Learner therapist (13)……Needs and wants, revisited

Learner therapist (13)……Needs and wants, revisited
Torrey Orton
Sept. 12, 2011

"…and if you try sometimes you get what you need"

It's commonly thought that needs and wants are a pair of related concepts, with wants in the role of supplicant to needs while seeking to become their surrogates. The pair is a basic unit of therapeutic assessment, in particular for all manner of relationship issues. Often I encourage patients to list the wants and needs they have of significant others in their lives – usually the relatively more powerful and distorting others at home, work or play. This exercise normally includes their perceptions of the other(s)' wants/needs of them, as well.


This is the starting place for reshaping the world to their own designs, lack of which leaves it shaped intractably by the powerful, and the social arrays around them. The outcome of the exercise, if seriously pursued, is always a focus on a few critical needs and possible pathways to them. This is the playground of little steps. The challenge, according to the Stones' famous ditty is: "you can't always get what you want, and if you try sometimes you get what you need".


Here's where wants come in developmentally. While being discretionary, they are also usually very specific, concrete and time-limited in their operation (even if repeated over long spans). People can list wants more easily than needs. So, as for the Stones, our wants are signposts of our possible needs. Following the posts may bring us to our needs as we currently understand them.


Wants are seen to be more discretionary; needs more necessary. Needs more solid; wants more fleeting, evanescent (though more concrete, strangely – wherein lies both their essential contribution to our need fulfilment and their potential for misleading us about the very needs we seek to fulfil). Certainly in couples therapy, for instance, a bunch of wants are expressions of needs. They are instruments of the directions needs propose to us, and often they elicit subject matters of resonant disputability.

Our needs have a fundamental reality and truthfulness about them. This is why people know eventually when some offered need fulfilment (a want) is wrong; not merely inappropriate, wrong. Being inappropriate is a matter of misconceiving a need, often an under-developed one; being wrong is a fake, manipulative, oppressive fulfilment like the binge sex and drugs and rock 'n roll micro-culture can be. Such self-knowledge, or the pursuit of a glimmer of it, is what brings people into developmental activities like therapy, study, etc. They are seeking need fulfilment by learning to negotiate their wants with themselves and others.If we have a framework for the needs which may compose a life for any human, we are therapeutically on better grounds than threshing around in the swarm of wants which modernity proposes as the answer to the question 'what does it all mean?' Acquire enough fulfilled wants and that's a life! Maybe even a brand.
Following is one such framework. There are others. I offer some signposting wants which may attach to each.

Elements of well-being (basic human needs)

*From: The Treatment of Sex Offenders: Risk Management and Good Lives.

Tony Ward, University of Melbourne, Claire A Stewart, Deakin University, 2005

Without specified needs we cannot decide how we are doing and what trade-offs are required to improve well-being. One approach to defining basic needs is this:

Needs	Wants specifications of needs
1) Life (including healthy living and functioning)	Adequate sleep, food, exercise
2) Knowledge	Knowing that…Knowing how to….knowing why…etc.
3) Excellence in play and work (including mastery experiences)	Play an instrument, a sport; Practice a profession, trade, art, hobby…
4) Excellence in agency (i.e., autonomy and self-directedness)	Cooperative activities; enlisting others in our activities
5) Inner peace (i.e., freedom from emotional turmoil and stress)	Meditation, martial arts,
6) Friendship (including intimate, romantic and family relationships)	Appropriate care, affection, connectedness….
7) Community	Authentic membership, identification, …
8) Spirituality (in the broad sense of finding meaning & purpose in life)	Relevant belief, imagery, contemplation….
9) Happiness	In my view this is not a need; it is one outcome of well-being
10) Creativity	Opportunities to invent at whatever level or domain of life activity (also a doubtful need)

Learning to act right (20)… Law without order!

Learning to act right (20)… Law without order!
Torrey Orton
August 30, 2011


Tram Traffic Travesty
I'm a persistent user and preferrer of public transport since I've lived in a large city (40 years). Since my own first seniors moment (2003) of passing out and getting pace-made for life, I've been attentive to the regulation of tram/car relationships on my regular journey routes. The road safety rule (#163) is embarrassingly clear – when driving a vehicle do not ever pass a stopped tram whose doors are open and warning lights are blinking. Realising that a heart stoppage (itself not remotely dangerous; just a pause in the beat) can occur at any time, even with a pacemaker, primes me to attention on descending from trams.


