Learner therapist (20)……Interpersonal politics of coupling, intimate or otherwise!

Learner therapist (20)……Interpersonal politics of coupling, intimate or otherwise!
Torrey Orton
January 27 , 2013

The blame and responsibility challenge – creating truth in shared facts

NB – this is a first go at addressing these issues. I expect it may not be the last because they are so difficult for me.

Michael and I have been having this discussion since we met 20 months ago. It keeps coming up so it must matter, at least to us. I'll call it the truth in relationship discussion. Mike might call it the responsibility in relationship discussion. I start from the question: how can we be jointly responsible for anything? He starts with the belief that we have to be responsible for ourselves first. The struggle between individual and group perspectives is the mental history of modernity, one prefigured in the outstanding lives of ancient individuals in all domains of human endeavour rising above terrain of their socio-historical contexts, without which they, too, could never have risen!! Some say, me among them, that the historical balance is out of whack now. Too much me, too little us.


Both are important perspectives and practices, but neither can stand alone. 'How do we get to be responsible?' is one question on the pathway of upbringing. It emerges from the WEness of family, community, and society in their various overlapping institutional forms. No surprise there.


Along the path of upbringing we may have experiences which compromise our capacity for being and feeling responsible for ourselves. Our social systems are as imperfect as our personal ones. Around this fact roils the search of many wounded individuals to parcel the responsibility (blame!) for 'bad outcomes' which they are subject to, and which they fear reproducing themselves in the next generation. This struggle can only be avoided by self-numbing – a long-term strategy bound for failure.


The compromised self develops distortions (I mean that, not disorders) in its capacities to relate to others and itself. Distortion is a normal occurrence because others' responsibility for us can never be perfect, or even close! As some poet roughly says, parents eff us up. We can only learn responsibility from responsibility; our parents learned theirs from their parents, ad infinitum. As well, the generally accepted contents of adult responsibility have changed measurably in the last century or so, and continue to do so now.


Unintentional offense and responsibility


M and I had been stuck in this discord for months, and amicably so, until one day:

M commented on his distress at my dismissive celebration ("Uh yeah…" w/self-satisfied tone) of him seeing something I clearly thought he should have seen before. (This is an often repeated verbal punctuation in the course of our acquaintance and a behaviour I was aware of; I had not yet gotten to the point of being able to interrupt it, only acknowledge it to myself as it irrupted once again.) I asked what feeling he was having after I said it and with some reflection he came up with "offended" or similar, to which I suggested "disrespected" and he accepted that, too.

 

I agreed he should feel "offended" because it was an inappropriate expression on my part…though I expressed it then, still do at times and not just between us. It is not my intent to hurt and wasn't then. But, I was to blame, he agreed, for his bad feeling about himself at that moment. His feeling included some anger….unsurprisingly. As part of our professional self-development, we have built a relationship of shared responsibility which contained the insult and the complaint about it and so opening another level of discussion between us. This experience lifted us up to the level of our relationship as the subject of conversation in a new way.

This article is a step towards formalising the difference in our understanding of responsibility so as to reduce the distance it provokes between us. Recently, I rediscovered on a back shelf Dr Harriet G. Lerner's book The Dance of Anger (1985) which includes a chapter titled "Who's responsible for what?" It brings together two of my favourite subjects – anger and responsibility in the context of intimate relationships. Here she notes:

It is tempting to view human transactions in simple cause-and-effect terms. If we are angry, someone else caused it. Or, if we are the target of someone else's anger, we must be to blame; or, alternately – if we are convinced of our innocence – we may conclude that the other person has no right to feel angry……

…We begin to use our anger as a vehicle for change when we are able to share our reactions without holding the other person responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices and actions. We are responsible for our own behaviour. But we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours ...

I think this is Mike's view, too, though not his exact words… and the view of not a small proportion of my patients who've been exposed to modern no-fault processes which are under-pinned by attitudes / principles like those Lerner proposes above.



Therapy, for those who choose it, is one pathway to undoing distortions of the self. Some undoing takes a few sessions; some takes years. The principal means of effecting recovery is the therapeutic relationship – the most reliable, "evidence-based" characteristic of therapeutic effectiveness, regardless of 'school' of therapy! The relationship stands or falls on the ability of the therapist to be present for patients in ways their histories have not made available to them. In doing so, the therapist is taking responsibility for the patient's recovery…while recognising they cannot be responsible in the end!! This paradox will reappear later in fractured couples' relationships.


Offenses to the self


We had a minor offense to M's self by me. The vignette of its occurrence and our recovery through "shared responsibility" is exemplary of the relationship challenge, while barely noteworthy in the greater picture. A bigger offense might elicit feelings like this:

What is it that is so unacceptable, that I react with such a survival instinct style reflex? What is so horrific about my reaction to these words that has me revert to this primal state? or if not primal, infantile or juvenile, and has me cry ...

"Now look what you made me do!"

I'm particularly interested in childhood experiences which underlie chronic depression and anxiety. Pretty consistently these experiences are major abuses of trust by parental, or broader familial, violations of personal space and self-control – often co-occurring sexual, physical and psycho-social violences. These can be usefully considered offenses to the self, are classified as such in legal systems and labelled traumas in western cultures.


They are chronic for two reasons: one, the offenses are sustained into the present by the social system(s) (families, churches, schools, clubs, workplaces…) in which they were first committed and/or reproduced, and two, optimal recovery often requires some change to those present sustaining systems. Children are not responsible for these behaviours, though almost every adult with an abused childhood attempts to take responsibility for others' abuse of them. Efforts to recover must pass through the blame grinder.


