Learning to act right (46)… Being radicalised, not

Torrey Orton
Jan. 14, 2015

Being radicalised is one of numerous fears du jour in our increasingly fearful age. Seems there’s a bunch of radicalisers all around us looking for candidates to join radical groupings – but, only one matters: the “Islamic” ones. There are other fundamentalist groupings of our own design which seek to attract people to fringe realms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and usually more than one per major religion. And in the background are “cults” springing off the fringes of the majors like the Children of God, the Elect Brethren, the ultra-orthodox Haredi, the Wahhabi, and so on. These are mostly devoted to hiding their lights under bushels, but come out bristling, especially when confronted with reality slights to their world views. Even Buddhists and Hindus have a go in this space, just not around our corners.

The signs of our fearful age are numerous, too, ranging from the creeping growth of self-esteem protective child management preoccupations, and on…

to the “limbs may fall” self-protection of local government domains,

to the ease with which governments of the ‘left’ and ‘right’ made the anxious white folks of the best country in the world fearful of dark demons arriving on boats 25 years ago, and continue to poke that fear to this day,

to the wilful obscuring of budget responsibilities by both major parties through the current period of mining fired wealth,

to the fact that radical sects and single-minded sectarians here have been springing into prominence well beyond their numbers precisely because they dare to behave inappropriately,

to the relentless erosion of basic securities – most notably job security in any form as the portfolio life fantasy is imposed on people without the preconditions of education or awareness or opportunity which make carrying one’s life in a bag remotely possible … all done in the name of “the economy”, a sure fire title for a scam masquerading as a scientific certainty, and

to the global threats before us constantly:

o   Climate change

o   Financial system vulnerabilities,

o   Ebola, and other natural disasters,

o   International political system instabilities,

o   The prevalence of the open big data minding of all our businesses, and the increasing likelihood that our privacy is irretrievably compromised by the very information science which we treasure for its detail and connectedness,

o   And the recurrent fact of the corruptibility of major social institutions of all kinds everywhere, at minimal cost to the perps!!

The similarities between the fundamentalists and financial product spruikers should not be avoided. Both behave with certainty to the point of obscuring the clearly illegal to protect their ‘brand’ (Hillsong, oh Hillsong and CommBank and ANZ…). One recent ‘community’ expression of fear is the election of minority governments to the mindless despair of the old major parties and their attached pundits. Compulsory voting shall not protect us from the emerging expressions of hopeless disengagement from the foundations of democracy.

Now, a person cannot be radicalised in any application of the term without a need for ‘radical’ solutions. Hence, for example, there is an endless market for radical solutions to health problems, silver bullets for ageing bodies. And our free speech democracy supports the proliferation of medical scams, just as it does financial ones. Advertising it’s called.

And for every religion there is a radical fringe which increasingly grasps the nice peoples’ ground in the middle with threats of embarrassing them for being unfaithful, weak livered and in any event unfilial for implying in any way that they, the radical, aren’t really members of the family, or, more, spiritually profligate but undisownable children thereof.

We all have origins in black and white processes, or more calmly, the life cycle which by not a few actually is fudged in being so described because it is the life and death cycle through which we pass with varying degrees of impact. The use of ‘pass’ for ‘die’ is one small instance of the deep desire in our culture to airbrush or hush away the realities of our being: namely, once dead we are done. Medical science persistently grinds away at the leading and following boundaries of this certainty, adding to the fear by deconstructing the foundations of faith through requiring reallocations of belief.

Existential anxiety is normal for conscious beings. However, the contexts sketched above aggravate this enormously because they compromise our sense of being able to act effectively in the areas of living we think we should be able to. Hopeless anxiety is usually described as depression if it gathers enough negative steam to power us down into the dark night of the soul. Lack of hope can be glossed as shortage of meaning. Depression is the source of radical action: whether inaction of over action, heading in the direction of death. Persistent depression (that is, inescapable meaninglessness) induces persistent rage. Now that’s a radicalising feeling with only two directions of expression: at oneself or at perceived others who make life meaningless for us. But the latter are hard to find except in the most stereotyped forms; other identities like ethnicities, races, religions, social statuses….I can populate my own world of perceived meaning destroyers. Problem is, they are also someone else’s meaning makers and sustainers!!! It is only this which keeps my radicalising in the box.

