Learner therapist (33)…… More couples stuff…Hugs and hope

Torrey Orton

March 31, 2013

“Hold the hug for as long as you can stand it…”

Some years ago I came up with the following small step for couples who are so separated by their family management tasks that they seldom talk, even about the tasks. They needed a way to get started again which was truly doable within the confines of their very task straitened lives. It had to be probable as well as possible. As a side light, it had to put them in touch with their real differences in attachment style in a manageable way which could also be extended into repair work on attachment.

Often a distressed couple has almost ceased physical contact with each other and the conversational contact his receded into non-verbals, held there by the enormous weight of the pile of unspoken matters they both know lies in wait. They know because occasional outbreaks of dysfunctional attempts to connect reaffirm their feelings of catastrophic powerlessness to take charge of their own joint affairs…so they rock along on autopilot, each doing what they’ve acquired as their contribution to the joint tasks. Stuck, but in motion, in that special stuckness which includes both members knowing basically what each other’s concerns are, what needs to be addressed to increase their joint stock in the relationship and at the same time aware that they can’t keep track of where they are at with their unspoken concerns – the just keep coming up.

The Hugs Regime

So I propose the following at the end of the first session:

You might like to consider the Hugs Regime as an undertaking to engage with the problems we’ve just got on the table between you. It goes like this –

At the moment you see each other at the end of the day the first thing you do is hug, holding it for as long as you comfortably can. When you have stopped you ask each other, in turn, ‘How are you?’ This is a serious question. An authentic response is required. If you also have something you need to talk about you mention it at this point, including roughly how much time you think you want of the other, and inquire about when would be good for them that evening.

Do you think you can do that? (If yes,) then please try every day between now and our next session. You may not succeed every day. Do not despair. The minimum point is to have thought about it. That counts as an effort.

NB – the Hug Regime also has the effect of confronting them at a low key level with the experiences they have of rejecting and being rejected by each other. This matters because fear of rejection is one of the most common underlying trip wires in relationships. Deciding when they have had enough of the hug each time and noticing when the other has similarly decided, or not, opens the door on more subtle responses and requests of each other.

Keeping track of business

Commonly a couple’s favorite issues keep getting lost. They come up, get a bit of attentional air and then slip back into the obscurity of the minimal conversational spaces the joint tasks allow them. It is repeated fruitless efforts at engagement, and especially the lack of mutual acknowledgment of respective issues actually being there, which fires the engine of despair.

So, I encourage couples to keep a public chart (side of the fridge often a good space, which can also be used with whiteboard markers) of their issues and any agreed approaches to handling them. This makes it possible to keep joint track of jointly undertaken efforts (which includes individual tasks on joint behalf!). Keeping track does two main things: one, allows reconsideration of agreed solutions as implementation efforts reveal shortcomings in them, and two, encourages appreciation of progress by keeping it in view.

 

Coincidences…… revisited

Coincidences…… revisited

Torrey Orton

March 17, 2013

 

That more and more coincidences seem to be appearing in my life has been in my awareness for some years (see from four years ago Appreciations (16)-Coincidentally yours? in www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com ) …and I’ve lost a sheaf of them as a result of not noticing my awareness. So here comes a reinvented topic range.

I am regularly reminded of the existence of apparent coincidences by the correlation between my recalling a certain ex-patient 6 or more months or up to 3-4 years after their stopping therapy and their calling for a new appointment. This correlation is so common in my practice I now expect any recollection to be followed by a reconnection. Perhaps from now I’ll begin recording the first to track the arrival, or not, of seconds.

I’m aware, also, that coincidence is often the expression of some kind of familiarity which in turn (?) is enlivened by personal recollection, by the fact that people and events come to mind in apparently the most unlikely places. This is in turn arises from our natural emotion-based filing systems. Many of their contents are connected in pre-conscious ways revealed over-and over again by associations coming into view with no immediately obvious relation to present events….etc.

 I have always had a talent for running into people in the strangest places, so that these days I expect if I visit a foreign place someone I know, usually from the distant past, will pop up for an unarranged hello. They are almost always more than pleasant events, happenings in public with ashamed priests to the contrary notwithstanding.

So let’s get a bit more systematic, starting with data collecting.

