Learner therapist (37)…… Unavoidable hurts: damaging dilemmas of development
Torrey Orton
Sept. 16, 2013

“I have to send you back again…”

 

A few months ago I wrote here on “Disrespect without intent” (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/learnertherapist-30disrespect-without.html ), arguing that we are responsible for damages we have done to others without intending to do so. I want to extend that claim from the relatively benign damage of my inappropriate “Uh huhs”* to the decidedly malignant damages of long term childhood victimisation which often compose the backgrounds of the deeply anxious and/or depressed. The deforming damages may be experienced in self-harming and suicidal intents / attempts, with the crystallised defences of PTSD, OCD, body/eating disorders and the various social phobias along the life paths of the damaged – constituting a reasonable chunk of the DSM V diagnoses.

Occurrences and forms of unintended damages

In child raising - Catch 22’s

A mother, having been abandoned with three children, decided to start ensuring she never had to depend on a man again. She did this by getting herself an education and then the work history which made her highly employable and repeatedly promotable. Along the way she had to be out of home for much of the day. In the space between end of school and end of work home time her three kids were home alone and into this unsupervised space arose the sexual abuse of the youngest child (girl, age 7) by the eldest (boy, age 12).

Similarly, the mother with two female primary aged children split up from her first husband after periods of violence at his hands. Dad eventually remarried (quite soon in fact) and the divorce settlement provided child access for him a weekend fortnightly. Unfortunately his new wife was also a graduate of a failed marriage with children, who were living with them.

She was utterly incapable of managing the blending demands of the visitation weekends, leading her to victimise the girls persistently and intensively. The degree of verbal violence was sufficient to leave the girls crying on the way home to mother and pleading with her not to be sent back. She had to say: “You have to go. The family court requires me to share you with your father.” For my patient, one of the two girls 20 years later, this went on until she left home for a violent boyfriend at age 16 and the cycle continued down the generations.

In marriages / families

The couple nothingness condition – when there is a space between the couple into which both have learned not to tread because the ground is rough, the air frosty and the lighting undimmable. This kind of space produces constant low grade irritation with occasional outbursts of rage. The irritation signals the constant presence of nothingness, which the individuals express in a persistent sense the other disrespects, disregards, dislikes them  and the other’s failed coupling is described in negative absolutes (he/she always,  never does…) which imply catastrophic outcome expectations for the relationship. These cannot be resolved because both experience it as what the other should do – take a chance to change things.

Family nothingness condition – when feelings are prohibited and opportunities for arousing or engaging them are reduced to the minimum and yet they still stay housed under one roof. For example, the family which eats meals separately (I know two of these), where almost  no feelings are explicitly expressed and where implicit expression is severely repressed (making passive-aggressive anger the only OK public feeling and guilt the de facto private feeling when its private version rage is not in play). Alcohol is the lubricator of the frozen joints of these two relationship worlds.

The dilemma of engagement in recovery

These four examples are all violent, though not in the sense the genpub or popular press imagines them. In principal, they would seem to be easier to deal with than family violences as we usually hear of them – either by friends or news reports. However, they are not easier, partly because they are somewhat invisible violences, leaving no broken bones or cuts except the victims’ self-inflicted ones.     

The challenge for both victims and abusers is to engage with the part good / part bad abusers’ behaviours. The victims cannot escape this dilemma because it is constantly present to them in the viscous mixture of self-blame and self-defence, which sticks them to recurrent patterns of daily life ineffectiveness – in work, relationships, self-care, etc. Out of this sticky mix they often generate their own history of damaging behaviours both to themselves (the self-harming and crystallised defences mention above) and others (reproducing the violences they have been subject to), …and so the damaging passes from generation to generation it often seems.

That this is no mean struggle is attested by the society level discussion over historical guilt, notably the 20^th century German ones (World War II guilt and political guilt for the DDR for 45 years thereafter). Positions on the virtues and abuses of remembering and atoning are exquisitely set out by David Rieff in Against Remembrance and dramatised in Bernhard Schlink’s fictions of war and self-oppression - The Reader and The Weekend - and theorised recently in his Guilt About the Past. The apposite by omission example is Japan. These are all multi-generational matters. They do not go away in societies any more than they do in families.

The problem of blame and responsibility

The desire to avoid the dilemma of responsibility (which entails potential blame and praise one way or another) shows up in funny places like famed works of self-development and injury recovery that falter around holding the parents responsible for their injuries to children (assailing the victims with the need to deny their victimhood), failing which their children can never extricate themselves from the cycles of self-blame which bring them to therapy in the first place. Correct blame locates responsibility where it belongs, which certainly is NOT wholly with the child. It also helps to clarify those things which are not changeable by the child because they were not the child’s responsibility.

There’s another level to this struggle – a conceptual one. Dilemmas are those kinds of things which cannot be reduced to black and white, digitised, constructs. A very large part of human populations are not presently capable of holding two largely conflicting versions of the same story in mind at once. So maybe my efforts to get patients to engage such dilemmas are misplaced and the strategies of other therapists (see above) which I see as avoidant of the dilemmas are in fact intellectually and morally prudent. That is, the strategies reflect and honour the developmental potential of patients under stress.  However, they do so by starting from an avoidance - namely, assuming that confrontation with abusers is wrong because uncomfortable for the abusers and so not even to be raised as an option by the abused. This is a little too close to self-protective institutional procedures for my comfort!!

