Learner therapist (33)…… More couples stuff…Hugs and hope

Torrey Orton

March 31, 2013

“Hold the hug for as long as you can stand it…”

Some years ago I came up with the following small step for couples who are so separated by their family management tasks that they seldom talk, even about the tasks. They needed a way to get started again which was truly doable within the confines of their very task straitened lives. It had to be probable as well as possible. As a side light, it had to put them in touch with their real differences in attachment style in a manageable way which could also be extended into repair work on attachment.

Often a distressed couple has almost ceased physical contact with each other and the conversational contact his receded into non-verbals, held there by the enormous weight of the pile of unspoken matters they both know lies in wait. They know because occasional outbreaks of dysfunctional attempts to connect reaffirm their feelings of catastrophic powerlessness to take charge of their own joint affairs…so they rock along on autopilot, each doing what they’ve acquired as their contribution to the joint tasks. Stuck, but in motion, in that special stuckness which includes both members knowing basically what each other’s concerns are, what needs to be addressed to increase their joint stock in the relationship and at the same time aware that they can’t keep track of where they are at with their unspoken concerns – the just keep coming up.

The Hugs Regime

So I propose the following at the end of the first session:

You might like to consider the Hugs Regime as an undertaking to engage with the problems we’ve just got on the table between you. It goes like this –

At the moment you see each other at the end of the day the first thing you do is hug, holding it for as long as you comfortably can. When you have stopped you ask each other, in turn, ‘How are you?’ This is a serious question. An authentic response is required. If you also have something you need to talk about you mention it at this point, including roughly how much time you think you want of the other, and inquire about when would be good for them that evening.

Do you think you can do that? (If yes,) then please try every day between now and our next session. You may not succeed every day. Do not despair. The minimum point is to have thought about it. That counts as an effort.

NB – the Hug Regime also has the effect of confronting them at a low key level with the experiences they have of rejecting and being rejected by each other. This matters because fear of rejection is one of the most common underlying trip wires in relationships. Deciding when they have had enough of the hug each time and noticing when the other has similarly decided, or not, opens the door on more subtle responses and requests of each other.

Keeping track of business

Commonly a couple’s favorite issues keep getting lost. They come up, get a bit of attentional air and then slip back into the obscurity of the minimal conversational spaces the joint tasks allow them. It is repeated fruitless efforts at engagement, and especially the lack of mutual acknowledgment of respective issues actually being there, which fires the engine of despair.

So, I encourage couples to keep a public chart (side of the fridge often a good space, which can also be used with whiteboard markers) of their issues and any agreed approaches to handling them. This makes it possible to keep joint track of jointly undertaken efforts (which includes individual tasks on joint behalf!). Keeping track does two main things: one, allows reconsideration of agreed solutions as implementation efforts reveal shortcomings in them, and two, encourages appreciation of progress by keeping it in view.

 

Coincidences…… revisited

Coincidences…… revisited

Torrey Orton

March 17, 2013

 

That more and more coincidences seem to be appearing in my life has been in my awareness for some years (see from four years ago Appreciations (16)-Coincidentally yours? in www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com ) …and I’ve lost a sheaf of them as a result of not noticing my awareness. So here comes a reinvented topic range.

I am regularly reminded of the existence of apparent coincidences by the correlation between my recalling a certain ex-patient 6 or more months or up to 3-4 years after their stopping therapy and their calling for a new appointment. This correlation is so common in my practice I now expect any recollection to be followed by a reconnection. Perhaps from now I’ll begin recording the first to track the arrival, or not, of seconds.

I’m aware, also, that coincidence is often the expression of some kind of familiarity which in turn (?) is enlivened by personal recollection, by the fact that people and events come to mind in apparently the most unlikely places. This is in turn arises from our natural emotion-based filing systems. Many of their contents are connected in pre-conscious ways revealed over-and over again by associations coming into view with no immediately obvious relation to present events….etc.

 I have always had a talent for running into people in the strangest places, so that these days I expect if I visit a foreign place someone I know, usually from the distant past, will pop up for an unarranged hello. They are almost always more than pleasant events, happenings in public with ashamed priests to the contrary notwithstanding.

So let’s get a bit more systematic, starting with data collecting.

