I was in a meeting recently with Mark Stolow of People Before Patients, and he mentioned that Nora Bateson asks the question: “Who can I be when I am with you?”
I found this question so intensely provocative that I immediately began to draw a series of word-and-arrow diagrams on sticky notes. After the meeting, I opened up PowerPoint and recreated what I had written there. I’ve cleaned it up a bit more since then, but this is mostly what I wrote.
After I did that, I thought: that was fun, swimming along with that idea for a minute. I should put this in a blog post so other people can swim along with it too. I opened up the PowerPoint file to clean it up (as I said), and while I was doing that, the idea grew another bud. Now it has a second, extended form, which looks like this.
So there you go. I don’t know why I responded to Nora’s question in that way; I only know that I did. What would happen if you swam along with the idea? What do you make of it? What can you make of it? What should you make of it? What do you want to make of it? Let’s see.
Not long after I posted this, Chris Corrigan sent me an email with another question: Who am I when I am not with you? I loved it, so I added it in. Now we can think about the comparison between both questions in every spot on the diagram, taking each box as two boxes sitting side by side (when I am and am not with you).
Edit (weeks later): Actually, Chris asked another question that I didn’t tell you about. He asked, “Who do I pretend to be when I am with you?”
I wasn’t sure what to think or say about that question when I first read it. I figured it fit into the category of “questions that live between am and not,” so I figured that adding am/not to the diagram would cover it. But the question stayed in the back of my mind, nagging at me.
This morning I woke up with a revelation: adding some “have you ever” questions could turn this diagram into a story elicitation exercise. You could give the diagram to a person or group, then ask them these questions:
- Can you recall an experience that reminds you of any of these questions? For example, have you ever attempted, succeeded, failed, or pretended to be (or not be) a specific version of yourself when you were (or were not) with a specific person or group? What happened? What did the experience mean to you?
- Have you ever experienced a conflict between two or more of these questions? For example, have you ever felt that when you were with a person, you were allowed to be the person you wished you could be with another person? How did the two questions come into conflict, and what happened as a result?
- Have you ever experienced a change in your answer to any of these questions? For example, have you ever felt a shift in who you should be when you were with someone? What happened before, during, and after the change? What do you think it means?
I don’t know about you, but for me, looking at this diagram and thinking about these questions caused a dozen stories from my own life to start jumping up and down begging to be told. That’s usually a good sign of a useful story-eliciting exercise. If anyone wants to try it, do, and please tell me what happened when you did.
Thank you, Nora, Mark, and Chris, for letting me swim along with this idea and with you.