Learner Therapist (68) … our historical context’s generational demands

Torrey Orton
Dec. 29, 2015

Multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-national traumas…

One aspect of what’s in us is our recent human history. It is a conundrum of trauma therapy that trauma at the family level tends to repeat itself over generations. It is an easy assumption, when looking for causes of this pattern, to notice and but not embrace the all-too-human recourse to violence to overcome the residues of the past (or defend them as abidingly necessary truths). We cannot do without our pasts, nor stay anchored mindlessly in them. Pasts are there regardless of the honourable or wondrous purposes and futures which the present may be holding out before us. Here is a literary version of the generational trauma of the first fifty of the last hundred years captured from a novel:

“With 10 million dead, the four years of World War I legitimised contempt for individual life, making possible the purges, pogroms and Holocaust and tens of millions of corpses of the next war, and the pitiful civilians: an old woman with seat covers sewn into a dress, a man in a jacket made from a flag, which gave them an air of desperate grandeur, like guests at an asylum ball.”

Anne Susskind review of Sebastian Faulk’s Where my heart used to beat (2015) in The AGE Spectrum; 26 Dec. 2015

In the novel the story ploughs on for the next 50 years in the lead character’s reflections.

Three generations is a good span…roughly 100 years…which from now takes us back to the early 20^th century when the massed forces of the 19^th century’s scientific, political and social liberations, in the industrial world at least, undermined many deep socio-economic-political structures. It is a good span because chances are we all know three generations of real people - not just socio-political categories like Boomer or Gen X. In that 100 years we have the generations affected in various ways by the 1^st World War (my grandparent’s generation). Then we have that generation re-afflicted by the Depression, as well as the rising generation which fought the 2^nd World War (my parent’s generation). My generation has hosted a serial testing and upgrading of military potentials through Korea, Vietnam with Cold War sparring in the background culminating in the Iraq ventures of ’91 and 2002, Afghanistan and the Iraq overflow keeping military competences tested to this day.

There are variations on the inescapable calamities theme in tandem with the ones above. For instance the fates of being caught in the Balkans as Yugoslavia declined into its component parts and then into smaller parts around religion over the decade from 1995 to 2005; the various Palestinian/Arab/Israeli battles to this day; the various intramural and Islamic spinoffs in Africa worth millions displaced; the oppressions of Central America with the support of the CIA; the struggles in Chile and Argentina between lefts and rights in the 60’s – 70’s and beyond, many sponsored or covertly supported by American cold war enthusiasms.

Trauma effects

These are all events which are characterised by no escape from danger for almost everyone in them, but especially non-combatants, for long periods of time ranging from the lead up to the respective wars and the wind down into non-war, but often with enduring consequential deprivations. This is a rough configuration for chronic trauma on a mass scale, similar in internal structure to the family level experiences which touch ±20% of populations across the industrial world. Developing country levels may be expected to be higher.

We know that those who fight wars are always traumatised to some extent from the reports of survivors of the undiscussability of their wartime experience. We know that undiscussability of traumatic experiences renders them more powerfully corrosive, and we know that this applies to non-combatants as well. We know that the use of legal (alcohol) and illegal drugs are highly associated with traumas, as is violent behaviour learned in the traumas. This kind of trauma – the trauma of protective services like military, firefighting, policing, emergency services, paramedical services – is endemic for those who undertake to protect us from trauma.

Systemic traumas

There is another class of traumatic conditions, emerging in their ultimate form as genocides, usually arising from long-term systematic and systemic discriminations usually on the basis of race, class, ethnicity, gender/sex and religion. Indigenous peoples everywhere, who escaped the local genocides, are caged in actual or virtual agreements that partition off their heritage lands, their original occupancy and, restrained therefrom, their souls. The history of humanity is of growth through dispossession of our predecessors and the irretrievable pollution of their cultures.

Traumatic effects are reasonably consistent across these cultures, taking forms like endemic alcohol (and other drugs) problems which in turn sustain individual and group incapacity to enter modern life, which in turn sustain the drugs and on it rolls. The psychological problems most commonly driven by trauma are conflicts between rage at dispossession (be it deprivation of life, property or affection) and guilt at being the authors in their view of the injustices they are subject to, at helping the oppressors – be they corrupt officials or bent parents, both often themselves products of social system maintenance of the discriminations going back generations. Altogether these forms roil around, re-emerging in family violences and public criminalities.

