To form oneself to the E.S.P.E.R.E method

Small path in big steps of a learning process

This text reviews quickly different aspects tackled by the ESPERE method. It wants to be a first presentation of this approach, considered in it entirety as a learning process which operates in many times.
Links will be offered as months go along, under the form of additional information, illustrations, clarifications, examples, in-depth analysis, key concepts or practical exercises.

Preamble

E as Energy
S as Specifically
P as Providing an
E as Essential
R as Relational
E as Ecology

The ESPERE method is a training method susceptible to promote healthy communications and relationships. It refers to the work of Jacques Salomé and training which are now offered by presenters and trainers authorized by the ESPERE Institute.
The ESPERE method does not aim at transmitting knowledge, strictly speaking, buy rather know-how to do, know-how to be, know-how to create and know-how to become.
It does not have for main objective to solve problems, to avoid conflicts or to elude differences of opinion but to invite each one to take responsibility and to act in coherence with his own fundamental needs, with his profound desires or his most essential values.
It does not seek either to bring answers to questions asked nor solutions to difficulties tacked or met but it proposes beacons and concrete means to tackle and live differently the most frequently relational difficulties met in everyone’s daily life.
Those who fall within the spirit of this approach take a stand and define themselves in front of their interlocutor in referring to relational hygiene rules, tools and specific concepts, clearly presented, located and transmissible. They confirm the other in his statement, confront him, by apposing their own point of view, but do not decide what the other must say or can do, because he is the only one who is supposed to know what is good for him.
The ESPERE method does not have, strictly speaking therapeutic designs, even if it has sometimes a therapeutic impact for those who apply it in their life.

What is this method ?
The ESPERE method offers essentially guidelines, beacons, tools and an accompaniment for learning another way to communicate and to put in common our differences in our daily life. It offers means to develop our own creative and evolutionary resources, in other words, it helps to help ourselves.
It adheres without a priori bias on the contents of the communication; it leaves to each one his free will about his ideas, beliefs, choices or points of view.
It does not defend any ideology, even if it rests on philosophic and anthropologic presuppositions meaning on a certain idea of man. With regard to this, it falls more within the vast courant of the existential and humanist psychology of Rogers. Approaches grouped together under this movement are characterized but the fact that they
" are built on the capacity of the human being to lead his existence and to be completely fulfilled. The emphasis is on the present moment, on the person’s capacity to become aware of his current difficulties, to understand them and to modify accordingly his way of being or acting ".
The accompaniment offered by practitioners and presenters works in this spirit
" looks for facilitating the committed self expression by the one who consults, as well as the experimentation of new ways of being or acting ".

To form oneself to the ESPERE method is to take over it by practising it in our daily life. It is about integrating it according to discoveries that it allows, reworking or adjustments required as they go along and the enthusiasm that it arouses. It is interiorized above all by confronting it to resistances or doubts met inside as well as outside ourselves.

The ESPERE method is first of all a working tool, a food for thought and in-dept analysis.

Beyond its pragmatic function which proposes concrete guidelines, without dictating any procedure, the ESPERE method opens up on another way to take a stand and to live intimate relationships (couple, family, children ) and professional relationships ( work, close society. ) It aims to promote a relational dynamic different from the one which characterizes our usual relationships. In particular it arouses confrontation, sharing and non violence rather than fighting, power trip or dependency. It prioritizes a creative and respectful dynamic of the evolution of each one rather than to fix issues of the exchange on the need to be right at all cost, on the enjoyment found in wanting to place the last word or to stand up to the other, on the priority given to try to impose only one truth or to put forward our own point of view as an absolute. It avoids maintaining battles of will and their consequences: various forms of dependency which follow it. It turns the attention towards issues specific to the relationship (giving, asking, receiving or refusing) instead of focusing as it is often the case, on alibis of feelings (" But I love you nevertheless ! " ), or stick to reference to good intentions or at the goodwill only. Because neither one nor the others are almighty or sufficient to maintain lively relationships.

The ESPERE method allows finding stimulating alternatives to not maintain submission or opposition. It gives avenues and orientations which are as many solicitations to give up reactional (well-known irritation and annoyance) that sabotages exchanges and maintains in a state infantile partners in presence. In this, the ESPERE method allows increasing in each one his relational potential, meaning his energy resources available to nourish lively and healthy relationships. It is an invigorating support to get out of the tendency to position oneself as a victim or to accuse the entire world when something does not happen according to our expectations or desires. The ESPERE method is a guide that brings us to take responsibility for the part of the relationship that concerns us and it allows respecting ourselves in the main acts, choices and commitments of our life.

