Learning to act right (35)… homophobia out
Torrey Orton
August 27, 2013

 

The challenge of recovering from inherited prejudices

 

How did I get over my adolescent homophobia? I think it just wore out from exposure to other realities. While I don’t think I knew anyone homosexual until I was in university in the early Sixties, I certainly knew “they” were somehow bad (mincing was bad, male or female, as was coyness or excess delicacy). Unmanly in any guise I guess. But by the time I was out of university, approximately, homophobia was a clear non-event for me. Along the path I was hit on by a gay guy (Jewish) in final year of university and another (Anglo) in second year of secondary teaching and in third year of teaching wound up rooming for a year with a black guy who came out a year later in NYC. I shared his flat for 6 weeks of a summer teaching program there (late ‘60’s) during which I met my wife. He did not hit on me and the prior hits had never elicited a striking response.

 

The above paragraph was a rough flow of consciousness prompted by the question “How did I get over…?”. This question, in turn, had been preceded by some loose wondering about how others might be unstuck from their frozen thinking / attitudes - namely the anti-abortionists of the Helpers of God’s Precious Infants at the Fertility Control Clinic.

 

In exploring this question I discovered I was taken back to generic parts of my upbringing to do with cultural identities, approval and disapproval of options and endorsements of our own family identities. I realise that one stereotyping sits in a sea (?) of stereotypes that composed working knowledge of the world. And they are interconnected, both as content (the whats of our worlds) and construct or system (the learning and engagement of our worlds). And it’s not a straight line of sequences or consequences.

 

So, what first came to mind was that there was one notionally Jewish guy in my boarding school class in an institution which was resolutely non-denominational. There were a few Jews in the small town of my origin. While my mother and father (?) were low energy anti-Semites, it is clear to me there was nothing in their views which was more than a narrowly Anglo aesthetic affronted by different cultural practices and beliefs. Somewhere early in my university days I met quite a few Jews who happened to be my intellectual peers or more, and gay to boot. Apart from being quick, they were also combative, a trait or style I’ve always enjoyed in matters of the mind, and some others like ice hockey and street politics.

 

My parents held consistently dismissive views of the French Canadians, Italians and Irish who were around in reasonable numbers even in our small town (pop. 5000 approx. in 1955), all being at least second or third generation immigrants (hence native English speaking) and all being Catholic. The underlying rationale of my parents’ disregard was never published in our times, nor am I clear that they held the different groups in the same degrees of disregard. Blacks were unseen and Hispanics had never been heard of or seen in the small town Massachusetts we inhabited in those days. The Finnish population, which was large enough to be noticeable, was assailed occasionally for an imagined propensity for alcohol, though who didn’t have that? A couple of German families were treated as cultured Europeans…why, who knows? This relief from the surrounding condemnation was heightened by their use of a German nanny to support my mother after the arrival of number two brother.

 

And I still carry the externalities of this culture in a number of matters of taste which I have resumed in the last ten years…e.g. an essentially North-Eastern US “preppie” style of dress which which happens to be making a return for two generations below me I think…khakis, moccasins (now flashed up in boat shoe forms), button-down dress shirts, preferably tailored (which my China consulting life put me in the way of with great ease and little expense…). I have books in my house as my parents did in theirs, to an appropriately greater degree given my work(s). In the midst of the right schools and universities I acquired an abiding, to this day, sense of social justice from the very parents who carried racist, sexist and classist stereotypes so freely. I’m aware, I think, that I cannot give up my class any more than my race or sex or gender…though class, religion and ethnicity may be changed over a generation or two.

 

Both parents, in different ways, also rejected their class, having traversed the right school/right college/right occupation territory in the 1920’s and 30’s. I imagine that for them the idea of “right” didn’t apply, any more than preppie dress seems to me “right” then or now; they were just what one did, as I did…a fact announced to me when I was in year 6 primary school – that I would be going to boarding school in 2 years, so I started to work on my ice skating and stopped basketball (for which I would have been a much better candidate at the time…but then what did I know?).

 

Attitude seems to be an important dynamic in this largely unconscious life negotiation. Both parents were to some degree sceptical of many things and critical to dismissive of the normal life around them, apart from some degrees of gross decorum like boarding school and right universities. They were not personally well connected in their class system and often critical to condemning of their class peers. Finally, my mother was ahead of her times in many ways, most notably in turning herself into a high school teacher around the time I was leaving high school for college. 20 years later she also came out publically in a letter to her local newspaper supporting my sister’s self outing as a lesbian.

