Rectifications (30)…CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES

Torrey Orton
Dec. 24, 2013

On the road again…slow vehicles

“CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES” the bright black on blue sign says along the Great Ocean Road. Then another sign says (in stark black on white) “SLOW VEHICLE TURNOUT” about 300 metres down the road, another few metres beyond which is the turnout. Having taken it or not, you are then greeted with SLOW VEHICLES THANK YOU in the black on blue idiom of the initial challenge. If you are a native born Ozzie, you know what a turnout is, but no amount of nativity will gloss the other two messages, even given the contextual background birth has given you. This is bureaucratic English of a high order, aggravated by the fact that the actual targets are non-native English speakers – tourists who rock up and down the famous Road, presumed to be without our inbuilt (though increasingly corrupted) regard for civility on the road.

On first encounter a couple of years ago, it took me a while to work out the syntax of CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES. ‘Consider’ cut a few ways at once, none of which easily self-selected out of the sign. Should I care for those vehicles if they are following me or notice more clearly that I was following them or should I be following them? The more I worried this linguistic bone the more the initial confusions returned. The attention to the possibilities lifts them all off the solid ground of shared realities which give easy meaning to most of life. The formulations take on their own life, unanchored, floating into a mildly paranoid verbal ether. Even my wife who is no mean linguist and a native Australian English speaking one to boot couldn’t provide definitive help with these options.

A XXL slow offense without intent

In the course of 9 days at the beach I traversed a handful of these linguistic suites a day, barely noticing their offer of driverly civic-mindedness. They were only brought sharply back into my awareness by a new set of them appearing on one of the inland approaches to the coast road. And then my awareness was tightened another notch by having the desired behaviour (in both my mind, and the presumptive sign writers I guess) demonstrated by a slow vehicle (a size XXL self-propelled accommodation variety vehicle) which appeared in front of me along one curvy stretch between Eastern View and Lorne.

Said XXL suddenly pulled off into an unmarked turnout (on other days it would just be a wide shoulder), no indicator of intent given. I was pleased for the release and irritated by the surprise move which required a bit of preventive braking on my part. Wife Jane thought I should have offered an acknowledging toot in passing, as one offers an acknowledging wave to someone coming who makes way for one on a single lane street. I thought not because no indication of intent had been given, implying to me that the turnout was gratuitous and not considered. It was a moment of that low grade moral conflict which makes marriage memorable for the often equal spread of justice between both our perspectives.

Another what’s normal now challenge?

As often, a linguistic detour turns into a challenge for action. For example, I haven’t even gotten to the question of what “slow” means. The practical implications of this potential for differentiation will be apparent to anyone living in a family situation, not to say the “loving family” of death notices and similarly human newsworthinesses! Who would self-identify as “slow” to start with? Then, what’s “slow” to them if they do, or are badgered into doing so by caring others? And, then, what’s their slow got to do with the “SLOW” on the instructional sign set? This is, perhaps, why instruction leading to discretionary, self-designed performance outcomes often induces indulgences…

…and a very merry Xmas to y’all.

Relativities (1)…following a path you can’t see

Torrey Orton

December 5, 2013

When looking where you are going is misleading

Telling direction by sun reckoning

We were out bushwalking a known path which became more and more uncertain as we ambled along uphill within decreasing earshot of the lightly gurgling rapids of Olinda Falls. The path had been much clearer two years ago when we walked into an ant colony territorial scouting party thereabouts in spring. I was sure we were on the right one (mapped in the walk book we were carrying), but Jane was not. And I understood her doubt. Many parts of our passage were unrecognisably the passage of before.

What grounded my certainty this time was direction. I knew from the previous walks, and the map, that we had to be heading north-westerly and we were. The sun told me we were actually doing so. It was assisted by the fading stream gurgles to our right and down 50 meters or so, which positioned the map in the place we actually were walking.

The sun has noticeably more consistency in its shifting daily passages than the flora on a bush trail year to year. This consistency does a reasonable job of being the truth for that setting. That is we can safely proceed with life as if it were true, and behaviourally we treat it as really true – that is, we act on it. For this practical purpose it is and was certainly true. Sure that certainty is only as good as this walk, though generally within our life spans the broad contours of maps do not change too much, climate catastrophes so far notwithstanding.  The sun is even more likely to endure for our reconnoitring purposes.

Plato’s cave

Plato probably knew about this level of certainty, but demanded, as philosophers do, something a little more reliable, more certain, more definite and picked up on the idea that an idea has a longer life than any particular sunray…though not than the sun, perhaps.

Those who have only lived in either the northern or southern hemisphere believe that the sun always runs in the same part of the sky characteristic of northern and southern exposures. They have to be told vigorously to check their natural directional guessing when changing hemisphere…somewhat as right side drivers have to be told vigorously to check their natural look to the left before crossing a road, and vice-versa for left siders. Of course, the sun is running in the same place, it’s only our perspective that makes it not look so.

 

Learning to act right (28)… Cracking nuts - talking to single-issue fanatics

Torrey Orton

Nov. 23, 2013

 “There is a right way of living” he said on the phone from Rome, “and it is our task to try to find it and follow it.”