Pinky presences and absences

I was standing Saturday morning witness to the harassing of patients at the FCC a week ago with another Friend of the FCC and the regular security guard. We enjoy good bantering Oz male bonding and re-bonding every Saturday. His aversion to more recently introduced bonding activities like hugs from colleagues of varying ages and sexes is notorious among us, which doesn’t prevent some of the younger Friends persisting in the hope they can re-educate him, or maybe it’s just cultural insensitivity both ways.

Anyway, one such effort had just been rebuffed and I, addressing the other Friend (a young gay woman quite new to the witness role), wondered what he would do if I offered a hug and in the same breath stretching my 7 foot wingspan in an embracing arc towards him from about 8 feet away. He stood there rigid and blank faced. He is very disciplined. A few tours in Vietnam, 13 years in the Army subsequently and 30 plus years consequently of professionally securing all kinds of installations and events underpin his resilient presence.

“Did you notice his left pinky twitch slightly?” I asked her in his hearing. Neither she nor he had noticed, and maybe even I didn’t either though it seemed so at the moment. My suggestion was strong enough that he started feeling his left pinky with his right hand … and suddenly said “Shit” with the force which assures its authenticity, shocking us all (even the HoGPIs across the foot path) in the way deeply troubled expressions usually do.

He discovered he had lost his company ring, a ring he never takes off. Its fit was always a smidge loose. He was stricken, thrown into a flurry of activities, all fruitless until six days later, to discover it. Turned up in a corner of the wash room in the security company office…found by a colleague who came out from a hand wash wondering whose ring it was.

How did I know to covertly tell him to check for it in the first place?

 

What floor do you want?

He did not say or ask when he followed me into a CBD lift a few days back. I was somewhat hurried and touched L-5 by mistake, then my desired L-2 which sits just below 5 on the pick-a-story pad. The delivery guy just behind me reached over to touch L-12 and I mumbled a quick apology for my miss-selection, which he had not noticed. But having it pointed out in my act of contrition, he realized that he actually needed L-5 to complete his deliveries. He would have realized it when he got to L-12 and still had stuff left over.

How often do I get to do something wrong (adding an unnecessary stop to the lift ascension) and have it made right by chance?? Did I know this one, too? Is it like the pinky absent its ring? No. That was getting something right (his pinky did twitch) and getting something more and totally unexpectable (no one on site at this moment knew he had lost his pinky ring) for me and him.

Are these just examples of being in synch, “on the same page”, in tune….with others?

A train ride and the coincidence of this coincidence

I’m thinking about coincidences and a patient walked in, not knowing of my emerging attention to coincidences, and launched into a coincidence of his which was enormously informative for his work and our work, not even seeing fully the parallels between them all. It went like this.

He was standing at a local train station and an older woman (80ish it turned out) asked which platform the Alamein train left by. He checked it out and told her “the one we’re on now”. ..with which she initiated a discussion that went on for the wait and subsequent ride, largely consisting of aspects of her life like being a non-graduate engineer most of her life and having learned whatever was necessary as new tasks came her way from management (which is how he’s living his professional life) and having been the inventor of a famous piece of sheep shearing technology 50 years ago and now pursuing a PhD in some applied area, until she got off. He listened in quiet astonishment at the unlikely claims, so astonished that he didn’t get her name, not because she withheld it.

The name came after his arrival at his aunt’s home, which was why he was awaiting the Alamein train. As he regaled her with the sheep-shearing engineer’s story aunt reached for an article about a “mature age” PhD candidate at a local university saying “she sounds like…” and handed him the article, confirming to his multiple amazements that she was not fabricating, just reporting, her life. For he, too, is in the middle of a self-built professional life converting what he feels is a thin educational foundation into an already professionally acknowledged value for others. If he were looking for a role model he could hardly have done better than her.

 But then, we don’t look for role models until we don’t need them, almost. Once we are well down our life roads, the supporting tuition may just pop up. An unnoticed coincidence may be no instruction at all. An acknowledged and embraced coincidence may be confused with our own developing awareness.

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

 

 

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

Torrey Orton

March 6, 2013

 

Only you can make this world seem right…

The Platters, 1953

Intimate aspirations

This resonant anthem to love has a popular culture life of great resilience and duration. Its underpinnings are the Western romantic vision of another (the One) who will perfectly reflect our own imagined goodness as a person – somewhat as the good-enough-mother does with unconditional love for her children. Perhaps the spiritual anchor is the One God, perfect in all respects, who we are encouraged/told to aspire to. Psychologically these may be the same foundation in different dress(es).

