Learner therapist (7) …Listening for talent

Learner therapist (7) …Listening for talent
Torrey Orton
April 29, 2011

This is only a taster for a longer trip. Hopefully there's enough indications of the trip purpose and process to warm others up for a later journey.

Not everyone speaks well. They have to struggle for words or thoughts. Things just seem to come to others. Here's one words don't come to in his first session:

By 40 minutes into it I didn't think that we had anything to work on. He was a litany of falteringly expressed sadness, aimlessness and hopelessness, presented almost as if they were a state, not a need. There was nothing for me to hold – that was his state, until I heard his language. I was listening for the strength (agency) which brought him into therapy. For someone claiming no discernible talent his presentation was peppered lightly with very particular vocabulary – not at all that of the truck driver he claimed truly to be. I had noted the words as he rambled around his self-described misfit history, but not noticed them for the talent they exposed. I confirmed my notice by pointing out that he had such language and he both recoiled at the idea he had anything and brightened up with the notice in one move. It wasn't clear to me that he had verbal talent. He had capability, and so maybe talent not just training.

It has turned out that he has quite a verbal talent. Everyone has some talent, some quite a lot and some quite a few – the Renaissancers among us. They often, especially those showing up for therapy, do not know or trust their talent. It may have been a cause, or collateral effect, of the injuries which brought them to therapy. Sometimes they show up as a loss of talent, as here:

At a social event I met a lifelong male painter, now 63, who was visibly flat and poured it out smoothly. He had lost his painting muse or mojo or animus and so was wandering around for the first time in his life with nothing to do. For a talented person whose gift was clear and commanded what to do, every day was given by the gift. He literally had lost his way, his inner light which showed him the path. That light had shown brightly since early primary school when a teacher recognised it by saying, "You should be a painter."Now he was lightless for the first time. I saw him again a few weeks later and he was still befuddled by his self-abandonment (it must have been himself, he thought; no one else stole his light from him).all that of the truck driver he claimed to be.h ng to grab for me until I heard his language. For someone presenbting tent ho

Whether he was a good painter or not is irrelevant to the matter of his talent. That 'good' is for discussion another time under the heading of competences or capabilities. The world is full of possible painters, fishers, writers, fixers, fighters, builders…. Few are great, but many are satisfied if they know and live their talent(s). There's room for many levels of the many talents.


Finding ones talent(s) can be a grounding experience, providing for the first time in our lives a source of truth which is reliably ours. It is no guarantee that a way will be made for our talents to enter the world, but knowing that they come from within is heartening and self-defining. Basic life standards are self-sourced and the associated motivation is self-validating. Just exercising the talent(s) creates further motivation.


There may be many ways to bring the talent into the world, allowing exploration and exercise of it even under conditions of low potential success – where a person's existing life commitments to partners, children, parents, siblings prohibit a fulltime engagement with the emerging talent. Equally restricting may be the low wattage of the talent – visible, palpable but not powerful to be a life on its own, yet still providing inner based illumination. We all have a complete suite of the talents necessary for life, just differently arrayed and enabled. The array and enabling are congenital; their growth and enactment are circumstantial (the domain of nurture and effort).


What the range of talents is can be taken from one or another of the emerging systems of well-being, all of which depend on defining the domains, directions and intensities of action which create well-being. Getting the items and their mixes right is essential, since well-being is specific. I like the "Elements of well-being" because they were created by the authors in an effort to provide a new approach to treatment of sex offenders, a notoriously difficult group.

Elements of well-being (basic human needs) *From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives. Tony Ward, University of Melbourne, Claire A Stewart, Deakin University 1) Life (including healthy living and functioning) 2) Knowledge 3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences) 4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness) 5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress) 6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships) 7) Community 8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life) 9) Happiness 10) Creativity

And, by the way, if you want to think about what the generic therapeutic task is from a biopsychosocial (cultural) viewpoint – this is it: a multidimensional well-being one. Elaborating that perspective is a task for another day. Well-being constructs like that above are starters. They are also the basis for work on things like vocation (below), since the kinds of vocations there are must reflect the needs we strive to fulfil through work.


