Learning to act right (18)… Gay promiscuous paranoids?

Learning to act right (18)… Gay promiscuous paranoids?
Torrey Orton
December 6, 2010


Another surprise - from a request for a comment on the article Promiscuous Paranoids comes a learning experience for me and the writer. This response, like that of "sounding a bit stupid", gives me hope that the task of capturing ethical learnings may be more engaging for people than I have imagined. If engaged, the writing comes fluently and persuasively. I hope you enjoy this contribution.


I am aware that it may arouse a flurry or storm of discussion about some of the reported facts. The author is clear this is his experience. The 'facts' we may have in hand at any moment of decision-making might have been improved by a wide review of the available evidence for most of us. That we seldom can make such a review in the conduct of everyday life is not grounds for disregarding our decision processes, or others'.

Regarding the "Promiscuous Paranoids" post, you asked me for my comments, particularly as to how your post relates, if at all, to the "gay world".  Clearly I can only comment from my own experiences and so I'm not sure how representative of the general gay public this contribution will be.  From my understanding of your article/post (and I could be way off), your experience with (straight) men who would be considered to engage in binge sex and then fall into a committed relationship is that they may become highly paranoid and jealous that their girlfriends are getting it on with every other straight guy who shows the slightest bit of physical attraction toward her - his perception is based on him transferring his own previous binge sex behaviour onto his girlfriend and on to other men.  Further, this paranoia adds a high degree of uncertainty to the relationship as the male is constantly thinking that his female partner is cheating. 

From my own experience and my experience with my gay friends, binge sex is the norm amongst gay males, especially those in their late teens to late twenties.  It is accepted as a "rite of passage" to sleep with as many other males as possible and it is not abnormal for a gay male in his mid twenties to have had sexual encounters with over 150 different men (be they gay, bi, "straight", and/or married).  I myself have had sex/fooled around with approximately 175-200 different men.  Such a number would seem obscenely high to straight males and females, particularly of the older generation, and indeed I see it as quite high myself, although I do not see it as "abnormally high", at least for a gay male in his mid to late twenties. 


The acceptance of binge sex amongst the gay male population is evident even in gay male relationships which are "open relationships" - i.e. the male partners have agreed that having sex with other males outside of the relationship and/or and bringing in a third or fourth male partner for threesomes or group sex is fine.  The reasons for the partners agreeing to an open relationship are often varied however two of the main reasons are as follows:  Firstly, as sex is viewed quite casually amongst the gay male community, little importance is attached to having sex outside of the relationship, and secondly, because gay males are so sexually charged, one of the main reasons for a committed couple breaking up is due to the infidelity of one of the partners - an open relationship therefore eliminates that potential break up cause. 

Often partners in an open relationship attach rules to when it is permissible to have sex with a person outside of the relationship - for example, if one of the partners is away for work it may be permitted for one or both to seek a sexual partner.  Another example is where one of the partners in the relationship is HIV+ and does not want to transfer the virus on to the other partner.  I know of one such couple.  The partner with HIV is so fearful of passing the virus on to his partner that the pair do not have any sexual contact whatsoever and he allows his partner to have sex with other men.  Of course this raises a range of issues, including low-self esteem on the part of the HIV+ partner and whether or not the couple can truly be happy without any form of sexual contact with each other, but those issues are not within the scope of my comment now.  Rather it serves to highlight the range of circumstances and rules which a couple may attach to a gay couples "open" relationship.

Now, how does this high level of binge sex amongst gay males relate, if at all, to your post regarding binge sex in straight males?  In the times that I have been in a relationship, and I really only consider myself to have had two relationships, the issue of binge sex was one which had to be addressed at one time or another in each relationship.  During my first relationship I myself cheated on my partner with another male (and another female).  It was during my "coming out" phase and I was still scoping to see whether I was or was not gay. However I accept that that is not an excuse for my infidelity and needless to say that despite much effort, the relationship did not succeed.  


During my second relationship, my partner was aware of my previous infidelity and was constantly suspicious of whether I had remained faithful to him.  Despite my assurances to him, he always remained somewhat insecure and to this day, even though the relationship ended over two years ago and he has a new partner, he still questions me.  I know that I was always faithful to him - having cheated once before I am aware of the damage that can be done by infidelity and have vowed never to do it again.  However as a result of the binge sex mentality, and my actions in my previous relationship, my former partner still has doubts.  On a side note, my former partner is now in an "open" relationship - he lives interstate from his boyfriend (for now anyway) and they two have various rules as to when sex outside the relationship is and is not permitted.

Accordingly, while I myself never had doubts about my partners and their fidelity to me in my previous relationships, they were constantly questioning me about my fidelity toward them.  The effect of that on me was that I felt that they did not trust me and it led to intense feelings of frustration on my part, especially in my second relationship as I knew I had remained faithful. 

However, that is not to suggest that I have never experienced the "promiscuous paranoia" explained in your article - indeed I have.  However, rather than occurring in the context of a committed relationship, my "promiscuous paranoia" has occurred, time and time again, in the context of dating - i.e the initial stage of a potential relationship in which neither of the men have committed solely to each other.  As in the straight context, I transfer my own binge-sex behaviour onto all other men, including the guy I am dating.  Consequently, I automatically think he is having sex with every male he comes across who shows the slightest of interest toward him. Not only am I therefore paranoid that he is having sex with a number of other men, but it makes the "courtship" process even more complicated - I feel that I have to work extra hard to retain the interest of the guy and to have him settle on me as a partner, and discard all the other potential partners he is "clearly" having sex with. 


Even if the guy I am dating is not having sex with anyone (and I believe him), I usually still feel incredibly jealous at his previous sexual encounters, even though the number of my own previous sexual encounters towers way above his (his actual or stated number). The jealousy is usually so intense and unbearable that I either sabotage the developing relationship or simply stop seeing the guy altogether.  The sense of insecurity created by the "promiscuous paranoia" is extreme, making it very difficult to form positive and lasting relationships.

My point is this: the scenario of the "promiscuous paranoid" which you describe in relation to the "straight" community is also directly applicable to the "gay" male community. However it is even more heightened. The practice of binge sex is readily accepted amongst the gay male community and therefore the level of binge sex is higher. Levels of paranoia amongst gay males who are in committed relationships are also higher and to that extent more destructive.  Gay males (including myself) sabotage their own relationships to prevent the inevitable "cheating" which will occur (or in the mind of the paranoid individual, has already occurred). Their ability to remain in a committed long-term relationship is damaged, and in my case, highly under-developed. Self-esteem and self-worth issues therefore ensue.  It is my belief that it is at least in part because of this "promiscuous paranoia", that gay males have "mastered" the "open relationship", as discussed above, developing an extensive range of rules and principles in which sex with a person outside the relationship is permissible.

Having recently become aware of my under-developed relationship skills and the negative impact that binge sex has been having on me, I am actively working to develop normal, positive relationships, not (entirely) based on sex.  I am challenging my impulsive thought processes that would have normally led to me becoming highly jealous and even vindictive upon hearing of potential relationship partners and their previous sexual partners and am seeking to understand why it is that I am having such impulsive thoughts, rather than focusing on the thoughts themselves.  Inevitably the issues surround my own personal insecurities and my perception that I am, in some way, "un-lovable". 


Further, I have embarked upon a self-imposed "sex free" period - if only for a few weeks or months.  Taking sex out of the equation is forcing me to meet new people and begin to develop relationships the old fashioned way - simply by meeting up for coffee and talking.  Even if there is no spark and nothing develops with the person I'm meeting, it's still forcing me to go out and meet new people. Given my personal insecurities, that can only be a positive thing.

In essence, I have become acutely aware of the negative effects which promiscuous paranoia has had on me and my ability to form relationships and I am now seeking to rectify that.  It will no doubt be a difficult process and I'm sure I will have re-lapses into binge sex, if only due to the culture of binge sex within the gay community to which I belong. However, I realise that it is an incredibly important and necessary exercise if I am to ever have positive and long-lasting relationships.

See Trusting Judgment for a related learning experience.

