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Wednesday, 30 January 2008
Me as a teenager
That's me in the yellow t-shirt.
Don't laugh at the pants they were all the fashion in those days.
I used to sail yachts competitively with the guy I am with.
That is me on the left with some chicks and buddies.
I had very long hair which you can only sort of see.
The guy behind me is a bad boy.
This is me on the left at my brother's wedding.
I like the look on my face on this one.
I am under pressure because I had serious responsibilities to perform at this formal occasion.
But another part of me likes the stress and pressure of it all.
Below is me aged 16 and I have a cigarette in my hand.
I was super fit in those days from all the sport and surfing I did.
I find this photograph a bit perturbing. The look on my face and my whole posture I suppose.
In some ways I was a very mixed up person then and I can see it in the look I have.
Generally life was good but at times it wasn't at all
Graffiti
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Tuesday, 29 January 2008
Assessing winner, loser and non-winner
Sometimes when I am counselling and with a new client, I obviously sit and listen to them talk about their life. I then in my own head will ask a question.
“If this person was 6, 7 or 8 years old what would they be doing”?. How would they be and what would they be doing.
If they were at school in the playground would they be organising everyone, trying to be the best, standing quietly on the sidelines, mucking around, would they be with the in crowd or the ‘dorks’, would they be getting wedgies or giving wedgies, would they sit at the front of the class or the back of the class and so forth.
What would they be like if they were at home. I don’t mean in their original home. If they lived in sort of an average home with a mother and a father and some siblings how would they fit into that system. Would they be competing with their siblings, or co-operating, or rescuing a younger brother, would they be trying to get mothers and father attention or trying to get mother and father to argue about him and so forth.
If I can find an answer to these questions then I know a lot about how this person operates in adult life with out all the ‘noise’ that is usually used to hide it. I have managed to be able to see this adult with their persona stripped away and thus I have a much better understanding of what are their covert goals in life that they are probably even unaware of. I will much better be able to assess if they are a winner, loser or non-winner.
So I might try and run this one up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes it.
When you were at school were you one of the IN crowd?.
Graffiti
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Gilly. A case study of winning and non-winning
In Australia a man called Adam Gilchrist (or Gilly for short), a member of the Australian cricket team has just retired. As a cricketer he is of exceptional ability maybe only second to Don Bradman. Apparently he is also a very nice person who everybody likes and so there has been many positive tributes and statements about him by many in the cricket community.
Shane Warne would send something like this via SMS
He has never got into any off field indiscretions like Mr SMS, Shane Warne or any other kind of trouble in his personal life. He is a good married man with a wife and three kids. Indeed in recent times he has publicly stated that he is a “Walker”. This means that if he thinks has gotten out even if the umpire is unsure and thus wont give him out then he will walk, or give himself out. Most cricketers don’t walk. So Gilly is seen as very sportsman like and really plays the game in the spirit it is meant to be played, the gentleman's game.
So he is receiving all sorts of accolades like:
“he is an ornament to the game”,
“he is a cricket icon”
“he is a great role model for young kids”
“he proves you can be a good person and be a great sportsman”
All these sorts of comments are flowing like the champagne at the moment.
So many would see him as a winner I think it is safe to say.
A winner in sport but the love life is another matter?
As it is instructive to do with people sometimes, what would Gilly have been like as a 6 year old boy?
He would be a good boy. He would have his chores done, homework done, bedroom cleaned better than anyone else. He would be smiling and happy and be outside running around and playing. He would be a very low maintenance child for any parent. He would do things in the right place, at the right time and in the right way better than anyone else.
This is why he is a good study on the idea of being a winner or a non-winner. Most 6 year olds who were like that would be seen as having a high level of Conforming Child. For some reason he decided that the way to live life is to work out what parents and authority figures want you to do and then do it with a smile on your face. This will get many positive strokes and people will like you and tell you how good you are. It certainly is a safe way to live life in that people will not confront you and you will not tend to put yourself in high risk situations.
The down side to this the young child tends to not do what it wants in life. It is so busy working out what others want it to do that it never gets to what it actually wants to do. Eventually the child starts to loose touch with its own needs and wants. Its own Free Child gets lost and is forgotten.
Another way to assess a winner is by what they would write on your tombstone. Will Gilly's be, "He was a winner in life" OR "He was an ornament".
