Learning to act right (49)… learning, unlearning, relearning cycle

Torrey Orton
Feb. 10, 2015

Is that a signal you’re making, or just a wandering wiper?

 

There’s an empty place feeding my feeling of disorientation, of not being in the world which I am in at that moment, when I shift from left hand drive to right hand drive and back again. This has been a relatively regular occurrence over the last five months as I’ve adjusted to a new car while occasionally revisiting the old one. It’s interest for me here, apart from the fact of repeatedly being seen to turn on and off headlights then on and off windscreen wipers and cleaning cycles totally inappropriately – e.g. wipers when turning left at a T junction; lights when the rains came down! – is that I am exposing myself to a very sharply focused example of learning, unlearning and relearning. This is the stuff of neuro-scientific phantasy – the plastic brain and all that.

Driving for 55 years

But there’s more. It’s the left right, right left confusion. My new car has its steering column mounted tools on the wrong side. That is, for a right hand drive car the turn indicators and lights are operated from the right hand side in Australia, regardless of manufacturing origin, but the new car has retained its European positioning, trading its firm market position for an excuse not to do the engineering required to shift them to the right along with everything and everyone else??

 

I’ve been 95% driving the new car for five months with very occasional forays in the old one. Each time I have the experience of revisiting the old car I have the following challenge: approaching a turn of choice my left hand goes for the turn indicator (new car position) before I notice it. This is a classic automatic, habitual function which sets off before we know it, as a good habit should do (that’s how you know a habit is ‘good’ – if it ‘works’ by pre-empting the need to consciously choose an action). But I’m driving the wrong car and I ping the windscreen cleaning system instead with the above mentioned “wandering wiper” effect, if there’s anyone to notice it apart from me.

Just describing this is difficult because everything has to be turned around and around to give the proper impression – a video would do better but who wants to see a video of the wandering wiper syndrome?? And, how could it be made except by a dash cam cued to the lights / wipers complex??

I’m noticing as a write this that a background factor may be that this manufacturer’s (Audi) arrogance triggers a deeper level of driving learning – those first 14 years I spent driving in Massachusetts, never interrupted by functional wrong-sidedness!! On some standard neuro-scientific understandings, specific types of learning are produced in specific brain compartments. My driving compartment, so to speak, may have a residue of these original learnings clagging up my system, given the small chance to do so which a dysfunctional trigger might provoke. No wonder I feel so disoriented by these small moments. They may be taking me back to my teendom. Perhaps I’m doing the learning/ unlearning/ relearning cycle on historically discrete competences held together in the package that is me, which has to produce a recognizable action sequence out of the range available and match it with a real world in the now. Maybe? If so, a good opportunity for a performance clag-up.

 

 

 

 

Learning to act right (48)… “Ah my…”

Torrey Orton
Jan. 31, 2015

What to do with a second hand emotion (thanks, Tina Turner)?

I’ve come recently to realise that I share with my security colleague T. at the Fertility Control Clinic a clinging residue of low grade exasperation with the behaviours of some anti-abortionists and some patients. They are as one in their repetition of an array of actions slightly silly or persistently contrary to their own interests.

The anti-abortionists repeatedly do two dumb things: one, offer a message to patients which once refused shifts to various levels and styles of berating the patients they were pretending to care about; and, two, offering their message to clearly unsympathetic local residents who frequent the pathways daily.

Some patients, on other hand, get stuck in conversations with protestors because they are following cultural traditions of public civility which lock them into engaging once they have stopped smilingly to acknowledge the offers they discover they don’t want. Politeness paralyses them, and they in turn paralyse us (unintended consequence to be sure; however…five or ten unavoidable times in 90 minutes creates its own effects) waiting as we must for them to disconnect and continue their progress to the Clinic door.

And T. and I are often one in expressing quite spontaneously our exasperation with a low volume sigh of “Ah my…” almost in synch. Say it aloud and feel the phrase’s natural rhythm draw the tension out of you. Then try it in company. More tension dispersal. The CBT oriented stress management community would commend acceptance and commitment with a dash of catastrophic thought reduction to sooth our self-imposed wounds. They would fail to notice that this is a systematically reinforced reinjuring powered by our respective commitments to the impossible task of smoothing the patient pathway to their legitimate medical service. Neither of us, along with others of the Friends of the Clinic and security services, are yet willing to forego that commitment.

