The Developmentalist Advice Column

Dear Lois,

I’ve been reading your new book “A Developmentalist’s Guide to Better Mental Health: Navigating Everyday Life Dilemmas,” and am really getting a lot out of it.  I saw you are still accepting questions, so here is my question for you with a description of my dilemma:

The further I go into the field of psychotherapy and learn how to be a better psychotherapist, the more depleted and torn down I feel professionally, in my personal life, and as a human being. I can often feel more like the “patient” and “victim” of a system that keeps me stuck, rather than a developing therapist and adult. I started out wanting to help people. I feel terrible even though I’m trying to do the “right” things as a therapist. I carry the weight of safety and liability on my shoulders and feel abandoned by my profession.

My colleagues don’t seem to want to engage in playfulness with me, something I crave, which helps me learn the best, and that I think we should be doing together. It’s like they’re not interested or I feel pathologized for wanting that and that is very painful for me. I didn’t know that I would become so isolated in this work and the professional boundaries inhibit my ability to develop a better support network for myself.  As I read your book, I’ve been considering other ways to engage with other people in this field that would feel more beneficial and helpful, rather than stuck.

I had done an art education program years ago which is where I first learned about Vygotsky. I’ve never forgotten it! I had an “aha!” moment a few years ago and looked back into him, because the mental health field has minimally adopted his theories, especially with adults. To my amazement, I saw Vygotsky had written a book called “The Psychology of Art” and proceeded to spend the next year reading it. It completely blew my mind and I started getting all these ideas about making a program where people can share art with each other in the Vygotskian way.

He talks about catharsis a lot and how we fulfill each other through the making of art and experiencing other’s art. He illustrated how the arts developed through language over human history and development, starting with fables and then leading to Shakespeare and Mozart, etc. and onward. He also questions why is it that art has stayed with humans all these years? What does it do for us that is so important? We would have given it up long ago if it was just looking at a pretty picture.

I love that he talks about “art is the social within us,” and this has become my mantra. Ever since, all my ideas and his ideas have bottled up inside me with difficulty having somewhere to go being in the mental health paradigm. I’m frozen in the where do I go from here? I can’t seem to engage with other people on this outside of my household. I can’t get other therapists or friends to engage with my invitations to do something with me on this. I think everyone is in survival mode. The one person who will is my partner, and we’ve started working on some ideas with the precious time we have. I feel almost phobic of taking these special ideas out into the world because of the bad experiences I’ve had. I think I want to protect them.

Vygotsky makes the case that art making is the way we human beings continue to go on, to exist. “Without new art, there is no new man.” It’s so existential! My dream is to use my career in social work not in the way I’m doing now, but to become an artist, a social work artist, a labor artist in the sense that our human power to exist and create is beautiful and is central. I don’t want to be alienated anymore personally or professionally. I want to develop. I’m so glad that I found you and your work Lois. Thank you for taking the time to consider and read my impassioned letter.

Sincerely,

Bottled up Vygotskian

Dear Bottled up Vygotskian,

Thank you so much for your impassioned letter! I hope you don’t mind that I abridged it a bit for this column.

I’m so glad that my book is helpful and maybe even inspiration to you, especially as a catalyst for “considering other ways to engage with other people in this field that would feel more beneficial and helpful, rather than stuck.” This is certainly a developmental way to go—for you to play around with who you are, who others are, and who you-and-others are together—and who all of you can become. So, bravo—it’s a big step for you to take.

You will have to create the other ways to engage people, especially your colleagues and the professional system that you feel betrayed by (that’s my word, not yours). What I can do is give you some direction for imagining new possibilities. ways to think relationally as you begin this journey.

We cannot remind ourselves too many times that we are social beings. You say that for Vygotsky, art is the social within us. I too call upon the brilliance of Vygotsky, for whom ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ were not a binary, but a dialectical unity. The wonders of the dialectical unity of human relations are many, too numerous to discuss here. I’ll just mention two that might get you thinking new thoughts—thinking is transformed, not expressed, in speaking; and self and other are not separate, but always in relation, and together create something other than either of them.

Getting back to your situation, I wonder what you’ve tried that has you feeling pathologized and victimized. I wonder what your conversations with colleagues are like. Are you curious about who they are? I wonder what you mean that they won’t engage in playfulness with you. I wonder what has them feeling stuck and, perhaps, victimized. I wonder how they think of you, and whether they like talking with you. I think you have to explore these kinds of questions as part of the process of creating other ways to engage them. If you do, you will already have transformed the conversation!