This set of archetypal vocations was built with Hamid Homayouni 5 years ago in the birthing phase of a 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' company which never grew up. However, many patients have found the constructs helpful for their efforts to build a picture of their vocational potential. The archetypes are described in ordinary language and everyday behaviours.

• Helper

Are you…compassionate, attentive to others' needs, a 'fixer'?

Do you like to…offer help, give suggestions, 'fix' things for others?

Are you good at… listening to others, putting your own thoughts in their terms, seeing how others really are, suggesting options for action…?

• Builder

Are you… physical, careful, 'results oriented', a 'tool man' (or woman)?

Do you like to…complete a piece of work, have something to show for your efforts?

Are you good at…making things with your hands, planning steps of development, using tools?

• Protector

Are you…cautious, attuned to possible dangers / threats, physically and emotionally robust, action-oriented?

Do you like to…be in dangerous situations, test your strength against others, use weapons, wear uniforms?

Are you good at…containing conflicts, dealing with anger, checking threats, using your body as an instrument?

• Entertainer /artist

Are you…flamboyant, emotional, and imaginative?

Do you like to…tell stories, draw pictures, make videos?

Are you good at…performing, working under public pressure, taking on different roles and styles?

• Maintainer

Are you…orderly, systematic, obsessive about detail?

Do you like to…keep things in order, clean things, know how things work, take them apart to see how they tick?

Are you good at…keeping things running, making repairs, figuring out what's wrong with things?

• Believer / visionary

Are you…'off in the clouds' at times, certain where you stand, looking for the answers to the final questions?

Do you like to… wonder about 'the meaning of life, engage others in questions of meaning?

Are you good at…seeing the larger picture, talking about 'the meaning of life'…?

• Thinker / investigator

Are you…introverted, abstract, logical, pattern seeking, 'deep', insightful?

Do you like to… get things clear, understand rather than act, find your way through confusion and unclarity, put the truth first …?

Are you good at…seeing patterns in things, making systematic pictures of things, making sense of puzzles / dilemmas ….?

• Creator / entrepreneur

Are you…a starter, sensitive to new things, early adopter of technologies / ideas?

Do you like to…be the first to do things, be recognised for innovation?

Are you good at…expressing, creating visual / musical works, starting up from nothing?

• Coordinator / leader
  

Are you…someone who steps forward first, takes the lead in social / political things?

Do you like to…negotiate shared tasks and resources, talk to people about what they want / need?

Are you good at…keeping a group together around shared tasks?

 

Appreciation (35) … A poem a day…

Appreciation (35) … A poem a day…
Torrey Orton
April 18, 2011


I never much liked poetry…not enough to continue reading after university until many years later…the last 6 or 8 in fact. Les Murray shifted that a bit as I took seriously that he speaks for aspects of this wide brown, lately green, land which are important. So I undertook to read, and have read, everything of his in print… part of my self-australianisation, akin to learning successfully to like bush and dry and flat and gummy, and ever since starting 38 years ago seeing new bits for the first time here and there now and then.


As I'm writing this I also notice that I did not read poetry (except to complete requirements) because it was hard to read. Compared to philosophy of any kind (exception: symbolic logic, but then that's not reading is it?), poetry requires attention of the short but deep variety – one not natural to me who does long and deep effortlessly. I did not know to make the effort, which says something about how I was taught poetry – as a must do, a formal compliance presumed to be valuable.


The last past they got right. Because I read it under academic duress, I 'learned' it so to speak. I know about some poetry, as I do some music, without ever getting into it until recently, and still now with more a long view than the immediate one. And once again, an education is shown to be unpredictably worthwhile. In that education I read a canon or two because, in spite of my lack of natural inclination to the mode, it was given to be done by people and a system I respected and whose standards I was brought up earlier to aspire to.


