Learner therapist (7) …Listening for talent

Learner therapist (7) …Listening for talent
Torrey Orton
April 29, 2011

This is only a taster for a longer trip. Hopefully there's enough indications of the trip purpose and process to warm others up for a later journey.

Not everyone speaks well. They have to struggle for words or thoughts. Things just seem to come to others. Here's one words don't come to in his first session:

By 40 minutes into it I didn't think that we had anything to work on. He was a litany of falteringly expressed sadness, aimlessness and hopelessness, presented almost as if they were a state, not a need. There was nothing for me to hold – that was his state, until I heard his language. I was listening for the strength (agency) which brought him into therapy. For someone claiming no discernible talent his presentation was peppered lightly with very particular vocabulary – not at all that of the truck driver he claimed truly to be. I had noted the words as he rambled around his self-described misfit history, but not noticed them for the talent they exposed. I confirmed my notice by pointing out that he had such language and he both recoiled at the idea he had anything and brightened up with the notice in one move. It wasn't clear to me that he had verbal talent. He had capability, and so maybe talent not just training.

It has turned out that he has quite a verbal talent. Everyone has some talent, some quite a lot and some quite a few – the Renaissancers among us. They often, especially those showing up for therapy, do not know or trust their talent. It may have been a cause, or collateral effect, of the injuries which brought them to therapy. Sometimes they show up as a loss of talent, as here:

At a social event I met a lifelong male painter, now 63, who was visibly flat and poured it out smoothly. He had lost his painting muse or mojo or animus and so was wandering around for the first time in his life with nothing to do. For a talented person whose gift was clear and commanded what to do, every day was given by the gift. He literally had lost his way, his inner light which showed him the path. That light had shown brightly since early primary school when a teacher recognised it by saying, "You should be a painter."Now he was lightless for the first time. I saw him again a few weeks later and he was still befuddled by his self-abandonment (it must have been himself, he thought; no one else stole his light from him).all that of the truck driver he claimed to be.h ng to grab for me until I heard his language. For someone presenbting tent ho

Whether he was a good painter or not is irrelevant to the matter of his talent. That 'good' is for discussion another time under the heading of competences or capabilities. The world is full of possible painters, fishers, writers, fixers, fighters, builders…. Few are great, but many are satisfied if they know and live their talent(s). There's room for many levels of the many talents.


Finding ones talent(s) can be a grounding experience, providing for the first time in our lives a source of truth which is reliably ours. It is no guarantee that a way will be made for our talents to enter the world, but knowing that they come from within is heartening and self-defining. Basic life standards are self-sourced and the associated motivation is self-validating. Just exercising the talent(s) creates further motivation.


There may be many ways to bring the talent into the world, allowing exploration and exercise of it even under conditions of low potential success – where a person's existing life commitments to partners, children, parents, siblings prohibit a fulltime engagement with the emerging talent. Equally restricting may be the low wattage of the talent – visible, palpable but not powerful to be a life on its own, yet still providing inner based illumination. We all have a complete suite of the talents necessary for life, just differently arrayed and enabled. The array and enabling are congenital; their growth and enactment are circumstantial (the domain of nurture and effort).


What the range of talents is can be taken from one or another of the emerging systems of well-being, all of which depend on defining the domains, directions and intensities of action which create well-being. Getting the items and their mixes right is essential, since well-being is specific. I like the "Elements of well-being" because they were created by the authors in an effort to provide a new approach to treatment of sex offenders, a notoriously difficult group.

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 1) Life (including healthy living and functioning) 2) Knowledge 3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences) 4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness) 5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress) 6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships) 7) Community 8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life) 9) Happiness 10) Creativity

And, by the way, if you want to think about what the generic therapeutic task is from a biopsychosocial (cultural) viewpoint – this is it: a multidimensional well-being one. Elaborating that perspective is a task for another day. Well-being constructs like that above are starters. They are also the basis for work on things like vocation (below), since the kinds of vocations there are must reflect the needs we strive to fulfil through work.


