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).