Somewhere in graduate school I learned poetry was music, though I knew that from Plato's complaint about the insidious nature of poetry long before without hearing it. Somehow I heard the music a bit. Like many musics, poetry is varied and less or more accessible to different personal attunements and cultural conditionings. Mine was more Gerard Manley Hopkins than Wordsworth. I have a simple, engineering ear. And I never wanted to make music, so never learned to read it. Same thing with poetry? I did write one poem in 1971 and it seems that was enough.


So I bought Frederick Seidel's Poems 1959-2009 due to a long view review in the New York Review of Books a year ago where claims were made for his grip on America (hear a Murray-like attraction here again? Yup). And I've started reading them in a new way compared to my Murray experience - grazing them at first, not striving to get inside yet tasting enough to think I could later do so. From the graze I cannot immediately embrace Seidel like Murray but he seems also less local than I expected; he's more cosmopolitan?


In the end of this wander maybe I just don't have a very poetic inclination, or too much of the engineering one crowded it out. Having grown up in a musically competent household, I never caught the tunemakers bug which my siblings did. Genetic defect, cultural or ???

Learner therapist (4) a breath of life?

Learner therapist (4) a breath of life?
Torrey Orton
April 7, 2011


In my search for patients' agency, and the author within who drives them (if other things don't get there first), I'm increasingly noticing little signals of activity. This is a matter of small sounds and slight expressions. These may grow into loud sounds and gross expressions as modelled for us all with indelible memorability by Homer Simpson.* Among the hardest things to say for the injured are words of self-approval or words disapproval of family sources of their injuries. I suspect such words are what are coming into hearing/view through the little breaths below.


I offer these signals as enticement to others to share their bits in the hope that we can develop a taxonomy of little expressions to join the forces of little steps. The point here, as there, is to enhance patients' awareness of ways in which and times at which they are taking small steps towards their emerging selves. It is our responsibility to provide such help, since they are often blind to their own agency and ignorant of the myriad forms it can take.


Small breaths…

For instance, "phuuh" is a sound I cannot spell. Yet it reaches me these days like a declaration of dry despair, usually arising out of the flatlands of a psycho-spiritual plateau, often mid-session midway through a therapy engagement. It is a quiet, almost inaudible expression barely strong enough to be heard, more seen than heard in the slightly pursed lips of a patient. Or myself, too, I'm noticing these days. The sound occurs often in synch with a slight movement of the head away from the line of eye to eye engagement, the kind of movement which also signals an emerging insight or feeling.

Apathetic Irritated

Further along this spectrum lies a dry spitting sound - "pffft" - which ejects a thought or feeling mildly but certainly. It often has a comment hidden in it. The speaker seems not to quite embrace it, but the thought is out enough that it cannot be restrained. The "pffft" is more about getting the fact that they have a thought out than making that thought visible.

Disturbed

Another grade along is the wet, spat ejection….a slight swear.

Annoyed

"Doh" or "doah" – derisive mimicry of dopey other(s), which, depending on the tone of speaking, may be cuttingly abrasive (an aggression) or just a twitch of the rhetorical tail (a slight gotcha).

Angered

"pfauuugh" is towards the other end of the exhalatory spectrum, a clear rush of derisive disapproval, amazement that another does not share one's own insight, sensitivity, …..or one missed it oneself!!

Enraged

These can all be applied recursively – directed at oneself as well as others. I'm not sure of my classification of expressions by feeling levels, but there's something systemic about them in the anger spectrum. Kassinove and Tafrate's "Anger Thermometer" has 10 grades of anger marked by ten vocabulary steps. These are more distinctions than I know how to use, but some psychs feel comfortable enough to publish them so facility with the distinctions may be useful.



