Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Torrey Orton

October 30, 2009

Months ago Hamid and Charles wondered what effective anger channelling would look like. They were picking up a line in my post on popular anger. The six months since then has seen an increase in popular public angers, notably to the level of scaring people like Thomas Friedman a few days ago – a guy who has seen a few things while wandering across flatter and hillier parts of the planet.

In the intervening months little has emerged to increase my awareness of channels I would likely choose for my angers, though I find myself continually looking at Comment and Letters pages for examples and models. Someone else's initiative I could join would be nice. Finding Don Watson interviewed recently and visiting the website spawned by his earlier writing (www.weaselwords.com.au) gave no solace to my shared anger at the linguistic (evidence of the) corrosion of basic social functions. Maybe we don't do popular anger and I'm unAustralian in my aspirations for more of it.

Sources – public and private
My most constant acquaintance with unresolved anger, aside from my own, is in therapy. With great regularity my patient clients with anxiety/depression related difficulties have substantive early abuses in their personal histories, often multi-generationally. This pattern has most recently been re-aired in the backwash of the arrest of Roman Polanski a while ago. Lurking in the interior of the veiled awareness of their abused childhoods, often extending well into early adulthood, are family systemic and peer group systemic threats to self. Coping with them at the time they are occurring involves a fine dance of conscious self-protection from these dangers and avoiding offense to their powerful authors. Especially critical is not allowing anger to surface, since that may be seen as a threat inviting even more vigorous abuse.

One can find this, too, in abused populations who are victims of racial, ethnic or other stereotypically driven abuses. Whole countries like Greece, China and Korea still show effects of longterm foreign domination. Individuals and groups learn to repress and deny their anger at felt injustice(s). The aversion to confrontation is so great people literally cannot speak their hurt directly. Equally, once freed of their oppression(s), the injured groups often cannot stop talking about the past that is so much with them. Their talk, organised as a group action, is one way to channel anger. The objective is to shame the oppressors, and maybe gain retribution or recompense. The enduring effort of surviving "comfort women" to win Japanese acknowledgement of their victimisation is a well known example. Reconciliations are another objective, seldom (?) successful, even if the once victimised are now the powerful as in South Africa. On the other hand, face-the-victim processes for personal injury criminals have some positive results, particularly if the criminal is early in their possible career.

Mixed feelings, often conflicted (an anger source itself)

One of the discoveries which open the door to moral complexity is that of conflicted feelings about acts of perceived goodness or badness. Even minor ones often suffice to elicit an emotional array about people well-known to us that leaves confusion in its wake. Where the origin of abusive treatment is within family, it is usually undiscussible. Failure to abide by the rule is punished by indirect or direct threat of emotional exile.

We could say that the existence of real moral simplification (black and white thinking) is among the leading indicators of social cohesion within groups. How better to identify a robust group than by its resistance to acknowledging, or, better, pursuing the ethical shortcomings of its members?

The latter is, however, an accepted indicator of under-development of personal ethics. Its organisational version is on show daily: the Catholic Church's repeatedly reported knee-jerk denial / obscuring of sexual predation; NFP organisations' abandoned children hostel's multidimensional predations; corporate boards unable to restrain greed in management or even apply preset performance indicators to executive remuneration; footy players distressing women or each other ….

In therapy, the mixed feelings of traumatised children are expressed in adult squeamishness about tagging their parents with any accountability for the agreed traumas. Often initially the traumas cannot be recalled, being locked in memory out of direct access. Sorting them out is essential to righting the wrongs (setting responsibility where it belongs: with those in power at the time). Once sorted, the anger can be addressed to managing the present state of the abusive relationships. This is not sortable by changing the way we think about abuses – i.e. changing the way we value them by portioning the experienced violences into non-catastrophic mind-bites. It requires action - actual or virtual – to hold the continuing forces of abuse at bay even in their weakened forms of the family social system: aged parents, the variously affected and denying siblings, etc.

