(Draft: January 10, 2006).

Abstract:

Recognizing the varied activities involved with drawing others forth as a positive category of wisdom-ing behaviors reinforces a broader view of the nature of wisdom, especially as it serves the social field in education, management, parenting, therapy, teamwork, helping in general, and other interpersonal and group activities.

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Images of what it means to be wise tend to be associated with the expression of profound truths, the putting forth of ideas. Certainly this type is more likely to be that which is able to be passed on as sayings or in writing. Recently I wrote about another view of wisdom, as a general activity that balances judgment, responsible assessment, and multi-level intervention–the point being that it is an activity rather than something that can be possessed (Blatner, 2005). There is always a myriad of temptations to lapse into foolishness, and one aspect of wisdom-ing is the vigilance in the full awareness of these temptation pitfalls.

I became aware of another, more elusive type of wisdom more recently: There is an art in drawing others forth, an art that deserves to be recognized as a type of wisdom. In some ways, this art has been written about, more in the last century, by educators, parent-guidance experts, psychotherapists, and, more recently, people re-thinking the nature of management in organizations and business. This is that body of writing that emphasizes the need to wait, give the other person time and opportunities to express themselves, to learn by doing, to think out loud, and the like. It is a wisdom of restraint, of receptivity. (A related group of ideas is described in another recently posted paper, Psychodrama as Ritual, near the beginning, considering the nature of authentic loving, or the I-Thou relationship.)

The point of this paper is to help people recognize that such approaches are indeed a category of wisdom. It requires an understanding of self and others to withhold the temptations to actively instruct, to intervene, correct, “show the students” by doing the task instead of letting them discover it for themselves. More, it emphasizes the skills of assessing when it is best to hang back and wait, and when instead a more active intervention is indicated.

A Balance

For a while, the more receptive style became dominant in therapy, perhaps caricatured by some practitioners of Carl Rogers’ Non-Directive Therapy. Rogers himself, though, was a bit more active than what apparently some of his followers espoused. He noted that the non-directive-ness was not the core of his approach, which evolved between the late 1930s through the 1970s. Rogers even re-named his method, moving from non-directive therapy to person-centered therapy  (Meador & Rogers, 1973).

The point is that optimal helping requires a balancing of interventions. There are times for direct instruction and demonstration. The point is that such approaches should be interspersed with more opportunities for experiential learning.

Historically, the more instructional types of learning have strongly dominated the process, while the more exploratory-experiential approaches have been somewhat neglected. Certain activities require varying degrees of practice, which then happens in laboratories, homework, or rehearsal halls. However, often in standard education this practice involves routine exercises that don’t require the immediate presence of the teacher. This is in part the problem: The art of drawing someone forth often requires far more “presence,” more time, patience, and individual attention than the instructional model. A greater teacher / student ratio, however, is a less economic model.

Parenting

An earlier model of optimal parenting has emerged in the last half-century, one that recognizes more the dynamics of encouragement. An offshoot of psychoanalysis called “self-psychology,” pioneered by Dr. Heinz Kohut, in the 1970s and 1980s, described two operations that fostered the emergence of the optimal sense of self in a young child: offering a good example (which fostered a healthy process of idealization), and “mirroring,” or responding with a relatively accurate level of empathy to the child’s expressions. It is this latter dynamic that is of special interest.

Daniel Stern, a psychiatrist and child-development researcher, writes about mother-child attunement, even within the baby’s first year (Stern, 1985). The wisdom involves releasing temptations and natural tendencies towards egocentricity, towards imposing on the child the preferences, timing, and interests of the parent. (Narcissistic people have great difficulty resisting these tendencies, as they are experienced as overwhelming needs; their children thus suffer from an inadequate experience of mirroring.)  Instead, a good parent recognizes that with only occasional exceptions, much of the time the child’s preferences can be easily gone along with, and those experiences indeed can be occasions for just the slightest edge of learning by even exaggerating the interaction.

Many parents do this intuitively. So delighted are they at a specific gesture of their child that they make a little fuss about it: Baby gives a fist full of block; mother responds, “Oh, a gift for me?” It’s all in the facial expression, the tone of voice, the congruence of feelings and behaviors so that the child feels validated in his feeble efforts. It’s positive reinforcement, as noted by the Behaviorist Psychologist B. F. Skinner; it’s encouragement, as noted decades earlier by the pioneering psychiatrist, Alfred Adler.