These people sometimes seek my counsel in their 40s and I ask them what they want out of life and where are they heading in life and they can’t answer the question. They simply don't know. They will usually give you some answer about what others want them to do. So in this way they are said to live a half life. High CC and low FC. Of course the goal of counselling is for them to again begin to listen to and understand what their own FC wants are. What they actually want out of life.
If you do that then sooner or later what you want and how the world or authority wants you to be, will collide. It is at that point that the child will be a bad boy. For instance the child steals a dollar out of mother’s purse because it wants to buy some lollies. The youngster’s FC and the world collide.
I am a winner!!!
Now I do not want to do Gilly a disservice as I have never met him so I have no idea what he thinks and feels under the surface. It is possible that he was just born with an unusual temperament in this way and that he is meeting a good deal of his FC wants. However he does provide some good insight into how I see winning and non-winning. He certainly is a winner in terms of fame and fortune. But is he a winner in terms of living life to the full, that is a very different matter. If he is high CC then he is a non-winner, then if high FC then he could be a winner.
Graffiti
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Friday, 25 January 2008
Winners and non-winners are symbiotic?
In my previous post about how winners need non-winners in order to exist I used this picture and said “Only winners and losers do this. Non-winners never live life to the full”
This of course is a matter of perception and needs some qualification. Non-winners are far less likely to take risks, they live a life with much less strokes and energy. For this mountain goat it would be an intense experience that winners and losers need in life and that the non-winner has much less.
The non-winner may have such experiences in life but they tire of them much more quickly. They can not live with that level of strokes for extended periods of time. The winners and the losers can live with them and if the intense strokes are not there they will seek them out or even create them. They are driven to have that high level of stimulation in the very fabric of how they live their lives.
Non-winners need to do the everyday jobs so others can take the risks.
One could call it an addiction or really it is just a aspect of the life script that is very hard to change. In childhood is where the person learns what is the stroke level for them. I was talking with a client the other day and she reported that in her house as a child there was just constant tension all the time. If her mother and sister were not openly fighting everyone was just waiting for the next fight to occur. Then there was father who would go to the pub after work. There was the tension of waiting for him to arrive home and then when he did there was the tension of him becoming involved in the fights as well. No physical violence but heated angry arguments. This was her family life from as early as she can remember until the day she left the home.
In adulthood she is a hysteric personality and lives a life very full of excitement, trauma, drama and high emotions. If there is a quiet patch then she will create some drama or angst. She cannot live without it just like the drug addict cannot live with out the drug
Winner & loser = high energy and strokes
Non-winner = moderate to low energy strokes
Changing from one to the other both ways is very difficult. The non-winner who complains that his life seems to have little point can find it very difficult to move to the higher level of energy. The winner and loser who complain that at times they just wished they could lead a simple life find it very difficult to shift to a lower level lifestyle for any length of time. Unfortunately many drug counsellors try to do precisely that. Get the high energy drug user to move to a non-winner life style. Rarely is it successful.
For a good example of the high energy life style of the loser one needs to look no further than the movie, Trainspotting. A very good picture of such a life style and in particular there is one song in it called “Choose Life”. This identifies the losers view of the non-winner life style. Just how incompatible they are. Don’t just listen to the words and watch the video also listen to the tempo and ambience of the whole thing. I think it captures it quite well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAHI3bH0rbc
So whilst one can say winners almost live off the back and hard work of the non-winner, the non-winner does not want the risk taking life style in the first place. So they are not being used in this way one could say. They are really more symbiotic with one another. Both just do their thing and benefit from each others activities.
As I said before there is a very fine line between the loser and the winner. Examples could be Ben Cousins, Phil Spector, Jmi Hendrix, O.J. Simpson and Sir Edmund Hillary.
In the psychological sense there is very little difference between Sir Edmund Hillary the pillar of society and the low life druggies in trainspotting. Sir Edmund put himself into a position where he could have very easily died. This was completely voluntary. If he had died he would have been seen as somewhat of a foolish man who obviously did not plan properly and would have been rapidly forgotten. There are plenty of unlucky Sir Edmunds’ dead on the slopes of Mount Everest. A fine line indeed.
One winner and one loser?
