Learner therapist (9) …”Finding my starter button”

Learner therapist (9) …"Finding my starter button"
Torrey Orton
July 24, 2011


B., 32, is struggling to step into his realistic, clearly focussed, and preferred work life. He has a track record of work and initiative in the field (food service), a plan for exploring a start-up enterprise, down to possible funding, and most recently a partner prospect of long acquaintance. What he doesn't have is a "starter button". Motivation for the last year or so has been negative – escaping a clearly unsatisfying present job, at which he is also underperforming (though his employer doesn't seem to mind because no pressure is explicitly put on B to do more or differently or better, or…anyway, actually a great situation for a career change – paid exploration time!).


But not negative everywhere. In the last six months he's discovered running and pursues it with sturdy and rewarding attention, to the point of prepping for a half marathon now. No trouble starting his engine for the morning chug around the neighbourhood. He knows he'll feel good doing it and enjoy the challenge of sharpening his times while trimming his steps to reliable sustainability. And so he knows what it means (thought/feeling/action) to be motivated, and is so about some things! His wife and child are among important others.


On the edge of his stasis lies a gambling penchant with a smoking habit attached, now under control, more or less. He recognises this cluster is a displacement of energies which could drive a new life direction and his shortage of accepted alpha aspiration for a male of his social, ethnic and religious identifications. As well, there's a family history of weak father performance in the provider role, which B reflects in his unfound "starter button". He doesn't believe he can succeed at leading a venture alone.


Some months into this exploration, along came the right business partner prospect – a friend of long standing, appropriate openness and relevant life background, interests, experience and resources. Then up jumped a new challenge. What is B expecting the partner to lead in the enterprise and what will/can he lead himself? He doesn't know, nor had he thought of the question, but can feel the relevance.


The background discussion is 'what is motivation and how can it be grown, urged, prodded…in short, increased?' Also in short, motivation is the outcome of a shapely purpose, plus attractive incentives. We know that incentives can act as a purpose, or be confused for one, because need for them (money, status, position, etc.) is confused with purpose arising from deep within – an intrinsic motivation driver. Motivation is enhanced or compromised by competence: actual, imagined and aspirational – which in turn are sustained or demeaned by hope. B. suffers from a motivation hope deficit.


So, to start again, how does B improve his shortfall in leadership competence? By replacing it with confidence in shared leadership – the everyday business solution except where compulsive micro-managers are in the seat. Two parallel leadership relationships bear on his future: the business partner and the life partner ones. While both of these people support his vocational initiative, their stakes differ; His life partner's stake includes management of the household economy, it also affects her personal vocational future(s) (they agree she should go back to work in some way). The business partner's stakes principally centre on business management issues and the household side of his own domestic economy, too.


For B, clarifying his life partner's needs is the starting place to setting some personal goals. But that cannot be done without clarifying his needs. We're talking here about real things like amount of time away from home, expected low income period for the start-up and fall back options for the venture. In parallel run her only slightly spoken vocational aspirations, motherhood self-images, and such.


Both share a habit which blocks exploratory discussions directly affecting them: the wish to do no harm to the other. This is held with something approaching the energy of medical professionals, but not the same professional obligation. The ethical one is almost as powerful. As a result they cannot enter into potentially disputable grounds – those which harbour uncertainty about life critical matters like the family economy above, for instance. And the perceived relationship of doing nothing is still too slight. Doing no harm prevents doing good.


Keep posted.

 

“Mentally competent” and “asking for death” – can I rationally choose death?

"Mentally competent" and "asking for death" – can I rationally choose death?
Torrey Orton
October 20, 2010


Decisionmaking and death – irritated reflections on Ahmed, Gray and others.


"balance-sheet" suicide and "rational" suicide – way stations in the argument about how a choice to die can be justifiable. This argument hangs partly on an undiscussed dispute about what a 'rational' decision is. It swings back and forth because rational thinking is persistently misunderstood as affect free thinking. The standard model is reflected in Ahmed's (TheAGE, Oct 7, '10) discussion, which leaves him stuck and indecisive.