Cardinal George Pell quoted in TheAGE’s GoodWeekend, June 16, 2012; pg. 10

It should be clear that Pell’s assertion is not remotely true. The Catholic Church’s history can be read as a repeated confrontation with the fact that there are many ways to be human and, so, to live. Pell’s untruth supplies the intellectual and organisational energy for the absolutisms of the Helpers of God’s Little Children’s (HoGPI) personal confidence in their abusing other’s life choices under the pretence of offering “help” they know they cannot materially or socially provide. Of course, similar simplicities underpin the fanatical ends of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and evangelical protestant Christianity.

The Protestants a few centuries ago arose out of various revulsions at the socio-spiritual voracity of the Church, only then to spawn their own rigidities (sects like the Exclusive Brethren and the cyclical upshots of evangelisms) with which they have struggled ever since. They rest in the near background of our present focus on the Catholic Church at the Fertility Control Clinic. Much about to be said here will apply to them, as to the rabid branches of Judaism (ultra-orthodox) and Islam (Wahhabi / Salafi) and Buddhism. All three monotheisms are fired by periodic ecstatic revisitings of the original texts in search of uncorrupted meanings, pure meanings, the ‘real’ meanings – always a backwards look which fuels backwards steps. The catalysts for the cleansing fires are perceptions of moral decline, often the fruits of socio-economic and scientific / technological growth.

Within these struggles lies the critical one over the question of rendering unto Caesar – that is, the acknowledgment that the religious is neither the only nor the dominant domain of human being and that pretending to be the only domain necessarily leads to astounding corruptions of the religious, and perversions of everything else. The separation of church and state took a lot of killing to achieve, first arriving at a clear closure through Roger Williams in what became Rhode Island in 1636 and that only by self-exile from the rigours of the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A shareable assumption, perhaps

Let’s continue with a potentially shareable assumption: the world as we knew it in the 1950’s has fallen apart across a broad spectrum of life domains and has been doing so for a long time before that. The pace of decomposition of basic relationships seems to be increasing, marked by data on reduction of friendships over time and increases of sole occupancy dwellings, especially by women. Marriages are a very un-investable 50/50 commitment these days. The evidence on life satisfaction as a function of increased wealth should be a caution to the hyper-accumulating One Percent club, but it won’t be.  And so on… It’s not hard to think we are in a period of catastrophic decline, surrounded by Decline of Rome type perversion and indulgence.

Some would say the fall started when the Church lost the fight to keep the sun circling the earth 500 years ago; others would say since the discovery of relatively safe sex media starting with reliable condoms and running on into the pills (before and after, in turn), and abortion as a backup for inevitable mistakes/failures of these media; others, again, would say since the acquisition of wealth has become the dominant objective of all leading world economies, and its principal measure, money, the major denominator of virtue (virtue having become just another tradeable commodity); and, others would say since human control of life was put within arm’s reach through the advances of sciences, amongst which the biological is the most prominent.

The Enlightenment scientific project (now a program daily reiterated by announcements of the latest “evidence-based” discoveries) promises to save us from the conditions of being human: from being fallen in the Judaeo-Christian sense, from being frail in the biological sense, from being limited in the ontological sense, and so on. That project is a canonical claim with as much purchase on reality as the biblical but masquerading as possible, not necessary – no faith required, just wondering interest.

Cracking nuts, really?!?

Yes, it is my professional judgment that the HoGPIs are nuts, cracked, crazed and must be addressed as such since an assumption of sanity (e.g. that they not provoke patients in any way!) justifies behaviour which repulses patients, and enrages us, by its inhumanity (to put it moderately). HoGPIs think somewhat the same of the patients (and Friends, too, of course) because we are working against what they see as the natural order of things. The main evidence for the latter thought is that they always present themselves as conflicted by their unrequited love of patients and unrecognised hate for patient’s choices. Their public face and materials (the hoardings worn by men and women to meet the council requirements for no promotional materials on the pathways) are more provocative of patient anger / sadness than they are solicitous of patient concern / interest. Why else keep secret video records of who comes to the FCC without knowing what they are coming for.

HoGPIs may not be cracked throughout their lives, but in Fertility Clinic matters they behave convincingly as if they are nuts. So, how can we talk to them? There are many difficulties having a real conversation in the setting of HoGPIs’ protest. One of us remains admirably committed to the possibility of “real conversation”. I’m a few steps behind him, currently mostly acting as if there is no possible conversation with them these days.

Challenges: major issues which I’d like to turn into development opportunities.

First, ask them their names. Most refuse, saying “I don’t have to tell you.” The refusal can be engaged as an avoidance of personal responsibility for the roles they are playing in “helping”. By staying nameless they do not have to face taking personal responsibility for their beliefs or their expressions of belief to patients. This is a sub-adult behaviour, of course, typical of those with an uncertain grasp of their belief systems. By remaining nameless they can treat us as “murderers” with no humanity. Ask which church they belong to of the two ex-Premier of NSW Christina Keneally a few months ago discussing the challenges of talking to her children about church paedophilia and distinguishing between the “Institutional church” (the putative guilty ones) and some of the church (the real one???).

Help pressed on patients who decline it is harassment.

1)     HoGPIs making the offer of “help” to patients is a legal process, until it becomes harassment. Harassment starts in Melbourne Council ordinances at the moment a potential offer of information or discussion is refused by a member of the public. This refusal may be explicit – ‘no thanks’, etc.- or implicit – a refusing non-verbal of normal sorts like turning away, shaking the head, etc. Nothing may be offered by hand or mouth after that point.

It is also unlawful to pursue patients, or anyone else, from down the street to their notional destination at the Clinic. Daily HoGPIs pursue three ‘innocent’ parties: local inhabitants, local workers and patients with other than termination concerns, often from 50 metres up or down the street from the Clinic gates.