Appreciation (32) … Wild strawberries – the taste, not a movie

Appreciation (32) … Wild strawberries – the taste, not a movie
Torrey Orton
Nov.30, 2010


It is a story I've told dozens of times: the taste of wild strawberries on an early summer mountainside… in the Massif des Bauges, south-eastern France, June 2005. What I didn't tell includes…


... that there was a dog from the neighbourhood (local dairy farm on the mountain side where we parked before the walk) which accompanied us almost to the top of our climb, then turned back and went home… 4 hours later seen hanging out in the parking lot at the farm...


… that there were four of us walking together for the first time, learning the pacing of our different styles, only one of us in reasonable shape (the other guy who tended to jog up the mountains effortlessly)...


…that it was early summer - the trees fully leafed, brooks still running strong with snow melt (not Cauterets strong, but for our first alpinish event in 10 years and from Melbourne, strong)…


…that I saw these slight red spots along the dirt roadside amidst otherwise lighter shades of green, hanging in the way strawberries hung when I picked them as a 10 year old for local producers in Lunenburg but this a trace of memory not consciously searching, nor on looking close did they appear at all like commercial berries, but there was enough lookalike to pull me down from looking forward, to stop me ambling along, to pull slightly aside the greenery which already seemed strawberryish…


…and, that they tasted like no strawberry I had ever known (nor since as well, having searched the slopes of three other alpinish ranges vainly since then to find their relatives - French, Spanish or Italian: rien, zilch, diddlysquat, etc.!). They had an almost vinous depth – no nose, but distinctive middle and finish. They were so slight (1/10 the size of a commercial strawberry) that there was almost no body; rather, they melted than crunched or squished.


Occasionally I have an apricot from our tree here that is precisely ripe and at an appropriate temperature which brings an acute taste and slight nose, reminding me of real fruit from those 55 years ago which were fresh. I did not know they were all manmade to some extent. Wild apples were hard to find in Massachusetts in the 1950's. Wild meant grows outside the house??


Strawberries anyone.

Appreciation (31) … Walk or wait?

Appreciation (31) … Walk or wait?
Torrey Orton
Nov. 26, 2010


Time was when the best way to summon a train, bus, tram or cab was to light a cigarette. Pretty much turned the corner within seconds of striking the light. Nowadays, 25 years on, the story is cleaner and more irritating. It's just a question of when to walk and when to wait between trams. I never minded the lost smokes all those years. But the threat of a lost walk or a lost punctuality is mildly gut shaking.


I'm a work walker. I believe I do myself goods by walking as much of my work routes as can be fit into the train / tram schedule which bridges them. But these do not mesh with the smoothness of high class gearing. Their rather more grindy operation, slightly unsynched it seems, signals their respective owners persistent proudly proclaimed unmet performance objectives. And I regress…


I do need to be at work on time (clients await). I leave home an hour before shutters up. Because of the just noted asynchronous public transports, I often walk a few tram stops. I know how long it takes and I can do two stops in the normal waiting time – about 8 minutes. That's easy. Uneasy is the non-arrival of the scheduled tram which opens a gateway to walk another stop, if I dare. If I dare wrongly, there's a prospect of another 8 minute wait as the scheduled tram ambles past catching me between stops*.


So what? Well, so I do not get the longer walk I usually take towards the end of the route (about 1 km. of quick-paced passage through the salubrious inner city streets of Albert Park). This walk sets me up for the day by providing a slight sweat and leaving me at the keydrop** with 10 minutes to settle down. If I do not have the walk I'm not well balanced, which leads to increased stress in therapy management. I know that will matter both towards the end of the day (an energy gulf) and during the day as my finer senses of process and detail are dulled.


This whole thing seems simple, and is simple if I drop my various other personal performance objectives embedded in the above narrative (my scripts for managing my day). It condenses a clear stressor into a clearly bounded area (6:50am – 7:50am), with almost guaranteed release. The almost is the lurking awareness that I could still mess up, or be messed up, by misjudgement plus fate.


Wait or walk?



*the loss leader of such events was the 7:26am arriving at 7:35am, closely followed by the next one, the real 7:35am. The wrap-up: I was ten minutes late and two trams down, so had my 1km walk at 1.5 km distance from the clinic; Result: just got there before 8am client. Plus, I lost X% of the training effect of the 1km thru apprehension about missing 8am.


**this is the café we leave clinic keys in overnight to allow the earliest arriving therapist to open office.

Rectifications (24) – Mental disease / illness??

Rectifications (24) – Mental disease / illness??
Torrey Orton– Nov 22, 2010


What to call a mental problem? There are good names for many of them – anguish, ecstasy, obsession, compulsion, anxiety, outrage, and so on, moving forwards. These are found in the heart of psychological / psychiatric description (with greco-latinate equivalents – e.g. anhedonia - for the more medically deterministic mentalities of the DSM series). They are also found in the heart of human languages. They are the material which occupies the arts…in fact, occupies pretty much everything except the natural sciences and scientistic technologies – engineering, medicine, etc.


These problems of course are the stuff of a life, not "mental problems". Sometimes they can get a bit big. Major life changes, by choice or fate, tend to be associated with these normal problems. A good grief lasts quite a while and can be incapacitating for weeks. So can a rabid infatuation! It is the difference between being depressed and having depression. We are in the grip of the latter and are affected by the former.


'Disease' suggests a medical condition, something to be treated with a pill or a patch. A broken body is not a diseased or sick one, or even an ill one. It is injured, impaired. Some diseased bodies require breaking (surgery) on their way to repair, but the breaking is not a disease. Mental health problems can produce physical symptoms of great intensity.Or, the reverse, bodily disorders can reflect or constitute mental problems. This is because the state of the mind is also physical and behavioural. We are thinkingfeelingacting beings. So is our cat, only somewhat less imaginatively than we.


Mental health matters are injuries to the mind/body, which is probably part of why we have a naming problem. Naming has become embroiled in a marketing problem posing as an awarenessproblem. The awareness problem – about the reality, normality and ubiquity of mental health issues – has been attached to our existing awareness of mostly troubling, inconvenient, not terrifying health problems. This has been to normalise the mental ones, which so scare us they remain the sometime content of myths and demonologies and movies.


The marketing problem is the public campaign by McGorry and others to increase government financial commitment to early intervention in youth mental health issues. How far there is to go in public understanding can be seen in a recent AFR BOSS (Nov. 2010, pg. 65-66) article called "Mind Games" which misquotes McGorry, misrepresents the nature of acute conditions like bi-polar and schizophrenia, and prints a recommendation from psychiatrist Ben Teoh that "any employee displaying evidence of mental illness be referred to a psychiatrist for immediate assessment." If these conditions are difficult I wonder how anyone in the average workplace can pick them or confront them. If lawyers, doctors and dentists can't, then can HR or the CEO????


The larger proportion of Medicare funded mental health treatments are in the non-psychotic, non-acute mental health domains. It is our apprehension about falling into the psychotic which accompanies the very idea of mental health problems. Many of my anxiously depressed clients are relieved to have me confirm that they are certainly not crazy, though their acutely anxious and depressed periods feel crazy, feel threatening to their sanity. Try on OCD episode, a suicidal ideation or a public panic attack for a taste.


Piggybacking the mental on the medical encourages a pre-existing tendency to see it as amenable to physical treatments alone – pills or patches. The current evidence about effective treatment of mental problems is clear: medication alone can never resolve them. It is a useful and, in acute stages, essential part of effective treatment. The reason is that mental problems are biopsychosocial events, not merely biological ones, including the apparently "chemical imbalance" ones. See Lyn Bender's recent article for another take on this discussion, and a vigorously disappointed reader (the 4^th comment) on therapy.


Both the Australian and American psychological associations actively promote biopsychosocial thinking and use it to evaluate and drive research, yet it has barely made it out of the professional policy box in which it has been installed for 10 years. And to think in this way stretches the competence of most allied health care practitioners well out of shape. We have neither the breadth of knowledge nor conceptual potential to use it.


