Learner Therapist (55) … it takes a village to make a mind

Torrey Orton

February 21, 2015

Parent, sibling, peer, partner… again

 

On this day 17/02/2015 there were 19 YouTube videos entitled ‘It takes a village to…” to make all manner of things, amongst which make a mind was one. The most noteworthy parallel is “to raise a child.” Villages are in declining supply in Australia, though I’m daily reminded of my roots in something near to a village 60 years ago in Massachusetts. It, Lunenburg, had a population of 5,000 which would count for a medium sized country town here, but felt like a village because within 15 minutes bike ride of my house could be reached every kid in my class in the local primary school and all their siblings older and younger than me. I felt like I knew everyone in Lunenburg, except for the occasional foreigners - soldiers from Fort Devens who passed though on the way to and from the bars of the mill town down the road (pop. 45,000). I subsequently spent 9 years in small educational institutions, secondary and tertiary, in equally small towns in New England. Double villages – residential education and small town environs for the price of one.

What reminds me of this heritage is the feeling I have about knowing people in our neighbourhood which has grown by about double in the last years as the newly minted flats of Studio Nine came onto occupational line. I don’t expect to know them all, any more than I knew all the locals of the old days here. What I do expect is to be able to recognise them and thereby know them for being among us and potentially of us – the locals. At a minimum, responsibility for turd patrol can be expected these days. This is one aspect of a village. Every villager knows the rules and respects them by enacting them. Our ‘village’ is a little more eclectic than Lunenburg or the others were, and maybe still are. So rule recognition and following is a bit more variable than I would like…but “it is what it is” as the saying of resignation and withdrawal goes, which I do not suffer lightly.

I’m drawing this out because it seems to me that we suffer a shortage of village, and certainly of “community”, another of those now empty words invoked anytime politicians want to embrace everyone as if they are beneficiaries of some offer which in fact has highly differentiated impacts for various parts of the putative community. So wither therapy in all this? Increasingly I find myself giving little speeches about our social states in explanation of some of the forces to which patients feel themselves subject as they struggle to right their traumatised lives.

These speeches emphasize, implicitly, the near absence of effectively supportive communities for us and the disproportionate presence of oppressive ones. Those for whom this absence doubled by oppression really matters are the traumatised. We in the therapeutic community know that socialising our experience is a basic way of engaging, normalising and embracing it, but that requires community at the village level. I have some patients who speak of their local “village” as the replacement for families of origin which have abandoned them. For them the village is a pub and its environs, a small shops and cafes street with enough density to be peopled most daylights hours and quite few early dark ones – peopled with recognized others.

Learner Therapist (54) … 1 person 4 roles

Torrey Orton
February 17, 2015

Parent, sibling, peer, partner

 

Many couples have been illuminated by the following idea: we all get to play any one of four roles in relation to each other – parent, partner, peer or sibling. If we are competent partners we know that our other half may at any time need us to be their peer, parent or sibling for them, and that we may need the same from them. Our need for others to relate to us in these roles may be upon us before we are aware, usually signalled by role specific behaviours like being needy (parenting), competitive (sibling), cooperative (peer) or interdependent (partner).

While it is totally normal not to be available in the appropriate role at the appropriate time because of our engagement in role needs of our own, what is more confusing and confounding is discovering that our respective capacity in the roles may be very different because our original learning was unbalanced (so a role got less developmental attention than is required to grow it to workable levels). We may not even really know the role because our upbringing did not contain it. An only child, for example, is likely to have an underdeveloped sibling competitiveness, unsurprisingly and wholly unknown to them, and unknowably so, too!! It is beyond their experience, existing perhaps only as a sense of aloneness exposed when in the presence of other families’ siblings.

So, who am I for you today?

The most obvious role is parenting. We need this throughout life whenever we approach significantly novel steps or stages in our paths, especially unpredictable ones and even more enervating those which we could have predicted but failed to. The parent for the day is needed to be unreservedly supportive, to be unconditionally accepting – a hard row to hoe under any conditions.

Sibling associations most clearly come into view when we relate to partners as brothers or sisters, deferring to them or competing with them while being bound together in a wholeness which affirms us all. Similar dynamics may be found in work place, spiritual and leisure associations with all the variety and less control since we do not understand such settings as family. Other cultures see them as always family in the sense that the various expectations of leaders, for example, are bounded by parental expectations.

