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Sunday, 30 December 2007
The apology transaction
There is a big hullaballoo in Australia at the moment. A man called David Hicks has just been released from prison and there is an outcry for him to apologise for being involved with terrorist groups. A number of years ago he was caught fighting with al-Qaida in Afghanistan against us (the good guys). He did a fairly long stretch in Guantanamo Bay prison and then a year back here in an Australian prison. His first comment to the media did not contain an apology and there are some who are saying that this is very bad of him.
So should David Hicks apologise?
Lets first sort the wheat from the chaff. The politicians calling for an apology of course also get the gain of looking good to the voters. The media calling for his apology also get the gain of getting a good story and thus making themselves more money. Indeed behind the scenes they would be hoping like heck that he does not apologise. There is much more profit made by a headlines which says David Hicks refuses to apologise than one saying David Hicks apologises.
Should the Ninjas apologise?
However, I am an Australian and I don’t get money or political points if David Hicks apologises or not. So do I think he should apologise? To me it is a non-question. I wouldn’t have even thought of asking it had I not heard someone mention it on the radio yesterday. To me if he wants to apologise then good on him and if he doesn’t then such is life. It really does not mean a lot to me one way or the other.
Him apologising for being involved with a terrorist group?. Well it really is all just a matter of perception isn’t it?. To the bad guys in Afghanistan I am the terrorist. I am sure there is someone over in Afghanistan just like me who sees him self as one of the good guys and me as one of the bad guys, and he could produce a list of all the bad things that me and my guys have done to him and his guys.
In war sooner or later everyone ends up being the bad guys
Did you know that because I think like this I have a high level of moral development. Holley molley, maybe I don’t have so many narcissistic personality traits as I claim to!!! Me with a good moral development!!!! If I think this way I am at the level of “Principled Conscience”. Below are Kohlberg’s six levels of moral development
Level 1 (Pre-Conventional)
1. Obedience and punishment orientation
(How can I avoid punishment?)
2. Self-interest orientation
(What's in it for me?)
Level 2 (Conventional)
3. Interpersonal accord and conformity
(The good boy/good girl attitude)
4. Authority and social-order maintaining orientation
(Law and order morality)
Level 3 (Post-Conventional)
5. Social contract orientation
6. Universal ethical principles
(Principled conscience)
Those pollies calling for D. Hicks’ blood for not apologising are at the Pre-conventional level - punishment orientation. They have retarded moral development. They have the moral development of a 4 year old child. Oh well, such is life.
However, when the Bali Bomb killed those young Australians I wanted blood from the bad guys. I thought Abu Bakar Bashir was someone who engaged in far to much onanism and hoped he died a slow and painful death. So I had retarded moral development then, but that was 5 or 6 years ago now and life goes on and it seems best to me to move on in my own head so I suppose that allows me to have a morality of principled conscience now.
Abu Bakar Bashir's christmas present
If Mr Hicks did apologise what does that actually mean?
So what is the apology transaction?. He could just apologise and not mean it, but if he did mean it what does that mean in psychological terms. Perhaps the apology transaction could be as such
Obviously there has to be the Adult to Adult transaction of the apology and then for the transaction to be complete the other party must accept the apology. In psychological terms there would be more to it than just words. The person apologising must also feel something about what he is saying. The classic body language of the apologiser is the hanging of his head which would seem to reflect some sense of shame in self and bad feelings about what they have done.
The person being apologised to would then have some feeling reaction to that and I suppose it would be a sense of feeling good and of course that other thing called revenge. The person feels avenged. So in this way the apology transaction is a bit of a sicko transaction. If David Hicks apologises to me then I feel good because I can see he feels bad. I don’t particularly want to do that. I don’t want to feel good in myself because someone else is feeling ashamed and bad. Indeed one could define that as a type of neuroses. So in this way the apology transaction is reflective of a neurotic condition.
I have mentioned this before in other posts on revenge or which those with rose coloured glasses like to call justice. You are actually left worse off. If someone apologises to me and I see their shame then I have to deal with that in my self. If they did not apologise in the first place then I would not have to deal with it.