*By the way, 50 years ago when in boarding school, an expression indistinguishable from Homer's "doh" was a popular reproach to another teenage dope's intellectual or behavioural vacuity of the moment. No one escaped the title! How did it transit all those decades?? Is this just another item in the records of the eternal return?? If the latter, then 'doh' arises from a deep cultural meme or, as the neuropsychs might have it, hard-wiring.

Learner therapist (3) What’s a person…

Learner therapist (3) What's a person…
Torrey Orton
March 27, 2011

… an agent, with potential authority?

What are we trying to help patients 'fix' or to repair in themselves? For me it is essentially their agency, their ability to act or to influence their worlds. Psychic injuries, like physical ones, inhibit our power, render us weak where we could, or used to be, strong. The help we need is to restart our motivation (value) and improve our action competence(s) (behavioural repertoires). Notice I've slid from patients to 'us'. We are them, but they are usually not us, when in the room. For what follows, we are them, too.


This is a vignette to hang a theory of agency on. The theoretical connections are made through numbers in parentheses – eg (6) – which refer to examples of agency in the first paragraph after the vignette.


D


One day alcoholic D, about 40, walked in with his whole self on show. His hands were fairly damp for the first time in a while. He asked for tissues to dry them (6) as he noted the fact in passing. It was the first time in 16 months work that he had been fully present, though not for lack of trying. That he could be present was always on display (7) in his ambivalence about being here. He could talk about that easily, and did so every session (1). "I really don't have anything to say today" he would announce on arrival, while always being almost unclothed his defences were so slight.


He has a lot to defend – a lifetime's actual and threatened violence from a still living alcoholic father. One thing in particular: the fiercely vivid memory of repeatedly over his primary years having to lie silently in bed in feigned sleep to avoid his just-home-from-the- pub father's attention, consciously effacing himself by containing his terror from the senses of his terrorist. He has the finest detectors of non-verbal expressions I have ever met, attached to a capacity (2) to precisely test those perceptions.


...a glass of whiskey


But that day he arrived in such ambivalence that he had skolled a glass of whiskey from a local provider on the way over. His conflicted feelings (anger and hope, riding on the energy of interest) had bounced him back and forth in the bus on the way here, just as they do every day for him. But in the room they were visibly so as he shifted in the chair, giving and withdrawing eye-to-eye contact like a chimp in a cage. What he had to say this day, after briefly having nothing as usual, is that he was here with his fears blazing and his hopes leading (8). This is the motivation that brought him into the room.


We stepped from his present into its origins through the gateway of D's defences, a set of behaviours which mark his coming to the end of bearable exposure of his pain. These gestures all happening together – breathing out, shaping up to fight or fly (in the shoulders), scrunching up his face – lead to a visible / audible stop signal (4) from D, if I haven't already got their implication. When I use his name, D, it always elicits this expressive set, as if I called out from the end of his bed to waken him into the expected paternal violence. It is this set of behaviours which expressed his being in that life space while in the room and how he controlled his exposure to it.


Control the terrorist father within…


We worked on that space to reduce its terror. I explained that this was a normal approach for engaging traumas of many kinds. Through it he could learn the threat was no longer present in its embodied way, and that he could control the feelings. As we finished a few minutes exposure, he queried, "You've done this before haven't you?"(5) And, he was ready to consider starting (3) the reconciliation trip through which he might get final control over the terrorist father in him. We had approached it 6 months ago but it had seemed way over his horizon then. Now it's in view; feels possible and desirable (1).


When I'm working with D, I have an implicit model of a person in the near background of my approach. I listen and look for certain indicators of how he is. (1) Can he say what they want, (2) interrupt to clarify a meaning, (3) propose a direction for discussion (at the beginning or in the middle of a session), (4) request changes of time or place for sessions, (5) offer feedback on how it's going for him, (6) notice what his body tells him about how he is, (7) how he presents overall, or (8) have an inner sense of truth or direction which tells him what's right and not (often expressed as feeling unfairly done by), etc.…? These are access points to his growth potential, present motivation(s) and levels of need(s). They apply to everyone.


