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Part Seven: Beyond roles. Eugene Gendlin, Beyond roles. Part 1: Toward living roles. A new kind of role
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Part Seven: Beyond roles
Eugene Gendlin, Beyond roles
The capacity to sense into oneself and articulate what is there is not only important in a private way. It has great implications for how we structure our living with others, and how we are in social structures. I would like to present a way of thinking about that.
After discussing this question broadly, I want to turn to certain specific aspects of how Changes is organized. These specific points, which I also list at the end of this paper, are an organizational model. I think the model or at least some of it can be usefully applied in many places.
Part 1: Toward living roles
People today, especially with focusing and listening, are becoming able to sense their own experience much more directly. When they do, they discover that the usual boxes, concepts, categories and labels, don't fit well at all. The usual words and phrases don't get at what a person really feels - it is always more specific and part of a finer texture. To say or think what one feels, what one lives, takes being inventive with language. It's beyond the usual trite words.
Not only is this true of our feelings, but also of our living - how we are in our situations. That's because feelings are really our inside sense of what we are living. Situations these days don't come in routines, each one needs special handling.
This is because our " roles" have changed, yes. But they have not only changed, they have also become much more specifically unique. They haven’t changed from this to that role. Rather, they have changed from easily understood but stultifying " roles" to confusing complexities which each of us must get into directly felt touch with, and which each of us must struggle with.
We can say that this is a tremendous historical development of the human individual! Rather than consisting of canned routines and handed-down roles, each person develops beyond that. It is a new and more real kind of inward in-touchness, a new and deeper way of being alive. Our time is an exciting era to be alive in. What is it to be human is developing another whole step.
But this development is also pretty rough on all of us and pretty spotty! And there is still a lot of confusion. Most people are not yet at the point where they can easily sense down into themselves and come up with some creative expression and improvisation of living that will work out. That's an understatement, I know from my own experience! I am not at that point either. I don't know anyone personally who is. Let us look ahead a little and imagine a world in which focusing and sensing oneself will be easier, and improvisations of how to live will be more common and expected. How can we even think about such a world?
The concepts today are still those from before this development. Theories still view humans as a bundle of handed-down roles. Personality is supposed to consist of " traits. " Psychology teaches psychological contents, little packages, factors, inner thing-like boxes. But these are much too general and empty compared to the rich texture we find inwardly! Yet, the concepts and words we have are still the old ones.
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Therefore, even social change is being talked about as a change in roles from this role to that role. Women will take men's roles, or all the roles will change, but into what? Other roles. New roles.
A new kind of role
Are people only roles? A truer philosophy of people recognizes them as processes, not as bundles of role patterns. In the papers in this book on Focusing we have seen the details of a process that alternates between outward patterns (roles, words, actions) and inward feeling and sensing. Through this alternation, newly made acts and words can be fashioned from what one feels and senses into.
This means that it wouldn’t be enough to change our roles from this to that, if we are in the new roles in the same put-on, constricted, unalive way we were in the old roles. Unless there can be this creative alternation, this " zig-zag" from what is done or said to feeling, and again from feeling to something new, one profits little by changing from one role to another. The new roles can be as oppressive as the old ones were.
For example: Jeff's place is a commune with a lot of very young people. Jeff and Beth are a little older and have a five-year-old girl. They believe in new patterns, especially multiple sexual relationships, and sincerely share the view that the old monogamy game is an empty routine in which one shouldn't be stuck. In a general discussion, they agree on " values, " but if they go a little deeper into their experience, then they feel a lot of rather different detail about these values. Jeff works in the city to bring the money that keeps the commune going and pays off the debts. On his job he meets people, some women, and it seems inhuman and artificial, he says, to cut such relations off at the sexual point, especially when one or another really meaningful relation develops. Sometimes, also, he brings such a woman to the commune to stay for a while.