'my pain is your fault'

One couple I have worked with off and on for 2 years found the perspective from which to rise above and hold the pains of their struggles: a place which they shared with equal interest and need. They are a couple both deeply injured in ways which when touched by the other regresses them to catastrophic positions – 'my pain is your fault.' Whichever gets there first on any given occasion, their catastrophic feelings incite the other. They have developed a number of effective workarounds and pre-emptions for many recurring circumstances they share, but not even these can stand up against the most conducive conditions for regression – co-occurring overtiredness, professional stress, excess drink, demanding kids and unbalanced, living parents .

 

The new perspective came into view as they were sinking for the N^th time into the fires of their respective recriminations about each other, dragged down or blown up by the catastrophic certainty of repeated disappointments, each with the other. I interrupted the rising tide of exasperation and suggested they stay with the very specific topic they were on…a matter of how physically close they needed to be when both were highly stressed by various things in their joint and separate lives at that moment. This is, of course, a quite sophisticated exploration already.

One, I don't remember which, verbally stepped back and noted that I had proposed on another occasion that their respective needs for closeness were almost exactly opposed when crisis struck: one withdraws and the other approaches, generating a massive reciprocating tension powered by catastrophic thinking. He/she checked that the other was experiencing it now, which she/he was, and the tension dropped. This was the first time they had created a respite from their struggle without leaving it in a heated rage or quiet despair. That creation remains as a shared platform for their struggle for a workable togetherness at their times of greatest vulnerability. Both acknowledged the achievement.

They had created a shared fact about their relationship which undergirds the potential for getting to new places in it instead of replaying the past, deprived places. This fact expresses and symbolises what the relationship is for, its purpose(s) rather than its product(s). Sometimes it's a revisiting of purposes still in play but lost from view which liberates deep motivation – in fact, the most important things about the relationship: its aspirations.


The blame and responsibility challenge


Now back to Lerner. She says our anger can become a source of useful change,

"…when we are able to share our reactions without holding the other person responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices and actions."

The blame and responsibility challenge – people show up for couples work because they are stuck in patterns of repeating failure to meet each other's needs, especially those which make being a couple worth the effort. It is impossible to progress as a couple without transgressing in the view of one or the other, or both, at some times!! There are three domains of likely transgression: (1) style (intellectual, expressive, etc. - preferences of congenital origin), (2) cultural role determined behaviours (responsibilities, tasks, authorities, etc.) and (3) personal needs/wants arising from particular normal developmental transitions. The manner of transgression often includes violences of aggressive (hitting, yelling, betrayal) and passive- aggressive (withdrawal, sniping, silence…) sorts. Often a number of manners and domains are involved together.


Complicating the effort to connect is the fact that injured parties carry loads of self-blame which inclines them to expect they will fail the needs of the other (I'm not good enough, don't care enough….), and they expect the other to blame them for the failure – a self-sealing circle of partner-assisted, covert self-accusation. Someone has to break through that circle to change the relationship disconnect cycle. To do so requires confronting their own sense of failure and their sadness /rage about it and doing so in a way that minimally elicits the partner's version of the same system. This is what the couple above achieved.


It's all a perception…not.
It cannot be achieved from a perspective which says everything in relationships is just a perception, and nobody's perception has a better claim to attention than anyone else's. That perspective is the driver of irreconcilable differences in which the members of a couple stand on their "right" to their perception, and giving any of it up to have a joint perception is not on offer. It only takes one person with such a stance for the relationship to be doomed all the way to the courts and beyond. This is a small part of the broken relationship population, at least judging from the fact that 90+% of broken marriages do NOT end up in court. They create some kind(s) of shared truth out of their "shared facts".


And this is the area of personal development into interdependence – partnership as the playground for skill building in joint ownership, authorship construction and so on. There are no free kicks in couples development, unless the couple are already developed enough to provide them freely?!! There have to be stumbles along the way and some way to do better than build up personal grievance banks loaded with material to prove the justice of ones disappointments with the other, and vice-versa. A combustible collection.


And so couples therapy has one task above others, which is helping the couple to see their existing and near horizon emerging successes in interdependent functioning, a joint ownership where the boundaries of who owns what are dropped, melt, disappear…which is what the romantics dream of in the merger/ melding of self in love, etc. but can't be dreamed, must be achieved…and all the more difficult in our times because the jointness historically was given by roles, which have for some time now been corroded by modernity. They have to blindly take responsibility for each other. An act of faith, repeated.









 

Rectifications (28) – “…and more”

Rectifications (28) – "…and more"
Torrey Orton
January 17, 2013

After enough comes more

 

"…and more" the Subaru sales advert promised full stop after a series of small value adds which dear buyer prospect can get with your model year 2012 demonstrator currently on clearance – a Forester I think it was. You know, "leather" with an asterisk to a footnote so small and finely printed anyone who could afford to would have trouble reading it. Actually, it's leather trim sort of. After three more such gifts, all of which are standard issue "features", we are offered "and more". A clear case where more is not a lot.


This offer, which I've seen in so many places for so many products, makes me feel confident it's a reliable indicator the phrase has entered normal usage. So, what is "…and more"? Another receptacle for the unrequited phantasies of the potentially buying public…? A teaser, like prices ending in $.95 used to be, stopping which could allow us to retire the 5 cent piece? …but I egress to the productivity door rear left. It is what they (merchants) say when they've run out of things to say and can't admit it to themselves. My butcher doesn't say things like that, perhaps because a steak is a steak unless wagyu or grass-fed, in which cases it's still steak and there's nothing more. Imagine "two rib eyes, and more"? The least they can be is one (two ribs uncut).


