Contact Me: per@revstedt.com

Per Revstedt can teach and supervise both in English and in Danish.

En vigtig oplysning er at Per Revstedt har 20 års erfaring at undervise og supervisere i Danmark. Han er fra Skåne og underviser på en forståelig svensk.

Du finder en beskrivelse af motivationsarbejde på dansk her: saxenhoj.dk

P.S. You can get all four books on Motivational Work for free as an e-book if you apply for a Kindle unlimited membership at amazon.com. D.S

Introduction

Motivational work is an approach designed to help people who are considered to be unmotivated and hopeless. Most personnel contacts are based on the clients/patients being motivated to some degree, i.e., that they want to cooperate constructively and accept help. When you expect constructive cooperation from clients/patients, you only reach the relatively functional group. This leads to the motivation paradox: the clients/patients who have the greatest need of support receive the least. Motivational work tries to resolve this paradox so that those who are most in need actually receive help.

The free enlarged course consists of 72 articles chosen from my blog to outline the method and theory. It is a longer and more detailed version than the crash course. You will find texts going into depth about values and theory and the relationship to the client. It is an account of the whole book Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, and part of Motivational Work, Part 2: The Motivational Relationship. The enlarged course describes, just like the crash course, how values and theory can be used as a protective suit to hinder being burnt out.

Most of the articles have a similar disposition. First, a general introduction, then a case study illustrating the theory, and at last a discussion summarising the subject. In this way, the blog can be used to stimulate discussion in groups or inspire individual thinking.

If you want to learn about methods and techniques in Motivation Work, you will have to read my book Motivational Work, Part 3: Method and Techniques.

Moreover, in my book Motivational Work, Part 4: Deepening the Theory, you can develop your comprehension of the method and utilize motivational work even more efficiently with clients.

Blog 1. Motivational Work – Paradigm for Unmotivated Clients

shutterstock_258918875 (1) — Motivational Work – The universe of the new paradigm

Prochaska and DiClemente and Motivational Interviewing

There is a need for Motivational Work – a paradigm for unmotivated clients. The necessity for a new theory is the current idea of using the psychotherapeutic model and applying it to unmotivated clients. In a way, it is understandable why it is done. It is a well-known approach and fits well in with how you traditionally meet others. Two examples are the methods of Prochaska and DiClemente and Motivational Interviewing. As a result, both approaches exclude many unmotivated clients, which is sad.

The Psychotherapeutic Paradigm

The two methods use the same paradigm as psychotherapy. You talk to the client in a civilized manner, you make emotional contact with him, he reflects on his situation, comes to the appointments made, and so on. This is a description of a fairly well-functioning person. He is in contact with himself emotionally; he dares to listen to the motivational worker. He can openly cooperate in the situation (comes to the meeting, sits there, and comes back to a new meeting). The motivational worker gets manifest positive affirmations with this method.

Most Clients Do Not Fit In

Most clients in psychiatric clinics in welfare agencies or in prisons do not fit in with this approach. They don’t come to meetings, or they leave abruptly, they are aggressive, insulting, threatening, violent, under the influence of psychopharmacological drugs, illegal drugs, or alcohol, they are compliant (that is, they adapt superficially to the motivational worker’s expectations), but they have shut themselves off emotionally. If you use the Prochaska and DiClemente model or Motivational Interviewing, you confirm the motivational paradox; those in most need of support get the least. Consequently, there is a demand for Motivational Work – a paradigm for unmotivated clients.

A New Paradigm

To be able to help, you must alter the approach and use a different paradigm. You have to change theory and perspective because unmotivated clients function in a completely different way than motivated clients. The paradigm that psychotherapy uses is similar to Newton’s physics. Its principles and laws work here on Earth. You cannot apply them to all the phenomena in the whole universe. You have to create a theory that can explain the total cosmos and at the same time include Newton’s physics; that is exactly what Einstein accomplished. The same thing applies to motivation. The psychotherapeutic situation is a special case of a much larger theme; that is, how human beings form relationships. If you extend your theory to that level, you will have the working tools required for your motivational work.

Change of Perspective

If you change to the Einsteinian perspective via Motivational Work, you will find that unmotivated clients relate to other people in a similar way to people in love. Resistance has other and more important functions than defending. Destructiveness helps the unmotivated client to connect to the motivational worker and has essential survival qualities. Mankind has, on the whole, two main forms of relationships: equal and unequal. The unmotivated client, above all, seeks unequal connections and is much more social than the motivated client. The motivational worker needs to have a more intense relationship than what is usual in psychotherapy. You also use a different set of methods and techniques.

Reaching All Clients

If you use this Einsteinian new paradigm (Motivational Work), you will notice that you can reach all clients. No matter how unmotivated and destructive they are, you will be able to motivate them and protect yourself from being burnt out. Now you can reach all those clients that need help and support most. The motivational paradox has disappeared. This can give the motivational worker a deeper meaning in his work and offer him the possibility of choosing which clients he wants to help without considering how motivated they are.

Who Am I

Who am I to formulate such grandiose ideas? I am a Swedish clinical psychologist trained in Rogers’ client-centered therapy, psychodrama, and individual psychodynamic therapy, and I have worked for more than 40 years with unmotivated clients and patients. During my first period with unmotivated clients, I worked with Rogers’ client-centered therapy. I learned then that you could only help those who were at least partly motivated, so I developed my own theory and method to motivate those with the least motivation. Since Motivational Interviewing is based on Rogers’ client-centered therapy, you could say that Motivational Work picks up where MI leaves off.

My Writing Process

After completing a textbook on motivational work in Swedish in 1986 (so far printed in four editions, also translated into Danish, with three editions), I then decided to write an English manuscript (with the help of two English translators) so that I could convey my ideas to the whole world (Motivational Work part 1-4). At the same time, I wished to develop my theory and methods so that everybody can fully understand what I mean.

Writing for 21 years

This writing process has taken 21 years to complete. During this period, I have always worked full-time, so I have used my evenings and spare time, including holidays, to write. I had no idea at the start just how huge the task would be. I was amazed at how much theory was necessary to describe the treatment of unmotivated clients.

A General Theory

When I wrote about the theory of Motivational Work, I found out that it applied to all human beings, i.e., not only the unmotivated. The new paradigm can be used to understand how a love relationship is formed, how parent and child connect with each other, how a family functions, how a group acts, and how an organization operates.

Blog 4. The Teenager with Brain Damage

December 5, 2015, by Per Leave a Comment | Edit

The Humanistic Approach as a Flower — Sunflower as a symbol of the power of belief

The mechanism behind the humanistic approach can be summed up as “the power of belief. The main idea is that you give yourself psychic energy. You do not need any positive confirmations from the outside. It is a general personal approach that everyone can use in stressful life situations. The belief gives hope that, even though there is nothing in real life that can prove this, there are positive alternatives. Here is an example from real life. It is a true story about the experience of one of my neighbors (see Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 26 -27).

Case Study: The Power of Belief

A 16-year-old girl, Daga, is knocked over and seriously injured by a car as she’s cycling home from school. Passers-by come to her aid and call for an ambulance. Once at the hospital, the doctors confirm that she has sustained a severe skull fracture.

Daga eventually completes her course of treatment, after which she has a deficient functional level: she has, for instance, total amnesia about her life before the accident, finds it hard to express herself in words, and is unable to tend to her own personal hygiene. To put it bluntly, she has become a long-term case in constant need of help from others.

The doctors inform Daga’s mother that her daughter’s condition is chronic and will not improve as they have had to remove certain parts of her brain. This comes as a severe shock to the mother, who nevertheless clings to the conviction that her daughter’s condition can be improved. The mother is critical of the efforts of the healthcare services and thinks that the staff is not doing enough to stimulate and activate her daughter. She decides to trust the power of her belief.

She, therefore, decides to bring Daga back into her family, where she can be looked after properly. Daga becomes activated in various ways and is taught by her mother to tend to herself. To deal with her amnesia and help her recover her memory, Daga’s mother invites people from her past life round to meet her, and they tell Daga what they once did together before the accident.

Daga slowly makes progress and is slowly but surely able to recover her old self. Ten years later, she has a job, is married with children, and lives a normal life. The outcome is the direct opposite of that which the doctors had predicted.

Conclusion

Here we see the power of belief in action. Initially, all the mother has to go on is her own convictions, deprived of any physical or mental support from the outside world; indeed, all she hears from the doctors is discouragement since they believe that Daga is beyond help. The mother’s decision to take her daughter home and activate her is based solely on her inner conviction, and it is from this, she draws the energy she needs to try to rehabilitate her daughter against all the odds.

Once Daga starts to make progress, life becomes easier for the mother, who obtains tangible confirmation of her beliefs. Up to this point, all she had to cling to was her belief, and this is its function: to bring self-affirmation in the absence of evidence. Her faith gives her the strength to be emotionally engaged with her daughter and thus have positive expectations for both of them.

Reflection

On reflection, we can make is that when this happened, physicians were not aware of the plasticity of the brain. In other words, the neural system can change even into adulthood.

Blog 5. Down’s Syndrome

shutterstock_31845295 (1) — Being a member of the choir in Mozart’s *The Magic Flute.*

An example from a television program on the educational training of intellectually disabled children will serve to illustrate the importance of having hope (Motivational Work Part 1: Values and Theory pages 27 – 28)

The TV team depicts how the staff of an institution is trying to teach a Down’s syndrome child to talk. His intellectual impairment means that he has difficulties learning to express himself in words. The program traces his development through clips filmed over the course of several years, and initially, little progress seemed to be made, despite his daily training. By the time he reaches the age of 12, his speech had started to improve, so that by the age of 14 (when the last recording was made), he is singing in the choir in a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

How the Staff found Hope

The interesting question is how the staff found the energy to keep working with the boy, day in, day out, year after year, without any apparent reward for their efforts. The institution where they work is based on anthroposophy, a humanistic school of thought which believes in a child’s own capacity for development. In the same way as the mother in the earlier case (Daga), having faith is their only support when there is no positive feedback. So even without any distinct linguistic improvement on the boy’s part, the staff’s ideology gave them hope of success.

Through their philosophy, the staff found the hope and thus the energy needed to continue. However, when they saw the first signs of success, it was much easier for them to keep up their positive belief.

Blog 6. A Hopeless Case Is Never Hopeless

shutterstock_301610624 (1) — Contact with the pain

The essence of the positive core is that no one is hopeless. Everyone has a positive energy that can be strengthened. The difficult thing with believing in the positive core is that you don’t get any clear, positive confirmations from the start. You have to rely on yourself totally. It becomes much easier to feel hope when you have seen someone considered hopeless change completely. When I met this client (see “Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 28 – 29). The experience made a deep impression on me.

The Case Study

The client, who will demonstrate that a hopeless case is never hopeless, was around 40 and generally known as a violent troublemaker. His childhood was a sorry one, for he was abandoned by his parents at an early age and raised in several foster homes. He was sent to a correctional school because of his criminal tendencies, which became more entrenched as he entered adulthood. Moreover, he was also an alcoholic and a drug addict.

The Perpetrator

Furthermore, he was “the bane of the social welfare office”. When he turned up to collect his money, everyone locked themselves in their rooms except for the poor terrified official whose duty was to serve him. The client often threatened the office staff, even at knifepoint. It was widely known that he had a string of convictions behind him for a violent assault on social workers. He was a large brute of a man, and everyone was scared of him. He was considered a hopeless case.

Special Treatment

What is more, his hostile behavior had earned him special treatment; he never had to wait in the waiting room, for example and could talk in person with the senior management whenever he wished. Decisions taken by social welfare secretaries were often changed to his advantage, and everyone bent over backward to please him while saying how much they pitied him.

Strengthening of the Positive Core

By way of incredible coincidence, this man was admitted to an institution. Unknowingly, the staff treated him as they would any other inmate. He had to clean and help out in the kitchen like all the others and eventually became part of a community where he found himself confronted by people who sought to challenge and contain his behavior.

Contact with the Pain

After a treatment period, he connected with his emotional self and ended up crying incessantly for almost a fortnight. After that, he was a new man. The troublemaker in him had gone, allowing him to put his aggression to good use. For instance, he managed to turn away an armed drug dealer from the center with just some well-chosen words and an immanent aggressiveness. He was generally a huge resource for the institution when it came to setting boundaries for other clients.

Afterward

After his treatment, he returned to his life of drugs but took them less frequently and was less aggressive. At his own request, he eventually received a new place to live far out in the countryside, where he met a socially balanced woman. They moved in together, and he lived a drug and crime-free life until he died of ill health.

Reflections

This client was considered hopeless by everyone, with his destructive behavior and his background. He had traits that many said made it impossible for him to change. He was too old. His abuse of drugs and alcohol had been going on for many years and must have led to brain damage. Psychiatrists had diagnosed him as a psychopath, which means that he was almost incurable. His behavior was very destructive and hostile.

Believing in the Positive Core

If, on the other hand, you believe that no one is hopeless, there is always the possibility that you may motivate the client, independently of his behavior, drug abuse, destructive behavior, and other diagnoses.

Blog 7. Bonita’s Protection Suit

shutterstock_226915750 — Hope is the warming light.

Here is an example of how the humanistic approach can help a social worker, Bonita, keep her commitment to her client and stop her from being burnt out (see Motivational Work Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 44 -45).

Case Study

Carmen, 35, is a single mother with three children from two different husbands. She has been divorced for two years. Both her husbands were violent and cheated her out of money. After the last divorce, she got in touch with a social worker, Bonita, 50, to get financial help, and since then, Bonita has tried to motivate her to look for work and start earning a living. Carmen has no professional experience. However, as in both marriages, she was a housewife.

Negative Feedback

To begin with, Bonita tells Carmen that if she is to continue receiving financial help, she must try getting work experience at an elderly people’s home. Carmen accepts but quits after two months complaining of pains in her shoulders and back, which she puts down to a work-related attritional injury. One and a half years pass and Carmen still complains of aches and pains and says that they prevent her from working or participating in activation projects. She also maintains that Bonita is to blame for her chronic condition since it forced her to do the work.

Hopelessness in Bonita

Her client’s attitude instills a sense of hopelessness in Bonita, who feels that she and Carmen cannot communicate. She also feels upset and insecure about all the criticism. Bonita manages to send Carmen to a pain clinic, where doctors cannot locate the cause of her pain. She shouldn’t, they say, be in pain at all. In meetings with Bonita, Carmen is always very reticent and only speaks when spoken to. Her attitude is that everyone is against her and wishes her harm.

During one session, Carmen suddenly offers to take part in an activation project. Bonita is pleasantly surprised and helps her client to get involved. After two months, the project personnel refuses to let her continue because she only joins in on certain parts of the project that don’t require so much active input, such as the counseling sessions and the leisure activities.

Carmen also refuses to get herself work experience. From having hoped for a change in her client, Bonita reverts to a state of hopelessness and has no idea how to continue motivating Carmen to take control of her own life.

The humanistic approach

Bonita takes up her client in her supervision group, where she is reminded that Carmen has a positive core. Deep down, she seeks deliverance from her “client” role, in other words, belief in the humanistic approach. Bonita is also given some tips on dealing with Carmen face to face at times when she is dismissive and silent. This brings Carmen out of her sense of hopelessness and imbues her with greater optimism. Although the feelings of hopelessness remain, they are residual, and she sees ways of progressing with her client. It’s essential for her to believe in her client’s positive core. In this way, she has refound her psychological protection suit.

Support from Supervisor

Bonita believes that Carmen can be motivated, but she also needs some support from her supervisor and her colleagues to sustain her faith. It will take some time before she has completely integrated the value, “No one is hopeless”. This process is made easier when she attends the supervision group.

Blog 8. Give Hope To Staff

shutterstock_307722197 (1) — Hope is the light in the darkness.

This is a clinical example of how the humanistic approach can give hope to staff, even if the patient appears to give back only negative confirmations. The case is from “Motivational Work Part 1: Values and Theory” page 23.

The Case Study

The staff at a psychiatric unit have undergone several years of supervisory support and training in motivational work. The unit houses a young schizophrenic woman, Pat, who’s very aggressive and is known to have assaulted the staff on more than one occasion.

Her attacks are impulsive and violently frenetic. She has already tried to poke out a staff member’s eye, for instance, and has poured scalding hot coffee over another. She makes regular verbal threats and has repeatedly tried to take her own life.

On one occasion, she managed to come across some scissors in the kitchen with which she immediately tried to stab herself in the abdomen and would have succeeded if she had not been restrained by a vigilant member of staff.

Despite all this, the personnel feels increasingly determined to help Pat, as they can see a point in still trying to motivate her. Pat is a common topic during supervision sessions, during which the staff gives vent to their feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Nevertheless, they can always recover their humanistic approach to Pat and see purpose in continuing their efforts to help her. Eventually, the supervisor no longer needs to raise the issue of humanism as the staff can deal with their feelings of hopelessness directly and unprompted.

Their desire to see Pat transferred gradually subsides as their unwillingness to abandon her grows stronger. The hopelessness and despair do not disappear as such. They simply fade as their humanism shines brighter.

Discussion

As already mentioned, a humanistic approach is not enough on its own to motivate the motivators. What it does provide is a rock upon which to build a basic sense of optimism around Pat. The personnel must also be equipped with sound methods of handling Pat’s aggressive behavior to help her boost her own motivation and quell her anti-social tendencies.

Blog 9. Motivation

shutterstock_15052351 — Life energy flowing

The objective of motivational work is to nourish the positive energy in the positive core. Such an approach also reduces the risk of burnout, as no external affirmation is needed in the client’s behavior to fulfill this objective. Instead, motivational work aims toward intrinsic change, which may only achieve expression in outward behavior after a long time. The more motivational work is tied to observable, distinct (and often immediate) changes in the client, the more likely it is that the worker will feel disappointed and redundant in his contact with the client.

The Case Study

Vivian is a 27-years-old woman with the occasional destructive drinking problem. She lives in a state of fear of other people and isolates herself from her neighbors. The only people she has any contact with are her mother and ex-husband. Her TV, oven, and telephone are all out of order. Vivian has been frequently abused by her ex and even raped.

A female social worker has been in sporadic contact with her for the past three years, while Vivian has spent days, even months, in seclusion. At these times the social worker tries making contact, and when they meet Vivian talks about the meaninglessness of life and her desire to end it all. A few months ago, she met a new man, who although an alcoholic treats her well, even tenderly (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 65).

Discussion

The external social context for the client does not change very much during the first years of contact with the social worker. However, if one considers the intrinsic goal, her relationship with her social worker can have boosted her life force so much as to dispel her suicidal tendencies. In this sense, the encounter with the social is infused with a great purpose: it helps to maintain the will to live in Vivian, who carries within her a strong destructiveness as manifested in her thoughts.

After two and a half years, Vivian’s external life also starts to show signs of improvement. She puts herself in situations in which she is repeatedly abused and she isolates herself from others. Her encounters with her social worker can have been particularly meaningful to her given that she has effectively no one else to turn to other than her mother and ex-husbandAccordingding to the social work she meets a new man who treats her well and who lacks the destructiveness of the former men in her life.

This change can be seen as confirmation that her positive core has been strengthened and that she is enjoying a greater quality of life. The motivational worker has helped the client become less internally destructive, and has thus given a valuable gift to the client that enables him to live a more purposeful life.

Blog 10. Demotivation

shutterstock_289271717 — Demotivation means a destructive force

The destructive force is the antithesis of the constructive and may be termed demotivation. Motivation is analogous to constructive life energy and demotivation with the destructive. Demotivation is a reflection of the substance of the positive core.

The person who becomes latently motivated does not have enough motivation to convert pain into energy for development and maturity; he does not have the strength to connect with his own anguish, which is a precondition of his being able to assimilate it. Instead, the life energy of the latently motivated is sufficient only to transmute the pain so that it remains – but does so in such a distorted form that the individual no longer has any contact with it.

Case Study

Andrew is a 55-year-old skilled worker. He has been married to the same woman for many years and has three adult children and four grandchildren. At the age of 53, Andrew becomes unemployed. He takes it hard and falls into a depression. His wife reaches her wits’ end and files for a divorce. At the same time, one of their daughters commits suicide. Soon afterward, Andrew contacts the psychiatric services and is put on a course of antidepressants.

He starts to drink and soon meets a woman in her twenties, with whom he moves in. She is an active substance abuser and offers him drugs. Andrew himself becomes a drug user, and soon he is mixing pretty much exclusively with other addicts. During rehabilitation, he denies or makes light of his substance abuse (Motivational Work, Part 1 Values and Theory, page 91).

Discussion

Andrew meets adversity in the form of unemployment. This, in turn, elicits a pain that he does not have the life energy to handle. Therefore, his demotivation is augmented as a survival strategy. A destructive life process is embarked upon, starting with a depression. His self-destructive behavior then accelerates through the drink and drugs, and his addiction gradually changes his life. Looking at the external phenomenon, we see the tragic downfall of a man. But this is his way of dealing with his pain; the “gain” for him is that he does not need to grapple with his real anguish. His self-destructive behavior serves as an emotional relief for him.

Blog 11. Latently Motivated

shutterstock_323020706 (1) — There is still water underneath the sand

The term unmotivated is actually a misleading one. The “un” prefix implies the absence of motivation. However, the humanistic approach posits a motivation in everyone in the shape of the positive core. This means that the “unmotivated” client does have motivation, but it is dormant and undetectable in his behavior.

