Learner therapist (41)…… Creating a couples work agenda through shared needs and wants

Torrey Orton

Feb 8, 2014

 

Guidelines for partners (and therapists)

What follows is a self-administered exploration process for couples. The purpose of this paper is to guide them through the process. It may also be used by therapists in session where it is necessary that a therapist direct the process to provide the discipline for focussed work. It is the fifth in a set of couple technique papers under the “Learner therapist” header at www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.*

Rationale: couples work is notoriously difficult because the stakes are high and the aggregated injuries, flashpoints and communication incompetences are often close to immovable in the eyes and hearts of couples by the time they show up for therapy. Functionally, a lot of shared ground has been lost or forgotten or lies obscured in the smoking residue of repeated failures to have needs met. The creation of actually shared ground, including the ground of their unmet needs, is an essential anchor for any new efforts to relate more effectively.

Objective: to develop a detailed, specific assessment of the needs and wants the couple has of each other as a basis for starting negotiation of those needs/wants in a manner which models shared ownership and conduct of the exploration process and models a process for developing agendas between them. This technique is particularly useful when the couple cannot start anything without descending into uproar - noisy or silent; hot or cold war!

Principles: that all needs/wants of both persons are included in the initial stage of the process; that respective needs and wants reflect the individuals’ thinking style expressed in their natural language; that engagement of the needs/wants is put off until the most thorough lists possible for the couple are completed; that clarification of meaning only is allowed in the list creation stage; that the agenda has to be chunked down to a workable bit in a context which assures that other bits are kept in view; and, that two levels of management are required – managing the whole process (decisions about what they are doing, how, when, etc.) and doing the work agreed to – exploring understandings, feelings, needs, etc. The first level is the most important, because it is what is missing from their processes: joint management.

1 - Process steps: in rough language that could be used with patients

a) Create a list of your wants and needs of the other and what you imagine he/she needs and wants of you in a format like this – do not consult your partner’s list until you both have finished your own lists.

	Mine	His/hers
Wants
Needs

 

b) Share your lists, clarifying items as necessary. Do not engage the items yet. Rewrite them if necessary to acknowledge any clarifications. Notice shared knowledge of each other’s needs/wants.

c) Create a shared list out of the two individual lists, without leaving anyone’s items out unless you both agree they are essentially the same. Resolve any dispute by keeping disputed items in the list. Where differences seem merely linguistic keep them in the list because language differences often reveal differences of perspective, value, intensity, etc.

d) Order the list from most important to least, with emphasis on the order of the first 4-5 items. These will provide the starting point for in-session work, preferably one item you both want to start with.

e) Send the joint list to the therapist before the next session.

f) If you cannot do steps b, c, d, or e tell the therapist so and the session will start from step a. In that case, send both lists separately to the therapist and bring copies of your own to the session.

2 - Process management steps in session one – therapist directions

a)      Set out the objectives, principles, and steps of the process and provide background papers (e.g. Needs and Wants here)

 

b)      Check clarity, appropriateness and, then, agreement to this process.

 

c)      Continue checking these aspects of the process as you work through the steps

 

d)     If doing the joint list from nothing live in session, set out the process as above and then take items one at a time from one person and then the other and back again, writing them up on a whiteboard or chart in the language the person uses themselves; do not summarise in your own words without agreement of the speaker.

 

Check that each item is clear to the other as you write them up and stringently do not allow any exploration of the items at this step; this usually requires stopping any counter-assertions or exploratory questions; allow only clarification at this time (Eg - Can you give me an example of…?).

This will often take a whole session. They take away the results for further additions, ordering and selection of the starting point issue for the next session.

 

e)      Before finishing this session point out that they have just experienced a way of handling their continuing development agendas and suggest they use it at home.

 

f)       The next session is the beginning of practicing approaches to managing the systemic communication dysfunction and developing increased communication effectiveness and problem solving by working on live issues of concern to the couple. The need to engage the issues provides the focussed motivation to try new skills and test new attitudes.

* http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/learner-therapist-17the-systemic.html;

http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/learner-therapist-18-systemic.html

http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/learner-therapist-19-systemic-problem.html

http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/learner-therapist-22telling-people-what.html

My experience is that these short posts are quite readable by patients, so I often offer them as part of their preparation.

