Alright, this one is about my dog. 
      Lady is a Great Pyrenees, weighing in about 120 pounds. When she was about three-years old, Lady was rescued from a backyard where she’d been chained and neglected. Coming into the rescue society she was dirty, her fur matted, and her beautiful face given over to absolute terror. Struggling to find an adoptive home, the rescue society wondered if she might just have to be euthanized. A kind foster family stepped up. Unfortunately, they could only be a temporary solution. 
      When Lady first came to our home we noticed signs of her having been abused. She cringed away when feet too close to her moved quickly. We think she had been kicked. She absolutely couldn’t tolerate men in baseball caps, still can't. She was wary of idling pickup trucks. From her reactivity to other dogs we think she’d been taunted by dogs running loose when she was chained in that backyard. Lady didn’t know how to walk on a lead and would either pull or lay on the ground stubbornly, her front paw folded beneath her. 
      Now almost three years later, Lady is the most loving, loyal and personable dog we’ve ever had. It took her over a year but she eventually started to play with toys and do zoomies. All in all, she has completely re-defined the word Lady-like for us.
      Just in case you’re not familiar with the breed, Great Pyrenees look like a massively oversized English Cream Retriever. One dark night a visitor coming out of a neighbour’s house when I was walking Lady exclaimed there was a polar bear roaming the neighbourhood. 
      But despite their polar bear /retriever looks, Great Pyrenees have a personality more like a German Shepherd. The breed originated as a guard dog for the sheep on the slopes of the Pyrenees Mountains in France. 
      And this is where the similarity between my dog and me comes in.
      No, I haven’t guarded sheep on the slopes of the mountains and I’m sure that unlike Lady I’d be really bad at it. And no, I don’t have a deep coat of white, self-cleaning fur. Also I’m not apt to use a punch with my left hand if someone stops showing me affection (Lady has perfected that, it’s called the Pyrenees’ Paw).     
      But Lady and I do resemble each other in personality. The dominant trait of the breed is that of being iconically independent and stubborn.
      I’ve met my match.
​      Let me give an example. Pyrenees typically require a period of thinking time between when you tell them to do something and when they do it. That is, if they do it. It goes something like this: “You’ve asked me to come. I’ll have to figure out whether coming to you at this moment is more important than watching out the window. Watching out the window for people or dogs that might invade our front yard is very important. I’ve no idea why you are asking me to stop, but stopping right away just doesn’t feel right. If you’re serious enough about it you’ll ask again and then maybe I’ll consider it. Or not. 

But that’s not the only tempo variation Lady has thrown into my life. There is also the five-alarm, lights-and-sirens, fast-off-the-starting blocks reaction she has to intruders in her zone of protection. More than once on a walk I’ve ended up flat on the ground as she has taken off after what she considered an existentially threatening other dog. If I allow her to get more than two steps into her pursuit I’m in danger of being dragged across the road.  Remember, Great Pyrenees were bred to keep other predatory canines (e.g. wolves) from the flock on those Pyrenees Mountains. Protecting me from other dogs is the closest thing Lady can get to living out her heritage.
      Of course, as the human I’m supposed to be able to control Lady. Matching her instantaneous strength takes all of mine. The obvious solution would be to take her to obedience school. However, there she would be stuck in an enclosed space with many attack targets a small fraction of her size. Nope.
      But we’ve figured it out. It’s more about cooperation than control. It’s about mutual respect and recognition of what is important to each other. It works like this: I notice her body alerting from her usual easy-going gate at my side. I stop. She sits. I ask her what she's noticing and look around to find what she thinks might put our existence in peril. I talk to her about what I see, let her know my assessment of the risk. With the sound of my voice she starts to ratchet down her alert level. I reassure her we’re okay. If all else fails, I massage her ear. Eventually, she goes back to the scanning mode from her locked-in-on-the-peril mode. Then we walk on, the lead between us loose again, Lady comfortably adjusting to my pace. Well, that’s the way it works on a good day. Occasionally, we have a more difficult one.
     We still need to yield the sidewalk or walking path to other dogs, this for their safety. Lady sits peacefully beside me about ten meters off the path, me talking, her senses latched onto the other dog but drawing reassurance from the sound of my voice. Over time, her level of reactive intensity is coming down.
     I’m learning again the lesson I needed to heed over and over again as a psychologist. Psychotherapy was about providing companionship in moving through the client’s subjective experiences of treachery and trauma. It was about being sensitive and accepting to what the other was feeling, respecting each other’s strengths and working with those strengths. It was about figuring it out as we went along, knowing it worked best when I formed a secure relationship with my focus on the safety and wellbeing of the other.
     Oh, that way-too-loud barking you hear? That’s Lady. There was a doorbell on a tv commercial and she’s at our front door keeping us safe. I might need to go and reassure her that nobody is actually there. 
    
