Coincidences (2) …… and causes

 

Coincidences (2) …… and causes
Torrey Orton
April 22, 2013

6 degrees of separation and such matters??

The 6 degrees thing was back in hardcopy sight last week with a few hundred words borrowed from Steve Jones by the Australian Financial Review’s Review (pg. 2R) section on Friday 19, April ’13. It reminded me there is this thing of organic coincidence among us, much closer than many would like to imagine, though increasing the distance as our (advanced?) cultures become more ethnically diverse (which leads directly to DNA diversification, which is good for humanity overall). We are, after all, all out of Africa.

And on they march…coincidences, concurrences (which is a competition for the French!), correlations, co-occurrences – the makings of causes…all the variations on the sense of being in synch with ourselves, others, the world, the multi-verse…Pick your preference if you can; if you can’t, these connections become opportunities for perceived and real dis-connection, being out of synch, feeling out of it.

Sharing house, but a life?

A few days ago one long term patient announced that his girlfriend is house sharing with another patient of mine. What are the chances of that happening? Probably calculable if I can set the parameters, though I couldn’t do the calculation myself. Some of the parameters might be:

·       Prior mental health issue(s), untreated or treated

·       Tertiary education levels

·       Under 35 and over 20

·       Single, and seeking partner

·       Minority backgrounds – race/ethnicity; sexual orientation…

·       Inner suburbs address

·       Share housing

·       Early career in recognised professional field

·       Tertiary educated parents??

These are groupings, presumably linked in some shared way. And if you get enough of them together you have a presumptive causal cluster. Demonstrating it rather than assuming it is the challenge.

But, what possible implication(s) can I draw from the fact of sharing itself, without any presumed other connective effects. So, they happen to share a house. And people share houses with no other connection than the need for sharing (economic/social/and?). These two could not be possible love objects for each other, distinguished as they are by different sexual preferences. Maybe there’s naturally occurring mutual support thru sharing their experiences of therapy with the same therapist…informal quality control reflected back to me as they adjust to our relationship in light of their understanding of it from the other one?? Could be.

Needle, not haystack

This is not a coincidence but a case of finding what I did not know I was looking for. We were wandering along the path in Chamonix towards the Swiss end of town, with Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi across the valley to the right and the local stream just off the path. On our left was a rock face of about 300 meters height forming the base of the lower range facing Mont Blanc. A few ropes were laid down the face from different heights and groups of primary school kids were being instructed in the entry level arts of defying the heights. I grabbed a couple of quick shots of the site and the little scramblers and sent it off to a patient at the time who was struggling to overcome such fears, which she subsequently did…with the slight increase in risk-taking which comes with its acknowledgement by others.

This is evidence of unconscious processes at work, as they often are in the therapy, the scanning for world understanding and the writing parts of my life. Much less so with the Friends of FCC work…or so it seems.

Her past just walked in the door

Then there’s the ex-patient of mine who started her own therapy practice and within a week a facsimile of her PhD candidate self walked in the door, struggling with a similar range of things she had herself back then – doubt, motivational slippage, conflict with supervisors, data collection glitches….normal stuff, except when you are in it; then it’s the pains which assure you the honour of completion is warranted, maybe. Within a couple of days an article had appeared in the New York Times on PhD study challenges, assaying the terrain we had just been revisiting. I passed it on and received a quick acknowledgement of a good fit with her own experience and that of her new patient.                  

And, there are the patients who seem to come in clusters of same-symptoms, same traumas, often over a week or two. This is signalled to me when I start telling one patient of another with similar concerns who I realise in the telling I just saw the day before or the week before. This is probably a case of proximity calling out approximately equal experiences from my recollections of near patients…not that there is a collocation of people and life practices in neat experiential bundles by chance!!!

J’s meeting of future wife D

K and cult colleague J went out to find dinner in Bangkok in the cultish way - begging it from neighbourhood restaurants /cafes. J suggested they ‘find’ the one they would try first by praying for a minute. They did so, and J asked K what God offered and K said there, pointing to a hotel a ways off. J said, “Just what I got”.  And off they went to be waited on by J’s future wife who was in her last hours of a three day employment trial (which she failed). The rest was 20+ years of the deepest marital solidarity which was broken before time by cancer. The cult had gone the way of some bad things well before the untimely cancers seized D.

A bag of lesser treats

·       Our in-laws at Jinks Winery, Tonimbuck, Vic… a classic coincidence which J and I both imagined was going to occur as we got within site of the winery. We’d only been there once before for their elder son’s wedding 3 years ago. We walked in the café door and a few steps inside spied them sitting at the nearest table… as if waiting for us. They weren’t, but also weren’t too surprised we appeared.

·       And there’s the guy in the incinerated fire zone of the Murrindindi fire four years ago whose house at Marysville, Vic. was the only one for a mile around NOT touched by the fires which killed 173. When I called hopefully to see if they were still OK, he said “Yes, and our fire insurance lapsed a week ago”!!

·       And there’s the synch of ‘Mother” coming to my mind in patient M’s discussion of recent developments and she having her dead birth mother coming at the same time to her mind though I was thinking of her step mother…but it’s all part of the total system of her family of origin relationships which cue each other...in her and me.

This matter of therapeutic synch is seriously interesting as a possible member of the coincidence genre. It’s a false coincidence, reflecting rather the coming together of minds that are on a sufficiently shared track, where each other’s stories and roles are firmly enough in mind not to have to be held in mind consciously. So, such synching moments in therapy are expressions or emanations of jointness, and also famously the place in which exactly whose mind is speaking at any moment is a wonder to be validated by checking – the principle activity of maintaining clarified jointness.

The emanations take the early form of premonitions of being in synch, of knowing what the other is thinking/ feeling and hence an example of empathy. In ordinary talk, this premonition is found in the listeners regularly completing the active speaker’s sentences before they do or adding the words the speaker is searching for at appropriate times (e.g. when a felt need to confirm correct attention occurs).