Different angers – levels
Anger can loosely be thought of as having two experiential sources: (1) undesired violations by others and (2) frustration of our appropriate aspirations through our own or others incompetence to support them. Some helping fraternity folks divide angry feelings from angry behaviours. This, and its sibling – the division of thought from feeling in CBT – are on the verge of relegation to a subservient role therapeutically as the indivisibility of thought, feeling and action are demonstrated by multi-modal research in these areas. Recent work on thought/feeling integration makes this distinction functionally meaningless, since there is no thought which does not have a feeling component, nor a feeling which does not have a behavioural component. This is the practical meaning of 'non-verbal' and 'habitual'.

Channels – pathways and platforms for action

There are a number of action channels, spread over two basic levels: actual (real, authentic) and virtual (technically mediated). These two flow into each other of course when the interaction becomes live (therefore real and authentic) while still being technically mediated (phone, etc.) Means of expressing anger (and most other feelings) are many and employable at either level. Here's a start at the micro level: two people. (Plug in your own two party scenario at this point.)

For example, I want to deal with a difficult issue with a person who matters to me. The issue is so volatile, and we have handled it so badly in the past, that there is justifiable anger arising from objective disrespects on both sides. How I start to re-engage will make all the difference to the possibility of a different result from the repeat failures we have achieved so far. The start has to flag that something new is intended without getting into the substance of things too early. A new shared ground has to be prepared.

This will partly be old ground recovered from joint history, and partly new ground created for this event. The old might include shared history, experience and values; the new, opportunities for growth or development that did not exist before now and the mutual interdependence(s) which can bring them to life. It ensures actual continuity and engages the shared history as a context for future activity.

I might send these thoughts in an email, written in a spare, agenda-offering style - for discussion, a precursor to a talk. If I wondered about his accessibility to email – some folks don't turn it on every day or more than once a day – an SMS noting that it is on the way would be appropriate. It's all virtual to this point. The rest unfolds in conversational steps like those mentioned here where a delicate entrance to a potentially indelicate subject is sketched out as a face-to-face event.

Join 'em
More recently, in trying to find a way to channel my anger more concretely I sought out an appropriate NGO as the prospective beneficiary of ½ day per week of my time pro bono. I overcame previous doubts about my ability to stick with anything too narrowly focussed by choosing one in the environmental domain. I realised (again) that such groups have to take a whole of system and systems viewpoint on their efforts – therefore allowing my broader unresolved interests some room to play, too. So, it looks like I've found something to join. I expect it will become a source of new bloggables.

Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Rectifications (17) – Trust, or confidence?

Torrey Orton– September 27, 2009

Thanks to Effective Negotiation Services, I learned 20 years ago that trust is as useful as the predictability which underlies it… that when people invite our trust as a condition of an agreement or a commitment to action, we should respond with doubt. About 10 years ago I learned in working with Dr. Terry Reilly that the domains of activity which affect trustful feelings number somewhere around 8 minimum. These are real values and processes of relationship among colleagues and in other commercial relationships – some values like fairness, reciprocity and equality; others processes like transparency, openness and information. All can be operationalised. They need not merely be espoused.

Recently, in the flush of interpretation released by the GFC, trust is enjoying a comeback in 'behavioural economics'' claim to replace the mathematically wondrous and empirically simplistic market fundamentalist paradigm. Unfortunately, it's a comeback with no feedback. There is assumed to be a causal link between trust and willingness to participate in commercial transactions, especially the most vaporous and greatly more damaging of them, the financial ones. We are talking here of something called "public trust" – an attribute or affect of people en masse. For example,

Take my word for it, your money's safe

Saturday, 24 October 2009 Australian Financial Review Howard Davies

I was relieved to find something a little more robust for Howard Davies from a few months back with a notionally serious research base in view. In both pieces a slide between "confidence" and "trust" occurs throughout. It goes like this:

"…. So the net is that this research suggests there has been a sharp loss in trust in the financial sector, that that lack of trust can have damaging effects on finance and investment, and that so far government interventions have not been successful in offsetting the consequences of the crisis for confidence."