 

My version of their attitude flowered extremely in my 5 boarding school years where it encountered in the late 50’s two things: pointless formalisms (mostly left over from the inter-war period which the headmaster was a graduate of himself) and mindless rules mindlessly applied, both by teachers and prefects. The upshot was an NA (“negative attitude”) of which I was the first bearer in my generation of our family. Many of my boarding school classmates had robustly developed NA’s, too. This was in parallel with the Beat period and similar emergent streams which gathered force and publicity in the 60’s.

 

All this and more burbled along under the surface of the post-war boom’s material expression of what a happy and fulfilled people we Americans were – as parcelled up by Madison Avenue for financing by Wall Street. In the background of the white picket fence* universe of 50’s America was the slow public sexualisation of culture through rock and roll’s incarnation of rhythm and blues, and the emergence of diversities in most things and the discovery of government chicanery coverted in the Cold War demands to keep the Commies down wherever they were. Three great anti-war novels were published in the early 60’s – MASH, Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five, ringing the bell on realities of violence in the music of humour. And James Baldwin in Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1953 to The Fire Next Time, 1963 was opening the black (and gay) experience on one side while John Howard Griffin’s Black like me (1961) made it accessible to someone like me with neither the colour nor the acquaintances to pick it up first hand.

 

So, if our attitude was sceptical and dismissive / condemning, our feelings were conflicted and confused at the deepest levels of being – where our values lie in wait to drive or deride us. My conclusion about humanity around the time of my turning away from a baseless rejection of a natural sexual preference was, and remains, that we are largely potentially omni-sexual from which we are directed at birth to one or another more constrained expression.

 

There’s also something here about multiple stereotypes interacting, though not with any empirical ground for their doing so – vis. gays and Jews and blacks and assorted other ethnics and confessions arise together from my ramble through the woods of my upbringing. There must have been something cooking for me, my sister and both brothers to all have married out and stayed out ever since - a trend which intensified in the next generation.

 

*I don’t think there were any white picket fences in Lunenburg, Mass., and few in New Haven, Conn. Yet, this image remains a strong present one for a certain world view. Urban Dictionary defines white-picket-fence syndrome as:

a state of mind where a person blindly holds on to the idea of their perfect lifestyle, regardless of the inevitable life factors that make it impossible for it to be true.

Learner   therapist (30)……Disrespect without intent, but effect

Torrey Orton

Feb 20, 2012

 

I’ve got a problem. Under certain circumstances, I spontaneously dismiss, even deride, others’ discussion contributions. It’s either “Uh huh” or “Oh yeah” with a self-satisfied, I coulda told ya that, tone. This behaviour has only come clearly into my view in the last 6-12 months, though having a foggy presence in my repertoire for some 10 years at least. I suspect it’s more like my whole life, the easiest evidence for which is that I’ve always had a tendency, confirmed by disinterested others, to be a wise guy, or occasional smart-ass.

 

I am trying to stamp it out. To do so requires that I follow my advice to my patients: be aware of the triggers, interrupt the behaviours and eventually pre-empt them in the most likely to trigger circumstances. Easy, no? Dismissive me seems to arise either from irritation at others’ failure to see what’s obvious to me or from my own pleasure in seeing an obvious which I wasn’t aware was coming in the conversational path I was on. I think these two sources are interwoven, and perhaps a third source is irritation with myself that I didn’t see the obvious - a brand of intellectual perfectionism…just enough to keep my eye on the rolling ball of life and only get fixated on its irregular movements.

 

I work in the obvious because truths come to me wholly formed out of an opaque inner process which is seldom wrong, once it produces. Intuitions seem and feel obvious once produced. Any pretenders to the title of an intuition must pass this internal comfort or fit rating to be the real thing. If an idea doesn’t feel right it can’t be right for me. This is not to exclude counter-intuitive ideas, which are often among the most revealing just because they do not immediately ‘fit’. So, to a certain extent my dismissiveness is rooted in exasperation at the difference in my mental style from theirs and /or my occasional failure to match my own requirements / expectations of my performance.

 

I should get a grip on this because I have a patient who thinks he’s mentally quicker than I am, and anyway feels he is because he can roughly see where the logic of my thoughts are going…what he can’t see is their emotional roots, which is why he’s still in the chair. But his slight disdain for my lack of pace has become a development point for both of us. He is experienced by others at his work as arrogant, distant, etc. and he doesn’t want to make that impression any more than I want to in my work…but I do, as does he.

 

So what? Well, “Oh yeah” is often heard as disrespectful by others, unless it’s a self-inflicted, resigned self-recognition, as one patient mumbled in reconnecting with a pattern of resilient dysfunction he’s trying to reduce. What position do I take on this ethico/politically? Ken Wilber proposes the following schema for working with differing levels of consciousness/ awareness/ knowledge:

1 -      that all truth is partial, approximate, ( “In this Theory of Everything, I have one major rule: Everybody is right. … everybody … has some important pieces of the truth, and all those pieces need to be honoured.”)

