the real by preferring generality, but reality never presents itself to us in meeting it on the ground as just the ‘particular instance’ of some generic rule. You don’t meet on the ground the general-category cat, you meet a succession of particular cats, each unique. Plato and Aristotle used this example of ‘catness’ to explore their different philosophical approaches – with Plato favouring abstract conceptualising about cats and Aristotle privileging the actual experience of meeting with a particular cat (Howard 2000, p.41). Abstractionism tends to gloss over that the different cats have their own flesh and blood, their unique matter, personality and spirit which mean any encounter with them is never mechanistic or predictable.
It is all too easy to claim as part of your theoretical orientation that you have warmth and unconditional positive regard for all your clients but on the ground you always meet with a very particular human being, replete with all their quirks, foibles, distressing habits, defensive manoeuvres and unexpected responses. You must meet with, work with, dialogue with, love with – him or her.
To walk this in reality is much harder than to simply talk it. To really immerse ourselves in the emotional, psychological and energetic world of another living person is far more dynamic, terrifying, uplifting and moving than any written account (either before or after the fact) can ever
capture. The map will always be drier, flatter, safer and cleaner than the contoured real world which is juicy, dirty, wet and dangerous. But we know that real food is tastier than the menu, climbing the mountain more satisfying than the outline in the guidebook and the breathing, moving, responding body touches you in ways a picture never can. It is also true, naturally, that the food can poison you; the menu cannot. During the climb you can fall; in the guidebook you cannot. The picture will not break your heart but the lover most certainly can.
The map feels safer, easier to control – and many retreat there to live something akin to a half-life. The terrain can potentially wound and destroy you but is drenched in colour, awareness, energy and change. It requires us to risk something, to be open to profound reshaping of who we are. Intellectualisation and defensive thought try to cut corners and eventually they deny reality, tending to ‘iron out’ the ground’s ambiguous patterns, so they appear more sensible and coherent than they really are.
They promise to spare us from the lows whilst depriving us of the highs.
The worst of this kind of thought pretends reality is like a crossword puzzle, presenting a well-defined problem that has an equally well-defined solution. This offers us the tempting and seductive illusion of safety. This may make us feel better for a time – but actually leaves us under-prepared and vulnerable when travelling on the ground. It is a form of shutting one’s eyes and hoping for the best. No matter how far we retreat into our cognitive mind we cannot remain there permanently unless we mean to avoid human relational contact altogether. For any practising therapist to do this is terrifying and wholly unacceptable.
Reality tests and pushes us, but moves us profoundly. This is why we must ‘try it out’ and ‘go through it’ for ourselves. The mystery, the pain and the joy of life is in the colourful, maddening, extraordinary details on the ground; but all this beautiful texture and depth, richness and quality, disappears in the too sweeping thought which prefers theorising because it does not want to deal with practical and existential variety.
The discipline of reflective practice thinking is to never cut the tie to experience, since this is what immerses us in the terrain’s humanity. To understand a terrain, we must be affected by it, involved, interested.
Given its experiential and enactive dimensions, situated functioning is easier to teach to students in the field, or on the job, than to describe to a reader on the page. For example, the way in which several strands come together in action that is relevant to its setting is hard to state
exactly. We say, ‘I finally got my act together’, and everyone knows what we mean, but this expression is a shorthand that suffices for a deeply complex process.
Any given therapy model – that of Freud, Jung, Adler, Rogers, Perls, Ellis, Beck, Fairbairn, Kohut, et al. – is no more or no less than a record of the route someone took in their walk through the terrain of therapising.
After their walk, they reflected on what got them through, what the helps and hindrances were, and tried to convey this by articulating it as a map and a plan. Some therapists did convey the lessons they learned in the field, and the organic ideas these sparked, in the thinking and language of reflective practice. Most founding fathers and mothers, unfortunately, developed their practitioner knowledge of the field into full-blown models with sets of precise directions and theoretical structures for others to follow. Some therapeutic practice by orthodox Freudians (especially after his death) typifies the very worst of what happens when the pure (and usually misunderstood) instructions of the founder are carved in stone. Whether in politics, religion or therapy practice what follows is often damaging or dangerous. The theorist is reified as a grand visionary, who can save their future followers from having to wrestle with reality themselves or develop their own practical wisdom. And, sadly, many are only too happy to give away their power, their intelligence and their agency to someone else who promises a shortcut, quick-fix, easy way to mastery.
Therefore, this book is saying to the situated practitioner: ‘Own the special quality of what you know by realising how extraordinary it is that you can know this. You are engaged in a practising that has its own existential and practical wisdom, its own poetic craft, and its own service of something ultimately valuable, all linked in an unbreakable fabric of interlacing threads’.
This being so, there is such a person as a wise healer, and there is such a thing as the wisdom of healing.
This wisdom grows over time, inside us, in the well – the portable, personal system of practical wisdom that will assist and guide us whilst in the terrain of working with clients. In reality we are our own well – it is our brain, our memory, our heart, spirit, body, energy, confidence and personality which holds this incredible resource for us, often at a level below everyday consciousness, in the implicit mind, in body memory. It is this location (outside of ordinary conscious awareness) which makes us
doubt that the bucket will come up full this time when we move inside the territory. This is the source of all performance anxiety – in therapy, in business, in acting.
Over many years of discussing, teaching, living and working with this set of lived phenomena I have outlined a very useful metaphor for how the well fills up: a number of streams of living water that flow into the well and replenish its supply – the streams fill the bucket with that intangible something which appears when we enter the real-world territory of practice. I have encouraged students, clients, colleagues and myself to reflect on these streams, to discuss and to journal around them, to act them out, draw them and feel them – to practise them as frequently as possible so that we can recognise and understand their existence within the self. Eventually we can rely on and be supported by them in each new return to the living, breathing territory of client work. The next section sets out 34 streams that flow into the well.
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