Confident, but not trusting

Trust and belief (some times in the cloth of faith) are often confused, especially by those who are only recently coming out of the paradigmatic dark to find it is a normal human emotion affecting all manner of relationships. This is may be what's happening with LSE Director Davies' slide from trust to confidence. The latter is an empirical term; the former an ethico-moral one. Both slide into each other from their respective bases, but 'confidence' retains its empirical reference to predictability and concreteness, while 'trust' retains is ethereal values tilt. So for example, when used with respect to people, one might express confidence in another's ability without endorsing the trustworthiness of their intentions or commitments.

Thus you will find in articles of its type that, if we could only repair trust then the masses would once again believe in banks and such instrumentalities, and growth could reignite. Some dozens of them have appeared in various guises over the term (to date) of the GFC. What they pretty regularly fail to do is to say what actions would be likely to rebuild the lost commodity (trust being like esteem and other commoditised emotions taken as entities which can be built explicitly). Some wise guy remarked in passing recently that the repair of certain damages to his community would take two generations at least. Our lost trust has been being eroded for a generation at least for many of us.

A concert of actions

The 11 causes of the GFC advanced by Daniel Yergin might make an interesting starting place for more concreteness in our reflections. If we need, as many believe, to reduce the prospects of more GFCs, then specific actions are required, probably in some intentional concert, for our confidence in institutions and persons to grow in to trust again rather than blind faith. This concert will be assisted by focus on specific actions, not on aspirational trustful outcomes treated as the actions – e.g. the "putting in place" of this and that as if that were the end. We know from the struggle for transparency through mandated processes like Freedom of Information that a put is never a practice.

What causes us to do things?

What causes us to do things?

Torrey Orton

October 25, 2009

The GFC has spawned a literature of expositions on its causes and their effects. One of these recently suggests 11 causes in search of a narrative. The effects are, in turn, causes of further effects – they 'make' us, or allegedly 'make' us, do things like buy less, save more, cry out about greed, etc. This is roughly the story of life, these narratives of description and explanation from which we give meaning to our experience. They also, as Daniel Yergin says in The Guardian a few days ago, provide a guide to future causes, to future actions we might want to take if we knew we could take them. That is, if we see ourselves as causes.

To cause is to relate

People in my trade – helpers of various denominations – work on the assumption that we can help others to become better causes, better agents for themselves (and for others as appropriate). We also assume that being an effective agent or cause, is a central part of well-being. Also, for now, we assume that the principle form for the giving and receiving of causes – for being effective – is our relationships. However there are reasons to wonder, only one of which is the GFC, whether we can cause things as we used to, whether we can be effective in this world.

 

Our relationship processes and mechanisms attune us to possible pleasures and dangers. They are designed to assist getting things done and telling us how the effort is going. Any particular 'effort', any solo or joint activity is supported by sensors which look forwards, sideways and backwards from the moment the activity comes into awareness until it fades out of it. These sensors are especially attuned to the others in our relationships about the 'effort'. When attuned, they ensure the greatest natural congruence of thought, feeling and action (mirror neurons) among relationship members, or even non-members.

 

Even after the effort fades, of course, traces remain through which much of the actual experience can be accessed. This system is the foundation of evidence-based human activities in the original sense. It does not require a lab to operate. In fact, no lab can operate with its facility and appropriateness. A lab is too slow and narrow because it is a ponderous, conscious activity system.

 

Relationships are meaning making memory systems. They also are systems of intent. For us, action is not like a sand grain sliding down a pile from the tipping point on. For us, action must be sustained, usually by motivation. In this sense, only human (or other conscious) action is caused. Inability to cause others to do or be things is sure sign of an injured consciousness and a deprived life. However, like the sliding sand grain at tipping point, even our started but unsustained action(s) can produce ripples expressing the implicit power of the initiative.

Intent and harm

In therapy intent appears clearly as the triggers of various anxiety spectrum syndromes. These triggers are mainly non-verbal: body language, tone, pace…all the emotional aspects of communication through which we express our intent and interpret others' towards us. Our predisposition to hear intent where none exists is a marker of the importance of danger detection in our totally functionality.

