Learner Therapist (59) … Learning by small steps

Torrey Orton

April 19, 2015

What are we thinking patients and students are doing when they are learning a new scheme, a new move, a new thought…? Roughly, they are trying it out. We have lots of experience of trying things out as children. Doing so as adults may be inhibited by self-censoring our playfulness.

The main point is that learning is a cycle of choosing an object of study, imagining it as a whole, attempting it in progressively greater precision and integration, appreciating the closeness of fit between today’s attempt and the imagined whole and re-attempting until inner and outer perceptions match well enough. This inner cycle sits in a larger cycle of a particular learning object’s place in a competent practice (football, music making, etc.), and where that practice sits in a life – and specifically in the life of the learner, both now and in some imagined future of theirs.

Along the way, what’s to be learned changes as the attempts get closer to it!! All together this is a practice cycle, repeated consciously and then unconsciously as long as the object and its user has a life. As therapist and coach we can help at each step.

Here’s a variety of tryouts to contemplate.

Mimic’s delight

Imagine this: you are struck by some person’s manner, style, feeling of being in your world and you want to mimic that style. Your reason for doing so may be to honour it by copying or to mock it – also by copying.  Anything can be modelled.

So how do you do it? Possibly by adopting their posture, then their gait and finally their flow – all embodiments of the person (now reduced to a stereotype in our minds!). Or you can start with their voice and a characteristic statement and expression. In any case, you eventually try a sound and get it right or not. Usually you are getting it partly right, and you know that’s what you’ve done. You have it fully right when all aspects of an action are integrated: volume, tone, pace, posture, breathing, movement…

Now, how do you know that? Because you have a memory of their performance in mind… but the memory may be incomplete, distorted in some way, partial like your performance of their performance. So you go back to the original, often easily because they sit next to you in school, church, pub or playground and you don’t tell them you are refuelling your memory.

And you try it again and again…until it’s good enough to be mistaken for them…but it isn’t them, wherein lies the particular joy of a successful mimicry.

40 years ago this process of modelling was commercially formalised in The Inner Game of Tennis (Tim Gallwey, 1974) including the rehearsal and visualisation processes - inner and outer – which I’ve just described in mimicry. It was the beginning of a grand coaching career for Gallwey. Its psychological career is a bit older.

The artist’s self-training at drawing and …

Now let’s shift to a different form of learning – drawing. It is the cheapest form of visualisation, barring drawing lines in the sand. And it draws on the same learning dynamic: a need to represent things visually, the sight of something which asks to be drawn, the step by step creation of the object out of the difference between a line and the paper holding it. This, if you watch a drawer at work, involves repeated looks at the thing, putting pencil to paper for a while, then looking at the thing again and around and around… sometimes they get stuck on a single line because they know from looking that it does not correctly catch the location of the thing in space, to say nothing of not looking like it at all (except to an artistic eye’s look).

….then painting to see what is imagined

But the original of the imagined object, say a flower, has never been seen in that way until the painter is producing it. Here the model …intrinsically ‘unreal’, fake, imaginary… is brought into reality by the brush. Painters I know talk of seeing the image they have in mind by putting their brush to paper. This assumes they already have skill in brush use, colour selection, paint density, paper porosity and so on. They just have to get a stroke of it right to get started and in part they cannot see what’s in mind until they apply the brush.

If they don’t have those precursors then they start with them. Naturally gifted artists start early feeling things, looking, splashing them around…just as the engineering gifted deconstruct and reconstruct their little worlds… and the musical give voice and tap rhythm…. Use of skill cannot be separated from expression of the self in its use.

Writing in the dark…

Or, try this: write a three word note on a small post-it on your night table with no light on, preferably when you’ve awoken naturally in midsleep with a thought on your suddenly conscious mind. This is a fun exercise in your inner sense of space which you can test yourself on immediately. On the way, notice that to write you actually have to think the words letter by letter to get the spacing right, and then you’ll probably get it wrong. Try it printed and in script for comparative purposes. Then repeat until your performance is reliable for data gathering, or just correctly reminding you of what you want reminded next morning!

