Joseph Roberts: You have an incredible overview from decades of direct experience in various personal growth movements. What has happened over the last 40 years and where are we now?
Marilyn Atkinson: I think that as we enter the 21st century we’re entering a new area of human development. I was part of the gestalt movement in the ‘60s and spent time with Fritz Perles, and then in the ‘70s with Virginia Satir. I explored a lot of different spiritual paths – Sufi and Buddhist teachings. I worked with the primal approach to psychology.
I was very much interested in the whole rise of the commitment frame in large personal workshops where people said, “Hey, I can take my life in my hands and move forward here.” So, I developed my own seminars through those years, working with NLP and Ericksonian hypnotherapy, solution-focused methods and accelerated learning, and those were all major learning frames for me and a lot of other people. But we are in a new era now. The 21st century is different.
JR How is it different?
MA First of all right now the pressure for change is huge. The rise of China and India, all sorts of different cultures melding into one global stream, has created a conversation. The conversation is on the internet. It’s happening between us all. And that’s never been that way before. There’s an over-culture now forming on the globe that has everybody in on the same conversations. Afghanis off in their corner know a lot more about the world than 15 years ago.
JR While traveling and teachings around the world, how do you see the over-culture emerging?
MA This last month I was teaching in central Russia, in London and Norway as well as in various areas of Canada and the US. Next week it’s Australia.
Erickson College is known throughout Russia. We have centres, and I was recently teaching in Ekaterinburg, the third largest city in Russia, and Voronezh a wonderful old city in the centre of Russia. We have a strong Erickson College established in St. Petersburgh and Moscow.
JR What’s emerging in Moscow?
MA It’s like Chicago in the ‘30s. There are some things that are very much a play of black and white, rich and poor. Yet, what’s coming through, like a tide, is the rise of a real intelligentsia and it’s a human one that we’re finding in every culture that has to do with what I call level seven thinking, a deeper understanding.
It’s a focus on world culture and the rise of a real interest in developing the world, our communality in and around even our differences. But the focus of level seven culture – well, let me explain a bit about spiral dynamics first.
Spiral dynamics is the study of value systems or value means. They’re huge streams of values, like currents that go through the oceans, the big ones, to Japan or England, that bring a whole tide of new experience. With that, of course, comes all the superstructure – the clothes, the music, the thought systems, the interest in certain kinds of learning, habitats – everything goes with these streams.
For example, Ikea is found all over the world. And it’s not just good marketing. It has to do with people’s ideas about what’s intelligent design. There’s an understanding of intelligence that’s shifting, which is also visible in the current onslaught of ideas in the US as two cultural streams collide.
MA What’s emerging today is a new focus on what it means to be human and that has evolved into different kinds and styles of learning, especially and including the rise of coaching.
JR What does it mean to be human?
MA Well, that’s a really good question. Our ancestors were part of little warring groups that felt only their group was human, much like some of the tribes like the Navaho – the word meant “the humans.” Other groups were considered non-human and that’s still to be found in some of the political mythologies that we hear spoken pretty widely in camps that fight each other.
If we look at the rise of different definitions of what it means to be human we find it can mean to have enough success to go out and build your own entrepreneurial system, or to follow the right political ideology, or it means you’re politically correct in terms of taking care of other people, but only the way you’re supposed to according to your group.
I think what’s coming out of the new “level seven” currents is a focus on innovation and the human capacity for creative thinking that can redefine our relationships productively, flexibly and with love.
JR Who are some of the people that helped create this new renaissance?
MA I spent a lot of time working with Fritz Perles, spent two summers as his direct student. And also I worked with Virginia Satir, who was a brilliant relationship specialist.
JR How so?
MA She was so able to step inside someone else’s feelings, thoughts and emotions and try them on herself and then reflect them back. She was a true rapport specialist, someone who understood deeply how to take someone else’s point of view. Thus she was able to do some things that, for me, led to deep learning.
One was her capacity to work with family groups where everyone was in turmoil and evaluating each other. She’d create a sculpture out of their body posture. She’d stop everybody like statues as they were arguing and say, “Just hold your posture” and get mama who was down on her knees with her hands open up towards daddy to hold it and exaggerate it until it looked like she was beseeching the world towards the daddy who was pointing his finger with his growly face and his eyebrows furled, while little brother reached over just at that moment to tease big sister who was snarling in response. She’d stop them and have them all take a look around and say, “Is this what it’s like?”
After they saw themselves they couldn’t do that anymore, so she had a capacity to turn old judgments into perceptions and when we take something that we hold as a conclusion but turn it into something we can see, then we can change it. On some level she understood that and she began a deep understanding of working with people on a different level.
