Learner therapist (5)…Quiet violences

Learner therapist (5)…Quiet violences
Torrey Orton
August 15, 2011


Following are some patient experiences of their persistent, consistent and seemingly untouchable disregard by those closest to them. They are the solid foundations of the anxiety / depression in their presently distorted relationship worlds. These feelings are both typical and totally particular at once. They easily elicit a self-denying doubt - "I've had everything I could expect. What have I got to complain about?" – compared to imagined others' terrible childhoods.


These patients are medicated, and/or in long term dynamic or interpersonal therapy with histories of short-term CBT inefficacy, and/or with associated relationship struggles at work, home and play. They usually have two or three anxiety/depression symptoms at once, with one or another more prominent depending on total stress and injury salient stress in varying measures. Their disorders have been traceably with them for decades. The complete family social systems which supported the incidents / perceptions below are alive and well to this day, continuing to carry and sustain the psychological bugs which infect these people.


The speech reported is a close paraphrasing of their actual words. So, for example:


She said: All I want is when I call up mum that she listen to my concerns of the moment; what happens is I call and she suddenly gives me over to Dad who doesn't engage about anything… (this has gone on for her whole remembered life).


He said: When I told my parents at age 6 my grandmother had introduced me to a man in her house who sexually abused me a number of times, they 'took care of it' and it never happened again…nor was it ever spoken of, even to this day (32 years later).


She (39, alcoholic, twice married, 2 own children, four other of second partner) said: They (her parents) never say 'I love you' to me (breaking out in her quiet version of wracked with tears late in the first session) and brush off my efforts to reduce drinking.


He said: For the last few years, living in our house has always been seeing the others but never doing anything with them – we even eat separately. Otherwise, Dad is always away and Mum's always cleaning noisily and intrusively…


She said, starting to cry uncontrollably: I remember being sent away for two months to summer camp aged 5 so my returned run-away 12 year old sister could "have space" as recommended by a social worker returning her…with the understanding for years after that I should "behave" or get into rouble from father for I knew not what; the reason for the runaway was never discussed…so the boundaries of expected behaviour were never clear, just implicit.


He said: (shaking with inner turmoil) I just remembered myself going down the hall of the hospital 30 years ago to see the back specialist in terror about the outcome (I was put in a body brace for 6 months) and mother (who was with me) not asking how I felt, and me feeling I couldn't say because she and father were unable to run the family themselves and I - aged just 14 at the time, eldest child - was carrying the load, down to doing the shopping, cooking and so on.


These are quiet violences of the family intimacy sort*, which often provide foundations for self-harm and suicidal thinking and action, mitigated by alcohol or binge drugs of delightful escape. To a person, those above say at one time or another: what have I got to complain about (compared to people in physically or socially violent lives, or the poor in Calcutta, etc.)? I don't want to blame anyone for my shortcomings - the litany of over-responsibility for lives which has also allowed them to be among the successful (that is the surviving, "high functioning" jobholding, family rearing sorts). Though anyway, I'm worthless, not good enough, can't get it right, hopeless….which makes me try harder to be perfect (a very useful inspiration for many kinds of public life success (jobs, etc.)).


These are not the violences we normally think of when talking PTSD. Their effects may appear in forms like OCD, social phobia, panic…and self-harming, with and without thoughts, or unsuccessful acts, of suicide. They are the kind from which arise baseless fantasies of being "annihilated" by the absence of others, by nothingness…a good starting point for re-visiting the Existentialists. No Exit comes to mind.


And, too, they are sources of apparently baseless, barely perceptible, angers, small outbursts of rage with no accessible origins – the very rages we find at the social level on the road, in the retail, at the home. Their power lies in the presence of the past in the present. People's current lives repeat in degrees and domains, the damages of childhoods sustained in the present relationships which produced them in the first place.


Even if the family members have changed, the parents have lost their power, the truth of the damaging histories cannot be validated because they are on the family's undiscussables list. So the struggle of the past reappears as sibling differences on what's discussable. Talk about resilience! And about systemic maintenance of contexts for paranoid processes! Enough to make one think themselves crazy, just a bit.