The writer’s search for the right word…

Writers have stories in mind - their versions of pictures - and editing is the final word!  Writers spend more time editing than they do writing, which means writing is more a reflective art than an inspired one and that the editing process is like the painter’s comparing her brush stroke with her inner vision. Notice that the written word is more powerful than the imagined words of an inner dialogue and the spoken word in public more powerful yet. The inner dialogue (rehearsal) is in a safe place and can be worked through with less stress than a public work out. This editing effect is visible even in the most ordinary writing. Try withholding your next email for 6 hours and then re-reading before sending. What do you need to change to get it right?

Aikido 31 kata again!

On my continuing effort to get the aikido 31 kata right, after 10 years of trying…and keep it that way from one session to the next! It is an interplay each training session (approx. 4 times a week) between recalling the correct form in mind and following the body’s lead to it from its previous years of instruction, with a closing reflective pause over the entire sequence before shifting into the next repetition. About 6 monthly I revisit videos of the Sensei performing the kata, as individual bits and integrated series. I imagine that it will take me another 20 years to get to the 30 year performance he produces. And then I remember that he too probably critiques his own performance to this day.

 

Learning to act right (50)… Better not look down…

Torrey Orton

April 17, 2015

 

…says BB King in the song: “You better not look down if you want to keep on flying…put the hammer down, it’s full speed ahead”. Here’s the whole thing:

 

I've been around and I've seen some things
People moving faster than the speed of sound
Faster than the speeding bullet
People living like Superman
All day and all night
And I won't say if it's wrong or if it's right
I'm pretty fast myself
But I do have some advice to pass along
Along in the chorus of this song

Better not look down, if you want to keep on flying
Put the hammer down, keep it full speed ahead
Better not look back, or you might just wind up crying
You can keep it moving, if you don't look down

…

http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/b_b_king/better_not_look_down.html

 

… Which came to mind as I was reflecting on my inability to give validity to those in developmental stages different from mine, people who, unlike BB, I want to tell are wrong. Or more saliently, I want to prevent them from doing wrong to others in the name of their right. In many instances it doesn’t matter. My irritation passes like the discomfort - not a lot!! - of a cool breeze on a warm night. However, when confronted with repeatedly immovable objects like the anti-abortionists at the Fertility Control Clinic, and the shameless fools pretending to govern us, my irritation is never far off rage.

 

My model for correct behaviour in these circumstances is Ken Wilber’s recommendation in his A Theory of Everything (Shambala, 2000) that “Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody - including me – has some important pieces of truth, and all those pieces need to be honoured…” The implications of this are massive for everyone and lead me to the view that  those more advanced, educated, gifted, successful and powerful have an obligation to honour the truths of those less well-endowed in any of those frames.

 

In my mind’s internal dialogue on matters of ethics at the Fertility Control Clinic, I can formulate relatively easily an appreciation of the position which the catholic anti-abortionist fraternity hold. It is roughly this: all human life is infinitely valuable and so deserves de facto whatever help we can offer it to exist and persist. I first encountered this view in the mouth of a long-term friend devoted to social justice 50+ years ago. He was certainly not Catholic and scarcely religious.

 

At the time it held no practical implications for me, though the mantra stuck, having acquired in the interim some passengers/accomplices like the therapeutic notion of unconditional positive regard and its everyday behavioural limbs like respectful disagreement, not playing the man and such appreciative tactics. He still holds it close to himself to this day. I have moments of doubt. The clinic prompts them.

 

What makes my self-imposed obligation a trial is that any of us, at whatever developmental stage we are in, are circumscribed by that fact in two respects: one, that’s as far as we’ve gotten in whatever developmental sequence we are in and so that’s as far as we can see; and, two, we need to feel that it is the truth in a sense sufficient to stand the winds of rejection from those we’ve left behind and the zephyrs of enticement from those above or in the neighbouring paddock suggesting we really haven’t gotten there yet (where they are of course in their respective certainties). Both breezes suck out energy and, so, enflame the defences of the self – the inward looking self-regard of the uncertain.