I haven't counted the number of times some fool roars thru a clearly marked tram stop even though all the required warning lights are blinking and doors are open on the tram. Pretty much instant mush if I stumble. I guess once or twice a month I see this and I only ride two days a week max and have been doing so for 10 years. It's a mistake I've almost made myself once or twice.


One clear morning recently (130811 to be precise, 10:20am) I was myself second car back from a tram stopping on Bridge Road, Richmond (my normal get on / off tram stop just near home) and close enough to see a grey BMW 4door 4WD wagon with multiple exhausts power up to sneak thru the stopping tram, missing the call by meters as the doors opened and first passengers started to get out.


I was able to follow a kilometre up Burwood Road into Hawthorn and by Power Street, a kilometre away, had come up within easy sight of the Victorian plates (Y.. 1.. – would I be invading their privacy if I published the whole plate number here?) and then turned off into the Renaissance car park to make the notes underpinning this plaint. With a mild burst of vengeful inspiration I thought, "I've got this one for sure." Now how to haul it in? I tried Vic Roads and Yarra Trams and got a neutral brush off to the local cop shop. 'We cannot prosecute anyone' their reps said (not even your ticket protectors can? I'm wondering now). Only the police can do that.


So I fronted at my local police a few days later. Guess what? They can't prosecute on the basis of my first hand witness with dated event notes back up either. Only if one of their divisionals happens to be sitting there at the moment and is facing the right way and isn't distracted with a sanger and a cuppa.


The best the young officer could offer was to take my particulars and put them on the maybe to be noted list of divisional assignments, leading then maybe to a divisional van ambling thru the tram stop occasionally to collect very occasional and totally unpredictable tram stop malefactors.


Nuts. What happened to citizen arrests or complaints??? Help me out here, pls.

Back to the Anger (3) – where does a homeless anger go to rest??

Back to the Anger (3) – where does a homeless anger go to rest??
Torrey Orton
August 26, 2011


A year ago just about now I was worrying my engagement with my anger. It's better engaged now than then. One part of that story is yet to be written tales of searching over the last two months for ways to interrupt Catholic anti-abortionists' harassment of patients at the foundational abortion provider in Melbourne. There are a lot of angry people on that stage and I am not trying to add to them, but the atmosphere is penetrating. My just being there reportedly reduces the harassment, while the anger just perks along in the undergrowth.


There's a short, nicely written, psychological treatment of anger here. It makes sense in every respect except the one I'm concerned about now – namely, that there are times and places when there is nothing we can do about the sources of our anger; when our anger's natural home is inaccessible, and so irremediable. We psychs can't tell us what to do in that case, other than "cognitive restructuring", relaxation, meditation, acceptance and such; that is, suck it in. The article mentioned above tells us that to do so may be unsustainable, if the threatening forces continue. But this is the fate of many people these days (though perhaps no more so than throughout human history).


…a homeless anger
Here's one of these people, a long term friend and colleague who has not found a job in more than a year, and not for lack of trying. He's basically too old (late 50's) for the real job market. The imaginary one would suit him fine, but it doesn't hire or pay. He's basically too competent for younger managers and bureaucrats to stand. He's not a natural to anger; too little so in my view, but then there's taste, sensitivity, temperament….and he is angry now. Deeply, richly, almost unbearably. And like many other placid folks, he doesn't like to talk about his anger.


Systemically forced indifference
But, he's seriously tired of being interviewed by recruiters 30-40 years his junior who often don't know the tasks they are recruiting for, can't speak openly/transparently/honestly (choose your forward moving spin) about which type of process they are involved in (e.g. making up apparent candidate numbers for already filled positions advertised by legal or political requirement, etc.), and are seem more concerned with meeting their performance target numbers than people.


He's not surprised by this because he knows the recruiting trade and its demands on practitioners, but as a present object of the trade its shortcomings are a repeated caustic abrasion of his self-respect. And, yes, he's complained, suggested, proposed – all manner of efforts to improve their "customer service". It seems impervious to improvement. The players (recruiters) themselves are mostly powerless to influence the market dynamics driving them and their organisations, though one calls him for advice about system improvement options.


Unsystematic but persistent failure
But, he's seriously tired, also, of being the second cab off the job candidate rank he usually heads at first glance. There's a river's worth of D words for the effect: depressing and degrading and demeaning and degenerating and….. thankyou but no-thankyou calls from the less able or incompetent are teeth-grindingly outrageous.