Learner therapist (13)……Needs and wants, revisited

Learner therapist (13)……Needs and wants, revisited
Torrey Orton
Sept. 12, 2011

"…and if you try sometimes you get what you need"

It's commonly thought that needs and wants are a pair of related concepts, with wants in the role of supplicant to needs while seeking to become their surrogates. The pair is a basic unit of therapeutic assessment, in particular for all manner of relationship issues. Often I encourage patients to list the wants and needs they have of significant others in their lives – usually the relatively more powerful and distorting others at home, work or play. This exercise normally includes their perceptions of the other(s)' wants/needs of them, as well.


This is the starting place for reshaping the world to their own designs, lack of which leaves it shaped intractably by the powerful, and the social arrays around them. The outcome of the exercise, if seriously pursued, is always a focus on a few critical needs and possible pathways to them. This is the playground of little steps. The challenge, according to the Stones' famous ditty is: "you can't always get what you want, and if you try sometimes you get what you need".


Here's where wants come in developmentally. While being discretionary, they are also usually very specific, concrete and time-limited in their operation (even if repeated over long spans). People can list wants more easily than needs. So, as for the Stones, our wants are signposts of our possible needs. Following the posts may bring us to our needs as we currently understand them.


Wants are seen to be more discretionary; needs more necessary. Needs more solid; wants more fleeting, evanescent (though more concrete, strangely – wherein lies both their essential contribution to our need fulfilment and their potential for misleading us about the very needs we seek to fulfil). Certainly in couples therapy, for instance, a bunch of wants are expressions of needs. They are instruments of the directions needs propose to us, and often they elicit subject matters of resonant disputability.

Our needs have a fundamental reality and truthfulness about them. This is why people know eventually when some offered need fulfilment (a want) is wrong; not merely inappropriate, wrong. Being inappropriate is a matter of misconceiving a need, often an under-developed one; being wrong is a fake, manipulative, oppressive fulfilment like the binge sex and drugs and rock 'n roll micro-culture can be. Such self-knowledge, or the pursuit of a glimmer of it, is what brings people into developmental activities like therapy, study, etc. They are seeking need fulfilment by learning to negotiate their wants with themselves and others.If we have a framework for the needs which may compose a life for any human, we are therapeutically on better grounds than threshing around in the swarm of wants which modernity proposes as the answer to the question 'what does it all mean?' Acquire enough fulfilled wants and that's a life! Maybe even a brand.
Following is one such framework. There are others. I offer some signposting wants which may attach to each.

Elements of well-being (basic human needs)

*From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives.

Tony Ward, University of Melbourne, Claire A Stewart, Deakin University, 2005

Without specified needs we cannot decide how we are doing and what trade-offs are required to improve well-being. One approach to defining basic needs is this:

Needs	Wants specifications of needs
1) Life (including healthy living and functioning)	Adequate sleep, food, exercise
2) Knowledge	Knowing that…Knowing how to….knowing why…etc.
3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences)	Play an instrument, a sport; Practice a profession, trade, art, hobby…
4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness)	Cooperative activities; enlisting others in our activities
5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress)	Meditation, martial arts,
6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships)	Appropriate care, affection, connectedness….
7) Community	Authentic membership, identification, …
8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life)	Relevant belief, imagery, contemplation….
9) Happiness	In my view this is not a need; it is one outcome of well-being
10) Creativity	Opportunities to invent at whatever level or domain of life activity (also a doubtful need)

Emerging needs (4) – Eyes to see?

Emerging needs (4) – Eyes to see?
Torrey Orton
March 17, 2010


I went looking for something the other day and found it, though I didn't know what I was looking for. I set off with a need in mind – to find a birthday present for Jane. It was already late, so some effective action was required. My plan was to look around town between one meeting and another. Not much of a plan in project management or business plan terms. However, it worked within 5 minutes of actually formally (in my mind) starting to look. The cue was a sign on a door next to the first meeting place.


It said "spiral " or something similar in a slightly attention grabbing script - more so because it was not visually garrulous and effusive. I remembered having seen it a dozen plus times and wondered what it was, while having an underlying impression it was a cover for a newsagency. You know… one of those multipurpose ones which thinks it's a gift shop and office supplies centre, with tool shop and copyfast production airs.


Having a couple of minutes before the schedule meeting, I ambled over to a window for a quick squiz, and immediately was blocked from an interior scan by a couple of women wrapping parcels in snappy paper – gift shop type! One beckoned and I shuffled away in my usual don't notice me noticing you way. As a result another window in a door shuffled into a view so the squiz was on again. More evidence of gift shopness and nil of news agent with allied services.


