Violational Experience & State-Control

This is a synthesis of two previous entries. One article was titled “Experience that Violates Expectation” and made the claim that true change occurs when one has a meaningfully different experience than what was expected—that resists being absorbed back into the current belief system, thereby forcing an inner reorganization. The second article was titled “State-Control” and made the claim that no therapeutic work is as important as the intentional shaping of specific states of being. 

The overlap between both entries should be immediately apparent. There is a fundamental claim that meaningful change occurs experientially. However, in order for an experience to be truly significant, certain conditions must be met. 

What’s of incredible interest is that a significant experience can occur as a very recognizable, incontrovertible truth from a single point; but can also be wholly insignificant and minimally noticeable while it’s happening. 

As an example, there can be a person with the semi-conscious/unconscious belief that if they’re honest about certain things, then something bad will happen. Well perhaps they’re in the therapy room and decide to share—they discover that sharing that specific information did not in fact cause something bad to happen. 

Depending on the unique contextual factors such as the complexity of the belief, the person’s current state of mind, the environmental factors—an experience can be meaningful, or shrugged away and assimilated back into the belief system. 

So, what makes an experience meaningful? 

Did it go against what was expected? Did the person notice that something different was happening? Was the person in an optimal state to receive new learnings? Did the relational context in which the experience unfolded support the direction of new learnings or encourage its dismissal? 

Questions such as these are not the end all be all but a great starting place for further exploration. 

One of the best measurements is whether there is a noticeable difference inside or out, after something has occurred. Of note, noticeable to whom is up for debate. Because the person who has changed does not always recognize it. 

In fact, this is a common observance in the therapeutic context. People come in week after week reporting differences in the way that they think, behave, or way that they do life and adamantly claim that nothing has changed. 

The therapist may get a kick out of happily agreeing with the client and saying that not that much is different after all.

It’s only natural to question whether that would be counter productive to the process. As previously mentioned, experiences can easily be assimilated back into pre-existing structures (and often are), so why would one want to risk funneling a person into a defeatist attitude about something new? 

Simple, personal experience. If one sits with people long enough and begins to understand the human condition, then one would realize that more often than not, talking in such a manner actually moves a person towards the opposite.

For instance, if someone has a complaint about no changes having been taking place, and someone else says to that person (in a contextually appropriate and refined way), “you’re right not really much has changed. You probably couldn’t even identify anything that’s changed”, then the person who claimed that no change has taken place is actually pulled towards searching for exceptions. And they will much more readily offer something contradictory to their original claim.

Digression aside, what constitutes a noticeable difference? 

This is a threshold question. If one cannot demarcate variance, then violational experience and state-based work may have questionable efficacy. 

However, this is not a rigid and sterile scientific experiment to be conducted in a laboratory setting. It is a real time refinement of processes that have intuitive merit and repeated success. 

What is the measurement of success? Therapy clients reporting significant/meaningful change. 

So, what does state-based work have to do with any of this? 

Follow the thread. What leads to assimilation versus something new? If the right conditions are met, one is more likely to experience something new. And this will be the topic of future posts.