The Paradoxical Theory of Change (@ Truth a Paradox)

I published a short blog post at Truth a Paradox this morning titled The Paradoxical Theory of Change . Check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Jackson

I read it, enjoyed it very much, and left this comment:

All this reminds me so much of certain teachings of Krishnamurti. He talked about “intelligence” as something we all have access to if we, in essence, stop everything and just look very carefully (choiceless awareness).
I do this practice and I believe that he is right. That there is a natural tendancy toward healing, toward knowing just the right next positive action, if one just gets out of the way and opens themselves up to all that is actually going on.
It’s the same reason that “faith” works so well for people with a devotional/religlious practice.



another thing that happens when one just stops is things can be seen much more clearly, which often makes one realize that there actually isn't even a problem, that everything is really all right

"another thing that happens when one just stops is things can be seen much more clearly, which often makes one realize that there actually isn't even a problem, that everything is really all right" -MM

That's a great point, Mike. It's worthwhile to ask, "Is this really a problem?" We may decide it is or that it isn't, but we can't decide either way if we don't ask.

Thanks for the comment.

Nice article, Jackson! This also reminds me of Krishnamurti, guys. He was particularly adept at articulating this paradox I think. Also, the renegade Jungian therapist Geigerich points out that 'therapy' is rooted, etymologically, in the Greek for "seeing". He argues that the point of psychotherapy is merely to bring things into awareness, that this rather than conscious attempts to change is the key to healing.

I'm attracted to Gestalt because it seems really sensitive to these kinds of insights which are so compatible with contemplative experiences of transformation emerging out of letting things be as they are. The more I look into it the more CBT, Gestalt and contemplative practice all seem to dovetail nicely with each other.

There's a dzogchen teacher named James Low who is also a gestalt therapist. He has some very interesting pdfs available on his website in which the complementarity of these two approaches is pretty clear. It seems like genuine transformation on a personality level (i.e., what many look for in psychotherapy) seems to bring one very close to contemplative territory (if not right into the heart of it), just as authentic contemplative insights sans spiritual bypassing automatically seem to have consequences on the personality level...

Yes.

Jackson, wouldn't you agree that a lot of what people need counseling and therapy for are often actually just created out of whole cloth by one's mind? I know for me that is true.

And, even, when there are real problems steming from actual life events, these can be made worse by the same kind of defective mental massaging.

Another paradox: stopping and doing nothing can be done while one is busy doing stuff

Thanks, Jake.

I also notice that many of the more effective Western psychotherapies dovetail nicely with certain forms of Buddhist/Contemplative practice. For example, the Tibetan tradition speaks a lot about "reactive emotions" that can be released in favor of simply being what is. In Gestalt, they refer to these reactive habits as "creative adaptations" - meaning that all behaviors are functional in one way or another. We wouldn't do them if they didn't at least sometimes address a problem we think we have. (As one of my professors puts it, "maladaptive coping is still coping.") Unfortunately, many of these adaptations either no longer work for us in adulthood, or they get used in areas for which they were not intended. So bringing awareness to these processes, allowing them to be in order to really experience them, is the first step toward change.

Of course, you are more well versed in the Tibetan tradition, so you can let me know if I'm missing anything here. I'm all for having my view continually refined.

I think this idea of the Paradoxical Theory of Change goes nicely with the R.A.I.N. process taught by the IMS folks. The first two steps are Recognition and Acceptance, followed by Investigation and Non-identification. Not a whole lot is going on here accept for allow experience to be, and then inquiring into it. One's own natural wisdom does most of the work for them, as the experiential data allows various modules/mechanisms of mind to respond in new ways - thus making adjustments to processing that are more adaptive. This work, however, isn't ever really done. We are constantly responding to new situations, and part of being an adult is being able to bend and flex to what is happening in the moment. In this way, meditation is probably less like weight lifting/muscle building and more like stretching/hatha yoga.

Jackson

Yes, I find what you say about "reactive emotions" true in my own experience. There is definitely a theme in the Tibetan tradition that at the core of such reactions there is a wisdom functioning, wisdom at the heart of neurosis. This has been my own experience too, in surprisingly profound and frankly rather strange and inexplicable ways.

Back into a Western psych framework, I would definitely say that these reactive emotions were at the point of origin rather brilliant strategies for coping in most cases. It's all a question of context, and growing up produces more nuanced sense of what it is to be human, therefore brings more nuanced possibilities of response.