 

Human intent comes in two main forms: the personal and the institutional. Our attunement to personal intent, as sketched above, does not help us much with institutional intent. The latter is often slow, long-term and barely perceptible compared to the short, sharp impacts of personally driven dangers. One result is that people may blame individuals for having bad attitudes or intentions towards them when the attitude is discussably institutional or systemic in origin.

A bad queue

One slight example. A work colleague complained about the attitude of the wait-staff at our local preferred café, characterising them as arrogant and dismissive. I asked what gave her that impression and she replayed an incident of apparent service disregard earlier the same day. In addition, she didn't get her coffee until it was cold.

 

On further exploration, I was able to show her that the disregard she felt stemmed from the way queuing is handled there. It works by customers presenting themselves in the right place and in the right order – in other words, a small self-organising system. There are no signs directing customers to a waiting area or the appropriate verbal protocols to achieve successful ordering. The cold coffee resulted from the staff seeing her and recognising her and producing the coffee. They left it on the counter expecting she was going to pick it up.

 

But, for instance, failure to say "I'm next" as needed, would lead to apparent disregard by the wait-staff. They depend on customers to control who's next themselves. And, voila, failure to do so produces a perceived disrespect and the story unfolded in my colleague's mind from there, cooking up into a tale of intentional disrespect. I guessed correctly that the wait-staff would have no idea they had created this impression either.

 

To cap it off, my colleague is a sometimes unassertive person who isn't comfortable performing as the queuing system requires. So, I coached her in the system, including a little voice projection often required in the ambient noise. She came back next day and said it worked exactly as predicted and she felt recognised, served, positively regarded and previous impressions deleted! She got her coffee hot, too.

 

Jane pointed out that this little system is defective and my colleague had a right to be angered by its failings. A good point, and also one which reveals that the personal and institutional may seldom be clearly distinguishable in daily life. The two causal sources may be mutually reinforcing. This is most obviously so where the systems are big need systems like health, education, work and so on, as discussed next.

 

Intentional bad effects

There are, of course, much more invasive institutional disregards, or actively damaging impacts. These occur especially in core well-being institutions like the health, education and legal ones which may variously discriminate against certain members of societies. The history of change in such discriminations is the story of the slow extension of fair treatment to total populations. They are notoriously slow progresses.

 

Some damaging institutional impacts are actually the objective of marketing. It intentionally sets out to pre-condition our decision-making at levels below consciousness – by drip-down familiarisation, so to speak. Where those subject to the drip are unaware and undefended from the process and its effects, the damage may be great. Current struggles over "sponsorship" of state schools by food brands are prompted by one such potential damage. Sponsorship's dubious nature is magnified by recognising that the argument for marketing and advertising is raised by those champions of choice, the market fundamentalists around us. The objective of the marketing, of course, is explicitly to restrict choice. John Roskam's argument for Big Mac schools is characteristically disingenuous. What would Adam Smith say?

Where to next with this expedition? Perhaps into the occasionally perverse world of science and causes. One example of this is here:

"Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the "Perestroika" movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, "quantitative methods are the preferred way to go," he said, but they can't tell "how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted" — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular."

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/books/20poli.html

 

There, nicely poised, is a fundamental problem with science: that as you become clear about facts, you cannot sustain a similarly clear interpretive picture about them. The science Smith is talking about is intrinsically uncertain in two key respects: (1) predictions are approximate, until they have happened; and, (2) the probabilities established by statistics are, even very high ones, never apply to a single case. The technical problem is that what constitutes the evidence is disputable.

 

For us, this means especially they don't predict for individuals. In these small spaces survive a host, a forest of exceptional knowledge practices ranging from standard doubt to marvellous interpretive schemes like horoscopes. I mean neither any harm here. But harm may come from inappropriate application of these schemes to daily life. If you feel a dilemma coming on, and you like them, see you here again shortly. This dilemma matters, to me at least. It has major impacts on my profession and my social concerns.

