Coincidences (2) …… and causes

 

Coincidences (2) …… and causes
Torrey Orton
April 22, 2013

6 degrees of separation and such matters??

The 6 degrees thing was back in hardcopy sight last week with a few hundred words borrowed from Steve Jones by the Australian Financial Review’s Review (pg. 2R) section on Friday 19, April ’13. It reminded me there is this thing of organic coincidence among us, much closer than many would like to imagine, though increasing the distance as our (advanced?) cultures become more ethnically diverse (which leads directly to DNA diversification, which is good for humanity overall). We are, after all, all out of Africa.

And on they march…coincidences, concurrences (which is a competition for the French!), correlations, co-occurrences – the makings of causes…all the variations on the sense of being in synch with ourselves, others, the world, the multi-verse…Pick your preference if you can; if you can’t, these connections become opportunities for perceived and real dis-connection, being out of synch, feeling out of it.

Sharing house, but a life?

A few days ago one long term patient announced that his girlfriend is house sharing with another patient of mine. What are the chances of that happening? Probably calculable if I can set the parameters, though I couldn’t do the calculation myself. Some of the parameters might be:

·       Prior mental health issue(s), untreated or treated

·       Tertiary education levels

·       Under 35 and over 20

·       Single, and seeking partner

·       Minority backgrounds – race/ethnicity; sexual orientation…

·       Inner suburbs address

·       Share housing

·       Early career in recognised professional field

·       Tertiary educated parents??

These are groupings, presumably linked in some shared way. And if you get enough of them together you have a presumptive causal cluster. Demonstrating it rather than assuming it is the challenge.

But, what possible implication(s) can I draw from the fact of sharing itself, without any presumed other connective effects. So, they happen to share a house. And people share houses with no other connection than the need for sharing (economic/social/and?). These two could not be possible love objects for each other, distinguished as they are by different sexual preferences. Maybe there’s naturally occurring mutual support thru sharing their experiences of therapy with the same therapist…informal quality control reflected back to me as they adjust to our relationship in light of their understanding of it from the other one?? Could be.

Needle, not haystack

This is not a coincidence but a case of finding what I did not know I was looking for. We were wandering along the path in Chamonix towards the Swiss end of town, with Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi across the valley to the right and the local stream just off the path. On our left was a rock face of about 300 meters height forming the base of the lower range facing Mont Blanc. A few ropes were laid down the face from different heights and groups of primary school kids were being instructed in the entry level arts of defying the heights. I grabbed a couple of quick shots of the site and the little scramblers and sent it off to a patient at the time who was struggling to overcome such fears, which she subsequently did…with the slight increase in risk-taking which comes with its acknowledgement by others.

This is evidence of unconscious processes at work, as they often are in the therapy, the scanning for world understanding and the writing parts of my life. Much less so with the Friends of FCC work…or so it seems.

Her past just walked in the door

Then there’s the ex-patient of mine who started her own therapy practice and within a week a facsimile of her PhD candidate self walked in the door, struggling with a similar range of things she had herself back then – doubt, motivational slippage, conflict with supervisors, data collection glitches….normal stuff, except when you are in it; then it’s the pains which assure you the honour of completion is warranted, maybe. Within a couple of days an article had appeared in the New York Times on PhD study challenges, assaying the terrain we had just been revisiting. I passed it on and received a quick acknowledgement of a good fit with her own experience and that of her new patient.                  

And, there are the patients who seem to come in clusters of same-symptoms, same traumas, often over a week or two. This is signalled to me when I start telling one patient of another with similar concerns who I realise in the telling I just saw the day before or the week before. This is probably a case of proximity calling out approximately equal experiences from my recollections of near patients…not that there is a collocation of people and life practices in neat experiential bundles by chance!!!