2 -      that there is a developmental sequence in human history, which we all go through, and that movement along it is likely to be very uneven for individuals and groups / societies

3 -       that there is a developmental pathway for engaging people in transformative activities, lubricated by respect

A Theory of Everything, Ken Wilber, Shambala 2000

“lubricated with respect” is a nice idea, that is, a good one finely poised, in my view.

Respect as proposed by Wilber includes respecting everything about us in principle, but most especially when we have a shortcoming from the perspective of domains of understanding we are largely inexperienced operating in and through. This includes the ‘heights’ of our own reflective overview of ourselves. It means that to respect others I must also respect myself in my less developed, more immature, faulty states and stages! With this approach in view and embraced, what can I do to mend my disrespectful way? Here are some starters:

Warn others about my propensity for “Oh yeah...” moments, and their likely sources if they are in my / our awareness.

Invite others to point out when they are getting the “Oh yeah…” treatment from me.

Continue investigation of the forms of ‘oh yeah’, the associated circumstances of their emergence and their inner and outer effects.

Be really careful to test for differences of consciousness/awareness/knowledge in different discussion settings.

And….??

There’s some way to go with this!!

Appreciation (45) – Age 69, or 70

Appreciation (45) – Age 69, or 70
Torrey Orton
May 7, 2012

"Happy first day of your 70^th year …"

…Jane said on the way out this morning, by chance reminding me I'm going to write about the latest fact of my aging. Now this is not new, neither as subject of my blogging (though not usually an Appreciation) nor a context factor of increasingly inescapable presence to me. After all, I've had two major hospitalisations in the period between January 10, 2011 and Dec. 19, 2011, with a minor due in the next month to replace a declining pacemaker. This last will be only 30 minutes of locally anesthetised open and shut, plug and play shoulder slicing. Peanuts for health care. Scarcely a day in the hospital.
But I'm aware that being 69, and coming up to the marker day yesterday, is a benchmark for me most notable for its neighbourhood to the real marker of 70. Why real? Well it feels like the entry point to old age.
I couldn't say to a couple of friends why 69 seems so strange to me …like being unremarkable because it is only the entry's forecourt or a life step's set off point and so escaping its due notice for being what happened before the main event - a look at the real thing, the peak of 70. As so often with life, I, like my patients, fail to notice the facilitating precursors to my benchmarks - achievements or failures – and so miss the benchmarks occasionally.
I'm not doing what the aged/elderly/old are supposed (in my historically determined mind) to be doing. I'm seriously involved in four activities of hope: confronting the HoGPIs* at the Fertility Control Clinic (actually, hope humbling), writing about that activity and anything else I can think of that refuses to go away (hopeful) and doing 20+ hours a week of one-to-one therapy (actually effective to a reassuring extent – hope rewarded). I can't remember the fourth one, though as with all fading memories I have the memory of once having thought it!!
With all this, what's to worry about? Only the unfinished business of getting a guaranteed escape clause if the lights come down. Pre-emptive euthanasia is not available here.
Statistically I've another 10 yearsish. And the things which give me hope and/or challenge it, will be around as much from now on as they have been up til now. If I look at this fact from Charles' point of view my real life has only just begun, since I am a beginner at street struggles (the FCC defence), a novice at writing (blog) and an late life pro at therapy. Maybe I'll discover the missing fourth activity of hope. What's not to learn? At least what I think I'm supposed to be needn't constrain what I become.
Happy birthdays to you, too.
*Helpers of God's Precious Infants

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.

Rectifications (27) – “An education evolution”

Rectifications (27) – "An education evolution"
Torrey Orton
August 17, 2011

"From the Vice-Chancellor" it was headed,

and titled "An Education Evolution"

in a 10 page advert with TheAGE of 15/08/2011.

I thought the days of rectifications were over until this one reached out and grabbed me by my righteous spinraker cojones. How could an educated man spruiking an educational (?) institution speak of "an education evolution". Well, mainly because his audience does use the word in that flaccid, pandering way – they, too, not knowing that an evolution is something arrived at in hindsight, not foresight. Foresight (and its assistant, intention) produce actions which, if they are lucky, may become evolutions, but not in our lifetimes – unless you are of the meme = gene brigade, and even that requires some years for memal maturity.


If you are leader of an institution (Melbourne University) which mostly talks about the training and skills it is selling, it may not be a wonder that such simplicities are ignored because no longer known. I guess they are just examples of unknown knowns. (I've often wondered what they were for the man (Donald Rumsfeld) who made them a part of public discourse in 2003 at no personal expense, but a great deal for the people of Iraq).