Another thing the "…more" is: an afterword when the speaker / writer doesn't think they've offered enough of whatever (not whateva, which is already too much to think about); when they think unconsciously that everything is quantifiable and quantity is what every buyer is looking for (have a look at guided tour adverts in the fast emptying local broadsheets' weekend special sections for another take on this view); or, what happens when your favourite gustatory indulgence runs out after two rounds. More!!


And, there's the Nissan "MORE" I saw last nite (15/01/2013) on the tube as the adjunct to the new model's name and the maker. Just MORE. A culmination of a trajectory I had just barely noticed, carrying an implication of (much MORE) in its slipstream as Nissan struggles to sell the new Leaf which is supposed to produce less, not more.


Then there's the grammatical status of 'more' – started as an adjective, accepted as an adverb, now morphed to a noun and soon to transform into a verb? Like 'impact', 'grow'? What would it be to more something or someone? Perhaps, an undifferentiated swamping? A colourless overwhelm? A tasteless effluent?


Actually, anything would do that adds to the featureless expostulations of spin city, an all-purpose excess for the descriptively incompetent. It's, at the end of the day, another let out word: intends something and specifies nothing…like outcomes, put in place, going forward and so on ever after. Ever so moreish.

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical

Learning to act right (31)… When is a counter-attack ethical
Torrey Orton
Jan. 9, 2012

I look forward to the views of St James Ethics Centre on the ethics of our proposed action described below. At least, some generic guidelines for our thinking so far would be useful. I will be approaching Ethi-Call, the Centre's telephone ethics consulting service for an opinion of the following strategy when they re-open in a week. This article is still in draft at this posting.

I write on behalf of a loose assemblage called Friends of the Fertility Control Clinic (FCC), numbering around 6-8 volunteers who appear solo or in pairs at least 4 of the 6 mornings a week the clinic is open. We support patients arriving between 7:30 and 9AM who are being challenged by Helpers of God's Precious Infants (HoGPIs). The HoGPIs' view is that they are offering help to pregnant women who are, in their own views, being harassed by the HoGPIs.


Proof of the patient perception lies in two facts: almost no patients ever take up the help offer (as reported by the HoGPIs themselves) and, two, once the patients pass by the first offer they are subjected to various degrees of continuing verbal harassment (as defined technically by the Melbourne City Council by-laws, which is also harassment by our standards and, we believe, the standards of most of society). The HoGPIs have on passive display materials which can only be called provocative for patients and partners. Their view is that they make no contribution to patient distress because patients are already distressed – a simple, but self-serving ignorance of the psychology of stress (it is cumulative!).


We have been supporting patients for 18 months now. The HoGPIs in some cases have been protesting for 20 years at this site, or another. We are on a first name basis with the principal actors of the HoGPIs, though none will take responsibility for leadership on the site. The regular HoGPI participants number about 10, with daily numbers varying from 4 to12. The most persistently aggressive of their number are women. Patients do not know they are usually being covertly filmed by one HoGPI and their daily numbers recorded manually, all assumed to be seeking abortions. The HoGPIs do not know which patients are coming for abortions and which for other fertility control help.


Apart from our presence, which patients spontaneously thank us for, we support by actively pointing out when HoGPIs have stepped over the technical harassment line, usually saying to the offending HoGPI, "they said 'no'". Sometimes some of us step between patients and protestors after that line has been crossed and accompany them to the clinic entrance. The pattern of events under discussion occur on a public footpath bounded on one side by the property line of the clinic and overseen by a security guard each day (one of whom was shot to death 10 years ago by a protest-associated gunman; no one in the clinic has forgotten that this is a possible end game of their professional commitment).


Our commitment to patient support is based mainly on the need to reduce patient stress. I am professionally committed to this as a psychologist and psychotherapist. Others of the Friends have their own reasons, but reducing patient stress is always the starting place for our actions. Therefore, any actions we undertake to inhibit, moderate, or deflect HoGPI impacts are judged from a patient stress reduction perspective.


Our actions are largely seen by HoGPIs to be an inhibition of their freedom of expression. They seek legal redress for our perceived indiscretions, e.g. being supposedly "provocative" by pointing out the connection between their anti-abortion line and the Church's clear anti-contraception and anti-gay positions, plus its present difficulties with systemic paedophilia. We are prompted to remind them about the latter difficulty when a regularly appearing priest adds his contribution to the patient experience as he surveys the clinic entrance from 6 feet away: "protect your child." They call the police when offended. This results in no reportable offenses being found.


We have made efforts to assist the HoGPIs to increase the effectiveness of their first offer to patients so that there would be greater uptake potential and less added stress for patients. These efforts have been documented, discussed and refused consistently. Two of their number attempt to discourage the more flagrant misbehaviours of their colleagues.


The HoGPIs are absolutely certain about when life starts and finishes. From that position they judge others' positions as right or wrong. The source, and authority, of their position is the Catholic Church's published positions on said issues, available for all to see on their website. From their point of view, no one has the right to any other position. Hence they label as "murderers", including by implication patients, those differing with them at the FCC. They do not extend to non-believers the democratic consideration we extend to them as our starting point in opposing them – that they have a right to say what they want. We do not oppose their offering help, but we are "going to hell" for opposing their excesses.


