The Flow-er Model: Step 1-3

This is the second part on the Flow-er Model. The first part is here.

Step 1-3 in The Flow-er Model concerns the basis for energy and flow. You can think of these steps as taken before the game begins, in how the game designer prepare you for the game, in how the game master (if any) explains the game to the other players, and in the play group's already set play culture and expectations. However, there aren't clear, hard borders between step 1-3 and step 4-7. It does make pedagogical sense to split them into these two categories, though.

1. Players' investment (The sun)
Energy is the basic currency of creativity. Just as everything starts with the sun, nothing will happen in your game if your friends doesn't show up and invest energy into it.

The more energy the players invest into the game, the more energy reserves it has to spend. You can invest energy by coming to the session eager to play, cook food for the other players (which builds group coherence as well!) and write little bits of in-game fiction or play reports, and prepare sessions, write scenarios, make hand-outs.

This is can be risky though, for if the other players do not invest as much as you do, you risk disappointment and bitterness, just as in any other relationship. (See my post on trust and investing it)


2. Sense of security (The soil)
As human beings, one of our top psychological needs is a need for control and understanding of the situation we're in. Therefore, a creative atmosphere requires the players to feel secure, and secure in their roles, just as a seed needs to sit secure in it's soil. For that to happen, the game needs to adress four points:

1. What is expected of me as a participant?
2. What contributions am I allowed to do, what authority do I hold over the fiction?
3. What if I lose control over play?
4. What if I mess up and do it wrong?

The first point (What is expected of me?) is all about what you need to do to make play good. Are you supposed to be inquisitive, tactical, obedient or creative in the game? Should your characters be reckless archetypical adventurers or ordinary people with great character nuance? If it is unclear what kind of mood and playstyle your game is going for, it's going everywhere and nowhere.

The second point (What authority do I hold over the fiction?) are all about making authority, stance and narration rights clear for the players. For traditional games, these are not a big issue: As a player, you decide whatever your character says, thinks, feels and attempts. To see if you are succesful in your attempts, you roll dice. Everything else, the game master decides. Whenever you leave established tradition (could be traditions and conventions of story games as well, of course!) of story authority however, you must be clear on these points.

If the players are confused with what is expected of them, how they play/run this game, or what they are allowed to say and do to the fiction, this creates insecurity. Timid players will feel intimidated and avoid doing anything while they feel confused, while brash players will just act to release tension, perhaps trampling more timid players in the process. Insecurity and confusion makes flow impossible, so always strive towards clarity!

The third point (What if I lose control over play?) is about creating a safe environment for your players. If the GM or the game have an attitude of punishing, opposing and controlling the player's characters, the players will close up and spend their energy to defend themselves against the GM's contributions, wasting energy both they and the GM could use to move the game forward. It is only natural that the players try to retain control over their characters' fates: The player characters embody the players' investment in the game, and the means through which they interact and play the fiction. If you take those away, the players have nothing, so the players will protect what they have.

As a GM, if your players are defensive, try telling them "I will never harm your characters against your will, and nothing will happen to them that you find not funny or uncomfortable". Maybe you'll see them relax a little bit, right there! A sense of control begets a sense of security, and a sense of security begets creativity.

Now, someone might object that danger and opposition is what makes the characters' lives interesting. Well, have you ever done the trust exercise where one person falls backwards, and another peson catches them? If your players feel 100% secure they will not lose control of their characters fate, they will willingly let themselves lose control. They will willingly fall backwards, have terrible things happen to their characters and explore catastrophes for their characters. Instead of you doing it against them though, you will do it with them, enhancing the game's energy rathe than blocking it. To have a sense of control is a very, very deep human need, and when we trust that feeling, we allow ourselves to do scary things.

The fourth point (What if I mess up and do it wrong?) sounds trivial, but it's huge. Being creative and improvising is scary! Everyone can improvise, but everyone also fears failure and looking like the fool. This too, is something deeply human. Playing towards flow demands a great deal of agency through your players, and not everyone feels safe with this!

But; If you cultivate a game where expectations, authority, vision and expectations are legible and clear, if you cultivate a safe and friendly environment, that will go a long way to make players feel more secure in their agency. Also, you can design your game to use techniques of Yes, and... (step 7), and then the game will go half the distance for your players, easing the load of performance anxiety markedly. Just going the second half of the distance is a lot less intimidating.

Also, fear of failure is probably the biggest difficulty for GM's to abandon pre-planned stories and start improvising instead. Give them the tools and the security they need in your game design, if your game is meant to be improvised!


3. Shared vision (The seed)
The seed holds an idea, a vision, for how the plant as a whole will turn out. Likewise, the players of a game will have a vision for what they're interested in, what they expect from the game, how the game world works and operates.

