Learner therapist (17)……the systemic communications breakdown in relationships

Learner therapist (17)……the systemic communications breakdown in relationships
Torrey Orton
April 25, 2012

How couples can't talk …and how therapists can help them.

You've seen this before, haven't you?
Couple walks in for a session, or is part way through, or is at the end, and suddenly bursts into a flurry of "you always say that…" or "you've got the facts wrong: I said red, not read" and away they go rising on the hot air of their self-justification and righteous recrimination at each other – back and forth with increasing volume, conviction and paralysing frustration morphing into rage, fuelled by unrequited injuries dating back to the beginning of the present conflicts which have brought them to you.

You've broken their cycle by insisting they "STOP !!". If you cannot do this, stop reading now because you cannot see or do what follows. You have been swallowed in their storm and are sinking in it with them. As you sink, ask 'Who's in charge here? Who should be in charge here?'


Their first agreement
If you have stopped them, you may say something like, "Is this what you usually do with this subject? … with these differences between you?" "Is this how this issue usually goes?" They usually say "Yes", often in unison – the first agreement they've had for the day, or sometimes for days; their first shared fact* about the relationship.

You may then ask them what happened, what did they see go on between them just then? If the heat was too high they will not be able to recall what happened because they did not hear /see it. They were in the grip of their feelings. This is also what happens to them every time about this subject, and others.

They can remember the heat of their conflict, and, depending on their approach to conflict (attracted or repulsed) move towards it or away. Both of these moves are automatic responses to conflict cued by their emotional DEW line** and anchored in their unrequited injuries***.
Usually a couple knows when conflict is coming and can name the most likely circumstances and issues which will provoke it. What they can't do is stop it once the process starts, once the triggers bite. Usually they have started biting before the participants are consciously aware, though the other may already be aware of their partner's feelings and launching their own defense…and so on it goes.

You should have some information to offer them about what happened, something like the following, which is a system for live exploration of the dynamics of conflict development. .. and their eventual reduction. But probably not in this session, or even the next few.

A systematic exploration approach

Having stopped the flash of conflict, ask 'What started the movement into conflict? Who said / did what?'

If neither can answer, ask this question of the person who first expressed a negative, defensive feeling. Usually the start of the conflict in the room is a glimpse of an expression, a shift of tone or pace of speech, a twitch of a shoulder or the whole posture of the other.

Ask whoever answered the first question, 'What did you feel at that moment?'

Often this is something like attacked, rejected, abandoned…not all of them but one with underlying/primary feelings like scared, sad, numb…

You may be able to point at physical indicators of feelings – movement, tone, intensity – if they cannot find them.

Then continue by asking, 'What did the other do that prompted your feeling…? '

What was the trigger for your response? This is likely to be some aspect of what started the conflict in the first place – a slight movement of body or tone or pace… What did you feel at that moment of your response?

And finally ask, 'Why did you each react to each other as you did?'

This is about what matters to them both; what gives meaning and what meanings are being threatened at that moment. This is what we really fight about of course.

Sometimes early in the work you may have to walk them through this sequence supplying the evidence for them to examine. You should be prepared to replay the events almost word for word if they've missed it because in the grip. You can't do this if caught yourself in their gripping drama.


Any conversation can be debriefed in this way. Practice at debriefing is important both to conceptual clarity (what feelings are., etc.) and technical grip on the dynamics of feelings – competence in handling high value subject matters . Competence supports confidence and thus lowers defensiveness. A shared framework for analysing is a framework for agreement which can be reached for at any time disagreement is threatening relationship progress.


Lead with a promise
It's a useful idea to have previewed this system before you start the substantive work with the couple. Then they will be ready for your stopping them when they fall into their habitual distress the first time. I include a sketch of the system in my opening speech to a couple in the first minutes of the session the first time we meet. It goes like this:

1. The responsibility for the current state and future of the couple is joint
2. This responsibility has varying levels with different issues because individuals value different issues differently
3. We can never fully meet all the needs of another person (goodbye white picket fence), hence our need for friends and family while coupled
4. We can never fully know our own needs at any time because:
   1. They are partly hidden in our unconscious
   2. They are emerging over time as we transit our life stages
5. Consequently, conflict is a necessary part of relationships (not just marriages)
6. This conflict usually takes a repeated form – the systemic communication dysfunction – which can be seen early in couples work, and which the couple immediately recognise as 'what we always do..' (see point 1 above)