Liberal democracies judge that everyone has a right to their claims, but not to ones which endanger the dominance of liberal democratic values – i.e. freedom of thought and its assistant, speech. At the gates of the FCC these two values clash quietly for the four groups of participants: patients and families, Friends of the FCC, security guards and HoGPIs. And so, we have the central challenge for Friends and HoGPIs – the challenge of enforcement of regulations which establish and manage the borders of free speech and offence. No one in enforcement wants to be involved with this highly irregular terrain. The last place the police and council officers want to hear from is the FCC footpath.



We know that the HoGPIs will vigorously defend their perception that they are not harassing the patients, just trying to help them…to the point of claiming, as one did recently when she was haranguing a couple who had turned away from the offer of help, that she was just "speaking to herself" in mouthing the standard accusative mantras at users of the clinic's services.


Now it's time for a new step. Remember the context, in brief, is this: 6 days a week the already emotionally charged patients of the fertility control clinic are confronted by anti-abortion protestors whose behaviour clearly offends them to the point of tears in many cases and outbursts of rage in a few. These patients are entirely within their legal and moral rights to use the services of the clinic.


This will be a more confronting step, at least from our viewpoint. Confronting for us is the fact that we have to become much more systematically attentive to HoGPI misbehaviour in order to push the Melbourne City Council / police authorities to enforce their own rules of public behaviour – notably the rules against public harassment.


So we are committing to a persistent data gathering campaign by live video to clearly document HoGPI transgressions against the law of harassment, and three other recurrent invasions of patient privacy. These three are:

(1) 'gang tackling' approaching patients in pairs or trios with the effect of partially blocking their normal progress along the footpath;

(2) chasing patients from many meters down the footpath, sometimes as far as 100 meters from the clinic so that their approach to the clinic is punctuated by the continuing presence of protestor(s); and,

(3) corralling patients in their cars on arrival so they cannot easily get out.

Harassment data is the most difficult to collect because it requires close video with audio which is highly likely to be more confronting for patients than HoGPIs.


This project, once agreed by all stakeholders on the FCC side, will be clearly advertised to the HoGPIs, as have been all our other initiatives. That is, we are trying to work with democratic values of openness and transparency in a context where they are not shared by the 'opposition' in the name of their right to free expression.


Torrey Orton
AHPRA Reg. No. PSY0001120138
11 Wertheim St
Richmond, Vic., 3121
Australia
Mob. +61 (0) 419 362 349
Skype - torreyo

Learner therapist (27)…… Valuing your injured self

Learner therapist (27)……
Valuing your injured self
Torrey Orton
Dec 27, 2012

"…When will I get over this…or, will I ever?"

 

