Learning to act right (51)… Obligation and relationships – invisible bonds which bind

Torrey Orton*

Sept 28, 2015

Attachment by obligation – an implicit reciprocity

A commitment may often be expressed in and through an obligation. An obligation reflects or expresses a reliable attachment, though this may not be what attachment theory means at first glance**. Add some culture to the mix and the meaning gets perhaps even more attenuated because experienced with less insight. For instance,

30 years ago my wife and I did a favour for someone which transformed their life, and not just putting on a new shirt or haircut as the word is used today. Our favour opened the door to a future they could not have ventured, though they certainly could imagine it and had done so. We have been paying for it ever since in the form of the others’ absolutely persistent thankfulness every time we see them (every few years 1/2 a world away). Here’s the rub: sustaining our enthusiasm for their over the top gifts is difficult for two reasons - time withers the intensity as the imbalance in the equation of our favour’s worth vis-à-vis the receiver’s benefit reduces our sense of that value to them. And the counter rub is this: our failure to receive with the energy of their thankful giving may demean the value of the gift and the giver!

This could be the dynamic of any gift relationship, until it is extended over 30 years with the expectation that it will never cease! That’s the cultural additive to the mix. Such devoted thankfulness is understandable in cultures where personal control over one’s fate, to say nothing of one’s opportunities and pursuit of them, is radically conditional. Such is the case described.

Ignorance of cultural obligations

The cultural effect at the individual, family and work group levels is a set of bonds with great temporal reach, with the consequence that social and personal bonds are almost an inescapable condition of living. These bonds provide a roughly guaranteed system of support extending to the outer reaches of ‘family’ to include village neighbours (the source of financial support for many Chinese students in Australia 20 years ago; those students who failed in the relevant terms were failing a whole village of stakeholders; the shame could be terminal). In this sense and in our own case, an obligation may often be attached with anchors at both ends. Under-acknowledgement of a benefit I provide may constitute another entangling bond both for me and my beneficiaries.

 

However, our western preparation for life included the implicit assumption that we could and should control our destinies in almost every regard. Where not possible, it became the responsibility of higher authorities to pitch in with ever more powerful health cares, safety nets and so on. Assume these conflicting assumptions in me and I came up short in receivership: I did not sustain the appropriate levels of concern for the honour they were bestowing. For me even 10 years later I emitted low grade resistance – the kinds expressed through slight withholdings of feelings…By 35 years later I had to mask a sense of irritation with the formalities. Of course lack of formality is ever so western, not eastern, too.

 

Binding bonds

The thing is, this bond (bind) by obligation can sustain any contents, from the merest reciprocities of food and drink to the entangling compromises of corruption and crime!! It can make anything personal and invest everyone touched by it with an ownership of the results of its exercise. So, we can track the resistance of institutions of many kinds to the acknowledgment of their various ethical, moral and legal calumnies to the need to hold the bonded together. Institution members hug their misdemeaning associates with warm embraces of approval or, under pressure, the cool handling of denial without betraying or exiling them. Those two ejecting responses are retained for punishing whistle-blowers of all kinds.

 

*I am a 72 year old, AHPRA registered male psychotherapist with a large caseload out of family violences. There the question of what is ‘live’ in real life is the central existential challenge and how to live better the central developmental one.

 

** I became aware by stepping into this simple task that whole chapters of Shaver and Mikulincer’s 577 pg. Attachment in Adulthood (2007) opened with it. A few hours perusal of it in turn reminded me of the abstract complexities of ‘attachment’ which cannot be processed in the act of engaging without disengaging to do the processing. I invite you to a small view here of that wide frame. There’s a modest (34 pg.) chapter on “Interpersonal Regulation” concerned mainly with the dynamic structures of interdependent attachment and not obviously with any contents, personal or socio-systemic, of those attachments.

Appreciation (56)… Can god learn?

Torrey Orton

Sept 26, 2015

I have regular more or less direct engagements with people who lay claim to know what god thinks, deriving from this fact a penchant for insisting the rest of us should do X or Y. It has been so for millennia. There’s bunches of such knowers assembled collectively as the religions of the Book – Jews, Christians and Moslems, in the historical order of their claim to the associated knowledge, all of which was dependent on revelations. And they each, in their more enlightened manifestations, recognise the role of the others in capturing the emerging thinking of god in the three chunks of the Book – the Torah, the New Testament and the Koran. Each chapter is a progressively less mediated relationship with the chief author, culminating with the words out of the mouth of Mohammed being transcribed as they were voiced (a source of much greater authenticity / credibility than the multi-handed reports of the Torah and New Testament, one would think).

The leading practitioners of the Book’s respective chapters, ranging from local priests through greater bishops and Ayatollahs and their associated members, tend to more rigorous views of who holds godly truth, really, in their hands, hearts and heads. From this position they put all the others of various persuasions in the spiritual shade and have enforced it with iron (as much intramurally as extramurally!) over the same millennia. Their respective institutional interests compromise their claims, of course.

