Coherence Part 2: Something Isn't Right!

Part 1 is available here.

Something deep in me (and many of you) has driven pursuit of knowledge, yet with every new thing I learn, there is this underlying feeling, urge, that recognizes the available pieces do not fit together in a meaningful way and that simply pursuing more knowledge mindlessly is, to some extent, a dead-end road. Given enough time, anyone who has extensively explored movement and pain science would also start to feel the urge to look for new knowledge to serve as another patch and to provide another fix toward our insatiable addiction to gain more and more knowledge that might once again temporarily satisfy us. Unfortunately, this process can lead to endlessly spinning of cognitive wheels in new territories with little reward of fulfillment after spending enough time there. Some just give up and call it “good enough,” make do with their knowledge base and do what they can with it and feel their clients will either get what they’re giving them or not. Many others, particularly those early in their careers will continue to be unsatisfied.

While working through an ACT Intensive course led the creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Steven Hayes, we were introduced to several “core yearnings” which form some of the functional basis of ACT. One of these yearnings I believe best describes the urge for things to make sense, and that is the “yearning for coherence.” In the course, this yearning was an introduction to Relational Frame Theory (RFT), which is a working model of language and behavior (we will discuss this further and it’s valuable role for working with movement behavior in subsequent posts), but for the purpose of this first series, we are stepping back further and looking at “yearning for coherence” as our entry point addressing a bigger picture of our desire for things to make sense. This recognition of my own yearning for coherence required me to follow Hayes's advice to look at Stephen Pepper’s work on “World Hypotheses,” or world viewpoints, as a place to begin to make steps toward a sense of coherence. In this process, it is important to note that coherence in a literal sense is not achievable, but coherence in a functional sense is sustainable, workable, and “liveable.” To recognize, understand, and firmly place your feet in one world viewpoint is necessary to develop a sense of coherence, yet most of us have no idea where we stand. In observation of this in myself, past and current colleagues and clients, it has become very clear that most of us are not fully aware of our current world viewpoint, and if we believe we have one, it is likely an incomplete awareness at best. This makes our current working viewpoint unstable ground to begin with, and our efforts to create a new viewpoint out of two distinctly different world views, let alone inadequately developed viewpoints, is further broken when creating “something in the middle” of two perspectives. Creating yet another cobbled together viewpoint which will fail to withstand minimal scrutiny. We then keep throwing knowledge on top of this shaky ground hoping somehow things will fall into place and finally “make sense” , but instead we get further convolution, poor translation, and of course, arguments that are based more on the viewpoint, than on the content of the argument. Content-based on language, which as we will discuss later, lends to it’s own complications, but for now I best leave this post with the following:

“Hold language lightly even the things called facts because they are built only on one part of your interactions..” Stephen Hayes

How can we even define this for ourselves and our patients? Find out in Part 3 next week!

Via Dr. Leonard Van Gelder - Dynamic Principles

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