The socio part of the construct is an often acknowledged component of mental health but inconsistently included in research or therapeutic action frames because the 'target' of the action is the individual. Their troubles are really social – they involve families (of origin and choice), playmates (the binge drinkdrugsex scene or footy squad, for instance) and workmates (bullies and their facilitating social systems of workplace control) and the authorisations of commercial culture (to booze, sexualise, and commercialise).


So, what can we call "mental" problems which is true and not banal? How about emotional issues, challenges, hurdles…well, in fact these are true, and banal due to their humanity. Sometimes that humanity overwhelms us, and always it is attached to other "issues" which we try to engage dryly, unexcitedly, numerically. The tide of heartless sciences is ebbing, but the names for biopsychosocial ones have yet to emerge. I wish I could do better.

Learning to act right (16)… “sounding a bit stupid”

Learning to act right (16)… "sounding a bit stupid"


Torrey Orton
Nov 15, 2010


If you've only got a hammer everything looks like a nail, and if it doesn't you treat it as one! Some ethical matters are invisible to us until we see them right. Without right seeing, right action is improbable. With right seeing right action is only possible. Sources of learning to see things rightly, as they are, unvarnished by preconception and prejudice, has been the heart of epistemology since Plato looked out of his cave and saw the light. In ethics, as much as science or art, the problem is that we can't easily see what we don't already know. This is not only a theoretical problem.


A good sign that someone is seeing anew, differently, as if for the first time, is the feeling of "sounding a bit stupid", as with my colleague below. So he earned an unexpected, and unintended, place in these annals and accepted the offer of a shift of domain with grace… a sign of potential for seeing anew. He was responding to an earlier post of mine on euthanasia and included the thinking breakthrough which opened the door to my views.


Hi, I think I run the risk of sounding a bit stupid with this, but here goes:

A few years ago I liked to play a game on my blackberry called "brickbreaker". It's a small version of a paddle/ball game. My high scores were typically around 8 to 10,000 points, and I never finished the series of challenges in the game.


Then one day, at Oslo airport, I started to think about what the purpose of the game was. For me, I was looking for the stripped back heart of the problem, a Zen approach if you like. What I realised was that the most basic aim of the game was to ensure I hit the ball with the paddle as often as possible; not to earn points, or to hit "bricks". In fact, those things were distractions. They almost took away from the game.


From that point I simply focused on that one aim, and, surprise surprise, I discovered that not only was the game a series of challenges that created a loop (ie, once a player finished level 33, the game went back to level 1 with the score intact) but that the high score was, in fact, without limit. From a high score of, at best, 10,000 points, I went on to give up and retire on 1,450,000, having worked through the series of challenges hundreds of times.


All through thinking about the game differently.


And that's what I love about your approach. When you strip back everything, why should choosing to end a life with dignity be a crime? Suicide is a crime, as is attempted suicide, I think. You take away religion and government, strip it right back, but you include personal responsibility to friends and family. It's such a clear assessment of the problem. The clearest I've read, and that's why I hope more people read it.


But you can't beat city hall, and you CERTAINLY can't beat God and those that believe in him/her. They have suckered us into believing that choosing death is wrong. But can they explain why it's wrong? It's an extension, in the Catholic Church at least, of the every sperm is sacred routine. If you ask why, it always comes back to God, and if god doesn't exist, they have a HUGE credibility problem.


There's a great scene in the old US series called Kung Fu, with David Carradine, where he is walking with a companion and they see a man about to jump off a bridge to his death. Caine's companion says "Shouldn't we save him" and Caine says "How can you know what he's experiencing, how can you say that death may not be the best thing for him" or words to that effect.


Any anti euthanas-ist who has ever taken a pain killer should be ashamed of themselves.

Learning to act right (17)… Matters of love

Learning to act right (17)… Matters of love


Torrey Orton
Nov 8, 2010



Matters of love provide daily opportunities for practicing ethical behaviour. Intimate relationships are among our most desired and needed life foundations. In and through them we achieve or seek a large range of other needs. Wherever modernity passes, these relationships are endangered by powerful internal and external forces.


So, 1/2 marriages will have the experience of total relationship breakdown and starting over again (or not – also a decision). This involves, among other things, a delicate dance of hope and pragmatism played out to the music of our needs asserted and acknowledged, engaged and resisted – all for a good reason: no one other can wholly meet our needs. That doesn't stop us hoping they will! This hope is fuelled by the process of negotiating the unequal quantities of dominance and submission required to construct a workable whole for both parties – this thing called an intimate relationship.


The story below catches many of the conflicting needs that pave the way to relationship development and sustainability, or not. It is the effort that offers the learning for us. The honesty of the description provides the material.


Learning to do the right thing: Matters of love
I met my husband when I went to university at the age of 17. With all the enthusiasm of the young we had sex, fell in love, lived together, got engaged and at 22 I was married. This was a marriage based on sex and good food. We had nothing else in common and at the age of 27 with a 2 year old and a 6 week old baby I found myself a single mother. For the past 25 years my life has consisted of work, study and raising children. Early in my single life I had thought I could find love but I was bitter, angry, and distrustful - not attractive features.


So at 52 I fell in love. I had known this man for a number of years through my work. We met on occasion for breakfast and to talk work and usually ended up talking of all manner of things. Though the relationship had always been professional the rapport was comfortable. Then he asked me to dinner. His invitation and insistence told me this was more than a professional rendezvous. The dinner went for 4½
hours. When I think back to that night all I can remember is him and me, I have no recollection of anything else in the restaurant. The conversation was easy and varied and none work related. Here was an intelligent, attractive man who was interested in me at all levels.


I knew he was married, but I let myself believe his marriage was over and that all he needed to do was "sort out the logistics". How SMS and e-mail has changed the face of romance. What in the past took weeks of furtive phone calls and dates to say seems to be said in days. Things that you would never say out loud can be typed and sent with ease. It was exciting and sexually arousing in a way that I had never experienced.


Then the relationship moved to the physical. How nervous do you think I was? The last time I had a lover I was in my early 40s and though fit and healthy things are not where they used to be. I know love is just a cocktail of hormones that combine to make you form an attachment, but I will always remember how caring and considerate he was of me. I don't believe any man has treated me with such respect or tenderness.


Through all the excitement of the past weeks sitting heavily in the back of my mind has been his wife. When I separated, my husband had had an affair with his secretary and for years I have been able to say "he left me for the secretary"; he was the wrong doer, which gave me a sense of righteousness. In fact, we divorced because we had a bad marriage that made neither of us happy. We communicated on the most basic level, had differing values and life expectations. We used sex as a bargaining tool. My life is richer and happier for not being married to my ex- husband and my children more enlightened and happy people.


I find a man I feel worthy to love and who I think could love me and he is married. I have never wanted to be the other woman, partly because of my own experience but also I believe women shouldn't do that to other women. I could continue to have an illicit affair ignoring the consequences to his family, and my own dignity to satisfy a lost need for intimacy but I know it is not right. I don't want to be the cause of his wife's heartache and I want a relationship that is open, honest and conducted in the open light of day. I want him make the right decision about his marriage because he is unhappy, not because of me. I have been conflicted because I am 52, and it has taken me 25 years to fall in love again; will I miss an opportunity that may never occur for me again and end up a lonely old cat woman. Is it right to do what I know is wrong in the pursuit of intimacy long forgotten. I know it is not.


Here is the rub! I fall in love with a man battling the same dilemma. He wants to do the right thing and while I struggle with my own impasse, he has the courage to articulate what is right thing to do and I know he is right. So he is going to sort out his "shit", whatever that means. I don't know what I am expected to do. Will I wait? Does he want me to wait? Will I try to find love on the internet now I have experienced it and will I lose this desperate feeling knowing the right decision has been made?


Today I wish I could be unethical with ease but I know I won't respect myself. Any relationship we may have had will be doomed if it starts this way. That doesn't make me feel any better.


Note – the author remarked that it had taken about 40 minutes to write this story once she allowed herself to see she had a live ethical learning in her heart. The search for a topic had gone on for weeks til that moment.