Enough evidence to hazard a look in the displays. So I shuffled in the door and in two more minutes what I was looking for materialised at my eye level. The beckoner of a minute earlier materialised herself with a well-timed "Can I help you?" I pointed at the beckoning prospective gift which I was fast reconstituting as an earring box. She noted she'd bought one for her husband's cufflinks before I got my thoughts out and she reached with a key to unlock the case. The rest is visual marketing history. She opened the box; it had four equal sized velvet sections in it; I said yes; she asked 'wrapped"? I yessed that, too and carded up for the final steps in the sales minuet.


Only left to finish the search: the recognition of the found thing as the gift it is intended to be in the eyes of the gifted one. And as it was so recognised, fulfilling for her a need she did not know she had exactly until the container for it was seen. She noted that she was always misplacing earrings, usually one of them, but had not formulated the fact of misplacing them into a need for a solution. The unwrapping disclosed more than it contained.


Jane reminded me that Asian sages have long known something like this, which left me both uplifted and downtrodden at once. Up for being in grand company and down for knowing that I would never belong to that company, neither of which is my fault; just my fate.

Enough, already!?

Enough, already!?
Torrey Orton
January 31, 2010


We certainly have enough, already, of almost everything conceivable, and an agreed excess of quite a few – foods, houses, cars - come to the public mind almost daily in one scandal of indulgences (obesity?) or another (Macmansions?) or another (exec remuneration?). These are remarkable for all being material excesses. We do not suffer an excess of probity, transparency, honesty, ….pick a virtue and we ain't got it much, in public at least, except for celebrations like Australia Day rituals of reward which are not media magnets for the rest of the year. So much for virtuous role modelling.


And we know we cannot constrain greed (because it's somehow incentively associated with the virtues of private enterprise and personal choice), but we will "quarantine" some benefactors of the public purse from spending their meagre takings on the needs and indulgences of their choice. They are to be quarantined for not knowing enough to buy right (see Our public moral base below for the thinking which sustains this discrimination). Can the alleged ingrained bad buying habits of the poor be any different, as habits, than those of their material betters who flourish in the greed slaking disciplines of high finance and corporate leadership?


The argument
That we over-provided for many parts of our society is undeniable, except by those who believe that there is no such thing as greed or excess – that is, that there can never be too much of anything. Many of us are confused about this. We know that people who should know better ("the best and brightest"), are unable to control reaching for luxury and that there are no objective performance constraints on them from doing so if they can put out their hands towards them. The very public case of Cherie Blair is analysed here. Further UK background is here in a report called "Sinking and swimming: understanding Britain's unmet needs". An Australian approach is outlined in The Road Home.


We also know that continued lifestyle improvements and increased acquisitions do not raise perceived life value (i.e. happiness and its affiliates like self-esteem). See AC Grayling for the insides of this apparent fact. Meanwhile, executive remuneration remains uncontrolled by performance outcomes and increasingly distant from workers' pay. It can no longer be argued that these levels are required for competitive reasons, since those have been scorched by the GFC. In addition, They are sustained by spinoff 'industries' (for example, luxury car, boat and golf club) sales. This pattern is not an artefact of the last ten years. The insights can be found in Keynes (below) and pre-configured in Adam Smith's full works which constrain the economy to a supporting cast of the human story, not the star.

"... Here I think Keynes comes closest to answering the question of why his "enough" will not, in fact, be enough. The accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the "good life," becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living. Beyond a certain point – which most of the world is still far from having reached – the accumulation of wealth offers only substitute pleasures for the real losses to human relations that it exacts."

Robert Skidelsky - "How much money is enough?" Sunday 22 November 2009

The proposition
I believe that any human organisation of sufficient wealth to over-meet the basic needs of most of its members owes the remaining members the guarantee of a minimum sustainability – a basic needs fulfilment platform. This should be available without any implicit reproach like over-zealous policing of access or controlling of use of services provided. This would be more than a safety net. It would also be a 2 or 3 generation program, since recovery from many of the embedded deficits of intergenerational poverty are social system change matters, not individual enterprise and guts ones. This is to some extent implicit in current approaches to homelessness in Australia. A concurrent supporting argument comes from An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK
.


I don't think this proposition is a covert Nordic nostrum, a snowbound socialism converted for our sandbox, but maybe it is. That we under-provide for noticeable populations like the homeless is certain. A similar domain of human obligation negotiation is the climate change accountability/ability to pay equation. The Australian's "Ask the Philosopher" column proposed:

This is becoming all too apparent as the Copenhagen conference enters its second week. Developed countries may indeed have historical outcome responsibility for climate change and its effects.

