You Can't Change Just the One Part You Don't Like

A marriage counseling session is improv: the plot is developed by the characters in real time. Note that the only skill the therapist needs is curiosity.

Chris: We think our lack of communication is ruining our marriage.
T: {to Stacy} You agree? Does Chris speak for both of you?
Stacy: Um, I guess so.
T: Why are you guessing?
Stacy: Well, Chris thinks so.
T: And Chris may be right but maybe not?
Stacy: Sorta
T: {to Chris} Can you be more specific how a lack of communication is ruining your marriage?
Chris: We don’t talk enough.
T: Is there something specific you think you should be talking about that you don’t talk about?
Chris: Lots of stuff.
T: Can you give me an example?
Chris: Stacy gets taken advantage of at work!
T: How so?
Chris: Everyone at work likes Stacy so much, and why not? Stacy helps others when they run into problems and never asks for anything in return. But Stacy gets passed over for promotions.
T: So everyone likes Stacy so much, but Stacy’s boss doesn’t or doesn’t think Stacy’s work rates promotions?
Chris: Stacy doesn’t even apply for promotions!
T: Oh. Not applying is different from being passed over, isn’t it?
Chris: So, why doesn’t Stacy apply?
T: You’re asking me?
Chris: I’m just exasperated. I’m asking the universe.
T: Why are you asking the universe? Stacy is right here.
Chris: {to Stacy} Why don’t you apply?
Stacy: We’ve been over this a million times. You know why.
T: {raises hand} Do I get to know?
Stacy: {exasperated} Because I don’t want to. I love my job. I love the people I work with. I don’t want that to change.
T: {to Chris} Oooh, you want Stacy to get a promotion because it would bring in more money to your household?
Chris: That’s one reason, but it’s not so much about the money. We don’t really need it. I make three times what Stacy makes, and we’re definitely not hurting. Maybe, after a tax hike, it wouldn’t make much difference.
T: {to both} Then what’s this all about?
Chris: I think Stacy should get fair value for Stacy’s work. If nothing else, it would be good for Stacy’s self esteem.

T: {thinking}
T: Let’s hold off on that for now.
T: {to both} You’ve been married for… {checks the intake form}
Chris and Stacy: Seven years.
T: Who wants to tell me how you met?
Stacy: A friend of a friend introduced us.
T: And how did the budding romance happen?
Chris: I had been doing the dating apps thing and was tired of it. I was getting to the point where I wanted to settle down, but with only the right person.
T: What was wrong with the dating apps thing?
Chris: The dating apps matched interests and preferences, but that didn’t translate to I want to be with this person. It was more, this could be a good friend, if that’s what I was looking for. I had enough friends. I was discouraged, I guess.
Stacy: I had just gone a long time between having more than a date or two with the same person. Just didn’t find anyone who I clicked with, until Chris, that is.
T: You clicked because?
Stacy: It was just comfortable. I could be myself.
Chris: Yeah, same.
T: When did you learn that Stacy made a third of what you made?
Chris: It became obvious, early on. Stacy didn’t want to go to fancy restaurants and lived a more modest lifestyle than I did, in general.
T: Did that bother you then?
Chris: I was so happy to be with someone like Stacy, I didn’t give it a thought. And, as I said, if we were going to be together, I make plenty of money.
T: You hadn’t met anyone before who you thought a lot of and also made a lot of money?
Chris: Yeah, but there were other issues. They weren’t interested in a life mate at the time, or maybe I didn’t find them attractive. It’s not easy to find a life partner fit.
T: {joking} Some find it easy enough that they find a life partner multiple times. {no one laughs} I was joking in my way of agreeing with you.
{as the joke hits them, both Chris and Stacy smile} So, if I understand you, Stacy was your first or best potential life partner. Do you see that differently, now?
Chris: God no!
T: How would you explain your current dissatisfaction of what brought you to see a marraige counselor?
Chris: I don’t want Stacy to change. I just want Stacy to value what Stacy contributes at work and be promoted.
T: And you don’t see that as Stacy changing?
{quiet}
T: Can you explain in more detail what you fell for in Stacy?
Chris: Stacy was … is just kinder, more thoughtful, and more fun, than anyone else I’ve met. Stacy’s got a bunch of friends who adore Stacy, and I can see why. Stacy is good with kids—I hope we’ll have kids eventually—and is just a great person.
T: Why do you think Stacy doesn’t apply for promotions?
Chris: I think Stacy’s afraid of being turned down—doesn’t want to put Stacy’s accomplishments on the line for potential criticism.
T: And you’ve asked Stacy, and this is what Stacy tells you?
Chris: Stacy just shrugs and says, “I dunno, I guess I like my job.”
T: And you don’t believe Stacy? Why don’t you ask Stacy right now.
Chris: Why don’t you apply for promotions?
Stacy: {quiet for a couple of minutes}
T: What’s keeping you from answering?
Stacy: Chris will think it’s dumb.
T: What makes you think that?
Stacy: Because maybe it is. I dunno. I tell Chris, I like my job, and that doesn’t seem to mean anything to Chris.
T: Maybe if you elaborated.
Stacy: I like the work I do. I like the people I work with. I like my boss, who gives me complete latitude. I like the office building, the coffee vendor down below, the exercise club next door. If I was promoted, I have no idea where I’d have to work, who my boss would be, who my co-workers would be. I would have more responsibility, but not the kind of responsibility that I’d like, which is working independently. I don’t want to supervise subordinates. I’d bring in a little more money, but after the effect on our taxes, it wouldn’t be much more, and as Chris says, we don’t really need it. So if I applied for a promotion merely to satisfy my ego, and got a position I liked a whole lot less, how would that better my life. And if I made my life worse to satisfy Chris, I’d probably be resentful, and how would that make our marriage better?
{quiet} Chris: I don’t know what I was thinking. I assumed that what I would like for my career would be what you would like for yours. Obviously, that’s not true.
T: And Stacy would be a different person if Stacy got a job Stacy didn’t want. And you may not like that new version as much as the old version.
Chris: {thoughtful} Probably not.