Conflicting rights: the right to offer and the right to refuse; the latter is not acknowledged or accepted in practice by HoGPIs except when Council authorities are present and even then…

“Murder is happening behind these walls”

2) Responding to single issue perspectives packaged as the most important thing right now – e.g. “murder is happening behind these walls” which we (Friends of the FCC) are facilitating in their view, and therefore we are murderers’ too.

Responding to the “murder” charge is necessary because this perception fires HoGPI righteousness!! It is not the legal view of life beginning in Victoria. It is not the scientific view of life beginning in the educated world. It is not the view of all Christians, Jews or Moslems anywhere.

A second response is to deny it is a stand-alone issue…rather, it is part of the whole package of the Church’s birthlivingdeath doctrine, which at any time in history variably validates and supports differing standards for birthing, living and dying; varying principles of decision…specifically the regressive Papal package of no abortion, no contraception, no gay sex or rights, no euthanasia which is the currently received message of the Church on all such matters and undiscussably so, or as Pell would say, “universally”…. though there’s a slight lightening of the atmospherics of the doctrine under the new Pope Francis – less judging but no less condemning.

They are failing miserably…

3) They are failing miserably in their efforts to even get a hearing from patients – 70% will not even accept a handout and most of those who do are Chinese or Indians for whom rejecting a public offer is impolite. Most of those which are accepted are not read, and in some cases couldn’t be because some patients are not native speakers of English.

No real numbers exist on “help” HoGPIs have provided to any patients and they acknowledge they couldn’t provide any large amount of help if they were successful engaging patients. So, they are constantly frustrated. One HoGPI said “It’s about love, not money” when confronted with the impossibility of their “helping” any significant number.

The historical shortcomings of prohibitions

4) Ask them if they know the pre-abortion and pre-contraception history of coat hanger abortion parlours and farming out of children to agencies - Catholic or otherwise – which themselves harboured systemic child abuse practices????

What did the recent Bert Wainer (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/dangerousremedy/video/ ) story tell us?? That no abortion, like no alcohol (have a look at the criminalities spawned by Prohibition in the US 90 years ago for an example of unintended and unimagined consequences of universal virtue imposed for others’ good) and no drugs (the criminalities across the world spawned by the War on Drugs) are practically unsustainable regimes, slowly collapsing under their own weight now and at previous attempts to impose virtue by force… Another case in point: the notorious failure of abstinence-only sex-education in the US!!!

Can you stop people from messing up relationships, committing rape, fumbling pre- and post-marital sexual encounters, having contraception breakdowns (20% condom failure rate?)?? The figures on relationship instability are consistent for 50+ years – around 40-50% formally fail (end in divorce). These figures are insignificantly different for major religious groupings in industrial cultures, except for the cult-like fundamentalist fringe groups across the monotheisms.

Ask HoGPIs what drove people to seek abortions under pre-legalisation conditions, even at great danger to themselves?? This set of forces is most instructive because it tells us something about what will push people into action with high risk potential – a way of predicting likely rates of abortion seeking in spite of a ban.

They are wrong about stress and trauma

5) HoGPIs have incorrect psychology about patient stress, historical traumas, the meaning of tears, leading to embedding untested attributions of patient present states like they are feeling guilt, regret, etc.!!!

 

The last weakness is the most important of all. Attributions cannot be reliably tested under threat like that patients experience out front of the Clinic. The social context there elicits the personal guilt/shame about sexual matters which abounds in our culture. Guilt/shame are known to affect reporting of abuses massively and are recognised widely as a distorting feature of the domain…one which is aggravated by religious upbringings for many people.

The HoGPIs’ abortion regret argument: there is no rigorous support for abortion being especially conducive to “mental health” problems. And, of course, regret and guilt are normally occurring feelings in life situations of many kinds. They are not intrinsically pathological or forecasts of depression.

Tears often have more than one emotional foundation: minimum possible feelings expressed in the simple act of crying are sadness, fear and anger together. Shame/guilt comes second. Stress is cumulative. Acute stress is common throughout life but not dangerous to well-being unless converted into chronic reoccurrences, as in family violence, etc.

If you claim to lead virtue you have to be squeaky virtuous

6) Recognising that different life matters have different moral valences – e.g. those who propose to rule (others) on “the right way to live” are making moral claims much greater than those in everyday life roles and institutions; the closest to the church would be legal and financial ones, w/ medical in the second row; those making great claims about anything and wanting to insist on being followed have to be purer than the rest of us; we can do impurity OK already.

Can you prevent a proportion of the population from being systemically excluded from normal society in ways leading to sub-minimal upbringings over multiple generations? E.g. – the repeatedly poor over generations. And there is “soul murder” – the destruction of quality of life by parents and other responsible adults.

The Church has a noble and long commitment to alleviating poverty, etc…why don’t you put energy into that since those conditions produce the most negative results for children...and doing so is part of your notional spiritual vocations!!

Can you guarantee no child will be assaulted by any religious from any given date forward??

Could you provide for anything like 10% of patients presenting for abortions if they chose your offer??

Sexual abuse and silence

7) Do you know that X % of sexual abuses, and many other intra-familial or communal ones, are never reported formally? Do you know why?

