Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
Thomas Merton
Categories
Categories
The Quest for the Center
Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.
Anaïs Nin
Everyday life is experienced as a heroic quest and played as a game.
Lawrence G. Boldt
Zen and the Art of Making a Living
At this crossroads, the metaphorical armor we’ve self-forged and worn over the years symbolizes our strength and determination to guard against life’s challenges. Yet, in these moments, we recognize the weight of this armor and how it distances us from genuine connection and joy. Our challenge is discerning when this armor, once protective, now hinders our engagement with life’s full spectrum of experiences.
Echoing through this journey is the profound reminder that we must choose: the safety of the known or the courage to experience the mystery. This choice becomes a dance with what one could call “fierce vulnerability,” a term that captures the valor required to remain fully present to the conviction of a full life.
Steven Morris
Armor Down: A Midlife Reflection on Fierce Vulnerability
By exploring the motivations and fears of each part, you’ll gain insight into their protective roles and the underlying needs they seek to meet.
Discover Your Parts with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Journal on Rosebud
Rosebud’s IFS guided journal is a powerful tool that brings the benefits of IFS therapy to your fingertips. Developed in partnership with certified IFS therapist David Coates, this journal provides a structured framework for exploring your inner world, helping you identify and understand your various parts, their roles, and their underlying needs.
Discover Your Parts with the Internal Family Systems (IFS) Journal on Rosebud
The field of concern in psychiatry has now expanded beyond the individual as it has become apparent that the most crucial issue before us is the development of a society that supports the individual in his individuality. I believe that the same change theory outlined here is also applicable to social systems, that orderly change within social systems is in the direction of integration and holism; further, that the social-change agent has as his major function to ‘work with and in an organization so that it can change consistently with the changing dynamic equilibrium both within and outside the organization. This requires that the system become conscious of alienated fragments within and without so it can bring them into the main functional activities by processes similar to identification in the individual. First, there is an awareness within the system that an alienated fragment exists; next that fragment is accepted as a legitimate outgrowth of a functional need that is then explicitly and deliberately mobilized and given power to operate as an explicit force. This, in turn. leads to communication with other subsystems and facilitates an integrated, harmonious development of the whole system.
With change accelerating at an exponential pace, it is crucial for the survival of mankind that an orderly method of social change be found. The change theory proposed here has its roots in psychotherapy. It was developed as a result of dyadic therapeutic relationships. But it is proposed that the same principles are relevant to social change, that the individual change process is but a microcosm of the social change process. Disparate, unintegrated, warring elements present a major threat to society, just as they do to the individual. The compartmentalization of old people, young people, rich people, poor people, black people, white people, academic people, service people, etc., each separated from the others by generational, geographical, or social gaps, is a threat to the survival of mankind. We must find ways of relating these compartmentalized fragments to one another as levels of a participating, integrated system of systems.
Arnold Beisser, M.D.
The Paradoxical Theory of Change
Perls’s own conflict with the existing order contains the seeds of his change theory. He did not explicitly delineate this change theory, but it underlies much of his work and is implied in the practice of Gestalt techniques. I will call it the paradoxical theory of change, for reasons that shall become obvious. Briefly stated, it is this: that change occurs when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not. Change does not take place through a coercive attempt by the individual or by another person to change him, but it does take place if one takes the time and effort to be what he is—to be fully invested in his current positions. By rejecting the role of change agent, we make meaningful and orderly change possible.
The Gestalt therapist rejects the role of “changer,” for his strategy is to encourage, even insist, that the patient be where and what he is. He believes change does not take place by “trying,” coercion, or persuasion, or by insight, interpretation, or any other such means. Rather, change can occur when the patient abandons, at least for the moment, what he would like to become and attempts to be what he is. The premise is that one must stand in one place in order to have firm footing to move and that it is difficult or impossible to move without that footing.
The person seeking change by coming to therapy is in conflict with at least two warring intrapsychic factions. He is constantly moving between what he “should be” and what he thinks he “is,” never fully identifying with either. The Gestalt therapist asks the person to invest himself fully in his roles, one at a time. Whichever role he begins with, the patient soon shifts to another. The Gestalt therapist asks simply that he be what he is at the moment.
Arnold Beisser, M.D.
The Paradoxical Theory of Change
Categories
Integrating Our Compartmentalized Roles
If alienated, fragmentary selves in an individual take on separate, compartmentalized roles, the Gestalt therapist encourages communication between the roles; he may actually ask them to talk to one another. If the patient objects to this or indicates a block, the therapist asks him simply to invest himself fully in the objection or the block. Experience has shown that when the patient identifies with the alienated fragments, integration does occur. Thus, by being what one is—fully—one can become something else.
Arnold Beisser, M.D.
The Paradoxical Theory of Change
It is about learning to harness a force that has been built into us through millions of years of evolution, a force that allows us to both discover our most essential selves and enlarge our world. We are designed to find fulfillment and creative growth through play.
Stuart Brown