People aren’t fixer-uppers. Be wary of going into a relationship that you believe will be just one change away in your mate that will make the relationship work. You probably won’t be successful in facilitating that change, or if you are, your mate won’t be the same in all the ways you liked beforehand.

Recursion in Therapy

(For the sole purpose of amusing myself, I gave my website a title.)

The unexamined life is not worth living.
—Socrates

Get over yourself.
—Thousands of people who aren’t Socrates

Because my wife keeps asking me to define recursion, which is tricky because it’s originally a mathematical concept, then borrowed by computer programmers, and eventually, by scientists.

Recursion is a different way of looking at the feedback loop. An abundance of carbon monoxide is feedback that the body needs to take a fresh breath. A recursive explanation considers that the whole body has been updated to its present state that includes the abundance of carbon monoxide in the lungs. The effect is the same but it’s a description of how the whole body updates rather than just looking at a change in a part of the body. A focus on a single change ignores the changes that are conditioned on taking that breath, in this case the other bodily functions and changes in the consequences that are dependent on oxygen (such as remaining alive). Change in a living being is not a single change while the rest remains exactly as before.

Below, I describe each change in the client as the whole of the client being the feedback for the therapist. The following is a caricature, that is, not based on a particular client and I attempt to give only the flavor of sessions. Think of the collection as an interview with all the “ums” and “you knows" deleted.

T: What brings you here?
C: I’m afraid to go outside.
T: How did you get to my office?
C: I drove.
T: You have a garage where you have your car, and can enter your car without going outside?
C: No, my car is at the curb.
T: So you walked to your car on the street and got in and drove?
C: Yes.
T: So you do go outside on occasion.
C: I guess so.
T: On what other recent occasions have you gone outside?
C: I needed groceries, so I went to the store.
T: There’s no one at home to get the groceries?
C: I live alone.
T: So you go outside when you absolutely have to?
C: I guess so.
T: On what other recent occasions have you had to go outside?
C: I work. I have to go to an office.
T: Like five days a week?
C: Yeah.
T: So, you’re afraid to go outside, but you do go outside?
C: I guess so.
T: You go outside regularly, in fact.
C: Yeah.
T: So you’re afraid, but you face your fears by necessity.
C: Yeah.

The client entered the office as someone who identified as afraid to go outside, but now identifies as afraid to go outside but does so when necessary. He is a slightly different person than when he entered.

T: You live alone. Do you have friends or family who visit you?
C: I don’t have friends. I have a sister who visits about once a month and brings her toddler.
T: You work in an office as what?
C: I’m an accountant.
T: How many people work in your office?
C: Maybe 20 or so. Six CPAs, the rest support staff.
T: Half are men, half are women or…?
C: Umm… probably about right; I don’t count them, offhand.
T: I assume you talk to your fellow workers, as needed.
C: Of course.
T: How about, besides as needed? Like, in the break room where you might say, “Did you watch that comedy about accountants?”
C: Not much [shrug].
T: Because you’re shy?
C: Yeah.

[Quiet for a couple of minutes…]

T: Do you have neighbors?
C: Yeah.
T: You talk to them ever?
C: We nod.
T: They’re shy too, or not friendly?
C: No they’re friendly. Guess they gave up.
T: Trying to strike up a conversation?
C: [shrug]
T: When you say you’re afraid of going outside, is it outside or worried about running into people?
C: Little of both, I guess.

The client now identifies as someone who is afraid of running into other people, perhaps more than being afraid of going outside. He is a slightly different person than when he entered.

T: You say you don’t have friends. Did you have friends when you were younger? In college? Or before that, in school?
C: I had one friend. He moved away when I was eleven.
T: How long was he your friend?
C: About five years.
T: And no friends since. What was it about him that you could be friends with and no one since?
C: Well, I guess we met before being cool was a thing and just liked doing stuff together.
T: Such as?
C: At first, just playing with toys together; mostly just hanging out at each other’s house, having snacks, and playing video games.
T: Before being cool; you didn’t have to pretend to be different from how you felt.
C: Yeah.

Session 2:

T: Anything different for you this week?
C: I waved to my neighbor.
T: Did the neighbor respond?
C: Yeah; took him a few seconds, then he waved back.
C: {laughs} Guess he was surprised.
T: Could be. That’s cool; anything else different this week?
C: I sat in the break room for a few minutes while drinking my coffee.
T: Did anyone come in?
C: Yeah, a couple of people. They said, “Hey.” I said, “Hey.”

Unlike, many therapists I don’t respond to these answers with, “How did that make you feel?” My bent is not to make explicit commentary on feelings because it reinforces focus on oneself, which shy people have more than a sufficient supply. An abundance of focus on oneself is a remnant of adolescence and its accompanying anxiety. Developing a habit of outward focus, curiosity about others, is a better strategy for shy people (and for most people).

Yet, again, the client is a slightly different person from who he was when he first came to see me and after the initial session. He’s no longer someone who’s afraid to go outside. He’s now someone who is experimenting with social interaction.

Session 3:

T: Anything different for you this week?
C: I walked around the block, as you suggested .
T: [waiting]
C: I waived at someone mowing the lawn.
T: [waiting]
C: He just looked at me, then went back to his mowing.
T: [waiting]
C: I felt like an idiot.
T: You have a theory about why he didn’t respond to your wave?
C: Only idiots wave to a stranger.
T: Your one theory was he thought you were an idiot for waving at him? Did you have any other theories?
C: What do you mean?
T: Did you have any other theories why he might not have returned your wave with a wave or some such?
C: No.
T: Can you think of any now?
C: Um…
T: Can you think of any theories why he might not have returned your wave with a wave or some such that had nothing to do with you?
C: Oh…um… argument with his wife?
T: Or?
C: Guess there can be a lot of reasons…
T: …that had nothing to do with you.
C: Yeah.

