Learner Therapist (57) … Retraumatising forever!

Torrey Orton
March 24, 2015

When the family makes a late, uninvited and seemingly unavoidable return…

There are many things about trauma which are difficult to understand, both for the traumatised and their friends and colleagues. High among the list is re-traumatising within the family, or other social system(s) of origin (e.g.-schools, clubs, churches…). Poor relationship choices are almost unavoidable, at least the first times around. These choices arise from inappropriate relationship needs shaped by the original abuses.

Maybe you wouldn’t have heard the one about the parents who had to call on their children for rescue from their everyday self-management incompetence? Or the one about the parents whose most abused male child bought them a new house after they lost the family home and then they lost it again, having never acknowledged the gift before losing it? But the parents who refuse to stay away are another thing. Here’s such a story.

The two children have long before moved to a distance beyond daily or weekly visits to or from their parents…both at times to other sides of the globe. One finds himself back in the monthly visit range with Father and weekly with Mother, while himself in the early stages of child raising and attempting to integrate family and continuing work demands with a rigorously perfectionist self-assessment system in place. It’s one of the unintended consequences of his parents’ respective withholdings of affection and engagement with him 35 years ago, amplified by conflicting gender role expectations arising from their southern European origins. Now, Mother can’t resist commenting on child rearing practices and behaving in ways which replay almost verbatim to his children the treatment she dished out 35 years before to him.

Dad has kept himself to the old family town more than a day away and retired with such bad effect that he’s lost all of his retirement funds except a vaguely commercial property in said town. He’s acquiring a new wife and the prospect of a sale of the property, but with no commercial nous that would ensure he doesn’t lose it all again. He, like Mother, keeps number two child, a daughter a few years younger than son, appraised of the collapse of his financial worlds. This sharing elicits without soliciting (and so all the more powerfully demanding) a financial sympathy which slides into a felt obligation to help. This sense is then imposed on the son with blind complicity by number two’s intermediation of the messages about the parental decomposition.

This would not be too much if the children were rich and calmly located in the upper end of their parenting cycles, but they are not. And the implied burden of the assistance they should provide is unequally spread, too. Because number two lives in another country she can’t remotely be expected to house Mother as she slides towards a physical infirmity paralleling her financial one. And note that this pattern of implied obligation, openly but indirectly (through Number Two) proposed, also repeats the pattern of indirect expectations the children had been subjected to in their childhood!!

Abuse creates guilt in the abused, almost without exception (and completely beyond the understanding or appreciation of the ‘normal’). The re-traumatised, as Number One and Two are, get to revisit the experience of guilt when their incompetent parents reappear with more or less explicit pleas for family succour and without acknowledgment of the abuse which created the original guilt. The children now have the guilt of their desire not to succour the incompetent and abusing, which Number One has made a professional life around as policeman, and similar occupations!!

 

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

http://www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au/classroom/fetch_class.php?course_id=105-3

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 purpose
The 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…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-in-kathleen-sebelius-hearings-on-obamacare-a-party-without-a-brain/2013/10/30/6d9713da-41af-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html?hpid=z2

Learner therapist (38)…… pathways to reconciliation

Torrey Orton

Sept. 23, 2013

“You always say / do X when I say / do Y….”

I always offer the following six propositions to first time couples therapy patients. It is a perspective they can use to interpret and shape their relationship from this point forward. And it is the one I use.

1. The responsibility for the current state and future of the couple is joint
2. This responsibility has varying levels with different issues because individuals value issues differently
3. We can never fully meet all the needs of another person, hence our need for friends while coupled
4. We can never fully know our own needs at any time because:
1. they are partly hidden in our unconscious, and
2. they emerge as we transit our life stages, or
3. they are subordinated to the needs of others.
5. Consequently, conflict is a necessary part of relationships (not just marriages)
6. This conflict usually takes a repeated form – the systemic communication dysfunction – which can be seen early in couples work, and which the couple immediately recognise as ‘what we always do…’ (see point 1 above)

The systemic communication dysfunction, however, is the hurdle too high for some couples. It brings them to me – this barrier which looms up between them with reliable consistency about a well-known set of issues. These are also facts, but mainly emotional ones about the status of the relationship. Helping them to be shared is my first task. I’ve written elsewhere (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/learner-therapist-18-systemic.html  ) about the techniques for doing this – exploring needs and wants, building a shared agenda for joint exploration and creating resolutions to the agenda.