Without such a system there's little way to shift the burden of habitual, mutually animated distress. That distress has two immediate sources: one, the perception of the unfair, inappropriate and, so, felt to be punishing behaviour by the partner; and two, the frustration of being unable to respond effectively to parry or contain the perceived threat of punishment. The frustration is the more dangerous and less discussable, hence often inaccessible while being the primary motivation of the moment. Not knowing what / how to do something is more threatening than doing something wrong, which at least is a doing!


Next article, some tools for working the feelings clashes – sharing issues inclusively, flagging hot items, and creating understanding of unshareable injury experiences. Also, some values blockages to effective communication




*a shared fact is one which both members of a couple (or larger grouping, too) give the same meaning to when asked what does this word or statement mean, or what an event looked like (what happened). A shared fact provides a point of agreement from which discussion can continue and come back to if disagreement reappears. It proves they can agree, and know how to do so. A shared fact is the start / heart of a shared world.


**the reptilian brain is tuned to non-verbal indicators of external threat or pleasure, operating at relative light speed; that brain's chief question of the environment is: am I its food or is it my food? Any possibility of getting this wrong tilts the decision equation in the first direction – a potentially terminal error. So the auto pilot for behaviour values higher risk potentials more than lower risk ones – pain over pleasure, that is and acts to prevent errors.


***unrequited injuries are deep historical relationship patterns which remain present to the view of oneself and others as how we normally behave under pressure, but they are often not acknowledged either to ourselves or by others because they are the kind of behaviours which elicit automatic defences; empathy helps us conduct this tacit defence.

Views of life-death

Views of life-death
Torrey Orton
Feb 18, 2012

Note: this piece is the first in the life-death series, the second of which was published here on April 17, 2012. This one was composed out of three separate posts two-three years ago. It sets the problem subsequent life/death posts will address. It was published on the Kings Tribune website on the date above and in the magazine's march 2012 issue.

"You're driving down a road in the desert, and the engine suddenly stops. .. no Pep Boys, no Auto Club to help. Whether the road continues is of no consequence. It has ended for you."

This is Edward Schniedman, dead at 90 in LA, predicting his own death's nature. While death is death, what it means seems to be a matter of opinion. Even what it is seems so, too. So, I offer some views of death as my contribution to the debates and discourses about death.


I have a stake. I'm old enough (68) to know that I'm nearer the end of my term than its beginning. I've outlived my father and his father by 4 years. I'm pretty clear I want to die when I want to, if I can, and have taken steps to encourage that possibility.


I share this view and intent with my wife. We've signed the necessary papers to ensure that the 'life support' technologies are turned off, or left off, if we're incapable of being consulted. Some things stand in the way of complete confidence they will be turned off, mostly others with other meanings to death, who may want not to accept what I have legally decided. Their meanings of life give different tones to death from mine. Some of those differences are catastrophically confronting for people like me. This is the terrain of naturally fundamentalist thinking in fact, not merely in faith or theory. The resurrected are only seen in faith tracts and films. How can I understand this better, and maybe them, too?


The purchase of assuredly effective means to end my life cleanly, with minimum clean-up required of any others is, however, not legally available. I do not want to count on under the counter substances with uncertified contents, etc. I would be happy to engage with a variety of safety requirements, especially ones aimed at ensuring the drug(s) cannot be accessed by anyone other than me. This would require a regime somewhat like the Swiss one portrayed in the Pratchett video. For a local perspective, see the Victorian branch of Dying with Dignity FAQs here.


Some initial takes on life-death

These views on life-death are undertaken with wonder at the difficulty of the task of making sense of death, and life. The counter point is my emotional wrenching by the uncertainty of fulfilling my preference for choosing my own death time, as much as that is possible. These are matters where perspective is nearly all in the struggle to give judgment a sustainable foundation. Here are some first takes. They do not pretend to be complete.


