Transcript for
Invitational and ethical practice with fathers who use violence (part two)
Alan Jenkins (00:00):
Agency’s not something people have and you find it. It emerges, it develops, it comes out of experience of interaction. Here he is with a sense of, “Yeah, what I need to do is to change, to become a proper dad to my son.” He’s ready to start talking about that in a rational way, because he’s in a space where he’s not dominated by a sense of diminishment through panic or shame. He’s in a space where agency’s present.
Narrator (00:31): Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.
Dan Moss (00:37): Hi, everybody, my name is Dan Moss, and welcome to this Emerging Minds podcast. We would like to pay respect to the traditional custodians of the lands on which this podcast is recorded, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We also pay respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors and elders past, present and emerging, from the different First Nations across Australia.
(01:05): Welcome, everybody, to what is the second part of a two-part episode with psychologist and author, Alan Jenkins. At the end of our first episode with Alan, he described the importance of shame in the ethical journeys of the fathers with who he works. This is not a shame that is inflicted by a practitioner, but rather the natural consequences of fathers beginning to understand how the use of violence has contradicted or got in the way of the kind of father or dad that they wanted to be.
(01:38): I began the second part of this conversation by asking Alan to provide a case example of how you might begin these conversations with men who are using violence.
Alan Jenkins (01:50): I learnt a lot from this one initially, and it was a guy who had dealings with the family court. He’d been very abusive in his family, and he’d separated from his partner. A family court was meeting about whether he should have access or with his son. The judge sent him to me because he was not behaving well in the court either. The judge referred him for, because he presented as yuck, because he was all complaints, “The effing family court, they only think about women, they don’t, women,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(02:27): When I hear that, I sort of hear, well, yeah, there’s a sense of injustice he’s holding here, but there’s something I hear in that man that he just doesn’t feel anybody listens to him. Well, that was my hunch, I suppose, at the time. I kind of opened up some space and got to asking about whether he felt people had taken him seriously, or heard, or were there things that people had even underestimated about him?
(02:55): I guess I’m trying to attune to his panic, a lot of this sort of that happens in that way, and that he can come a little bit and then start to tell me the things that he thinks people don’t know about him. One is that his relationship with his son, he was going to court because he really wanted… Now, I don’t know how much he thought about what kind of relationship, but it’s not necessarily that all these things are there, waiting to be discovered, but that being co-created almost as you talk.
(03:29): I start to ask about the kind of relationship with his son and how he might want that to be. He starts to describe, and of course, he starts to go back then to looking at his relationship with his dad, and he just didn’t have a dad that was there. He wanted a son to have a father who was there with him. I asked him about how scared he was of losing that in this court process, and he was terrified of that.
(03:53): We’d had all this conversation about what kind of dad he wanted to be and his son, and then he, because court had organised some supervised accesses, and he had this first access, where he’d loaned his son a model, a special thing that was kind of precious. The second access came along, and his son had lost it along the way. Now, this was a father who’d been used to pretty harsh discipline in his relations with his son in the past.
(04:34): The son came with trepidation, having lost this thing and told his dad he’d lost it. Now, this guy, Tom, we’ll call him, Tom, he stopped and thought and he thought, “Yeah, look, my past thing would’ve been to really tell him He’s always losing things, be more careful, to give him a lecture about it.” He said, “No, I’m going to,” he thought, he worked out for himself, “I’m going to praise him for being honest and telling me.”
(05:05): Now, his way of doing that was to reach out and shake his son’s hand. He wasn’t a huggy kind of guy, he was more a handshaking guy. When he reached out, his son flinched, but the interesting thing is that Tom saw the flinch. It’s the first time he’d seen it. He’d never noticed anything. He came along that time and he was really despairing. He was haunted by this flinch. I started to ask him about it, about seeing the flinch, and what that meant that he’d seen it. He just said, just, “God, I’m just an asshole,” I think was his expression.
