Should we get a professional to teach us “life”?
In Frank Furedi’s Therapy Culture — Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (2004, 2013), he describes the professionalisation of our everyday lives:
“One of the characteristic features of modern times is that the decline of taken-for-granted ways of doing things has encouraged the perception that individuals are not able to manage important aspects of their life without professional guidance. … The belief that the conduct of everyday encounters requires special skills has created an opportunity for the ‘expert’ to colonise the realm of personal relations.” (Chapter 4, ‘How did we get here?’)
Putting this quote on Split Theatre’s website seems, at first glance, to undermine the work and philosophy of Split. Indeed, our Work On The Self and Creating Arenas programmes have often been perceived as similar to self-help/self-work programmes, where participants learn how to create their unique places in society. This perception is, however, proven wrong once participants complete the full journey with us. It is not our aim at all to become “experts” in the realm of personal relations. We don’t have answers for you.
We often encourage participants to find their own answers and to discover their own ways to create. For us, the baseline is for each participant to learn how to create their own unique place in society — that’s something each participant has to find out for themselves, so we are adamant NOT to provide any “framework” or “model answers” for “teaching self-work or life skills”.
That is a two-edged sword: some participants loved the freedom to choose for themselves and they have gone on to do many exciting things in their lives with their newfound freedom and courage; however, there were others who grew frustrated with us. Much of their frustration seemed to have stemmed from the fact that no concrete life skills were taught to them, and they couldn’t see how skills taught within the studio translated to life outside the studio. In today’s world, where we constantly look towards professionals to “tell us what to do” or to “tell us what’s wrong with us,” we end up relinquishing our own responsibility to work on our own answers in life. We also begin to imagine that there are “nice” and “neat” solutions to our personal problems, even when we know deep down how complicated, messy, and contradictory our emotions, desires, dreams, passions, and relationships can be.
Here’s what Furedi has to say with regards to our reliance on “professional advice:”
“The problem is not that professional advice is always misguided, but that it short-circuits the process through which people can learn how to deal with problems through their own experience. Intuition and insight gained from personal experience is continually compromised by professional knowledge. This has the unintentional consequence of estranging people from their own feelings and instincts since such reactions require the affirmation of the expert.” (Chapter 4, ‘How did we get here?’)
I often begin the first session of our workshops by sharing my experience as an ex-MOE teacher in Singapore. I would share about the Compass Ceremony that pre-service teachers had to go through, where we were told that we were like compasses of the nation, pointing towards the correct direction for students. That was something that did not sit well with me because I often wondered why Singapore teachers necessarily knew the “true north”. What if there were answers or pathways for students that did not yet exist? I am developing this work under Split Theatre because I want to become a teacher outside the system, where participants can have the time and space to craft their own unique answers/places in relation to society. I’ll wrap up this blogpost with two final quotes (on why professionalising “life skills” is not encouraged) and some thoughts on why Split is staying away from professionalising the private sphere:
“Privacy is necessary for the formation of intimate relationships since it allows people to reveal themselves through emotions and feelings to friends, family members and lovers. Such displays of emotion are intimate precisely because they are withheld from the rest of the world. Through such unpoliced disclosures some of our most life-defining relationships are forged. Such a spontaneous display of emotion cannot be readily assimilated and managed. They do not readily conform to the demands of therapeutic management.” (Chapter 3 - ‘Targeting Privacy and Informal Relations’)
I hope that there wouldn’t come a time when we would be setting up legal contracts for friendships and relationships with our family members, or treat generalised anger management techniques like “Stop — Think — Act” as a kind of formalised rule to be followed.
“… the introduction of contractual norms into the realm of interpersonal relationships can only contribute to the disorganisation of the private sphere. A contract which is based on the premise of a conflict of interest inevitably undermines people’s capacity to honestly display their entire range of feelings.” (Chapter 3 - ‘Targeting Privacy and Informal Relations’)
We are complex and contradictory human beings capable of so much more. At times, the exploration of our life’s journey and our relationships with others can be a messy endeavour where, no matter what the “professional” says, there are really no right answers. And it is only through really living our lives that we can gain valuable personal experiences, and with these experiences, we find our own answers.