For some reason the god in the second and third chunks insisted that the up to that point benighted masses put no other god before she/him/it. This turned out to be a call to arms either in their eventual history (see the Christian wars of religion, the Crusades, the Inquisition,) or Islam’s spread by the proselytising / colonising sword. The latter eventually declined into the schisms of the Succession to the Prophet continuing unresolved to this moment, repeating Christianity’s bad old days.

Now it is interesting to note that there has been nothing new from she/him/it since about 626AD. Even if we count the Book of Mormon (which the others do not) as written from the same source, little has happened in revelatory terms since Mohammed. This fact can be interpreted as a sign of closure to the revelations and so a sign of an end to the god’s learning. Otherwise she/him/it would be forced to speak again from their own emerging truth(s), as happened in the prior two revelations, wouldn’t they??

These affiliates of the god’s have had their terrains encroached by the growth of reason as a factor in grasping the nature of our worlds if not their meanings, which is religion’s real domain. The claim to meaning, however, has to be grounded in a claim to experienced realities, as demonstrated by the Book’s attempts to speak of all things under the sun authoritatively. But then in its times our worlds were more integrated, whole, partitioned only by the facts of life: that it begins and ends. Science and the arts have demonstrated the pretence of this unity at gathering rates for the last few millennia as well.

If anything this fact demonstrates one thing: that the god never had perfect knowledge, and the lack of further revelations suggest she/it/he never will, but the game is hardly over.

Learner Therapist (63) … How real can Skype therapy be?

Torrey Orton*

July 20, 2015

Last year I was called by a colleague in Europe chasing up a therapist for the CEO of a digital start-up. I had come to mind because, aside from my family violence case-load, I have a broad spectrum of business experience internationally and, by chance, occasionally in IT. I have used Skype for various private and public relationships for years, including executive coaching, therapy and peer supervision.

More recently, I was encouraging a reluctant friend to do some connecting with me on Skype which he resisted on the grounds it just couldn’t be real. It can but that, like many matters of fact, cannot be disputed into existence by arguments from conflicting faiths. Here’s my experience in fact.

I took on the offer and met the CEO face-to-face for the first time three weeks ago, having done four months of twice a week Skype therapy sessions from September to December ’14. What follows are observations about the medium from this experience and subsequent work in the company.

 Some Skype virtues -

1)      It really is just like being there with the patient. All the non-verbals are accessible and to some extent more so than in ‘live’ therapy because the cameras bring us closer than my normal seating distance live (which is about 75 centimetres knee to knee). So we were there together for those hours. The proof of this sense was that when we finally met face-to-face it was almost unreal; it was no surprise; it was as if we had always known each other ‘live’!

2)      The real time, ‘live’ nature of Skype also allows real time SMS communication within the Skype system. This is particularly useful for short chats between normal longer sessions prosecuted by keyboard in real time but only in type. A decision to go to video can be made without starting at full exposure, and commentary and sharing of data can accompany the fully live event. One can see if the other is on deck from the contacts list down the left side of the Skype screen.

3)      Skype allows an out of time SMS service, too, through which I can leave a comment about some matter relevant to that relationship, propose a formal meeting (live, video, etc.). This can serve to ‘ping’ the contact without forcing them to reject a live call if it is inconvenient. Often it’s a matter of negotiating a few minutes leeway to prepare this or leave that.

4)      Then there’s the video message option which arises about ten rings into a connection attempt, which is the same presentation as a live event, but for viewing at the receiver’s preferred time/place. The message’s 3 minute time limit is short enough to prevent any ranting tendencies in the messager.

5)      Skype allows multiparty meetings of which I’ve done quite a few too, with remarkable clarity, etc. A good headset and higher class camera mounting is important to get best mileage out of the service.

Skype shortcomings

It is highly sensitive to bandwidth problems, which advanced practitioners can mitigate by selective deletion of functionality, notably turning off video while audio stays live, as does the SMS feature. These mitigations can be negotiated between participants live, with one turning video off and the other keeping it on, etc. This also makes the administration of the event a joint responsibility not just that of the therapist, coach, boss…

Skype also seems to have a therapeutic hour self-concept…it begins to threaten the process with performance warnings around the 50 minute mark. Longer on Skype, especially in group sessions, is strenuous for some reasons I suspect having to do with too much unbroken screen time.

*I am a 72 year old, AHPRA registered male psychotherapist with a large caseload out of family violences. There the question of what is ‘live’ in real life is the central existential challenge and how to live better the central developmental one.

Learner Therapist (59) … Learning by small steps

Torrey Orton

April 19, 2015

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

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

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

Here’s a variety of tryouts to contemplate.

Mimic’s delight

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

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

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

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

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

The artist’s self-training at drawing and …

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

….then painting to see what is imagined

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

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

Writing in the dark…

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

The writer’s search for the right word…

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

Aikido 31 kata again!

