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Friday, 23 November 2007
Quasi-counselling approaches
I have been writing some stuff on counselling and thought this would go well on a blog
In any true counselling approach there is always a clear treatment contract and counselling techniques are being used. A treatment contract occurs when both the client and counsellor agree to a certain set of circumstances. The client agrees to attend the counsellor’s place of work, at a certain time for a counselling session and often the client makes some sort of payment for the service. The counsellor agrees to meet the client there and conduct a counselling session where he will use certain counselling techniques in order to assist the client to resolve whatever difficulty the client presents. The counsellor usually receives some sort of payment for doing this and commonly has some form of training and qualification as a counsellor. The counsellor is often a member of some kind of professional organisation which defines how the counsellor and client can relate. When two people relate in this particular set of circumstances one can say that counselling is occurring.
Real counselling
On the other side there are many relationships where there is clearly no treatment contract such as with friends, business partners and marital partners. Obviously no counselling techniques would occur in such relationships. There is also a group in between where the lines are less clear between as to what is counselling and what is not. It is much less clear on weather there is a treatment contract or not and these can be seen as the quasi-counselling approaches. See diagram 1
Diagram 1
Quasi means not real or a substitute
To move from one group to another on the surface is quite simple. Two people who agreed they had a treatment contract and were client and therapist can simply both agree that a treatment contract no longer exists and say to each other that they are now friends.
Of course that is easier said than done and does not address the real issue. For example in counselling there is sometimes a power difference between client and therapist. The client imbues the counsellor with potency and power similar to how a child views a parent as more psychologically powerful than it is. Of course by simply saying we no longer have a treatment contract and we are now friends does not change the psychological perception of both parties. That takes time, effort and good will on both sides. The change from client-therapist to friends is a difficult transition to make and indeed makes for an interesting study in human relationships. In my 25 years of counselling I have done it on a few occasions but it is certainly not a common occurrence.
How does a guru get his power? He convinces people to give their power over to him.
However it gets even more unclear. Two people who have never been client and counsellor and have simply developed a friendship over time may not have an equal power relationship. Just because they have only ever been friends does not mean they will view each other with equal power and psychological potency. In fact I would say that in most friendships the there is a power difference. One person will tend to be the more psychologically dominant one. Usually it is not too big a difference in power but on occasions it certainly is. Obviously the more dominant one can use their power to exploit the other financially, sexually and so on and indeed that does occur. The same situation exists in many marriages.
Of course it works both ways and does not have to have a negative outcome. Some friendships can be very therapeutic for one or both parties. The ‘less powerful’ friend can be valued and treated with respect by the other friend and thus achieve significant psychological gains. All this with not a treatment contract in sight!
Friends. Often one person is more often in the driving seat.
Of course this is what professional organisations are endeavouring to deal with when they develop their ethics codes and so forth but trying to regulate human relationships is fraught with difficulty and is a notoriously ineffective pursuit. As is shown in the paragraphs above therapy can easily occur in many different types of relationships.
I have met some counsellors who my dog would not see as psychologically potent and I have met some clients who are very emotionally robust where there would be minimal transfer of potency onto the counsellor.
Graffiti
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Thursday, 22 November 2007
My school medals
Kahless asks about my medals I won when I was a youngster at school, so here they are.
These are from when I was at Hale School.
Here is me holding my swimming trophy after I won it earlier that day.
It was a round medal disc that was mounted in a plastic trophy type of thing. The only thing I have left is the round medal disc. See the front and back of it below. R/U stands for "Runner up". I came second in the under 13 years old swimming championship.
Below is a medal I won for playing Rugby Union. I was the "fairest and best" of the team over the season in 1971 when I was 14 years old (2nd year high school). I also actually won it in 1972 as well but I do not have that medal anymore.
Below is the cup I won for athletics at school. It is titled "A. White", because my name is actually Anthony.
Memories from a long time ago
Graffiti
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Tuesday, 20 November 2007
More on my style of counselling
I am writing some stuff on counselling and I thought this bit might go well in a blog.
So here it is.
A pure non-directive approach is not my natural style I would say. Although it has its uses with a particular type of client as I mentioned before. On the other hand I certainly am not a ‘teacher’ or very directive type of counsellor. So what am I?