J’s meeting of future wife D

K and cult colleague J went out to find dinner in Bangkok in the cultish way - begging it from neighbourhood restaurants /cafes. J suggested they ‘find’ the one they would try first by praying for a minute. They did so, and J asked K what God offered and K said there, pointing to a hotel a ways off. J said, “Just what I got”.  And off they went to be waited on by J’s future wife who was in her last hours of a three day employment trial (which she failed). The rest was 20+ years of the deepest marital solidarity which was broken before time by cancer. The cult had gone the way of some bad things well before the untimely cancers seized D.

A bag of lesser treats

·       Our in-laws at Jinks Winery, Tonimbuck, Vic… a classic coincidence which J and I both imagined was going to occur as we got within site of the winery. We’d only been there once before for their elder son’s wedding 3 years ago. We walked in the café door and a few steps inside spied them sitting at the nearest table… as if waiting for us. They weren’t, but also weren’t too surprised we appeared.

·       And there’s the guy in the incinerated fire zone of the Murrindindi fire four years ago whose house at Marysville, Vic. was the only one for a mile around NOT touched by the fires which killed 173. When I called hopefully to see if they were still OK, he said “Yes, and our fire insurance lapsed a week ago”!!

·       And there’s the synch of ‘Mother” coming to my mind in patient M’s discussion of recent developments and she having her dead birth mother coming at the same time to her mind though I was thinking of her step mother…but it’s all part of the total system of her family of origin relationships which cue each other...in her and me.

This matter of therapeutic synch is seriously interesting as a possible member of the coincidence genre. It’s a false coincidence, reflecting rather the coming together of minds that are on a sufficiently shared track, where each other’s stories and roles are firmly enough in mind not to have to be held in mind consciously. So, such synching moments in therapy are expressions or emanations of jointness, and also famously the place in which exactly whose mind is speaking at any moment is a wonder to be validated by checking – the principle activity of maintaining clarified jointness.

The emanations take the early form of premonitions of being in synch, of knowing what the other is thinking/ feeling and hence an example of empathy. In ordinary talk, this premonition is found in the listeners regularly completing the active speaker’s sentences before they do or adding the words the speaker is searching for at appropriate times (e.g. when a felt need to confirm correct attention occurs).

Learner therapist (34)……Not good enough therapist

 

 Learner therapist (34)……Not good enough therapist

Torrey Orton
April 21, 2013

Another of my therapeutic errors…

A year ago I wrote:

I am somewhat obsessively tuned to my mistakes, a commitment moderated by a fairly balanced level of professional self-regard. However, it seems that mistakes continue to occur in sufficient numbers and powers to guarantee the balance falls slightly towards the obsessive side. From my point of view, my reputation is always in danger from my next performance.

And a striking case has arisen, as they do, totally predictable as sessions went on, but avoided by me out of my self-imposed belief that I should always be able to work with anyone and that I am infinitely flexible. Yes, I see the universalising and that I am in the grip of moderate catastrophising, but that’s the price of standards in practice (another argument this, but not now). I pay this price a few times a year in the currency of disturbed sleep and therapeutic relationship crises (in my mind often). Here’s this one:

In brief, he’s a 33 year old in a growingly committed relationship with a woman he characterises as anxious like himself. They are on the verge of cohabiting. But he doesn’t share with her the vitality of his anxiety – that it is persistent, permanent, paralysing – which he deploys like a shield from his deep sense of being notgoodenough. This sense has been unavoidably present to him for 10 years post a major car accident recovery, which took a year of physio and some subsequent therapies through a parade of therapists and psychiatrists of which I am the last, so far, in line.

We’ve been one session a week for three months on an insurance funded therapeutic journey. It was limited to 5 in the first instance and then only after review which I did not do at the time. I had never clearly monitored the conditions of the insurance. So, I was working for free.

He knows his notgoodenough comes from somewhere further back in his past, and has recently acknowledged that father is the obvious source. Father has never been accessible to him nor outreaching for him, though always present… an active, unconscious (?) denial of the son’s existence. Mother appears as the good parent, though almost acknowledgeable as a collusive partner in father’s absent presence. She is also in late stages of thrice recurrent cancers, so seriously compromised as a pathway to the father, or even a discussant of son’s needs.