On the passage through this all too human history we come up against the challenges of responsibility and forgiveness. Forgiveness cannot meaningfully be given except for an acknowledged miscreance, or crime, though certain religious practitioners (see review of Marilynne Robinson’s The Givenness of Things, NYRB Dec. 17, 2015) recommend grace, where forgiveness cannot be obtained or offered. This latter act is perhaps all that’s left for macro explanations of the self-inflicted injuries of humanity’s passage – that we are all fallen, etc. and the grace is that we give more than we can afford and get less than we deserve.

…and how to engage them in the present.

We can ‘test’ moments, patterns or themes of the past emerging in the present whenever a patient’s self-reported automatic response or initiative produces ineffective relationships. Sometimes that ineffectiveness will be clearly visible in the therapeutic relationship itself, expressed as an unnecessary or inappropriate silence, diffidence, deference or provocation (all defences). The ‘test’ can begin with noticing and pointing out the evidence of ineffectiveness in the patient’s engagement at the moment. If carefully gauged to the patient’s current sense of power, that test can be followed with wondering “Is there more?” or, “Are you familiar with this feeling??” which lead in two different directions of cognitive association: one, an unfinished feeling inhibited by the fear of exposing it, and two, an exploration of an existing track of very familiar recurrent feeling.

That’s for starters, only.

 

Learner Therapist (69) … Digitally mediated relationships

Torrey Orton

Dec. 26, 2016

Who’s at lunch with who?

I was out to a demonstration lunch a while ago. Two demonstrations were occurring: the successful pretence of a great chef and the aspirational pretences of a bunch of diners. The pretentiousness was exemplified by the number of discrete courses – around 20: enough to occupy the whole of the only page in the menu. A socially and ethically interesting question was: who else was there and were those who were there actually there? Why they and we were there would be to follow the pretence path, but that’s another story.

Rather, it was clear from the number of phones tables and in hands that there were others being summoned, cajoled, invaded by the experiences of some diners. Perhaps the reverse was also true in response and maybe some of the apparently sharing diners were actually partaking of their digital partners’ pretences and not really present in the lunch for those moments (either in their own view or the view of their lunch relationship partners). And some connections with unknown unpresent partners on both ends may have been secondhanding the partnerships of the first instance in simultaneous sharings with unknown others…and so on around the digital twittiverse.

If you think that experience is hard to express and, more so, to comprehend, I’m sure you are not alone. Acquaintances of mine who are masters of the digital disciplines continue to amaze themselves with the unintended disclosures of their notionally private selves which blow around the cloud of endless remembering as a result of a burst of communication neediness from the grip of a heart ache or break, or a glass too many. In the same vein of virtuality, we can wonder which of these dining relationships were authentic, real, present (add your favourite behavioural, emotional, or cognitive criterion of existence here). And what would they be being authentic about?

How can we know what happens at lunch?

These kinds of practical implications of relationships are what concern my therapy patients. In fact these kinds of questions / concerns are what people are usually in therapy for – things to do with who can they be usefully connected to in myriad ways and which of those ways are appropriate on criteria that they embrace and think can be embraced by the others, and consequently may actually be embraced in a real relationship. For example, clarity about relationship types would allow increased fine judgment of what type is actually uppermost in one’s own mind and one’s partner(s) mind(s) in a specific relationship moment, event, history and prospect.

I propose that without a systematic way to classify digital relationships on non-digital criteria, we do not know what we’re talking about in discussing, and especially researching, contemporary digitally mediated relationships. Digital criteria are simple: can a digital wire be tripped in a recording device by an effective sensor signal? For an analogue example of criterion domains, are we talking about personal relationships, commercial relationships, organisational relationships, spiritual relationships …and how would we know when a relationship is one, some, or all of these at any one time (and other things not yet itemised)?

And suppose that whatever the type, there is virtuality in play. Most coarsely, is there any difference between a virtual sexual relationship and a real sexual relationship (of the body contact variety)? At least one thing is for sure, so far: no unwanted progeny can result from the virtual one without a shift of level from digital to analogue! On the comestibles side, the longest virtual lunch still leaves a half-full plate of offerings on one side and a wholly empty stomach at the other end of the digital appreciation.

One approach to classifying relationships and behaviours would be Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance as a tool for grasping realties. It is quite a nice theory of knowledge (which tells us how we can say something is and is such a thing reliably). It is also noticeably not standard issue RCT scientific research reality. Perhaps some research should be on the phenomenology of digital behaviour?

