Musing on assumptions

Musing on assumptions     by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
June 2010

     The other day a friend and I went kayaking on the Wilson River in Lismore. What an amazing place we live near, yet barely know. I was blown away by the tumble of lushness tingling with unexpected flowers; a richness of life practically hidden beneath the bridges that link South Lismore to cbd.  We saw a raft of branches and weed ferrying a little group of ducks downstream. I was reminded of the little rafts ferrying Thai children across rivers to school. 

      Fish were leaping, water birds scurrying, as I, in my kayak skimmed across the perfectly glassy surface, amazed, yet again, how easy it is. This expedition was my first in this part of the world. I regularly took my kayak out on the Swan River near Fremantle in WA close to where I lived until early 2009. Sometimes, and that was the most fun, I kayaked on the ocean.  There, I was sometimes visited by dolphins paralleling my movements as we slipped a wave or two together. Ah, the magic of it all.

     It is mucking in, on, and around water that inspires me. I am a swimmer, snorkler, diver, and kayaker and playing in this way I come to know my own thoughts on things, what matters to me, and how I may achieve what sets my heart on fire.

     So, it was in kayaking in Lismore that I began thinking, yet again, about life, death, the inbetween, and assumptions we make about what’s normal. Fortunately, though, this bit of thinking was short-lived on the water.  Kayaking is for being present with water.   I resumed it over coffee, later.

I’ll start with assumptions. Life, death and the inbetween will have to be written about some other time. It seems to me that when we make assumptions about what’s normal behaviour we are short-circuiting a process that is really much more complex. What is normal is open to dispute. My passion for water play (I can’t call what I do, sport) is distinctly non-normal for women of a certain age who relish rounds of golf. The estimation of what’s normal, in this example, arises from a comparison between preferred activities. Is such a quality of estimation reasonable when deciding what’s normal behaviour in matters of the heart: falling in and out of love, grief, feelings of loss, reactions to trauma, etc.?

     What’s normal?  When two people declare love for each other, yet one does not act in a loving way and the other is grief stricken, is the experience of the latter  non-, or ab-normal? This scenario is quite common and one I occasionally witness in my clinical practice. The depth of grief experienced by the person, who has declared her love and meant it with every fibre of her being, is not emotionally met by the empty words of the other, even though the words sound right. Writing this, it seems obvious. No, the loving one is the ok one. Yet, quite often, it is the grieving, loving one who comes to therapy – sent by the partner who speaks well, but means not much. My work, in this regard, is to validate the realness of this person’s experience. 

     How is it that we, so often, doubt ourselves so much, and take on the assumptions about our experiences that effectively undermine what we know intimately to be real? In the example above, it is in terrible heartache and the confusion surrounding the double-speak of the partner that the capacity for seeing clearly is lost. 

     Assumptions subvert the complexity of human interaction. They make things seem to make sense, without necessarily doing so. They are slippery and very unreliable, yet they do serve a purpose in shortcutting across the multiple possibilities of life, the number of which we would have difficulty negotiating otherwise. Getting through a day without making some assumptions would be really difficult. I assume, for instance, that my shoes will fit, my car will go, I’ll earn enough money to stay alive, etc.

      Tragedy comes when assumptions are made about other people, nature and the cosmos and never consciously questioned. Knowledge about the world would be miniscule and our relationships with one another well and truly stuck.

     The art is to apply awareness – and counselling is a very useful tool to learn how to do this – to what is felt and being said by others and ourselves and to determine what is authentic and what is not.  Separating out what belongs to us, emotionally, and what belongs to others is empowering, and a necessary skill in the art of life. 

Copyright @ 2013 Dr Elizabeth McCardell