Optimysticals (4) – Summer’s in the mind

Optimysticals (4) – Summer's in the mind

Torrey Orton
October 18, 2009

Melbourne is always special to those who inhabit it, leaving a small space for recent arrivals' discourse of distress for our 4-seasons-in-a-day weather. We are now sliding forwards and back into spring. Backsliding is more prominent in the last few weeks with more snow on the mountains than the rest of the season and a serious upturn in water resource holdings. Still, our ever optimystical* weather people promote ideas like sunny and warm (20C) in the midst of an evidence-based assault on heating systems, both personal and mechanical.

On such a day a client showed up in short sleeves (with T undershirt) and cargo shorts ready for therapy. I queried the premise of his presentation: that the day's forecast had predictive validity. He produced a model of optimystical perception. Roughly, it's time for summer and so I dress for how it should be, and appreciate whatever approximation to 'should be' I get. This is akin to my farmer friend's view that it will rain, sometime. Both have an indefinite certainty of what the future holds for them, modulated by flexible expectations of the turnaround times required to reach it….

…which reminds me of an experience 28 years ago when living in Beijing. The Chinese traditional calendar is lunar and is used for various festivals, underlying which is the schedule for managing agriculture. The autumn festival, around full moon time in September, signals the end of summer and start of harvest. Our students (in 1981-83) put off their light cottons and put on medium cottons with long underwear.

In Hong Kong at the same period the pools and beaches closed. The students did not seem to sweat in 30+C temperatures, while HKers were possibly thrilled to know they no longer had to run the sharky gauntlets of their beaches. Minds over matters. For both northerners and southerners it always got as cold as their superficially silly behaviour predicted.

Therewith, I've now established, to my evidence needs, the cross cultural substance of optimysticality. It's a human capacity and not merely a product of our Bureau of Meteorology or my need for linguistic cuteness. It may become a test parameter for distinguishing artificial intelligences from the real things. Feel free to shop it around to likely users.

 

* an optimystical is a purveyor of hopes I wished someone would purvey once I heard/understood they were doing it. It is often a counter-intuitive, maybe ironic, communication.

Emerging needs (2) – Ties that blind?

Emerging needs (2) – Ties that blind?

Torrey Orton

October 13, 2009

What I wear is seldom of much concern; it's just the same arrangement with slight variations. But occasionally I have a brief flitter of indecisiveness in the face of my wardrobe's slight variety. This only happens when I'm subliminally aware of needing to make an impression which does not align with my habitual want to look moderately presented with a touch of flare. The latter light is usually to be cast by a tie, of which I have 20 or so with heritages running back to the mid-90's – that is, the oldest are almost ready to come back into style, like my aviator glasses.

This occasional opportunity for a precisely contained visual confusion experience was brought to mind, as so often such things are, by another patient client. The container is the time between when I start dressing for an impression-demand event and my departure time to it – 15 minutes approx. Anyway, he, in the midst of dealing with a multi-level, multi-domain life shift, has quite significant mood swings as his various experiences and prospects clatter and crunch within him. The swings are sometimes energised by virtual or real engagements and brief encounters with his work colleagues.

An outstanding tie

A week ago he appeared for therapy in his standard work dress (dark suit, white shirt and dark lace-ups), with a tie of outstanding pattern and colours – the latest (would I know?) in thick upward coursing stripes of red and blue and white. An unmissable bid for recognition which I acknowledged at the time with a query about what had happened. Well, a good week had happened, a step up to achievement and a pause for relief before the next climb to a new life stage.

A week later a plateau had appeared where last week's step had fallen, a transitional terrace which felt like a step backwards to him. This was expressed in a tone-matched suite of vestments, all low key and low relief, including a tie of slight dullness melding into a pastel shirt. He was, as before, somewhat unaware of what he had done, though recalling that the struggle to select his impression this week had been particularly unsettling compared to the previous week. Perhaps the unconscious news was more troubling, as in deed it was. This terrace was unknown ground on his trip, reminding him of much earlier periods of deep depression years ago.

