Counseling: Philosophical Foundations in Brief
The type of change, growth, learning, self-improvement, etc. that counseling aims at results from some transformative experience. The kind of transformation I have in mind is not like adding new items to my inner treasury of information or adding a new skills to my repertoire or improving upon a skill I already have. These may be transformative in their way, but what I have in mind is learning about learning. It is understanding myself as a person who has been making improvements and then first identifying then committing to work with that process. This is growth at a different level because it means taking control of my own development.
The founder of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Aaron Beck, characterized CBT as training in epistemology. It is training in what constitutes knowing. People who make good use of CBT have understood something about themselves as knowers and deliberately make use of what they now know about themselves. From Bernard Lonergan I take the idea that knowledge is a matter of self-transcendence. It is comforting, and sometimes a sign of laziness, to assume that knowing comes easy. That it is a matter of looking and seeing what is going on. But if knowing is by self-transcendence, then we know by going beyond this youthful assumption. It is also comforting, and possibly a sign of arrogance, that we show a special regard for our preferred hypotheses or our own ideas. This is arrogant when my, perhaps unacknowledged, assumption is that an idea must be right if it occurred to me, or that it deserves special respect. Knowing as self-transcending means going beyond this attitude and doing the real work of verifying my hypotheses, of checking my work. The real transformation is a change in the criteria of truth that motivate and direct my acts of observation, my questions, and my efforts at verification. Lonergan also talked about this as an intellectual conversion, a conversion to intellectual self-transcendence as the criteria of truth.
Usually people do not seek counseling to become better thinkers. They may wish to change something in their lives, to make things better for themselves. People seek a couple’s therapist in order to work on creating a better relationship. To seek for something better is not a matter of intellectual but of moral self-transcendence. Here we are also entering into a more complicated field. The first stage of moral self-transcendence is away from a facile association of goodness and value with getting what I happen to want or simply seeking satisfaction of my needs and desires. I recall my earliest awakening to moral deliberation captured in the phrase, “If it feels good, do it!” It didn’t seem right that the satisfaction of feelings and of passing desires were the standard of goodness. At a second level of moral deliberation we may indeed take other people into account, but only our friends. The good is defined by what is good for our group, or community, or industry, or race, etc. We may continue to expand our moral horizons or we may even discover new criteria for making decisions that would make things better for ourselves. The transformative experience that does make things better is a shift from the criteria of satisfaction and of group preference to the criteria of self-transcendence. This does not mean, of course, that the satisfaction of desires is never morally justifiable or that we must always be putting others’ interests before our own. Moral maturity is a matter of knowing when to apply the proper criteria for moral decision making. This means developing the art of deliberation and cultivating the skills of discernment.
Intellectual and moral self-transcendence are names for the dynamism that we are as rational and responsible beings, and to be intellectually and morally converted is to be committed to living according to our nature. But I’d like make a few observations. First, self-transcendence means denying the self that is transcended. It is a massive step out of my comfort zone. We are invited to deny our immediate satisfaction, to question our cherished hypotheses, to consider others first, or to risk rocking the boat. Second, we are invited to submit to the process that we are with no guarantees. By the nature of the case we cannot have beforehand the certainty we might desire that our efforts will get us where we want to go. Transcendence is in the direction of what as yet I do not know and do not yet care about or value. It means calling into question a known for the sake of an as yet unknown. It means giving time, and energy and space to values that cannot possibly mean anything to me until my heart is expanded. So the overriding question emerges, Why put myself through that? Is it worthwhile being the creature that I am? It has famously been said that a person can put up with any ‘How’ as long as he or she has a ‘Why’. The Why is the meaning or purpose in life that grounds a one’s commitment to self-improvement in the intellectual and moral realm. Submission to the criteria of self-transcendence is for Lonergan the question about the ground of our being. It is ultimately a matter of trusting that our natures are wonderfully made. It is what he called religious conversion.
To these three forms of self-transcendence, we must add a fourth, affective self-transcendence. To some extent our feelings grow and change as we develop intellectually and morally. More importantly, our relationship to our feelings undergoes a transformation, because of the moral and religious conversions. When I began to wonder whether feelings were the measure of the good, I brought my feelings into question. When I no longer look upon the satisfaction of my desires the highest value in life, I can acknowledge that I may very much like it if the world went as I want it to go, but that this is unrealistic and would be not be a good thing. Here I am developing a new attitude toward my feelings and desires. I have them but am not ruled by them. My irritation or anger at not getting what I want is put into perspective. Just because I want it does not mean it is good for me or for us. It may not be good for the system to grant the fulfillment of my desires if it means compromising the system itself. I can handle feelings threat much better. Just because I feel threatened does not mean I am under attack. I have to learn how to check things out. I can also accept the fact that I may be irritated or angry without beating myself up, because I know that this is the being that I am. Moral self-transcendence is a matter of denying myself the right to act on selfish feelings, and it wouldn’t be self-denial if I did not feel those selfish feelings. So I accept my difficult feelings because they have a role to play in my overall development. On the positive side, my feelings also change as I commit myself more to the good of system than to the things I get out of it. That system may be a relationship or group, humanity, or the environment. I start to cherish what I did not cherish before. Here we see that in addition to feelings that refer to getting things that I want there are other types of feeling.