    

Scenario Number One:
       Decades ago I invested thousands of dollars to get my credential as a marriage and family therapist. The process required extensive hours of supervision spent viewing and critiquing my videotaped sessions. The supervisor, with the remote firmly in hand (his hand), would watch my work for a minute or so and then stop the tape to tell me what I should have done at that point in the session. Then he would start the tape to see if I did it (which I hadn’t because the session had been taped a week before). Then those steps would repeat. And repeat again. Over the course of the hundred hours I spent with him he never watched an entire session, and I don’t think he ever saw me for the unique therapist I could be.  
      The supervisor’s particular way of working was a perfect fit for his worldview and personality. Unfortunately, it was a lousy fit for mine.

Scenario Number Two:
A few weeks ago I paid for one of my novels to be reviewed by an editor. This editor teaches creative writing classes and is a published novelist. I’ve worked for three years on this novel and it’s deeply meaningful to me. In keeping with my values, a humanistic theme was the impetus for this novel. As in a classical music composition, the theme was first stated explicitly, embedded in a story told in the second chapter, then it was spun out into a couple of dozen variations through the rest of the novel. A story arc of a deepening relationship between a father and his son linked these variations, also a meaningful issue for me. 
    In her review the editor wondered about what the theme was, completely missing the one that motivated the writing. She also dismissed the progressive deepening of the central relationship that carried the story through. She missed what the novel was (and could be). And, she completely missed me. 


The family therapy supervisor thought what worked for him should work the same for everyone else. The editor had a sense of how a character’s story should be told that works for her and looked for it in the work of another writer. Both pointed in directions they considered necessary for my work to be successful in the ways theirs were. Both ran through the procedure they believed was necessary for the service they provided to me. 
    However, both missed what was unique and potentially valid in someone else’s different approach. They missed the person behind the therapist and the writer, a person who makes his own unique observations and engagement with the complexity of the human condition.
    There have been two outcomes of all this. 
    As a therapist, I occasionally found the theoretical perspective of my supervisor was useful. However, I stayed away from his intervention approach with both clients and those whom I later supervised. And, while I’m still processing the feedback of the editor, I will make some changes to strengthen weak areas of its plot development. It will still be mine, but arising from her guidance I can make it a little bit better.
    That’s the first outcome.
    The second outcome arises from that early supervision experience. As my career unfolded my focus became on truly seeing the person whom I was serving, not just running them through the procedures expected within my professional role. 
    Over the course the several decades of my practice I picked up a great deal of psychological knowledge. My head became well-stocked with theories of human behaviour. I learned many protocols and clinical maneuvers, each of which had promised great success in the therapy room. The professional knowledge and skillful therapeutic maneuvers were predicated on me acting upon the client, analyzing what was wrong and providing treatment. The client was expected to comply because, after all, the professional knows best.
    But for me that was not what it was all about. It became about my ability to truly see the person I was working with. In being so seen, they could then work with me as much as I would work with them. They could bring their own energy, hope and engagement with change, not just their compliance. To get there involved more listening than talking. It involved more questions than just those to identify symptoms and track treatment response. It was about what could emerge within them rather than what I could cause to occur through my treatment. It was about curiosity and celebration.
        