(05:50): I said to him something like, “You’ve seen that flinch, and it’s really hit you. It’s killing you, isn’t it? What would it mean if you didn’t feel like an asshole? If you see your son frightened of you, what would it mean if you didn’t feel like that? What would that say about you?” Then I asked him to go into more to describe the flinch a bit more, and tell me about your son’s face, what told you he was scared? Took him further into it.
(06:27): Then again, processing that to look at what it meant. “What would it have meant if your dad had stopped and noticed how frightened you and your mum were? What would that have meant? What difference might that have made if he’d stopped?”
Dan Moss (06:41): This is really interesting, Alan. As the father begins to engage in the shame he feels about his son’s flinch, some of his own parenting ethics start to become clearer.
Alan Jenkins (06:55): We’re starting to try to reposition shame in a way as an indicator that, “Hey, you’ve seen, isn’t that what a dad’s job might be?” It was interesting, as we kind of worked and looked at the importance of shame here, importance of seeing his son, and I use those terms, seeing, seeing as looking beyond the surface, and actually seeing him, and seeing how scared he is, and feeling that, and owning that and recognising that.
(07:30): It was interesting, as we started to put that into a context where this is actually a sign of integrity that he sees, and what difference might it make for his son if he knew that his dad saw, kind of got it? He started to sort of sit up a bit straighter, and he looked up and I said, “What are you seeing?” Sort of like an image coming to his mind. He said yeah, he was seeing himself perhaps hugging his son and saying sorry for all of the times that he’s just not been a good dad for him.
(08:07): Then it was interesting, he stopped himself. In the middle of that, he stopped himself and he said, “Yeah, but saying sorry would do bugger all. Like I’ve said sorry. What I need to do is actually change and become a proper dad.” By that, his actually shame had energised him, in a sense, into some agency. It’s the emergence of agency that intrigues me with shame. Agency’s not something people have and you find it. It emerges, it develops, it comes out of experience of interaction.
(08:42): Here he is with a sense of, “Yeah, what I need to do is to change to become proper dad to my son,” and he’s ready to start talking about that in a rational way. Then I can talk about all the things about parenting and the stuff that counsellors love to share, and the rational information, because he’s in a space where he’s not dominated by a sense of diminishment through panic or shame. He’s in a space where agency’s present, and he can listen, he can hear things. All the things he wouldn’t hear that have probably been said to him a thousand times can be sat down and talked about.
Dan Moss (09:21): Alan, listening to the story of this work with this particular man reminds me yet again of some of the ground-breaking work that you’ve done. I remember doing some training with you, must have been 20 years ago, and some of these theories about fairness and parallel ethical journeys with men were just so different to anything I’d heard or thought about before.
(09:45): Being fair, we didn’t jump straight into a violence [inaudible 00:09:49] with a man, or we didn’t start just telling a man off, that we allowed space and time for fathers and men to describe some of their ethics or hopes that were separate, or set in contrast to their use of violence. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of these ideas for you?
Alan Jenkins (10:09): Well, it’s a difficult question, because the ideas have changed too over time. I guess initially, I had this notion, sort of slightly Pollyanna-ish notion, I think now, that everyone has good in them. It’s sort of the notion that you’ve just got to dig in there and find it. I don’t think that now. I think that what is ethical or what might be labelled as evil, we co-produce. It’s kind of like people are not one or the other, or you can bring forward ethical stories.
(10:50): If we do good parenting, we’re doing that with our kids. We’re co-creating sort of ethical notions, and fantasies, and stories, and all of that stuff. We could do the opposite to that too. Hopefully we wouldn’t consciously set out to do that, but if we go back to the history, there’s always a sense, to me, like the idea’s a bit embedded in neoliberal capitalist kind of critique in a way that sort of says these systems, we want to start talking about the contradiction between…
(11:32): There’s a cartoon that says it really nicely, where this child says to her mother, she says, “How can it be heroic when we do it and evil and underhanded when they do it?” The mother says to her, “What part of us and them you understand?” There’s another, for example, the contradictions, like there’s a Loony cartoon I love where the boy says to his father, he says, “Father, what is peace?” The father says, “Well, peace is what people kill one another for.”