 

I could approach these anti-abortion folks with an attempt to establish my credentials of empathy by noticing they are in the field of preserving life which is under attack in many ways. These attacks come most unavoidably into play at the boundaries of life – birth and death. Hence, the armies of night and light arrayed around the entries to those two boundary states – anti-abortionists/pro-choicers and the natural deathers / euthanasiasts. Also at play in the fields crossing these boundaries are the life scientists and artificial intelligencers. The effects are disruption of boundaries, a process which once developed enough leads to degeneration of being, as childhood abuse does so clearly, whence flow the twin streams of suicide and homicide – both expressions of hopeless/helpless rage.

 

So, now to the boundary: when is an abortion a better choice than full term delivery? When the conditions into which birth will be made are so perilous as to ensure that the early steps in life and many thereafter (most of childhood) will be plagued with life-destroying potential on the best science of abuse outcomes. These conditions are both natural (birth defects, etc.) and institutional (families, schools, churches…) and we know enough about minimally supportive institutional conditions to know that they fail at rates better than chance conditions (from an ethical viewpoint – namely that no failure of intentional behaviour is good enough for a good enough life). Who is to decide when the conditions are adequate is a fine task from which we can exclude the agents and apologists of the various key institutions until they can guarantee that their respective institutions will not blight the lives of their participants. That is, in the case of child rearing, the prospective parents, and where the parental relationship is dubious, the prospective mothers should be able to decide. Our law now provides this should.

 

There is a similar argument for euthanasia, and against it.

 

The Hogpi’s trade on the life is any level of living fallacy in their street arguments and their theoretical ones, too. Namely that a vital embryo is a viable one and so a life - which it ain’t until 20+ weeks - and they don’t work thru the argument that viability on both ends of the life spectrum is massively distorted by science, whose benefits are inequitably distributed, which they’d acknowledge if they thought about it in this context, but don’t…

 

In the background lies the great paradox: that prospective parents can with a little attention mostly prevent unwanted children from being conceived, yet they often do not take that care. Otherwise a major proportion of those seeking abortion would never need to present. But then, the same adults drive while intoxicated and party when drunk and their demises are noted with the language of world changing human drama – tragedy, amazing, loving…. – which they certainly aren’t. All artefacts of banality?

 

“…What I am saying is that when one form of being is more congruent with the realities of existence, then it is the better form of living for those realities. And what I am saying is that when one form of existence ceases to be functional for the realities of existence then some other form, either higher or lower in the hierarchy, is the better form of living….” Dr Clare W. Graves

http://www.clarewgraves.com/theory_content/quotes.html

 

We are in times when many realities are in disarray and so the claim that any level of development is more appropriate than another is hard to sustain, but the desire to feel comfortable in my current stage is strong enough to maintain my rage. Maybe I’m just not accepting myself.

 

If only I could just “not look down”!!

Learner therapist (40)…… Blame as a life span development factor

Torrey Orton

Oct. 31, 2013

Lifelong learning’s performance engine – error and blame

What I’m about to say is unremarkable. Its purpose is to rehabilitate the concepts of responsibility and blame, especially the latter. Blame enjoys a very modest reputation these days. In the therapeutic and associated (e.g. criminology, health…) trades some would like to execute blame with a severe termination and others less certain hold it at the distance that a bad smell requires to be noticed but not be uncomfortable. I will attempt the rehabilitation by situating blame among the broadest of human concepts – life span development. Here goes.

I look at therapy as a specialised learning trip for the repair of psycho-spiritual injuries acquired in the process of upbringing and adulthood. This view places therapy inside the range of lifespan development. Life span development, in turn, has some predictable or, perhaps more precisely, unavoidable stages, steps, challenges, obstacles …choose the noun which fits your current developmental situation.

Every human meets at least two of these stages by default: birth and death. The rest are somewhat subject to individual choices. They are foreseeable but not predictable in the usual sense of that word. Putting the same point another way: while the life pathway can be mapped for humanity, everyone’s place on it takes precedence over their stage in it; stages are retrospective markers of passage. Ask a parent if having children was anything like what they imagined from their experience of being children or their instruction by their elders about what it would be like. Answer: usually, no.