So, say it loud “Ah my…”

Learner Therapist (53) … Revisiting an abuse to clear it

Torrey Orton

January 28, 2015

Guilt and trauma

 

I’m going to stretch a concept a bit here. Abuse has a well understood content in therapy, characterised by a range of behaviours which distort personal development at any age. The distortion I’m concerned with – guilt – is especially inculcated (a word I have never used out of disapproval of its implications for learning, but here is where it speaks its truth) by religions and cultures to establish internal controls meeting externally sponsored and sanctioned behaviours and values.

 

This social use of guilt as control is most notable in matters sexual and procreative of all descriptions. The controls (the abuses in question here) are aimed at ensuring that historical narratives of sexuality are sustained, in the process sustaining historical inequities and iniquities along with them. These are fought out daily today, within cultures and between them. They reflect transitions from normals to new normals in the most foundational areas of life.

 

So, what to do with such a historical distortion carried by a patient as part of her present stress overload burden (marriage / relationship breakdown, betrayals of various sorts, retrenchments, illness, etc.)? I’ve had a number of these patients, and in two cases resorted to the following strategy for deflating the guilt which drives their self-oppression: I suggested they go back to the beginning, back to their guilt’s self-acknowledged origins in their Catholic girlhoods.

 

There were two reasons for this suggestion. First, the origins in the Church entailed its own forgiveness through confession and, second, their present guilts from those origins are in a much changed socio-cultural context from that in which they grew up – notably the collateral sins of sexism in particular are on display, backed by the Church’s leaders’ failure to command right behaviour of its agents, the priests and nuns. Some of the things they had been taught to feel guilty about are no longer on the guilt feeding horizon, at least of everyday practitioners of Catholicism.

 

 A relevant example of the changed cultural context of the Church appeared in the NYTimes as I was starting this post. It exemplifies the results of the struggle against the guilting forces of the mid-20^th century, especially the Sixties. Columnist Frank Bruni, writing in the New York Times on 26 Jan. 2015 says,

“At my request, Gallup did a special breakdown of its “Values and Beliefs” survey from last May and looked at how the principles of people who identified themselves as Catholics diverged (or didn’t) from those of Americans on the whole. Catholics were only slightly less open to birth control, with 86 percent of them saying that it was “morally acceptable” in comparison with 90 percent of all respondents. But Catholics were more permissive than all respondents when it came to sex outside marriage (acceptable to 72 percent of Catholics versus 66 percent of Americans overall) and gay and lesbian relationships (70 percent versus 58).”

 

Finding an appropriately modern priest was a challenge in one case, but once found, the reduction in guilt was sustainable from that experience of a now unnecessary confession. Interestingly, the priest in question was also mature enough for the Church to want not to hear from him much anymore. The other example is still in the works.

 

What surprised me, for a while, was that such an idea should come to me so easily and offering it to the patients came equally easily. Priests, of course, play a role like therapists in being bound by a personal and institutional code of silence, and so when not in the role of judge as when preaching, they are safe carriers of ‘sins’. That’s a simple transferential equation.

 

The underlying reason, which I discovered by taking action, is that acknowledgment and apology from relevant authorities or authority figures, is an essential step in trauma recovery. It frees the traumatised of the self-critique which paralyses them in their trauma. Confronting the traumatising authority (something the patient has to do for themselves) lifts the lid on one of the traumatic dynamics.

Learning to act right (47)… Repetition revisited… a comforting failure??

Torrey Orton
Jan. 27, 2015

Learning to park, again

 

For five months I’ve been learning to park again! That’s on the back of 55 years’ experience on three continents in two modalities (left and right), and 5 months of rear video and audio assist. The new car was measured for fit with our off-street parking space, passing by about four inches greater width than its predecessor. Length about equal. The space in question is like an on-street parking space, but behind an automatic sliding gate parallel to the street and about 1 car’s width wide by two cars’ lengths long.

 

It’s that four inches I’ve been learning to command with quite intermittent success. Here’s the achievement standard: when I get the angle of entry correct and the closeness of passage bearably delicate (i.e. – failure to rub off door panel paint on the driver’s side gate post and front fender paint on its opposite number) a best of class single-go entry to the parking space with no back and fill moves will result. This I have managed about five times in these five months. The rest (almost one go a day) have been variations on two or three back-and-fills to be able to close the gate with me and the car inside it.

