What’s normal now (4)…beyond the boundaries – passing for / as…?

Torrey Orton
Jan 20, 2013

Passing for white, or Jewish or gay or…another passing identity?

I’ve passed briefly for German, Dutch, Irish, Swedish, but never French, Italian, Russian…where passing is defined as being treated as one of those origins by birth members of that origin. I don’t even mention Chinese, except where I’ve passed as Chinese on the phone a few times by dint of a capacity for fluently mimicking the standard politenesses which make everyone comfortable in Chinese (and my face is not visible!!). This passing is always a treat, usually a surprise the first time around and enduringly a source of pleasant assumptions about my flexibility…or maybe that’s my evasiveness?

The treat is intensified by the fact that I’ve never passed for Australian in my present home country, though when back in my original one - the US - I’ve never passed for American for 40 years. In both places the locals say ‘how long ya been here’, or similar (where’re you from?), which on an irritable day I reply to thus: “Here longer than you’ve been alive” (when being prickly) or “Richmond” (when being passive aggressive). This ‘passing’ is not to be confused with the contemporary euphemism for dying…

 

For others with stigmatised attributes – race, ethnicity, sexual preference, gender, religion – passing may be both an opportunity to share the dominant class privileges of the culture in question, to feel a traitor to one’s class, culture, etc., and to be in danger of being self-outed by misspeaking. Misspeaking is one of the dangers the effective passer has to master since accent and vocabulary are among the easiest signs of an identity group membership and motivation for exclusion of others. This is sharply observed by Tim Winton in The “C” Word (The Monthly, December 2013).

Normal boundaries

One of the minimum requirements for being normal is a workable definition. Usually this requires some kind(s) of clear boundaries for some normal to be other than another unanchored evidentiary mote in the everyday eye. Another level down, or up, we have the boundaries of the language in which the normal is being expressed. ‘Passing’ carries a sense of either leaving something behind or being left behind, which is probably why ‘pass’ has replaced ‘die’ as the privileged descriptor for death events in the Obits pages of our papers and tellies. ‘Pass’ implies a continuing presence anchored by the past still in someone’s mind. Die is just that – dead and gone.

So we can imagine that to ‘pass’ in this sense suggests the living, those left behind, are in a defective state of some sort (see the major religions for established answers to that assumption). And so, segue to passing for white, or straight, or religious (or not) where not being the real thing in any of those domains may be experienced by the unreal ones as an intentional, discriminatory exclusion. Here’s an example:

“Isabelle Mussard is 41 and lives in Oakland, California. She is sometimes mistaken for Latino or Iranian but is actually of Métis descent, by way of France and Senegal, and of unknown mixed origins on her mother's side, as she was adopted. She takes no pride in passing as white, but sees many parallels in the experience that spans the varying identities of her family. "I think a lot about the analogies between coming out as a black woman of mixed heritage and my lesbian mother's coming out." Mussard remarks on another tension, a "triple consciousness" for passing as white, being black, but resisting America's definition of blackness given her European ancestry. Not having a black identity that is linked with the American history of slavery renders her identification even more complex. She is wary of appropriating a culture that is not her own and says that she wants to stay cognisant of and responsible for her privilege in passing.”

Koa Beck “The trouble with 'passing' for another race/sexuality/religion …”theguardian.com, Thursday 2 January 2014

This background presents the kind of situation in which constant renegotiation of one’s identity is a requirement, or threat, of everyday living and typifies a characteristic of our culture of “liquid fear” which Z. Bauman characterizes so exhaustively. The exclusion experience can occur also for members of an imagined dominant identity whenever they are caught in the minority role such as turning up at a largely LGBT event, or a working class pub by default of any other option and so on. Overseas travel can be a great opportunity to learn about being a minority person though few seem to do so, reliably treating encountered (and, one would have thought, sought) difference(s) as a deficit of the dominant identities they are visiting. Try some. You may like them. Food is a recognized boundary riding opportunity for most humans.

The identity boundary problem reaches into the future in unexpected forms like this: One of my favourite passing problems is artificial intelligence. Here’s my take on it. When a robot can conduct a life it is no longer a robot; it’s a person. Prospects of this occurring are not too great …but then…

As for robotic persons, they’re around aplenty in public discourses speaking in the tongues of commodification and politicisation in repeated sound bites answering questions the enquiring reporter hasn’t asked, or as often disregarding the reporter’s queries to mount as if not heard their mantra of the moment. This is a party-free phenomenon.

