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.

Rectifications (10) – Bonding…

Rectifications (10) – Bonding…

Torrey Orton – June 8, 2009

Just about anything can be bonded in a few hours these days, and I’m not referring to super glue. You could think from the commercial promotions (900,000 web hits for ‘team bonding’) and the everyday journalistic mentions of bonding that we were in a new age of emotional embrasures. “Fun” plays a prominent role in promotional materials, guaranteed to bring every participant into the events. The resulting outcome claims and expectations are bizarre (from a mother-child bonding point of view).

For example, imagine the key players in Zimbabwe’s current government bonding their way to trust for 3 days in a 5 star hotel on the Zambezi in April ‘09? What were they thinking? Not long after, Morgan Tsvangirai acknowledged the government was going nowhere fast in addressing the disastrous situation of the country’s decline.

There are lots of ways and whys to bond. Among the common ways: running together (mini-marathon preps), hanging together (rock climbing, abseiling, ropes coursing), drinking together (group binges, bar flying), and singing together (karaoke?) with varying degrees of time and freedom to participate. Among the common whys to bond: improved team work, consequent improved ‘outcomes’, stakeholder retention and such.

But these are all playtime compared to the bonding that mother and child do. It takes months of night and day application to achieve, and it’s usually off a bit in one way or another. What would a perfect mother-child bond look like? It’s not to be found because the purpose of the bond is to provide a foundation for separation, for individuation. You can’t be a real person if you haven’t been bonded to someone else for a while before it was your choice to do so.

From a mother-child viewpoint again, if corporate events don’t include extensive (hours a day for many days) and intensive (physically close activities about life critical functions - eating, sleeping defecating, cleaning, cooing, etc.) components the ‘results’ can only be ephemeral, with memories mostly composed of fun and not-fun bits. Barely a basis for trust and confidence, except in the diminished forms these have now. Mentioning them in serious conversation is taken as doing or being them, a practice which leads immediately to doubt and distrust as we know from our expectations with politicians and car salesmen.

The mimicking of military or professional sports team regimens and atmospherics in some ‘bonding’ events is just having the real thing on. The team work which is aspired is often totally inappropriate. Either the group being bonded isn’t a functional team (has no substantive shared tasks or outcomes) or it already is a bonded group by dint of long-term internal social structures of shared purpose, perceptions and passions – the kind typical of professional organisations.

The prevalence of managerialist activities in places like universities is indicative of the extent to which they have lost their intrinsic purposes, perceptions and passions – characteristics which always made professors unlikely management leaders, and their colleagues resistant staffers. Bonding will not help and team building will confuse the misplaced expectations even more.

In this view, bonding is just HR and leadership cosmetics sold as anti-ageing applications for organisations without urgency or imagination. The saving grace is that like many products, there is always a market for a wide range of them in different market segments. The trouble is, many of those should never have been markets. The bonders in those various worlds and ways above are starting at the wrong end of the stick, hoping to bond something that was never together in the mother-child sort of way in the first place.

‘So, what?’, you say. So, our culture no longer understands what a culture is, unless it’s a reality show or high culture stuff – neither of which is formative for the everyday, though they aspire to represent it. A culture, a flowing entity of activities, values, feelings and artifacts sustained by generations of humanity cannot be created in a day, week or year. Decades are probably the minimum quanta for such enterprise. Therein lies another story, much longer, and perhaps more helpless, than simple rectifications pretend to be. It is the story of moral decline, among others.

We can’t have bonding in a ‘moving on’ culture, just bindings. This is done with practical obligations and material enticements…with local culture value / behavioural routines (see footy club end of season events) and money, access to special opportunities and prizes (see executive pay packages). Whatever these are, they are not intrinsic rewards of long term belonging and mutual commitment. The relationships in question don’t last that long, and many now are intended explicitly not to do so (what’s a job that it didn’t used to be: an item in a portfolio life ). If we are held together at work only for short periods of time (less than decade-long segments), life bonds cannot be sustained across groups, though a few individual relationships may survive the changes.