Conversation is an art. Maybe it’s the ultimate “social within us.“ I invite you to imagine conversation as your playground/artist studio and become an artist of conversation. And you can carry that with you as you build relationships with others in the field. Make friends with others who feel much the way you do. There are many hundreds of them all over the world. To begin, you can get to know the folks of The Taos Institute, The Radical Therapist, and the East Side Institute Associates.

Developmentally yours,

Lois

Want more of The Developmentalist?

The Overweight Brain:  How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World 

All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)

Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)

Play Helps Us Grow at Any Age (TEDx Talk)

Dear Developmentalist,

My friend Annette and I really enjoy talking together. When we meet up, both of us are eager to share about what is going on in our lives, but we also enjoy listening and learning from the other person. Whenever one of us shares something, the other is quick to ask a follow up question and express genuine interest. There is an easy balance in our conversations, with neither one of us doing all of the talking. We often comment that is what makes us seek out the others’ company.

Today at lunch, our conversation turned to other people in our lives — people that we genuinely love but that we find more difficult to spend time with. These people monopolize conversations, always turning the topic back to themselves and rarely asking questions of us.  It strikes us as no coincidence that the people who display this tendency are often lonely and have trouble making other friends. Even having made this observation, however, we are too cowardly to raise it with our friends, because we are afraid of hurting their feelings. How might we become more courageous and ‘intervene’ to help our self-absorbed friends become better conversationalists?

Little chickens,

Marcus and Annette

Dear Marcus and Annette,

Thanks for writing me to share your situation. It’s so common to want to help friends or family but feeling afraid to. I can imagine most readers nodding when they read your letter and remember situations like this they’ve been in. You see yourselves as cowards. But I don’t. Rather, I see you as in the horns of a dilemma of your own making. But not your own fault—it’s a classic; it’s how we’ve been shaped and socialized to see and understand making choices.

You’re seeing yourselves with two options, both of which could have bad outcomes. Do we tell our friends that we think they are self-absorbed and hard to be with, that they’re creating their own loneliness? The risk here is that we will hurt their feelings. Or do we hold our tongues and carry on with them in conversations that are all about them? The risk here is that we will feel more and more distant, maybe even come to dread spending time with them.

What if these aren’t the only choices? What if you see this situation as an opportunity to develop yourselves and your relationships with your friends? What if you imagine yourselves confronting a developmental dilemma? Where you leave ‘this way’ or ‘that way’ behind. Where you now have to stretch, where you now have to imagine other ways to see the situation that has you stuck in two choices, where you now can see and do other.

Maybe you can create ways to give the relationship you two have with each other as a gift rather than as “the right way” to have a conversation. (“I was talking with Annette yesterday and she asked me a question I never would have asked myself. Her curiosity made me curious too! We made it into a game. I’d love to play that with you. You wanna try?”)

I imagine that might be fun. And I can think of other non-threatening, perhaps silly, ways for you to invite new kinds of conversations. Maybe you initiate a “curiosity game” where you make up an invention (say, a banana skin vacuum cleaner). You’re the expert and your friend has to discover what it is and how it works through asking questions.

Use these suggestions to jump start your imaginations. Start playing.

The key thing, as I see it, is not to confront your friends with how you see them, but to invite them into environments where they and you are doing something different. The “problem” will vanish because you will see them differently. They will be performing “not self-absorbed.” Through you being courageous in this way, your friends have a shot at becoming better conversationalists.

Developmentally yours,

Lois

Want more of The Developmentalist?

The Overweight Brain:  How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World 

All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)

Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)

Play Helps Us Grow at Any Age (TEDx Talk)

Dear Lois,

I’m writing because I am stuck in what you would call a developmental dilemma – and I finally have language for that because of you.

For most of my life, development wasn’t a theory. It was survival.

When I was 11, I lived with my single mother in a roach motel. There were no visible pathways forward. No inherited networks. No institutional belonging. I had to grow, develop, transform – become other than who I was – just to stay in motion. I learned how to see what environments required and to become that. I got into schools I had no business being at. I entered professional worlds I was never groomed for. I built ventures. I advised leaders. I helped companies find the invisible gap between what they thought customers wanted and what actually drove buying decisions.