Here’s a thought for beginners on the life road to a coupled future of one kind or another: the One you are looking for, believe exists out there and cherish as “who I am meant to be with” cannot be ‘found’. He/ she has to be co-created, jointly built over years of shared work in  marriage, partnership or cohabitation  -  something exclusive for some large percentage of a life’s time. The happiness research is on my side here. Among the happiest people in industrial cultures are old people in stable relationships of long duration. Modernity has been attacking that paradigm for a century or three. The One is a cheap, cosmetic imitation, but just about all there is on offer…oh, I forgot religious fundamentalists’ straitened marriage gates.

How do you become a One?? You can’t. You can be deemed the One by another and you’ll know if he/she tells you, though that’s unlikely because to do so would reveal the perilous state of the relationship: still being measured up for the suit of engagement according to standards which are both wholly transparent (the public ones imagined by all to be what they are straining to attain) and totally private in the judge’s suite of fantasy needs.

There’s no One...many could do

The imagining of the One is a defence against the uncertainty which is one major feature of intimate living. It is fired by the blind energy of infatuation – one of the few life emotions which is best savoured at its finish.  But, “maybe we aren’t meant to be together” comes to the aspirant’s mind. An expression of powerlessness… being in the hands of fate(s). If the fit isn’t perfect the game can’t be played?? But if you don’t play how can you know the game.  One aspirant confronted the M sex columnist (Sunday AGE, March 3, 2013 pg. 6) with:

…Then a man I really liked said he wanted us to be “friends with benefits” because “how else can you find ‘the one’? Now if I meet someone I think, “another one to treat me badly”.

She was not a beginner; rather more a culture warrior tired of the fight with no finish. How commonly are variations of the ‘friends with benefits’ path to relationship wholeness traded on as the married or partnered future recedes into the faint light of the biological clock’s hands??

Accessorise – everything can be verbed and what can be buffed can be matched. But can it? What is the central theme, colour, shape, sound, smell which defines everything else in the One package as accessories. How would a beginner know? By buying matching sets from approved providers of recognised One costumes…those available in financially appropriate versions… so the One is ultimately democratic. You can put them on and still not know where / who you are.

The inner One

Yourself as the One is expressed in “that person” who you do / do not want to be. E.g.  “I don’t want to be that person who….”;  “I don’t want to be that person in the anger position” – the disempowering judgment against expressing strong feelings to others. We can only wonder what the boundary within her between “too extreme” and the rest of her life might be for Anna Guy.

“…But actually hurting anyone or killing someone, that was just too extreme. I didn’t marry that person. I didn’t know that type of person. I wouldn’t have thought I’d choose that type of person…”

Anna Guy reflecting on her husband having recently been arrested for murdering her brother. THE SATURDAY AGE, GoodWeekend Jan. 19, 2013

The public One

The One has history. For example:

… from the mid-18th century onwards, and particularly with the advent of Romanticism, a different problem presented itself: the glorification of the suicidal person as a romantic hero. In 1774, Goethe published the literary sensation, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a painfully earnest young man, tortured by unrequited love, who ends up shooting himself. All over Europe, other young men started to dress up in yellow trousers and blue jackets, following Werther. They also began to imitate the manner of his death, and Goethe's book was banned in several countries. The roots of the poisonous connection between suicide and the romantic hero began to form at the very same time as the development of modern celebrity culture.

There's no shame in suicide. And there's no glory, either

Giles Fraser  The Guardian, Wednesday 30 January 2013

 

Branding as the pursuit of a corporate One. You have arrived when your company name is the generic name for the product – e.g. Hoover for vacuum cleaner, Kleenex for tissues (USA), etc. The individual person equivalent would be iconic (see archetypes) male and female, a brand changing roughly with the fashion cycle (30 years for Ray Ban aviators, for an instance of a cycle). For archetypes try the gods of old (Viking or Greek identities) or the One God, promoted by the competing owners of its serial revelations, in whose image we are made and always fail to live up to…So what’s left are celebrities. Brand names change a bit more quickly than they used to.

And there’s the ‘history’ of the latest One which solves all previous failures to solve the fat, addiction, ageing...problems. The only resounding evidence for most of these is that they fail, One after another, yet the failures never cease to promote themselves as the One of their respective domain. Fat comes to mind as the most resilient loss-leader of self-improvement fantasies. How many of these are still in play: the Atkins diet, the Mediterranean diet, the Dukkan diet, the 5-2 diet (the latest, latest diet)? Such Ones are also known generically as “the real deal” or “real thing”, out of which spins an unending breeze of real “real things”.