The client entered the office as someone who identified as afraid to go outside, then identified as afraid to go outside but does so when necessary. He entered the latest session, miffed that my suggestion that he walk around the block resulted in him feeling like an idiot when his greeting gesture was ignored. (When you have few interactions with others, each interaction takes on great significance.) However, he’s now a person who is slightly less self conscious. He is a slightly different person than when he entered the first, second, and third sessions. This presentation of a slightly different person is recursive feedback for the therapist.

Session 4:

T: Anything different for you this last week?
C: You always ask me the same thing.
T: I guess I do.
T: [waiting]
T: Is there something you’d like me to ask you instead?
C: I dunno, seems you could be more creative.
T: Maybe I’m not that creative, but I’m open to suggestions.
C: I’ll think about it and let you know.
T: Ok. Does that mean you don’t want to answer my question—“Anything different for you this last week?"—today?
C: Maybe I’m just in a bad mood.

T: Care to explain, or rather not?
C: I don’t want to, at least, not now.

I don’t know why the client wasn’t in the mood to answer my regular opening gambit. Anything I can come up with is an inference that has less of a chance of being accurate and more of a chance of creating something that wasn’t there until I suggested it into existence.

Session 5:

T: [I’m quiet.]
C: [Snickers] You’re not going to ask me what you always ask me? Did I hurt your feelings?
T: [I chuckle] Maybe a little. Mostly, I’m just trying something different.

I think it’s good he knows he can affect me, that he knows he can affect anyone at all. It’s the opposite of realizing the guy who was mowing his lawn was not personally snubbing the client; that the mower has his own life and is not a character in the client’s life. The client is learning he can affect other people, including me.

Session 6:

C: I thought of something different you could ask me.
T: Cool. [waiting]
C: You could ask me whether I did anything new this week.
T: I see, more specific. Did you do anything new this week?
C: I talked to three people in the break room.
T: How was that for you?
C: It was ok.
T: Anything in particular that was ok?
C: Not really, I guess because nothing bad happened.
T: Nothing that made you regret it like with the guy in the yard.
C: Yeah.

Since my early years as a therapist, I’ve had a theory that the client will nudge the therapist in some way, as needed, in the same spirit that the therapist nudges the client. This is mutual recursion. The therapist is also changing in relationship to the client over the sessions. In other words, the relationship between the therapist and client is the same as any other. The one difference is it’s the therapist’s role to be the change agent. Except, because of the mutually recursive feedback, they become each other’s change agent. The client’s change is specific in that he’s becoming someone who can change the therapist to change him.

Session 7:

T: Did you do anything new this week?
C: [Chuckles] You learn fast.
T: I know, right?
C: Not really, new, I would say. More talking to people in the break room.
T: Anyone in particular?
C: Just whoever came in.
T: Tell me about someone who came into the break room who you talked to. What is the person like?
C: [Puzzled] I dunno know. She’s ok, I guess.
T: Is there anyone who you talked to that you know more about? Are they with someone? Have kids, maybe? Do they like music; any particular kind of music? Or sports? Or whatever? Good dressers or causal?
C: Not really; I don’t know those things.

I’m putting out a couple of suggestions: (1) the way to overcome shyness is to show interest in others (as opposed to focus on oneself), and tips how to specifically show interest in others.

I liked that he had the confidence to tease me at the top of the session. We’re not friends; I get paid to talk to him, to help him in how he wants to be helped. However, a relationship is a relationship. It’s not as different from other relationships as many therapists believe. Yes, there’s “projection” in that a therapist may remind you of a significant figure in your life, for example, a mother, father, sibling, etc., and respond at some level as if you were that figure, but that’s true in all relationships. Therapists needn’t make a big fucking deal out of it by bringing up transference.

To reiterate: unless the therapist lacks the behavioral repertoire to respond to the behavior of another, we are mutually responding to each other. Therapy is recursive in that we are constant changing each other and those changes are feedback to each other.

Session 8:

T: Did you do anything new this week?
C: I learned a couple of things about a co-worker.
T: Did you ask a co-worker questions?
C: No; I just listened to when the person was talking to someone else in the break room.
T: Another way of learning about others. You can observe them.
C: Yeah.

Two ways the client is a different person from when he started therapy: he realized he could learn about others without feeling invasive, and he is less attentive to himself and more attentive to others.

Inference, Repertoire, Acceptance

This replaces the last two essays. While Skinner's Folly is much the same, Part 1, Inference is mostly new.

Thanks to Joan and Adam for their help.

The essay is for Denise, because she complains that my writing does not include enough sports examples.

Part 1, Inference

…the physicist himself, who describes all this, is, in his own account, himself constructed of it. He is, in short, made of a conglomeration of the very particulars he describes, no more, no less, a bound together by and obeying such general laws as he himself has managed to find and to record.
G. Spencer-Brown, from the Laws of Form

B.F. Skinner's behaviorism is now an over-the-hill band playing oldies at state fairs, but in the sixties, his theories climbed to the top of the charts of academic psychology.1 In place of personality theories, such as those from Freud and Jung where inner drives explain behavior, Skinner believed that all human behavior was shaped by reinforcement from behavioral conditioning. Influences were external, not internal.

Skinner's premise and that of the behavioralists that preceded him, that we can't see inside the mind of another, can't be denied. Theories of personality are, (as I keep insisting) just stories, maybe closer to just-so stories, Rudyard Kipling's famous fictional explanations for how characteristics of specific animals came to be. In theories of human behavior, the stories are in the mind of the theorists, not of their subjects. Freud, Jung, and other famous personality theorists were writing "dear diary" and calling their entries, science.2

We can't see inside the mind of another, because if you look inside a brain, you see neurons and connections among the neurons, but the complexity of how that translates to human thought is elusive, and despite future strides in understanding, will always be elusive because of the paradox that the (scientist's) mind is studying the (subject's) mind, with all the limitations inherent in cognitive filters (neurological plus psychological filters equals cognition).3

The scientific study of how we think is akin to Zeno's Paradox of Motion, which is explained simply: no matter how fast you run, each moment you can get only halfway closer to the finish line, and no matter how close that gets you to the finish line, each moment you can still get only halfway closer to the finish line, and so on.