He can do anger at two things: his parents, but especially his father, and me if I suggest he “out” his admittedly socially phobic obsessions and compulsions to anyone, but especially his girlfriend. When angry he presents clearly as powerful – language strong (f bombing) and posture strike ready. Outing is part of a process of exposure which is a widely accepted ingredient of anxiety and addictive therapies, and one I’ve used in a wide variety of situations with workable effectiveness for patients of many sorts. I said as much to him in roughly the following words:

The principle reason for encouraging self-outing of any kind is to reduce the burden of the un-outed secret(s) which, for lack of psycho-spiritual-relational air, fester in the paranoid richness of the dark holding bay of the self. At this point it was a crucial move because we were going around in circles and the only talking place for this was therapy.

There exists alongside the phobic persona a competent, though self-doubting, one with a wide range of social and potentially professional skills, and with better than average verbal skills, both spoken and written. He is supposed (psychiatric report) to have done CBT for self-doubt, but shows little retention. He’s devoted to the latest manual driven self-improvement thingy about social phobia – very CBTish in style. He hasn’t been able to stick with any such processes or related tracking of moods over the three months, though getting started a couple of times. He’s swamped by the daily flux of his fears, and amplifies them at each session by arriving late and leaving early, starting to notice the approaching self-imposed departure time 30 minutes into the session.

Because of his intense resistance to raising his phobia with his girlfriend or selected workmates and his increasingly reported despair about the phobia (expressed in spontaneously written emails capturing the daily experience), I felt trapped and ineffective and looking to reduce it by stopping our work and handing him on to someone appropriate.

I had not confronted him with this thought, but he could have been aware of my doubt from my unwillingness to add another session to the present once a week. He has history for losing therapists because they cannot / will not fit into his workplace secrecy regime which requires him to do nothing in work time (even if lunch) which might invite a question from colleagues or management about what he’s doing.

I did not feel that I had the time or mood flexibility to respond usefully to his needs. At the same time, progressively over the preceding two weeks, I found myself under a rapidly increasing load of high need patients. It takes a while for me to notice I’m close to not coping, but I’m getting better at it. This is a significant straw in this story, and this camel’s back was bending. With this case I was feeling like death and actually surrounded by long term patients considering themselves as candidates for death. My decision to discontinue our work came off a base of having done similar things at very high pressure times of near overwhelm over the decades of my organisational development practice, both here and in China.

A few days ago we had our first session since my coming to the conclusions above about my needs and his. He walked in and started immediately with his doubts about how we were going, beating me to the task. Within 20 minutes we had agreed that I would find him an alternative therapist within the day and pass that option back to him, which I did. He was a bit angry that he had once again lost a start on therapy which happened partly because he did not demand at intake that the proposed therapist (in this case, me) work outside normal hours. Some of the other lost therapists had parted for similar reasons, he said.

I think from the backside of my failed effort that it is principally a result of insufficient checking with the patient about how things were going for him. Checking is about the only antidote to letting things amble along when they really aren’t ambling much at all. And it is not as if I don’t check regularly. But maybe it is that I check somewhat less regularly than I think and that rigorous attention to checking (putting it explicitly on every session’s agenda) would reveal a pattern that somewhat more diffident checking occurs with more diffident patient experiences – and it’s my diffidence I’m talking about here. My failure to check the insurance requirements for continued payment are party to my self-deception or avoidance.

As I said at the start: “my self-imposed belief that I should always be able to work with anyone and that I am infinitely flexible”  may facilitate my not taking seriously some recurrent but slight evidence that things are not getting very far or very well, though they continue! As so often in development matters, awareness is all except when it isn’t enough, as in this case. I know exactly what that self-monitoring awareness feels like from my commitment over the last 6 weeks to raising my performance in aikido weapons practice to both a higher intensity and greater regularity. The subject is always close to the front of mind, including when I choose to not make the required effort.