Much like sense of security, this step needs to provide a clear framework to the players - The game should evoke images in the players' heads, and these images needs to match up to each other. A game that conveys an unclear concept of what the characters do and what the world around them looks like will leave the players lost and confused, maybe heading in different directions.

The setting need not be detailed, it's enough to describe some details in evocative language for the players to get a vision and a feel for it. Again, it's a question of sense of security - As long as the players get a feel for the world, a feel for what kind of contributions and mood belong there, they feel safe contributing to it.

If the players' creative visions for the game differ, they will in best cases talk it through and reach a shared vision, and in worst cases fight each other to enforce their vision, or suck it up and feel bitter. This will make the energy and investment from step 1 fly all over the place, crashing into each other, and this is the one source of roleplaying drama.

Once again, a problem with pre-planning your story as a GM: You will have a strong vision that your players do not yet share with you, which makes it harder for your players to approach your vision. Furthermore, you have already spent great investment in your vision, which makes it harder for you as a GM to approach your players ideas of what should happen. In other words: When you have created a cool scene to show your players, you will steer play towards that scene rather than adapt to flow, encourage flow, and go with the flow.

The Big Model places great emphasis on shared vision, look up Social Contract and Creative Agenda in this article. Also, I talk a little more about shared vision here.

• The Flow-er Model: Introduction
• The Flow-er Model: Step 4-7

Trust is the basic currency of life

Today, I wish to tell you that:
- Trust is the basic currency of life.
- As such, it can be invested, or bet if you will.
- A balance between trust and distrust must be managed
- In finding this balance, we construct working models of how to live our lives
- But perhaps evolution has put a greater emphasis on distrust than is optimal for the modern human

So yeah, I believe that having a sense of security, or trust towards oneself, is the one basic measurement of both our mental health and our ability.

Which is, you know, kind of a given, since a sense of security is just that: It’s an emotional assessment of the given situation, a belief that things are under control and won’t end in disaster. (See my post Man will survive)

But it runs both ways: We can have a sense of security in ourselves because we are well equipped to deal with the current situation, but we can also become better equipped to deal with the current situation by finding a sense of security in ourselves.

I would say that this sense of security, is the one single biggest psychological issue for the modern human. Trust in that I am capable of handling myself, trust that I am a valuable person, trust that I am accepted and loved by my peers. This is sort of an expanding on the concepts I introduced in A model of mental health.

We are today living in an individualistic society without authorities and traditions which can tell us what profession to pursue, what life to live, how to judge our worth as a humans, which was the case in the old collectivistic societies of tradition, family and religion. Suddenly, we need to make these calls ourselves.

There is plethora of psychological and layman-psychological terms for these issues: Self-efficacy, self-worth, self-esteem, locus of control, self-image, attachment style, insecurity-security.

In fact, everything that is good in humanity requires trust.

• Generosity towards others requires a trust in that these people will not exploit us.
• To dream and to work towards that dream requires that we trust in our visions, that we do not fear failure and disappointment.
• When we create and express ourselves, we show others our innermost being, and we need to believe that this is something valuable that other people will respect.
• Listening to and caring for other people requires a belief that their inner darkness won't hurt us.
• Love, to open up to another person, requires trust.

By the same token, many things in humanity which are not so great, are a form of distrust or defense, a way to close yourself up and keep others away.

To be mean-spirited, aggressive, distant, anxious, afraid, delusional, psychotic or borderline are different ways to be defensive, to keep people or thoughts away which could otherwise hurt our selves.


Domains of security
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that this balance of trust-distrust and security-insecurity is so central. For an organism to maximize it's chance of forwarding it's genes to offspring, it should be ambitious in order to gain advantages when the situation allows it, and cautious in order to survive when the situation requires it.

Attachment theory is a great example of this evolutionary readiness for adaptation. Bowlby proposed that we have in our brains basically three pre-wired models of approaching other people; Secure, clingy or avoidant. (Generalizing, of course.) Which model we choose depend on how we are treated by our parents, and this is to adaption to the environment we grow up in. For instance, if we are born in a place where food and protection is scarce, and our parents doesn't always have time available to tend to our needs, it makes sense to be clingy to maximize one's chance of survival. If a child is given a sense of security or trust, sie instead learns that the world is not such a bad place, and that sie should be ambitious, open and trusting, because that will be the adaptive stance to maximize one's chances for survival, development and procreation.

As I touched in my post A model of mental health, one can see Abraham Maslow's model of needs in much the same way.

Attachment theory only accounts for the intimacy need, how secure we feel in that other people care for us and love us. In the same way, Maslow proposes that you can have a sense of security or insecurity in any need.

If, for instance, my need for esteem isn’t satisfied properly by those around me, I understand that I need to work hard to feel esteem, and that it cannot be taken for granted. This becomes an internal working model for how I view and handle the world, what strategies I use to maximize security, love and satisfaction.