 

…but I’m not getting it right

 

Now I might have thought I would get this right, since I’ve always been a high performance parker, till now. And this is why I’m writing. I’m not getting it right but by chance almost. I’m not finding the right path and then repeating it, I’m just repeating the looking for it! Weird.

 

Why not trial and error the path, as any sensible person including me does when learning something new? Why not notice the front and rear markers for the right place to start the approach to the gate? Why not notice the point at which the turn to enter the gate has to begin to optimise the entry space for backing in?

 

I don’t know why not for all these except that I started trying to park here with the assumption that I would progressively get it right and that would include the implicit signals for the required moves. This assumption, in turn, involves an implicit assumption that the learning will occur without trying, so to speak, which is often enough true when an action has to be repeated, whether we learn it or not. This is not, therefore, a short term memory problem, which I have plenty of and reliably expect. For them there is a treatment: conscious repetition of the prospective memory item by doing it over a couple of times, or even better by writing it in the pocket notepad I always carry for such events.

 

This is a mistaken assumption problem supercharged by my resistance to the facts above – namely I keep getting it wrong way above what normal evidence-based practice should allow. I could say I’m enjoying the potluck approach I’m taking and the evidence for that is I don’t get irritated about messing it up. And so, I could say I should get irritated and there’s something wrong with me that I don’t. But I’m not irritated and any reader of my blog posts can tell when I’m irritated about something.

 

A comforting failure??

 

Maybe there’s something comforting in the repetition of my approach, which is wrong about 90% of the time on the above numbers? The comfort being the promise of a small challenge which has a high failure rate and low salience. Much less than an expected change of street lights when I’m close to the end of a cycle on a normal progress on a normal street. At those I get a small charge of disappointment that the fates of timing have corralled me again.

 

Not so the pathway to the safety of my home. I can say now that maybe this is a presence exercise undertaken without intent, but under the thumb of necessity, as the best are. Evidence in search of a theory is also a scientific process. Hmmm.

 

 

Learner Therapist (52) … Fear of losing the edge

Torrey Orton

January 22, 2015

 

For the second time in a week I ran into a patient from a traumatised background fearing that if he recovered from his defences against the trauma he might lose his life energy, drive and motivation…that his strength would be diminished or undermined, that he would lose his edge. I remember a very similar feeling myself five decades ago when I was interrupted in my life’s progress by depressive episodes. At the time I argued (to myself of course) against finding some help with the notion that I would lose my quite clear edge in my chosen activities, while in tandem advancing the view that my worries were nothing compared to person X or Y, whose troubles were so obviously more deserving of help than mine. At the time I thought my appreciation of the needs of others was a unique moral insight. I’ve since found an enormous company of helpers and fixers espousing my mantra all on their own. Another edge dulled by normality.

 

This second aspect – unworthiness of help, or much of anything for that matter – is what our hyper-vigilant defences keep from our view. The edge of our defences, their energy, focus and sharpness, is sustained by a largely unconscious apprehension that it is being dulled by the engine of unworthiness.  So, if we deconstruct our defences we will slide back into the sludge of unworthiness and its helpers - hopelessness and helplessness. The actual experience of trying new thoughtfeelingbehaviour is one of re-entering the traumatising world and self – a world of danger which a lifetime’s defences have been designed to prevent. The twister here is the often recognised fact of the abused re-exposing themselves to old and new abusers over the life cycle. Why? Because the defence is more comfortable than the promise of freedom from it, which can only be obtained by daring to behave in new ways!!

 

I think this kind of experience is especially prevalent for the “high performing” among my patients. It might be difficult for them to tell the difference between their injured self and their competent one – all the more so if their high performing self is clearly and unarguably publically acclaimed. It may appear to the therapist as ‘resistance’ to therapy in various forms. An ally of the preference for the edge is disclaiming victimhood, which is encouraged by the pop psych “move on”, “just get over it”, “changing your thinking will change your world” ideology.

 

The third side of the edge is an over-developed competence, which may create an unbalanced self but does not qualify for Medicare funding. A fourth cut of the edge is that it will never wholly disappear, that the wound which it expresses will always be with the wounded to some extent. It is, with respect, called character. The wearing away of our visible person into the wrinkled one of old age is one mark of our learning experiences of all kinds.