…anyone can grow


When I first had the idea of presenting my underlying therapy assumption it seemed easy because it is so obvious to me, revisited daily in my conduct of therapy. The foundations extend back to my past as a teacher, trainer, coach where my assumption always was, and remains in every new encounter in therapy, that anyone can grow if they are compos mentis.


This is not a value statement. It's one about our nature (to which our nurture may or may not add!). The value aspect arises in making the choice to apply this assumption to everyone I encounter, professionally or personally. This is our professional responsibility.


I have worked with this assumption in the US, France, China, Singapore and Australia. You probably have your own version of favourite indicators and there's probably a thousand books proposing various right or correct answers to 'What is a person?' For me, my version allows me to approach EVERY patient from the same foundation – that they all have an identifiable set of needs, core functions and basic necessities for effective living in their world(s). I find the details of their needs, functions and basic necessities arguable, but a lack of them is the boundary between human and android. At another time a full underlying theory of a person may be usefully added to my entry assumption.

Appreciation (34) … Just do it!

Appreciation (34) … Just do it!
Torrey Orton
March 6, 2011


'Just do it!' should be a candidate for a Rectification. It reeks of modern mantras commanding effortless deployments of will for transformations of shoes, souls, or real estate perhaps. But this appreciation came to me in the flush of a therapeutic intuition.


Many years ago the impossible – reversal of a 90% public opposition to seatbelts – occurred in 6 months or less (the user survey did not identify at what point in the six months respondents' opposition to the innovation had ceased). It occurred by force (legislation). Six months later the numbers were almost reversed. 'Just do it' version 1, a seamless habit change, but a very small and doable one with almost zero post-adoption costs for drivers. Easy to do, and easy to police.


Then there's the Nike version arising out of the mindless careerism of the 80's – 90's driven by the silly but attractive proposition that everyone and every organisation should be "world class". A principal capacity for arrival in that class was action and that, in turn, was a mere matter of personal will. 'Just do it' Version 2. Implication: if you don't have the will you don't deserve the fill. Moral arm twisting and a competitive edge.


The version I want to bring into view arises from another developmental proposition altogether – though it can easily appear as just another version 1 or 2 above. This is the 'doing it' required for an experience one's never had. This extends across the full range of human activities from eating to loving. For me a recent one was taking up morning floor exercises when in partial recovery from pancreatitis.*


I was still feeling achy and dog tired much of the time, and this started from the beginning of the day. I wasn't improving my sleep either. Probably some connection between the two facts: low sleep and low feelings. So I decided to take up the sleep improvement program's first recommendation – learnt to relax, and practise it daily for 20 minutes. While at it, I thought I'd throw in a few stretches I'd learned in yoga 35 years ago, and then also a few tone builders for my weakened gut core. Some leg lifts, bicycling, arches, and various hip flexors. Altogether about 25 minutes.


No surprise to those on top of rehabilitation, but I got such a seriously clear lift in overall good feeling that I was looking forward to doing it again the next day. I've been at it daily ever since, on the back of the same daily reinforcement, which is now an inducement to persistence. It's an internal push rather than an external pull.


It struck me that there must be many variations on this theme of taking action to discover a need or want. Cuisines offer obvious (once discovered) taste titillations hiding behind the screen of olfactory repulsion – eg., durian, chou doufu, some wines and cheeses. Music provides similarly distinctive, and equally offensive to the uninitiated, variety – the modern atonal, Beijing opera, Middle Eastern rhythm and melodies. Visual arts are a storehouse of visions which have to be learned to be appreciated, or even seen in some cases – Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.


Different degrees and kinds of actions are required to enter these worlds because they initially resist entry or even obscure the possibility of it. So it may be helpful to find a person's relevant previous experience(s) to build a first effort on. Relying on chance won't do. Explicit encouragement is required since the unknown cannot be chosen until it is known. A look at a durian does not invite a bite. A first hearing of a Beijing opera is a jangle. First sight of Blue Poles may be a downer.