Learning to act right (15)… Performance management up close

Learning to act right (15)… Performance management up close
Torrey Orton
Nov 3, 2010


Mick's Case – unavoidably conflicted retrenchment


It's easy these days to find stories of corporate malfeasance on large and small scales. So the world of business, which some think is outside the realm of ethics, is one rife with ethical challenges and short on ethical exemplars. The following is one candidate for exemplar status. Its power resides partly in the persistence of the main agent, Mick, and partly in the unavoidable complexity of the situation – performance management.


One meaning of an 'unavoidable complexity' is that there is no exit without carrying some of the dirt on you, as much inside as out. One reason there are few public examples is that ethical people tend also to be self-deprecating and so their stories remain only in the hearts and minds of those directly affected. Is it unethical to promote one's ethicality?! How could others learn from them?


Context - based on discussion June, 2003

 In 2003 Mick was opening a new franchise in an established retail / wholesale field. He had six months to reach break-even, and with an upward trend in place towards profitability. The current figures were promising. If successful, the franchisor would hand him a number of other opportunities on a platter. If unsuccessful, he would lose money, face and a future. He had been recently retrenched from corporate life himself and did not want to return to it. This was a very small business. That means all and every aspect is directly managed by the owner(s), especially difficult people issues like the following. No HR department, legal staff, salaries clerks, etc.


The small initial staff was handpicked for sales competence. One of them, Jean, was a mid-40's woman with background in the industry and track record in retail. However, over the first 6 weeks of operation, she had become less and less effective in converting prospects to sales. She paid too much attention to details of customers' product selection, disregarded prospects with much greater sales potential and was unpredictable in work attendance. Other staff, especially Mick's number two Jim, were beginning to remark Jean's short-comings, including her impact on sales. Mick was feeling the heat of both his own perceptions of her and Jim's emerging perceptions of his management competence. Jim had some stake in the outcome because equity participation for him was just around the corner of their passing the start-up test.


Jean appeared to have some personal issues which affected her work. Her children were in Perth and she was palpably uncertain and anxious in her dealings with people at work – staff and customers. Mick sensed she was in a fragile state. However, so was the business. Mick himself had recent experience of "Stalinist" management in large enterprises and very much saw himself as an opponent of that style. It was a very painful situation for him to appear "Stalinist", especially to himself.

Action

Nevertheless, Mick felt he had to let Jean go. A replacement had been found and was scheduled to start Saturday. Mick decided to retrench Jean on Friday. This was in keeping with the 3 month trial period of her employment contract. The payout was generous from the contract's viewpoint. His approach was to hand Jean her retrenchment notification and benefits at the close of business that day. He acknowledged her contribution so far and pointed out the reasons for retrenchment and expressed his concern at having to take this action.


Mick is troubled, still. First, he is aware that any retrenchment is violent for the retrenched. Second, he wonders if this one may not have been extremely violent from Jean's viewpoint considering her overall fragility - maybe a last straw kind of situation? Third, he wondered about his own contribution to this situation: did he make a hiring mistake in the first instance which exposed her to challenges she couldn't meet in her current condition? And, fourth, he didn't want to see himself as someone who does violence to others, though he knows that the viability of the business required it at that time.


July 25, 2010 email from Mick about my treatment of his work above


You give me too much credit. The replacement was organized in the background. I also had to balance up the supplier angle as they had a hand in finding Jean. And, yes, we did let her go. She was NOT up to the task. She should not have been there in the first place and the longer the situation went on the more it reflected on the total organization. I would like to think she was treated as well as could be done; but Torrey it was still a brutal act. Such acts occur when you take the time to "look and respect" staff. Whether or not they can do the job is an overlay on top of this.

As an addendum we had another one in the last 12 months. Greg – mid 50's, working in a small goods factory after he had been retrenched from a shipping company some years ago. His current employer was relocating to the other side of the city. He was looking for another job and he was recommended to us by a supplier (who we later found out had a relationship with Greg's daughter).


We sent Greg on a course – investment $4K. He appeared slow so we gave him more time. We spent time in explaining things we had gone over a number of times previously. He was not up to it so we set a deadline of 3 weeks and if no progress was made he would leave. After 3 weeks he had to leave. His performance was noted by customers and staff. I spoke to him at lunchtime and he left with a cheque straight away.


I later found out that that very morning he had refinanced his house. Knowing this, would we have done anything differently? NO.

 

Appreciation (30) … Water days

Appreciation (30) … Water days

Torrey Orton

Nov. 2, 2010

A different Australian nature, a wet one. We did waterfalls two days ago, as many as we could get into a 6 hour driving window – Lal Lal, Sailors and Trentham – spurred by a 3 inch rainfall in our backyard and a BOM-enhanced confidence that the outer plains and hills got up to 5 inches. The Lal Lal in the link and that below are seriously different. My pic is 311010 a day after the big drop. Trentham was like this by higher by 10 metres and ½ again the water volume. Lal Lal swished, Trentham thundered, Sailors burbled from two distinct rivulets coming over the same cliff edge. Interestingly to me, the pic does not capture how muddy the water actually was, as many in the link do not either. Probably trashy photog work by me. I am not alone. Turn your screen on end for the next minute.

The drive, totalling 300ks, was pocked for me by incessant glimpses to one side of the road and the other looking for water. It took a while to realise what was happening. I needed to see water in the fields and woods, knowing that it must be there and that it could be ten years again before I would see it (and, I now realise while writing, that ten years may not be there for me to do so). I yearned for it – the sight of water on land. I don't know that I've viscerally yearned before, but the word is right though I've never spoken or written it. I must have learned it in others' speech and writing.

Ten years of drought has meant very little water on land. What appeared sank so quickly out of sight it often did not even bring stream beds back to a watery life even for a few days. We've walked a dozen stream/river beds of sand and rock, looked for a slight run-off in dry creeks. I've often thought I was fully habituated to the great Australian dry and flat. Yesterday tells me I'm not I've just been hankering slyly for the rolling and the wet. My perception of being in the rolling wet yesterday was enhanced measurably by the amount of introduced greens along the way – exotic trees and food crops which a spring in northern hemisphere always produces. Trentham / Daylesford/Lal Lal are rolling and presently wet.


This yearning comes in company with my many wonders about things past and struggles at the moment about how much of the future to devote to them – to focussing them, refining them, rediscovering them. My water worries must be an edge of this need arising from my long pleasure in places, especially the natural ones or the nature in places not so natural like the trees of Paris or Beijing. There is something unfinished – missed? – there in my old places. Next year US and Europe – the first looking back seeking to tie off something(s)? … the second a back (to France) as a step towards futures spent there in part.


Or perhaps my flow is deeper than that.

Learning to act right (13)… Promiscuous paranoids

Learning to act right (13)… Promiscuous paranoids
Torrey Orton
October 27, 2010


Among some men in the 20 to 40 age range there's an unexpected result of being in the binge drinking / drugs and sex scene. It only arises when they part the scene for a more constant form of relationship…sometimes their first real love. They appear on my therapeutic doorstep with obsessive fantasies that their new girlfriend is having it off with any guy they say hello to or, more particularly, any guy they were once close to. This is aggravated if the girlfriend has a history somewhat like their own – one of apparently disinterested sex in one of the principle social forms recognised as 'normal': one nighters and friends with privileges, or its more honest moniker - fuckbuddies.


Their presenting "mental health problem" is hyper-vigilant jealousy with anger punctuations which threaten relationship health, or their partner's. In other words, they are on the verge of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in their minds. The driver, as usual with OCD, is an apparently inescapable dilemma or conflict which attacks the individual's self-concept.


The binge sex dilemma looks roughly like this: the guy develops obsessive imagery / thoughts about the partner's probability of being seduced (or re-seduced!) by another guy; this is accompanied sometimes by acute self-denigration about being unlikely to be able to compete with the imagined seducer's attractions; the guy also imagines that his partner is in fact positively disposed to seduction if given the slightest encouragement by the irresistible seducer.


