Applying the metaphor of the preceding blog, the rock starts to crack when the motivational worker enters a demotivational process. He does not have enough life energy to detransmute his client’s contact rebus. He has to make increasing use of the more ‘economical’ way of handling pain – transmuting it into detransmutation.
He gives less and less of the motivational relationship’s six emotional attitudes back to his client, which means that the untransmuted part of his client’s ascribed untransmuted contact rebus gradually weakens as the transmuted destructive part grows (Motivational Work, Part 2, Motivational Relationship, page 105 – 127).
Content of the Demotivational Relationship
The emotional content of the demotivational relationship in the sense of the destructive component of the ascribed untransmuted contact rebus is as follows:
Commitment becomes hatred or indifference
Hope becomes hopelessness
Trust becomes distrust
Regard becomes disregard
Understanding becomes non-understanding
Honesty becomes dishonesty
Evil over Good
From a mythical perspective, an increasingly strong demotivational relationship is the gradual triumph of evil over good. Who starts off good slowly becomes evil through the interaction. This is a theme that has occupied the minds of mankind throughout the ages and is expressed through many different works of culture. Take Goethe’s Faust, for example, or Dracula or Shakespeare’s Othello.
Case Study
Staffan is one of four social workers in a drug-users group, where he regularly meets his client Hugo, 24. Hugo is a drug addict and a criminal and feeling a sense of commitment toward him, Staffan decides to enter a program of motivational work with him. They meet at Staffan’s office once a week, but Hugo starts not turning up after a month. Finally, Staffan tries to contact him in his flat and drops notes into his letterbox saying that he’s called. He also writes letters to Hugo.
After a while, Hugo turns up unannounced at his office and aggressively accuses Staffan of not helping him. Then, he picks up a glass from Staffan’s desk and smashes it against the wall, and acts, as Staffan perceives it, in a very threatening manner.
Eventually, he calms down and walks out of the office, leaving Staffan shaken. He refuses to see Hugo and feels himself a professional failure, not just with Hugo but in general. He takes up this problem with his supervisor, but his feelings of fear and failure remain, and on no account does he ever want to see Hugo again. His supervisor does not manage to help him detransmute his client’s aggression and sees no meaning in Staffan bearing Hugo’s pain.
Discussion
Fear
The motivational worker has lost his motivational relationship with his client and has developed a powerfully negative emotion in the form of fear. From having been committed to helping his client, he becomes fearful and uncommitted. The motivational worker cannot detransmute his client’s contact rebus and receive life energy back from him. So an imbalance of life energy develops between the two, leaving the motivational worker with a net energy deficit.
Experientially, this is translated into fear and makes him blind to the suffering client behind the aggressive façade. Nor is he prepared for the negative rebound, which is an indirect positive affirmation of the start of a bonding process. This is because he never manages to detransmute his client’s positive rebound of compliance.
Avoidance Contact Rebus
The motivational worker’s contact rebus of his client is transmuted. This leads to a powerful sensation of pain and failure. The motivational worker is left wondering if he is a professional failure, which gives rise to a contact rebus that entails avoiding his client.
Unable to Detransmute
In that the motivational worker cannot detransmute his client’s contact rebus, a process begins within him paralleling that which the client experiences. The aggressively transmuted contact rebus in the client contains concealed fears and feelings of failure. Thus, the motivational worker’s own response to the contact rebus becomes fear. However, because the motivational worker is manifestly motivated, his contact rebuses are less marked by the transmutation principle of destruction.
The Client’s Contact Rebus
His client’s corresponding contact rebus is much more destructive and thus contains more pain. In turn, this means that the motivational worker’s experience is a ‘diluted’ version of his client’s transmuted world. Hence, we can say that if the motivational worker really wants to empathize with his client, he would have to take his own experiences and multiply them by a factor of 10,000, for only then will he really understand his client’s pain.
Parallelism
This parallelism between the client’s and the motivational worker’s experiences we can call ‘dumping’. By not detransmuting his client’s transmuted destructive contact rebus, the motivational worker ‘allows’ the client’s destructiveness to enter his psyche, which can lower his degree of motivation and trigger a demotivational process.
Passive Detransmutation
In one respect, we can call this entire interaction a kind of detransmutation since the motivational worker gets to experience his client’s contact rebus with a lower degree of transmutation. However, the motivational worker has not actively tried to detransmute his client’s contact rebus, nor has there been any intuitive or conscious detransmutation since the motivational worker has no access to greater life energy.
It is a detransmutation without any positive characteristics, and the motivational worker receives no positive affirmation. We can therefore call this passive detransmutation. This means that the motivational worker receives his client’s destructive contact rebus without any detransmutation, leaving the client’s contact rebus to run riot in the motivational worker’s psyche.