Now I turn to yet another engagement with the human condition, that of writing fiction. My goal is to write what will be both compelling for the reader but also say something significant about what it means to be human. This time I am engaging with characters rather than clients.
    My writing process involves those same elements of curiosity and celebration as I strive to see the story’s characters emerge through what they do and say. I listen to them speak (in my head) and then I keystroke their words into the manuscript. Sometimes those words really surprise me. I never start with a predetermined plot, and typically don’t know how the story will end as it is begun. All this is so much like being present with my clients as they learn to navigate their lives true to themselves and effectively within their circumstances. 
    And perhaps, as no surprise, those unique values I believe in, values about human dignity and hope and the capacity to heal and rise above adversity, the very things about the human condition I cherished as a psychotherapist, emerge in the story line my characters create. 
    Those two scenarios are a cautionary tale about the limitations of being technically correct but not humanly affirming. When we truly see the other person engaged in the endeavour, see them for the unique person they are, we trigger motivation within them to be their best selves. And we become our own better selves as well.

So it happened again. You’d think I’d learn, eh?
      A couple of months ago I blogged about a listener who wanted to hear the song I’d played a year before with fairies in it. A few weeks ago someone wanted the song with the bubbles. Just to be clear, fairies and bubbles had never been a inspiration for any song I’d composed. After trying out different ones with my listeners I was able to locate the songs inspiring those unique subjective experiences for them. Now I feel the fairy-ishness and the fizz in those songs whenever I play them. The songs have come to mean something different for me based on the experience of them by others.
      Oh, and then there was the song I’d always associated with the wind swept heather of Scotland. It took a listener into the tropical forest of Jamaica. 
      What am I to make of this? I used to wish people would just get it right, recognize what I was describing when I composed a song. But not any longer. Now I think it’s kind of fun when the mood and impetus within a song transports to different places than I could’ve imagined on my own. My creative endeavours trigger my listeners to look inward, return to an experience of meaning for them.
      Let’s call this in-sight.
      And, let me reflect on just how loaded that word happens to be.
​      Early on in my career as a psychologist I was trained on something called a mental status examination. I was required to conduct one of these on every client. As well as querying usual mental health symptoms (things like sleeping, eating, activity level, flow of thought, distressing emotions) it had me check for client insight. In that setting the term “insight” had a very specific meaning. The client had insight if they agreed with what the psychiatrist had diagnosed them to be and would comply with treatment.
      Later in my career I discovered there was an entirely different use of the word insight, one quite the opposite of agreeing with the psychiatrist. Insight emerged within clients through thoughtful evaluation of their personal motivations, values and habitual patterns of behaviour and relationship. The insight orientation in psychotherapy involved respectful questioning and gentle feedback. Through that process, the client discovered something uniquely their own, something they could act on responsibly to trigger personal growth.