Pinky presences and absences

I was standing Saturday morning witness to the harassing of patients at the FCC a week ago with another Friend of the FCC and the regular security guard. We enjoy good bantering Oz male bonding and re-bonding every Saturday. His aversion to more recently introduced bonding activities like hugs from colleagues of varying ages and sexes is notorious among us, which doesn’t prevent some of the younger Friends persisting in the hope they can re-educate him, or maybe it’s just cultural insensitivity both ways.

Anyway, one such effort had just been rebuffed and I, addressing the other Friend (a young gay woman quite new to the witness role), wondered what he would do if I offered a hug and in the same breath stretching my 7 foot wingspan in an embracing arc towards him from about 8 feet away. He stood there rigid and blank faced. He is very disciplined. A few tours in Vietnam, 13 years in the Army subsequently and 30 plus years consequently of professionally securing all kinds of installations and events underpin his resilient presence.

“Did you notice his left pinky twitch slightly?” I asked her in his hearing. Neither she nor he had noticed, and maybe even I didn’t either though it seemed so at the moment. My suggestion was strong enough that he started feeling his left pinky with his right hand … and suddenly said “Shit” with the force which assures its authenticity, shocking us all (even the HoGPIs across the foot path) in the way deeply troubled expressions usually do.

He discovered he had lost his company ring, a ring he never takes off. Its fit was always a smidge loose. He was stricken, thrown into a flurry of activities, all fruitless until six days later, to discover it. Turned up in a corner of the wash room in the security company office…found by a colleague who came out from a hand wash wondering whose ring it was.

How did I know to covertly tell him to check for it in the first place?

 

What floor do you want?

He did not say or ask when he followed me into a CBD lift a few days back. I was somewhat hurried and touched L-5 by mistake, then my desired L-2 which sits just below 5 on the pick-a-story pad. The delivery guy just behind me reached over to touch L-12 and I mumbled a quick apology for my miss-selection, which he had not noticed. But having it pointed out in my act of contrition, he realized that he actually needed L-5 to complete his deliveries. He would have realized it when he got to L-12 and still had stuff left over.

How often do I get to do something wrong (adding an unnecessary stop to the lift ascension) and have it made right by chance?? Did I know this one, too? Is it like the pinky absent its ring? No. That was getting something right (his pinky did twitch) and getting something more and totally unexpectable (no one on site at this moment knew he had lost his pinky ring) for me and him.

Are these just examples of being in synch, “on the same page”, in tune….with others?

A train ride and the coincidence of this coincidence

I’m thinking about coincidences and a patient walked in, not knowing of my emerging attention to coincidences, and launched into a coincidence of his which was enormously informative for his work and our work, not even seeing fully the parallels between them all. It went like this.

He was standing at a local train station and an older woman (80ish it turned out) asked which platform the Alamein train left by. He checked it out and told her “the one we’re on now”. ..with which she initiated a discussion that went on for the wait and subsequent ride, largely consisting of aspects of her life like being a non-graduate engineer most of her life and having learned whatever was necessary as new tasks came her way from management (which is how he’s living his professional life) and having been the inventor of a famous piece of sheep shearing technology 50 years ago and now pursuing a PhD in some applied area, until she got off. He listened in quiet astonishment at the unlikely claims, so astonished that he didn’t get her name, not because she withheld it.

The name came after his arrival at his aunt’s home, which was why he was awaiting the Alamein train. As he regaled her with the sheep-shearing engineer’s story aunt reached for an article about a “mature age” PhD candidate at a local university saying “she sounds like…” and handed him the article, confirming to his multiple amazements that she was not fabricating, just reporting, her life. For he, too, is in the middle of a self-built professional life converting what he feels is a thin educational foundation into an already professionally acknowledged value for others. If he were looking for a role model he could hardly have done better than her.

 But then, we don’t look for role models until we don’t need them, almost. Once we are well down our life roads, the supporting tuition may just pop up. An unnoticed coincidence may be no instruction at all. An acknowledged and embraced coincidence may be confused with our own developing awareness.

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

 

 

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

Torrey Orton

March 6, 2013

 

Only you can make this world seem right…

The Platters, 1953

Intimate aspirations

This resonant anthem to love has a popular culture life of great resilience and duration. Its underpinnings are the Western romantic vision of another (the One) who will perfectly reflect our own imagined goodness as a person – somewhat as the good-enough-mother does with unconditional love for her children. Perhaps the spiritual anchor is the One God, perfect in all respects, who we are encouraged/told to aspire to. Psychologically these may be the same foundation in different dress(es).