For the moment it is clear that my reputation to myself as an aikido practitioner is more important than my professional one!!

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.

 

Coincidences…… revisited

Coincidences…… revisited

Torrey Orton

March 17, 2013

 

That more and more coincidences seem to be appearing in my life has been in my awareness for some years (see from four years ago Appreciations (16)-Coincidentally yours? in www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com ) …and I’ve lost a sheaf of them as a result of not noticing my awareness. So here comes a reinvented topic range.

I am regularly reminded of the existence of apparent coincidences by the correlation between my recalling a certain ex-patient 6 or more months or up to 3-4 years after their stopping therapy and their calling for a new appointment. This correlation is so common in my practice I now expect any recollection to be followed by a reconnection. Perhaps from now I’ll begin recording the first to track the arrival, or not, of seconds.

I’m aware, also, that coincidence is often the expression of some kind of familiarity which in turn (?) is enlivened by personal recollection, by the fact that people and events come to mind in apparently the most unlikely places. This is in turn arises from our natural emotion-based filing systems. Many of their contents are connected in pre-conscious ways revealed over-and over again by associations coming into view with no immediately obvious relation to present events….etc.

 I have always had a talent for running into people in the strangest places, so that these days I expect if I visit a foreign place someone I know, usually from the distant past, will pop up for an unarranged hello. They are almost always more than pleasant events, happenings in public with ashamed priests to the contrary notwithstanding.

So let’s get a bit more systematic, starting with data collecting.

Pinky presences and absences

I was standing Saturday morning witness to the harassing of patients at the FCC a week ago with another Friend of the FCC and the regular security guard. We enjoy good bantering Oz male bonding and re-bonding every Saturday. His aversion to more recently introduced bonding activities like hugs from colleagues of varying ages and sexes is notorious among us, which doesn’t prevent some of the younger Friends persisting in the hope they can re-educate him, or maybe it’s just cultural insensitivity both ways.

Anyway, one such effort had just been rebuffed and I, addressing the other Friend (a young gay woman quite new to the witness role), wondered what he would do if I offered a hug and in the same breath stretching my 7 foot wingspan in an embracing arc towards him from about 8 feet away. He stood there rigid and blank faced. He is very disciplined. A few tours in Vietnam, 13 years in the Army subsequently and 30 plus years consequently of professionally securing all kinds of installations and events underpin his resilient presence.

“Did you notice his left pinky twitch slightly?” I asked her in his hearing. Neither she nor he had noticed, and maybe even I didn’t either though it seemed so at the moment. My suggestion was strong enough that he started feeling his left pinky with his right hand … and suddenly said “Shit” with the force which assures its authenticity, shocking us all (even the HoGPIs across the foot path) in the way deeply troubled expressions usually do.

He discovered he had lost his company ring, a ring he never takes off. Its fit was always a smidge loose. He was stricken, thrown into a flurry of activities, all fruitless until six days later, to discover it. Turned up in a corner of the wash room in the security company office…found by a colleague who came out from a hand wash wondering whose ring it was.

How did I know to covertly tell him to check for it in the first place?

 

What floor do you want?

He did not say or ask when he followed me into a CBD lift a few days back. I was somewhat hurried and touched L-5 by mistake, then my desired L-2 which sits just below 5 on the pick-a-story pad. The delivery guy just behind me reached over to touch L-12 and I mumbled a quick apology for my miss-selection, which he had not noticed. But having it pointed out in my act of contrition, he realized that he actually needed L-5 to complete his deliveries. He would have realized it when he got to L-12 and still had stuff left over.

How often do I get to do something wrong (adding an unnecessary stop to the lift ascension) and have it made right by chance?? Did I know this one, too? Is it like the pinky absent its ring? No. That was getting something right (his pinky did twitch) and getting something more and totally unexpectable (no one on site at this moment knew he had lost his pinky ring) for me and him.