Borderlands – there are ‘bad’ Ones, too

Two weeks before the Australian Open opened in January , on a billboard at the corner of Punt Rd and Swan St. in Richmond facing towards the Tennis Centre, I saw “Don’t be ‘that guy’ at the match”, the drunk and disorderly one in the photo front and centre. Interestingly, on reflection he was scarcely the model D and D type; more drunk and sleepy, foolish, clean cut kid who just went too far for his own system – that is, the wrong one to bother fearing.

In a similar vein, there’s Madison Eagles reflecting on her lady wrestler self-image. She says there’s a joy in being a ‘bad’ One, and that there’s a market for it, proven by her winning ways on the professional mat.

“I’m just drawn to being that horrible person everybody hates and I really enjoy it…”

Madison Eagles, “the Punisher”, 28 yr old woman professional wrestler in TheAGE GoodWeekend Jan 19, 2013

What’s the psychology of this: Do you get a whole picture and then seek items to compose it - a vision thing rather than a tick-a-box thing? The closest to becoming One thru your own efforts is to acquire socially approved features (kardashianisation? Beiberfication?) of the look. It’s not surprising that ours is an age of body dysmorphias and binges. The One is a deeply evaluative and moral construct (ethical…maybe, maybe not) of cardboard thickness.

Another e.g. - “get the garden you’ve always wanted...” Imagine how you would get to recognise the garden you’ve always wanted. How does it get “populated” with plants, pathway(s), vistas…?? Can you choose these components when your source of taste is already set by exposures well before you are choosing such things…much as choice for junk food is primed almost irremediably by junk food childhoods intentionally designed to bond you to junk …?  Can you find a human partner in the same way?

The Game of relationships in a world of Ones

 

The Game has two objectives: to determine who would want to be your One and to determine if they are suitable to be your One. A dilemma leaps out. The other’s desire for you (thru which you feel their want to be your One) and their suitability (thru which you send your desire for them) are mutually confounding variables, as psych researchers would say. Want clouds perceptions of suitability making it difficult to have confidence in your judgment of either variable. This brings us to the Game.

The accepted practices in the Game are to be found in the commentary (gossip?) of interested same sex others about your relationship progress. Sophisticated players draw on the resources of the target sex as well. Everyone knows the rules, with a leaning towards their own sex interests. But do they work in finding a suitable One? Well, if the national relationship failure rate (40+% for marriages) is any indicator, no. And this does not count the myriad of failed efforts which many go through on the way to the supposedly committed versions, both binding and bonded, etc. And we rely on co-gamers to shore up our judgment of the process of discovering whether a possible One wants us and is suitable. There’s a book in the Game, as in the One.

Where to for any one, but especially therapists?

… While the date is ultimately unimportant, what is important is the arrival of systems that support rapid reconfiguration of every aspect of human life, from our work structures to our family lives to our political processes. To trans-form means to change the shape of (of what? … everything). Because a significant portion of the entire human family is now interconnected in real-time, the transformational era can take an opinion in Shanghai and within weeks it could dramatically influence purchasing behaviour for certain products in Reno. Our collective attitudes, behaviours, energy, and spending now constitute a complex, global and fundamentally chaotic school of fish. Or perhaps more apt, a flock of Taleb’s black swans.

“The Transformational Life” – Rob Smith on Integral Life.com 18/02/2013

This sounds like the culture of the One on steroids, where it has become loosened from its mooring culture of origin trappings and converted into a globally portable cloth (among those cultures with a ‘middle class’, defined as anyone with enough disposable income to look at adverts of wannabe approved self-presentation).

Why does all this matter for relationship therapists? Because, if this scant analysis is somewhat right, the conditions for relationship consistency, reliability and certainty are declining, perhaps at a rate well beyond our capacity to adapt. The breakdown rate is one datum. The start-up age is another. The single living rate for over 30’s, especially women, is another. Should increases in family violence rates count as another??

What does it mean to help patients navigate this world, be they 20 or 50. I have ones across that spectrum struggling with the challenge to be someone’s One and find a suitable One, too.

Stay tuned.