      However, the culture and regulation of my former profession was not so inclined to the latter perspective. It was about doing things right. We were to make the right diagnosis and then apply the right treatment regime. When it came to ethics, the right thing was rote following of codes standards, guidelines and best practices. 
      Over the course of my career I began to recognize the limitations and harm that such rightness can involve. Enacting externally defined rightness shuts down one’s own critical thought, negates creative solutions to unique circumstances, and disqualifies nuance. 
      The alternative? Rather than striving to be the arbiter of the right for my clients, as a psychologist I encouraged them to find what was good: goodness both within them and around them. Latching on to it, clients could grow their own sanity and functionality.
      Often clients would ask what was the right decision for a particular situation. My typical response was that rather than finding the right decision the client needed to make the first of a series of good decisions. Each good decision would move them closer to what would eventually solve the problem. A good decision was in keeping with their values, opened up options and, provided them with more resources to address the larger issues they faced.
      Working this way I needed to get to know the uniqueness of the client, not reduce them to a single dimension of disorder or deficit. It helped to know the pace of life change for the client and what gave them a sense of meaning and satisfaction. Sure, I could suggest options and ideas. These were given not to solve the problem but to open up new possibilities. Typically the client came up with more suitable directions than I could have, their perspective and possibilities triggered by things I’d suggested. 
​
I debated what title I would put on this blog. I really wanted to call it “Standing up to the tyranny of the right”. Of course, that would’ve immediately been considered a political statement (and for those who know me, there would be knowing nod of the head).
      There are times when holding to what is correct is apt and helpful. Our national neighbour to the south is providing us with a cautionary tale about about firing scientists and eliminating regulations for health and safety. We’ll see how that turns out.
      As a psychologist I often found myself occupying two worlds, not ones defined by right and left but two worlds were defined by distance, about three metres distance. 
      Let’s consider the inner one. Within that sphere I could influence for change, recognize nuance, enact sensitivity, and celebrate emergent awareness. Psychotherapy is within that sphere, the zone of conversation. Within that sphere being right about things was both counterproductive and disrespectful. In there it was especially important to be guided by values of respect for the dignity and self-determination of others. 
      Then there is the other sphere, the one out past those three metres. In interacting with others out there, I want to make correct choices and have others do so as well, you know about things like driving on the right side of the road and stopping at stoplights.
      Getting back to the fizz and fairies, there are a mixture of folk listening to my music at the coffeeshop. Most are in the distant sphere with their lattes, conversation partners and phones. I hope my music is pleasant for them. But there are others who are clearly in the inner sphere, the one of meaning and relationship. It enriches me to have them there.