Usually there are emblematic hurdles which have years of unresolved injuries* attached to them. Often these hurts are so big that some form of reconciliation is called for, though usually it is me who labels them as such. Even the mention of reconciliation expresses a level of optimism for the relationship which the traumatised couple may not easily rouse early on in the work…

…such issues attack the central confidence of the relationship – usually matters of fidelity, though not always sexual. They corrupt trust and embed suspicion while accruing a nest of reinforcing experiences between the couple, eventually becoming self-reinforcing to the point of crippling their basic relationship assumptions. The common verbal form or corrupted trust is the accusation: “You always say / do X when I say / do Y….”

Reconciliation for a change

The offer of a reconciliation process - which assumes that everything relevant can be (1) truthfully acknowledged, (2) apologised as appropriate, (3) recompensed if necessary and, finally, (4) prevented from recurring - is often heard by patients with mild to serious wonder, edging into disbelief. Here’s roughly what I say about it, set out as a presentation which ensures, when well executed, that a clear idea of a clear process is available to both parties. It can take numerous sessions to get to the detailed implementation, though it often has been pre-empted by their engaging with each other with that process in view before formally arriving at it. The power of applied suggestion.

An approach to marital reconciliation:

Step	Purpose	Process
1 Acknowledgement	To build an agreed version of what happened, so that the ‘facts’ are mutually endorsed. This will be essential to achieve a credible apology and to establish appropriate recompense and relevant prevention strategies	The person responsible** writes out what the facts are, with guidance from the person harmed to assure they are all there. The final document is read by the writer out loud, repeatedly if necessary, until an acceptable tone of seriousness is achieved for the person harmed.
2 Apology	To ensure that the acknowledged facts are taken up as the responsibility of one of the other parties – credibly and authentically (the latter contributes largely to the perception of credibility)	The writer apologises for their role in the acknowledge facts, again repeated until an appropriately authentic tone is achieved for both parties.
3 Reparation	To restore a sense of balance in the relationship where damage is seen to be high by both parties. May be material or services in nature…	In civic life we have community orders as a form of giving back for breaking the law. In private the same concept can be applied. For instance,
4 Prevention	To ensure that “it never happens again”.	If the acknowledgment is full about the damaging behaviours, their triggers should be clearly in view. Consequently, pre-emptions can be designed jointly (!) to interrupt recurrence opportunities.

 

Any system like this actually reflects participants’ unreflected understanding of violations – their sense of justice.  So, they often have begun the reconciliation process implicitly. For example, at the start they may already have ideas about recompense and prevention…very likely in fact, because these two steps are the imagined results both are looking forward to. Failing to do the pre-work on acknowledgment and apology is what prevents progress on the last two. Fear of the last two inhibits progress on the first two. Similarly, getting good at the first two means falling into distress deep enough to call for recompense and prevention happens much less often and the cycle of re-injury is broken up front when precipitating events occur – as they will!

Note there’s a practice of reconciliation for criminal invasions of personal and property safety. It is called Restorative Justice and has formal state, national and international proponents. In these the guilty are encouraged to confront their victims and engage with the damage they have caused. The focus is on acknowledgment and apology, with occasional acts of reparation.  Restorative Justice is associated theoretically and practically with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in various places – e.g. Canada , South Africa, Australia – with heritages of systemic and systematic colonial violations of indigenous families (among other violations of indigenous life!). All  from marital reconciliation to inter-ethnic truth and justice are means of engaging the past by working it through in the appropriate publics.

Forgiveness and forgetting. Matters for another time.

*unresolved injuries are deep historical relationship patterns which remain present to the view of oneself and others as how we normally behave under pressure. They are often not acknowledged either to ourselves or by others because they are the kind of behaviours which elicit automatic defences on both sides; empathy helps us conduct this tacit defence.