So I guess the VC is seeking, if he intends it, to coat his training in glimmering cloth. If he'd said, for example, ' An Educational Emerging' (or the weaker, Emergence) this would have been more than acceptable, since novelty of potential substance has to come out of somewhere, otherwise it's a known known already!


The appearance of 'changing' and 'transformative' in his discourse of 'evolution' is also a known known because they are part of the suite of spinisms which pass for social, political and educational analysis in our times. Even banks do it – transform, change and evolve that is. Just watch their self-promotions. Not surprisingly individuals describe themselves in this language, too.


For an alternative discourse, see the article by Raymond Gaita in the 17/08/11 Australian
Higher Education – "Loving the truth is not enough." Gaita notes that the public discussion of educational meaning and purposes has been subverted by the discourse of consumer corporate speak, as has our world. The concepts which underlie an education have not been available to common use for decades. Woe is us. Of such are futile rants made.

Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Emerging needs (3) – Ties that bind?

Torrey Orton

November 19, 2009

So the Oz coal industry is not spending its governmental freebies for "clean coal" development research and commercialisation. Almost no-one with industry awareness, except the industry mouthpiece Australian Coal Association, thinks they are even trying. How can this be so? There's a host of factors, one of which I want to enlarge a bit. It is the natural entropic forces in organisations, specifically the multiple creature comforts of present arrangements, especially for large and deeply embedded organisations, of which coal is one. Ties that bind.

Try the American automobile industry for another – with decades of encouragement to build useful and energy efficient cars, they've done little, even in the face of dramatic innovativeness from their close worst enemy, Toyota. Their leaders rode to a Congressional hearing on their futures in private planes at the edge of the great downturn. Didn't they know? Obviously never thought about it. Ties that bind.

A micro lesson on resistance

A lesson I learned a while back in executive coaching is that a key development moment for a major shift in coachee approach occurs when he/she doesn't know what to do in a critical workplace relationship. Typically, this is when a personally 'tried and true' approach fails repeatedly with one person or group. The exec is stymied by their own inability to work in a different way. Even high levels of notional motivators like failure to meet objectives, KPI's and similar Taylorist contrivances do not provide the energy and discipline required to change their behaviour. That executives are systemically impervious to disincentives (except in placing their own remuneration pleas) is increasingly acknowledged. Ties that bind.

To do differently – to become effective in the area of agreed ineffectiveness - they would have to learn a new approach. That involves a period of personal vulnerability. This period has two main steps: acknowledgment of the specific incompetence and learning the new one. Resistance flowers in the uncertainty (and implicit loss of face) that accompanies the acknowledgment of incompetence and then flourishes in the anxiety of learning new behaviour. Ties that bind.

Acknowledge the stymie

The pathway to a solution is simple: acknowledge the stymie. But this usually includes acknowledging a weakness – namely not knowing what to do. Around that dilemma many exec's get stuck in their habitual range of communication competences. Many relationship breakdowns can be tentatively sourced to this failure. I'm not the first person to discover this, so it must be hard to learn. I can only guess that it's too hard to be included in leadership trainings or is on the very hard end of the learning spectrum for such events and so few are pushed to extend themselves into this territory of personal vulnerability. They probably would not get a bonus for trying and might get a career limiting file note for embarrassing the leadership. Ties that bind.

Among many factors, this may be a difficult learn because workplace social system(s) are resistant to change, like families, cultures and major human institutions. The resistance arises from the very functionality that is suspect – traditional ways of doing things. Its source is the tension between the ease of present need fulfilment arrangements and the threats of new ones. Few people go into any form of perceived dark night willingly (and those who do personally – the suiciders / euthanasiers - are vilified for weakness, self-indulgence and disrespect of the god(s)).

An outstanding bind – whistle blowing

We are increasingly in a bind about a number of things. The typical diversity of the responses is on with issues like climate change, health reform, and economic system constraints. Not a few ring appropriate alarm bells on each of these – each a whistle-blower of a sort. Trouble is, we have become inured to the whistle and demonise the blowers, unless they shrill for our ties that bind.

It seems that governance can never catch up with work arounds. Wholly normal and wholly necessary…just who we have to work with. If we can notice our own bindings we may do better speaking to others of theirs.

These are the ties that bind.

Emerging needs…and wants.

Emerging needs…and wants.
Torrey Orton – July 27, 2009


I’m partial to the view that life is for fulfilling human needs, if we know what they are. Ah, if we know! We know that they change over time, that some are not available to direct inspection, that they emerge often under a veil or obscured in the stream of other needs which dominate daily life… we know, thus, that we cannot know them until we have them at a certain level of intensity, salience, etc. And we are expected, and expect, to pursue our needs politely, temperately, considerately, as well as focussedly, commitedley, all to pass through flowingly...to happinesses again.

