Cutting the Bungee Cord

Despondency tends to descend on people who, in trying to change, repeatedly experience failure, finding themselves jerked back to where they started, just at that point when success seemed to be within reach or even accomplished. It is like trying to change with a bungee rope tied to your back which becomes taut at the last moment, pulling yourself back to where you started - change becomes a Sisyphean task. Each day a person seems condemned to start again, only to be frustrated. It is a familiar experience for many and is often evidence of failure to really stop and find a way forward.

Both Alexander and Kelly wrote about this phenomena and using different language both suggested solutions that were similar and pertinent to whoever finds themselves experiencing this sort of difficulty. As is often the case, it is helpful to approach such difficulties not just from one standpoint but two or more and that is what I hope to do today.

For Alexander, the failure lies in what he called 'end-gaining', in not identifying the real cause of our difficulties, which lay for him in relying on what he called 'subconscious guidance and control.' Rather, we identify a specific fault and tend to try and correct it directly, so a problem with a limb is seen as just that, and not a problem stemming from the overall use of ourselves that is best corrected by aiming for a better co-ordination of the whole. For Alexander, the need to stop and think, to reconstrue is an embodied matter, best done through releasing one's breathing, freeing oneself for a wide range of possible actions, actions that in themselves depend on new conceptions of what is possible, conceptions that recognise situations for what they are, which break our dependence on old habits and cut the cord that binds us to our past. What Kelly adds to this comes with the formal idea of a construct being based on a dichotomy, a contrast, where we like to experience ourselves on one side of the distinction being made. Constructs as contrasts, are highly personal, borrowed and evolved by each person for their individual ends. Meanings are seen as personal, rather than dictionary definitions formally imposed. So, that for one person the choice at work might be to pull down and be a 'kindly' person rather than a 'efficient’ one, where attempts at ‘efficiency’ are always in the end trumped by the need to be ‘kind’. This might happen because being 'kind' or 'nice' is ultimately a way of attempting to control the person’s anxiety in the face of the unknown demands of ‘efficiency’. Kelly called this kind of attempt at change ‘slot rattling’ and like Alexander saw it is an ineffective sort of change, that is better replaced by controlled elaboration and experimentation. In this case the link between being ‘kindly’ and ‘efficient’ might usefully be broken and seen not as an ‘either/or’ but possibly as an ‘and’, subsumed underneath a new construct for change – that of ‘confidence in the face of the unknown’. This involves the ability to stand and face the future, to see what possibilities hope offers us. It is the pre-requisite for change that Alexander always brings us back to and Kelly invites us to adventurously elaborate by cutting the cord to our past failures and seeking the future.