With a sense of insecurity in esteem, I become worried and preoccupied with securing esteem, even when I’ve found friends who accept me and who I am - Our internal working models doesn’t change easily.

I believe that confidence and status is a sort of security (or trust in oneself) as well, but I'll save that for another post.

Trust, or don’t?
Everyone must walk a balance between trust and distrust, between openness and defense.

When we use trust, we are capable of the greatest feats, but we are also at our most vulnerability - Vulnerability towards disappointment and deceit.

If trust and sense of security is the basic currency of life, you can certainly invest it. You can invest trust in other people, and you can invest energy and belief in your dreams. If you have invested wisely, then the results are glorious. You realize your dreams, or grow close to someone you've opened up to. If you invest in something that fails, it’s our most terrible moments of disapointment or betrayal.

So we certainly need a certain amount of distrust and skepticism, but I also believe that since no-one has to fend for their survival in our modern and peaceful nations, we are pre-wired for more distrust than we need to be. Prisoners dilemma. It pays to be distrusting because other people are distrusting/cold/protective of their own interests. At the same time, by tradition, we put way too much trust in an unsustainable lifestyle, the one big threat against humanity today.

Anyway

I felt I just had to get the first draft of creative roleplaying out of my system and down in electronics, and I think the writing suffered as a result. Originally it was just one post that grew into two, the first being rather dry and the second being rather passionate.

I saw "Where the wild things are" yesterday. Really nice, with relevance to this blog. It has life issues, the frustrations of growing up and not being able to articulate these frustrations yet, and portrayed in a way I could believe in. Furthermore, there is a lot, like a lot on expectations there, expectations for the future, on other people...

At one point, one of the wild things smashes up his work of love. When he returns to it, Max (the main character) has a left a little twig heart with his acronym in it. He raises his hand as if to smash that too, but he can't. It's just too strong and he gives in. I cried a little bit then. Okay, well, I choked up like a bitch. It was awesome. :D

An interplay model of roleplaying

Background
My thoughts on roleplaying are influenced by my interest in impro theatre and client-centered therapy. Here, I intend to make a general model of roleplaying, and in the next post follow up the general with the specific, going into detail of "creative roleplaying", a style of play I am particulary interested in exploring.

In this model, I view roleplaying as movement, a process that is happening in the here and now of a group. Also note that one of my key concepts, flow, is said to require great experience - So perhaps my model is only accurate in capturing the process of experienced roleplayers?

In any case, In this post I make four statements on roleplaying in general:


1) Roleplaying is a group process
As a tradition, roleplaying games have been written as simulations. The books contain rules and the setting that together describe a world and its set of laws, and you are offered to bring your character to life within this world and experience it through that character.

But I believe that the act of roleplaying is not primarily a simulation, but a group process, an interplay between players. This is an aspect of roleplaying that just cannot be ignored, but historically it has been grossly neglected in the writing of roleplaying games. How often does a roleplaying book concern itself with how to take care of the other player's creativity, or how to settle on a social contract together? Oftentimes, writing roleplaying games seems to be lacking the assumptions that some people are actually going to play this. Perhaps the worst example of this is the following rules which where present in all (?) of roleplaying games released by the leading swedish roleplaying publisher in the 80s-90s:

1) The GM is always right
2) If, for some reason, the GM would not be right, see rule 1)

This is denying the interplay in roleplaying.


2) The ultimate goal of roleplaying is flow
Flow is the sensation of losing oneself in an activity, to be completely immersed and absorbed in concentration. All of your cognitive (thought) resources are in the game, so you don't have to consider what to do next - You just do it. You go with the flow, so to speak.

In my introduction to roleplaying I mentioned three aspects of roleplaying: Game, immersion and story. I believe flow can be achieved in all three.

I have experienced flow sensations in story-focused games when going on a creative spree with my fellow storytellers. To immerse completely in your character is the equivalent of immersive play. I haven't encountered flow in game-focused roleplaying, but since the sensation of flow is common to most task-oriented human activity it should definitively be possible when trying to best an in-game challenge, such as tactically mastering a combat scene.

Now, achieving this flow state should be understood as exactly an ultimate goal. Casual roleplaying can have the goal of meeting and relaxing with friends, but I believe that working with the assumptions that leads towards flow also work towards easier achieve casual roleplaying. Working towards flow is making the game smoother, simply put.

It might also be prudent to point out that constant flow is not necessarily a good goal for roleplaying - In most stories, we switch tempo between energy-filled intense scenes, and refreshing and slow ones. In any case, I wish to make the point that a good game is one that moves forward, one that has energy.