Whenever I meet with a successful client be that in business or in sport or whatever I always sort of surreptitiously hunt around for their dark side. That time when the winner side of them crossed the line into loser territory. Often it is there. How many politicians seem to do such unnecessarily dumb things at times. Things that can completely ruin their careers, that they had no reason to do and gain very little from. Welcome to the winner crossing the line over into the loser. A fine line indeed.
Then of course there is the whole area of the male who lives on the winner/loser line and the female attraction to that. Why would that be? Stay tuned - same channel, same time!
Graffiti
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Thursday, 24 January 2008
Winners need non-winners in order to exist.
In the previous post I talked about non-winners, losers and winners. At least in western societies you need most people to be non-winners or “worker bees” for that society to survive. What this means is that most average citizens in such a society have too little Free Child (FC) and too much Conforming Child (CC). This of course raises an interesting question in itself.
The goal of psychotherapy is to help change non-winners and losers into winners. For people to break the psychological chains that keep them in the same old self defeating patterns and to come out and take life by the jugular and achieve want their FC truly wants.
If counselling was actually successful in doing this with a large number of people then there would eventually be too few non-winners for the society to survive. This means that psychotherapy can survive only if it is not too successful. With too many winners there would not be enough people to do the mundane and unpleasant jobs, activities and so forth which a society has to have done day after day. This is mostly done by the non-winners.
Only winners and losers do this. Non-winners never live life to the full.
So psychotherapy really is only for a small group in a society even if everybody had access to it. However our psychological theories about personality, child development, what is psychologically healthy, what is emotional pain, what is neurosis and so forth are designed for all people on the planet.
Perhaps people who write about such things need to be a bit more honest and state this explicitly. That most people in a society have to never fully achieve their potential, to never truly self actualise, to never live a full emotional life. Then there is a smaller group who all the psychological theories apply for and provide the definitions of what is full potential and psychological health.
They also explain how to do counselling and how to get from neurosis to psychological health. All these theories can only work on this smaller group if the majority in the society (the non-winners) don’t ever achieve what the theories call psychological health. The larger group have to remain neurotic, at least in part, for the smaller group to be able to rid themselves of their neurosis. So lets be honest about it and say this openly.
Doesn’t sound very fair does it?
But as we know who ever said life was fair.
Plenty of non-winners feel this from time to time, but they never really do anything about it. They just endure it and plod on.
I sometimes see non-winners in my counseling room. They come by in their 30s or 40s usually. They say things like,
"Is this all there is?",
"What is the point of it all?"
Some call this a mid-life crisis and when the crisis is over they are basically the same as before the crisis. They then spend the rest of their days like that.
Then again, maybe there is another explanation. That groups of people (societies) unconsciously know this, the collective unconscious, and thus structure themselves so the few can benefit from counselling but the majority never do.
Graffiti
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Friday, 18 January 2008
Winners and losers
Raisingrainbow asks of our friend Corey:
So are you saying that you think this kid's behaviour was appropriate?
A good question and one which is being asked a lot in my home town at the moment. He hasn’t really done anything that bad. He organised a party and invited lots of people but he did not make them come along. To my knowledge he has not broken any laws and he has apologised to some neighbours which I am glad he has done and I think that is the decent thing to do.
But the real issue now is not about what he did with the party its about him not agreeing to be named and shamed. In that TV interview the presenter can smell public humiliation in the air and she by and large didn’t get it. I think she gets a bit frustrated at the end when she gets very parental. So she named Corey but she can’t shame him because he refuses to feel ashamed, in fact he’s a bit proud of what he has done. This is now what all the ado is about.
Now that is a challenge to authority!
This is the part that interests me. What is the larger meaning of this guy and why has he appealed to so many of his age group?. He is at times just so defiant in the face of authority such as that TV interview. He is behaving like he shouldn’t, not like a good citizen would behave. Years ago he would be described as showing leadership qualities.
The rule of thumb is that in western societies the people are usually
60% are non-winners
20% are losers
20% are winners
Every society needs most of its members to be the worker bees (non-winners). Those people who do not rock the boat, follow most of the rules and spend their lives doing the right thing. They are basically conformist and the good members of society. No society could survive if most of its members were not like this. Then there are the 40% who are not like that, the winners and the losers. At times there is a fine line between them as these are the people who do not follow all the rules. The losers end up dead, in prison and the likes because they do not follow the rules. The winners don’t follow the rules but end up achieving what they want out of life. They tend to do the unusual and exceptional things and make societies question and look at themselves.