Thus, much of what this paper is talking about has been described in depth and at length by these and thousands of others; the point here is to gather all these approaches together and have them noted as a type of wisdom, a category that can be explored as a subject for continued learning. The work of educators such as Maria Montessori also need to be included here.

The emphasis is on a continual process of diagnosis or assessment, not to label any conditions, but to sense what is needed by the student (or child, client, subordinate, co-worker, co-committee member, or friend) in the moment. Is this a time to offer your theoretical ideas, or to hold back and see what the student has to say? Sometimes a question may work better than an answer–the “Socratic method,” exemplified in the dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, as described by his student, Plato.

Again, this more receptive strategy can be overdone, and part of the evolution of psychotherapy has reflected a dialectical swing from the activity of the earliest psychotherapists doing hypnosis, to what many felt to be an extreme passivity of the classically-trained psychoanalyst, and continuing swings back and forth as different schools evolved their own models. There have been enough swings, enough different schools of thought, now, so that perhaps we can begin to discern the underlying relevant variables: Sometimes a bit more activity is indicated, sometimes, more drawing out, more receptivity. Often a delicate mixture, with a few provocative or evocative statements followed by an enjoyment or careful listening to the student’s response.

Timing

I think one of the reasons that drawing others forth as an art form is a bit elusive is that it depends so much on the fluctuating levels of readiness of the student. There are times when what is really needed is a time out, a backing off, a “giving space,” not pressing the point, offering room to digest. This might involve minutes, hours, days, or weeks.

A friend of mine who was dying decided not to press one of her young adult daughters to engage in a heart-to-heart encounter. Although the dying mother wanted this, at another level she realized that what would be said might have far less value than expected, while the underlying message of “go at your own pace, I trust your growth” would, in her best guess, be more likely to produce the desired effect, which was basically one of encouragement. Psychodramatically, if the mother were to speak, the message would have been something like, “I believe in the emergence of your inner being, and hope you’ll know that I believe in this, and want to encourage its emergence in its own natural rhythm.”  On reflection, after doing this exercise, my friend decided to smile and not push the matter, as the daughter probably didn’t have the emotional infrastructure to engage in such an explicit dialogue.

In another example, I remember teaching my daughter when she was around four to tie her shoes. Sometimes I would demonstrate, sometimes she would need to show me. I could never guess which was needed until the moment, and she would let me know. This taught me the need for ongoing feedback, mutuality. I realized that if I were the greatest mind in the world, I still wouldn’t know which approach to use moment-to-moment without finding out what she needed from her. There was another technique I learned, too: Sometimes it was okay to let the task go for a while, for a day or two! It wasn’t something we had to stay with even if she were tired and bored and annoyed.

The idea of abandoning a task-oriented project wasn’t in the books. It seemed apparent to me that with this child, pushing would only be counterproductive, and I realized that we as a culture frequently pushed older kids, teenagers, adults, overriding the principle articulated by the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, the principle of attending to the “zone of proximal development.” That’s a fancy way of talking about what the other person is ready for. Attending to readiness, that ambiguous mixture of temperament, ability, interest, motivation–and how vulnerable that is to the interpersonal field–is frankly uncomfortable for most helpers who want to move the task along.

People on a learning curve–a contemporary phrase that is most intriguing, reflecting this increased awareness of the processes involved–often suffer from varying levels of shame, feeling a bit overwhelmed, discouraged, confused, guilty for wanting to quit, irritation with the minor lapses of the helper (in pushing too much now, then lapsing into being a bit too passive), and so forth. The interaction of student and teacher can heat up, and frictions can expand to affect the overall sense of trust and respect. The student or “helpee” might wonder, consciously or unconsciously, “Is this person capable of helping me? Am I capable of being helped?” The helper might similarly wonder about the nature of the student’s “resistance”–what a terrible term derived from psychoanalysis. It makes the difficulty catching on a kind of wilfulness.