And the government funded, not-for-profit, intermediaries facilitating his attempts in exchange for the dole are but another cog. Same coat of pretence to perform cut from the same material of personal and organisational incompetence. This is the arena of long term unemployment. My friend is still a vital statistic in the rate reported to us almost daily in proof of how well Australia is doing compared to our Anglo relatives. And, he knows that he is not statistically unusual: older = unemployable by dint of no 'economic' need for his services. Being a statistical mean is neither reassuring nor redeeming; it just provides a middle of the road place to be run over by fate.


Exposure of what to who?

Exposure therapy is the "evidence-based" treatment of choice to reduce fear of bad personal fates of many kinds. Exposure is a standard treatment for traumatic events which assault the self with recurrent images (recalls) and effects (anxiety symptoms). It is reliably effective. But it is less reliable if there is no visible cause (someone declaring you unsuitable for employment by right of disability, for instance, or being disabled in an objectively ascertainable way – loss of limbs, brain function, etc.; age cannot be mentioned of course, so it's not addressable). With such losses a start can be made on a life which embraces the loss as the from-this-point-forth condition of one's humanity. That is exposure to oneself. But/and, who would he "expose" himself to so that the fear of his daily deepening fate would be reduced?


Lacking an identifiable source of an apparent but unacknowledged disability (being over some age barrier beyond which is housed 'old') the threat cannot be reduced and the anger continues to be reinforced daily. So, too, with no job today, yesterday and likely tomorrow, day after day. This brings him close to existential despair – the expectation that there is no hope. For some this may produce resignation, for others outrage. Death is the imagined outcome of both, differing only in who is imagined dying: oneself or the nameless, faceless others. He said that it is "a struggle to believe" that continued efforts to job seek can make a difference, the moments of believing just fending off the pull of depressions expression of expected and unavoidable failure.


This is not a mental health disorder, it's a biopsychosocial one!! In other words it's down to the individual but the individual is not responsible for it, except to deal with it. A year ago I proposed here that,

"Disregard makes investment in emotions unrewarding to their owners, but it doesn't reduce their energising sources. Often it intensifies them, or the owners' perception of them, which does just as well for outrage production."

I was wrong in the long term. For some, at some times, under some personal conditions the weight of others' disregard generates one's own self-disregard in return. Unfortunately this is not terribly instructive to the others whose regard is needed. They do not feel the absence of ones regard for them or oneself. It doesn't show up in normal metrics of governance and well-being. Living nothingness. No home.


So this is his fate so far – to be refused a place to deploy his existing capabilities, through no fault of his own, by nameless two-faced forces speaking from one mouth 'you should work to be whole' and out of the other 'consume to be complete'. No home.

Rectifications (27) – “An education evolution”

Rectifications (27) – "An education evolution"
Torrey Orton
August 17, 2011

"From the Vice-Chancellor" it was headed,

and titled "An Education Evolution"

in a 10 page advert with TheAGE of 15/08/2011.

I thought the days of rectifications were over until this one reached out and grabbed me by my righteous spinraker cojones. How could an educated man spruiking an educational (?) institution speak of "an education evolution". Well, mainly because his audience does use the word in that flaccid, pandering way – they, too, not knowing that an evolution is something arrived at in hindsight, not foresight. Foresight (and its assistant, intention) produce actions which, if they are lucky, may become evolutions, but not in our lifetimes – unless you are of the meme = gene brigade, and even that requires some years for memal maturity.


If you are leader of an institution (Melbourne University) which mostly talks about the training and skills it is selling, it may not be a wonder that such simplicities are ignored because no longer known. I guess they are just examples of unknown knowns. (I've often wondered what they were for the man (Donald Rumsfeld) who made them a part of public discourse in 2003 at no personal expense, but a great deal for the people of Iraq).


So I guess the VC is seeking, if he intends it, to coat his training in glimmering cloth. If he'd said, for example, ' An Educational Emerging' (or the weaker, Emergence) this would have been more than acceptable, since novelty of potential substance has to come out of somewhere, otherwise it's a known known already!


The appearance of 'changing' and 'transformative' in his discourse of 'evolution' is also a known known because they are part of the suite of spinisms which pass for social, political and educational analysis in our times. Even banks do it – transform, change and evolve that is. Just watch their self-promotions. Not surprisingly individuals describe themselves in this language, too.