Teacher style therapists who just tell clients stuff can end up with clients who feel like this. The therapist starts to sound like a grammer phone or a broken record. Its like the father who gives the teenage son a lecture. After one minute they just stop listening and just nod the head to give the impression they are listening.
If one is not being non-directive, it is also not a matter of telling the client stuff. I like this picture of the sheep herders on the bridge. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that clients are like sheep, but it addresses the whole area of leading people and how does one do that. They can be seen as sheep like, but there are other alternatives.
Like a counsellor, the man in charge of the sheep knows where they are going but how does he keep them moving. He could use an electric cattle prod and a whip and indeed some psychotherapies are like that. There are some therapies and some thrapists who do have an abusive quality about them. The problem is that they have too many negative side effects for my liking. This man however does not have that. Instead he makes noises and waves his arms to keep them moving. As a therapist I think that is what I do. Make oblique comments, ask questions, suggest contracts, self disclose, use therapeutic techniques, report feelings in the relational, report observations and so forth. None of these actually tell the client what direction to go and what to do. So we end up with the diagram 1 below. The counsellor keeps the client within certain wide boundaries but within those they go where they go.
The therapist sits behind the client making noises and thus we see the movement of the client along the path and as is shown it can be meandering. That is the nature of self discovery and again teenagers have a similar like quality as they move out into the real world for the first time. In counselling how you get to where you are going is just as important as where you are going.
If the client is permitted to self discover rather than being highly directive then what does that say to the client. The therapist is saying in his actions towards the client:
“I believe you have the ability to find your answers and I trust you to find the path that is right for you”. Without a doubt this is very good for the self esteeme. The highly directive counsellor does not believe the client is capable of finding their own way.
Diagram 1
If the counsellor is highly directive then that forces or puts pressure onto the client to respond with either Conforming Child or Rebellious Child and thus they never actually find out what they want. They may find out what they don’t want but not what they actually want. With much less direction then the client can wander in Free Child and find what is their way and what is their passion in life.
Graffiti
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Friday, 16 November 2007
Why become a counsellor?
Kahless makes a good statement on counselling on her blog, “Random Kahless” (see my blogs I like list)
“They say that the fire brigade attracts arsonists”.
As noted this is also true for counsellors. In a couple of ways. Some people are attracted to training as a therapist in order to somehow surreptitiously sort out their own difficulties. “If I can cure a client of his anxiety then that some how cures me of mine”, is the magical thinking.
This is the same that some parents do through their children.
“I am never going to treat my kids the way my parents treated me”. So they never punish the kids because they were excessively punished as children.
So in one sense they are living through the other person which is quite an interesting phenomena in itself.
This diagram shows the therapist using her Nurturing Parent with a client. This is not an uncommon transaction to see in the counselling room. Of course the therapist’s own Child is also fully aware of what is going on. So it can kind of also accept some of the nurturing going around at the time and feel a bit better in itself. This is actually called a carom transaction. The person sitting on the sideline watching what is going on also takes in some of the strokes that are happening, either positive and negative.
Then we have the situation where therapists tend to end up dealing with clients or specialising in areas that were of a particular personal relevance to them. A common one is with child abuse. A person who as abused as a child them self ends up counselling mainly clients who were also abused as children. This can occur for the reasons as is shown in the diagram. They kind of live through the client.
One needs to be particularly careful when the counselling can lead to some sort of police involvement as it can with child abuse. Some counsellors do encourage such clients who were abused as children to go to the police. Are they doing that because it is the best for the client or because they are still angry at their own abuser and are just living out the ‘pay back’ through the client? A difficult question to ask and an even more difficult answer to find. If they do not have the client’s health as the penultimate priority then of course the client is just getting re-abused all over again by the counselling.
A counsellor must always be very cautious advising a client to involve of the police. As soon as you do then there is a whole bunch of others who have all sorts of legal powers that can impinge on the client in quite negative ways, and they can't be stopped once the police are involved. One needs to be very clear of the long term goals of the client so one does not just get lost in the short term pay back effect.
However lets take a different circumstance. A woman who is a survivor of breast cancer becomes a counsellor of cancer sufferers herself. Not an uncommon scenario. Is this a good or a bad thing? It can be either. It depends on how much the therapist identifies with the client.