3) Blocks are counterflow
So the game needs to go somewhere. It needs to move forward to be interesting and captivating, and anything that breaks this energy is counter to flow and enjoyment of the game. As these elements are blocking the game, let's call them "blocks". They are the phenomena that block the games movement, disrupts and distracts players when they are in the game.

Imagine that you know what do next in the game, you have a vision (I'll return to this) in your head, you just need to verbalise it to bring it into our shared imagined world. If you're interrupted in that process, you have been blocked. Your movement loses its momentum, and thus the game loses momentum.

What counts as blocks depends on what you're concentrated on, of course. A player immersing in hir character and the fantasy world is blocked by out of character-discussions between players, or the game master breaking out the rulebook.
A player focused on creating story is blocked and disrupted if elements that run counter to the storys established mood is introduced.
Most everyone is blocked by long discussions on how to interpret game rules during game time.


 4) You need to share the same expectations on the game
When doing roleplaying, I believe that shared expectations on the game is the very foundation without which rewarding interplay between the players are impossible. The greater extent of shared expectations, the better the game works.

Expectations can be social expectations, such as "We all show up at Daniel's place at six o'clock" and "We don't make fun of each other's characters". Let's call these the social contract.

They can also be expectations on the game world, such as "My character is a real upstanding hero, I expect others to view that way too" or "I expect those vines would be a perfect to climb that wall". Let's call this vision, how we see the game world.

We can use expectations to construct three levels of how well the game is going. I will use a graphical representation of the interactions between four light-beige coloured people around a gaming table. Pardon the eurocentricity. :)

4.1) The expectations aren't shared

If this is the case, you have a problem. If the players have different ideas of how to conduct themselves, what goes for this group, which mood is appropriate in the game, and how events should resolve in the game ("I hit you, you're dead!" "No I'm not, you missed!" to quote a classic line from children's play) you get frustration and conflict among the players.

Players might resort to try to enforce their vision on the others rather than working collaboratively.  "Okay, your character is making mine look bad, but I expect him to look cool, so I'll have to kill your character" or development along such lines is one way of reaching your personal vision by force. This means constant blocking of each other.

4.2) The expectations are shared

If this is the case, the vision of the game in each players head are matching. When you verbalise your vision, it doesn't block anyone elses vision, but rather works in concert with them, creating a shared, sustained fantasy. The game gathers momentum and it goes somewhere.

4.3) Flow

Without blocking, the players can get into the flow together so to speak, and their visions are not only matching anymore, they become a communal vision shared by all, almost tangible. The players can scoop story ideas, in-character lines, et cetera from this shared vision without hesitation, just creating and creating together. Each contributition builds on the previous, moves the game forward and energizes the other players.

This should be understood as a continuum. There are always some amout of blocks appearing in all games, and a flow or sensations of flow can be achieved without being completely immersed in the game.

You can draw a parallell to my model of mental health, at the bottom we have defensive-aggressive, in the middle communal and at the top creative. When roleplaying, just as when living our life, we need a sense of security. A sense that my contributions works, that they are worth something, that they won't be blocked, and that I won't have to justify myself.


Conclusions
No matter your creative agenda (Game, immersion, story), roleplaying is a group process. As a player and a game designer, you have a responsiblity to take care of other players creative input - Probably most relevant to immersion and simulation games, where it is easy to hide behind in-game logic. "But that's what my character would do!"
Games should be designed for clarity above all things, as confusion will lead to blocks of the game. Clarity builds a sense of security of which the players can work creatively from.
Games should be designed to provide energy to the group, not to drain energy.

Expectations

Expectations are huge. Once you have your sense of security and a sense of coherence, I'd say expectations is the one big deal in life. Take a look at expectations in these subjects:

Life happiness
Our overall life happiness and satisfaction is not primarily determined by actual life conditions, but rather our expectations, comparisons and outlook on life. Did we expect more? Then we are disappointed. Did we expect less? Then we feel lucky. It is interesting how having a monetary windfall will make us happier, but having a lot of money does not make one happier, our expectations soon adjust to our newfound wealth. The book "The Art of Happiness", written by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, explores this idea further.

(A friend of mine poignantly pointed out that she felt truly happy in the moments you cannot compare to others, moments of strong community together with friends, or meaningful moments)

Therapy
In Psychological Therapy, Klaus Grawe describes positive expectations, or hope, as one of the most important things to establish in psychotherapy. Thereapy must change expectations to the better, and positive expectations on the therapy and a trust in the therapist energizes the client, giving a positive effect very early in psychotherapy, and this is can in turn strengthen the positive expectations.

Cognitive behaviour therapy can, in a way, be said to work entirely with faulty expectations, since it works with our inner assumptions such as "If I get up on stage in front of people, I will make a fool out of myself" or "I will never, ever find true love". - The models and answers to life issues.