Therefore, an unmotivated person can be called latently motivated, possessing as he does a motivation that is too weak to be expressed. Redefining the lack of motivation thus can help to instill in the motivational worker a more hopeful approach to his client (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 79 – 83).

The motivational process is therefore directed at enhancing the life force in the latently motivated client so that it is made explicit in his behavior, at which point he becomes manifestly motivated.

Case Study

Karen is the daughter of a single mother. Because her mother feels unable to take care of her, Karen is sent to live with her maternal grandmother. Apart from when Karen stays with her mother for brief periods, they only meet when the mother visits the grandmother.

Her Mother dies

When Karen is seven her mother dies. She is not allowed at the funeral as she’s considered too young to attend. She is then moved to her great aunt, who is a nurse and who lives alone. She lives with her for the rest of her childhood.

On leaving school at 16, she takes a job as a shop assistant. Then in her early twenties, she meets an older man, a famous poet, whom she soon marries. Karen leaves her job, becomes a housewife, and feels that her marriage to a well-known person boosts her self-esteem.

A Son is Born

After a short while, she gives birth to a son. Her husband starts to drink heavily and suffers increasing bouts of DTs, during which he acts threateningly towards both Karen and their son. After 13 years of marriage, Karen files for divorce and returns to work as a shop assistant. She enters a string of affairs with wealthy married men, who invariably end up abandoning her.

Somatic Symptoms

Karen experiences increasing back pain and starts to lose contact with her son and grandchildren. She manages to procure painkillers to deal with her back pain and starts to abuse them. She also ignores the directions she’s been given to prevent her back trouble from deteriorating and develops a range of symptoms, including asthma, which she is diagnosed as having in a mild form.

This she uses to demand different kinds of support from those around her, and her friends and acquaintances start to avoid her. Karen also sustains a number of injuries from a series of accidents, such as a serious concussion and a broken leg after having slipped on the ice. This means that she has to be hospitalized for lengthy periods. Her doctor, whom she has contacted because of her asthma, refers her to a psychotherapist, who concludes that her symptoms are largely psychosomatic.

Meeting with the Psychotherapist

On her first meeting with the psychotherapist, she appears open and receptive; however, the more the therapist talks to her, the more she feels an emptiness. Karen seems to be wearing a mask to conceal her “real” emotions and talks only about superficial, non-personal matters.

When the therapist tries to raise the issue of her life situation, Karen does nothing but imply that she is a victim of circumstances. Her problem is, she says, attributable solely to her different diseases, and it is those, and only those, that she needs help with. Karen is unable to give any personal explanation as to why she has been referred to psychotherapy and points her finger instead at the doctor who sent her there. The psychotherapist concludes that Karen is unmotivated towards psychotherapy.

Discussion

Karen’s destructiveness outweighs her constructiveness. She ruins her health, takes no constructive initiatives to deal with her problems, lacks feelings of existential responsibility for her situation, and cannot be bothered to connect with her own health. She withdraws further and further from social contact, seems to lack purpose in life, and has no interest in change. The conclusion is that Karen is latently motivated, her motivation not being explicit in her actions but it still exists.

At the same time, Karen serves as an example that latent motivation is not synonymous with social maladjustment. Socially well-adjusted people can also be latently motivated.

Blog 12. The Manifestly Motivated is Constructive

shutterstock_70419961 — The life force is strong

A manifestly motivated person is someone who decides to do something constructive about his problem. Granted, he may find it equally as difficult as the latently motivated, but he does have a securely rooted constructive will on which to build his choices. In other words, the manifestly motivated is constructive.

Usually, however, the life context of the latently motivated client is much more destructive since his life force is weaker than in his manifested counterpart (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 79 – 83).

The manifestly motivated client has the capacity to do something constructive about his life. This does not mean that he has achieved self-actualization; he also has harmful destructive urges but is able to deploy greater forces to counter them.

The Case Study

Laura has been raised by both her parents and is an only child. They live in a village, and Laura finds the strict, overbearing atmosphere of their home oppressive. She, therefore, spends a great deal of time with friends and obtains by default a number of surrogate parents.

When Laura is ten, the family moves to another town, and she finds herself separated from her friends and their parents. Two years later, her mother and father get divorced, and she spends the remainder of her childhood in the custody of her mother.

Married

She leaves school at 16 and gets a job in a shop. In her early twenties, she meets an older man and they get married. The man is an established and renowned scientist. Laura feels inferior to him and is intimidated by his intellect. After some time, She quits her job in the shop to become a housewife. Laura and her husband have three children, to whom she is devoted.

However, her marital problems increase. Her husband has drinking problems and acts in a threatening way at times toward Laura and the children. Laura refuses to become financially dependent on her husband and enters teacher training.

Divorce

The husband’s drinking grows worse, and after ten years of marriage, Laura divorces him. She wins custody of the children, completes her training, and gets a job. Shortly afterward she realizes that she needs some sort of help, as she has started to feel increasingly remote and unable to be a proper parent to her children. Eventually, she contacts a psychotherapist.

Psychotherapy

Laura initially talks calmly and sensibly about her problems, but the psychotherapist notices that she seems to disengage her emotional responses to her life situation.

Despite this mask that she appears to hide behind, the therapist still connects with her client. Laura gradually begins to open up about her remoteness, and when the therapist asks about her children, Laura starts to cry in despair at being a bad mother.

She is extremely worried about her remoteness, which is alien to her as a person; yet she is also aware that there is no one else to blame, and that if something has to change, it’s something within her. Laura is desperate for help and is prepared to undergo psychotherapy regardless of how severely it will strain her finances. The psychotherapist concludes that Laura is motivated toward psychotherapy and accepts her as a client.

Discussion: The manifestly motivated is constructive

Laura’s motivation is explicit in her actions: she takes constructive initiatives to seek help and cares about herself and her children. She has an existential awareness that she is partly responsible for her problems, and she has the energy to connect with her suffering. She seeks to change. All in all, Laura is manifestly motivated, her motivation being explicit in her actions. Once again, the manifestly motivated is constructive.

Blog 13. Contact Rebus: Aggression

One of the typical features of the latently motivated is his resistance to change; he shuns contact with the motivational worker and defends himself against the forces of development. His resistance appears strong and able to negate all attempts at treatment, cooperation, and constructive influence.

From an emotional perspective, the client’s defensiveness is the most difficult thing for the motivational worker to deal with, as his unreceptiveness and emotional distance convey a powerful negative confirmation of the motivational worker’s efforts. Therefore, it is of critical importance how the latter views defense and resistance, as it is also his primary working material.

The fundamental tenet of the theory that will now be expounded upon is that the prime purpose of all forms of defense and resistance is as an indirect means of making contact. Henceforth, such an indirect communication strategy will be termed a “contact rebus”, a rebus meaning a puzzle comprising pictures, words, and letters that together can be decoded into a particular word or phrase (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory page 94 – 159).

The Case Study

The following story was related to the author upon meeting one of his students: a female social worker and contact person for a 36-year-old male client, Erik.

Erik, the client, has a long history of alcohol and drug abuse and is an imposing figure of a man, well-known for his violent tendencies. The social worker has been in contact with Erik for a while but has sensed there is a great emotional distance between them. One day, when they are walking across the town square together (the social worker is helping Erik with some task) he suddenly lifts her in the air and holds her there with his arms outstretched. Being petite, the social worker dangles freely without touching the ground. Erik starts shouting at the social worker, criticizing her with very offensive language, and a crowd of people soon gathers around them.

The social worker understands that the onlookers interpret what they see as a lover’s quarrel and not as a dispute between a social worker and her client. Accordingly, she cannot count on receiving any help from them. At that moment, the social worker recalls the course in motivational work that she attended: what did Revstedt say about this? Yes, contact rebuses, she thinks to herself. She then looks at Erik and says to him: “You aren’t angry, are you?” “No,” he replies, setting her down. I

t seems that Erik’s attack of rage has disappeared as quickly as it appeared and they leave the town square together. The social worker feels that something has changed in their interaction: they have established contact with one another. After this incident, her client has the courage to draw closer to her and demonstrates greater confidence in her than before. He does not act in a threatening way toward her again.

Discussion

The interaction between Erik and his social worker can be seen as an example of how the latter successfully responds to his aggressive, threatening, and distancing behavior. His testing requires the social worker to understand that Erik does in fact want to establish contact and receive help. He is subconsciously investigating whether, despite his threatening behavior, the social worker will still feel concerned for him. This means Erik is looking for someone he has the confidence to lean on and open up to – a refuge in the storm. If the social worker consistently shows positive commitment and does not become afraid when distancing occurs in the relationship, this is a sign she is someone he can trust.

Blog 14. Contact Rebus: Compliancy

The Case Study

Twenty-seven-year-old Naemi is a drug addict and has now been taken into custody on suspicion of dealing. A non-institutional care assistant is assigned to visit Naemi at the police station, and she reads her client’s file before meeting her. Naemi has grown up in a socially functional family and she has a brother who is well-adjusted. As for Naemi, she had no problems at school and later began working as an elderly care assistant.

Shortly after finishing school, Naemi met an older man who used to be a serious addict. They moved in together and had a child but separated after two years, upon which Naemi attempted suicide and started to use drugs. This led to her losing the custody of her child to her former boyfriend. Naemi then moved in with another older drug addict and started using drugs with him. According to the journal, she also got into prostitution.

Equipped with this brief, the assistant now goes to police custody, where she is met by an apparently lively, bubbly Naemi who says it feels good to use drugs and that she misses her boyfriend. Generally, life is a ‘blast’ and she likes it when things happen. Her suicide attempt and drug addiction are temporary glitches with no special reason behind them.

This admission confuses the assistant, as her impression of Naemi during their conversation is completely different to that based on the information in her journal. Naemi is very convincing in the way she speaks and the assistant believes what she says.

Discussion

Naemi appears to be positive in her contact. Although there is no open destructiveness, we catch a glimpse of it in Naemi’s denial of her problems while she is sitting in custody awaiting trial. This in itself is a destructive situation which Naemi refuses to acknowledge.

By trivialising her addiction and suicide attempt, she avoids having to deal with her problems. One feature of conciliatory attitudes is clearly demonstrated: the care assistant finds Naemi to be convincing in what she says. If she is to solve her client’s contact rebus, she must understand the whole situation (i.e. she is sitting in police custody with a client who has a destructive life situation) and she must consider this in relation to what her client says.

Naemi has grown up in an environment in which she has learnt how to conduct herself socially. This increases her ability to sound convincing. Naemi adopts the role of victim by not taking advantage of the help that is offered in this situation. The social worker is tested whether she will adopt the role of indirect aggressor by failing to see her client’s problems.

If she does this and accepts Naemi’s attitude towards herself, she will harm her. Superficially, the contact rebus appears to be positive. As previously mentioned, we see dissonance in the client’s test: her vivaciousness and contentment are incongruous with her life situation. She has a serious drug addiction, has attempted suicide, and taken to prostitution, most definitely has a destructive relationship with her partner, and is now in custody under suspicion of criminality.

A compliance contact rebus turns its destructiveness inwards on the client so that she fails to take care of herself in a constructive way, meaning she is in self-denial. Naemi, for example, demonstrates this by not taking advantage of the treatment that would be made available to her if he more openly demonstrated who he was and what help he needed.

Instead, she creates a false image of herself through self-denial. The inwardly-directed demotivation occurring with a compliance contact rebus may, in a more active stage, increase the risk of a client openly turning it on themselves through acts such as self-mutilation or suicide. That said, the destructiveness of the compliance contact rebus may also be directed outwardly at others. (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and theory, pages 313 – 319)

In common with other latently motivated individuals, Naemi is looking for the parental figures she was lacking as a child. She is longing to be accepted and liked for who he is and is looking for a person who values her despite her conciliatory attitude and who is concerned about her excessive compliance. Naemi achieves this by behaving like a well-adjusted individual, and she is looking for a person who can question her compliance and see through it, thus providing her with a positive affirmation for the woman she is. Naemi will feel confident in someone who can question and break down her façade in a kind-hearted way. Naemi’s compliance is thus an indirect plea for help: in other words, her contact rebus. Her well-adjusted behavior is her way of seeking out honest and open communication.

Blog 15. Contact Rebus: Withdrawing Contact

Case Study

Twenty-four-year-old Max gets his mother’s assistance in seeking non-institutional psychiatric care. He has been quiet and withdrawn of late and no longer wants to go to work. In the discussion with the psychologist it is revealed that Max’s family was of a non-conformist faith and at the age of 22, he moved in with his cousin and adopted a different lifestyle.

Although he acts responsibly in going to work at the mechanical workshop where he is employed, Max is also out partying a lot, drinking and experimenting with drugs, and having numerous short-term relationships with women.

Max’s new lifestyle also involves him going to the gym, and he takes anabolic steroids for a while to improve his results. On several occasions, he has been questioned as to how his lifestyle and faith go together, something that angers him so much at times that he might take a swing at his critic. Eventually, Max confesses that the contrast between his religious values and his lifestyle is too great and that is why he has been so withdrawn.

The psychologist is finding it difficult to help Max with his religious dilemma because he is not a man of faith himself, but he feels he understands that Max’s religious beliefs are important to him. The psychologist’s uncertainty leads to his raising the subject of his failings in a supervision group. There he learns that Max’s religious dilemma is a contact rebus and that other things are much more difficult for the patient to solve, namely his drug abuse and destructive behavior towards others.

When the psychologist returns to his patient, he questions the religious dilemma. Max then starts to talk about his fear of meeting people and his anxiety over being unable to control his anger and the possibility of him being violent again.

Moreover, he is very worried about telling his friends about these problems because he thinks they will laugh at him and he has been avoiding them for this reason. After talking to the psychologist about his troubles, Max has the courage to tell his friends. He feels they respond positively and demonstrate great understanding.

After a further two meetings with the psychologist, Max stops contacting him. The psychologist then calls him to ask how things are and Max is relieved that the psychologist isn’t angry with him but wants to continue helping him. He turns up for his next appointment.

Discussion

The patient first employs a contact rebus which invites the psychologist to concentrate on the religious dilemma created by his current lifestyle. It is a verbal test that would involve lengthy discussions about theology. It is known territory for the patient where he tests if the psychologist stops at this verbal level or understands that there are emotional problems behind the religious dilemma.

With the help of his supervision group, the psychologist is able to solve this contact rebus so that Max has more courage to get in touch with his anxiety and pain. His next contact rebus arrives in the guise of his absence from appointments and failure to cancel: Max is withdrawing from the psychologist. It is the same test that Max employed on his mother and friends (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 387 – 389).

In this case, destructiveness is openly enacted, not concealed. Max starts to get to grips with his problems and has a positive experience in so doing. He then interrupts this positive development and bars progression, seemingly wanting to destroy the relationship he has with the psychologist.

Max’s contact rebus contains both aggressor and victim elements. He is an aggressor towards the psychologist in the way he gives negative feedback for the help he receives, but he harms himself by ruining his opportunity to receive further help.

In turn, the psychologist is invited to feel offended and maltreated, which may lead to his reluctance to initiate renewed contact or work with Max altogether. The role of victim is also offered to him in that he will feel he has done something wrong and is a failure. This role also involves his not contacting the patient, but in this case, it is because he has nothing to give him.

Dissonance is seen in the amount of energy Max expends on staying away. Had he been more apathetic from the start, he might not have gone ahead with the liaison or not made an effort. Since Max is committed to it, his absence is not a question of apathy. The psychologist seems to have passed the test by not adopting the role of aggressor or victim and by maintaining a positive commitment to Max. When he calls Max, he receives positive affirmation from the client that his absence has to do with his commitment. The psychologist solves the contact rebus by contacting Max and showing that he is still concerned about him, upon which Max employs a compliance contact rebus by resuming discussions with him.

Blog 16. The Idea behind the Contact Rebus

From an emotional perspective, the client’s defensiveness is the most difficult thing for the motivational worker to deal with, as his unreceptiveness and emotional distance convey a powerful negative confirmation of the motivational worker’s efforts. Therefore, it is of critical importance how the latter views defence and resistance, as it is also his primary working material (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory. page 94 – 159).

The Oxford English Dictionary defines rebus thus:

[French Rébus – Latin rebus, plural of res thing, in the phrase de rebus quæ geruntur ‘concerning things that are taking place’, a title given by the guild of lawyers’ clerks of Picardy to satirical pieces containing riddles in picture form.] An enigmatical representation of a name, word or phrase by figures, pictures, arrangement of letters, etc., which suggest the syllables of which it is made up.

A rebus is a puzzle with a concealed message. Let us take Chinese characters as an example. Research has shown that these characters were originally concrete pictograms that have undergone a process of stylization. The pictogram itself is a kind of rebus, and its subsequent stylization is a further transmutation. For instance, the symbol for the verb cross was originally a picture of a man with his legs crossed – itself a pictogrammatic puzzle, the meaning of which is not immediately obvious, although easily guessed. The character looks like this:

This character has since been stylised to appear thus:

The transformation of the original pictogram makes the “puzzle” harder to solve. It has also been compounded by the character’s taking on a more figurative sense of contact, exchange or communication. The puzzle has increased in complexity, rendering the meaning of its hidden message almost impenetrable to the uninitiated.

The picture puzzles can be further compounded by juxtaposing two independent characters to form a third, which now has two layers of coding, namely the stylization and the combination. An example of this is the character for good/love, which is a fusion of the characters of woman and child.

By borrowing a character for another word with different meaning but the same pronunciation, the Chinese can add a third degree of transformation; a derivative sign to specify the meaning of a “homonymic” character attaches a fourth. The transformation can also involve the appending of a pronunciation signifier to distinguish between different possible meanings.

As complex rebuses that incrementally transform the original message, Chinese characters are analogous to the structures of defense and resistance. Concealed within them, and heavily transmuted, is an indirect attempt to make contact. Just like a rebus, defense embodies a puzzle, which, if solved, can reveal the client’s outstretched hand and open a channel along which to reach him.

The theory of the contact rebus helps the motivational worker understand the client’s dissociation and destructiveness, fires his commitment stamina, and enables him to see different opportunities in the motivational situation. It is also a general and versatile theory that is not restricted for use with the latently motivated. One central component of the theory deals with how people form mutual relationships.

At the same time, it is also a critical guide to dealing with the latently motivated client’s apparently formidable defenses. When laying siege to these sturdy walls, the motivational worker is confronted with aspects of human behavior in a concentrated, maximized form. Therefore, the approach he adopts can also be applied in other contexts with more motivated clients since everyone fundamentally has the same type of functional behavior.

An important part of how the motivational worker responds emotionally and deals with the client’s defense is his own attitude towards his client’s dismissive behavior, for this will determine how optimistic he is towards his client. The theory affects how he feels when dealing face to face with his client, while the meaning of the client’s defense is a key shaper of the motivational worker’s attitude, which protects him against burnout and increases his commitment stamina accordingly. His view of his client’s defense also sets the framework for his chosen methodology.

Blog 17. Falling in Love: Aggression

The contact rebus theory is not only useful therapeutically; it is a universally applicable concept of human behavior that lends itself to other contexts of human interaction.

Parallels are also obvious between lovers and the way the latently motivated handle defense and contact, particularly during the time when the enamored make initial contact with each other before they have experienced “that first sweet kiss”.

One strategy a person might use to reach out to the object of his desire is to be aggressive and dismissive (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 99 – 103). To the casual observer, the two might seem the bitterest of enemies, quite loath to have any positive contact with each other, and not be shy about it either.

The intention is to demonstrate that the key function of defense is to serve as an indirect contact-making strategy. Resistance is thus not primarily a distancing from or rejection of another person but a tentative move towards close relations. Nor is it chiefly some intrapsychic strategy to help the individual avoid feeling pain and discomfort. It is a way to make it easier for the person to connect with all of his experiences, the painful ones included.

I make no guarantees that the reader will be able to use the methods described below to win the object of his or her desire; if you try, then on your head be it! Eros is happiest when allowed to work his magic unaided, and when the two victims of his darts listen to the voices of their hearts with undivided attention.

Case Study

Consider the following true story, told to me by a woman in connection with a lecture on the contact rebus. It is winter and the woman is walking along a street in town. Suddenly a snowball strikes her head. She turns around angrily and sees a man of her own age, to whom she duly gives a piece of her mind, unaware that this is the first meeting between her and her future husband. They have been married for many years.

Discussion

Common to every would-be lover who seeks contact through aggression is ignorance of his feelings for the other person. Indeed, he might be deeply irritated by her, or consider her insufferable. If he still has some of his wits about him and can take a step back from the situation, he will be able to reflect on why his reactions are so strong. It never strikes him at this stage, however, that he is in fact in love.

The people around them are also able to reflect on matters; to them, it may be obvious that there is friction between the two, but why this fervor, this intensity of feeling if they hardly

In a later blog, the psychological mechanisms behind romance will be explained. It will be shown that, on a general level, latently motivated clients bond the same way as lovers.

Blog 18. Falling in Love: Withdrawing Contact

The contact rebus theory is not only useful therapeutically; it is a universally applicable concept of human behavior that lends itself to other contexts of human interaction (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 349 – 388).

To illustrate the general theory of the contact rebus, we can start by describing how manifestly motivated people build relationships with one another. An obvious candidate for such a relational scenario is that between lovers, the active mechanisms behind the process of bonding are clear for all to see. It also exposes the relational function of defense. Parallels are also obvious between lovers and the way the latently motivated handle defense and contact, particularly during the time when the enamored make initial contact with each other before they have experienced “that first sweet kiss”.