Peers are our equals more or less. The equality comes from shared experience not shared outcomes, aspirations or inspirations. If you are 10 years older or younger than your partner, the peer potential is low, even within families, where 10 years makes often for an unshareable childhood by the same parents and siblings. They bring to us a kind of experiential corroboration which parents and siblings cannot – that of the world outside the family but inside the same history! The extent of moving home in one’s life, increased by any distance which makes neighbourliness with old acquaintances only sustainable by conscious action is a demonstrable destroyer of such peer potential in our lives.

First amongst equals, our partner - the one who makes us whole and for whom we do the same in return. In fact we are inextricably implicated in our partnership needs, even more clearly so by our lack of a partner. Of all four roles this is the most fundamental and it seems at the same time the most perilous, hence perhaps the importance of the others as backstops for the ones which pass through even the keeper. Who would invest in a role which has a reliable 40% chance of failing? The other three roles provide fail safes against the almost inevitable failure so easily imagined that its play in our awareness and not is one of the major themes of literary and moral history – deception and infidelity.

…and, who are you for me?

Probably by this point you are noticing that these roles may be covertly in play throughout our lives, most clearly so in the major everyday interpersonal settings like work, sports, religious, and various avocational and political groups. They are the means of establishing and maintaining deep bonds in the relatively distant relationship worlds of post modernity. These may resist the pleas of justice, honour or prudence, as we can see in various instances of groups which prefer their publically guilty members to the rights of victims of various abuses. Add identity dynamics to such group and we have the material of gross discriminations against out groups, especially easily stigmatised ones.

Learning to act right (49)… learning, unlearning, relearning cycle

Torrey Orton
Feb. 10, 2015

Is that a signal you’re making, or just a wandering wiper?

 

There’s an empty place feeding my feeling of disorientation, of not being in the world which I am in at that moment, when I shift from left hand drive to right hand drive and back again. This has been a relatively regular occurrence over the last five months as I’ve adjusted to a new car while occasionally revisiting the old one. It’s interest for me here, apart from the fact of repeatedly being seen to turn on and off headlights then on and off windscreen wipers and cleaning cycles totally inappropriately – e.g. wipers when turning left at a T junction; lights when the rains came down! – is that I am exposing myself to a very sharply focused example of learning, unlearning and relearning. This is the stuff of neuro-scientific phantasy – the plastic brain and all that.

Driving for 55 years

But there’s more. It’s the left right, right left confusion. My new car has its steering column mounted tools on the wrong side. That is, for a right hand drive car the turn indicators and lights are operated from the right hand side in Australia, regardless of manufacturing origin, but the new car has retained its European positioning, trading its firm market position for an excuse not to do the engineering required to shift them to the right along with everything and everyone else??

 

I’ve been 95% driving the new car for five months with very occasional forays in the old one. Each time I have the experience of revisiting the old car I have the following challenge: approaching a turn of choice my left hand goes for the turn indicator (new car position) before I notice it. This is a classic automatic, habitual function which sets off before we know it, as a good habit should do (that’s how you know a habit is ‘good’ – if it ‘works’ by pre-empting the need to consciously choose an action). But I’m driving the wrong car and I ping the windscreen cleaning system instead with the above mentioned “wandering wiper” effect, if there’s anyone to notice it apart from me.

Just describing this is difficult because everything has to be turned around and around to give the proper impression – a video would do better but who wants to see a video of the wandering wiper syndrome?? And, how could it be made except by a dash cam cued to the lights / wipers complex??

I’m noticing as a write this that a background factor may be that this manufacturer’s (Audi) arrogance triggers a deeper level of driving learning – those first 14 years I spent driving in Massachusetts, never interrupted by functional wrong-sidedness!! On some standard neuro-scientific understandings, specific types of learning are produced in specific brain compartments. My driving compartment, so to speak, may have a residue of these original learnings clagging up my system, given the small chance to do so which a dysfunctional trigger might provoke. No wonder I feel so disoriented by these small moments. They may be taking me back to my teendom. Perhaps I’m doing the learning/ unlearning/ relearning cycle on historically discrete competences held together in the package that is me, which has to produce a recognizable action sequence out of the range available and match it with a real world in the now. Maybe? If so, a good opportunity for a performance clag-up.