Written by: Paul Betito, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Have you ever wondered if the doctor, psychotherapist, other clinical or medical professional in your life is really achieving something for all that practical, communication-centered experience—for all of those years talking, gabbing, in the field? Yes, indeed, they are—thankfully, we might agree—but not what you might assume.
Doctor-In-Learning?
For one thing, medical or other clinical expertise is not exactly coterminous with professional development. As a matter of fact, we assume clinical professionals are completely—not just partially—trained beforehand, that they are rigorously grounded in and guided by respective backgrounds, not that they are learning in vacuo; in fact, we would not be likely to attend their expertise at all if we figured clinical professionals were half-cocked, half-baked, half-inspired—half-learned.
The Richness of Experience
For another thing, we might expect everything stemming from such experience to be exponential in nature. After all, human interaction is profound, pluripotent, ineffably rich, and we clinicians are most often bombarded by demand: time is short, attention is sacred, the myriad forms of—particularly mental—pathology are innumerable, and hospital shortages, among other unacceptable medico-democratic slouches, are now the rampant norm.
However, such experience is not exponential at all, but rather completely commensurate with secular expectation, perfectly factorial to every inner capacity and ecological balance, accommodated independent of respective vagaries no matter how compellingly disorder tempts to stretch individual limits.
In part, this is attributable to the average business of consciousness and reality, in that clinical services and associated dynamics are preternaturally matched, configured and tending to conform to established practices by nature. However, there is more to this story.
The Clauses of Experience
True, yes, professional regulation trims the fat. And, sometimes—often, in fact—clinical progress breaks the mould, client presentation defies interpretation in very tricky ways, or healing undoes its own pathways as it tends to, leading at the most general level to business-as-usual governance, to clinicians woozy from complexity, from being upended, subverted, forced not just to recall but to process their inherent limitations.
So, clinical experience is not a goldmine, and it stands to reason that communication would not lag far behind its stipular headway in de facto possibility, making our most dynamic means—at least in logical terms—a developmental dead-end.
Communication Cybernetics
Above all, when it comes to communication person-centered experience such as that which clinicians obtain is not knowledge-centric, not epistemological per se. It is cybernetic.
Clinicians fashion discourse over rhetoric; hence, we align. We craft models and frameworks in real-time; hence, we conceptualize.
We tinker; hence, we train.
But, at the level of communication, this training is not about theory. It is about process, about mechanism, about tempering, modulating, affecting—every which way.
Feedback, central to cybernetics, equals the outright momentum of the clinical dyad, the mutual vector of displacement towards creative possibilities, and as a psychotherapist I hunt for it in complex, often deeply embedded, intractable—and ultimately indelible—ways.
Back to Exponents
Communication, however, is extremely dense, inordinate, and axiomatic, making it largely impassable if not for the banal trigger of the people in our midst, the clients or patients in our armchairs; thus, what counts for feedback within communication is accounted so almost always for exponential reasons.
Clearly, the exponential domain if it exists to clinical awareness is not par for the skillful course, so to say, but moot to communication, and it is easy for these reasons to see what makes communication bottom-up in nature—first and foremost intuitive and energic, charged-up and libidinal, unbounded and irrepressible—and especially what makes clinicians some of the most advanced communicators on the planet.
Ontological Communication
Firstly, every item of communication—every text message, every passing greeting, every conversation, every fleeting symbolic recollection—recruits ontological reserves, such as basic physiological loads (blood pressure, satiety, etc.), perceptual and probabilistic resources in the brain, learning and crystallized intelligence-based potential, and cumulative existential ground-truths; whereas the most effective communicators such as clinicians typically assimilate, incorporate and deftly administer the most parsimonious assemblages of these reserves, managing thence to exercise and manipulate their respective purposes and allocations with precision, ineffective communicators tend instead to fabricate, displace or dispose of them outright—often in this very order of development exactly.
Unlikely Communication Patterns
It may come as a surprise that, of all possible resources for exploring the nuances of communication, the latter pattern comes straight out of forensic psychology—not the most innocuous or forgiving of sub-disciplines, compared to other routes for self-improvement.
In fact, forensic psychology shows us in an incredibly straightforward way how the above pattern tends to emerge symptomatically: a murderer, for example, who is likely as a child or adolescent due to aberrant neurological reward-based patterning to develop habits of lying (fabrication), tends to notice the relative absence of this pattern and to progress to serious externalizing behaviours (displacement), whereby communication is largely abandoned in favour of stronger, more comprehensible sensations such as aggressive and destructive behaviours. Finally, he might be expected due to sensation-seeking to eventually lose track of communication-based causality altogether, to begin to confuse others for absolute endpoints (disposal), that is, seeing others not as causeways, makeshifts or latent beings but as lost or anathema causes for communication, either alternately incapable or completely threatening to self, either blind to his reality or profoundly invasive to it, and so on.