Rectifications (30)…CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES

Torrey Orton
Dec. 24, 2013

On the road again…slow vehicles

“CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES” the bright black on blue sign says along the Great Ocean Road. Then another sign says (in stark black on white) “SLOW VEHICLE TURNOUT” about 300 metres down the road, another few metres beyond which is the turnout. Having taken it or not, you are then greeted with SLOW VEHICLES THANK YOU in the black on blue idiom of the initial challenge. If you are a native born Ozzie, you know what a turnout is, but no amount of nativity will gloss the other two messages, even given the contextual background birth has given you. This is bureaucratic English of a high order, aggravated by the fact that the actual targets are non-native English speakers – tourists who rock up and down the famous Road, presumed to be without our inbuilt (though increasingly corrupted) regard for civility on the road.

On first encounter a couple of years ago, it took me a while to work out the syntax of CONSIDER FOLLOWING VEHICLES. ‘Consider’ cut a few ways at once, none of which easily self-selected out of the sign. Should I care for those vehicles if they are following me or notice more clearly that I was following them or should I be following them? The more I worried this linguistic bone the more the initial confusions returned. The attention to the possibilities lifts them all off the solid ground of shared realities which give easy meaning to most of life. The formulations take on their own life, unanchored, floating into a mildly paranoid verbal ether. Even my wife who is no mean linguist and a native Australian English speaking one to boot couldn’t provide definitive help with these options.

A XXL slow offense without intent

In the course of 9 days at the beach I traversed a handful of these linguistic suites a day, barely noticing their offer of driverly civic-mindedness. They were only brought sharply back into my awareness by a new set of them appearing on one of the inland approaches to the coast road. And then my awareness was tightened another notch by having the desired behaviour (in both my mind, and the presumptive sign writers I guess) demonstrated by a slow vehicle (a size XXL self-propelled accommodation variety vehicle) which appeared in front of me along one curvy stretch between Eastern View and Lorne.

Said XXL suddenly pulled off into an unmarked turnout (on other days it would just be a wide shoulder), no indicator of intent given. I was pleased for the release and irritated by the surprise move which required a bit of preventive braking on my part. Wife Jane thought I should have offered an acknowledging toot in passing, as one offers an acknowledging wave to someone coming who makes way for one on a single lane street. I thought not because no indication of intent had been given, implying to me that the turnout was gratuitous and not considered. It was a moment of that low grade moral conflict which makes marriage memorable for the often equal spread of justice between both our perspectives.

Another what’s normal now challenge?

As often, a linguistic detour turns into a challenge for action. For example, I haven’t even gotten to the question of what “slow” means. The practical implications of this potential for differentiation will be apparent to anyone living in a family situation, not to say the “loving family” of death notices and similarly human newsworthinesses! Who would self-identify as “slow” to start with? Then, what’s “slow” to them if they do, or are badgered into doing so by caring others? And, then, what’s their slow got to do with the “SLOW” on the instructional sign set? This is, perhaps, why instruction leading to discretionary, self-designed performance outcomes often induces indulgences…

…and a very merry Xmas to y’all.

What’s normal now (1)…broken normals

What’s normal now (1)…broken normals
Torrey Orton
Oct. 8, 2013

Normal, standard, common, regular, typical… A restart

Normal, standard, common, regular, typical…all are words we use to establish an expectation for ourselves, about ourselves, others, and so on. Am I normal? Is this normal?…Well, I normally have trouble getting things going and keeping them going. It’s taken me two months from promising to start “What’s normal now” to starting it. I’ve struggled and not told anyone I was doing so. I’ve made gestures at starting like creating a topic page for a wiki, mentioning to people that I am going to do this and then gone back into not doing it. How normal is that? A linguistic formula whose systemic ambiguity invites its own denial!!

Are we heading for a future where the new normal is the norm? Maybe we are already in it and its arrival hasn’t been noticed. One probability is that whatever has been superseded by fashion may itself be superseded by the fashion it replaced. Try the history of fashion in sunglasses for the last 40 years, or 80! My aviators are back in.