From Wikipedia:

The paradox of neurobiology is that even as we get closer to understanding neurobiology, because a mind is studying the mind, we’ll never get to the finish line. Your neural and psychological cognitive filters don’t get suspended when you receive your research grant. No matter how much science jargon you sprinkle over your thoughts, you can never think or observe outside your story.

This essay attempts to convey that inferences about others are harmful, and the way to get beyond harmful inferences is to expand our behavioral repertoire.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman

Sid Meier, a famous computer game designer,4 once explained that, because of his development experience, when he plays a computer game, he can't help but see the algorithms—the underlying software processes that create the action. Experts in a domain can envision the below-the-surface complexity of how determinants form the system in action. When doctors press a stethoscope to your chest, they can translate your heartbeat to the status of your cardiovascular system. Domain experts don't have Superman's x-ray vision, but they make do with training and experience.

A computer game, as Sid Meier might explain, is assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data. An animation layer acts as public relations for the hidden software processes. With either a game controller or a keyboard and mouse, the game player interacts with the animation layer, and if the player isn’t the all-knowing Sid Meier, the player suspends disbelief to regard the continuous animated updates as a simulated world.

The corporate strategist, costumed in dull business attire rather than the gamer’s hoodie, uses the spreadsheet—which is also assembled with data and with formulas to define the relationships among the data—to engage in imaginary play similar to that of the gamer. But unlike game players, corporate strategists interact with their imaginary worlds directly by modifying the data and formulas. These strategists call their spreadsheets "projections" to make them sound businesslike and rational, but they’re just stories, with numbers as the characters and the formulas to define the relationships among the characters. A possible plot might be, “What if we buy another company to incorporate their product or their intellectual property?” Or, “What if we reduce the price of our widget to expand our potential market?” The spreadsheet and game are distinct approaches to a similar goal: to play in a fantasy world without the risks found in the concrete world.5

The spreadsheet creates a simulation that you directly manipulate (by changing data and formulas in the cells) to look at possible outcomes. The game, in contrast, is a pre-made simulation that you indirectly manipulate via the interface to experiment with possible outcomes that are implicit in the design of the data and formulas.

In short, with a spreadsheet, you explore and experiment by changing the parts from within the skin of the virtual world. In a game, you explore and experiment by changing the whole from outside the skin of the virtual world.

The parts and wholes of spreadsheets and games belong to abstraction, but it works similarly in the concrete world. An engineer designs the parts of a car, and then the parts are assembled to test how the whole performs on the road. A football coach selects, conditions, and trains players, plugs them into defined positions, and tests how the whole performs on game days.


Alice thought she had never seen such a curious croquet ground in her life; it was all ridges and furrows; the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
Lewis Carrol, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Without even a hand wave, I made the job of the auto engineer and of the coach sound the same, but that's only accurate from the descriptive distance that ignores the complexity of living creatures.

Much of the auto engineer's task is to keep as much rubber on the road as possible under all circumstances while keeping, for example, a 225-pound passenger comfortable and safe. To that engineer, it doesn't matter if that passenger is Tom Brady or Tom Brady's cousin, but the coach knows the difference. The engineer designs and fits parts together from a technical specification, and after the prototype passes its on-the-road tests, the engineer's work is reduced to fixing glitches discovered when the car is driven by the masses. Those cars already on the road won't be affected if the engineer has a salary dispute with the company. The coach, on the other hand, designs the team, but the parts are from the living where the difference between Tom Brady and Tom Brady's cousin are seven Super Bowl championships.

Unlike car parts, living individuals have their own agenda, and equally physically-gifted athletes have motivations that don't always coincide with that of their coach. There are athletes who outperform their physical attributes, such as Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who dominated the NBA in the 1980s, and there are forgettable athletes—I forgot their names already—who underperform their physical attributes. Psychology matters.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Red Queen wanted to play a game of croquet, but every "part" of the game, including the balls, wickets, and mallets were living creatures with minds of their own, and the game dissolved into pandemonium.6 The frustrated Red Queen finally yelled, "Off with their heads." I'm sure many coaches suppress a similar sentiment.

Neither the view from inside (studying the parts of the nervous system) nor the view from the outside (observing and experimenting with behavior) expose the determinants of human behavior. No one has lived inside another’s mind. And yet, when academics do research in human behavior, which depends on cognitive interpretation, they neglect the level of inference that's required to call the results, “conclusions.” Worse: both amateur psychologists (sports pundits and fans) and behavioral scientists with fancy degrees use circular explanations to stretch inferences with the strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger.7 Brady won seven Super Bowls because of his "will to win." Does that mean on the days he lost three Super Bowls he left his will to win in his other pants? Or more sciency, during his winning Super Bowl games, could scientists have located the will-to-win in a Brady brain MRI?

Inference as influence

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. —Mike Tyson

When I faced a counseling situation that was particularly difficult (for me), I would often create a pre-session elaborate plan for an intervention. That was an interesting exercise but proved to be only that. I would abandon my plan within minutes of the beginning of a session. My clients were authors of their stories. They were not characters in mine.

After my father died, my mother made an offhand remark that divulged that I fell far below their (career) expectations for me. That wasn't news, as they left similar hints throughout my adulthood. I wasn't offended because their motivations for my work differed from mine. But I was offended when she attributed my "failures" to a personality flaw.8 While I'm not short of personality flaws (in fact, I have a personality-flaw subscription), I believe my parents were 180 degrees off in their inference about why I didn’t meet their expectations. If you can be that far off about those you've known all your life, how accurate can you be about anyone else?9

You can't understand someone until you walk a mile in his shoes
—Unknown

Unknown? I wouldn't want to be known for the above aphorism either. It doesn’t work in the concrete because it's unlikely that you’ll wear the same size shoe, but more to its intention, it doesn’t work as a metaphor because all experience is unique to the person. We treat others as characters in our stories because our only reference point is our own minds.