(12:05): I sort of grew up through the Vietnam War, and I was conscripted but didn’t go into the army, and seeing all of this kind of contradiction and stuff, and thinking, there’s something about needing to open out these contradictions, and to sort of think about them, and to kind of look at the implications of them. I started doing, I suppose, work with men earlier in the piece, and I saw the parallels between the social context and the personal of these guys.
(12:46): Then over time, I sort of saw how I was caught into that too, and how the positions I took or didn’t take, how they were reflected in this work. It just became a bit of a mess for a while there, but gradually sort of sorting it out, and unmuddling, and trying to get a little clearer on contradiction, and the notion that I started to come to the idea that might not matter too much what I do, as long as I don’t reproduce violence, as long as my actions don’t reproduce the very problem that I’m dealing with.
(13:32): That became a pretty central effect in the work I was doing. I started to think about men’s scripts at that time and think, all of this stuff around teaching men, and having all these curriculums and things that you provided, at which time, I think often men weren’t ready to even listen to that, or they would just accommodate through that. I started to think, if I could do put this into practise, then it would really not be anything to do with teaching men’s stuff.
(14:06): It’d be setting up a community of men, where judgement was refused, where there was a duty of care, where what we did is we kind of listened to each other without judgement , where we kind of became attuned to one another, where men had each other’s backs that disrupted the hierarchy. You’d get a men’s group often come in, and you’d see the men at the beginning, all checking each other out. The whole notion from the cultures we live in is that difference is used to order people and judge people.
(14:42): Men would be looking at the differences, and ranking each other in different hierarchies that they’d be doing. There’d always be a guy in the group who was the dissident, often, who became known as the guy, he just didn’t get it. Everyone would compare themselves to Joe and say, “Oh, at least I’m not as bad as Joe over there.” I saw how all of this hierarchical ordering got reproduced. It was like just thinking, how would you do that without? How would you refuse that kind of hierarchy?
(15:16): They were all the kind of things I got really intrigued with and had played around with in different ways, sometimes more successfully than others.
Dan Moss (15:25): Alan, would it be fair to say that the political has been just so integral to your work, your practise, your writing?
Alan Jenkins (15:33): The stuff is based very much in politics. It’s very much based in power relations, and social ordering, and hierarchy, and neoliberal kind of moral positions. Then I guess more recently, I started to get a handle a bit more around affect theory, and the ways that… You can’t just look at politics. The politics set the direction of what people do, but the energy and the impetus is affect. Things like panic, things like shame, it has a range of affect, different affect theories have come up, how do I engage with that? How do I work with that?
(16:22): They were the things that were getting in the way of the psycho-educational men’s curriculum that was tended to be taught around the place. Probably about halfway through my career, I started to think much more about that, and try and find ways to engage effectively. Now, I think that’s everything, I sort of think. I almost look at it a bit like parenting, that with our children a little, the idea of attunement, the idea of that sort of connection, and being able to, it doesn’t require words, even. It’s gestures, but it’s a flow of connection.
(17:06): Then of course, there are ruptures in there when something happens: a kid spills stuff all over your best furniture or whatever, and there’s a rupture in the attunement, but then there’s a repair. That notion in child development is quite well accepted now, the sort of resonance, rupture, repair kind of model. I think the same really holds in working with adults, too. You establish, I listen to guys, I’m hearing their panic, their fear of losing everything. That’s motivating them to go and harass their partner, or send a thousand SMSes or something like that.
(17:52): I’m attuning in with that, and I’m understanding and feeling some of that with the guy. Then there’s something that happens that brings, where shame comes through, and there’s a rupture in that relationship, and then there’s a repair, and repositioning shame as part of the repair that I talked about earlier. The same kind of ideas, I think, are really present there. I think probably in any kind of counselling relationship, really, it’s where the energy is of that particular relationship.
Dan Moss (18:28): Alan, your two seminal books, Invitational Practise and Parallel Ethical Journeys, have been as much about the ethical journeys of practitioners and how they position themselves within their practise as it has been about a moral comment on men and fathers who use violence. I was wondering if you could say something about how you continually do this in your work, how you continually invite us as practitioners to consider our own ethics, to consider how we position ourselves within the work that we do with men and fathers?
