The Self-as-Context
In & Of Itself
A few weeks ago my spouse and I watched Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself, a filmed version of a one-man stage play performed over 500 times across 2017 & 2018. If you live in the US you can watch it on Hulu, and if you are outside of the US you’ll have to track it down on one of many streaming services.
The show is a debate, a struggle, a story, about what determines the Self. A tale about identity and how it is formed. DelGaudio—an interactive artist, and magician—weaves six stories from his life together in the hopes of clarifying just who he is. . . .
Audience members too were tasked with completing the sentence “I am _________” as they walked into the theater for the performance. Tasked with reducing themselves down to a single component or word or identity.
I am a reflection.
I am a counselor.
I am an idiot.
I am nobody.
These are but a few of the identities audience members assign to themselves.
The film is worth a watch especially for ACT clinicians, as it is filled to the brim with metaphor, stories, and examples of transformation of stimulus function. At one point, DelGaudio tells a story involving an object and then points out that we the audience will never be able to see this everyday object the same way again; not now that it has been imbued with meaning, all through verbal behavior. Several of these stories and metaphors could be used with clients.
The crux of the show is the question “What makes me Me?” Are we a sum of the content of our lives? Are we a process in motion? Are we the context we’re in?
Much has been written about the self-as-context in ACT, often deemed THE MOST DIFFICULT AND MYSTERIOUS PROCESS ON THE HEXAFLEX.
But I don’t buy it.
In actuality, I think the difficulty of the self-as-context/process/content comes from the word Self. Throw any other word in there and perhaps it starts to be a little more clear.
For example:
The House-as-Content
I live in a house that is over 100 years old. It is a bungalow house in the style common to the south eastern Wisconsin area. Almost everything inside is wood. It has a stable foundation, enormously large basement, high ceilings, and good natural light. This area of Wisconsin has very hard winters (as I’ve described before), and our house has a few leaks, both in the chimney and the basement. Houses don’t behave, but they do keep standing.
All of the above is content related to my house. Is my house the content? It could be defined that way if someone chose to. And if it was defined that way, and a large leak happened and ruined the roof, I might be very upset, or sad, or any other range of emotions.
To see the house as the content of the house, such as the furniture it contains, the material it’s made out of, etc. would be the House-as-Content.
The House-as-Process
The house has remained standing for over 100 years, and in that time it has seen a number of families live and grow inside it. The most recent family to inhabit it is myself, my spouse Jet, and our rabbit Charlie, and hopefully a baby on the way within the year.
When we moved in we refinished the floors ourselves, which involved renting sanding equipment and wood stain. How many times have the doors in the house opened and closed? How many hours did the previous owner spend in his basement workshop? How many feet of snow have piled onto the roof in those hundred years? The joists of the house are essentially petrified wood at this point, as hard as concrete.
Could the house be defined as the changes over time that it has experienced, and all ongoing changes that it will experience in the future? It could be, and if so that would be the house-as-process.
The House-as-Context
The house stands, one hundred years old, a product of its environment (south eastern Wisconsin, the United States of America, planet Earth). Each little hand that has reached up over the kitchen counter for cookies, each little foot that has pounded the hardwood floors, each shovel of coal fed into the coal fired furnace long since removed has changed the house forever. The walnut I rubbed on the kitchen door to cover up the scratch on the wood finish I caused just weeks after moving in (which my spouse still has not noticed years later) is the house for me. I cannot look at any part of this place without being in some sense connected to the history of this place, both my own personal history and the history that I did not directly experience but only see evidence of.
The house exists in context, it participates in context, it serves as context. The house is context.
Now you
Now I want you to think about how you define your life, your Self. You can use the matrix to do so, by following along with this.
Respectfully Submitted,
Jacob Martinez // Through the ACT Matrix