Learner therapist (38)…… pathways to reconciliation

Torrey Orton

Sept. 23, 2013

“You always say / do X when I say / do Y….”

I always offer the following six propositions to first time couples therapy patients. It is a perspective they can use to interpret and shape their relationship from this point forward. And it is the one I use.

1. The responsibility for the current state and future of the couple is joint
2. This responsibility has varying levels with different issues because individuals value issues differently
3. We can never fully meet all the needs of another person, hence our need for friends while coupled
4. We can never fully know our own needs at any time because:
1. they are partly hidden in our unconscious, and
2. they emerge as we transit our life stages, or
3. they are subordinated to the needs of others.
5. Consequently, conflict is a necessary part of relationships (not just marriages)
6. This conflict usually takes a repeated form – the systemic communication dysfunction – which can be seen early in couples work, and which the couple immediately recognise as ‘what we always do…’ (see point 1 above)

The systemic communication dysfunction, however, is the hurdle too high for some couples. It brings them to me – this barrier which looms up between them with reliable consistency about a well-known set of issues. These are also facts, but mainly emotional ones about the status of the relationship. Helping them to be shared is my first task. I’ve written elsewhere (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/learner-therapist-18-systemic.html  ) about the techniques for doing this – exploring needs and wants, building a shared agenda for joint exploration and creating resolutions to the agenda.

Usually there are emblematic hurdles which have years of unresolved injuries* attached to them. Often these hurts are so big that some form of reconciliation is called for, though usually it is me who labels them as such. Even the mention of reconciliation expresses a level of optimism for the relationship which the traumatised couple may not easily rouse early on in the work…

…such issues attack the central confidence of the relationship – usually matters of fidelity, though not always sexual. They corrupt trust and embed suspicion while accruing a nest of reinforcing experiences between the couple, eventually becoming self-reinforcing to the point of crippling their basic relationship assumptions. The common verbal form or corrupted trust is the accusation: “You always say / do X when I say / do Y….”

Reconciliation for a change

The offer of a reconciliation process - which assumes that everything relevant can be (1) truthfully acknowledged, (2) apologised as appropriate, (3) recompensed if necessary and, finally, (4) prevented from recurring - is often heard by patients with mild to serious wonder, edging into disbelief. Here’s roughly what I say about it, set out as a presentation which ensures, when well executed, that a clear idea of a clear process is available to both parties. It can take numerous sessions to get to the detailed implementation, though it often has been pre-empted by their engaging with each other with that process in view before formally arriving at it. The power of applied suggestion.

An approach to marital reconciliation:

Step	Purpose	Process
1 Acknowledgement	To build an agreed version of what happened, so that the ‘facts’ are mutually endorsed. This will be essential to achieve a credible apology and to establish appropriate recompense and relevant prevention strategies	The person responsible** writes out what the facts are, with guidance from the person harmed to assure they are all there. The final document is read by the writer out loud, repeatedly if necessary, until an acceptable tone of seriousness is achieved for the person harmed.
2 Apology	To ensure that the acknowledged facts are taken up as the responsibility of one of the other parties – credibly and authentically (the latter contributes largely to the perception of credibility)	The writer apologises for their role in the acknowledge facts, again repeated until an appropriately authentic tone is achieved for both parties.
3 Reparation	To restore a sense of balance in the relationship where damage is seen to be high by both parties. May be material or services in nature…	In civic life we have community orders as a form of giving back for breaking the law. In private the same concept can be applied. For instance,
4 Prevention	To ensure that “it never happens again”.	If the acknowledgment is full about the damaging behaviours, their triggers should be clearly in view. Consequently, pre-emptions can be designed jointly (!) to interrupt recurrence opportunities.

 

Any system like this actually reflects participants’ unreflected understanding of violations – their sense of justice.  So, they often have begun the reconciliation process implicitly. For example, at the start they may already have ideas about recompense and prevention…very likely in fact, because these two steps are the imagined results both are looking forward to. Failing to do the pre-work on acknowledgment and apology is what prevents progress on the last two. Fear of the last two inhibits progress on the first two. Similarly, getting good at the first two means falling into distress deep enough to call for recompense and prevention happens much less often and the cycle of re-injury is broken up front when precipitating events occur – as they will!

Note there’s a practice of reconciliation for criminal invasions of personal and property safety. It is called Restorative Justice and has formal state, national and international proponents. In these the guilty are encouraged to confront their victims and engage with the damage they have caused. The focus is on acknowledgment and apology, with occasional acts of reparation.  Restorative Justice is associated theoretically and practically with Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in various places – e.g. Canada , South Africa, Australia – with heritages of systemic and systematic colonial violations of indigenous families (among other violations of indigenous life!). All  from marital reconciliation to inter-ethnic truth and justice are means of engaging the past by working it through in the appropriate publics.

Forgiveness and forgetting. Matters for another time.

*unresolved injuries are deep historical relationship patterns which remain present to the view of oneself and others as how we normally behave under pressure. They are often not acknowledged either to ourselves or by others because they are the kind of behaviours which elicit automatic defences on both sides; empathy helps us conduct this tacit defence.

 

** Person Responsible and Person Harmed is the language used in Restorative Justice to identify participants in various kinds of proceedings. See Best Practice Standards for Restorative Justice Facilitators Copyright © Victorian Association for Restorative Justice, 2009

 

Learner therapist (37)…… Unavoidable hurts: damaging dilemmas of development
Torrey Orton
Sept. 16, 2013

“I have to send you back again…”

 

A few months ago I wrote here on “Disrespect without intent” (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/02/learnertherapist-30disrespect-without.html ), arguing that we are responsible for damages we have done to others without intending to do so. I want to extend that claim from the relatively benign damage of my inappropriate “Uh huhs”* to the decidedly malignant damages of long term childhood victimisation which often compose the backgrounds of the deeply anxious and/or depressed. The deforming damages may be experienced in self-harming and suicidal intents / attempts, with the crystallised defences of PTSD, OCD, body/eating disorders and the various social phobias along the life paths of the damaged – constituting a reasonable chunk of the DSM V diagnoses.

