I've been finding it difficult to know where to start lately... specifically with my writing. In the clinical part of my work—the part where I see clients—I am never stuck. I am never stuck with clients, because in that part of my work, I am productively constrained.
To be productively constrained means that there are a whole variety of ways in which my relationship to my clients is shaped by the simple fact of my position as a Counsellor. Some of those constraints are pretty mundane. Nevertheless, they are helpful in the way they reduce the informational density of that part of my life. Let me give an example: it is appropriate to present myself in a particular way to my clients: that is, I have a uniform. I wear long pants—jeans or cords or slacks—with a plain t-shirt, and a cardigan, with black boots or shoes. Stains or tears in clothes are not permitted. In the time I have worked as a Counsellor, I have never spent more than 30 seconds thinking about my dress.
There are a variety of other such mundane constraints, and they all play a role in helping me in my orientation toward my client. But the most important and productive of the constraints that I appreciate about this work is the way in which the client themself serves as the most profound and orienting constraint. That is, all my dealings with clients are solely directed toward their wellbeing. That's it. That's the whole thing. It is the most clarified position in which I ever find myself, and I couldn't find it more liberating.
It is ironic in its construction, but the path to liberation is found through constraint.
The client, in each and every instance, offers me a starting place. The client, in each and every instance, orients me in all aspects of my being: bodily, cognitively, affectively, existentially, and temporally. The client, in each and every instance, offers me ways of directing myself temporally—i.e. helping individual clients toward their own goals and in helping me to become a better Counsellor, which is a benefit to all clients, including the ones I haven't yet met.
This does not mean that I am incapable of asking a poorly formed question, and it does not mean that every client gets the relief or understanding for which they might wish. But, in each and every instance I know entirely who I am in my relationships with my clients, and I couldn't like it any more than I do.
Who I am in relationship to my writing is a completely different story. I do not have the same obvious constraints in my writing as I do with my clients. There are none of the mundane constraints I mentioned above: in principle, I can wear anything I want, I can do it any time, and I can do it any where. So, physically I am almost completely unbounded in my writing. That's true substantively as well: I can write about anything. And, I can write to any number of audiences—prospective clients, a general lay audience, other Counsellors, or an academic audience.
The great challenge in my writing is the challenge of everythingness. One of the constraints I introduced to my writing recently was to write dialogically, with clients. This has been a wildly productive constraint as evidenced by the posts I published with Josephine about her experience with adhd diagnosis, therapy, and medication—Part 1 and Part 2—and another that I am currently working on with a client about their relationship to time. Having a particular person who is asking particular questions about particular themes liberates so much energy and creativity in me.
But in the absence of the constraint of another, I am thrown back into the common adhd experience of overwhelm. The language that I use to describe this feeling of overwhelm is lostness. And when we experience lostness, the likelihood of producing anything of much value at all is pretty low. Lostness produces fear and anxiety and concern for one's own wellbeing, and those are not the foundations of clarity of thinking or creativity.
This discussion of lostness, ironically, is helping to orient me to some writing about therapy in general and adhd specifically, because it is through an examination of lostness that, I propose, we might gain some clarity—some foundness or there-ness.
Lost person behaviour
A couple of years back, I came across—I found by metaphorically stumbling around the internet—a literature unrelated to therapy that speaks directly to the question of lostness. The folks who work in Search and Rescue are uniquely interested in the ways people get lost. I'm not writing here about existential lostness but good, old-fashioned not knowing where you are in the physical world lostness. You know... lost in the woods kind of lostness.
When I started to look into this literature, the thing that immediately struck me was how resonant the descriptions of physical lostness were to the sorts of ways-of-being that people that are seeking counselling regularly present. It is out of this literature that the phrase Lost person behaviour comes, and I think it speaks directly to such psychological phenomena as depression, anxiety, and adhd.
Let me share some of the definitions and descriptions of lostness that the Search and Rescue folks provide. The following two-part definition of the components of lostness is from the Robert Koester's book, Lost Person Behavior A Search and Rescue Guide on Where to Look — for Land, Air and Water.