Such is life
Some will say that if you get the apology then you are more able to move on. I would agree that there is some truth to this. Seeing a person who assaulted you get imprisoned can be used by you to psychologically move on. However that is by no means guaranteed at all and it takes some hard psychological work to achieve the ‘move on’ if you get the revenge or not. In my view the situation just gets more psychologically complicated so most would be left worse off psychologically than if they had not got avenged in the first place.
That may not seem just and right, but hey, no one ever said life was fair.
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 26 December 2007
The contradiction of the treatment contract
Over a number of posts now I have written about some inherent flaws or contradictions in counseling. I once again find myself on the same theme and probably would have not know that if I had not been blogging. Its only because I can see what I have written over the past 6 months that I can see a pattern evolving here. I find myself in one of those situations where I know I am going somewhere but at the moment don’t know where that happens to be. Its like I am seeing small bits of a larger picture, but am yet to see the larger picture. However these smaller pictures do seem contrary to mainstream thinking on counseling that it certainly merits further consideration.
For example I have discussed the fact that as soon as one opens for business as a counselor automatically the client is hindered in making therapeutic gain or moving towards psychological health. There is a contradiction. As soon as I become a counselor I am saying to the client that there is hope for relief from your distress. I am selling the client hope which undoubtably is a most positive thing and at the very same time I am saying to the client, I agree that there is something wrong with you. Indeed there is something wrong with you to such an extent that it is necessary to go outside of yourself and get help from another person. By the very act of me being a counselor I am saying that. The only way I cannot say it is by not being a counselor in the first place. So in this way the clients pathology is supported even before they have entered the therapy room for the first time.
I have discussed the contradiction of pain in counseling. It seems safe to say that all therapies to some degree subject the client to pain. Sometimes that is physical pain but most often it is emotional pain. However as each and everyone of us knows emotional pain can really hurt. Therapeutic techniques are sometimes painful weather that be from getting on and then the pain of getting off methadone to remembering painful things from one’s past. Again we have a contradiction. The therapeutic technique has the goal of assisting the person out of their emotional problems and at the very same time it is physically or emotionally hurting the person. So again the client’s pathology is promoted by the counseling. If a parent hits a child because it ran across the road without looking what does that hit say to the child. First and foremost it erodes the self esteem.
I have discussed at some length the contradiction of the relational and the client being viewed as ill. Another contradiction. As soon as a client enters the counseling room it is highly likely that they view them self as being ‘ill’. That happens even before they get there for the first time and the counselor can do nothing to halt it. It is also likely if not very likely that the counselor will view the client as ‘ill’ to some extent as well. They have been trained to think like that for years, even before they qualified as a counselor. As we know as soon as the client and therapist define the client as ill then the relational is curtailed if not severely eroded. And it is the relational or the therapeutic relationship between the client and therapist that has repeatedly shown since Freud first started in the 1800s, to be most powerful force in assisting the client to change. So the most curative factor in psychotherapy is curtailed and eroded even before the client has entered the first session. A contradiction indeed.
Hence we arrive at the case against contracting. As soon as a counselor suggests or accepts a contract from the client they have made it more difficult for the client to achieve their goals. A contract is the stated goal of the counseling. Every counselor in some way gets the client to identify what is their problem and how they would like to be different. What they want to stop doing and what they want to start doing instead. In some form every counselor gets the client to do this. For example a client may state that they want to stop putting self down and start being assertive. Or the client may say that they want to stop hiding their feelings from mother to protect her and start showing their anger and displeasure to her.
Powerful imagery
The contradiction of contracting with a client? On the one hand one gains a sense of direction in the counseling and has a focus of where to head. It also creates a battlefield or a war zone in the client’s mind. The two combatants are clearly identified and this is deleterious to the client. As a counselor one thing you do not want to happen is for a war zone mentality to arise in the counseling sessions. As an example take the client who presents in counseling and states they have panic attacks. The two combatants are first the state of panic and second the state of relaxation or calmness.