As for the contemplative dimension of development, yes, I think you're spot on: it's a question of becoming flexible and nuanced there too rather than heroically cultivating heavy-duty altered states. The body builder's attainments aren't less real than the hatha yogi's or the gymnasts, but they are-- simply, truly-- less relevant to They are their own justification for people who enjoy and are drawn to such things, but they can even hamper normal functioning me thinks.

And Mike, I think you're really hitting the nail on the head. I'm not in graduate training yet but am aiming to be a counseling psychologist as well and my impression is definitely that effective therapy is focused on the processes of meaning making rather than the specific contents. There are, simply put, ways of making "sense" of life which aren't very connected to what's actually going on within and around us. Getting back in touch with what is actually going on, and then learning to tell stories that are more connected to the actual flow of feelings sensations and situations we find ourselves in rather than stories which serve to isolate us from our actual present experiencing and life circumstances is to me the basic gist of good psychotherapy. It's about helping someone connect with their life in meaningful, honest ways, based on befriending themselves rather than tying themselves up in knots or falling apart.

I came across another short exposition about the Paradoxical Theory of Change at the same website, and thought some of you may find it interesting...

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The Paradoxical Theory of Change

The paradox is that the more one tries to be who one is not, the more one stays the same (Beisser, 1970). Many patients focus on what they "should be" and at the same time resist these shoulds.

The Gestalt therapist attempts to work toward integration by asking the client to identify with each conflicting role. The client is asked what he or she experiences at each moment. When the client can be aware of both roles, integrating techniques are used to transcend the dichotomy.

There are two axioms in Gestalt therapy: "What is, is," and "One thing leads to another" (Polster and Polster, 1973). The medium of change is a relationship with a therapist who makes contact based on showing who he or she truly is and who understands and accepts the patient.

Awareness of "what is" leads to spontaneous change. When the person manipulating for support finds a therapist who is contactful and accepting and who does not collude with the manipulation, he may become aware of what he is doing. This Aha! is a new gestalt, a new outlook, a taste of new possibility: "I can be with someone and not manipulate or be manipulated." When such a person meets "therapeutic" collusion, derision, mind games, game busting and so on, this increase in awareness is unlikely to happen.

At each and every point along the way this new Aha! can occur. As long as the therapist or the patient can see new possibilities and the patient wants to learn, new Aha!'s are possible and with them, growth. Awareness work can start anywhere the patient is willing, if the therapist is aware and connects it to the whole. The ensuing process in Gestalt therapy leads to changes everywhere in the field. The more thorough the investigation, the more intense the reorganization. Some changes can only be appreciated years later.

Patients in Gestalt therapy are in charge of their lives. The therapist facilitates attention to opening restricted awareness and areas of constricted contact boundaries; the therapist brings firmness and limits to areas with poor boundaries. As sensing increases in accuracy and vividness, as breathing becomes fuller and more relaxed and as patients make better contact, they bring the skills of therapy into their lives. Sometimes intimacy and job improvements follow Gestalt work like an act of grace, without the patient's connecting the increase to the work done in therapy. But the organism does grow with awareness and contact. One thing does lead to another.

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From Gestalt Therapty: An Introduction , by Gary Yontef, Ph.D.
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The two complimentary axioms of "What is, is" and "One thing leads to another" seems to relate to the Buddhist/Contemplative axioms of "Being/Ultimate nature" and "Becoming/Dependent nature". It is also stressed within the context of Gestalt therapy that these axioms are not dichotomies, but rather polarities; part of a whole, like yin and yang.

In so many words, change is happening all the time in the timeless Now. Trying to impose change on top of change based on ignorance or bad habits results in suffering. Letting go and trusting the natural process of change results in an organic wholeness of being and expression.

Side note: the more I learn about this approach to therapy, the more I wonder why there is such a stigma against psychotherapy among so many meditators. Their knowledge of the subject must be WAY out of date. Just saying...

Part 2 of the Baraz "enlightenment" talks has a great moment. He is talking about the state of awakening and freedom when one just "stops all effort" and lets go and surrenders and the natural luminosity of oneself and everything else is glimpsed.

He says that one can't 'stay there' because we all have so many self-centered habit patterns that will take us out of it. So, these "patterns" need to be worked on over time to help integrate oneself into the natural luminosity.

So, isn't just obvious that pyschotherapy or any kind of work on our "stuff" would be very helpful in working on these "patterns?"

Great points fellows, I totally agree. I think this may have been a case of the pendulum swinging... there does seem to be something to the hard-core critique of mainstream practice culture, in some respects, but the pendulum then swung too far in the other direction.