One strategy a person might use to reach out to the object of his desire is to be aggressive and dismissive. To the casual observer, the two might seem the bitterest of enemies, quite loath to have any positive contact with each other, and not being shy about it either.

A way for people to approach one another is through mutual avoidance. Just like with aggression, close contact is actively shunned through distancing behavior that is either bi- or unilateral. At least aggressiveness betrays strong feelings, albeit negative ones; here we find the opposite, as one or both parties show total indifference to the other and actively seek to avoid contact.

Case Study

A true story told to me may serve to illustrate the way people reach out to each other by withdrawing. A famous young actor and bachelor pays a visit to a town to give a talk about his latest book. The audience is predominantly female, and when the talk is over, several women rush forwards to talk to him. However, one woman remains seated at the back of the room looking aloof and indifferent. Eyewitnesses describe how the actor breaks away from the throng of women surrounding him, goes up to the lone woman and engages her in conversation. After a while, the actor and the woman, who were formerly strangers, get up and leave the room in each other’s company. They spend the night together.

Discussion

Such withdrawers are not consciously aware of an attraction, and may indeed feel a strong repulsion towards the object of their unwitting desire. They might also experience a debilitating embarrassment that paralyses their minds and tongues.

In a later blog, the psychological mechanisms behind romance will be explained. It will be shown that, on a general level, latently motivated clients bond the same way as lovers.

Blog 19. Falling in Love: Compliance

A third way for one “enamoured” person to approach another is to make himself as attractive as possible to his intended on the grounds of some personal idea of what that person desires.

Case Study

A woman who is not normally interested in physical exercise might suddenly start to jog regularly – in a trendy new jogging suit to boot. A possible explanation for this sudden show of interest is that some object of her desire, who is genuinely keen on physical exercise, goes jogging in the same area. In making a display of being a keen jogger, the woman is hoping to present herself as an attractive prospect. If they then meet, date, and finally get married, he may regard with surprise her waning interest in physical exercise.

For the sake of balance, let us imagine a man who spends his time in front of the TV, drinking beer and watching football. When he meets a woman whom he finds attractive he denies such slobbish habits, feeling intuitively that such behaviour would put her off.

In an effort to appeal to what he senses are her interests, he suggests going to see a play, which, as he unconsciously understands it, will make him more attractive to the woman. His plan works, but once they have moved in together and the honeymoon period is over, he returns to his TV and his cans of lager.

Discussion

Unlike the other two ways of making contact, this form of behavioural adjustment and compliance is a socially acceptable way of starting a relationship in our culture and is all done in full observance of the official rules of courting.

In a later blog, the psychological mechanisms behind romance will be explained. It will be shown that, on a general level, latently motivated clients bond in the same way as lovers.

Blog 20. Lovers’ Bonding: Defence

It saves both time and energy if the lovers-to-be could form a relationship with each other efficiently and rationally. So why is the courting game such a complicated and sometimes protracted process?

The answer to this question lies in the functions that this indirect contact-making fulfils. From the perspective of emotional logic, in fact, it is highly rational and meaningful for people to make contact in this way (Motivational Work, part 1: Values and Theory, page 109 – 159).

One of these functions is defence: protection against being openly rejected. Making approaches to the object of desire is a profoundly personal act. If the feelings are not mutual, we feel rebuffed on a personal level, and suffer accordingly without anything to hide behind or blame.

So we avoid this open rejection by not making ourselves vulnerable with explicit shows of interest. Instead, we hide our tentative approaches behind a protective mask, denying the other person the opportunity to reject us as we have not made our love explicit. We also turn the mask to ourselves, so that we remain partly or even wholly unaware of our true intentions. If we are then rejected, we feel no pain as there are no acknowledged feelings of love upon which the other can trample. Put briefly, we hide our opening gambits from our intended and ourselves to protect us from pain.

Aggression

Aggression, for example, is an attempt at contact that places the enamoured out of the rejection danger-zone. Instead of displaying interest by playing a positive opening gambit, he makes a show of actually disliking the other person.

He is in denial of his own love and appears fractious and undesirous of further contact; being thus unaware of his true feelings, he is able to avoid the pain of rejection should these feelings be unrequited. It is simply a relief to avoid any further contact, and if the other party is also aggressive, it is confirmation that both feel the same hostility towards each other.

The man with the snowball (see blog: “Falling in Love: Aggression”) seems intent only on being a nuisance and, at best, taunting his victim; and judging by her response, it would seem that she genuinely feels indignant at his audacity. Neither of the parties needs risk being openly rejected.

Withdrawing Contact

Similarly, the “withdrawal” gambit spares the enamoured the pain of open rejection. In showing no interest in contact and experiencing no love himself, he does not have to deal with the disappointment of unrequited feelings.

The woman at the back of the room (see blog: “Falling in Love: Withdrawing Contact”) in which the actor has given his talk is also in no danger of being openly rejected. As far as she is concerned, she is totally indifferent towards him and undesirous of contact.

Compliance

Making contact through compliance fulfils the same function as the other gambits. The individual finds himself suddenly interested in, say, poetry without realising that his new-found interest has been fired by a young lady who is an admirer of Byron or Dickinson. This allows him to avoid the danger of open rejection as he is, after all, simply interested in poetry and nothing else. If she happens to reject him, it is because of some other obstacle between them, such as their appreciation of different poetic genres.

The woman who develops an interest in jogging (see blog: Falling in Love: Conciliation”) can do so on both a conscious and an unconscious level. Whichever it is, her interest is not observably about love but about keeping fit, and in this way, she avoids open rejection. If the relationship does not continue, the relationship will be remembered as the outcome of a shared interest in exercise, nothing more, and neither of them needs to feel rejected.

The relationship between the TV-watching slob and his woman friend (see blog: “Falling in Love: Conciliation”) is also “interest-based” in the sense that he denies his love for the sport and conforms to what he believes is her interest profile. To the casual observer, their relationship is also one of shared interest rather than love.

Blog 21. Lovers’ Bonding: Expression and Testing

Expression of Feelings

The fundamental drive is one of contact and not defense, and it is to this end that we adopt these indirect romantic maneuvers or mutually targeted indirect gambits. Our covert advances are an unwitting and indirect expression of our feelings for another person. They offer an opportunity for this other person to express him or herself, equally unwittingly, in return.

Testing

The indirect emotional expression also includes a testing element, whereby the lovers-to-be make tentative advances by assaying the extent to which their feelings are reciprocated. In making the contact attempt indirect, the one receives additional confirmation that the other is in love, should this indeed be the case and is made more certain that his target notices his feelings. This creates a reciprocity in that her feelings are exposed to him and his to her, which fulfils the romantically fundamental need for the one to be acknowledged by the other. In short, then, we can say that the covert contact gambit allows the lovers-to-be to receive more positive affirmation from each other than if their amorous advances had been overt. Positive affirmation has the dual components of being understood by the other and having our feelings for the other reciprocated.

The testing process is a mutual one that elicits simultaneous responses from each party to the tentative advances of the other. Both use coded messages to communicate, the true content of what they communicate being then deciphered on a subconscious level.

Aggression

When the enamoured makes contact through aggression, he gives vent to his feelings without having to reveal them to himself or others. He also probes the depth of the other’s feelings and judges the extent to which they can see his signals. If he is aggressive, and his target responds with a test involving a coded but positive message, he obtains, subconsciously, transmuted positive affirmation for his gambit.

The man with the snowball also receives positive affirmation from his target since she too continues to have contact with him, despite her aggrieved outburst at the assault.

Withdrawal

Just as in the case of aggression, withdrawal is an indirect expression of love on the part of the enamoured. It also incorporates a test that he uses to ascertain whether his intended is able to see what is concealed behind his indifference. He then unconsciously hopes the confirmation of this will tell him that his target continues to be in love even when he distances himself; should this be so, it is a very powerful positive affirmation indeed.

Withdrawal is thus another way to make advances. The contact-seeking and compellent nature of withdrawal is illustrated in a classic scene that appears in many a Hollywood film. The ritual is set in motion by the woman, who instigates a chase by running away from the man, but with no more conviction than is needed for him to catch her.

In behaving thus, the woman is hoping to elicit a clearer and more powerful emotional reaction in the man than would be possible if she simply opened her arms to him. The man, in turn, responds by pursuing the woman, which, given that being chased is also a challenge of sorts, fires her interest in him. When one party retreats, the other is inevitably compelled to choose a response.

The female member of the audience also receives strong positive affirmation through the proactive efforts of the actor to defy her resistance and make contact with her. His advances are, in turn, a coded compliance rebus.

Compliance

Compliance involves the same functions as aggression and rejection: a) expressing feelings and b) setting tests to ascertain if the target understands that the compliance gambit is an indirect signal of something else and whether the target is attracted on a personal rather than just behavioural level.

The woman, who has a sudden interest in jogging, gets a stronger answer from the man she encounters if he feels attracted to her independently of the shared interest.

The same applies to the man, who is fascinated by ballet. If the woman is interested in him without regard to their common diversion, he receives a stronger affirmation than showing his attraction openly.

Summary

The indirect contact gambits from the enamoured can thus be seen as tests. Their function is as reinforced contact gambits, “turbo” gambits if you will. Using this indirect channel of communication, he sends out a more intense, loaded question than could be asked openly and directly. He is also able to receive more powerful affirmation. At the same time, he has hedged himself against overt, negative feedback through the defensive function of the rebus. In adopting such a covert strategy he need not suppress his feeling but can express them, albeit indirectly. The enamoured has apparently succeeded in having his cake and eating it. (Motivational Work part 1: Values and Theory, page 109 – 159).

Blog 22. Lovers’ Bonding: Finding the Right Partner

The enamoured also test whether or not they have found the right person, someone to enrich their lives and protect them from harm. By virtue of how the indirect gambit is designed, the individual also receives positive affirmation from someone with the very personal traits needed (Motivational Work part 1: Values and Theory, page 109 – 159).

Aggression

The use of aggression means that the target has no choice but to respond, faced as she is with a challenge in which indifference is not really an option. The tester also places himself in a similar situation, as his display of aggression enables him to engage more deeply in himself.

The young man with the snowball receives answers to several questions with a directness and clarity he would not have been able to obtain in any other way, as the woman cannot help reacting to the snowball that hits her on the head.

Withdrawing Contact

Withdrawal is also a way for an individual to test whether or not he has found the right person. Will the target take up the chase or give in? Does she feel wronged and insecure? In applying this test, he is looking for someone who can take initiatives and who has enough self-assurance to follow the course of her feelings. At the same time, he also hopes to find out if she understands the meaning of the withdrawal and returns his love.

Compliance

Similarly, compliance tests can also be used to ascertain if a person has found the right partner. Meeting someone who appears to share his values and interests invites an emotional reciprocity. He also learns how much the other person is willing to adapt and compromise.

In just the same way as the other tests, the target is compelled to make a decision about whether or not she is interested in further contact. The way she reacts to the compliance also reveals something about her true person. At the same time, the compliant tests to see whether the target is interested in the adaptation or the person behind it.

Unconscious Process

The testing process described thus far may seem analytical and calculating. However, the prospective partners are totally unconscious of their actions and simply follow their conscious experiences. The process of deciding whether or not they have found the right person is an intuitive one, and as far as each is concerned, all he or she doing is obeying the dictates of the heart.

Blog 23. Lovers’ Bonding: Building Relationship

Reducing Distance

Each time the lovers-to-be interact with each other, they receive more answers to their questions. When the contact gambit meets with a positive response, they move that little bit closer to each other and their feelings, and in this way gradually build up a relationship. Each positive response to a test strengthens their mutual bonds and reduces their mutual distance.

Building Relationship

At the same time, they become increasingly open to their own emotional reactions, and it is here where we find another function of the contact rebus: it helps to build a relationship of growing intra and inter-psychic intimacy. The repeated tests gradually raise the tension between the two lovers, who prepare themselves for eventually moving closer to each other and themselves in an overt, open manner.

Consequently, much emotion has been invested by the time they meet openly and embrace. The period of time before the unveiling takes place differs from case to case. It may happen instantly or relationships can take longer to form, passing first through an unconscious stage and then a bridge-building stage, which at first might not even be recognised as such. (Motivational Work, part 1: Values and Theory, page 109 – 159).

Hierarchy

Once a relationship has been established on the intra- and interpsychic planes, several more tests follow, with a hierarchy of tests slowly forming as each successive contact rebus follows the solution of the one before. If the lovers are to have the courage to show their feelings overtly and make contact with themselves and others, they might have found it necessary to test each other in several possible ways first.

Blog 24. Lovers’ Bonding: Succession of Contact Rebuses

Order of Succession

The contact rebus has a multi-layer structure in which each type of test gradually deepens the relationship. All layers of depth are needed to construct a relationship. One can thus say that the contact rebus is designed in an order of succession. So, for example, the compliance rebus might be followed by the aggression rebus. The interrelationship between the tests can be a complex one, however, and the trajectory of rebus succession need not be linear. In fact, the same kinds of test can recur more than once, each time with a slightly different spin (Motivational Work, part 1: Values and Theory, page 109 – 159.

Building Blocks

This order of succession is based on a series of building blocks, whereby some of the tests form the foundation of the edifice and others the body. To extend the metaphor further, the longest time is spent laying the foundations, and once they are down, the pace of building can increase so that the superstructure itself takes relatively little time to complete. The initial unwitting phase of a relationship is analogous to the laying of a building’s foundations; it takes a long time and produces no visible results. It is only when the storeys are added that things become more obvious.

Building a Skyscraper

At the time of writing, a skyscraper is being built in the author’s hometown. It has a special twisted form and has been designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatravas. The building will be 190 metres and 54 storeys tall when completed. Building began in February 2001 with excavation work, and it wasn’t until March 2002 that the 15-metre deep pit was ready.

During this entire period, all that could be seen was a wooden screen, behind which nothing much seemed to be happening. One weekend, from a Friday morning to the following Sunday evening, a mixer truck came and went every four minutes as the builders cast the foundations. The concrete had to be filled constantly so that a solid mass 7 metres thick and 30 metres in diameter could form.

On top of this concrete base, the bottom skeleton of the building was cast from massive concrete pipes, forming a space that houses two basement levels. The work finished in June 2002, and it was not until then, 15 months after the initial excavation had begun, that the structure started to rise above ground level.

Work progressed more quickly, with one storey being completed every week, until (after a brief delay) the skeleton of the skyscraper stood ready. It was then September 2004 and a year before the skyscraper was due to open its doors. So, looking at the time-line of its construction, the skeleton took 27 months to build, its completion another 12 months, and the foundation 15 months; this means that for 28 percent of the time, nothing of the building site could be seen other than the wooden screen.

Unconscious

A fundamental property of the lovers’ contact rebuses is worth repeating: they are not rationally calculated. At first, the enamoured is unaware of what he is doing, and his tests are unconscious. The process then continues without either side being able to explain what is happening until the relational building programme has progressed so far as to bring about a certain degree of relational salience.

None of the couples described in this chapter have any initial awareness of what they are doing to each other, and as far as they are concerned “things just happen”. Moreover, the awareness process is not necessarily similar for the two, and the one party can become more quickly aware of their blossoming relationship than the other.

Spectators

We can gauge the unconscious quality of two people’s love by studying the reactions of the people around them. It is not uncommon to find that everyone else is able to see their feelings for each other long before they do; and this too provides the dramatic irony of many a film and play. Audiences often understand immediately that the two stars are in love with each other, the tension lying in just how the protagonists will discover this too.

Blog 25. Lovers’ Bonding: A Fairy Tale

Introduction

The enamoured also test whether or not they have found the right person, someone to enrich their lives and protect them from harm. By virtue of how the indirect gambit is designed, the individual also receives positive affirmation from someone with the very personal traits needed. The following (loosely retold) fairy tale may serve to illustrate the importance of this function of the contact gambit (Motivational Work part 1: Values and Theory, page 117 – 122).

The Fairy Tale

Once upon a time, there was a princess called Margarete who lived in a land far, far away. She was a beautiful young woman of 20 summers, and she lived in a magnificent castle with her father, the king. Margarete was an only child, for after she was born her mother died of fever. The bereaved king was beside himself with grief, but never once forgot to take care of his daughter, and made sure that she had the kingdom’s best teachers in languages, music, dance, song and mathematics.

The king went to great pains to meet his daughter every day, even when he had a lot of ruling to do in his kingdom, and would sit and listen to her tell him what she had learnt that day. Often, Margarete and her father would ride through the leafy forests that surrounded the castle.

The years went by and the king started to get over his grief, but not once did he meet a woman he wanted to wed. This was a problem for the kingdom as the law said that only sons could inherit the throne, so if the king died, there would have been no one to succeed him. His only hope of securing his dynasty was if Margarete got married, for then her husband would inherit the throne.

One day the king started to realize he was growing too old to be king. So he summoned his daughter, who was now famed throughout the kingdom for her wisdom and skills, and told her that it was time for her to find a husband, and like all good daughters, she was only too pleased to obey him.

Heralds were dispatched to all corners of the kingdom (and, to be on the safe side, the neighbouring kingdoms too) to announce to the people: “Her majesty the princess intends to be wed. Any man who wants to be her husband and crown prince must be in the royal town square next Saturday at twelve o’clock with his horse. The one who manages to perform a certain task correctly will win her majesty’s hand in marriage!”

The heralds’ message spread like the wind to all the kingdom’s young men, and many felt ready and willing to take up the challenge. All the kingdom’s subjects wondered what the task would be, and because the princess was considered very wise, they all thought it had to be something very clever indeed.

The big day finally arrived for Margarete to choose a husband. A large crowd of young men had collected in the town square, where a long scarlet carpet had been laid that led up to the princess upon a throne of ivory and precious stones.

She looked radiant in her light blue dress and a tiara of gold and rubies in her long golden hair. Beside her stood her bodyguards and a little further away sat the king, who, even though he trusted his daughter, was feeling very nervous. A crowd of townspeople stood by, watching in silence with baited breath. Who would it be?

The princess lifted her hand as a sign that she wanted to speak, and with her pretty voice said: “Whoever can ride his horse along this carpet up to my feet without creasing or dirtying it will be the man I choose. Let the trial begin!” The people cheered for their princess and an excited murmur spread throughout the crowd.

The young men came from good families and were all very rich. They were dressed in their finest velvet garments and rode on the noblest of steeds. Then out came the first suitor, riding very carefully. Suddenly his horse was startled by a bird and shied, wrinkling the carpet and setting off a disappointed murmur through the crowd. One by one the men rode out onto the carpet, but all of them failed to complete the task.

The sun passed its peak and morning turned to afternoon. The trial would soon have to be cancelled, and the crowd started to grow nervous. What if no-one passed the test? Finally, the last man tried and he too failed. In fact, he was so nervous that he fell off his horse onto the carpet. It looked as if the princess wasn’t going to get a husband after all.

Just then a young boy turned up in peasant clothes. Some of the townspeople knew him as the son of a local farmer, and he came along riding bareback on a large farm horse. With wild, powerful leaps the horse galloped onto the carpet and ripped it to shreds.

Everyone shook their heads in dismay, for he too had failed the test. When the young man reached the princess’s throne he bent down, hoisted the princess up onto his horse and kissed her passionately. The princess looked round and cried, “He’s the one I want!”

The crowd burst into cheers and whoops of joy. At last, the princess had found a husband and the kingdom a crown prince. The king cried tears of happiness. The wedding was soon arranged and lasted for a whole week. And they all lived happily ever after.

The Princess’s Testing

The test set by the princess has the same function as that set by a person in love. There is a defensive function to the task preventing her from being openly rejected, which happens indirectly as each young man fails. There is also a contact gambit in her task, although this time it is an overt one as the princess has openly demonstrated her need to find a husband.

The contact gambit is therefore not concealed, and because it is indirect it also has a strengthening effect on positive affirmation, earning the princess a more intense response than would otherwise be the case.

Her task fulfils, however, yet another function. It is designed so that one man and one man only will understand her and her needs. The message is coded and can only be deciphered by someone with the right characteristics, which makes the princess’s test highly specific and purposeful.

This property of the test is common to all contact gambits, for it is designed to seek out and appeal to people with specific qualities. At the same time, the contact gambit demands that the intended is able to express an appreciation of what the test entails so that the correct response involves displaying certain characteristics and expressing an emotional understanding of the test itself.

Who is it then that the princess seeks so purposefully? We can image that she is not after some social climber who is only out to win the crown and the kingdom. What she does not want is someone who will perform the test simply to earn honour, fame and power.

What she is looking for is a young man who loves her for who she is. If the suitor dutifully complies with her rules, he shows that he is more interested in the throne. The test is thus cunningly designed as a Catch-22 that is impossible to accomplish. If, however, he has the wherewithal to break the rules, it is a sign that the princess is the most important thing for him; a sign that he loves her.

The princess’s rules are also designed to allow her to carry out a simultaneous personality test. We can imagine that she does not wish for a sycophantic wimp who bows to her every command (i.e. someone who is careful, reserved and compliant). Such a man would fail the test. What she wants is an equal partner, a man with a mind of his own who has the courage to show intimacy, who can handle being in the public eye, and who has a laid-back attitude to authority.

To the young man who understands the concealed message, the princess is announcing that she will love someone who does not do exactly what she says and yet shows that he cares for her; in other words, she wants him to make his advances to her in his own way without bothering about the carpet. What matters is his contact gambit with her.