Are these just examples of being in synch, “on the same page”, in tune….with others?

A train ride and the coincidence of this coincidence

I’m thinking about coincidences and a patient walked in, not knowing of my emerging attention to coincidences, and launched into a coincidence of his which was enormously informative for his work and our work, not even seeing fully the parallels between them all. It went like this.

He was standing at a local train station and an older woman (80ish it turned out) asked which platform the Alamein train left by. He checked it out and told her “the one we’re on now”. ..with which she initiated a discussion that went on for the wait and subsequent ride, largely consisting of aspects of her life like being a non-graduate engineer most of her life and having learned whatever was necessary as new tasks came her way from management (which is how he’s living his professional life) and having been the inventor of a famous piece of sheep shearing technology 50 years ago and now pursuing a PhD in some applied area, until she got off. He listened in quiet astonishment at the unlikely claims, so astonished that he didn’t get her name, not because she withheld it.

The name came after his arrival at his aunt’s home, which was why he was awaiting the Alamein train. As he regaled her with the sheep-shearing engineer’s story aunt reached for an article about a “mature age” PhD candidate at a local university saying “she sounds like…” and handed him the article, confirming to his multiple amazements that she was not fabricating, just reporting, her life. For he, too, is in the middle of a self-built professional life converting what he feels is a thin educational foundation into an already professionally acknowledged value for others. If he were looking for a role model he could hardly have done better than her.

 But then, we don’t look for role models until we don’t need them, almost. Once we are well down our life roads, the supporting tuition may just pop up. An unnoticed coincidence may be no instruction at all. An acknowledged and embraced coincidence may be confused with our own developing awareness.

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

 

 

Learner therapist (29)…… The One and the game(s) of intimacy

Torrey Orton

March 6, 2013

 

Only you can make this world seem right…

The Platters, 1953

Intimate aspirations

This resonant anthem to love has a popular culture life of great resilience and duration. Its underpinnings are the Western romantic vision of another (the One) who will perfectly reflect our own imagined goodness as a person – somewhat as the good-enough-mother does with unconditional love for her children. Perhaps the spiritual anchor is the One God, perfect in all respects, who we are encouraged/told to aspire to. Psychologically these may be the same foundation in different dress(es).

Here’s a thought for beginners on the life road to a coupled future of one kind or another: the One you are looking for, believe exists out there and cherish as “who I am meant to be with” cannot be ‘found’. He/ she has to be co-created, jointly built over years of shared work in  marriage, partnership or cohabitation  -  something exclusive for some large percentage of a life’s time. The happiness research is on my side here. Among the happiest people in industrial cultures are old people in stable relationships of long duration. Modernity has been attacking that paradigm for a century or three. The One is a cheap, cosmetic imitation, but just about all there is on offer…oh, I forgot religious fundamentalists’ straitened marriage gates.

How do you become a One?? You can’t. You can be deemed the One by another and you’ll know if he/she tells you, though that’s unlikely because to do so would reveal the perilous state of the relationship: still being measured up for the suit of engagement according to standards which are both wholly transparent (the public ones imagined by all to be what they are straining to attain) and totally private in the judge’s suite of fantasy needs.

There’s no One...many could do

The imagining of the One is a defence against the uncertainty which is one major feature of intimate living. It is fired by the blind energy of infatuation – one of the few life emotions which is best savoured at its finish.  But, “maybe we aren’t meant to be together” comes to the aspirant’s mind. An expression of powerlessness… being in the hands of fate(s). If the fit isn’t perfect the game can’t be played?? But if you don’t play how can you know the game.  One aspirant confronted the M sex columnist (Sunday AGE, March 3, 2013 pg. 6) with:

…Then a man I really liked said he wanted us to be “friends with benefits” because “how else can you find ‘the one’? Now if I meet someone I think, “another one to treat me badly”.

She was not a beginner; rather more a culture warrior tired of the fight with no finish. How commonly are variations of the ‘friends with benefits’ path to relationship wholeness traded on as the married or partnered future recedes into the faint light of the biological clock’s hands??