 

Learning to act right (33)… Engaging HoGPI strategy with anger

Torrey Orton

Feb. 25, 2013

Anger into energy…

A major change of direction is often upon us before we know it’s happened. We find ourselves facing into the wind instead of back to it…So it seems to be with me and the HoGPIs at the Fertility Control Centre (FCC). I adopted a treat-them-as-they-treat-patients attitude 8 months ago. I explicitly disregarded them and did not speak to those I had spoken to before, restricting my speech only to moments of their ‘bad behaviour’ – their daily-repeated breaching of the Melbourne City Council public harassment regulations. That’s the amount of time they gave to each passing patient.

When I wrote of my anger struggles 8 months ago (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/learning-to-act-right-26-my-rage-and.html

I was at the start of my attempt to influence HoGPIs with disregard. They, the errant HoGPIs, carried on as before, harassing with indifference and impunity.  My anger continued, somewhat reduced by attending to not being angry – the CBT solution. This internal strategy worked a few hours of each week’s time on the line at the FCC, only to be overwhelmed by the more outrageous examples of harassment. These moments still spark a perilously vertical rise in my pulse and pressure at the sight of an already crying woman and her bewildered male companion being set upon by the harpies of heaven.

Two of my FCC Friends – Marty and Charles – took a more assertive approach to the HoGPIs over this period, stepping up more pre-emptively to their actual harassing. Need for an intervention was relatively predictable because the most persistent harassers were 4-6 women, usually present on any given morning in ones and twos. Patients arrive in discrete pairs with lots of time between one and another. I could not do this so pre-emptively as they. Proximity to the offenses pushed me outside my self-control range in a flash.

Anger in retreat

My anger started to recede three months ago when I heard the outcome of the HoGPIs efforts to have a security guard charged with assaulting one of their number. They were unsuccessful. My anger receded further over the intervening months since as I formulated an approach to data gathering which offers a prospect of shutting the HoGPIs down to some extent and a way to be (more) effective protecting patients.

In some trial rounds of data gathering with voice-over video (where I comment on what a HoGPI is doing, her name, the time of day and date) of specific HoGPI transgressions has produced two results: an immediate HoGPI shame reflex and withdrawal from the behaviour, and a secondary threat of possible legal action. There was only one patient query about the videoing, which was easily answered.

Engage or disengage?

But it is not so simple: engage or disengage. Feelings come in different intensities. My anger varies with circumstances, which I still do not understand well or engage effectively. For example, one of the interesting things about the HoGPIs is their aversion to personal accountability for their public actions at the FCC. Aversion appears in self-veiling in different ways. The religious wear trench coats; the laity are trenchantly nameless. Neither provide their names easily, or ever so far. Two examples here - http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/learning-to-act-right-32-unveilings.html

They do not provide their associations – professional, social, familial, avocational – easily, or at all, if asked. And, yet, they see themselves fit to attack others (under the veil of “helping” or “counselling”) about one of the most individual challenges in life…the continuation of it...or not. Their aversion is intrinsic to their single-issue strategy. Anything more personal is always a threat to the consistency and firmness of a single objective – removing abortion rights period. I’m reliably told by some among them that keeping it pure is part of the playbook for many HoGPIs.

Seeking their names, affiliations and vocations is not easy. They are hiding and my approach is a threat and their hiding is a threat to me and patients.  Upshot: an angry request from me. Effect: even more likely withholding by them. And so on. Personalising our relationship is one pathway, maybe, to breaking through the single issue veil. It’s hard to see 3D persons as iconic figures of evil. The generic example of this is the incapacity of those close to serious misbehaviour to actually see it or predict it – the family which stays together, blames together.  Anger’s not a helpful starting point. On the other hand, it provides energy for action in pursuit of what I see as patient justice. A difficult mix to get right.

The sinner-prospect identity, TBC

There is another dynamic at play in the FCC front yard. It goes something like this, I think: HoGPIs see patients through the anti-abortion lens only, so every patient who appears is identified as a prospective sinner to be saved. Their identity for the HoGPIs is sinner-prospect TBC (to be confirmed, by their response to the HoGPI offer of counselling or help). No other aspect of the individual is relevant. Keeping irrelevant the factors which could personalise the patients out of the sinner-prospect identity is central to sustaining the HoGPIs own identity as perfectly justified in any efforts the make – that is, harassments in particular. HoGPIs perform this fantasy maintenance trick by only presenting to the patients what they perceive – the sinner-prospect – with no question about the actual circumstances which bring patients to the FCC. Patients feel this perspective.