 

** Person Responsible and Person Harmed is the language used in Restorative Justice to identify participants in various kinds of proceedings. See Best Practice Standards for Restorative Justice Facilitators Copyright © Victorian Association for Restorative Justice, 2009

 

Learner therapist (37)…… Unavoidable hurts: damaging dilemmas of development
Torrey Orton
Sept. 16, 2013

“I have to send you back again…”

 

A few months ago I wrote here on “Disrespect without intent” (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/learnertherapist-30disrespect-without.html ), arguing that we are responsible for damages we have done to others without intending to do so. I want to extend that claim from the relatively benign damage of my inappropriate “Uh huhs”* to the decidedly malignant damages of long term childhood victimisation which often compose the backgrounds of the deeply anxious and/or depressed. The deforming damages may be experienced in self-harming and suicidal intents / attempts, with the crystallised defences of PTSD, OCD, body/eating disorders and the various social phobias along the life paths of the damaged – constituting a reasonable chunk of the DSM V diagnoses.

Occurrences and forms of unintended damages

In child raising - Catch 22’s

A mother, having been abandoned with three children, decided to start ensuring she never had to depend on a man again. She did this by getting herself an education and then the work history which made her highly employable and repeatedly promotable. Along the way she had to be out of home for much of the day. In the space between end of school and end of work home time her three kids were home alone and into this unsupervised space arose the sexual abuse of the youngest child (girl, age 7) by the eldest (boy, age 12).

Similarly, the mother with two female primary aged children split up from her first husband after periods of violence at his hands. Dad eventually remarried (quite soon in fact) and the divorce settlement provided child access for him a weekend fortnightly. Unfortunately his new wife was also a graduate of a failed marriage with children, who were living with them.

She was utterly incapable of managing the blending demands of the visitation weekends, leading her to victimise the girls persistently and intensively. The degree of verbal violence was sufficient to leave the girls crying on the way home to mother and pleading with her not to be sent back. She had to say: “You have to go. The family court requires me to share you with your father.” For my patient, one of the two girls 20 years later, this went on until she left home for a violent boyfriend at age 16 and the cycle continued down the generations.

In marriages / families

The couple nothingness condition – when there is a space between the couple into which both have learned not to tread because the ground is rough, the air frosty and the lighting undimmable. This kind of space produces constant low grade irritation with occasional outbursts of rage. The irritation signals the constant presence of nothingness, which the individuals express in a persistent sense the other disrespects, disregards, dislikes them  and the other’s failed coupling is described in negative absolutes (he/she always,  never does…) which imply catastrophic outcome expectations for the relationship. These cannot be resolved because both experience it as what the other should do – take a chance to change things.

Family nothingness condition – when feelings are prohibited and opportunities for arousing or engaging them are reduced to the minimum and yet they still stay housed under one roof. For example, the family which eats meals separately (I know two of these), where almost  no feelings are explicitly expressed and where implicit expression is severely repressed (making passive-aggressive anger the only OK public feeling and guilt the de facto private feeling when its private version rage is not in play). Alcohol is the lubricator of the frozen joints of these two relationship worlds.

The dilemma of engagement in recovery

These four examples are all violent, though not in the sense the genpub or popular press imagines them. In principal, they would seem to be easier to deal with than family violences as we usually hear of them – either by friends or news reports. However, they are not easier, partly because they are somewhat invisible violences, leaving no broken bones or cuts except the victims’ self-inflicted ones.     

The challenge for both victims and abusers is to engage with the part good / part bad abusers’ behaviours. The victims cannot escape this dilemma because it is constantly present to them in the viscous mixture of self-blame and self-defence, which sticks them to recurrent patterns of daily life ineffectiveness – in work, relationships, self-care, etc. Out of this sticky mix they often generate their own history of damaging behaviours both to themselves (the self-harming and crystallised defences mention above) and others (reproducing the violences they have been subject to), …and so the damaging passes from generation to generation it often seems.

That this is no mean struggle is attested by the society level discussion over historical guilt, notably the 20^th century German ones (World War II guilt and political guilt for the DDR for 45 years thereafter). Positions on the virtues and abuses of remembering and atoning are exquisitely set out by David Rieff in Against Remembrance and dramatised in Bernhard Schlink’s fictions of war and self-oppression - The Reader and The Weekend - and theorised recently in his Guilt About the Past. The apposite by omission example is Japan. These are all multi-generational matters. They do not go away in societies any more than they do in families.

The problem of blame and responsibility

The desire to avoid the dilemma of responsibility (which entails potential blame and praise one way or another) shows up in funny places like famed works of self-development and injury recovery that falter around holding the parents responsible for their injuries to children (assailing the victims with the need to deny their victimhood), failing which their children can never extricate themselves from the cycles of self-blame which bring them to therapy in the first place. Correct blame locates responsibility where it belongs, which certainly is NOT wholly with the child. It also helps to clarify those things which are not changeable by the child because they were not the child’s responsibility.

