Reacting
If the psyche reacted to everything which the environment makes available, it would immediately collapse from overload. Just like any other system, human response is highly selective, thus most things are ignored. But in order to react at all and to bring movement, inner receptiveness is required. Just like we would not be able to see without the optic nerve’s responsiveness to light waves, so we could not respond to feelings, language, body language and thoughts from such ‘offers’ out of our environment. Systems differ from their environment and from each other by the way in which they shape this response. To succeed in life, therefore, we must make response decisions: what we would like to react to and what we want to ignore. It is obvious that how free this choice is depends much upon how appropriately or inappropriately we were programmed (“You are the musical one!”), which response is connected with pleasure and which with displeasure. But response patterns can change, this is why this guiding process is so important from a meta-theoretical viewpoint. Thus, for counselling, amongst other things, this has important consequences: The counsellor is effective then, when the intervention finds a response in the client. This, though, also means: What is right for one person, is wrong for another.