We are in a world of intemperate processes and outrageous wants, often disconnected from substantive needs, whose momentum generates unnecessary activity that reinforces itself. Talk about moral degeneration…For in this world our needs are distorted, reconfigured, powered and bustled by waves of energy we often cannot even feel until their infectious power grips us. We discover needs by the emergence of new behaviours…sometimes discussed as trends or megatrends, the fashionable material of second rate sociology sustaining consumption-driven marketing to create new ‘needs’ like this:


Commercial self-indoctrination?

Rashid’s commercial self-indoctrination story – told to me one day at lunch.

He and Safiya went to the optometrist’s to get her new eye test done. After she went through, the staffer asked R. if he wanted to have an eye test, too.

He said no, no problems reading or anything else, thanks.

She said it’s free on Medicare, just have a try…maybe…

OK, he said, and so he did have them tried. There was a slight shortfall in tasks like reading.

So, R. accepted that he needed glasses. Why? Because the test said so, though he did not feel any need of them until he heard the test results. If the test said so, there must be something. He found it a day or two later (before getting his first glasses) when noticing that some things seemed a little blurred while reading…Voila, commercial self-indoctrination.

A few days later he added by email, speaking of the above rendition of our chat:

“It’s nice and accurate T. However; after wearing my new glasses few days now, I do feel that I really needed them!! Power of commercial self-indoctrination getting stronger by the day :)”

I love vindication. However, R replied to my reply to the above:

“Somehow I don’t want you to post the story, and when I inquire into the nature of my resistance I hear two things. One seems to do with resisting public self-disclosure on the net and leaving digital crumbs and the other is to do with knowing now that actually the glasses are medically useful to me. While I could read even relatively small prints but wearing glasses now I notice that I was subjecting my eyes to quite a bit of stress! It also has an undercurrent of denying that “commercial self-indoctrination” could happen to me. “

So, it’s a very delicate business, this emerging needs / wants one. Now I understand what a marketing friend has often tried to get me to see – what a serious business it is, too, fooling as it does with the boundaries between acknowledged needs with hairextension-like retro-fitting of them to the latest thing, fashion, trend, innovation – all the materials of consumptionous wellbeing.


Expressive need

Here’s a quite other kind of need – an emerging need for ‘negative’ self-expression which I wrote in a post entitled Popular anger denied makes way for populists a few months ago.

A small example of displaced anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few questions as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).

This need is for expression of experience. People need to do this. Just when and how much is a personal and social question. Unvented anger is an internal stressor; lots of little ones may make a big explosion – a rage. We all know that withheld anger or irritation builds, often to be inappropriately expressed on the wrong person(s) (often at greater distance and of less power than ourselves); or, expressed to the appropriate person(s) but well over the top of the immediate cue that sets it off. Inappropriate after all. This comes from the arena of perceived injustice or unfairness, a capacity which it seems all humans have (for personal detection of injustice, that is). Accessing emerging perceptions of injustice is a core skill for a competent person and a competent social system. Prevention of inappropriate blow-ups is one reason for getting better at it. Another is to rectify emerging injustices.

Getting a grip on emergences, separating the real from the false, the liberating from the enslaving, is one of the major challenges of our turbulent times where standards and process of all kinds are up for grabs. The challenge is personal, familial, social, political…multilevel, multi-sectoral…all happening at once.

A sense of need, but what need?

A third potential example of the emerging, and a difficult one to even present, is this: I have a sense that there is a new level of intellectual / spiritual activity, a kind of desperate expressiveness coming from every type of existing socio-political paradigm across all domains of human activity (all those which are disordered, distressed, displaced by turbulence) as if they are gearing up for a fight and want to get on the field of influence or battle early. Perhaps it is just a flowering of new expression liberated by the turbulence – change is good for innovation, encourages it, demands it. My sense is that we are entering a new phase of activity.

So, join me in discovering and disclosing emergences of all kinds…we certainly can’t tell now which ones matter for the future. Refining our detection capabilities will count for the future, since some of the emerging needs / wants will be thematic in the future.

1. If I’m mad, why a diary?
   Torrey Orton 130109
   
   I realised many years ago that unsourceable angers occasionally seized me. More recently (10 years ago) I began to find the traces after having some small rages which obviously did not belong to their apparent objects. They were often inappropriate surges of frustration, especially at moments of bad or invasive commercial interactions (notably, not real long term commercial relationships like monthly for 35 years with my barber, or regularly visited local restaurants of similar duration, or the 20 years of daily paper delivery). Since then I have studied these phenomena with a view to getting a grip on myself, and most recently (last 5 years), to finding ways to work with others about them. I am still more in the grip than getting a grip, hence this blog.
   