There’s another level to this struggle – a conceptual one. Dilemmas are those kinds of things which cannot be reduced to black and white, digitised, constructs. A very large part of human populations are not presently capable of holding two largely conflicting versions of the same story in mind at once. So maybe my efforts to get patients to engage such dilemmas are misplaced and the strategies of other therapists (see above) which I see as avoidant of the dilemmas are in fact intellectually and morally prudent. That is, the strategies reflect and honour the developmental potential of patients under stress.  However, they do so by starting from an avoidance - namely, assuming that confrontation with abusers is wrong because uncomfortable for the abusers and so not even to be raised as an option by the abused. This is a little too close to self-protective institutional procedures for my comfort!!

My impression is that many patients make only modest efforts down the pathway of historical reconciliation with their abusers. There are good reasons for this, but one of them is not that the abusers are blameless. Rather they may be now incompetent to play the role of responsible adult, either through moral weakness of the sort demonstrated by public figures and institutions of all sorts these days (or, has it not always been thus?) or the constitutional weaknesses of advanced age.

* by the way, that uncontrollable spontaneous dismissal of others seems to have almost fully disappeared in the last couple of months…sliding out of my natural communication repertoire with not a peep of resistant protest. How that came to be is a wonder for another time.

 

 

Who’s to blame for a bad childhood?

Who’s to blame for a bad childhood? Accountability, responsibility, blame and victims
Torrey Orton July 28, 2009

Accountability*: giving an account for personal responsibilities or for those undertaken by others on our delegation.

This is a terrible field to step into. Much travelled and trammelled. Who am I to add another step…even to be presumptuous enough to try? This is one I have to try because my confusions are so great. Others seem equally confused. I have been here before while exploring the Royal Commission on the Black Saturday bushfires. Here I will focus on this quartet as it applies in psychotherapy. I do not think that’s the same thing as the great worlds of politics and world changing surrounding our everyday lives. But my patient clients feel this greater world in their own distresses and are touched by their place(s) in it.

The problem for us all as adults is that there’s a part of our life we are not responsible for. Sometimes we need to be able to give an account of it!! One such time is if we are in psychotherapy. Most therapies acknowledge that our family of origin experiences shape our potential for family making (and many other group) experiences as adults. Our gender roles are learned there and the nature and variety of attachment is developed and embedded. Some cultures think of themselves as families and construct all social roles in family terms.

… our parents’ children

So, in important respects, we are always our parents’ children. This is recognised in everyday observations to that effect about children. And, we all honour the part(s) of our shared heritage we delight in. The undelightful is usually omitted. Sometimes it is systematically excluded from family conversation by explicit punishment of anyone who strays into the guarded territory. Therapeutically, I would say the most important breakthrough for many of my traumatised clients is to speak to the power of the family’s denial by actually opening previously closed doors with parents or sibs, or both, or virtually doing so in imaginary role-play of such openings.

Similar dynamics of denial and speaking to it can be seen in our societies at large – e.g. child abuse by trusted figures like priests, carers, etc. Acknowledgment of these abuses is resisted by the responsible organisations (seeking deferral of their accountability) like churches (Catholic most prominently, but certainly not solely) and social service agencies like the Salvos recently. The only thing worse than a bad family experience is no family at all.

Again therapeutically, family of origin appears as a source, a cause, of both the foundations and the distortions of our everyday relationship functionality. Some distortion is unavoidable. Parents can be no more perfect than the rest of us. Imperfection has its prices, though, and this acknowledgment meets a barrier in the same everyday world of this type: ‘thou shalt not blame, nor a victim be’. Probably this is because someone would have to be uncomfortable in the process and so it would be aggressive and selfish and therefore undesirable. About this time we can forget justice, forgiveness or many other everyday attributes of a ‘normal’ life.

Blame and intent to injure

Blame has to do with perceived intent to injure. Human intent is the only true cause of anything, and then often of not much or not what was intended! Without intent we have no actions, goals, progress… a view for which I might make a case in another argument! If I am injured in fact, I am a victim of the injuring force. Its actual blameworthiness is a matter for discussion or negotiation. The discussion process may reveal that I have not been victimised, though I am pained – that is, what happened arose from my wandering into the path of another’s intentions.

