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.

Man will survive

 Remember the song I posted? After the first verse, Martin Gore sings just that, man will survive. And pauses. The sentence seems to hang in the air on it's own, complete in it's message, before it is concluded with the harshest conditions

The fact is, those words do stand on their own. They convey an idea I've heard before, in the classes of psychology - The belief that I will survive this. And not only in the prosaic way of living on, but this concept also encompasses not losing hold of yourself, becoming lost - My ego will remain intact.

The storms of life will be difficult, and sometimes you have to risk breaking your heart... but you can still have this sense of security, have faith in that you won't be overpowered, disintegrated. The storm might end in heartaches, but not in uncontrollable catastrophe.

This is important when growing up.

- A child with a sense of security uses hir parents both as a secure port to find solace in and a safe base to explore the world from. When the storms come, mother and father will come to you, hold you, and put you together again.

- My lecturer describes the difficult development tasks (life issues, we might call them!) and how a difficult task (like separation from our parents, for instance) that we manage to master works like a vaccination, strenghtening us the next time something like it turns up (when breaking up with our loved one or losing a relative) – But a much too difficult task leaves us bewildered and feeling overpowered, frightened of it and certain that we cannot handle it the next time it turns up.

- Also, let's look back at Antonevsky's model Sense of Coherence. Antonovsky said that everyone meet stress in their life, but it is whether you find life manageable, understandeable and meaningful that decides whether you handle it successfully. Belief would have man survive.

- In the same way, when going through therapy you will call the storm to you, go into the dark and difficult places of yourself. You must have faith in that this won't destroy you - Grawe describes hope in the therapy and trust in the therapist as the most important components of successfully therapy.

My next post will be on hope.

Writing this, I'm at Kulturhamnen once more.
A woman is reading her poems to us. She is visibly nervous, restless, her swedish grammar falls short at times, but her words ring true to us. Before reading the third poem she tells us ”This one, I haven't practiced at all”

But she goes through with it, with heartfelt applause. Goes into the storm.

Man will survive.

Meaning, story, understanding

I've been reading a book on school psychology. (Psykolog i skolan, Schad 2009) This is what Leif Strandberg has to say about learning (my translation and emphasis):

"Letters, symbols, thoughts and knowledge are the tools of freedom and creation of meaning: The freedom to move beyond the world they [the pupils] occupy right now; the freedom to visit strange places and visit people they otherwise never could reach; the meaningful experience that the air they breathe, the water they drink and the stars glittering above are not only wonderful sensory impressions - they can be understood (!), and when they understand one thing they will discover that there is still more to understand, there is always another step to take, and then yet another one..."

And it struck me like a bomb. No, not the point he was trying to convey, but a different idea made up with the same images:

Meaning = Story = Understanding

We can imagine early humans, gazing up into the sky and conjuring stories of what the stars were, from where they came, what their names were... For man must understand the world.

Understanding
In his book Psychological Therapy, Grawe cites Epsteins four basic human needs, the need for orientation and control being the most basic one. (The other ones being increasing pleasure and avoiding pain, the attachement need and the need for self-enhancement) This makes sense - What point would there be to all your mental processes if you couldn't use them to predict and exert control of the world?

So man conjured stories to explain and predict nature, and at the same time gave meaning to nature.

Story
Today we can explain and predict nature through science, but science cannot provide meaning. Meaning is the sign of storytelling, the idea that there is a point to what we just heard - Things doesn't happen for no reason in a story, they happen because there was a lesson to be learnt, symbolism we could recognise or themes we could relate to our own lives. Back in the day, the Pleiades were not just a random configuration of stars, they were seven sisters, transformed into stars for a reason; Zeus had put them there to protect them and comfort their father Atlas, and the reason one of them doesn't shine quite as bright as the others is because she is shamed eternally for having an affair with a mortal. Now that's a story, there is a point to it, and it relates to us  humans, our lives and our emotions.

Meaning
Humans are meningsskapande, (creators of meaning) that is, we seek to understand things in terms of what they mean to us, what emotional significance they carry for us. Events in our life must be interpreted in terms of meaning and emotion to be fully understood and integrated into our psyche. Thus, it can be said that every person has not only their own mental models, but also their own narrative (or story) of their life and the world around them. Psychologist Erik H. Erikson stresses our need to string our history of life events and choices together to make a coherent narrative. If we are unable to make sense of our actions and thoughts, predict them, find a meaning in them, this is a very distressing situation indeed - Our life doesn't make sense anymore!

Sense of Coherence
There is a questionnaire for measuring this in psychology, called Sense of Coherence, or SoC. It measures to what degree your life is characterized by comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. Sociologist Aaron Antonovsky, who designed the model argues that everyone encounters stress in their life, but it is those with a sense of coherence that pull through and manages it, choosing to focus on health rather than disease in his model.

Our lecturer told us that SoC is a good asset when measuring therapeutic progress - Oftentimes other measurements and tests doesn't show improvement: There might be slight improvement on all symptoms and life issues, but no single factor has changed enough to provide statistically significant differences. With SoC you could show that that all these small improvements have lead to a point where the client now feels sie has control of hir life, can understand what's going on in hir life, and that there is a point to hir life - And in the end, that's the one most important thing.

Psychology, sociology, philosophy
In general, therapeutic psychology and psychological qualitative research stress understanding someone's narrative and and their feelings for the world, rather than the cold, hard and objective facts. To be understanding is to know what another person feels, to see things from their perspective.

I suppose this is obvious stuff to students of sociology, but this was the moment things fell into place to me - I suppose you could say I went from knowing it to understanding it, a process sought after in psychotherapy: When the client process something not only intellectually, but also emotionally, it becomes a real process. You need to activate the emotions and work with them to really make a difference. (Process activation)

I think you could also make a parallell to existentialism, the philosophy where mankind must find meaning in a world where science has replaced stories.

I don't really know much about narrative psychology or related sociology, but I think I should check it up. Anyone suggestions for good reads?

Oh, and I picked up Play Unsafe yesterday. Looking forward to it!

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.