Describing someone/something as ‘normal’ is a basic assessment that someone or something is alright, OK, workable, etc. and as such is a basis for the conduct of everyday life. The key word is ‘conduct’. Hence, when we feel not normal – abnormal, bad normal, etc. – we may also feel compromised in our personal and social capacity to act. If we feel not-normal in too many ways or too intensely our performance collapses. The same applies to our worlds – physical, spiritual, etc.

Challenges of the normal

There will be some challenges pursuing the question ‘What’s normal now?’. For instance, by what authority can anyone say anything is ‘normal’, including themselves? Another is that there are normal things which are also clearly (I say authoritatively) bad, dangerous, damaging, etc. (e.g. alcohol, over-reliance on a narrow set of capabilities; excess focus (obsessiveness by successful people) And yet another is how to distinguish the normal from other factors which tend to present in cloying clusters in human events. For example, a single norm like marriage, has personal, interpersonal, social and material aspects (and, also, subjective and objective faces with substantive cultural variations). Then there is the fact that norms (another challenge) are implicit in matters labelled ‘normal’. Finally, the normal and its associated norms are often about dilemmas and paradoxes which are hard to norm.

And I haven’t even mentioned a huge range of natural normals and norms which provide the basis for our understanding of what the world really is, failing which our intentions will be waylaid by it. That is, the sciences, human and physical, with spiritual systems nearer or farther from view as fits your comfort.

I know some of why this is normal for me and of course, for the positive spin people out there, it is not totally me by quite a way. So, (a normalising conjunction), it is appropriate to me that I start by acknowledging this damaged part of me and invite you to help create the first class of normals: broken or damaged ones. Some starters are below. Small steps and all that!!

Broken normals/ declining normals, in ‘advanced’, anglo economies etc.

•        Marriage – 45% failure rate

•        Job insecurity, signalled in various ways

•        Religious affiliation / participation – actual attendance = <20 o:p="" overall="">

•        Grotesque income disparities, again especially in the Anglosphere

•        Single occupancy living increases in Australia, especially for over 35’s and women

•        Personal health – the obesity challenge.

 

Learner therapist (32)…… What’s psychologically normal, or Am I crazy now (draft)
Torrey Orton

May 6, 2013

Is normal good enough??

A potential handout for patients, or outlines of various ‘inputs’ to be made by therapists, as part of patient education about what’s psychologically ‘normal’

Before you start reading this please do the following:

Write down one thing you think is abnormal about you. Then identify one patient who is troubling for you.

Now consider that a role of psychology in contemporary life is as a well-being improvement service for the ills our parents would barely conceive treating. We are the “worried well” from that viewpoint. Determining what’s normal provides fences around what’s good-enough, the moral self-evaluation (and social evaluations) of wellness.

In psychology (and health services generally) a patient life is composed minimally of biopsychosocialspiritual /cultural components. These 4-5 factors, in principle, equate to the presumptive ‘normal’ which is intrinsically good-enough for living well. We inherit certain biological features and a society and a social status. Hence family, school and culture of origin are critical factors in establishing our growth, but not well-being, capability. We are not responsible for our inheritances. They are fated, but we are responsible for what we do with them. For some, fate is almost destiny – e.g. being born into a constantly marginal care (material and /or psychosocial) environment can almost permanently damage capability.

A general fact about anyone appearing as a patient in therapy is that they will report a range of symptoms for their appearance, often the most important not first. Among them will be little things like:

 …disordered sleep, binge-like consumption of food and /or drink, failure to exercise regularly and adequately, rumination about certain events or prospective events, occasional periods of mildly self-harming or suicidal thinking and, more visibly, self-destructive consumption behaviours, differing degrees of present relationship disturbance, conflict or breakdown, some degree of perceptible anxiety like mild panics or phobias, negative self-appraisals like ‘I’m just not good enough’ or ‘I’m worthless’ and a history of inadequate family of origin early in life, with continuing

These are known in the psych trade as “comorbidities”. They are what make “mental health” issues so resilient. They spread into many aspects of patients’ lives, usually with one symptom dominant and thereby attracting the diagnosis of Disorder X or Y, whatever it may be. These lesser symptoms also present a variety of treatment opportunities which can provide easily achieved small steps of recovery.

