Learner Therapist (55) … it takes a village to make a mind

Torrey Orton

February 21, 2015

Parent, sibling, peer, partner… again

 

On this day 17/02/2015 there were 19 YouTube videos entitled ‘It takes a village to…” to make all manner of things, amongst which make a mind was one. The most noteworthy parallel is “to raise a child.” Villages are in declining supply in Australia, though I’m daily reminded of my roots in something near to a village 60 years ago in Massachusetts. It, Lunenburg, had a population of 5,000 which would count for a medium sized country town here, but felt like a village because within 15 minutes bike ride of my house could be reached every kid in my class in the local primary school and all their siblings older and younger than me. I felt like I knew everyone in Lunenburg, except for the occasional foreigners - soldiers from Fort Devens who passed though on the way to and from the bars of the mill town down the road (pop. 45,000). I subsequently spent 9 years in small educational institutions, secondary and tertiary, in equally small towns in New England. Double villages – residential education and small town environs for the price of one.

What reminds me of this heritage is the feeling I have about knowing people in our neighbourhood which has grown by about double in the last years as the newly minted flats of Studio Nine came onto occupational line. I don’t expect to know them all, any more than I knew all the locals of the old days here. What I do expect is to be able to recognise them and thereby know them for being among us and potentially of us – the locals. At a minimum, responsibility for turd patrol can be expected these days. This is one aspect of a village. Every villager knows the rules and respects them by enacting them. Our ‘village’ is a little more eclectic than Lunenburg or the others were, and maybe still are. So rule recognition and following is a bit more variable than I would like…but “it is what it is” as the saying of resignation and withdrawal goes, which I do not suffer lightly.

I’m drawing this out because it seems to me that we suffer a shortage of village, and certainly of “community”, another of those now empty words invoked anytime politicians want to embrace everyone as if they are beneficiaries of some offer which in fact has highly differentiated impacts for various parts of the putative community. So wither therapy in all this? Increasingly I find myself giving little speeches about our social states in explanation of some of the forces to which patients feel themselves subject as they struggle to right their traumatised lives.

These speeches emphasize, implicitly, the near absence of effectively supportive communities for us and the disproportionate presence of oppressive ones. Those for whom this absence doubled by oppression really matters are the traumatised. We in the therapeutic community know that socialising our experience is a basic way of engaging, normalising and embracing it, but that requires community at the village level. I have some patients who speak of their local “village” as the replacement for families of origin which have abandoned them. For them the village is a pub and its environs, a small shops and cafes street with enough density to be peopled most daylights hours and quite few early dark ones – peopled with recognized others.

Learner Therapist (54) … 1 person 4 roles

Torrey Orton
February 17, 2015

Parent, sibling, peer, partner

 

Many couples have been illuminated by the following idea: we all get to play any one of four roles in relation to each other – parent, partner, peer or sibling. If we are competent partners we know that our other half may at any time need us to be their peer, parent or sibling for them, and that we may need the same from them. Our need for others to relate to us in these roles may be upon us before we are aware, usually signalled by role specific behaviours like being needy (parenting), competitive (sibling), cooperative (peer) or interdependent (partner).

While it is totally normal not to be available in the appropriate role at the appropriate time because of our engagement in role needs of our own, what is more confusing and confounding is discovering that our respective capacity in the roles may be very different because our original learning was unbalanced (so a role got less developmental attention than is required to grow it to workable levels). We may not even really know the role because our upbringing did not contain it. An only child, for example, is likely to have an underdeveloped sibling competitiveness, unsurprisingly and wholly unknown to them, and unknowably so, too!! It is beyond their experience, existing perhaps only as a sense of aloneness exposed when in the presence of other families’ siblings.

So, who am I for you today?

The most obvious role is parenting. We need this throughout life whenever we approach significantly novel steps or stages in our paths, especially unpredictable ones and even more enervating those which we could have predicted but failed to. The parent for the day is needed to be unreservedly supportive, to be unconditionally accepting – a hard row to hoe under any conditions.

Sibling associations most clearly come into view when we relate to partners as brothers or sisters, deferring to them or competing with them while being bound together in a wholeness which affirms us all. Similar dynamics may be found in work place, spiritual and leisure associations with all the variety and less control since we do not understand such settings as family. Other cultures see them as always family in the sense that the various expectations of leaders, for example, are bounded by parental expectations.

Peers are our equals more or less. The equality comes from shared experience not shared outcomes, aspirations or inspirations. If you are 10 years older or younger than your partner, the peer potential is low, even within families, where 10 years makes often for an unshareable childhood by the same parents and siblings. They bring to us a kind of experiential corroboration which parents and siblings cannot – that of the world outside the family but inside the same history! The extent of moving home in one’s life, increased by any distance which makes neighbourliness with old acquaintances only sustainable by conscious action is a demonstrable destroyer of such peer potential in our lives.

First amongst equals, our partner - the one who makes us whole and for whom we do the same in return. In fact we are inextricably implicated in our partnership needs, even more clearly so by our lack of a partner. Of all four roles this is the most fundamental and it seems at the same time the most perilous, hence perhaps the importance of the others as backstops for the ones which pass through even the keeper. Who would invest in a role which has a reliable 40% chance of failing? The other three roles provide fail safes against the almost inevitable failure so easily imagined that its play in our awareness and not is one of the major themes of literary and moral history – deception and infidelity.

…and, who are you for me?

Probably by this point you are noticing that these roles may be covertly in play throughout our lives, most clearly so in the major everyday interpersonal settings like work, sports, religious, and various avocational and political groups. They are the means of establishing and maintaining deep bonds in the relatively distant relationship worlds of post modernity. These may resist the pleas of justice, honour or prudence, as we can see in various instances of groups which prefer their publically guilty members to the rights of victims of various abuses. Add identity dynamics to such group and we have the material of gross discriminations against out groups, especially easily stigmatised ones.

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

Torrey Orton
Feb. 10, 2015

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

 

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

Driving for 55 years

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Learning to act right (48)… “Ah my…”

Torrey Orton
Jan. 31, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

So, say it loud “Ah my…”

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

Torrey Orton

January 28, 2015

Guilt and trauma

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Torrey Orton
Jan. 27, 2015

Learning to park, again

 

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

 

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

 

…but I’m not getting it right

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

A comforting failure??

 

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

 

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

 

 

Learner Therapist (52) … Fear of losing the edge

Torrey Orton

January 22, 2015

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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