About the clash of propensity with predicament

I first met Ken and Marlys during early mornings while my wife and I were on holidays with friends. I always got up earlier than the others. My early rising gave me a great chance to get to know this other interesting couple. Then, I brought Ken and Marlys to the breakfast table so my traveling companions could meet them too. Ken and Marlys were facing a predicament in their lives, one that clashed spectacularly with their propensities. 
    More recently I spent time with Ken and Marlys on the stage of our local theatre. They were dressed in Edwardian garb and I was costumed as a parrot.
    
This is a story about story. It’s about how stories, and perhaps about how all things creative, move through a process of emerging, adapting, consolidating and moving on. 
    Ken and Marlys are fictional, perhaps you already gathered that. They were written into a short story those early mornings while I was on holiday. There’s a lot of humour in their story. However, their story is much more than that. It’s an illustration of what I’ve seen and celebrated in my professional career as a psychologist, something about what it means to be human. 
    Let’s try something different in this month’s blog. If you have an extra fifteen minutes you can jump to the story, Sailor, on another page of this website. At the end of that page is the link to jump back here. You would be able to understand the rest of the blog without first reading the story, but reading the story will make this much more fun for you.  Here’s the link: Sailor
    
So, this is how Ken, Marlys and I (as a parrot) got on stage.
    Three weeks before an Arts Gala themed on the Netflix series, Bridgerton, a theatre guy read several of my short stories. He was taken with the one entitled Sailor and decided it would make a great one-act play for the Gala. I was game.
    During the rehearsals the actor portraying the part of Marlys got it: the story was about the healing power of compassion. I’d never phrased it so concisely as she did. Of course, compassion’s transformational power has been a long held belief of mine. It motivated my entire career as a psychologist. It’s not surprising it emerged in my story about Ken and Marlys.
    This blog could very well be about that belief. But it isn’t.
    It’s about the creative process. 

The creative process is an emergent one. 
    The stage play Sailor came together in two short weeks. The creativity I had in writing the short story jumped into an entirely new form, first as it was re-written as a stage play and then further interpreted through the creative power of actors in a small improv group. There were challenges. We had a very short time line to prepare it for the stage. We needed it to be acceptable for a general audience including children. The story itself needed to be abridged to fit into a ten minute slot in the night’s schedule. 
    It all turned out out quite differently than I’d imagined it in its initial writing. One round of creativity gave way to another round of creativity and then to another, all preserving the story’s humour and theme. 
    What started as a solitary venture became a co-creative process with the actors. 
    And that’s the focus of this blog. 

As I look back on my professional career, as I’m so apt to do in this blog, I realize psychotherapy is also essentially a creative act, or actually, a co-creative one. 
    A person entering psychotherapy is typically stuck, stuck within persistent negative emotions, stressful circumstances and hurtful or ineffective relationships. It’s that stuff about propensity and predicament all over again. To get out of that stuck, new ways of thinking and acting are needed. 
    The creative work of the therapist notices the uniqueness of the client and their situation, looks for openings of receptivity and resiliency to build on, finds ways the client can be motivated to work toward change. The therapist’s flexible and responsive approach fosters creativity in the client, helps them explore new ways of thinking and engage new ways with the world around them.
     That creative process interlaced many elements. I could bring the knowledge that the science of psychology has developed to seed ideas and possibilities for the client. I could bring in the wisdom of healing and recovery garnered from the creative work of other clients. My life work fostered an appreciation the complexity of the human condition which helped me respond with compassion, patience, hope and grace for the client’s struggles. The ethics of my profession would safeguard my clients from harm.
    It was a creative process, unique to each client. 
        
So getting back to the parrot…
    The predicament that Ken and Marlys encountered was that Sailor, a parrot they’d adopted through a rescue society, swore prodigiously. Ken and Marlys had their own propensities, too. They were in their senior years and had strong religious beliefs which forbade the very thing the parrot was very good at. 
    (If you haven’t already flipped over to read the story, you probably want to do so now. Here’s the link again: Sailor)
    The challenge the theatre group had was to put on a play with swearing as a central element for a general audience, without any swearing coming from the stage. If you’re interested in how that was accomplished send me an email and I will write back to tell you ([email protected]). Truly, what the actors did was ingenious. 
    While a stuffed parrot in a bird cage or a parrot hand-puppet could have worked, neither would’ve been optimal to portray the transformational power of compassion: that required an interpersonal connection. So, I got to play the part of Sailor. I don’t want to give too much away but will mention that the bird eventually replaced the swears with a chuckle that would help Marlys heal from a deep sadness she felt. 
    And that’s what creativity and compassion can do.