Owen's Meanderings

March 17, 2024March 17, 2024

Letter to a Teacher

The book arrived!!

I thought I’d just write you a letter for all the public to read.

I haven’t done near enough practice these past few years but I can provide my personal testimony that training in Emotional Effector Patterns provided an access to an emotional range I didn’t think I had. I subsequently realised that restriction of emotional expression is a survival and identity development mechanism for the psychic impositions, even trauma, put on many boys and youth.

The training has wonderfully supported other training I have done in leadership and I am finding, now in my 60s, I am able to bring a better contribution to the world than ever.

Owen holding book open at chapter his teacher in emotional body, wrote.

I can give more straightforward expression to my upset. I can hold my ground for love and care and fairness all at once, without capitulating to upset. I can make strong requests. I can be generous and then hold a line against exploitation by others. And I can feel at ease with have multiple feelings at once, which I once held as ‘out of control’. The work comes with me into the many arenas of my life and even when I feel I have dropped the ball, it assists me in cleaning up the mess with others and in my return to confidence – a set of real tools that I can call on, that give me reassurance I can get back on the field and make my next engagement count.

Dr Laura, I count you and your trainer team as among my true teachers and I haven’t told you enough how impactful the course I attended with has been in my life. I can vouch that you and the Emotional Body trainers are very safe hands in the theatre (can’t help the pun) of the fully expressed human being.

Back to the readers. Of course, Dr Laura is only one of 15 of the world’s best in dramatherapy workers and researchers who contributed to this book, so it is packed with the extraordinariness of this work.

March 8, 2024

There is (No) Time

I never told you
“I am fond of you
I found solace in your
life,
solace being part of the team
that picked rocks off your paddock,
sorted the seed maize.
ate corn-beef sandwiches for lunch
and that you asked me,
when I was 11,
to join your card group
to make up the numbers for
a monthly saturday night
of 500 or Canasta,
that you were my father’s
best friend
and farmer companion
you at ours
we at yours
and always machinery
books out on the dining table
you both mulling
and discussing how to fix,
re-engineer, or make,
a solution.
and after that,
talking about social things
with my mother.”

you never married
settled in your isolation
attentive to your neighbours
attracting select visitors.
it just seemed
the natural thing,
after my father died,
to cook food and
rally my mother
and go to your place
one unplanned
New Year Eve.

I last saw you,
sitting at lunch
in the nursing home
as I marched
my brief contracted time
and thought,
“I’ll come back another day
and have a yarn to Clive”.
and you died during your shower
the next morning.

Now, 5 years later,
amidst my disappointment
with myself
failing the solace of a memory
of a last conversation,
I am still given to believing
there is time.

March 5, 2024

Justice Accountability and Forgiveness

It is the season of Christian Lent and the Baha’i Fast. The wonderfulness of the teachings of Jesus Christ has lead to one signal cultural message down through the ages: no one is taboo by culture, love and care for everyone you come across, and who abides by that forms a brotherhood and sisterhood, a community, a church.

Baha’u’llah, founder of the Baha’i Faith, pulled justice, the expression of true brotherhood through the larger socio-political lense, into the centre of a religious framing that includes the acknolwedgement that we are a global civilisation that requires integrative tools beyond that of the individual or the community.

Two qualities lie at the interface of the moral individual and the moral society: accountability and forgiveness.

Accountability is the voluntary open and honest exploration of one’s personal life. Given that the culture of accountability by which a society can go about its business in a secure and confident manner requires formal processes social process of accountability, all issues regarding the conquest and subjugation of another people, the takeover of lands, and the expression of this the enlightenment colonial powers performed on many generations after the first conquest, layers embodied trauma (psychic and physical) on those generation until the epigenetic qualities are ingrained in the lives of people living in a more supportive social environment.

Accountability and justice cannot be performed without recognising the true nature of the impact to the conquered people. Indeed I would argue that it is so difficult to outlive this trauma over generations, it is the one thing that has taken generation after generation to war for the past several thousand years. Only the very hard work of accountability can give the conqueror ease even as their descendants carry the trauma of their murders down through many generation afterwards, also living tortuously in our epigentics. Only a full and willing accountability provides a pathway out of our social traumatised behaviours.

When a full and willing accountability has been formally established, what some call a truth-telling, then two redemptive actions can be motivated: a recompense for the losses caused by conquerors (true justice); and, because the recompense can never be fully made for genocidal policies or slavery, the victims across time might resort to radical forgiveness for the shortfall. I would encourage the victims to forgive or at least play with forgiveness even if for the rest of life, for in that lies a path out of the malaise of victimhood to a true empowerment. However we need to be honest with ourselves that forgetfulness is forgiveness (not the other way around) and forgetfulness is only induced by being offered a full accounting of wrongs done against us and a full recompense where it is needed both individually and socially. Such social acts of social integration allows the perseverating mind to rest and turn to other more developmental, transformative and productive living.