Learning the ESPERE method goes from the simple awareness (in theme groups linked to the intimate, conjugal, family or professional communication) up to a more advanced training for those who consider transmitting it in turn. The learning cycle is composed of five main chapters which are joined together and interact with one another. Those who wish to be trained can find in the theoretical and practical corpus offered by this method, specific guidelines that they will be able to integrate to their personal, family or social life. Some will skim over the set, others will choose to deepen each chapter and take time to integrate everything. The use made of this approach varies according to everyone’s availability, meaning according to the interest and satisfactions they find with it, the time they free in this direction, the level of requirement they search, the rigor they accept to support or the impact of resistances met in him and et in his close circle.

1. WHAT IS THE S.A.P.P.E. SYSTEM?

S as Sightless
A as A deaf ear
P as Perverse
P as Pernicious
E as Energy-absorbing
or
S as Suffering
A as Alienation
P as Pathology
P as Problems
E as Embarrassment

The SAPPE system gathers the set of usual components in terms of communication that implicitly govern our interpersonal relations and which develop dependencies, exacerbate violent reactions, mistreat our fundamental human needs, sabotage our potentialities and our resources, and affect sometimes deeply and durably self confidence and self esteem. Its main manifestations are recognized by speaking for the other, which come in a variety of most banal expression mode.

Injunctions: " Be strong ! Be sincere ! A man does not cry ! "
Disqualifications: " It is not possible to be so clumsy ! You are so awkward ! "
Guilt: " How dare you talk to me this way ? "
Threats: " Attention, to the count of three, you know what is going to happen to you ! "
Blackmail: " If only you were working better in school, I could be proud of you ! "

Learning of the ESPERE method involves a chapter dedicated to the study of these main expression modes which structure the non communication and maintain forms of devitalised relationships to which we collaborate most of the time without even knowing it, by absence of model of alternative reference. We are often persuaded that we tried everything "and convinced to have no other choices; even though quite often ways remain possible that the ESPERE method allows to explore, to invent and to imagine.
The awareness to the ESPERE approach goes through a personal implication. It does not consist in studying the SAPPE system by observing from the exterior as if it was about a series of "objective" phenomena but rather by reflecting on the way we collaborate, collectively and individually to maintain this system, being by unconsciousness, ignorance, leniency or blindness and deafness.

In other terms, one chapter of the ESPERE method is dedicated to the following points :

Presentation and enlightenment on the SAPPE system
Identification of beliefs, practices, habits and phenomena which underlie, govern, structure and maintain the system SAPPE.
Work of awareness of our own participation to the SAPPE system.
Foundation of the non communication : denunciation of main saboteurs and toxins which pollute most of our exchanges and are the origin of what could be called a form of relational terrorism, or lead to dead ends and negative relational repetitions.
Actualisation and practice in everyone’s life, by practicing using the main tools of the ESPERE method to forge them to our hand and to personalize them.

2. FROM THE S.A.P.P.E SYSTEM TO THE E.S.P.E.R.E METHOD

The E.S.P.E.R.E method refers to a set of theoretical and practical data constituted by tools, guidelines, beacons and mediations, which, put in relation and articulated one with another, aim to activate, stimulate and arouse a process of relational gestation, of becoming autonomous, of liberation and of taking responsibility by who takes means to resort to it with sufficient constancy, coherence, regularity and continuity.
" The ESPERE method is not composed of a succession of recipes but it rather corresponds to a methodology open on a spirit and a life ethic. It is an invitation to a journey and sometimes even to an asceticism with its rigors, constraints and own requirements. "
" The search, on which it is built and rests on, is spread out essentially in two directions:

How to develop lively communications ,
How to live healthy relationships ? "

" The ESPERE method aims at the awareness, while knowing that the unconscious does not obey to the conscious, that it does not let it get it because it has at its disposal an economy, autonomy, a language and its own energy and dynamic. "

It is based on some theoretical presuppositions summed up in a some formulas of which the following are a few :

" What cannot be said with words is said otherwise : by acts or by illness "
" We have many languages to tell oneself or to not tell "
" We cannot not communicate "
" To put into words undoes, soothes, drops tensions, allows to make reliance… "
The passage from the SAPPE system to the ESPERE method consists in defusing the SAPPE system. It assumes two main attitudes oriented in two directions : to learn to no longer maintain it ourselves and to spot basepoints, fixations, characteristics and most operating conditionings of the SAPPE system imposed daily by our closest circle.