Corey is not a non-winner. Weather he ends up as a loser or a winner only time will tell. Here is another picture of “Corey”.
Yes it is, our boy Bill. The super geek as a younger man in 1977. He broke the rules like Corey. He defied authority and he seems to be all smiles for the mug shot as well. So he is also not a non-winner and as time will have it he turned out a winner. He has spent his life not following the rules. He has done things like other people have not done them before, so these are the rules that he has broken.
This is why graffiti is so important to our society, and this is where we get to interesting questions like risingrainbow originally asked. In fact some of the most interesting questions are the ones that never get asked.
Everyone is too busy asking,
“How can we stop this scourge of graffiti?”, “How can we stop the youth breaking rules like this?”.
No one ever asks, “What would be the consequences if we actually could stop graffiti?”
What would happen if the government actually could find a way to get all those youth to conform and stop doing graffiti?. What would the government do if they found the way to do that? The first thing they would do is apply the same mechanism to other areas of society where they also wanted conformity.
Rule breaker
We have a very good example of this in Singapore. There is very little graffiti in Singapore. There is also no freedom of the press. The Singapore government can stop graffiti because it is very much in control. There are very few Corey’s in Singapore. But it’s not going to restrict its control to just graffiti it will spread it out all through society and hence you end up with a very controlled society with no graffiti and also no freedom of the press.
You can’t have it both ways I’m afraid.
So if the Australian government could actually stop graffiti that may be a very bleak sign for our future. We end up with 90% being non-winners and who wants to live in a society like that?. Perhaps the Corey’s of society are very important to us. Perhaps graffiti is a good barometer as to how much personal freedom there is in a society. Singapore openly admits that it is a highly conformist society that significantly lacks creativity. Most graffiti is a creative act that is done by the Corey’s and Bill Gates’ of society
Graffiti
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The Aussie Taliban - channel nine
What’s the difference?
This is an image from a YouTube video of a television interview with Corey the 16 year old party animal.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu-aIMKcBLA
I have two sons, 18 years old and 16 years old. Yesterday they were at home with 6 of their mates playing computer games. I ‘inadvertently’ overheard some of their discussion (as you do, just to check in on the lie of the land). They all think Corey is great, he is already a cult hero.
This is an image from a video that was widely circulated on the internet. It is from when the Taliban was in power in Afghanistan. It is a picture of a man from the Taliban beating a woman with a whip. Indeed after this was shown over the internet the Taliban actually changed its policy. There was no longer to be any public beating of women, it had to be done privately. This is true!
We here in the west see the Taliban as primitive brutes who do such things and have a morality police force walking the streets establishing good moral order.
What’s the difference?
The Taliban use physical abuse to get ‘moral’ behaviour and in Australia our morality police use psychological abuse such as public humiliation to get ‘moral’ behaviour.
Graffiti
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Thursday, 17 January 2008
What is suicidal?
There is a Hullaballoo going on in the city in which I live at the moment. With the end of 2007 there is much discussion about the road toll and road safety. First we need to put things into perspective. In 2007, 235 people died in car accidents in the state in which I live. This state has a population of 2 million. By my calculations that makes it 0.0001175% of people in this state who died through road crashes in 2007.
Why the hullaballoo? Lets face it the road toll is a very small killer here. It is not a big threat to us at all. Compare it to something like cigarettes and alcohol and there you have big killers and a very real threat to us. As well as other things like heart disease, diabetes and allergies. But for some reason an inordinate amount of attention, time and money is spent on the road toll and its threat to us when it is a very small killer.
Why? Probably many factors but it does make for a great story as it grabs attention and there are lots of attention grabbing pictures that come with road accidents. So I suppose the press highlight it for these reasons at least in part. Also anyone with some sort of political agenda to push can make public statements about how tough they are on road safety and that will score them points in the public eyes. What ever the reason road accidents are a very small killer of us and “road safety’ gets an overly large slice of the pie given to it.
Safety scores lots of political points. "Zero tolerance" gets votes!