Over the years a recurrent challenge for many of my patients has been handling a sense of wasted life that they carry with their various injuries. The repetition of the question "Will I ever get over this?" emphasizes the difficulty of their recovery challenges. It contains a hope that they could return to some pristine pre-injured state (in themselves) or status (in the eyes of imagined knowing others) struggling with an expectation that they have been inescapably tarnished by their histories.
Part of this sense comes from the victim's perception that he is the author of his own injuries. Another part comes from the injuries being seen to be his fault when it cannot be – childhood violations of numerous kinds are imposed by powerful others (usually close ones). While I may wonder about the value of my life, as many of my acquaintances do about theirs, I'm not confusing this with the wonder of patients whose injuries are deep and long term. The shared part is the human self-evaluation drive. Victims' self-evaluation drives are hyper-vigilant versions of a natural drive, like their threat detection systems which sense danger all the time, correctly but inappropriately.
Valuing the injured part
Certain injuries carry an almost irrepressible shame/guilt – especially those of a sexual nature. As patients' lives unfold in various attempts to create workable ones, they may gather up a trail of partial starts at this or that, or long term stuckness in not ever 'good enough' occupations, relationships and life-styles. How can such a life trajectory be seen to be valuable in more than a pollyanaish way (well, you tried hard, dear) that seems to default to dismissal of the injury? My belief is that most traumas can be valued, at least a lot more often than they may be, and that they must be valued for a final escape from their fate of victims (by embracing them for all to see).
Certainly there are people who have risen above congenital injuries and war injuries which left their bodies deprived of parts and processes. And most of them "carry" their injuries in more or less visible ways. My patients "carry' theirs without others, and sometimes themselves, knowing it. Memory of early psycho-social injuries is notoriously unreliable. Sometimes the injury can only be perceived in the tracks of present relationships and life processes. These early memories are often blocked as well, and the over-developed capacity for blocking distorts the aspects of life where the injury was experienced decades before – again, most notably, blocks to feeling, expression, and imagination in relationships.
If we judged the virtue of being injured from the treatment of those injured on our behalf – for example, our soldiers, sailors, fire-fighters, and police – we'd keep them hidden. And so it is with those of us who carry our injuries to the soul, spirit, and self silently and unobtrusively, and are quickly pushed back in their containers by the deft hand of others' instantaneous disregard whenever we let them slip into their view. On a good day our slips might be deigned to a treatment from another – 'what you should do is…' type stuff. A different push back in the box. Not often a call to 'share'.
Strength from adversity
As a collective matter, the bearing of active systemic disregards of ethnicity, race, gender, religion or class yield peculiar strengths in those who survive by quietly putting up with them. These strengths include insight into the real dynamics of the oppressive system(s). Ask the nuns about the church; ask the women about the men, ask the blacks about the whites….though a 'consultation' about exploitation by the exploiters (openness and transparency and honesty and all that) is likely to be characterised by impenetrable withholding by the oppressed which the oppressors will not seek to penetrate while at the same time discouraging any expression of the perceived oppression. Notice our long social unhearing of the sexually victimised. Any unguarded 'sharing' of perceived oppression (say, of sexist or racist behaviour in any of the footballs) will be put back in the box with defensive disregard – 'it's just a joke', 'it was just a bit of fun'…It's hard to progress bullying, harassment, and hazing in the systemic fog of oppressors' denials.
As a personal matter, the abused/oppressed often find sustenance through success in parallel systems – e.g. the violated child whose gifts translate easily into school success. These successes are all quite normal; the unoppressed do them, too. Personal development, normally, involves a bunch of small steps of increasing complexity and intensity. Progress – that is, a completed development stage – is marked by internal and/or external 'tests' when a normal performance of a life task is required and achieved for the first time in its fullness or wholeness. Some of these developments are required of all humans as foundations of living. Many are possible for all humans, while very high standard performance is possible only for a few and usually only in a few task domains for any individual. The renaissance man/woman is a figment attested by its scarcity.
Acknowledge trying
What recovery from an injured self particularly strengthens are virtuous habits: persistence, focus, assertiveness, etc. As a result a victim made something of herself in unpromising conditions. She tried and tried again as the Quit ad now correctly encourages smokers!! Al Anon has done this for alcoholics for decades. As I've noted elsewhere, success cannot be the measure of a life's quality since the internal and external conditions for high achievement, or any achievement, are not equally available to all. Trying can be expected, and that trying which occurs in the face of a powerful socio-politico-economic headwind is universally well thought of, honoured even.
But, when the headwind is also psychological, the right of the person to honour for their efforts is compromised. We still do not think the injuries of abuse are injuries like a car accident, a road side bomb explosion, a bush fire and so on…all things which have very definite time and place boundaries. They can be seen to be finished and the damages are often visible. The socio-psychologically injured tend to take on themselves this debasing of their emotional currency and so may disable their acknowledgement of their trying.
Another value to be acknowledged is the "functional" parts of themselves which are the basis for what appears to others to be a normal life. The injured often do not even acknowledge these objectively assessable parts. They wince when a compliment is extended for a clearly, undeniably, and externally validated good piece of work. They shift from 'I' to 'you' as subject of their discourse. They cannot put together words of self-approval like 'I did X well', or even 'OK'.
The denial of their uninjured self, or its obscuring in the tailings of the injury, is a collateral damage of the original injury. Learning to accept their own achievements and intentions and valuing by others is competitively as challenging as overcoming their inappropriate guilt for their injury. Resistance to doing so is one of the public signs of hidden injury.
Build self-acknowledgement
How to work on this self-acceptance of injured part(s)? (1) Build self-acknowledgement. I've tried recently to directly confront a self-denigrating thought by amplifying the patient's success achieved in parallel systems (work, school, play). I do this by persistently, sometimes irritatingly, recognising all achievements a patient lets pass unacknowledged, even if mentioned by them (as if they are dead, or recognition would be a kind of dying) and contradicting all implicit disavowals of their own worth (which are an actual piecemeal reinjuring of the self). The disavowals are easier to see as the surface disturbances arising from deeper self-denials. Once started on the pathway to self-acknowledgement, homework of various kinds can target and reinforce self-acknowledgment. A sign it is 'taking' as a normal self is an improved rate of unconflicted positive self-report in session – for example, the steady disappearance of apology as the first step of entering a session and growing into taking charge of session agenda setting.
Understand family history
A different stage in treating injured parts is (2) to pursue understanding how the family (or other systems) became damaging to oneself over time. Knowing that one or both damaging parents were themselves damaged by damaging parents over successive generations gives a perspective which modifies the sense of injustice about one's own trauma. To some extent it no longer has the intensely personal feel it always did. The mining of family history produces appreciation of one's place in it, and usually of one's place in a long history of trauma that is not merely familial. Rather often regional, social, cultural, national or global.
This generation's family trauma is fired by the unexpressed / unacknowledged traumas of the previous ones. Look for the family members who carry undiscussables damages which they sustained for the benefit of future families – the warriors who survived wars for example; the workers who never recovered from depressions...!! Follow the pathways of alcohol and violence within and across generations. Expect to find traumatic peaks in tandem with social, economic and political troughs. Note that there was a 40 year trough between 1910 and 1950 covering two world wars and a global depression. That's enough to affect two generations directly, the latter being the Boomers' parents – the parents of our patients.
Seek acknowledgement from abusers
Next, (3) there's getting acknowledgment of their injuries from those responsible – an experience which redeems life from the pit of self-blame. This can be obtained from others, but often defaults to oneself when the others are even more injured than oneself. The process of seeking, demanding even, acknowledgement of their responsibility from those who perpetrated the traumatic events is a critical step, even if often only a virtual one because the blameworthy are beyond reaching – dead, decrepit, demented….
…this step is critical because through it patients achieve confirmation of their historical experiences, relieving themselves of the paranoid process of retaining the injuries as secrets and creating reliable facts about those experiences. It may be that what is confirmed is their own memory and that has to be accepted without validation by the other(s) concerned. Either way, confirmed or not, self-acceptance as injured is central to recovery. This should lead to apology, completing the guilt erasure process, and may be supported by reparation for damages experienced and guarantees no further ones will occur. These four steps are the basics of a reconciliation cycle.
Create personal power by confronting
To work through this cycle requires development of a further capacity – the capacity to act in the face of explicit and implicit challenge. In other words, patients have to increase their personal power to do any of the above. I work on this by making that objective explicit quite early in the work, saying 'If you want to work through this thoroughly you will need to increase your personal power, and working through steps (like those above) will have that effect'. Many patients are surprised / shocked and then pleased with this idea. The pathway to power is a bit more challenging than accepting or embracing the objective of becoming more powerful. Some of my earlier posts on communication interventions for relationship improvement suggest details of the work.
A major step in confronting abusers is what I call 'self-outing'. It may start with coming to therapy. Finding friends and others who can be trusted to accept the offer of the patient's pain is often an important prior step or early result of therapy. This finishes with confronting victimisers, especially the family system which keeps the family secrets. Some patients go further to join victim advocacy organisations. This is courageous work since each offer of the injured self is a chancy move – even the best friends and colleagues cannot be guaranteed to be good receivers. They, too, may reject the patient's experience. Public advocacy is an invitation to re-experience abuse, since to advocate is to speak into a prevailing breeze of social disregard, if not condemnation, of the matters and people advocated. Another form of whistle blowing.
I am aware that in the background of my working over this post stands the question of what is a technically traumatic life experience. I offer a simple definition for therapists which I use as a guideline for my listening with any patient who appears with serious, endemic anxiety or depression – what they consider persistently life-distorting feelings and behaviours and outcomes. I also offer it to the afflicted as a search guideline for themselves. The definition is:
DIMRS = a quintet of experiences with collective traumatic impact