October 12, 2023

The Labels We use for each Other

Recently a person who identified themselves as ‘neurodiverse’, called me ‘ableist’. I got it that he meant something derogatory. For sure the wikipedia definition of ableism is: “discrimination and social prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities. Ableism characterizes people as they are defined by their disabilities and it also classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non-disabled people. On this basis, people are assigned or denied certain perceived abilities, skills, or character orientations.” What was quite strange about the conversation was that I was counselling the person that, unless there was some particular challenge they were having that they needed other people to know about, the self referencing as neurodiverse seemed to be avoiding the very real possibility that they were actually just a minor variation as most of us are in the ‘mainstream’.

I also got on some reflection afterward that, yes, as a physiotherapist I tend to the world view that humans live in a world as more able or less able to negotiate the circumstances of the world, and even survive. Nearly 100% of my clients have acknowledged that they need assistance to optimise their movement so they can negotiate as many of the circumstances of the world as they can. Those few clients who are unable to acknowledge their incapacity are also those clients who are not committed to the problem-solving and action they require to build a more capable life. They seem also more likely to make complaints about their doctors and other health professionals and are probably disproportionately represented in complaints to health professional tribunals. The great many of my clients have been on a restorative path and returned to near full capability. A lesser number have been on an adaptive path and not only require physical training but assistive devices such as wheelchairs or prosthetics.

I have worked with many people whose brains function differently than most of us, what might be called in the statistical tail of brain function. Of course, where on a bell curve someone might reside really depends on the characteristic being studied. If we studied running, some people with autistic spectrum disorder (ADS) will be in a long statistical curve of non-running. However if we were assessing a specific intellectual performance some of those non-runners may show up on the statistical tail that might be referred as genius or savant. And many people I know socially, including a cousin, a neighbour, a colleague, have a minor disability to do with social interaction and cueing. And while I’ve wondered about myself at times I have realised that socialisation is challenging, more so for the person who is more honest about what they know and don’t know about life, or who are empathetic even of the more difficult to socialise with. For many people assessed as ASD, their main handicap is that they come across socially as a bit weird. I don’t resile from using the word ‘weird’ even knowing some will only see the word as having derogatory connotations. I invite the reader to read it without derogatory connotations. Indeed I have often used it for myself both playfully and seriously. As the human world occurs to me mostly in a certain way, I occur to myself as weird in comparison. I occur to myself as weird, a lone wolf, a ready study, a powerful human. I also see that I am reassured with my way of working in the world and my work view while anxious that at anytime I have made a seminal error that will threaten my life work or my survival. I revel in the flourishing of diverse ecosystems and human life while knowing that food growing requires the management of natural competition, even cutting out most of the diversity, supporting the diversity only where that supports the optimisation of the food

I write these things about the way the world occurs to me, including myself, in order to bring out in the open, what I am trying to deal with in asking the question, What is it about labels?

It is clear that labels are very useful and perhaps the primary order of language in human beings communicating with each other, in setting up the primary relationships between one human and anything else. Me, tree, thee.

Modern science, through the fabulous invention of Latin, is the epitome of labeling language. Now that Latin is not common language, a comparison between scientific nomenclature and common words for things reveals an important feature of language. Nomenclature for most people provides stand alone words for an individual thing or set. The common word for that set inevitably comes with history and a number of social responses that are provoked from how we were taught that label from childhood. While flexor digitorum may not evoke much to many people, it’s common concept as the muscles and tendons of the grasping hand looms large in our embodied and literary lives.

You can note from the writing here that labels are enhanced by how we denote what they are doing. The hand grasps. The tree shades. The (grasping hand) looms large. In these three examples only one comes close to describing a real phenomenon. The hand does, indeed, grasp. The other two phrases are contextualised to how we humans perceive the world as given purpose to us and not how the object is. A tree only grows as it grows and has no purposefulness. A shadow is cast from the tree and we can find that useful on a hot day, but the tree has no purposefulness called making shade. Anything that ‘looms large’ is a subjective human experience and I used it to enrol you, the reader in my subjective experience in the hope that you will be a good social animal and go ‘oh gosh, of course, how amazing’. And again, while there is a little sarcasm in the flattening of the language here, I invite you to read this without any sense of derogation but as a nod to how we truly are and why we use language.

