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

Torrey Orton

Feb 20, 2012

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

A Theory of Everything, Ken Wilber, Shambala 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

And….??

There’s some way to go with this!!

Perceptions and truth(s)

Perceptions and truth(s)
Torrey Orton
Sept. 23, 2010


I am struck these days by the various ways we can be deceived in our grasp of the world, and ourselves. This is apart from the consciously deceptive intent of our public world(s) and the conscious intent to create perceptions which our various artists demonstrate for us. There is also the unconscious distortion of our perceptions which arises from our premonitions of them in the form of 'previews' in the media, the reports of others about them, the interactions between the two and so on.

 For instance of the later, there was the Millau Viaduc in my mind from quite a lot of exposures at a distance, among them the BBC series of great modern constructions, a web page full of site clips and photos, some local (regional French) tourist encouragements – all contributors to a sense I knew what I was going to see. Almost all were taken from the level of the bridge or above. Our approach to the reality was from the level of the river Tarn 250 meters below the road way. Grand enough at that, but not the hanging in air glory that the previews supported. I was not stunned, shocked, shaken, uplifted….but thought I should have been, which added to the letdown. It did not occur to me that 90 minutes spent beforehand in the Roquefort cheese caverns 25 Ks down the road might have constrained my expectations to things just in front of me.

The reverse of this was my first sight of The Nightwatch through a small door on an oblique angle to the picture in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam 40 years ago… a view which amplified the commanding stature of the work, and which in turn was intensified by its unconscious comparison with two existing images in my mind: (1) that of the picture from an art history slide show screened in a format close to that of the real thing and (2) its micro version in the text book of the same course. Then I felt visually completed, fulfilled in an expectation I did not know I had until reality rewarded it with fact.Yet another access to the perils of perception is the very common experience of seeing something which at a certain moment looks like something it certainly is not. The rooster on the road is a web-honoured example of this, including its own self-test against variable perceptions.

Extending the avian theme, I saw a rosella of unlikely hues on the ground overlooking the Loddon River at Glen Lyon, Vic. a few days ago. This bird turned out to be a lichen infested rock declining in similarity to my first impression with every step closer to it. My focus of course was much more intent than the first glance which created the perception. My search for continuing likenesses to support that first glance moved with the insistence that self- justification demands. And, too, it was a very unlikely spot to find a solo rosella in the open, as my wife implicitly noted by immediately debunking my perception. I gave in two steps later, losing in the doing a hope that I had seen something normal in a very unusual way. Trouble is, it was wholly unusual and firmly no way. My point here, in case I lose it in short term memory glitches, is that it is very easy to see what we want / need where it is not. For my painter friends this is a good thing, for their work is to create what we can't see in what is there. Even a gathering of others may work against the clarification of the imagined when too much group membership is at stake in a threatened group perception. The research and experience on this tally fully for once.

So what is the effect of a world in which two kinds of realities are confused by misrepresentation? First the intimate is made public and then the public is made banal. Public intimacy is the content of "reality" TV …public banality is the censoring of human (and animal these days) realities like death, injury and other matters attracting notices of too dangerous to be seen without forewarning. Listen to police reporting road trauma, family violence, drunk violence, etc. Intention is the source of this misrepresentation – the intention to obscure our world and our worlds from each other. Among The effects are an untraceable paranoia, low grade fears that we are being got at…but by who? Obsessive vigilance sets in, with an air of preparation for battles. We know from the "fog of war" that persistent uncertainty in a context of potential threat is destabilising to selves and groups. The needs which are assailed by this dynamic are those for intimacy (love, care, etc.), affiliation (belonging, membership) and their facilitating ones (appreciation, acknowledgment, etc,).

The question is: is the misrepresentation intentional or consequential, or some of both? It really does not matter, except that apparently unintentional misrepresentation (deception) is an aggravated assault because it is unaccountable. The consequence is a sense of being either the authors of our own paranoia, or, as can be seen in exaggerated forms in cults and conspiracy theories (both which are massively facilitated by the Web), victims of veiled dangers. This effect is prominently on display in the US in the phantasies about Obama's origins believed by 20+% of the population, paralleled by the beliefs about alien visitors kept secret by the government, and the origin of 9/11 in the CIA, etc. Not surprising the Tea Party plays so well, hatched in a fog which we '60ers associate with another kind of tea.And, they tend to multiply and mutually reinforce. They are also untouchable by empirical truth, having emotional truths (the threats) already occupying the relevant brainspace.

 Woe are we, for these are the marginals. Woe are they because their leaders pre(a)y on and feed their paranoias. Under present conditions, the difference
between 'we' and 'they' becomes daily thinner.

Appreciations (7) …Cat causality: Poppy’s view

Appreciations (7) …Cat causality: Poppy’s view
Torrey Orton
July 8, 2009

I wanted to write this when I had the thought of it a week ago. Then my desire collapsed in the face of my incompetence to produce the effect that I intuited. Now, some wordmongering later, I like its intent if not its achievement. On to the cat….

