Author: Dr Jean Pain

Categories
How To Use Words

The power of oratory

Babies learn to walk and talk remarkably quickly. They are born with this potential. However, they also need to hear people talking around them. They are curious about everything. Eric Fromm wrote one of the best books about how human beings work. He noticed that children up to the age of six are so active and productive that they create their own stimuli provided that those who look after them pay attention to all the things they enjoy doing and let them get on with it, providing they are not interfering with other people’s fun.

Fromm noticed that once they go to school where teachers tell them what to do, their spontaneity diminishes: they become more docile and passive. Of course this is inevitable. Children learn to adapt to the world outside home and to be taught to read and write. When we think about it we understand what a huge change children have to face. It can be a very traumatic experience. The Swiss psychoanalyst, Alice Miller, coined the phrase ‘poisonous pedagogy’. She meant that throughout the ages children have suffered greatly because they have had to be dependent on grown-ups for their early years. It has always been so easy for them to be exploited to suit the needs of their family relations and other adults who have some power over them.

Freude recognised that psychological damage suffered by children has a very profound effect throughout their lives. Sometimes the damage can be repaired and sometimes not. There are good reasons for this and the major one is that children want to love their parents and anyone who makes them happy. Such people are gods to children. Hence they tend to believe everything they are told. This is one of the major mistakes that make our lives so difficult. This is the source of an eternal search by many different people of all kinds to discover the meaning of life: what is true and what is not true. We all have to work that out for ourselves.

Since the rest of the animal kingdom who cannot speak with words they rely entirely on their instincts and emotions. All parents, apart from our species, have only to feed their offsprings and show them how to look for food as soon as they can walk or fly. Once they are independent they have no further need of their parents. Life is simple for them unless great changes occur in their environments, most due to the intervention of mankind.
‘Cognito ergo sum’ said the philosopher Descartes in the 17th century: I think therefore I am. As soon as we learn to speak we become aware of many things that other animals cannot know: such factors as working out what we do not understand through thinking in words. Very few of us remember anything about their early life, except through vague pictures and feelings. There comes a moment when we suddenly realise ‘This is me! I am different from everyone else. I am small now, but every year I have a birthday and grow bigger!’ I become aware of time and know I have been born and will one day die!’

The power of words is very great. I shall go on to discuss how words are used to influence other people.

Categories
General

Why are people dissatisfied with their Lives?

Why is it that whilst we live in far greater comfort than our ancestors, many of us are so dissatisfied with their lives? Too many people are telling other people what to do. Why? Because far too many people want to be told what to do.

This is the sliding road down to dictatorship. People need challenges, without them life is boring. I’ve been studying human nature all my life. The results are in myPhD, ‘Not Just Talking’ which was published by Karnac in 2009. It is the first of its kind.

It shows that psychotherapy will not work unless the dialogue between therapist and client is focused on the therapist challenging the words spoken by the client, whatever the kind of therapy applied. The aim is to teach the clients to think for themselves.

People who do think for themself do not need therapy. It does not mean that they don’t have problems but it does mean that they have the mental resources to take the needed actions.

Thinking for yourself only works when you know yourself very well. Such people are rare, as Shakespeare taught us:

This above all to thine own self be true
and it must follow as the night the day
thou cans’t not then be false to any man.

None of us are perfect in our use of words, or to put it a different way, we none of us say exactly what we mean to the right person ar the right time. The art of conversation requires great honesty and great skill. You do not have to be an academic to do this: what you need is the courage to discover what kind of person you are and no-one else can do that for you. We can only help ourselves and others as best we can without letting strong emotions get in the way.

The two conclusions of my work are that what we all of us need to follow them to be at peace with ourselves, whatever happens in our lives.

The first is we need to respect ourselves enough to become the individuals we were meant to be and second, because we cannot be ourselves except through what we learn from those around us, we must make sure to join only those groups that will benefit us and vice versa.

The most important writers who influenced me are the philosopher Spinoza (1632-77), the works of George Orwell, Harvey Sachs and ‘Science and Sanity’ by Korzybski.

Categories
Conversation Analysis

Conversation Analysis

We talk to each other without being aware of what we are doing. As a result what goes on in conversations can be a major cause of misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and above all a lack of mutually useful cooperation. This is reflected in the fact that despite all the technological advantages of our times, more and more people are dissatisfied with their lives and seek psychological help to find out why.

Dr Pain is the first practising psychotherapist to have completed an analysis of the ongoing and continuously changing structure of therapeutic talk (she was awarded a PhD in Conversation Analysis by Brunel University in 2003). She found that the major factor for clients is that they learn to make changes in their thinking, through learning to use conversation more effectively.

Moreover, those facets of therapy talk, which is very different from everyday talk, can be applied to other domains such as family relationships, teaching and business. The key to effective cooperation, as distinct from one person trying to coerce another, is the establishment of a situation where both participants use conversation to learn from each other in an ongoing creative way.

Effective therapists do not give advice or impose their own preconceived ideas on another person. What happens is each client is respected as a unique individual, and helped to think for themselves so that they develop the ability to discover what they are doing that causes problems and work out for themselves how they can make changes. For this to happen, therapists need to have both professional training plus such skills as the ability to listen and to know when to intervene.

Jean Pain realised that all conversation could be improved by the taking on board of some of the devices that work in a therapy situation as revealed in her research. The aim of our work is to help people, whoever they are, to gain awareness of what they do in talk that they do not know they are doing. Only then can they become aware of what changes they need to make.

Once these principles have been learned, we can use them to change both the way we talk to others and how we respond to what others say to us. We can then achieve mutually satisfying results in our interchanges with others in whatever situation we find ourselves, whether it be in close personal relationships, in business, in teaching, or in the joint exploration of problems.

There is, of course, no universal panacea. What matters is that we can develop a more open-minded attitude towards each other’s different ideas that could lead to an improvement in the nature of cooperation from an activity where, more often than not, two or more people are struggling to get the best deal for themselves individually, to one from which all participants can benefit.