Death-threatening – the victim feels in danger of death, though not necessarily physical death; spiritual or emotional death will do just fine for a verdict of worthlessness; and

Inescapable – a feeling of hopelessness because he / she is caught in the grip of another on whom they are totally dependent for their survival, both physically and emotionally / spiritually; and

Multi-dimensional – damages occur in many dimensions of well-being: self-care, self-image, aspiration(s), emotional hyper-vigilance; and

Recurrent – the threat is present more or less all the time for years, sometimes up to the present adult time in which they appear in therapy – more or less all of their lives to date; decades in their minds and present living; and

Systemically distorting – the victim's capacity to enter into and sustain relationships of many kinds is restricted by profound distrust expressed in bad choice of potential partners of many kinds (intimate, peer, work, etc.) and inappropriate levels of commitment: too much or too little, sometimes oscillating between the two; the distrust extends to their own perceptions.

Learner therapist (28)…… Unemployment close-up

Learner therapist (28)……Unemployment close-up
Torrey Orton
Dec 5, 2012

This is our world, and our patients'…

I was talking about job prospects with one of my long-term unemployed patients. It's been a couple of years at least since he had a regular job. He has persistently over-fulfilled the Centrelink job seeking performance measures, gotten a reasonable bunch of interviews, including final round levels. A number of these opportunities have been by direct approach from the employers to him.
Apart from the now old normal experience of having applications unacknowledged, phone calls let run off into the tele ether and promised follow-ups to interviews languishing for weeks without notice…apart from these indignities there's one worse: after being told explicitly, and without soliciting it himself, that the employer would respond certainly "tomorrow", no response occurred on that day, or since.
Nor was there any acknowledgement of the fact that there was not going to be a fulfilment of the unsolicited promise of contact, now 'today'!! I was seeing him 'today' at 9am, the second day after the promised "tomorrow" and while quite excited about having had a good interview which seemed almost to be a sign-and-start tomorrow at the end, he was beginning to slide. In his own words, he was "running downhill" with each passing hour of hearing nothing.
He was running like a stream down a slope and running like a marathoner off the peak of a hill – both pulled and propelled by the weight of the decline. The forces emerged and increased with each passing moment of expected response unfulfilled – a process he has borne repeatedly over the years of his search. This will not be a bearing which yields much new, anything which is generative, creative, soul supporting. He's sliding towards depression again.
The "sunrise of anticipation" and hope was running downhill towards a "sunset of (his) expectations"…again. This is the dynamic of depression from the start of which rises the glimmer of a drink, or the thrill of a bet, or the taste of a fast food bite…the compulsions which become their own free-standing injuries with their own self-sustaining internal dynamics of running downhill. Almost irresistible forces for him and so many others.
All he needs to know is human closure of a simple human interaction so he can stop expending himself in hopeless, draining expectation. Not even that labour is honoured with recognition. Rage cannot be far away when so disregarded by others. How many are there in the army of seekers having this experience every day??
I'm reminded by writing this that simple civility, acknowledgement of humanness, is the engine of connectedness and engagement in our public lives. Its lack – attested by so many letters to editors – is also an engine. But now it's an engine of anger fuelled by the denial of self which the unacknowledged suffer in their vulnerability. Fire it often enough and anger becomes implacable and its expression most likely to be self-destructive.
Two months ago I went to a public meeting in my neighbourhood which drew almost everyone affected by a major planning shemozzle our council (Yarra) had committed. Officials of many stripes were present. A Council officer chaired, and not badly at all. But he and his colleagues drew flack for 30-40 minutes for the pain their failure had caused us. Not until almost everyone had had a go did they do the obvious thing: say they were sorry. That is civility.
The flack fell to nil from there on, though real issues of substance remained to be negotiated and for the most were done so successfully, for the moment. I wish I could hope for my patient the same civility but neither he nor I expect it.

Leaving home …for good.

Leaving home …for good.