There is my notion of a 'good death'. Dying on one's own kitchen floor or over-night in bed, as one of my parents did, qualifies for this label. In some pre-modern societies there was an understanding that one's time had a limit and making way for others was both necessary and honourable. Another 'good death' may be that at home with more or less extended periods of relatively painless decline and social intimates present continuously on the way. The fact of dying attracts moral attentions of every imaginable sort.


The climate for dying

Second, we have the increasing squeamishness of late modernity about any perceived damage to the self, driven by an implicit assumption that we can be protected from all imaginable dangers (see some of the submissions to the Victorian Royal Commission based on assumptions that the actual 2009 bushfire conditions could have been foreseen and planned for comprehensively).


A handmaiden of this aversion to the material tribulations of everyday life is the philosophy of 'nice'. Be nice; don't trouble others; adjust your thinking and feeling to not confront anyone, even unintentionally.


'Nice' has been enhanced by the actions of the damages lawyers and the health marketing fraternities. The latter sell hopes of endless life and instant recoveries (you deserve a lineless face or pot-less gut as much as you deserve a Gucci or a Ferrari) from the costs of living (obesity, wrinkles, varicosities and lost hair among them).


The lawyers sell (actively marketed these days) reprieve from perceived slights to soul and self which have been legally or administratively excluded from polite discourse. Defence against bullying grows into defence against anything "uncomfortable" like a different perception of our workplace worth from our self-perception – the foundation of performance management, or learning! Warnings of the dangers of overhanging limbs and maybe fallen rocks compete with trees for attention on our highways.


So, we are not to see death or damage in public. My ex-countrymen – Americans - take this even further by banning the showing of those dead from defending the country. The Pratchett video mentioned above received 800 objections to the fact it showed, without flinching or inflating, the last breaths of the patient's life! In case we might be overwhelmed by reality, our TV stations all prepare us for possibly disturbing images.


Nor should we even speak disturbing images. Our public servants are trained (I assume; why else this tortured rhetoric and toneless, robotic delivery by cops and docs and pols?) to say anything but 'dead', 'body' or similarly explicit language. Rather we are given 'the deceased' who 'passed on' (just to somewhere else?) or more grimly 'passed away' (finality is acknowledged), or, more evasively, just 'passed' (like a train in the night?). Yet all are considered "tragedies" that befell "victims" (with the exception of publically recognised crims and malefactors) in print, on screen and in the mundane discourse of our neighbourhoods.


Demographics and politics of life-death

The demographics 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. This 20% achieve a larger electoral influence than their numbers warrant because the total field of voters is finely poised between the major parties. Small factors shift small margins in finely poised electorates. Electorally true and ethically incorrect.


The facts of death – who, how many, when, but not often how or why – are available daily, along with births. With one exception: suicides, successful and attempted, are seldom reported unless unavoidable and even then only implicitly (notably death by train). So the fact that we begin and end are matters of public record, presumably because enough of us are interested to warrant the use of space that might otherwise be sold for ciggy and alcopop ads. We cannot meaningfully speak of death or birth separately without being in denial of the absent partner – we are living-dying beings; we live for a while. However long we do, it never amounts to how long we have not existed. Hence I talk of life-death.


In addition, the boundaries are a bit suss on both ends. For example, where does IVF fit with naturally occurring conception; similarly where does life support machinery fit with naturally occurring death. Notice that neither of these options is available to the poor anywhere. Some of the poor some places do have the chance to sell a part of their biological resources to the rich (comparatively) elsewhere, giving them a surrogate participation in others' longevity. As the Everest example below highlights, human rights are easily over-ruled by specific disabling circumstances, plus variations in courage (or, as I'd have you think, variations in need for martyrdom, which is just a label for a split-second decision). This is also the land of everyday hospital triage under disaster conditions.


A program of explorations

I hope, after building various views of life-death, to arrive at a place where fully rounded treatments of life-death issues can more often be achieved. To do so would mean, for example, considering all specific issues in the context of the materially and socially enabling factors through which any resolution is constructed. In other words, to use consistently the biopsychosocial construct on which some evidence-based medicine attempts to stand for all life-death matters.


So here are some views of life-death to come in this series. The first I have elaborated a bit to give a sense of the material argument. The other six are skeletal images. The order is not assured, nor are the topics guaranteed as stated. I'll be learning as I go and that may change my overall perspective and the features in its view. Reader suggestions welcomed!


