Learner therapist (15)……Why don’t people do what’s good for them?

Learner therapist (15)……Why don't people do what's good for them?
Torrey Orton
March 21, 2012

Even I don't always do what's good for me… and I know it!

I assume that anyone who shows up for therapy wants to change themselves in some regard. They may actually arrive with the idea someone else should change and discover that they have to change themselves to achieve that. After a while they get somewhere…often after quite a bit of a while, like a year or two of weekly work on complications of the experience underlying their anxiety and depression.


The techniques for improving anxiety and reducing depression are not difficult, but achieving improvement is, in the long term, notoriously difficult. It takes real attention to personal and contextual detail to control panic, for example. I've been through such things on both sides of the therapeutic arena, as patient and practitioner. Getting to the airport well in advance of the advised on-time ensures me low anxiety departures and placid passages. Pre-emption, one of the clearest panic management techniques, works. It took a few years multiple long distance flights per annum of attention to get it clear and do it consistently.


Get real…it's hard to change anything everywhere, almost
Failure rates for weight reduction over the medium to long term are now thought to be partly organic in origin and still people persist. Obesity has so many negative life implications it's a wonder it is achieving an increased representation among the gen pub. Resistance to change also well known in medical practice…and we can see it alarmingly on display in climate change scepticism, financial institution blamelessness and state decimation of populations in defence of the existing order (Syria anyone? Sudan…?)….


…even over quite long terms... and a commercial yield of extinction for some (many) entities along the way… Kodak finally went under this month, 20 years after the digital camera innovation (the invention was 20 years before that) and they could see it coming, but still…like digitisation --- or couldn't they see it coming…and who's to blame for this blindness?? Perhaps they were always going to lose and there are plenty of cases of that.
Well, maybe it's just that the existing habits have not been engaged by a sufficiently compelling motive to give up their hold…we know in some sense that changing will be transformative and that it's almost impossible to believe it will be both doable and effective. Transformation = obliteration opportunity??


So back to me – the case I know the best, and a good example of not doing what's good for me…


One thing I can see is that I do not do what's good for me because that usually involves breaking down a well-established and core self-system. Not just a self-management system but a self-system through which my distinctive (to my senses) public and private self is expressed in values, behaviours, thinkings, sensibilities and sensitivities. Taking care of myself before others is one such system.


The hurt's not bad enough
Another thing I can see is that many of the warning signs or attraction signs for self-care – the sources of motivation - have been defaced, erased or otherwise sidelined by the process of building the just mentioned self-systems. A small example: to deal with a childhood sensitivity to poison ivy I had to learn to avoid its sources: the oily leaves which attack through direct skin contact, pets who carried the oil unknown back to us to be rubbed off in patting and scratching or indirectly through the smoke of burning ivy vines in outdoor fires during winter. Both produced seriously unattractive and distressing weeping blisters across affected skin lasting a week or so. But I liked cutting grass in summer and ice skating in winter and on rolled the attacks until I wintered in boarding school and skated on an enclosed ice rink. It seemed that overall allergy declined with puberty.


I have learned to disregard irritants so that even strongly felt ones withdraw from immediate perception after a few days…the trouble I note for preventive attention vanishes. I think I digress. Maybe I regress, because it came to me in the middle of the night that I am part way through avoiding an FOB test for bowel cancer…not a name to repulse me but the idea of the process certainly does: see faecal occult blood test. And I recognise now that I've done so before successfully – not collect it that is.


The repulsion interacts with an avoidance inclination already mentioned – not doing things that are good for me. So, why not? The reason for doing what's good is not strong enough to compensate for the ugliness of the possibly virtuous process of discovering a potentially fatal condition! That is, the motivating risks are too easy to tick Not Applicable to me.


Up a level…family life as an anti-change system
Another perspective on resistance is that of family life. Try a blended family composed of the remnants of at least two pre-existing ones, harbouring various baggages. Keeping the blend reasonably clear while flexible is a piece of relationship artistry mostly achieved in the moment, over and over again, those in charge and their charges accommodating the unspoken needs of all members as well as possible. The expelled, escaped or lost prior members lurk in the consciousness of their respective partners and children, appearing in the new family as 'hard-wired' response patterns projected on the replacement parents – demands which they may be unsuited to manage by temperament, style or value, or just plain lack of time/energy.