JR What was Fritz Perles like?
MA He was kind of scary for me. I was very young when I was working with him. He was brilliant, brilliant as a psychotherapist. He could take someone and intuitively get him or her to start expressing, but in those days I could see there was no pattern. He wasn’t someone you could really study like Virginia. I spent quite a bit of time with Fritz, but in fact we were studying his genius. What I learned from Fritz was that there’s a flow of seeing that people have, that when you learn to get into that flow you can see the world at a much deeper level than you can otherwise.
My analogy might be the difference between being able to run a personal computer like we can now. You can produce a magazine with a personal computer and understand a lot more of the deep structure of developing a result. In those days it was all hit and miss and Fritz’s hit and miss was wonderful to watch, but it was very difficult for his followers to understand the deep structure of what he was doing. It was a hard road for his students.
Now, Milton Erickson was another matter.
JR You named Erickson College after him. What about him made such an impact?
MA First of all, he was a very simple person in terms of the way he treated life in general. He gave himself to his inner intuitive process in such a way that he allowed his deeper knowing to do all the work. He understood the difference between the conscious and deeper knowing selves such that he could allow his perception in any given situation to truly do the work. Only later would he, and very lightly, bring his conscious mind along to chatter about what it all meant. Milton was very focused on simply allowing the work to happen through him in the same way that most great spiritual teachers do.
JR How did he do it?
MA He had some basic principles and I’ve discovered when we truly work from those principles everything happens – psychotherapy, coaching, the whole process of human development, any kind of learning, and the whole quality of discovering your own creative development. All of that becomes very easy when you simply notice that, first of all, people are okay – that was one of his fundamental principles. And, not only are people okay, but you specifically are okay. There’s nothing broken.
A lot of the recent understandings of the brain have supported this completely. Human beings are really okay. All this focus on getting the right drug, the right anti-depressant, to somehow fix your broken chemicals – it’s not needed. As soon as we discover the flow of your intuition, of our deeper learning, away we go into the reaches of our own development and we begin on our path in a way that takes us home.
JR That people are okay is a wonderful principle, did he have others?
MA Yes, that people have all the resources they need, and this is the heart of coaching. You can sit down with a client and as you ask questions you begin to assist the person as they find their own understanding of what they need to do. So, coaching is not about giving advice or assisting or taking over the game from someone. My most recent analogy is that it’s like curling – people throw their own purpose ahead of them and a good coach clears the way for that purpose to aim and hit its mark.
Milton was very much like that. He listened deeply for people’s purpose. He was hugely aware of the human spirit, of the passion that people had for life and he saw people as heroes. He really gave room for people to find a place to deeply respect themselves.
Another principle was that people deserve no blame. This world seems to have so much black and white thinking, so the growing awareness that people can come back from all sorts of spins and downsides and really discover their own vision is new. I think Christopher Reeves is a good example of someone who found his vision even in complete adversity.
With coaching we’re working with that capacity of people to reinvent the moment and discover a game worth playing even when they think some aspect of their development corners them. Everybody’s got some area where they’re not quite so sure of themselves – maybe their goals in learning or relationship or health or finances or even their spiritual areas of development.
People discover they deserve no blame for the seeming sidetracks, that those are highways into deeper learning.
JR It’s a path to discover a part of yourself that you didn’t realize.
MA Milton’s model was that there’s no such thing as failing. He had a wonderful framework on failure, that if something’s worth learning it’s worth doing badly at the beginning. We had fail forward. So we can treat everything as a feedback frame for becoming satisfied with our own path.
JR What was he like?
MA He was amazing. Milton had polio at age 15. Can you imagine going to sleep with what seems like a bad cold and waking up four days later only being able to move your eyeballs? He nearly died in the interim and ended up on life support and was in a wheelchair for a while.
In those days what they did was move the bed into the kitchen. So from there Milton watched his baby sister and began to visualize himself being able to raise his head like her and he began to get some movement. So that became the focus of his energy for two years. He’d watch her and visualize himself learning as she did, and the doctors say today that he literally retrained the brain cells. Two and a half years after that first paralysis he was walking with two canes.
That taught him about visualization. He was a visualization specialist and the training we do at Erickson is focusing on how we can use this amazing visual capacity of the cerebral cortex to assist with emotional development.
He discovered that people could, through deep seeing, really begin to take charge of the metaphor of their own life.
Marilyn Atkinson, PhD is a registered psychologist, professional coach, NLP master trainer and founder of Erickson College. This is the first of a two-part interview; in part two we will discuss recent discoveries in brain research. For further information contact www.erickson.edu, 604-879-5600 or email info@erickson.edu