When you identify with someone it is harder to stay objective about the other person. In your own mind you become sort of emotionally connected to the other person. You start to see yourself in the other person. That is what identifying means. So the therapist in part starts to see their own Child in the client, this is a type of projection as in the diagram.
This is not good for the counselling situation because the counsellor looses some of her objectivity with the client. She stops seeing the client in her own right and starts to see her as a mixture of the client’s Child needs and the therapist’s own Child needs as the diagram shows. So incorrect Adult decisions, by the therapist, will be made for the client because the counsellor is using the client (in part) to get her own Child needs met surreptitiously through the carom transaction.
The above of course is not common and with some good supervision it is not too hard to avoid. The good part about such situations is that the breast cancer survivor counsellor truly knows what the client is going through and understands the process of learning about accepting the diagnosis and going through treatment much more than a non cancer sufferer ever can. This of course can make them a much better counsellor with cancer suffers as long as they don’t start to identify with the clients too much.
If you have been through the same situation as another person then you can understand them much better.
This leaves us with one other question. Is it possible to ever do a job that is not in some way relevant to our own life script?. A wise man once said: “People are at, where they are at”. That is no one will do any activity or be in any relationship for any length of time unless it is relevant to their own life script. My view on this? As we spend such a significant section of our life working then I would agree with the wise man. I would also say that for some people a job is just a job and thus it does not have so much relevance to their personal issues. However such a person would have a script where they spend a large section of their life totally bored or not doing something they like. Perhaps one could say that the more you like or hate your job (the more it is not just a job), then the more likely it is relevant to your own personal script. People do not spend long periods of time doing something unless it is. They will find a way to do something else.
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 14 November 2007
The dark side - Lilith
Well there you have it, its surprising what you learn on the internet. I went to a christian school when I was young and we had a lesson each week called “Divinity”, which is now similar to what they call religious education. We were taught about the bible and stories in it. One of those stories was about Adam and Eve. My divinity teacher has lied to me for all these years that the first man and woman were Adam and Eve.
I feel betrayed as Adam was actually shagging some other woman before Eve came to be. It was a woman called Lilith. So the real first man and woman was Adam and Lilith. I think that is a pretty significant fact and myself and all my fellow students were deceived with this information for all these years.
Read this:
Lilith was the first wife of Adam. She was banished from the Garden of Eden when she refused to make herself subservient to Adam. When she was cast out, she was made into a demon figure, and Adam was given a second wife, Eve, who was fashioned from his rib to ensure her obedience to her man.
Lilith captured babies in the night and ate them, and led young girls and young husbands astray. Lilith was demonised and became a symbol of promiscuity and disobedience. (end)
Over time Lilith has come to symbolise the dark side of human psychology. We all have a Lilith in us its just what do you do with it that is important. We all have at times desires, urges and wants that are if not outright illegal are certainly immoral and shunned on by society.
Is this her Lilith
If only I could tell you some of the things people have told me about their wishes, desires and fantasies, under the shroud of client confidentiality over the years. About the Lilith in them. About their dark side. There is not much that I haven’t heard except occasionally I get a new one and log that into the filing cabinet.
So what do you do with that urge or desire?. The first thing it does is it causes a psychic imbalance inside us as this diagram shows
So as soon as you acknowledge your dark side, or as soon as it forces you to become aware of it you are forced into a situation where two ego states are working in opposite directions. This is an unstable situation that will result in some form of action occurring inside your own psychology quite quickly. One is immediately forced into a state of tension as the diagram shows. This situation cannot last for any length of time. There is a battle between the Parent and the Child. One of them has to win and usually the battle is quite short but it can be repeated many, many times.
We all have a persona or a social face which we present to the world. We wear this face because we think it makes us look like good person who does appropriate things. When we wear this face the Parent is winning the battle with the Free Child. Our dark side or the Lilith is ‘defeated’.
The problem is that it does not go away. The person may not act on the Free Child want, they may even be able to somehow not think the want in their head in the first place. But the problem is the want still remains regardless of all this.
If not dealt with correctly the dark side can snowball out of control
Then it gets down to luck.
Some people are able to shift into Conforming Child for long periods of time. In his dark side a man may have exhibitionistic desires. He feels a want to expose himself to an unsuspecting woman. His Parent will tell him that that is wrong and he must not do it. Some can conform to that Parent directive for long periods of time and thus he never acts on that want.