Why is a war zone mentality counter productive in counseling? The war becomes an entity in itself. In people’s minds the winning of the war becomes more important than what the war was about in the first place. So in the client and counselor’s mind the therapeutic goal becomes that the state of calmness ’triumphing’ over the state of panic . The triumph tends to become the goal more than the reduction of the panic and there are some main stream approaches to panic attacks that actively promote such a thing. In fact I would suggest that the vast majority of treatments for panic attacks get lost in the war zone mentality to varying degrees. Indeed a very common approach in treating phobias is systematic desensitization. Such a therapeutic approach very much proposes a war like mentality in the clients mind. It clearly and openly establishes the two combatants - a state of relaxation and a state of phobic anxiety - and then actively sets about providing the battleground between them. That is the whole nature of the therapeutic approach in this instance and there is no idea at all of loving the phobia to thus reduce the war like or adverserial nature of the systematic desensitzation treatment approach.
The other problem with wars is that they take up so much time and energy. If there is a conflict it quickly becomes the central focus of attention and get lots of strokes. The more attention and strokes the combatants get for fighting the more likely the fighting will continue. I mentioned this in a recent post on eating disorders. A crucial component in working with a client with an eating disorder is to focus on other things than food. The food and eating is the battlefield, so the counselor needs to avoid it for at least 50 percent of the contact with the client so the counseling does not get lost in the war.
Unhappy girl
Should she love the enemies in her mind?
The old christians had a very interesting saying, which was, “Love thy enemy”. The interesting part about this is that if you love your enemy then you don’t have an enemy in the first place. If you love the enemy you can’t have a war in the first place at least in one’s own psyche. So the goal in counseling is to love you panic attack. If the client can learn how to love her panic then the war zone will not develop. How the counselor assists the client to achieve that is the hard part that can take some fancy foot work to do. It is not just a matter of getting the client to say that they love their panic, it is assisting the client to establish an attitude of the same kind and establishing an attitude of love thy enemy in the sub-structure of the client therapist relationship. However if achieved then the war zone mentality in the counseling can be avoided and that is a great advantage to the client.
Unfortunately as soon as a counselor asks a client for a treatment contract he is encouraging a war zone mentality in the clients mind and the counseling in general. If one does not get a contract in the first place then that cannot happen.
So what is the bigger picture?
I am still not sure.
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 19 December 2007
Addiction to strokes
In my writing on feelings I talk about the feeling graph. The feeling graph simply explains how the process of feelings occur. Initially some event occurs to which the person has a feeling reaction. With feelings we experience an increase in body tension and our bodies get stimulated with various hormones, many other bodily changes and so forth. In transactional analysis terms we get strokes. Indeed one could say that every time you have a feeling you experience a stroke as it is know. If humans don’t get such psychological strokes then they rapidly deteriorate mentally. They are said to be stroke deprived and can commonly suffer things like depression and so forth.
However it also works the other way as well.
Some people come from backgrounds that are highly emotionally charged over an extended period of time. Such children are raised in homes where there was a high degree of emotional ‘action’ going on. The family members related in such a way that there were regular strong emotions like anger, anxiety, sadness, shame, despair and so forth.
Families teach each of us what level of strokes to live with
Of course this sets up the pattern in life for the child and they in one sense become addicted to this degree of emotion. One could say that this is a good thing because if the person is having a high degree of feelings then they are also getting a high degree of strokes. It is the stroke deprived person that is not in a good psychological condition, so a highly stroked person should be in very good psychological condition. Sometimes this is so and sometimes it is not.
When I see a client who has come from this type of background I say that they live life in the emotional fast lane. The problem is, like everyone else they will continually seek to maintain the same level of strokes that they received throughout childhood. If a person was stroked deprived in childhood then they will tend to create an adult life that is also stroke deprived. If they were highly charged with feelings and strokes in childhood then they will tend to create adult lives that are the same.
A good example of this is the hysteric personality or that individual who is very emotional labile. Their life is full of lots of strong feelings that often come and go quite quickly. This persons life is full of strokes. Would one want to live like that? That is a personal choice to be made. They are however sometimes referred to as ‘small dose’ people because others experience the degree of strokes and the feelings they have as tiring and at times over whelming.
So the high levels of strokes in the person’s life is not a problem in itself. It can become a problem in how they seek to maintain that high level of strokes in adulthood. If a person became a sky diver or sought to climb the highest mountain on earth or joined the special armed forces as a way of maintaining the high stroke level then we as a society see nothing wrong with that at all. In fact we see it as admirable. There are other ways to maintain the high stroke level that are not as productive.