What is interesting is that my model of mental health is based on sense of security, and a sense of security is just about the same thing as positive expectation on the future, based on experiences in the past.

Impro
In impro theater, we spend a lot of time to be obvious. Stay within the circle of expectations! Do what you could expect from this scene! Be obvious! What is neat about this is, what is obvious to us will seem genius to others, just because it fits so well. It doesn't have to be mundane and boring - Maybe to you it is obvious that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, for instance - So you go with that! Others will think it's genius and go "Of couuuurse..." (because it is obvious)

Since the scenes I've done impro on is always without props or the background of previous scenes, a improv scene really is built out of nothing else than the actors assumptions (or expectations) of what objects are present, the mood of the scene, the characters and their relations... When all the actors share these visions, act on the imagined objects and relationships, the scene becomes tangible, alive - It's only in the mind of the actors and the audience, but it becomes an entity of its own. This generates a great sensation of presence, and community with the other players. It lifts you higher! (Remember my last post?)

Roleplaying
In roleplaying games, I'd say expectations... are king.

Conflict when playing invariable spawns from differing expectations and visions, or from real life issues played out in the context of the game. Different players can have different expectations on how the fantasy world should look, how it should work, what a character should be able to do, what style of play should be pursued, etc.

This can be almost completely avoided by carefully adressing just what kind of expectations the players has on the game, instead of just making assumptions.

The opposite is true as well: When all players share expectations, when their visions come together, the same high and immersion can be achieved as the one i described in impro.

Myself
What's interesting is, I've primarily analysed my expectations as something negative: I can charge something or someone with expectations, only seeing one possible route which will end in either success (yay!) or failure (gaaah!). When my expectation doesn't match up with others, this can be a very painful situation.

Conclusion
I think the conclusion to be drawn is that expectations are powerful forces pointed towards others and towards the future. When expectations are open, positive, and shared by others, energy and success is almost inevetable. A sense of security can provide these positive expectations.

But when expectations are negative, the energizing charge of positive energy is lacking.
(Another friend of mine described how she used the strategy of pessimism when she was a child, so she would never be disappointed. It worked, but how can you invest and actually succeed, if you always assume you will fail?)

When expectations are stiff and forced, you will be too, pre-occupied with how things must turn out, rather than taking in, and adapting to, how they are right now.

When different people have different expectations, someone will be disappointed or frustrated. These expectations set you up for failure.

Triforce

I think my triforce is Courage, Sensitivity and Hope. These are my three strengths, my greatests assets in life and as a psychotherapist-to-be.

I have Courage when exploring myself, trusting others with my serets.
I have Sensitivity when I'm listening to others, being careful with their inmost feelings.
I have Hope when finding joy in humanity, putting trust in my fellow humans, believing in them.

But they are also my vulnerabilities.
Too much courage, and I force myself to be self-revealing rather than open, exposing myself and alienating others.
Too much Sensitivity, and I put guilt on myself, project others' disapproval upon myself, closing myself up rather than opening up to others.
Too much Hope, and I charge my life with expectations rather than optimism, I put great expectations on what I will accomplish, what heights I shall reach in my relations to other people, becoming rigid rather than open, anxious of failure rather than hopeful.

One force is balanced by the other two.
Courage needs sensitivity to feel and stay in touch with reality, and when sensitivity recognises a difficult place, it needs courage to actually go there. They both need hope to tell me that, "Yes, people do like you just the way you are, you don't need to be strong or compliant". Hope needs a moderation of courage and sensitivity when meeting reality.

...

Notice how I define my healthy self as balanced and open, in line with the model of mental health I've posted here. Open to and in touch with the inner and outer world.

Notice how this coincides with good impro: A good impro actor should dare to let out hir inner impulses, stay sensitive to and pick up hir fellow actor's ideas and stay open and trusting, rather than rigid and planning. To stay open.

Notice how psychotherapy could describe these attributes as life problems, but I have decided to describe them as strengths.

...

Do you have a Triforce of your own?

A model of mental health

During these last few weeks I've been working on a model for understanding mental health and therapy. It is a way for me to make sense of, to make a map of what I'm learning in classes and what I'm exploring in my own therapy. This is my personal understanding of mental health, but I'm hopeful that it will be helpful in understanding and helping others, and curious of which clients and which diagnosises it models well.

I - Life issues
As we grow up, struggle through life, we must all find our own answers to the big questions – Things like....

Who am I?
Is the world a safe, good place?
How do I protect my self from those who would do me harm?
Do I deserve love?
How will I convey my own love?
What sources do I draw from to strengthen my self-esteem, what makes me feel good about myself?
How will I handle a neurological handicap I was born with or a brain injury I sustained mid-life?

Life demands answers to these questions. Our answers become models for handling everyday life, they shape who we are, what we think, what we feel. Without these models, life would be impossibly extorting.