 

 

Back to the Anger (2)

Back to the Anger (2)
Torrey Orton
August 30, 2010


Anger is back on my emotional menu, more by its absence than its presence. Maybe I have slipped into a higher state of fundamentally being angry (in the here that, being here kind of way). But it feels more like a slip back into apathy, indifference, ambivalence, abstraction, depression? For some weeks now I've been struggling to write. This would be OK if it were a struggle, but it's not. It's a muddle. I'm in a muddle with me and my world, wondering if the feelings are mine projected or prompted and sustained by the world around me.


I have felt this coming, in much the way that HH was saying of himself recently: feeling short of energy, mixed motivation, apathetic to some extent, though not to the point of inactivity. Aikido practice disappeared into the space of French/Spanish things two months ago – I travelled for the first time in three years without a jo. It had been slowing for a couple of months, attrited by a solo training regime which needed the spark of submission to reinvigorate itself. I haven't forgotten aikido, but the inner push flags in the cool of Melbourne dawns. Don't ask about the warmth of winter arvos.


What's actually arrived? One thing is inexpressibly fierce thoughts about our leaders of many stripes and competences in many places. These thoughts have stopped me even as I write. So powerful is the commandment against thinking them that the prospect of public shame for doing so inhibits my language, and so my fingers (with which I write these days, not the 'pen' I would have written just now). After a couple days' pause in the space between fullstop and 'A', I can say these are thoughts of retributive justice. Trouble is, I'm untested at violences of the bodyful sorts and quail in the face of bodily threats unless provided in controlled environments like ice hockey or aikido, in which cases I love violence.


What's behind this arrival? Nothing new, but the gathered load of years of obsessive anger, which CB reminded me today was long gathering hair rather than action.


A year and some ago I proposed that

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

I was wrong in the long term. For some, at some times, under some personal conditions the weight of others' disregard generates one's own disregard in return. Unfortunately this is not terribly instructive to the others. They do not feel the absence of ones regard for them or oneself.


Back to the anger.


Here Michael Leunig surmised a few weeks ago:

Perhaps we are witnessing a historic moment when our politicians are ceasing to advocate our intelligent concerns and are beginning to openly represent our madness.

Maybe that's not why I started aikido training (self-training) for the first time in three months today. Maybe it has been mostly me and only somewhat 'them' that I have slipped into torpid laxities – TV, eating/drinking in compulsive ways – which I've always had a taste for but they are both more and less powerful these recent days. Watched more often but for total less time.


In honour of my honouring a monthly performance target for 17 months, I'm posting this in the last days of August, way behind on my notional monthly target, yet still keeping myself in the game. Will I lift it or leave it?

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Anger channelling – effective or expressive

Torrey Orton

October 30, 2009

Months ago Hamid and Charles wondered what effective anger channelling would look like. They were picking up a line in my post on popular anger. The six months since then has seen an increase in popular public angers, notably to the level of scaring people like Thomas Friedman a few days ago – a guy who has seen a few things while wandering across flatter and hillier parts of the planet.

In the intervening months little has emerged to increase my awareness of channels I would likely choose for my angers, though I find myself continually looking at Comment and Letters pages for examples and models. Someone else's initiative I could join would be nice. Finding Don Watson interviewed recently and visiting the website spawned by his earlier writing (www.weaselwords.com.au) gave no solace to my shared anger at the linguistic (evidence of the) corrosion of basic social functions. Maybe we don't do popular anger and I'm unAustralian in my aspirations for more of it.