Torrey Orton

November 28, 2012*

 

Marching, walking, dancing to different drummer(s)

 

Home is as much a state of mind as a place. I never felt at home in my home town Lunenburg, Mass., though I was hardly atypical for the area. I played baseball with a definite style (pitching in Little League for the Fire Department Red Sox in 1951-55, while holding down third base when not firing from the mound). My unpadded tackle football was competitive, and skating and skiing more than passable. I had a paper route (winter deliveries on Sunday morns a specialty – not much competition for that job) and cut acres of grass each summer til age 14.

 

Then I went to boarding school. That pretty much confirmed what I didn't know – that I didn't fit in back home. It was a matter of class. One of my primary school classmates had said as much towards the end of that era, so I should have known, but… Subsequently I didn't fit into my boarding school class either.

 

It's by reason of not fitting in that I could leave home in numerous ways for the rest of my life, while being constrained in my moves by fear of not fitting in elsewhere either. It took a while to realise that I would never fit in because I didn't really want to. I have never liked people en masse of any ethnicity, though foreign ones are somewhat more bearable than my own because their shared traits (which make them not me) are not required of me. So, some cultural traits became objects of acquisition for personal diversity's sake and an eventual basis of professional flexibility.

 

I manage a one minute Chinese handshake easily when asked by the other's grip to do so. I've eaten some Nonstandard Issue meals, offered a refill of anything drinkable at least three times to everyone at the table and equably resisted such offers from others…Actually the acquisitions came quite naturally, so I guess my flexibility in this respect was real.

 

None of this not fitting ever pinched my toes as an undersized pair of shoes do. It all still is natural to me. Occasionally someone would nominate my standing back from the mass as arrogance or unreachability or likely to be last married, as my boarding school yearbook proposed. The last was almost true but it wasn't a race that I was in, at least in my view. The second is probably true and the first is a danger I actively patrol – in other words, my guarded potential for arrogance is a pathway to qualified reachability. Another of my classmates won the latest title by about 15 years over me. He's one of us, too.

 

One side-effect, sometimes central, of this attribute is loneliness accompanied by success self-reproach. I never got anywhere conventionally, yet (as one of my LinkedIn colleagues just reminded me). I never really wanted to, though the environing social noise recommended that I should have. An early therapist summarised his impression of me as "homeless", which clanged like the bell of an Alpine cow herd's queen…audible over great distances as a slow paced clunking in the empty spaces of my brain.

 

The more I mature (which is what I say my ageing is doing to me) the better my natural distance fits me and the easier it is to bring together the somewhat meandering pathway my life is into something which feels whole and, more importantly, can be deployed in toto in the works I now do. This is what the therapist me purveys, both to myself and others.

 

I know there are others like me. They are my best friends throughout my life span. Some are more rigorously devoted to our self-regarding integrity, others less but still recognisably so. We are members of a scattered band recognised by others as such for our difference, for our marching (walking, running, dancing) to the different drummers who we also are. None of us would accept all, or perhaps much of this description. How could we and remain members of this avowedly lightly attached family? But in a Wittgensteinian family way we recognise the shared themes, traits and tendencies among us.

 

Groucho's memorable explanation for his curmudgeonly prickliness is our motto – never join a club that would have us as a member. It's counter-typal to say so, but we are model individuals. Rather do what we want than play along with anyone. Not really what the individualists who march to political /ideological drums mean are we? And being at home with myself is not as comfortable as the trip might suggest, accompanied or not.

 

* This post was started two years ago as a title which drifted into the lower reaches of my development archive. It resurfaced a week or so ago as I was looking for something else, now still hidden though much more recent. So sink weak initiatives. Yet that one had $350 as an outcome attached to it. So fail incentives.

Learner therapist (25)…… Congruence, integrity and self-defence in the anger position

Learner therapist (25)…… Congruence, integrity and self-defence in the anger position
Torrey Orton
Nov. 14, 2012

The "anger position" and congruence, integrity and self defence

One of the things that my patients struggle with is their anger. Not the anger which they know but that which they do not. They had the anger drilled out of them by their abusers early in their abused lives. They learned to hide it so as not to attract additional abuse – the abuse beyond the everyday abuse which they survived by dissimulation, pre-emption or collusion with their abusers, abetted often by abuser partners' collusion with the abusers. Failing these tactics, they caught occasional reminders of how much worse things could be than they already were.

One of these patients remarked she did not want to be in the "anger position". The disparaging of anger's reputation among the human emotion suite is systemic well beyond childhood of course. Women are often sharply aware of male aversion to their anger. Tears often get to do double duty as media for sadness and anger. If these fail, there's the backup position of self-denigration for being angry – one patient sharply calls herself "a bitch" for directly voicing her anger to others, especially other women. Then, she doubles down on it by saying "I don't want to be that person in the anger position."

Denizens of white collar work-places often report the unspoken rules of many offices mandate feeling-free interactions while the value espousals warrant 'transparency", "openness" and "honesty" – all states whose fulfilment require perceived authenticity. That is, the values have to feel real in action, not just mouthed, parroted, etc. But real = emotional in this case. And if the truth or honesty is an important honest truthfulness, then appropriate feelings are required for its expression (as were required for its perception in the first place). The plea to 'be rational' and similar encomia to feeling-free thought are among the most resilient fooleries we are beset by in our public lives, especially from various cultural and social heights.

Another patient recently explored her rage at a deeply manipulative move by her clearly incompetent boss. The rage went two ways at once: towards him for his professional chicanery and toward herself for being powerless in his face (and consequently shamed and guilty before imagined friends who she might discuss the situation with but couldn't). This bifurcation of attention reflects a lifetime's self-doubt and high achievement for her, with the doubt dominating the inner battle and achievement the outer one. All up, a lot of conflict expressed in various anxieties.