There are some patterns that keep re-emerging as answers to these questions, for instance:

- People neglected by their parents as children become insecure of their self-worth, typically beccoming withdrawn or clingy and love-hungry.
- People denied their individuality and integrity and self-worth (and with the right biological sensitivity) can protect themself by displacing their guilt and shame into an accusing voice or delusions of other people controling them, becoming schizophrenic.
- People who are wrought by difficult loss (by a parent, for instance) and lack of love in their early years may come to the conclusion that it is actually they who doesn't deserve love. This is to retain the feeling they are in control of their life and protect themselves from the very frightening insight that they have to rely on people that deep down doesn't give a shit either way.

Questions resolved in a healthy fashion doesn't follow common patterns of development in the same way, perhaps because mental health is characterised by self-realisation, individuality, to become your own person – That is, to defy patterns and go your own way.
Or maybe just because there is far more research on mental illness than mental health.

Whereas some life questions are resolved in a way that leave the person vulnerable and frail in that domain, others are resolved successfully, and will be a source of strength and confidence for the person, following hir through life. Though typical models keep reappering in the care of mental health, each person, both ”normal” or ”abnormal” must be understood as made up of a unique disposition of life models.

You can understand these "life issues" as a mix of existentialism (It's up to everyone to find answers in life) and cognitive-behaviour therapy. (People live by automatic models, programs so to speak, of behaviour.)


II - Normality
Let us revisit Lucien A Buck's model of normality, placing different answers and strategies to life issues on his continuum of mental health.



Buck describes the abnormal position as a defensive one, protecting oneself from regressing, losing what one has. The schizophrenic person fears sie might disintegrated any moment, and keeps a paranoid wall against all other people. The bipolar (or manic-depressive) person goes into manic states to defend hirself from the soulcrushing darkness of depression. It's all or nothing, either you surrender to unbearable anxiety or you wall yourself off to survive. Abnormality is characterized by this all-or-nothing stance, it is rigid and without flexibility.

To have achieved normality in a life issue is to have accepted the answers provided by society as good. There is safety in this, community and efficiency, but normality is not without it's own problems: There is still a stiffness in letting a norm define you, not daring to explore your own answers. There is stress and ulcers in societies' norms, and it is difficult to change when you are dependent on other people's ready-made answers. And we all change with age, thus the age crisis.

Whereas abnormality and normality is defined by rigidity and stiffness, health is characterised by a form of softness – When you trust yourself this much, you can allow yourself to change according to situation, without losing track of who you essentially are. You can be playful, adaptive, open-minded. You can also be thoughtful and genuine - You know yourself well enough for that. You have explored yourself and found the right answers for your questions, whether they are part of norm or not.

Buck encourage us to take caution when exercising mental care, not to squish a person into a normality that sie doesn't fit into, and would feel alienated by. We should rather give security to abnormal issues and take care of and develop the healthy ones.

The model is actually a continuum and should be drawn as a line, but I like the thought of someone standing in the circle of normality/health/abnormality at a given moment.


III - Security
The difference between these positions can be explained with the words "sense of security".

At the greatest level of abnormality, security is none. Your life issue is at constant threat of regressing, desintegrating, collapsing, so you protect yourself against others fiercely.

Going from abnormality to normality is characterised by establishing outer control: Limits, borders, structure in your life that provides predictability and manageability, even protection from yourself.

At normality, the borders and norms have been internalised - They are a part of you now. Your self is secure enough to let other people near without exaggerated fear of being hurt. There is still a sense of insecurity though – There are still parts of you unknown to you, since you have just accepted the answer rather than exploring the question fully.

Going from normality to health is characterised by process depth: Exploring, understanding and taking control of your inner processes.

At health, security is greatest. Imagine you have built a very sturdy house – You then have the safety to leave it, to explore. You also feel safe going into your dark places, the parts of yourself you don't normally think of, confident you can handle any anxiety it wakes up. The house will hold together.

There are parallells to different psychological theories on security here:

Attachement theory describes how the children with a well founded sense of security are the bravest in their exploring. Safe in the knowledge that you can always return to your parents and they will provide safety, they will go explore the world, not needing to conform to other people for validation and approval. They already have an internal approval firmly placed in their hearts.

Humanist Abraham Maslow has an interesting idea of how humanity have a series of human needs (physical safety, social, self-realization etc), and just like the child can establish a sense of security in their parents, people can establish a sense of security in these different needs. For instance, if I have a sense of security in my social needs, I do not need constant confirmation from my friends that they still like me.