Sources – public and private
My most constant acquaintance with unresolved anger, aside from my own, is in therapy. With great regularity my patient clients with anxiety/depression related difficulties have substantive early abuses in their personal histories, often multi-generationally. This pattern has most recently been re-aired in the backwash of the arrest of Roman Polanski a while ago. Lurking in the interior of the veiled awareness of their abused childhoods, often extending well into early adulthood, are family systemic and peer group systemic threats to self. Coping with them at the time they are occurring involves a fine dance of conscious self-protection from these dangers and avoiding offense to their powerful authors. Especially critical is not allowing anger to surface, since that may be seen as a threat inviting even more vigorous abuse.

One can find this, too, in abused populations who are victims of racial, ethnic or other stereotypically driven abuses. Whole countries like Greece, China and Korea still show effects of longterm foreign domination. Individuals and groups learn to repress and deny their anger at felt injustice(s). The aversion to confrontation is so great people literally cannot speak their hurt directly. Equally, once freed of their oppression(s), the injured groups often cannot stop talking about the past that is so much with them. Their talk, organised as a group action, is one way to channel anger. The objective is to shame the oppressors, and maybe gain retribution or recompense. The enduring effort of surviving "comfort women" to win Japanese acknowledgement of their victimisation is a well known example. Reconciliations are another objective, seldom (?) successful, even if the once victimised are now the powerful as in South Africa. On the other hand, face-the-victim processes for personal injury criminals have some positive results, particularly if the criminal is early in their possible career.

Mixed feelings, often conflicted (an anger source itself)

One of the discoveries which open the door to moral complexity is that of conflicted feelings about acts of perceived goodness or badness. Even minor ones often suffice to elicit an emotional array about people well-known to us that leaves confusion in its wake. Where the origin of abusive treatment is within family, it is usually undiscussible. Failure to abide by the rule is punished by indirect or direct threat of emotional exile.

We could say that the existence of real moral simplification (black and white thinking) is among the leading indicators of social cohesion within groups. How better to identify a robust group than by its resistance to acknowledging, or, better, pursuing the ethical shortcomings of its members?

The latter is, however, an accepted indicator of under-development of personal ethics. Its organisational version is on show daily: the Catholic Church's repeatedly reported knee-jerk denial / obscuring of sexual predation; NFP organisations' abandoned children hostel's multidimensional predations; corporate boards unable to restrain greed in management or even apply preset performance indicators to executive remuneration; footy players distressing women or each other ….

In therapy, the mixed feelings of traumatised children are expressed in adult squeamishness about tagging their parents with any accountability for the agreed traumas. Often initially the traumas cannot be recalled, being locked in memory out of direct access. Sorting them out is essential to righting the wrongs (setting responsibility where it belongs: with those in power at the time). Once sorted, the anger can be addressed to managing the present state of the abusive relationships. This is not sortable by changing the way we think about abuses – i.e. changing the way we value them by portioning the experienced violences into non-catastrophic mind-bites. It requires action - actual or virtual – to hold the continuing forces of abuse at bay even in their weakened forms of the family social system: aged parents, the variously affected and denying siblings, etc.

Different angers – levels
Anger can loosely be thought of as having two experiential sources: (1) undesired violations by others and (2) frustration of our appropriate aspirations through our own or others incompetence to support them. Some helping fraternity folks divide angry feelings from angry behaviours. This, and its sibling – the division of thought from feeling in CBT – are on the verge of relegation to a subservient role therapeutically as the indivisibility of thought, feeling and action are demonstrated by multi-modal research in these areas. Recent work on thought/feeling integration makes this distinction functionally meaningless, since there is no thought which does not have a feeling component, nor a feeling which does not have a behavioural component. This is the practical meaning of 'non-verbal' and 'habitual'.

Channels – pathways and platforms for action

There are a number of action channels, spread over two basic levels: actual (real, authentic) and virtual (technically mediated). These two flow into each other of course when the interaction becomes live (therefore real and authentic) while still being technically mediated (phone, etc.) Means of expressing anger (and most other feelings) are many and employable at either level. Here's a start at the micro level: two people. (Plug in your own two party scenario at this point.)