* "The WRCH also presents a typology of violence that, while not uniformly accepted, can be a useful way to understand the contexts in which violence occurs and the interactions between types of violence. This typology distinguishes four modes in which violence may be inflicted: physical; sexual; and psychological attack; and deprivation. It further divides the general definition of violence into three sub-types according to the victim-perpetrator relationship.

• Self-directed violence refers to violence in which the perpetrator and the victim are the same individual and is subdivided into self-abuse and suicide.
• Interpersonal violence refers to violence between individuals, and is subdivided into family and intimate partner violence and community violence. The former category includes child maltreatment; intimate partner violence; and elder abuse, while the latter is broken down into acquaintance and stranger violence and includes youth violence; assault by strangers; violence related to property crimes; and violence in workplaces and other institutions.
• Collective violence refers to violence committed by larger groups of individuals and can be subdivided into social, political and economic violence."

I've lost the link to this quote so can't source it, but seems worth including for the framework. The emphasis is supplied.

Who’s to blame for a bad childhood?

Who’s to blame for a bad childhood? Accountability, responsibility, blame and victims
Torrey Orton July 28, 2009

Accountability*: giving an account for personal responsibilities or for those undertaken by others on our delegation.

This is a terrible field to step into. Much travelled and trammelled. Who am I to add another step…even to be presumptuous enough to try? This is one I have to try because my confusions are so great. Others seem equally confused. I have been here before while exploring the Royal Commission on the Black Saturday bushfires. Here I will focus on this quartet as it applies in psychotherapy. I do not think that’s the same thing as the great worlds of politics and world changing surrounding our everyday lives. But my patient clients feel this greater world in their own distresses and are touched by their place(s) in it.

The problem for us all as adults is that there’s a part of our life we are not responsible for. Sometimes we need to be able to give an account of it!! One such time is if we are in psychotherapy. Most therapies acknowledge that our family of origin experiences shape our potential for family making (and many other group) experiences as adults. Our gender roles are learned there and the nature and variety of attachment is developed and embedded. Some cultures think of themselves as families and construct all social roles in family terms.

… our parents’ children

So, in important respects, we are always our parents’ children. This is recognised in everyday observations to that effect about children. And, we all honour the part(s) of our shared heritage we delight in. The undelightful is usually omitted. Sometimes it is systematically excluded from family conversation by explicit punishment of anyone who strays into the guarded territory. Therapeutically, I would say the most important breakthrough for many of my traumatised clients is to speak to the power of the family’s denial by actually opening previously closed doors with parents or sibs, or both, or virtually doing so in imaginary role-play of such openings.

Similar dynamics of denial and speaking to it can be seen in our societies at large – e.g. child abuse by trusted figures like priests, carers, etc. Acknowledgment of these abuses is resisted by the responsible organisations (seeking deferral of their accountability) like churches (Catholic most prominently, but certainly not solely) and social service agencies like the Salvos recently. The only thing worse than a bad family experience is no family at all.

Again therapeutically, family of origin appears as a source, a cause, of both the foundations and the distortions of our everyday relationship functionality. Some distortion is unavoidable. Parents can be no more perfect than the rest of us. Imperfection has its prices, though, and this acknowledgment meets a barrier in the same everyday world of this type: ‘thou shalt not blame, nor a victim be’. Probably this is because someone would have to be uncomfortable in the process and so it would be aggressive and selfish and therefore undesirable. About this time we can forget justice, forgiveness or many other everyday attributes of a ‘normal’ life.

Blame and intent to injure

Blame has to do with perceived intent to injure. Human intent is the only true cause of anything, and then often of not much or not what was intended! Without intent we have no actions, goals, progress… a view for which I might make a case in another argument! If I am injured in fact, I am a victim of the injuring force. Its actual blameworthiness is a matter for discussion or negotiation. The discussion process may reveal that I have not been victimised, though I am pained – that is, what happened arose from my wandering into the path of another’s intentions.