Stuck
I've been stuck for two weeks in this misunderstanding, too, which from my present perspective is no problem because I cannot influence it. I am clear myself where I stand on my own access to effective self-destruction. The details matter some. Nigel Gray's in THE AUSTRALIAN, Oct 6, 2010 alternatives, for example, are quite attractive to my needs to pre-empt an unfortunate death. But a well refined approach to what a good argument for my euthanasia should be will not increase my access to it. That portal is blocked now by a few others' (lifer kooks and gutless pollies) beliefs that I should not have it. By the way, by their default to inaction, the gutless pollies of course cast themselves as supporters of the kook believers. The pollies are a very special class of banal believers – swaying in the intemperate breezes of the various kooks (individual and institutional) for fear of losing something. That fear costs them their integrity and legitimacy, and the rest of us our representation.


Two rationalist fantasies
There are two rationalist fantasies employed in the euthanasia debate: both to the detriment of my rights.

1- that we can and should be able to make rational decisions about our deaths, unclouded by irrational affect; and,

2-that we can only make irrational decisions about euthanasia, because all reason on matters of death is always clouded by 'mental problems' about being close to death – feeling down about being ill, fearing our decline and tormenting ourselves with our pathetic state(s); that is, we are mentally ill if dying, and so unable to decide.

The emotional factors are not understood within the range of normal human emotions. So, the depression, sadness, etc., felt by the dying and the-in-danger-of-dying are treated as pathological rather than normal responses to perceived (and objectively real) dangers. Ahmed acknowledges this implicitly by referring to dialysis research where personal control emerged as a key determinant of patient depression and connecting it to related Oregon findings about euthanasia choosers and oncologists' observations of cancer patients. He then confuses his discussion by calling this mix of feelings and needs "personality factors". While his personal position on patient decision-making is never made explicit, it is suggested by his use of the term "saved" in discussing suicide by aged, near terminal patients.


Rational decisions = ?
What do we know about decision-making by everyday humans (not rats or undergraduates, please)? Simply, that rational or logical decisions mainly exist in digital systems like ICT, positivist economics and its social science affiliates, and the foundations of classical physics and chemistry. The latter have been withdrawing from the fantasy that a number is a discrete item, that data are clearly discernible from each other, since Einstein. And data clear or foggy do not, it is generally agreed, have feelings or thoughts except perhaps in some delicate metaphysics (electrons feel their neighbours and scurry off to a safe place at a nano-distance; planetary attraction is a species of elective affinity?).


Behavioural economics is the belated acknowledgement that Adam Smith was right about economy – it's not the numbers that matter, except to bankers and even not to them when they consider their "quality time". There's a place in human development where an increase in quantities of livelihood produce no gain in quality of living. Many of us are there now.


Judgment = intuition
Decision-making is making judgments. These are integrating intuitions, summarising whole experiences into actions. They do not follow iterative, additive pathways except in expostfacto reconstructions of the sort used in "evidence-based" medicine and its allied affiliates. Try mapping the decision steps in a serious life issue on a decision mapping system like this: http://www.austhinkconsulting.com/ . You will still end up with a judgment which cannot be rationally explained except by reference to supposedly non-rational, emotive factors. Judgments express values in relation to important facts. Important facts are the valued ones.


Individual rights only available fully to a group
If our rights were pure universal truths they would just be. When they are contested, as with euthanasia, abortion and just war, for example, their limited claims are made apparent in the act of their dispute. If they were pure and universal they would be substrate, assumptions, of our life processes. The pointy end of the rights stick these days is individual rights. The upshot of the contest in matters socio-economic, so far, is that a few get to monster the many in the name of the many's right to choices they cannot make.


Nigel Gray argues for euthanasia from a personal choice perspective. He stretches his case just as egregiously as he claims the pro-lifers do theirs, but maybe not for the same effect. He proposes a pure right of individual choice on the basis that "..this is one's own business, no one else's." He certainly has a right to think this, but that does not constitute a right to die with no consideration for the effects on others. It's an irritated right with which I sympathise but cannot honour as any more rational than those who say I do not have it (because it belongs to God for instance.)