Others are less lucky and the Free Child want will just increase even more and the desire to ‘win’ over the Parental controls just increases. Thus he ends up with this state of psychological disequilibrium continuing. People cannot tolerate that for long periods of time and something with have to ‘give’. He can simply medicate it out of existence with alcohol or something like that, he may act on the want and go and expose himself to some one, he may discover that he can satisfy the Free Child just enough by viewing certain pornography or going to a sex worker of some kind, he may seek out some system like a religion that constantly reinforces the parent directive.
Salvador Dali's work, Chastity. Perhaps some artists express their dark side through their art.
We all have out Lilith and our dark side. What are our dark side wants and how do we cope with them?. How have we managed to satisfy both the Child and the Parent or do we just satisfy one and not the other.
A married woman may find that she is becoming increasingly attracted to a man at work. She will never sleep with him she is sure of that, she loves her husband, but she finds she is falling in love with him and seeks him out at work and they have lunch together and so forth. Her dark side is in action, Lilith is in action again. She is in essence having an affair with him just without the physical sex. In one way that is worse than if she just had physical sex with him and there was no love. What does she do?
Most will react by firstly clamping down harder with the Parent prohibitions. If lucky she will conform and also have a sense of ongoing pain or dissatisfaction that is sort of always there in the back ground of her mind. If less lucky her Free Child will simply react harder against the prohibitions. Then we have a more volatile situation like I mentioned before. She will have to take more drastic psychological action to cope with the continuing conflict between the Parent and the Free Child. She may act on the want, medicate it away, join some belief system that supports the Parent, find some intermediate release that kind of satisfies both the Parent and the Free Child. Not an uncommon counselling scenario.
Normal average everyday people all have a Lilith. Everyone of us has a dark side with wants that society sees as bad and wrong.
Graffiti
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Monday, 12 November 2007
The fourth R
This comes from a section of a workshop on kids and anger and feelings. It relates to what that wise man once said to counsellors and therapists. Therapists are forever picking people out of a fast flowing river, wouldn’t it be a good idea to go up stream and see who is throwing them in in the first place?
We have the three R’s at school but what about the fourth R - relating. Do they learn about that? No, not really, if any at all.
So this is a system that one can use to teach kids about emotions and feelings with the hope of avoiding neuroses further down the road.
Some people have a strange belief that for some reason that learning to be a mother should be just a natural thing. So when she has her baby she should automatically know what to do - the natural mother so to speak. The same is for emotions, we all have to learn them like learning to ride a bike or like learning to dance. A skill to be acquired.
Teaching kids about feelings
Preparation phase
1. Parents complete their own feeling and expressions menus. (Self awareness so the blind are not leading the blind). It is always a good idea for any teacher to understand what their thoughts and feelings are about the subject matter they are about to teach. Particularly with something like emotions. Of course all parents are going to have ‘blind spots’ in relation to their own emotions and these are usually passed onto the children quite unknowingly. The same reason why it is always good for any counsellor to have undergone their own personal counselling at some point and hopefully it is ongoing.
2. Parents isolate how they feel in response to the child’s feelings. This is the same as point one but in realtion to the child. If a child feels and shows anger how does the parent’s Child ego state react to that. If a boy starts to cry, sometimes fathers can have a problem with that and feel uncomfortable about it.
3. Parents give the child information about feelings. The different words for the different feelings (Feelings chart). Humans are a verbal species and communicate a lot by speaking to each other. So it is a good idea to have the right word connected up to the right feeling. So the word of S.A.D. is connected to the experience of sadness. Information also given about anger and violence, anger and frustration tolerance, its OK to cry, its OK to ask for help when scared, and so forth.
There is emotion here, but what is it?
4. Child’s feeling and expression menus are completed so they get an understanding of what they tend to have the various feelings about and how they often express those emotions.
Thus the perparation is done and we wait for some situation to arrive in the home where the child reacts emotively. The parents can then use that situation to further teach the child about its feelings.
Child has feeling
5. Parents accept the child’s feeling. There are no bad or wrong feelings, so the parent accepts the child’s feeling and acknowledges it. (This is not an acceptance of the way the child expresses a particular feeling but of the child’s experience of that feeling).