Learning to manage these feelings is a large part of couple therapy. When things like relationships themselves become important to me, I am vulnerable to the threat of losing them. And because the system is more important to me than the good things I get from it, the threat is more severe. The biggest transformation is the adoption of a new criteria for assessing the quality of a relationship. At the first level of moral evaluation, a relationship looks good to me if it is giving me the things that that I want. By contrast, a relationship is bad if it is not giving me the things I desire. To take a stereotyped and composite example simply by way of illustration, a wife who is preparing for a dinner party may want a clean kitchen with an empty garbage can and may feel irritated that the bin is overflowing. If this minor conflict is not handled well it will escalate into feelings about the relationship. Her accusations may sound something like this: “You’re not trying hard enough.” “You’re not committed.” “You are not a man-of-your-word.” His defensive responses will also turn to her role in making the marriage a living hell. As the fight becomes more personal both accuse the other: “You don’t love me!” “I am just not important to you!” From this example, we see that threats to care come in three kinds. As the threat moves from individual good things that each wants (a clean kitchen or some down-time) to the lack of responsibility each takes for the relationship to the absence of genuine love for the other, the feelings grow in intensity. The problem is that what provokes the fight, the absence of individual goods, is not what the fight is about. This is why most couples cannot remember what they were fighting about.
What each most wants is to be loved and to be in a healthy relationship. However, it is never the case that those higher needs could be fulfilled by any number of good things that I may get. An infinite series of good deeds, which may be provided by a butler or barista or hairdresser, won’t make a loving relationship. If what she wants is for him to be a “man of his word”, she is asking for moral self-transcendence and even asking to know that he has a purpose in life that grounds his commitment to lifelong personal development. If what he wants is peace in the home, then he asking for the same thing. They both want the other to be committed to the relationship and want to trust that the other is sufficiently grounded to follow through on that commitment.
The three prior forms of self-transcendence themselves help to manage the conflict and the attendant feelings. If knowledge is a matter of intellectual self-transcendence, then the fact that I feel threatened does mean that I am actually in danger. But we are beings who learn and grow in conversation with others. And I can only dis-confirm the feeling of threat by engaging in the conversation. However, communication is a complicated activity and messages as sent are rarely identical to messages as received. But I can only dis-confirm my initial interpretation of a message by testing it against further evidence in the conversation. A great difficulty exists where the intensity of the feeling prevents me from hearing or correctly interpreting the sender’s message. It may also be that the feeling is so intense that it makes being in the conversation itself hurtful. Feelings may prevent the learning process whose outcome is needed to change the feelings. The most important and difficult skill relevant to conversations from a counseling perspective is emotional regulation.
In some cases difficult feelings or bodily responses need interventions of their own. Somme feelings may not respond even to the experience of dis-confrmation in a good conversation. Feelings have a physiological component that in cases such as trauma or neurodiversity functions independently of insight and responsibility. In short, we may be triggered or flooded with affect, and unable to learn in order to de-link feelings and judgments. Insight requires the cooperation of our feelings and imaginations. I invite you to think of an insight the emergence of a new skill that allows us to coordinate many discrete operations. To speak about seeing an object is an abstraction. There are a host of operations involved. My wife is a speech therapist and I have come to learn from her about many of the operations that we have to organize and coordinate to accomplish the abstraction called talking. The emergence of insight in mathematics is likewise an achievement of coordination. Things just finally come together, which really means, there is something I can finally do, that is, perform a specific set of cognitive operations. In order for a hard conversation to move a relationship forward, many things have to come together. I have to be able to coordinate a specific flow of feelings and thoughts. When my nervous system is sufficiently malleable, it spontaneously cooperates with my efforts to bring things together. Under normal conditions, our bodies happily cooperate with our life projects. In the case of trauma or anxiety, or even exhaustion or illness, that neuroplasticity is not there and some intervention at the level of the body may be necessary. As a simple example, couples engaged in a tough conversation are invited to monitor their heart rate. It has been found that an elevated heart rate corresponds to nasty behavior. It is as though I am seeing the other as an enemy rather than a friend. Even if I wanted to have a good conversation, I may not be able to pull it off when my body is in threat mode. My body may not make the adjustments that constitute seeing the other in a new light, or understanding the other’s point of view. I cannot coordinate my physiological and intellectual operations. Trauma therapy, somatic therapy, pharmacology or some specialized form of coaching may be helpful in meeting the challenges that one’s body is presenting.
To take ourselves seriously means accepting that knowledge is the outcome of a good conversation and developing the art and skills of communication and conflict management. We not only learn intellectually in relationship with others, we also develop morally in and through our interactions with others. I grow as I move from valuing what the other offers me, to valuing the quality of the relationship, to valuing the other as integrally worthy. The process of growth is a matter of self-denial for the sake of self-transcendence. None of us know where this will lead, but we learn to trust the process. And to the extent that the process is authentic to the conversational beings that we are, the process is trustworthy. Accepting and committing to the criteria of self-transcendence means accepting that there are operations or facts of consciousness that make us who we are, that these occur in a normative pattern and that we are challenged to live our lives in submission to that normative order. It is the challenge of self-love, and it helps to know that we are loved first. This we experience in a good conversation, in therapy, in a mutually committed relationship and in prayer.