This set of archetypal vocations was built with Hamid Homayouni 5 years ago in the birthing phase of a 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' company which never grew up. However, many patients have found the constructs helpful for their efforts to build a picture of their vocational potential. The archetypes are described in ordinary language and everyday behaviours.

• Helper

Are you…compassionate, attentive to others' needs, a 'fixer'?

Do you like to…offer help, give suggestions, 'fix' things for others?

Are you good at… listening to others, putting your own thoughts in their terms, seeing how others really are, suggesting options for action…?

• Builder

Are you… physical, careful, 'results oriented', a 'tool man' (or woman)?

Do you like to…complete a piece of work, have something to show for your efforts?

Are you good at…making things with your hands, planning steps of development, using tools?

• Protector

Are you…cautious, attuned to possible dangers / threats, physically and emotionally robust, action-oriented?

Do you like to…be in dangerous situations, test your strength against others, use weapons, wear uniforms?

Are you good at…containing conflicts, dealing with anger, checking threats, using your body as an instrument?

• Entertainer /artist

Are you…flamboyant, emotional, and imaginative?

Do you like to…tell stories, draw pictures, make videos?

Are you good at…performing, working under public pressure, taking on different roles and styles?

• Maintainer

Are you…orderly, systematic, obsessive about detail?

Do you like to…keep things in order, clean things, know how things work, take them apart to see how they tick?

Are you good at…keeping things running, making repairs, figuring out what's wrong with things?

• Believer / visionary

Are you…'off in the clouds' at times, certain where you stand, looking for the answers to the final questions?

Do you like to… wonder about 'the meaning of life, engage others in questions of meaning?

Are you good at…seeing the larger picture, talking about 'the meaning of life'…?

• Thinker / investigator

Are you…introverted, abstract, logical, pattern seeking, 'deep', insightful?

Do you like to… get things clear, understand rather than act, find your way through confusion and unclarity, put the truth first …?

Are you good at…seeing patterns in things, making systematic pictures of things, making sense of puzzles / dilemmas ….?

• Creator / entrepreneur

Are you…a starter, sensitive to new things, early adopter of technologies / ideas?

Do you like to…be the first to do things, be recognised for innovation?

Are you good at…expressing, creating visual / musical works, starting up from nothing?

• Coordinator / leader
  

Are you…someone who steps forward first, takes the lead in social / political things?

Do you like to…negotiate shared tasks and resources, talk to people about what they want / need?

Are you good at…keeping a group together around shared tasks?

 

Appreciation (35) … A poem a day…

Appreciation (35) … A poem a day…
Torrey Orton
April 18, 2011


I never much liked poetry…not enough to continue reading after university until many years later…the last 6 or 8 in fact. Les Murray shifted that a bit as I took seriously that he speaks for aspects of this wide brown, lately green, land which are important. So I undertook to read, and have read, everything of his in print… part of my self-australianisation, akin to learning successfully to like bush and dry and flat and gummy, and ever since starting 38 years ago seeing new bits for the first time here and there now and then.


As I'm writing this I also notice that I did not read poetry (except to complete requirements) because it was hard to read. Compared to philosophy of any kind (exception: symbolic logic, but then that's not reading is it?), poetry requires attention of the short but deep variety – one not natural to me who does long and deep effortlessly. I did not know to make the effort, which says something about how I was taught poetry – as a must do, a formal compliance presumed to be valuable.


The last past they got right. Because I read it under academic duress, I 'learned' it so to speak. I know about some poetry, as I do some music, without ever getting into it until recently, and still now with more a long view than the immediate one. And once again, an education is shown to be unpredictably worthwhile. In that education I read a canon or two because, in spite of my lack of natural inclination to the mode, it was given to be done by people and a system I respected and whose standards I was brought up earlier to aspire to.