I‘m going to focus on patients on the borderline of mental illness – long term trauma victims who provide the deep end of the anxiety-depression ranges.

Bad normals

1)     A suite of bad normals which normally occur for people assailed by multiple morbidities: these are common and also not good for people. Therapy should challenge these directly as and when appropriate. Trouble is, they are the outer expressions of the defenses you needed to survive the trauma, so they have natural resistance to being disclosed and even more to changing. So, many victims of long term trauma:

·       blame themselves for their trauma and feel guilty for being injured

·       feel it is unethical to put themselves first

·       self-medicate with alcohol and/or drugs, or self-distract with compulsive behaviours like gambling, sex, etc.

·       deny their traumatic experiences (I was never mistreated by my parent(s), school master(s), and anyway I don’t remember anything, even if someone else – a sibling – reminds me, etc.)

·       have things they’ve never told anyone, and never will…

·       just don’t feel much of anything…like pleasure or pain or anger or…

·       life feels conflicted much of the time

A look back over this suite will show a bunch of interactions among the items which tend to keep you stuck in your defenses, even after the immediate threat has passed. These are normal in varying degrees and configurations. (Effective) defenses are normal, until they become dysfunctional. Some, like aggressive behaviour, are so close to normal that they are mistaken for being so, as when they appear in the hands and mouths of leaders.

Good normal

2)     Underlying patient trauma is ‘right’ normal life…that of eating, playing, loving, achieving, learning, creating, sustaining, believing…but what is a normal life? After thinking all around this topic for weeks (years actually, as I’ve responded to patient needs for normalising of their experiences as much as they can be normalized, which is almost always a great deal more than they expect) I realized that the question is: where are the boundaries of normality which we can lay clear and reliable claim to for ourselves and others??

Well, they seem to be expanding / fracturing / evanescing at an increasing rate. There’s a website for every imaginable (to this point) way to vary our look to others and ourselves, to vary our duration in this life, to vary our creativity, to vary our speed, mass, agility….on it goes to validate any variation. Enhancement is the objective of our times, bringing to reality the fears once held for eugenics in a positive psychology, moving forward form. The new black is grey.

This expanding universe of human aspiration leaves in its wake the detritus of previous generations’ norms, which cling as do broken limbs and dropped leaves to the ground on which they fall but without the fertilizing effects. People miss their norms and flail in the breeze of the as yet thinly shaped successors. What’s a real relationship? How would you know when you have one? ...or have the right body? … or the right sex. Equally, determining the boundaries between normally occurring psychological distress and pathological is not at all easy for two reasons: one, what pathological distress is is unclear (its defining characteristics) and, two, how much of it someone has to have to have it is uncertain. Depression is a good example of this difficulty, recently getting print and digital media airtime as the DSM’s latest version struggles into the light of publication.

So in what follows I will lay claim to some boundaries which seem to be viable now and have some prospects for imaginable futures. My main resource in this pretense will be ideas about human needs and well-being (cultures and values) and some structural features (aspects of brains and bodies) and some contextual features (socioeconomic and cultural/historical played out in family and community life) which seem relatively reliable.  In all cases, a recurrent question to patients will be: “How does it work for you?” Is your life effective for you?

Am I nuts, or on the way to it?

3)     A very common concern of patients who appear with relatively acute anxiety or depression is their sanity. Anxiety produces moments of intense disorientation in its panicky forms and depression feels like death and grows thoughts of dying. Because patients know a little about psychology from the public press, health adverts and friends / family with mental health experiences (or opinions about what the experiences of others should or should not be), they default to assumptions that they’ve caught a special kind of cancerous disease and they may be scarred for life, especially if others know about it. ‘I can’t tell X… they would not listen, they would reject me, would tell me what to do’ (order from bad to worse option).

Most of what we treat is not life threatening. It is however, life distorting. And if it goes on long enough, the distortions harden, building defending and compensating behaviours around them. When these become ineffective, taking them apart can take almost as much time as initially required to build them. The same is the case for physical injuries, which can take months of daily exercises of appropriate sorts to return a patient to ‘normal’ functioning, and often they never return to completely ‘normal’, though they may be good enough!

