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Showing posts with the label Collaborative interaction

Cassandra or Apollo syndrome?

Quote taken from this source.  [+]   All we know for sure from the various writers of the past, such as Homer, Aeschylus, Virgil and Euripides, is that Cassandra will never be believed.  No matter how real and true her words.  Nor will anyone ever believe even after it has happened, that she had known how things would be. But why Cassandra came to suffer so, the writers of this sad story do not agree. Simply put, Cassandra was  cancelled  by the God Apollo. Nietzsche in  The Birth of Tragedy (1872) contrasts Apollo as a God of light and knowledge - calm and reason, with Dionysus as a God of ecstatic emotions.  But the story of Cassandra and Apollo does not support this simple division. This story was written in a time when   Greek society valued hypermasculinity. A time when sexual expression was defined by status, not gender, not love. A free male Greek citizen was at the top of society and women only one notch above slaves. Apollo was...

When I hear his truth, there is contact. 22nd November 2021.

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I'm wearing my purry, furry, fake leopard coat.  He says It reminds him of his childhood... Both of us laughing. He tries it on.  And then he says the strangest thing?  "I've never seen a coat like this in the flesh" Then - oh my heart! - he remarks so deliciously on my warmth seeping from the coat into his skin... "Goodness - you're warm!"  Just for a few seconds it is as if I have held him, breathing animal heat and a golden radiance into the void of darkness and separation, confronting the narrative that fixes us in time and space. We are talking about music...lost music. As if heard in fairy hills...And then we are talking about my assignment. He is telling me that the presenting issue a client brings is often like a thin crust over the real problem. And in response I divert us down an intellectual worm hole pursuing the importance of paradox, in therapy - and more to the point - what would a meta- dox be?  Here now in 2023 my ability to be tangenti...

1st November 2021.

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He - "How are you"? Me - "I'm fine..." And I would say " Fine! Hey how are you"?   But I don't.  I've been told that I'm tangential, and if I talk it will be labyrinthine; long, coiling, discursive.  Tangential.   His silence, is wide open waiting.  Even though I do this silence thing myself too, I feel obliged to fill it. I go full tangential - I'm talking about episodic and autobiographical memory, and the work of Tulvig  and I know that anything like this is considered cold, and CBT, and he will see it as  tangential to the relational work of therapy.  But I have assignments to write, and I'm chasing Evan George's statement that 'our' work is to help people create future memories. I love that idea, future memories! That we step through past, future, present - to find the better in the past, to place instances of good memories into a functional sequence, coherent and believable and possible. Using memory is such ric...