The downside to this is that the much bigger killers like heart disease and diabetes loose the resources to finding a cure or better management and thus more people die. If there was less focus on reducing the road toll more people would be alive today
However this not my main reason for writing this. Lets look at some more statistics from 2007.
Causal factors of the crash?
Speed 39
Fatigue 21
Inattention 27
Carelessness 23
Alcohol and speed 23
Alcohol 24
Well there you go, now we know why. I have a close friend who lived with a flatmate about 4 years ago. She used to speak with me regularly about him because she was concerned about him. This flatmate often stated suicidal ideas and urges. About 4 years ago he drove his car at high speed on the main freeway straight into the bridge over pass at Karrinyup Road. He died at the scene which by the way cause a very big traffic jam on that day as well.
It is highly likely that suicide was a main causal factor if not the most causal factor in the crash. But as we can see the statistics show us that there was not one suicide caused road death in 2007 and you can always trust statistics can’t you?
Teenagers have a higher level of suicidal energy
Of course the statisticians can’t have suicide as a reason because it is much harder to assess as a causal factor. So what do they do? They just ignore it and pretend that it does not exist. They certainly are not directing any resources to deal with it as they deny it even exists in the first place.
I worked with the local ambulance service for 15 years as a trauma counsellor and over the years many of them mentioned to me that they thought some car accidents they attended were suicides by the way they occurred. I have had suicidal clients tell me directly that if they suicide they will make it look like an accident, like a car accident. There are two reasons for this. First, some life insurance companies are reluctant to pay out on suicides and second they don’t want to leave their loved ones with the stigma of having a relative that suicided.
In a population of 2 million it seems quite plausible that 200 of them could suicide in a year by using a car accident. It seems quite reasonable that suicidal urges could have played at least some part in such a number of deaths on the road in one year. So all the efforts with higher demerit points, higher fines, more booze buses, lowering speed limits are ineffectual in lowering the road toll. A person who is feeling suicidal its not going to worry about getting double demerit points if they are caught drunk driving. The only people who really suffer from the new road rules are the safe driver who gets caught inadvertently speeding occasionally.
This is where the understanding of suicide gets a bit more murky. Consider a hypothetical client. A man attends counselling with me and states that he has for a number of years voluntarily placed himself is high risk situations repeatedly. These situations he puts himself into could kill him. Some times the risk is just a bit above average and sometimes it is quite a bit above average. Is this man suicidal? The name of my hypothetical client is Steve Irwin.
I would assume that if Steve Irwin was asked if he had any suicidal urges he would have given an emphatic, “No” as an answer. However he repeatedly placed himself in situations where the possibility of him getting killed significantly increased. Is that suicidal behaviour?
It is commonly acknowledged in psychotherapy circles that a person who is a heavy smoker for a long period of time has some suicidal urges. That such chronic smoking is suicidal behaviour. How is the heavy smoker any different to Steve Irwin?
So that is the question.
A person states that they have no suicidal urges or thoughts and repeatedly, and voluntarily place self in situations where the risk of being killed is significantly increased. Is this person suicidal?
This would include people like Steve Irwin, Peter Brock, chronic smokers, the chronically obese, the Bali nine, soldiers in active duty in Iraq, and people who drink and drive and drive dangerously at high speeds.
My answer to that question is, yes.
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 16 January 2008
The abuser and the self abuser
Kahless asks
A (hypothetical) question for you...
If I told you I have served 2 years in prison for slashing the throat of someone who I didn't like how would you feel about me? Would you view me differently?
If I told you I took a razor to my thigh and cut a 2 inch line into it, how would you feel about me? Would you view me differently?
(end quote)
I will answer the hypothetical Kahless. It depends how you look at it. How different is the person who punches another person to the person who punches them self. From a psychological point of view there is very little difference between them. They have both made a decision that physical violence is a reasonable solution to a problem. The only difference is where they direct their anger.
And the difference is?
It is much more possible for a person who cuts self to become an attacker of others than it is for a person who does not physically attack self or others. Such people do not see physical violence as a solution to a problem and thus they are much less likely to do it.
Take suicide and murder. Psychologically there is very little difference between them. Suicide is murder, just murder of the self. A murderer is far more capable of suicide than a person who is neither suicidal nor murderous because they have made that early decision that killing is a viable option when certain circumstances occur. Its just a matter of where they direct it.