Putting my hand up for certainty
A string of ways of dying from self inflicted euthanasia to physician assisted euthanasias – the actually occurring choice-based deaths - sit inside the over-arching fact that (so far) we will all die if we live. Euthanasia already exists de facto in physician assisted deaths, either by legally mandated turning off life-support or providing assured decline into death with family-agreed terminal palliations (morphine comas). This is where the individual choice wheels meet the highway of life – namely, with a hand-up if you want it, and sometimes if you do not. I could do with a bit more certainty in my hands.

Learning to act right (10)…. Doing little goods badly

Learning to act right (10)…. Doing little goods badly
Torrey Orton
June 1, 2010 - Cauterets, France


Little goods may be great for others, for a moment
A guy is sitting back against a building with a hat turned up next to a small, handwritten plea for our consideration…$10 for a ticket to Frankston, $50 for a return to grandma in Warrnambool, anything for a meal… He's roughly dressed and generally unkempt, with spare clothes and potential bedding behind him. The right action(s) in such situations are thoroughly clear, and have been since the beginning of recorded reflections on acting right. These have always commanded giving to those less fortunate. Only late in human history have we arrived at societies which discourage caring for those in various perils. I'm perhaps somewhat afflicted with such thinking. I don't know. I do things like this:


I was coming out of the DHS building in Lonsdale Street a few weeks ago when my eye caught that of a panhandler* standing by the entry. He moved slightly towards me, at once saying "have ya got a dollar" as I glided nervously beyond reach, though I had a hand in my change pocket reaching for a gift which in mid-fingering I decided against and continued down the street. Just describing this is very difficult. What really happened? What did I /he actually do if we had a three camera video of the event to discover it from?


We haven't got such a record, but I know I went on down the street as he said "I only need $4 to get a …." (something inaudible). I headed off, pursued by my shame at having turned away from our visual engagement, to check out a camera at a place recommended by a friend. And fifteen minutes later I was headed back the same way with new camera in backpack and hand in pocket searching out the four dollars to give to the guy who I'd walked away from… thinking as I went up the street to the train to find him and make good my failed first response...taking out the loose change and separating $4 into my right hand held ready for giving … and not finding him where last seen and so wandering back across the street towards the train station holding the change still in hand for giving…by that time willing to give to any likely needy person to make good my lack of doing good when and for whom it was first needed … and therefore the more deserving in some way, I agreed with myself… and along some 20 seconds later he came, another gifting candidate, as I approached the crossing meters away from the train entrance, stopping for the light to change and, as with his precursor, catching an eye and receiving a request to which I responded with the prepared hand held backwards towards him as I crossed refusing to acknowledge (so it felt) his thanks or his look, disappeared into the station.


Protecting my professional distance?
Is my problem how to assess need on sight: what global personal look means what need, and comparatively which look is more needy at any time? And what's the individual's and what's the social responsibility for their need, and what are the mixes between them? These are useful reflections but perhaps not the central ones underlying my initial disengaging moves.


Rather my avoidant moves above may arise out of my need to protect my professional distance. This goes naturally with the therapeutic territory for me, though requires constant monitoring to reach and sustain the right level(s) for each relationship. The maintenance is usually done more or less explicitly with each client, and we both understand that it has to be there. Levels below that lie my relatively distant relationship style, too. An unscripted and spontaneous encounter with a needy other torsions both my professional and private selves.


There are other aspects. These come into view in the following events.


On a street corner in Pau, France. We were on the way to a week in the Pyrenees and an immediate lunch which was expected to be and turned out to be worth the travel for. I saw the guy (a French instance of the beggar in the first paragraph above – almost a clochard) 10 meters ahead and reached in my change pocket to pull out a 1Euro coin by touch and got a 2 instead, which I handed over to profuse thanks in mildly religious language. On reflection about this event I realised that part of my halting approach to giving in public is being in public, being seen to give…an apprehension which I can't yet source itself. At least now I know it's there in the feeling of the act. A vulnerability driving my distance?