Poppy’s the fifth in a line of cats who’ve befriended us over 35 years. He’s not the oldest. Moon (black female longhair; ‘good’ farm family; real lap cat) was at 20 earth years when she decided to take up a position under an unplanted azalea 15 years ago. He’s only 16 and in the best shape of them all.

I will discover why I am writing about him by writing. I’ve become a cat person by marital exposure though not, be clear, with any resistance to the opportunity from the first glimpse of our own first cat - the above mentioned Moon - on the farm of her birth in 1974. We don’t do dogs because we travel too much and they pine. Cats do not, and our neighbour feeds them if were off for a real visit elsewhere. Our yard is their playpen, but for occasional visits of cat neighbours.

It occurred to me recently that Poppy, like the others, displays serious intent about a range of important matters – bed, breakfast, dinner, stalking bugs and aspiring to birds. In these he is focussed to a point I seldom achieve doing this blog; he’s a model of timely preparation and persistence (the prep often failing to conclude the hunt successfully – its best test).

Here I’m giving him the blackbox treatment – attributing intentions – because he makes things happen and does it repeatedly. Pretty much what we do. So, who’s to say he doesn’t know he’s doing what I attribute? He certainly resists energetically any blockages on the way to the various ends of his days and accompanies the performances with verbalisations of relatively consistent types, too. Is this consciousness? Enough so to warrant consideration. Mine is often not easy to distinguish from his.

Cat causality

Poppy knows how to make things happen. Around dinner time, ours that is, already beyond his, he makes for the door, if he’s in, to get out to get ready to get back in. It took a while – months, years? – to see this move for what it is: a part of his system of making new food appear. He’s really on the stick about this, distinguishing between opportunity types with precision.

Top of the line are bony things like chicken and duck; second, steak with bone attached – rib-eye, or t-bone; third, lamb with chop attached. Fish doesn’t rate other than a short presentation to announce he knows its dinner time and a show must go on. When he gets back in he devotes greater or lesser attention to encouraging the inevitable, depending on the offerings available.

But his system of making it happen is consistent over all the sub-classes of his actions. He perseveres in the face of failure…like Mallee farmers who know it will rain, sometime. And unlike them, he knows his intention that food should happen is effective… though he doesn’t know it will stop being so when he stops, which is why he is a cat.

Cat naps

He’s really good at body heat adjustment, running through two to five locations a night over an 8 hour span. He warms up for sleep with the food act, morning and night. After our dinner, if the external temperature is below 10C degrees, he uses my lap as a post from which to oversee the empty plates and slip into a snooze looking across the table at Jane.

About 15 minutes of this is enough. He’s off to the bedroom for a first go at the bed, or maybe Jane’s office for a bit of her reading chair. An hour later he sets up shop on my dining room chair which, when pushed into the table, leaves a lying cat’s height of space between him and the underside. There he practices snoozes for an hour or so.

If it’s cold, he shapes up for the bed, either towards the bottom if moderately cold or between us at shoulder height if threateningly so. His step up is always in the lower corner of my side, as is the step down. On warmer cold nights he pushes off back to the chair, to return around sunrise for a first headbutt push towards breakfast. This is administered from a standing position on my back with lots of verbal encouragement that has started from ten feet away before getting up again.

Cat connection

Cats are great head-butters, in a friendly, beseeching manner. See Christian the lion for a good example of this writ large. Poppy’s a member of headbuttersanonymous, like most catty beings. It’s a cleaner assault than doggy slurping, though a lion headbutt is probably testing in other ways. He also has the slideby which is an internal segment of the bone seeking act. This is more a leaning walk against some lower extremity, which he occasionally confuses with chair legs, door jams and similar appendages. A slideby sequence can go on for 5 minutes, halted for a scratch pause, then restarted for a few more minutes just to see if there’s anyone with forgotten bones.

Cat memory

A mother substitute always goes a long way to calm a disturbed cat, or one trying to settle for a bit of napping. A nice hairy blanket or a feather duster often do well in this role. I know it’s on because Poppy kneads the blanket with a kitten’s intensity and satisfaction, even if for a milkless trip. All his predecessors in our life have done the same.

Catoptimystical??

I’m wondering if Poppy qualifies for an optimystical ranking. I’m trying to understand this new category by the ‘see if it fits’ method of inclusion. If I say he does he does, but some bright lights out there will detect that I’m being willful again, not insightful, and probably complain, I hope. I could cite Wittgenstein on families of meaning as an authority for my inclusion of the cat but other bright lights would rubbish my lack of conviction.

I think, after this digression that I will so consider him. In the first Optimystical I characterised an optimystical as a purveyor of hopes I wished someone would purvey once I heard/understood they were doing it. It is often a counter-intuitive, maybe ironic, communication.

Since for me consciousness is an emerging competence, allowing myself to appreciate its possibility in forms and beings my education did not prepare me for is an important development step in my own consciousness. Poppy - a small step for human kind, too?