So what for patient anger?

Why does it matter? Just as satisfaction registers a pleasure with a successful action, anger registers the invasiveness of another's attack or disapproval of one's own mistake(s). The abused carry many signs of injury. One of the less obvious is injured feeling receptors and expressors. Their emotional range is confined, as was their action range, by the abuse. The distance between the ends of a feeling spectrum like irritation - anger - fury - rage are driven closer together; it's harder to express any degrees of difference. One public figure who looks and sounds like this is Malcolm Fraser. Similarly, Julia Gillard does a too good job of reducing her speech to flat, ponderous, sleep-inducing noise. They share facial immobility. Were they abused? If not, then the disease of self-restraint is much more deeply spread among the competent than I imagined.

Three steps to effective anger: becoming congruent (knowing what you feel), acknowledging integrity (deciding from what you feel) and acting in self-defence (acting from what you feel). They can be learned, usually building on some pre-existing residuals of natural capability created while preparing for engaging an established threat.

Congruence – the ground of awareness in the fizz of anger, when inside and outside are aligned

The only way to avoid congruence when repressing anger (or even irritation) is to be numb to the feeling…in which case, though, the fact of numbness will be broadcast by incongruous non-verbals like stiff faces, rigid speech delivery, and clumsy movements. This will be on display for those who want to see. We may be congruent in this way without knowing it and others assist our ignorance by not pointing out explicitly what they can see, often to their advantage in the sense of saving them from an imagined conflict they want to avoid. And around and around it goes until an explosion point is reached inevitably but unpredictably in the experience of those involved. By that time the anger is way over the top…and undirected to an appropriate or workable subject between the parties. Such explosions are the stuff of everyday couples breakdowns, tit-for-tat accusations of bullying at work and the public micro-rages we are increasingly exposed to. Emotional congruence may occur most compellingly when long gathered anger bursts on the unsuspecting and minimally deserving heads of its sources, or maybe just lookalike passers-by that trigger the gathering emotional storm. Brilliant, flaring and frightening for all because almost out of control.

How does this oh so common scenario come to play out? The persistent disapproval of any form of anger yields an effective self-restraint which fakes self-control until the actual perceived offenses pile high and wide enough to threaten suffocation. But it attracts real rage in return, it creates it, authorises it, validates it and those involved are cast into a who's to blame game that is irresolvable because the sources incite more rage. "This is what we usually do." Congruence is a starting place for engaging real issues, but not a restful one.

Integrity – is the place of truth in oneself when the real self can be used…
 

… to decide the realities we want to engage (if we can choose to do so). That real self, the reliable background to our everyday life, is the home of basic values, notably justice and fairness, and virtues like persistence and courage, which seem to be alive across all kinds of cultures, even the most spiritual, communal or familial included. These values are understood to apply equally to self and others, though their application may, unsurprisingly, lean towards self and own group. They provide a sense of direction for action and a mixture of confidence and compulsion to take action. For example,

…instead of falling into despair, Shawna got mad at what she felt was a betrayal. 'Mad' was not ideal, but it was better than depressed and full of self blame! Indeed, her anger actually seemed to lift her depression and allowed her some energy to decide what to do about taking care of herself…

 

PSYCHOTHERAPY IN AUSTRALIA
• VOL 18 NO 4 • AUGUST 2012 pg. 19

For more information visit www.margaretwehrenberg.com.

And, so to ….

Self-defence – the steps which stop and eventually pre-empt previously enraging threats

Self-defence may need to be either forward (assertion-aggression) or backwards (explanation, delivered assertively). So, what to do in everyday pre-rage circumstances? Start with the real anger only when timely, etc. Otherwise, acknowledge and defer the anger to a later time, place and content in order to take care of present business which is not directly implicated in the anger and loss of which would undermine most foundational conditions for engaging the anger usefully (for instance, by ending an employment relationship or intimate one prematurely).

Practising anger – some steps and tools for patients, and others

To get better at expressing anger requires practice as does your golf, singing, dancing, writing… through persistent small steps as in any skill building.
1) Start expressing anger by punching a pillow, boxercise, hitting a tree trunk with a stick, speaking somewhat louder than you normally do and increasing the volume slowly up to yelling or screaming. A good walk in the woods or on a perhaps windy beach will provide venues for this step.
2) Continue exploring it through martial arts, boxing, any gross motor sport – preferably within a meditative framework! Notice how hard it is to embody your anger without falling into freezing or wild Flight or fierce Fight (losing control).
3) Cultivate control of body mind and heart by choosing one physical discipline for long term development. Physical is critical because cultivating a capacity for appropriate expression of anger is an engagement with the freeze/fight/flight response system, all three of whose terms are physical. The FFF system readies the body for action. Those of us with repressed feelings may not even notice them coming into play because our bodies are out of tune for them. The body is our instrument of feelings in two senses: for perceiving them and expressing them. An untuned instrument will never play well.
4) Start employing anger. Build skilled competence by strategic intervention planning and execution along the lines of basic graduated skill development programs of any kind: a sequence of motivation (identifying the defence need), observation (of competent actors), approximation (visualisation of proposed actions, etc.), initiating (trialling the actions), debriefing (did well, do different, etc.), replanning, re-initiating, debriefing…..Some of the relevant communication technologies to be mastered are available in previous "Learner therapist" posts in this blog.
Finally, it should be apparent that what's proposed in this post is applicable to everyday life, not just catastrophic circumstances. Act well – congruently, integrally and self-defensively, remembering that the best defence is a good offense.