Or, it may reveal that the actions expressing that intention were inappropriately designed, executed, etc. The other is still ‘to blame’ but not condemnable. This is recognised in law, but recently is being deformed by the assumption that any injury I incur is someone else’s fault and worthy of compensation by them, especially if they are a legal person. Whence warnings in national parks like “Limbs may fall” or on the roads to them like ”Overhanging trees” to defend the relevant authority from suits for supposed maintenance malpractice.

Who’s to blame?

Not a few of my clients wonder at some point if talking about family history suggests their parents are “to blame” for whatever presenting issues they have. And, consequently, are they “victims”? It seems to me that both of these are their rightful usage if the hurt is great enough. Now there’s the lynch pin. Establishing for me that something hurts enough is easy. I decide for myself. But establishing the hurt is big enough to warrant an acknowledging apology is another thing. It requires some kind of negotiation, or intermediation, when the level of hurt reaches which mandates notification by public authorities like teachers, police, health workers of all sorts, etc.

In our cultures we have defined levels and types of evidence of hurt which require intervening action by others and condemnation for failure to act (which is a virtual collusion) by relevant others like the above authorities and parents, siblings, etc. These levels and types vary significantly from culture to culture, so much so that some feel proud to stand on a notional high ground declaiming the sins of others. This ground is often built in turn on their own relatively recent development from the close neighbours of the attitudes and behaviours they are decrying. That these are extremely difficult matters to adjudicate is affirmed almost daily with stories here of children abandoned to incompetent parents’ rages at their own social and personal non-entity. The authorities trying to handle child protection services are caught between saving lives and the social commitment to saving families. As close to pure lose/lose as I can find, at least for the kids and the workers!

Anxieties sustained by long-term childhood abuse, and often continuing family denial, are almost always experienced by the patient as their own fault, even while they are aware that they were (and, often, still are) being abused! This is the deep meaning of ‘victim’ - the meaning which holds people over the long term in sub-functional experiences from which moving on is not a choice unless the relationship system members choose together to change. Not easy to do if they are already under-powered. Taking the pathway of no blame and no victim begs the question of right for the sake of avoiding a dispute of power. Not disputing power may be a smart move, but to assume it away is to leave the victim stuck with their self-perception: ‘It must have been my fault.’

The multi-generation, multi-family challenge

To complicate matters a bit – part of the exploration of long term trauma usually reveals that it is multi-family and multi-generational, extending back 2 or more generations in the conscious memory of living descendants. Alcoholism, and other addictions, personal violence, distant relationships with no intimacy or affirmations – all have family histories sometimes anchored in major socio-political cataclysms like wars, social breakdown (depressions), natural disasters. This means the apparently to blame are themselves more or less victims with their own blaming to do! Have a look at “Who do you think you are?’ for some trails followed back hundreds of years.

With this complexity in mind, plus the need to allocate responsibility across time to meet the current calls for accountability, we can ask what criteria should we use for giving accounts and/or for demanding accounts be made by others of public damaging events? Here’s a go. Accounts of events should:
…treat all adult participants in the events being judged as partially blameworthy (a recognisably Asian perspective), and so as victims, too.
…make clear what actions were intentional, or predictably likely as consequences from intended actions.
…make clear who and what were truly collateral / accidental damages and who and what were ‘targetted’ damages
… specify that the time frame for accountability extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods – something like 30-50 years for many public services like education, health, and water systems.
…establish who among the affected put themselves knowingly in harm’s way, thereby mitigating their inclusion as victims and ensuring some membership in the collateral damages category.

These are just a start. Your thoughts???

*The state of being accountable; liability to be called on to render an account; accountableness; responsible for; answerable for; The obligation imposed by law or lawful order or regulation on an officer or other person for keeping accurate record of property, documents, or funds. ...
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accountability
The pretentious nature of my undertaking any discussion in this area is highlighted by a few webfacts: rates of occurrence of accountability related searches (Oz websites only!): “accountability and responsibility difference in government” - 5,490,000 webhits; 165,000 for ‘accountability transparency’; 43,300 web hits for ‘ethical accountability’.

Who’s to blame?

Who’s to blame?