 It also helps sustain the idea that patients cannot be any more distressed than their identity as potential sinners already makes them. Normal psychology of stress doesn’t even get into view. Maybe when I get a better grip on my stressors, I’ll get better at increasing the HoGPIs’. Tracking my actions and their effects on me and HoGPIs will come next.

Stay tuned.

Learner   therapist (30)……Disrespect without intent, but effect

Torrey Orton

Feb 20, 2012

 

I’ve got a problem. Under certain circumstances, I spontaneously dismiss, even deride, others’ discussion contributions. It’s either “Uh huh” or “Oh yeah” with a self-satisfied, I coulda told ya that, tone. This behaviour has only come clearly into my view in the last 6-12 months, though having a foggy presence in my repertoire for some 10 years at least. I suspect it’s more like my whole life, the easiest evidence for which is that I’ve always had a tendency, confirmed by disinterested others, to be a wise guy, or occasional smart-ass.

 

I am trying to stamp it out. To do so requires that I follow my advice to my patients: be aware of the triggers, interrupt the behaviours and eventually pre-empt them in the most likely to trigger circumstances. Easy, no? Dismissive me seems to arise either from irritation at others’ failure to see what’s obvious to me or from my own pleasure in seeing an obvious which I wasn’t aware was coming in the conversational path I was on. I think these two sources are interwoven, and perhaps a third source is irritation with myself that I didn’t see the obvious - a brand of intellectual perfectionism…just enough to keep my eye on the rolling ball of life and only get fixated on its irregular movements.

 

I work in the obvious because truths come to me wholly formed out of an opaque inner process which is seldom wrong, once it produces. Intuitions seem and feel obvious once produced. Any pretenders to the title of an intuition must pass this internal comfort or fit rating to be the real thing. If an idea doesn’t feel right it can’t be right for me. This is not to exclude counter-intuitive ideas, which are often among the most revealing just because they do not immediately ‘fit’. So, to a certain extent my dismissiveness is rooted in exasperation at the difference in my mental style from theirs and /or my occasional failure to match my own requirements / expectations of my performance.

 

I should get a grip on this because I have a patient who thinks he’s mentally quicker than I am, and anyway feels he is because he can roughly see where the logic of my thoughts are going…what he can’t see is their emotional roots, which is why he’s still in the chair. But his slight disdain for my lack of pace has become a development point for both of us. He is experienced by others at his work as arrogant, distant, etc. and he doesn’t want to make that impression any more than I want to in my work…but I do, as does he.

 

So what? Well, “Oh yeah” is often heard as disrespectful by others, unless it’s a self-inflicted, resigned self-recognition, as one patient mumbled in reconnecting with a pattern of resilient dysfunction he’s trying to reduce. What position do I take on this ethico/politically? Ken Wilber proposes the following schema for working with differing levels of consciousness/ awareness/ knowledge:

1 -      that all truth is partial, approximate, ( “In this Theory of Everything, I have one major rule: Everybody is right. … everybody … has some important pieces of the truth, and all those pieces need to be honoured.”)

2 -      that there is a developmental sequence in human history, which we all go through, and that movement along it is likely to be very uneven for individuals and groups / societies

3 -       that there is a developmental pathway for engaging people in transformative activities, lubricated by respect

A Theory of Everything, Ken Wilber, Shambala 2000

“lubricated with respect” is a nice idea, that is, a good one finely poised, in my view.

Respect as proposed by Wilber includes respecting everything about us in principle, but most especially when we have a shortcoming from the perspective of domains of understanding we are largely inexperienced operating in and through. This includes the ‘heights’ of our own reflective overview of ourselves. It means that to respect others I must also respect myself in my less developed, more immature, faulty states and stages! With this approach in view and embraced, what can I do to mend my disrespectful way? Here are some starters:

Warn others about my propensity for “Oh yeah...” moments, and their likely sources if they are in my / our awareness.

Invite others to point out when they are getting the “Oh yeah…” treatment from me.

Continue investigation of the forms of ‘oh yeah’, the associated circumstances of their emergence and their inner and outer effects.

Be really careful to test for differences of consciousness/awareness/knowledge in different discussion settings.

And….??

There’s some way to go with this!!