Life stages and needs

There are a number of life stage systems around which overlap with human needs. For example, consider Maslow’s hierarchy which somewhat proceeds upwards from infancy to late adulthood without ever exactly saying so. The bottom rung (the ground) is survival matters of food shelter and safety; the top (varying with cultures) may be self-realisation (the Western one) and/or individual integration in social structures (Eastern).

Robert Kegan’s view of the developmental process is something like this:

Our psychospiritual development as individuals is, in fact, a series of ever-more-inclusive disidentifications and identifications. As Kegan (1982) notes in his developmental sequence, we go from the neonate stage of being our sensations and reflexes to having them but being our perceptions, from there to having perceptions but being our needs and interests, from that stage to having needs and interests but – at adolescence -- being our relationships, and so on. With each successive stage comes an ever-greater capacity to identify with – and then disidentify from – a deeper layer of ourselves (MacVicar, 1985).

From Mental Health Academy course – Principles of Psychosynthesis

http://www.mentalhealthacademy.com.au/classroom/fetch_class.php?course_id=105-3

He’s marking related but distinctive stages to Maslow’s, which have something to do with levels of consciousness, somewhat akin to a dialectic – the cyclical relay of experience from being to having and back to being along a ladder of concreteness to abstraction. As such it is also a ladder of accountability and prospective praise or blame – depending on how ones transit turns out for oneself and our unavoidably involved others (relatives, friends, classmates…).

Development and purpose
The objective of life span development is to become competent, agile, excellent, good, diverse….all different aspects of purpose. This is what all sexually reproducing organic beings do – they become themselves, which can be done more or less well, for many reasons. Some of these are within the being’s grasp (intelligence, efficient fuel usage, etc.), some arrive by chance (in the range of environments they inhabit) and some reasons are matters of inheritance (all beings vary from their genetic and cultural originals to some degree).

Human beings add purpose and meaning to the passage. In fact, pursuit of purposes that give meaning to effort and results is a central director of effort. The meaning may be intrinsic or extrinsic. When young, we depend on our elders for meanings beyond the organic ones of survival and pleasure. Growing up is, under right conditions of meaning, the building of meaning-making capabilities.

Growing by stumbling…

Now, working thru the Kegan stages, or any other developmental sequence, is a matter of trial and error, while on predictable pathways. This trip has a thousand names from the Platonic seeking of the ideal forms through the Hegelian coursing of the dialectic to Wilber’s implicit integrity, and I haven’t mentioned a religion yet. While predictable, we have to learn and discover our particular journey by missteps. We do not learn much from correct steps…they are converted after a few successful repetitions to automatic capabilities.

…and by playing

A principal means of making the passage is play - a naturally occurring function under conditions of safety, and sometimes in spite of them. Play entails a high possibility of error, of inadequate efforts, of approximations to a competent performance. Self-correction, applied with a persistent but light hand, is the main tool of developmentally effective play. For self-correction we need responsibility and accountability for our efforts. And we are back to blame and blameworthiness. Adults are notoriously bad at play, unless artificially fuelled (drink, drugs…) and/or socially authorised (celebrations of various levels from a night on the turps to days on agricultural fairs or sports).

These overlap and intertwine, of course. Our adult weakness in the face of need for play is fear of judgment…that we will be blamed for being incompetent. Children have to be taught that fear. They take stumbling as natural and pick themselves up. But some child and adulthood errors are forced on us by others. These constitute the bulk of psychologically damaging traumas. Even if the force is applied by mistake, the others still are to blame – they did it. They produced injury.

A view of taking the blame to effect: from Dana Milbank’s review of K. Sebelius’ interrogation by the US House of Reps two days ago.

The taking –

“Access to HealthCare.gov has been a miserably frustrating experience for way too many Americans,” she said in her opening statement. “So let me say directly to these Americans: You deserve better. I apologize. I’m accountable to you for fixing these problems. And I’m committed to earning your confidence back by fixing the site.”

