At interself, our goal is to equip our clients for success through nurturing healthy relationships. Often this means that they need to re-learn how to learn. Now, to some ears this may sound overly simple. However, in my estimation it deceptively simple. Please allow me to explain: in this posting, I will discuss learning in terms of what psychodynamic theory classically refers to as “object relations.” However, I’ll do it with an interself twist by explaining how genuine learning is never devoid of context and is measured only by how it nourishes human thriving.
Let’s begin by explaining why the “re” in re-learning. Unlike the old Dragnet show, understanding is never “just the facts.” This is because, competency is more than the ability to cite facts, compute figures or refine operations. Rather, competency includes living harmoniously with others in the concrete world. Said another way, learning is as much social as it fact-based. For this reason, at interself we seek to reconceptualize what learning is in view of sociality.
Who one is and who he or she is becoming provides the direction of all learning; relationships structure all understanding and directs the (supposed) facts to their life-related purposes. Thus, genuine learning has a certain character to it. For example, learning that asks: “what can I take from the world for ME (?),” versus “how do I learn who I am alongside others (?)” are quite different. The former is motivated out of a narrative of scarcity that perpetuates fear. Whereas, the latter reflects a freer narrative and to cultivating an environment of mutual encouragement (notice here the intent of learning directs the interpretation of the so-called facts with the difference being: how relationships impact the conceptualization of learning).
We are thrown into a world of meaning …born into a story already in process. In other words, being human entails inheriting pre-formed expectations and obligations that are used to interpret the meaning of facts. As such, there is no such thing as uninterpreted facts and understanding never occurs apart from its significance for living. Said another way, facts are ultimately explained by the stories we use to understand them. The belief otherwise dissociates facts from experience (the exact opposite of mindfulness), leading toward confusion and the diminishment of human potential.
Therefore, what learning is cannot be explained apart from our embodied existence as social creatures. In short, without relationship, learning lacks heart (!). Learning conceptualized as “just the facts” (as if somehow, we are isolated not social beings), all too often becomes unwitting to its facilitation of nihilist ways of seeing and living in the world, which, in turn, erode one’s own self-understanding. We are not simply fact producing flesh machines.
Genuine learning is integrally coupled to selfhood. To be human is to engage, find meaning and ultimately to care and to love. Any approach to understanding that isolates facts apart from the complex embodied needs of living engagement can too easily hide harmful and divisive agendas, such as: misconceptions about the value of people and the erosion of what makes for a good life. Put another way, genuine knowledge is concerned with how authentic understanding facilitates thriving relationship of one to another in the context of community that seeks out the good through love.
As we see at interself, society on a whole needs to learn learning anew. Learning must be conceptualized as more than the facts by including how it is informed by existential and pragmatic considerations to live out a good life in relationship to another. Sadly, given society’s over-emphasis on the individual, it seems that many in the modern world seem virtually unaware to how the inherited disposition to reduce life to only the (supposed) facts works counter-productive to imagining new possibilities and therefore hinders transformation.
interself offers a module (for both individuals and couples) that explores how to re-learn learning. The module is designed to make learning concrete by helping someone envision being an active participator in the world through cultivating healthy relationships, instead of only an observer of neutral facts relegated to living disconnected from his or her context. Only in a setting of peace, safety and mutual embrace can learning have its natural result in facilitating understanding that enriches experience.
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