Whatever the approach to taking action, the moment of action has to be faced. Having a purpose other than that which the action explicitly seeks can help cross the hurdle into a new experience. For some, just trying something new is enough. For others, the action's explicit objective could be to acquire a skill, a sensitivity, knowledge, etc. The implicit objective might be to validate their own sense of direction. Support is often essential to find an inner source of motivation so 'Just doing it' can be its own reward.


*A not to be recommended event which left me 10kgs lighter (which could have taken months of training to achieve but only a week of nil-by-mouth in hospital). The standard recovery period is 3-6 weeks, of which I am now into the eight week, restarting moderated work 3 weeks ago (therapy) and developing new self-management regimes in eating (no alcohol which I don't miss at all and one latte on clinic therapy days) and morning relaxation and exercise practices with daily consistency, so far!

Learner therapist (2) – Are you culturally competent?

Learner therapist (2) – Are you culturally competent?
Torrey Orton
Feb.27, 2010


The same but different dilemma
I am a little apprehensive about writing this. The area of cultures and cultural differences is fraught with cross-currents of moral and political and social and personal energies in contest with each other. Any generalisation about cultures is an opportunity for claims of prejudice or factual doubt or moral obtuseness…. I want to acknowledge I'm inviting you into this territory because it is real territory seen from many perspectives in our culture and our world, hence conflicted. It is also inescapable, except in denial.


Cultures present therapists with a very prominent dilemma (which applies across the health sector) – we are all the same (human) and all different (individuals). The therapeutic challenge (amplified by medicalisation of our trade) is to integrate patient uniqueness with generic formulations and manual-driven treatments.


Unremarkably, I have had clients from places I scarcely know more of than their rough place on a map (and I don't' mean country Victoria!). While I speak some Chinese (lived there total of 3.5 years) and more French (lived there 1+ year), my Croatian, Hungarian, Booran, Farsi, Cantonese, Greek…and on and on… are limited to the English versions of what they each call their languages and ethnicities.


One of my best and bilingual (English / German) friends spent years saying "yes, but there's really no fundamental difference is there?" Only after 5 years back and forth did I succeed in bridging what I never imagined would be a resilient rift. My teaching failure, for sure. Most of the differences that matter are invisible. Most of us cannot talk clearly about our cultures except through stories which assume their contextual meanings - just what foreigners lack.


Why do cultural differences matter for therapy?
As therapists we engage with all manner of ages, genders, socio-economic, religious and professional backgrounds about all manner of complaints, issues and concerns, and recognise shared patterns among them (our eventual formulations) and offer them structured treatments (evidence-based therapies). They all speak English, so what's to worry about?


Well, here's a few things to worry about: basic ideas and beliefs may be misrepresented in translation or an inflexible second language – love in a personal choice culture and in a family choice culture may be quite different; getting fine points of client meaning, especially emerging ones, is difficult enough when a smile does not mean anxiety; there's too much to learn to really understand another culture – I barely understand my own!


Different therapies?
Finally, to admit a difference of conceptualisation of therapy into is to saddle myself with a potentially unbridgeable incompetence. For example, a non-judgmental, non-advisory relationship is not what is expected in many cultures; just the reverse. In such cultures, one consults a wise (by experience or profession) person for advice and insight, not facilitation. Of course it is understood the advice may be disregarded, but not getting any is dereliction of perceived professional duty.


So, what difference(s) matter?
In three ways, culture is critical to who we are. It determines (1) our first concepts and practices of family; (2) it provides core meaning systems (religion, values, assumptions, etc.); and (3) it models appropriate practices for relating to close (family) and distant (public, others) people, plus a host of everyday matters like what's right to eat, how to do so, and what to do with the results. These foundations survive into second and third generations, or further for some cultures, of displaced peoples - immigrants of various origins (trauma or economic; forced or chosen). These three areas are also principal domains of most therapeutic work.