 

A sign of therapeutic success for trauma patients is the capacity to hear that they will never get over it in some important senses, one of which is having an edge. Another is seeing our scars as honours. That this is extremely difficult is modelled for us in daily life by the struggle of our defenders – soldiers, police, firies, paramedics… - to handle the traumas of their defence of us and the denial of their experience demonstrated by our social unpreparedness to care for them on return from our wars. Therein lies one of the most obvious sources of intergenerational violences, and around it goes again!

 

Those two patients I mentioned got over it. They were enough into the therapeutic work that they could acknowledge their temptation not to do the work for a tangible reason – that getting better might make them even less well, or so the loss of edge might feel to them. Their edge is among the most reliable of their feelings of being in the world, of existing, and reliable about keeping them in the world in the face of various pressures pushing or pulling them out of it!! But they are successful enough to know that their edge is now constraining their full development, usually in the relationship sides of their lives, either intimate or collegial, or both.

 

Learning to act right (46)… Being radicalised, not

Torrey Orton
Jan. 14, 2015

Being radicalised is one of numerous fears du jour in our increasingly fearful age. Seems there’s a bunch of radicalisers all around us looking for candidates to join radical groupings – but, only one matters: the “Islamic” ones. There are other fundamentalist groupings of our own design which seek to attract people to fringe realms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and usually more than one per major religion. And in the background are “cults” springing off the fringes of the majors like the Children of God, the Elect Brethren, the ultra-orthodox Haredi, the Wahhabi, and so on. These are mostly devoted to hiding their lights under bushels, but come out bristling, especially when confronted with reality slights to their world views. Even Buddhists and Hindus have a go in this space, just not around our corners.

The signs of our fearful age are numerous, too, ranging from the creeping growth of self-esteem protective child management preoccupations, and on…

to the “limbs may fall” self-protection of local government domains,

to the ease with which governments of the ‘left’ and ‘right’ made the anxious white folks of the best country in the world fearful of dark demons arriving on boats 25 years ago, and continue to poke that fear to this day,

to the wilful obscuring of budget responsibilities by both major parties through the current period of mining fired wealth,

to the fact that radical sects and single-minded sectarians here have been springing into prominence well beyond their numbers precisely because they dare to behave inappropriately,

to the relentless erosion of basic securities – most notably job security in any form as the portfolio life fantasy is imposed on people without the preconditions of education or awareness or opportunity which make carrying one’s life in a bag remotely possible … all done in the name of “the economy”, a sure fire title for a scam masquerading as a scientific certainty, and

to the global threats before us constantly:

o   Climate change

o   Financial system vulnerabilities,

o   Ebola, and other natural disasters,

o   International political system instabilities,

o   The prevalence of the open big data minding of all our businesses, and the increasing likelihood that our privacy is irretrievably compromised by the very information science which we treasure for its detail and connectedness,

o   And the recurrent fact of the corruptibility of major social institutions of all kinds everywhere, at minimal cost to the perps!!

The similarities between the fundamentalists and financial product spruikers should not be avoided. Both behave with certainty to the point of obscuring the clearly illegal to protect their ‘brand’ (Hillsong, oh Hillsong and CommBank and ANZ…). One recent ‘community’ expression of fear is the election of minority governments to the mindless despair of the old major parties and their attached pundits. Compulsory voting shall not protect us from the emerging expressions of hopeless disengagement from the foundations of democracy.

Now, a person cannot be radicalised in any application of the term without a need for ‘radical’ solutions. Hence, for example, there is an endless market for radical solutions to health problems, silver bullets for ageing bodies. And our free speech democracy supports the proliferation of medical scams, just as it does financial ones. Advertising it’s called.

And for every religion there is a radical fringe which increasingly grasps the nice peoples’ ground in the middle with threats of embarrassing them for being unfaithful, weak livered and in any event unfilial for implying in any way that they, the radical, aren’t really members of the family, or, more, spiritually profligate but undisownable children thereof.

We all have origins in black and white processes, or more calmly, the life cycle which by not a few actually is fudged in being so described because it is the life and death cycle through which we pass with varying degrees of impact. The use of ‘pass’ for ‘die’ is one small instance of the deep desire in our culture to airbrush or hush away the realities of our being: namely, once dead we are done. Medical science persistently grinds away at the leading and following boundaries of this certainty, adding to the fear by deconstructing the foundations of faith through requiring reallocations of belief.