The Peasant Boy’s Testing

In turn, the young peasant boy also tests the princess. After all, if they are to fall in love, there has to be a mutual affirmation. He tests to see if she is the right woman for him by breaking the rules of the task, because if she loved him, she would prioritise contact over obedience; he also tests to ascertain the extent to which she, in turn, is a “wimpess” who really does want such a compliant husband and whether she assents to being physically embraced.

In other words, she must be someone who is at once independent and intimate. He also tests to see how seriously she takes her role as a princess, and if she considers it more important than his love. Finally, by hoisting her up onto his horse, he exhibits a charming defiance of authority.

As we can see, then, the test carried out by the princess also serves as the response to the peasant boy’s contact gambit and vice versa. This means that the contact rebus has the double function of providing positive affirmation, which it fulfils by seeking positive reciprocity in the target. A test is a two-sided coin, of which the opposing faces bear a question and an answer.

From the princess’s perspective, her contact rebus is a test directed at young men; from the peasant boy’s perspective, her test is a positive affirmation of his own contact rebus. We can imagine the contact rebus as an outstretched hand that matches only a few other outstretched hands. When two such hands meet, contact is made in a clasp that is at once question and answer.

Indirect Contact Gambit

As mentioned previously, this tale is also an illustration of another function of the test, namely the indirect contact gambit. By virtue of its concealed nature, it elicits a greater emotional response from the best suitor than would have been the case had the channel of communication been overt and explicit.

The princess’s test is a challenge designed to engage the emotional commitment of her suitors, who are more touched by this method of expressing a desire to wed than they would have been had she simply invited them to the castle for an interview. Presumably, some would have seen this as a challenge, but the princess is clearly not interested in such suitors. What she wants is someone who is comfortable with a challenge that demands action.

In that the young men have to perform the test physically and emotionally, it is more difficult for them to hide themselves and they are compelled to expose, in their behaviour, their true selves. Agreeing to take part in the test is an answer in itself, and the young men have to immediately decide whether or not they are interested in marrying the princess.

How they then perform as equestrians says even more about who they are and what they feel. Moreover, the task they have to perform is extremely expository as they have to bare themselves to the scrutiny of a large crowd.

To pass the princess’s test, however, they need to do more than just the “right” thing; they also have to put their heart into their performance to meet the princess’s need for a man who is explicitly passionate and able to understand and accept her test.

If this emotional component was absent, she could be seduced by a contestant who, although coolly calculating, was also able to show empathy and end up being cheated. One way for her to protect herself against such an individual is to exercise her own empathetic skills and openness towards others. When sitting astride the young man’s horse, she has a particularly good opportunity to discover whether or not he exudes love.

The peasant boy’s test is also compellent, in that by refusing to obey the rules, he forces the princess to respond on the spot. But the situation is more than compellent; it is also public, observed as it is by a large mass of subjects. Like her, the peasant boy can test if she exudes love and empathy.

The princess puts herself in a situation in which she finds it hard not to show her feelings. The rules say that she has to marry the man who performs the task correctly, and she has to judge every contestant. In setting these rules she paints herself into a corner, as she has to show by her actions what she feels. The situation is also one that demands her own engagement, as it is thus also a test that is directed inwards at herself.

Similarly, the peasant boy’s actions are also turned in on himself. He chooses a situation in which he has to show where he stands emotionally and that also helps him to feel engaged in what he is doing.

The contact rebus, or test, is dual-directional, aimed both at the individual himself and at the object of his love. In other words, there is both an intrapsychic and interpsychic component to the contact rebus, which forms the relational link between himself and his world.

Blog 26. Lovers’ Bonding: Romeo and Juliet

Love between two people differs in terms of its longevity. By way of illustration, consider Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which the love of the eponymous couple is brief but intense (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 135 -139).

The Play

Romeo and Juliet live in Verona and come from two feuding families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Both are mere youngsters. At the start of the play, Romeo is bewailing his unrequited love for Rosemunda. His friends persuade him to go to a party where he might meet a new girl to fall in love with. Meanwhile, Juliet’s mother is busy telling her that at 14 she is reaching marriageable age. Present is also Juliet’s wet-nurse. Her father holds a party at their home, to which everyone is invited except the Montagues. Romeo and his friends get to hear of the party and sneak in wearing disguises.

As soon as he sets eyes on Juliet he falls in love, unaware that she is a Capulet. When the dancing starts, he makes sure to dance with Juliet and declare his love for her. It is reciprocated immediately by Juliet, who is also unaware that he is a Montague. When they finish dancing they ask other guests what their names are. The fact that they belong to families with an ancient grudge does not change their feelings for each other.

After the party, Romeo hides in Juliet’s orchard. Soon, she emerges onto her balcony and speaks aloud to herself of her love for Romeo. He reveals himself and together they profess their love for each other once again. They decide to marry in secret and Juliet promises to send Romeo a message the next day so they can make plans for the wedding. Romeo arranges for his old friend and confessor Friar Laurence to conduct the service.

The nurse is informed and Juliet arrives under the pretext of going to confession, and the two are married. Her nurse arranges a rope ladder so that Romeo can climb up to Juliet for their wedding night. When it’s all over and Romeo and Juliet go their separate ways,

Romeo and his friends run into a group of young men of the Capulet clan. He refuses to be drawn into a duel with Juliet’s cousin Tybalt and does not rise to the challenge. So a duel breaks out between Tybalt and Romeo’s friend; Romeo tries to intervene, and in doing so indirectly causes the murder of his friend. Romeo is plunged into rage and despair, and rushes madly after Tybalt, challenges him to a duel and kills him.

All this happens in the open, and the word soon spreads. Romeo is then banished by the Prince of Verona on pain of imprisonment and death should he return. Romeo goes into hiding with Friar Laurence, to whom he reveals his thoughts of suicide.

There’s a knock at the door and in comes Juliet’s nurse, who joins the Friar in raising Romeo’s hopes that he will eventually be able to live with his Juliet. Before Romeo leaves town, he and Juliet spend the night together. They part at dawn, not knowing when they will see each other again, and swear undying fidelity.

That morning, Juliet is told by her parents that they intend to marry her off to a young count, Paris, the next day. At first, she refuses, and her parents threaten to disown her. The nurse agrees with them, and in her despair, Juliet begs Friar Laurence to help her.

He gives Juliet a potion that will put her into a death-like sleep for 42 hours. The plan is that Romeo will then find her in her burial chamber, she will wake and they will flee. Juliet pretends to acquiesce to her parents’ wishes, and that evening drinks the potion.

Everyone believes she is dead and she is given a funeral. Friar Laurence sends word to Romeo about the potion, but it fails to reach him. On hearing that Juliet has died, Romeo decides to take his own life and buys a phial of poison from the apothecary.

That night he goes to Juliet’s coffin, kisses her one last time and takes the poison. Soon thereafter Juliet wakens and finding her Romeo dead by her side, kills herself with his knife. Their respective parents find them lying dead in the chamber, and before their dead children swear a pact of peace between the two families.

The Gambit

The story of Romeo and Juliet is an example of a contact gambit that elicits an intense and passionate love. Their bonding includes elements of compliance and withdrawal. When Juliet’s father bans members of the Montague family from Juliet’s party, there is already a contact via withdrawal, which Romeo interprets as an indirect invitation to attend.

He falls in love with Juliet at first sight, and Juliet, through her body language and facial expressions, sends signals to Romeo that pierce his heart. He, meanwhile, transmits his own amorous signals to Juliet. Their contact intensifies when they dance with each other, to the point where they are able to openly communicate via eye and body contact. He also talks to Juliet.

All these contact gambits are a form of compliance behaviour, and are thus a positive, albeit coded, way of making contact. At the same time the lovers-to-be are also partly concealed behind masks and are ignorant of each other’s identity, and in this sense, it is also a withdrawal form of contact.

However, they respond to this situation by finding out each other’s names, at which point they realise that any further contact would be illicit. This establishes a very powerful test of withdrawal, and in retaining their feelings of love in defiance of their family feud, they give each other profound positive affirmation.

After the party there is another moment of withdrawal on a very concrete level: Juliet remains in the house, and Romeo leaves. They respond to this withdrawal by trying to reach out to each other. Juliet goes out onto her balcony and talks aloud to herself, allowing Romeo the chance to overhear should he be nearby. He, in turn, has crept into her orchard, from where he responds to her advances.

Marrying is another method by which the one tests the love of another. Romeo’s duel with Tybalt can also be seen as a kind of withdrawal contact gambit, as it means he will not be able to meet Juliet. Moreover, he has killed one of Juliet’s closest relatives and has thus established an aggressive contact gambit as well.

Juliet responds by holding on to her love for Romeo, and they spend the night together. When Juliet visits Friar Laurence and receives the sleeping draught, it is her way of showing trust for Romeo and his confidant. The tragic ending comes about when Romeo fails to see Juliet’s subterfuge and believes her dead. It was a contact gambit too concealed for him to understand.

The Tests

The tests that the lovers proffer each other fulfil the functions mentioned previously. The couple is unable to be overt about their true feelings for each other, as they risk being openly rejected. At the party, Juliet shows her interest through her body language, while Romeo’s mode of communication is more verbal.

Both are wearing masks and are unaware of the other’s name, and in this ignorance of identity they elicit strong affirmation of the other’s love: if Romeo (or Juliet) wishes to continue the relationship despite their families’ feud, he (or she) must clearly be in love. The bad blood between the Montagues and Capulets paradoxically allows the two star-crossed lovers to receive immediate and intense confirmation of the other’s love.

When they then make positive contact with each other, they do so indirectly as well. Juliet speaks aloud into the night air rather than appealing directly to Romeo, who, in turn, remains undercover until Juliet has spoken. Marriage is an example of a compliance rebus, and they test each other by assaying the consequences of their positive advances.

Then, when Romeo has committed his act of violence, he is really evaluating Juliet’s love and loyalties. Juliet confides fully in Romeo’s confessor, testing whether or not Romeo is to be trusted in turn. All the while the couple take steps towards ever-greater intimacy as they protect themselves, express their feelings, and transmit/receive powerful, indirect affirmation.

They also use their indirect contact to test whether they have found the right person. Romeo has just been through a period of unrequited love, and is apparently in dire need of a positive response from his chosen one. He is probably in doubt as to whether anyone can genuinely love him. Rosemunda and Juliet can be taken to represent the two different love relationships that Romeo is seeking.

If he chooses the “Rosemunda” type, he will possibly find his unreciprocated feelings hard to bear yet comforting, as he need not doubt her feelings for him. Should he have the courage to choose the “Juliet” type, on the other hand, he will find a genuine love yet be plagued by doubt.

In choosing a Capulet, and murdering one to boot, Romeo makes sure to elicit an unambiguous response from Juliet. If she loves him, it means her feelings for him are more important than family loyalties. Her acceptance of his hand gives him further powerful and positive affirmation.

Juliet, for her part, has a family that seems largely indifferent to her, to the extent that if she refuses to marry Paris they will disown her. In other words, they are only prepared to accept her if she lives up to their expectations. Juliet seems to be looking for someone for whom social conformity and façades are unimportant. The fact that Romeo is a Montague tells her that Romeo is a feelings-man rather than a façade-man, and demonstrates this right from their first encounter with his candid declaration of love.

Marrying her confirms this lack of convention. Juliet is looking for a devoted partner whom she really can trust. Granted, Romeo’s murdering of Tybalt, and the subsequent end it puts to their chances of meeting may make her doubt his love, but it does demonstrate that compliance is of no importance to him.

Both the young lovers are in doubt that they can be loved for who they are, and it is this that, in one way, leads to their untimely and tragic deaths. Romeo might well have been convinced that he would never meet someone who really loves him, and his insecurity pushes him to test things with a brutal act of violence. Juliet also discovers that she can not trust the man she loves when she wakes to find his dead body beside her. Both lovers’ hopes and mutual love have been dashed.

Consequently, their insecurity and doubt is as much the source of their love as the cause of their deaths. Theirs is a love story that is both gripping and tragic, and that will never cease to fascinate.

Blog 27. Transmitted and Received Contact Rebus

There are two types of contact rebus in the interaction between two people (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 139 – 159). The enamoured transmits a contact rebus to his love interest. If the love is to be reciprocated, the love interest must respond in kind. He therefore transmits and receives a contact rebus; that which for the one is the transmitted rebus for the other is the received rebus. These two properties carry different functions. The functions of the transmitted rebus are those thus far described for the contact rebus, namely:

* To act as a defence against the pain of injury at the hands of another

* To act as a channel for the expression of feelings

* To seek out the right partner

* To facilitate a sincere and unambiguous response

* To build, maintain and develop a relationship with another person

Embedded within this last function is also an indirect plan to end the relationship. It is actually the third function (seeking out the right partner) that determines whether the relationship will be developed. This component is present not only during the creation phase but at all times, its function having been explained during the threshold rebus discussion above, and drives the couple to test unrelentingly whether their chosen partner is indeed the right one.

For love to be mutually felt in a relationship, it must be affirmed by the response contact rebus transmitted by the recipient of the precipitant contact rebus. In other words, the response from the person to whom one transmits a rebus must in some way match the transmitted rebus. Therefore, each contact rebus is dual-purpose, serving both as a question from the transmitter and a response from the receiver. The functions of the received contact rebus, which is also the mirror image of the transmitted rebus, are as follows:

* To receive emotions and feelings

* To receive a response about the rightness of partner

* To receive a sincere and unambiguous response

* To build, maintain and develop a relationship with another person

Discussion of Case Study “Lovers’ Bonding: A Fairy Tale”

The story of the princess and the peasant boy (see “Blog 25. Lovers’ Bonding: A Fairy Tale)” can serve to illustrate the dual-directional “question and answer” functionality of the contact rebus. When the princess presents the task that the young men have to perform in order to win her love, the functions of the transmitted contact rebus are fulfilled, and she is protected from being openly rejected. She is able to hide behind the task that she has set, and if a suitor does not want her it will be because he is unable to complete the task, not because she does not attract him as a person. The test is a way for her to indirectly express her yearning for love.

In laying the red carpet, the princess sets in motion a process of finding a suitable man. The suitor must, by virtue of the test he is required to complete, make more of an effort than if he was simply to propose to her: not only must he be at the town square at the right time on the right day, he must also be prepared to perform, in competition with others, under the gaze of the crowd.

The carpet test also serves to create and develop a relationship between the princess and the “right” partner, and it is through this initial test that the bridge-building process can begin.

At the same time, the princess’s test is also a response to the suitors. To all of them bar one, her answer implies that her wishes are out of alignment with their transmitted contact rebus, which they base upon the belief that the princess really does mean them to ride carefully along the carpet. As for the peasant boy, he receives a response from her that matches his question.

Her contact rebus is a form of protection for him since in ostensibly performing the test he avoids the risk of being openly rejected by her. The way the princess has set up the task allows him to receive her feelings of longing and gives him indirect and subsequently direct confirmation that he has found the right person.

The princess shows him a more sincere and unambiguous response than she could if directly professing her yearning for love. In doing this, she is putting herself in a vulnerable position, and does so in public; she also puts a great deal of energy into the test in its planning and execution. At the same time, her response fulfils the same purpose as before: creating and developing a relationship.

In the same way, the peasant boy’s contact rebus has a transmitted and received function. His transmitted contact rebus gives him protection and is a way for him to express his love. He also uses it to test if the princess is the right woman for him. Further, his contact rebus elicits for him a more sincere and unambiguous answer than if he had directly proposed to her. His conduct enables him to make sure that a relationship is created and developed.

However, his transmitted contact rebus is also the princess’s received contact rebus. She is protected by the fact that he will not openly reject her. She also indirectly receives feelings from him. His way of performing the task gives her a more intense and unambiguous response than if he had proposed directly, while his behaviour in the test confirms to the princess that she has found the right partner. Finally, as with the other contact rebuses, it facilitates the creation and development of a relationship.

Sequential Interaction

From this example, we can also see that the transmitted-received function is sequential rather than simultaneous. The partners respond to each other alternately; the princess begins with a request, which doubles as information. In turn, the peasant boy poses a question to the princess while supplying an answer to her previous question. The whole process is an alternating ritual of interaction in which the two sides take turns to ask questions and give replies.

Blog 28. Main Function of the Contact Rebus

To sum up, we can find one general principle that holds true for all contact rebus functions (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 158) :

All functions of the contact rebus serve to ensure the optimum maintenance and reinforcement of a person’s life force so that he or she may live and develop along both the intra- and interpsychic dimensions.

The contact rebus exists in all kinds of relationships, not just those that exist between lovers. Thus, the contact rebus theory is a general theory of how people bond and how they deal with the life force inherent to their positive cores.

The contact rebus is not a “thing” in the human psyche; rather it is a term for a complex and vital function in the psyche’s way of responding. The building blocks of the contact rebus can, therefore, comprise all the different parts of a human mind. Intrinsically, this could be thoughts and feelings; extrinsically, words and deeds.

Blog 29. The Teenager Contact Rebus

As we have demonstrated, contact rebuses exist not only in romantic liaisons but in all relationships. To gain further understanding of the prerequisites for motivational work and the functions of contact rebuses, we must also describe the relationship between parents and children. When two people are in love, the relationship is equal in that both partners have the same needs to fulfil.

However, the parent-child relationship is based on two unequal parties; the onus is on one to look after the other and the parent has different needs to that of the child. Another difference is that contact rebuses in children and teenagers take on another guise to those of adults. As before, we will continue our discussion of only the manifestly motivated (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 159 – 205).

Case Study

Alice is 13 years old and a very conscientious and responsible girl. She is one of the top pupils in her class and sets a high standard for herself when it comes to homework and various assignments, whilst she also regularly participates in a number of extracurricular activities. When agreeing about family arrangements, Alice’s parents really feel they can trust their daughter, and Alice now discusses with them a potential visit to the cinema with a friend that evening.

She has done this before; she knows which bus to take home and to avoid certain areas etc. Alice agrees to be home by 9.30 pm at the latest, and just before leaving, she double checks with her parents that 9.30 pm was the agreed time.

At 10 pm she still hasn’t returned, and her parents are starting to become a little anxious as Alice has always given them a call to tell them she is going to be late. They try to come up with reasonable explanations, such as Alice and her friend have met someone they know, got talking and then forgotten the time.

At 10.30 pm, the parents are getting more anxious and wondering where Alice has got to – the clock is ticking on and there’s still no sign of their daughter. A little over 10.30 pm and they really start to worry and decide that her father will take the car into town to look for her while her mother stays by the phone to be the communication hub.

Just as her father is about to leave, Alice turns up. Her parents are extremely relieved and happy to see her and shower her with hugs and affection. They immediately start to ask her where she has been and tell her how worried they were. They also tell her that her father was about to go and look for her while her mother waited by the phone.

Alice, failing to understand that her late arrival could provoke such reactions, is completely nonplussed at her parents’ agitation and worry. After their visit to the cinema, Alice and her friend thought it would be nice to go and have a cup of tea at a well-known café. They had been there for a while, talking, and then took the bus home.

Alice appears to be very pleased with her parents’ concern for her and asks them several times to relate just how worried they were. As for Alice and her friend, they hadn’t even given a thought to calling home. The next day, Alice’s parents have a talk with her about the implications of coming to an agreement and how one party is affected if the other deviates from it without notification.

Like most parents, they expect her to tell them if she is going to be late and even offer to collect her if necessary. Because they still trust their daughter, Alice’s parents tell her that she can continue to go out by herself. Alice never comes home late in this way again. Either she arrives home on time or calls her parents if she is going to be late, and sometimes asks to be collected.

Discussion

The teenager Alice is demonstrating an extra need for affirmation, and by not being conscientious, she receives greater affirmation than if she always does things right. She finds out how much she means to her parents and how much they love her. She also receives confirmation of how much her parents trust her. Like the person in love, her testing is subconscious. Her actions provoke such strong affirmation that she need not test in this way again.

Further, the social conditioning and boundary setting elements of this test teach Alice that it is important to give notification if she is going to be late and that others will worry if she doesn’t. Since Alice is a secure individual and has parents who love her very much, she does not need to perform a more ‘aggressive’ test than coming home a few hours late. In other words, she is manifestly motivated and so are her parents.

Through the contact rebus, the teenager forces his parents to demonstrate where they stand emotionally. In Alice’s case, the test provokes a stronger reaction from her parents than if they had verbally expressed how much they loved her. Alice receives strong affirmation through the actions of the parents: they both give her a hug when she comes home, her father was going to go and look for her, and her mother was communications standby.

For the parents, anxiety over their daughter also put a stop to all other activities – they had actually been looking forward to some time to themselves. This, in addition to their continuing to trust Alice, is a powerful demonstration of acknowledgement.

Apart from their actions, the more the parents’ emotions escalate, the more they show they care. Whilst actions can be performed in a perfunctory fashion if they are accompanied by strong and apparent emotional responses, the teenager receives greater affirmation.

Blog 30. Untransmuted and Transmuted Contact Rebuses

Untransmuted Contact Rebus

It appears then, that parents have a relatively unmodified contact rebus, the function of which is to first and foremost provide maximum life force. By not modifying the contact rebus, parents do not need to expend energy on such a modification. Life force can be tapped at source, i.e. from the parents’ positive core. Energy is also saved because the teenager does not need to expend his own life force in interpreting the contact rebus. So in this type of situation, the person in love or the teenager employs another form of contact rebus. Although the term is an approximation, we can for the sake of simplicity call this category of contact rebus the untransmuted contact rebus. Here the aim of the contact rebus is to provide life energy. The fact that it is untransmuted is an approximation because a contact rebus always involves some transmutation; for example, parents always have certain personal emotional needs (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 184 – 190).

