Friday 27 April 2012

Alexander Technique and the Inter-personal 4



Hate, like love, is something we all experience. It is part of life and decidedly normal. If you have any doubts about this, then just hang around with some two year olds for a while. Hate like love is always an option. What we do with it, how we control it, how we react to it, how others react to it - are what counts. 

We might be open, as Eric Hobsbawn recently was, in saying that we are 'good haters,' sustaining a particular commitment, by doing so. Or we might be terrified of the fact that we do hate; leaving it unrecognised, to pursue an image of ourselves as 'good' or maybe 'nice.' Where that happens we have often learned to pull down to control our reactions, our feelings and to stop ourselves from saying things, which we fear will provoke humiliation and isolation. We anticipate verbal abuse or perhaps physical attack. We have learned to control our desire to speak and to try to escape from feelings that we have been taught are 'wrong' or 'bad.' Often the understanding that develops here is not that the feelings are wrong or 'bad' but that I am 'bad.'

Now, in an ideal world everybody would have a mum or a dad who can cope with his or her child saying 'I hate you' or 'I don't want to do that.' Mum and dad would be able to understand that it is what young kids do, and in their understanding they would be free enough to help their child understand the normalcy of their feeling, freeing them to find a way forward, to return to loving their parent in time, always in a new and more mature way. Where that does not happen on a regular, predictable basis and children are taught to be good, they usually learn to pull their heads down, shorten and tighten, learning to hide their misery, acting a part, sometimes as a 'good,' 'dutiful' son or daughter, at other times as the wayward rebel.

A habitual use of the head and the neck develops, which not only interferes with our organic functioning but plays its part in our psycho-physical attitude, that we are bad which we hold towards ourselves, as well as, whatever attitude we adopt to others and the outside world. In Personal Construct terms we are talking about a persons core role, the role they play, as if it is a matter of life or death, and a role that is deeply tied to systems of life maintenance. 

To develop Conscious Control here is a matter of developing, if we simplify things greatly, two different stances, one of which is towards those aspects of the self that have been rejected or fragmented which are often tied to spontaneity and feelings of being alive. Practically speaking what we are looking for is the ability to face unwanted and often shamed parts of oneself, by applying the Alexander Technique and learning to face and then understand them, through dialogue, if you believe as I do that at heart we are dialogical beings. 

The second stance is towards others and if I am seeking to illustrate this in an Alexander lesson, I will stand in front of a pupil and ask them to directly look at me. Often what happens is that they pull their heads down, sometimes they want to look away. As I talk them through the process, they find they can engage with me, visibly lengthening, releasing their breathing, improving their organic functioning and establishing a conscious use of themselves in relation to another.
If I am working in my capacity as a therapist, I will invite people to then take this further by allowing themselves to look and see the other, by describing the other and their own experience of the other. With the description of the other including a portrait of how they see and experience the situation and relationship. This allows the development of what Kelly called sociality and is called mentalization elsewhere. Most importantly it leads to the possibility of new role relationships, relationships that are vital for people's well-being and functioning. This leads me to propose that from an Alexander Technique point of view, that if we were to consider what is involved in the highest standard of inter-personal function, there would two conditions, the first concerned with the ability to consciously and co-ordinate the use of ourselves in relationships. While the second following Kelly would be concerned with our ability to understand the other in their terms. 

This rather long blog concludes this series on Alexander Technique and the Inter-personal. To those that have followed it right the way through and sent me comments or talked to me about the ideas contained here, a big thank you. I will be developing them further in time for the EPCA conference in July where I will be presenting them in a workshop format to colleagues from that particular world. 



Friday 13 April 2012

Alexander Technique and the Inter-Personal 3



Sitting up, standing up, are achievements. We forget this, if we ever realise it, only to take note when we see a baby sitting or up standing for the first time; taking his or her first steps. That there is such a thing as sitting up well, standing well is often missed, unremarked on. The gesture of ourselves to ourselves, to the outside world, too often pre-dominates, to the exclusion of our organic functioning, manifesting itself, in breathing that is held, muscles that are sore, ailments that seem to afflict us, ways of being with others that can terrify us and them. 


That these might be linked escapes us, if we approach them through disciplines that have first divided the human being into physical or mental, psychological or physiological, where psychological is not firmly grounded in the concept of ourselves, as actors in and of the world. Such philosophical and epistemological groundings may seem far removed from the distraction of a bad back, the pain of a sore neck, the blinding migraine that occludes the possibility of work.  Yet, such groundings are openings towards understandings that can free us of habitual pains and terrors; groundings that Alexander struggled with and understood in terms of action and through not dividing but combining the mental and physical into the psycho-physical.

The psycho-physical for Alexander is his way of saying that we are indivisible into mental and physical when it comes to the ‘act of living.’ Acts, themselves, are approached by him, as mental or physical when it comes to, how use, effects the standard of functioning. This is because he lacks better words, better understandings and what is missed, as I blogged about in the first of this series, are inter-personal acts. 

Inter-personal acts require some explaining. In some ways, what I am about to write might seem obvious, but from the nineteenth century which conceptualised people as organisms, to the late twentieth and early twenty-first century conceptualisation of people as information processors, it has been a hard won battle to recognize again that people are people. That we are formed as people by our first relationships; that being understood is often our first step in understanding.  

Understanding first of all occurs face-to-face between mother and baby, it is non-verbal in its grounding with mutual gazing providing respite and calm when anxiety threatens. We are inherently social, our withdrawals and individuality existing only within the network of our personal relationships. To be excluded from the personal realm, in the fullest sense, in infancy, is to face non-existence, a terror and an anxiety that is met with a full-throated cry or perhaps, a muffled sob. 

Lesser terrors exist; lesser anxieties exist, grounded in this greater terror. Our first attempts at controlling them are to look to mum, or are withdrawals that come with looking away or looking down. Each has characteristics of its own; each exists within a network of personal constructs that are all too easily dismissed, as subjective when placed in ‘objective’ frameworks concerning mechanical or organic functioning. 

For some and certainly not all these early habits of control, involving the use of the head and neck to control attention, to control feelings of overwhelm, to control anxiety in the personal realm are what are evoked in Alexander lessons. Early and core elements of experience then are loosened becoming available for reconstruction through a mental act, that is transforming in the present, towards the past and future in new personal acts towards others and ourselves. This allows for the highest standard of inter-personal and intra-personal functioning to be achieved through our conscious understanding and acceptance of ourselves and others, of which more next time.