Shame is one of the more difficult emotions to deal with and is one of the more devestating ones if parents don't deal with it adequately in a child.
6. Relate the feeling back to the child (Feelings chart discussion with the child). The parent and child can look at the feelings chart and discuss what emotions the child just experienced. This is putting the word to the actual feeling and of course it establishes a child parent relationship where the child knows it can talk with the parents about its feelings.
7. Provide avenues for expression and do any confrontations particularly about anger or inappropriate affection. How does a child actually express what it is feeling in this home. That needs to be discovered by the child with the parents approval.
An interesting area of study. When groups of people get together and they all have the same strong emotion. What will happen?
Epilogue
8. Demonstrate the relationship is unaffected by the temporary feeling. Child learns that there are two levels of feelings. One on the surface where it has lots of different emotions that come and go and then there is a deeper down one that is far less changeable and much more stable. This is particular relates to the feeling of anger both ways. The child learns she can express anger at mummy and mummy still loves her. The child also learns that mummy can be angry at her and love her at the same time.
Graffiti.
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Sunday, 11 November 2007
My work
Holley Molley!!!
Look at this picture.
It is where I work.
You can access it at:
http://www.truelocal.com.au/business/white-tony-psychologist/north-perth
Yes it came from a satellite (I assume).
That must be one awesome camera up there in space
Big brother is out there taking your photograph!!
To the left of my building over the road is a vacant block of land.
Building commenced there about 3 months ago so this picture must be at least 3 months old.
I am glad I was not sun bathing in the back yard at the time this was taken!!!
Graffiti
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Friday, 09 November 2007
Fairness in life
There has in the past two days been much public comment about a case where a twenty year old man raped and murdered a 10 year old girl in a public toilet. It was a particularly brutal crime and thus has attracted much interest and comment. The family must be particularly upset at this time of course. However it does raise some interesting points about counselling as you hear various parties comment and see how they are reacting.
The actual crime occurred 1 to 2 years ago and has now ended in court with a life sentence with the possibility of parole in 13 years. In reality it is very unlikely that he will get parole in 13 years or ever for that matter. He can be detained in prison for ever under special legislation with crimes like this.
After the sentencing at court the press sought comment from a local priest who spoke for the family of the girl and the church community in which they belonged. He began by saying twice, “We are not a vengeful people, we are not a vengeful people”, and then spent the next 2 or 3 minutes of the interview stating vengeful things. The usual things, such as he got off lightly and it is necessary for harsher penalties and so forth.
Sometimes this happens in life?
From a counselling point of view this is not a good thing. Vengeance is a normal human emotion, it is a derivative of anger. It is natural to feel vengeful and be angry at the other party and want them to suffer. If you don’t accept this, then of course it just goes under ground and thus you can get someone saying they are not vengeful while acting in a vengeful way. There is denial going on in this priest’s mind and if the family are being counselled in the same light then that may also be counter productive for them. It just makes it harder for them to get over this and get on with their lives.
It also highlights a potential problem with support groups. Without a doubt when people feel they have social and emotional support they are much better off psychologically. That is quite clear. In a trauma such as this those close to the family are also traumatised by her death. So those who are supporting the family are also in a charged emotional state, this makes the support and counsel they give to the family of a more dubious nature. They have an alternative agenda in what counsel they give to the family and that agenda is what their own thoughts and feelings are about the situation.
If someone thinks that they (them self) must not have vengeance or anger at the murderer then they may advise the family to do the same. But this is for the emotional sake of the advisor and not for the emotional benefit of the family. Support groups can be too close sometimes and this can hurt the bereaved rather than help them. A support group can also foster what is called “Group think”. This phenomena was highlighted after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when the USA president made some very bad decisions when invading Cuba many years ago at the Bay of Pigs.
When people form a group they quite quickly start to support what each other thinks and says. In a group of 10 people, 3 may actively voice anger that they must not forget the child and must make the murderer pay for years to come. If no one else offers a differing view then the other 7 assume that all the others must agree and if they thought otherwise then they are 1 out of 10 when in fact they maybe 7 out of 10, its just that no one said anything. If that makes any sense! The majority actually disagree with what the group actually ends up doing - Group Think. All groups quickly establish a culture of what is right to think, feel and do. People instinctively copy and imitate each other particularly when they are in a heightened emotional state.
