Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life
Torrey Orton
July 30, 2011

Get a grip on yourselves before the roof blows off.

Non-verbal communication is recognised as much in its excess (hitting, slapping…) as its shortage (touch-free upbringings, non-contact sports….) in everyday life. More ordinary levels like handshakes and arm touches are the unconsciously applied media of daily interactions, from intimate to instrumental. Their therapeutic potential may be unnoticed. I offer three recent experiences for your appreciation.


M and A have explosively volatile struggles around their respective needs for care, powered by very different but equally searing injuries to self. These struggles have improved countably over three months of work (weekly) from daily 2-3 hour storms to weekly ones; from standing at the edge of the abyss of relationship implosion to enjoying each other much of the time. But still the volatility remains. The injuries will never fade away, especially his – he has a congenitally weak lower back. She only has interpersonally catastrophic parents, so far.


The signalling of their needs is still not fine enough and they turn any single glitch into another in the running sores of their past failures, still in often uncontrollable emotional flashes. Fine enough is what? It's a capacity to catch an emerging need default to disappointment when it's only a difference in the prevailing atmosphere of their joint life. Need defaults are moments like this:

Typically, he's having a bad back day, which means unpredictable pain grasping an apprehensive attitude (because always on edge for the unpredictable) and she's having a bad recall (which means direct experience of parental abandonments). He needs stillness; she needs a hug. Two into one don't go. He tenses and she pushes her need. She feels abandoned and he feels crowded. The great disappointment blast off.

Creating a fine enough treatment looks like:

This day they show up in therapy (session 12) with an increasing sense of achievement and a reminder of the distance to go – the blast off above, just a day before. In a guided revisit, they experience their respective hurts under control and agree that her hug is unreasonable for his pain. So then what? I ask her what would help her need for reassurance. She knows immediately and precisely: a held hand would do just fine.

I ask her to move a seat closer to him, within easy hand reach, and show him where to offer his hand. She places hers palm down just above her knee. He slides his under hers and she says "No". Through his shock he figures out the slide is a slip (but not what slip; it's the sexual one). She lifts hers and places his on top. Success. Abandonment defeated with visceral relief. Guilt at being unable to respond to her need fended off appropriately.

I think I may have primed this result by telling them a story of another couple (F and D) in their age range who were sitting in these seats a week before, separated by a similar need gap. It was crossed by the guy taking action to respond to her pain about their relationship arising from conflicted feelings about his responses to it earlier – that she often needed space and he needed closeness at the same moment. This typically happens at the end of the work day.

He initiated the same seat change spontaneously and grabbed her ambivalently available hand from a slightly cringed position in her chair. This allowed exploring just how close was too close, and considering how their attachment styles differed around a critical mutual reassurance behaviour. Joint distance regulation was tested live, and controllably, as they adjusted the hand holding to achieve optimum need fulfilment at the moment: giving help for him and acknowledging her distance for her in the same act.

These events seem to come in pairs and triplets, or just surges. A day later, a twenty years older couple (C and P) appeared, struggling with increasing success with rages driven largely by him and facilitated by her chronic passivity. His rage driver is an undiscoverable family history – an absent father of a one night's burst pregnancy untraceable by his mother, plus years of deception about his adoption heritage. At 17 he finally caught his otherwise caring adopters messing up their version of his life, an exposure he had long felt coming.


It leaves him hugely vulnerable to rushes of anxiety at perceived performance failures of his, or others in regard to him – a threat of not getting to anything on time will do it. This one was on the way to see me together, with her driving to pre-empt such a rage, but the tactic failing on the road. So,

...they had one of the blow-ups they so fear, but constrained enough by their joint therapeutic work to so reduce it that he just fumed in the passenger's seat about being late, maybe! Like the others above, these two had had a major explosion (first for some weeks) earlier that week.

Trouble is, the fuming is contagiously electric and bad memory inducing for her – will this be another rage or just a low grade trash fire?? So, she reached out to pat his head and he ducked away into a foetal sulk, with emanations of fury growth. They wondered what she could have done differently. It took us some while to come up with the insight that her intuitive touch had been conceptually right, only practically clumsy.

A head touch is not benign, but three others are: the shoulder, upper arm and forearm touches. These are almost universally recognised as OK touches, even between sexes/genders. Most others are sexual, domineering, or both.

The touch is essential to break the rage cycle once it has started. Words just feed it. The touch allows another level of consciousness to be accessed, wherein the path to freedom of the moment's disruptive passion.

Appreciations (7) …Cat causality: Poppy’s view

Appreciations (7) …Cat causality: Poppy’s view
Torrey Orton
July 8, 2009

I wanted to write this when I had the thought of it a week ago. Then my desire collapsed in the face of my incompetence to produce the effect that I intuited. Now, some wordmongering later, I like its intent if not its achievement. On to the cat….