One time when this high stroke and feeling level is a problem is when counseling some people who have a drug problem. Being involved in the drug scene or criminal world in general is exciting and dangerous. Thus it involves a lot of feelings and strokes for those involved. In counseling the ‘addict’ type of drug user this can be a very real problem. For them to stop using drugs they have to move out of that subculture. As soon as they do that then the stroke level rapidly diminishes and as is so often reported by them life rapidly becomes very boring. Of course it is boring to them as the stroke level has decreased by a factor of 10. Working 9 to 5 as a clerk in a shop is not as exciting as pulling off a good sized drug deal!!
From what have seen this is very hard to deal with. Some counselors will suggest that they do other exciting things like extreme sports and so forth. This is a good option but most often does not fill the gap. It is very difficult to fill that stroke and feelings gap that they have lived with their entire lives. In some instances I don’t think it can be filled.
So if you are dealing with an addict type of drug user who is say 25 years old who’s life is full of excitement, pain and strokes then realistically there may not be a cure as life outside the drug scene is just too damn boring. The counseling goal then becomes one of management. The goal is to assist them to stay alive, hopefully out of prison and reasonably healthy for the next 10 years or so. When such an addict type user hits about 35 they start to grow out of the drug user lifestyle for the same reason that got them in there in the first place. The high energy and excitement just becomes too much. They can’t live with that level of energy in their lives forever and I suppose in one sense they burn out. So they slowly drift out of it and find some other way of living that is less dramatic and highly stroke driven.
Graffiti
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Monday, 17 December 2007
Completing the gestalt and blame
Completing the gestalt. When you see this picture what do you want to do? Many people report a sense of wanting to go and get a pen and draw the lines so the square is completed. This a normal human process and we are constantly filling in the gaps even when we are not aware of it. Indeed this often happens on the blogosphere when we meet with other bloggers. We can talk with them for long periods and then when we finally see their photograph for the first time we are surprised. Why would that be? Because we have filled in the gaps. We talk with the person via blogging and automatically assume that they must there fore look this way. We naturally and automatically do this. We completed the gestalt or completed the square.
Person 1: To blame is to name someone or some thing and thus to avoid personal responsibility for
some event
Graffiti: it seems safe to agree with you on such a statement, such as the child who is asked for his homework at school and states that the dog ate it.
There maybe other reasons as well. When a particular type of transaction or psychological process is very wide spread, it seems to say to me that this forms part of the natural human psyche or is a natural Free Child activity for us. I think I can be safe in saying that we have all blamed others at various times in our lives.
Perhaps blame also allows us to complete the gestalt or gain a sense of psychological closure on a particular event in our life. If someone steals a large sum of money from our local community group one thing that most of us will think is, I wonder who did it? That is who is responsible for this and who is to blame for it? If the scoundrel is never caught then we are sort of left with no closure on the matter or the gestalt is not completed in our own mind as they say. The more emotional meaning the event has for us the more important it is to gain a sense of closure or complete the gestalt.
An extreme example of this is when a child leaves home to go to school one day and is just never seen again and it is never found out what happened to the child. In such a situation the parents are left with a very big sense of non-closure that can have significant deleterious effects on them psychologically in the long term. The gestalt is never completed for them.
So for each of us to be able to attribute blame or responsibility to an event that impacts on us is a health promoting exercise. So blaming could be seen as a constructive thing to do in this way. This of course is where the law comes in as a formalized way of attributing blame of a particular event to a particular person. Indeed the courts put a great deal of effort into discerning how much blame is relevant and then even quantifies it in the sense of providing a fine or imprisonment. The more the blame the higher the fine for a particular crime. Those being blamed for the indiscretion immediately set about relieving them selves of blame and say such things as I was drunk at the time of the act and thus I am less to blame for it, or I had a mental illness at the time and so forth.
It wasn't my fault she distracted me.
Indeed this leads on to a subsequent psychological exercise and that is of revenge. By being able to blame a person for a particular event is not enough on its own to obtain a sense of closure or to complete the gestalt. To do that we need to obtain some sort of revenge. Once that is done then there can be a sense of closure if the person is actually wanting a sense of closure. There are some who want the revenge but not the closure, and thus they continually seek revenge over and over.