During the teenager’s adolescence, parents, as well as their teenager, experience change. The family’s life situation may have altered, resulting in new personal needs affecting the parents’ relationship with their teenager. For this reason, parents are constantly faced with situations where their resolve to maintain an untransmuted contact rebus is challenged, as they must prevent their personal needs from infringing on their parental contact rebus as far as possible.

Transmuted Contact Rebus

The transmuted contact rebus appears to be more useful when an individual is in need of a great deal of life force, such as a teenager. When the parents’ untransmuted contact rebus provides a response to the transmuted contact rebus of the teenager, the latter can derive more life force than if he had himself employed an untransmuted one. The parents’ life force takes on greater value if it addresses a teenager’s contact rebus for which effort is required on the part of the parents in order to reciprocate with an untransmuted contact rebus.

In the case of a person in love, the transmuted contact rebus partly fills another function. Here it is important to receive life force from the partner whilst giving back as much as possible. Like the teenage contact rebus, the aim of the romantic contact rebus is to elicit a strong response from the target. However, the desired effect of reciprocity is to build a close, intense and egalitarian relationship and not to one-sidedly rake in as much life force as possible.

Neither is this feasible, as the person in love will receive a different transmuted contact rebus in response. For this reason, teenagers have a greater opportunity to receive life force through a transmuted contact rebus than a person in love. The parent-teenager relationship is already in place and they will receive a response in the form of an untransmuted contact rebus.

In a romantic situation, the partners must first build up a relationship with one another through transmuted contact rebuses that may afterward be replaced by more untransmuted ones. Only then can the person in love receive the same amount of energy as the teenager. However, unlike the latter, there is an interchange of life force through the untransmuted contact rebus.

The transmuted contact rebus is focused on elicitation whilst the untransmuted contact rebus is focused on communication. In this way, transmuted and untransmuted contact rebus are two different strategies for relating to other people, both creating relationships, but in different ways.

Discussion

The untransmuted and transmuted contact rebus make possible different kinds of relationships. Every human being has these two contact rebuses in his relationships. In this way, different kinds of relationships are created from this dichotomy between the two rebuses.

Blog 31. Principles of Transmutation

We can gain further insights on the nature of the contact rebus by examining the principles that govern transmutation. Our previous examples of romantic liaisons and the bonding of children and teenagers with their parents highlight three different governing principles that exist apart from the degree of motivation. For this reason, we can call them neutral or independent principles of transmutation. (Motivational Work; Part 1: Values and Theory, page 227 – 237).

Destruction

A fourth principle of transmutation is directly linked to the degree of motivation and elicits varying degrees of destructiveness from the contact rebus. This fourth principle may be assigned the term destruction and differs from the other principles of transmutation by its very dependence on levels of motivation Destruction is actually more of a transmutation variable arising from the neutral principles of transmutation, meaning that in the manifestly motivated, neutral or independent principles of transmutation are more evident than destruction, whereas in latently motivated individuals, both independent principles of transmutation and destruction are discernable, the latter becoming more noticeable.

Opposites

One principle of transmutation involves the transformation of a positive gambit through opposites. The individual aims his contact rebus at the target with the same untransmuted emotional intensity but his feelings and behaviour are the opposite of what constitutes a positive contact. Aggression is one example whereby love turns to anger and there is intense commitment, but it seems that the individual dislikes rather than loves his target.

Negation

The second principle involves negation of the contact rebus, which to all appearances is a non-contact gambit. Withdrawal is an example of this, such as in a romantic situation where one party demonstrates his love by avoiding contact. Here, the direction of the gambit is reversed and, unlike the principle of opposites where contact is initiated, contact is withdrawn. The intensity of the contact is now transmuted into dedicated avoidance. On a conscious level, feelings are transformed into ambivalence – the individual does not experience any special feelings for the other person, having subjugated them to the contact rebus, where they have now been unleashed in a transmuted form.

Emulation

A third principle involves emulation of a positive gambit. The individual adopts a transmuted approach that retains positivity whilst its components are adapted to the target’s expectations of what constitutes a positive gambit. The individual demonstrates that he is no longer being himself by, for instance, denying feelings of love and only appearing to be concerned about making a good impression.

However, his actions do mean that he directs his contact rebus at his target and actively initiates contact. In this way, his actions are similar to those resulting from the principle of opposites, but intensity of feeling is paralleled by extreme compliance in feelings and actions in order to live up to what the individual perceives his target’s expectations to be.

Blog 32. Embedded Clues

The transmutation of a contact rebus serves to plant clues within it, clues that an observant target will interpret as a genuinely positive gambit. These clues indicate that transmutation has occurred and occasionally reveal just what has been transmuted. However, those possessing the greatest ability to detransmute the contact rebus are independent third parties or individuals responding with an untransmuted contact rebus (Motivational Work, Values and Theory, Part 1, page 235 – 237).

One clue is that different types of discord or dissonance are evident in the contact rebus, meaning that the various rebus components are incongruent with one another or the contact rebus as a whole. One of the challenges of motivational work is trying to identify such dissonance, which demands a sleuth-like mind.

Case Study 1

The same kind of dissonance occurs when two parties involved in an everyday conversation devote a disproportionate amount of energy to it, or when one of the parties feels strong antipathy for the other although they have had no prior acquaintance, as in the following example:

A woman is about to start a computer course with other people from a variety of professions. As soon as Mattie walks into the room, she feels instant antagonism towards him, dismissing him as self-righteous and arrogant and wanting nothing further to do with him. A year later, she marries this same man.

Case Study 2

Where teenagers are concerned, we see evidence of negation in Alice’s contact rebus (a teenager who is home too late at night), dissonance being evident in that although she is well aware of the time she should be back home (and double-checks before leaving) she expresses amazement over her parents’ reaction to her late return. Likewise, there are two dissonant chords in Alice’s blasé attitude: she expends much energy in making a point of not comprehending her parents’ anxiety, and she deviates from her normally conscientious observance of punctuality.

Blog 33. The Constructive Contact Rebus

The contact rebuses of the manifestly motivated are very much more constructive than destructive, the pain mostly being openly exhibited with a small residue being transmuted in the form of demotivation. Thus we can say that the individual has a constructive contact rebus (Motivational Work, Values and Theory, Part 1, page 237 – 277) Nevertheless, we have mentioned that the manifestly motivated may employ relatively indirect contact rebuses which need not be destructive.

The more interested he is in having contact with another person, the greater his need may be to test. For the individual, commitment needs time to establish a bond and to offer abiding protection. When a bond is established, he allows his experience of the other person into his consciousness through the contact rebuses; his guard is thus lowered, and he opens himself up to contact.

In manifestly motivated individuals, constructive forces have the upper hand. Their motivation is strong, and they have an abundance of life energy to assist in the confrontation of a variety of harmful experiences. Moreover, they do not need to receive powerful, positive reinforcements via transmuted gambits, except on particularly important occasions.

Since the manifestly motivated are self-confident and enjoy a positive attitude to themselves, they need less affirmation from others to understand that people have a positive opinion of them. Pain largely emerges in untransmuted form, although a part of this pain is transmuted to demotivation because their life force is frequently insufficient to achieve a wholly untransmuted contact.

The large proportion of motivation in the manifestly motivated person reduces the ambiguity of the gambit in his constructive contact rebus, as it has a lower degree of transmutation than that of the latently motivated. Similarly, the manifestly motivated person allows himself to have more untransmuted contact with his own feelings.

Moreover, his gambits are not as complicated and indirect as that of the latently motivated individual in a similar situation. The manifestly motivated person is bolder in demonstrating who he is, and in this way does not run the risk of his target failing to see his gambit, but he does expose himself to the risk of open rejection in equal measure. He needs to test others but the process is not as complicated and is relatively quick, as the gambit in the contact rebus is more visible.

Case Study

When 45-year-old Ingemar is on the train one day, he meets an old classmate, Leifer, who he hasn’t seen in twenty years. They start to chat and catch up on what has happened in their respective lives over all those years and then they reminisce about old times at school. When they were young, they both shared radical political views.

After some hesitation, Leifer now brings up his current political stance, which is highly critical of his former view. Although he has the feeling that Ingemar still holds on to their old ideals, Leifer chooses to reveal his true self now, as he is interested in renewing their relationship and not just having a superficial one. Ingemar’s reaction to this is vehement. He is agitated by Leifer’s change of attitude and will not discuss it in a calm manner, which Leifer is trying to do.

When they part at the station, Leifer has to admit that there does not appear to be a basis for a renewed relationship. He is also somewhat sad and feels bothered about Ingemar’s lack of respect for him.

Discussion

In showing who he really is to his old classmate, Leifer deliberately takes a risk because it is a pre-requisite for them to re-establish a close relationship with one another. Leifer is also prepared for the pain that distancing would involve, but it would have been more burdensome to Leifer if he had not tried to be open. All the same, he is not interested in displaying this pain as he sees it as possibly intensifying the hurt caused by Ingemar’s reaction.

Nevertheless, we have mentioned that the manifestly motivated may employ relatively indirect contact rebuses which need not be destructive. The more interested he is in having contact with another person, the greater his need may be to test, for example falling in love.

For the individual, commitment needs time to establish a bond and to offer abiding protection. When a bond is established, he allows his experience of the other person into his consciousness through the contact rebuses; his guard is thus lowered, and he opens himself up to contact.

Blog 34. The Destructive Contact Rebus

The more demotivation an individual has, the more he depends on and gravitates towards others, but demotivation also means he becomes more asocial, that is to say more destructive towards others. Moreover, it is a question of establishing contact with others whereby his own needs are put first and his focus is on receiving rather than giving.

This is how we can identify it as a destructive contact and one that differs to social behaviour fuelled by positive life force. Moreover, demotivation here is not directed at having full emotional contact with oneself, as would be the case for the manifestly motivated when being social; transmutation has prevented the individual from having open contact with his pain (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 277).

Destruction helps the individual to find a way of managing his pain, and thus facilitates his survival. He also makes it possible for himself to receive more life energy and thereby experience optimal development. However, if the individual does not receive a life energy boost, such development will never be entirely stunted because he has sufficient life energy to address parts of his pain in untransmuted form.

The consequence of detransmutation of the manifest motivated is that most of the pain dissipates, the residue becoming destructively transmuted. The pain has been processed and the individual has matured.

Through the destructively transmuted contact rebus, a destructive interplay within the individual and with others continues, leading to new pain. However, both destructiveness and pain will be less than before because elements of the original pain have become transmuted. It is like creating a firebreak to stop a forest fire – fighting evil with evil, fighting fire with fire.

Demotivation

Demotivation increases the pressure on the contact-making functions of the contact rebus and intensifies them. Since the individual’s contact rebus involves demotivation, it is able to receive a more unambiguous response from the recipient.

If an individual hurts another person and he still wants contact with him and shows interest, this constitutes greater positive affirmation than if the individual had only behaved constructively in his gambit. The destructive variable also makes it easier for the individual to discern whether he has found someone who genuinely wishes him well.

Demotivation in the contact rebus of the latently motivated intensifies its functions and enables the individual to receive life force from the right person and to activate the transfer of this life energy from him. The latently motivated individual is not modest in his demands, as he is in compellent need of life force.

The most important characteristic of his target then is that he can return surplus life energy, or at least not create a deficit. This is why the latently motivated person will try to interact with everyone he meets in order to achieve this and strives to obtain a powerful and unambiguous response to the destructive variable that makes the contact-seeking functions of his contact rebus more compellent on those who are targeted by it.

Case Study

Lage is on his way to the gym in the centre of the city. As he crosses a road, he notices two men on the opposite side who appear to be substance abusers. They stare at him scornfully and aggressively, and he now realises that it is too late to turn back on the pedestrian crossing as this would provoke them. As he walks past the junkies, one of them very aggressively demands a cigarette and makes a snide remark about Loge’s clothes.

Lager is annoyed and walks past without responding, but the junkie continues to call after him and appears to be getting more aggressive and threatening. Lager carries on walking with a growing sense of unease. He hears footsteps running up behind him and feels an arm on his shoulder.

Lager realises that the junkie has caught up with him and now he has to politely try to explain that he does not have any cigarettes. The junkie is content with this answer and leaves. Afterwards, Lager is disturbed and has a feeling that he has been subjected to an attack of sorts.

Discussion

This is a situation in which the two parties have not had previous contact with one another. The substance abuser is a latently motivated individual in need of more life force, and he exhibits a verbally aggressive and reproachful contact rebus, which later also becomes focused on action. Lager first tries to dismiss the contact rebus but realises that he must be of a cooperative disposition in order to extricate himself from the situation.

While he feels he has been given an invitation to be equally aggressive and offensive in return, Lager chooses to reciprocate with a constructive contact rebus that provides the substance abuser with more life energy than he has imparted to his target.

Blog 35. Parallel between Lovers and Latenly Motivated client

We can now draw parallels between the person in love and the latently motivated. Both are very keen on establishing contact and very indirect in their gambits (according to this line of reasoning we assume that the person in love is manifestly motivated).

For the person in love, his testing is complex because the relationship with the other person is very important and his need for contact is intense. It is a good survival strategy to put a lot of effort into this testing. The contact rebus of the latently motivated is also indirect and complex as he has the same intense need for contact as the person in love. However, the gambit of the latently motivated person is based on a largely desperate need for survival and is filled with demotivation.

To further clarify what is meant by a destructive contact rebus, it may be useful to examine more carefully the similarities and differences between the contact rebuses of the person in love and that of the latently motivated. Both may employ the same three neutral principles of transmutation: opposition (e.g. aggression), negation (e.g. withdrawal) and emulation (e.g. compliance).

What separates the person in love from the latently motivated is how much they utilise the fourth principle of transmutation: destruction. Since our previous examples of people in love are manifestly motivated, there is only a minor element of demotivation in their constructive contact rebuses. In the latently motivated on the other hand, destruction is the dominant principle of transmutation (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 237 – 277 ).

Case Study

Ronald, a 25 year-old patient, comes walking towards his unit’s male psychologist within the hospital grounds. Although the psychologist has individual professional contact with some patients in this unit, Ronald is not amongst his patients.

Keeping a good distance between them as he walks past, Ronald starts to shout at the psychologist, accusing him of being sick in the head. Some days later they bump into each other in the unit day-room. Ronald starts when he sees the psychologist, rushes towards him and positions himself less than a metre away from his face and launches a fresh tirade of abuse about how the psychologist has engineered his (Ronald’s) fiancée’s miscarriage.

The psychologist perceives the patient to be threatening, but after a while, Ronald calms down and they can both sit down in the discussion room, where Ronald now talks about his fiancée’s miscarriage, the truth of which the psychologist has previously been informed by the unit staff.

Discussion

The patient here employs a destructive and aggressive contact rebus towards the psychologist, the latter having been subjected to two different varieties of these. When the psychologist first meets the patient in the hospital grounds, he is confronted with an aggressive, verbal destructive contact rebus with which Ronald maintains a distance from him.

The contact rebus is built up with the help of opposition, verbally exhibited by the patient through his negative comments. In reality, the patient has a positive image of the psychologist and wants contact with him.

However, using the principle of opposition he turns this into a negative image. His emotional expression of aggression means that he reverses the gambit even more, which he further demarcates by keeping a large physical distance from his target. The patient also employs another principle of transmutation, that of negation, and so instead of approaching the psychologist, he keeps his distance. The patient’s contact rebus thus contains cognition, a feeling and physical action.

The positive affirmation is hidden within the contact rebus in the form of dissonance, upon which the transmutation principle of opposition rests. The patient expends a great deal of emotional energy in making contact with the psychologist whilst denying that this is the case.

The transmuted positive affirmation lies in the way that Ronald gets closer to the psychologist and, through his emotional commitment, demonstrates that the latter is very important to him; the dissonance is evident in the maximisation of his criticism of the psychologist and in the instantaneous change (whereby the patient is suddenly very aggressive, without warning).

Finally, dissonance exists in Ronald’s acting in direct opposition to his total life situation: he is in no way forced to have contact with the psychologist but still gravitates towards him.

In this case, the patient is employing the same principles of transmutation as a manifestly motivated person in love. However, as previously explained, the difference here is that the fourth principle of transmutation in the form of destruction is dominant.

On their first encounter, Ronald directs his aggression at the psychologist with a destructive outcome, intending to do psychological harm to him with threats of physical violence that are not implicit in the hail of abuse to which Ronald subjects him.

Moreover, if the patient has such a lack of control over his language, he may also lack control over his behavioural impulses. The verbal expressions are also offensive (i.e. they cause psychological damage) and in this way are also destructive.

The threat is also evident in non-verbal expression such as gestures, posture and tone of voice, through which the patient warns others that he may use physical violence. By maintaining the same distance between himself and the psychologist, there is destructive transmutation in that the patient is threatening. It is also offensive to keep such a long distance away from someone you are addressing.

The functions of the contact rebus are intensified through destruction, and dissonance becomes even more apparent. Why would the patient expend so much emotional energy on someone he despises and dislikes so much?

When the psychologist and patient later meet in the day-room, the other contact rebus comes into play. Here, the patient also employs opposition in painting a negative picture of the psychologist. The transmutation principle of negation exists in verbal form in that the patient absolutely does not want a conversation. In contrast, his negation in the form of maintaining physical distance has disappeared and he is standing very close to the psychologist. By approaching the psychologist in such a tangible manner, Ronald is also employing emulation.

The contact rebus is also transmuted by destruction, meaning the patient is threatening in the same way he was with the previous contact rebus. However, in this contact rebus, even the element that is transmuted by emulation is a threat. The fact that the patient is standing in offensively close proximity constitutes an openly destructive transmutation of this feature of the contact rebus, which is also governed by the transmutation principle of opposition through aggression.

Behind the patient’s contact rebus lies a desire to be given the same access as others on the unit to professional counselling. However, since he is so scared and suspicious, his cry for help is indirect. Destruction reinforces the dissonance in his contact rebus in the same way as before: the patient expends a great deal of energy on someone he appears to have no faith in whatsoever.

Finally, by having a discussion with the psychologist, the patient switches to a contact rebus that is based on emulation, whereby he is complying with the psychologist’s expectations.

Blog 36. Origins of Latent Motivation: Childhood

As opposed to the manifestly motivated child, the latently motivated child has been given so little nourishment for his positive core that his contact rebuses have become overwhelmingly destructive, and his demotivation has outpaced his motivation.

This condition arises when the positive core does not receive sufficient nourishment in the form of positive affirmation, and when the social atom emanates more demotivation than motivation (i.e. it is not loving enough). Instead, the child mainly receives negative feedback from his environment, and, on balance, destructive contact rebuses from his parents and others.

This breeds considerable anguish in the child, and because the life force he receives is too weak for him to deal with this external demotivation, his contact rebuses become chiefly destructive. Development and maturity will have to wait: the child’s prime concern now is to invest energy in surviving and appealing for help (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 277 – 292).

Jonathan, 12, and a younger friend find themselves in trouble with the police after just having tried to snatch a bag from an elderly woman. Jonathan is aggressive and will not admit to having run away from home. He ends up being taken into a children’s home, where the staff discovers bruises covering his body.

When a doctor comes to examine him, he flees from the home but is found by his parents and returned. He tells the staff that his parents have ordered him to lie about the beatings to which they subject him.

Case Study

He later gives to the social worker leading the subsequent inquiry an account of how his parents treat him, and when his mother is subsequently confronted with this, she says that she and her husband can no longer cope and want the authorities to take care of their son. She also tells them that Jonathan has frequently threatened them, and blames this and his general antisocial behavior on a brain injury.

Back at the children’s home, Jonathan admits to the staff that he has always felt unwanted by his parents and that he doesn’t want to live anymore. On researching into his case, his social worker discovers a history of aggression from playschool onwards and accounts of bullying at the hands of his classmates.

When he was ten, for example, his parents accepted an invitation to contact the child psychiatry clinic, where he was either compliant and well-behaved or very aggressive towards the staff.

Discussion

Jonathan uses his very destructive contact rebus to make a desperate appeal for help, both to his parents and to other adults. He is most aggressive and threatening, yet on occasions can be quite acquiescent.

His parents’ destructive contact rebuses give him back a certain amount of life energy, as, rather than being indifferent to him, they are actually conveying transmuted positive affirmation to him via their physical and mental abuse, (i.e. violence at the hands of his father, and denunciations of being worthless and unwanted from both).

Once the child is latently motivated, he enters (as Jonathan illustrates) a vicious circle, in which he continues to hunger for the life energy he needs to survive, keep his pain in check and appeal for help.

The demotivation inherent to the contact rebus impels him to construct experiences that conform to his deeply negative self-image, affirmation of which he constantly seeks from others in order to survive. In being destructive both to himself and those around him, the child simultaneously keeps his anguish at a distance and emits an appeal for help, his destructive contact rebus receiving life force in the form of demotivation.

The latently motivated child is abandoned, betrayed and hated. He stands isolated and forsaken, full of pain, appealing desperately for help.

If the child continues to be latently motivated, his demotivation will accompany him into adulthood. Thus, the fact that he has lived with latent motivation since childhood is one of the reasons an adult may be latently motivated, however, unlike the child, the adult has a fully formed psyche, in which the latent motivation has become entrenched.

The house is built and furnished, so to speak, even though the foundations are unstable and the supporting walls weak. The latently motivated adult has an adult’s emotional needs and is no longer in the child’s overt state of dependency.