Who deserves a gift?
Maybe there's an element of doubt about who's most deserving, or how much deserving, which is brought prominently into my awareness by the publicity and variety of opportunity for a perceived misallocation, a kind of performance anxiety which might afflict me at anytime where the decision I'm making is relatively uncertain for me. Hence the importance of automatic ethical responses to our ethical effectiveness?? …to our making a decision rather than none (also a decision of course, but..)?


What good will it do anyway?
And there's the question of gift effectiveness. One friend handles this with the rule that when approached he will give whatever is claimed to be needed – e.g. $50 last week on the other's promise it was required to make a certain practical change which would liberate him from certain difficulties. There's no follow-up or follow through to validate the method. But, it is a method with more than madness since the problems of authentication of need and outcomes to giving are such as to require bringing the other into the family or a relationship of long term friend to support it... and then giving becomes an adoption! Perhaps that's a feared (while wholly unlikely!) effect for me, too.


Underneath this concern is an objective social one about what makes good lives and how can we increase the number of us leading them. The distance some of us are from any reasonable notion of good life is obvious – often for unavoidably visible reasons which invoke the notional danger of "othering" (see Lyn Bender's nice review of these challenges here). The visible reasons -liked poverty, disability… - are accompanied by less visible incapacities of all kinds (hidden injuries of class, family history, etc.) which are not going to be repaired or often even vaguely ameliorated by a little good giving.


Guaranteed continuous giving strategy
Another acquaintance adopted the strategy of guaranteed continuous giving to the same needy person she encountered daily on the way to work, and no giving to others in need on the same trip. This approach was a partial fiscal adoption. It went on at a rate of $15 a day for some years. My acquaintance noticed the person had not been around for a while and eventually ran into her looking a whole lot better. She asked what the other had done with the daily gift and heard that it had provided a foundation on which to build a new life and kept her child in school because she was settled enough to ensure daily attendance.


Counterpoint: the accordionist with recorded accompaniment on a Paris Metro. I felt trapped on his arrival, knowing that an unavoidable request for money was coming, so was ill-disposed towards him before he started. More commercial versions of this tactic are the wandering musicians or their candid photographer colleagues in certain types of restaurants.


Trapped and relieved
His play was actually notably good with a suitable selection of tunes for an enclosed space and an unintended audience. A few others were tapping to the beat, and I resisted with effort myself, knowing the movement would be a tell for a prize I wasn't offering at the moment. When he stopped and came around with a worn cup one of my co-riders noted that he was better than average and that all wandering players were actually field tested for quality by the authorities. This moved me to reconsider and I drew out a 2 Euro coin and offered it to warm thanks (the average offer seemed less than a Euro).


Shame and giving
Looking back, I imagine that some of the size of my offer was compensation (self-punishment?) for my initial recalcitrance / reluctance to engage. Only I knew this thinking at the time, so the negotiation was entirely internal, except as it was infected with the potential shame(s) of my public exposure for so thinking. This is perhaps the other within me, a companion and competitor ever present to my daily activities. My other is often most present when real others are present, eliciting one facet or another of my being in the world.


I'm guessing now that I will try to work on doing little goods less conflictedly. Then I might see more clearly what mixture of thought/feeling is really occurring and build thereon a more effective contribution to decreasing the numbers and varieties of challenging others for me and them. I have to clarify my otherness to get there. I know for sure there are some others I do not want to be (nor could I be) and for these the struggle is political. For example, there's a shift of view in OECD and US policy thinking (Krugman) towards making the unemployed responsible for their joblessness by cutting off benefits. This raises once again an underlying individualist mantra – you are responsible for your fate, even if you are not!! But the policy argument is fiscal.


For me the struggle is to engage personally, which could include policy struggle but cannot be achieved by that alone.




*Not really such; we don't have a word I can find for a reasonably presented, but slightly down, usually male person who's acting out of desperate need.