Any group that sets about attacking and demonizing others will sooner or later turn in on themselves. It is almost inevitable that they will turn on their own kind and do the same to them. The group collapses from the inside out. The biggest danger to the Roman empire was the Romans. The biggest danger to the Nazi party was themselves.
The person who has not made such an early decision is very unlikely to kill self or others, they just don’t see it as an option. There is a cogent argument held by many, that many people who get the death penalty are really suicidal and they are just arranging it that way. To murder so as to get the death penalty (suicide). Being killed, dying and killing others is their script currency, whilst others simply don’t have death and dying as a script currency and thus are very unlikely to do such things.
Of course from a social point of view there is a very, very big difference between them. In our society if a person wants to hit another person then that is considered very bad. If they hit them self then most people wont like that and will tend to feel sorry for the individual but they will not be considered bad like the other.
Demon or a delight? Depends on how you look at it.
So from a psychological point of view I do not view the self harmer and the ‘others’ harmer as different much at all. In fact they are quite similar and have the very same script currency. Me, like most others in Australia view the ‘others’ abuser as a bad person and the self abuser in a much more favourable light but that is only social programming.
Graffiti
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Saturday, 12 January 2008
Conflict in personality
I wrote a posting 4 back called “The contradiction of the treatment contract”. One of the points made was that as soon as one contracts with the client then one is fostering a war zone mentality in the clients mind. This has some negative consequences for the client. For example I said about treating panic attacks:
“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 counsellors 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.”
(end quote).
However this adversarial (war like) approach to psychology and counselling is very ingrained in its very nature and has been around for many, many years. The father of modern psychology, Sigmund Freud, proposed a very adversarial model of personality. The ego and the id were in constant battle from day one until death in each and every individual. The impulses and desires of the id were continually being ‘repressed’ by the ego.
Indeed he proposed many such war like concepts. He talks about the “defence mechanisms” where each of us use such mechanisms like projection, reaction formation, rationalisation, sublimation and so forth. These protect the ego from threats coming from the id. So as you can see it is very much about conflict and collision and human personality is viewed in this light. It is in the very core of how we understand and think about ourselves.
Perhaps our psychological theories encourage us to fight with ourselves and to struggle.
Can one have a non-adversarial model of human personality? Is such a thing possible? And then can one have a non-adversarial model of counselling?
Transactional Analysis has the three ego states
As soon as you look at human personality in this way then it is very easy to find a war. You instantly have three entities that can easily be seen to be fighting and of course that has happened and the Parent ego state and the Child ego state are often seen as being in conflict. This is called an impasse.
The Parent tells the person to work harder and the Child ego state says that it does not want to. So the personality is said to be at an impasse where the Child and Parent are in conflict like in a war. Many people come to counselling in a similar state of an impasse in their personality.
How can one understand human personality and not find so many conflicts and adversaries? How can one have a psychotherapy which it is not based on conflict between two parts of ourselves? If one loves their panic attacks rather than hating them then at least you do not have adversaries and can avoid the war like mentality and the negatives of such a way of thinking.
Graffiti
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Wednesday, 09 January 2008
Life and death
For a very good post on life and death
Go and visit the blog of Kenoath
Graffiti
----------------------
Jan 10th
Roses says:
Tony?
When you read his post, did you feel sad?
Graffiti replies:
That is a good question Roses,
Yes I did feel sad, but perhaps the true question is what do I actually feel sad about.
I feel sad that the man which Kenoath discusses has arrived at the place in which he is now in with his illnesses and the conditions of his life. That is very sad indeed.
Is it sad that a person who is going to die from illness suicides first?. Some see death for the person with cancer as a liberation and thus that is not a sad thing.
Some people and counsellors say to clients that there is always hope. There is always a way out of your emotional pain. You tell that to someone who has had life sapping depression and crippling anxiety for the past 10 years. To the person who has tried every therapy and every medication and they still suffer painfully with depression and anxiety day in and day out. Is death or suicide a sad thing for these people?
Perhaps those counsellors who tell long suffering clients that there is always hope are really just trying to convince themselves and thus the client suffers even more. Maybe there are some situations people get into that are hopeless. If that is true and you tell such a client that there is hope then they only suffer more so.