Blog 37. Origins of Latent Motivation: Traumatic Events in Adulthood

Single traumatic events can also cause latent motivation. This means that a manifestly motivated person can also, even as an adult, be latently motivated. He can encounter destructivity that is too intense for him to ward off the inevitable pain.

Manifestly motivated children who live with manifestly motivated parents can also become latently motivated when their social atoms (from which they draw life energy) are unable to deal with some deeply painful experience (Motivational Work, Part 1 Values and Theory, page 292).

Consequently, there are no guarantees that anyone will remain manifestly motivated. Everyone has his breaking point, so that regardless of how strong his positive core is, a person can still be propelled by severe pain into a state of latent motivation.

The roots of the latent motivation lie in the interaction between the external trauma and the positive core when the individual does not have enough life force to deal with the pain and attain emotional contact with it.. For the child, it means receiving insufficient life energy from his social atom.

A traumatic situation, such as being a hostage, can entail immense pain even if one has a great deal of life energy. Being a soldier in combat is another example of an individual experiencing unbearable pain. The manifestly motivated person cannot cope with the pain caused by destructivity, which can also come from external conditions such as natural disasters, disease, and so forth.

Blog 38. Origins of Latent Motivation: Life Crisis

It is not only traumatic events that can render an adult or child latently motivated. The more the components of a person’s life fail to affirm the adult individual or the figures in the child’s social atom, the greater is the risk that he will be latently motivated.

Take a father who is the cause of a motor accident in which his wife and children die; he then finds out that he has malignant cancer and is wrongly convicted of false accounting, leaving him with a fine that will irreversibly cripple his personal finances. When will his pain prove unbearable?

The weaker a person’s positive core, the less external strain is needed for him to become latently motivated. In some cases, ordinary life crises such as unemployment, divorce, serious disease or grief are enough to cause intolerable pain.

Even if the person’s life force in the personal conceptions he developed from childhood is not that strong, he might still draw a measure of support from some isolated aspect of his life context that has the resources to empower him with positive affirmation, such as being good at his job or having a healthy network of friends (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 293 -303).

Case Study

Yngve is an established artist. After ten years of marriage, his wife divorces him. It comes as a serious blow to him and he takes to the bottle. His artist friends help to get him into a detox centre, and continue to support him until he soon finds himself back at the easel.

Discussion

Here, Yngve has an asset in his network and in his artistic creativity, which give him the energy he needs to prevent a deterioration of his drinking habits. We can imagine that his divorce caused a pain that he will always carry with him, and as long as his life remains unproblematic, the energy inherent to his social atom and within himself should suffice.

However, a person’s life situation is often geared to the strength of his positive core, so that the stronger the former, the greater capacity he has to arrange an affirming existence.

When someone goes from being manifestly to latently motivated, the same phenomenon arises as in childhood, and his contact rebuses become increasingly filled with demotivation.

Blog 39. Aggressor-Victim Contact Rebus

The destructive aggressor-victim contact rebus contains a test as to whether others will connect with either the aggressor or victim role. This element of the contact rebus takes the form of role-testing that, when carefully observed, is of much help to the motivational worker. Within the contact rebus is a hidden invitation to associate with either the role of aggressor or victim (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 308 – 367).

Case Study

Thirty-five-year-old Felix has been living at a hostel for the homeless for the past two weeks now. All of the hostel staff are afraid of him as he has behaved threateningly a few times and they know that he has been incarcerated for assault on numerous occasions.

That evening, Felix goes ballistic and trashes all the furniture in the communal lounge in a fit of screaming and swearing. None of the staff dare do anything until the hostel manager comes in, takes Felix by the arm and asks him how he feels. Felix quietens down and starts to cry, after which he sits and talks to him about his problems for quite some time.

Discussion

This aggressively anti-social contact rebus invites the staff to become either aggressors or victims. In angering and hurting people, Felix tests whether anyone will respond by returning his violence to bring him back in line (in which case the person would become an aggressor) or if anyone will be scared and immobilised (in which the person would become a victim).

It appears as though all of the staff adopt the role of victim apart from the manager, who solves the contact rebus not by adopting the aggressor or victim role, but by giving affirmation to the suffering individual who is concealed within the contact rebus.

Blog 40. Destructive Contact Rebus and Age

There are qualitative differences between the contact rebuses of latently motivated children and youths and latently motivated adults. Adults display more concealed and complex contact rebuses than young people because the adult psyche is fully developed and has more life experience, meaning that it contains a larger register of behaviour types and their subtleties.

Latently motivated adults can add more dimensions to their contact rebuses while those of children and teenagers are more open and obvious, making it easier to see their cry for help. If an adult has become latently motivated as a child, a long experience of negative feedback can make the cry for help all the more complicated (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 322 – 325).

Case Study 1

A male and female social worker pay a visit to a married couple in their home. Both clients are known to have a history of abuse. The 38 year-old husband, Ebbe is also known to be violent and has spent time in jail for GBH. Both clients are obviously intoxicated when the social workers arrive, which causes them to urge the couple to stop their drinking.

As the social workers are about to leave, the 32 year-old wife, Pia, turns to the female social worker in a private moment while her male colleague is talking to Pia’s husband.

Pia shows the social worker strangulation marks on her neck, claiming it is the work of her husband. The social worker is not brave enough to take Ebbe to task about this immediately for fear of his aggression, but she suggests that Pia leave the apartment with her, which Pia refuses to do.

Instead, they arrange a time for her to visit social services and the two social workers leave. During her meeting with social services the next day, Pia makes light of the assault she has been subjected to and wishes neither to report her husband to the police nor to move to sheltered accommodation.

Case Study 2

Agnes, aged 17, has been admitted to a juvenile care institution because she has been subjected to incest and can no longer live at home. Agnes has developed a special attachment to her social worker, who is also one of the female staff at the institution. One evening, Agnes disappears. The social worker finds out from the other girls at the institution that Agnes is at a hotel in the city with a man she met over the Internet.

This angers and distresses Agnes’s social worker a great deal so she goes over to the hotel, finds out which room Agnes is in and breaks open the door. Inside, Agnes is lying half-naked on a bed with a man in his thirties.

Agnes’s social worker insists that Agnes immediately leave with her; the girl obeys without hesitation and the man does nothing to stop her. Instead, he seems to be terrified that he could be in trouble himself. After this incident, the social worker feels Agnes has bonded much more closely to her.

Both Pia and Agnes transmit a victim contact rebus with which they have put themselves in a destructive situation with an aggressor. However, the differences between the adult and the teenager can be clearly seen. In Agnes’s case, there is direct re-enactment of the incest to which she was subjected and she is hoping that someone will positively affirm her by stopping the assault.

In her contact rebus she does not directly relate where she has gone, rather her test requires that the social worker responds actively and independently to find out. Agnes has left an indirect clue in telling the other girls at the institution where she has gone.

When the social worker finally comes to the hotel room, Agnes immediately leaves with her, clearly indicating that the transmutation in her contact rebus has decreased and her bond with her social worker has strengthened.

Discussion

While Agnes makes it clear that she wants someone to come and save her, and responds immediately when this happens, Pia is more indirect in her cry for help. Although she shows her social worker the strangulation marks, her response is more transmuted than that of Agnes. Pia does not wish to leave the apartment when she is given opportunity to do so, but the social worker is given indirect affirmation because Pia agrees to meet her at the social services office.

However, Pia rejects open co-operation and declines help, thus demonstrating that her reaction is more transmuted than that of Agnes. The destructive variable is also stronger in Pia. Her aggressor is more destructive towards her and more of a danger to the motivational worker.

In the case of Agnes, the social worker does not hesitate to intervene in the situation and set boundaries, whereas in the case of Pia’s husband, the social worker feels it is too great a risk to confront a man with such a violent reputation, as he is someone who could attack visitors.

Moreover, the fact that he is drunk means that he has reduced control over his impulses. In contrast, Agnes’s aggressor does not pose the same degree of danger. In fact, he is terrified by the actions of the social worker.

Pia’s victim contact rebus is more indirect than that of Agnes and the social workers are not confronted directly with a situation involving assault. Instead, just prior to their leaving, Pia gives an indirect indication that she has suffered great violence. With Agnes, the assault is direct and the social worker is able to put a stop to it. Both women employ a contact rebus that involves spending time with the aggressor.

However, since Pia only mentions her assault as the social worker is leaving, it is more difficult to judge her predicament than in the case of Agnes, where information is made available at the outset and the social worker has more time to prepare her course of action.

Another difference is that Pia has lived with her aggressor for a long time and developed a relationship with him, unlike Agnes, who has just met her aggressor. Putting a man between themselves and their motivational workers is a common feature of both clients’ tests, but Pia’s test is more destructive and transmuted than Agnes’s.

In review we can say that Agnes’s cry for help is less ambiguous than Pia’s and her response is less transmuted. The older woman has lived longer and acquired more life experience which has led to her becoming more disillusioned and having a greater sense of hopelessness than Agnes because she has accumulated more negative feedback. For this reason, Pia’s testing is more transmuted in terms of the destructive variable and the neutral principles of transmutation.

Blog 41. A Reached Out Hand in Barbed Wire

Because of his desperate need for life energy, the latently motivated client tests virtually everyone with whom he comes into contact. In turn, this means that he never means what he says and does, for there is always a contact gambit concealed somewhere in the background. In this way, he is like the enamoured person, who also embodies a covert communication in his behaviour.

When encountering a latently motivated person, we effectively meet two individuals: a visible one, who is a distorted version of the real self; and the real person, concealed within the former. The client’s explicit behaviour (i.e. his selection of contact rebuses) not only constitutes the disguise that he must don to survive his encounters with other people and with himself, it also serves as an indirect contact gambit.

Spells and curses cast by witches and evil fairies can be interpreted as a poetic metaphor for how the destructive contact rebus can distort a person. The latently motivated is actually under a spell that turns the real person into another, disguised form – which also creates opportunities for contact and change. The tale of Beauty and the Beast is a good example of this (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 304 – 308).

Beauty and the Beast

There once was a wealthy merchant who had six sons and six daughters. The youngest of the daughters was also the fairest, and so was known by all as Beauty. At first, the merchant was very successful and grew very wealthy, until one day he ran into serious financial difficulties and had to travel to a port to meet one of his ships that had returned home with a precious cargo.

Before he set off, he asked his children what they wanted him to bring home for them. All of them mentioned all sorts of riches, except for Beauty, who just wanted him to return home safe and sound. The merchant insisted that she ask for a present, and so she said that she wanted a rose from him on his return. It turned out, however, that the merchant’s partner had cleared the ship and there was no money for him to collect. On his way home, a terrible blizzard descended and he feared he would get lost.

Suddenly he found himself on a road without snow. The air was warm, the trees were in leaf, and the birds were singing. He followed the road until he arrived at a beautiful castle. It seemed deserted and so he led his horse to a stable that was open, where he tied it up. Suddenly the great door of the castle opened and he entered, finding himself in sumptuous rooms, beautifully furnished.

Finally, he came to a room with a huge table loaded with the choicest meats and the finest fruits. The merchant sat down to sample the delights and called again and again for his invisible host, but no one answered. After his meal, he walked out into the charmingly delightful garden that was filled with roses.

He picked a rose for his youngest daughter, and immediately a terrible hairy beast appeared, bearing its fangs and huge, sharp claws. The monster was furious and accused the merchant of being a thief.

First of all he wanted to kill his guest, but then decided to give him another chance. All the merchant had to do was make one of his daughters come to live with him of her own free will. If he succeeded, he would escape the monster’s punishment; if he tried to cheat him, however, the monster would find him and kill him on the spot.

The merchant grew very frightened and told the Beast that never would one of his children sacrifice herself for him. In the end, he went along with the Beast’s proposal, as it was the only way he could escape from the castle.

When the merchant arrived home he gave his children their presents, and as he handed Beauty the rose he told her of the Beast’s retribution. Beauty insisted that she would go straight away to the castle to live with the Beast, and neither her father nor her brothers and sisters were able to talk her out of it. With a heavy heart, the merchant returned to the castle with his youngest daughter, and before he left, the Beast said he could take with him as many riches as he could carry.

At first, Beauty was scared of the Beast but soon realised that he was actually kind and considerate, and grew to like him. On several occasions, he proposed to her, but no matter how much she liked him she could not make herself agree to a marriage – for she loved a prince who had appeared to her in a dream, begging her to release him. In the same dream appeared a beautiful woman, who told her that she would one day be happy, on one condition: that she must never allow herself to be taken in by appearances.

Even though Beauty (who was convinced that the Beast was holding the prince prisoner) started to enjoy being at the castle, she also missed her father and brothers and sisters, and so asked the Beast if she could return to them. He said then he could not refuse her request and agreed, but told her that if she didn’t return within two months he would die. He gave her a ring that if turned on her finger would transport her straight back to the castle.

When she returned to her family, she was overjoyed and all but forgot the Beast. Time passed, and when the two months had gone by she had a dream in which she saw the Beast lying in the garden, dying under a blanket of roses. Troubled, she turned her ring and returned to the castle. When she found him, he was lying as if dead on the ground. She started to cry but soon noticed that he was breathing weakly.

She realised then how much she loved him and she covered him with kisses. He woke and proposed to her once more, and this time she accepted. Immediately he turned into the handsome prince whom she had seen in her dreams. He told her that an evil goblin had put a spell on him, and his only way to break it was to have someone love him despite his monstrous appearance.

Suddenly, the prince’s fairy godmother and his real mother appeared in a carriage; Beauty recognised the fairy – it was the beautiful young woman of her dream. The fairy asked the Queen if she would accept the prince’s choice of wife. She answered by arranging a wonderful wedding, and Beauty and the prince life happily ever after.

Discussion

One way of interpreting this fairy tale is to see the prince as latently motivated by virtue of the transformation spell cast on him by the goblin. He is destructive in his behaviour by being verbally threatening and puts the merchant and his family in a serious predicament that is tantamount to criminal blackmail.

There is, however, an opportunity for the prince in his enchantment: if someone can show faith in him and love him despite his distorted form, he will be released. The spell can be interpreted as an aggressive contact rebus, which, if successfully detransmuted, will render the prince manifestly motivated.

The daughter receives no explicit help from her family in seeing the Beast’s real identity, only indirect help from her father, who lets her live with it/him. However, her dream, which is the work of the good fairy, enables her to start to intuitively detransmute the prince’s destructive contact rebus, while the Beast/prince similarly starts to intuitively detransmute Beauty’s compliance contact rebus.

This story is a clear illustration of how a contact rebus is transmuted and how it is detransmuted, with the image of a prince being concealed inside the body of repulsive monster. The Disney version of the story shows how the detransmutation of the Beast gradually progresses and how the prince’s real features slowly start to emerge, showing us quite clearly how the destructive transmutation has distorted his entire physiognomy.

Similarly, the real, suffering person is hidden in the destructively transmuted contact rebus of the latently motivated client. The Beast also serves to illustrate the latently motivated person’s dire need of life force, which, if not satisfied, can lead to ruin and, ultimately, death.

Blog 42. Temporal Contact Rebus: Falling in Love

To illustrate the temporal contact rebus and its mechanisms in the relational process, let us return to our enamoured couples. Contact is made between the two parties through transmuted contact rebuses that are arranged in a sequence containing a temporal contact rebus and the mechanisms that go to form a bond (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 402 – 418 ). Here is an example:

Case Study

A large company arranges a management development course for its personnel. The group comprises twelve people, all of whom have some sort of managerial position. Two of the participants are Andy (29) and Amy (28), both of whom have had previous long-standing relationships and are now single. Two years ago, in fact, Amy went through a very traumatic divorce.

Amy and Andy have never met before, and know each other only by name. At the first session the participants are paired off so that they can talk to each other for five minutes and get to know each other a little better. Andy carefully avoids ending up with Amy as he feels a powerful but diffuse irritation towards her and dares not come close to her lest he expose his feelings, which he would find hard to deal with.

On the other hand, he shows considerable interest in the other participants. Amy, for her part, registers that Andy is trying to avoid her. She isn’t accustomed to men being indifferent towards her and not noticing her as a woman. She finds Andy’s conduct annoying, and but does not show her irritation outwardly.

A week later at the next session Amy feels increasingly irritated by Andy, yet still manages to conceal it. Andy, meanwhile, no longer avoids contact with her, but is very neutral when talking to her. He is growing aware of his attraction towards her and has started to seek contact with her. He tries to talk about the course and offers to help her with the theory.

Similarly, Amy realises that she is not irritated with Andy, but attracted to him as well; yet when he makes contact with her to discuss the course, she becomes withdrawn and openly irritated. This she finds an unfamiliar reaction, as she isn’t usually so averse to other people coming to talk to her.

Andy, in being unusually conciliatory, also feels he isn’t really himself and later is unsure about whether his feelings are reciprocated. Nevertheless, the attraction he has for her is so powerful that he has little choice but to continue trying to connect with her.

After her encounter with Andy, Amy starts to feel that she has to do something about her attraction towards him. After one session, she makes sure to leave the room with Andy and another male colleague. Amy and Andy talk amiably to each other about the course and what everyone has got planned for the evening. They soon reach the car park and go their separate ways, both now feeling that they are very attracted to the other.

At the following session they avoid each other. They know that they would react strongly if they met again and are, in fact, in love with each other. However, they each wonder if their feelings are mutual, their withdrawal from each other instilling a sense of doubt in each, and think about making contact with the other.

The first to do so is Andy, who calls up Amy to declare his love for her. Amy lets him know that she feels the same, and they arrange to meet. They soon embark on a relationship, falling into each other’s arms three months after they first met.

Discussion

This is no literary example. It is a story from real life told by a genuine couple who met in this way. Both Amy and Andy use a number of contact rebuses, illustrating yet again how two people in love connect using a rebus strategy, which we can see is built upon a temporal order of succession. There is also a general pattern in the contact rebus sequence.

The temporal sequence of contact rebuses appears as follows: a contact rebus which is affirmative in content is followed by a contact rebus that gives apparently negative feedback; this is then followed by a new affirmative rebus and so forth.

The pattern is an alternating shift between manifest affirmation and negative feedback. To simplify matters we can call these types of contact rebus the positive rebound and the negative rebound respectively, the term rebound stressing the interactive nature of the rebuses.

All functions of the contact rebus are reinforced by the temporal testing process. The individual protects himself against the pain of abandonment, and in testing even more intensively the detransmutation abilities of his intended partner, runs an even greater risk of having “ended up” with the wrong person.

The temporal testing process also provides protection from future pain. By testing intensively right at the start of a relationship, the individual avoids being abandoned when he has bonded further, which would entail greater pain. A stitch, as they say, in time.

The contact rebus shifts that Amy and Andy experience in their relationship provide them with greater protection against open rejection, while the constant alternation of contact polarity allows them to keep themselves more concealed from the other.

If they had employed the same contact rebus all the time, the ‘danger’ would have been greater that the contact rebus of the one would be more easily detransmuted by the other. The changes in transmutation make each of them a perpetually moving target for the other; and this, by making their surface appearance more contradictory and confusing, provides them with more resilient armour.

The temporal testing process is also very useful for helping someone find the right partner. The nature of the positive and negative rebounds allows a suitable target to return more obvious affirmation. The individual can make use of several types of contact rebus in the testing process that can give a clearer picture of the person being tested. The temporal contact rebus also increases the pressure of the test, so that, increasingly so, only those who match the profile respond.

Andy can test how Amy responds when he withdraws, and Amy does the same. The response that they seem to elicit from each other is that their mutual withdrawal does not overly undermine their self-esteem. Amy also tests how Andy deals with her irritation. He grows more interested in contact, and as the alternating polarity of the rebound enhances the test, the parties obtain an even clearer idea of how much the other is attracted to them and how strong their self-esteem is.

The temporal testing process also allows the response to the contact rebus to be as intense and explicit as it can be. The rebus shifts subject the communicant to a stressful situation and the testing becomes more compellent, raising the temperature of the interaction.

The alternating rebound polarity forces Amy and Andy to deliver emotional responses. Andy’s withdrawal is provocative to Amy, even more so when he switches to a positive rebound. Amy displays her irritation, which inspires her to move on and make further contact.

The shift from withdrawal to irritation in Amy fuels Andy’s feelings of attraction, which grow even stronger when they converse during the positive rebound. The ensuing withdrawal pressurises them both to pursue the relationship and show their feelings for each other.

The time aspect is particularly prominent in the building, maintaining, and deepening a romantic bond, whereby the mix and sequence of contact rebuses exploit the temporal factor with maximum efficiency.

When Andy makes contact with Amy and declares his feelings for her, there is already the presence of an emotional tension and bond between them. Through their contact rebuses they have untransmutedly constructed a platform from which to deal with the relationship once it has become openly mutual.

The temporal contact rebus has enabled them to make optimal use of the time up to the formation of their relationship through the mechanisms already described. If they did not already have this platform when the relationship becomes more untransmuted, their chances of making further advances would be smaller. All bonding that has to be done must then be achieved from the start in untransmuted form, which would be a great strain on both parties and jeopardise the future of their relationship.

Blog 43. Untransmuted Temporal Contact Rebus

The fact that the parents’ temporal contact rebus remains positive compounds the effect of their parental contact rebus, in a similar way to that of the teenager’s transmuted temporal contact rebus. The inertness of the parents’ temporal contact rebus is what strengthens the untransmuted contact rebus which they are already transmitting to their child.