For example, I want to deal with a difficult issue with a person who matters to me. The issue is so volatile, and we have handled it so badly in the past, that there is justifiable anger arising from objective disrespects on both sides. How I start to re-engage will make all the difference to the possibility of a different result from the repeat failures we have achieved so far. The start has to flag that something new is intended without getting into the substance of things too early. A new shared ground has to be prepared.

This will partly be old ground recovered from joint history, and partly new ground created for this event. The old might include shared history, experience and values; the new, opportunities for growth or development that did not exist before now and the mutual interdependence(s) which can bring them to life. It ensures actual continuity and engages the shared history as a context for future activity.

I might send these thoughts in an email, written in a spare, agenda-offering style - for discussion, a precursor to a talk. If I wondered about his accessibility to email – some folks don't turn it on every day or more than once a day – an SMS noting that it is on the way would be appropriate. It's all virtual to this point. The rest unfolds in conversational steps like those mentioned here where a delicate entrance to a potentially indelicate subject is sketched out as a face-to-face event.

Join 'em
More recently, in trying to find a way to channel my anger more concretely I sought out an appropriate NGO as the prospective beneficiary of ½ day per week of my time pro bono. I overcame previous doubts about my ability to stick with anything too narrowly focussed by choosing one in the environmental domain. I realised (again) that such groups have to take a whole of system and systems viewpoint on their efforts – therefore allowing my broader unresolved interests some room to play, too. So, it looks like I've found something to join. I expect it will become a source of new bloggables.

1. If I’m mad, why a diary?
   Torrey Orton 130109
   
   I realised many years ago that unsourceable angers occasionally seized me. More recently (10 years ago) I began to find the traces after having some small rages which obviously did not belong to their apparent objects. They were often inappropriate surges of frustration, especially at moments of bad or invasive commercial interactions (notably, not real long term commercial relationships like monthly for 35 years with my barber, or regularly visited local restaurants of similar duration, or the 20 years of daily paper delivery). Since then I have studied these phenomena with a view to getting a grip on myself, and most recently (last 5 years), to finding ways to work with others about them. I am still more in the grip than getting a grip, hence this blog.
   
   Recently I realised that I am not drawing on my anger as a motivation for my writing – not that I wasn’t motivated by it, but I didn’t honour the motivation and so did not extract full motivational potential from it. The most important potential is that the anger gives energy connected to a proven (to myself at least) sense of disconnect between many aspects of the world I inhabit and my need for truth (or justice, fairness, honesty, etc.) Pick your favourite feeling(s) and it (they) will tell you how the world is going for you and you are going with it.
   
   Angers and thinking
   These angers disclose developed lines of thinking on the anger eliciting events. For example, about 4 years ago I rediscovered a tool I had created 18 years ago for work with groups affected by traumatic change in organisations. At that time I was caught in a “merge-over”, as it was called internally, between two Melbourne banks arising from the Tricontinental affair (a bubble entity from the cowboy days of the late ‘80’s). It was represented by the banking and political authorities as certainly unlikely to be to anyone’s detriment in either of the merging entities. This, at the time (and now), was so palpably untrue and (consciously?) deceptive that my outrage bells clanged persistently. Anyone can see intuitively that two into one doesn’t go on almost any organisational level. This was, of course, not discussable at large in the banks, though in close quarters of immediate workmates it was (with an eye out for the management thought police). The subsequent pain for many staff of deception by their top leaders (including a state government premier and both banks’ CEOs) was intensified by the explicit threats against any who considered publicly doubting (e.g. – to the press) the deceptions. However, in times of great change, many new spaces open up and into them I introduced “Facing the Facts” - an intact workgroup event designed to increase the chances of engagement rather than flight, fight or fadeaway. About 500 staff in our bank went through an exploration of their perceptions of the changes, and their implications for themselves, in normal work groups – teams, departments, regions. The aim and outcome was acknowledgement publically that a single traumatic event could, and did, have very different but equally valid effects on those exposed to it. Once validated, other options began to appear. That’s another story.
   
