Empathy Versus Synchrony (podcast $)

“The term neural synchrony… refers to how the brains of people carrying out an activity together will start to behave in the same way.” — Morten Pedersen, technologist

Mysteries

There are mysteries about how things work, some of which are crucial. The central mysteries provide insight into other questions, and reveal deeper questions that no one has yet asked.

The central mystery in physics is the way fundamental objects behave both like waves and particles, but never at the same time. This is the foundation of cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, and biology and we know the universe would not “work” if this were not the case, but we don’t understand why this is, or know how it works. The best we have is quantum theory, but the theory can’t explain this.

In politics, as far as I’m concerned, the fundamental question is why people fail to understand their problems. Why do people repeatedly accept, endorse, and even die for explanations that are nonsensical or wrong?

Some people make progress in understanding culture by applying thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, but most people don’t. Why are the problems of groups unfathomable to individuals? If there is something keeping people stupid, what is it?

Psychotherapy is remotely related to psychology. Psychotherapy works to change the nature of mind; it addresses itself to the mysteries of individuals. Psychology is an institution focused on academic questions of a political nature. Psychology has always been political.

Psychotherapy is to psychology as spirit is to religion. The distinction is unclear to most people, and the similar names and professional overlap confound the two, but once you’re involved in the field, the differences become clear. As a practitioner of clinical counseling, which is another word for psychotherapy, psychology is of little use.

The central problems of psychology are therapeutically unimportant, and will remain unimportant as long as psychology remains logical and dogmatic. At least religion fosters cultural unity. In comparison, psychology’s research culture is insignificantly small.

How people change is central to psychotherapy. It’s often said that you cannot change another person. I often point this out to my clients. The truth is that you can, but it’s not done using any formula and it’s unpredictable.

We know experience changes people, and experience is somewhat under our control. Travels, adventures, family, relationships, and cultural exposure enlarge a person’s understanding and modify their personality. A cloistered, isolated life leads to dumb, inflexible people. We can cause people to change, but we can’t predict how they’ll change.

The Keys in Psychotherapy

In 1957, Carl Rogers (1957) proposed that the success of psychotherapy depended on what’s now called “unconditional positive regard.” Today, this is defined as showing complete support for and acceptance of a person no matter what that person says or does. This distortion of Roger’s idea percolates through much of psychotherapy, undermining its foundations.

What Rogers meant, and which he could not get therapists to understand, was that people are the best experts on their lives and experiences. It’s not that the therapist must accept their client’s conclusions, it is that the therapist must recognize that only the client has the power to change.

What you unconditionally accept is not that the client is always right—even they don’t think so or they wouldn’t ask for help—what you unconditionally accept is that only the client has the authority to change. In other words, that the therapist has neither power nor answers.

It’s therapists’ inability to accept their ignorance that has led to the twisting of Roger’s suggestion into something that preserves the therapist's self-image. It leads to the perception that therapists are manipulative and untrustworthy.

Using the misunderstanding that acceptance changes people, therapists maintain the fiction that they have knowledge, authority, and control. In truth, they have these in no greater measure than anyone else, and in less measure than their clients.

Psychotherapy’s Mystery

You don’t need to know how people change in order to support change. The idea that you need to answer question number one before approaching question two throws most therapists off track. This is a common mistake in applying reason to an unreasonable process.

In most circumstances where you want to change someone else’s opinion, you first ask why they believe what they do. Then, you’ll proceed to explain why your ideas are better. It’s reasonable to assume that people’s ideas are based on reason. They’re not. They’re based on feelings, and feelings are not reasonable.

Psychotherapy’s first and second mysteries are how people change and how to facilitate change. Psychology tries to answer the first question but has not. This leaves those therapists who follow psychology in the dark. Being in the dark is not acceptable to most therapists who need to feel that they’re valuable. These therapists may to turn to encouraging aphorisms, such as:

“We cannot change anything until we accept it.”
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
“What is necessary to change a person is to change their awareness of themselves.”

These aphorisms are circular and don’t tell you how to do anything. The only one worth remembering is Irvin Yalom’s, “A different therapy must be constructed for each patient because each has a unique story.” Still, I cannot subscribe to the word “construct” because it implies some best therapy, and that a therapist can construct it.

It’s my experience that the most effective change follows when I “construct” nothing. Instead, I follow each client in their unique path of unpredictable change.

A change in personality involves a complete rearrangement affecting intellect, emotions, and neurology. The process is chaotic, and there is no more a proper therapeutic structure than there is a proper shape of a cloud or a volcano’s eruption.

Empathy

While no therapeutic structure is proper for all situations, some are generally useful. Empathy is one. Empathy is an imagined feeling of similarity. It enables one person to think they feel what another person feels. An empathic connection is only as effective as it is true and, with divergent or disabled people, the illusion of empathy doesn’t go far.

What empathy accomplishes, if it accomplishes anything, is resonance. If what you and another person imagine are largely the same, then you can join each other in exploration without relying on reason or language.

You may still speak, but the language may be your own, with its own structures and meanings. You may speak in ways that are emotional, angry, or dispirited. If there is a resonance, then you will hardly need to explain yourself. Each person will understand the feelings of the other.

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Synchrony