Learner Therapist (55) … it takes a village to make a mind

Torrey Orton

February 21, 2015

Parent, sibling, peer, partner… again

 

On this day 17/02/2015 there were 19 YouTube videos entitled ‘It takes a village to…” to make all manner of things, amongst which make a mind was one. The most noteworthy parallel is “to raise a child.” Villages are in declining supply in Australia, though I’m daily reminded of my roots in something near to a village 60 years ago in Massachusetts. It, Lunenburg, had a population of 5,000 which would count for a medium sized country town here, but felt like a village because within 15 minutes bike ride of my house could be reached every kid in my class in the local primary school and all their siblings older and younger than me. I felt like I knew everyone in Lunenburg, except for the occasional foreigners - soldiers from Fort Devens who passed though on the way to and from the bars of the mill town down the road (pop. 45,000). I subsequently spent 9 years in small educational institutions, secondary and tertiary, in equally small towns in New England. Double villages – residential education and small town environs for the price of one.

What reminds me of this heritage is the feeling I have about knowing people in our neighbourhood which has grown by about double in the last years as the newly minted flats of Studio Nine came onto occupational line. I don’t expect to know them all, any more than I knew all the locals of the old days here. What I do expect is to be able to recognise them and thereby know them for being among us and potentially of us – the locals. At a minimum, responsibility for turd patrol can be expected these days. This is one aspect of a village. Every villager knows the rules and respects them by enacting them. Our ‘village’ is a little more eclectic than Lunenburg or the others were, and maybe still are. So rule recognition and following is a bit more variable than I would like…but “it is what it is” as the saying of resignation and withdrawal goes, which I do not suffer lightly.

I’m drawing this out because it seems to me that we suffer a shortage of village, and certainly of “community”, another of those now empty words invoked anytime politicians want to embrace everyone as if they are beneficiaries of some offer which in fact has highly differentiated impacts for various parts of the putative community. So wither therapy in all this? Increasingly I find myself giving little speeches about our social states in explanation of some of the forces to which patients feel themselves subject as they struggle to right their traumatised lives.

These speeches emphasize, implicitly, the near absence of effectively supportive communities for us and the disproportionate presence of oppressive ones. Those for whom this absence doubled by oppression really matters are the traumatised. We in the therapeutic community know that socialising our experience is a basic way of engaging, normalising and embracing it, but that requires community at the village level. I have some patients who speak of their local “village” as the replacement for families of origin which have abandoned them. For them the village is a pub and its environs, a small shops and cafes street with enough density to be peopled most daylights hours and quite few early dark ones – peopled with recognized others.

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)

Wellbeing and Royal Commission Outcomes

Wellbeing and Royal Commission Outcomes
Torrey Orton
April 30, 2009

What’s it all about, this Commission? It’s all about human well-being in Victorian bushfire prone areas. We are concerned with our areas but extend this concern to the experience of others in similar ones (across Australia, and in California and Greece for instance). The underlying question of the Commission’s inquiries is, ‘What is a viable context for human well-being in such areas?’ For many this will include the well-being of indigenous plants and animals, too.

The Black Saturday Royal Commission has the responsibility to recommend on:

1) The preparation and planning for future bushfire threats and risks, particularly the prevention of loss of life.
2) Land use planning and management, including urban and regional planning
3) Fireproofing of housing and other buildings, including materials used in construction
4) The emergency response to the fires
5) Public communication and community advice systems and strategies
6) Training, infrastructure, and overall resourcing needs.

The last is the outcome delivery system, the means through which the first 5 are implemented. So, how it is shaped matters more than the others, since without good implementation the Commission will have been just another Government ‘talkfest’. At least three pre-conditions are important to success. One, that the implementation of new ways of doing anything is understood to be iterative, not a one-shot stamping of a new impression on old materials. Two, that the processes are open and transparent (including no places to hide like ‘commercial in confidence’). And, three, that implementation is well-rounded: its parts and processes are interconnected and interdependent. The last is the focus of the following discussion.

All of these recommendations will touch directly or indirectly on aspects of human well-being. There are models of well-being around. One I like is used by Australian criminologists to drive a new approach to sex offender rehabilitation – where re-offending is an all too usual result. Their model looks like this:

1) Life (including healthy living and functioning) 2) Knowledge 3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences) 4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness) 5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress) 6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships) 7) Community 8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life) 9) Happiness 10) Creativity

*From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives.
Tony Ward, Claire A Stewart,

I am not too excited about happiness and inner peace as core human needs (I think ‘interest’ does better because it isn’t turned in one direction – a ‘positive’ one - about outcomes). While we can dispute the specifics of models, we have a sense of what it means to be human. That is, we won’t dispute well-being as a human need, just its components and configurations. All societies have well-being assumptions. Our models are also implicit most of the time, until decision demand times arrive with high life/death outcomes.

Let’s apply part of our model to the sixth outcome - Training, infrastructure, and overall resourcing needs. The relevant parts may be life (1), knowledge (2), excellence in play and work (3) and community (7). For example’s sake I’ll take the resourcing element as one focus for application of well-being criteria. What would it mean to do this? A series of questions which can be used to establish the parameters of resource decisions and for tracking their implementation:

Life
Will these resources in this configuration best provide for added safety within the technical constraints and not detract from other life sustaining matters?

Knowledge
Will these resources provide the best chance(s) of increasing our understanding (knowledge) of fire related factors as they change across their total spectrum? Eg – is it clear where across various provisions, systematic data gathering and interpretation is necessary and how will it occur? This understanding must be increased at three levels at least: state, locality and family / individual.

Excellence in play and work
Are the programs associated with fire danger amelioration providing best opportunities for local stakeholders (business, residents, etc.) to improve / increase their work and play?

Community
What affects on the whole populations of various localities will the total set of programs have, how will this be monitored, what feedback systems are built in…?

A similar application of selected well-being parameters should be made to the other two parts of item 6 (training and infrastructure) , and each of the other 5 outcome areas, and then across the set as a whole. Attention should be paid to which well-being parameters must apply to assessment of all outcomes.

Underlying all efforts may be this mantra: “It’s just not affordable”.
Access Economics CEO Chris Richardson on ABC 7:30 Report, 280409, talking about the coming financial constraints of the GFC.

This will be at play in the Commission’s decision-making, too. A rounded, well-being based approach will enhance the value achieved from their work. Lack of it will lead to an assumption ruling the proceedings – the neolib assumption about public debt and private provision before which all still kowtow since there is no other accessible language for public discourse!! This one is employable almost with impunity because we cannot know what the future will bring to the ‘economy’. This fact, and its attendant diversely reported feelings of fear, anxiety and anger, will tend to drive everyone and every public process (where those feelings are constantly intentionally exaggerated) to lowest common denominator thinking.