Accessorise – everything can be verbed and what can be buffed can be matched. But can it? What is the central theme, colour, shape, sound, smell which defines everything else in the One package as accessories. How would a beginner know? By buying matching sets from approved providers of recognised One costumes…those available in financially appropriate versions… so the One is ultimately democratic. You can put them on and still not know where / who you are.

The inner One

Yourself as the One is expressed in “that person” who you do / do not want to be. E.g.  “I don’t want to be that person who….”;  “I don’t want to be that person in the anger position” – the disempowering judgment against expressing strong feelings to others. We can only wonder what the boundary within her between “too extreme” and the rest of her life might be for Anna Guy.

“…But actually hurting anyone or killing someone, that was just too extreme. I didn’t marry that person. I didn’t know that type of person. I wouldn’t have thought I’d choose that type of person…”

Anna Guy reflecting on her husband having recently been arrested for murdering her brother. THE SATURDAY AGE, GoodWeekend Jan. 19, 2013

The public One

The One has history. For example:

… from the mid-18th century onwards, and particularly with the advent of Romanticism, a different problem presented itself: the glorification of the suicidal person as a romantic hero. In 1774, Goethe published the literary sensation, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the story of a painfully earnest young man, tortured by unrequited love, who ends up shooting himself. All over Europe, other young men started to dress up in yellow trousers and blue jackets, following Werther. They also began to imitate the manner of his death, and Goethe's book was banned in several countries. The roots of the poisonous connection between suicide and the romantic hero began to form at the very same time as the development of modern celebrity culture.

There's no shame in suicide. And there's no glory, either

Giles Fraser  The Guardian, Wednesday 30 January 2013

 

Branding as the pursuit of a corporate One. You have arrived when your company name is the generic name for the product – e.g. Hoover for vacuum cleaner, Kleenex for tissues (USA), etc. The individual person equivalent would be iconic (see archetypes) male and female, a brand changing roughly with the fashion cycle (30 years for Ray Ban aviators, for an instance of a cycle). For archetypes try the gods of old (Viking or Greek identities) or the One God, promoted by the competing owners of its serial revelations, in whose image we are made and always fail to live up to…So what’s left are celebrities. Brand names change a bit more quickly than they used to.

And there’s the ‘history’ of the latest One which solves all previous failures to solve the fat, addiction, ageing...problems. The only resounding evidence for most of these is that they fail, One after another, yet the failures never cease to promote themselves as the One of their respective domain. Fat comes to mind as the most resilient loss-leader of self-improvement fantasies. How many of these are still in play: the Atkins diet, the Mediterranean diet, the Dukkan diet, the 5-2 diet (the latest, latest diet)? Such Ones are also known generically as “the real deal” or “real thing”, out of which spins an unending breeze of real “real things”.

Borderlands – there are ‘bad’ Ones, too

Two weeks before the Australian Open opened in January , on a billboard at the corner of Punt Rd and Swan St. in Richmond facing towards the Tennis Centre, I saw “Don’t be ‘that guy’ at the match”, the drunk and disorderly one in the photo front and centre. Interestingly, on reflection he was scarcely the model D and D type; more drunk and sleepy, foolish, clean cut kid who just went too far for his own system – that is, the wrong one to bother fearing.

In a similar vein, there’s Madison Eagles reflecting on her lady wrestler self-image. She says there’s a joy in being a ‘bad’ One, and that there’s a market for it, proven by her winning ways on the professional mat.

“I’m just drawn to being that horrible person everybody hates and I really enjoy it…”

Madison Eagles, “the Punisher”, 28 yr old woman professional wrestler in TheAGE GoodWeekend Jan 19, 2013

What’s the psychology of this: Do you get a whole picture and then seek items to compose it - a vision thing rather than a tick-a-box thing? The closest to becoming One thru your own efforts is to acquire socially approved features (kardashianisation? Beiberfication?) of the look. It’s not surprising that ours is an age of body dysmorphias and binges. The One is a deeply evaluative and moral construct (ethical…maybe, maybe not) of cardboard thickness.