Group Think
This is one of the advantages of having an external counsellor. They are not emotionally involved with the client and not part of their support group then they do not have any personal agenda when they counsel the client. They are also not subject to the pressures of any Group Think that would be occurring in the clients life.
If I was counselling people in such a situation I would be careful to monitor the group think around the number 13. That number could very easily become entrenched in the family’s minds. It could very easily, quite unconsciously, become a milestone in their lives as it is the first time that the murderer would be up for parole (and possible release). It is highly likely that some in their support group would want to hang onto the anger at the murderer. They would want him to pay for many. many years and thus the anger remains for many, many years, indeed 13 years (for a start).
The problem with this is that if you maintain an angry frame of mind then you certainly suffer physically after time. It also slowly but surely erodes your relationships and they begin to collapse in on themselves. In essence if you maintain an anger, you loose.
Who looses in the long run?
The other problem is, if you stop feeling angry at the murderer what do you then think and feel? What does it mean to stop feeling angry. In one sense it means you are forgiving them at least to some degree. If you stop hating him then you are getting over it and forgetting about it. It is becoming less important to you. In this case the child’s murder is loosing emotional importance for you. That is what ‘getting over it’ means.
This is the counsel I would be giving to people in such a situation. Life is sometimes unfair, in fact it is sometimes very, very, very unfair. But one thing is for sure life rolls on relentlessly. Events come and events go, the longer they are gone the more we forget about them. There are some who will not want to forget about the murder for ever, or at least 13 years. These people will suffer day after day, week after week and year after year.
In addition to this sometimes people maintain the anger by rejoicing about him suffering in prison. They maintain their vengeance but this might also be misguided. Often people like the murderer do not think like ‘normal’ people do. Whilst he would not like being in prison, the “why” of him being in prison would be long gone out of his mind. He has long since stopped suffering about the murder in his mind. He is suffering his loss of freedom but not suffering about murdering the little girl. Again life is sometimes not fair.
Often such murderers are very self involved and self centred individuals who can almost totally live in the here and now. They can recite to you what has happened in the past year but it does not actually have any meaning for them. What does have meaning is what has happened in the last 24 hours and what is going to happen in the next 24 hours.
I recall a man in prison who was HIV positive. He was receiving no treatment for it at all. He had requested none. If he did request that, it would have been given to him probably for free. When I questioned him on it he was fully cognisant on what being HIV meant and what would happen to him. But it had no meaning to him. Something 5 years away was just like a life time away and not relevant to him.
Some people are like sand dunes. It is all in the Here & Now
Finally I would recommend that the family have no involvement in the parole process now, or in 13 years time. You certainly do not provide any witness impact statement about it. That will only keep you angry for the next 13 years and who looses when that occurs.
In the final analysis - you have the vengeance and the anger and then forgive and forget no matter how horrible something has happened to you. You eventually forgive the murderer unless you want to suffer and indeed maybe even suffer more than he does. Easier said than done.
Sometimes life is just not fair.
Graffiti
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Sunday, 04 November 2007
Alcohol prohibition - Part 3
With the new government policy of alcohol bans in Fitzroy Crossing and the obvious belief that it will work, it does make you wonder about such social policy advisors. Add to that all the social commentators who actively called for such bans makes you wonder about them and their intellect I must say.
It might be a good idea to research such things and get a bit educated about it before implementing it. As I have said before the prohibition of alcohol has never worked before so why all of a sudden should it work in Australia’s north west.
Maybe they just believe their own propaganda too much. “If we make it law then it must work eventually”, is perhaps what they think. Laws made about human relationships, like Violence Restraining Orders, or about primary human motivations, like prohibiting drugs are going to be notoriously ineffective. Substantial numbers of people will simply either break them or get around them some how.
These government social advisors and social commentators surely need to look at what has happened historically. Indeed if they just opened their eyes and looked at the world today in 2007 they would see that such alcohol bans do not work. That would seem like a really good idea for them to do. Because they have not done that now not only do they need to clean up the mess they created in Broome, they also have to deal with an increasing illicit drug and alcohol trade in Fitzroy Crossing. All that money in Fitzroy Crossing that was being spent on alcohol is now not, so what is it being spent on?