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.

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.

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.  

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. 

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.

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. ​

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.

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. 

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

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.

I was away for two weeks … without my piano! Within a few days upon returning home the songs of my repertoire came back. The secure relationships I’d nurtured between the harmonic structures and melody lines nestled in together like old friends.
      My vacation also gave me a break from work on the novel. Upon my return, the characters were still there but I saw them in a different light. The premise of the novel has always been on healing from trauma. Acts of respect, understanding and kindness contributed to that healing. What I noticed upon my return was that secure relationship, committed and assertive in maintaining connection, was even more fundamental to the healing of my central character.
      And so, returning to my creative passions, I find solace in reflection on secure relationships, much needed solace given the insecurity presently percolating around us as Canadians.
      As a nation, we’ve experienced a secure relationship being quickly destroyed. The political impetus in USA is no longer on being a supportive neighbour sharing mutual benefit. We’re now dealing with a bully fuelled by economic greed and imperialistic ambition. We don’t know what the future holds for the quality of life for our two countries, we hope eventually a solution can be found. However, given the disrespect and devaluation shown already, our relationship security has been shattered, probably irreparably.
      I learned a lot about secure relationship from my work as a psychologist. Actually, a lot about how it gets screwed up.
      I subscribed to a notion of psychotherapy that focused on the creation of context to facilitate the natural healing process within the mind of the client. I believed the mind was like the skin in its capacity to heal from trauma. 
      But healing works better if supported. Damaged skin needs protection from being torn open again allowing harmful bacteria to get in. Dressings need to be replaced and the wound cleaned out. Systemic support is needed to insure reserves for the internal processes of repair and fighting infection. 
      Recovery of the psyche through the provision of psychotherapy is much the same. Interpersonal and intrapsychic wounds need to be tended and emotional support provided to enhance the resiliency of the person harmed. The therapist needs to know the client really well to select modalities and timing, to find channels of support the client can accept. With taking that time and exercising that care, trust and security develops. Once these are in place healing can emerge, paced at a rate natural for the client.
      This fundamental notion of psychotherapy placed me at odds with the institutions of psychology and mental health: its scientists, regulators and managers. According to them, wellness comes not from within the client but from enacting intervention protocols onto the client, ones that have theoretical and research sanction. It was all about what we did, not what emerges in the client through a secure, sensitive and deeply knowing relationship. 
      For those scientists, regulators and health care managers it doesn’t matter which mental health professional dispenses the protocol, just that the protocol is dispensed.
      Two situations arose toward the end of my career in which clients arrived at their previous mental health agency to be told their therapist was no longer available and another was taking over. Moreover, for both of these clients, it happened repeatedly. Their subsequent therapists could access the documentation of diagnosis and treatment to continue the treatment protocol. However, the result was not further progress but distrust, disillusionment and anger. It took enormous courage for both of those clients to trust again as they entered therapy with me. Once they knew I would safeguard my relationship with them from interference or being externally truncated we were finally able to progress. 
      Secure relationship, even the capacity for those agencies to provide secure relationship, had been broken. The result was harm.
      I accept that skilled practice using proven techniques can be helpful. I was trained on many of those. My contention is that it’s not the only thing, and probably not the most important thing. However, my former profession elevates this one element as the critical component of treatment. Indeed, over the course of my career, it became the ideology of the profession. As an ideology it took on an ethos of unquestionability and irrefutably, hegemonic and confining.
      But ideology has the power to destroy. While ideology can give a sense of purpose, meaning and approaches to problems, it can also harm. Ideological adherence destroys an individual’s capacity to think independently and critically.
      Furthermore, ideology destroys secure relationships. Consider the consumers of social media political bias who become so adamant in their sense of outrage, personal rights and political correctness they alienate themselves from their family members. Consider the faith groups that shun or disfellowship family members through exercising their religious arrogance and petty piety. Healthy families thrive on intergenerational cohesion but dedication to an ideology can destroy those secure relationships.
      By narrowing perspective, ideology acts like horse-blinders. It blocks out contextual and contributing variables in addressing complex issues. For my former profession it devalued the essential human elements of compassion, wisdom, the capacity for sensitive intersubjectivity, creativity, gentleness, the nurturing of secure and supportive relationship, and the valuing of the client as a unique individual. In my practice, those were foundational to effective psychotherapy. 
      Humans are complex beings living in a complex world. Ideological reductionism can’t meet the demands of complexity. It doesn’t do it well in politics, in families nor in the delicate process of encouraging wellness within someone who is emotionally suffering. 
​
​
I recently saw where ideology can lead. I visited the Mauthausen Jewish Concentration Camp in Austria (you might want to google it, but be prepared for an account of the worst humanity has to offer). Viewing that camp was especially poignant given what is happening in a country that used to be our neighbour and now wants to be our possessor.

​Gosh, I need my piano, the solace I find there.
        
        


    
    
       
    
    


    
    
    

