A Word of Caution
Regarding Current Limitations of Fieldwork
NOTE: In what follows, I talk about the relationship between the methods I share here and the kinds of challenges you may encounter in using them. What I share comes exclusively from my own experience using these methods with myself and others. Because of this, you may find it important to have more information about who I am and how I have developed this work. If so, please make sure to read Who Is This Joe Shirley Guy?.
Psychotopology fieldwork carries considerable potential. It is possible to enter inner realms with great agency and relative ease. But I also want to be clear with you that it also carries some risks and limitations at this time.
First, as is true whenever science breaks through into new territory, there is a lot we do not yet know. What that means is this. If you choose to enter this world with me, you must take full responsibility for your well-being and the well-being of those with whom you share the work.
In other words, please be realistic about what you can expect from me. My role at the moment is to give you my absolute best effort to share what I have discovered in a form that you can use. Your role is to be mindful about how you use it.
Best scenario: You have a lot of experience doing inner work, or guiding others in their inner work, and you have many tools in your toolbox to fall back on if you find yourself in perplexing territory.
On the other hand: If you are very vulnerable or unstable, and/or if you have very little experience in these realms, please do not use fieldwork either on your own or facilitating another person.
For those who are appropriately (in your estimation) skilled and resourced, there is power here to traverse this new realm, but there is also some uncertainty about the shapes of the various landscapes as they inhabit individual people. This will be something we will need to study carefully, and together.
Second, psychotopology fieldwork may turn out to be one of the most reliable tools available for undoing patterns of distress and suffering. However, the work is still in its youth with respect to developing practices of integration. At the moment, fieldwork will best be paired with other practices that assist in the re-integration of the restored portions of the self back into the tapestries of life. Those practices should always include multiple sources of support of various kinds.
Some Specific Limitations
Let me make more clear some of the places where I have bumped up against fieldwork’s limits, and other places where I have not yet had an opportunity to explore how it might be applied. Most of the examples below have to do with the requirement in fieldwork that the explorer is able to bring a coherent witness awareness to their inner experience. Without that capacity, fieldwork cannot proceed.
Young Children
I have had great success in working with children above the age of self-awareness. Depending on the child, the ability to witness their own inner territory may emerge anywhere from five to twelve years old. Once it is there, the work is very effective in helping kids restore their natural functioning after a disruption of some kind. In fact, in some ways children find it easier to clear reactive states than adults because they don’t have as much history, and have not built extensive thought, belief and behavior structures around keeping their reactive states suppressed.
On the flip side, they do not have much control of their environment, including the people and behaviors that may have played a role in the formation of their inner compensations. Nevertheless, helping them learn a stronger, more stable witness relationship to their feeling states will enable them to better adapt in the long run.
For teens, fieldwork is especially useful. Many young people have not built the kind of verbal awareness of their inner states required for many therapies to function well. In fieldwork, all they need is their present experience. They don’t need to try to put interpretive words to things that resist being compartmentalized. They don’t need to share story specifics they find too vulnerable. There’s a safety and freedom in simply bringing their awareness to feeling and describing its tangible properties, and working primarily with that.
For younger kids, though, doing fieldwork is more challenging. One of my clients had a three-year-old that he reported being able to support with rudimentary mapping, but I haven’t personally had a chance to explore how that might work, or how best to approach it.
Psychosis
One person was brought to me by a family member hoping fieldwork could help. She was in an active psychotic break, and although I was able to enter her world to some extent, I found that the mapping practice did not take hold in the way it does for someone not experiencing psychosis. Things were much more fluid and changeable, with very little effect on the apparent actual felt experiences.
It is possible there might be a way to approach the work with someone experiencing psychosis, and that would probably need to focus on the actual experience of self in some way. But I have not had any further opportunities to explore that, and I have doubts about whether it would be effective.
Psychiatric Medications
Over the years, I have from time to time worked with people whose medications seemed to get in the way of successful fieldwork. I am not a medical doctor and so cannot go into any level of detail about this, but I can share what I noticed.