Extreme sports and....the permeability of rights in pursuit of meaning – some examples:

Cathy O'Dowd's Rewind 1999 piece in Sunday Life (24 May '09, pg. 30; Melbourne) included a report of her passing by a dying woman on the north face of Everest. "The general public don't get this: they think, 'As long as she's alive, you can't leave'. But they live in a world where you can call the police or an ambulance. You can't do that on Everest."

 

High risk sports - like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping , base jumping - have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood in sub-Saharan hunter-gatherers.

 

In Australia we have our own sport: binge drinking - specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfilments every weekend. These are called "tragedies" when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness.

Beginning of life and ...rights to life. The IVF opportunity and challenge


'Normal' end of life and... is death for embracing or defeating?


Martyrs, those who serve and the costs of justifiable violence


Suicide attempts, successes and failures...irretrievable meaning statements


Choice – what can we really choose, how much should we choose?

 

Near deaths - insights from those who passed over and back again.



 

Learning to act right (26)… My rage and being right…the making of a fundamentalist?

Learning to act right (26)… My rage and being right…the making of a fundamentalist?

Torrey Orton w/ Charles Brass*
April 17, 2012

My ethical / emotional fumblings at the Fertility Control Centre 

This paper is another step in the process of our attempting to understand what we are doing at the Fertility Control Clinic. Since we and the protestors are de facto actors in dramas beyond our personal reach, making sense is difficult. For lack of sense, the effort to continue defending the Clinic is much larger than the four hours a week we usually spend there. This is one part of that effort. See here for the broader context of this paper. We have been at this work for nine months now.

I have a problem. I can't keep my temper when I see a Fertility Control Clinic patient, especially one who is visibly distressed, being verbally assaulted by self-righteous moral prigs with offers of help to continue an unwanted pregnancy. The assailants go beyond merely offering a leaflet to pursuing the patients with closing words something to the effect: "Don't kill your little baby". Remember, these patients are coming for a wholly legal service, which in no respect implies they are murdering anything!!! Quite the contrary. The protestors' injunction is a grossly immoral assault. And it is applied to any female entering the Clinic, though many do for generic sexual health issues. A few stray passers-by get the same treatment, minus the baby killing accusation.

When I see such assaults (which happen on multiple occasions during any morning at the clinic) I flare red in my gut and my thinking more or less stops. I sometimes verbally counter-assault the offending protestor(s), and sometimes their home team facilitators. The latter are protestors who do at other times admit freely that their colleagues' behaviour is inappropriate. And, like many team members in all walks of life, they cannot rein in the abuses by their own. They cannot because membership and identity come before truth and justice for us all much of the time. As Camus said, "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice". See the fate of whistle blowers in any culture for a short history of this human ailment.

I flare because of a certain conviction I am right. The flare's strength tells me how strongly I hold that conviction about any particular assault. Hence, I call some of their language "a grossly immoral assault" above. However, I can see how close this is to their opposing position on the same matters. This kind of certainty process is the making and sustaining of fundamentalists, of me as much as them. It is a process fed, driven even for me, by bringing together a number of threatening factors under one trigger. I know my own, I think.

I know theirs are quite variable in intensity, as are their respective behaviours towards patients. I treat their behaviour as one thing because the patients' primary experience is of their worst behaving members, couched in the context of the HoGPIs' simple presence being experienced as an expression of disapproval by patients. Patient vulnerability at the moment of arrival varies, but the HoGPIs show no capacity to recognise and act on this awareness, as demonstrated by the persistence of their assaultive behaviours.

Collateral contributions to my rage
For me the initial trigger of my rage is the patient abuse by HoGPIs. Some of the collateral threats are also ethical ones more or less tangentially related to that trigger. Here are three of them – a suite of moral obligations foregone by the protestors, which in my view are grounds for a judgment of major hypocrisy against them.