For an alternative discourse, see the article by Raymond Gaita in the 17/08/11 Australian
Higher Education – "Loving the truth is not enough." Gaita notes that the public discussion of educational meaning and purposes has been subverted by the discourse of consumer corporate speak, as has our world. The concepts which underlie an education have not been available to common use for decades. Woe is us. Of such are futile rants made.

Learner therapist (5)…Quiet violences

Learner therapist (5)…Quiet violences
Torrey Orton
August 15, 2011


Following are some patient experiences of their persistent, consistent and seemingly untouchable disregard by those closest to them. They are the solid foundations of the anxiety / depression in their presently distorted relationship worlds. These feelings are both typical and totally particular at once. They easily elicit a self-denying doubt - "I've had everything I could expect. What have I got to complain about?" – compared to imagined others' terrible childhoods.


These patients are medicated, and/or in long term dynamic or interpersonal therapy with histories of short-term CBT inefficacy, and/or with associated relationship struggles at work, home and play. They usually have two or three anxiety/depression symptoms at once, with one or another more prominent depending on total stress and injury salient stress in varying measures. Their disorders have been traceably with them for decades. The complete family social systems which supported the incidents / perceptions below are alive and well to this day, continuing to carry and sustain the psychological bugs which infect these people.


The speech reported is a close paraphrasing of their actual words. So, for example:


She said: All I want is when I call up mum that she listen to my concerns of the moment; what happens is I call and she suddenly gives me over to Dad who doesn't engage about anything… (this has gone on for her whole remembered life).


He said: When I told my parents at age 6 my grandmother had introduced me to a man in her house who sexually abused me a number of times, they 'took care of it' and it never happened again…nor was it ever spoken of, even to this day (32 years later).


She (39, alcoholic, twice married, 2 own children, four other of second partner) said: They (her parents) never say 'I love you' to me (breaking out in her quiet version of wracked with tears late in the first session) and brush off my efforts to reduce drinking.


He said: For the last few years, living in our house has always been seeing the others but never doing anything with them – we even eat separately. Otherwise, Dad is always away and Mum's always cleaning noisily and intrusively…


She said, starting to cry uncontrollably: I remember being sent away for two months to summer camp aged 5 so my returned run-away 12 year old sister could "have space" as recommended by a social worker returning her…with the understanding for years after that I should "behave" or get into rouble from father for I knew not what; the reason for the runaway was never discussed…so the boundaries of expected behaviour were never clear, just implicit.


He said: (shaking with inner turmoil) I just remembered myself going down the hall of the hospital 30 years ago to see the back specialist in terror about the outcome (I was put in a body brace for 6 months) and mother (who was with me) not asking how I felt, and me feeling I couldn't say because she and father were unable to run the family themselves and I - aged just 14 at the time, eldest child - was carrying the load, down to doing the shopping, cooking and so on.


These are quiet violences of the family intimacy sort*, which often provide foundations for self-harm and suicidal thinking and action, mitigated by alcohol or binge drugs of delightful escape. To a person, those above say at one time or another: what have I got to complain about (compared to people in physically or socially violent lives, or the poor in Calcutta, etc.)? I don't want to blame anyone for my shortcomings - the litany of over-responsibility for lives which has also allowed them to be among the successful (that is the surviving, "high functioning" jobholding, family rearing sorts). Though anyway, I'm worthless, not good enough, can't get it right, hopeless….which makes me try harder to be perfect (a very useful inspiration for many kinds of public life success (jobs, etc.)).


These are not the violences we normally think of when talking PTSD. Their effects may appear in forms like OCD, social phobia, panic…and self-harming, with and without thoughts, or unsuccessful acts, of suicide. They are the kind from which arise baseless fantasies of being "annihilated" by the absence of others, by nothingness…a good starting point for re-visiting the Existentialists. No Exit comes to mind.


And, too, they are sources of apparently baseless, barely perceptible, angers, small outbursts of rage with no accessible origins – the very rages we find at the social level on the road, in the retail, at the home. Their power lies in the presence of the past in the present. People's current lives repeat in degrees and domains, the damages of childhoods sustained in the present relationships which produced them in the first place.


Even if the family members have changed, the parents have lost their power, the truth of the damaging histories cannot be validated because they are on the family's undiscussables list. So the struggle of the past reappears as sibling differences on what's discussable. Talk about resilience! And about systemic maintenance of contexts for paranoid processes! Enough to make one think themselves crazy, just a bit.


