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.

 

Appreciations (21) … gods golfing?

Appreciations (21) … gods golfing?
Torrey Orton
March 10, 2010

Appreciation on demand…

Hope is often not enough. I need a boost or a boot to get going, and so it is with appreciating. I appreciate lots of things, but often with only a slight rise in temperature or heart rate. So they pass out of my awareness, rather than joining the crowd of input/output forces and facts jammed up around the portals of my perception.

 I mention this because I discovered one such matter – gods golfing – as a result of wondering what to write today and thinking an Appreciation would be a good thing if I could find one. My tangential insight is that creativity or inventiveness can be primed with a self-imposed demand for performance. Today's demand arose from an underlying one to keep my writing production rate up to a level which I have never specified precisely but hovers perilously (from month to month) around 4-6 pieces a month. I don't like objectives of the MBO type, but a trackable sense of concrete direction can be helpful.

 …feeds a demand for appreciation.
So, the gods golfing. Last Saturday we had our third or fourth big ploush* day in six months – an inch or more rain in a single event of 30-60 minutes. Three of these have happened on VicAvePsych days by chance and I haven't noticed whether the therapeutic events have been similarly striking in any way at those times,…but then, as I said, I miss a lot of little appreciables.


The latest event was punctuated and pocked and pierced by hailstones, appreciated danger-free from the doorstep under the front veranda of the psych shop. The real action was elsewhere, which Jane pointed out when I got home, marvelling at the height of the bounce hailstones achieved on our back lawn (nb – our back lawn is more like a cricket pitch on a country oval than whatever 'lawn' may bring to mind, so the bounce potential was good). The best pics of this effect can be found by expert websters. The link provided is indicative but not current.


Anyway, the bounce was stunning and my impression days later is that of gods golfing. I know for some the gods golfed with cricketball sized hail and damages were great, though no one seemed to stand out in the game to see what it felt like. A few cars got cratered, though not to the level of a similar event in Sydney 10 years ago, which decimated vehicle insurers, and funded lawyers for months. Some new and old buildings sprang leaks they shouldn't have – e.g. our brand new train station and a quite mature art museum.

Enjoy.

*ploush – my stab at an onomatopoetic for the sound of a deluge dropping without accompanying stormy noises, or where the other noises has been edited out by my internal sensors; the most recent was a day after the gods golfing event, in the middle of the night when a fluid afterthought dropped 10 mm on us with a ploush.

Appreciations (20) … Hopeful helping

Appreciations (20) … Hopeful helping
Torrey Orton
Feb 19, 2010

"Plan for the worst and hope for the best…"

Presenter at Transition Decade 2010 launch

at Melbourne Town Hall, Feb. 14, 2010

Rising hope…anticipations of hurdles jumped


My work is doable because I can approach anyone (so far!) with a view to their potential for personal development. I look for and find that potential, usually through an undergrowth of blockages and false directions which make the potential and pathways to it inaccessible to themselves, and others. I understand this attitude, and its behavioural expression, as what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard.


It seems so far, too, that everyone who comes within my therapeutic reach intends to develop for comprehensible reasons. This is not always true in group settings, where the participants may be present because the management has dragooned them (for comprehensible reasons, again, but…not the individuals'). Their development intentions cannot always be revealed with confidence that they won't be used against them in some perceived breach of organisational values – explicit or, more dangerous, implicit ones!


My hope has an inner directed aspect, too. To be hopeful for others I have to be hopeful about myself being able to help. Apart from my natural risk fascination (if there's a challenge in a domain of my competences, I'll bite on it.), therapy, and many other learning settings, repeatedly present opportunities to discover that I do not know what I am doing for one specific person or group. I fail to connect or sustain.


It could be that hope is a variant of optimism, or nestles in the same family. I don't think of them together because I am not optimistic in the usual sense of the term. Where I am not in control, I check the dangers first. Perhaps we all do so, some more knowingly than others. Certainly the constant drumming of the 'don't be negative' acolytes of positive psychology reminds me of my position on the other side of a somewhat temperamental divide.


Challenged, wavering, and rejuvenated hope….scraping knees learning to walk


My hope is challenged and wavers as novelties of personality, history and self-construction arise unexpectedly in my work. These require a personal response – most notably where the therapy / learning has not developed far enough to have shared intent and frameworks sufficiently in view of all participants. Our tasks, objectives and bonds are still under construction.


In fact, a special hope jag is often necessary for me to step up or back from a present novelty, those moments when I have to design interaction on the run. This is akin to the role of faith in taking action towards a novel future (an unpredictable one) which I discussed a few posts back. My underlying competence is intuitive creation of appropriate action options, which generally take 2-3 minutes if I am really puzzled by a significant deviation in the path we had been pursuing. If I miss the need to reframe or reshape the process, it can stumble along for some sessions. There may be a series of such phases in the total process.


