June 15th, 2025

This month I am piggy-backing two blogs, one new and one from about a year ago. There's a chance the first might tweak your interest to read a bit more.

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. 

Still intrigued?

What follows is a reprise of the blog I published on complex systems last September. 

Emergent from the creative process

As a new song develops during my practice sessions, working the riffs feels both enticing and frustrating. Musical phrases emerge out of snippets of melody. Eventually a sequence of riffs begins to hang together. As I keep playing with those riffs, harmonic structures add depth and presence. Melody and harmony begin to gel into an arrangement that feels as though everything belongs. I play around with the tempo and rhythm. I try out different voicings for my digital keyboard to find the one that best compliments the harmonized riffs. A stable rendition gradually takes shape with each musical phrase contributing to a common emotional feeling. After a few weeks, it’s a song and ready to take to the coffeeshop.
      But that’s not the end of the song’s development. In subsequent months I find nuances in how those riffs can be played. In doing so, the characteristic feeling comes across more strongly. Listeners at the coffeeshop begin to respond, perhaps suddenly alerting to the music or staring toward the piano in concentration. One listener stated that my songs come across as if they were coming from my heart. Which indeed they do.
      For this blog I want to put a label on that characteristic feeling of a song: it is an emergent property which arises from a complex system of riffs, harmonies, rhythms, variations in timing, and the voicing of the digital keyboard. 
      Different songs have different emergent properties. Some songs feel like being in a French cafe with a roving accordion player. Often coffeeshop patrons say that right away. Other songs feel like being in a piano bar of a classy hotel. And then there are the songs that transport one’s mind to a walk in nature. Each song has its own emergent property arising from its stable structure of musical elements. Some are similar, others break into their own distinct emotional territory.
     Last month I blogged about beauty, how it is more than an attribute or an aptitude but arises from the complex of context, relationship, perceiving and being. Two months ago I blogged about how my songs played the role of friends in helping with my moods and insomnia. Both of those blogs were about emergent properties arising from my music. 
      That label, emergent property, is taken from the theory of complex systems. Complexity Theory provides a different way of thinking about the world around us and our experiences within it, not at all like the way I was trained to think as a psychologist.
      As a psychologist I was taught to think in terms of entities in categories (e.g. mental health disorders) linear causality (what changes what?) and stages (what is the progression?). This way of thinking forms the foundation for how the professional practice of psychology is regulated. And from what I gather, it continues to be the way the science of psychology is researched and taught. 
     But over my career, I changed. The change arose from being a keen observer and doing my own critical thinking in the therapy room, a great place to observe the human condition. In the safety and privacy of therapy, hypotheses (or perhaps better said, hunches and intuitions) about human subjectivity and behaviour can be developed and then either confirmed or discarded.
​      The ability to be an observer and critical thinker revealed me to be, at my core, a scientist. However, and even more compelling, alongside my scientist-self something else emerged, yet another emergent property of the complex system of which I was a part. The more I dealt with the human condition, the more strongly grew within me the humanistic elements of compassion, empathy, intuition, creativity and respect for individual autonomy.
      One of the little wisdoms I developed during four decades of being a psychotherapist was “it’s never just one thing”, clearly a nod to complexity theory. 
     If you want to read more about complexity theory, check out my book review of Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise. His book illustrates complex systems in the natural sciences and philosophy.  (https://www.twiltondale.ca/wiltons-reads.html).

But before I go, let’s take another dip into the relationship of complexity theory to my creative process. 
      My novels are the product of years of work. An early draft establishes the storyline with its characters. Then the work begins to construct the complex system to sustain it. I do dozens of rounds of editing, paying attention to how characters think and speak. I lay in contrasts, endeavour to create rhythm to the read. All of that work is to get the many elements of fiction, character and voice and circumstances and happenings, to gel into a stable structure that gives rise to an emergent experience of meaning and feeling for the reader. 
      I’m aiming for a beauty that is different than prettiness. It is the beauty of human nature as it can emerge to be. Healing plays a strong role in my novels as I come to be an author after decades of helping clients heal from mental distress. And, you won’t be surprised that my characters become my friends. I feel their pain, I cry with them and celebrate their breakthroughs: friends, much like my songs in the night.
      I want to share a brief phrase from one of my current novels. The words are simple, ordinary even. But they always bring a tear to my eye and other readers have confessed the same. Here they are in their simplicity: “ … and whispered Merry Christmas in my ear.” 
      The intense emotion these words create in the reader emerges after 150 pages of plot and character development. The stage for them had been set with an evocative description of the music at a Christmas concert in a jazz club. Readers are already well aware of struggles of the speaker and the one spoken to, the perplexities those two characters are facing. Arising from this complex system of character, plot, and setting, profound emotion and meaning are emergent from seven simple words. 
      And with them, a tear runs down your cheek.