Here’s a thought for beginners on the life road to a coupled future of one kind or another: the One you are looking for, believe exists out there and cherish as “who I am meant to be with” cannot be ‘found’. He/ she has to be co-created, jointly built over years of shared work in  marriage, partnership or cohabitation  -  something exclusive for some large percentage of a life’s time. The happiness research is on my side here. Among the happiest people in industrial cultures are old people in stable relationships of long duration. Modernity has been attacking that paradigm for a century or three. The One is a cheap, cosmetic imitation, but just about all there is on offer…oh, I forgot religious fundamentalists’ straitened marriage gates.

How do you become a One?? You can’t. You can be deemed the One by another and you’ll know if he/she tells you, though that’s unlikely because to do so would reveal the perilous state of the relationship: still being measured up for the suit of engagement according to standards which are both wholly transparent (the public ones imagined by all to be what they are straining to attain) and totally private in the judge’s suite of fantasy needs.

There’s no One...many could do

The imagining of the One is a defence against the uncertainty which is one major feature of intimate living. It is fired by the blind energy of infatuation – one of the few life emotions which is best savoured at its finish.  But, “maybe we aren’t meant to be together” comes to the aspirant’s mind. An expression of powerlessness… being in the hands of fate(s). If the fit isn’t perfect the game can’t be played?? But if you don’t play how can you know the game.  One aspirant confronted the M sex columnist (Sunday AGE, March 3, 2013 pg. 6) with:

…Then a man I really liked said he wanted us to be “friends with benefits” because “how else can you find ‘the one’? Now if I meet someone I think, “another one to treat me badly”.

She was not a beginner; rather more a culture warrior tired of the fight with no finish. How commonly are variations of the ‘friends with benefits’ path to relationship wholeness traded on as the married or partnered future recedes into the faint light of the biological clock’s hands??

Accessorise – everything can be verbed and what can be buffed can be matched. But can it? What is the central theme, colour, shape, sound, smell which defines everything else in the One package as accessories. How would a beginner know? By buying matching sets from approved providers of recognised One costumes…those available in financially appropriate versions… so the One is ultimately democratic. You can put them on and still not know where / who you are.

The inner One

Yourself as the One is expressed in “that person” who you do / do not want to be. E.g.  “I don’t want to be that person who….”;  “I don’t want to be that person in the anger position” – the disempowering judgment against expressing strong feelings to others. We can only wonder what the boundary within her between “too extreme” and the rest of her life might be for Anna Guy.

“…But actually hurting anyone or killing someone, that was just too extreme. I didn’t marry that person. I didn’t know that type of person. I wouldn’t have thought I’d choose that type of person…”

Anna Guy reflecting on her husband having recently been arrested for murdering her brother. THE SATURDAY AGE, GoodWeekend Jan. 19, 2013

The public One

The One has history. For example:

… from the mid-18th century onwards, and particularly with the advent of Romanticism, a different problem presented itself: the glorification of the suicidal person as a romantic hero. In 1774, Goethe published the literary sensation, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a painfully earnest young man, tortured by unrequited love, who ends up shooting himself. All over Europe, other young men started to dress up in yellow trousers and blue jackets, following Werther. They also began to imitate the manner of his death, and Goethe's book was banned in several countries. The roots of the poisonous connection between suicide and the romantic hero began to form at the very same time as the development of modern celebrity culture.

There's no shame in suicide. And there's no glory, either

Giles Fraser  The Guardian, Wednesday 30 January 2013

 

Branding as the pursuit of a corporate One. You have arrived when your company name is the generic name for the product – e.g. Hoover for vacuum cleaner, Kleenex for tissues (USA), etc. The individual person equivalent would be iconic (see archetypes) male and female, a brand changing roughly with the fashion cycle (30 years for Ray Ban aviators, for an instance of a cycle). For archetypes try the gods of old (Viking or Greek identities) or the One God, promoted by the competing owners of its serial revelations, in whose image we are made and always fail to live up to…So what’s left are celebrities. Brand names change a bit more quickly than they used to.