But first, what is an obligation? For these purposes, it is an action required to sustain the meaning of another value. So, if the values (so-described pro-life values) that HoGPIs espouse are rooted in an institution that devalues life in its other actions (unprosecuted priestly paedophilia, for example) we can wonder about what their real values are. This is clearly the case where authorities debase their espoused values by practicing, or allowing to be practised, values which contradict the espoused ones. The fading of the enlightenment project in the light of late capitalism is rife with such contradictions. Our political and commercial authorities resist with similar vigour and tactics to the Catholic resistance: denial, obfuscation and finally pretences to acknowledgement. The Church's Melbourne Response is one such tactic. It is in turn under attack by local members of the priesthood concerned citizens and victims groups for failing tests of transparency, fairness and legitimacy.

What makes an obligation command our attention?
Then, why do these three 'obligations' count as obligations? First, because they are couched within an organisation – the Catholic Church – which is openly and happily hierarchical in its authority, infallible in its claims and so authorising infallibility in their application by the community of its parishioners. The Church's actual fallibility in matters sexual is increasingly on public display across the world, accentuated by its pathetic denials for decades.

Second, the organisation is trying to step into the domain of democratic government with an infallible dictum; that is, to impose a behaviour (notably a negative one: things not to do – abortion, contraception, multiple self-identified sexualities) which is a matter of personal and familial choice. Its agents – the HoGPIs – make it clear in their documentation and on-site behaviour that these matters are never negotiable options for Catholic humans.

Two laws – religious and legal
There are two 'laws' here: the law of the land and the 'law' of God. The second enjoys a special place in the law of the land – namely, being religious and therefore unassailable. This is the source of the Church's effective, to date, claim in Victoria to keeping the handling of what are illegal behaviours (child abuses!!) in house – that is, outside the jurisdiction of the law of the land!! On site at the Clinic, HoGPIs have no qualms about using any tactic they can to influence patients, and deflect defenders. Two laws yield different rules of engagement. We cannot act within their rules, because we do not play by their law.

The nature of the religious law on certain things is to claim superiority over the law of the land, handing therewith to its organisational practitioners a right to disregard the rights of those acting under the law of the land – e.g. patients seeking sexual health advice and abortion services. One need only see what's happening these days in the US and UK for a glimpse of how all sexual health issues are being presented by religious conservatives as matters for reduction to family rights issues – another haven of miscreants and upper-middle class rent seekers. The step from constraining abortion rights to removing contraception rights is small, and the action of HoGPIs at the FCC are in fact constraints of both for patients.

Third, the Church's sexual fallibility partly derives from their one-sex leadership policy. Ours is not a one-sex universe (yet). Continuing to focus on female sexual outcomes as their only locus of control unbalances the responsibility equation. What would a family life campaign look like which especially stigmatised male sexual irresponsibility and was led by nuns and sisters with priests and bishops in the background as support troops?

I will accept that a collateral damage of my seeking to protect FCC patients from unwarranted assaults is facilitating abortion when the HoGPIs accept that one collateral responsibility of theirs is pursuing and preventing priestly predations! That their systemic avoidance response is so untouchable isn't surprising when the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart said on the ABC at a press conference he convened on April 14, 2012 afternoon that what happened in the diocese of Bendigo for decades in the mid 1900's isn't the business of the diocese of Melbourne. As if all Catholics are not tainted by this??

At last, the 3 obligations
One of the HoGPIs home team members is a priest in training who is a "prayer", that is, one of those protestors who only recite prayers and sing hymns, never approaching the patients in any other way. He is among the facilitators of the assaults on patients. Uniformly, they refuse an implicit moral obligation of their working under the headings and formulas of the Catholic Church's judgments on matters of life/death. This obligation is to restrain behaviour which exceeds the range appropriate to normal human interactions for reasonable discourse – that is, not harassing or demonising, the FCC patients. These limits are published in the Forty Days for Life website. They are routinely disregarded both by assaultive HoGPIs and their facilitating colleagues.

A second obligation arises from the continuing history of unprosecuted sexual exploitations carried out by priests and brothers under the umbrella of the same church which authorises the demonising of unknown others for using their legally authorised rights - access to abortion, same sex relationships, contraception, etc. The HoGPIs failure to engage themselves with this history is an implicit endorsement of the abuses and abusers. Expecting consistency about such matters is not nit-picking because the sexual failures of the church are in the same moral domain as the patients' rights. In Australia, paedophilia is a distorted sexuality, both in law and religion. Abortion and contraception are only seen as distorted in some religious practices.

