Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Agency is not something people have, and you find it. It emerges, it develops, it comes out of experience, of interaction. And 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, 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.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: 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.
So 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 their use of violence has contradicted or got in the way of the kind of father or dad that they wanted to be. I begin 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.
[00:01:50] Speaker A: I learnt a lot from this one initially, and it was a guy who dealings with the family court. He had been very abusive in his family, and he'd separated from his partner. And there was a family court was meeting about whether he should have access with his son. And the judge sent him to me because he was not behaving well in the court either. And the judge referred him for. Yeah, because he presented as ya. Because he was all complaints, you know, the Effin family court, you know, they only think about women. They don't, you know, women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And 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. And I kind of opened up some space and got to asking about whether he felt people had taken him seriously or had heard, or were there things that people had even underestimated about him.
I guess I'm trying to attune to his panic, you know, a lot of the sort of that happens in that way, and that he can calm a little bit and then start to tell me the things that he thinks people don't know about him. And one is that his relationship with his son, you know, he was going to court because he really wanted. Now, I don't know how much he thought about what kind of relationship, but sort of. It's not necessarily that all these things are there waiting to be discovered, but that being co created almost as you talk, you know. So we start to ask about the kind of relationship with his son and how he might want that to be. And 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. And I asked him about how scared he was of losing that in this court process.
He was terrified of that. We'd had all this conversation about what kind of dad he wanted to be and his son. And then he.
Because Cort had organized some supervised accesses, and he had the first access where he'd loaned his son a model, a special thing that was kind of precious. And the second axis came along, and his son had lost it along the way. And now this was a father who'd been used to pretty harsh discipline in his relations with his son in the past. And the son came with trepidation, you know, 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 have been to really tell him he's always losing things, you know, to be more careful, you know, to give him a lecture about it. And he said, no, I'm gonna. He thought he worked out for himself. I'm gonna praise him for being honest and telling me. Now, his way of doing that was to reach out and shake his son's hand. That was. He wasn't a huggy kind of guy. He was more a hand shakey guy. And 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, like. And he came along that time, and he was really despairing. Like, he was haunted by this flinch. And, you know, I started to ask him about it, about seeing the flinch and, you know, and what that meant, that id seen her. I. And he just said, like, you know, just, God, I'm just an asshole, I think, was his expression. And I said to him something like, you know, you've seen that flinch and it's really. It's really hit you. Yeah, it's really. It's killing you, isn't it? You know, but, you know, what would it mean if you didn't feel like an asshole? You know, 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? And then I asked him to go into more, to describe the Fletcher bit more and tell me about your son's face. What told you he was scared, you know, and took him further into it. And then again processing that to look at what it meant. What would it have been 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?
[00:06:41] Speaker C: This is really interesting, Alan. So 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.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: So 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 and job might be? And it was interesting as we kind of worked and looked at the importance of shame here. Importance of seeing his son. And I used those terms, seeing, you know, 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. And he started to. It was interesting, as we started to put that into a context where. And I said, that's actually a sign of integrity, that he see that.
What difference might it make for his son if he knew that his dad saw. Kind of got it, you know, and he started to sort of sit up a bit straighter and he looked up and I said, what are you seeing?
An image coming to his mind? And he said, yeah, you were seeing himself perhaps hugging his son, you know, and saying sorry for all of the times that he's just not been a good dad for him. And then it was interesting. He stopped himself in the middle of that. He stopped himself and he said, yeah, but saying, sorry, debugger all, you know, like, I've said, sorry. What I need to do is actually change and become a proper dad. And by that, he's actually. Shame had energized him, in a sense, into some. It's the emergence of agency that intrigues me with Shane, agency's not something people have, and you find it. It emerges, it develops, it comes out of experience, of interaction. And here he is with a sense of, yeah, what I need to do is to change, to become a proper dad to my son, and he's ready to start talking about that in a rational way. And then I can talk about all the things about parenting and the stuff that counselors 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. And all the things he wouldn't hear that have probably been said to him a thousand times can be sat down and talked about.
[00:09:21] Speaker C: Alan, listening to the story of this work with this particular man reminds me yet again of some of the groundbreaking work that you've done. And 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, you know, and being fair. We didn't jump straight into a violence intervention 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 sat in contrast to their use of violence. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of these ideas for you?
