“There is a Crack in Everything: that’s how the light gets in”. Leonard Cohen. Isabel Clarke Consultant Clinical Psychologist.

Some Questions: Who do we think we are? The trouble with people Inadequate models of people – e.g. the Medical Model Elusive utopias What motivates people: what makes us tick? What about spirituality? – the enduring sense of the sacred.

Two Views of the person people are rational beings, with, needs, plans and aspirations, who function more or less well, unless they turn out to have an 'illness' –Static people are perpetually seeking definition through dreams and symbols, and deeply dependent on important relationships; easily knocked off course by loss of any of these props, and perpetually trying to balance the inner state. –Dynamic and in flux.

Introducing Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (Teasdale & Barnard 1993). Interacting Cognitive Subsystems provides –An information processing model of cognition –Developed through extensive research into memory and limitations on processing. –A way into understanding the “Head/Heart split in people.

Body State subsystem Auditory ss. Visual ss. Interacting Cognitive Subsystems. Implicational subsystem Implicational Memory Propositional subsystem Propositional Memory Verbal ss.

Important Features of this model Our subjective experience is the result of two overall meaning making systems interacting – neither is in control. Each has a different character, corresponding to “head” and “heart”. The IMPLICATIONAL Subsystem (which I will call RELATIONAL) manages emotion – and therefore relationship. The verbal, logical, PROPOSITIONAL ss. gives us our sense of individual self.

Two Ways of Knowing Good everyday functioning = good communication between implicational/relational and propositional At high and at low arousal, the relational ss becomes dominant This gives us a different quality of experience – one that is both sought and shunned.

Relational Subsystem concerns Meaning and meaningfulness The self; threat and value Intense, extreme feelings (all or nothing) Loss of fine discrimination and boundaries (domain of the propositional subsystem) This gives us the quality of experience I will call the “transliminal”

A Challenging Model of the mind The mind is simultaneously individual, and reaches beyond the individual, when the relational ss. is dominant. There is a constant balancing act between logic and emotion – human fallibility The self sufficient, atomistic, mind is an illusion In our relational mode we are a part of the whole. In this way the crack is healed - not by the perfectability of the individual, but by our embededness in a great web of relationship.

Web of Relationships Self as experienced in relationship with primary caregiver Sense of value comes from rel. with the spiritual primary care-giver In Rel. with wider group etc. In Rel. with earth: non humans etc.

Unpacking the Web We learn about ourselves from the way the important people around us treat us from babyhood on. The function of emotions is the organisation of relationship: relationship with others, but also our relationship with ourselves. Emotions communicate directly between people, bypassing the verbal-logical (they are catching).

Beyond the Person We are defined by relationships that go beyond our current human bonds These include relationship with our ancestors and those who will come after us Moving out to relationship with our group, nation, other peoples, humanity Our relationship with the non human creatures is deep and significant for us

Further dimensions of relationship Relationship with place, with the land Relationship with the earth, our planet Relationship with that which is deepest and furthest – which is beyond our naming capacity, but is sometimes called God, Goddess, Spirit etc. Relationship is something we experience – so it can be beyond propositional knowledge – we can feel more than we know.

The Relational Mind We grow, and are moulded, through all these relationships The quality of them affects us in our deepest being – where they are sound and loving, we flourish Where they are abusive, even if it is not our personal intention – we are diminished.

As a therapist, one tries to break the chain of abusive, distorted relationship passed from one generation to another. In our society and our world, we are locked into abusive relationships that it is hard to escape –with the peoples in poorer countries who provide the goods for our lavish lifestyle –with the non human creatures –with the earth that we raid for relentless consumption, and pollute with the waste that produces

There is another side to this.. There is the sense of the sacred that survives in a scientific age There is the response of wonder to beauty – whether natural or person made There is the individual sense of specialness, even in the most abused individual Perhaps the source of all this is the sense of relationship with that widest and deepest circle of the web.

Web of Relationships Self as experienced in relationship with primary caregiver Sense of value comes from rel. with the spiritual primary care-giver In Rel. with wider group etc. In Rel. with earth: non humans etc.

Being Porous our capacity to communicate and participate in ways that defy ordinary logic and have always teased science. In our relational minds we are open – some are more open than others The contents of the mind become common in this state – a means to explain some psychic phenomena Conceptualisation and the propositional falters at this point. There are things we can experience but not precisely know.