Encountering links
One of my joys of stumbling onto Tumblr has been encountering Shrinkrants. He's intellectually curious and humane; following his links has led me to some long threads which feel important to me.
Last week he wrote about encountering a link in a post, Psychiatry and Narrative Therapy and Jonella Bird. The link takes you to "two short, interesting testimonials–one by a psychiatrist, the other by a nurse–to to work of Johnella Bird, a first-generation narrative therapy practitioner and teacher who has inspired and prodded me at several key points in my own development as a therapist." One of the very intersting bits to me in following the links is that both clinicians work in the trenches so to speak.
There's a quotation from Buckminster Fuller frequently posted online:
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change somthing, build a new model that makes the exisiting model obsolete.
A new model doesn't pretend the existing models don't exist. Both clinicians work in the "existing reality" of modern hospitals with all the protocols that entails. They have been also integrating the ideas from Johnella Bird into their practices and have found the ideas have engendered positive movement.
When I was at University in the mid-seventies we watched a video of using operant conditioning in an introductory abnormal psychology course. The video involved an instructor offering positive or negative reinforcement in a learning task involving flashcards to a autistic boy. There were two sequences with different instructors. The first instructor offered positive reinforcement with comments like, "Yes, you've got it." Negative reinforcement was "no" with a neutral valence. It appeared a joyful exercise for both the boy and instructor. The second instructor offered positive and negative reinforcement saying. "good boy" and "bad boy." The exercise got stuck in when the boy meltdown.
I offered the comment about the video that the context of reinforcement was different between the two instructors. The first instructor's focus was about the performance of the exercise, whereas, the second instructor in saying "good boy/bad boy" turned the focus to the boy himself. The professor wasn't having it, both instructors were following an operant conditioning plan, and that's was what I needed to attend to.
I took two take-aways from this exchange. The first was that meaning is relational. And the second was that the lens, or perhaps more apt in this case, theoretical commitments, shape what we imagine reality to be.
One of my most common pitfalls in my life is failing to remember that I am experiencing reality through lenses and to consider that other ways of seeing things are possible and necessary.
The pages at the link Shrinkrants posted have relevance beyond psychiatry and therapy and can be useful to ordinary people as they engage in living. Something that interests me about the pages is they result from a collaboration between the two clinicians, Josephine Stanton and Tania Windelborn. That's implicit, but readers aren't privy to that process. In the same vein I'm intrigued by Shrinkrants’s formal writing with his partner; it's one voice that comes out of intimate conversations between the two of them, and probably conversations with many others. Of course they offer citations, but they’re not the process that intrigues me.
Online conversations often consists of people pointing to things, links, with others taking up the links and pointing to new ones. Most often we're strangers, but like direct conversations, the exchanging of links is affecting. I am so grateful to Shrinkrants and others who I engage in online conversation.