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Well, it's a difficult question because the ideas have changed, too, over time. You know, I guess initially I had this notion, sort of slightly pollyannerish notion. I think now that everyone has good in them. You know, like, it's sort of the notion that, yeah, you've just got to dig in there and find it. And I don't think that now. I think that what is ethical or what might be labeled as evil, we co produce. It's kind of like people are not one or the other. Or you can bring forward ethical stories. And if we do good parenting, we're doing that with our kids. You know, we're co creating sort of ethical notions and fantasies and stories and all of that stuff. I mean, we could do the opposite to that, too. Hopefully, we wouldn't consciously set out to do that. But I guess if we go back to the history, there's always a sense to me like the idea is embedded in, I guess, neoliberal capitalist kind of critique in a way that sort of says, you know, these systems that we want to start talking about the contradiction between.
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? And the mother says to her, what part of us and them don't 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? And the father says, well, peace is what people kill one another for. You know. And I sort of grew up through the Vietnam War, and I was scripted but didn't go into the army and seeing all of this kind of contradiction and stuff and thinking there's something about, you know, needing to open out these contradictions and to sort of think about them and to kind of look at the implications of them. And so I started, you know, doing, I suppose, work with men earlier in the piece, and I saw the parallels, you know, between the social context and the personal of these guys.
And then over time, I sort of saw how I was caught into that, too, and how, you know, the positions I took or didn't take, how they were reflected in this work. And 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, you know, as long as I don't reproduce violence, as long as my actions don't reproduce the very problem that I'm dealing with. And that became a pretty central ethic in the work I was doing. And I started to think about man's scripts at that time and think, you know, 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. And, you know, I started to think if I could do put this into practice, then it would really not be anything to do with teaching men stuff. It'd be setting up a community of men where judgment was refused, where there was a duty of care, where what we did is we kind of listened to each other without judgment, where we kind of became attuned to one another, where men had each other's backs. That disrupted the hierarchy. You know, you'd get a man's group often come in, and you'd see the men at the beginning all checking each other out, you know, the whole notion from the cultures we live in, is that difference is used to order people and judge people. So men would be looking at the differences, ranking each other in different hierarchies that they'd be doing. And 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 at. So everyone would compare themselves to Joe and say, at least I'm not as bad as Joe over there.
And I saw how all of this hierarchical ordering got reproduced. And so it was like just thinking, how would you do that without? How would you refuse that kind of hierarchy? So they were all the kind of things I got really intrigued with and, you know, and had played around with in different ways, sometimes more successfully than others.
[00:15:25] Speaker C: Alan, would it be fair to say that the political has been just so integral to your work, your practice, your writing?
[00:15:33] Speaker A: 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. And 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. You got to look at the politics, set the direction of what people do. But the energy and the impetus is affect.
And things like panic, things like shame. It has a range of affect, different affect theories that come up. How do I engage with that? How do I work with that? Because they were the things that were kind of getting in the way of the psychoeducational 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. And now I think that's everything, you know? So I think if I'm, you know, I almost look at it a bit like parenting. You know, that with our children a little, we. The idea of attunement, you know, the idea of that sort of connection and being able to. Yes, it doesn't require words, even. It's gestures, but it's a flow of connection. And then, of course, there are ruptures in that. When something happens, kids bills, stuff all over your best furniture or whatever, and there's a rupture in the attunement. But then there's a repair.
And that notion in child development is quite well accepted now, the sort of resonance rupture repair kind of model. But 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 1000 SMS's or something like that. And I'm tuning in with that and I'm understanding and feeling some of that with the guy. And then there's something that happens that brings where shame comes through. 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. And I think probably in any kind of counselling relationship, really, it's where the energy is that particular relationship.
[00:18:28] Speaker C: Alan, your two seminal books, invitational practice and parallel ethical journeys, have been as much about the ethical journeys of practitioners and how they position themselves within their practice as it has been about a moral comment on men and fathers who use violence. So 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.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I guess the parallel journey is that it begins with the fact that we experience similar effective reactions and responses to our clients. You know, if you think about you getting ready to see a guy, you know, we're anticipating a little where, you know, we might have some butterflies in the stomach a little, you know, you know, we're wanting to get it right. There's the urgency that we talked about earlier. You know, there's external demand. These people can do harm.