Somewhere in graduate school I learned poetry was music, though I knew that from Plato's complaint about the insidious nature of poetry long before without hearing it. Somehow I heard the music a bit. Like many musics, poetry is varied and less or more accessible to different personal attunements and cultural conditionings. Mine was more Gerard Manley Hopkins than Wordsworth. I have a simple, engineering ear. And I never wanted to make music, so never learned to read it. Same thing with poetry? I did write one poem in 1971 and it seems that was enough.


So I bought Frederick Seidel's Poems 1959-2009 due to a long view review in the New York Review of Books a year ago where claims were made for his grip on America (hear a Murray-like attraction here again? Yup). And I've started reading them in a new way compared to my Murray experience - grazing them at first, not striving to get inside yet tasting enough to think I could later do so. From the graze I cannot immediately embrace Seidel like Murray but he seems also less local than I expected; he's more cosmopolitan?


In the end of this wander maybe I just don't have a very poetic inclination, or too much of the engineering one crowded it out. Having grown up in a musically competent household, I never caught the tunemakers bug which my siblings did. Genetic defect, cultural or ???

Learner therapist (4) a breath of life?

Learner therapist (4) a breath of life?
Torrey Orton
April 7, 2011


In my search for patients' agency, and the author within who drives them (if other things don't get there first), I'm increasingly noticing little signals of activity. This is a matter of small sounds and slight expressions. These may grow into loud sounds and gross expressions as modelled for us all with indelible memorability by Homer Simpson.* Among the hardest things to say for the injured are words of self-approval or words disapproval of family sources of their injuries. I suspect such words are what are coming into hearing/view through the little breaths below.


I offer these signals as enticement to others to share their bits in the hope that we can develop a taxonomy of little expressions to join the forces of little steps. The point here, as there, is to enhance patients' awareness of ways in which and times at which they are taking small steps towards their emerging selves. It is our responsibility to provide such help, since they are often blind to their own agency and ignorant of the myriad forms it can take.


Small breaths…

For instance, "phuuh" is a sound I cannot spell. Yet it reaches me these days like a declaration of dry despair, usually arising out of the flatlands of a psycho-spiritual plateau, often mid-session midway through a therapy engagement. It is a quiet, almost inaudible expression barely strong enough to be heard, more seen than heard in the slightly pursed lips of a patient. Or myself, too, I'm noticing these days. The sound occurs often in synch with a slight movement of the head away from the line of eye to eye engagement, the kind of movement which also signals an emerging insight or feeling.

Apathetic Irritated

Further along this spectrum lies a dry spitting sound - "pffft" - which ejects a thought or feeling mildly but certainly. It often has a comment hidden in it. The speaker seems not to quite embrace it, but the thought is out enough that it cannot be restrained. The "pffft" is more about getting the fact that they have a thought out than making that thought visible.

Disturbed

Another grade along is the wet, spat ejection….a slight swear.

Annoyed

"Doh" or "doah" – derisive mimicry of dopey other(s), which, depending on the tone of speaking, may be cuttingly abrasive (an aggression) or just a twitch of the rhetorical tail (a slight gotcha).

Angered

"pfauuugh" is towards the other end of the exhalatory spectrum, a clear rush of derisive disapproval, amazement that another does not share one's own insight, sensitivity, …..or one missed it oneself!!

Enraged

These can all be applied recursively – directed at oneself as well as others. I'm not sure of my classification of expressions by feeling levels, but there's something systemic about them in the anger spectrum. Kassinove and Tafrate's "Anger Thermometer" has 10 grades of anger marked by ten vocabulary steps. These are more distinctions than I know how to use, but some psychs feel comfortable enough to publish them so facility with the distinctions may be useful.



*By the way, 50 years ago when in boarding school, an expression indistinguishable from Homer's "doh" was a popular reproach to another teenage dope's intellectual or behavioural vacuity of the moment. No one escaped the title! How did it transit all those decades?? Is this just another item in the records of the eternal return?? If the latter, then 'doh' arises from a deep cultural meme or, as the neuropsychs might have it, hard-wiring.