This is a sticky web of affiliations, attachments and associations to be rewoven only with intense effort, and then only partially. Not surprisingly, the couple leading a blend may be resisted by the web's crystallised accommodations and adaptations, which gain strength over time.


It's all a bit like a cat which resists the pills that will save its life being stuffed with the offending capsules by well-intentioned owners…as often unsuccessfully as successfully. I watched an old friend struggle to get the precisely named "Clawed" to take his medicines one morn in Sydney.


It's as hard for the cat to know what's good for it as for us, perhaps, but he's easier to overwhelm for the sake of his good.

Learner therapist (9) …”Finding my starter button”

Learner therapist (9) …"Finding my starter button"
Torrey Orton
July 24, 2011


B., 32, is struggling to step into his realistic, clearly focussed, and preferred work life. He has a track record of work and initiative in the field (food service), a plan for exploring a start-up enterprise, down to possible funding, and most recently a partner prospect of long acquaintance. What he doesn't have is a "starter button". Motivation for the last year or so has been negative – escaping a clearly unsatisfying present job, at which he is also underperforming (though his employer doesn't seem to mind because no pressure is explicitly put on B to do more or differently or better, or…anyway, actually a great situation for a career change – paid exploration time!).


But not negative everywhere. In the last six months he's discovered running and pursues it with sturdy and rewarding attention, to the point of prepping for a half marathon now. No trouble starting his engine for the morning chug around the neighbourhood. He knows he'll feel good doing it and enjoy the challenge of sharpening his times while trimming his steps to reliable sustainability. And so he knows what it means (thought/feeling/action) to be motivated, and is so about some things! His wife and child are among important others.


On the edge of his stasis lies a gambling penchant with a smoking habit attached, now under control, more or less. He recognises this cluster is a displacement of energies which could drive a new life direction and his shortage of accepted alpha aspiration for a male of his social, ethnic and religious identifications. As well, there's a family history of weak father performance in the provider role, which B reflects in his unfound "starter button". He doesn't believe he can succeed at leading a venture alone.


Some months into this exploration, along came the right business partner prospect – a friend of long standing, appropriate openness and relevant life background, interests, experience and resources. Then up jumped a new challenge. What is B expecting the partner to lead in the enterprise and what will/can he lead himself? He doesn't know, nor had he thought of the question, but can feel the relevance.


The background discussion is 'what is motivation and how can it be grown, urged, prodded…in short, increased?' Also in short, motivation is the outcome of a shapely purpose, plus attractive incentives. We know that incentives can act as a purpose, or be confused for one, because need for them (money, status, position, etc.) is confused with purpose arising from deep within – an intrinsic motivation driver. Motivation is enhanced or compromised by competence: actual, imagined and aspirational – which in turn are sustained or demeaned by hope. B. suffers from a motivation hope deficit.


So, to start again, how does B improve his shortfall in leadership competence? By replacing it with confidence in shared leadership – the everyday business solution except where compulsive micro-managers are in the seat. Two parallel leadership relationships bear on his future: the business partner and the life partner ones. While both of these people support his vocational initiative, their stakes differ; His life partner's stake includes management of the household economy, it also affects her personal vocational future(s) (they agree she should go back to work in some way). The business partner's stakes principally centre on business management issues and the household side of his own domestic economy, too.


For B, clarifying his life partner's needs is the starting place to setting some personal goals. But that cannot be done without clarifying his needs. We're talking here about real things like amount of time away from home, expected low income period for the start-up and fall back options for the venture. In parallel run her only slightly spoken vocational aspirations, motherhood self-images, and such.


Both share a habit which blocks exploratory discussions directly affecting them: the wish to do no harm to the other. This is held with something approaching the energy of medical professionals, but not the same professional obligation. The ethical one is almost as powerful. As a result they cannot enter into potentially disputable grounds – those which harbour uncertainty about life critical matters like the family economy above, for instance. And the perceived relationship of doing nothing is still too slight. Doing no harm prevents doing good.


Keep posted.