The Developmental Process I

Sleep and development. I'd like to start by addressing some things I left unsaid last time. First, I indicated that REM dreams are involved with skill development in addition to motivational development, yet when one looks at the dreams in terms of manifest content, all one finds is motivational material. Remember, though, that what we use to recall a dream is a conscious faculty that operates primarily in the motivational realm. So it shouldn’t be surprising that skill components are absent from the manifest dream. Skill development proceeds unconsciously during sleep just as it does during the day.

REM dreams continually evoke memories not included in the dreams. In the skill-development realm, this leads to adaptations that contain most of the information the person has accumulated about dealing with the situations treated in the dreams. The same thing happens on a motivational level, and that can be seen in changes in manifest content as the period of sleep continues. The first REM dream is manifestly about the events of the preceding day. The next dream contains memories that go farther back. By the third or fourth dream, childhood memories may be seen to participate. In other words, as sleep continues, childhood memories take an ever-stronger hold over the motivational adaptations the person awakes with the next day.

This in itself is NOT why childhood learning continues to dominate a person's behavior in the motivational area. After all, in the area of physical and social skills, we are able to grow quite a bit, despite the inclusion of elements from childhood. The reason is that during our waking intervals we put ourselves in situations that force us to acquire those skills. Sleep promotes positive growth, but we must give sleep new experiences to work on. In the motivational area--which involves our capacities for loving and being loved and our intimate social relationships in general, we don't challenge our ways of thinking, acting, and feeling so much, hence little new learning takes place.

That we can change significantly in these matters is evidenced by the progress a person can make as a result of therapy. During therapy, a person is led to process new information, so sleep is able to produce positive motivational adaptations. These adaptations are months or years in coming for two reasons. The first is that a therapist's interpretations are only so many seedlings. For these to take root in a client's personality, the client must experience the reality of these interpretations in the real world. That is, the client must dare to act differently in the real world. Without this openness to new experiences, therapy would not be able to proceed very far, precisely because sleep would not be given the experiences it needs to install major changes in our personality.

The second reason therapy takes time is that childhood learnings do not sit back lazily during therapy. Remember that during sleep these learnings operate as a critical faculty. As a therapist's interpretations are processed, these learnings warn the person that he is being led into danger, that taking the therapist's advice will lead to disaster. These warnings live the next day as contrary feelings, critical conscious thoughts, and a lack of resolve to behave differently. Therapy starts an inner war, and as therapy proceeds, sometimes the therapist wins, sometimes childhood learning wins, and sometimes it's a draw, leaving the person not knowing what to think or do.

I seem to be saying that interpersonal growth is painful while skill learning is not, which is not true at all. When we put ourselves in new skill-related situations--such as starting at new jobs--our conscious feelings warn us of the dangerous position we have put ourselves in. We are generally quite nervous and have difficulty conjuring up feelings of self-confidence. This negativism goes away as we come to learn how to deal with all of the new demands being placed upon us, but in the interim there is inner hell to pay. And if a person was led in childhood to be especially fearful of new situations, the interim period of inner hell will be lengthened precisely because of the reinforcement of childhood learnings in sleep.

Another reason childhood interpersonal lessons persist into adulthood is that there are precious few opportunities for growth in this area. The greatest opportunity most people have relates to marriage. Unfortunately what happens in many cases is that each partner insists that the other recreate his home environment. Demands for change on each other's part merely lead to resentment and grudging superficial compliance. Instead of working together in ways that address the aspirations and fears of each, an accommodation is reached that is based primarily on each changing minimally.

The reason people tend to respond this way is only partially related to a person's reluctance to act in ways that are temporarily not supported by feelings. The other is that most people are inexperienced in exerting conscious control over their own lives generally. You want to make a million dollars? Develop some scheme that will promise people that they will be able to diet or slim down or have a better self-image or learn math or whatever easily and quickly and without any sort of inner unpleasantness whatsoever. Most people are inexperienced in marshalling and maintaining inner resolve, and so are hesitant to take a new direction without being forced to by external circumstances.

Consciousness and other things. My stated viewpoint on consciousness requires a change in how one thinks about conscious and unconscious mental contents. Typically one asks why something is unconscious, whereas according to the present viewpoint one should ask why has something been accorded the special status of being conscious--that is, of being experienced. Or put another way, the typical view implies that total consciousness should be the norm, and that therefore when something is absent from the conscious stream, it must be so for a reason--some sort of repression, for example. The present viewpoint recognizes that most mental contents are in fact unconscious--that conscious manifestations are extraordinary events, and therefore are what need explaining.

A child learns what to expect from itself and the world in general from its parents and in part from imitating and identifying with them. The distinction I make between these two concepts is that I see imitation as merely mimicking ways of behaving. Identification is a more generalized phenomenon whereby a child says in effect, "I am like these people; their goals should therefore be my goals; their aspirations should be mine also; their view of what life is about and what I am should be my view, too."