   Recently I realised that I am not drawing on my anger as a motivation for my writing – not that I wasn’t motivated by it, but I didn’t honour the motivation and so did not extract full motivational potential from it. The most important potential is that the anger gives energy connected to a proven (to myself at least) sense of disconnect between many aspects of the world I inhabit and my need for truth (or justice, fairness, honesty, etc.) Pick your favourite feeling(s) and it (they) will tell you how the world is going for you and you are going with it.
   
   Angers and thinking
   These angers disclose developed lines of thinking on the anger eliciting events. For example, about 4 years ago I rediscovered a tool I had created 18 years ago for work with groups affected by traumatic change in organisations. At that time I was caught in a “merge-over”, as it was called internally, between two Melbourne banks arising from the Tricontinental affair (a bubble entity from the cowboy days of the late ‘80’s). It was represented by the banking and political authorities as certainly unlikely to be to anyone’s detriment in either of the merging entities. This, at the time (and now), was so palpably untrue and (consciously?) deceptive that my outrage bells clanged persistently. Anyone can see intuitively that two into one doesn’t go on almost any organisational level. This was, of course, not discussable at large in the banks, though in close quarters of immediate workmates it was (with an eye out for the management thought police). The subsequent pain for many staff of deception by their top leaders (including a state government premier and both banks’ CEOs) was intensified by the explicit threats against any who considered publicly doubting (e.g. – to the press) the deceptions. However, in times of great change, many new spaces open up and into them I introduced “Facing the Facts” - an intact workgroup event designed to increase the chances of engagement rather than flight, fight or fadeaway. About 500 staff in our bank went through an exploration of their perceptions of the changes, and their implications for themselves, in normal work groups – teams, departments, regions. The aim and outcome was acknowledgement publically that a single traumatic event could, and did, have very different but equally valid effects on those exposed to it. Once validated, other options began to appear. That’s another story.
   
   I carry that experience as a piece of my acquired professional wiring which is cued into action by any conditions of large scale change like the nows we are incontrovertibly in (see below for detail). Whatever adaptations, accommodations, or avoidances of these nows we undertake will be done under the major influence of traumatic change on individual, group and organisational life – feelings which both provide energy and distort relationships and thinking. Anger is but one of these. Others may include a range from euphoria at being released by chance from unwanted work settings to sadness at loss of colleagues and anger at injustices in the process, all enveloped in a fog of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety, pierced by varyingly attractive and recuperative glimmers of hope and anticipation.
   
   ‘Negative’ feeling is central…
   As psychologist I am aware that what I feel is central to what I think (which contents get into my awareness with what affective tones), how I think (the degree of flexibility in my concepts) and how likely I am to act ( my motivation) and in what manner (passive-assertive-aggressive). Our times are ones with immense, persistent and personally salient subliminal stressors, with an array of overarching and forward projecting ones which are seriously challenging (scary, terrifying, mystifying….). Their effects are hard to correctly source, and so they are often missed, assumed to be personal foibles and so not discussable (only to be quibbled) and consequently, unvalidatable. This tends to increase distance between people and pressure for holding them together is achieved by calls for joining a jihad of some description against some bad guys of variously composed differences from ‘us’. This is the process of fundamentalising thinking in a context of fragmented relationships. It is difficult to avoid and hard to counter.
   
   Mostly here I will focus on the notionally ‘negative’ end of the feelings spectra. This is recommended by the pervasive scale, intensity and persistence of threatening nows. It is also recommended because there is a natural tendency to avoid fear, anger, sadness…because they are distressing. Some pop socio-psychological trends have all but eradicated open discussion or use of these feelings – these are the “positive” sciences and their happiness minions. In as much as they dismiss the ‘negative’ they reduce access to data which is most necessary when we (culturally) do not know what we are doing. This fact, our failing socio-econo-politico know-how, is the heart of the nows we are in. As yet, no public political figure has acknowledged what most competent public intellectuals and commentators have – that we do not know what we are doing, nor could we.
   
   Nows we are in…
   As I begin again to write my perceptions of what I call the ‘nows we are in’, my intentions are not fully clear to me. They presently include: i) clearing my own internal processes by ordering the contents a bit (to reduce the stress of confusion); ii) developing a more complete picture of the nows are in, with emphasis on their effects on personal engagement and commitment (to increase the energy of purpose and potential competence by creating a field of action(s)); and, iii) developing a natural language manner of dealing with matters which are now so clouded by spinmeistery and weasel words as to be almost empty of tangible meaning (to counter the loss which generates some of my anger and sadness). I am also very aware that part of this project will be a struggle to (iv) clarify and separate anger based in my own historical personal issues from that which can be tied to some objective (external and internal) realities (though I doubt that is ever fully attainable, nor should it be); and, v) finally, understanding how appropriate anger (and other feelings) can be relevantly converted into productive effects (or, at least, efforts).
   
