I’m reading Olaf Jacobsen’s book Ich stehe nicht mehr zur Verfuegung (literally “I’m no longer available” – not a good translation though; the book seems to be available in French, Spanish and Italian, but I haven’t found it in English). I will review it separately (this is not intended as a recommendation), but I just wanted to quote and translate this passage, which makes a really good point, affirmed by my recent experience:
When someone makes a dogmatic assertion, the perception by others of his or her position in the social pecking order changes. The person making the claims becomes a “repository of truth” and puts him- or herself above the others. The relationship of equality with the others is lost. In order to recreate this situation of equality, the others need to express resistance to the claim and perhaps make a contrary or different claim or distance themselves from it.
Behind the feeling of resistance is often the desire to be treated as an equal, whereby both people have the same rank and the same value and their realities and convictions are equally valid.
In the feeling of resistance, I see the message that “something wants to be recognized, valued and integrated”, whether we are talking of children, adults – or me myself. If I am aware of the fact that my resistance derives from my wish for recognition or inclusion, then I can also reflect on whether or not I might be willing to forego this wish. Florence Scoval Shinn [a pioneer of the New Thought movement] explains impressively in her book The Game of Life and How to Play It that struggling against something tends rather to keep the situation in place than to resolve it. Bert Hellinger [the founder of constellation theory] also says, “What we struggle against we will never get rid of. Only what we love sets us free.” Shinn proposes the perspective that “every person is a golden link in the chain which ultimately serves my wellbeing”. [Stephen] Wolinsky [founder of so-called quantum psychology] recommends to stop struggling against the person who has generated resistance in us, but rather to concentrate on the energy within us, the feeling of resistance itself. In this way the feeling may gradually disappear or be transformed into something more pleasant. When we tell someone that we are no longer available for his or her assertion, we achieve the same result. We look less at him or her and more at ourselves. The feeling of resistance starts to dissolve. The origin of this feeling was our attention to the other person, linked to our desire for recognition or change. That is why we first made ourselves available to him or her and experienced the resulting feelings. When our desire and our attention shift, so does our feeling.
This account skips all too glibly over the conditioning inherent in the reaction of resistance, seeming to imply that contemporary factors explain everything and not delving into where the desire for attachment, to this particular person at this particular moment, comes from and to what extent, if at all, I can exert conscious control over it. It also fails to acknowledge the pain in my repeated experience of rejection as an unnatural, toxic state of being engendered by the contemporary world.
Still I like it because it often happens to me that therapists (who may mean well) wade in with offhand interpretations of my personal story to which I cannot relate. It chimes with the constant declarations my mother would make as to how I was feeling, which apparently she thought she knew better than me. I am happy to be challenged, but only from a position of vulnerability and compassion where I feel a common bond with the person in the therapeutic role. Doubtless there is such a thing as a natural authority of which I could be accepting, but in practice it is often the case that therapists (and would-be therapists) are more like “therapests” – they derive pleasure from sitting in a position of power over others. And this never works at all – it immediately neutralizes the power in the encounter. Sure, I may be oversensitive, I may be unable to see certain truths – but fundamentally I am just refusing to be manipulated and expressing faith in the ability of my own organism to regulate its problems. Only people who work with this drive for emancipation can help me and befriend me. The others are just making the problem worse and isolating themselves. I can, indeed, withdraw and not suffer needless pain. This, however, does not alter the profound tragedy of disconnection.