Where does your taking choice away from people stop??  At the church’s “double jeopardy” principle for handling end of life pain mitigation: that medicating to reduce suffering may consciously be used where the process will also produce eventual death (the de facto ‘put ‘em out of their misery’ treatment that has long been allowed in medicine)?

Sexism and power

 

8) Who are you the Church to decide for women and men? Sexism is explicit in the Church’s role structure and ideology.

Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and Council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.

Start at home…

9) Why don’t they go after their co-religionists who do not practice the Church’s doctrine on life/ death matters?? Actually the Church has sent an envoy recently to “evangelise” the wayward masses who self-identify as members but are non-practicing…Do they fear the disapproval of their co-religionists? Wouldn’t it make a greater impression if they were known to be putting the resurrection of Catholic morality first in their efforts?? Shouldn’t it be easier to do…or maybe that’s why it’s not a promising venture for the martyr oriented fundamentalists of the FCC front yard.

Matters of faith / belief

10) But in the end, this is a matter of faith, which cannot be adjudicated by facts and we see the issue of life beginning (and ending!) differently, and you have a right to your faith but no right to attempt compelling our faith / belief…though I’m happy to entertain discussion about the rightness of the faiths – e.g. some faith issues have been clearly ruled matters of fact, like varieties of sexualities!!!...just as the role of women as equals in everyday life has been similarly clarified as fact and accepted as such even in the Church except for where further work needs to be done to close the gaps in historical practices  - eg male only priesthood, bishoprics, etc.

A note on faith: there have been three iterations of the Word, of revelation, each of which founds a religion – Judaism, Christianity and Islam - all of which are in the name of the same god. This leads to a wonder at what the god was doing each time, since the revelations overlap in content…did the god realise it had forgotten certain points and needed to have another go? This would make the god a developing or maturing being, not a finished and perfect one.. and therefore having no universal, immutable claims…a fact which is replicated in  the  Church’s Papal infallibility having been repeatedly shown to be fallible, or need adjusting for changing times, etc., by the Church itself, to say nothing of Galileo and company.

 

 

 

Learning to act right (37)… A burqa near enough

Torrey Orton

November 23, 2013

I got to learn something the other day at a psych conference in Sydney. As usual, the important learnings often do not come by choice…or, rather, the choice is about whether to learn or not once fate has cast me into teachable moments. This one arose from my habitual preference for the last seats in the room of trainings and presentations. It keeps me out of the frontline of unsolicited audience participation tactics and allows a modest escape if the event is failing enough of my needs!

A woman arrived late and sat three chairs over from me with nothing but a slit for vision. She was even wearing thin dark leather gloves amplifying the fact and prominence of her hands (writing session notes with her gloves on, but shoes off stockinged feet). My whole self tensed with apprehension. I had previewed such a scene in the past as I worked through the challenge of full body veiling to my sense of normal social practice, testing my flexibility for tolerance of a practice which seemed then, and still now, to be inhumane. Travel has often exposed me to variations of the burqa, always at the distance which travel provides even if we are confronted by lack of space and packed aisles.

She was separated from me, and I from her, by another woman who had come along before the session started. The burqa’d voice started me on the path to release from the dogma of my cultural incompetence. It was a real Oz accented, somewhat rough, loud presence (…maybe a smoker’s) asking about fine points of psych research’s implications for families. Slowly my anxiety declined, joints unleashed, breathing lengthened, attention to the event focussed again. Maybe a half hour or so to return to normal, with only that slight fizz of guardedness which attends most of my public behaviour still in play.

Somewhere between that session and the next we resat in a similar configuration but shorter rows and my anxiety continued to abate. So, anxiety about what? Anxiety about not being able to see the whole face of anyone I might talk to. Since then I’ve remembered that men in sunglasses at night present the same opportunity for discomfort. And since then, I’ve remembered that actually I’m a specialist in voice in my work. I can catch a slight movement in tone, pace, rhythm, volume…the kinds which signal movements of evaluation, of appraisal, of all the emotions through which we engage the world. The kinds which give a sense of the being of the person at the moment rather than the mediated being of visual cues like manner of dress.

And so it was with the burqua’d woman. I recognised her voiced expressions of culture, health and interest, among others. I could have addressed them in the dark never having seen how she was dressed – that is, as if I were blind. I can see with my ears, as the blind do. Sometimes my seeing gets in the way of my hearing. This was one of them.

There were other things I learned, but this is the one to write home about rather than letting it slip into the ether of memory. Trust my other senses.

 

 

 

Appreciation (52)… Whatever became of…?

Torrey Orton

November 11, 2013

Whatever became of…?

So this is what became of us.

Me collapsing on the bed after making it for the thousandth time one would-be stormy night in our Melbourne house and home of forty years… Jane having finished off a story about a projected late-50^th graduation anniversary event in France wondering as she considered a classmate’s proposed list of participants, “so that’s what became of X…” and following up with “…and this is what became of us..” rolling around with tear pulling laughter that we have become an expert (not without dissent) bed-making team with clear role delineations (me the sheet layer; she the pillow ironer – a division of labour which expresses the advantages we each bring naturally to the respective tasks) and usually reliable product. Is this what mothers mean intoning the “I wonder what will become of you...” incantation at our teen and early adult selves?

That’s not all we’ve become but the moment captured the perilously fine judgment of having arrived at something, of having become, of finishing…appropriately enough in a life domain that is never finished (housekeeping goes on until there is no one to do it or nowhere to do it – the ultimate declarations of fate completed). And we could rest on the laurels of this moment with no second thoughts.