   My earlier researches on little violences, and more recently on the nows we are in (big violences), disclose clear perceptions that I am being assaulted by many little violences (30 or more) which have a strong impact in five valued aspects of my life:
   
   
   
   
   Public civility - e.g. not standing in line, using two car parks, driving without regard for others convenience…
   Public trust - e.g. government & corporate lying, dissimulation, denial of exposed faults (the financial meltdown), unaccountability of leaders,….
   Personal taste - e.g. too much perfume / aftershave, getting smoked out, noised out….
   Personal space - e.g. too close, marketing calls at night, no access to persons at bank, etc.
   Personal risk – road & other rages, disease (SARS, bird flu), crime, etc.
   
   Of these, my sense is that the key anger drivers are # 2 and #4, based on what incidents I consciously have a threat spectrum response to. #2 stands out far and above #4 and the others. In what follows I am assuming that this assessment applies pretty much throughout the original Anglosphere, and significant parts of the EU. Some elements can also be found in the three Asian giants (China, India and Japan) and their satellites. My professional association has recently published an exploration of these matters (see http://www.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/NPW_FactSheet_1108.pdf ). This somewhat validates items in my lists, but more importantly suggests there are many others having the same experience, though their most salient domains may be different from mine and each others’.
   
   Big violences…
   However, over those years the big violences have become much more prominent – e.g. there are four or five working at once now globally: for example, (a) speed of change, (b) fluid (fuels and water) shortages, (c) food vulnerability and shortages (GM crops, directing food crops to fuel alleviation, drought and urbanization, etc.), (d) finance (and general economic) insecurity (leading to job uncertainty, housing uncertainty, rapid price fluctuations, etc.) and (e) climate change. You may have a list of your own that are real, ‘big’ and affecting you directly in your view. Three (a, b and e) of these have been working away on us for some years, only recently achieving general recognition that they are inextricably related in various ways. They appear as a tangle of perceptual inputs which are constant, intense, fast and beyond my control, unless I focus on one part of one of them – for instance the right to die as a facet of the endless human conversations about the boundaries of living. Such pathways are already laid in the myriad of single subject, single issue, pressure groups whose impact on the general passage of discussion is to increase both fragmentation of civic relationships and fundamentalising of thought in one strike. They also get more attention than their numbers warrant because they are fearlessly raucous in putting their cases.
   
   Anger strength
   The strength of my anger(s) comes from my sense that one effect of the last 20-30 years has been (and continues daily to be) the undermining and conscious degradation of our public infrastructures. The state of much physical infrastructure (or the simple failure to build it) is a concern, but not primary here. Much more hurtful for me is the loss of interpersonal, social, and political infrastructures. At one level these are the core materials of cultures: languages, values and standards, and systems of relationships. Their degradation has been achieved, in part, by abuse of the social systems of their delivery – health, education, transport, governance. The means and manner, and counter-measures where possible, of the abuse will be the subject of many entries in this blog. The reality of these losses can be seen in various facts accepted as valid across political spectra -
   1- The debasement of post-modern public language has been remarked occasionally (see Unspeak; Wordwatch, and in various Op Eds around the world as an addendum to other discussions) and systematically (see e.g. Don Anderson’s Weasel Words; Death Sentence; George Lakoff’s Don’t think of an elephant , etc.) for 10 years; and the loss of shared markers for factual integrity are evident in the public discourse / debates which engage the same issues from different interpretative and data frames.
   2- The decline in family structure reliability, and in connectedness to friends, neighbours and workmates are also widely remarked at both anecdotal and systemic levels (see Richard Sennett’s Corrosion of Character and Respect; Michael Pusey’s The Experience of Middle Australia, etc.).
   3- Participation rates in major elections in the US have been below 60% approx. for decades (and similar in UK and EU; see “I will not vote…” here newmatilda.com/2007/11/14/i-will-not-vote.); declining everyday social civility (situations of contact with unknown others in public) is a commonplace of news – the more exaggerated forms of ‘rage’ attracting louder reports. The public esteem of highly placed and paid leaders in many areas of life could hardly be lower – particularly where these leaders sit on top of foundational structures – government, law, accounting, nation-scale corporations… .
   4- The widely researched matter of comparative happiness across economies and ethnicities reveals we ( the first world) have gained next to nothing in the happiness stakes over the 3-4 decades of our abundance – more or less constantly increasing consumption with flat perceived improvement of living (life style, yes; living, no).
   This is a sketch of the project of defining and delineating the abuses, without which the steps to any futures will be clouded by the continuing abuse – as happens in family abuse, bullying and so on – since the abusive attitudes, values and behaviours are systemic and cultural, not just occasional and individual. Some alternatives will be proposed, too!
   