- confusion with current location in respect to finding other locations,
- inability to reorient. (Koester, p. 6)
The second part is critical, because simply not-knowing-where-you-are is not descriptive of lostness in total. It is the combination of not-knowing-where-you-are with the inability to recognize how to reorient yourself to safety. In the context of being lost in the woods, we might think of this through the following example: you are in the woods on a walk and find yourself confused as to where you are. You look around and can't figure out what is the right direction back to your home base. No direction seems any better than any other. This is the first component of lostness.
In this instance, you remember that you passed a stream a couple of hundred metres back and that this stream leads back to a marked path. Once you find the marked path you can find your way back to your home base. Even though you don't know where you are in absolute terms, you know that the stream will lead you back to safety. The stream orients you to safety.
Perhaps the distinction here is between knowledge that we could call contentful and knowledge we could call procedural. Knowing where you are in absolute terms is contentful. In this instance, we might think of this sort of knowledge as cartographic—i.e. being able to plot yourself on a map of the area. If you could plot yourself cartographically, you would know definitively the direction to walk to get back to your home base.
Contentful knowledge is domain specific. That is, you would need to have specific cartographic or topological information about the particular bit of land you are standing on. In this sense, contentful knowledge is very robust but also brittle. It is robust in that if you have the right bit of contentful knowledge, you know where you are in absolute terms and can easily return to home base. With proper contentful knowledge, you would not feel a single moment of fear or anxiety. But it is brittle, because it is completely domain specific: if you have perfect cartographic knowledge of Provincial Park X, then you are incapable of being lost in that particular domain. But perfect cartographic knowledge of Provincial Park X offers you no assistance at all in Provincial Park Y.
But lack of contentful knowledge is not sufficient to produce true lostness, because in the absence of contentful knowledge, we still have access to procedural knowledge. Procedural knowledge is the opposite of contentful: it is less immediately robust, but it is domain agnostic. As opposed to contentful knowledge, procedural knowledge is applicable in both Provincial Parks X and Y.
Emotionally, we might expect some more challenging states when contentful knowledge fails us. As I noted above, if a person who is disoriented in the woods has perfect cartographic knowledge, there would be no reason to experience fear or anxiety. Contentful knowledge, in this sense, has no real horizon of time. It is instantaneous. Procedural knowledge, on the other hand, is expressed over time, and, as such, opens up the possibility for challenging emotional states.
Let's return to our example, thinking about ourselves disoriented in the woods. In this instance, we have no contentful knowledge of our surroundings. We know Provincial Park X like the back of our hand, but that knowledge is not helpful, because we are disoriented in Provincial Park Y. Nevertheless, we have procedural knowledge that offers a method, literally a way, back to home base. We have knowledge about streams and vegetation growth and a dozen other clues that will assist in orienting us towards home base.
Unlike contentful knowledge, though, procedural knowledge is expressed in time. Contentful knowledge, for all intents and purposes, is non-temporal in its immediacy. Because it is non-temporal, it is non-emotional. This is the case, because no decisions need to be made. No predictions need to be made. In the first instance, we had near perfect cartographic knowledge of our surroundings. Upon realizing that we were disoriented, we referred to contentful, cartographic knowledge and proceeded in the direction of home base.
In the second instance, we have no contentful knowledge and had no immediate understanding of how to get back to home base. Our procedural knowledge is available to help us return to safety, but the very procedures that will assist us in that operation take time. And it is in that time that emotional states arise, because emotional states are fundamentally related to the manner in which we predict the future.
With contentful knowledge, there is little room for emotional expression, because contentful knowledge is absolute—i.e. it is either known or not known (and if it is not known then it is not contentful knowledge). Unlike contentful knowledge that is absolute and non-temporal, procedural knowledge must be teamed with procedural action to ultimately be effective... and action implies time.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, the author of the great How Emotions are Made, helps us to understand what emotions are:
Emotions are meaning. They explain your interoceptive changes and corresponding affective feelings, in relation to the situation. They are a prescription for action. (my emphasis, p. 126)
In the posts that follow, I will spend some more time thinking through the emotional expressions that are these "prescription for actions," as they pertain to experience of lostness, and how, armed with these ideas of contentful and procedural knowledge, that we might be able to feel a sense of there-ness even when we don't know where we are in absolute terms.
