Obsession with Map Finding

We have an obsession with map finding. We think that if we search hard enough, we will correct the map that we have, and/or find the right map to rule them all.

To see if this is true, just observe the types of studies that get published in your favorite peer-review journals (i.e., this treatment approach for this type of personality disorder), topics that gets addressed in conferences (i.e., parenting method for this type of child behavior), or in the psychotherapy marketplace (i.e., learn this method that resolves trauma completely).

When we obsess with map finding, we might lose sight of two important things:

1. When you are at
2. Where you need to go.

Our obsession with map finding makes an assumption that we start off at the same place.

See Related Posts:
Mastery Learning for Therapists: Figure Out the “What” Before the “How” 
Figure Out Where You Are Before Where You Need to Go
6 Visuals About Our Progress
Circle of Development

Any Old Map Will Do.

In the First Kiss book on how we can undo an emphasis of “taking” information from clients and instead learn to focus on what we are “giving” from the get-go, I mentioned this one story at the end:

A small group of Hungarian troops was camped in the Alps during the First World War. Their commander, a young lieutenant, decided to send a small group of men on a scouting mission. Shortly after they left, snow began to fall steadily for two days. The scouting squad did not return, and the young officer, something of an intellectual and an idealist, suffered a paroxysm of guilt over having sent his men to their deaths. In his torment he questioned not only his decision to send out the scouting mission, but also the war itself and his own role in it.

On the third day, the long-overdue scouting squad returned. There was great joy and relief in the camp, and the young commander questioned his men eagerly. “Where were you?” he asked. “How did you survive? How did you find your way back?” The sergeant who had led the scouts replied, “We were lost in the snow and we had given up hope and resigned ourselves to die. Then one of the men found a map in his pocket. With its help we knew we could find our way back. We made camp, waited for the snow to stop, and then as soon as we could travel we returned here.” The young commander asked to see this wonderful map. It was a map not of the Alps but of the Pyrenees![1]

---

First, Relational North Finding

I’m not saying maps are unless. We do need one.[2] But what we really need first is not to play into our anxiety of needing to find the “right map.” Instead, what we need to entrust is the development of personal maps based on the conversational unfoldings in therapy. This relational north finding is so critical, because it doesn’t presume we have the right map for the problem (i.e., “what works for whom type of thinking), but that both therapist and client have ideas that can be interchanged and dialogued to find a path that leads to the client to become more fully alive.

Benedictine nun, Sister Joan Chittister points out a useful example: [3]

In the mid-17th century, Spanish seafarers sailed up the west coast of the Americas to what is now known as the Baja peninsula. The cartographers of the time simply drew a straight line up from the Strait of California to the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington state. Consequently, the maps that were published in 1635 show very clearly that California was an island. For 50 years, then, the years of the most constant, most crucial explorations of the California coastline, those maps went unchanged because someone continued to work with partial information, assumed that data from the past had the inerrancy of tradition and then used authority to prove it. Finally, after years and years of new reports, a few cartographers, the heretics, the radicals and the rebels, I presume, began to issue a new version, and in 1721, the last mapmaker holdout finally attached California to the mainland.
But — and this is the real tragedy perhaps — it took almost 100 years for the gap between experience and authority to close. It took almost 100 years for the new maps to be declared official despite the fact that the people who were there all the time knew differently from the very first day. Vision is the ability to realize that the truth is always larger than the partial present. The map you use to explore this new world will be the path by which the next world walks.

---

Be Your Own Cartographer

We like to believe that our practices are based on sound theories. More often, theories of psychotherapy are built post-hoc. “The theorists can only build his theories about what the practitioner was doing yesterday. Tomorrow the practitioner will be doing something different because of these theories,” says Gregory Bateson. It is after the fact that we develop a theory of our own.

At the start of my profession, I got to work with a clinical supervisor[4], who asked me to take on a project. Dr Thomas Lee said that this project is important–and it might take me my whole career to figure it out. The project was based on a single question: “What is your theory of change?”

Thomas was right. It’s been more than 16 years, and I’m still working on that question. It’s an evolving map. More importantly, it’s a map of my own based on the territory that I’m in.

My hopes for each is to take on Dr. Thomas Lee’s advice to be your own cartographer and develop your own map.

P/S: IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN BEING YOUR OWN CARTOGRAPHER, JOIN SCOTT MILLER AND I–AND THERAPISTS FROM THE WORLD OVER WHO ARE AT THE FRONTIER– FOR THE 4TH COHORT OF THE DELIBERATE PRACTICE WEB-BASED WORKSHOP. KICK-OFF IS ON 29TH OF NOVEMBER 2021.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.

Footnotes:

[1] I first came across this story of “Any Old Map Will Do” in the book Yes to Mess, Frank Barrett 2012 (pp.10-11). I traced the origins, and it’s probably first told by Medical researcher Oscar Hechter in 1972. He cited the story to be from Albert Szent-Györgyi. See: http://andrewgelman.com/2012/04/23/any-old-map-will-do-meets-god-is-in-every-leaf-of-every-tree/
[2] Maps are actually pretty amazing. see Maps reveal hidden truths of the world’s 99% Invisible – Invisible-13- Maps httpf
[3] This excerpt was taken from On Being with Krista Tippett – Sister Joan Chittister — Obedience and Action: https://onbeing.org/programs/sister-joan-chittister-obedience-and-action/ based on a speech she had given.
[4] When I first met with this clinical supervisor, Dr Lee called me a “young punk.” After our supervision contract ended, he tried to explain it to me what he was trying to provoke within me, but I never fully understood why he said it. Nevertheless, nearly 17 years on, I hope I continue to be a young punk.