Maslow has also written on the subject of the self-actualizing person, the healthy person so to speak, who seeks to explore and express hirself, actualize hir inner potential, to grow. Just like in Buck's model, Maslow characterizes this person as someone who is genuine, who follows hir own way, not in a forced way but in a curious and open-minded way. Self-actualization is not a goal that can be reached, but rather a process, to be in movement, to be open-minded and fluid.

I associate this model to learning theories as well, but that's for another post.


IV - Therapy
All therapy must somehow first establish a sense of security. This is called therapeutic alliance, a sense of trust and hope between the client and the therapist. When the client feels safe in the therapeutic room, sie can let hir models of thought out into the light and examine them. Sie can, not necessarily consciously, test the therapist with them - If I expose you to what I was exposed to, will you react like I did, or is there another way you can show me? In this way, people's model are changed.


                                               Acceptance, empathy, genuinity ->   
                                                                     New mental models ->

Now, the big question is, does security lead to healthy models, or does healthy models lead to a sense of security? Like so often in psychology, you can work in either direction:

Humanistic therapy creates an atmosphere of acceptance, empathy and genuinity, building on the sense of security. Provide the sense of security and carefully prod the client towards processing depth, and sie will spontaneously explore hirself. Having written it down, I can see that this model implies that in humans there is a natural movement towards health, growing and development as long as safety, security and acceptance is supplied, and this is a foundation of humanistic psychology.

Cognitive-behaviour therapy works the other way around, first you assess the clients mental models and provide more healthy alternatives, and with this competence the client will gain a sense of security.


V - Soft-Hard
"Defensive" is a word which has made it's way into everyday english, but it is originally from psychodynamic theory. According to psychodynamic theory, defenses are something we must have to protect ourselves from anxiety, but when defenses are too strong, too primitive or too inflexible they may become a problem.

This points to how different people will handle issues differently: In a way I inhereted my fathers sense of guilt when he raised me, but whereas he keeps this guilt away by intellectualization, I have instead become sensitive and vulnerable to other people's disapproval and sensible to their own insecurities.

Strong defenses also illustrates the rigidity of abnormality: In the hard circle of abnormality, you can either let the problems and anxieties of life issue manifest themselves freely, or you handle it with strong defenses - throw it away completely, deny it, unable to confront it. All or nothing.

The softness and adaptivity of the healthy individual remind me of the ideals of taoism: Do not force yourself onto nature. Be fluid, like water, and you cannot hurt yourself. Be accepting, humble, genuine and happy in the way of the ever-curious and innocent child.

Coincidentally, it also reminds me of impro theatre.

One of my difficult life issues has been romantic love. I've never actually achieved a romantic relationship, which has been the source of great stress - I felt that I had to have it, I had to reach normality, and through reaching this normality I would reach a sense of self-worth. I've had problems with expectations building up - Love encounters became confrontations with the only possible outcomes a) high expectations fulfilled or b) nothing at all. As you can tell, there was a great deal of stiffness involved.

With a greater sense of security, with the safety to explore these feelings, process them deeper and understand them better, with a chance to experiment without the have-to's, love can become something playful and lustful. Something healthy. I can stay in the moment, fluid, enjoying the present rather than building up to some wishful future state.

I don't actually have to have a single relationship if it doesn't feel right - The one important thing is that I find my way to that bright and gentle circle of health.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3phAqQeMMcc&feature=related

I'm introducing: Lucien A Buck

While doing research for a paper on normality and self-realisation, me and my partner stumbled across the research of psychology professor Lucien A Buck, a paper titled "Normality, abnormality and health". In this paper he makes several references to patients with autism and patients with schizophrenia, the people farthest away from our normality and community.

But Buck argues that instead of placing a diagnosis on the abnormal and move them towards normality, we should see the individual strengths and weaknesses that exists in every person... Screw it, I'm just going to quote his abstract:

Most forms of psychotherapy are limited by assumptions about abnormality that focus on pathology while ignoring the potential for growth that exists in all. Effective psychotherapy requires respect for human complexity. Each person needs to be perceived as embodying a unique balance of strengths and weaknesses: The potential of normal people cannot be properly evaluated if their limitations are ignored, nor can individuals diagnosed as abnormal be understood by relying upon a pathology perspective. "Normalization" - psychotherapeutic practices aimed toward producing normal behaviour - can deprive people of existing strengths.

What he is saying is basically, instead of seeing people as mentally ill (With different diagnosises as the subcategories) or normal, we should see all people striving with the same human basic goals (which constitute the terms of human existence and what it means to be human) Almost no one person is entirely sick or entirely healthy. I'll quote Buck again:

"It is possible to conceptualize abnormality, normality and health as segments along a continuum of increasing capacity for managing the essential issues of living: autonomy, identity, work, creativity, propagation, aging and death."

As you can see, Buck separates normality and health: He argues that normality means letting everyone else decide on your life issues for you, resolving these issues based on conformity. Normality is an efficient way to live, but it also brings "normal problems", such as stress and age crisis.

