AN EXAMPLE OF HYPOTHETICAL
REALPLAY
Written 2006.
Last Updated April 2014.
The following has been adapted from the Laceweb Book ‘Coming to One’s
Senses – By the Way’, a book containing 130 stories from life woven together
giving glimpse of Laceweb Way.
What follows is an example of Hypothetical Realplay using Cultural Healing Action.
This Realplay comes from a time when a Laceweb person was
introducing these ways at a tertiary level certificate course in interpersonal
relations. Some course workshops were held in a TV studio on campus and we were
engaging in a series of hypothetical real-plays with two or more people in the
hypothetical with around 24 in the audience.
This realplay occurred early in the course before Laceweb Way was
introduced relating to experiencing ways for increasing wellness in social
relating and exploring intersubjective experience and meaning – your inner
experiencing of my inner experiencing of you.
A simple context was given. Examples:
o Husband coming
home late for a home-cooked tenth-anniversary dinner with wife
o Mate arriving
late in meeting with five of his mates going on a fishing trip
o One person
arriving late in meeting up with a Group of friends travelling together to a
sporting final
The starting line in the hypothetical was:
You’re two hours
late….
From then on everything in the Realplay was spontaneous.
Typically, .as soon as the first line of the realplay is said
people were judging, blaming, accusing, and attempting to impose their meanings
on others. The blamed, accused person becomes engaged in justifying,
rationalising, explaining and defending, with a consequent rapid breakdown in
the quality of their relating.
The behaviour was typically saturated with what Bateson in his
book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972, 233-238) terms schizophrenic type double bind behaviours. This is where the person
who has being waiting is disconfirming
and disqualifying each successive
contribution by the late person(s) who are continually being told that their
contributions are not valid. Any attempt to refer to this disconfirming type
behaviour is also disconfirmed.
The latecomer’s contributions:
a) Tend to be received as if they are in some way
different from what they thought they
intended.
b)
Everything they say tends
to be negated and distorted, and deletingly and
discountingly generalised by those who
have been waiting.
The latecomer(s) from their
viewpoint tend to sense that they are endlessly
being misinterpreted and disconfirmed.
The person who had been waiting endlessly endeavours to put the latecomer in the wrong by his or her interpreting
of whatever the latecomer says or
does.
The latecomer comes to expect that the person who has being
waiting will misinterpret whatever
the latecomer says or does next and so the bind tends to become mutual.
This stage in the relationships may slide to where neither person
can ever afford to receive or emit communications about their communicating (meta-communicating) without
distorting meaning, as invariably they begin engaging in the very same behaviours they are endeavouring to talk about in
describing what they sense is going on
Any attempt to sort out what is going on is also interpreted by
the other as being judging, blaming, misinterpreting, disconfirming, justifying, and defending, so sustaining a
profound and sustained denial of their reality.
This denying of their reality tends to invalidate their being, and
in a very short time this tends to collapse their integrity. People tend to
lose it - whatever ‘it’ is.
R.D. Laing refers to this dysfunction tangle as ‘knots’ in his
book of the same name (1970).
So to explore some of the dynamics in these hypothetical
real-plays - the person who was arriving late would invariably have his or her
behaviour and internal state immediately altered by the manner and tone
of delivery of that first line, as it tended to be strongly overlaid with
innuendo – judgement and personal attack.
And the manner and tone of delivery of that first line also helped
constitute the psycho-emotional state for the first speaker, and the rest of
the group, and it tended to impose that person’s definition of the situation,
and anything that the other person did, tended to be filtered through that
state, and tended to escalate that state, or be sliding it into more intense
states; for example, from irritation to annoyance, to anger, even towards fury.
The first speaker tended to prejudge the person and or the context - to show prejudice.
They would rarely clarify the
other’s context.
And another thing we did was to repeat the realplay and have the
person say the opening line with a different manner and tone and with differing
implication and innuendo, resulting in very different exchange.
And perhaps you have noticed that this hypothetical real-playing
is creating experiential contexts where people actual experience real time
feeling and emotional reactions, often intensely.