Pushing the Limits
Secondly, these ontological reserves are grounded in limitation. That is, they only make sense to consciousness, to conscious understanding and concomitant implementation, if they are finite. Finitude gives way to tangibility, and tangibility broaches awareness. When things are finite we are able to understand their provenance, can distinguish their self-relevance from other-relevance and can begin to master their pathways. Imagine a leash tied to a post, or a kite bound to a tree, or a rope bound to a climber; we need not necessarily consider the static portions in these metaphors images of the self, but we ought to see that a lot can happen based on a simple tether.
Now, ontological reserves, in terms of finitude, can be said to be in their nature, to use a philosophical term, a priori or purely preceding. They possess strict inculcation in each of their respective arms, or tangents, or operations—whichever you prefer—at the level of somatic regions of the body—remember Freud? How about Robert Burton, who published The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621?—and at their respective points of maturity in life become grouped, roughly speaking, and then eventually subject to compensation and de-compensation, to raw amalgamation and dissolution, to expansion and dissension, rather than to fine-grained analysis and interpretation. This is why the cybernetics of person-centered experience tend to lose face; it is challenging, if not downright stubborn and irreparable, to dynamically dissociate such primitive components of the self, particularly to give haste, principality and meaning to something as fundamentally unsupported as communication.
Cognitive Boundaries
For this finitude to be possible, we require recognizable cognitive boundaries. Yet this assumption is paradoxical, since such boundaries would in every instance (due to common properties) tend to be recurrently constituted by highly varying stimuli, particularly in the clinical sciences wherein cases are created and addressed individually (yet informed and reinforced, in a sense, universally).
Lights, Tunnels, Action
Aside from informing logical processes of inference and deduction, boundaries provide a critical function towards communication. Namely, they are in an essential way completely beside the point of communication, and in this very way come to illumine, accentuate and overdetermine—to create—the properties of the internal, individual ego-based paradigms from which we, for example, take, recognize and understand our communication to be self-possessed.
Importantly, it is precisely because these boundaries are porous that this informative cognitive lens is rendered possible, and they are porous for the very reason of their reproducibility.
Do It Again
Yet, reproducibility always or in every instance remains a question of singular propensity, of something like the cybernetic or computer-science recursion function: unpacking, repacking and so forth, ad infinitum. This mutual dynamism of porousness and reproducibility is the reason that the ego, the purely individual source of judgment and aesthetics, the seat of willpower and self-determination, in the clinical sciences perilously close to abandon but in reality nothing short of imperative, has its primordial a priori component of separation.
In essence, then, communication depends on its very antitheses, its opposites, for its creation of judgment and potential.
The Computer Science of Communication
Thirdly, based on these ontological reserves communication compiles and extracts from experience. You might say we perform a complex function, a transformation, either faltering or dexterous, evasive or immutable, immanent or transcendent, based on our latent processing capabilities which are linked to the natural forces undergirding compilation and extraction. Advanced communication depends entirely on these operations for its raw creativity, as opposed to making short-order of styles, modes, idiosyncrasies, vocabulary and so on. And clinical mastery applies advanced communication less in a deliberate way, merely seeing experience for what it is worth, but more upon the resting or existential premise of experience, in order to—in a rather impressive way in fact—dissociate the possibility of advanced communication such that the client may also partake of it, such that a truly affordable (and hence equitable) space is made possible for the client or patient for a shared—yet entirely needs-based—journey or experience. For example, it should come as no surprise that interior design has tended towards minimalist assumption, that culture and the arts have tended to abandon realism and complexity for principles of inversion, invasion, regression and primitive staples; both corners in this interplay, not knowing how to foster innovation per se, create deliberate or intentional space for diversions and distraction, both of which are irreducibly rife for communication.
Clinical Mastery and Communication
It should be clear that clinical mastery, if it is not exactly discretional in terms of communication, is arguably hard-fought for. But it is also repleted, full with its own vectors and assumptions, and part of an inescapable or self-surmounting class of vertices, of chasms and polarities. And learning from clinical mastery, advanced communication is clearly less about tactical skills and strategies, less about systematic approach, and more about the dormancy of truth—that is, about the intuitive, the familiar, the elemental.
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Paul Betito, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Paul Betito is a Registered Social Worker and Psychotherapist with a virtual and in-person private practice in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has expertise in complex systems theory, psychoanalytic theories, cognitive therapies and the study of consciousness.
