Psychological Skill

Psychology is best understood as a set of physical skills. Now I suspect that sentence will seem odd to most readers, but a small minority will be thinking, ‘tell me something I don’t know!’

Unfortunately as my writing gets better, along with my confidence in understanding our social world, there seems to be an ever greater risk of losing what modest readership I already have. Perhaps one should just practice psychological skills, rather than try to write about them.

You see the problem is, there is this strange phenomenon of people liking mysteries and not wanting them explained. A lot of modern magicians have experimented with building explanation into their acts, but have sooner or later hit a wall - and it‘s not just a need to maintain trade secrets in order to earn a living. People want to be amazed, in awe of, and frightened (up to a point). In the world of mental health it often appears that someone in distress, does not want, nor responds to, either explicit explanation of their difficulties, or to training in techniques to relieve them. It’s even got to the point in our individualistic society where many will argue that there are no universal ways of understanding or helping - apart from the mysterious ‘love conquers all’! And the more knowledgeable person certainly doesn’t want to end up suffering the emotional isolation of what I call Sherlock Holmes Syndrome - of going to the trouble to explain (about inductive and deductive reasoning, how he built-up his library, apprenticed himself to learn about such things as horses and dogs, the logic of railway operations and timetabling, etc, etc) only for Watson to call it all inborn ‘talent’ and ‘genius‘, the police to call it ‘luck‘, and the public ‘…well when you put it like Mr Holmes, I can see it really is so simple anyone could…’ It was others who set him apart. People fear something is lost in explanation when in fact the reverse is true - it only adds to the wonder of the world.

But there is a more fundamental problem about explanation, learning and skill. For those of us who did not learn our social skills unconsciously and naturally in early childhood, it is a cause of fascination to watch the socially skilled finding themselves quite incapable of describing what they do so self-evidently well! Conversely it is alarming to watch one’s own continuing incompetence at the same time as knowing exactly what one is doing wrong. The old truism that those who find a subject or skill difficult to learn make the best teachers, often holds-up. Now we are into the domain of tacit knowledge, the knowledge and skills we know others have, know to be vital to much social interaction, whether work or leisure, which have proved impossible to write about or codify in other ways?

There is a huge body of knowledge (useful or otherwise, effective or harmful) that one knows is learnt, over long periods of time, possibly quite unconsciously, when alongside the most experienced of practitioners. You know they have ‘it’, that’s why you place yourself alongside them; they know they have ‘it’ but can’t articulate it to you.

Consider the following. The range of human emotions are universal and so is the way they are expressed. Human emotion is communicated through facial expression and tone of voice. (Whilst thoughts are communicated through the content of speech and hand gestures). There is relatively little individual variation. Emotion is felt as your facial muscles react to what you see or hear in the other person. Emotion comes first, thoughts follow.

Some of you will be thinking ‘well that’s bleedin’ obvious’, for others it may be a ‘bolt from the blue’.

I don’t do empathy (the ability to feel what others feel). At least not very well, and not most of the time. I didn’t learn that basic human skill in early life, which most people acquire so un-self-consciously that they don’t even name it. It’s not a ‘learning disability’ - I have the capacity, it simply became blocked. Hence my adult life has been one long painful process of mechanically acquiring the skill. And I’m not fluent in it - others can see the joins, often become fearful of me, and turn away. (Doing one of Paul Ekman’s tests I correctly guessed only 3 out of the 8 universal emotional expressions - and that was with 30 seconds to think about it!)

As for a ‘theory of mind’ (knowing how others think) well, a long time ago when I was a patient on a ward a student nurse demonstrated a few NLP basics, such as the reasoning behind ‘eye accessing cues’ - you see I’m profoundly left-handed, I’ll move anti-clockwise when 90% of the population are moving clockwise.

Twenty wasted years in the psychiatric system. Being diagnosed with depression, schizoid affective disorder and manic depression - actual taught me nothing. They only described, rather inaccurately, how my limbic system reacted to such dodgy data!

Psychiatry, clinical psychology and mental health nursing don’t know they are stuck at the end of a cul de sac - ramming each other out of road rage, whilst the rest of the world passes on the main road. Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System has been available since 1978 but I know of no mental health worker who has ever learnt it. And of course any part of NLP has been thought ‘beyond the pale’ for the last twenty years.

There is much that is not mysterious. Simple laws can lead to massive complexity. Complexity does not mean something is necessarily complicated to understand. Darwin taught us that 150 years ago - he also guessed right about facial expressions!