Mike, you sum it up nicely. My impression is that this is how, at its best, the dzogchen/tantra facets of vajrayana function. the dzogchen is going for dzogchen-- great completion, great perfection-- what is, is. And this is the very heart of tantra, which in turn is emphasizing the complementary psychological facets of the awakened and deluded states, in which every deluded state has unrecognized within it a profound wisdom, and every facet of timeless wisdom can appear in the guise of a correlated flavor of dualistic tension. So the immediate, timeless aspect(space) has a structure to express itself (mandala as skandhas/passions/wisdoms/compassion), in which the (not yet fully awakened-- perhaps never fully awake by this criteria) practitioner can participate understandingly in the unfolding of their relative nature, in the light of that timeless luminosity. So increasingly that changeful aspect of existence can be seen and felt to abide or unfold in that timeless openness. My long way of saying that in vajrayana we definitely have an example of beginningless enlightenment being unfolded in the context of a sophisticated holistic psychology.

"In so many words, change is happening all the time in the timeless Now.
Trying to impose change on top of change based on ignorance or bad
habits results in suffering. Letting go and trusting the natural process
of change results in an organic wholeness of being and expression.

Side note: the more I learn about this approach to therapy, the more I
wonder why there is such a stigma against psychotherapy among so many
meditators. Their knowledge of the subject must be WAY out of date."

I only speculate, but the old modalities of psychotherapy were pretty friggin' heavyhanded; just like many modalities of meditation, for that matter. Heavyhandedness, disrespect for Nature, human nature, and 'what is', is endemic to our time and place-- up to just about yesterday, for almost all of us. We were acculturated to strive to become Masters of the Universe, to regard everything as resources for us to USE based on the latest 'bright idea'; bad outcomes are 'side effects' to be dismissed or at best requiring slight adjustment-- not taking an entirely different approach, until a critical mass of bad outcomes has been produced. The first I ever heard about psychotherapy, back in the '60's, the aspiration was to become 'adjusted' to 'a normal level of neurosis.' Pharmaceutical psychotherapeutics-- the current trend-- is, if anything, even MORE heavyhanded than the old 'talking cure.'

Our conversation takes place in a kind of blessed bubble; I certainly hope for its continued expansion, but we have to recognize that we're not the current mainstream. On either the meditation or the psychology aspects. Noticing the context can only add to our appreciation of our several and mutual discoveries-- so I'm not aiming to be a party-pooper, or to be the old geezer with tales of how rough we had it, 'back in my day.' Context is a valuable bunch of information.

-- I'd add that personally I'm currently allergic to ALL impositions, and suspicious of my own and others' certainty that 'I know best.'

Since writing this article, I've been putting this Paradoxical Theory of Change to good use in my meditation practice. What I mean is that I've been sitting with only one end in mind; that is, staying with present experiencing, come what will.

It's clear that change happens of its own accord. When I think of all the time I have spent advising people with special tips, tricks, and techniques in order to make progress, I have to laugh at myself a little. For, it is obvious now that any tip, trick, or technique in meditation has everything to do with simply staying with present experiencing. It has very little to do with figuring something out.

There is so much talk of trying to "debunk" some kind of self-sense or center-point, as if insight was the result of solving some kind of logical puzzle. In contrast, my current hypothesis is that the misperceptions of ego-identity that plague some of us (or at least seem to) are released naturally as we learn to let experience work itself out. This approach seems scary to a lot of people, as if they believe that letting go is the same as giving up, or quitting, or zoning out. But the "way to look" is not by passive ignorance (ignore-ance), nor by heroic interjection of pre-formed insights; but rather, through conscious active non-action.

And this is where the idea of "faith" actually plays an integral role within the contemplative paths. There needs to be a willingness to try this out; to stick with active non-action long enough to realize how change happens of its own accord, and that our habitual interference with the process is what keeps the cycle of suffering spinning out of control. As Alan Watts put it, faith is, "a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water," and, "the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be." I am also beginning to understand all the talk of "grace" from the point of view of Tantra and Advaita Vedanta, if only due to the fact that growth is not something the ego does. This process, as it seems, is trans-egoic.

yes

I think that "active non-action" is a perfect description. One can be very busy, very active, ambitious even, full of life, while, at the same time, taking no action of a resistant, manipulative, or grasping nature. It really is possible.

The word "conscious" is also key because that is where practice lies.



"Faith and "Grace" -- Krishnamurti used to say something like: "it is up to you to open the window and let the wind blow in, but you have no power over when or if the wind will blow."



Being willing to open the window is faith. The wind is grace.

"Being willing to open the window is faith. The wind is grace." -Mike



Couldn't have said it better myself.