* "The WRCH also presents a typology of violence that, while not uniformly accepted, can be a useful way to understand the contexts in which violence occurs and the interactions between types of violence. This typology distinguishes four modes in which violence may be inflicted: physical; sexual; and psychological attack; and deprivation. It further divides the general definition of violence into three sub-types according to the victim-perpetrator relationship.

• Self-directed violence refers to violence in which the perpetrator and the victim are the same individual and is subdivided into self-abuse and suicide.
• Interpersonal violence refers to violence between individuals, and is subdivided into family and intimate partner violence and community violence. The former category includes child maltreatment; intimate partner violence; and elder abuse, while the latter is broken down into acquaintance and stranger violence and includes youth violence; assault by strangers; violence related to property crimes; and violence in workplaces and other institutions.
• Collective violence refers to violence committed by larger groups of individuals and can be subdivided into social, political and economic violence."

I've lost the link to this quote so can't source it, but seems worth including for the framework. The emphasis is supplied.

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life

Learner therapist (11) … Touches for life
Torrey Orton
July 30, 2011

Get a grip on yourselves before the roof blows off.

Non-verbal communication is recognised as much in its excess (hitting, slapping…) as its shortage (touch-free upbringings, non-contact sports….) in everyday life. More ordinary levels like handshakes and arm touches are the unconsciously applied media of daily interactions, from intimate to instrumental. Their therapeutic potential may be unnoticed. I offer three recent experiences for your appreciation.


M and A have explosively volatile struggles around their respective needs for care, powered by very different but equally searing injuries to self. These struggles have improved countably over three months of work (weekly) from daily 2-3 hour storms to weekly ones; from standing at the edge of the abyss of relationship implosion to enjoying each other much of the time. But still the volatility remains. The injuries will never fade away, especially his – he has a congenitally weak lower back. She only has interpersonally catastrophic parents, so far.


The signalling of their needs is still not fine enough and they turn any single glitch into another in the running sores of their past failures, still in often uncontrollable emotional flashes. Fine enough is what? It's a capacity to catch an emerging need default to disappointment when it's only a difference in the prevailing atmosphere of their joint life. Need defaults are moments like this:

Typically, he's having a bad back day, which means unpredictable pain grasping an apprehensive attitude (because always on edge for the unpredictable) and she's having a bad recall (which means direct experience of parental abandonments). He needs stillness; she needs a hug. Two into one don't go. He tenses and she pushes her need. She feels abandoned and he feels crowded. The great disappointment blast off.

Creating a fine enough treatment looks like:

This day they show up in therapy (session 12) with an increasing sense of achievement and a reminder of the distance to go – the blast off above, just a day before. In a guided revisit, they experience their respective hurts under control and agree that her hug is unreasonable for his pain. So then what? I ask her what would help her need for reassurance. She knows immediately and precisely: a held hand would do just fine.

I ask her to move a seat closer to him, within easy hand reach, and show him where to offer his hand. She places hers palm down just above her knee. He slides his under hers and she says "No". Through his shock he figures out the slide is a slip (but not what slip; it's the sexual one). She lifts hers and places his on top. Success. Abandonment defeated with visceral relief. Guilt at being unable to respond to her need fended off appropriately.

I think I may have primed this result by telling them a story of another couple (F and D) in their age range who were sitting in these seats a week before, separated by a similar need gap. It was crossed by the guy taking action to respond to her pain about their relationship arising from conflicted feelings about his responses to it earlier – that she often needed space and he needed closeness at the same moment. This typically happens at the end of the work day.

He initiated the same seat change spontaneously and grabbed her ambivalently available hand from a slightly cringed position in her chair. This allowed exploring just how close was too close, and considering how their attachment styles differed around a critical mutual reassurance behaviour. Joint distance regulation was tested live, and controllably, as they adjusted the hand holding to achieve optimum need fulfilment at the moment: giving help for him and acknowledging her distance for her in the same act.

These events seem to come in pairs and triplets, or just surges. A day later, a twenty years older couple (C and P) appeared, struggling with increasing success with rages driven largely by him and facilitated by her chronic passivity. His rage driver is an undiscoverable family history – an absent father of a one night's burst pregnancy untraceable by his mother, plus years of deception about his adoption heritage. At 17 he finally caught his otherwise caring adopters messing up their version of his life, an exposure he had long felt coming.