In fact I will even help out those social engineers and give them clear evidence of the wonders of alcohol prohibition in action. I have a good friend who lives in Tehran, Iran and he recently sent me these photographs of two social gatherings in Tehran. Just your average thing where people get together and socialise.
Since the revolution in 1978 when the Shah was ousted many things have been banned in Iran - homosexuality, adultery, women having jobs and so forth. In addition to this alcohol was banned. So here we have a contemporary experiment in alcohol prohibition for the past 30 years. We have alcohol prohibition in action before our very eyes!!!
Well as the photographs show it has been a flop! I have even circled the demon drink for those social policy advisors, just in case they still don’t get it. These people are not from some strange subculture of Irani society nor are they the down and outers who are drug addicts and alcoholics. These are well to do, university educated professionals. They are the good citizens of that society. That second photograph shows quite a palatial home which I assume is of someone whom is at the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum in Iran.
This apparently is a very common scenario in Irani society, alcohol and all. I am told that you simply ring “the guy” up, place your order and he brings it to your home. The wine is usually home made as is the vodka, but the beer as is shown in the photograph is proper commercially produced beer, obviously from outside Iran.
Wow, alcohol prohibition is really successful isn't it! And why on earth does anyone expect it to work in Fitzroy Crossing!
Graffiti
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Saturday, 03 November 2007
"Decoding body symptoms"
I placed this on a discussion forum and thought they may also go well as a blog so I put them here.
If they are a bit small to read just click on the picture and it will take you to my flickr where they are easier to read.
These are from two posters which I have on the wall in my office.
I created these from bits I read elsewhere and my own observations of people of years of
counselling. I have seen that the psychological issues described are often related to the
body parts mentioned.
Whilst I am not a body worker. I use the body a lot in my therapy. As is often stated the
Child ego state lives in the person's body. It is the somatic part of us and thus it is
constantly speaking through the client's body. So I listen to it by observing the client's
body languauge and speak with the client's Child ego state through their body.
Hence I came up with these two posters over time.
Graffiti
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Thursday, 01 November 2007
Alcohol prohibition - Part 2
It has since become apparent that our Police Commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, has not been fully candid with us. He made out that the shift of people out of Fitzroy Crossing to other towns like Broome had been very minimal. If fact it has been quite noticeable and it is a trend that is expected to increase.
A local newspaper has reported
“Tough liquor restrictions in a nearby town have shifted its alcohol problem to the West Australian tourist centre of Broome, where drunks are having sex and defecating in the streets, authorities say.
Shire of Broome chief executive Ian Bodill says there has been a noticeable increase in visitors disturbing the centre of the tourist town since an alcohol ban was implemented earlier this month in Fitzroy Crossing, 400km away.
"There has been a lot of public drunkenness and there has been sexual activity in the middle of town reported to us," Mr Bodill told ABC Radio in Perth.
"There's been defecating in front of the shops, every morning some business are reporting having to hose down last night's mess, picking up the rubbish. It's just unacceptable.”
The local police have also reported a significant increase in car stealing, burglaries, domestic violence and anti social behaviour in Broome since the alcohol ban started at Fitzroy Crossing.
This is a good example of social engineering using a very simplistic approach like alcohol prohibition. It will be interesting to see what it evolves into. It will be interesting to see what the government do as now there are whole new set of pressures on them. Broome is a high profile tourist resort, where the rich play and build their holiday homes. From a tourism point of view it is important to the state of Western Australia. There are many businesses and hotels there and many people have jobs there as a consequence of the tourism.
At this time many of the very tragic social problems of Fitzroy Crossing are currently marching in the front door of the town of Broome. That is certainly not good for tourism and could end up costing a lot of jobs and ruin its reputation as this idyllic place to holiday. The longer the government keeps the Fitzroy Crossing alcohol ban in place the longer these new inhabitants of Broome are going to get settled there. So even if they do eventually lift the Fitzroy Crossing ban on alcohol the new residents of Broome may not move back! The longer they are there the more likely other members of their families will follow them to Broome as well. The government can’t make them move back so the longer the alcohol ban is in polace the worse it is for Broome and its tourism industry. From a pure voter point of view it is better for the government to have a functional Broome than a functional Fitzroy Crossing. Even as terrible as that sounds.
Graffiti
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