Treatment is simple except for the hidden dilemma within the picture above. Exposure and CBT work fine, but do not touch the dilemma which is lodged in the male self-image. The guy knows that all guys are roughly like him, at least in his general social network (pubs, clubs, etc., on weekend nights). Anyone female is fair game and may consider him to be fair game in turn. But the male self-image says the women are sluts and guys are players, or hotties, or choose your self-approbation of preference and enter here.


This valuing system means that any girlfriends who come out of the binge social system are players, too, which leaves the guys at best on an equal moral footing with the gals. But that's not what they really think, despite sexual equity in the binge play space. This part of the treatment requires confronting at least the present equality of indulgence across genders*. It's a hard burnishing of a tarnished esteem. Not a few clients have choked on the way, though all have come through so far.


If the girlfriend does not originate in the scene, then she may find herself treated like a prospective player because that is boyfriend's default position on women (underneath the sexual equity cover). Girlfriend, meanwhile, cannot easily be told boyfriend is/was a player with a dance card the length of a wishfully extendable appendage.


I guess that various aspects of this valuing and behavioural world contribute to the rampant uncertainty and diffidence about relationships which pass before me daily in therapy. This is expressed through conflicting needs: one, for certainty that a relationship will be inviolable and one for certainty that escape is always possible with minimum damage (itself usually expressed as financial – the only certain entity in the relationship universe because it is totally abstract and so can harbour any meaning allocated to it!). Listening to would-be and actual couples struggle to denominate their contributions to the joint exercise of a shared future is often pathetic. When did finance ever reduce paranoia?


I think this works similarly for gay as straight men, with appropriate gender distinctions in their partners. See this post for an example.


*none of this means that equity and equality in sex are achieved without various infractions of good taste, respect, or activities in the violence domain, since being players does not grant a free pass to civility. To an extent it prohibits real civility, and respect is out of the question, for both self and others.

“Mentally competent” and “asking for death” – can I rationally choose death?

"Mentally competent" and "asking for death" – can I rationally choose death?
Torrey Orton
October 20, 2010


Decisionmaking and death – irritated reflections on Ahmed, Gray and others.


"balance-sheet" suicide and "rational" suicide – way stations in the argument about how a choice to die can be justifiable. This argument hangs partly on an undiscussed dispute about what a 'rational' decision is. It swings back and forth because rational thinking is persistently misunderstood as affect free thinking. The standard model is reflected in Ahmed's (TheAGE, Oct 7, '10) discussion, which leaves him stuck and indecisive.


Stuck
I've been stuck for two weeks in this misunderstanding, too, which from my present perspective is no problem because I cannot influence it. I am clear myself where I stand on my own access to effective self-destruction. The details matter some. Nigel Gray's in THE AUSTRALIAN, Oct 6, 2010 alternatives, for example, are quite attractive to my needs to pre-empt an unfortunate death. But a well refined approach to what a good argument for my euthanasia should be will not increase my access to it. That portal is blocked now by a few others' (lifer kooks and gutless pollies) beliefs that I should not have it. By the way, by their default to inaction, the gutless pollies of course cast themselves as supporters of the kook believers. The pollies are a very special class of banal believers – swaying in the intemperate breezes of the various kooks (individual and institutional) for fear of losing something. That fear costs them their integrity and legitimacy, and the rest of us our representation.


Two rationalist fantasies
There are two rationalist fantasies employed in the euthanasia debate: both to the detriment of my rights.

1- that we can and should be able to make rational decisions about our deaths, unclouded by irrational affect; and,

2-that we can only make irrational decisions about euthanasia, because all reason on matters of death is always clouded by 'mental problems' about being close to death – feeling down about being ill, fearing our decline and tormenting ourselves with our pathetic state(s); that is, we are mentally ill if dying, and so unable to decide.

The emotional factors are not understood within the range of normal human emotions. So, the depression, sadness, etc., felt by the dying and the-in-danger-of-dying are treated as pathological rather than normal responses to perceived (and objectively real) dangers. Ahmed acknowledges this implicitly by referring to dialysis research where personal control emerged as a key determinant of patient depression and connecting it to related Oregon findings about euthanasia choosers and oncologists' observations of cancer patients. He then confuses his discussion by calling this mix of feelings and needs "personality factors". While his personal position on patient decision-making is never made explicit, it is suggested by his use of the term "saved" in discussing suicide by aged, near terminal patients.


Rational decisions = ?
What do we know about decision-making by everyday humans (not rats or undergraduates, please)? Simply, that rational or logical decisions mainly exist in digital systems like ICT, positivist economics and its social science affiliates, and the foundations of classical physics and chemistry. The latter have been withdrawing from the fantasy that a number is a discrete item, that data are clearly discernible from each other, since Einstein. And data clear or foggy do not, it is generally agreed, have feelings or thoughts except perhaps in some delicate metaphysics (electrons feel their neighbours and scurry off to a safe place at a nano-distance; planetary attraction is a species of elective affinity?).


Behavioural economics is the belated acknowledgement that Adam Smith was right about economy – it's not the numbers that matter, except to bankers and even not to them when they consider their "quality time". There's a place in human development where an increase in quantities of livelihood produce no gain in quality of living. Many of us are there now.


Judgment = intuition
Decision-making is making judgments. These are integrating intuitions, summarising whole experiences into actions. They do not follow iterative, additive pathways except in expostfacto reconstructions of the sort used in "evidence-based" medicine and its allied affiliates. Try mapping the decision steps in a serious life issue on a decision mapping system like this: http://www.austhinkconsulting.com/ . You will still end up with a judgment which cannot be rationally explained except by reference to supposedly non-rational, emotive factors. Judgments express values in relation to important facts. Important facts are the valued ones.


Individual rights only available fully to a group
If our rights were pure universal truths they would just be. When they are contested, as with euthanasia, abortion and just war, for example, their limited claims are made apparent in the act of their dispute. If they were pure and universal they would be substrate, assumptions, of our life processes. The pointy end of the rights stick these days is individual rights. The upshot of the contest in matters socio-economic, so far, is that a few get to monster the many in the name of the many's right to choices they cannot make.


Nigel Gray argues for euthanasia from a personal choice perspective. He stretches his case just as egregiously as he claims the pro-lifers do theirs, but maybe not for the same effect. He proposes a pure right of individual choice on the basis that "..this is one's own business, no one else's." He certainly has a right to think this, but that does not constitute a right to die with no consideration for the effects on others. It's an irritated right with which I sympathise but cannot honour as any more rational than those who say I do not have it (because it belongs to God for instance.)


Putting my hand up for certainty
A string of ways of dying from self inflicted euthanasia to physician assisted euthanasias – the actually occurring choice-based deaths - sit inside the over-arching fact that (so far) we will all die if we live. Euthanasia already exists de facto in physician assisted deaths, either by legally mandated turning off life-support or providing assured decline into death with family-agreed terminal palliations (morphine comas). This is where the individual choice wheels meet the highway of life – namely, with a hand-up if you want it, and sometimes if you do not. I could do with a bit more certainty in my hands.

Appreciation (29) … Ant flurries, or termites?

Appreciation (29) … Ant flurries, or termites?
Torrey Orton
Oct 5, 2010


We were walking the local hills on the first real day of spring. That is, the first day two plus layers were not required on top by the effects of wind-chill at 15 degrees C or less (which is what we've had at sea level for three months straight). An hour and a half into the ramble, we were on the home stretch of a circle route around what passes for a water course with falls here. It had two virtues: it was 50 minutes from home and there was audible and visible water in it. And, we had not been there for 10 years or so, having given ourselves over to more highly invested (in time and distance) wanders to find ramble-worthy spots. Particularly lately, there are quite a few with major water and falls*.

 
As we were coming down a modest decline I noticed to the left of the path a small flurry of fluttering things which on first look I thought were spring seeds in dispersal flight. They were rising on a slight breeze – not enough to sustain the visible activity. But the numbers were constant and dense enough to seem, in some long unexercised memory of things past, a snowlike event.

