August 24th, 2025

I'm still getting webpage openings for last month's blog From Scientist to Humanist. I suspect this reflects readers passing it along to others who might be interested. So, I've left it on the page below this month's blog.
​       In a way, these two blogs are an interesting pair. One deals with the science side of my life and the other with the creative arts. And as always, both of them touch back on my decades of work as a psychologist.

The Hero's journey

There’s a plot device in literature called the hero’s journey. It works like this: the reader identifies with a specific character and follows that character through a sequence of adversities to end up in a place that fulfills the journey. 
      Along the way, the central character typically displays courage and accumulates wisdom and perspective. Also along the way, allies provide assistance or compassion. Adverse circumstances and other characters, the oppositional ones, create impediments to the journey. The scenes in the story follow in a one-thing-after-another fashion. The linear plot line is sprinkled with an occasional cycling back, picking up backstory or a loose end from a previous scene.
      As a reader, by the end, you feel satisfied. The novel mimics what you hope is true about life: life is all about facing tough stuff but getting through and becoming better off in the process.
      Both of the novels I’m currently preparing for publication follow this plot. Because I was a psychologist these fictional journeys are psychological ones, involving healing and reconciliation of relationship. Both novels, even though extremely different, will convey to the reader a sense of hope. 
      Through these novels readers witness the goodness within human nature. In their stories, we learn we can face the life events that befall us, make sense of them and know that others also feel the same frustrations, hopes and determination we do.
Every song I compose starts off with a single riff, a sequence of 10 or so notes. Then that riff embarks on its own hero’s journey. Along that journey, the first riff picks up other complementary ones. A pattern forms as the main riff intersperses itself with the others.
      But a good song is more than just the hummable riffs. Undergirding the riffs are harmonic structures and rhythm to add richness to the song and make it more compelling. Some harmonies are dissonant, jarring, but those are always resolved so the listener can feel settled.
      To make song humanly relatable, my jazz riffs and harmonies typically inhabit the part of the piano keyboard corresponding to the frequency range of the human voice. There the song’s riffs take on their personality as twists and turns give the riff its unique character. 
      During the composition process some riffs saunter off into musical dead ends. At other times I struggle with a particular note in a potential melody line that doesn’t fit in with the progression of the harmony supporting the song. The process is never straightforward. During the several weeks of creating I try out different variations on the emerging handful of riffs, harmonic combinations, and rhythms. It’s a seemingly endless process of adding in and culling out. 
      And then, at some point it is finished. When I play the song in the coffeeshop I trust it will leave the listener with an emotional hangover: energized, or made content, pensive or at peace, much like the reader at the end of a novel. 

Of course, I learned about the hero’s journey in the therapy room.
      The education required to enter the profession of psychology, and the culture I found once there, prepared me to be the hero, actually expected me to be so. With knowledge and skill, I was the one with the mastery to create good outcomes. Psychologists learn clever little psychological maneuvers to assist the process. The knowledge of the human mind we get from textbooks and academic journals saturates our thinking. We learn (sort of) how the brain works. We develop therapy room rituals to set the stage for our heroics. We practice our procedures so we can perform them smoothly, carrying our clients along toward personal change.
      However, over my forty years I came to learn the hero on the therapy room journey wasn’t me at all. It was the client. I was just a supporting character. To use the other metaphor, I was the underlying harmonic and rhythmic structure while my client’s life story was the tune. 
      I’d love to share some heroes’ stories with you, several of them come to mind. In my remembering, I’m inspired by those clients all over again. Alas, I retain the burden of confidentiality and fear that if I get too specific I’d violate the trust and sacred privacy of the therapy room. So, what I’ll do instead is tell you the nature of some of those journeys.
      Frequently, I got to witness people struggle through the emotional and behavioural residuals of childhood abuse to become well-functioning adults and parents. These heroes interrupted trans-generational patterns, allowing future generations their own better chance at wellness.
      I got to see courageous journeys of heroes breaking the bonds of addiction with its abuse and dependency. Their lives became richer and more functional, their capacity for relationship enhanced.
      I worked with many military personnel and veterans. They came with minds shattered and intense emotions running totally amok. Those brave men and women spoke of horrors I could barely imagine. Often, in my mind, I walked their battlefields feeling their emotions as they relived being there. They trusted me with their traumas and I got to witness their healing. They are my heroes too.
      Oh, and there’s another group deserving mention. I had the privilege to work with young professionals coming out of their university studies. Their heroes’ journey came through discovering that assisting others was not just a matter of applying research findings, familiarity with elaborate theories, enacting step-by-step protocols and applying ethical rules. What a privilege it was for me to pass over the profession to folk who could assist with their hearts as well as their minds.