You know, we need to act.
So there's an anticipation that's established there too. And when the guy comes in, he's expecting judgment. We have some anticipation. And his statements, if they say contemptuous statements, they hit us, you know, and we are aware of the need to sort of maintain connection and need to work with this. And yet we have a shocked reaction.
Our journeys and our clients journeys are not that dissimilar in many respects. And the idea of a parallel journey is that we are attuning to our clients affected experience in forming a connection and in engagement. And we react and we respond at times. We react in ways that are unhelpful or that become judgmental or that escalate a process of argument in. So 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, like panic and shame become like, 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? Or maybe if my colleague Rob hall was here, he'd do a better job of it, you know, than what I'm doing. We question ourselves and we. Or we worry when we're. 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 helping people to be able to sit with uncertainty that I might have lost this relationship, I might never regaining it in some ways. And 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 behavior that's going off and doing harm or harassing or things like this. But I'm seeing where we're dealing with similar processes to the ones our clients are, in a way. And it is a parallel journey, and one that transforms 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. Yeah, 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. 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. And 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. So all of those things are present in the affective nature of the relationship at that time. And yes, I think that idea of that parallel journey is one that's just become more poignant, I think, for me in a way, too. And it's what brings the highs and lows of this work, too. That we can come away from something feeling a sense of goshen, I realized I learned this. Or we can come away from it feeling, gosh, I stuffed that up.
But, 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's refusing to other.
In fact, one of the emotive is the word I'm looking for, for invitational work, is to regard. When people ask me, well, what is nonviolence? What's the opposite to violence? And I look at the antithesis of violence in this case. So the motive is the antithesis of violence is a passionate interest in otherness. So the notion of what is opposite to violence is becoming a not just interested in the other or in otherness, but passionately interested in otherness. So in a sense, to me, that also highlights something about the parallel journey that becomes really important.
It is a journey that refuses judgment 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.
[00:25:40] Speaker C: 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?
[00:25:51] Speaker A: 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. And I think these are agency resilience concepts like this.
There's no 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 emerge in an interaction.
Each person's bringing something. And then out of that comes perhaps realization and agency which is produced. I think at that moment it emerges. It's sort of created. It's interesting.
Feminist quantum physicist Karen Brad. She goes even further than that. I think she would see agency not existing. And even the individuals not existing. But somehow it's an intraaction, she calls it, where.
And she's looking at the parallels in how matter works in the quantum world. And out of that, there's an agential cut where something is brought into being that is real.
It's kind of recognizing that things don't always just exist hidden away.
They're brought into being. 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. But 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. And the notion of empathic unsettlement was not about empathy with somebody where you kind of can sort of feel what they're feeling, you know, or you can imagine what they're feeling. But empathic unsettlement is something where you 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? He had sort of the absent but implicit, I think was a concept. And I remember having a yarn to him while we were riding our bikes one day and it sort of felt that similar and different, but. And then unfortunately, he didn't. And we never got to have enough conversations after that about it. But, yeah, you're reaching towards what is implied in a person's ethical.
You know, what I'd 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.
[00:29:33] Speaker C: Alan, we could talk with you for many more hours, but unfortunately, we've only got one last question left. So 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?
[00:29:56] Speaker A: 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 you 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 he called it, restorative shaming or something. 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 because the person and the behaviour, I guess there was a distinction being drawn between it and whereas I think the tendency, if anything, there's a little more of that tendency in this world today as to what a shame and eject or exclude rather than to make place for, you know, that I care about you and I'm not rejecting you. You know, does that make sense?
[00:31:24] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a relief.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: And I think calling out sometimes can just be a gesture of exclusion rather than a gesture of community.
[00:31:35] Speaker C: Folks, please join me in thanking Alan Jenkins for joining us through this double podcast episode, working with fathers who hurt others. If you are 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. And 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 Daniel Moss and from emerging minds it's bye for now.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com dot au to access a range of resources to assist your practice 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.