I’ve learned from my daughter and from her infant daughter the influence of subtle interactions with a child. Our daughter has been persistent in nurturing the autonomy of her little one from day one—to do only the absolute minimum of coercion necessary for her daughter’s health and safety. Watching our daughter in just how she changes a diaper or puts Nova in her stroller is a model in patience and non-coercion.

Inference as an affront

Our little granddaughter knows only a few words,10 so when she attempts to convey something beyond those words or her made-up sign language, we play guess-what-she’s-telling-us. Harmless most of the time, but that guessing may contribute to a habit of making inferences about her thought processes–inferences we have no way of checking. But our inferences don't really stem from our granddaughter's undeveloped language faculty. My parents had access to a language-developed me for all but the first couple of years of my life and their (negative) inferences about me went undisturbed.

I’ve begun to wonder whether the inferences we make about our granddaughter can create unspoken expectations? And whether these unspoken expectations may in the future contribute to her being torn between our desires for her and her desires for herself?

When my brother and I were little, my parents would ask what we wished to be when we grew up. At the time, if we were to answer honestly, we would have both said we wished to play for our favorite sports teams, the Chicago Bears or the Chicago Cubs. Instead, we both answered, “doctor.”

Inference and tribalism

Inference about others—which started with, are they friend or foe?—must have predated all relationships for any species to have survived. In ancient times, when a stranger or wild animal might have been a threat, our habit of inference helped keep us alive. Now the habit of inference is a chief contributor to tribalism in the form of racism, religious wars, and other identity-grounded conflicts. When threatened emotionally, our behavior gets funneled towards the well-known fight-or-flight response that can turn into a war of words with strangers over the Internet or even with a loved one in your home.

I can’t solve pernicious tribalism, but I can aspire to better personal behavior. I can become more observant of how my inferences can affect my relationships, and especially, how inferences can affect my grandchildren.

To quote myself from my essay on privacy and democracy:

Bria Bloom (our daughter) recently posted an essay with a description of her witnessing an interaction between a mother and the mother’s (about) ten year-old-daughter. The mother is playing with her daughter’s hair, treating it as if it belonged to a doll while ignoring her daughter’s repeated requests to stop. The daughter and mother both persist until her mother finally stops and calls her daughter a brat.

If you stop reading Bria’s essay at this point, you’d probably think nothing of the incident — children and parents will be children and parents. But if you read further, Bria makes an unexpected connection: the insistent (pardon) manhandling of the daughter, despite the daughter's protests, is inadvertently training the daughter to accept that her body is not her own, that without consent, she should allow her body to be invaded by another’s behavior.

Our progeny, and to a lesser but still significant extent, all those over whom we have a period of authority or influence, will not be (mal)formed by an incident or two, but incidents, as described above, can describe a behavioral pattern of authority figures who are loving and well-meaning but disregard the developing autonomy of their charge.

This is not meant as a criticism, but as an observation of how we well-meaning parents and other life mentors don’t know when to back the hell off. Our two adult children are many-years independent in all important ways, and I still nag, and (I'm sure) they still roll their eyes metaphorically or actually. Ideally, we go from caring for our children’s every need to backing away in just the right increments so they can live without our care. Backing away doesn’t mean not caring, it means recognizing of the maturity of your dependent or no-longer dependent.

In one of the tribal cultures she studied, the anthropologist, Margaret Mead, witnesses a young child learning to close a door. She concludes that in this culture, children are given the minimum of assistance to achieve a task. Contrast that with today’s helicopter parents who never let go.11

The neurobiologist, Humberto Maturana describes an example of how we can nurture confidence:

One winter day, my little five-year-old grandson came to visit me. Due to his very poor vision, he has to wear thick glasses. That day, he was also packed in many clothes to keep him warm. While playing in the garden, he slipped into the deep part of my pool. He went under but was pushed to the surface again because a lot of air had collected in his clothes. He desperately grabbed the pool edge and started to scream for help. I ran to the edge of the pool, pulled him out, and said to him: “Congratulations – you have saved yourself!”

When his sister came to see me in the evening he ran up to her – and told her, beaming with joy and swollen with pride: “I fell in the pool, and I saved myself!” He did not feel guilty, he had developed no fear of the water, and he had not lost his self-confidence.

And you do not react according to your fear or anger, but according to your perception and positive appreciation of the particular situation of the child.12

Bria Bloom, from whom I've learned to be more sensitive to how habitual treatment of children conditions them for a lifetime in unintended ways as well as intended ways, has shown me that it's never too early to consider the subtle influences of personal and institutional childcare (by childcare, I mean all the means of raising children), no matter how well-intentioned.

Part 2, Repertoire

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
—Arthur Ashe13

Repertoire in competition

… the "law of requisite complexity", holds that, to be efficaciously adaptive, the internal complexity of a system must match the external complexity it confronts.14

In 1967, Wilson introduced the first metal tennis racket, the T-2000, and with it, Billie Jean King won the U.S. Open Women's title without dropping a set. But the T-2000 was like taming a lion, difficult to control, and Jimmy Connors became the only player to tame it over time. With that racket, Conners was among a handful of players who dominated men’s professional tennis in the mid-70s. Of average size, (five feet, ten inches, and 160 pounds), Conners made the ball explode off the metal head. Conners’s mastery of the T-2000 encouraged him to entrust it as the hammer, where every opponent is just a nail. (I apologize for the hammer cliché, but it fits.)15

In Conners’ era, three of the big four tournaments (All England at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the Australian Open) were still played on grass, the fastest tennis surface. Unlike other top players of the time, who when playing on grass hit a big serve and raced to the net to volley (hit the ball before it bounced), Conners usually stayed back and relied on his powerful flat ground strokes that darted low over the net.