And what’s becoming of another…

By that chance which is founded and directed by a conjunction of genetic histories and vocational overlaps, a nephew arrived among us for a couple of days in pursuit of his vocation and having arrived in his broader journey at a height of achievements (the world increasingly coming to his professional doorstep in search of his views and his family of four having settled enough to confirm it’s really working …) from which he can look down and back with justifiable self-approval, unalloyed with self-aggrandisement or narcissism.

Nor are we finished becoming, it seems, though there’s talk again about major changes of employment commitment about a year from now. It’s hard to imagine, and there is no pressure to do so, that we’ll ever be seriously retired. That’s what one does when there’s nothing left to do and/or no more capacity, whichever arrives first. On the other hand, I’m getting some feeling for what retired my mean when I am visited by thoughts of camping the Kimberley again, doping similar in Tasmania and puttering around parts of Europe…none of which can comfortably done at length and a therapy practice be maintained. Or so it seems from here.

…but for now this is what’s become of us.

Learner therapist (40)…… Blame as a life span development factor

Torrey Orton

Oct. 31, 2013

Lifelong learning’s performance engine – error and blame

What I’m about to say is unremarkable. Its purpose is to rehabilitate the concepts of responsibility and blame, especially the latter. Blame enjoys a very modest reputation these days. In the therapeutic and associated (e.g. criminology, health…) trades some would like to execute blame with a severe termination and others less certain hold it at the distance that a bad smell requires to be noticed but not be uncomfortable. I will attempt the rehabilitation by situating blame among the broadest of human concepts – life span development. Here goes.

I look at therapy as a specialised learning trip for the repair of psycho-spiritual injuries acquired in the process of upbringing and adulthood. This view places therapy inside the range of lifespan development. Life span development, in turn, has some predictable or, perhaps more precisely, unavoidable stages, steps, challenges, obstacles …choose the noun which fits your current developmental situation.

Every human meets at least two of these stages by default: birth and death. The rest are somewhat subject to individual choices. They are foreseeable but not predictable in the usual sense of that word. Putting the same point another way: while the life pathway can be mapped for humanity, everyone’s place on it takes precedence over their stage in it; stages are retrospective markers of passage. Ask a parent if having children was anything like what they imagined from their experience of being children or their instruction by their elders about what it would be like. Answer: usually, no.

Life stages and needs

There are a number of life stage systems around which overlap with human needs. For example, consider Maslow’s hierarchy which somewhat proceeds upwards from infancy to late adulthood without ever exactly saying so. The bottom rung (the ground) is survival matters of food shelter and safety; the top (varying with cultures) may be self-realisation (the Western one) and/or individual integration in social structures (Eastern).

Robert Kegan’s view of the developmental process is something like this:

Our psychospiritual development as individuals is, in fact, a series of ever-more-inclusive disidentifications and identifications. As Kegan (1982) notes in his developmental sequence, we go from the neonate stage of being our sensations and reflexes to having them but being our perceptions, from there to having perceptions but being our needs and interests, from that stage to having needs and interests but – at adolescence -- being our relationships, and so on. With each successive stage comes an ever-greater capacity to identify with – and then disidentify from – a deeper layer of ourselves (MacVicar, 1985).

From Mental Health Academy course – Principles of Psychosynthesis

http://www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au/classroom/fetch_class.php?course_id=105-3

He’s marking related but distinctive stages to Maslow’s, which have something to do with levels of consciousness, somewhat akin to a dialectic – the cyclical relay of experience from being to having and back to being along a ladder of concreteness to abstraction. As such it is also a ladder of accountability and prospective praise or blame – depending on how ones transit turns out for oneself and our unavoidably involved others (relatives, friends, classmates…).

Development and purpose
The objective of life span development is to become competent, agile, excellent, good, diverse….all different aspects of purpose. This is what all sexually reproducing organic beings do – they become themselves, which can be done more or less well, for many reasons. Some of these are within the being’s grasp (intelligence, efficient fuel usage, etc.), some arrive by chance (in the range of environments they inhabit) and some reasons are matters of inheritance (all beings vary from their genetic and cultural originals to some degree).

Human beings add purpose and meaning to the passage. In fact, pursuit of purposes that give meaning to effort and results is a central director of effort. The meaning may be intrinsic or extrinsic. When young, we depend on our elders for meanings beyond the organic ones of survival and pleasure. Growing up is, under right conditions of meaning, the building of meaning-making capabilities.

Growing by stumbling…

Now, working thru the Kegan stages, or any other developmental sequence, is a matter of trial and error, while on predictable pathways. This trip has a thousand names from the Platonic seeking of the ideal forms through the Hegelian coursing of the dialectic to Wilber’s implicit integrity, and I haven’t mentioned a religion yet. While predictable, we have to learn and discover our particular journey by missteps. We do not learn much from correct steps…they are converted after a few successful repetitions to automatic capabilities.

…and by playing

A principal means of making the passage is play - a naturally occurring function under conditions of safety, and sometimes in spite of them. Play entails a high possibility of error, of inadequate efforts, of approximations to a competent performance. Self-correction, applied with a persistent but light hand, is the main tool of developmentally effective play. For self-correction we need responsibility and accountability for our efforts. And we are back to blame and blameworthiness. Adults are notoriously bad at play, unless artificially fuelled (drink, drugs…) and/or socially authorised (celebrations of various levels from a night on the turps to days on agricultural fairs or sports).

