Learner therapist (46)…… Uplifting thoughts in times of down

Torrey Orton

Sept. 19, 2014

A cream pie in the mind

I’m working through very complex lifelong injuries with a very willing and able but psycho-spiritually compromised patient. At the moment we are picking apart an eating/body-image distortion which expresses a lifetime of deprivation of affection by family and schooling and….as we get closer to the core structure of the eating distortion, unguarded by its automatic functions (bingeing, constraining, etc.), the pain of sessions increases and cannot always be nicely balanced within the session timeframe. That is, we cannot often end on an upswing, or even a bit of flat earth.

 

The 42 year old female patient started introducing what have come to be known as cream pie diversions in the last minutes of a session still in its down (appreciating the pain of the past in the present) phase. She developed this tactic by chance a few weeks ago and it has become a signature skill for self-management around the hardest parts of our work. She can now confidently shift her mood out of obsessive / dark places in a few minutes before the end of a session.

 

The effectiveness of the pie in the face move initially arose from the summoning up of an image of pie smushing a face, but found enduring perceptual legs through my general vulnerability to desserts and ignorance of fine details of their contents. For instance, what really lies below the cream in a cream pie? Once opened, this doorway led into matters of cultural ownership of dessert types, with potential for pleasingly simpleminded explorations about what a real apple pie is, which naturally degenerates into memories of childhood pies, and we’re back in the lap of our mothers again. Which is where it all starts for her (and me in my way, of course)…

More travel funnies…(2)

More travel funnies…(2)
Torrey Orton
May 19, 2011


"...the only white people on the train"

This is a race joke. It was told on himself by a 70 year old anglo friend who was on a New York City subway with his 13 year old son a few weeks back. He looked down the carriage and thought 'we're the only white people on the train'. Something stopped him saying it just in time. He remembered that he was the only white guy on the train. His son is a product of his second marriage. His mother is Sri Lankan; he's clearly not a white guy.

 

His father's not without deep experience in matters of race, having spent a number of years as a teacher in Harlem schools and as a curriculum consultant in many others in the late '60's where he was often the only white guy on the train. In between, I guess he forgot what he is. How anyone can do that you may wonder. He did, too. I still am.

"The last time I saw you…"
    

This is a sex joke masquerading as 'just between you 'n me, for your ears only' boy talk. Talk about giving it all away in a paroxysm of paranoia! C was on the door for new arrivals at the reunion. He had also been particularly solicitous of our travel comfort, accommodation arrangements and general well-being. He was not a guy I knew at all well in the day. I do a bit more now.

 

Having overseen our hotel registration from a distance, he rushed out to join us on the way back to our car (for luggage transfers) whispering (as he often did),

"I saw you play hockey once in Buffalo." (Western New York, near Niagara Falls).

Me: "When was that?"

He: "A few years after leaving school".

Me: "Oh yeah, against Yale in 1964. We got killed 13 to 3. I don't remember seeing you there."

He: "I just don't want you mentioning it to my wife. I was there with another girl."

Me: "Sure thing. No worries."

 

Of course carrying such a secret was difficult; it always lurked in the wings looking for a chance to sneak out. Two days of reunioning provided regular opportunities for sharing back. I was eased in my self-management by the fact the secret totally lacked salience for me, though gaining small traction from my wonder at the marvels of guilt and its persistent need for self-exposure. I can only hope his sharing it with us reduced the burden for him. It was big enough for him not to have heard that I never noticed him that day in '64. Perhaps the clang of the puck in our goal distracted my attention. Certainly paying attention did little to stop the clanging. Maybe I should have been there for C after all??

Tar pit triumph

In LA I saw a tar pit at last, fulfilling an unrecalled childhood (mid-primary age) dream arising from one of those enduring standalone impressions of a sabre-tooth tiger risen from the pits decades ago, with mastodons and ground sloths in the background. This was a totally unmediated perceptual success. Seen one, seen 'em all. I hadn't the slightest need to see a dozen more, which were easily at hand in the La Brea display ground. The need fulfilment was probably assisted by the smell-o-vision nature of the experience – I smelled the pit before I saw it. Primary sense trumps secondary. Not funny; just nice.

Streets of New Haven

We went back to the place of our first married year (and my first 7 years of adult life!) New Haven, CN for a few hours after the reunion. We knew it was likely to be disappointing because we had been there a few times over the last 20 years – another rust belt city bereft of manufacturing and host to long term urban poverties.

 

The story is this: the streets in, through and around the Yale University environs are clean and well-paved. Those in the areas to the north, west and east, largely black inhabited, were potholed from end to end. These holes were suspension clatteringly and control compromisingly pervasive. The south is Long Island Sound. Only a few fish pass there.

Not funny at all.

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?

Appreciation (36) …out of Africa?
Torrey Orton
May 4, 2011

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?", she said quietly.

We were in the fourth day of four in a leadership program for journalists. The group of 9 held six women and three men from seven countries/regions: Indonesia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Irian Jaya(Papua) province of Indonesia, PNG, Timor Leste and Solomon Islands. They spoke 15 or twenty languages between them and no one language was competently held across the whole group. Individuals often had 5 or six, including English, pidgin, family or clan languages and a national language. So there was a constant play of interpreting throughout the learning activities. I was the only non-islander English speaker in the group. I was also 30 years older than everyone but Jason, who was about 50. Jason held down the darker end of the colour spectrum for which I anchored the lighter, with everyone else spread out in between* - the ethnic Indonesians closest to me, the Papuan next and the others following to Jason.