Indeed, occasionally it is, or at least there’s an admixture of sheer rebellion. Psychodynamics are so complex that often even as we may be sincerely trying to learn–I’m remembering sessions when my son is trying to teach me something on the computer–I am able to discern just a touch of the inner brat, the little kid who wants it simple and easy, feels offended that it has to be so difficult, and angry at the teacher for the difficulty of the task. I feel tiny waves of spite and snotty sarcasm. Another part of me is amused that so much can be evoked from the simplest–well, no, a bit more complex than that–task of learning some new techniques on a computer.

Wisdom as Art

The challenge for the helper is to refuse to lapse into mere technique. There is such a thing as being too receptive or non-directive, refusing to see that the helpee is flailing, drowning. Some have affirmed the idea that people have all the resources they need, and can ultimately come up with the answer from inside–deep listening is all they need from others. This seems to be nonsense to me. Not completely, I will concede–it has some validity some of the time. But there really are many occasions where specific instruction, the providing of some simple information when it was not known previously, also helps immeasurably. Also, there are times when this is what the helpee wants and is ready for. I confess to being less skilled of an artist in this way than I know I should be–but I say to myself that I’m still learning.

Archetypal Associations: The Divine Feminine

Actually, this line of thinking emerged from my contemplations of the idea of the “Divine Feminine,” or “Women’s Wisdom,” spoken and written about by associates. I confess I had trouble understanding what they were referring to–generally it had something to do with “receptivity” or “nurturance,” which, admittedly, is more common in the women’s role as caretaker of younger children. But how was it a type of wisdom. More recently, with the ideas described earlier breaking through, I could see this connection.

Simply being nurturing or receptive is not in itself particularly wise–mothers in many species do this–and not infrequently, fathers, too. It becomes wisdom when it reflects an awareness of the needs of the other even when those needs might go against the grains of one’s own more petty needs for feeling recognized, blindly obeyed, feeling effective, or in other ways refusing to react out of habit or personal style, but instead re-evaluate what is needed in the present.

For example, my mother was somewhat hyper-critical out of a mixture of anxiety for my welfare and a simplistic entrenchment in a role of feeling effective through offering corrective advice. It was well-intentioned, but not wise, because worry generates its own self-fulfilling prophecy. While occasional correction may be indicated, psychological research has demonstrated that positive reinforcement is on the whole more effective than negative reinforcement: “Yes, that’s right” is more encouraging than “No, that’s wrong.”

Enthusiasm

A somewhat intangible component of the wisdom of drawing others forth is the art of curiosity that leads to a genuineness of interest, so that the helper can behave congruently: Acting delighted and supportive is authentic because the helper really finds that the struggles of the helpee are significant, and the steps towards progress are valued.

A corollary involves the need for helpers to associate with helpees with whom they have positive rapport. I don’t think one should attempt to assign mentors. They need to meet and check out their “vibes” together, see if they naturally like each other. Many people–indeed, most people–generate what might be considered more neutral or indifferent rapport, and with some, the chemistry is negative–and, note, neither party has done anything wrong. Sometimes folks just don’t fit. This dynamic of rapport is addressed by a method called sociometry, invented in the 1930s by Dr. J. L. Moreno (who also invented psychodrama). It is an area of social psychology that deserves far more attention and development. The challenge is to enable people in larger groups to find and develop a connection with the kinds of other people with whom they seem to feel most comfortable. Such relationships are most conducive to the expression of wisdom in drawing others forth. The enthusiasm flows more naturally.

Summary

The art of drawing others forth, bringing out the best in them, should be recognized as a type of wisdom that can be cultivated, an art deserving of respect. The focus is on the process rather than the subject-matter. Leading a youth group, managing a staff, perhaps even what Dale Carnegie in the 1940s called the art of dealing with people–emphasizing the role of salesman – these reflect more than mere skills of manipulation. When done in the service of the greater good, they partake of something more noble.

References

Blatner, A. (2005). Perspectives on wisdom-ing. ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness & Transformation, 28 (1), 29-33.

Meador, B. D. & Rogers, C. R. (1973). Client-Centered Therapy. In R. J. Corsini (Ed.), Current Psychotherapies (1st ed.). Itasca, IL: F. E. Peacock.

Stern, D. (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. ? Publisher.

 (This paper is still a draft: Your comments are welcome!  Email to adam@blatner.com)