Learning to act right (42)… building stereotypes from nothing

Torrey Orton

July 21, 2014

 Once more again with feeling…

Repetition is the heart of learning almost anything. Noticing that one is repeating certain experiences is the heart of capturing unconscious learning in motion. Until captured by awareness the unconscious process unfolds with certainty and produces actions assumed to be right automatically…which is what a habit does.

Repeated experiences are based on sufficient uniformity of actions, circumstances and purposes to survive generalising over time. That is, an effective habitual response requires a consistent experience base. The test of an effective habit is it works for me, and maybe others.

 Once more, the Fertility Control Clinic

So, back to the frontline at the Fertility Control Clinic. My colleague T., the regular security guard, with more than a year’s experience 6 days a week at the Clinic, has acquired an unscratchable itch about certain classes of arriving patients. The itch is their perceived resistance to him executing his security role to his standards of adequacy (which independent observers class as high).

The routine is supposed to go like this: for each arrival at the Clinic (an action sequence of about 3-5 minutes duration depending on how far down the street they come into view, repeated at unpredictable intervals about 15-18 times a morning over a 90 minute period) he walks towards them to escort them past the Catholic anti-abortionists and then up the pathway into the Clinic*. At the Clinic front door he unlocks the door and admits them to reception, turns around and leaves, closing the door (and so relocking it again). Patients usually come in pairs – a patient and her partner, family member, friend, etc. – which makes a small crowd at the door.

 Unintended injuries
 

Here’s where the stereotyping begins to be built, and then reinforced and embedded. A proportion of arrivals do not notice T. is getting out keys while walking towards the door and saying, “I’ll open the door”. They may miss his call because their English is weak, because they are apprehensive about being there in the first place, because his English is accented, because they do not know his role though he’s clearly marked as Security, and so on….with the overall consequence that he is unable to effectively, from his viewpoint, play his role correctly – to care for patients until they are safely inside!! This is seriously angering. The people he’s supposed to protect unwittingly make it difficult for him to do so to his standards of service!! A classic unintended injury.

The backwash of this injury to his professional self-regard has hardened into stereotypes, the effect of which is to raise his blood pressure well beyond appropriate levels, while not affecting his presence  and conduct to all patients. When he sees suspect patients (from his developed stereotype viewpoint) on the street horizon he’s already expecting trouble for him which he cannot, so far, prevent because the situational variables reduce everyone’s capacity to respond ‘rationally’. There are few patients, or protestors, arriving at the Clinic who are not in a heightened state of some kind.

 

There is very little room for altering the context to allow new perspectives and awareness to arise. There is no relationship with the patients other than offering a kindly reception, including obstructing their harassers (an emotion priming activity). There is no room (?) for engaging the patients about their potentially, from T’s viewpoint, injurious behaviour towards him because the relationship is too fraught with implicit intent and brevity of exposure. So, the injury is incorrigible, unmitigatable…the very stuff of hardened emotional arteries set in permanent ineffective defence for T. Micro-traumas recurring persistently. Perhaps this kind of pattern is why few Clinic security staff last very long at full exposure.

 

I have raised my perception outlined above w/ T. in various less complete forms over recent months, prompted by his slowly increasing expressions of exasperation with his least favourite types.  This is the beginning of creating a space for reflection and change, I expect.

 

*the over full richness of this sentence somewhat captures the emotion and content density of the experience it describes.

Learner therapist (43)…… chronic childhood trauma recovery - a note for patients

Torrey Orton

July 13, 2014

The purpose of this paper is to provide a generic framework for thinking about the experience of chronic trauma and the typical processes involved in recovery. It will not replace doing work on your trauma, but it may soften the trip by making likely pathways visible and therefore easier to travel. While every individual’s injury is different, their nature is shared and recovery pathways are, too.

What is chronic childhood trauma?

Damaging behaviour (physical, psychological, social, financial, historical…) imposed repeatedly on people (children) unable to defend themselves against it. The traumatised child is therefore a victim in the normal meaning of that word. It is believed that in Australia 20 % of adults have some childhood abuse in their backgrounds. Under-reporting is the norm.

They are victims of violences of a number of kinds ranging from physical to spiritual, passing by way of social and economic on the path. What distinguishes violences as such is their being sources of personal pain, usually experienced in the gut first and later in symptoms like constricted breath, movement, and consequently in self-restraint by self-doubt, and so on. The original sources may be lost in personal memories blocked by self-numbing and addictives of various sorts. Physical assault and social/emotional deprivations are equally damaging forms of violence, with different hardened defence symptoms.

What do we know about chronic trauma?

It is caused by adults who themselves have often been victims of abuse, often multi-generationally, with clear histories of violence, alcohol and drug habits, defective intimate relationships, marital breakdown…Just the histories which you reading this may have come to therapy to deal with!

The victims blame themselves

Most childhood abuse is familial, but recent national investigations make clear its prevalence in schools and other institutions charged with care of and for children. Victims almost always feel guilty about their abuse! They feel ashamed of their abuse. They think they are (partly) responsible for their abuse. They feel dirty. They still love their abuser(s), which goes around and around in circles sustaining a partial denial of the abuse, loss of memory of the abuse, or even largely taking over responsibility for it from the perpetrators. And finally they live often in a climate of re-abuse in the social system(s) of its origin – family, school, office, church, barracks…!!