Beth is seeking other relationships but not yet finding them. Beth stays mostly in the commune where everyone is younger, and with Margie, their five-year-old. She says there are times when she doesn’t know if Jeff won’t just leave, and leave her with all the eighteen-year-olds and Margie, or worse, take Margie away too. She won't let herself wish back to the old monogamy, she'd rather go forward to something new, if she could find someone. Once or twice she thought she did but Jeff interfered and managed to stop it, and that gets her mad. Jeff says she's right but he hasn’t been able to help doing that. Really, he wishes she'd find someone. She doesn’t like it very well that that’s what he wishes, either. She doesn't want just another monogamous relation, that would be the old dependence. She is into women's things and wants to reject that. It certainly hasn't worked. Right now, Jeff is going to be half time out of the house and things feel pretty bad, but when he's here with some other woman it doesn't feel OK either. Either way she feels hurt.
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This is an example of two people who both believe in a new role pattern and the abstract values that go with that pattern. Yet, I would argue that these people are in this new pattern just in the same way they were in the old one. The pattern came to them as an invented pattern, " multiple sexual relationships. " It also fitted the economic situation of him working, and her staying at home. Home is now something very different, yet it's again a trap for the woman, making it much harder for her than for him to find these abstractly talked about multiple relations. The economic situation makes it " natural" for him to pursue such relations, and " artificial" for him to cut them off. For her, the reverse is the case and she has to work to find someone, and she has to fight being dependent on him. While she would sincerely like and value being in the new pattern, so that it isn't forced on her against her values, it goes all the same against her organism and felt sensing of what’s what. If she lays out this felt sensing, a different and much more detailed texture of things emerges, than the abstract value. This pattern is forced on her, by him and her. It has so far failed to fit or to carry her living in it forward.
Superficially, Jeff, on the other hand, seems to have it all his way. This also isn't true. It ignores his need to relate deeply, which can't very well happen in a pattern in which one person's living is made to be blocked. In doing these things without her lively experiential approval (although with her verbal approval) he can no longer live a moving process with Beth really - only with this stuck Beth. Not that there aren't days and nights of discussing and working on the issues and so on, but that’s mostly so hard and unrewarding as to become a duty, not a living. A close relationship that moves is also hard, but it is constantly rewarding, one gets less tired of it than of anything else. Just working on stuckness that stays stuck is unrewarding and painful.
Had they both in their mutual process come to a choice of multiple relations, that would have been something else. Before that could even begin, and anyone could get hurt, the problem of how to make it equally possible for Beth to meet new people would have had to come up. In a real process also, both would have come to know deeply what they could and could not fear from each other, as Beth now fears either losing Margie or getting stuck with her. Trust between people isn't just some general thing you're supposed to have when you can't feel it; trust comes from taking steps into both people’s feeling-detail so that they can feel each other, and so that what is said and done flows from that. They might have agreed to the very same general role pattern, but in a very different way. They would then have been in that pattern in a different way of being in a role.
But it wouldn't be the same role, quite, if it had been arrived at in a process way. It would only look the same. The reason it would be different is that if the moves are made from out of both people’s sensing (or even one person's - because one does sense both people’s situations to some extent). Then each such move would be modified in detail, would have the odd special unique specificity each person needs. Then Jeff would be saying that he relates to other women in just such and such a specific way that Beth can stand, and that Beth relates to that in just such and such ways that he can stand, and vice versa. People differ greatly on these unique details. For example, one person needs every detail of the other's outside relations shared, while another person may feel all right about such relations only if they are never mentioned. What a person will feel violated by isn't as simple as the breaking of monogamy, but very special to that person and that person's interaction with that other person.
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But with all this we are not saying that multiple sexual relations will work, if done in the experiential manner, because we have never seen that pattern really work, and we have often seen it fail. Neither are we saying that it cannot work. We argue that new roles, if we are entering into them in the old forced-onto-us way, cannot work much better than the old roles. We also argue that the new roles we are looking for will be found only if we look for them by developing their form and detail from out of the at first clearly felt detail of our sentence, in accord with which we then modify and specify them.