These overlap and intertwine, of course. Our adult weakness in the face of need for play is fear of judgment…that we will be blamed for being incompetent. Children have to be taught that fear. They take stumbling as natural and pick themselves up. But some child and adulthood errors are forced on us by others. These constitute the bulk of psychologically damaging traumas. Even if the force is applied by mistake, the others still are to blame – they did it. They produced injury.

A view of taking the blame to effect: from Dana Milbank’s review of K. Sebelius’ interrogation by the US House of Reps two days ago.

The taking –

“Access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans,” she said in her opening statement. “So let me say directly to these Americans: You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”

And the effect –

…But many of her interrogators were unusually mild, probably disarmed by Sebelius’s self-criticism…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-in-kathleen-sebelius-hearings-on-obamacare-a-party-without-a-brain/2013/10/30/6d9713da-41af-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html?hpid=z2

Oh my sad home place

Torrey Orton
Oct. 21, 2013

Oh my sad home place in me…how you look from here…

…is what I wrote to myself some nights ago as I finished reading the sudden capitulation of the temperamentally optimistic Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times, among others,  who bewail (no longer just bemoan) the decline of their exceptional country in the face of the rising tides of its fundamentalist progeny (the backward and truthless Tea Party and its religious (e.g. evangelicals) and  greedy (e.g. Kochs at al) facilitators) of the late capitalist days of the West (and maybe the East, too, long before they got to have more than a taste of it). I felt sad - just that for a while - and it came back a week later. I’ve often been outraged and despairing of my country of origin’s systemic faults, but sad was new. As if something is passing, maybe passed, as they now say of the dying. And so something in me which has long felt an endangered remnant I feel is sinking into the dark night of spirit.

This something I think is a gift of my upbringing – an education – no longer available even from the bastions of educational quality which I worked through 50 years ago and more. At the time I despised the boarding school and subsequently loved the undergraduate and post-graduate institutions I traversed between my 13^th  and 27^th years (with a four year timeout as a teacher).

I see all this from far away, not just in space but also in preoccupation. I have been busy learning other things about cultures and peoples and occupations that living around the world make necessary - most especially my times in China at various junctures between 1978 and 2008.

I guess this loss was predicted by Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (US $6.36 at the Harvard Coop remainders table a year after publication announces the purchase receipt still occupying the Foreword by Saul Bellow) which I bought when it came out years ago and never read until I was recalled to Bloom again by a retread of his argument in the NYRB a couple years ago.  In the last chapter of the book was a section titled “The decomposition of the university” in a chapter called The student and the university foreshadowing a string of book length theses confirming Bloom’s fears in the early Noughties, including one by an undergraduate philosophy colleague now Yale Prof. Anthony Kronman (Education’s End Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given UP on the Meaning of Life – Yale, 2007). Harry Lewis at Harvard published Excellence WITHOUT A SOUL How a Great University Forgot Education -Public Affairs, 2006.

That a 30+ year old Williams College grad at Heritage Action is a leading manipulator of Republican reps and senators with Koch bros’ $$ and the mindless certitudes of the under-educated masses they manipulate without remorse for the sake of power is confirming of my loss. He remains nameless though nameable because he could have been of Yale or MIT or choose your establishment’s provenance The American inhabitants of the international Top 50 universities ratings have for decades been churning their precursors out of their undergrad societies. Skull and Bones for dinner?

And this was not predictable from the Sixties. Who could have thought that the standards which ruled my days in the learning yoke of the best would have corroded so thoroughly and so unnoticed by their very core supporters – my teachers and we who learned from them, our generation of leaders of thought. Almost without a joint whimper anywhere but the books mentioned above they succumbed to the Circes of late capitalism and its strange facilitator relativism, polished by positivist science. There were counter tremors in various fields but few moral outbursts to be found as the language and practice of learning was suborned by that of “productivity” and customer service.

There’s a tremor of the same here in Whackademia (NewSouth, 2012), Richard Hil’s indictment of the greater and less great Australian universities in similar arguments to Kronman and Lewis, with a down-under flavour. Recently the staff of Sydney University went on strike against the administration’s latest efforts to “reform” the place. Among the issues were:

“ … commodification is just one facet of the disastrous hijacking of universities by corporate interests and ideology. It might have been hoped that senior academics would show some critical distance from the corporate shibboleths of our age. Far from it: vice-chancellors and their deputies now enthusiastically enact the values of competition, league-tables, performance indicators and similar managerial fetishes with all the fervor of recent converts.

Students, correspondingly, are increasingly encouraged to view their education as a commercial transaction, and themselves as clients. Except that they’re getting an increasingly shoddy deal, with cost-cutting bringing reductions in the number of course offerings and increases in casually employed teaching staff – a trend the union’s current campaign has successfully opposed, in the face of strenuous management resistance.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/30/sydney-university-strike

But it’s a bit late. The entire discourse is corrupted, it seems. Sad countries.

Paul Krugman, a somewhat less positive scribe says a few days ago in his closing remarks on the resolution of the  U.S. default discussions:

“Things could have been even worse. This week, we managed to avoid driving off a cliff. But we’re still on the road to nowhere.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/krugman-the-damage-done.html?ref=international

Mad country?

For a counter argument of sorts see Ely Ratner deputy director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security and Thomas Wright a fellow with the Managing Global Order project at the Brookings Institution  here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-not-in-decline--its-on-the-rise/2013/10/18/4dde76be-35b1-11e3-80c6-7e6dd8d22d8f_story.html

There’s the judgment problem of incommensurable measures between them and the others…but what’s new? Same country, different worlds. One the world of economies and the other of influences.