   A personal indulgence?
   However, there is something potentially (actually?) self-indulgent about starting from and continuing with my personal emotional attachments and events as a thought grounder and direction finder. And yet, it seems appropriate (apart from being motivationally necessary) for me at this time in my life and this place of my existence (Australia). My argument for the indulgence is that it is a necessary corrective to the linguistic and social distancing which characterises public discourse and, by socio-cultural colonization, private talk, too. Beneath this discussion surface lurks the challenge of the unknowability of the world we are in.
   
   I am also aware that my writing is, and will continue to be, constantly hedged by contingencies, doubts, and wonders, expressed, as just here, by over-expression and over- specification of the fact that contingency is the context of the nows we are in (just what the constructivist and relativist (post-modernist?) intellectual project was telling us, only now we are forced to be in that flux much of the time rather than some!). An attenuating side-effect for me is that I am constantly aware of what I don’t know in the same breath that I call up what I think I do – the breath which animates this enterprise. This should moderate my excesses of certainty and definitiveness.
   
   A somewhat larger scale perspective: I was wondering a while ago what my parents (born in the first war period (1910-20) thought about their world towards the end of their lives. This question arose from observing that generations tend to throw up clouds and occasional storms (I think Socrates died in one of these) of objections, disappointments and disputes with the emerging world which their lives had helped to build but wasn’t what they thought they were building – or even if they had actively opposed it along the way. I know there’s a reasonable amount of that in domains of serious concern to me. So, maybe my angers are supported by a quantum of intergenerational meanness or curmudgeonly disregard for new forms of humanity.
   
   Perhaps this is all an expression of three facts about me: one, I am temperamentally drawn to the notional ‘left’ – I’m a helper by life-time choice (teacher, psychotherapist, executive coach, trainer….) with an ear / eye for the less privileged; two, I’m a natural sceptic, always able to look at the side I’m attracted to naturally and see that it is not the whole picture of anything; and, three, I am an intuitive information handler (I see what’s happening) with an intensely logical decision style (I present the intuitions in logical arrays, argued with definition and conviction. This is actually quite a good combination for a helper. It prevents me falling into the world(s) of my clients, patients, students. Thus, I do listening well, and joining badly. And, I know I have insight that’s worth attention (while always being doubtable!) so I can supply structure, content and direction where it is needed with testably appropriate levels of certainty (from ‘I guess’, ‘I suppose’.. to.. ‘I think’, ‘I know’…to ..’I’m sure’,. ‘I recommend’, etc.). In addition, I am more pessimist than optimist and a bit cowardly about conflict (though I won’t stand bullying).
   
   Learning to write…
   To have a humane view of other people requires understanding them roundedly, multi-dimensionally. City neighbourhoods, country towns and small workplaces are settings offering best opportunities for close understanding of others. The distance(s) across which much contemporary discourse occurs about major issues is exactly the condition for automatic demonising or idolising of others. It supports the contextually driven fundamentalising of thought. So, one challenge for my work is to write so as to reduce the opportunity for distanced, two-dimensional perceptions of others and their issues. I hope to achieve some wholeness of description and judgment in every piece I create. Unfortunately, I cannot now say I know how to do that consistently and adequately. Bear with me or, preferably, tell me off, please.
   
   I believe, for the moment, that my excursions here will arise from 5 main sources, expressed through all manner of substantive topics. The sources are: outrages and irritations (a thicket of which can drive an outrage), puzzles and dilemmas (being puzzles without solutions), and reflections on the whole process encouraged by unpredictable mixtures of the first four sources. Some of the topics I expect to visit over time include:
   what is enough of anything in life (but especially enough material goods)?;
   moral and ethical confusions in everyday life (e.g. in Oz the belief in a right to public funding for private schooling );
   imbalances between individual and group focus in public policy and private practice;
   challenges of cultural differences
   workable truth – how can we know what we can believe about everyday matters in health, education, politics or personal commitments…?;
   correctable language in public life – concreteness over abstraction (e.g. dead for passed away or deceased; changed for backflip; lost or reduced for smashed, slammed, and so on).
   Where possible (when I can think of something) I’ll include suggestions for actions to be taken at various levels (personal, group, organisational) about the subject discussed. I will try to identify the source(s) of the feeling(s) giving rise to the piece, and point at the contiguous and tangential domains within which the subject is set.
   
   I invite your comment, especially expanding or challenging comment. I will probably not respond directly, but a specific request or proposal will be considered, especially where some course(s) of action is in question…or should be!