I think my next chapter, if it’s okay to keep working here. Like a sort of chill integral scratch pad. Reflecting about my group experiences.
Gregory bateson, did he make the cut into SES? Footnotes maybe. So he had this game where you take two wildly different things. Any-things. And find a ‘pattern that connects’. Genius. Although if can be complex at times. And we learnt in group this week that things can come in 3s and 7s as well. At least I guess? I’m new so I didn’t ask too many questions.
But here I can be free to imagine as I please 
So how do my two pictures relate? Let’s try! To find a pattern. That connects.
I’ll take this as my little step to the edge of what I can say with words. But have fun as well! No scary things will be allowed to keep it safe.
- A Trojan horse. It can be a symbol as much as a literal story. I learnt that in therapy. So sometimes the therapist might suspect a snippet from her analysands imagination might be real and true and truthful. And it beholds a unknown truth. And their special job can be to gently hold it up to see in the room together. And see what happens next. The Trojan horse is a symbol that could mean a lot of things right!? When we think about it like a symbol. Not a history lesson. But that could be fun as well.
- How to get unstuck from linkedin** - a spiral. We can see the artist/thinking behind it is clear. It is not as symbolic. It a mini idea packaged with a nice line and words. It can bring us to reflect on how we might like to reflect on how we get stuck with others. It’s not very deep. It’s not so deep we need to put it on our fridge for the weeks and wonder what the report is really getting to. It can be just. Ok, yeah, interesting. You might see it as how to be a process of wiggling from under the eagles claw. That would be an image to think about. But you might see something else that is more interesting. Maybe you didn’t see anything.
How do we find a connection?
This will now be my connection that connects. You might follow a different path. You might not connect anything. You might just smile and think. Ha, what is this? And that’s good too. I think.
So my pattern is a quick one. It goes like this:
A. Unconscious symbols are unconscious. We cannot directly know what they mean. Or they would not be unconscious. We need help to see the meaning for us. Good, bad interesting. And we have to realise this first or we will become stuck in a mess of our own mess. We will eat our own mess and then be sick or feel unwell. And then we will be worse than before we started. We can’t escape needing help with our Trojan horses.
B. What if one day we have a realisation of sorts. Where we are stuck with others. And they are helping us see our symbols but it’s making us sick? And we try and see this as part of our recovery and that really it’s necessary. And then we start to wonder. What if we need to say something?
C. We know that we can’t walk around saying we have no need for the medicine when we are being asked to. That would be rude and ungrateful. And the rules are there to keep us all safe from bad actors who might try and skip their medicine making more work for everyone. Mess everywhere. More work to clean up and make good.
D. My next step is what every sequence needs to escape the problem off logical types. It’s the slight of hands every author hopes will not be seen or felt. But I’m being honest for my own sake in my own reflection thread. It’s the possibility that one day we might change how we make our next safe move. We might have been learning to lucid dream just as one example. We might. And we might have been learning how to work with wood and crafting. And we might wonder to ourselves. What would happen if I didn’t call out? If I kept very quiet. And hid something inside the gates? That at night might contain something unexpected for the others to keep us safe with?
Now obviously this is a tall tale. Bayesian logic is very complicated and not even proved yet to be safe or even helpful. I guess to come back to my reflective thread. I wonder how we can know what will help us all to get unstuck? We cannot go back to naive therapy. It’s too easy to lose sight of real and unreal symbols which might be defences we need to stay safe from those who try (sincerely) to help. It keeps them busy at least as we take a pause to reflect.
So that was my experiment. Using bateson’s patterns today connect. I will go offline now to think about how helpful this has been. I will also ask my group what they think. I hope they will give me some guidance on what to do next. Being isolated can be helpful only so far I guess and then it’s back to work! Thank you if you have read this. You can comment if you like. I might like that. And also, I like this forum. It can be quiet and quite beautiful.
I will share one more picture. Just to finish my reflection with. I hope you (my imagined reader) will enjoy it as much as I do
**https://www.linkedin.com/posts/susanadavidphd_its-easy-to-fly-into-a-downward-spiral-when-activity-7317939825108537345-saTC
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