3. PRESENTATION OF THE E.S.P.E.R.E METHOD KEY CONCEPTS

Some main points studied

To become aware of the spirit of the relational communication (What is to communicate ? How to define lively relationships ? What does the term relational ecology means ? )
To learn to go beyond the myth of spontaneous statement, good will and good intentions in matters of relationships. Communication can be learned at any age.
To familiarize oneself with basic principles of the relational communication, in promoting mutual communications of reciprocity.
To recognize a few main fundamental needs in every human being
- to be able to tell oneself ( to go from the impression to the expression )
- to be able to be heard ( to go from the expression to the communication )
- to be able to be recognized ( to go from the communication to the relationship )
- to be able to recognized our value ( capacity to take our place in a social system, to exercise an influence on our environment, to have the feeling to be able to have something to do in what happens to us. )
- to be able to not say everything ( to go from the need to tell the truth to the capacity to speak truly, constitution of a space of personal or shared and sharable intimacy)

To exercise ourselves to self responsabilization by giving us means to go out of positions of victimization, accusation or non responsabilization
To learn self respect and respect of other
To develop our capacity to give ourselves relational care, to establish reliance. This form of attention towards ourselves goes by the possibility to learn to hear the sense of what happens to us rather than to look for understanding at all costs, to want to explain causes or reasons for what happens.
To differentiate the register of feelings and the register of the relationship. Good feelings, good will or laudable intentions are not sufficient to communicate; we must give ourselves some concrete, practical means which can be spotted and transmissible.
Words are necessary, indispensable to communicate but they are not sufficient to maintain lively and healthy relationships in duration.
The personal implication goes through giving evidence, taking a stand and an effective commitment in the relationship.
To take the risk to assert ourselves without expecting systematically the endorsement of our interlocutor or looking for his approval, under whatever forms it may be.
To promote confrontation over fighting, to develop the capacity to go from react ional which maintains reducing to infantile level, to relational, guarantee of maturation. Any change arouses inevitably resistances within us and in our close circle.

4. PRESENTATION OF TOOLS AND RELATIONAL HYGIENE RULES WHICH CONSTITUTE THE BODY OF THE E.S.P.E.R.E METHOD

This stage of the learning process consists in an experimentation of tools and mediations proposed by the ESPERE method (in particular to use them permanently in order to take over them)

For example

The talking stick

Le bâton de parole

The external visualization

Symbolization

Presentation and illustrations of relational hygiene rules :

" Relational hygiene rules are means, supports, guidelines, beacons, to go towards a greater coherence possible between intention, desire and objective. It allows also confronting the effects on each protagonist of an exchange in terms of well-being, congruence or satisfaction. It constitutes propositions susceptible to be offered to interlocutors. "

Contrary to what we often believe it is not necessary to be two to start practising it.

" It is not necessary that both protagonists know and practice the relational hygiene rules. It is enough that only one introduces them, gives evidence of it, to initiate a change in the relationship. This change will be followed or not by effects according to resistances met. "

Some basic rules :

" Any relationship symbolised by a scarf has two ends. "

" In any exchange, as in any communication attempt, we are always three protagonists: the other, me and the link which links us, named: RELATIONSHIP "By reminding that if it links us, t also separate us (if not it is no longer a link but a ligature.)

" I learn to give evidence, to speak about me to the other and not for the other "

" In a relationship I learn to differentiate what belongs to the register of feelings and what is more in the order of the relationship (to give, to ask, to receive, to refuse) "
- Illustration from participants’ experience, of basic concepts (diagnostic of non communication : identification of main anti relational characteristics specific to each one … )
- Visualisation of issues and dynamics which participate to structure our behaviours and our most common relational attitudes ( towards ourselves, others, life… )

5. WORK ON DIFFICULTIES AND RESISTANCES MET IN THE PRACTICE OF THE E.S.P.E.R.E METHOD

This point represents in fact the essential of the awareness and the training.

Because it is in the daily confrontation that the method is practiced, is put to the test, is verified, is built, is asserted, becomes more refined and is personalised in function of everyone’s sensibility and discoveries.

It is in the daily constant and vigilante application, in our personal as well as professional or social life that the integration of the E.S.P.E.R.E method can really operates, such as a maturation process that is interiorised and which requires to take time.

Analysis and identification of main resistances and difficulties met

difficulties within ourselves ( doubts, necessary renouncement, bereavements, choices, commitments … )
difficulties in others ( personal life, professional life : reactive attitudes manifested in front of change from the close circle )

To form oneself to the ESPERE method
Text of Jacques Salomé in “How to no longer live on planet HURT”.

To form oneself
is knowing to recognize the part of universal
that manifests itself
in the intimate and sincere evidence
of each exchange.

To form oneself
is accepting to become an agent of change
for oneself and for others.

To form oneself
is to greet a new knowledge
to confront it through
a personal involvement
in our own experience.

To form oneself
is to enter in the amazement of being,
it is to recognize the miraculous
of each encounter,
it is to develop our capacity
to hear the universe supernatural.

To form oneself
is to enter in the infinite of our possibilities.

To form oneself
is to open up to the question of the sense
to discover, beyond the tolerance,
love
that links us to all life.

To form oneself
is to create some life
with the best of oneself in oneself.

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