   I carry that experience as a piece of my acquired professional wiring which is cued into action by any conditions of large scale change like the nows we are incontrovertibly in (see below for detail). Whatever adaptations, accommodations, or avoidances of these nows we undertake will be done under the major influence of traumatic change on individual, group and organisational life – feelings which both provide energy and distort relationships and thinking. Anger is but one of these. Others may include a range from euphoria at being released by chance from unwanted work settings to sadness at loss of colleagues and anger at injustices in the process, all enveloped in a fog of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety, pierced by varyingly attractive and recuperative glimmers of hope and anticipation.
   
   ‘Negative’ feeling is central…
   As psychologist I am aware that what I feel is central to what I think (which contents get into my awareness with what affective tones), how I think (the degree of flexibility in my concepts) and how likely I am to act ( my motivation) and in what manner (passive-assertive-aggressive). Our times are ones with immense, persistent and personally salient subliminal stressors, with an array of overarching and forward projecting ones which are seriously challenging (scary, terrifying, mystifying….). Their effects are hard to correctly source, and so they are often missed, assumed to be personal foibles and so not discussable (only to be quibbled) and consequently, unvalidatable. This tends to increase distance between people and pressure for holding them together is achieved by calls for joining a jihad of some description against some bad guys of variously composed differences from ‘us’. This is the process of fundamentalising thinking in a context of fragmented relationships. It is difficult to avoid and hard to counter.
   
   Mostly here I will focus on the notionally ‘negative’ end of the feelings spectra. This is recommended by the pervasive scale, intensity and persistence of threatening nows. It is also recommended because there is a natural tendency to avoid fear, anger, sadness…because they are distressing. Some pop socio-psychological trends have all but eradicated open discussion or use of these feelings – these are the “positive” sciences and their happiness minions. In as much as they dismiss the ‘negative’ they reduce access to data which is most necessary when we (culturally) do not know what we are doing. This fact, our failing socio-econo-politico know-how, is the heart of the nows we are in. As yet, no public political figure has acknowledged what most competent public intellectuals and commentators have – that we do not know what we are doing, nor could we.
   
   Nows we are in…
   As I begin again to write my perceptions of what I call the ‘nows we are in’, my intentions are not fully clear to me. They presently include: i) clearing my own internal processes by ordering the contents a bit (to reduce the stress of confusion); ii) developing a more complete picture of the nows are in, with emphasis on their effects on personal engagement and commitment (to increase the energy of purpose and potential competence by creating a field of action(s)); and, iii) developing a natural language manner of dealing with matters which are now so clouded by spinmeistery and weasel words as to be almost empty of tangible meaning (to counter the loss which generates some of my anger and sadness). I am also very aware that part of this project will be a struggle to (iv) clarify and separate anger based in my own historical personal issues from that which can be tied to some objective (external and internal) realities (though I doubt that is ever fully attainable, nor should it be); and, v) finally, understanding how appropriate anger (and other feelings) can be relevantly converted into productive effects (or, at least, efforts).
   
   My earlier researches on little violences, and more recently on the nows we are in (big violences), disclose clear perceptions that I am being assaulted by many little violences (30 or more) which have a strong impact in five valued aspects of my life:
   
   
   
   
   Public civility - e.g. not standing in line, using two car parks, driving without regard for others convenience…
   Public trust - e.g. government & corporate lying, dissimulation, denial of exposed faults (the financial meltdown), unaccountability of leaders,….
   Personal taste - e.g. too much perfume / aftershave, getting smoked out, noised out….
   Personal space - e.g. too close, marketing calls at night, no access to persons at bank, etc.
   Personal risk – road & other rages, disease (SARS, bird flu), crime, etc.
   
   Of these, my sense is that the key anger drivers are # 2 and #4, based on what incidents I consciously have a threat spectrum response to. #2 stands out far and above #4 and the others. In what follows I am assuming that this assessment applies pretty much throughout the original Anglosphere, and significant parts of the EU. Some elements can also be found in the three Asian giants (China, India and Japan) and their satellites. My professional association has recently published an exploration of these matters (see http://www.psychology.org.au/Assets/Files/NPW_FactSheet_1108.pdf ). This somewhat validates items in my lists, but more importantly suggests there are many others having the same experience, though their most salient domains may be different from mine and each others’.
   
