Personal
coaching - an orientation
I currently call what I do and what I offer "personal
coaching".
The old models of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
have become increasingly limited,
both as regards to content
and as regards to their institutional setting. Most of the
therapists I know share this critique, although at times
in different language and are deeply frustrated by the bureaucratic
trains. At the same time field is opening up to new influences,
new ways of being with people and a new results can be expected.
Because of the entrapment in system issues, I sense that
it is worthwhile having a few practitioners who are willing
to be perceived as outside the system.
I have written a few background papers that explore in
more detail what I will summarize here. Freud's own work
was limited by the impossibility of questioning the social
system of his time. The American version of psychoanalysis
very early caved in to medical politics, completely against
Freud's own advice, and further narrowing the range of questions.
Psychotherapy in its new openness is so varied and often
so undisciplined that is hard to say what it is, except
my experience is that increasingly many practitioners feel
confident in socializing their clients to a point of view
without any awareness that there are bigger choices. A focus
on psycho dynamics and the biodynamics of mood states are
increasingly well understood, but at the same time there
is a retreat from the hot world of interpersonal, cultural
and political commitments and beliefs.
I recently sat on a plane cross country next to a first
year medical student who had her psychiatric textbook with
her. 1400 pages. It began with a brief chapter on the human
life cycle, a very watered down Erik Erikson model, avoiding
the elegance of his three part model: the body, the mind,
and society. The rest of the book consisted of fifteen chapters
each of which was titled "X disorder", where X
was all the obvious things - mood, behavior, affect, substance,
personality. The overall impression was that normalcy was
order and everything else was disorder. Order implied the
acceptance of an adaptation to the current state of society.
The idea was that for any "dis-order", there would
be medication to eliminate the problem and restore ordered
normalcy.
As a person who has taken pride in being helpful to people
who have been anxious, depressed, scared, bored, but exploiting
the meaning and soul making qualities of these very human
experiences, I have been distressed that the trend in the
more formal, mainline psychiatric and psychotherapeutic
worlds has been to treat these increasingly as symptoms
to be removed as rapidly as possible. My own view is closer
to that of my teachers, Eric Fromm and then Erik Erikson,
and follows more recent work such as James Hillman's. In
his fascinating book with Michael Ventura, We Have Had 100
Years Of Psychotherapy And The World Is Getting Worse, even
inside oriented psychotherapy has become a way of resisting
the present. Our psychic apparatus is exquisitely sensitive
to the environment within which ourselves and our soul live
and the environment is not doing well. Our Dis-ease with
it is treated by the therapists as a reflection, not of
the current outside conditions of our attempt at living,
but from the experiences of our past. The result is to make
political idiots of us all. "You've got a problem with
your boss? Tell me about your father."
The search is on for genes for depression and anxiety,
as if by turning them off the person would live a happier
life. There is no understanding that depression and anxiety
are key feedback mechanisms for society to comprehend that
it may be on the wrong track. In the same way, children
who are not allowed any longer to go out and play because
of the real and perceived threats and the outside environment
and are required by their parents to descend to experiences
like T. V., have too much energy at school for hard pressed
teachers and parents to cope with. The result is a massive
medication for children in huge numbers as a pharmacological
police action. Society is making up for its own failure
at the expense of the children.
In short psychiatry and psychotherapy, instead of being
an oasis for the exploration of difficulties in adaptation
to an alienated world, has become part of the program of
"order", and reminds me of phrases in political
science like "the well ordered society".
In my practice I have become increasingly sensitive to
the damaging role of unexplored ideology in the worlds that
clients are trying to find a place in. I can no longer operate
in any way except that of making ideology itself part of
the inquiry, if it seems to be a source of difficulty.
At the same time increasingly clients are disastrously
uneducated. They lack an understanding of history, literature,
the arts and social science. Each generation of clients
brings new problems. In Freud's time and it was then repression
of the sexual. In the years of my first training problems
of identity moved into the forefront. Next came an almost
ubiquitous quasi schizophrenia of alienation and fear, called
in the unattractive language of the trade, borderline personality
disorders. Since then there is among clients an increasing
social understanding of the difficulties of the society
and a feeling of complete helplessness in the face of historical
forces where bureaucratic power has replaced any sense of
citizenship as an active process.
Given all this I have made the active choice of calling
what I do personal coaching. Many are making a strong case
for this choice. Primarily it is to reinforce the friendship
and alliance with a client rather than aligning, or appearing
to be aligned, with the same dangerous forces that are threatening
the client's vitality, quality of life, and sanity.There
is an aura of seriousness exuded by most psychotherapists
which they regard as "neutral", but actually is
a well recognized attitude of the well trained bureaucrat
who is able to say "how may I help you?" A lighter
touch, more humor or actual rather than feigned seriousness
would be more "neutral" because it is more in
line with human expectations.
We have to take seriously uncomfortable critiques. Ivan
Illich explored how professional ization, while motivated
at the core by helping, always transitions into its opposite.Schools
become dis-education, medicine becomes iatrogenic, law becomes
entanglement, and psychotherapy becomes psychically antiseptic.
The point here is that all institutional life has its own
phases. Continual renovation is necessary if we are to keep
alive to the healthy spectrum of human enthusiasm and doubt
And to create the conditions for a vital, healthy interchange
between the person whose authority is in experience and
wisdom and the person whose problems reflect how hard it
is to make sense of a life in society. None of the current
words, such as the"client", or "patient",
express this a-symmetry in a delightfully and lovingly adequate
way. Burdening these relationships with increasing requirements
for reporting and institutional control makes the practitioners
increasingly uncomfortable with their status as an agent's
of the most bureaucratic parts of our life -where for example
medicine and insurance are the most computer intense interconnectedness
parts of our society -and they are made to feel more like
agents of the law than participants in free inquiry. We
must find a way to get beyond equating dis-ease with dis-order.
Personal coaching will have its own dilemmas. I'm reminded
of the old phrase "football builds character, but the
question is, what kind?" In the same way personal coaching
runs the danger of helping people in the game, such as corporate
power, without noticing that the client might be interested
in questioning the game itself in the pursuit of other values,
such as citizenship, social justice, or personal development.
We can expect continual realignment in the field of mental,
emotional, spiritual, relationship, and life path helping.
This choice by me represents my best understanding of what
is most effective for clients at this point in time. Personal
coaching too will probably become ossified, bureaucratic
and standards based. At that point there will be new practitioners
who, concerned about their own integrity, and the healing
process for their clients, will find new paths.
The supporting essays are
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