Yesterday’s arti­cle has gen­er­ated a cou­ple of ques­tions that I really like, and to which I responded. Now I want to get peo­ple to ask ques­tions here on the Blog!

Any­way here’s the two ques­tions, and my response.

Hi Wayne, You wrote:

~~~~~Clients come to learn com­mu­ni­ca­tion. They learn how, and refuse to actu­ally do it with their part­ner. I ask why. “She’s not coop­er­at­ing.” “I know he’ll do it for a month, and then stop.” The resis­tance to doing is two-fold.

First, it is about the fear of try­ing the new thing. Sec­ond, it is the fear of failing.~~~~~

I am inclined to feel there is a more impor­tant rea­son for resis­tance: if I start com­mu­ni­cat­ing hon­estly I will be forced to con­front many of the mil­lions of com­pul­sive beliefs which I use to sim­plify my think­ing. Con­fronting these will demand sig­nif­i­cant change in much of my fun­da­men­tal beliefs. That is really **HARD WORK** and nobody is eager to embark on that.

It is *very* much eas­ier to cling to my exist­ing prej­u­dices and beliefs (most of which I learned as a two-year-old in pre­cisely the way you illus­trated). They have served me poorly for the last 40 (or what­ever) years and the devil you know is always to be preferred.

This is a sound eco­nomic judge­ment. It is not mis­taken. Because the stick-in-the-mud does not know how much it is cost­ing him he can­not take the cost of his fear of change into account. He can see only the very real cost of change and fails to value the ben­e­fits because he does not recog­nise them. Regret­tably, that is a ratio­nal response.

The prob­lem is the same as that you illus­trated for the infant. We can­not under­stand or value what we do not perceive.

This is a chicken-and-egg conun­drum to which I see no sim­ple solution.

My reply:

Ben & Jock think (and I agree) that some­where around 5% of the pop­u­la­tion chooses to exam­ine their beliefs, and let go of what does not work, adopt­ing more ele­gant behav­iours, etc.

I think your analy­sis is spot on. And yet, over the years, what I have seen are clients who decide that the way they are doing life is not worth doing any more, and so they adopt new meth­ods. And I agree this is def­i­nitely not easy, nor for the faint of heart.

I sus­pect that every­one feels a sense of “some­thing is wrong,” and what is wrong tends to be an irra­tional fear one represses. Depend­ing on your ’stripe’ you might see it as Freud did: sex­ual repres­sion, or as exis­ten­tial­ists do: fear of death, or as Bud­dhists do: (my present favourite) as an essen­tial know­ing that I have no “Self” — that there’s just a void “in there.”

Most sim­ply feel greater or lesser amounts of Thoreau’s “quiet des­per­a­tion.” This, it seems to me is what moti­vates the 5% or so to cre­ate another path for them­selves. This requires the assis­tance of some­one who is also on a path of self-exploration and change.

Or so I keep sug­gest­ing… and so it seems to me.

2) Are expe­ri­ences truly dupli­cated? Is it pos­si­ble to step into the same stream twice or do we con­struct the event as if it really is hap­pen­ing rather than pur­su­ing it with curiosity?

My Reply:

As to events, well, your com­ment is sort of the point. Each sit­u­a­tion is entirely unique (and mean­ing­less) — and the ’flaw’ such as it is, is to attempt to fit the unique expe­ri­ence into a pat­tern. Now, in a sense, this makes sense as I don’t want to relearn to chew my food. As i relate to inter and intra per­sonal sit­u­a­tions, how­ever, I want to allow for myself the pos­si­bil­ity to respond, rather than to react. Espe­cially if the way I typ­i­cally ’react’ is get­ting me results I do not want.

In other words, ‘It is too dif­fi­cult until it is not.’

I sus­pect the key to all of this is the will­ing­ness to con­sult my goal for the inter­change. If it is to deepen rela­tion­ship, then my ego need drops away. Which also makes sense, as ’self’ is an erro­neous con­cept any­way! To para­phrase the Bud­dha, “SELF (as opposed to ’life’) is dukka (unsatisfactoriness.)”