What’s normal now (1)…broken normals

What’s normal now (1)…broken normals
Torrey Orton
Oct. 8, 2013

Normal, standard, common, regular, typical… A restart

Normal, standard, common, regular, typical…all are words we use to establish an expectation for ourselves, about ourselves, others, and so on. Am I normal? Is this normal?…Well, I normally have trouble getting things going and keeping them going. It’s taken me two months from promising to start “What’s normal now” to starting it. I’ve struggled and not told anyone I was doing so. I’ve made gestures at starting like creating a topic page for a wiki, mentioning to people that I am going to do this and then gone back into not doing it. How normal is that? A linguistic formula whose systemic ambiguity invites its own denial!!

Are we heading for a future where the new normal is the norm? Maybe we are already in it and its arrival hasn’t been noticed. One probability is that whatever has been superseded by fashion may itself be superseded by the fashion it replaced. Try the history of fashion in sunglasses for the last 40 years, or 80! My aviators are back in.

Describing someone/something as ‘normal’ is a basic assessment that someone or something is alright, OK, workable, etc. and as such is a basis for the conduct of everyday life. The key word is ‘conduct’. Hence, when we feel not normal – abnormal, bad normal, etc. – we may also feel compromised in our personal and social capacity to act. If we feel not-normal in too many ways or too intensely our performance collapses. The same applies to our worlds – physical, spiritual, etc.

Challenges of the normal

There will be some challenges pursuing the question ‘What’s normal now?’. For instance, by what authority can anyone say anything is ‘normal’, including themselves? Another is that there are normal things which are also clearly (I say authoritatively) bad, dangerous, damaging, etc. (e.g. alcohol, over-reliance on a narrow set of capabilities; excess focus (obsessiveness by successful people) And yet another is how to distinguish the normal from other factors which tend to present in cloying clusters in human events. For example, a single norm like marriage, has personal, interpersonal, social and material aspects (and, also, subjective and objective faces with substantive cultural variations). Then there is the fact that norms (another challenge) are implicit in matters labelled ‘normal’. Finally, the normal and its associated norms are often about dilemmas and paradoxes which are hard to norm.

And I haven’t even mentioned a huge range of natural normals and norms which provide the basis for our understanding of what the world really is, failing which our intentions will be waylaid by it. That is, the sciences, human and physical, with spiritual systems nearer or farther from view as fits your comfort.

I know some of why this is normal for me and of course, for the positive spin people out there, it is not totally me by quite a way. So, (a normalising conjunction), it is appropriate to me that I start by acknowledging this damaged part of me and invite you to help create the first class of normals: broken or damaged ones. Some starters are below. Small steps and all that!!

Broken normals/ declining normals, in ‘advanced’, anglo economies etc.

•        Marriage – 45% failure rate

•        Job insecurity, signalled in various ways

•        Religious affiliation / participation – actual attendance = <20 o:p="" overall="">

•        Grotesque income disparities, again especially in the Anglosphere

•        Single occupancy living increases in Australia, especially for over 35’s and women

•        Personal health – the obesity challenge.

 

Learner therapist (39)…… Boundaries and borders in and of therapy

Torrey Orton

Oct. 4, 2013

Work in progress…the contributions of social media

 

I’m going to a workshop entitled “Boundaries, borders and multiplicities: ethics and professionalism for psychologists with emphasis on social media” on October 16^th, ‘13. So I thought I’d think about it a bit first since I know some of my practice is a bit borderline – or, maybe unbounded? - for some. In fact, I think I work the borders with persistence and urgency – the borders of feelings, of spaces, of intentions, of understandings, of behaviours, of roles…all the places where patients arrive in therapy unproductively self-constrained!! The social media provide new opportunities for boundary stretching and/or unintended crossings! My point here is not to argue the role of social media but first assay the field of boundaries, among which it is a relatively new one.

 

So, let’s start with a definition of boundaries and borders (with frontiers on the sidelines). I think they are still fitting for a virtual world. That is, social media can be partly described and engaged using these three concepts – boundary, border and frontier – with the emphasis on the last of the three.

Boundary, border, frontier share the sense of that which divides one entity or political unit from another.

Boundary in reference to a country, city, state, territory, or the like, most often designates a line on a map: boundaries are shown in red….

Border is more often used than boundary in direct reference to a political dividing line; it may also refer to the region (of, for instance, a country) adjoining the actual line of demarcation: crossing the Mexican border; border towns along the Rio Grande.

Frontier may refer to a political dividing line: crossed the Spanish frontier on Tuesday. It may also denote or describe the portion of a country adjoining its border with another country ( towns in the Polish frontier ) or ….the most remote settled or occupied parts of a country: the frontier towns of the Great Plains. Frontier especially in the plural, also refers to the most advanced or newest activities in an area of knowledge or practice: the frontiers of nuclear medicine

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/boundary

My professional organisation (the APS) proposes the following cautions about boundaries. Interestingly, the concept of frontier is not included, maybe because it is implied in the concept of “boundary crossings”. And with that observation it immediately becomes apparent that the relationship between boundaries/borders and frontiers is systemically conflicting.