Occurrences and forms of unintended damages

In child raising - Catch 22’s

A mother, having been abandoned with three children, decided to start ensuring she never had to depend on a man again. She did this by getting herself an education and then the work history which made her highly employable and repeatedly promotable. Along the way she had to be out of home for much of the day. In the space between end of school and end of work home time her three kids were home alone and into this unsupervised space arose the sexual abuse of the youngest child (girl, age 7) by the eldest (boy, age 12).

Similarly, the mother with two female primary aged children split up from her first husband after periods of violence at his hands. Dad eventually remarried (quite soon in fact) and the divorce settlement provided child access for him a weekend fortnightly. Unfortunately his new wife was also a graduate of a failed marriage with children, who were living with them.

She was utterly incapable of managing the blending demands of the visitation weekends, leading her to victimise the girls persistently and intensively. The degree of verbal violence was sufficient to leave the girls crying on the way home to mother and pleading with her not to be sent back. She had to say: “You have to go. The family court requires me to share you with your father.” For my patient, one of the two girls 20 years later, this went on until she left home for a violent boyfriend at age 16 and the cycle continued down the generations.

In marriages / families

The couple nothingness condition – when there is a space between the couple into which both have learned not to tread because the ground is rough, the air frosty and the lighting undimmable. This kind of space produces constant low grade irritation with occasional outbursts of rage. The irritation signals the constant presence of nothingness, which the individuals express in a persistent sense the other disrespects, disregards, dislikes them  and the other’s failed coupling is described in negative absolutes (he/she always,  never does…) which imply catastrophic outcome expectations for the relationship. These cannot be resolved because both experience it as what the other should do – take a chance to change things.

Family nothingness condition – when feelings are prohibited and opportunities for arousing or engaging them are reduced to the minimum and yet they still stay housed under one roof. For example, the family which eats meals separately (I know two of these), where almost  no feelings are explicitly expressed and where implicit expression is severely repressed (making passive-aggressive anger the only OK public feeling and guilt the de facto private feeling when its private version rage is not in play). Alcohol is the lubricator of the frozen joints of these two relationship worlds.

The dilemma of engagement in recovery

These four examples are all violent, though not in the sense the genpub or popular press imagines them. In principal, they would seem to be easier to deal with than family violences as we usually hear of them – either by friends or news reports. However, they are not easier, partly because they are somewhat invisible violences, leaving no broken bones or cuts except the victims’ self-inflicted ones.     

The challenge for both victims and abusers is to engage with the part good / part bad abusers’ behaviours. The victims cannot escape this dilemma because it is constantly present to them in the viscous mixture of self-blame and self-defence, which sticks them to recurrent patterns of daily life ineffectiveness – in work, relationships, self-care, etc. Out of this sticky mix they often generate their own history of damaging behaviours both to themselves (the self-harming and crystallised defences mention above) and others (reproducing the violences they have been subject to), …and so the damaging passes from generation to generation it often seems.

That this is no mean struggle is attested by the society level discussion over historical guilt, notably the 20^th century German ones (World War II guilt and political guilt for the DDR for 45 years thereafter). Positions on the virtues and abuses of remembering and atoning are exquisitely set out by David Rieff in Against Remembrance and dramatised in Bernhard Schlink’s fictions of war and self-oppression - The Reader and The Weekend - and theorised recently in his Guilt About the Past. The apposite by omission example is Japan. These are all multi-generational matters. They do not go away in societies any more than they do in families.

The problem of blame and responsibility

The desire to avoid the dilemma of responsibility (which entails potential blame and praise one way or another) shows up in funny places like famed works of self-development and injury recovery that falter around holding the parents responsible for their injuries to children (assailing the victims with the need to deny their victimhood), failing which their children can never extricate themselves from the cycles of self-blame which bring them to therapy in the first place. Correct blame locates responsibility where it belongs, which certainly is NOT wholly with the child. It also helps to clarify those things which are not changeable by the child because they were not the child’s responsibility.

There’s another level to this struggle – a conceptual one. Dilemmas are those kinds of things which cannot be reduced to black and white, digitised, constructs. A very large part of human populations are not presently capable of holding two largely conflicting versions of the same story in mind at once. So maybe my efforts to get patients to engage such dilemmas are misplaced and the strategies of other therapists (see above) which I see as avoidant of the dilemmas are in fact intellectually and morally prudent. That is, the strategies reflect and honour the developmental potential of patients under stress.  However, they do so by starting from an avoidance - namely, assuming that confrontation with abusers is wrong because uncomfortable for the abusers and so not even to be raised as an option by the abused. This is a little too close to self-protective institutional procedures for my comfort!!

My impression is that many patients make only modest efforts down the pathway of historical reconciliation with their abusers. There are good reasons for this, but one of them is not that the abusers are blameless. Rather they may be now incompetent to play the role of responsible adult, either through moral weakness of the sort demonstrated by public figures and institutions of all sorts these days (or, has it not always been thus?) or the constitutional weaknesses of advanced age.

* by the way, that uncontrollable spontaneous dismissal of others seems to have almost fully disappeared in the last couple of months…sliding out of my natural communication repertoire with not a peep of resistant protest. How that came to be is a wonder for another time.