And there’s the ‘history’ of the latest One which solves all previous failures to solve the fat, addiction, ageing...problems. The only resounding evidence for most of these is that they fail, One after another, yet the failures never cease to promote themselves as the One of their respective domain. Fat comes to mind as the most resilient loss-leader of self-improvement fantasies. How many of these are still in play: the Atkins diet, the Mediterranean diet, the Dukkan diet, the 5-2 diet (the latest, latest diet)? Such Ones are also known generically as “the real deal” or “real thing”, out of which spins an unending breeze of real “real things”.

Borderlands – there are ‘bad’ Ones, too

Two weeks before the Australian Open opened in January , on a billboard at the corner of Punt Rd and Swan St. in Richmond facing towards the Tennis Centre, I saw “Don’t be ‘that guy’ at the match”, the drunk and disorderly one in the photo front and centre. Interestingly, on reflection he was scarcely the model D and D type; more drunk and sleepy, foolish, clean cut kid who just went too far for his own system – that is, the wrong one to bother fearing.

In a similar vein, there’s Madison Eagles reflecting on her lady wrestler self-image. She says there’s a joy in being a ‘bad’ One, and that there’s a market for it, proven by her winning ways on the professional mat.

“I’m just drawn to being that horrible person everybody hates and I really enjoy it…”

Madison Eagles, “the Punisher”, 28 yr old woman professional wrestler in TheAGE GoodWeekend Jan 19, 2013

What’s the psychology of this: Do you get a whole picture and then seek items to compose it - a vision thing rather than a tick-a-box thing? The closest to becoming One thru your own efforts is to acquire socially approved features (kardashianisation? Beiberfication?) of the look. It’s not surprising that ours is an age of body dysmorphias and binges. The One is a deeply evaluative and moral construct (ethical…maybe, maybe not) of cardboard thickness.

Another e.g. - “get the garden you’ve always wanted...” Imagine how you would get to recognise the garden you’ve always wanted. How does it get “populated” with plants, pathway(s), vistas…?? Can you choose these components when your source of taste is already set by exposures well before you are choosing such things…much as choice for junk food is primed almost irremediably by junk food childhoods intentionally designed to bond you to junk …?  Can you find a human partner in the same way?

The Game of relationships in a world of Ones

 

The Game has two objectives: to determine who would want to be your One and to determine if they are suitable to be your One. A dilemma leaps out. The other’s desire for you (thru which you feel their want to be your One) and their suitability (thru which you send your desire for them) are mutually confounding variables, as psych researchers would say. Want clouds perceptions of suitability making it difficult to have confidence in your judgment of either variable. This brings us to the Game.

The accepted practices in the Game are to be found in the commentary (gossip?) of interested same sex others about your relationship progress. Sophisticated players draw on the resources of the target sex as well. Everyone knows the rules, with a leaning towards their own sex interests. But do they work in finding a suitable One? Well, if the national relationship failure rate (40+% for marriages) is any indicator, no. And this does not count the myriad of failed efforts which many go through on the way to the supposedly committed versions, both binding and bonded, etc. And we rely on co-gamers to shore up our judgment of the process of discovering whether a possible One wants us and is suitable. There’s a book in the Game, as in the One.

Where to for any one, but especially therapists?

… While the date is ultimately unimportant, what is important is the arrival of systems that support rapid reconfiguration of every aspect of human life, from our work structures to our family lives to our political processes. To trans-form means to change the shape of (of what? … everything). Because a significant portion of the entire human family is now interconnected in real-time, the transformational era can take an opinion in Shanghai and within weeks it could dramatically influence purchasing behaviour for certain products in Reno. Our collective attitudes, behaviours, energy, and spending now constitute a complex, global and fundamentally chaotic school of fish. Or perhaps more apt, a flock of Taleb’s black swans.

“The Transformational Life” – Rob Smith on Integral Life.com 18/02/2013

This sounds like the culture of the One on steroids, where it has become loosened from its mooring culture of origin trappings and converted into a globally portable cloth (among those cultures with a ‘middle class’, defined as anyone with enough disposable income to look at adverts of wannabe approved self-presentation).

Why does all this matter for relationship therapists? Because, if this scant analysis is somewhat right, the conditions for relationship consistency, reliability and certainty are declining, perhaps at a rate well beyond our capacity to adapt. The breakdown rate is one datum. The start-up age is another. The single living rate for over 30’s, especially women, is another. Should increases in family violence rates count as another??

What does it mean to help patients navigate this world, be they 20 or 50. I have ones across that spectrum struggling with the challenge to be someone’s One and find a suitable One, too.

Stay tuned.