Growth and Constraint: Concepts and roles as trellises or cookie cutters
Human life always needs some mixture of stability and change, familiarity and freshness. If life is overly structured it feels rigid and entrapping. If life lacks structure it can feel chaotic and overwhelming. Making healthy change, in therapy or in life, will generally involve some understanding of this tension between stability and change. I have often thought about healthy structure through the image of a trellis. Trellises are relatively rigid structures that allow a plant to develop in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. I have a plant, for example, that for the first year was always drooping over the edge of its pot, limply dangling. One day I decided to built it a trellis out of skewers and pipe cleaners. It has grown quite differently over the last year, and I have taken pleasure in watching it interact with and benefit from this stable structure. Trellises, crucially, are structured, but not overly structured; they leave room for the plant to make its own path.
Human beings are not plants, but there is still something for us to learn about our way of growing from this image of a trellis. A trellis is peculiar in that it enables by constraining, it simultaneously makes things possible by making other things impossible. The plant can no longer grow outside the confines of the trellis, yet the trellis is what allows for the growth. For human beings, I think our ‘trellises’ are things like concepts and roles. Like a trellis, concepts and roles place constraints on our lived experience, making certain things possible while delimiting other options.
Engaging Concepts and Roles as Trellises rather than Cookiecutters
Therapy is essentially a type of conversation that is supposed to bring about positive change. Much time in therapy is spent working with concepts. We talk about things like sadness, depression, loneliness, and pain. These words are general concepts with general meanings that everyone is aware of. We all know what it means to be sad or depressed. In therapy, however, I am not interested in the general meaning of the words, but rather the unique experience of a unique person. Words have this strange double life where they are both public-general and individual-unique.
We thus have a choice about how we relate to words: we can allow our experience to be more complex than the concepts, or we can try to impose the general meanings on ourselves, ignoring the complexity that doesn’t ‘fit’ into the general category. It is common in therapy and in life to tell ourselves that we shouldn’t feel this or that, shouldn’t think this or that, to lecture or bully ourselves about what we should feel. Talking this way is to use concepts like cookie cutters: we cut the edges off our complex and unique way of experiencing something. Alternatively, we can relate to concepts like trellises. Concepts are no doubt somewhat rigid and often overly structured. But if we can use concepts with awareness of their limits, we can see them not as an occasion for imposing some belief but as an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding. I often say things in therapy sessions that I know are incomplete. I may say, for example, “Well, there is a lot going on here, but a part of it seems to be about shame.” I say it this way so that there is then room for more to be said, for a correction to be made, for nuance to be added to the general concept. Hopefully I’ll get a response like “Yes, there is shame… but it’s funny because there’s shame but there’s also all this anger. It’s like they are in some wrestling match, tussling around in the dirt.” Ultimately I want people to use funny words and phrases because I want them to understand and convey how unique and particular their experience is. These funny words and phrases don’t function like cookie cutters, but like trellises: the point isn’t the concept itself, but the way they help people gain a deeper understanding of the situation they are living.
We will always be experiencing and feeling more than we can say. So I am sure to leave room within the concepts for more to arise. As Eugene Gendlin, a philosopher and therapist said: “There is vastly more than our conceptual structures can encompass. And experiencing moves—we cannot think all that just was. We feel more than we can think, and we live more than we can feel. And if we enter into what we feel in certain genuine steps, we feel more than before. And there is much more still." I think that change in therapy comes from this ability to let concepts further our experience rather than shut it down.
Words often function to prevent certain experiences from being felt or known: we want to fit into expected social patterns, we want to be good or acceptable in the eyes of others. But when we consistently impose these shapes on ourselves and bring these cookie cutter words to our experience, we generate distress and become estranged from what we really feel and need. So many people I’ve met in therapy have precisely this relationship with language, and we spend much time learning how to relate to words in this more trellis-like fashion.
Even when concepts are used this way they still do constrain. To name something is always to place limits on it. But it is precisely the experience of these limits that allows our understanding to go further: we can feel that ‘sadness’ doesn’t convey the whole of what we feel. So we say ‘I feel sad, but that doesn’t cover it all…it’s a funny sadness, like I’m drowning, like I’m reaching out and there’s only straws.’ The words constrain, but if we are open to sensing how it constrains, we gain information that enables another step, one that brings to light aspects that we wouldn’t have felt had we not been willing to constrain or incompletely name it first. I often purposefully say the wrong thing to clients just so that I can be corrected.
This relationship between constraint and growth is also evident in our social roles. Like concepts, social roles can either be like trellises or cookie cutters. Being a therapist, for example, is a formal role that I occupy that places constraints on my life: I have to manage a calendar, maintain my license, and act in the ways appropriate to the formal role. The role, however, has also been an incredible source of growth in my life. It has allowed me to have deep and intimate relationships with clients, it has brought me into deeper contact with myself, and has provided me with a sustainable livelihood. I think basically any social role can be examined in terms of the balance between constraint and growth. A romantic relationship, for example, will certainly introduce limitations on how we organize and experience our lives. A good relationship is one in which those constraints are ultimately worth it: they enable more than they limit. Some relationships or roles, on the other hand, will feel more like cookie cutters in that they will impose undue sacrifices on us, take more than we can give.
No human life is simply free, and there is no such thing as pure autonomy. Everything we do will be some trade off, some different constraint. The goal is not to be free of constraint, but to understand how constraints inhibit or enable growth. I like talking about this problem as the difference between trellises and cookie cutters. But there are many ways to talk about this problem, and I find that I am talking about it in almost every conversation I have whether as a therapist or simply as a human being.
Riley Paterson is a Self Space Seattle therapist who works with individuals who are healing from past traumas; who are looking to recover a sense of wholeness in the face of depression and demoralization, and those working to get a handle on anxiety. He is also interested in questions around queerness and/or gender.