What is abused? The person or the self is abused, is injured in their heart and soul. Some therapists call it “soul murder”. The basic distortions of the self are in the Fight, Flight or Freeze response which is triggered repeatedly by the trauma and provides the basic form of patterned defence. So, you can expect to have over-developed patterns of violent (fight), avoidant (flight) or numbing (freeze) behaviours which occur automatically under stress, even if the stressors are not exact replicas of your original abuse. 

You may also have a tendency to relate with / be attracted to people who help you replay the original trauma(s) because they are familiar and within your emotional and behavioural competences. You may reject positive behaviour from people because you feel unworthy of it or confused because you do not know what it is and/or mistake it for a manipulative tool of your abuser(s)…

Recovery?

If you are expecting the original injuries, and their present expressions, will be completely expunged, they won’t. Think of a major physical trauma like losing a limb or a critical organ failure. These are facts with which one has to deal forever after. They modify capability. The various kinds of childhood abuse all distort body functions…ranging from inhibited breathing patterns to hyper-vigilance, jitteriness, defensive postures and carriage…etc.  This means our bodies carry visible messages of our abuse and that abuse can be reached through the body. Abuse also distorts social functions – our basic relationships and ways of relating. We learn to relate in ways which compromise our potentials.

That messaging can be radically reduced, but the history is the same. You were abused. Feeling you have to keep it a secret is part of the abuse, and is often made an explicit demand on you by your abuser(s).

You may have to manage multiple vulnerabilities – drugs / alcohol, eating, weight, disordered sleep, relationship instabilities (infidelities, recurrent breakdowns, social isolation, etc.). On the way to recovery there may have to be various little recoveries made. Some of these are very trying. Alcohol and other drug dependencies come to mind. While a whole suite of disordered behaviours may feel overwhelming, the work on any one of them should produce results across all of them. For example, if you are learning to manage anxieties, the process will include serious self-awareness development. That development – mindfulness – will be transferable to other parts of your life. Mindfulness is an all systems, all situations capability.

Getting your power back

Any of these pathways will involve getting your power back. Some pathways may be explicitly designed to do this, as are reconciliation processes and assertion techniques. Others may help you gain greater self-control over your responses, clarity in your understanding of your history and present, and confidence in your own intentions and needs. Along the way there are a few key challenges:

·         Disclosure - How much of your story to tell, and to who?

·         How to create your story – Write it? Draw it? Tell your story..???

·         Reframe behaviours – your currently dysfunctional behaviours (your ‘symptoms’) were adaptive when acquired as responses to abuse in childhood.

·         Practice new behaviours (which may be presently useful versions of presently unuseful ones, especially on the assertion/aggression border) – e.g. capturing anxiety early in its trajectory so that abuse can be pre-empted; expressing anger when it is still containable for you and those near you – when it is irritation or unease that piles up into rage if not acknowledged.

·         Finding and developing natural drives which enhance your sense of self – vocations which are intrinsically rewarding, and often partly developed already, even to a high degree.

 

See Adult Surviving Child Abuse at http://www.asca.org.au/about/resources/child-abuse-prevalence.aspx

 

Learner therapist (47)…… Background factors affecting family relations

Torrey Orton

July 8, 2014

Background factors affecting family relations

Understanding families and their dynamics is helped by a few ideas about people and relationships. These ideas provide handles for our experience of family life and structures which support it. The following factors must be understood as all existing in the context of the others, so they are an interacting set of factors contributing to family life. Each may have greater or lesser parts of biology, sociality, spirituality, economy and so on contained within it. The factors themselves may change from generation to generation and culture to culture. Immigrant families have the benefit and challenge of embracing multiple cultures as they become settled in new places

Gender, and sex

“..the pattern of behavior, personality traits and attitudes defining masculinity or femininity in a certain culture.”  Psychology Dictionary

 

Birth order – in a family each child has a different developmental experience with the same parents. It differs because the parents change over the term of their parenting (they learn to parent and treat their children differently) and the environment of the family changes (social, economic and other systems change)

Family roles – child, parent, sibling, friend, partner

At any time we may be all of these roles at once. That is, as a child we may also be a sibling (of other children in a family), parent of our own children, friend to our sibs and parents, and partners. These roles provide different human development functions within families, which come into play over the life span

Development stages – baby, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, ageing, aged. There is some disagreement about life stages because the boundaries between them (however they are defined) are quite porous and unpredictable. Simply, we can’t run until we can walk and so on. Life skills have a stage nature.

Life skills – may be developed, under-developed or over-developed; both over and under-development may be dysfunctional, and ‘normal’ development may be inadequate to present circumstances!!

Relationship Needs - dependence, independence, inter-dependence. Early in life, and sometimes thereafter, we are dependent on others for our survival; as we grow we seek to be independent in many practical ways.  Some of us may learn to be interdependent. In that case we negotiate the shift of our dependence and independence with our partners.

Values – fairness seems to be a universal human value (shared to some extent in our near human ape cousins); we seem to be programmed by nature to seek fairness and this may be because it is a deep foundation of group survival.

Culture of origin – all the above factors have specific and often different approved forms in different cultures. These forms reflect aspects or interpretations of the factors which follow. Culture is the gathered wisdom of a group’s approach to making a life together.