Learner Therapist (55) … it takes a village to make a mind

Torrey Orton

February 21, 2015

Parent, sibling, peer, partner… again

 

On this day 17/02/2015 there were 19 YouTube videos entitled ‘It takes a village to…” to make all manner of things, amongst which make a mind was one. The most noteworthy parallel is “to raise a child.” Villages are in declining supply in Australia, though I’m daily reminded of my roots in something near to a village 60 years ago in Massachusetts. It, Lunenburg, had a population of 5,000 which would count for a medium sized country town here, but felt like a village because within 15 minutes bike ride of my house could be reached every kid in my class in the local primary school and all their siblings older and younger than me. I felt like I knew everyone in Lunenburg, except for the occasional foreigners - soldiers from Fort Devens who passed though on the way to and from the bars of the mill town down the road (pop. 45,000). I subsequently spent 9 years in small educational institutions, secondary and tertiary, in equally small towns in New England. Double villages – residential education and small town environs for the price of one.

What reminds me of this heritage is the feeling I have about knowing people in our neighbourhood which has grown by about double in the last years as the newly minted flats of Studio Nine came onto occupational line. I don’t expect to know them all, any more than I knew all the locals of the old days here. What I do expect is to be able to recognise them and thereby know them for being among us and potentially of us – the locals. At a minimum, responsibility for turd patrol can be expected these days. This is one aspect of a village. Every villager knows the rules and respects them by enacting them. Our ‘village’ is a little more eclectic than Lunenburg or the others were, and maybe still are. So rule recognition and following is a bit more variable than I would like…but “it is what it is” as the saying of resignation and withdrawal goes, which I do not suffer lightly.

I’m drawing this out because it seems to me that we suffer a shortage of village, and certainly of “community”, another of those now empty words invoked anytime politicians want to embrace everyone as if they are beneficiaries of some offer which in fact has highly differentiated impacts for various parts of the putative community. So wither therapy in all this? Increasingly I find myself giving little speeches about our social states in explanation of some of the forces to which patients feel themselves subject as they struggle to right their traumatised lives.

These speeches emphasize, implicitly, the near absence of effectively supportive communities for us and the disproportionate presence of oppressive ones. Those for whom this absence doubled by oppression really matters are the traumatised. We in the therapeutic community know that socialising our experience is a basic way of engaging, normalising and embracing it, but that requires community at the village level. I have some patients who speak of their local “village” as the replacement for families of origin which have abandoned them. For them the village is a pub and its environs, a small shops and cafes street with enough density to be peopled most daylights hours and quite few early dark ones – peopled with recognized others.

Learning to act right (34)… “Gloves are off”

Torrey Orton
June 1, 2013

 

“Gloves are off” usually signals engaging with more force, preparing for a fight of some kind, having it out. There’s another usage, at least in my life, which is perhaps equally automatic as this one, but does not enjoy its linguistic popularity. This ungloved hand is a foundation of right action.

 Right action is founded in civility in part, and civility in politenesses, and politenesses in human history, perhaps some even back to our pre-historic precursors. Among these, manners of greeting are central and mostly pass by without notice because they are automatic at the beginning and ending of events. The arrival of Melbourne’s version of winter (8C early mornings) is glove country for me. I show up around 7am at my twice weekly morning post in front of the Fertility Control Clinic to be greeted eventually by the security guard of the day. On his walking down the Clinic path I unglove my right hand with my left and offer the bare paw to him.

 

Originally, on the first such morning, he declared my ungloving unnecessary. I had to explain that it just is not right to shake a man’s hand (or any other’s, child or adult for that matter!) with a glove on. I couldn’t explain why. He had not grown up in a winter gloved  place, so it was a wonder to him, and no one on the street who I’ve chased it up with has had an idea either why it is the right thing to do.

 

My point here is not really the historical origins of my sense but rather that I have it automatically functioning, as it always has. It belongs with a number of other politenesses (public ones, especially) which arise out of me under appropriate circumstances. The most recent was standing back for others to enter a lift first. Given that I’m usually undeniably the oldest person standing wherever it is, there’s some natural deference I elicit in my efforts to honour others. A small tussle sometimes ensues of the variety specific to efforts at mutual respect which can only be resolved by one deferring to the other’s need by accepting their respect. I usually stand on my right to be respectful over theirs, but will accede to a repeatedly pled need.

 

Such habits can be changed, with serious, persistent application. For instance, I can deliver a good Chinese handshake now after a few years practice. This is seriously counter-intuitive to westerners, particularly Anglo ones, who treat any close contact between men (other than jocks in the full spiritual frenzy of sport) as suggesting sexual intent. For Chinese, length of handshake and intensity, nicely balanced and certainly not paw crushing, is a signal of presence and likely eventual persistence. Good starting places for any connection.

 

There are some other own cultural fine points: right hand only and shaking all the present hands being preferred, even if they are the paws of knowable unknowns – friends of friends; colleagues of colleague. I walked into a psych workshop a week ago and was greeted by the sponsor’s president who I’ve known professionally but distantly for 10 years. I had a coat, a backpack and the day’s course ware in my right arm/hand and offered my left to him as I moved by to let others in.  A few hours later at the midmorning break I stopped by at his table first to re-offer the shake right handed. I just had to on the way to asking a question about other matters.

 

A neuroscience influenced thinker might point out that these are behaviours intended to “down regulate” the amygdala’s wariness about anything new. I’m not sure this adds too much other than to  the accessibility of the concept of the amygdala’s function. I don’t doubt it is true, nor that an appearance of civil intent can be presented which is also keeping under cover some degree of apprehension about the other.

 

A few weeks earlier I had stopped into a local restaurant in Albert Park to pass on a long-delayed message from an industry old-timer I had seen months earlier in another place. The boss was in, as were his main 2ICs. I held out my hand to the boss and reported the message with appropriate disclaimers for my lateness in doing so. I was in a rush for some reason and went out immediately only to be stopped in my tracks 100 meters away by noticing that I had insulted the 2ICs. It’s a nice question what prompted the awareness but the proximate trigger was a video replay of the just gone event in which I notice the missing handshakes for the 2ICs!!!

 

The explanation, I imagine, is a subliminal function which checks experience against templates for right action. I turned around in the middle of my stopped tracks, retraced my steps, asked the boss to get the 2ICs back (one of whom was in the upstairs storage area of the restaurant), shook their hands and explained my need to do so, which they persistently assured me was not required nor even noticed by them. The latter point I wondered about but couldn’t stop to explore. It could have been impolite to do so – disrespectful of their explicit self-knowledges of not needing my paw then!!

 

I wonder if these behaviours can be picked up in an fMRI “light up”, or any other of its kind.