In the same vein, this hypocrisy is more than the banal variety of everyday life because the Church's claims about life and death are made without exceptions allowed, absolutely, and so must be sustained by absolutely reliable behaviours by practitioners and priests and sisters and brothers…!! We know, however, that the level of everyday Catholic practitioner support for these rules is less than 20%. They, the communicant masses, are of course vilified mildly by descriptions claiming they aren't the real Catholic thing…just liturgical communicants, perhaps.

A third obligation is to assail (to evangelise, in religious idiom) their own fellow believers who do not follow the teachings the Church espouses on matters of sexualities. Some 80% of practicing Catholics use contraception, and/or avail themselves of abortion when necessary and / or, as appropriate, couple same-sexually if not merely claim their sexuality publically. One protestor acknowledged their failing when I pointed it out to him and waved it away as a lost cause.

Other factors contributing to my rage
Beyond these three factors are those derived from my appreciation and judgment about the current state of our small corner of the universe – mostly sad, enraged…depressed. Overall, powerlessly assaulted myself, but not to my face like the patients are by the HoGPIs. These feelings have nowhere practical to go…as many have noticed, our politics are close to terminally damaged as are the surrounding social structures – family associations, work – all consumercialised in the one size economic containers that pass for the best living standards in the history of humanity…

So, it is easy for these feelings to attach to any available, apparently relevant outlet: fundamentalist depredations of the weak, for instance. My feelings system decides what such outlets are. And maybe, as Charles suggested, it's not the HoGPI assaults on patients which trigger my responses but these other factors triggering first – hard to tell. I'll watch a little more closely the next time I take the street at the FCC.

Some of our FCC defence colleagues cannot speak to the HoGPIs because they are so angry at their behaviour (and attitudes and values and…). Some of us think they don't deserve normal human treatment because of their blind devotion to their rightness. For months, Charles and I have related to them as human, though not all were interested in being treated as human by us for fear of corruption of their beliefs/faith. They were right, since some of those who do talk to us acknowledge some growth in their views of the whole situation and other related matters.

For me their way of holding their morality at the FCC – as incontrovertibly true / right – conflicts loudly with my number one professional principle: that everyone is capable of learning to some degree and my job is to identify and support that capability (in other words to treat them all as human), and so the door to a hope condemned to failure opens once again, and I get another kind of rage – that of the helpless child confronted with a necessary but unachievable objective.

How to act in this conflicted context?
One option is to treat HoGPIs as morally dead human ciphers, the way they view and treat patients, and to systematically abuse HoGPIs quietly about the moral obligations they are failing to acknowledge or fulfil in their "helping" activities. That they know they are breaching such obligations is clear whenever I mention them quietly; they flinch and deny the connections suggested…akin to their hidden camera work: acts of shame caught out. It's not true they are "morally dead". But their morality is deadly for patients. Not surprisingly, they very seldom get any patient uptake even if their handouts are accepted. This does not teach them anything about approaching others. Is punishment their real personal objective?

This option of treating them as morally dead is encouraged by the black/white, right/wrong universe which emerges unavoidably for me during patient arrivals at the FCC. At those times I must be clear whose side I am on, and that is not in doubt. Not fronting up to the harassment means another patient is assailed wrongfully. These moments are the "certainty process" I mentioned at the beginning of this discussion. They are also radicalising moments as a result, since each encounter with the HoGPIs' group indifference to patient pain encourages a more robust intervention from us which attracts more robust ones from them. And around it goes.

To possibly achieve some reduction in patient pain, be consistent with our commitment to non-violent counter-protest and maintain some sense of our moral integrity, we are moving towards an agreed tactic of active blocking HoGPIs when they breach the harassment barrier – when they step beyond a patient refusal of their offer and continue verbal assault. The block is physical, moving between them and the patients and accompanied with words to the effect: "They said no." No belittling, demeaning or demonising allowed towards HoGPIs. Just a block between them and the patients, and a reminder they have stepped over the legal line into harassment (a line they know because they act within it when police and local council law officers are present).

We also continue the effort to get all HoGPIs to respect the white line separating them from the public walk space.