In 1974, Conners dominated his finals opponent, Ken Rosewell, at the two most prestigious tennis tournaments, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Rosewell was known for his perfect backhand slice, a ball hit with the racket moving downward and under the ball, which would skid on the hard surface on his opponent’s side of the net, rather than a topspin stroke hit upwards on the ball, which bounced high and deep. The Rosewell slice that troubled other players was an easy pitch for Conners to bash deep on his opponent’s side.

The following year, in the Wimbledon finals, Connors was a huge betting favorite over the older veteran Arthur Ashe, but Ashe beat Connors easily. Rather than futilely attempting to match Connors power game, Ashe used Judo as a strategy, using Connors’s aggression against him with geometry as a tactic.

Whereas Rosewell hit his slices deep, Ashe hit shallow slices that landed on the other side closer to the net and in the middle of the court. While Rosewell's deep hits allowed Conners to wind up and bash the return deep, Ashe's shallow slices meant Conners had to hit up to make the ball clear the net, but with Connor’s powerful swing, the ball would sail past the back line. Or, if Conner’s didn't hit it upwards, the ball wouldn't clear the net. Geometry was Ashe’s friend.

In sports, the best players don't always win if they have weaknesses that can be exploited and a limited ability to change behavior that isn't working. Conners and his unique racket formed a partnership that had carried him to dominance as long as his environment (his opponent) was static. In sports, in work, in any skill, and even in relationships, an extraordinary competence works until it doesn't. And then what?


We've all been Jimmy Connors, sharing the court with Arthur Ashe. It could be as teacher, therapist, engineer, negotiator, lawyer, coach, plumber, gardener, or even Bill Murray's character in Caddyshack who takes on and loses to the golf-course gophers. Some who practice these vocations carry a tool box, and some just whack everything with a hammer. The hammer might work most of the time. Connors beat all the other players who carried only a hammer because he had a better hammer. But as much as a wide repertoire matters in the confines of finite rules and boundaries of a game, it matters far more when dealing with challenges of infinite complexity.

Repertoire and submissiveness

There is no evolutionary scenario, where children sitting in chairs for five or more hours a day, much of that time, being talked at, is an obvious learning environment. Children who can't adapt are labeled and drugged—punished for not submitting. While those children are sometimes reported as happier because they can now focus at school, that's easily explained by Stockholm Syndrome, where identifying with your abuser occurs. Why would children not act pleased when those who truly care for them, parents, teachers, and school counselors are pleased.

While learning to parent is sprinkled with cultural guidance and pressure, most learn from their own experience as children. They raise their offspring either the way they were raised or the way they wish they were raised. (The fortunate are the few where the two ways are the same.) No one is to blame; everyone involved—educators, doctors, school counselors, and parents want what's best for the child. But all the generational lessons stem from the culture that's influenced by governmental and commercial institutions where submissiveness is learned. Again, I point to my Privacy — an essential habit of democracy.

Repertoire in relationships

As with Jimmy Conners’s match with Arthur Ashe, a lack of repertoire can lead to an inability to deal with what's currently in front of us, no matter how successful we've been with a strategy in the past. Conners, like all competitive athletes, was not isolated from his mistakes. But counselors and teachers can be ineffective without affecting their careers by blaming their clients and students.

Side Box: *I conflate teaching and counseling, first, because I believe they're both forms of helping individuals expand their behavioral and life-skills repertoire so they'll have more choices in life, and second, because along with marriage and child-rearing, they're the most intense relationships from which I've had personal experience to learn.

A more respectful and effective path for counselors and instructors is to view working with clients and students as a game, but not a game we can beat, but a game that teaches how to play it. We make our moves and see how the game responds. Rather than attempting to impose our will, we learn from trial and error and change our strategy. To learn to play a game is to widen your repertoire—acquire skills, such as when (apology for another tennis analogy) Björn Borg learned the serve-and-volley skill necessary at the time to win on grass, and won five consecutive Wimbledons.

Sports give us concrete examples, but there are more complex examples in interpersonal interactions.

To quote from myself from Coupling:

Sometimes I don’t sleep well. If my wife says you’ve been grumpy all morning, whether I have or have not been grumpy, I’ll usually become grumpy in response to her spoken observation. If, on the other hand, she says, sorry you didn’t sleep well, I’m likely to say, “I’m okay,” and feel okay. She didn’t make me behave one way or the other. She accessed something within my repertoire. If I were a more even-tempered person, perhaps I wouldn’t have responded with grumpiness, no matter what she said. If she were conscious and desirous of accessing my more pleasant response, she’d have gone with the “sorry you didn’t sleep well.” All behavior stems from one entity accessing a behavior of another entity within that entity’s repertoire.

As I explain further in Coupling, your ability to access a behavior within the repertoire of another depends on your behavioral repertoire. And broadening your interpersonal repertoire is the key to interacting with others with grace.

Good Will Hunting, a film about an angry and resentful genius, Will Hunting, is an illustration of how three people who entered Hunting's life were able to form a relationship with him that expanded his behavioral repertoire: the distinguished math professor who discovered the genius of an MIT janitor, a determined clinical psychologist, and a new girlfriend who fended off Hunting's anger and cynicism until Hunting allowed himself to trust. It was the behavioral repertoire of the three that accessed Hunting's narrow but present behavioral repertoire. Because Hunting had one close friend since childhood, he had some capacity to learn to trust others.

Part 3, Acceptance

Acceptance in action

You can’t read the code you have to do experiments on the system
—John Carmack (graphics programmer for the legendary game, Doom, and often considered the greatest programmer)

Carmack was referring to computer software that has evolved to be so complex that, unlike, for instance, with a James Joyce novel, no one can even pretend to understand the source.