And the effect –

…But many of her interrogators were unusually mild, probably disarmed by Sebelius’s self-criticism…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-in-kathleen-sebelius-hearings-on-obamacare-a-party-without-a-brain/2013/10/30/6d9713da-41af-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html?hpid=z2

Appreciations (20) … Hopeful helping

Appreciations (20) … Hopeful helping
Torrey Orton
Feb 19, 2010

"Plan for the worst and hope for the best…"

Presenter at Transition Decade 2010 launch

at Melbourne Town Hall, Feb. 14, 2010

Rising hope…anticipations of hurdles jumped


My work is doable because I can approach anyone (so far!) with a view to their potential for personal development. I look for and find that potential, usually through an undergrowth of blockages and false directions which make the potential and pathways to it inaccessible to themselves, and others. I understand this attitude, and its behavioural expression, as what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard.


It seems so far, too, that everyone who comes within my therapeutic reach intends to develop for comprehensible reasons. This is not always true in group settings, where the participants may be present because the management has dragooned them (for comprehensible reasons, again, but…not the individuals'). Their development intentions cannot always be revealed with confidence that they won't be used against them in some perceived breach of organisational values – explicit or, more dangerous, implicit ones!


My hope has an inner directed aspect, too. To be hopeful for others I have to be hopeful about myself being able to help. Apart from my natural risk fascination (if there's a challenge in a domain of my competences, I'll bite on it.), therapy, and many other learning settings, repeatedly present opportunities to discover that I do not know what I am doing for one specific person or group. I fail to connect or sustain.


It could be that hope is a variant of optimism, or nestles in the same family. I don't think of them together because I am not optimistic in the usual sense of the term. Where I am not in control, I check the dangers first. Perhaps we all do so, some more knowingly than others. Certainly the constant drumming of the 'don't be negative' acolytes of positive psychology reminds me of my position on the other side of a somewhat temperamental divide.


Challenged, wavering, and rejuvenated hope….scraping knees learning to walk


My hope is challenged and wavers as novelties of personality, history and self-construction arise unexpectedly in my work. These require a personal response – most notably where the therapy / learning has not developed far enough to have shared intent and frameworks sufficiently in view of all participants. Our tasks, objectives and bonds are still under construction.


In fact, a special hope jag is often necessary for me to step up or back from a present novelty, those moments when I have to design interaction on the run. This is akin to the role of faith in taking action towards a novel future (an unpredictable one) which I discussed a few posts back. My underlying competence is intuitive creation of appropriate action options, which generally take 2-3 minutes if I am really puzzled by a significant deviation in the path we had been pursuing. If I miss the need to reframe or reshape the process, it can stumble along for some sessions. There may be a series of such phases in the total process.


Waning, fading hope…a life process running down


There comes a time in some therapy where we are not getting anywhere. This time is often forewarned by repeated events of stillness settling on the process. It not the kind which arises in meditation or some flow experiences. Rather, there is an energy gap or attention lapse. The language content and focus fades. Boredom is about to jump up. Disconnection is in the room, with disengagement threatening in the doorway of awareness. There are two pathways at this time – one of wasting decline and the other of conclusive achievement.


Withdrawing hope…the premature end


Time to stop, when the end has not been reached, often arrives in interruptions of the preceding routines – routines of times and procedures. Patient clients come late, miss sessions and I look forward to the sessions with declining energy. It can take a session or some months of them to unroll.


Or, confirming hope...the agreed closure


I often say to patient clients that they will know when they have finished our time together, know when they are well, or better or improved to the level they need. They will take charge of hope in the room by increasingly commanding the direction, depth and intensity of sessions. They will be checking the coverage of their various agendas and looking forward to support systems (internal and external) to sustain their achievements. They will know that they will be challenged again in the areas and ways that brought them to therapy in the first place. The task of primary hoper is theirs, and that of their social worlds.


I imagine that these phases / stages are something like what we will encounter repeatedly over the life of the climate change struggle. Perhaps many participants from many perspectives will do so, and this may be a potential common ground to be built on!!