Alan Jenkins (19:04): Yeah, I guess The Parallel Journey is that it begins with the fact that we experience similar affective reactions and responses to our clients. If you think about you’re getting ready to see a guy, we’re anticipating a little, where we might have some butterflies in the stomach a little, we’re wanting to get it right. There’s the urgency that we talked about earlier, there’s external demand. These people can do harm, we need to act. There’s an anticipation that’s established there too.
(19:43): When the guy comes in, he’s expecting judgement. We have some anticipation, and his statements, if they’re, say, contemptuous statements, they’re his. We are aware of the need to sort of maintain connection and need to work with this, and yet we have a shocked reaction. Id journeys and our client’s journeys are not that dissimilar in many respects. The idea of a parallel journey is that we are attuning to our clients’ affective experience in forming a connection and an engagement, and we react and we respond.
(20:26): At times, we react in ways that are unhelpful, or that become judgmental, or that escalate a process of argument in. We’re constantly looking at how we take this kind of journey in a way, how we respond, and how we then invite our clients to respond. It’s interesting, panic and shame become, if I look at my supervision of workers in this area, one of the biggest concerns that practitioners have is of, “Am I handling this well enough? Am I doing well enough? Am I managing this okay? Maybe if my colleague, Rob Hall, was here, he’d do a better job of it than what I’m doing.”
(21:10): We question ourselves or we worry if we think we’re losing somebody, or if we get concerned about the urgency and the effect this could have on other people. We’re experiencing similar affects to our clients, and we’re learning to regulate. I look at how often the notion of regulating panic and the sort of desperation that follows it, how often that’s a process of co-regulation with clients.
(21:44): Helping people to be able to sit with uncertainty that I might have lost this relationship, I might never regain it in some ways. There’s a panic, there’s a sense of loss in that that’s profound, and how to be able to sit with people and co-regulate so that it doesn’t wind up with reactive behaviour that’s going off and doing harm, or harassing, or things like this. I’m seeing where we’re dealing with similar processes to the ones our clients are, in a way. It is a parallel journey, and one that transforms…
(22:26): The example I was giving earlier of talking about Tom and his son with the flinch, I can remember in that conversation with him about when he had agency to take action, and I’m aware that I was different at that point. There was something about me that was in a responsive mode. I could see collaboration here where we could work. It’s not just we’re doing work with a client, he’s changing. We’re changing along those journeys, too. We’re discovering stuff about ourselves.
(23:01): We’re discovering something about the connection that we have, and we’re co-regulating something here around shame and putting it into a different space. I can’t do that without sort of connecting back with every experience of shame that I’ve had too. They’re all there. When there’s an attunement around shame, both people are in touch with the experiences, the highs and the lows, the times we’ve effectively regulated shame and had it motivate us in some ways, and the times where we feel we’ve done a terrible job of it.
(23:41): All of those things are present in the affective nature of the relationship at that time. I think that idea of that parallel journey is one that’s just become more poignant, I think, for me in a way too. It’s what brings the highs and lows of this work too, that we can come away from something feeling a sense of, “Gosh, I realised, I learnt this,” or we can come away from it feeling, “Gosh, I stuffed that up.”
(24:18): Yeah, that parallel journey aspect, it’s the exact counter to the thing of us and them. It’s refusing to us and them it, it’s refusing to other. In fact, one of the… A motif is the word I’m looking for for invitational work is to regard, when people ask me, “Well, what is non-violence? What’s the opposite to violence?” I look at the antithesis of violence in this case. The motif is the antithesis of violence is a passionate interest in otherness.
(24:56): That notion of what is opposite to violence is becoming not just interested in other, in the other, or in otherness, but passionately interested in otherness. In a sense, to me, that also highlights something about the parallel journey that becomes really important. It is a journey that refuses judgement and that is interested in otherness. I suppose my belief is that if we can kind of hold that notion and put that notion into action, that’s when things change. That’s when something different is likely to come forward.