Much of what a child learns about itself exists as a set of unconscious givens it tends not to question. Aspects of this reality concept surface as experienced emotions, thoughts, feelings, and at times neurotic symptoms, which act to guide the person in making life choices. The reason very little surfaces as verbalized thoughts has only partly to do with repression and consequent mental disguises. Feelings, emotions, and symptoms are based on inner realities that are too complex and interwoven for accurate verbal depiction. When a therapist shows a client how to verbalize them, the verbal understanding the client receives represents a gross simplification, no matter how good the therapist is or how accurate the psychological theory being appealed to is in making interpretations. In other words, conscious manifestations often arise as accurate reflections of unconscious realities; they are as accurate as the person can be, given their complexity and the person's lack of psychological understanding.

Through imitation and identification, a child learns two basic things: how to behave and how to judge itself and its behavior. Behaviors derived from past experience are evoked in a given situation because the person perceives the present situation as similar to certain childhood situations. Such transferences arise in their purest form and greatest variety during therapy because the therapeutic situation mirrors childhood as a whole. That is, both are extended periods in which the client looks to another for basic lessons about how to live. A client who confronts a therapist with aspects of its behavioral repertoire derived from childhood is said by CM therapists to be engaging in transference testing.

The judgmental aspects of a child's reality concept, which reflect how parents reacted to the client as a child, are also evoked on a situational basis. So a parent finds himself tending to respond to his own children much as his parents reacted to him, even to the point of tending to criticize the children in terms of the same hurtful language that was used on him. When a client becomes his judgmental parent in a clinical situation, he is said to be engaging in passive-into-active testing.

A client resorts to transference testing to learn how he should behave. He resorts to passive-into-active testing to learn how he should judge the way he behaves. The client needs both kinds of information to arrive at an integrated reality concept, which is why both kinds of testing are typically encountered during therapy.

As the foregoing discussion indicates, we don’t merely act in accordance with our childhood reality concept, we continually test its validity in small ways. This testing is invariably unconsciously planned. Planning comes into play because the testing has the purpose of bringing us closer to consciously pursuing important life goals. Pursuing these goals consciously right from the start would be too dangerous in the sense that it would raise the level of our commitment to achieving the goals prematurely, thereby provoking a sharply critical reaction based on the disparity between our present reality concept and where we want to be. By achieving small successes unconsciously, we reshape our reality concept to bring it closer to where we want to be so that when we are ready to commit ourselves to conscious pursuit of the goals, they will seem more attainable. The goals may relate to development of our abilities, our capacity for love, or our worthiness of being loved. Often they involve all three.

The thinking exemplified by this kind of argument is, I believe, very close to Weiss's when he discusses safety.

The tentative nature of this unconscious testing means that a person will win several easy growth victories. Unfortunately this often is not enough. Taking tough growth steps requires staying power in the face of several failures, which often is lacking. Unconscious failures can lead a person to change his tactics or his goals or give up. The person who gives up often thinks of himself consciously as "settling down." Actually such a person doesn't give up altogether, but may unconsciously continue on an on-again, off-again manner. If the unconscious desire for change eventually becomes strong enough, it may surface consciously as a "mid-life crisis." Another way a person may strive to regain the courage to continue with his own quest is by living through his children. That is, the person may encourage his children to pursue his own goals in the hope that their success may inspire him.

Another thing a person may do is put himself in a situation where he will be forced to grow in desirable ways. The success of the slogan "be all that you can be" indicates that this is what many young men and woman do who join the Armed Forces. In this case it's probably confusion over what one's unconscious plan should be that is the primary motivation leading young people to take this step.

Therapy is another situation people place themselves whereby they will be forced to grow. The client arrives, as CMT states, with an unconscious plan for growth in mind and the hope of achieving the tough successes that he failed to win alone. What consciously brings the client to therapy are symptoms, which are conscious manifestations expressive of the person's conflicted state. On the one side is a reality concept that operates as a set of expectations predicting that the person will fail in any attempt at change, and on the other is desire for change. This ambivalent state can often be read directly from the presenting symptoms.

Aspiration and CMT. Like most psychological theories, CMT is formulated very narrowly as a prescription for therapeutic practice. Basically it says that a therapist should become attuned to a client's unconscious goals and plans for attaining those goals and then help with the execution of those plans as they becomes refined during therapy. What does that therapeutic approach say about human beings? It says that humans innately know the direction their lives should take and that it is wise to trust this innate sense when making life choices, because the goals involved are often expressive of a person's most abiding aspirations.

It may be argued that I am reading too much into the CM approach, since it often seems to concern itself only the goal of liberation from unconscious guilt. That is true of Control Mastery theory, but is not true of CM as practiced. Time and again, one finds CM therapists helping clients with a range of related goals, only some of which involve guilt.

More next time about this and the developmental process as the timeline of a person's life.