Me:

Compare the intelligence of ChatGPT to a robot vacuum

ChatGPT: Comparing the intelligence of ChatGPT to a robot vacuum is like comparing a library to a broom. ChatGPT, as an AI language model, is designed for understanding and generating human-like text across a wide range of topics. It can comprehend language, generate responses, answer questions, and even engage in conversations on various subjects.

On the other hand, a robot vacuum, while it may possess some level of automation and sensor-based navigation, is primarily designed for a specific task: cleaning floors. It operates based on predefined algorithms and sensor inputs to navigate and clean spaces efficiently.

In terms of cognitive abilities and versatility, ChatGPT far surpasses a robot vacuum. ChatGPT can understand complex language structures, learn from vast amounts of textual data, and generate contextually relevant responses. It can engage in meaningful interactions and adapt its responses based on the input it receives.

While a robot vacuum may excel in its specific task of cleaning floors autonomously, its intelligence is limited to that domain. It lacks the cognitive flexibility and broad knowledge base of ChatGPT, which can handle a much wider range of tasks and interactions.

Me:

Compare ChatGPT to human intelligence

ChatGPT:

Comparing ChatGPT to human intelligence is like comparing a tool to a mind. ChatGPT is a sophisticated language model designed to understand and generate human-like text based on patterns in data it was trained on. It can process and generate responses to text input, answer questions, provide information, and engage in conversations on a wide range of topics.

However, ChatGPT's intelligence is fundamentally different from human intelligence. While it can mimic human-like responses and understand language to a certain extent, it lacks true consciousness, self-awareness, emotions, and the ability to understand context in the same way humans do. ChatGPT operates based on statistical patterns and algorithms, without subjective experiences or understanding of the world.

Human intelligence, on the other hand, is incredibly complex and multifaceted. It involves not only linguistic abilities but also sensory perception, emotions, creativity, problem-solving, social interaction, and many other cognitive skills. Humans have consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to understand abstract concepts and moral reasoning.

In summary, while ChatGPT can simulate aspects of human-like intelligence in its language processing capabilities, it falls far short of the rich and nuanced intelligence exhibited by humans.

Let me translate the above without ChatGPT’s self-serving smugness:

ChatGPT is smart, that is, smart enough to gloss over that, like a robot vacuum, it may excel in its specific task to examine and reconstitute the text it robo-vacuumed from the Internet and excrete answers that may or may not be true.

The best programmer, John Carmack, admits that the software he creates is so complex even he can’t understand it. He can only poke at it to get a reaction. But the software he creates is not nearly as complex as ChatGPT. And ChatGPT software is not nearly as complex as a human being. Why do cognitive psychologists, neurologists, educators, and politicians think that you can know how an individual child learns, a child with her own genetic makeup and developmental experiences? Should we not do experiments on the system, the system being the mind of an individual child. And, given, what I stated above about the limits to a mind studying a mind, should we not remain humble regarding the results of the experiments?


When Arthur Ashe played Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon, he did an experiment. Hypothesis: Connors wins with one dominant tennis skill, his powerful groundstrokes. I can’t compete with his groundstrokes, but if I can neutralize his main weapon, he has nothing to fall back on.

To beat Conners, Ashe needed both his hypothesis to be correct and to have the skills to exploit Connors’ weakness. His hypothesis proved correct and Ashe did have the skill to make his experiment work. If his hypothesis proved incorrect, Ashe needn’t have been locked into a failed plan, he could have attempted alternate experiments, as many as necessary.

Flipping the switch

From Louise Penny's novel, The Brutal Telling:

Agent Morin had changed. His loose-limbed awkward body contorted perfectly for the violin, as though created and designed for this purpose. To play. To produce this music. His eyes were closed and he looked the way Gamache felt. Filled with joy. Rapture even. Such was the power of this music. This instrument. And watching his agent the Chief Inspector suddenly realized what Morin reminded him of. A musical note. The large head and the thin body. He was a walking note, awaiting an instrument. And this was it. The violin might be a masterpiece, but Agent Paul Morin certainly was. After a minute he stopped and the music faded, absorbed by the logs, the books, the tapestries. The people. “That was beautiful,” said Superintendent Brunel. He handed the violin to her. “It’s called ‘Colm Quigley.’ My favorite.” As soon as the violin left his hand he went back to being the gangly, awkward young man. Though never again totally that for the people who had heard him play. “Merci,”

Before Louise Penny (the author excerpted, above) became a best-selling author, she was a radio and TV journalist. She had no training in writing fiction. Her college degree was in media journalism.

Penny met her husband-to-be in her late-thirties and expressed that she'd like to try writing a novel. Her fiancé supported Penny to quit media journalism and give the novel a try.

Penny's enormous latent talent was a good bet to remain latent. She spent five years failing to write an historical novel and even lied to her husband about her (lack of) progress. It wasn’t until she gave up on the historical novel and took up writing the kind of novels she loved to read that she succeeded.

The excerpt above about agent Morin is an example of how the chief detective and hero of Penny's novels, Gamache, plucks nondescript figures who later become major contributors to his crime-solving team. Penny creates characters who, like her, go on to thrive when the inferences of doubters, which even once included herself, are suppressed.

What if I flipped the anecdote regarding the match between Ashe and Conners upside down. What if Ashe was coaching Conners, in an attempt to perturbate growth in Conners's game? Ashe, as with the fictional Gamache would exploit, in a good way, the proclivities—what we call strengths—of his student? Conners obvious strength was his dedication, You don’t rise to his level without it. As his mentor, Ashe would suggest Conners learn to serve and volley on the hard tennis surfaces that reward that strategy. He would encourage Conners to add finesse to his power game. That is, Ashe would work with Conners to expand the repertoire of his tennis tool set.