Such a new type of role would still be a role. At least from a distance it would still look like a repetitious recognizable pattern, but it would be different because inside it, it would not only be developed from experiential detail, but to carry out the role would always be a process of role-feeling-role alternation. For instance, not only can two people develop their specific pattern of multiple relationships, but that very pattern involves them in being sensitive to each other and mutually devising each new specific situation. Otherwise how could they really live closely with each other (the multiple relations pattern is supposed to be a pattern of one's closest relationships)?
Thus, it can be said that the new way of being in roles will itself be a kind of role. It is OK to say that, as long as it's clear that it's different in kind from the way old roles were. Old roles did not involve, in fact prevented, that kind of getting into oneself and each other, that kind of continuous adjusting and changing.
If the new way of being in roles is a role, then it is a role in a more general over-all sense. What used to be " role, " the specifics on what you say and do, now varies. The how of its varying, by sensing into oneself for one's next step, that " how" would be the new role.
Instead of describing only the content (the what is done and said) of the role, we would now be less specific about the greatly varying always new content, which we could only describe in broad outline. However, we would describe the role also as the kind of process it is, the " zig-zag" of outward-inward alternation.
Anthropologists a hundred years ago thought they could find out what human nature really is, by collecting information from all the different cultures and finding out what is common. This information is now largely in, and the answer is: next to nothing is in common! There doesn't seem to be anything such as a human nature, according to these findings. People have much less in common than any other species of animals. Any species of animals, wherever in the world they are found, all feed the same way and mostly on the same food, build the same kind of nests, and have the same kind of mating patterns and action patterns. Human's don’t.
So, if we take roles and patterns to be our nature, then there is no human nature but only a welter of different roles and patterns.
The anthropologist Victor Turner (The Ritual Process) holds that breaking roles is utopian, if one wants to be permanently beyond roles. He says, however, that there is such a thing, but it occurs between one set of roles and another. He explains ritual as this between, and describes many instances of a ritual being the way in which someone is entered into a new role. For example, in initiations toward becoming adult men, boys are taken into the woods and there are led to interact in ways that contradict all their previous roles. Turner views this as a breaking down of roles to a " lowest common denominator, " and also describes the great intimacy which develops. Turner views these as necessarily temporary situations, after which everyone is again in their (new)roles.
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Turner is sure that anything beyond roles can only be the temporary breakdown of roles. If permanent it would be chaos, nothing, no society. And, if you think of anything formed (actions, interactions, words, etc. ) as formed one way or another, then anything beyond roles would at best be sitting silently doing nothing, perhaps feeling strongly. Or is there, somewhere, an example of people living beyond roles?
Can we, perhaps, find an example of people living beyond roles, not as a temporary breakdown, and not in silence and inaction or chaos, but rather in a continual process of freshly forming words and actions?
Psychotherapy is often exactly like this. But until now psychotherapy has been thought of as temporary, as " not real life, " as an interlude, after which the person is able to function in existing patterns. This old view makes therapy temporary and unreal. But the kind of process therapy is, need not be temporary and it is very real.
Here is another example of living beyond roles: although rare, there are some close relationships in which what people do and say is taken directly from how they feel, rather than what their roles prescribe. Such relations are called " intimate, " but that word is also used for love relationships, and we do not necessarily mean those because often they are as role-determined as any others. We mean the kind of relationship in which " taking a role" would be felt as withdrawing from the relationship. Friendship is somewhat like that. If you start to act a role, you put your friend off. But most friendships are role-determined in what goes on (doing certain things together, discussing certain topics and in certain ways). If one is fortunate, one has, or has had, in all of one's life perhaps one or two relationships in which what one said and did was made from oneself, from the yet unclearly felt insides, newly. But there are such relationships.
In such a relationship, one does not express what fits best, one does not do or say only what is supposed to go here, or come next, but whatever rises up in one and is next. One responds from what just then is inside, rather than from what one wishes were there. Or, if one struggles to be a certain way one isn't yet, then one lets the struggling be visible and known to the other person. To relate in this way makes each bit of relating something that has never before happened in the history of the world.
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