Poppy’s the fifth in a line of cats who’ve befriended us over 35 years. He’s not the oldest. Moon (black female longhair; ‘good’ farm family; real lap cat) was at 20 earth years when she decided to take up a position under an unplanted azalea 15 years ago. He’s only 16 and in the best shape of them all.

I will discover why I am writing about him by writing. I’ve become a cat person by marital exposure though not, be clear, with any resistance to the opportunity from the first glimpse of our own first cat - the above mentioned Moon - on the farm of her birth in 1974. We don’t do dogs because we travel too much and they pine. Cats do not, and our neighbour feeds them if were off for a real visit elsewhere. Our yard is their playpen, but for occasional visits of cat neighbours.

It occurred to me recently that Poppy, like the others, displays serious intent about a range of important matters – bed, breakfast, dinner, stalking bugs and aspiring to birds. In these he is focussed to a point I seldom achieve doing this blog; he’s a model of timely preparation and persistence (the prep often failing to conclude the hunt successfully – its best test).

Here I’m giving him the blackbox treatment – attributing intentions – because he makes things happen and does it repeatedly. Pretty much what we do. So, who’s to say he doesn’t know he’s doing what I attribute? He certainly resists energetically any blockages on the way to the various ends of his days and accompanies the performances with verbalisations of relatively consistent types, too. Is this consciousness? Enough so to warrant consideration. Mine is often not easy to distinguish from his.

Cat causality

Poppy knows how to make things happen. Around dinner time, ours that is, already beyond his, he makes for the door, if he’s in, to get out to get ready to get back in. It took a while – months, years? – to see this move for what it is: a part of his system of making new food appear. He’s really on the stick about this, distinguishing between opportunity types with precision.

Top of the line are bony things like chicken and duck; second, steak with bone attached – rib-eye, or t-bone; third, lamb with chop attached. Fish doesn’t rate other than a short presentation to announce he knows its dinner time and a show must go on. When he gets back in he devotes greater or lesser attention to encouraging the inevitable, depending on the offerings available.

But his system of making it happen is consistent over all the sub-classes of his actions. He perseveres in the face of failure…like Mallee farmers who know it will rain, sometime. And unlike them, he knows his intention that food should happen is effective… though he doesn’t know it will stop being so when he stops, which is why he is a cat.

Cat naps

He’s really good at body heat adjustment, running through two to five locations a night over an 8 hour span. He warms up for sleep with the food act, morning and night. After our dinner, if the external temperature is below 10C degrees, he uses my lap as a post from which to oversee the empty plates and slip into a snooze looking across the table at Jane.

About 15 minutes of this is enough. He’s off to the bedroom for a first go at the bed, or maybe Jane’s office for a bit of her reading chair. An hour later he sets up shop on my dining room chair which, when pushed into the table, leaves a lying cat’s height of space between him and the underside. There he practices snoozes for an hour or so.

If it’s cold, he shapes up for the bed, either towards the bottom if moderately cold or between us at shoulder height if threateningly so. His step up is always in the lower corner of my side, as is the step down. On warmer cold nights he pushes off back to the chair, to return around sunrise for a first headbutt push towards breakfast. This is administered from a standing position on my back with lots of verbal encouragement that has started from ten feet away before getting up again.

Cat connection

Cats are great head-butters, in a friendly, beseeching manner. See Christian the lion for a good example of this writ large. Poppy’s a member of headbuttersanonymous, like most catty beings. It’s a cleaner assault than doggy slurping, though a lion headbutt is probably testing in other ways. He also has the slideby which is an internal segment of the bone seeking act. This is more a leaning walk against some lower extremity, which he occasionally confuses with chair legs, door jams and similar appendages. A slideby sequence can go on for 5 minutes, halted for a scratch pause, then restarted for a few more minutes just to see if there’s anyone with forgotten bones.

Cat memory

A mother substitute always goes a long way to calm a disturbed cat, or one trying to settle for a bit of napping. A nice hairy blanket or a feather duster often do well in this role. I know it’s on because Poppy kneads the blanket with a kitten’s intensity and satisfaction, even if for a milkless trip. All his predecessors in our life have done the same.

Catoptimystical??

I’m wondering if Poppy qualifies for an optimystical ranking. I’m trying to understand this new category by the ‘see if it fits’ method of inclusion. If I say he does he does, but some bright lights out there will detect that I’m being willful again, not insightful, and probably complain, I hope. I could cite Wittgenstein on families of meaning as an authority for my inclusion of the cat but other bright lights would rubbish my lack of conviction.

I think, after this digression that I will so consider him. In the first Optimystical I characterised an optimystical as a purveyor of hopes I wished someone would purvey once I heard/understood they were doing it. It is often a counter-intuitive, maybe ironic, communication.

Since for me consciousness is an emerging competence, allowing myself to appreciate its possibility in forms and beings my education did not prepare me for is an important development step in my own consciousness. Poppy - a small step for human kind, too?