So how do we divine labels?

It is clear that labeling is identifying, discriminatory or distinguishing language. Me, tree, thee.

When we contextualise language, as we do even when we utter, me, tree or thee, the distinction is determining what belongs or doesn’t belong. Weed, wog, nerd, jock. I’m guessing each of these words provide a host of imagery, memory, emotions, to all readers unless you actually haven’t had them in your social life. And so from belongs or doesn’t belong, we have tribalism, propaganda and war. Some words are so tribal formed and provocative that I, as a white person, can’t use them while a person from another race can use them blantantly and often. It seems the use of the word in that tribal context is an attempt to impress something to other people of various ethnic groups in a social setting or audiences to an artform. I personally find myself disgusted such is my education for contextualising those words as extremely derogatory and lowly, just as I am disgusted by one particular scatological word whose reference is even more derogatory of a people. Thus I won’t write them here.

Yet it is equally evident that language’s utility for contextualisation has pre-verbal sensibilities. I do not ascribe to the theory that language is the defining motivator of human behaviour. I can only agree that language is a modulator of behaviour. That is not to say language isn’t a powerful tool. I would assert language is the most powerful tool humans have, even above the hand (although that relationship is particularly tight, anyhow). I have seen how language can be utilised to provoke a transformative movement in behaviour. Yet it can be misleading to imagine we are talking about common day speech as transformative. Transformative language is a whole host of linguistic, performative and artistic techniques that requires expert facilitation like any specialist domain. To bring this paragraph back to full circle, transformative language has it’s power in deriving verbal or artistic expression from pre-verbal sensibilities.

Pre-verbal sensibilites are those which human being evolved long before the human being found they could bring a vocal quality to express some of the things they were experiencing. The human being has evolved, not only to survive in a particular ecological world, but to become its dominator. The human being has dominated the world by dominating each other. From our pre-verbal ties, we have a pecking order based in physical power. The pecking order has been refined in the linguistic era as society itself became more complex. Labels that define social discriminations are a double edged sword. On the one hand, they can be support our human tendency to look after each other by language shortcuts through which we tell each other, this person requires assistance, adaptation, particular consideration etc. On the other hand, labels can be contextualised so as to impoverish the nobility of another. Whether it is to use white middle aged man to only mean, an inconsiderate power-monger, or low functioning to mean ‘can’t do anything responsibly’ or ableist to mean ‘horrible person who doesn’t agree with me about disabilities’, such contextualisation renders the label itself useless in the very real sense of what we need from language to make human society work better.

There are two important types of expression that we use in every day life: linguistic abstractions and phenomenal language. We often use these loosely in common day conversation such as to leave our hearers or readers bewildered, objectionable. Without understanding how these expressions work, we fail to manage them in a way that advances our human society. Linguistic abstraction, while not speaking about real phenomena, can certainly provide contextualisation of society and the future that can inspire societies e.g the labels ‘citizen’, ‘democracy’. Even the word ‘man’ and ‘woman’ provide powerful representations of something that doesn’t exist for the related thing that does exist – a man, a woman. This is better understood as asking, “how does a (specific) man be a (abstracted) man’.

Phenomal speech is the most useful speech for daily conversation. It is the speech of distinction and to be distinct must be specific and accurate. I do not agree with the objection to the use of well-defined words but rather object to the ill-defining of words. So it is quite relevant to distinguish between high performance and low performance, high functioning and low functioning with the addendum of specific performance e.g 100 metre dash or number of sales this week, or specific functioning e.g. high functioning downes syndrome will mean low IQ with significant capacity to engage in conversation and reason. Either way the Downes syndrome will point to a quite low level of intellectual and physical prowess, with a tendency towards openly expressed emotional states. On the other hand high functioning ASD simply has little usefulness as a distinction as it is just saying, ‘that capable slightly socially weird person’, while low functioning ASD has the usefulness of indicating that the degree of ASD is causing significant capacity limitations in communication, possibly intelligence and physical prowess. Ultimately in every individual case, these distinctions are only ball park references from which individualised evaluation of actual capability is essential is we want to adopt appropriate communication techniques so that the person can engage with anyone else in their social range, parents, siblings, school friends, disability workers etc.

It is clear people and even policy-makers have gotten confused about disabilities. The confusion has been introduced by able-bodied and intellectually high functioning people without fully considering the vast range of phenomena that we place under the linguistic abstraction ‘disabled’. It has been further advanced by highly intelligent physically disabled people who are also failing to consider the real plight of people whose impairments render them with limited agency and no possibility of improving such state, perforce of their intellectual and physical incapacity.