It leaves him hugely vulnerable to rushes of anxiety at perceived performance failures of his, or others in regard to him – a threat of not getting to anything on time will do it. This one was on the way to see me together, with her driving to pre-empt such a rage, but the tactic failing on the road. So,

...they had one of the blow-ups they so fear, but constrained enough by their joint therapeutic work to so reduce it that he just fumed in the passenger's seat about being late, maybe! Like the others above, these two had had a major explosion (first for some weeks) earlier that week.

Trouble is, the fuming is contagiously electric and bad memory inducing for her – will this be another rage or just a low grade trash fire?? So, she reached out to pat his head and he ducked away into a foetal sulk, with emanations of fury growth. They wondered what she could have done differently. It took us some while to come up with the insight that her intuitive touch had been conceptually right, only practically clumsy.

A head touch is not benign, but three others are: the shoulder, upper arm and forearm touches. These are almost universally recognised as OK touches, even between sexes/genders. Most others are sexual, domineering, or both.

The touch is essential to break the rage cycle once it has started. Words just feed it. The touch allows another level of consciousness to be accessed, wherein the path to freedom of the moment's disruptive passion.

Learner therapist (9) …”Finding my starter button”

Learner therapist (9) …"Finding my starter button"
Torrey Orton
July 24, 2011


B., 32, is struggling to step into his realistic, clearly focussed, and preferred work life. He has a track record of work and initiative in the field (food service), a plan for exploring a start-up enterprise, down to possible funding, and most recently a partner prospect of long acquaintance. What he doesn't have is a "starter button". Motivation for the last year or so has been negative – escaping a clearly unsatisfying present job, at which he is also underperforming (though his employer doesn't seem to mind because no pressure is explicitly put on B to do more or differently or better, or…anyway, actually a great situation for a career change – paid exploration time!).


But not negative everywhere. In the last six months he's discovered running and pursues it with sturdy and rewarding attention, to the point of prepping for a half marathon now. No trouble starting his engine for the morning chug around the neighbourhood. He knows he'll feel good doing it and enjoy the challenge of sharpening his times while trimming his steps to reliable sustainability. And so he knows what it means (thought/feeling/action) to be motivated, and is so about some things! His wife and child are among important others.


On the edge of his stasis lies a gambling penchant with a smoking habit attached, now under control, more or less. He recognises this cluster is a displacement of energies which could drive a new life direction and his shortage of accepted alpha aspiration for a male of his social, ethnic and religious identifications. As well, there's a family history of weak father performance in the provider role, which B reflects in his unfound "starter button". He doesn't believe he can succeed at leading a venture alone.


Some months into this exploration, along came the right business partner prospect – a friend of long standing, appropriate openness and relevant life background, interests, experience and resources. Then up jumped a new challenge. What is B expecting the partner to lead in the enterprise and what will/can he lead himself? He doesn't know, nor had he thought of the question, but can feel the relevance.


The background discussion is 'what is motivation and how can it be grown, urged, prodded…in short, increased?' Also in short, motivation is the outcome of a shapely purpose, plus attractive incentives. We know that incentives can act as a purpose, or be confused for one, because need for them (money, status, position, etc.) is confused with purpose arising from deep within – an intrinsic motivation driver. Motivation is enhanced or compromised by competence: actual, imagined and aspirational – which in turn are sustained or demeaned by hope. B. suffers from a motivation hope deficit.


So, to start again, how does B improve his shortfall in leadership competence? By replacing it with confidence in shared leadership – the everyday business solution except where compulsive micro-managers are in the seat. Two parallel leadership relationships bear on his future: the business partner and the life partner ones. While both of these people support his vocational initiative, their stakes differ; His life partner's stake includes management of the household economy, it also affects her personal vocational future(s) (they agree she should go back to work in some way). The business partner's stakes principally centre on business management issues and the household side of his own domestic economy, too.


For B, clarifying his life partner's needs is the starting place to setting some personal goals. But that cannot be done without clarifying his needs. We're talking here about real things like amount of time away from home, expected low income period for the start-up and fall back options for the venture. In parallel run her only slightly spoken vocational aspirations, motherhood self-images, and such.


Both share a habit which blocks exploratory discussions directly affecting them: the wish to do no harm to the other. This is held with something approaching the energy of medical professionals, but not the same professional obligation. The ethical one is almost as powerful. As a result they cannot enter into potentially disputable grounds – those which harbour uncertainty about life critical matters like the family economy above, for instance. And the perceived relationship of doing nothing is still too slight. Doing no harm prevents doing good.


Keep posted.