Our program included five segments, in this order, on personality, stress management, culture and leadership, negotiation and conflict management, and mentoring/networking, all with an orientation to the leadership demands of being a journalist in their respective contexts. The culture segment opened the door on a range of shared histories among us, and the overall shared history of European colonialism. In the process of exploring the cultures in the room I pointed out that we all come out of Africa. This was news to everyone.


At some later point in our excursion through negotiation and conflict management I mentioned to the group that there is published research evidence about the out-of- Africa claim and I had the book – Spencer Wells' The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Jason jumped at it, along with another – Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies – which explains cultural success in geographic terms, as well as the unintended depredations of Christian colonialism (germs, mostly).


On reflection, I have to admit that saying I come out of Africa has a very low face-value truthfulness about it. A case of the mind's eye getting it wrong to any unbiased observer. I just don't look anyone's 'black' or tan or Asian, or…Italian. The research shows (love that frame!) that my relatives are traceable to a female origin out of Africa quite a while ago. But it is demonstrably obvious that I'm not black or tan or anything other than fading lily whiteish. And it is even more incontrovertibly clear that I didn't come out of Africa in any comprehensibly practical sense. Talk about an inner truth?! The genes shape us but the appearances make us.


And so the quietest group member, and occupier of a prime position in the darker range, Fijian Dorothy said, pointing at the leader with no clothes running the training – me:

"Ask him when he came out of Africa?" she posed quietly.

 

And three of us – Diana, Jason and I - broke into unstoppable laughter, with tears, which lasted three or four minutes, reigniting as they do with recollections or repetitions of the cue line "Ask him…" I've since repeated it enough to drain the trigger of its tickle.

 

 

*I recalled as I was entering the culture segment of our work that I had first encountered the colour conundrum 45 years ago as a beginner high school teacher in New Haven, CN, USA. This was particularly the first time of my really being a minority person for a bit. Years later in China it was daily for two years – a more shaping experience. At that US time I devised a simple experiment. In English classes with a majority of blacks and an ethnic multitude of whites, I offered an exploration of the substance of the terms 'white' and 'black'.


We (including me) lined up in a horseshoe (so everyone could see everyone else) whose gradation from darkest to lightest, and back, was agreed by all. The result always was that some self-identified 'black' kids actually were over the line into 'white' and vice-versa, as agreed among the participants in any particular line-up. (This kind of perception is the empirical origin of the current identification 'mixed', which is established in the identity stats of the UK census and an ongoing subject of discussion in the US). The kids had little trouble agreeing on the fade from light to dark and vice-versa, yet clung energetically to the soundness of their practical judgment that the difference was black and white clear!! Black hung with black and white with white. Therein the dilemma of the difference which is not, but is!


This dilemma is played out in both light and dark communities as they privilege the other in their beauty gradings – for some purposes. The lights approve tannedness among themselves (even fake tan!), but get queasy with permanently tanned members of their 'community' (maybe they've got a bit of dark the lights suppose) and the darks approve with envy the lights of theirs while at the same time reserving true darkness membership to the darkest (nearest to Africa??). What a human mess. Was 'mixed' cooked up to bridge the unbridgeable distinctions without creating a discriminatory difference??

Optimysticals – the weather according to the BOM

Optimysticals – the weather according to the BOM
Torrey Orton
June 22, 2009

Now it has been almost 2 hours of constant shifting from susurration to light roar as I pass back and forth between eating and writing. At last, nothing. Probably I can sleep.

It has been two weeks since the above appreciation of rain. We (Jane and I) were walking across one of Melbourne’s better outer city parks, 30 kms from our place near the city centre and 30 minutes drive time total door to gate. It sprinkled as we walked. That is, we felt a drop here and there. Nothing visible. But we now notice a level of wet we never have before – the barely perceptible; if you blinked or sneezed you missed it. ‘Sprinkle’ is not a forecast category.

The forecast for the day was “showers”. It had dropped like that on the windscreen on the way out to the park - the visible part of the forecast. An on and off day like this reminded me of the perilous but permanent optimism of the meteorological services here, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). They have a forecasting regime consisting of: “intermittent showers”, light showers, patchy rain, or a little rain, rain easing, thunderstorms occasional….What’s so optimistic about the forecasts is that it takes nothing to forecast showers, which is so often what we get with that forecast.

We can also get nothing in Melbourne when there are a 'thunderstorms' or a 'little rain', or a 'rain increasing' forecast. And some of us, me among them, really pine for rain, dream consciously of it, hope for it (but not the pray-for-it fraternity; that’s another level) with mindless intensity. It’s mindless because rain so seldom comes – well below the average which hoping should cause by chance!

Until today I had looked intensely askance at the BOM for its mindless persistence with their clearly faulty promise – rain is coming. A farmer friend assures me this so (the rain is coming), and I know enough stats to appreciate his point. But, since seeing the BOM as a chief purveyor of local climate hope, my esteem of them has turned around.

So, it occurs to me that the BOM is the patron saint of optimysticals* - a symbol, an exemplar of the type - and so they should be noticed. If you like to help you will send this paean of acknowledgment to anyone you know in the BOM. They probably need more than we to know that others notice their mystical level of optimism, drawing what fantastic hope from it we may.

PS.
You may have a favourite optimystical. I’d like to post them. We’d probably have to negotiate a bit to develop a shared standard for them. Once negotiated, you can become an authorised poster on this site in the optimystical stream. Howzat?


* an optimystical is 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.