So, you are not crazy, so far. To be crazy you have to pass a CAT exam for hospital admission, and then you are only crazy for that moment. Long term craziness is attested by recurrent incarcerations, especially if they are against your will. Some long term meds may be a good introductory step, but are not conclusively correlated with future pathological outcomes.

I’m just confused, muddled, can’t keep my mind on anything

4)     Another concern is how to make sense of the morass you may feel you are in, at least on arrival. Having an idea of what’s a normal mind may be a helpful response to this concern. Much of the early stages of therapy are ventilation, dumping, letting it all hang out, etc. Letting it out gives our mind air and allows a self-organising process to occur…stuff is gathered up in chunks and bunches and families and domains…a natural storage and retrieval system. We vary in our facility and style of remembering – variations which can be very irritating or blocking under pressure. Some prefer pictorial approaches, others verbal and others physical, etc. All are normal and we all have some capacity in each remembering style, but may be more gifted in one.

There are unavoidable complexities to the memory tasks – for example, family is a multi-generational, multi-contextual entity complicated by gender (cultural) and sex (biological) and mediated by ethnicity, religion, etc. This is the biopsychosocialspiritual /cultural perspective mentioned above. A little recording of brain dumps is often helpful. It gets the stuff outside and into an examinable position. Normally, there’s relief in just unburdening.

Dilemmas along the way

However, there are unavoidable dilemmas along the way: e.g. –

·       we are all the same (human) and all different (individuals);

·       we are subject to unequal workload distributions and/or unequal affection distributions – one loves more than the other;

·       what’s good for one is sometimes bad for the other;

·       work-life imbalances drain our energies and contest with other values for attention;

·       we are subject to conflict / interdependence between our needs and those of family, team and other groups;

·       we are whole (one consciousness / awareness) and broken (incomplete, in process never to be completed); and,

·       we think we should choose but discover we are repeating habits.  

 

These are all presented digitally, as either/or constructs, when most are continuous ranges. Only the life and death dilemma is either /or, though it is also one of the domains which is continuously being enlarged (some would say deformed) by science jet-propelled with wealth – e.g. surrogacies of various kinds (children, body parts, etc.), life-support systems of increasing power, procreation choice tools (ultra-sound, day after drugs, surgical abortion, in-utero pre-natal surgery, etc.).

So, conflict is unavoidable in life!! There are some other reasons, too, but these are systematic…and actually so are the others like the emerging nature of our needs, the impact of unpredictable forces on our normal progress in life…

Will I ever get over this? I just want to move on…

5)     And yet another concern – will I ever get over this? Will it be gone forever? This is about memory – its roles and characteristics (e.g. feeling based, unreliable…etc.) and especially about how we come to maturity…by handling challenges, creating new approaches, trying new behaviours, etc. So, implicitly, we will be changed by the pains we carry and our efforts to manage them. And like the activities which please us, all experiences contribute to who/what we are as long as we remember them. Peak experiences tend to get remembered, especially painful peaks repeated systemically.

We are creatures of habit, who develop over time thru relatively predictable life events (both inner e.g. puberty, ageing and outer e.g. transition from school to work, becoming competent, shifting careers/workplaces, becoming coupled, etc.). Our potential for habit formation is leveraged by our capacity for communication, which comes laden with pre-formed (“hard-wired” as the neuro’s, and just about everyone, now say) potential.

The nature of consciousness: we are that being which can observe itself and reflect on what it sees – that is, evaluate itself; much of the processing of experience is below the level of daily awareness and the outcomes are usually intuitive; that is, they seem to emerge whole out of nowhere, and especially without trying (in fact, you can’t get there from here by trying too hard!).

Awareness, which is conscious presence, is a key tool for learning of all kinds. Awareness works mostly by focusing on parts of the total potential experience at any one time; high focus is very like obsessiveness, as skilled action is like compulsiveness (that is automatic in large parts)…It can be developed by working on mastery of any kind of activity. We can choose some things to some extent some of the time.

The body is the main instrument of awareness, and the vehicle of consciousness (think of a brain without a body; it’s easier to think of a body without a brain). Awareness grows by small steps and so does therapeutic effectiveness, one of the on-going learning activities that humans can engage ‘til death!