For example, in some cultures the structure and meaning of family, and therefore individuality, is not comprehensible from within an Anglo/ western cultural frame – the assumptions and practices which underlie psychology here. In China,

"The relationship between family and family members can be likened to the relationships between a body and body parts. For example, I feel itchy on my leg and my hand comes to help by scratching it. Does my leg have to say, "Thank you, hand." Does my hand reply, "You are welcome." No, neither one does so. Why, because they are supposed to help each other as they belong to a single unit. Though parts can be distinguished, they do not function independent of the body. The mutual relationship between parents and children are understood by Chinese in the same way.

 

And that's why in a Chinese family, when parents do something for their children or vice versa, you hardly hear something like thank you and you are welcome. From the perspective of the Confucius tradition, the family as a unit of intelligence is fundamental and irreducible when children are young. Any attempt to further reduce a family to a collection of individuals violates the integrity and meaning of the family unit."

Chen Jie-qi, AERA, 2006, San Francisco - How MI Theory fits into traditional and modern China, pg 3

On the other hand, a Booran family in the borderlands of Ethiopia and Kenya is entwined with its clan and village in myriad ways. For example, a council of elder women oversees the treatment of married women and can authorise a divorce for mistreatment by husbands. Among other things, this judgment forces the return of the woman's bride gift cattle from the husband…possibly a more than 50-50 split. Being a child involves being under the constant care of all adults in the village, who share the responsibility for child-raising outside the home. Everyone is an uncle or aunt, grandmother or grandfather.



What do our cultures do for us?
We tend to think our culture is good. It must be, otherwise we would not be good, which apart from our psychological injuries, we tend to think we are. If we do not, we can see ourselves to be good by identifying with our culture of origin. Mostly we don't think about this, so it is out of our awareness.


Automatically we judge other cultures by our standards. So does pretty much everyone else, with a few exceptions who I hope will become more numerous. But even they will have moments of deciding that their own culture is best. Having a culture is like having a family – even if it's bad for us we give it a break at our cost, and sometimes the cost of others of different cultures.


In the public domain this plays out in the form of persistent expectations, if not demands, that the rest of the world follow our path to human improvement. For instance, follow the commentary about China in which the assumption they have to become democratic, and free-marketers, too, is often not even stated as the ground of critiques being made of their pathway for the last 30 years.


What does being in a minority do to minorities?
In contexts where one culture is presumed to be right (like national cultures tend to do of themselves), minority culture members are subjected to three pressures: one, to delete characteristics which are unsettling to majority culture members, like speaking their own language in public; two, to keep to themselves the fact that this is painful and feels unjust to them.


As well, third, they know that much of what they carry as their culture of origin cannot be explained to people who can't see further than their own next footy game, school fete, meat pie, etc.….Their attention span isn't long enough. Even members of the majority culture can't get their foreign experiences listened to when they come home from some time in other peoples' cultures, an experience in which some may be in the minority in a clear way for the first time in their lives.


Culturally literate therapists?
So, what should be done to increase the numbers of the culturally literate? A few pathways:

Try the story Meat for a shock to the assumption that we are all the same. Similar effects can be found in a variety of science fiction works (eg. Isaac Asimov – I Robot, Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land, William Gibson: Neuromancer

as well as utopias and dystopias. Then, add the factoid that the divorce rate in China exceeded the marriage rate by 10+% last year, proving at once that things change while remaining consistent.

If you have little experience of foreignness it can be had at home by experiments like walking into a pub you aren't sure you 'belong' in. A seriously country town can provide this quite well (if you are not and never have been a farmer). You should get that odd-one out feeling. Failing to find a pub to test, recall a moment of adult embarrassment or shame for a related feeling – misfit isolation.

