Inquiry:
Persons, Communication, and Gender
by Carol B.
Willis
The professional homeopath is responsible for setting the tone of communication with patients.
...if we operate at too high a level of abstraction at any given time, we may miss the details of particular cases...
...ask assumptive "What" questions... |
 oes
gender play a role in professional homeopathic communications? If so, what is that role?
Secondly, how can homeopathic communications be enhanced in a way that best honors gender
diversity?
The Problem of Gender The popular book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus by John Gray seeks to make useful distinctions between the way that men and women communicate, all toward the end of helping the genders to understand each other better and communicate more successfully. That best-selling book has now spawned many other books, tapes, and workshops on the subject of gender communication. A key thesis from the book is that men tend to seek solutions when they communicate, and women tend to want to tell their story and be heard but may not necessarily seek a solution. As a woman, I found that I didn't relate to Gray's description of the woman's approach, and what he said about the male approach didn't match well with what I had observed about men. I asked my husband John to read the book and give me his viewpoint on it, as a man. He read the book, and his comments were a breath of fresh air. He said that what Gray was describing was the cultural conditioning that a person might have before going through therapy. Therapy is about removing cultural conditioning, including gender conditioning, so that a person can be free to express himself authentically and ethically without the baggage of limiting past experiences or arbitrary social expectations. The question for me was: How do we honor gender and other diversity, without getting caught in the trap of tacitly validating the inauthenticity of social conditioning? By "tacitly validating," I mean buying into the social conditioning model that says "men are this way, and women are that way," assuming that certain social conditioning will be present in patients (e.g., Nux vomica is a man's remedy and Pulsatilla is a woman's remedy), and designing case-taking and case-management using that social conditioning as an orientation point around which other things then revolve. The Solution The answers to the question lay for me in: 1) spirituality and 2) correct use of orders of abstraction. 1) Spirituality I see a person as a spirit-in-a-body. I also see communication as fundamentally spiritual, where the speaker conveys an intention, the listener understands the intention, and speaker and listener change roles as needed. Bodies and language are secondary, gross vehicles of communication, but are often mistakenly considered as primary. When a homeopath takes a case, he, as spirit, directs the patient's attention to various aspects of the patient's experience by asking questions. The homeopath, again as spirit, is mindful, heartful, grounded, and very present with the person. He watches the inquiry process with a split attention, not only as a participant but as an observer, and listens closely as the patient conveys his experience and intentions. The homeopath also observes the patient's body and language. However, the spirituality and experience of the patient are primary, and will be reflected in the patient's body and the language he uses to describe his life experience. Thus, spiritual communications are neutral and genderless. They are about life experience, and some of that experience is about being in a male or female body. The professional homeopath is responsible for setting the tone of communication with patients. The homeopath's spiritual centering and a neutral yet caring attitude will go a long way toward creating a safe space for the client, thus giving the client permission to, in turn, neutrally convey information as well, without embarrassment or fear of judgment, even bypassing much gender conditioning. The potential is high for a very authentic conversation to transpire. Not only will the spiritually-centered and sensitive homeopath be inclined to see the universal nature of spirit present in himself and others, but he will also be likely to honor the individual spirit, so will be flexible in communication and will ask questions needed to elicit relevant information. Such individuality is authentic and transcends limited gender conditioning. The skillful homeopath sees his clients as unique individuals. Furthermore, the spiritual acknowledgment and basis for working, albeit silent, are very validating to the client. 2) Orders of abstraction. When persons are not seen as unique individuals, but rather part of a worldly class such as gender, race, religion, nationality, profession, marital status, economic status, etc., then illogic and false conclusions threaten. A person may indeed be part of a class, but the fact that he is part of a class does not mean that all attributes that someone (e.g., the homeopath) considers to be related to that class obtain in the individual (e.g., the patient). To assume that the presumed attributes of a class obtain over all members of that class is a faulty generalization, an illogic. Consider the following model of intelligibility. Visualize a triangle pointing upward. At the base of the triangle is an array of particular cases, situations, individuals, including persons. If we proceed up the triangle, in the middle of the triangle are intermediate generalizations including classes, quantitative matters, then laws and principles, then some values and ideals. As we