Here’s what the APS ethics rules say -

1.3. A distinction is frequently made between boundary crossings and boundary violations. Crossings are

departures from commonly accepted practice that some psychologists may see as appropriate, for example

attending a client’s special event. It is acknowledged that both cultural background and theoretical orientation

will influence how psychologists and their clients construe certain behaviours. Nevertheless, given that such

blurring of boundaries is often a precursor to later major transgressions, it is important for the psychologist

to examine the implications of such actions, no matter how innocuous they seem at the time. Boundary

violations will be referred to in Section 3.

 

1.4. In practice, major boundary violations are frequently preceded by lack of attention to minor boundary

crossings. The process of boundaries gradually eroding is sometimes referred to as the ‘slippery slope’

phenomenon, (Barnett, Lazarus, Vasquez, Moorehead-Slaughter, & Johnson 2007; Gabbard, 1996; Gutheil,

1989). For example, in circumstances where psychologists significantly alter their standard practice to

accommodate the ‘needs’ of their clients, psychologists consider the following questions to help clarify

whether there are potential boundary crossings emerging.

• Am I operating within my limits of competence?

• Am I avoiding any topics?

• Am I showing any uncharacteristic behaviours?

• Do I have discomfort with boundaries?

• Am I self-disclosing more than usual?

• Am I taking into account any current personal difficulties?

• Is there a possibility of a conflict of interest developing?

Professional boundaries and multiple relationships © The Australian Psychological Society Limited 2008

Event boundaries of therapy are the field of my practice – I work in two shared offices (with financial and other patient management services provided) and a home office (I provide all patient management services). In addition under those rubrics for patient management purposes, I have used non-typical locations: in a car, in a cafe, in a park, walking the street together. These occur when, e.g., a shared office is closed unexpectedly by alarm system failures, locked doors or patient preference for variety.

Social media are woven into my practice – but NOT Facebook and Twitter - e.g. email (did supervision and therapy by email), SMS (set and change appointments, take homework reports) phone (same management matters and some therapy), and Skype (therapy and catch-ups overseas) in order from least to most intimate. I wave goodbye to Skype partners at closing of sessions!!! …and sometimes hello, too!

The standard therapeutic hour has at least these three major segments with barely visible boundaries between them. They come into view when a patient has trouble negotiating them. Entry and exit seem most perilous perhaps because they require explicit agency from patients, which is often what they are in the room for in the first place.

a.      Entry to office and to room

b.     Working and the setting in room – distance between chairs, size of total space, lighting, heating, contents, etc.

c.      Exit from room/office

Physical boundaries – the edges of our bodies and places and furnishings / designs.

For instance, a patient who came and stayed for 6 months twice a week at his own expense, noted after the first or second session that he had been strongly discouraged from making ANY physical contact with patients (he’s a psych in training) prompted by the fact I always shook his hand on the way in and on the way out of every session. It clearly did not trouble him, but he had been given the impression that it was a handhold too far for my academic colleagues. None of my many practice colleagues who I have worked with for the last five years has ever expressed a worry, nor has a patient. Nor is it mentioned for forbidding in the above Professional boundaries and multiple relationships, though it may be implied in discussion of other hands-on therapeutic techniques elsewhere in the APS ethics.

Intellectual boundaries

I leak from therapy competences into other life competences. For instance, when I bring therapeutic perspectives and processes into many work settings as an executive coach. And I leak in the reverse direction as a result of having a grip on organisation and group theory and practice (as worker, manager and principal of professional practices), which allows extension of individual therapeutic work into the spheres of public and private action which range from family to team to organisation in a range of industries.

Social boundaries

Managing social boundaries like gender, age, class, education, culture (and the respective cultural variants of each of these factors) I do fairly well across at least European and Confucian cultures, with some capacity in East African and Middle Eastern ones. I have lived as an adult in the US, France, China and Australia.

Emotional boundaries – displaying  / expressing any of the core emotions – joy, sadness, anger, shame, fear, surprise,  interest, disgust – which occupies a large part of my focus in session, both as mine affect patients and as theirs affect them and me. I attend to how they are expressed, which I point out to patients often and early to anchor their level of self-awareness and control in our relationship.

Lifecycle / developmental boundaries enforced by aging to some extent socio-economic factors  – mentioning these is often a useful frame to patients stuck in a swirl of factors leaving them pitching in a sea of emotions without a shore in sight.

Institutional boundaries – family, school, club, work, church, state, nation….often interacting with the lifecycle/developmental ones since the institutions often sit astride the entries and exits of developmental stages. They are rites and rights of passage.

And, there are roles and hence role boundaries like therapist, teacher, instructor, parent, - I understand myself to be shifting around these roles, with therapist as the dominant one even if at times not at all the prominent role of the moment. I consciously mark my transitions between them most of the time, showing that I have the dependence / independence / interdependence triad largely in hand in session.

Finally, the thing about boundaries is they never (?) come in ones. Like people, they come in multiples, which is maybe what the workshop title is hinting at. e.g. – restorative justice and trauma therapy are conducted by processes somewhat similar in steps and goals, but emerging from opposite ends of the practice spectra. Restorative justice is a socio-legal prescription for a personal, socially imposed, hurt. Therapy provides the setting for embracing the right to that justice.

The world of therapy is always complex in many ways, and social media is just another way, not THE one that techonauts blindly promote. In the therapy place, wherever and whichever it is, all is in play face-to-face with mutually examinable settings for each player as needed. The ‘mutually desirable’ bit is what therapy models and provides the opportunity and experience to achieve in the everyday world.