 
A silly perception in fact since the temperature was 23C. Less silly in their mimicking the wandering rise and fall of big-flake snow in quiet winter air. The storm effect was intensified be a mid afternoon sun highlighting the individuals in its 45 degree rays.

 
So, I looked more around than up and spotted 10 meters off the track a termite-looking mound on which the storm seemed to centre. Only getting closer did I see the newly winged ones walking up the brownish, one meter mound from its base. They were slowly unlimbering their wings as they climbed, ending with a preparatory flap or two before jumping off on their one-way ticket wedding flights. It was one of those wonders of nature so far from my understanding that I'm still not sure who they were - ants or termites – partly because I did not know to look for the distinguishing differences!


* A week earlier we had visited one of the rivers burned out by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. Many of these once camping and walking areas are still closed to public use, though one can now drive down the access roads. Along one such we saw one of our favourite cascades on the Murrindindi River running in full flow from the recent rains. But it was unveiled. Where for a couple decades of regular walking in near rainforest conditions along that part of the river yielded varying intensities of rushing waters over tumbled rock surfaces, we now found bare rocks and remnant trunks, everything open to the eye made prying by fire. A new falls, with a waiting period of 20-30 years to get back to 'normal' is probably beyond our allocated time….so we will learn to like the unveiled.

6 Views of death (3) – ‘Normal’ ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.

6 Views of death (3) – 'Normal' ends of life: the self-extermination challenge.


Torrey Orton


Oct.1, 2010

My life / death view: I am sure I have a right to live and die in as much as I can choose to do so. I did not choose to be born, but choose everyday to stay alive. I'm aware that I may not get to choose when to die, but I certainly will die. The same cannot be said for my birth; it was not certain. Like my birth, my death will be in the hands of others in some respects, the least of which, from my point of view, will be cleaning up afterwards, just as it was for my birth.

I deal three days a week with younger people (20's to 40's) who think /feel their lives are not worth living for various amounts of time, with regular recurrences and typical shared origins in excruciatingly inescapable traumas. Also typically, they have self-administered palliative problems (addictions) and often have irregular employments, housing and similar signs of fragmented lives. Quite a few sustain professional presences of great sophistication and substantial achievement. I have no trouble believing it's too soon for them to go. How successful I am in conveying that conviction into self-affirmation is a session by session challenge.


…unlucky not to die well.

 As for myself, on the other hand, I am quite sure I want to have the choice of dying when I see fit. That means dying before my natural time, possibly. That I may die as I write will do fine as my time, should it be so. It's a ponderous decline into multiple incapacities, worst of all a mental decline, which I will choose to avoid if I can. Given diagnoses of certain kinds, I would initiate a process of self-extermination, I hope. That 'hope' expresses my awareness that I may not be strong enough, which I may get a chance to test, if I'm unlucky not to die well. Next to a lingering death, a failed effort at pre-empting it is my greatest fear. I'd like some certainty in my own hands. Either this will be legal – e.g. running a car into an immovable object – or, at the moment, illegal by amassing a sufficient quantity of appropriate medications.


I do not have the time to read much of what's written in the so-called 'debate' about euthanasia. I don't really care about much of the detail, or to make arguments in detail which I am intellectually competent to do. I have patients to care for and other things to think. Not to write at all on this is dangerous and part of me knows that the fools in the religions and the politics of late capitalism and post-modernity are likely to lock away pre-emptive opportunities I am as certain I deserve as they are I do not. That's the making of rages, and even the fools I just mentioned must know these are growing day by day, just maybe not in the minds of people like me.


Natural right to choose…

 I know I have a natural right to self-extermination, but not a legal one here in Australia. There are those who would say I have no natural right, either, but they do not check their assumptions about the sources of right, being stuck in a system of presumptive answers which is historical, not 'natural'. This system is the Abrahamic religions of the Book. I really do not mind their believing what comes with allegiance to The Book, including endless to-the-death struggles about whose version is correct, true or The Word. I am amazed that a profoundly clear truth, like that the religions propose, should produce so much distress for believers, but not amazed enough to want to help them out by adding myself to one of their ranks. How could I choose?

"But our right to choose is important and is too often deliberately forgotten or conveniently ignored by those who evangelise around "the right to life"...." .Geoff Gallop, in The AGE 28092010.

The Australian politics of life-death are this: a few (about 20 %) of the electorate in Australia are prepared to fight (to the death?) to preserve the right of every conception to come to term and every adult to be constrained from dying on their own terms, assisted or not. The latest pro-euthanasia figures are 76% in favour. The 20%ers get a larger electoral influence because the field of voters is finely poised between the major parties and small factors shift small margins in the most finely poised electorates. Electorally correct and ethically unfair


Fundamentalist convictions

 So what part of the anti-euthanasia arguments are just tactics to cover fundamentalist convictions? Such tactics might be expressions of moral outrage, pseudo-scientific or "evidence-based" facts and ad hominem assaults demonstrating other non-believers' attitudes descend from character faults or notional immoralities.… Where such tactics do not work there are only implacable demands or refusals on offer.


An example of apparent evidence-based arguments is Dr. Ruth Gawler in TheAGE, Letters 29/9/2010. In a self-described backflip on euthanasia, she notes that cancer patients "initially … are often confused in their thinking." She doesn't say anything about what happens to the initially confused after some work. Competent cancer treatment like the Gawlers provide must help clarity, among other things. Viz- people who start confused do not have to remain that way.


She adds to her evidence against euthanasia that population issues make getting clear about good reasons for dying unlikely. This is an argument carried by her professional status, not any clarity of fact or causal connection.


Because we can do it…

 Underlying the pro-life argument is a scientistic lie – that unnatural efforts must be made to preserve lives – at the beginning or the end of the life span, and in some cases before it (IVF) because we can do it scientifically. I don't think this is what the gods recommended in their times. Once again there was a sad letter pleading for families to let their elders die when ready and to do the legal homework to minimize useless resuscitations. (TheAGE 29/9/10).


This reflection yields another: that there may be a need to achieve something for my life in / thru my death, a clarifying of the moral ground…which invites a recollection of possible causes for choosing to end life, eg.: (1) to save the life of another; (2) to prevent a useless decline into a terminal outcome; (3) as a weapon of struggle (martyrdom); (4) to save precious resources for others (cousin of #1, but with no specific other(s) in mind or view).


Two self-destructions

 Finally, let's notice a matter of origins. There are two self-destructions: the Greek one and the Roman one. Euthanasia, the good death, is Greek; suicide, the bad death, is Latin, as are its familiars matricide, fratricide and patricide. But a death by one's own hand is self (sui) killing (cide), whatever the labeling. Some deaths we choose to label nicely and others not. The choice is a discrimination between those with an acceptable rationale and those without one (in the eyes of some others). I don't know that the Greeks and Romans differed that much on matters of life and death. The choice is moral, not factual of course, leaving aside the problem of determining if a death is by accident or intent.


A song comes along with this thought – "Suicide is painless.." and reminds me of the absurdity of life and death, except when we can give meaning to it. Generally the meaning achieved by making our own choices exceeds that by following others' choices for us. Perhaps the worst situation is that where making meaning seems impossible but action is required which only produces absurdity. There's a literature around this dilemma. Yossarian, where are you? Slaughter House 5, Catch 22, Mash...

Appreciation (28) … taking care and giving care challenges

Appreciation (28) … taking care and giving care challenges
Torrey Orton
Sept.27, 2010



To my co-workers in psychotherapy:


I noticed recently that caring is an important core part of therapy…not because I had not been being caring. The research on therapeutic effectiveness shows a 30% contribution from the therapeutic relationship alone, regardless of therapeutic paradigm or technique(s). The core of effective relationship is perceived care, arising from relevant therapist attention, interest, etc. 'Relevant' means felt by clients as directed accurately towards their needs at the moment.


Certainly I vary / waiver in my caring at times, but underneath all is unconditional positive regard as I understand it. My patients should feel, not always at the same moment, that I am caring about them and taking care of them. They need both to be taken care of adequately. If my care taking is not felt as caring, as specific to them and personal, it will not work in therapy.


If you have not been in therapy, you may have experienced care-taking from personal trainers, nurses, doctors, and other health providers which felt careless in the personal regard sense – as emerging from an automaton, or worse, someone who really doesn't like being with you. The effect may be to make you doubt the technical quality of the service provided, and that may inhibit its effectiveness, even if declared to be 'best practice', best of class, or similar marketised appreciations.


Unmarked detour: I did not expect to come to the following observation here but this is how writing goes. It is already noticed in Australia that the increase in non-native English speakers in aged care and some standard nursing is leading to a decline in perceived care because some care givers cannot communicate adequately with their patients. Similar is sometimes noted in general practice, and certainly the written competence of some NESB* medical practitioners is well below local high school graduation level.


This is not to impugn the intentions of care-givers. Rather it is to highlight that care – given and received – is expressed and expected differently in different cultures. Learning these differences and being able to produce them naturally is often a more than one generation's efforts away from an immigrant. The first level of that learning is linguistic, but not sufficient by itself. Many NESB immigrant groups in Australia have long had aged care facilities for own community patients for this reason.


Back on the road again. Herein lies a primary psychotherapeutic boundary issue – that taking care and caring seem inextricably intertwined. Taking care is analytically separable from the personal connection of caring / being cared for, but for the patient it is not. Nor is it separable for therapists, though efforts to do so by adopting certain distancing attitudes to patients suggest it can be. Care taking feels like it is caring, lacking which it feels mechanical (you're giving me a treatment rather than treating me) or experimental (you are using me / seeing me as an object of study). Even behavioural interventions for eating disorders, panic, phobias, etc., require a caring relationship to be effective because patient motivation is the key variable in interventions aimed to bring certain behaviours like binges under control.


People in treatment for such visibly behavioural troubles are there precisely because their self-control has fallen into the hands of a destructive habit. Habits are behavioural recipes for achieving aims without thought. They systematically solve recurrent problems with systemically repeatable solutions. They embody recurrent motivations (energy to achieve needs / wants). Motivation, in turn, stands on the back of self-confidence, self-worth, self-efficacy – all products of appropriate developmental challenges and relevant, timely appreciation by others, parents first among them. The therapist's task is to rehabilitate the injured selves. The first step is care for the patients. Doing so both suggests more or less explicitly that the patient is worth rehabilitating and that they have some of what's required already in them – their worthiness!


The danger of care, however, is its personal character and the potential for it to feel or be extended outside the therapy space and time. The boundaries for constraining care to the spacetime of therapy may constrain it out of reach for some clients…that such boundaries are needed is certain, but how they should be configured is a case by case, and often moment by moment, therapeutic task. Their importance is reflected in the articulation of professional guidelines for boundary construction and typical dangers of shoddy construction. Breaching some of these is a matter for de-registration. Case by case, moment by moment caretaking is delicate work.

Linguistic note: we speak of care givers and caretakers as if they were the same thing, though 'caretaker' has a more manorial, landed sense to it, while in ordinary usage 'care givers' are workers in respite or aged care country. How did those two usually opposed verbs come to signify the same action? Perhaps, the 'take' suggests a focus on the worker, an attitude necessary to effective care giving; the 'give' focuses on the receiver – the patient or client.

*NESB – non-english-speaking background

Perceptions and truth(s)

Perceptions and truth(s)
Torrey Orton
Sept. 23, 2010


I am struck these days by the various ways we can be deceived in our grasp of the world, and ourselves. This is apart from the consciously deceptive intent of our public world(s) and the conscious intent to create perceptions which our various artists demonstrate for us. There is also the unconscious distortion of our perceptions which arises from our premonitions of them in the form of 'previews' in the media, the reports of others about them, the interactions between the two and so on.

 For instance of the later, there was the Millau Viaduc in my mind from quite a lot of exposures at a distance, among them the BBC series of great modern constructions, a web page full of site clips and photos, some local (regional French) tourist encouragements – all contributors to a sense I knew what I was going to see. Almost all were taken from the level of the bridge or above. Our approach to the reality was from the level of the river Tarn 250 meters below the road way. Grand enough at that, but not the hanging in air glory that the previews supported. I was not stunned, shocked, shaken, uplifted….but thought I should have been, which added to the letdown. It did not occur to me that 90 minutes spent beforehand in the Roquefort cheese caverns 25 Ks down the road might have constrained my expectations to things just in front of me.

The reverse of this was my first sight of The Nightwatch through a small door on an oblique angle to the picture in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam 40 years ago… a view which amplified the commanding stature of the work, and which in turn was intensified by its unconscious comparison with two existing images in my mind: (1) that of the picture from an art history slide show screened in a format close to that of the real thing and (2) its micro version in the text book of the same course. Then I felt visually completed, fulfilled in an expectation I did not know I had until reality rewarded it with fact.Yet another access to the perils of perception is the very common experience of seeing something which at a certain moment looks like something it certainly is not. The rooster on the road is a web-honoured example of this, including its own self-test against variable perceptions.

Extending the avian theme, I saw a rosella of unlikely hues on the ground overlooking the Loddon River at Glen Lyon, Vic. a few days ago. This bird turned out to be a lichen infested rock declining in similarity to my first impression with every step closer to it. My focus of course was much more intent than the first glance which created the perception. My search for continuing likenesses to support that first glance moved with the insistence that self- justification demands. And, too, it was a very unlikely spot to find a solo rosella in the open, as my wife implicitly noted by immediately debunking my perception. I gave in two steps later, losing in the doing a hope that I had seen something normal in a very unusual way. Trouble is, it was wholly unusual and firmly no way. My point here, in case I lose it in short term memory glitches, is that it is very easy to see what we want / need where it is not. For my painter friends this is a good thing, for their work is to create what we can't see in what is there. Even a gathering of others may work against the clarification of the imagined when too much group membership is at stake in a threatened group perception. The research and experience on this tally fully for once.

So what is the effect of a world in which two kinds of realities are confused by misrepresentation? First the intimate is made public and then the public is made banal. Public intimacy is the content of "reality" TV …public banality is the censoring of human (and animal these days) realities like death, injury and other matters attracting notices of too dangerous to be seen without forewarning. Listen to police reporting road trauma, family violence, drunk violence, etc. Intention is the source of this misrepresentation – the intention to obscure our world and our worlds from each other. Among The effects are an untraceable paranoia, low grade fears that we are being got at…but by who? Obsessive vigilance sets in, with an air of preparation for battles. We know from the "fog of war" that persistent uncertainty in a context of potential threat is destabilising to selves and groups. The needs which are assailed by this dynamic are those for intimacy (love, care, etc.), affiliation (belonging, membership) and their facilitating ones (appreciation, acknowledgment, etc,).

The question is: is the misrepresentation intentional or consequential, or some of both? It really does not matter, except that apparently unintentional misrepresentation (deception) is an aggravated assault because it is unaccountable. The consequence is a sense of being either the authors of our own paranoia, or, as can be seen in exaggerated forms in cults and conspiracy theories (both which are massively facilitated by the Web), victims of veiled dangers. This effect is prominently on display in the US in the phantasies about Obama's origins believed by 20+% of the population, paralleled by the beliefs about alien visitors kept secret by the government, and the origin of 9/11 in the CIA, etc. Not surprising the Tea Party plays so well, hatched in a fog which we '60ers associate with another kind of tea.And, they tend to multiply and mutually reinforce. They are also untouchable by empirical truth, having emotional truths (the threats) already occupying the relevant brainspace.

 Woe are we, for these are the marginals. Woe are they because their leaders pre(a)y on and feed their paranoias. Under present conditions, the difference
between 'we' and 'they' becomes daily thinner.

Appreciation (27) … Learning to paint by painting

Appreciation (27) … Learning to paint by painting
Torrey Orton
Sept. 13, 2010


A client who is finding his way out of depression with a paintbrush was talking about his emerging experience of learning to hold the brush correctly. Though a graphic designer by trade, he's only recently started painting seriously. It's a gift he first glimpsed around age 5, but various things kept it out of the field of his life's play. Recently in a gulf between employments, he bought a painter's kit and started in.


