I’d imagine, and hope, that most therapists would instinctively presume that they don’t particularly use much ‘tube thinking’ with their clients. Railroading ideas and imposing their own maps, and what they perceive to be their values and beliefs on other people.
Stop and consider, though. How many times, if any, have you suggested to a client that as a result of seeing you they will now notice a change? Even if you haven’t suggested it explicitly, it’s implicit in the the very fact they came to see you with an issue or a problem. How many times, if any, have you said because of the anchor or the suggestive induction, they will now be free of their phobia or temptation to smoke? This is all endemic of Cause and Effect thinking.
A caveat here. Cause and Effect, which you may recognise as being utilised to a large extent by Milton Erickson, is embedded within our language. It’s there every time we ask a ‘Why’ question and it’s because (there I go again!) of this, or rather as a consequence, that it can be difficult to leave behind the shackles of tube line thinking.
There’s an argument to be had here that generally someones issues or problems in life are as a result of cause and effect thinking- so isn’t it better that we use the same thinking patterns to deprogramme them? It can work, and it can work effectively but is it ethical? Are we not merely turning a person from an unhappy robot to a happy robot, rather than encouraging a deeper epistemological change at the unconscious level into not being an obstacle in the space in which the development of a fully functioning human being unshackled from such restraints can flourish?
By way of demonstration, in his most accessible work Mind and Nature; A Necessary Unity – Bateson asks us to consider playing billards. We could take the best mathematicians and geometrists in the world, and they could correctly predict to an amazingly accurate quantification the exact angle and location at which the ball will cease to roll at once hit with the snooker cue.
If you replaced the billard cue with an animal, a cat for example, and chose to kick the cat (I really don’t condone animal violence but the hypothetical serves the example well) – there’s no possible way of ever predicting where the cat will land. The cat has choice. It can run, bite , scratch, hide, or give us a behaviour we could never expect. The cat is it’s own organic system within the wider system of the context of the situation and interacting with the other systems (ie The person kicking it and even the observers of the experiment.)

It’s getting cold and I need to concentrate on the road. To be continued….

UPDATE: I appreciate that the Journal Publication are fairly stringent in that their articles should ONLY be published in the journal. However, this first draft will be so unrecognisably different from the finished product, I don’t anticipate an issue. It is only the themes that shall remain the same and this is merely a playground in which to present them.