*I credit Charles with part authorship because his persistent demand for clarity of expression and convincing argument has been essential in pushing me through this morass. Failures in these regards are wholly my responsibility, much as I'd like to share them.

Life at the edges of death: Extreme by choice

Life at the edges of death: Extreme by choice
Torrey Orton
April 11, 2012

 
TJ's trials by near death – not his wish, his fate …

 

He was falling backwards into a bottomless glacial crevasse, joined by high tensile rope to three other climbers - two in front and one behind him. He stopped falling with a jerk after 15 meters of free-fall, only to be yanked into free-fall another 15+ meters as the porter behind him was pulled into the crevasse with him and dropped the length of the safety rope past him. The rescue commenced by the front two dropping separate ropes down to be buckled onto their safety harnesses.

 

But his hands were frozen on his safety rope, and soon started literally freezing as the wind-chill took the ambient temperature to -20C. He tried but failed to convince his right hand to let go and grab the new line…it took an hour to get through from brain to the hand, which effortlessly resisted loosening its catatonically traumatised grasp. Finally he and then the porter were hauled up.

 
This is a true story and it is not the source of TJ's primary nightmare. When TJ showed up in therapy he was wracked nightly by hourly wakeups snapping him upright in bed, as if at the end of that drop again, staring into a blank space in his memory of the events...part of which he could not recapture. This was turning sleep into a drama he'd never enacted before in his life. He wondered if they would stop, and then what it all meant anyway.

 
High risk sports like sky diving, paragliding, bungee jumping, BASE jumping, monster wave surfing, and cave diving have been around since lion-baiting was the entry price for manhood among Rift Valley hunter-gatherers. But with extreme sports participants can always choose not to play on any given day, while lion baiting was a must do for entrance to adulthood. It was work in its time. The difference between extreme outcome occupations and sports is this: workers do not get to choose whether to 'play' or not; if their shift is on, they're in play. Their story is for another day. The story of willing self-endangerment is today's.

 
3 Questions


I'm trying to figure out who are the audiences for this story, what is the objective and what is the narrative? First, the audiences I'm seeking here come in two brands: the fearful, look-young brigades (both young and old) who are the market for eternal youth treatments and preparations, and the fearless experience seekers who climb any mountain in search of a peerless cliff to rappel or jump, even better for the possibility or certainty that no one will be there to pick them up if this jump/fall is the one too far! Both groups are death defying in different ways. The bulk of my possible audience is judiciously discriminating choosers of appropriate lives and life activities – or so we may think we are. We may be death avoiding, too.

 
Second, the objective of this undertaking is to create perspective on this most central subject – the meanings of life/death. As there are many lives, there are many deaths. Dignified dying like dignified living is certainly not assured even for those most endowed with means and rights. Yet dying, like birthing, we share with all organic creation; these are the events where we leave and re-join the non-human. Dust to dust and all that…

 
Vulnerable awareness


Third, the narrative is vulnerability. A fault line of appreciation runs through these audiences: are they aware or not of their vulnerability to fate? My impression is that a major life stage, sometimes called midlife, is marked out from the preceding stages by this awareness. Much of its drama is fired by efforts to deny or avoid the awareness that we will all die. Few step up to embrace it comfortably. Some get to embrace it early, like TJ in the crevasse at age 21, which gives meaning to "having maturity beyond one's years". Often we do not choose the risk we find ourselves taking. TJ knew of it beforehand, but not in the sense he now does.

 
To embrace our vulnerability might lead to shifting our life focus from what we do to how we do it: to value ourselves for the manner of our efforts more than success. This opportunity comes sharply into view when the amount of future before us is growingly likely to be less than the past behind us. My age, for example.

 
Some psychologists tell us we can't reliably choose about much. That small much apart, the rest of our lives is contained in the largely self-programmed grip of habits. We choose from within their confines. But it would seem we should be better about choosing death-defying activities. Maybe we learn what they are by approaching them so close we can hear the breath of death, feel its power, taste its dryness…Or, maybe we seek death-defying activities because we can't quite hear or feel or taste ourselves in our normal living.

 
The normal is, after all, somewhat boring. We know how to do the normal things, what the risks are, what value we get from them. Like our cat, we cannot always resist climbing that bit higher, reaching that bit further, straining that bit longer…and if we do, we often have some other humans, as does the cat, to come along and catch us falling. In fact, we have whole systems devoted to just that: emergency crews (the extreme occupations) for every clime and consideration, as long as there are enough of us risk-takers around to afford the service.

