June 2018
I have a friend who when confronted by a
single sight of something fabricates a whole story around it, filling in
details that seemingly come out of nowhere. For example, he and I were driving
together through the forest around here and came upon a woman hitchhiking at a
really awkward corner where there was no way we could pick her up, so we kept
on going. A few minutes later my friend came up with a whole story about this
woman where she was escaping from a horrible marriage where the man beat her. I
said, we don’t know that, her car might’ve broken down, or she might’ve hitchhiked
there and now was wanting to leave, or maybe prefers to hitchhike, or any other
unknown reason.
Making up stories is less about doing it for
the fun as attempts to see things according to a pre-existing idea, experience,
or hypothesis about human situations in ways that do not consider alternative
possibilities. This is known as cognitive
bias, or confirmation bias. The
single idea is elaborated on in order to see it in recognizable ways. My friend concocted his story to fit
something familiar to himself.
I need to add some background here. My
friend was visiting a relative who also lives here whose marriage had broken
down. He had also spoken to me of the imminent divorce of a young Perth friend of
his (a young woman he helped rear). So, marriage breakdowns were very much on
his mind. The random encounter of a woman on the side of a forest road was made
to fit a pattern and situation that was preoccupying him.
This is fairly common tendency that is quite
useful when trying to make sense of the behaviour of other people when we don’t
know the full story as it allows for a seeding of empathy for others in the
community and it is a time saving exercise. It is one, however, that is open to
misuse. When we construct a story around a single observed fact about a behaviour,
we risk stereotyping others with our own bias.
The psychotherapist has to deliberately abandon cognitive biases. For a therapist
to run with a preconceived idea is to not listen to what is actually being
presented. Indeed, we are trained to put aside our preconceptions, to suspend
our beliefs about how the world and its inhabitants “should” be according to
our own worldview, so as to hear how the other person actually operates in the
world. This is what we call epoché. If
we, in this profession, don’t suspend our judgement, we are no good to anybody.
Effective therapy begins with the close
hearing of the texture and resonance of voice, the words chosen, whole body demeanour,
the capacity for listening, their willingness to enter the therapeutic
conversation, the heaviness or lightness of being (too heavy, too light), avoidance,
confrontation, repeated accounts, and so on. We need a sensitivity to be
present with the person with us, and a not too ready desire for resolution. We
have to hold back solutions, because if we go in with what we consider good
solutions without having actually understood where the person is coming from,
then we have effectively lost them. We also need to be able to say we don’t
know sometimes and even to enter the dark place of ignorance and sit with it to
see what emerges.
There is something of the scientist in the
epoché, but only in the sense that here
practiced dispassionate detachment is actually being very present, caring, and listening
deeply to the other person. What must be realized though that to achieve it, we
have to know our own mind, with its predilections, biases, assumptions and this
means that to practice psychotherapy we should (at least as I and many others
see it) have experience of our own therapy and also engage in regular
supervision. We need a clarity of vision and self awareness to be good at what
we do and this practice of bringing awareness to our own lives needs to be
continued throughout our whole working life.