Another e.g. - “get the garden you’ve always wanted...” Imagine how you would get to recognise the garden you’ve always wanted. How does it get “populated” with plants, pathway(s), vistas…?? Can you choose these components when your source of taste is already set by exposures well before you are choosing such things…much as choice for junk food is primed almost irremediably by junk food childhoods intentionally designed to bond you to junk …?  Can you find a human partner in the same way?

The Game of relationships in a world of Ones

 

The Game has two objectives: to determine who would want to be your One and to determine if they are suitable to be your One. A dilemma leaps out. The other’s desire for you (thru which you feel their want to be your One) and their suitability (thru which you send your desire for them) are mutually confounding variables, as psych researchers would say. Want clouds perceptions of suitability making it difficult to have confidence in your judgment of either variable. This brings us to the Game.

The accepted practices in the Game are to be found in the commentary (gossip?) of interested same sex others about your relationship progress. Sophisticated players draw on the resources of the target sex as well. Everyone knows the rules, with a leaning towards their own sex interests. But do they work in finding a suitable One? Well, if the national relationship failure rate (40+% for marriages) is any indicator, no. And this does not count the myriad of failed efforts which many go through on the way to the supposedly committed versions, both binding and bonded, etc. And we rely on co-gamers to shore up our judgment of the process of discovering whether a possible One wants us and is suitable. There’s a book in the Game, as in the One.

Where to for any one, but especially therapists?

… While the date is ultimately unimportant, what is important is the arrival of systems that support rapid reconfiguration of every aspect of human life, from our work structures to our family lives to our political processes. To trans-form means to change the shape of (of what? … everything). Because a significant portion of the entire human family is now interconnected in real-time, the transformational era can take an opinion in Shanghai and within weeks it could dramatically influence purchasing behaviour for certain products in Reno. Our collective attitudes, behaviours, energy, and spending now constitute a complex, global and fundamentally chaotic school of fish. Or perhaps more apt, a flock of Taleb’s black swans.

“The Transformational Life” – Rob Smith on Integral Life.com 18/02/2013

This sounds like the culture of the One on steroids, where it has become loosened from its mooring culture of origin trappings and converted into a globally portable cloth (among those cultures with a ‘middle class’, defined as anyone with enough disposable income to look at adverts of wannabe approved self-presentation).

Why does all this matter for relationship therapists? Because, if this scant analysis is somewhat right, the conditions for relationship consistency, reliability and certainty are declining, perhaps at a rate well beyond our capacity to adapt. The breakdown rate is one datum. The start-up age is another. The single living rate for over 30’s, especially women, is another. Should increases in family violence rates count as another??

What does it mean to help patients navigate this world, be they 20 or 50. I have ones across that spectrum struggling with the challenge to be someone’s One and find a suitable One, too.

Stay tuned.

 

Learning to act right (33)… Engaging HoGPI strategy with anger

Torrey Orton

Feb. 25, 2013

Anger into energy…

A major change of direction is often upon us before we know it’s happened. We find ourselves facing into the wind instead of back to it…So it seems to be with me and the HoGPIs at the Fertility Control Centre (FCC). I adopted a treat-them-as-they-treat-patients attitude 8 months ago. I explicitly disregarded them and did not speak to those I had spoken to before, restricting my speech only to moments of their ‘bad behaviour’ – their daily-repeated breaching of the Melbourne City Council public harassment regulations. That’s the amount of time they gave to each passing patient.

When I wrote of my anger struggles 8 months ago (http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/learning-to-act-right-26-my-rage-and.html

I was at the start of my attempt to influence HoGPIs with disregard. They, the errant HoGPIs, carried on as before, harassing with indifference and impunity.  My anger continued, somewhat reduced by attending to not being angry – the CBT solution. This internal strategy worked a few hours of each week’s time on the line at the FCC, only to be overwhelmed by the more outrageous examples of harassment. These moments still spark a perilously vertical rise in my pulse and pressure at the sight of an already crying woman and her bewildered male companion being set upon by the harpies of heaven.