Now, in retirement my presence with heroes comes in the form of brave little riffs and complex fictional characters. It is no less engaging (although not nearly as tiring). Whether it be the creativity of the arts or the compassion and wisdom of the therapy room I count myself so fortunate to have witnessed and walked so many stunning heroic journeys.
     I rather suspect if you look for them, you’ll find heroes around you too.

From Scientist to Humanist

I started out my psychology career as a scientist.
      I ended up as a humanist.
      There remains much I love about science. Scientists are keen observers. They look for the nuances of how things are. They are curious, I love that. And they are creative. They form hypotheses to explain what they see and then test those hypotheses out, often in ingenious ways. Wow! What’s there not to love.  
      As a profession psychology has prided itself in being based in science. And so, I learned as much of that science as I could and entered the profession eager to be a keen observer, eager to be curious and figure out why things were the way they were, and eager to be creative in how I went about things. I expected I’d constantly monitor whether or not the way I was thinking and the way I was responding was getting me closer to understanding my clients and helping them.
      Was I ever wrong.
      By the end of my career I realized that professional psychology was not interested in me being a good observer, curious and creative, testing out hunches, progressively gaining a clearer understanding. Quite the contrary. Professional practice was about abiding by rules and enacting approved protocols of assessment and treatment.
      The science of psychology was to be left to people in universities who could write grant proposals for funding and publish in journals. Psychologists treating clients were to be technicians doing what those scientists had established, not being scientists themselves in figuring things out. It’s not what I’d signed up for.
     By the end of my career I was still convinced science is an amazing human venture, it just has to be the appropriate science for the purposes intended. Unfortunately, professional psychology has chosen the wrong science. It chose to think in terms of linear cause and effect. These linearities are built in pretty deep and are never supposed to be questioned. You know them. Diagnose and treat is one. Then there is goal, plan, execution, and outcome. 
      The longer I worked as a psychologist, the more I realized linearity didn’t capture what I was seeing in the therapy room. The therapeutic change process could better be understood in terms of the regulation and emergent outcomes of complex systems. 
      There is a science to complex systems, a different one. It postulates multiple contributing variables in dynamic interaction. There can be extreme and unexpected outcomes, but also periods of just getting stuck. The progression of change often comes with unpredictable leaps and setbacks. Contributing elements to the change process include feedback loops and inhibitory and excitatory processes. Sequencing, timing, repetition and rhythm all make a difference in outcome. 
      I also noticed positive outcomes in the therapy room are highly dependent on subjective variables like the client’s perceived safety and motivation. Furthermore, those are germane for the therapist as well. It makes a huge difference for the client to have the perception of being listened to, especially if the listening goes beyond what the therapist thinks they need to hear.
      For both the client and the therapist, personality and priorly experienced relationship dynamics contribute to the functionality of the therapeutic endeavour. A good personality match makes a huge difference. Both parties are autonomous while both parties are relationship together. 
      It is messy. It is wonderful. It is human. 

Now for a hard segue. Be patient, I’ll get you back to the theme.

About a dozen years ago I started to explore my musical creativity. I was too old to play anyone else’s music, it was time to create my own. 
      Some of my coffeeshop repertoire is jazz, an instrumental ballad style of jazz with complex harmonies beneath melodic riffs. I play music from other genres too, all original but utilizing the musical structures of those genres.
       A dynamic relationship between melody, harmony and rhythm emerges as I noodle away in creating a new song. The riffs and I work together on how that song can be.
       Consider it the opposite of a tribute band.
​       Then at the coffeeshop I’m a subjective experiencer of the music I play, just like I was a subjective experiencer of the dynamics of the therapy room. As I play it, I feel it. 
      And each song carries the capacity to create meaning. Often coffeeshop listeners share the meaning the song creates within them, things like a memory of a particular place. All those meanings are unique to that particular listener. Listening to music becomes a complex process of past and present, what’s inside and what floats in between. 

I started this blog by stating I began my career as a scientist and ended up as a humanist.
       I’ve experienced my humanism subjectively and perhaps I’m way off from what a dictionary (or google) would say about it. I don’t really care to look. 
      Here’s what arose within me.
      My career as a psychologist and my musicianship has convinced me each person I interact with is a unique human being, a person with their own complexity of subjective experiences. 
       In the therapy room, it wasn’t up to me to set goals for them, or to decide what sanity would look like for them. I could bring knowledge to them of how things often work. I could bring whatever capacity I could muster to be compassionate and wise. I could foster clarity of mind to help them think things through. When I did, good things could happen, but those good things would come as much (or more!) from them as from me.

Let me end with a story. Recently a person came back to the coffeeshop a year after her last visit. She wanted me to play the song with fairies in it, the one she’d journaled about a year before. It took a long time to figure out which one she meant but we finally did. It didn’t have fairies when I first composed it, nor during many other times I’ve played it. But as I played it for her again, I noticed that now it does.