The more the child receives the same untransmuted contact rebus in response to his own tests, the more his positive core will continue to receive maximum external nurturing. This positive core will develop and mature so that the child can increasingly employ its life force (Motivational Work, Part1: Values and Theory, page 402 – 418).

The untransmuted temporal contact rebus is therefore a permanent, ‘genuine’ (i.e. untransmuted) positive contact rebus. Thus there are two types of temporal contact rebus, the untransmuted one manifesting life force in its least transmuted guise, in which life energy is directly transferred without being wasted on transmutation. However, the fact that the temporal contact rebus is untransmuted does not mean its content and emotions are inert; it means that they are untransmuted.

Our discussion of the untransmuted temporal contact rebus has thus far been based on an unequal relationship, namely that of parent-teenager or in more general terms, parent-child. This type of relationship must be built up from scratch or already exist. Nevertheless, the parental figure must be primarily focused on giving the child love, and for this reason does not require a powerful and unambiguous response in return.

The child, on the other hand, focuses on receiving as much life force as possible, meaning that his contact rebus may be transmuted or untransmuted. When the child’s contact rebus is untransmuted, he is responding to his parents with full trust and openness. However, unlike the parental contact rebus, this untransmuted contact rebus is unstable as it varies with the child’s needs and circumstances. In this case, the child’s untransmuted temporal contact rebus will be correspondingly unstable.

The unstable untransmuted contact rebus and similarly unstable, untransmuted temporal contact rebus may also occur in equal relationships, such as an adult romance where the two parties have already tested one another in the order of succession and there is no longer any great need to confirm that the right partner has been found. The need for a powerful and unambiguous response is also eliminated since it has already been provided in the other party’s contact rebus.

From this we can maintain that the untransmuted contact rebus may occur in a variety of relationship types, and when present in mutual relationships which equally satisfy the emotional needs of both parties is the result of a bonding process.

However, in the parental relationship, the parent already has an untransmuted contact rebus, something we can call an ascribed untransmuted contact rebus. It is there from the start and is permanently inert. At the same time the child exhibits a transmuted contact rebus towards his parents, and may also exhibit an untransmuted contact rebus, but it is unstable in the way we have described for equal relationships.

Such an untransmuted contact rebus, which has a degree of transmutation that depends on interaction, may be called an achieved untransmuted contact rebus. Unlike the ascribed untransmuted contact rebus, the achieved untransmuted contact rebus is more unstable because the interaction between the two parties affects the degree of transmutation. The achieved untransmuted contact rebus may exist from the start or arise after a longer or shorter period of interaction.

The two types of untransmuted contact rebus make the untransmuted temporal contact rebus somewhat different. Achieved untransmuted contact rebuses are always dependent on the interaction remaining open and trustful (i.e. untransmuted). The achieved untransmuted temporal contact rebus can thus be more unstable than the other type of temporal contact rebus, which is based on the transmitting partner in an unequal relationship (i.e. an ascribed untransmuted temporal contact rebus),

In the case of the latter, the parent’s untransmuted temporal contact rebus is permanent since in the parent-child relationship the parent is not mutually emotionally dependent in the same way as he is in an equal relationship.

As we have learned, even the constructive contact rebus of the manifestly motivated person contains demotivation, and this is the case with both transmuted and untransmuted contact rebuses. However, it is not the primary component of the contact rebus as long as the individual remains motivated. For the transmuted contact rebus, demotivation means that functions are added to it which would not otherwise exist.

Blog 44. Equal and Unequal Contact Rebus

To add further nuances to the achieved transmuted contact rebus, we can distinguish between two different types of contact rebus based on equal and unequal relationships. One such is when a child transmits an achieved transmuted contact rebus in order to receive an untransmuted contact rebus from his counterpart. Thus there are two types of achieved untransmuted contact rebus depending on which type of relationship the person is looking for. For this reason we can call them the equal achieved untransmuted contact rebus and the unequal achieved untransmuted contact rebus (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 402 – 418).

Equal transmuted contact rebuses occur more commonly in manifestly motivated adults, as the individual receives most of his life force via equal relationships with others. Nevertheless, the unequal transmuted contact rebus also exists, meaning that the individual can receive life energy through unequal exchanges.

Supportive relationships such as that between doctor-patient, priest-confessor, teacher-student and manager-employee are cases in which there is no equal and mutual exchange of life force. One party receives more, while the other gives more.

Latently motivated children and adults alike have a vast need for life energy, which is why the largest component of their transmuted contact rebuses is unequally transmuted, although there are also equally transmuted contact rebuses involved.

This means that the latently motivated individual has a limited capacity for forming friendships since he is more intent on a unilateral receipt of life force than a mutual relationship. The more latently motivated the individual, the greater the influence of the unequal transmuted contact rebuses.

Case Study

Five year-old Amanda (Part One page 449) is forcibly placed in a foster home following a couple of years in various children’s homes. Amanda’s mother, 31 year-old Rita (a drug addict and prostitute) has been unable to look after her daughter during this time, frequently neglecting to feed her properly and even having her present when receiving punters.

To add to the misery, Amanda’s father died two years ago of an overdose. Before Amanda is placed in the foster home, her mother must first visit and approve of the family. Afterwards, her social worker regularly drives her there to visit Amanda.

However, Rita is passive during these meetings and does not initiate contact with her daughter or her foster parents. It is up to them and the social worker to keep the conversation going. Amanda is usually very lively and active, but when her mother is visiting, she becomes hyperactive, climbing on furniture and bookshelves without sitting still for a moment.

The foster parents tell Rita that her visits are welcome and that she has a lovely daughter; then the foster father enquires about Rita’s parenting routines, for example about how she puts Amanda to bed. Amanda’s foster parents are not too concerned about setting boundaries for Amanda while she is acting up, as they do not wish to be too negative in their interaction with her in front of her mother.

They are also focused on maintaining a positive attitude towards Rita so that Amanda is spared from a sense of conflicting loyalties. Since the foster parents realise that feelings of failure, aggression and hopelessness lie behind Rita’s passive behaviour and that the little girl’s hyperactivity is linked to her anxiety and is a way of shielding herself from the situation, they do not become annoyed by it all.

Discussion

The social worker present at the home visit views her role as one of encouraging Rita to regularly visit her daughter and adopt a positive attitude to the foster home if she can. The social worker is also aware of the need to give Rita positive affirmation, and, as they are driving back, commends her for visiting her daughter, telling her how wonderful the little girl is.

She also recognises Rita’s withdrawal contact rebus, understanding that going through with the visit causes her great pain. Likewise, the social worker is able to detransmute the aggressive contact rebus that Rita usually adopts in the car on the way back from her visits, one that entails criticising the foster parents and homing in on their faults.

The foster parents transmit an ascribed untransmuted constructive contact rebus to both mother and daughter. From the mother they receive a contact rebus involving passivity, a test which they are able to detransmute.

By primarily focusing on the daughter and trying to maintain a positive relationship with the mother they facilitate the development of the relationship between them. Further, their ability to detransmute both contact rebuses provides both mother and daughter with positive affirmation. Althoug

h the mother’s tests invites them to feel offended or criticised and the daughter’s contact rebus tests their tolerance of her hyperactivity, solving these tests gives them life force and prevents them from becoming drained.

Since the social worker has a professional relationship with the mother and daughter, she is not emotionally involved in the same way as the foster parents. Her role is to motivate Rita to maintain regular contact with her child and develop a positive attitude towards the foster home, thus facilitating Amanda’s bonding process. The social worker adopts an ascribed untransmuted contact rebus towards Rita and can detransmute her transmuted destructive contact rebus.

Blog 45. Achieved Untransmuted Temporal Contact Rebus

A child’s transmuted contact rebus also involves two temporal contact rebuses. As we have discussed, the degree to which the contact rebus is transmuted will vary, but it does so independently of the child’s level of motivation. Although the contact rebus is intent on receiving life energy, the child may also be openly generous, although the magnitude of this generosity may vary. Such a feature of the child’s contact rebus may be a useful element in his survival strategy. Open generosity provides the parent with powerful affirmation and strengthens the bond between parent and child (Motivational Work,Part 1: Values and Theory, page 402 – 418).

Case Study 1

Morgan is 20 months old. His behaviour clearly demonstrates how much he loves his parents: when they pick him up and carry him he rests his head against them and clings to them, especially when he is feeling scared or tired. He often asks his parents for a hug or a kiss, and when his mother is resting on the bed, he wants to put a blanket over her.

Discussion

This little child openly demonstrates love for his parents and his emotion is very untransmuted. Here the achieved untransmuted contact rebus is relatively stable, meaning its stability is dependent on how much love Morgan receives from his parents and other important individuals in his social atom, and in which phase of development he finds himself.

Nevertheless, within the positive feelings expressed to his parents there is a smaller transmuted component, that of insecurity, which prompts one component of the positive rebound to be compliant.

The very instability of the achieved untransmuted contact rebus may be viewed in light of its receiving function. The contact rebus only becomes less transmuted if this provides the best possible exchange of life force. However, the ascribed untransmuted contact rebus is focused on giving and is therefore less dependent on external conditions. The individual decides to give in a different way than he decides to receive from others.

The achieved untransmuted contact rebus is not necessarily the result of an interaction. The individual may employ this contact rebus in his initial attempt at making contact, but in doing so exposes himself to great risk; by letting down his guard he risks having to openly confront pain. I

n this interaction, the individual has not transmuted his contact rebus to a greater degree than the destructive transmutation that is linked to the level of motivation. Since the other party may have a higher level of motivation, the individual is at risk of being unprotected from the transmutation of the other party’s contact rebus, something he is unable to detransmute, unlike in the case of the ascribed untransmuted contact rebus.

Case Study 2

Ray has just landed at JFK airport after a long flight from Europe. At the airport, Ray decides to take the bus to the centre of New York and is overwhelmed by all the sights and sounds on his way into the Big Apple. The bus finally arrives at Grand Central Station and all the passengers alight and collect their baggage.

As Ray collects his baggage, a young man offers to carry his suitcase and hail a cab. The young man also asks which hotel Ray is staying at. Ray accepts the man’s help and gives him the name of his hotel – it’s a relief to have some assistance in getting a taxi.

Once Ray is installed in a cab, the driver starts shouting at the young man and tells him to clear off, but he won’t be dismissed that easily because he’s after a tip from Ray. The furious driver tells Ray to ignore him and starts moving off while the young man is still hanging on to one of the doors. He hurls abuse at them and doesn’t let go of the door until the driver produces an iron rod and threatens to beat him.

Once they are on their way, the driver tells his shocked passenger how heroin addicts can’t be trusted and that he has been extremely lucky not to have had his suitcase stolen. In the driver’s opinion, addicts like that will stop at nothing to get money; in their world, life is cheap.

Most importantly though, tourists like Ray should never say where they are staying as they risk being followed and robbed. Ray’s journey continues without further incident, and he arrives at his hotel unscathed and having learnt something about survival in the city.

Discussion

This is an example of a man who comes from an environment which promotes trust in an entirely different manner to that of the metropolis. The low degree of transmutation in Ray’s contact rebus towards the young man put him in a dangerous situation.

In contrast, had Ray intuitively exhibited a higher degree of transmutation in the form of dismissive or aggressive behaviour, he would have received a more rapid and unambiguous response as to the young man’s true nature. The latter, for instance, could have responded by being even more insistent about carrying the suitcase or simply withdrawn.

Blog 46. Concealed and Visible Functions

We can thus see that the functions of the contact rebus, as previously described, correspond to those concealed within the contact rebuses’ visible content. We can, therefore, henceforth refer to them as the contact rebuses’ concealed functions, ‘concealed’ because they are functions linked to the actual transmutation of the contact rebus and therefore not directly observable (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 402 – 418).

The surface of the contact rebus also has an important part to play in the relational dynamic. There are, therefore, also visible functions in the contact rebus, by which we mean the observable transmuted content of the contact rebus. This content consolidates, by virtue of its very visibility, the level of contact and degree of transmutation that the couple has attained, and in revealing it to each other, the couple affirms the level of bonding that they have attained.

At the same time, the surface of each rebound prepares for the next. In other words, the positive rebound contains the seeds of the negative, and if solved, the content of the negative rebound becomes the conflict-filled emotional content concealed in the positive rebound and a new contact rebus that tests and hides the positive feelings that will go to make up, in transmuted form, the next positive rebound (which is slightly less transmuted than before).

At the same time, it will conceal a negative content through its transmutation. If the positive and negative rebounds are solved as they arise, the couple will become more intimate with each other and with themselves personally.

Their contact rebuses will, therefore, start to emerge increasingly in their proper guises, while the real positive emotions and conflicts will become more manifest and less transmuted. Consolidation thus entails a reduction of the degree of transmutation. The couple’s greater intimacy also renders their conflicts less charged, their dissonance less pronounced, and their genuine positive emotions more powerful – and their bond gradually strengthens.

Case Study

Sandra and Gabriel have been married for 25 years. They have three children, the youngest of whom has just left home. The couple demonstrates their love for each other in various ways: Gabriel might surprise Sandra with flowers, and Sandra might take the initiative in the bedroom.

While their children were at home, their couple contact rebus came to a standstill, which expressed itself in the way that Sandra would criticise Gabriel for not pulling his weight in the home, while he would refuse to do more housework, claiming that Sandra was wrong to criticise him and is unnecessarily angry.

Now that they have been alone for a week, the degree of transmutation in the couple contact rebus increases, which in itself can elicit a solution. The higher degree of transmutation means that Sandra and Gabriel argue more with each other about the household chores, and start to take up habits that alienate them from each other: Gabriel sits watching TV late into the night, and Sandra goes to bed early without saying goodnight.

When the positive rebound comes, they are able to discuss how they have grown apart over the past few years (when the children lived at home) and put their parental role above their own emotional relationship.

After this conversation, Gabriel decides to change his attitude towards the housework, Sandra becomes less critical, and they both try to devote more time to each other. Discussions can still arise about the distribution of labour at home, but they understand each other in a new way and can more easily settle their disputes.

Discussion

Their new life context makes it possible for Sandra and Gabriel to solve another contact rebus in their bonding process, the one at which they had stagnated over the 25 years of their life as a family unit. Thanks to the increase in transmutation, the couple manage to move on in their relationship and the bond between them grows stronger and more intimate.

People base their relationships on what consolidation has made visible and mutually accepted. They have the energy stored within the already solved contact rebuses to help them tackle the next contact rebus. Its concealed functions enable change and growth and its visible functions achieve a consolidation of the current situation and an opportunity for balance.

The tenses, if you will, of the rebus’s visible function are present and past, as what has previously occurred is affirmed in the here and now; those of its concealed functions are present and future, as the here and now contains the potential for change.

The visible part of the contact rebus is the aggregate manifestation of the solved positive and negative contact rebuses, or, in other words, the visible component of the couple’s relationship. It is the bridge upon which life energy can be conducted without the need for prior testing. This means that the contact rebus’s visible functions are the same as the relationship’s functions.

The concept of the temporal contact rebus develops d broadens that of the contact rebus. When the different contact rebuses are placed along a time-line, a pattern emerges in which the rebuses are not sharply defined, but merged into one another to produce one meta-contact rebus. Simultaneously, each individual contact rebus is interwoven with others in a special pattern that we call the relationship.

Blog 47. Motivational Process

Manifested and latently motivated people all strive to acquire more life force through an exchange of energy with those around them or the rebuses within them. When the interaction leads to a surplus of energy, the individual is in a motivational process, which can be quite long-standing.

The shortest motivational process is when the individual only receives more life force back in one single exchange. Often, however, the surplus energy stretches over several interactions. The motivational process both applies to an individual relationship and refers in general to the totality of exchanges that take place in a person’s relationships.

This means that someone can have a deficit of energy in all his relationships except one, and yet still be in a motivational process. Provided that this one relationship gives an energy surplus that is greater than the total deficit from his other relationships, the individual will be in a motivational process as regards his total exchange of life energy (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 456 – 492)

Case Study

Barbro is 32 and has a son of 12. She is currently out of work and on benefit. Although she is an occasional substance abuser, she still manages to take care of her son. When he was born, and for some time afterward, she was helped by a home therapist. Barbro has had many relationships with different men, all of whom have been drug addicts and criminals, and although she has frequently been abused by her present partner, she has always refused to end the relationship or report him to the police.

When not on a benefit, she works as a cleaner and has never sought help for her own addiction, even though she has to leave her son to fend for himself when she’s intoxicated. The roles can change then, and he looks after her. He has now got into trouble for vandalism and other crimes with his friends. The social services carry out an investigation into his delinquency, the outcome of which is that Barbro agrees to receive the support of a social worker, who goes to talk to her every fortnight.

The social worker feels that Barbro starts to bond with her as time passes, and after nine months, she notices that she’s starting to take much more into her confidence. The next time she visits, a known dealer opens the door to her and tells her that Barbro isn’t in, even though she clearly sees Barbro slip into the bedroom.

The social worker makes no comment and leaves. At their next meeting, Barbro apologises for not being at home when she called, and the social worker tells her that she saw her but that it wasn’t a good time to talk given that the dealer was there too,

On successive visits, different male acquaintances are present in the flat, some of whom are aggressive towards her, one even demanding in threatening tones to know what she’s doing there. The social worker refuses to be provoked and tells the man that she can’t answer him.

On another occasion, the social worker receives flattering comments from two men who are preparing food in the kitchen and who take Barbro aside to tell her to tell the social worker that they think she’s attractive and want her to join them for something to eat. She declines politely.

Her male acquaintances are there for three months, and the next time the social worker sees Barbro on her own, she is high on drugs. The social worker discusses with Barbro how to take care of her son now that her abuse of drugs has grown worse.

Barbro then shouts at the social worker and tells her that she can take care of him, seeing as how it’s her job. Finally, however, Barbro decides that her son can be put in the care of a former childminder, and when he comes home from school, she organises his transfer.

Once the son is in his new home, the social worker helps her client to undergo detoxification. When Barbro returns home from the hospital, the social worker continues her visits. Barbro accepts the fact that her son is in foster care and is active in choosing a family.

Two months later, the social worker discusses with her the idea of staying at a treatment centre for drug users. Barbro visits the institution and agrees to apply for a place. Two weeks into her stint there, she asks the social worker to come and meet her and the staff to tell them about her background. The social worker now feels that Barbro is very trusting towards her.

Discussion

For a long time, Barbro is conciliatory towards the social worker, conduct that is possibly accentuated by the fact that she knows they have their eyes on her as a mother. The negative rebound appears nine months on after the social worker has started to feel that Barbro is genuinely bonding with her.

The rebound takes the shape of visits by different men linked to the drug subculture. She also tests the social worker by getting a stranger to tell her she is not at home, which is a withdrawal contact rebus. There are a number of elements to this test.

She denies through the agency of another that she is at home and yet demonstrates clearly that she actually is. The negative rebound then continues as a number of male acquaintances make sure that the social worker is denied any personal contact with Barbro.

The men are either compliant or aggressive. The negative rebound comes to an end when Barbro becomes so drugged up that she is unable to take care of her own son. This is followed by a period of compliance (positive rebound). By the time Barbro signs herself into a treatment centre, 14 months have passed since the motivational work commenced.

Barbro’s positive rebound becomes less and less transmuted, which the social worker notices in Barbro’s increasing openness towards her (for the first nine months there was much more distance between them than when the social worker visits her client at the institution).

In the negative rebound, Barbro makes sure to prevent all contact with the motivational worker. Doing this, she is testing to see how the female social worker deals with meeting men – if she allows herself to be distracted by them or if she maintains her focus on her client.

The men’s contact rebuses invite the social worker to feel either afraid or flattered. Meanwhile, the client herself is being indirectly tested. Will the social worker feel violated or disappointed that Barbro constantly obstructs their meeting?

When the social worker has solved these contact rebuses, a negative rebound occurs in which Barbro displays her drug habit and her maternal neglect. In doing this, she is inviting the social worker to take over her parental responsibility, which would constitute negative feedback, as the social worker would be effectively announcing that her client is unable to take her responsibilities as a mother.

Barbro also tests to see whether the social worker loses her positive attitude when she gets to see at first hand how much danger her son is in. This gives Barbro strong positive affirmation, which reduces the degree of transmutation of the subsequent positive rebound.

Throughout the motivational work, the social worker is able to see her client’s contact rebuses and the positive affirmation that she receives in return. She is prepared for the negative rebounds but is most taken aback by the first (the dealer’s visit) since the compliance contact rebus had lasted for such a long time.

Her commitment to Barbro is strong from the outset, and she is able to see the sufferer behind the mask. The more contact she has with the client, the stronger her resolve to continue her motivational work becomes.

She is also given a sense of purpose in being able to help Barbro’s son have a better life. She has regular chats with a colleague about her motivational work and receives additional affirmation for her efforts. We can also note that the social worker is also in a motivational process and is increasing her reserves of life energy.

Blog 48. Motivational Process in Motivational Work

The motivational worker’s contact rebus towards the client is thus an ascribed untransmuted constructive contact rebus. This is the most powerful response to a transmuted destructive contact rebus. The values and theories described in this part of the book are intended to make the detransmutation of the client’s contact rebus by the motivational worker as untransmuted (i.e. as conscious) as possible. This means that conscious detransmutation has an important part to play even if the intuitive part of the process is also present. An important aspect of the conscious decipherment of the client’s transmuted contact rebus is the knowledge of how the transmuted contact rebus and the motivational process work (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, page 456 – 492).