And after a time the real-play would be stopped and the opening
speaker (who had delivered the ‘you’re two hours late’ line) as well as the
others who had been waiting are given the added challenge of commencing the
real-play yet again. This time they were also challenged to comprehensively
find out firstly, the context(s) that the other person had been involved in,
and secondly, all of the myriad aspects involved - so that those who had been
waiting are able to begin to more fully
enter into the world of the late-comer.
This provides scope for those who had been waiting begin to
understand the late-comer and then for the late-comer to begin to understand the world of those who are waiting. For
example, time seems to slow down when you’re waiting.
This repeat real-play would take a very different course, although
there was still the tendency to slide into judging, blaming and the like.
Then some of the other class members would be given the same
opening line with a different context. Not-withstanding the processing we had
done, typically new real-players would immediately go into judging,
blaming, accusing, and attempting to impose their meanings on others, and the
blamed person would begin engaging in justifying and defending - again with a
consequent rapid breakdown in the quality of relating.
These forms of responding tend to be habitual. That which we know the most is typically
unconscious and hence not noticed. Initially the group had no awareness of
the process being used in dysfunctional habitual responding.
After each hypothetical there was discussion amongst the
real-players, and the audience would become involved in the discussion.
Later in the evening the class came up with a brief
context scenario for a realplay involving six realplayers. Personalities were
created for the six different people in the real-play that would commence with
the same opening line, ‘You’re two hours late!’.
All of the people in the class were 18-24 year-olds except one
mature-age woman named Christine who was amongst the audience for the next
hypothetical. Christine becomes very agitated during the hypothetical. When the
realplay is stopped the audience is asked if anyone has anything to say.
Immediately Christine yells at Mario, one of the real-players and
says:
You made me extremely annoyed and angry. You were just goofing off
as you always do and you did not engage in the personality that we gave
you.
A signal was given for Mario not to respond. Others in the
audience were immediately asked what they felt about Mario.
o
One said:
o
Mario made me laugh
o
The following are examples said by different members of the
audience:
o Mario lightened
the emotional energy in the group
o I never noticed
Mario
o Mario played a
valuable role in the exchange
o Mario was the
peacemaker with his funny antics
o Mario made me
think
o Mario reminded
me of my best mate
It turned out every person in the audience had a different
reaction to Mario!
Then the following was said to Christine:
o Christine,
notice this. Mario made you extremely annoyed and angry, and
o
Mario made Louise laugh
o
Mario impressed Fred in how he lightened up the group
o
Mario made Charlie not notice him
o
Mario made Suzy notice his valuable role
o
Mario impressed Peter with how he used his humour
o
Mario made Jane think
o
And Mario reminded Jack of his best mate
All of the differing responses to Mario were repeated to Christine
in this ‘Mario made’ format.
And Christine, isn’t Mario a flexible fellow? Seems that he has
the ability to ‘make’ everyone in the audience think and feel something very different, or is there
more going on than, ‘Mario making’?
Perhaps this is not so much about Mario per se, more about
Mario-and-each-person-in-the-real-play-and-each-person-in-the-audience, and the
myriad inter-connecting, inter-relating, inter-depending aspects of each of
them in their relating with Mario including the moods of people prior to
arrival in the class on the day, their conditioned ways of responding to
various tones and personalities, associated memories, their various ways of
looking-at-the-world, and being-in-the-world at this moment; it’s about many
things, including response-ability - that is, our ability to respond, and our
meaning making, .and our defining of the situation.
Later in the evening we commenced showing the
video recordings of the Hypothetical Realplays so the Realplayers and the
Audience could experience being in a third-party observer position.
Typically people are very poor observers of
process. They tend to attend, and often attend poorly, to aspects of what’s happening. They tend not to notice how things are happening. Also typically very few people can cope
with noticing and attending to processes about process, what is termed
‘meta-communicative’ (metaprocesses).
Slowly some of the dynamics mentioned above
starts to be noticed by some in the audience. Others made little change.
Unconscious dysfunctional habits may respond to specific action. Refer Flexibility and Habit.
During the ten months of the course, the above
process would be repeated towards establishing mutual understanding and
respecting, and connecting, and mutual caring, and negotiating of meaning with
some exploring of aspects of relational
mediating and negotiating of meaning.
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