There are natural life stages, through which we are able to develop to varying degrees, so learning (and unlearning or change) is always present, driven by naturally occurring challenges; but, natural learning is only assured by necessary natural conditions – e.g. nutrition, care, experience

Freud was right – family is central and essential because it is the place for all learning for 5-6 years for most people in most cultures…and that learning is always likely to contain distorting elements to the congenital needs and capacities we start with…there is no perfect family. The claim daily seen in the news that so and so, now dead, had a loving family, was a loving parent, etc. is the signal of its untruth. Why would anyone bother saying this? May be they think it will make dead turn into passed?

There are normal feelings, esp. including the so-called “negative” ones – anger, sadness, despair, fear. These feelings occur in graded levels of intensity. But what terrifies me may only slightly disturb you. We can learn to deal with things through experience, training, watching others deal and so on. There are natural functions – for example, our in-built threat detection system, the FreezeFlightFight response it triggers, the body readiness processes (muscle tensing, etc.) etc.; organic needs and self-regulation; stress management in the face of cumulative stressors.

Who / What can I trust?

6)     Another concern is to interpret the myriad of commercial and “evidence-based” claims about what’s normal in life and effective in treatment. A few trust indicators:

·       How does the product offer feel to you?

·       What market recognition does it already have?

·       Google the product and find professional reviews of it by accredited members of recognized professional associations.

·       If the product has recognition then it will have user blogs providing client /customer experience reports

·       Check out CHOICE for product danger warnings.

·       Ask your treating therapist, GP or experienced friends

The “K 10” test you took at the GP’s to get your Mental Health Care Plan is based on the assumption that perceptions of feeling are individual and that certain levels of perception are potentially toxic for anyone.

What’s a good person?

7)     A related concern is how to know if they are good enough human beings. This may not be the same as ‘normal’, but includes normal as a foundation. There is no single right way of living, believing, etc., demonstrated by the endless struggle between even very similar religions (e.g. the Abrahamic trio) for dominance of the god space. Diversity in sameness is the rule…and the foundation of species survival in short and long term. An unchanging species is a dead one…in the long term. There seem to be some basic conditions of life which, if transgressed or disregarded, lead to less fulfilling or early terminating lives. Among them are adequate food, cover, care, exercise …etc.

There are natural human values – e.g. fairness, balance, wholeness – and virtues: persistence, integrity, etc., which seem to be present across all cultures. The values come into play automatically under the appropriate conditions. For example, we sense when we are being unjustly treated. That sense is a reliable capacity, except where it has been distorted by punishments directed at it by the more powerful in life. Even then, in therapy the sense can be exhumed from its socially induced grave (or rehabilitated from its weakened state). It appears in patient observations of their world which retain sensitivity to truth, which reflect other perspectives on that world than the ones approved by the powerful. We can see the truth sense operating at the broad cultural level in all (not only the repressive) societies in the socio-culturally appropriate forms of whistle-blowers.

Another source of truth is what I call our gifts. These are the natively occurring interests and dispositions towards the world which shape our preferred occupations or vocations. We are not all equally gifted, but almost no one is ungifted in this sense. Everyone has capacity for taking an interest in life’s opportunities; a few have huge capacities in specific areas – the arts are the most glaring example of this, along with certain technical proclivities (the nerd-doms).

There are some whole constructs of what human being is. Draw on Maslow, AQAL (Wilber), Spiral Dynamics, etc. The religions offer worked-through answers to this question, too, though lumbered with some empirical historical falsehoods of major orders. Seligman’s wellbeing theory; the needs construct of

Primacy of the non-verbal / feeling in expression and perception – that is, the body is the instrument of the mind and shapes it to its needs!! A pain in the foot is in the foot, etc. Eg. The brain doesn’t sense, the body does; brain interprets sensation in habitual (schematizing) and hard-wired ways and mind interprets it above the FFF level. This could go on but much of the detail of ‘normal’ should be found in an introduction to psychology textbook, failing which reverse engineering the prescriptions of abnormal psych may provide backup through implicit definition of the terrain of normal…

Interpretation – a recursive step.

Go back to the beginning. Look at what you wrote and ask: Is this normal? How normal is it (a little, not at all, fairly, quite, completely)? Could you easily share it with someone you know? Who?..... If not, why not? This last query reveals the true normal you are working with; the definition you practice for yourself now. There’s no reason to hide the normal, is there?