Again the want for revenge is a very wide spread desire in the human species. We all have had it and thus one could see it as a Free Child process in this way. It also seems that we try to hide from this aspect of ourselves because we don’t think it is a good thing to have. Indeed many religions see vengence as a sinful act.
When one studies a topic like crime and punishment we often see stated as the purpose of prisons is for things like punishment in terms of consequences for ones actions, rehabilitation, protection of the public and so forth. It is rarely stated that one of the reasons for having a prison is so the public can gain a sense of revenge which then permits more of a possibility of a sense of closure for them. Well that is the theory any way but in many instances, getting revenge via a prison term for the offender actually makes it more difficult for the revenge seeker to get closure or complete the gestalt.
Graffiti
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Friday, 07 December 2007
SFBT
In counselling how you get to where you are going, is just as important as where you are going.
How do you get there? What are these three boys learning about how you get to where you are going?
There was an article in the most recent addition of the “Australian Psychologist” which is one journal of the Australian Psychological Society. It discussed the current treatments for anorexia nervosa. It was refreshing to read the discourse as it was not in the usual vein of that journal.
Did you know that for people who meet the formal definition of anorexia nervosa the duration of the disorder usually lasts between 1 and 8 years with the average being 5 years. After 8 years it is considered to be chronic.
Half of the patients treated by usual psychiatric treatments do not meet the diagnostic criteria for anorexia at a long term follow up. So it could be said that the long term outcome of psychiatric treatments have at least a 50% success rate. (Don’t we love statistics). However it is also openly acknowledged that many of these cured anorexics continue to experience significant psychological disturbances, eating disturbances, or both.
In psychology these days the trendy type of counselling is SFT (Solution Focused Therapy) or SFBT (Solution Focused Brief Therapy). Most solution focused approaches are brief because they are solution focused, so that is why there are two names for these approaches to counselling.
It is widely accepted in psychological and psychiatric circles that with anorexia (and many other conditions) the overall focus is on symptom resolution. The treatment specifically focusses on eating behaviour, attitudes to weight and body shape and the expectations of weight gain. So the therapy specifically focuses on the observable symptoms. So this approach is very solution focused in this way.
This type of approach is widely used in many settings in Australia. When the tax payer or some organisation is funding the therapy they often have a limit on the number of sessions each person can have, such as 6 sessions. So SFBT is very often used in such situations which seems fair enough as someone else is paying for it. One simply can’t do longer term treatment so focus on the clear symptoms is often the way to go.
However as already noted this does have problems. Even if one focuses on the symptoms and achieves a solution in 6 sessions, is that person cured or better off. As I said before someone may not be diagnosed as anorexic but still have a significant eating disturbance and at times feel very bad.
As I said before, in counselling how you get to where you are going, is just as important as where you are going. With eating disorders I particularly disagree with a pure symptom focused approach. When I counsel such a person I will spend no more than 30 minutes of a 60 minute session discussing food, weight gain, eating and so forth. You certainly do address such matters but you need to keep them in context of the therapeutic relationship (ie not purely symptom focused counselling).
If I am counselling a 19 year old bulimic and all we discuss is her eating and so forth what am I saying to her in terms of our therapeutic relationship or the relational. Our relationship is completely dominated by her eating disorder, focus on weight gain and so forth. This is something that one does not want.
The quality of the therapeutic relationship supports the eating disorder in the sense that our relationship is all about her eating problems. So what one does in counselling is bring in other aspects of her life like her relationships with her friends, what music she likes, why and how she feels about being a gothic and what is she saying by that, and so on. The food and eating issues are addressed but they are almost treated as being of secondary importance. It does not get all the attention and strokes while other problematic and successful areas of her life do.
I would widen this to almost any psychological problem presented by a client. How the problem fits into the relationship between the client and therapist is just as important as what treatment is applied to the symptoms of the problem.
It appears this agrees with what the journal article was saying. The need for a wider therapeutic approach if one sees that symptom cure alone does not mean the client is really any better off in the long run.