Learning to act right (32)… Unveilings

Learning to act right (32)… Unveilings
Torrey Orton
Jan. 30, 2013

The ashamed will often out themselves,

even if they are sure their God is on their side

One of the interesting things about the HoGPIs is their aversion to personal accountability for their public actions at the FCC. Aversion appears in self-veiling in different ways. The religious wear trench coats; the laity are trenchantly nameless. They do not provide their names easily, or ever. They do not provide their associations – professional, social, familial, avocational – easily, or at all, if asked. And, yet, they see themselves fit to attack others (under the veil of "helping" or "counselling") about one of the most individual things in life…the continuation of it!!...or not.


Here's a couple I've recently seen.


Flywire screen veil


My wife and I were in Bunning's – a first in our lifetime joint venture – seeking and finding a broom and scoop set for brushing up the kitlit which our two fuzzy wonders spread around in their version of veiling their presences from the world. As we lined up for the getaway with our treasures I caught a recognised face outline to my rear right and turned slightly to confirm it. It took a millisecond (or 2?) to note that the old priest from my Fertility Control Clinic vigils was ambling by the outers of the checkout lines holding a rolled length of flywire on end to cover his face from my view. Or so it seemed. If I've learned anything from 18 months out front of the FCC it's the unreliability of my own perception.


So, I asked my wife to turn to her left and see if what I thought I had seen was actually there, describing him as above and so he was, as she reported, "looking like he didn't want to be seen" by me. I took another look and confirmed my impression. He has never met my eye while standing on the line at the FCC singing religious ditties, mouthing verses from a prayer book and supporting the women doing the Church's work of harassing patients. A few days later when I ambled by their morning protest post on Wellington Parade and I noted how nice it was to see him in Bunning's the week before, he didn't meet my eye then, either.


One of the grim-faced, superannuated men standing with him immediately threatened me (a feather's blow from a handleless duster) with the grimaced assertion that "we'll call the cops if you say anything we don't like". The priest in question already refused to support an effort by his HoGPI minions four months ago to sick the cops on me for offending him about the Church's paedophilic history and his potential shared responsibility for that as an elder – both facts, of course. I suspect they're working up for the new public offense legislation to roll in. I wonder if this post will be seen to be an "offense" in the meaning of the eventual act. There's nothing but the facts here, I suggest.


"I don't have to tell you…"


Then there's one of the five most harassing HoGPI women, also grim-faced, who I asked a week ago "what do you do", and then "what's your profession?", to which she answered "I don't have to tell you." Which is interesting for someone trying (98% unsuccessfully) to tell patients what their medical and social situations are with moral certitude of a remarkable order. Some of what she says is meant to be "evidence based" but isn't. I can read the evidence on social/psychological factors with some competence. I was wondering if she could, too. If so, then I could point her at the latest deep work on the areas she purveys.


She and her sisters are purveying false information to patients. Obviously their faith is weak since they keep advancing pseudo-science for matters which are items of Church dogma (and proudly proclaimed so for some authorities ensuring us that the Church has always thought the same things about matters sexual, without exception, etc. until it is overwhelmed by facts). Where faith treads science can have no say, unless it can throw faint lights of reason on the dull dim of dogma.


Anyway, through another Friend of the FCC I heard that she is a Billings Method "counsellor". It seemed useful to test this hearsay by offering it to her to avow or dis as she might. This offer – "I hear you are a Billings counsellor" – produced a gush of almost incomprehensible gabble about guessing I've done a web search and "it's better than putting things inside you" and…on unstoppably like a caught child…the babble of the guilty / ashamed confessing to she didn't stop to find out what accusation...which wasn't anything but an empirical observation…but, I did the search later and found that the Billings Method in Australia advertises three levels or domains of services, one of which is natural contraception…a little conflict there with dogma.


I think the nuts are cracking.


Maybe this stuff fits in my flexible travel category of "travel funnies" which I usually write on road trips. Friends of the FCC is a trip for me from places I know to ones I haven't entirely imagined, or sometimes even dreamed, and the end is not in sight nor is my motivation clear.

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

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

The blame and responsibility challenge – creating truth in shared facts

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

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


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


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


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


Unintentional offense and responsibility


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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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



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


Offenses to the self


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

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

"Now look what you made me do!"

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


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


'my pain is your fault'

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

 

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

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

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


The blame and responsibility challenge


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

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

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


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


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


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


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