Dancing the edge of the void of the tao te ching

[Steve Saunders]

whatever I measure clean to be, it will then be different

this is like 'chasing ghosts' or 'snatching at dreams'

it could be like a dance, where the client leads and I follow, but clearly i cannot be in their face, not eye-to-eye.

clean is like the holy grail, it can be glimpsed from afar, but as long as believe that we affect each other when we interact then it is not possible to be 'clean'. all I can do is to aspire to be as 'alongside, working with' as possible, but...

how on earth do i know what this 'unnamed thing' is that i'm trying to work with. so i have to choose a model and live with the consequences ... the shadow, the down-side, by having many models i hope 'to cover enough bases' ... for normal people, if we can ever nail down what normal is

... an interesting question is 'what is clean when working with people who have been diagnosed with mental health code a la DSM'?

[phil]

i suppose the cleanest model is the one that comes from the client. Anything we 'apply' from outside them will be less clean than that. Somewhere in between is having the flexibilty to change external models when the client doesn't like/respond to the one offered.

Can you say what you mean by 'normal people'?

[Steve Saunders]

No. I wish I could. This has troubled me for about 6 months, consciously, and further back I did not differentiate.

One possible definition is "not covered by a category of DSM-...", but not good enough.

Another possible definition is a stereotyping, e.g. : job, hetero, adult, anglo-saxon ... but .... urghhhh no.

Mathematically one could consider every one of the myriad axes of human perception and saying outside the 95th percentile is not normal, but these are arbitrary boundaries.

I could say 'a normal person has no arrested developments' but that rules out all of us apart from the Tibetans possibly.

As anyone can potentially 'turn psychotic' I guess I have to live by the establishment definitions in the meantime: DSM etc.

or better: clean has no boundary of who can work with clean process, we adapt the process, the form, the whichever, for the client. practicing that, let alone teaching it, is a challenge.