The role of blame and victimhood in responsibility and accountability assessment by the Black Saturday Royal Commission
Torrey Orton April 13, 2009

Here I want to look at one facet of the Fire Commission which should become a lens through which the review is conducted and received by its publics. This is blame. The use of blame (hand in glove with guilt and shame) is essential to effective accountability and responsibility. It reminds us there are others depending on us, and we on others. Like most things human, blame can be politicised. It already is in the direct and indirect processes of the Commission; parties and interests are at work stigmatising their notional competitors or contestants for various outcomes, or building on existing stigmata in our local discourse – greenies, foresters, etc. The Commission also stands between the Government of the day and its citizens.

Unfortunately, this normal process of interest group struggle distributes resources to social projects, but seldom the truths needed for more resilient responses to the unpredictable. In our very uncertain times, truths are the more needed and the less likely. Maybe a new approach to blame would be useful in sustaining truths.

“We are responsible, in the end, for what is done in our name.” – Viggo Mortenson (THEAGE A2 040409; pg. 18-19). The cries for exemplary blood around the economic miniverse (CEO remuneration rage, AIG et al. bonus envy, Wagoner’s head at GM, Sir Fred’s departure dough at RBS… ) express popular blame of these elites and their support teams for their greed and grandiosity without restraint or regret. These are the cries of the victims of their excesses. Others have long pointed out that some of the victims contributed to their own losses in various ways – mostly through avoidable ignorance. This is most reasonable when the victims are also the greedy with flavours of the grandiose like Bernard Madoff’s “clients”. It is a less reasonable accusation to make of the subprime mortgagees reaching for the American dream which their commercial leaders told them was their right (to dream, that is) and the subprime offer a viable commitment to make.

What powers blame, and the sense of being a victim, is when people feel they have been intentionally harmed by others. Spontaneous acts of natural destruction – tornadoes, floods, volcanoes, droughts – attract great sorrow, depression and despair. But not enduring anger. Anger doesn’t do much to nature because it is largely beyond our powers. What does generate anger is when agreed defences against the possibility or effects of such events fail to protect. Katrina comes to mind. Our Black Saturday fires are another such event. Apparent failures of these defences are the objects of blame attacks.

But, these defences include actions by the eventual victims*. They took a chance in the face of a probable but unpredictable risk – a 1 in a 100 bushfire – to live in a fire prone place, deciding to comply or not with local clearing regulations, etc. These are blameable as much as excesses or shortages of various public provisions for fire safety in fire prone places. The claim that they had and have a right to live where they like amplifies the right to being blamed along with the public safety providers. Children and invalids are excused from this status.

So let’s start with the assumption that everyone involved in the fires is to blame in some degrees and dimensions as appropriate to their roles, situations and capabilities. This would then lead to a Commission focused on who holds what responsibility for what over the course of the fires. The time frame for responsibility extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods. From this might come recommendations which relate more appropriately to future responsibilities and their supporting accountabilities. The gray regions between individuals / families and local governments, and those between local governments and state or national ones will be the major focus of blame strategy and dispute.

The accountabilities are another thing. But with responsibilities more thoroughly established (or at least explored), some more balanced appreciations might extend to the main accountable organisations. For example, they might accept less of the responsibility and direct more attention to helping those actually responsible to fulfil them. Most important among these may be individual land and business owners / occupiers, and local government entities. It is they who can most immediately respond to changing conditions (long term drought, land clearing, increased housing intensity…). What higher level entities and agencies could contribute to building such capabilities will be useful to identify.

* NB - the status of ‘victim’ is confused in our times. We have people who knowingly swim into the jaws of death in the Daly River, NT (April 10, 2009) to be retrieved in segments days later; we have a conventional litigiousness which makes every accident an opportunity for a no win/ no fee legal firm (where market growth comes from extending the range of items deemed rewardable – that is blameable on some public entity); we have parents so anxious about the safety and self-esteem of their children that no challenge not previously vetted for insipidity should cross their tiny paths; we have councils which post inane notices like “limbs may fall” (or rocks) along country roads (undoubtedly in fear of those voracious defenders of personal loss, the litigation mavens of Australian legaldom now reaching for the pecuniary heights of their pathetic American counterparts. Look where that got those folks! I’m waiting for Albrechtson to write about the well-in-train depradations of legal cupidity which works to turn every relationship in the country into items for dispute – note: they don’t make the big money from mediation!).
Declaration of interest: I’m a bi-national of American origin who’s been pleased to be here rather than there for 35+ years partly because some that culture’s least attractive features have long been visible to my eyes.