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
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 purposeThe 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…
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