Impression/expression

The subject, we discovered, as we walked ourselves through my impression of his sartorial expressions over two meetings, was the difference between an impression and an expression, along with a place where they seemed inextricably intertwined. This is the matter of emergent perceptions, I suppose, where inner meets outer, greets outer, is affected by outer, is reflected in outer, or reflects outer in itself?

Choosing your expression/impression may provide a quick trial of your togetherness about a certain social event: see how long the vestment compilation takes and on achieving the finished presentation, reflect on what had passed for conflicting motives in the process*. It can be useful to get a reliable, instructive impression of how you are from someone who knows you enough to have a well formed impression. Observant close acquaintances can do a good job on a day to day basis. Therapists not necessary.

 

*this is one of a to-be-collected suite of mini-techniques for studying emergences and their inhibitors.

Rectifications (16) – How’s your day been

Rectifications (16) – How's your day been…so far? Then, Have a nice day…

Torrey Orton– October 6, 2009

Many are the assaults of false connectedness, few so offensive as "How's your day been?", exceeded only by "How's your day been so far?" Both come almost solely from the mouths of casual retail workers* aged 15 to 20, often recent immigrants or more likely students of English speaking backgrounds who cannot possibly know what they are saying, socially. It can also be found in banks where staff are moderately more permanent, but still not real. Closing with 'Have a nice day' rounds out the insult.

False friendlies

What's the offense here? I've already attacked the false friendly – the would-be personal relationship ambit of contemporary retailing. In addition, there's the irritation of being asked a real question which solicits a real answer – an invasion I do not want when shopping in a place where almost none of the staff are recognisable from week to week (by contrast with my barber, barista and butcher!).

This particular phrase grates screechingly. I may get over it, but move on? I know I am not alone among my peer group (over 50's). The usage is widely despised. Maybe we will all deal with it and go forward…but then there will be another to replace it until we die because the roots of false friendly are deep in the dissimulations and pretensions of our culture.

So, what to do?

Here the immediate rectification is obvious and dubious at once. The obvious is to tell them its offensiveness to me. Dubious it is, however, that they will personally deserve the negative energy which will be attached, and also it is dubious that they could change it if they wanted to (assuming a successful instructional foray from me which was minimally offensive to them). They would probably be fired for ceasing and desisting as requested, since much cash and little intelligence has been devoted to training kids, and their elders masquerading as kids, to be customer friendly by uttering similar inanities with the pretence of making the experience personal.

Equally, they would probably be irritated in return, since there is nothing for them to understand about the language itself. It is a grammatically correct English expression. It is the language gifted to them by our times. And, if they are foreign students or immigrants, even from other English-speaking places, they will be trying to be local by speaking local, as one does. Should they be disturbed in their progress by irritating oldies? But more likely a source of their irritation would be this: by raising the issue of the inappropriateness of a certain verbal turn I would be shifting the relationship from false friendly into real, personal and possibly unfriendly. Not the engagement they had signed up for, nor intended by their irritating query, probably.

How to..?

Tactics is all once a strategy is in hand. My initial strategy is to test my assumptions about local usage of 'How's your day been..?' This will be precursor to designing a more broad-spectrum strategy for rectifying such usages. My tactics could be:

• Check with myself that my emotional engagement level is moderate or less, so the performance anxiety of trying this tactic doesn't blow up my irritation into anger.
  
• Ask if the service person has a second to talk.
  
• If yes, then point out I'm going to raise an issue they might find challenging, and that I don't want them to be worried – it's not a complaint. Nothing for management.
  
• Then, say I'm trying to understand certain language which is broadly used by service persons, as you just did, and is irritating to me
  
• Viz – 'How's your day been…(so far)?
  
• Can u tell me why you say this? Where did you learn it?
  
• If I told you I find it very irritating what would you think/ feel?
  
• Do you want to know why it is irritating?
  

My aim is to try this over the next week and see what comes of it. I should be able to report in 10 days or so. The next strategy step should be available then, too.

* If what's happening at Coles' checkout counters is any indicator, those kids will soon be working elsewhere anyway. There'll only be a couple of personally serviced lanes left for customers who can't be trusted with a credit card or like untraceable transactions.