Or, it may reveal that the actions expressing that intention were inappropriately designed, executed, etc. The other is still ‘to blame’ but not condemnable. This is recognised in law, but recently is being deformed by the assumption that any injury I incur is someone else’s fault and worthy of compensation by them, especially if they are a legal person. Whence warnings in national parks like “Limbs may fall” or on the roads to them like ”Overhanging trees” to defend the relevant authority from suits for supposed maintenance malpractice.

Who’s to blame?

Not a few of my clients wonder at some point if talking about family history suggests their parents are “to blame” for whatever presenting issues they have. And, consequently, are they “victims”? It seems to me that both of these are their rightful usage if the hurt is great enough. Now there’s the lynch pin. Establishing for me that something hurts enough is easy. I decide for myself. But establishing the hurt is big enough to warrant an acknowledging apology is another thing. It requires some kind of negotiation, or intermediation, when the level of hurt reaches which mandates notification by public authorities like teachers, police, health workers of all sorts, etc.

In our cultures we have defined levels and types of evidence of hurt which require intervening action by others and condemnation for failure to act (which is a virtual collusion) by relevant others like the above authorities and parents, siblings, etc. These levels and types vary significantly from culture to culture, so much so that some feel proud to stand on a notional high ground declaiming the sins of others. This ground is often built in turn on their own relatively recent development from the close neighbours of the attitudes and behaviours they are decrying. That these are extremely difficult matters to adjudicate is affirmed almost daily with stories here of children abandoned to incompetent parents’ rages at their own social and personal non-entity. The authorities trying to handle child protection services are caught between saving lives and the social commitment to saving families. As close to pure lose/lose as I can find, at least for the kids and the workers!

Anxieties sustained by long-term childhood abuse, and often continuing family denial, are almost always experienced by the patient as their own fault, even while they are aware that they were (and, often, still are) being abused! This is the deep meaning of ‘victim’ - the meaning which holds people over the long term in sub-functional experiences from which moving on is not a choice unless the relationship system members choose together to change. Not easy to do if they are already under-powered. Taking the pathway of no blame and no victim begs the question of right for the sake of avoiding a dispute of power. Not disputing power may be a smart move, but to assume it away is to leave the victim stuck with their self-perception: ‘It must have been my fault.’

The multi-generation, multi-family challenge

To complicate matters a bit – part of the exploration of long term trauma usually reveals that it is multi-family and multi-generational, extending back 2 or more generations in the conscious memory of living descendants. Alcoholism, and other addictions, personal violence, distant relationships with no intimacy or affirmations – all have family histories sometimes anchored in major socio-political cataclysms like wars, social breakdown (depressions), natural disasters. This means the apparently to blame are themselves more or less victims with their own blaming to do! Have a look at “Who do you think you are?’ for some trails followed back hundreds of years.

With this complexity in mind, plus the need to allocate responsibility across time to meet the current calls for accountability, we can ask what criteria should we use for giving accounts and/or for demanding accounts be made by others of public damaging events? Here’s a go. Accounts of events should:
…treat all adult participants in the events being judged as partially blameworthy (a recognisably Asian perspective), and so as victims, too.
…make clear what actions were intentional, or predictably likely as consequences from intended actions.
…make clear who and what were truly collateral / accidental damages and who and what were ‘targetted’ damages
… specify that the time frame for accountability extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods – something like 30-50 years for many public services like education, health, and water systems.
…establish who among the affected put themselves knowingly in harm’s way, thereby mitigating their inclusion as victims and ensuring some membership in the collateral damages category.

These are just a start. Your thoughts???

*The state of being accountable; liability to be called on to render an account; accountableness; responsible for; answerable for; The obligation imposed by law or lawful order or regulation on an officer or other person for keeping accurate record of property, documents, or funds. ...
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/accountability
The pretentious nature of my undertaking any discussion in this area is highlighted by a few webfacts: rates of occurrence of accountability related searches (Oz websites only!): “accountability and responsibility difference in government” - 5,490,000 webhits; 165,000 for ‘accountability transparency’; 43,300 web hits for ‘ethical accountability’.