This morning, I spent some time on a CPD Workshop run by Robin and Joan Shohet entitled, “The Finite and Infinite Game of Supervision”. It was wonderful, and I would like to express my sincere appreciation to both of them for their thought-provoking session…
Amongst many of the thought processes that were started off like hares across my mind was one about Judgement. Now we can’t do without judgement – it’s how we make sense of our world, after all (“This is like that”, and so on), but moralistic judgement, that’s a bit different, because it comes from our ego (“That’s wrong”, “I wouldn’t do it like that”, etc). Moralistic judgement is born out of fear; fear of difference, fear of loss, fear of not being good enough, fear of shame, whatever…
At one point during the session, Robin turned off his camera, and I found myself looking out of my office window whilst I listened, and I could see my little rose – looking a bit sad and bedraggled now as lots of the flowers are fading… Now my sister had earlier sent a photograph of her little rose which I had bought for her on a previous birthday, and it looks amazing – really beautiful – and I found myself judging mine against hers… and I noticed my thinking… My first thought was that if I wanted to send a photograph back, I would have difficulty finding some really good flowers on it to photograph.
So, after the session was finished, I did some self-inquiry reflection. What was the judgement about? Well, there was a belief about ‘ugliness’ – to me, the brown of the dead flowers is ugly. So there’s something in there about a loss of perfection – maybe beauty = perfection? I couldn’t send a photograph of less-than-perfect flowers, because my photographs of flowers have to be beautiful and perfect…? (Take a look around my website!) Do they have to be perfect, or do they just have to be seen to be perfect – because those are two different things…
So here I am, back in some very old ‘stuff’ which I thought I’d dealt with years ago during my Psychotherapy training, but it turns out to just be another layer coming to light… The fear of being seen as not perfect (and yes, I know there is other deeper stuff there too, around fear of ageing, loss and death; the passage of time, the end of summer, darkness of winter, cold etc, etc… but that’s for another blog, another time, and even the act of my having to write that to you is in itself a reflection of the fear of being seen as not perfect, because I have to draw attention to the presence of other stuff, to save someone mentioning it in a comment because they thought I hadn’t seen it…)
So why am I sharing all this? Because I believe this fear isn’t just mine – it actually belongs to all of us (as do the other fears, too… just look at social media, and all of the ‘perfect’ selfies). If I own it, with compassion for myself, then I’m taking another step towards becoming my authentic self; becoming ‘perfect in my own imperfection’, if you like, and accepting that. In doing that, I am also accepting it with love on behalf of the human collective. As Freud said, “In our vulnerability lies our strength” – what he meant was that if we own our shadow self, then we have no more need of our defence mechanisms. But in order to own the dark bits, we first need to become aware of them, and that’s what the journey into self-inquiry is all about.
As a therapist (and a human being) it also means that if I no longer need to have defences around this ‘secret’ belief, then I can fully accept others in their perfect imperfection, too; the belief is no longer a secret. So our journey into self-awareness is about becoming as clear a vessel as possible, so that we can see others through a clearer lens, without our own ‘stuff’ getting in the way… Of course we can never clear all of our ‘stuff’ – it still keeps coming up in layers – but that’s what makes life interesting, and challenging, in a “Ooh – what was that reaction about?” kind of way.
So… take another look at the perfectly imperfect photograph of my little roses… (I found it very amusing that in trying to take a ‘perfect’ photograph of the contrast of dead and live flowers for this blog, I was unable to get a shot that was in focus – until I realised that that was the whole point!) Consider, then, what this photograph brings up for you, and what are the thoughs that come up… notice your own beliefs, ideas and complex equivalences, and ask yourself, “Ooh – what is that reaction about…?” Exciting, isn’t it…!