 
Why some sports cannot be extreme…


There's a difference within this sports and extreme occupations. There are risky activities which are contained from start to finish within supervised rules – professional team ball sports of all types. Among them there are differences in the degrees of intentional violence spread across from minimal contact soccer games to high contact footballs and ice hockey. The latter is distinguished professionally by having the boundaries of legitimate danger policed by designated enforcers whose lifespan is shortened by a regime of concussions which start in high school play. This may be the boundary between normal contact sports and the extreme ones – the level of death threat allowed by the rules.

 
One-on-one struggles are more sharply framed to confront participants and observers with near death on the hoof. There's cage fighting ("mixed martial arts" for those who prefer a façade of discipline to a parade of punishments), whose objective is nearly death, as is boxing's. Or try Muay Thai for cultural variety and the pleasure of seeing small guys work hard without a covering of chemically promoted bulk.

 
And there are machine-mediated entertainments where death is possible but not intended - the various car and motorcycle racing formulas with a terminal smash just around the corner, or a fence jump to carry away a few spectators to boot. Long distance sailing competitions (Sydney/Hobart) can be deathly dangerous. But, after losing, seasickness is usually the worst result.

 
In Australia we have our own freelance sport: binge drinking - specialty of the young and younger olds, with death dealing potentials and fulfilments every weekend. These endgames are called "tragedies" when they are merely excesses of youthful riskiness. They seek, and achieve, meaning by "just having a bit of fun" (also the excuse-de-jour for public sexual harassment, racial vilification, bullying…), confirmed by their reports of having missed whole chunks of the fun they had – blacked out, but still standing. These are not extreme sportsters, though often the clients for extreme outcome occupations – police, security guards, paramedics …

 
Nor are those going into warzones for work – reporters, aid providers, observers – who die at greater rates than the extreme explorers, but not so high as alcohol/drug supported road kills. Theirs, the warzone workers, are respected deaths with damages for respectable reasons, though most of us may see them as extreme, too. Theirs is another realm of meaningfulness, also at the boundaries of life, whose purpose is clear. Just the price is high and we may dispute the appropriateness of paying it for one or another story.

 
So, back to TJ.

 

His worst nightmare snaps him upright in bed with a start five times a night – the same start every time: he feels the avalanche coming and can't remember it hitting him. The rest is history; it's unavailable to memory.

 

He was thrown, along with his three climbing partners, down the mountainside. Out of the tumble one landed on top of the snow mess. He started the recovery process, digging the other three of them out after a few hours in the snow – long enough for TJ to experience acute claustrophobia. Another first for him.

 

Two hours later he started the trek down the mountain and onto an ice field, following more or less in the steps of those in front, knowing that probable death could be a few feet off the marked path…but he forgot and slipped into a review of his just passed resurrection from the snow, precursor to the hourly shocked upright awakenings from his sleep…and he fell backwards into a crevasse….

 

And so, what's the purpose of his life? The hourly flashbacks had dropped from hourly to once nightly, assuming the shape more of questions than images.

 
Partly a response to these questions has to include their meaning for TJ's others…that is the meaning his life has for them and what his life does for their meaning. Another part of a response lies in the boundary between living and not: how much can we choose to live, rather than just take living as it comes? And how much does he, or anyone, need to try to live by testing themselves near the edges of death, in order to feel that they have lived as well as they can?…and so, too, others may feel they have as well, too, by drawing energy, direction, validation from his efforts as has happened publically in the Jim Stynes story lately.

 
These will all be particular answers; the questions remain universal general. One constraint on questions and answers is that some meanings cannot be created and sustained without the live possibility of failure. Limits cannot be set without exceeding them. The ultimate excess is death. This is the stuff of story, the material of literary practice past and present. Real stories which illuminate out potential by stretching the limits may also seem to be more fiction than fact – how can anyone be so good, or bad?

 
Next: Extreme outcome occupations: those who may die for us – police, firies, soldiers, and their commercial and volunteer colleagues. Do we care enough about them as they are caring for us??