go upward, there is increasing abstraction and universality, until near the top we have what I have called in other writings "the ultimate ideas," the classical Ideas [eidos] - the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the qualitative considerations from which all other values and virtues are derived. Abstract ideas and generalizations allow us to understand and to evaluate particular cases, even predict the nature of future cases. These bottom, various middle, and higher levels are _orders of abstraction_. However, if we operate at too high a level of abstraction at any given time, we may miss the details of particular cases, and we are likely to commit errors of evaluating inappropriately. This is what happens when there is too much emphasis on gender, a low-level generality which misses both the spirituality _and_ individuality of the person, resulting first in attention misdirected to an inappropriate order of abstraction, and resulting secondly in illogic, error, and less-than-optimal case management. Conclusion Paradoxically, I propose that best way to honor gender diversity is to transcend it. I don't mean to pretend gender doesn't exist. Rather, the task is to look directly at the person who is in front of you, so you can see them as spirit and as a unique individual. Come face-to-face and spirit-to-spirit to see and understand everything about them as an individual that you need to see, and that they want you to understand. Inquiry: Context for Understanding Here is a final note on inquiry, with two objectives: 1) to help you understand what the person wants you to know, and 2) to elicit what you need to know. The structure of the questions you ask will determine the nature of the answers you receive. Ask open-ended questions when you want to observe how a person will construct his answers, what he selects as important to communicate, how he says it, and clues to his considerations and world view. Open-ended questions often begin with "How" or "Tell": "How is X for you?" or "Tell me about X." For example, "How is recovery after sex for you?", "Tell me about your menstrual periods." Be aware that you may initially get social answers, and may need to take off these layers with more or repeated questioning ("What else about X?", e.g. "What else about the PMS you experience?") in order to remove layers and surface useful information. To narrow the patient's attention further and to elicit information about a specific area, ask assumptive "What" questions: "What X's?" For example, "What kind of dreams do you have?" or "What's your greatest fear?" Or the person says they're here to resolve digestive problems, you ask "What digestive problems do you have?" The question assumes there's an "X" to be found. The person will go looking for "what X's," and you'll find that the question will be more effective at surfacing information than constructs such as "Any X's?," or "Is there...?". The patient can always initiate that there are no X's after checking, if that is the case. Repeat questions until the person runs out of answers, since repetition will often surface additional information. For example, in The Spirit of Homeopathy, Rajan Sankaran asks the question, "What are the qualities in others and in yourself that you cannot tolerate or understand?" This question will likely produce much insight into the case. However, the purpose of questions is to direct the listener's attention and elicit correct answers, and attention can only focus on one question at a time without becoming confused or risking error, so this complex question would be best broken up into four four simpler questions if the practitioner cares about getting the best information from the person: "What qualities in others can you not tolerate?"; "What qualities in yourself can you not tolerate?", "What qualities in others can you not understand?" "What qualities in yourself can you not understand?". Simple linguistic analysis will allow you to formulate more precise questions that yield more fruitful answers. For example, Sankaran also asks, "When are you angry with yourself?" which is, in some sense, not really a "When" question, since it's not asking for a time such as 12 noon, or at bedtime, but instead asks for conditions. Therefore the question more purely is, "Under WHAT conditions do you become angry?" Asking a WHEN question to ascertain time of day is an additional, different question. The two sorts of questions should not be collapsed in some misguided attempt at elegance, because ambiguity of the word "when" may lead to incomplete, misleading answers. So instead of asking the client to make the mental translation from time to condition because he understands the nuances of language and suspects that he knows what the practitioner intends, consider that asking him the more pure questions adds an element of precision and rigor to your work together that will ultimately bear fruit in the elegance of more correct remedies. If you're looking for a yes-or-no answer for differential diagnosis, ask a
"do," "does," "have," or "are" question:
"[Do] you...?" or "Does x...?" or "Have you...?" or
"Are you...?". For example, "Do you drink coffee?", "Does it
bother you to skip a meal?", and "Have you had HRT (hormone replacement
therapy)?" and "Are you still on HRT?" References: Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski, 4th ed.,1933. Orders of abstraction, pgs. 42, 288, etc. Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans.
G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1958. Linguistic analysis; the use theory
of meaning. |
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