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.