As I post this blog I’m just back from a two-week stay in Europe. To meet my usual posting date, I decided a month ago to get the blog written ahead of time, ready to post when I got back. It was going to be on the wisdom we can gain through endings. I got right down to work on a first draft. 
    Well, so much for that. It faltered miserably. 
    So here comes one written in just a couple of days while still on holiday … the quick and dirty (oh, I hope not) story of ending.
    That first draft had been about the power of looking back on what one had been embedded in but was now extricated from to see it through different eyes. But then for the re-writing, I did a re-think. Rather than describing what I’d been embedded in, why not write about how I changed coming out of having been embedded?
    So, to get the hang of this I’ll share a couple of examples from years ago. Then I’ll finish the blog with a little more about our European river cruise.
    I grew up in a constrictive religious environment.  A prominent feature of the gospel church culture was that people were sorted into two groups. There were the sinners and there were the saved. A person could go from the sinner to the saved category. After all, that’s what evangelism is all about. The theological handwringings about moving in the reverse direction were still largely unresolved, last I heard. 
    Then, I spent most of my adult years in the world of professional psychology. It also came down to two categories. There were those who had disorders (and there were about as many kinds of those as were the many kinds of sins) and then those who were normal. Psychologists were constantly engaged in trying to bring the disordered ones back into the normal category, 
    Can you see the similarity?
    I haven’t heard the joke for quite a while but it always started with …psychologists tell us there are two different kinds of people in the world. Perhaps I could end it with … There is the kind of people that divide the world into two different kinds of people and the ones who don’t. 
    I’m definitely in the latter category. And I’m definitely railing there against being in a category at all. Whatever. I just can’t be content in divvying up people into mutually exclusive camps. 
    So, in getting dis-embedded from these, what have I learned about myself? I learned that I see others as emerging out of, and embodying, dynamic complexity. An essence of human nature is that we constantly shifting and blending and becoming and declining and … Oh, such  fun! Way more interesting, so full of potential.
    Emerging out of the religious environment I recognized that the sinners and the saved were not really all that different. While the saved folk didn’t do some fun things, considered them sinful, they still had the flaws of entitlement and arrogance (after all they were God’s chosen people with all the benefits of being so and were the only ones with the correct religious belief). Coming out, I can strive not to be arrogant nor entitled.
    In the psychology world we constantly tried to be objective about things. We kept turning human existence into numbers so it could be counted and run through mathematics.  The math then told us about what was normal and what was disorder. We totally forgot that all of us, psychologists included, live our lives immersed in our own subjectivity, our unique melange of thoughts and feelings. We too are … no, let me say it personally … I,  too, am experiencing and interacting as the expression of my dynamic complexity.
    Whew, what a relief!


So now about the cruise. When we left Canada we were embedded in politics, in the midst of a federal election. Over the last few months Trump has been playing his international game of chicken with tariffs and his desire to take over Canada. Heading out I expected that most of the other guests on the river cruise ship would be from (Trump’s) USA. I was a bit apprehensive.
    I didn’t need to be. For much of the cruise no one really wanted to bring it up. Occasionally, upon hearing we were Canadian, there were instant apologies. When the topic came up our American neighbours took on sad and disbelieving faces, exuded a sense of powerlessness, disorientation and fear. We held much in common with these folk, after all they were interested in learning about a different countries like we were. Amazingly, they knew very little about Canada other than it was a pretty good country, a pretty good, cold, country. 
    But river cruising with Viking we became embedded in something else. History! During our guided tours we learned a mosaic of tidbits from a millennium of history, centuries of it visible in front of us. We learned of the ebb and flow of many peoples over the same land each with their unique cultures, their unique sense of nationhood.
     Through this experience I realize that I’ve inherited a very shallow view of history living in North America. In North America we think in terms of decades rather than centuries if we think history at all. Our view of history has been very ethnocentrically constricted.
    Our North American narrow view of history doesn’t serve us well in our present situation in Canada. The politics we are experiencing, so absolutely sad and frightening as it is, has happened before in other times and places. We heard hundreds of years of it while walking the old cities of the Danube. There were hatreds and carnage and destructiveness along the way, but those were not the end points. New cultural and ethnic identities emerged and took hold. There exists within our collective human nature the capacity to right itself and grow into a new direction.    
    And in me too, I hope.