Abnormality in life issues means you haven't given up and let society define your issues, but it isn't in your own power to define yourself either. The life issue is ruled by chaos instead of control, it is ruled by the fear of losing control of it rather than the security to evolve it and let it develop. The abnormal position is fortified one, and it means the person aggressively defends against other people's expectations and conformity which threatens to take hir over.

Health is also a sort of deviance from normality, but a balanced one. You have managed to reach your own conclusions on these life issues, and the healthy issue is characterized by originality, creativity and genuineness.

Let's draw a model to illustrate. I've chosen four issues and made a slice of someone's life. Let's call him Tim.

So instead of saying "Tim is a schizophrenic", we assess that Tim has great problems with identity, keeping a stable sense of himself and what he is, as he fears he might be desintegrated any moment. Love is really difficult as well, with no point of ego to fix it to. Tim has a great health in creativity, though. Work is alright.

So instead of trying to make Tim normal and potentially crush his creativity and alienating him from himself in the process, we should take care of his abnormal issues and encourage his healthy ones.

Let us now combine this with humanist psychology founding father Abraham Maslow's idea of the healthy, self-realising person.

According to Maslow, this person is genuine, original, brave/secure and has a healthy bit of perspective on normality. Maslow describes the healthy person as someone who "can wear normality as a coat", so to speak, put it on or put it away as sie likes. When the situation calls for it, sie can put on a tie and a suit, and respect norms and courtesies to smooth out human interactions, even if sie considers these rituals rather pointless...

For you see, the healthy person can do this without endangering hir own sense of identity and security - It takes great deal of security and confidence in your life issues to be able to venture out of the safe zone, explore the issue without fear and needing to defend your standpoint.

What really strikes me about Buck's model is that he interprets normality as being stiff, abnormality as being completely stuck, and health as a creative, playful stance. Remember what I said about impro?

I love this dude. Check out his tribute:

http://www.dowling.edu/wikis/pmwiki.php/LISSHistory/ATributeToDrLucienBuck

Next up: Life issues, sense of security and playfulness. After that, we'll take a look at life issues in roleplaying games. (flags)

Let something grow

A markedly nonnarcissistic attitude toward offspring informs the remarks of an 85-year-old frined of mine who reared 12 children during the Depression, all of whom have turned out well despite borderline poverty and some painful losses:

“Every time I’d get pregnant, I’d cry. I’d wonder where the money would come from, how I was going to nurse this child and take care of everything else. But around the fourth month I’d begin to feel life, and I’d get all excited, thinking, ‘I can’t wait till you come out and I find out who you are!’”

From the book Psychoanalytical diagnosis, by Nancy McWilliams.

What McWilliams describes here is a mother that didn't let her expectations and preconceptions force themselves unto her children, but instead kept an open-minded and attentative attitude. I think you'll agree with me that the word "curiousity" sums up this mother's stance towards her growing children.

I believe this has relevance for psychotherapy in general.
Klaus Grawe has written a tome of a book called Psychological Therapy, in which he has this to say: One of the most basic things in psychotherapy is that a psychotherapist needs to convey hope, trustworthiness and a sense of empathy and interest in the client, through verbal and non-verbal communication. (i e, looking interested)

After years and years of providing psychotherapy, how do you maintain that interest? How do you avoid growing jaded? How do you avoid reaching the point where you think to yourself "It's just another narcissist, I already know what this client needs" and start filling the client with your own ideas rather than seeing hir for who sie is? 

I think the sense of curiosity is key for maintaining this sense of interest. Ask yourself Whatever new things will this client teach me? and you will also stay curious and attentative, and actually pick up on the unique secrets of this human being. I guess. As an undergraduate, I'm not really in a position of advicing jaded psychotherapists on how to handle their great mass of experience... Hell, maybe I am in just that position, on virtue of having no experience in providing real therapy. I can tell you this though: The number one complaint I hear about psychology is "It's just about trying to classify people into categories"
So hey, let's roll with it, see what comes out of it. Now check out this guy, Carl Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic therapy I mentioned in my last post. The very first thing he says when he comes into play (at 3:05) is:

From my own years of therapeutic experience, I have come to feel that if I can create the proper climate, the proper relationship, the proper conditions, a process of therapeutic movement will almost inevitably occur in my client.

Which sums up a big part of humanistic therapy pretty good, actually. It's an idea that thoughts and awareness will grow and develop if you give them the room for it, the trust, the careful encouragement. (You can see Rogers in action in part 2 and forwards, mm-hm!)

Everything needs room to grow.

Now, this subject is huge. I could go on about expectations, the connection of curiosity and playfulness, or taoism... but actually, I think this is a good time to introduce improvisation theatre.