   Big violences…
   However, over those years the big violences have become much more prominent – e.g. there are four or five working at once now globally: for example, (a) speed of change, (b) fluid (fuels and water) shortages, (c) food vulnerability and shortages (GM crops, directing food crops to fuel alleviation, drought and urbanization, etc.), (d) finance (and general economic) insecurity (leading to job uncertainty, housing uncertainty, rapid price fluctuations, etc.) and (e) climate change. You may have a list of your own that are real, ‘big’ and affecting you directly in your view. Three (a, b and e) of these have been working away on us for some years, only recently achieving general recognition that they are inextricably related in various ways. They appear as a tangle of perceptual inputs which are constant, intense, fast and beyond my control, unless I focus on one part of one of them – for instance the right to die as a facet of the endless human conversations about the boundaries of living. Such pathways are already laid in the myriad of single subject, single issue, pressure groups whose impact on the general passage of discussion is to increase both fragmentation of civic relationships and fundamentalising of thought in one strike. They also get more attention than their numbers warrant because they are fearlessly raucous in putting their cases.
   
   Anger strength
   The strength of my anger(s) comes from my sense that one effect of the last 20-30 years has been (and continues daily to be) the undermining and conscious degradation of our public infrastructures. The state of much physical infrastructure (or the simple failure to build it) is a concern, but not primary here. Much more hurtful for me is the loss of interpersonal, social, and political infrastructures. At one level these are the core materials of cultures: languages, values and standards, and systems of relationships. Their degradation has been achieved, in part, by abuse of the social systems of their delivery – health, education, transport, governance. The means and manner, and counter-measures where possible, of the abuse will be the subject of many entries in this blog. The reality of these losses can be seen in various facts accepted as valid across political spectra -
   1- The debasement of post-modern public language has been remarked occasionally (see Unspeak; Wordwatch, and in various Op Eds around the world as an addendum to other discussions) and systematically (see e.g. Don Anderson’s Weasel Words; Death Sentence; George Lakoff’s Don’t think of an elephant , etc.) for 10 years; and the loss of shared markers for factual integrity are evident in the public discourse / debates which engage the same issues from different interpretative and data frames.
   2- The decline in family structure reliability, and in connectedness to friends, neighbours and workmates are also widely remarked at both anecdotal and systemic levels (see Richard Sennett’s Corrosion of Character and Respect; Michael Pusey’s The Experience of Middle Australia, etc.).
   3- Participation rates in major elections in the US have been below 60% approx. for decades (and similar in UK and EU; see “I will not vote…” here newmatilda.com/2007/11/14/i-will-not-vote.); declining everyday social civility (situations of contact with unknown others in public) is a commonplace of news – the more exaggerated forms of ‘rage’ attracting louder reports. The public esteem of highly placed and paid leaders in many areas of life could hardly be lower – particularly where these leaders sit on top of foundational structures – government, law, accounting, nation-scale corporations… .
   4- The widely researched matter of comparative happiness across economies and ethnicities reveals we ( the first world) have gained next to nothing in the happiness stakes over the 3-4 decades of our abundance – more or less constantly increasing consumption with flat perceived improvement of living (life style, yes; living, no).
   This is a sketch of the project of defining and delineating the abuses, without which the steps to any futures will be clouded by the continuing abuse – as happens in family abuse, bullying and so on – since the abusive attitudes, values and behaviours are systemic and cultural, not just occasional and individual. Some alternatives will be proposed, too!
   
   A personal indulgence?
   However, there is something potentially (actually?) self-indulgent about starting from and continuing with my personal emotional attachments and events as a thought grounder and direction finder. And yet, it seems appropriate (apart from being motivationally necessary) for me at this time in my life and this place of my existence (Australia). My argument for the indulgence is that it is a necessary corrective to the linguistic and social distancing which characterises public discourse and, by socio-cultural colonization, private talk, too. Beneath this discussion surface lurks the challenge of the unknowability of the world we are in.
   
