The WEB and Therapy

Pulling out the WEB immediately changes therapy. The focus shifts from fighting for control and power to curiosity about a colorful, plastic toy. Meanwhile, the teacher or therapist must prove the toy’s value, and the student or client kicks back to enjoy the show, put off balance enough by the WEB to offer "teach" a chance to win them over. Pulling out the WEB puts you in the fool’s seat, equalizing the ground between you and your quarry and taking the immediate focus away from the problems being wrestled with. As Milton Erickson discovered years ago, indirection is often the best way to get through locked doors. The WEB allows you to stop knocking on the front door, which usually doesn’t open anyway.

Using the WEB can improve any kind of therapy or educational work. It provides a focus that isn’t on the client, allowing them to come out more with who they are and get involved. The leader who presents the WEB takes a chance, looking a little foolish while waving a multi-colored toy around and using it to express their highly educated agenda. The WEB provides a lightning rod for the client’s pessimism and doubts. You let the WEB do the talking and let the WEB translate the talking back. You let the WEB demonstrate the most basic concepts. Clients find ways to let the WEB speak truthfully about their experience.

In Drugs and Sexuality Work

• Demonstrate drug or alcohol addiction and how denial operates in an untreated addict or alcoholic.

• Explain the power of movie stars, athletes, and musicians and their relationship to drugs – what it helps and what it hurts.

• Explain the appeal of sex to a teenager in terms of mirroring their needy core.
  

In Working with Families

• Demonstrate how a normally moral and honorable person can flip out and violate their most sacred values, perhaps harming their own children.

• Use two WEBs to explain how parents flush their unwanted issues into their children, pushing their kids over the edge and refusing to acknowledge their roles in the familial disaster.

• Show what happens when a man beats his wife and how he’s different when the police arrive.

Whatever you choose to do, it won’t be just words. That’s the key. At some point, your student or client will ask to hold the WEB, to play with it, and to ask those very questions you always wanted them to ask. Plus, they will stun you with the interpretations they cook up on their own and use the WEB to explain.

I once worked with a group of teenagers in a summer arts intensive training program. When we first met, I passed the WEB around and asked each of them to guess what the WEB was. By the time they were through, they had tagged half of my introductory points. My impact increased ten-fold because I could now use their words and observations to weave my presentation. Halfway through the sessions, they had already grasped the essentials and pressured me to help them use the WEB for problem-solving major issues in their personal lives.

The WEB works with the people who really need it. We professionals are too often complicated and full of concepts that don’t translate well into our clients’ realities. The WEB functions as an editor, keeping it simple and within the client’s range. Students and clients gravitate towards the WEB easily. The WEB becomes a touchstone for ideas, questions, and experiences they’ve not been able to integrate yet. It gets them thinking. It bypasses the usual power struggles which waste time and energy.

Quotes to Consider

"Therapists must realize the social implications of categorizing violent reactions as 'inappropriate.' Diagnoses based upon mainstream cultural assumptions may be racist or sexist and abuse power, prestige, safety, and privilege. As long as psychiatry and psychology are socially unaware, they will put down youth, women, the poor, People of Color, older people, gays and lesbians, 'criminals,' and people suffering from substance abuse, as if all of these people should solve their problems without the rest of the world’s having to change. In this way, psychology exacerbates problems instead of alleviating them."

– Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire

"Psychologically speaking, the old ethic is a partial ethic. It is an ethic of the conscious attitude, and it fails to take into consideration or to evaluate the tendencies and effects of the unconscious… it does not consider the condition of the psyche or total personality, but contents itself with the ethical attitude of the conscious mind, a partial system within the personality. In terms of the collective, this encourages an illusory form of ethics, oriented solely towards the action of the ego and the conscious mind. This is, in fact, a dangerous illusion…"

– Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic

"Non-violence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation."

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Indigenous people say that you are successful if your relationships are in order. By contrast, people in the West often say, 'It is enough for me to change within my own heart and soul. Let others change as they need to. Don’t push them.' In my view, if you only change yourself and take that to be more important than anything else you could do, you make a political statement to the effect that you are independent of other people, spirits, animals, and the environment. You may say: 'I love everybody. Let them develop on their own.' But I say: Your laissez-faire attitude is not tolerance. It is a form of self-indulgence. It is Eurocentric philosophy, Eastern passivity, and plain middle-class laziness. You appear to treat the world around you with compassion, but actually, you erode your relationship with it by avoiding the discomforts of interaction. Your attitude puts up barriers between yourself and others. You secretly look down on them for not being as 'developed' as you and for not growing as you think you are growing."

– Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire