Appreciation (41) … I thought this was beyond me

Appreciation (41) … I thought this was beyond me
Torrey Orton
Dec. 7, 2011

Ungloved, two-handed catch

The waitress leaned across the small three-seater to recover a finished starters plate. On the way back she tipped my half full, long-stemmed glass of fine Hunter rose towards me from the middle of the table. I can't remember how my hands got to catching it in mid-fall as if it were a cricket ball being gloved by a wicket keeper. I didn't drop the catch but a few drops splashed the table between Jane and me without threatening cuffs or shirt fronts in their flight to the table cloth.


I was, till that moment, mostly renowned for doing the glass tipping myself and having to sop up large wine puddles across tables and floors at home, not counting those glasses – short stemmed and long - smashed irretrievably in the sink : around 1 every two months or so. There's something invigorating about finding a natural skill that had seemed lost forever, though I can't actually remember how my hands got from where they were on the table to the appropriate catching position. Reflexes improve momentarily; short term memory slides even further?? Compensation before capitulation.

Appreciation (40) …Old man’s prayer

Appreciation (40) …Old man's prayer*
Torrey Orton
Nov. 28, 2011

In sight and out of mind at the FCC

Saturday was the monthly prayer vigil against abortion day at the clinic. On our side were a measly 8 or so holding a large banner and chanting moderate offenses at the 100+ followers of Helpers of God's Precious Infants massed across Wellington Parade. I was there to show support (until sunk by a persistent downpour which left me swimming in my shoes) and collect potential players for an enlarged weekday presence in the face of the Helpers.


I was involved in collecting the last name and email when an old guy approached from the back seeking my attention. I turned enough to say I'd come talk to him when I finished. And so I did 3 minutes later, noting that I was approaching a guy short of my height and even shorter of my weight, but longer in days. He was clothed in an almost twin of one of my sports jackets (Germanic hounds-toothy sort of thing to compliment tans and such), trilby hat and wire-rimmed glasses of faintly 80's and a hand hold on a string of rosary beads.


As I came up he started to ask if it was OK for him to pray here. I said fine with me but I couldn't authorise him; he'd have to ask the others…and he volunteered to pray for me, too, as well as the souls in the clinic. I thanked him for the offer. Probably it was my fairly lurid red waterproof, relative towering over the herd on our side and my fairly clear age advance on the rest, too, which drew him to me.


Anyway, he started up walking back and forth in the neutral zone between the roadside white line and the clinic gate soundlessly working through the beads. Of our side, holding the banner and chanting, no one noticed and no one interrupted him. And there we were, infiltrated in broad daylight. As far as I know, prayer doesn't gain or lose power as a function of distance from its objects.


The real story here is power: that there's this power vacuum just waiting for users to appear with enough daring to claim it for themselves, as Charles and I originally did. The proof of its opportunity walked up and down until I left 15 minutes later – in sight and out of mind. The unsqueaky wheel needs no foil.


* A 'prayer' in Fertility Control Clinic security-speak is a pro-life protestor who only prays, as distinguished from protestors who pray and harass patients in moments of prayerful lapses.

Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action

Learning to act right (23)… tipping points – anger and action
Torrey Orton
Nov.16, 2011


A moment in the FCC defence frontline…


I lost it…my temper that is! About 8:30 last Wednesday morning I looked down the footpath towards the city just in time to see a couple coming along, the woman crying uncontrollably; her partner just behind her and a protestor ( "Purple Shirt" as she was called in TheAGE four days later) looking the woman in the face, seeing her crying and gesturing her away, and continuing to follow her towards the clinic gate with the standard "Save your little baby; you'll be a good mother" mantra beating on her back. As she almost always does to every patient. A perfect example of harassment of a visibly vulnerable patient.


The keyword is harassment – a perception of being persistently, repeatedly, verbally and visually attacked by another. I harassed back, stepping up to her (all 191cm/105kg to her pudgy 155cm) and pointing out as I came from 3 metres away "that is harassment; she was crying all the way and you saw her and continued anyway…" I can't remember how it ended but the whole sequence from go to no was 15 seconds. I became aware that I had been sucked in by her offense…enraged briefly, close to physical assault… and almost as the awareness arrived I was turning back from the protestor to see her colleague approaching…


In talking to the protest leader, David Forster, seconds after the event (which had drawn him towards me as if he were going to defend the harasser from me) I pointed out that she had harassed the patient and knew it, knew that the patient was already crying, had said no and been followed up by her partner in doing so. He started to run the Helpers of God's Precious Infants party line on the evil things done behind the clinic walls (which justifies their offer of "help" over any other consideration) until I interrupted with these facts. David accepts that this is harassment, knowing as he does that another male protestor has clearly drawn back from patients who arrive in tears. I also wondered to him: "Isn't harassing the weak unchristian?" to which he nodded assent with the scrunched look of a logically forced agreement.


Charles thought the elapsed time between my seeing the harassment and taking action was a couple of minutes…I thought a few seconds. Charles and the guard, Edward, had seen the same scene unfold, the guard more fully because he had noticed them coming before they got to the protestor…that the woman waited for her husband to catch up and was already crying, he having been completing a mobile call. TheAGE columnist Suzy Freeman-Greene's version appears here. It was built out of her own perceptions, and some of our three, gathered at the moment described.


I am surprised to re-learn (assuming I ever did really learn this) how unreliable my perception of live events can be, how open to multiple interpretations; how filled with material lacunae such that a report of the event would be more holes than whole. My contribution sprang from my interpretation of harassment, amplified by my lifetime revulsion at any bullying, but especially of the weak. I was perhaps able to pull back from my spring by a borderline awareness that I was about to bully the bully ("Purple Shirt") and so earn a placeholder status in my own ethical bestiary.


How easy it is for my reason to fly off in a rage where my righteousness rules the moment to moment equation of time seeking justification in worthy action. I'm speaking only of myself in this accusation. If it fits, feel free to join it.

Preface to a counter protest – observations on power and perception in public places

Preface to a counter protest – observations on power and perception in public places
Torrey Orton
Nov.7, 2011


The FCC protest site is a miniature power vacuum which allows and facilitates our access. It's almost as if we did not have to intervene as such…just show up. Which is what we did… to be received with slight apprehension / wonder by the occupiers of the two lane pathway. We had no authorisation other than our interest in the daily dramas played out there. We did, though, have an encouragement from a senior FCC staffer as a jumping off point for our fronting up the first day four months ago now.

We came to do a job we did not know, which did not exist and, for whatever it turns out to be, we could easily be blamed and quite likely not congratulated (it seemed at the time). The only certainty still is we will not be paid. We really did not know what we were doing. We did know we wanted to do something to reduce patient harassment by protestors. We created the job somewhat by a default to our personal role preferences – me somewhat more combative and Charles somewhat more consultative.
The human scale of this theatre made our entrance moderately and manageably threatening to the others and us*. We talked to people immediately person to person, face-to-face (unmediated by banners and territories). Our starting place was wonder about what is going on there…how they all see the daily drama. We could see it but not interpret it without their perspectives and meanings. The personal entry level allowed close examination of all their behaviours to test the polarised interpretations (of each's perfidy in the other's eyes, of course) which leapt out first.

We started from a clear position that we side with the FCC. This became more explicit as I tended to spend all my time with the guards and Charles all his with the protestors, especially the one most open to our interest in understanding their experience. I have a workable relationship with him but not as deeply founded on hearing his views or putting mine. I did test with him the potential impact of a shaming threat I was considering if necessary to balance the patient harassment equation on the Wellington Parade footpath stage. Its potential impact was big enough.A few regular passers-by (local inhabitants mostly) inquired who I was in the play, or more sharply, what I was – 'lifer' protestor or 'choicer' FCC patient rights supporter. I eventually ported a small badge saying: "Pro-child, Pro-family, Pro-choice" on a white background. Another badge - "My Body, My choice" against a half green, half blue background - captures my personal concern about euthanasia but isn't so clearly relevant to Wellington Parade. It rests for another day.

Seeing patent harassment from both points of view is an essential achievement for our intervention. It cannot be read from a book or even watched in a video of a harassment event. It takes at least a minimum of two different and independent viewpoints to establish a video fact, as it does a judicially respectable one, and hence a successfully prosecutable one. Further, the most important meaning, that of the patients, has to be inferred much of the time. To enquire directly as they pass through the two lane pathway would only intensify whatever negative pressure they already feel from being watched / harassed.Harassment by protestors and guards of each other across the same pathway is driven by unrequited righteousness on both sides. The "lifers" have the Word in their hearts, justifying anything that comes to mind in seeming contradiction to their perceptions of its meanings. The security services have historical injuries of the Word's church school renditions from which they are still recovering and the daily animosity of the protestors…injuries easily re-primed by the "Lifers" persistent patter ("Please save your little baby", "You'll be a good mother", etc.).

All this becomes more instructive when contrasted with two recent massed protest events – (1) the monthly Saturday appearances of large numbers and varieties of prayer protestors who set up across Wellington Parade for an hour from 10:30 to 11:30am approx. and (2) the Victorian Parliament steps launch of the 40 days of protest against abortion on Oct. 14, 2011. Such events are dominated by loud voices and large posters / banners. They are totally speaking at, not with, events. The boundaries on the launch day were marked by "scuffles". On the monthlies they are policed across 20 meters of streetscape by two bunches of Vic Police, one assigned to each side of the street. Little crosses the street but air and hard looks.The more recent ejection of Occupy Melbourne protestors shows how quickly things in larger scales can move from dominance to violence, even though early violence inducing initiatives may be the products of very small numbers of protestors and police provoking each other.

We, Charles and I, are a small force in numbers and proven persistence – the real denomination of interpersonal power and engine of virtue. The protestors' forces are both larger in the street and proportionally massive in the background (members of active "lifer" organisations, catholic and otherwise). And, their persistence quotient is seriously impressive (18 years at this site for one leading player, who is also present five mornings a week minimum). So, unless we can achieve a systemic shift in the rules of the daily theatre we will be worn down by their moral dominance in effort. They will still be here in a year, or five. I haven't got that long.If we were to move to active intervention against the protestors – turning the threatened threat to their self-esteem into an action program which made it so uncomfortable for them they would retreat – it would be fun but hard to do without causing as much new trouble as the old it was meant to punish. Patients would be in danger of being harassed by our anti-harassment campaign. Not a good look or touch!


*While at the same time much less threatening to me; I have a distinct aversion to potential shaming, and a thin skin for deflecting anything I can construe as an allegation deserving my shame; on reflection here, however, I think my aversion is more to being posted on the other side of an imaginary fence of inclusion…but then being on the inside is shameful in some things, such as being in the community of "lifer" protestors. Being a lone member of a non-existent group alerts my aversive side just fine.

Learning to act right (22)… Threatening to threaten – making sanctions clear

Learning to act right (22)… Threatening to threaten – making sanctions clear
Torrey Orton
Oct. 31, 2011


A reader wondered how I could "threaten to threaten"* someone – in that case, threaten a protestor that I might seriously threaten him and his accomplices for their harassment of patients. That is, that I would take aggressive action to injure them in some way (not physically). The actual objective would be to shame them in the theatre of their choice for shaming others. A brief discussion about the situation with a verbally facile buddy delivered a string of punch lines, advertising hording material and such in 3 minutes, so I know it's doable.


"Threaten to threaten" goes like this:

• Decide, preferably with the other, what our mutual expectations are for a specific activity.
• Establish to myself that potentially serious shortfalls in their performance seem to be happening
• Formulate appropriate step(s) I might take to sanction them for breaking our agreement(s)
• Invite them to discuss how we are doing with our mutual undertakings
• Have this discussion in private; if necessary, out of sight and hearing of others with an interest but not a stake in your relationship
• Make clear that what I am about to say is a threat to threaten more seriously at a later time if things do not change in the specific matters of concern to me.
• Conditionally offer an actual threat I might use ( if you / then I type of formulation)
• Note their non-verbal reaction to the threat – are they shocked, etc.
• Check it is clear to the them
• Check their perception of the appropriateness, intensity, focus, etc. of the threat.
• Invite them to consider changing their performance….Consider changing my threat.
  
   

The next step would be an announcement that the threat is about to be executed, if they fail to respond appropriately. Then, do it.

 People often wonder why others don't take them seriously in everyday life interchanges, especially in pursuit or defence of their own interests. All too often this, on examination, is because they have not been clear about their expectations / needs with those others. Being clear is not easy, especially under pressure. Both sender and receiver, to use an old, simplistic but resiliently tenacious image, are likely to have their communication machinery befuddled.


There are at least four virtues of the "threaten to threaten" tactic:

One, the ethical part of this is not dropping a surprise punishment on someone which they might have escaped if they knew one was coming for certain behaviour(s). This virtue is the private version of the management principal that leaders are morally obliged to warn their staff of dangers arising for them from contextual factors they could not know or guess by themselves – an impending buyout, default, bankruptcy, catastrophic technology or market developments, etc.

 

Two, the threatened threat may elicit the other's perception of our needs, our shared circumstances, or their needs, which may change the understanding of the total context. In other words a challenging event may increase our understanding of the realities we are in, if we engage it in a challenging way, out of the heart of our needs.

 

Three, threatening to threaten shows that we can act with effective restraint in strong ways without blowing things up irreparably, that we can act with strength and focus in appropriately modulated ways. Perceived self-control may increase the potential for negotiating difficult matters. Threatening to threaten demonstrates such control, as do other tactics like self-disclosure, and self-rebuke.

 

Four, the first three above may deepen and humanise the relationship in question.

*I learned this tactic 20 years ago on the negotiation training ground of Effective Negotiation Services. The basic influencing idea is do not threaten if you do not mean it. A fake threat is worse than no threat, especially when it establishes your bottom line or walk away position so the other party knows that an end game is approaching and can better gauge their need to win at all costs. If your 'Don't tread on me' point turns out to be posturing, expect to be counter-postured into even greater losses.

Preface to a counter protest – Defence of the FCC

Preface to a counter protest – Defence of the FCC
Torrey Orton
Oct. 19, 2011


The purpose of this paper is to establish the context for design of an intervention to change the outcomes for participants in the processes which occur here. It arises from our – Charles Brass and my - participant-observer experience at the FCC since early July this year.

The Fertility Control Clinic's front gate is a frontline of the struggle over life and death rights in Melbourne. There a group of Catholic protestors meet six days a week at 7:30am to protest patients' moral rights to a legal service authorised by elected representatives of the people of Victoria three years ago. Their protest expresses their unflagging commitment to expunging this parliamentary offence against the revealed word of gods.


Our goal is to improve the FCC patient experience by reducing the negative effects of the protestors' manner and methods. To do so we have to take into account all the players, direct and indirect, in the theatre of the public patient experience. Anything we do which increases patient stress is not a viable strategy. By chance, so far, the net effect of our presence has been an unintended positive for patients. Our presence appears to constrain protestors' harassing behaviour. We did not set out to do that at the start. We do now.

There is a set of regular players in this drama – the protestors, the security guards and large numbers of local residents and locally officed workers who pass through the frontline the five work days the FCC is open. The sixth is quieter.

The theatre of protest – a gauntlet to run

The typical 'facts' are simple. This is what you might see repeated perhaps twenty times a day:

The set: a two way black top with one lane access in the middle; one verge marked with a white line the other corralled by a 6 foot stone wall; midway is a recessed gateway with Fertility Control Clinic advised in large letters.

Onto this set six days a week between 7:30 and 10am a pregnant woman, with partner or family member(s) accompanying, walks along the footpath on Wellington Parade, East Melbourne, to the gated entrance of the Fertility Control Clinic. If she is coming for an abortion, she may be filled with conflicting feelings amongst which anxiety, shame and guilt may predominate. She may also have been told to expect watchers in wait for her – the 'pro-life' protestors whose aim is the reversal of the recently (2008) legalised practice of abortion in Victoria, and so they will explicitly and openly disapprove of her walk.

As she approaches, the protestors first appear standing on the curb side of the footpath. A couple, both men, have display boards dangling from their shoulders like spruikers for a year 8 sex-education class… 3D plastic portrayals of early stages in foetal growth and screen prints of ultrasound scans. A security guard, whom she perhaps has not even noticed, signals to her that she does not have to talk to the protestors.

Next, the patient encounters an 'offer' of help, often from a female protestor, to see her experience in the light of the only Catholic option – birth. She accepts it by stopping to talk or refuses by walking on by, sometimes with a verbal clarification on the way. Some protestors push their offer beyond the patient's refusal, to the point of attempting a verbal assault unless physically blocked. The patient's last message from the uninvited outside world may be "Don't kill your little baby…" as she's entering the inner world of the Clinic. Its door is always locked. Only a guard can admit her.

The 'set' – an emotional portrait

I have been a watcher, too, standing with the security guard for the Clinic, watching the watchers and at times explicitly protesting their protest by physically blocking their access to arriving patients who made it clear they did not want to hear from the protestors. The mood of this setting is just below the physical violence threshold. The guards and protestors have faced each other across the footpath for months (and years in some cases). Each day is a stream of boredom¹ with sharp irruptions of rough water as a patient comes into view and a dance of offer and protection as in the theatre above is stepped out. The boredom produces a slow build of inexpressible energy which even the protestors occasionally fall victim to in moments of baiting the guards. For protestors and guards this is an experience of waiting with fear and anticipation. Fear roused by possible conflict runs from slight discomfort to irritability thru frustration on into anger and occasional rage. It is expressed in a running background struggle between protestors and security for judicial ascendancy: who can prove who is harassing who? Who can catch who fudging local short term parking rules?

Anticipation adds an edge of fight to the fear's possible flight - a situation poised for action; players waiting to take up their roles; the boredom of no patients being present holds them in suspension. This edgy experience fills about 2 of the 2 ½ hours each morning. The ½ hour of action is approximately 20 X 1 minute flurries, each event having its own specific, unique dramatic energy as the dance of entry plays out.The protestors and the guards both see the other as more powerful than themselves, and so threatening. The guards have physical and legal power on their side, though they have very limited right to use the physical – much less so than in other security contexts like night spots. The protestors have persistence, baiting and the niggling stretching of the notional behavioural limits of public protest on theirs. Both spend time trying to catch the other out in derelictions of roles. Hence the role of cameras in the daily drama, especially at moments of patient arrivals.

Patients walk into this set already tuned to potential assault from without by the assault from within of their own feelings. Refusing a protestor's offer is culturally more difficult for some than others, as it is psychologically more difficult for some than others. The simplest evidence for the acceptance which is not an acceptance is the number of protestor handouts given by patients to the guard as he accompanies them to the locked front door for which only he has the key. The guard's slow ritual shredding of the handouts in the protestors' faces completes the loop of patient refusal.Behind the scenes…

All of the regular players – protestors, guards, local residents and locally officed workers - are aware that this clinic is the symbolic centre of resistance to the Catholic, and other (religious) fundamentalist, "pro-life" protestors. It is not a political playground. A guard died here 10 years ago at the hands of a madman², armed in part with the beliefs offered by the protestors to arriving patients. The protestor's case against the FCC sits, in part, on a thorough misunderstanding of what professional counselling's role is in clinics like the FCC. As has been explained to me first hand, that role is first to help generally with patient understanding of their fertility issues and second to help sort through the personal implications of a pregnancy, checking that all implications and options have been taken into account, including proceeding to normal birth.

It is professionally unethical to promote a particular patient conclusion as much as to hide a medically understood, socially viable and legal option. Those charged with the welfare of patients do neither³, if they can. There is no complaint book suggesting the FCC's counsellors have compromised their role. Fulfilment of that role does not include any assumption of what the right resolution is for any patient, other than that patients' unintentional ignorance of factors and options may produce sub-optimal resolutions.

Reality photo shoots??

Think of yourself being paraded by fate before an avowedly prejudiced audience which seems likely to judge you as falling short in some painful regard – an audience which will record your shame and give it a life by reciting it as end of day stories to their families and friends. And, they'll have a photo record of it, too!! Welcome to celebrity health in the name of the lord.There is always a hidden camera in the dress of one protestor capturing the daily comings and goings. This occurs in other protested sites in Australia and the US. That the cameras are hidden means they are ashamed of their actions because there is no legal reason to hide them. They know it is an unwarranted intrusion. Private photographs of anyone are just that until they are made public at which point pay-for-use and defamation concerns arise immediately. They know this, too. We've discussed this explicitly with the protestors.

The bigger picture

We guess that for protestors the patients are both individuals making their personal way through life challenges and symbols of mistaken pathways at the same time – that is, representations of big ideas, not people. I know that some protestors label patients, and us⁴, as evil. In their symbolic form for protestors, patients are bigger than their own reality and so open to any influence process, and righteously so in the minds of protestors. They, the protestors, would not present any assaultive materials if they wanted to maximise low-emotion responses from patients. High emotion responses express automatic defensive reactions, likely to elicit an automatic rejection of the protestors' offer – the reaction of someone feeling punished by unreachable others.

 Because they are confused about their aims – helping the patients vs. helping the church achieve its mission of repealing the law – they assault as often as they solicit. One could say that any offer by a "protestor" under such circumstances is always a potential assault.

Larger struggles of this sort surround us in increasing numbers and depths. They take tangible shape in the human scale of face-to-face settings like the Clinic entrance on Wellington Street. That's just fine. However, this protest is executed through invasions of patient privacy in the open space between their transport to the Clinic and its front gate. They feel harassed, and 14 once-a-week participant observations by both of us support this claim. These are palpable harassments of visual, verbal and physical sorts. Research makes this observation more than a passing or stereotyped perception of ours⁵.

Onto this stage patients appear solo or in couples, in widely ranging states of disarray from the wholly contained to open crying. The core cast of protestors (in bunches of five or more) and guards (always only one at a time) can see them coming 100 meters away. The guards almost never mistake a patient for an in-transit local. The protestors, though more experienced than the guards (some being on deck at this site for 18 years) often propose their offers mistakenly. And if rebuffed by an actual patient, they are too likely to persist with a plea like "please save your little baby…" and follow them to the gate (unless blocked by the guard) repeating the plea over and over. At the same time, in the background, a visual assault is on offer. We know from the guards and patient reports that protestor actions are more invasive in our absence.

Disapproval and disenabling are the weapons of moral intimidation. The disapproval is obvious. The disenabling, more veiled. The agent of disablement is shame, with a backdrop of guilt. Shame is the public face of guilt and the passage from transport to clinic aggravates its power. Patients arrive in a context in which they are at best amateurs and are confronted by a working practice, an established order of things whose role players are thoroughly at ease with their purposes and moves, though not with each other!

Vulnerability and intimidation – the harassment equation

This makes the very presence of the protestors – physical, visual, and verbal – potentially invasive. It is especially so for those patients most affected by the experience of unwanted pregnancy. They are the most vulnerable and the least able to defend their vulnerability. In my most recent conversation with the most articulate and sympathetic of the protestors, there was no recognition of the immense power imbalance that patient vulnerability gives to the protestors, perhaps because they are so often unheard themselves.

They are aware that harassment is a matter of perception, but not that some perceptions of harassment have ethical priority over others. Clearly in counselling, patients' perceptions of their own vulnerability always comes first at the beginning of any work. This is also the medical rule. How else can we find out what they think/feel is wrong?I know the protestors are open to moral intimidation because I have quietly threatened to threaten them morally twice and the reaction was faster than the twitch of an eye offended by a wandering mote. So, they should appreciate their effects on patients, but the powerful seldom do appreciate their effects except as benefits to themselves. When I aim an openly held camera at them they shy away, while training a hidden one on me. Shame is a wondrous thing.

We are in the early stages of negotiating an agreement between all the players. Whatever form an agreed result might take, it will have to respond to the factors above. Keep posted.

1-boredom is a high energy state expressing one's frustration with a context with no accessible action opportunities, no way to focus an interest into anything.

2- see Dr. Susie Allanson's Murder on his mind (2006); Wilkinson.

3-declaration of interest: I am an AHPRA registered psychotherapist with a broad caseload of biopsychosocial disorders in which degrees of danger to patient viability are common; they are in danger from others or themselves.

4- "Fear the lord…" - In one of my more effective patient shielding efforts recently I earned the attention of a candle wielding, female, septuagenarian protestor's ire : "Fear the lord" she said drawing a roar out of her 4'10' body. I asked her later what she meant and she said (roughly) "…because it's written in black and white, thou shalt not kill and what you are doing is evil and the lord will come and take you away, snip, snip, just like that (with a snip of her fingers as if pinching off a wayward stem)."

5- see Hilary Taylor's Parliamentary Intern Report "Accessing Abortion – Improving the safety of access to abortion services in Victoria", June 2011.

Appreciation (38) …Poppy died today

Appreciation (38) …Poppy died today

Torrey Orton

Oct. 4, 2011

There's an absence here today

I keep expecting to see him in his usual haunts – before the dining room radiator, on our bed, beside the pond in a corner outside Jane's study. I have never known, or just forgotten, the absence of a presence in this way. It began early yesterday when I looked in the early half-light for him near the radiator and couldn't see him. He had shrunk it seemed, though on closer view was laid out in a relaxed, balanced array - head to the heater and back legs and tail fanning away from it on his two ply sleeping pad. And lifeless, already stiffening by 6AM.

Or is it the presence of absence that's happening? He howled his way into death earlier that night, already having lost much of his locomotion when his back legs failed under him as they had been threatening to do for a couple of months. He had woken about 2am and struggled around a bit and we went to see him and then left again and ½ hour later he set off one, the last it turned out, of his trademark howlings. This mimics with convincing similarity the roar of a lion, even to the pose of the head thrust forward and down a bit which gives throat to the sound - ouaagh, repeated on a rising crescendo of pace and volume, to tail off in a couple of fading breaths. Altogether, about 8 calls.

This performance was almost always elicited by emptiness, by rooms in which he found himself unexpectedly (?) alone. Audible in the street, neighbours say. This was his last alone, throated with the fullness of his late ageing self. Just to write it brings tears for me. Such a roar! He also beset the garden at times after meals as if some latent memory of a long not present competitor arose to take the meal off him.


We finally buried him the next day a few feet away and just as far down as his predecessor Moon's resting place in the enclosure outside the bathroom - like her, wrapped in plastic and topped with a rose and a sprinkle of white wine and tears. Later will come the azalea above.

Before that had already come the clean-up, especially of bowls. He had three flash water bowls of distinguished design: one outside the back door, two inside - one by the eating space in the kitchen and the other near the heater in the dining room. They supported his mild struggle with failing kidneys over the last two years. He, however, sought often the pleasure of more natural containers – pot plant saucers' remnant traces or the pond's more prodigious offerings – passing by the flash without a nod.

He was just 18 and been with us 12 years or so, after a neighbour offered him …his many other virtues can be found here.

Here's potted Poppy in his youth, always a good fit for a tight spot.

Learner therapist (13)……Needs and wants, revisited

Learner therapist (13)……Needs and wants, revisited
Torrey Orton
Sept. 12, 2011

"…and if you try sometimes you get what you need"

It's commonly thought that needs and wants are a pair of related concepts, with wants in the role of supplicant to needs while seeking to become their surrogates. The pair is a basic unit of therapeutic assessment, in particular for all manner of relationship issues. Often I encourage patients to list the wants and needs they have of significant others in their lives – usually the relatively more powerful and distorting others at home, work or play. This exercise normally includes their perceptions of the other(s)' wants/needs of them, as well.


This is the starting place for reshaping the world to their own designs, lack of which leaves it shaped intractably by the powerful, and the social arrays around them. The outcome of the exercise, if seriously pursued, is always a focus on a few critical needs and possible pathways to them. This is the playground of little steps. The challenge, according to the Stones' famous ditty is: "you can't always get what you want, and if you try sometimes you get what you need".


Here's where wants come in developmentally. While being discretionary, they are also usually very specific, concrete and time-limited in their operation (even if repeated over long spans). People can list wants more easily than needs. So, as for the Stones, our wants are signposts of our possible needs. Following the posts may bring us to our needs as we currently understand them.


Wants are seen to be more discretionary; needs more necessary. Needs more solid; wants more fleeting, evanescent (though more concrete, strangely – wherein lies both their essential contribution to our need fulfilment and their potential for misleading us about the very needs we seek to fulfil). Certainly in couples therapy, for instance, a bunch of wants are expressions of needs. They are instruments of the directions needs propose to us, and often they elicit subject matters of resonant disputability.

Our needs have a fundamental reality and truthfulness about them. This is why people know eventually when some offered need fulfilment (a want) is wrong; not merely inappropriate, wrong. Being inappropriate is a matter of misconceiving a need, often an under-developed one; being wrong is a fake, manipulative, oppressive fulfilment like the binge sex and drugs and rock 'n roll micro-culture can be. Such self-knowledge, or the pursuit of a glimmer of it, is what brings people into developmental activities like therapy, study, etc. They are seeking need fulfilment by learning to negotiate their wants with themselves and others.If we have a framework for the needs which may compose a life for any human, we are therapeutically on better grounds than threshing around in the swarm of wants which modernity proposes as the answer to the question 'what does it all mean?' Acquire enough fulfilled wants and that's a life! Maybe even a brand.
Following is one such framework. There are others. I offer some signposting wants which may attach to each.

Elements of well-being (basic human needs)

*From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives.

Tony Ward, University of Melbourne, Claire A Stewart, Deakin University, 2005

Without specified needs we cannot decide how we are doing and what trade-offs are required to improve well-being. One approach to defining basic needs is this:

Needs	Wants specifications of needs
1) Life (including healthy living and functioning)	Adequate sleep, food, exercise
2) Knowledge	Knowing that…Knowing how to….knowing why…etc.
3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences)	Play an instrument, a sport; Practice a profession, trade, art, hobby…
4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness)	Cooperative activities; enlisting others in our activities
5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress)	Meditation, martial arts,
6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships)	Appropriate care, affection, connectedness….
7) Community	Authentic membership, identification, …
8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life)	Relevant belief, imagery, contemplation….
9) Happiness	In my view this is not a need; it is one outcome of well-being
10) Creativity	Opportunities to invent at whatever level or domain of life activity (also a doubtful need)

Learning to act right (20)… Law without order!

Learning to act right (20)… Law without order!
Torrey Orton
August 30, 2011


Tram Traffic Travesty
I'm a persistent user and preferrer of public transport since I've lived in a large city (40 years). Since my own first seniors moment (2003) of passing out and getting pace-made for life, I've been attentive to the regulation of tram/car relationships on my regular journey routes. The road safety rule (#163) is embarrassingly clear – when driving a vehicle do not ever pass a stopped tram whose doors are open and warning lights are blinking. Realising that a heart stoppage (itself not remotely dangerous; just a pause in the beat) can occur at any time, even with a pacemaker, primes me to attention on descending from trams.


I haven't counted the number of times some fool roars thru a clearly marked tram stop even though all the required warning lights are blinking and doors are open on the tram. Pretty much instant mush if I stumble. I guess once or twice a month I see this and I only ride two days a week max and have been doing so for 10 years. It's a mistake I've almost made myself once or twice.


One clear morning recently (130811 to be precise, 10:20am) I was myself second car back from a tram stopping on Bridge Road, Richmond (my normal get on / off tram stop just near home) and close enough to see a grey BMW 4door 4WD wagon with multiple exhausts power up to sneak thru the stopping tram, missing the call by meters as the doors opened and first passengers started to get out.


I was able to follow a kilometre up Burwood Road into Hawthorn and by Power Street, a kilometre away, had come up within easy sight of the Victorian plates (Y.. 1.. – would I be invading their privacy if I published the whole plate number here?) and then turned off into the Renaissance car park to make the notes underpinning this plaint. With a mild burst of vengeful inspiration I thought, "I've got this one for sure." Now how to haul it in? I tried Vic Roads and Yarra Trams and got a neutral brush off to the local cop shop. 'We cannot prosecute anyone' their reps said (not even your ticket protectors can? I'm wondering now). Only the police can do that.


So I fronted at my local police a few days later. Guess what? They can't prosecute on the basis of my first hand witness with dated event notes back up either. Only if one of their divisionals happens to be sitting there at the moment and is facing the right way and isn't distracted with a sanger and a cuppa.


The best the young officer could offer was to take my particulars and put them on the maybe to be noted list of divisional assignments, leading then maybe to a divisional van ambling thru the tram stop occasionally to collect very occasional and totally unpredictable tram stop malefactors.


Nuts. What happened to citizen arrests or complaints??? Help me out here, pls.

Back to the Anger (3) – where does a homeless anger go to rest??

Back to the Anger (3) – where does a homeless anger go to rest??
Torrey Orton
August 26, 2011


A year ago just about now I was worrying my engagement with my anger. It's better engaged now than then. One part of that story is yet to be written tales of searching over the last two months for ways to interrupt Catholic anti-abortionists' harassment of patients at the foundational abortion provider in Melbourne. There are a lot of angry people on that stage and I am not trying to add to them, but the atmosphere is penetrating. My just being there reportedly reduces the harassment, while the anger just perks along in the undergrowth.


There's a short, nicely written, psychological treatment of anger here. It makes sense in every respect except the one I'm concerned about now – namely, that there are times and places when there is nothing we can do about the sources of our anger; when our anger's natural home is inaccessible, and so irremediable. We psychs can't tell us what to do in that case, other than "cognitive restructuring", relaxation, meditation, acceptance and such; that is, suck it in. The article mentioned above tells us that to do so may be unsustainable, if the threatening forces continue. But this is the fate of many people these days (though perhaps no more so than throughout human history).


…a homeless anger
Here's one of these people, a long term friend and colleague who has not found a job in more than a year, and not for lack of trying. He's basically too old (late 50's) for the real job market. The imaginary one would suit him fine, but it doesn't hire or pay. He's basically too competent for younger managers and bureaucrats to stand. He's not a natural to anger; too little so in my view, but then there's taste, sensitivity, temperament….and he is angry now. Deeply, richly, almost unbearably. And like many other placid folks, he doesn't like to talk about his anger.


Systemically forced indifference
But, he's seriously tired of being interviewed by recruiters 30-40 years his junior who often don't know the tasks they are recruiting for, can't speak openly/transparently/honestly (choose your forward moving spin) about which type of process they are involved in (e.g. making up apparent candidate numbers for already filled positions advertised by legal or political requirement, etc.), and are seem more concerned with meeting their performance target numbers than people.


He's not surprised by this because he knows the recruiting trade and its demands on practitioners, but as a present object of the trade its shortcomings are a repeated caustic abrasion of his self-respect. And, yes, he's complained, suggested, proposed – all manner of efforts to improve their "customer service". It seems impervious to improvement. The players (recruiters) themselves are mostly powerless to influence the market dynamics driving them and their organisations, though one calls him for advice about system improvement options.


Unsystematic but persistent failure
But, he's seriously tired, also, of being the second cab off the job candidate rank he usually heads at first glance. There's a river's worth of D words for the effect: depressing and degrading and demeaning and degenerating and….. thankyou but no-thankyou calls from the less able or incompetent are teeth-grindingly outrageous.


And the government funded, not-for-profit, intermediaries facilitating his attempts in exchange for the dole are but another cog. Same coat of pretence to perform cut from the same material of personal and organisational incompetence. This is the arena of long term unemployment. My friend is still a vital statistic in the rate reported to us almost daily in proof of how well Australia is doing compared to our Anglo relatives. And, he knows that he is not statistically unusual: older = unemployable by dint of no 'economic' need for his services. Being a statistical mean is neither reassuring nor redeeming; it just provides a middle of the road place to be run over by fate.


Exposure of what to who?

Exposure therapy is the "evidence-based" treatment of choice to reduce fear of bad personal fates of many kinds. Exposure is a standard treatment for traumatic events which assault the self with recurrent images (recalls) and effects (anxiety symptoms). It is reliably effective. But it is less reliable if there is no visible cause (someone declaring you unsuitable for employment by right of disability, for instance, or being disabled in an objectively ascertainable way – loss of limbs, brain function, etc.; age cannot be mentioned of course, so it's not addressable). With such losses a start can be made on a life which embraces the loss as the from-this-point-forth condition of one's humanity. That is exposure to oneself. But/and, who would he "expose" himself to so that the fear of his daily deepening fate would be reduced?


Lacking an identifiable source of an apparent but unacknowledged disability (being over some age barrier beyond which is housed 'old') the threat cannot be reduced and the anger continues to be reinforced daily. So, too, with no job today, yesterday and likely tomorrow, day after day. This brings him close to existential despair – the expectation that there is no hope. For some this may produce resignation, for others outrage. Death is the imagined outcome of both, differing only in who is imagined dying: oneself or the nameless, faceless others. He said that it is "a struggle to believe" that continued efforts to job seek can make a difference, the moments of believing just fending off the pull of depressions expression of expected and unavoidable failure.


This is not a mental health disorder, it's a biopsychosocial one!! In other words it's down to the individual but the individual is not responsible for it, except to deal with it. A year ago I proposed here 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 self-disregard in return. Unfortunately this is not terribly instructive to the others whose regard is needed. They do not feel the absence of ones regard for them or oneself. It doesn't show up in normal metrics of governance and well-being. Living nothingness. No home.


So this is his fate so far – to be refused a place to deploy his existing capabilities, through no fault of his own, by nameless two-faced forces speaking from one mouth 'you should work to be whole' and out of the other 'consume to be complete'. No home.

Rectifications (27) – “An education evolution”

Rectifications (27) – "An education evolution"
Torrey Orton
August 17, 2011

"From the Vice-Chancellor" it was headed,

and titled "An Education Evolution"

in a 10 page advert with TheAGE of 15/08/2011.

I thought the days of rectifications were over until this one reached out and grabbed me by my righteous spinraker cojones. How could an educated man spruiking an educational (?) institution speak of "an education evolution". Well, mainly because his audience does use the word in that flaccid, pandering way – they, too, not knowing that an evolution is something arrived at in hindsight, not foresight. Foresight (and its assistant, intention) produce actions which, if they are lucky, may become evolutions, but not in our lifetimes – unless you are of the meme = gene brigade, and even that requires some years for memal maturity.


If you are leader of an institution (Melbourne University) which mostly talks about the training and skills it is selling, it may not be a wonder that such simplicities are ignored because no longer known. I guess they are just examples of unknown knowns. (I've often wondered what they were for the man (Donald Rumsfeld) who made them a part of public discourse in 2003 at no personal expense, but a great deal for the people of Iraq).


So I guess the VC is seeking, if he intends it, to coat his training in glimmering cloth. If he'd said, for example, ' An Educational Emerging' (or the weaker, Emergence) this would have been more than acceptable, since novelty of potential substance has to come out of somewhere, otherwise it's a known known already!


The appearance of 'changing' and 'transformative' in his discourse of 'evolution' is also a known known because they are part of the suite of spinisms which pass for social, political and educational analysis in our times. Even banks do it – transform, change and evolve that is. Just watch their self-promotions. Not surprisingly individuals describe themselves in this language, too.


For an alternative discourse, see the article by Raymond Gaita in the 17/08/11 Australian
Higher Education – "Loving the truth is not enough." Gaita notes that the public discussion of educational meaning and purposes has been subverted by the discourse of consumer corporate speak, as has our world. The concepts which underlie an education have not been available to common use for decades. Woe is us. Of such are futile rants made.

Learner therapist (5)…Quiet violences

Learner therapist (5)…Quiet violences
Torrey Orton
August 15, 2011


Following are some patient experiences of their persistent, consistent and seemingly untouchable disregard by those closest to them. They are the solid foundations of the anxiety / depression in their presently distorted relationship worlds. These feelings are both typical and totally particular at once. They easily elicit a self-denying doubt - "I've had everything I could expect. What have I got to complain about?" – compared to imagined others' terrible childhoods.


These patients are medicated, and/or in long term dynamic or interpersonal therapy with histories of short-term CBT inefficacy, and/or with associated relationship struggles at work, home and play. They usually have two or three anxiety/depression symptoms at once, with one or another more prominent depending on total stress and injury salient stress in varying measures. Their disorders have been traceably with them for decades. The complete family social systems which supported the incidents / perceptions below are alive and well to this day, continuing to carry and sustain the psychological bugs which infect these people.


The speech reported is a close paraphrasing of their actual words. So, for example:


She said: All I want is when I call up mum that she listen to my concerns of the moment; what happens is I call and she suddenly gives me over to Dad who doesn't engage about anything… (this has gone on for her whole remembered life).


He said: When I told my parents at age 6 my grandmother had introduced me to a man in her house who sexually abused me a number of times, they 'took care of it' and it never happened again…nor was it ever spoken of, even to this day (32 years later).


She (39, alcoholic, twice married, 2 own children, four other of second partner) said: They (her parents) never say 'I love you' to me (breaking out in her quiet version of wracked with tears late in the first session) and brush off my efforts to reduce drinking.


He said: For the last few years, living in our house has always been seeing the others but never doing anything with them – we even eat separately. Otherwise, Dad is always away and Mum's always cleaning noisily and intrusively…


She said, starting to cry uncontrollably: I remember being sent away for two months to summer camp aged 5 so my returned run-away 12 year old sister could "have space" as recommended by a social worker returning her…with the understanding for years after that I should "behave" or get into rouble from father for I knew not what; the reason for the runaway was never discussed…so the boundaries of expected behaviour were never clear, just implicit.


He said: (shaking with inner turmoil) I just remembered myself going down the hall of the hospital 30 years ago to see the back specialist in terror about the outcome (I was put in a body brace for 6 months) and mother (who was with me) not asking how I felt, and me feeling I couldn't say because she and father were unable to run the family themselves and I - aged just 14 at the time, eldest child - was carrying the load, down to doing the shopping, cooking and so on.


These are quiet violences of the family intimacy sort*, which often provide foundations for self-harm and suicidal thinking and action, mitigated by alcohol or binge drugs of delightful escape. To a person, those above say at one time or another: what have I got to complain about (compared to people in physically or socially violent lives, or the poor in Calcutta, etc.)? I don't want to blame anyone for my shortcomings - the litany of over-responsibility for lives which has also allowed them to be among the successful (that is the surviving, "high functioning" jobholding, family rearing sorts). Though anyway, I'm worthless, not good enough, can't get it right, hopeless….which makes me try harder to be perfect (a very useful inspiration for many kinds of public life success (jobs, etc.)).


These are not the violences we normally think of when talking PTSD. Their effects may appear in forms like OCD, social phobia, panic…and self-harming, with and without thoughts, or unsuccessful acts, of suicide. They are the kind from which arise baseless fantasies of being "annihilated" by the absence of others, by nothingness…a good starting point for re-visiting the Existentialists. No Exit comes to mind.


And, too, they are sources of apparently baseless, barely perceptible, angers, small outbursts of rage with no accessible origins – the very rages we find at the social level on the road, in the retail, at the home. Their power lies in the presence of the past in the present. People's current lives repeat in degrees and domains, the damages of childhoods sustained in the present relationships which produced them in the first place.


Even if the family members have changed, the parents have lost their power, the truth of the damaging histories cannot be validated because they are on the family's undiscussables list. So the struggle of the past reappears as sibling differences on what's discussable. Talk about resilience! And about systemic maintenance of contexts for paranoid processes! Enough to make one think themselves crazy, just a bit.


* "The WRCH also presents a typology of violence that, while not uniformly accepted, can be a useful way to understand the contexts in which violence occurs and the interactions between types of violence. This typology distinguishes four modes in which violence may be inflicted: physical; sexual; and psychological attack; and deprivation. It further divides the general definition of violence into three sub-types according to the victim-perpetrator relationship.

• Self-directed violence refers to violence in which the perpetrator and the victim are the same individual and is subdivided into self-abuse and suicide.
• Interpersonal violence refers to violence between individuals, and is subdivided into family and intimate partner violence and community violence. The former category includes child maltreatment; intimate partner violence; and elder abuse, while the latter is broken down into acquaintance and stranger violence and includes youth violence; assault by strangers; violence related to property crimes; and violence in workplaces and other institutions.
• Collective violence refers to violence committed by larger groups of individuals and can be subdivided into social, political and economic violence."

I've lost the link to this quote so can't source it, but seems worth including for the framework. The emphasis is supplied.

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life
Torrey Orton
July 30, 2011

Get a grip on yourselves before the roof blows off.

Non-verbal communication is recognised as much in its excess (hitting, slapping…) as its shortage (touch-free upbringings, non-contact sports….) in everyday life. More ordinary levels like handshakes and arm touches are the unconsciously applied media of daily interactions, from intimate to instrumental. Their therapeutic potential may be unnoticed. I offer three recent experiences for your appreciation.


M and A have explosively volatile struggles around their respective needs for care, powered by very different but equally searing injuries to self. These struggles have improved countably over three months of work (weekly) from daily 2-3 hour storms to weekly ones; from standing at the edge of the abyss of relationship implosion to enjoying each other much of the time. But still the volatility remains. The injuries will never fade away, especially his – he has a congenitally weak lower back. She only has interpersonally catastrophic parents, so far.


The signalling of their needs is still not fine enough and they turn any single glitch into another in the running sores of their past failures, still in often uncontrollable emotional flashes. Fine enough is what? It's a capacity to catch an emerging need default to disappointment when it's only a difference in the prevailing atmosphere of their joint life. Need defaults are moments like this:

Typically, he's having a bad back day, which means unpredictable pain grasping an apprehensive attitude (because always on edge for the unpredictable) and she's having a bad recall (which means direct experience of parental abandonments). He needs stillness; she needs a hug. Two into one don't go. He tenses and she pushes her need. She feels abandoned and he feels crowded. The great disappointment blast off.

Creating a fine enough treatment looks like:

This day they show up in therapy (session 12) with an increasing sense of achievement and a reminder of the distance to go – the blast off above, just a day before. In a guided revisit, they experience their respective hurts under control and agree that her hug is unreasonable for his pain. So then what? I ask her what would help her need for reassurance. She knows immediately and precisely: a held hand would do just fine.

I ask her to move a seat closer to him, within easy hand reach, and show him where to offer his hand. She places hers palm down just above her knee. He slides his under hers and she says "No". Through his shock he figures out the slide is a slip (but not what slip; it's the sexual one). She lifts hers and places his on top. Success. Abandonment defeated with visceral relief. Guilt at being unable to respond to her need fended off appropriately.

I think I may have primed this result by telling them a story of another couple (F and D) in their age range who were sitting in these seats a week before, separated by a similar need gap. It was crossed by the guy taking action to respond to her pain about their relationship arising from conflicted feelings about his responses to it earlier – that she often needed space and he needed closeness at the same moment. This typically happens at the end of the work day.

He initiated the same seat change spontaneously and grabbed her ambivalently available hand from a slightly cringed position in her chair. This allowed exploring just how close was too close, and considering how their attachment styles differed around a critical mutual reassurance behaviour. Joint distance regulation was tested live, and controllably, as they adjusted the hand holding to achieve optimum need fulfilment at the moment: giving help for him and acknowledging her distance for her in the same act.

These events seem to come in pairs and triplets, or just surges. A day later, a twenty years older couple (C and P) appeared, struggling with increasing success with rages driven largely by him and facilitated by her chronic passivity. His rage driver is an undiscoverable family history – an absent father of a one night's burst pregnancy untraceable by his mother, plus years of deception about his adoption heritage. At 17 he finally caught his otherwise caring adopters messing up their version of his life, an exposure he had long felt coming.


It leaves him hugely vulnerable to rushes of anxiety at perceived performance failures of his, or others in regard to him – a threat of not getting to anything on time will do it. This one was on the way to see me together, with her driving to pre-empt such a rage, but the tactic failing on the road. So,

...they had one of the blow-ups they so fear, but constrained enough by their joint therapeutic work to so reduce it that he just fumed in the passenger's seat about being late, maybe! Like the others above, these two had had a major explosion (first for some weeks) earlier that week.

Trouble is, the fuming is contagiously electric and bad memory inducing for her – will this be another rage or just a low grade trash fire?? So, she reached out to pat his head and he ducked away into a foetal sulk, with emanations of fury growth. They wondered what she could have done differently. It took us some while to come up with the insight that her intuitive touch had been conceptually right, only practically clumsy.

A head touch is not benign, but three others are: the shoulder, upper arm and forearm touches. These are almost universally recognised as OK touches, even between sexes/genders. Most others are sexual, domineering, or both.

The touch is essential to break the rage cycle once it has started. Words just feed it. The touch allows another level of consciousness to be accessed, wherein the path to freedom of the moment's disruptive passion.

Learner therapist (9) …”Finding my starter button”

Learner therapist (9) …"Finding my starter button"
Torrey Orton
July 24, 2011


B., 32, is struggling to step into his realistic, clearly focussed, and preferred work life. He has a track record of work and initiative in the field (food service), a plan for exploring a start-up enterprise, down to possible funding, and most recently a partner prospect of long acquaintance. What he doesn't have is a "starter button". Motivation for the last year or so has been negative – escaping a clearly unsatisfying present job, at which he is also underperforming (though his employer doesn't seem to mind because no pressure is explicitly put on B to do more or differently or better, or…anyway, actually a great situation for a career change – paid exploration time!).


But not negative everywhere. In the last six months he's discovered running and pursues it with sturdy and rewarding attention, to the point of prepping for a half marathon now. No trouble starting his engine for the morning chug around the neighbourhood. He knows he'll feel good doing it and enjoy the challenge of sharpening his times while trimming his steps to reliable sustainability. And so he knows what it means (thought/feeling/action) to be motivated, and is so about some things! His wife and child are among important others.


On the edge of his stasis lies a gambling penchant with a smoking habit attached, now under control, more or less. He recognises this cluster is a displacement of energies which could drive a new life direction and his shortage of accepted alpha aspiration for a male of his social, ethnic and religious identifications. As well, there's a family history of weak father performance in the provider role, which B reflects in his unfound "starter button". He doesn't believe he can succeed at leading a venture alone.


Some months into this exploration, along came the right business partner prospect – a friend of long standing, appropriate openness and relevant life background, interests, experience and resources. Then up jumped a new challenge. What is B expecting the partner to lead in the enterprise and what will/can he lead himself? He doesn't know, nor had he thought of the question, but can feel the relevance.


The background discussion is 'what is motivation and how can it be grown, urged, prodded…in short, increased?' Also in short, motivation is the outcome of a shapely purpose, plus attractive incentives. We know that incentives can act as a purpose, or be confused for one, because need for them (money, status, position, etc.) is confused with purpose arising from deep within – an intrinsic motivation driver. Motivation is enhanced or compromised by competence: actual, imagined and aspirational – which in turn are sustained or demeaned by hope. B. suffers from a motivation hope deficit.


So, to start again, how does B improve his shortfall in leadership competence? By replacing it with confidence in shared leadership – the everyday business solution except where compulsive micro-managers are in the seat. Two parallel leadership relationships bear on his future: the business partner and the life partner ones. While both of these people support his vocational initiative, their stakes differ; His life partner's stake includes management of the household economy, it also affects her personal vocational future(s) (they agree she should go back to work in some way). The business partner's stakes principally centre on business management issues and the household side of his own domestic economy, too.


For B, clarifying his life partner's needs is the starting place to setting some personal goals. But that cannot be done without clarifying his needs. We're talking here about real things like amount of time away from home, expected low income period for the start-up and fall back options for the venture. In parallel run her only slightly spoken vocational aspirations, motherhood self-images, and such.


Both share a habit which blocks exploratory discussions directly affecting them: the wish to do no harm to the other. This is held with something approaching the energy of medical professionals, but not the same professional obligation. The ethical one is almost as powerful. As a result they cannot enter into potentially disputable grounds – those which harbour uncertainty about life critical matters like the family economy above, for instance. And the perceived relationship of doing nothing is still too slight. Doing no harm prevents doing good.


Keep posted.

 

Learning to act right (19)… When being needy is good for others!

Learning to act right (19)… When being needy is good for others!
Torrey Orton
July 17, 2011


S. is a fixer and a guilt artist, with shame toppings if possible. Fixing things for others, preferably without much recognition, is his primary means of justifying his otherwise (in his view) unworthy self. The joy of fixing a lot is never enough, however, to compensate the wrongs he has done in the process of trying to right things…even worse when the fix itself fails, too, as it did recently. You may recognise yourselves in this caricature somewhere.


So what to do when we are unwell, injured, beset by bad karma – especially the ones which challenge others' empathy or compassion, the ones in the extremes of life like prospectively terminal illnesses / injuries, committing or being victims of incarcerateable offenses, betrayals real or imagined, etc.? If we are reasonably well befriended, some of them will rush to palliate or placate the injuries.


Others will duck and run or just not be seen when they realise they've never experienced your bad luck before or it's their own bad dream. In either case, about then helplessness sets in. What can I do for you, they may ask, and you may say, literally, nothing, thinking what right do I have to ask for help, especially if I'm partly the author of my own condition?


But the friend needs your help to feel worthy themselves!! A fixer's catch 22: need to help my helpless friends, but not to help myself if helping them means helping them to help me!! In my most recent encounter with this dilemma I think I convinced the fixer, S. above, to accept that he had to bear the taint of a little help sticking to him from the virtuous action of his helping others know what to do so they did not feel helpless. There was additional pain for him, but not enough to compensate for the self-indulgence, of identifying what he really needs help with/for!


Of, course, sometimes the friends are helpless and that's for sure. They cannot undo the damage you have suffered, or you theirs. Then the fixer's in real trouble because the only solace for friends' helplessness is that painful truth. Herein's another story – the virtue of painful truths expounded rather than withheld. Doubly difficult for the fixer, but way too hard for many leaders.

I digress.