   I am also aware that my writing is, and will continue to be, constantly hedged by contingencies, doubts, and wonders, expressed, as just here, by over-expression and over- specification of the fact that contingency is the context of the nows we are in (just what the constructivist and relativist (post-modernist?) intellectual project was telling us, only now we are forced to be in that flux much of the time rather than some!). An attenuating side-effect for me is that I am constantly aware of what I don’t know in the same breath that I call up what I think I do – the breath which animates this enterprise. This should moderate my excesses of certainty and definitiveness.
   
   A somewhat larger scale perspective: I was wondering a while ago what my parents (born in the first war period (1910-20) thought about their world towards the end of their lives. This question arose from observing that generations tend to throw up clouds and occasional storms (I think Socrates died in one of these) of objections, disappointments and disputes with the emerging world which their lives had helped to build but wasn’t what they thought they were building – or even if they had actively opposed it along the way. I know there’s a reasonable amount of that in domains of serious concern to me. So, maybe my angers are supported by a quantum of intergenerational meanness or curmudgeonly disregard for new forms of humanity.
   
   Perhaps this is all an expression of three facts about me: one, I am temperamentally drawn to the notional ‘left’ – I’m a helper by life-time choice (teacher, psychotherapist, executive coach, trainer….) with an ear / eye for the less privileged; two, I’m a natural sceptic, always able to look at the side I’m attracted to naturally and see that it is not the whole picture of anything; and, three, I am an intuitive information handler (I see what’s happening) with an intensely logical decision style (I present the intuitions in logical arrays, argued with definition and conviction. This is actually quite a good combination for a helper. It prevents me falling into the world(s) of my clients, patients, students. Thus, I do listening well, and joining badly. And, I know I have insight that’s worth attention (while always being doubtable!) so I can supply structure, content and direction where it is needed with testably appropriate levels of certainty (from ‘I guess’, ‘I suppose’.. to.. ‘I think’, ‘I know’…to ..’I’m sure’,. ‘I recommend’, etc.). In addition, I am more pessimist than optimist and a bit cowardly about conflict (though I won’t stand bullying).
   
   Learning to write…
   To have a humane view of other people requires understanding them roundedly, multi-dimensionally. City neighbourhoods, country towns and small workplaces are settings offering best opportunities for close understanding of others. The distance(s) across which much contemporary discourse occurs about major issues is exactly the condition for automatic demonising or idolising of others. It supports the contextually driven fundamentalising of thought. So, one challenge for my work is to write so as to reduce the opportunity for distanced, two-dimensional perceptions of others and their issues. I hope to achieve some wholeness of description and judgment in every piece I create. Unfortunately, I cannot now say I know how to do that consistently and adequately. Bear with me or, preferably, tell me off, please.
   
   I believe, for the moment, that my excursions here will arise from 5 main sources, expressed through all manner of substantive topics. The sources are: outrages and irritations (a thicket of which can drive an outrage), puzzles and dilemmas (being puzzles without solutions), and reflections on the whole process encouraged by unpredictable mixtures of the first four sources. Some of the topics I expect to visit over time include:
   what is enough of anything in life (but especially enough material goods)?;
   moral and ethical confusions in everyday life (e.g. in Oz the belief in a right to public funding for private schooling );
   imbalances between individual and group focus in public policy and private practice;
   challenges of cultural differences
   workable truth – how can we know what we can believe about everyday matters in health, education, politics or personal commitments…?;
   correctable language in public life – concreteness over abstraction (e.g. dead for passed away or deceased; changed for backflip; lost or reduced for smashed, slammed, and so on).
   Where possible (when I can think of something) I’ll include suggestions for actions to be taken at various levels (personal, group, organisational) about the subject discussed. I will try to identify the source(s) of the feeling(s) giving rise to the piece, and point at the contiguous and tangential domains within which the subject is set.
   
   I invite your comment, especially expanding or challenging comment. I will probably not respond directly, but a specific request or proposal will be considered, especially where some course(s) of action is in question…or should be!