Back to the pretentious lunch…

How could the key physical experiences of the lunch be captured and shared digitally as they are occurring? La Grande Bouffe (1973) did a good job of capturing an imagined experience of dining, as did Tom Jones (1963).  But sharing real experience is notoriously difficult and highly reliant on shared communication skills and relationship depth and intensity in the experience domains of interest. Some experiences cannot be shared with the inexperienced other than by involving them in such experiences, and we are back to relationship depth and intensity. Virtually we may get a feel for the experience, but not the experience. Rather we will be having the experience of a tantalising possibility which may be the experience of an intentional or provocative deprivation, which might then be shared by the virtual attendee with the real one and we’re back to tantalising and provocation. In addition, the range of possible experiences of the virtual kind – email, twitter, text, Instagram, telephone, Skype, … – offer different degrees of deprivation potential, usually out of the awareness of the participants. Bring on the phenomenology!? Give me a ring or a ping if you are interested.

Learner Therapist (67) … My enduring ignorance and patient progress

Torrey Orton

Dec. 9, 2015

Wholes and bits

The whole person is the object of therapy, as is the case for all kinds of learning. What comes broken into pieces is therapeutic techniques, learning contents and learning processes, as if readied for piecemeal consumption. Our learning theories tell us things must be chunked, parcelled and presented.

What’s hard to preserve in the passage of the bits is the wholes. The whole person, the whole of the subject, the whole of the practice… anything whole in the moment perhaps. A first challenge to my deeper engaging this situation is my ignorance across many domains and levels of human activity. There are so many things relevant to effective living which I do not and never will know deeply. These ignorances spring from aspects of myself which were never strong – the mathematical arena for example, the related natural sciences and their associated engineering applications.

I know they exist and that they matter, but I am constitutionally unsuited to engaging them with any hope of a real grasp arising from the effort. And, I don’t have that much time anyway.

Action for a change

What I can, and do, do is this:

·         Pay attention to those domains and levels which are clearly both important to whole persons and beyond me (and perhaps beyond them, too, in varying configurations).

·         Choose a few of them to pay persistent attention to – follow them at different levels of presentation: daily news, monthly news and annual review level (but in standard educated reader publications - the best of X for year 2016).

·         Be on the lookout for signs of the chosen domains in everyday life. This should occur unconsciously as a result of the persistent attention chosen interests.

·         Develop specialty interests in the domains which you follow closely enough to be able to lead a conversation among non-experts about the nature of that enterprise / issue / domain and its importance for you, us, and them now and into the near future, but especially how it feels important to you – the kinds of feelings it elicits.

·         Find and maintain a suite of colleagues with specialisations in those areas of interest to me that are beyond my likely competence. Engage on the periphery of activities and projects which are driven by specialists. For example follow target domains in different cultures, easy to do these days by subscribing to web versions of major papers daily and get notifications of preferred subjects direct. Many foreign language majors have English editions – e.g. Le Monde, China Daily, etc.

(I learned this technique living and teaching in Beijing in the early ‘80’s when wanting to learn to read Chinese and understand their view of education. I discovered that the Guangming Ribao (the ‘intellectuals’ daily) carried a regular column of matters educational. I stayed with that pretty much for two years. I could read the then current education commentary by the end, though very little about specific subjects or courses.)

Domains and levels of interest for action

So, what are some candidates for must-know domains and levels for the next 5-10 years with testably high impact on the lives of our patients (and ourselves!)? Try these for now:

Domains of action:

 

1-      The Artificial Intelligence / Enhanced Performance* industries

2-      The life extension business – to the century as normal and the planets as possible by artificial starts (IVF, etc.) and hangings on (replacement parts, etc.)

3-      Climate changes and other acts of gods

4-      Macro (the degradation of democratic practices in the chief democracies) and micro (local violences) political disintegrations

5-      Loss of concrete public language* for expressing and discussing experience (the prominence of spin across everyday life)

6-      The commercialisation of everyday life and the sanctification of productivity. (The only measure of worth is money and its surrogates (stuff)

 

Levels of understanding:

 

7-      What’s normal now? (from the impacts of the preceding,  and their interactions)

8-      Dilemmas / paradoxes* (gains are losses and losses are gains?)

9-      Boundaries – defining the spaces which domains occupy exclusively

10-   Evidences* – the ‘facts’ and ‘values’ which constitute the substance of life.

These domains and levels can also be seen as the context for everyday persons’ lives which provide perspective on their purposes, conduct and achievements. Elsewhere I will offer some approaches to checking for their influences in the course of therapy. One implication of these domains and levels is that some parts of much therapy will have to be concerned with “tools and skills” for helping patients get their power back in domains and levels which are inescapably present to us all.

*These are my current favourites.