Though pouring knowledge into students is still a mainstay of modern schooling, it should be obvious it doesn't work. To learn, you must reach from your current level understanding, your scaffold. If a mentor is going to help, it's going to be to help students find their scaffold. Less obvious but just as true, one student's scaffold isn't necessarily every student's scaffold. Mr. Miyagi might have been successful with many of his students teaching muscle memory with his "wax-on, wax-off" gambit,16 17 but what if Daniel did not learn from that and got an F for his failure with Miyagi's movie-famous scaffold? This happens all the time in school, and young people are blamed and shamed (with grades) for their inability to mesh with their instructor's mindset.

You can't change another, you can change only yourself. Arthur Ashe could not change Jimmy Connors. Ashe had no control over Connors's behavior. Ashe could only use his own repertoire—in this case, a repertoire in strategy rather than in athletic tennis skills—to expose Connors’s lack of both a broader strategic or athletic repertoire.

And how you can change yourself comes from your repertoire. You can only run through your repertoire to see if another's repertoire responds in kind with yours. And accepting that you can't change another is not just the root of acceptance, it’s the meaning.

Acceptance of children

The Child is father of the Man
—William Wordsworth

I discussed repertoire in sports competition with Connors and Ashe, and in coupling, with how Joan's different responses to my grumpiness brought out different responses from me. I discussed how the subtle and unsubtle behavior of authorities, individually and in institutions, shape children in ways we regret, such as their submissiveness to those who peddle superficial qualities of attractiveness and peer approval.

The most obvious thing I can say is that people vary and children are people. And yet, we in authority treat children as if they're identical. The important business of childhood is learning—learning to be a good citizen, a (if desired) good mate and provider of child nurturance, a good friend and neighbor, and to learn to be equipped for a vocation suited to one’s skill and wellbeing. Ideally, young people will grow to balance their needs with the needs of those with whom they have an emotional bond along with the needs of their culture. I submit that the key to all of the above is acceptance—acceptance by others to the young person, and the young person learn acceptance of others.

What does acceptance look like? We no longer assume we know what goes inside another. We can’t change another, we can change only ourself. We accept our responsibility to model what we expect from our children (practice what we preach). We park our psychological and cognitive theories outside and if they get towed, maybe it's for the better. We do away with educational approaches that are past their pull dates.

I’m going to add one more level of acceptance that’s maybe hardest to accept: aside from issues of health and safety, we allow our children to be ten percent more stubborn than we are as their parents. If you’re too strict, you’re liable to turn your children into sneaks, and without practice at self-discipline, your children might be rudderless when they leave the nest.

Acceptance of children isn't just about acceptance of children. The lack of encouragement and acceptance to develop our way of being in the world contributes to our eventual vulnerability to pernicious bots on social media, websites devoted to conspiracy theories, authoritarian politicians, and all the ills we blame on outside forces.

If you have any influence on children, directly or indirectly, and I submit that includes nearly everyone, and if you're dissatisfied in the direction of our current culture, maybe reconsider the decision to stay the course.


  1. Skinner's influence was swept away by sophisticated theories of language acquisition and by the cognitive revolution in psychology. ↩︎

  2. I'm not discounting the ideas of Freud, Jung, and other famous personality theorists, just their certitude. More annoying, their followers are more strident than the founders. ↩︎

  3. My preferred sources for these ideas are Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Gregory Bateson, Mary Catherine Bateson, Heinz Von Forester, G. Spencer-Brown, Gordon Pask, Karl Pribram, George Miller, Ross Ashby, Margaret Mead, Paul Watzlawick, Norbert Wiener, Kenneth Craik, Kurt Gödel, and Douglas Hofstadter. ↩︎

  4. Meier is best known for the Civilization series, but he has designed or supervised the design of many games. ↩︎

  5. I got this idea from the great computer scientist, Alan Kay, who called the personal computer a fantasy amplifier and the spreadsheet a fantasy world. ↩︎

  6. That Carroll was pointing out that the living can’t be controlled comes from Gregory Bateson. ↩︎

  7. The most tired example of a circular explanation is old aphorism, [he did it because] boys will be boys. ↩︎

  8. I don’t think my mother meant harm. I think she lacked the confidence she could hurt my feelings. And I can’t know that she accurately conveyed the thoughts of my father. ↩︎

  9. Many would rightly state that the closer you are to someone, the more you are motivated to project your story onto them. That just furthers my point about the minefields of inference. ↩︎

  10. That was written months ago. She knows hundreds of words now and has started to use short sentences. By the time I finish this article, she'll be writing the sequel to Moby Dick (but it will be about a friendly dolphin). ↩︎

  11. From Wikipedia: “The Chronicle of Higher Education* reported that helicopter parents continued advocating for their adult children at the graduate school level as well, such as advocating for their adult child's admission to law school or business school. ↩︎

  12. From Being to Doing Humberto R Maturana & Bernhard Pörksen ↩︎

  13. The quote by the late tennis star was referenced by the computer scientist and journalist, John Naughton. ↩︎

  14. The Law of Requisite Complexity is both a technical and general concept originated by the psychiatrist and pioneer in cybernetics, W. Ross. Ashby. While cybernetics is commonly associated with computers, it's the study of organic systems (ecosystems are cybernetic), as well as machines that are controlled through feedback mechanisms. I discussed cybernetic systems earlier here. ↩︎

  15. At the time, every professional player but Connors used a wooden racket (King abandoned the T-2000), which were better at controlling the ball as it hit the strings. (The lone exception was Arthur Ashe who was testing a new type of racket made from aluminum, carbon, and fiberglass.) ↩︎

  16. Miyagi began his instruction with his teen student, Daniel, by having Daniel perform repetitive tasks such as painting a fence with up and down and side-to-side strokes. When Daniel finally objected, Miyagi showed that the painting motions were karate blocks, now part of Daniel's muscle memory. ↩︎

  17. Traditional training uses kata forms to teach muscle memory, but kata training would have killed the drama and made for just another instruction video. ↩︎