My impression is that many patients make only modest efforts down the pathway of historical reconciliation with their abusers. There are good reasons for this, but one of them is not that the abusers are blameless. Rather they may be now incompetent to play the role of responsible adult, either through moral weakness of the sort demonstrated by public figures and institutions of all sorts these days (or, has it not always been thus?) or the constitutional weaknesses of advanced age.

* by the way, that uncontrollable spontaneous dismissal of others seems to have almost fully disappeared in the last couple of months…sliding out of my natural communication repertoire with not a peep of resistant protest. How that came to be is a wonder for another time.

 

 

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’.

Who’s to blame?

Who’s to blame?

The role of blame and victimhood in responsibility and accountability assessment by the Black Saturday Royal Commission
Torrey Orton April 13, 2009

Here I want to look at one facet of the Fire Commission which should become a lens through which the review is conducted and received by its publics. This is blame. The use of blame (hand in glove with guilt and shame) is essential to effective accountability and responsibility. It reminds us there are others depending on us, and we on others. Like most things human, blame can be politicised. It already is in the direct and indirect processes of the Commission; parties and interests are at work stigmatising their notional competitors or contestants for various outcomes, or building on existing stigmata in our local discourse – greenies, foresters, etc. The Commission also stands between the Government of the day and its citizens.

Unfortunately, this normal process of interest group struggle distributes resources to social projects, but seldom the truths needed for more resilient responses to the unpredictable. In our very uncertain times, truths are the more needed and the less likely. Maybe a new approach to blame would be useful in sustaining truths.

“We are responsible, in the end, for what is done in our name.” – Viggo Mortenson (THEAGE A2 040409; pg. 18-19). The cries for exemplary blood around the economic miniverse (CEO remuneration rage, AIG et al. bonus envy, Wagoner’s head at GM, Sir Fred’s departure dough at RBS… ) express popular blame of these elites and their support teams for their greed and grandiosity without restraint or regret. These are the cries of the victims of their excesses. Others have long pointed out that some of the victims contributed to their own losses in various ways – mostly through avoidable ignorance. This is most reasonable when the victims are also the greedy with flavours of the grandiose like Bernard Madoff’s “clients”. It is a less reasonable accusation to make of the subprime mortgagees reaching for the American dream which their commercial leaders told them was their right (to dream, that is) and the subprime offer a viable commitment to make.

What powers blame, and the sense of being a victim, is when people feel they have been intentionally harmed by others. Spontaneous acts of natural destruction – tornadoes, floods, volcanoes, droughts – attract great sorrow, depression and despair. But not enduring anger. Anger doesn’t do much to nature because it is largely beyond our powers. What does generate anger is when agreed defences against the possibility or effects of such events fail to protect. Katrina comes to mind. Our Black Saturday fires are another such event. Apparent failures of these defences are the objects of blame attacks.

But, these defences include actions by the eventual victims*. They took a chance in the face of a probable but unpredictable risk – a 1 in a 100 bushfire – to live in a fire prone place, deciding to comply or not with local clearing regulations, etc. These are blameable as much as excesses or shortages of various public provisions for fire safety in fire prone places. The claim that they had and have a right to live where they like amplifies the right to being blamed along with the public safety providers. Children and invalids are excused from this status.

So let’s start with the assumption that everyone involved in the fires is to blame in some degrees and dimensions as appropriate to their roles, situations and capabilities. This would then lead to a Commission focused on who holds what responsibility for what over the course of the fires. The time frame for responsibility extends backwards to include the precursor or preparation periods. From this might come recommendations which relate more appropriately to future responsibilities and their supporting accountabilities. The gray regions between individuals / families and local governments, and those between local governments and state or national ones will be the major focus of blame strategy and dispute.

The accountabilities are another thing. But with responsibilities more thoroughly established (or at least explored), some more balanced appreciations might extend to the main accountable organisations. For example, they might accept less of the responsibility and direct more attention to helping those actually responsible to fulfil them. Most important among these may be individual land and business owners / occupiers, and local government entities. It is they who can most immediately respond to changing conditions (long term drought, land clearing, increased housing intensity…). What higher level entities and agencies could contribute to building such capabilities will be useful to identify.

* NB - the status of ‘victim’ is confused in our times. We have people who knowingly swim into the jaws of death in the Daly River, NT (April 10, 2009) to be retrieved in segments days later; we have a conventional litigiousness which makes every accident an opportunity for a no win/ no fee legal firm (where market growth comes from extending the range of items deemed rewardable – that is blameable on some public entity); we have parents so anxious about the safety and self-esteem of their children that no challenge not previously vetted for insipidity should cross their tiny paths; we have councils which post inane notices like “limbs may fall” (or rocks) along country roads (undoubtedly in fear of those voracious defenders of personal loss, the litigation mavens of Australian legaldom now reaching for the pecuniary heights of their pathetic American counterparts. Look where that got those folks! I’m waiting for Albrechtson to write about the well-in-train depradations of legal cupidity which works to turn every relationship in the country into items for dispute – note: they don’t make the big money from mediation!).
Declaration of interest: I’m a bi-national of American origin who’s been pleased to be here rather than there for 35+ years partly because some that culture’s least attractive features have long been visible to my eyes.