Dan Moss (25:40): Alan, you’ve spoken a bit about agency as something that is co-produced or generated, rather than something that is possessed or owned. Can you talk a little bit more about this?
Alan Jenkins (25:52): I think that agency is often seen as a quality we can possess. It’s a bit like resilience is seen that way too, so some people are seen as having more resilience than others. I think agency, resilience, concepts like this, there’s truth in this, but it’s just the way I feel about them, is that they are experiences, qualities that we connect with, and that they emerge in an interaction. We bring, each person’s bringing something, and then out of that comes perhaps realisation and agency, which is produced, I think, at that moment.
(26:40): It emerges, it’s sort of created. It’s interesting, the feminist quantum physicist, Karen Barad, she goes even further than that. I think she would see agency as not existing, and even the individuals not existing, but somehow you, it’s an intra-action, she calls it, where she’s looking at the parallels and how matter works in the quantum world. Out of that, there’s an agential cut, where something is brought into being that is real, and it’s kind of recognising that things don’t always just exist hidden away, that they’re brought into being.
(27:29): It’s the difference I was saying earlier, whereas I think my early thinking was people had this inherent goodness in them that was waiting to pop out. I think more now that we find ways that we move beyond some of the restraints, some of the affective restraints, where then something new can happen, and it is often a surprise to all people concerned. It’s not necessarily a predictable thing, or it’s something that hasn’t been given words. I used a term in, I think it was in Becoming Ethical that was called empathic unsettlement.
(28:13): The notion of empathic unsettlement was about not about empathy with somebody, where you can sort of feel what they’re feeling, or you can imagine what they’re feeling, but empathic unsettlement is something where you’re becoming attuned with another person, and you’re reaching beyond what is currently known, or what is currently even perhaps existing, in a way. You’re reaching towards something that’s implied. It might be a bit like what Michael White, what did he talk about just before he died?
(28:52): He had the absent, but implicit, I think, was the concept. I remember having a yarn to him while we were riding our bikes one day, and it sort of felt, eh, that’s similar and different, but… Then unfortunately, he didn’t… We never got to have enough conversations after that about it. You’re reaching towards what is implied in a person’s ethical, what they’ve revealed about an ethical striving, and it’s sort of moving towards bringing into existence something that perhaps is not necessarily there, but it is forming at that time, I think.
Dan Moss (29:33): Alan, we could talk with you for many more hours, but unfortunately, we’ve only got one last question left. For practitioners who are working with fathers who use violence, how can they continue to take a stand against or call out violence with fathers, while still working from a place of respect?
Alan Jenkins (29:57): I think traditionally, in male culture, calling out somebody is not a foreign concept, but to call out something and to be with the person, to call out, not as just a shaming gesture, but where it becomes a gesture of connection that I’m calling this out, but I’m with you, and I have your back, and I’m not rejecting you, to me, that becomes the important thing to bring in here, that it’s a bit like Braithwaite in shaming… What’d he call it, restorative shaming or something?
(30:38): He looked at cultures that named a behaviour that was unacceptable, but instead of kicking them out, or if they did have to leave the culture for a bit, there was a place made for them to come back, and they were welcomed back in. The person and the behaviour, I guess, there was a distinction being drawn between it. Whereas I think the tendency, if anything, there’s a little more of that tendency in this world today as to shame and eject or exclude, rather than to make place for, that I care about you, and I’m not rejecting you. Does that make sense?
Dan Moss (31:23): Yeah, it does. Yeah, it’s a relief.
Alan Jenkins (31:25): I think calling out sometimes can just be a gesture of exclusion rather than a gesture of community.
Dan Moss (31:35): Folks, please join me in thanking Alan Jenkins for joining us through this double podcast episode, working with fathers who hurt others. If you’re like me and many of my colleagues at Emerging Minds, Alan has been a very formative part of your work over the years. It’s been an absolute privilege one more time listening to him, and we thank him very much for his time.
(31:59): Thank you for your continued support of our podcast at Emerging Minds. Can’t wait to catch up with you next time. My name is Dan Moss, and from Emerging Minds, it’s bye for now.
Narrator (32:11): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds, the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.