Two of my FCC Friends – Marty and Charles – took a more assertive approach to the HoGPIs over this period, stepping up more pre-emptively to their actual harassing. Need for an intervention was relatively predictable because the most persistent harassers were 4-6 women, usually present on any given morning in ones and twos. Patients arrive in discrete pairs with lots of time between one and another. I could not do this so pre-emptively as they. Proximity to the offenses pushed me outside my self-control range in a flash.

Anger in retreat

My anger started to recede three months ago when I heard the outcome of the HoGPIs efforts to have a security guard charged with assaulting one of their number. They were unsuccessful. My anger receded further over the intervening months since as I formulated an approach to data gathering which offers a prospect of shutting the HoGPIs down to some extent and a way to be (more) effective protecting patients.

In some trial rounds of data gathering with voice-over video (where I comment on what a HoGPI is doing, her name, the time of day and date) of specific HoGPI transgressions has produced two results: an immediate HoGPI shame reflex and withdrawal from the behaviour, and a secondary threat of possible legal action. There was only one patient query about the videoing, which was easily answered.

Engage or disengage?

But it is not so simple: engage or disengage. Feelings come in different intensities. My anger varies with circumstances, which I still do not understand well or engage effectively. For example, one of the interesting things about the HoGPIs is their aversion to personal accountability for their public actions at the FCC. Aversion appears in self-veiling in different ways. The religious wear trench coats; the laity are trenchantly nameless. Neither provide their names easily, or ever so far. Two examples here - http://diarybyamadman.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/learning-to-act-right-32-unveilings.html

They do not provide their associations – professional, social, familial, avocational – easily, or at all, if asked. And, yet, they see themselves fit to attack others (under the veil of “helping” or “counselling”) about one of the most individual challenges in life…the continuation of it...or not. Their aversion is intrinsic to their single-issue strategy. Anything more personal is always a threat to the consistency and firmness of a single objective – removing abortion rights period. I’m reliably told by some among them that keeping it pure is part of the playbook for many HoGPIs.

Seeking their names, affiliations and vocations is not easy. They are hiding and my approach is a threat and their hiding is a threat to me and patients.  Upshot: an angry request from me. Effect: even more likely withholding by them. And so on. Personalising our relationship is one pathway, maybe, to breaking through the single issue veil. It’s hard to see 3D persons as iconic figures of evil. The generic example of this is the incapacity of those close to serious misbehaviour to actually see it or predict it – the family which stays together, blames together.  Anger’s not a helpful starting point. On the other hand, it provides energy for action in pursuit of what I see as patient justice. A difficult mix to get right.

The sinner-prospect identity, TBC

There is another dynamic at play in the FCC front yard. It goes something like this, I think: HoGPIs see patients through the anti-abortion lens only, so every patient who appears is identified as a prospective sinner to be saved. Their identity for the HoGPIs is sinner-prospect TBC (to be confirmed, by their response to the HoGPI offer of counselling or help). No other aspect of the individual is relevant. Keeping irrelevant the factors which could personalise the patients out of the sinner-prospect identity is central to sustaining the HoGPIs own identity as perfectly justified in any efforts the make – that is, harassments in particular. HoGPIs perform this fantasy maintenance trick by only presenting to the patients what they perceive – the sinner-prospect – with no question about the actual circumstances which bring patients to the FCC. Patients feel this perspective.

 It also helps sustain the idea that patients cannot be any more distressed than their identity as potential sinners already makes them. Normal psychology of stress doesn’t even get into view. Maybe when I get a better grip on my stressors, I’ll get better at increasing the HoGPIs’. Tracking my actions and their effects on me and HoGPIs will come next.

Stay tuned.

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!!