Yet do they bear a special ethical burden?

Before we can allocate remedial responsibility, we must first determine whether countries have exceeded their fair quota of natural resources. This is, for many reasons, a much more difficult proposition.

A work program for such an ethic would cover the systematic glitches and lacunae in our basic human services – health, education, and accommodation. One obvious step would be to mandate job creation until there is no gap between employed and demand for employees – everyone has a job of some kind.


Our public moral base
The 'enemy' of such thinking about accountability / responsibility is found in many places. I'll look at two recent examples and a public counter-example next.


One, John Armstrong recently argued in the Australian Financial Review that "It's OK to be wealthy - the trick is to also be worthy". For a philosopher this is a disgrace. He conflates the question of exec remuneration into a "value for money" principle which he characterises as "a question of efficiency, not of ethics". There are two muddles here: first, no one in business (except perhaps money managers) thinks that efficiency is a standalone criterion of value. Electricians (his example) and their clients certainly do not. Effectiveness is usually the second term of the value equation. Second, the powers of electricians and executives to influence the terms and the interpretations of their respective remuneration agreements are near to wholly incommensurate!


Further, he later concludes: "A person is morally entitled to exactly the quantity of resources they can use for their finest flourishing." A kind of aesthetic ethics - notable for its patent individualism, or, slightly better, familism. Armstrong mentions beautiful houses and interesting holidays as soul nourishing intrinsic goods it is morally right to buy if you appreciate them properly (who's the judge?) Matters of taste have not long been a core capacity among well-being needs. For him there is no in principle limit to acquisition, and the moral case for right to acquire is subordinated anyway to his version of the value for money principle.


I can barely imagine the enjoyment corporate leaders will get from quoting a philosophy professor in residence at Melbourne Business School in defence of their reapings of our realms.


Two, a similar line is taken by Michael Keane in "Lifestyle-altering strategies more likely to reduce liberty" where he takes an ethical hammer to efforts to manage the debilitating health side-effects of late modern living. Here we are presented with the choice/legitimacy argument, a variation on Armstrong's. The field of play is bigger – the whole of health provision – than executive salaries. And the underlying interpretive assumption is the same as Armstrong's, expressed by Keane thus: "..our society is built on deferment to the fundamental ethical principle of autonomy" which is expressed in individual choices.


Strangely (?), the Armstrong/Keane thesis never recognises that people are differently able to decide sensibly. The first among these differences is pre-programmed expectations ("top of mind" choices for which billions are spent yearly to sustain automatic, thoughtless choosing in the major domains of required expenditure – food, health, clothing, transport…). I guess the advertisers, and marketers directing them, know they are getting something for their money and it isn't what Keane/Armstrong mean by rational choice.


Three, a coincidental counterpoint comes from Catherine Bennett discussing bariatric surgery as a public health offering in the UK. Working a corner of the terrain Keane commands, she explores the complexities of the boundaries between disease and social undesirability in the case of obesity – a classic case of 'consenting' adults making decisions which are guaranteed to make their lives shorter, less fun, more oppressive, less comfortable…the list is terminal. Why should the public subvene their indiscretions? She doesn't have refuge in an ideological distinction between individual and social responsibility.
My Australian readers may notice an excess (from our viewpoint) of foreign sources in my proceedings. I noticed it myself just now. The reason, I realised, is that the key terms of the discussion of these issues derive from elsewhere – notably the US and UK, with parts of the euro zone in attendance. The ethical and political arguments are framed in the big economies and traditional sources of Western life. Take a look at the lag and inappropriateness of recent citations of Joel Klein as a model for Oz school reform – a man speaking from a place where local control is not even mentioned because it's the only thing there is in education in the USA!! Translate that for our local and what have you?

Emerging needs…and wants.

Emerging needs…and wants.
Torrey Orton – July 27, 2009


I’m partial to the view that life is for fulfilling human needs, if we know what they are. Ah, if we know! We know that they change over time, that some are not available to direct inspection, that they emerge often under a veil or obscured in the stream of other needs which dominate daily life… we know, thus, that we cannot know them until we have them at a certain level of intensity, salience, etc. And we are expected, and expect, to pursue our needs politely, temperately, considerately, as well as focussedly, commitedley, all to pass through flowingly...to happinesses again.