And, repeat.
    There’s something I’ve been doing over and over again for the last four years. It may sound absolutely tedious to you, Furthermore, given the creative and curious sort of person you know me to be, you probably wonder whatever could motivate me to such a thing. 
    So, now are you curious?
    It’s editing the novel I hope to soon publish. 
    I’m up to two dozen rounds of editing now, continuing to polish every sentence so that when you read it you’ll never see a single sentence there. You’ll see characters, you’ll witness compelling circumstances, you’ll find insight into human nature … and you might even discover something of yourself.
    Editing is a reiterative process. Every edit bootstraps the novel up to a more polished level, each step enabling the next. Progressively the text becomes clearer, more engaging, more meaningful. While I might be attending to different writerly things, I’m constantly asking myself the question how can I make this better for my reader? 
    Reiterative processes are different than linear ones. A linear process progresses straight through to get itself done. Writing the first draft of a novel is linear. There’s a starting point moving to an end point. Some authors know where they are going before they begin, writing to their climax. Perhaps they’ll follow a genre template along the way. I never do. I follow my characters as their thoughts and actions lead them progressively toward a different set of circumstances, one that will allow the reader to be content in leaving them there. But either way, there’s a start to the story and a finish. If I write well enough the reader will keep turning the pages to the very end.
    And while the flow of plot and the realism of the characters seem like what the story is about, it’s not. The story is about what you as the reader feel along the way. As an author I hope you will feel curious, that you will have moments of sadness and disgust and celebration and apprehension, and, ultimately a sense of completeness at the end. I hope that you might understand the people around you and yourself a bit better because you have read. That is why I write.
    To get there I need to keep going back through it to make sure that nothing glitches up along the way. I need to edit well so you will feel deeply and self-reflect knowingly. 


I had the privilege of engaging another reiterative process throughout my four decades as a psychotherapist. My clients and I repeatedly moved through their life stories: things that happened years ago, things that happened just days ago, things that they were just realizing now. We would take repeated passes, allowing ourselves to re-experience the moments of sadness, disgust, celebration, contentment, apprehension and terror embedded in those stories. 
    Eventually, we came to that satisfactory place where we could end. 
    Each session was an Again, repeat. Doing it well wasn’t tedious, it was circling deeper into the humanness of the client: who they were as a person and how they could carry on being that person with sanity and wellness.
    This wasn’t the way I was supposed to do it. My training and the prevailing professional model was the medical, linear one: diagnose and treat. Until you had the right diagnosis you wouldn’t know what you were supposed to treat. First things first. 
    I never really got the knack of doing psychotherapy that way. Certainly, I trained on linear models of treatment for mental health conditions. However, my core in doing the work was that reiterative process of being with the struggling and distressed person, gradually having stressful matters become more clear, more resolved.
    Part way through my career I realized something vital to the process: from my very first moment with a client I could ease suffering and help the client to cope. I could do so in the way I attended to the client, felt and expressed my compassion for their suffering, put in the hard work of understanding. The easing came through in my tone of voice, the dance of eye contact, the simple words I used from their vocabulary rather than the complicated ones from mine. 
    It was a both things first. 
    As I progressed into applying the psychological theories and therapy maneuvers I progressively deepened my understanding of the client: their values, their world views, their intentions for their lives, their relationship needs. What I continued to learn about them would make the therapy increasingly individualized and effective. Never by the book, always beside the human.
    This progressive movement toward wellness was a both things yet again. And, again.
    And so you see, the two reiterative processes are the same. Each editing pass and each psychotherapy session circles deeper in making sense, feeling with, and coming to a place of resolution.
    
But there’s a key to how insuring the reiterative process doesn’t become tedious. Let me illustrate with my music.
    I play keyboard jazz at the coffee shop on Saturday afternoons, all original stuff. Some of the songs have been with me for ten years. Some are new, just emerging over the previous week. But overall, it’s very much an And, repeat sort of thing.
    There are two ways I can play my songs. I can suspend my brain for a while, just go back through them from memory because I know them really well. That sort of music goes into the background and comes across okay but not great.
    The second way is to put in the mental and emotional effort to find the beauty and the meaning in each song, yet again. That requires concentration and intention. It can leave me simultaneously feeling both refreshed and exhausted. 
    Not every listener notices the difference, but some do. I see it in their far-off looks and spontaneous smiles.
    And that’s what it’s all about, this And, again thing. It’s about being able to remain present to meaning, beauty and human connection on yet another time through.