Rumination and Accountability

The specific reason for emailing or texting a Practitioner/ Support Worker once or twice per day is not primarily about accountability (even though it carries some of that characteristic) – it is about the fact that rumination, going onto the inside, privileging the inside, disappearing inside your head, withdrawing, retreating, systematic avoidance, secrecy, lying, cheating & deception, are all directly linked – all shades & shadows of the same thing, many are synonyms. Each becomes the other very quickly and it is a short walk from rumination to deception.

Texting & emailing is specifically designed to call all of this to a halt. It is especially important in those moments when you are most likely to go ‘inside’ your head, into a world of your own, of secrecy & avoidance & to lie & deceive & cheat.

Going onto the ‘inside’ is second nature to some people. Reflexive; certainly, semi-automatic. Most human problems & symptoms are either connected to, or actually produce, an imbalance between the ‘inside’ & the ‘outside’.

Some people retreat to the ‘inside’ way too easily, for all kinds of good reasons, especially when the going gets tough. Weed, alcohol and other substances, are all close at hand and when you go onto the inside – substances of addiction can find you really easily.

Texting & emailing everyday – is designed to act as a barricade against an individual’s automatic & reflexive tendency to retreat to the ‘inside’ when life is ordinary, when life is rough, when disappointment takes hold and gets a grip. Ultimately, disappointment is embarrassing, humiliating, to be hidden from view.

Texting & emailing re-creates an ancient feedback loop between the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ and is consistent with the idea that change first happens from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ – not ordinarily from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’.

If practitioners, in the therapeutic process, accommodate too easily to a clients proclivity to retreat to the ‘inside’, then they act in a way that reinforces a client’s problems & symptoms. A practitioners role is to counteract a client’s problems & symptoms, not to reinforce them.

Texting & emailing a practitioner or support workers once or twice per day, carries with it a mantra, helps keep individuals on the outside, where change comes from.

When people retreat onto the inside, ordinarily time future evaporates, paralysis then sets in and they become emotionally exhausted and comatose, time present becomes compelling, and time past begins to intrude.