Graffiti
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Monday, 03 December 2007
The blame transaction
Blaming
Critical Parent and blaming
When the Critical Parent ego state displays anger it is not nice to be on the receiving end of it. It will tend to be blaming, attacking, prejudicial, discounting, intimidating and so forth. The person who is expressing anger in this way has two main goals. The first is to vent their own anger so as to get the cathartic release and the second is to establish a relationship with the other person where they are the top dog and in charge.
Critical Parent anger seeks to put the other down usually so the the person expressing the anger can feel one up, superior or better about themselves. This person can often has the belief, “If the other person is bad or inferior then I am OK and superior”. Often Critical Parent anger is not so much about attacking the other party but more about making the Critical Parent person feel better about them self. They seek to angrily criticise the other because they have their own insecurities about their worth and value.
Another problem with Critical Parent anger is that it can lead to mob type behaviour. This type of anger is most often based on some mistaken belief that is seen to justify the anger in the first place. So if you get a group of people who all have the same belief such as my religion is right and your religion is wrong, then that belief justifies to those people that it is OK to express anger at the other side. If they then act on those angry feelings you can get mob type behaviour.
Mob behaviour. Burning Beatles records
in Southern USA, 1969
All in all there are very few, if any, positives to the Critical Parent expressing anger. However it is often effective. If a boss angrily attacks a secretary for her poor performance on the job then it is very likely that she will improve her performance rapidly. So this it would seem is an effective way of getting workers to improve their performance and work better.
The problem with it is the side effects that also come from such anger. Whilst the secretary rapidly improves her performance it is only short term, or it will cause other problems to arise. The best employee is the one who feels good about self, values self and feels valued by the organisation. A Critical Parent management style directly erodes all that and thus you get a high staff turn over and employees who longer term have little interest or investment in working to promote the organisational goals.
The blame transaction
Why would someone blame another person for their current misfortunes? Such as a client blaming their parents for their own current game playing?
So they can have a sense of, If its not my fault so then I must be OK? The person has self doubts and self dislike but the criticism is projected out onto the other person. If they are bad then that means I must be good is the thinking.
However the blamer’s own Child ego state has a problem. When the blamer attacks and blames some one else their own Child ego state obviously observes that blaming. This is anxiety producing because it knows that the blaming can very easily switch from being outward directed to being inward directed.
Revenge?. When I was a child you hurt me so I can now get pay back by making you out to be bad? So I feel better when I have gotten my revenge.
To complete the gestalt?
If I blame you then I don't have to forgive you and move on with my life? To maintain a state of blaming then of course the individual will not move on psychologically. This is indeed a trap in counselling as people can easily slip into blaming the parents for their current difficulties. If that happens then psychological growth is much more difficult. The blamer is stuck in this sense and they are very much adopting a victim position.
Blame for specific practical gain. “The dog ate my homework” approach as is found in politics. Five year olds in particular do this. (Mr Nobody did it). This could be a blaming from the Adult ego state. In western society one can make big bucks by blaming. If you can blame someone else for your misfortunes then financial compensation can be considerable indeed. The soldier who goes off to war and comes back with PTSD can be compensated by the government for that, if he can get it proved in a court. So blame is big business.
Blaming from Child ego state? Is this possible.
The victim position
It allows a person to assume the victim position and all the rackets that go along with that? To view self as a victim of child abuse is a doubled edge sword. It is good in the sense that it says to the individual you were not responsible for the abuse. As we know often the person who was abused in some ways feels they are responsible for the abuse. If one views self as a victim then that says, “No I was not responsible for the abuse”. The problem with viewing self as a victim is it is a very disempowered position. The victim position often goes along with words like helpless and hopeless which hardly leaves one with a sense of strength or empowerment.
The blamer as a client
If a blaming type of person presents for counselling as a client then they often will present a change others contract. They think - “My problem is the fault of some other person doing something to me. So for me to solve my problem then that other person must change”. Of course the goal in therapy is to get the blamer to accept their contribution to their problem. To own responsibility for their thoughts, feelings and actions. The blamer will see self as I+U- (I’m OK, You’re not OK). So if the therapist can get them to accept that they are really I-U-- (I’m not OK, But you’re worse) then a major advancement in their therapy has been achieved.
Graffiti
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