It seemed that with a few medications, particularly those given for bipolar disorder, the person was able to go through the mapping and moving process, but did not experience the tangible shift in feeling as a result. It was as if the mapping and moving was simply an intellectual exercise.
My guess is that these particular medications work by somehow disconnecting the link between the field dimension of experience and the body’s responses. Normally, when you shift a reactive state to an ideal one, you feel that shift with your entire being, body included. With these meds, that entrainment with the body seems to be unhooked, and so there is an absence of strong feedback that something good is happening.
It is possible that the work in those situations still has the normal effect. But in the absence of tangible somatic feedback, it’s hard for someone to justify what seems like going through the motions when they’re paying for private sessions. I haven’t had the opportunity to explore what would happen if someone were to engage in comprehensive fieldwork around their issue to plant new patterns of being, and then work with their psychiatrist to come off the medications to find out whether the roots have grown deep enough to sustain themselves once the meds are gone.
As I said, my experience of this has come up only with a few particular medications. I can’t say with confidence in retrospect which ones they were, and anyone’s experience with any med will be unique. So my recommendation is simply to follow the fieldwork fundamentals and trust your / the explorer’s experience to guide the way. And of course, rely only on qualified professionals to advise on any medication management decisions.
Big Life Changes
In the kinds of transformations that typically happen in fieldwork, people often “wake up” to conditions in their lives that do not support their greatest well-being. Relationships, living situations, job environments and more become illuminated as having played a role in maintaining a dysfunctional pattern of existence. Even small things like the photo hanging on the living room wall can become suspect.
Our lives are of a whole. What is inside us is reflected outside like a hall of mirrors, and when we change what is inside, those outside reflections can sometimes be jarring to witness. At the same time, we are multiple. We have many more aspects of ourselves beyond whatever is being transformed in the moment through fieldwork.
Many times, emerging from a cycle of fieldwork, we may find ourselves wanting to make a big, life-changing decision. I caution against radical changes in direction and recommend, instead, a slow breathing into the new way of being.
When we take our time to more fully integrate the changes within ourselves, we begin to spontaneously make new micro-decisions. We make different choices in the moment when faced with the familiar conditions of our lives, and those small moments of redirection accumulate over time in a much more organic and healthy way than a radical leap will tend to be.
If in fact there is a big change coming, much better to lay the groundwork for that change both inside and outside, in small ways, establishing a comfort in the new way of being that can support an integrated decision. Much more important than the act of moving away from what is unhealthy is the choice of what new healthy condition we move toward. Getting clear about that can take some time.
That said, every life situation is unique, and when we find ourselves on such a threshold, the best we can do is to bring as much of our whole selves to the question as possible, and to move from there.
Other Conditions
There are infinite ways that people’s inner worlds and their relationship with the outer worlds can be configured in the context of genetic, societal, familial and experiential influences over time. We are very complex. The field of psychiatry has attempted to simplify this complexity into workable form through the design of its lexicon of diagnoses and their criteria. But psychotopology’s introduction of the field topology of being brings us face to face with that complexity and asks us to respond to it.
I cannot tell you much at all about the forms inhabited by any given person, even when they have been assigned a formal diagnosis from the DSM-5 or other taxonomy of dysfunction. This is something I hope to see happen as research begins to take place, taken up by people in positions that give them access to the resources and opportunities to conduct such research into the actual inner structures of people’s challenges. I believe there are entire careers and institutions waiting to be established in this effort.
For now, what is important is that anyone practicing fieldwork simply keeps coming back to the basics. Always prioritize the explorer’s experience, follow what emerges, and establish stable places to stand. This territory of the inner human world is rich beyond our current imaginations, and it is begging to be known.
I will have more to share about this richness and how best to navigate it in a future post about addressing the challenges of modern life in the context of our immense inner complexity.
Reflections
Here’s your chance to influence how I move forward by adding your reflections in the comments below.
How does this post land for you?
What in you feels like it is being spoken to in this post?
What questions are you left with? What are you most curious about?
What feedback would you like to offer me, in service to my being able to share this new work with you and the world?
What feedback could you offer toward improving my writing of this post?
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Thank you.
Thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for sharing your thoughts in the comments below. I look forward to meeting you soon.
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