Existential anxiety is normal for conscious beings. However, the contexts sketched above aggravate this enormously because they compromise our sense of being able to act effectively in the areas of living we think we should be able to. Hopeless anxiety is usually described as depression if it gathers enough negative steam to power us down into the dark night of the soul. Lack of hope can be glossed as shortage of meaning. Depression is the source of radical action: whether inaction of over action, heading in the direction of death. Persistent depression (that is, inescapable meaninglessness) induces persistent rage. Now that’s a radicalising feeling with only two directions of expression: at oneself or at perceived others who make life meaningless for us. But the latter are hard to find except in the most stereotyped forms; other identities like ethnicities, races, religions, social statuses….I can populate my own world of perceived meaning destroyers. Problem is, they are also someone else’s meaning makers and sustainers!!! It is only this which keeps my radicalising in the box.

 

 

Learning to act right (45)… a racist old white guy

Torrey Orton

Dec 04, 2014

I’m swearing at the tube again…

I’m becoming a racist old white guy, much by the same process of my stopping being a homophobe years ago. Daily I’m confronted with objectively powerful white guys (and some white gals) bemoaning aggressively their perilous condition, if they are not spurring other white guys and gals to fear their own perilous condition as members of a threatened dominant species – white folks. The amount of scaring other white guys and gals they do is proportional to their power – those in government and corporate leadership are more aggressively scarifying than those out of it.

 

That I’m a white-on-white racist is exposed in my frequent resort to expressions like “white, Christian fuckwits” (our current national government is notably avowedly Christian, undoubtedly white and undeniably male, but for one minister) while watching the news.  Few count as “old” in the normal sense of the term, but they aren’t young. They are unified in my appreciation by an absolutely consistent refusal to speak ordinary English and acknowledge that anything they have said might be wrong. It may turn out that this refusal has crystallized into an inability. Whichever, this is particularly galling when they are hiding invasions of others’ freedoms and rights – notably, the usual suspect refugees, unionists, et al.

As one of this government’s cheerleaders J. Albrechtsen said in The Australian (261114) of the ABC funding fiasco:

… But instead of working through that initial error, the government played condescending word games. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann declared: “These are not cuts.” The PM, in question time on Monday, refused to answer the question of a broken promise about cuts.

This utter nonsense leaves voters fuming. When the government doesn’t respect them with straight-talking honesty, voters will respond with even more disrespect.”

Some of us think such mis-spokes (see Bigotry-is-OK-Brandis for another whopper out of the same kettle) actually occur because they do not respect the voters or working families or the community, full stop, not because they are having failures of rhetorical competence. The right wing argument for freedom of speech so often comes down to unintentional, unaware, unconscious (?) authorisations of vile speech (bigotry, etc.) rather than just acknowledgment of it as part of the speech practice spectrum. Dog whistling to the pub standard??

Speaking of bigotry, now that I can draw on its implicit authorisation by the government and the IPA* (surrogate for a beer style of imported popularity from a place over there which specialises in bigotry, racism, classism….), I’m noting that my disdain for the current crop of middle-aged white guys leeches out into the current opposition, driven partly by their being the initial authors of the great moral scandal of our immigration policy and practice and they too being often self-espoused Christians, but more gender generous in their composition!!! And the leeching goes further since the institutions of their belief (the various churches) never act with consistent moral fervour or ethical precision to publically embarrass the hypocrisy of that policy!!

And. in the end it’s the repetition that gets me…of weasels’ words and wishes and the blind and dumb refusal to follow the evidence of their effects, while creating the conditions in which their effects cannot be perceived, hidden as they are in the closet of neo-liberal plus PC plus anti-terror speechifying.

And, most irritating / enraging are the powerful who deny their power either outright by lying or covertly by keeping their processes from us. Deception is a far greater threat to a relationship than a misdeed, or even deeds, for they can be known and that is a kind of certainty. Uncertainty is the greatest threat to stability in all (?) things.

But the coincidence of their behaviours with numerous challenges of deep and broad sorts - climate change, economic conflicts, ethical transgressions – regresses me in rage, itself fuelled by endless public reportage inflammations of all manner of human events into tragedies and smash-ups and truth flipflops and…. My rage is not far in its inarticulate name calling (“white Christian fuckwits” being the higher end of my expressive spectrum in this matter) from that of the anti-abortion fundamentalists at the Fertility Control Clinic, though our terms of condemnation differ. Ah, we are on common ground at last!!

*IPA = Institute for Public Affairs, a self-anointed think shop with a thought range from Ayn Rand on the right to Hayek / Friedman on the left.