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Saturday, 05 January 2008
Sleepy and the pull to nonlife
There is an interesting book called, Transactional Analysis after Eric Berne and it has in it a chapter written by a woman called Fanita English. I find it an interesting chapter. She states that there are three forces or inborn drives in each human being. She refers to them as the three muses.
First there is scary. Scary is about fear and is a drive about individual survival and the protection from danger.
Second there is spunky. Spunky is about excitement and includes risk taking, creativity and exploration.
One thing about spunky and scary is that they represent a pull to life for the individual. In this way they represent the opposite to sleepy. Sleepy represents a pull to inertia. It is regressive and represents the pull to nonlife.
So these two drives are at odds with each other. Every young child is born with a drive towards life and a pull towards nonlife. It should be noted that there is a particular behaviour in Transactional Analysis called "Doing nothing". This where the person chooses to do nothing in response to another person. This is commonly found in teenagers who defy parents by choosing not to respond and be passive. So this is often a Rebellious Child ego state act and its goal is to get the other person to take over and do something for them. This would be seen as a very action oriented state of mind that is definitely driven by scary and spunky.
Sleepy also ends up with the person doing very little so they may look quite similar to the person observing them. Psychologically they are quite different states. The person who goes into the inert state of nonlife in a pathological way does so because in childhood they did not fully grow past their pull to nonlife. It occurs as a result of the person not completing their child development fully or correctly which is very different to the person who chooses to go into the behaviour of doing nothing. Every person can choose to do nothing. Only a small group of people can go into sleepy and be in that state of nonlife for any length of time.
These guys were scary and spunky all mixed in together and spat in your face. Don't you just love them boys?
An interesting concept indeed - the pull to nonlife. I find this quite well conceptualises a small group of people or clients that I have seen over the years and indeed represents one man who I have seen for some time now. When most people are asked how they responded to mother’s depression or father’s anger in childhood most people will say something like they felt anger back, got scared, felt very sad and so forth.
These responses are the most usual kind you get and they represent an active response. The person is stating that they responded to the parents with some, well, response!! There is another much smaller group who do not do this and it is with them that I find the concept of sleepy is a good explanation.
These people do not respond by going into a emotional, doing or thinking state of some kind. Instead they sort of go into a non-response. Into a state of inertia where they are not fighting against something, or thinking of giving up or doing something to get away from mother. They go into a state of nonlife is a good way to explain it. A state of nothingness. So one could say that they have a pull to nonlife. They are not seeking to find a solution, they are just there in this state.
Sleepy?
Also note that it is a pull to nonlife, it is not a pull towards death. These people are not suicidal in the usual sense of the word. To attempt suicide is a very action oriented thing to do which a person in the pull to nonlife would not do. But it is a state of nonlife so one could say that they almost have a sense of passive suicide where they could just sort of fade away over time rather than take some action to kill self.
Once they enter into spunky and this regression to a state of nonlife what does one do in response to them as a counsellor. From what I have seen is you kind of just wait for them to come out of it. From a psychotherapy point of view it is not easy to deal with. How do you deal with someone who is in a state of non-response? Counselling is all about the counsellor doing something so the client responds in such and such a way which then leads them to a healthier state of mind.
What if the client is simply non-responsive. The counsellor can give positive strokes, shout at them, confront them, plead with them or do many other things. However if the clients basic position in life is simply not to respond then the counsellor simply gets inertia.
The counsellor is left high and dry. The vast majority, if not all counselling approaches rest on the assumption that if the counsellor does “A” then the client will respond in some way with either “B”, “C” or “D”. What do you do with the client when that assumption is incorrect or does not work? You don’t get a response no matter what you do.
In counselling circles one often sees this diagram;
Humans can respond or be three ways. They can either think, feel or do in response to any situation. People usually spend most of their life in one or two corners and tend to avoid the third corner. So when ever the counsellor does something then the client will respond in one of the three ways and thus the counsellor has his armoury.
Perhaps with sleepy there is a fourth position as shown;
There is a response of inertia where the client is in the inert state of nonlife. When this is the case the counsellor has lost his armoury.
There is one theoretical possible solution which I have yet to try. Perhaps an approach along the lines of Logotherapy as described by Viktor Frankl.
Graffiti
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