I developed myself into rooms that were never built for me.

But now something has stopped.

For the past 2.5 years I have been out of work. I cannot return to what I used to do – incubating new ventures – not only because AI now performs much of that work faster and cheaper, but because through that work, I realized I don’t actually love building businesses. I love rewiring identities. I love the moment when someone sees differently, becomes differently, acts differently. But that was “only 10% of the job.”

The problem is: the market does not name that as the thing it needs.

Organizations hire for strategy, product, revenue, efficiency. They don’t say, “We need someone to surface the unexamined assumptions that are quietly distorting everything.” Even though that is often the real problem.

So, I am suspended between identities.

The identity that got me here no longer fits.

The identity I feel emerging has no economic container.

I’m in serious credit card debt. My networks have thinned. My usual pathways to work no longer function. I am trying to find contract work using my old skill set while attempting to step into something truer – work that is developmental at its core.

What makes this painful is that development has always been my superpower. I naturally see where people and systems are trapped in limiting frames. I can sense the invisible gap before there is language for it. I help people create new responses to situations that felt fixed. But I don’t yet know how to create that new response for myself.

I think my dilemma is this:

I know how to develop inside constraints.
I don’t yet know how to develop a new form of life.
I don’t want to escape my situation.
I want to create something new out of what I have.

What I have:

• Deep experience operating in uncertainty
• A lifetime of self-transformation
• A capacity to name what others can’t yet see
• A desire to help people grow/develop/transform as my way of living

What I don’t have:

• A clear next move
• An economic bridge
• A community practicing development as development

You write that when we feel stuck, we are often deep in a developmental dilemma – limited by the way we frame the situation and the moves we believe are available.

That feels exactly right.

If you were to look at my situation as a developmentalist, how might you reframe it? What might I be unable to see because I am still narrating this as a career crisis rather than a developmental opportunity? What would it mean to create something new with what I’ve got, especially when what I’ve got feels unstable and insufficient?

I am not asking for rescue. I am asking for performance direction. I want to live developmentally – not just admire it.

With gratitude,

Drew

Dear Drew,

Thanks for writing me with your dilemma, I’m happy to read how you’ve done so much work already recognizing that there’s probably a developmental dilemma here, identifying what you don’t want and hinting at what you do want, exploring your history and how you shaped an identity out of it, and wanting to reshape your development into more development.

Your becoming activity, through which you built your life up until now, seems at a halt. And that’s despite your passionate desire to not stop growing. It sounds lonely and painful. And I agree that framing the current moment as a career crisis rather than as a developmental opportunity might be blinding you to seeing possibilities. At a minimum, it exacerbates the pain and self-doubt.

You ask, “What would it mean to create something new with what I’ve got, especially when what I’ve got feels unstable and insufficient?” From your letter, Drew, you seem quite familiar with my thinking—I bet you have a sense of how I might respond to that question! I invite you to take a minute, think on it, and then jot down your response.

I can’t possibly know, you can’t possibly know what it would mean. What it will mean to create something new with what you’ve got is unknowable—until it’s created. (Is that what you jotted down?) So, I wonder what you are saying with those words. Perhaps that it’s scary. Perhaps that you think no one cares. Perhaps that you think you have to figure this out yourself. I agree it’s scary, but it sounds like you’ve faced many scary situations before. I doubt that no one cares. And I know you don’t have to do this alone.

My performance direction is to open your eyes and see who and what is there for you. Really look hard. Look sideways. My performance direction is to reach out. Thousands of people are in your position—their relationship to the work they’ve been doing feels stale, they want out, want to do something new, something other, something that is meaningful and gratifying to them. Find them (on LinkedIn and within your existing circles). I bet there’s already a community or two supporting each other to venture out into new arenas (“caring” businesses, human-centered ventures, not for profits, and the like). Join them or start your own community. For yourself and others who feel stuck in a career crisis.

You say that you developed yourself into rooms that were never built for you. But you rebuilt them so you belonged. Keep using—and keep developing—that skill. Create belonging. Create becoming.

Developmentally yours,

Lois

Want more of The Developmentalist?

The Overweight Brain:  How Our Obsession with Knowing Keeps Us from Getting Smart Enough to Make a Better World 

All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)

Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)

Play Helps Us Grow at Any Age (TEDx Talk)