Education agencies should include a cultural perspectives course as a requirement for graduate psychs of all varieties, but especially those in front line heath care provision. These courses should include a non-negotiable behavioural segment challenging participants' mono-cultural perspectives.

Join the Psychology and Cultures Interest Group of the APS and get on the mailing list from Multicultural Mental Health Australia.

 

Finally, ask questions when you feel an assumption coming on.

 

And, delight in difference.

Learner therapist - a proposition

Learner therapist - a proposition
Torrey Orton
Feb.14, 2011


Dear PsychologyMelbournePartners colleagues and others,


I want to talk to other therapists more than I can now. There are some opportunities at a clinic I share with 10+ other interestingly different psychs. I also share with them very restricted times of exposure to each other (scheduling) and small windows of engagement (diary again).From the two kinds of structured sharing events we have monthly – staff meetings and a couples therapy group – I have never failed to get useful prompts to my own perspectives and access to tools of our trade.


And, more important for me, this group in various configurations shows a consistent development in openness. Members both offer unsolicited, critical self revelations and respond supportively to others' revelations, while keeping the task(s) of the moment in view. For me, this group capacity is essential to engaging challenging therapy issues and cases.


But, it's still not enough, partly because I'm finding myself home to a bunch of somewhat developed insights and tools which need assessment of their real potential in the view of fellow practitioners. The other problem is limited access, so find a way to expand the group!! Now there's a problem. By what means should I try to do this? I know what a blog cannot do without massive efforts. There are a lot of activities competing for therapists' attention, including many mandated ones fulfilling professional development requirements whose attractiveness is compelling if not always entrancing.


In earlier lives of mine I've set about somewhat similar objectives by network building – looking up people I knew who 'should' have an interest in what I was proposing: an experimental school, a commune, a protest about some public issue, an alternative to a moribund union. This was actually community building since it was based in a small city where most of the players knew each other, or of each other, or could get a personal connection in two degrees to each other. That was then. A TV, telephone, radio and newspaper community.


I'm imagining potential participants in this exploration will be therapists who want more engaged, challenging peer reflection, who want more challenging perspectives on the purposes, processes and contexts of therapy, and who are computer comfortable but prefer face-to-face work…
For me writing is part of learning. As I build a picture of what I'm trying to understand, the process itself contributes new understanding. As well, written learning makes understanding open to critique, a necessary step for getting outside of myself!


So, I'll start with a few trial articles: my general objective is to identify and break through the black and white, either/or, and digital thinking patterns which abound in our trade. These areas of practice tend to summon up exclusive responses to proposed therapeutic interventions. In some cases I will be commending new competences as mandatory for effective therapeutic practice - e.g. intercultural competence and knowledge. Possible topics include:

• Power in recovery from anxiety/depression – learning to convert anger into relevant power in appropriate relationships
• Cause and patient injuries – a blame free world is a cause-free world; post-modern dilemmas
• The world we are in as a background facilitator of injury – see eco-anxiety for instance.
• Culture difference and therapeutic competence – a minimum requirement for a multi-cultural country
• Commercialisation and bureaucratisation constraints and facilitation effects on practice - the Medicare 'service' conundrum
• Couple conflict and shared 'facts' – finding things to agree on in areas of dispute
• Competing therapeutic paradigms?? How do therapies relate to each other?
• What research is really worthy of report? How to tell evidence from research.
• The biopsychosocialcultural perspective in practice
• Where do you stand on the boundaries of life – IVF, abortion, euthanasia, suicide??

I'll be inviting feedback from PMP colleagues in the following areas:

• Interest of the topic itself?
• Accessibility / clarity of the writing?
• Suggestions re: topic/style improvements, extensions
• Others who might be interested in such matters??
• Venues for exploring / presenting such matters??

The invitation will be personal and declinable; if declined I will appreciate a few words of explanation since these may also help identify different approaches I might use to finding and connecting with therapists. If accepted, I expect the feedback process will take 10-20 mins. by phone; no writing required.