He works at it three hours a day. Along the way he's learning the craft by doing. Brush wielding turns out to be a critical technical foundation. As he's learned to hold the brush ever further along handle, his view of the emerging picture has developed too. Grasping the handle just behind the brush, as if taking up a pencil, pulls the eye and body down into the picture. To see the point of application, to see the perception he was creating, he had to look around the brush tip.


I was sharing this progress with another painting client, who's further down the technique path. She noted that the shift from close to more distant application involved two other moves: standing while painting and painting from the shoulder not the wrist…demonstrating as she spoke with a solid but refined flourish of an imaginary brush …much as a conductor in a delicate slow movement in a classic.


….all of which put me in mind of my own painting career – for two summers between university years as an industrial painter, of schools at the time. . and what it took to learn to paint, especially "cutting in" or edging the boundaries of a surface; if attempted with too much precision, more slips occurred; a certain flourish lightly deployed cut the best edge, sweeping lightly in from the open spaces of the surface to the boundaries and then away again with each brush load. Most satisfying, even on recollection. There was a definite flow in the process, though we lacked the concept then. Or, rather, a flow was just what wasn't wanted in a painted surface, then or now!


By the way, this was edging in pre-masking tape times (late 1950's). Similar, but less delicate, flourishes were useful in coating the concrete block walls which made up the bulk of the paintable spaces with a 6cm bristle brush 15cm long and 4cm wide. Brush work was superior to rollers because the standard union contract of the time required them – brushing took longer. The technical argument was that brushing gave better filling of the rough surfaces. Compressed air spray guns were limited to painting obscure surfaces like the 15 meter high roof of the gym with aluminium based paint…. But I regress.


My emerging painter noted in passing that he can feel in the flow of his brush stroke that it is achieving the "look" he was seeking, that at once the body realises his unrevealed perception of the image he is producing. This has something to do with what is recently applauded as the muscle memory. The applause is only partially warranted since it takes the concerted effort of all muscles to train a few in a specific way, in other words a consciousness not just a body, arm or eyelids, among the subcomponents.


It has more to do with the relationship between perception and intention. Of this, more next week.

Back to the Anger (2)

Back to the Anger (2)
Torrey Orton
August 30, 2010


Anger is back on my emotional menu, more by its absence than its presence. Maybe I have slipped into a higher state of fundamentally being angry (in the here that, being here kind of way). But it feels more like a slip back into apathy, indifference, ambivalence, abstraction, depression? For some weeks now I've been struggling to write. This would be OK if it were a struggle, but it's not. It's a muddle. I'm in a muddle with me and my world, wondering if the feelings are mine projected or prompted and sustained by the world around me.


I have felt this coming, in much the way that HH was saying of himself recently: feeling short of energy, mixed motivation, apathetic to some extent, though not to the point of inactivity. Aikido practice disappeared into the space of French/Spanish things two months ago – I travelled for the first time in three years without a jo. It had been slowing for a couple of months, attrited by a solo training regime which needed the spark of submission to reinvigorate itself. I haven't forgotten aikido, but the inner push flags in the cool of Melbourne dawns. Don't ask about the warmth of winter arvos.


What's actually arrived? One thing is inexpressibly fierce thoughts about our leaders of many stripes and competences in many places. These thoughts have stopped me even as I write. So powerful is the commandment against thinking them that the prospect of public shame for doing so inhibits my language, and so my fingers (with which I write these days, not the 'pen' I would have written just now). After a couple days' pause in the space between fullstop and 'A', I can say these are thoughts of retributive justice. Trouble is, I'm untested at violences of the bodyful sorts and quail in the face of bodily threats unless provided in controlled environments like ice hockey or aikido, in which cases I love violence.


What's behind this arrival? Nothing new, but the gathered load of years of obsessive anger, which CB reminded me today was long gathering hair rather than action.


A year and some ago I proposed that

"Disregard makes investment in emotions unrewarding to their owners, but it doesn't reduce their energising sources. Often it intensifies them, or the owners' perception of them, which does just as well for outrage production."

I was wrong in the long term. For some, at some times, under some personal conditions the weight of others' disregard generates one's own disregard in return. Unfortunately this is not terribly instructive to the others. They do not feel the absence of ones regard for them or oneself.


Back to the anger.


Here Michael Leunig surmised a few weeks ago:

Perhaps we are witnessing a historic moment when our politicians are ceasing to advocate our intelligent concerns and are beginning to openly represent our madness.

Maybe that's not why I started aikido training (self-training) for the first time in three months today. Maybe it has been mostly me and only somewhat 'them' that I have slipped into torpid laxities – TV, eating/drinking in compulsive ways – which I've always had a taste for but they are both more and less powerful these recent days. Watched more often but for total less time.


In honour of my honouring a monthly performance target for 17 months, I'm posting this in the last days of August, way behind on my notional monthly target, yet still keeping myself in the game. Will I lift it or leave it?

Will I not vote*, again? No!

Will I not vote*, again? No!
Torrey Orton
July 28, 2010

It's voting time again. Last time (11/2007) I did not vote. Should I not vote, again?

Early in the emergence of democracy, Kant (on 30th September, 1784) wondered "What is enlightenment?" In that short musing he arrived at one of the conditions for public unenlightenment, as follows:

"… The remarkable thing about this is that if the public, which was previously put under this yoke by the 

guardians, is suitably stirred up by some of the latter who are incapable of enlightenment, it may subsequently 

compel the guardians themselves to remain under the yoke. For it is very harmful to propagate prejudices, 

because they finally avenge themselves on the very people who first encouraged them (or whose predecessors

 did so)…."

He seems to claim that a public, in its unenlightened state being in the "yoke", might make its "guardians" keep it unenlightened, keep it in the darkness of prejudice and the unthinking behaviour which blinds it to the realities of its times. That is, keep us under the yoke of tradition, etc. It might also be enlightened guardians themselves, corrupted by hard times, who encourage their brethren to peddle prejudices as enlightening


To read the commentators (who are among our "guardians", supposedly) on the present Australian election campaign, it's hard not to think that we are seeing other guardians, the politicians and some of the commentariat, knowingly keeping the public in the dark by dealing only in "prejudices". Aside from my increasing certainty that our collective ignorance, abetted by our guardians commitment to yoking us in their intramural power struggles, is growing, little else with useful foundations is on offer.


The socio-political context remains much the same as 3 years ago, but with intensified challenges (climate, financial, socio-economic, etc., etc.) and reduced commitment of public authorities, especially the political, to engaging them. There is no discourse but the spun world, hence there is no politics. There is a charade, with tragic undertones.


There is a discourse about life style matters of the rich and famous, modelling the deepest values of our culture to ourselves… and so on. Only two things challenge my commitment to note voting again. The seat of Melbourne has been vacated by a very competent and relatively spin-free Labour pollie, a candidate for membership of the enlightened guardians Kant mentions, who maybe got tired of being dragged by his unenlightened mates backwards into the twilight. This departure increases the chance that a green MP can be elected for the first time, since his replacement has none of the broader public respect that he attracted. As well, Greens are 7ish % off a senate seat quota in Vic, too.


While my overall sense is that it won't make a difference in the grand scheme if they get a seat or not, the small scheme may offer a poke in the eyes of the defective majors. That's hard to pass up since I can't get close enough to poke them personally without committing a crime, or an uproar, at least!


So, I will vote again, if for no other reason than to offer a slight aspirational hand up to acquaintances and friends whose hopes are greater than mine in the here and now that we're in.

Aude sapere**



*In November 2007 I wrote an article published in the now defunct New Matilda titled "I will not vote" arguing that voting in the Australian federal election was an undesirable collusion with the appearances of democratic process in undemocratic conditions. It was not warmly received, even by close acquaintances who were, and still are, more hopeful than I about the conditions for democracy here.


** 'dare to know,' 'have the courage, the audacity, to know.' Foucault, 1984 discussing Kant's challenge to those seeking enlightenment.