We are in a world of intemperate processes and outrageous wants, often disconnected from substantive needs, whose momentum generates unnecessary activity that reinforces itself. Talk about moral degeneration…For in this world our needs are distorted, reconfigured, powered and bustled by waves of energy we often cannot even feel until their infectious power grips us. We discover needs by the emergence of new behaviours…sometimes discussed as trends or megatrends, the fashionable material of second rate sociology sustaining consumption-driven marketing to create new ‘needs’ like this:


Commercial self-indoctrination?

Rashid’s commercial self-indoctrination story – told to me one day at lunch.

He and Safiya went to the optometrist’s to get her new eye test done. After she went through, the staffer asked R. if he wanted to have an eye test, too.

He said no, no problems reading or anything else, thanks.

She said it’s free on Medicare, just have a try…maybe…

OK, he said, and so he did have them tried. There was a slight shortfall in tasks like reading.

So, R. accepted that he needed glasses. Why? Because the test said so, though he did not feel any need of them until he heard the test results. If the test said so, there must be something. He found it a day or two later (before getting his first glasses) when noticing that some things seemed a little blurred while reading…Voila, commercial self-indoctrination.

A few days later he added by email, speaking of the above rendition of our chat:

“It’s nice and accurate T. However; after wearing my new glasses few days now, I do feel that I really needed them!! Power of commercial self-indoctrination getting stronger by the day :)”

I love vindication. However, R replied to my reply to the above:

“Somehow I don’t want you to post the story, and when I inquire into the nature of my resistance I hear two things. One seems to do with resisting public self-disclosure on the net and leaving digital crumbs and the other is to do with knowing now that actually the glasses are medically useful to me. While I could read even relatively small prints but wearing glasses now I notice that I was subjecting my eyes to quite a bit of stress! It also has an undercurrent of denying that “commercial self-indoctrination” could happen to me. “

So, it’s a very delicate business, this emerging needs / wants one. Now I understand what a marketing friend has often tried to get me to see – what a serious business it is, too, fooling as it does with the boundaries between acknowledged needs with hairextension-like retro-fitting of them to the latest thing, fashion, trend, innovation – all the materials of consumptionous wellbeing.


Expressive need

Here’s a quite other kind of need – an emerging need for ‘negative’ self-expression which I wrote in a post entitled Popular anger denied makes way for populists a few months ago.

A small example of displaced anger: in our house we intensely dislike phone solicitations for charity or sales, with slightly less animus for the charity than the sale, and greatly more for those who just want to ask a few questions as a cover for a sale by marketing slime!! I’ve placed us on the national not-to-be-called register and things keep coming, especially around dinner time. One of these happened yesterday from a charity. I called back today to ask them to take us off the call list (we give regularly by mail). I was rougher in tone and barely withheld anger than she deserved, except that they are the latest in a running series of these things which seem unstoppable. I did not know when I picked up the phone to call that I was actively angry. I was and she got a bit of it (I do the same to males – gender free aggressiveness).

This need is for expression of experience. People need to do this. Just when and how much is a personal and social question. Unvented anger is an internal stressor; lots of little ones may make a big explosion – a rage. We all know that withheld anger or irritation builds, often to be inappropriately expressed on the wrong person(s) (often at greater distance and of less power than ourselves); or, expressed to the appropriate person(s) but well over the top of the immediate cue that sets it off. Inappropriate after all. This comes from the arena of perceived injustice or unfairness, a capacity which it seems all humans have (for personal detection of injustice, that is). Accessing emerging perceptions of injustice is a core skill for a competent person and a competent social system. Prevention of inappropriate blow-ups is one reason for getting better at it. Another is to rectify emerging injustices.

Getting a grip on emergences, separating the real from the false, the liberating from the enslaving, is one of the major challenges of our turbulent times where standards and process of all kinds are up for grabs. The challenge is personal, familial, social, political…multilevel, multi-sectoral…all happening at once.

A sense of need, but what need?

A third potential example of the emerging, and a difficult one to even present, is this: I have a sense that there is a new level of intellectual / spiritual activity, a kind of desperate expressiveness coming from every type of existing socio-political paradigm across all domains of human activity (all those which are disordered, distressed, displaced by turbulence) as if they are gearing up for a fight and want to get on the field of influence or battle early. Perhaps it is just a flowering of new expression liberated by the turbulence – change is good for innovation, encourages it, demands it. My sense is that we are entering a new phase of activity.

So, join me in discovering and disclosing emergences of all kinds…we certainly can’t tell now which ones matter for the future. Refining our detection capabilities will count for the future, since some of the emerging needs / wants will be thematic in the future.