Waning, fading hope…a life process running down


There comes a time in some therapy where we are not getting anywhere. This time is often forewarned by repeated events of stillness settling on the process. It not the kind which arises in meditation or some flow experiences. Rather, there is an energy gap or attention lapse. The language content and focus fades. Boredom is about to jump up. Disconnection is in the room, with disengagement threatening in the doorway of awareness. There are two pathways at this time – one of wasting decline and the other of conclusive achievement.


Withdrawing hope…the premature end


Time to stop, when the end has not been reached, often arrives in interruptions of the preceding routines – routines of times and procedures. Patient clients come late, miss sessions and I look forward to the sessions with declining energy. It can take a session or some months of them to unroll.


Or, confirming hope...the agreed closure


I often say to patient clients that they will know when they have finished our time together, know when they are well, or better or improved to the level they need. They will take charge of hope in the room by increasingly commanding the direction, depth and intensity of sessions. They will be checking the coverage of their various agendas and looking forward to support systems (internal and external) to sustain their achievements. They will know that they will be challenged again in the areas and ways that brought them to therapy in the first place. The task of primary hoper is theirs, and that of their social worlds.


I imagine that these phases / stages are something like what we will encounter repeatedly over the life of the climate change struggle. Perhaps many participants from many perspectives will do so, and this may be a potential common ground to be built on!!

Confidence amid calamity

Confidence amid calamity
Torrey Orton
170109

Confidence is a creature of capability and competence. Reading John Hewson (AFR 160109 – “Blind leading the blind”) and a plethora of other economic commentators, we could believe the reverse is the case: that confidence is the creator of competence. If only we could print it like money, then we could recover from our economic calamities. It is the dark energy in most commentators’, observers’ and bloggers’ understanding of our times.

Hewson finishes excoriating the economics crowd by asserting that “Economists are not really good at saying exactly what will make that happen.” - the confidence that is (while implicitly counting himself among them by not counting himself out). There’s a good reason for his judgment: because you can’t get there from here soon enough. Confidence is not a product nor is it an outcome. It’s a platform or a precursor to outcomes, which can be increased by success (especially against odds and difficulties). Confidence is, in brief, a mix of material predictability (the capacity to make ‘things’ happen) and intentional community (the desire to do it together).

The false confidence based on material predictability alone we’ve seen a lot in modern times. And some would argue that the dominant tendency to seek outcomes for self over others in the last few decades has eroded the will to community (and distorted the relationships though which the will could be expressed). If we seek confidence about and from the economy alone, as economists tend to, we cannot get the whole thing.

Self-esteem, happiness and other emotional assessments like confidence cannot be created by direct instruction. We cannot achieve them by trying to be them. We can only achieve them by living. Put another way, confidence and self-esteem and happiness, etc.) can only be had by successful learning and doing. These emotions tell us how we are doing along the way; they are not the doing itself. When we are doing OK, the feelings support our next steps into new learnings (unknown settings, new tasks, etc.).

Back to our calamitous times. In the short term (1-5 years, say), what can we do to re-create confidence? A starting place is to tell the truth of our declining confidence. First, it is increasingly unlikely we can have, or hope for, predictability in material matters. The world of material certainties is fading around us as a (perfect) storm of personally uncontrollable forces assail us. Not merely is it the economy stupid. It’s also the climate and the fluids (fuels and waters), the food and the pervasive speed of movement of them all., plus a gathering of insights and innovations which mark the growing edges of the sciences.

Second, we are engaging these forces from a weakened position in our fragmented relationships. And these weaknesses will be enhanced by the times which are the reasons for our worries in the first place. Making the effort for the longer term will be even more important as each day of its decline passes.

This, telling the truth, is something our leaders (especially, but not only, political) seem uniformly unable to do. One commentator (see Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, Sunday Jan. 11, ‘09 ) suggests that even those leaders who display occasional truth-telling tendencies (often appearing in unguarded ‘mis-spokes’ quickly reversed in appalling tangled circumlocutions prefaced with first name addressing of the interviewer and .. “Look,…”) are caught in a situational Catch 22: if they said they did not know what to do at this time, they would be turfed out and maybe the people would feel bad and hopeless. But the research on credibility shows the masses don’t believe them anyway, so I’m not sure who would be surprised. The exception is the credibility of perceived intentions or character of leaders for religious believers – even in the face of evidently incompetent pursuit of those intentions with flawed character. That is a kind of confidence.
I look forward to the first public utterance of these two truths by any government or corporate leader (commentators and not-for-profit leaders already do).