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

 

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

Torrey Orton

April 17, 2015

 

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

 

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

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

…

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

Learner Therapist (57) … Retraumatising forever!

Torrey Orton
March 24, 2015

When the family makes a late, uninvited and seemingly unavoidable return…

There are many things about trauma which are difficult to understand, both for the traumatised and their friends and colleagues. High among the list is re-traumatising within the family, or other social system(s) of origin (e.g.-schools, clubs, churches…). Poor relationship choices are almost unavoidable, at least the first times around. These choices arise from inappropriate relationship needs shaped by the original abuses.

Maybe you wouldn’t have heard the one about the parents who had to call on their children for rescue from their everyday self-management incompetence? Or the one about the parents whose most abused male child bought them a new house after they lost the family home and then they lost it again, having never acknowledged the gift before losing it? But the parents who refuse to stay away are another thing. Here’s such a story.

The two children have long before moved to a distance beyond daily or weekly visits to or from their parents…both at times to other sides of the globe. One finds himself back in the monthly visit range with Father and weekly with Mother, while himself in the early stages of child raising and attempting to integrate family and continuing work demands with a rigorously perfectionist self-assessment system in place. It’s one of the unintended consequences of his parents’ respective withholdings of affection and engagement with him 35 years ago, amplified by conflicting gender role expectations arising from their southern European origins. Now, Mother can’t resist commenting on child rearing practices and behaving in ways which replay almost verbatim to his children the treatment she dished out 35 years before to him.

Dad has kept himself to the old family town more than a day away and retired with such bad effect that he’s lost all of his retirement funds except a vaguely commercial property in said town. He’s acquiring a new wife and the prospect of a sale of the property, but with no commercial nous that would ensure he doesn’t lose it all again. He, like Mother, keeps number two child, a daughter a few years younger than son, appraised of the collapse of his financial worlds. This sharing elicits without soliciting (and so all the more powerfully demanding) a financial sympathy which slides into a felt obligation to help. This sense is then imposed on the son with blind complicity by number two’s intermediation of the messages about the parental decomposition.

This would not be too much if the children were rich and calmly located in the upper end of their parenting cycles, but they are not. And the implied burden of the assistance they should provide is unequally spread, too. Because number two lives in another country she can’t remotely be expected to house Mother as she slides towards a physical infirmity paralleling her financial one. And note that this pattern of implied obligation, openly but indirectly (through Number Two) proposed, also repeats the pattern of indirect expectations the children had been subjected to in their childhood!!

Abuse creates guilt in the abused, almost without exception (and completely beyond the understanding or appreciation of the ‘normal’). The re-traumatised, as Number One and Two are, get to revisit the experience of guilt when their incompetent parents reappear with more or less explicit pleas for family succour and without acknowledgment of the abuse which created the original guilt. The children now have the guilt of their desire not to succour the incompetent and abusing, which Number One has made a professional life around as policeman, and similar occupations!!

 

Learner Therapist (56) … Learning attraction a little at a time

Torrey Orton

March 19, 2015

Waiting to be led

One of the challenges for some people is to know where they are with another, especially of the potential intimate associate type. This is especially so for the more introverted and passive who depend on others approaching them. Such folks often show up in therapy with breaking relationships arising from two passive people getting together and not generating enough demand energy to go anywhere. The relationships just peter out, though they can survive years because once established they tend to cling and be clung to because they exist and the expense of creating new ones feels scarily large.

Now some one or two serious relationships down their life trail and finding themselves partnerless again, they are trying to shift two behaviours: the waiting one and the lack of judgment when the first is fulfilled by a needy other. Breaking their personal waiting game is a matter of developing enough intent to try new behaviour and that in turn requires knowing what they want (and even better what they need) from intimacy.

Leading the waiting game

Here’s an exercise many have found entertaining, challenging and revealing. The objective is NOT to get a date or a cup of coffee, just an acknowledged hello. The process is:

1.      Introduce yourself to one person (of the appropriate sex/gender for you) who you are attracted to. This means nothing more than saying hello in a line at the grocer’s, etc. and acknowledging a response.

2.      If the hello develops naturally into a short natter, that’s fine.

3.      As soon as possible after the hello debrief the experience:

·         Note what attracted you to this person.

·         Note if their response felt like they were attracted to you. What was the evidence of their attraction?

·         How did it feel to be attractive in that way?

·         How did it feel to go through the exercise?

4.      Do it again and see what you want to do to make it go a little further….to that cup of coffee, or accompanying them a little further in their activity of the moment…

Play it again…

Repetition may be necessary to develop a good debriefing report which is full of specific details of the interaction.  What’s being trained is, of course, self-awareness. A little skill may come into view in the process. The introverted, shy and diffident often don’t even recognise the skills of relating they possess. That effect itself often provides energy for more challenging self-developments.