The latently motivated client’s transmuted destructive temporal contact rebus is, in principle, no different from other transmuted contact rebuses. Because of the client’s low degree of motivation, his temporal contact rebus will be highly transmuted, and the more transmuted it is the more energy it can acquire. Moreover, the neutral principles of transmutation are reinforced by destructivity.

This means that there is a considerable difference in the temporal contact rebus between the positive and negative rebounds. Both these contact rebuses will also be highly transmuted and destructive, and the polarity shifts between them very abrupt. The degree of transmutation of the contact rebuses also makes them very aggressive and destructive.

The greater share of the motivational worker’s temporal contact rebus is ascribed untransmuted constructive, which means that it has a low degree of transmutation and facilitates a direct channelling of life force. Unlike the transmuted contact rebus, the untransmuted temporal contact rebus is constant and permanent, and, although it is not due to transmutation, its emotional and cognitive content can shift. The basic attitude is the same at all times.

Case Study

Elsa, 29, has been a heavy drug user for many years. The general opinion of her held by the social services is that she is a hopeless case. However, a female social worker finds herself wanting to help her and, in consultation with the client, plans a stay in a treatment centre. Elsa approves of the idea but insists on having her dog with her as she cannot bear to be parted from it during her treatment. This excludes most treatment centres.

The social worker is convinced that Elsa is becoming motivated, despite the opposition of her colleagues and bosses, who say that Elsa is deluding her, as she is using her dog as an excuse not to have to go away for treatment, her demand making it difficult to find a centre prepared to take them both. After six months of searching, the social worker finally finds a family home willing to accept Elsa and her dog.

Elsa visits the home with the social worker and both give their approval. The social worker then has to spend a great deal of time convincing her bosses to accept the visit and that Elsa is motivated and serious about wanting to stay there. Her organisation gives the go-ahead but with considerable reservations, and the following week the social worker drives Elsa and her dog to the home.

On the way back to work, the social worker feels happy that her client is finally in care, as she is likely to benefit from that experience, especially as she is able to have her beloved dog with her. The social worker is also pleased that she has continued to believe in the client and been able to ignore the scepticism of her colleagues.

Two days later, the family home calls to inform her that Elsa is no longer there. The day after her arrival, they explain, a man, obviously on drugs, turned up in a car to collect her, and Elsa left with him immediately, abandoning her dog and the home.

This makes the social worker feel like a professional failure and she refuses to have any further contact with the client, as there seems to be no point in it. She also starts to doubt her own ability to help people. She is also plagued by misgivings about Elsa’s motivation and feels that she’s been conned. Her colleagues, she decides, were right in writing off Elsa as a hopeless case.

Discussion

The client steps up the pressure of her testing and the bonding with the motivational worker through the temporal contact rebus. In the negative rebound, the client learns how much she is worth if she does not ‘behave herself’, in that she leaves the home.

She tests whether the social worker cares about her and continues to believe in the possibility of a change for the better. Her hasty exit gives the impression that she is not motivated, and her abandonment of her dog tests how credible the social worker thinks she is. First, Elsa tells her how much the dog means to her and then acts in a way that expresses the opposite.

The boyfriend’s appearance further reinforces the negative rebound, as it enables Elsa to demonstrate that she has chosen a destructive drug abuser over the commitment of her social worker and her proposed treatment. This aspect of the contact rebus is reminiscent of the teenage girl’s testing of her parents when she comes home with a new boyfriend whom she knows they will find hard to accept.

Just like the teenager, Elsa examines if her ‘parent’ (read social worker) still cares about her even though she has an unacceptable boyfriend. If they fail to respond favourably to her choice, it means they do not respect her.

Elsa’s testing is both destructive and dynamic, which increases the weight of the contact rebus. Instead of notifying anyone of her decision to leave the home or warning them of her craving, she immediately acts out her contact rebus, and in a very destructively demonstrative way at that. She abuses drugs and enters a very destructive relationship with another drug addict, which places her in a very dangerous situation.

Added to this is the fact that her destructive behaviour is also very obvious negative feedback to the social worker’s commitment. After all the work she has put into her client, this is what she gets. The contact rebus also contains another test. Elsa is intuitively aware that her social worker’s faith in her is not accepted by her colleagues.

When the client acts out her negative rebound, she justifies their opinions of her. At the same time, Elsa seems to give her own social worker negative feedback, and thus tests whether she is able to keep up her commitment, even when she breaks her trust in front of her colleagues.

The social worker is thus beset by the client’s tests. In this situation, she chooses to see the client as manifestly motivated and concentrates on the visible component of her client’s contact rebus. This makes her feel as though she has received powerful negative feedback. Her strong emotional reaction to her client results from this attitude, and the social worker ignores the opportunity to do some conscious detransmutation.

The Significance of Supervision

A short while after the incident with the client, the social worker takes up her emotional reaction in a supervisory session, which allows her to see her client’s negative feedback as a concealed indirect contact gambit. The contact rebus then becomes a strong indirect affirmation of her work.

The negative rebound is clear evidence that the client is undergoing change, and Elsa’s acting out is down to her growing closer to the motivational worker, a ‘rebound’ that the social worker’s commitment elicits.

By seeing her client’s demonstrative behavior in this way, the social worker recovers her sense of commitment to her client to realize that Elsa is seeking affirmation. After the session, the social worker manages to make contact with Elsa again and continue her work.

A year later, Elsa has quit the drugs, found a job, and started to live an ordered life. She is also taking care of her dog, which she has collected from the home where she had abandoned it. All this happens despite her taking no alternative course of therapy; the change has come about solely through her relationship with her social worker.

When the social worker sees the concealed functions of the negative rebound, she gives herself powerful affirmation of her work. Conscious detransmutation allows her to give herself positive feedback and break her own demotivational process to enter a motivational process. This enables her to start transmitting an untransmuted constructive temporal contact rebus to her client again.

Blog 49. Motivational Process – Two Steps forward One Step Back

In the negative rebound, the pain that the motivational worker experiences parallels the client’s own. The motivational worker feels a sense of hopelessness and a worthless failure and wants to end the relationship. If he could multiply his feelings by a factor of 10,000, he would empathize with the client’s own pain in this respect and his fear of being abandoned.

Because the motivational worker is manifestly motivated, he can receive his client’s pain and reduce its destructiveness through intuitive detransmutation. If this form of detransmutation does not help the motivational worker avoid energy depletion, he will also have to use conscious detransmutation.

This is done by seeing the negative rebound as something positive, which provides a counterweight to the pain and helps the motivational worker see a sense of purpose in the situation. A rule of thumb for him is, therefore: WHEN YOU MOST WANT TO GIVE UP, THAT’S WHEN IT’S MOST IMPORTANT TO KEEP ON TRYING TO MOTIVATE THE CLIENT.

This attitude is part of the conscious detransmutation of the client’s negative rebound and gives the motivational worker affirmation, understanding, and a sense of purpose in keeping up this painful contact.

In this way, the motivational worker meets the client’s pain within himself. Processing with his own emotions and cognitions allows the motivational worker to complete the detransmutation that the client seeks but has insufficient life energy to do himself.

The motivational process, with respect to the positive-negative rebound interaction in the client, can be summarised, experientially, for the motivational worker as follows:

TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK.

It is, however, difficult to keep a cool head when the negative rebound occurs. The author himself has experienced, as a supervisor, how hard it is for the motivational worker to escape feelings of hopelessness and of being a failure. Regardless of how much he might know about rebounds intellectually, once the negative rebound happens, the emotions are so dominant that it is easy for him to lose his sense of distance.

There is also the risk that the motivational worker loses perspective when the positive rebound returns and becomes unrealistically optimistic, seeing only the visible content and not what is concealed in the client’s transmuted destructive contact rebus. Added to this is then the greater risk that the motivational worker will be unprepared for the successive negative rebound when it happens (Motivational Work, Part 1, Values and Theory, page 456 – 492)

Case Study 1

When the social worker begins his motivational work with Elsa (blog no. 47. ), her client is negatively rebound. Elsa leads a life of active abuse and is dismissive in her contact with the social services. The social worker is surprised that her client wants to cooperate and believes that she has turned her back on her destructive lifestyle.

This is bewildering for the social worker, and she fails to detransmute the compliance contact rebus. She is consequently unprepared for the negative rebound that occurs as Elsa runs away from the center.

Discussion

Often, motivational work is terminated just when the negative rebound occurs. The client is then left without help and the motivational worker, with severely dented self-confidence, feels a failure. At the same time, the negative rebound demonstrates the incredible power inherent to the temporal contact rebus, which it has for the very reason that it follows on from a positive rebound (preferably when the client really does seem to have changed for the better) and because it occurs so suddenly. If the client had only a negative rebound from the beginning, the same effect would not be achieved.

Case Study 2

A psychiatric ward decides to motivate one of its patients, Helge (25), in consultation with the ward psychologist. At the start of the process, Helge is very hostile and aggressive. For a year, he shifts between this negative rebound and a positive rebound in the form of a compliance contact rebus, which many staff members find hard to deal with.

The patient is then very ingratiating towards the staff and puts them on a pedestal. Throughout the motivational work, the psychologist has regular supervisory sessions with the staff, during which they talk about the motivational process and positive and negative rebounds.

After a while, the staff doesn’t find it hard to see that the negative rebound (i.e., the aggressiveness) is indirect confirmation that a motivational process is underway, and this helps them to deal with the patient’s threatening and aggressive behavior. They can also recognize that the positive rebound is an attitude of conciliation on the part of Helge. The staff’s commitment to Helge increases, and they become more hopeful about motivating him.

The psychologist grows increasingly satisfied with how the motivational worker is progressing. But then the negative rebound occurs. Helge lies in bed all day and refuses to take part in the scheduled activities. He has been thinking about his life and finds it hard to find any meaning in carrying on.

The psychologist looks favorably upon this negative rebound and tries to impress upon the staff that the patient has come into closer contact with his pain and started to see his life situation more clearly. He points out the indirect affirmation inherent to the negative feedback: the motivational process is continuing.

At the same time, the patient also seems to have a more untransmuted contact with his pain, although the staff finds it difficult to detransmute this negative rebound, as they are missing the aggressive destructiveness through which they knew how to handle the patient. The staff are worried about Helge’s inactivity and are unsure what to do. Time and again, they try to get Helge out of bed and activate him, but in vain.

A growing sense of failure descends on the staff, who start to find it difficult to see any sense of purpose to their work. The staff becomes extremely concerned, and some of them claim that they have done what they could for Helge, and it would be good for him to transfer to another unit, where he might become more active.

However, the psychologist refers constantly to the motivational process and the negative rebound, but the staff is no longer able to detransmute Helge’s withdrawal contact rebus. They question the psychologist’s reasoning and tell him that his theories could be wrong. The indisposition of the staff increases until the patient is discharged and transferred to another unit.

Discussion

When the negative rebound goes from an aggressive to a withdrawal contact rebus, the staff are no longer able to detransmute it. (The same shift, although in reverse order, has already been described in connection with Amy’s relationship with Andy). The staff enters a demotivational process, which escalates as their emotional experiences reflect their patient’s view of the world.

The staff and Helge thus share the same thoughts and feelings, which are, of course, stronger in the patient. Helge feels worried, insecure, and a failure and finds it hard to see any meaning in his life. His trust for the staff wanes, which leaves him filled with worry about being abandoned; he would also feel relieved to leave the ward.

There is, therefore, a danger of not being able to solve the temporal contact rebus if the negative rebound shifts from one principle of transmutation to another. The motivational worker must also be prepared for this change. In the above context, the psychologist sees that the shift in principle is per se indirect confirmation of the motivational process’s continuation, although he could have perhaps prepared the staff more for this change.

On the other hand, the psychologist was unprepared for the staff’s inability to solve the contact rebus. Yet, he can always detransmute the client’s rebounds and is thus in a motivational process or equilibrium process with the client himself. He finds it purposeful to help Helge from the start, which supplies him with additional life energy.

Blog 50. Demotivational Process

There is another form of life energy exchange. This is when the individual is drained of life force. This is called the demotivational process. The interaction between the individual and his surroundings leaves him with a net energy loss. This is no longer a question of the balance that can arise in exchanging energy in an unequal relationship, like that between parent and child. The demotivational process means that the exchange of life energy causes a deficit, and the individual cannot offset this drain through detransmutation. This process can also occur in the interaction between intrapersonal contact rebuses (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 436 – 456)

The demotivational process is thus the opposite of the motivational process. For, while the latter gives life energy, the former takes it. We have already described the experiential aspects of the demotivational process earlier in the book. The motivational worker who loses commitment and hope in his clients is one such example. Both the manifestly and latently motivated can find themselves in a demotivational process.

In an interaction between individuals, the demotivational process can arise when the contact rebus is received. If the contact rebus has a level of demotivation greater than the individual’s own transmitted contact rebus, life force is lost on the exchange. Because of the greater level of demotivation, the individual will experience pain that is more or less transmuted. In cases such as this, the greater degree of destructiveness in the contact rebuses serves as a warning signal. If the demotivation leads to a lower general degree of motivation, the individual will have a greater amount of destructiveness in his own transmitted contact rebuses, which become a cry for help to those around him.

The destructiveness in the received contact rebus causes damage to the individual, the untransmuted sensation of pain. This is the clearest kind of warning signal that the individual can send to himself. In turn, he must have enough life energy to achieve an untransmuted contact with the pain. If, on the other hand, the individual does not have this life energy, the pain will be transmuted, and all such transmutation will tend towards destructiveness.

Since the individual’s need for life energy has increased, the transmutation will, in line with neutral transmutation principles, be more comprehensive. Destructive transmutation creates new pain, as it means that the individual injures either himself or others. The destructiveness is the transmuted warning signal that exists in the pain. A manifestly motivated person will notice his destructiveness and the more motivated he is, the less destructiveness is needed for him to be made aware of it and react. The manifestly motivated person can thus handle the pain associated with the demotivational process in two ways, his choice depending on the amount of life energy he has available to him.

Case Study

Arne, 40, is having a terrifying experience. He has been taken hostage on a bus by a group of terrorists demanding the release from prison of some of their own members. If their demands aren’t met, they will kill their hostages. The terrorists belong to a political organisation fighting for independence from a colonial power. For two days, Arne lives in fear for his life until he and the other hostages are finally freed by the police. On his return, Petronella (35), Arne’s wife of many years, finds him a changed man. He has sleeping difficulties exacerbated by recurring nightmares. He also becomes involved in the political wing of the terrorist organization, goes to their meetings, and generally gives them support. Petronella feels that Arne has cut himself off from her emotionally and is no longer committed to their marriage. Instead, he wants Petronella to share his interest in the terrorist organisation. At first, Petronella is upset by Arne’s new attitude, and she gradually withdraws emotionally from him.

Discussion

Arne has, as a hostage, been caused such pain that he does not have the life energy needed to keep it untransmuted. Instead, he acts out his destructiveness by withdrawing from his wife. He also has sleeping problems and suffers from nightmares. However, he is also very compliant in his dealings with the terrorists’ political organization. Arne is in a demotivational process that is gradually draining him of life force.

Blog 51. Demotivational Process – The Little Match Girl

The essence of this process can most simply be illustrated by one of Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, “The little match girl” (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 492 – 495):

Fairy Tale

It’s New Year ‘s Eve, and evening is approaching. The weather’s getting colder and it has started to snow. A poor little girl is walking along the street, her head uncovered and her feet bare. She’d had some wooden slippers earlier in the day, but lost them when she scuffled across the street to avoid being hit by a horse and carriage. In an old apron she has some matches, which she has tried to sell during the day, but no one has bought any. Along she creeps, all alone, looking through the windows of houses into warm, candlelit rooms. The street smells of all the delicious food that’s being laid out on dining room tables.

She seats herself down in the corner formed by two houses and curled up to keep out the cold. She did not dare go home as she had not sold any matches and her father would strike her. Besides, it is just as cold at home. They have no fuel and the wind whistles through the roof. She starts to think how warm a match would make her. She draws one against a wall, and how it blazes in a warm, bright flame!

As bright and warm as a large iron stove. She stretches out her feet to warm them too, but the flame goes out and she is left holding the remains of the burnt-out match. She lights another and she sees in front of her a magnificent Christmas tree with thousands of lights burning on its branches. She reaches out her hands but the match goes out, and the lights of the tree become stars in heaven. As she looks, one falls, a long trail of fire forming behind it.

“Someone has just died!” she says to herself. Her old grandmother once told her that when a star falls, a soul ascends to God. She lights another match, and in its light she sees her grandmother, looking radiant and mild. She begs her grandmother to take her with her when the match stops burning. In her eagerness, she lights the whole bundle of matches and her grandmother becomes even more radiant. She lifts the little girl in her arm and they fly high, so very high, to a place that knows no cold or hunger.

In the morning, the girl is found frozen to death. She has a smile on her face and in her hand is a bundle of burnt matches.

Discussion

This moving little story is also a metaphor for the process that drains a person of life energy. The girl loses her shoes, her matches remain unsold, she dares not go home, and she starts to light the matches. They give off temporary warmth, but eventually she continues to lose body heat. She makes it even more impossible for her to venture home as she is now using the matches herself. Her life is draining away at an ever faster rate.

Thus is the nature of the demotivational process. The individual receives life energy for the moment, but it is not enough to keep his life energy or ‘heat’ (if we think about the girl’s story). He becomes more and more drained of life energy, and the less he has, the more desperate he becomes.

If the demotivational process continues, even someone who started off manifestly motivated will become latently motivated, and once this happens, his destructive transmutation will increase, since he already has so much demotivation. He will light match after match. His actions leave him all the more alone in the same way as the girl, by burning her matches, makes it more difficult for her to return home.

If the demotivational process cannot be stopped, the individual will die, just as death eventually comes to the little match girl. The closer the individual comes to death, the louder his call for help, in the form of destructive contact rebuses, will be. And like the girl burning all her matches, he reaches maximum destructiveness just before his death.

This paradox about destructiveness can be hard to understand. If the individual is injured, instead of seeking help he aggravates his situation by harming himself or others. It is this very paradox that can make the behaviour of certain individuals incomprehensible to a manifestly motivated person, who might well attribute it to brain damage or other physiological problems.

Transforming pain into destructiveness is, however, the same as when the little match girl strikes match after match against the wall. Although it gives momentary relief, the pain always returns. The girl is still outdoors in the freezing cold and is dying of hypothermia.

Blog 52. Demotivational Process in Motivational Work

Another form of consolidation takes place in the demotivational process. As the negative contact rebus becomes increasingly demonstrative and destructive, a withdrawal between the motivational worker and the client becomes increasingly obvious.

The positive contact rebus can likewise be seen as a visible consolidation of the ending of the relationship. This process is seen most clearly in the latently motivated client since the rebounds here have a high degree of transmutation, both in terms of destructiveness and the neutral principles of transmutation (Motivational Work. Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 492 – 516).

Case Study

Valentin, 29, is a long-standing drug user, having started sniffing solvents at the age of eleven. His father, who has been dead for many years, was an alcoholic and used to abuse Valentin, while his mother did nothing to intervene. The social authorities were called in and Valentin was placed temporarily in a foster home.

His substance abuse became worse and worse during his early years so that by the time he reached adulthood he had taken everything, including heroin. He finances his addiction through crime and has been frequently imprisoned for theft and burglary.

He has also badly assaulted other drug addicts, but his victims never press charges, or if they do, soon withdraw them. He also hits his mother when he visits her. However, there are periods in which Valentin’s habit becomes less intense and he considers treatment. Twice he’s been to a treatment centre, both times for almost a year. Valentin’s life shifts between the two states – serious drug abuse and violence versus less drug abuse, restraint and introversion, and active participation in rehab programmes.

In the past year, his demonstrative period has been unusually destructive; he has abused substances, whatever he can get his hands on, with abandon, seriously beaten his mother up and started more frequent fights with other addicts. His mother calls the social welfare office and tells them that she is in fear of her life. On several occasions, Valentin has received medical care, through the agency of a social worker, for the injuries he has been caused by others.

At the end of his periods of abuse, he enters a state of despair and cries in front of his social worker, at which time he normally accepts being admitted to a detox center. He then goes along with their after-care regime for a month or so and then abandons it completely. After such a period of detoxification, the social worker loses contact with his client and pays a visit to him at home. He finds Valentin lying on his bed, dead from a lethal cocktail of different narcotics.

Discussion

In this example, we can see clearly how the negative rebound becomes increasingly negatively demonstrative. Valentin’s substance abuse increases both in frequency and scope, and his violence becomes even more accentuated. He physically assaults his mother more and gets into increasingly violent situations in which he is in very real danger of doing himself serious harm.

Toward the end, Valentin withdraws from contact with his social worker, while his positive rebound becomes even more transmuted. Looking only at his behaviour, it seems as if he is more motivated than before and in more emotional contact with himself (i.e. he cries and agrees to undergo detoxification).

Blog 53. Motivational and Demotivational Process Summary

We can summarise the differences between the two processes in a latently motivated client through the change in contact rebuses thus (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 516 – 532):

DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONTACT REBUS WITH RESPECT TO PROCESS

THE DEMOTIVATIONAL PROCESS

THE MOTIVATIONAL PROCESS

POSITIVE REBOUND

More transformed pain = more destructive

less genuinely constructive

POSITIVE REBOUND

Less transformed pain = less destructive, more genuinely constructive

NEGATIVE REBOUND

More transformed pain = more destructive,

less genuine conflict

NEGATIVE REBOUND

Less transformed pain = less destructive,

More genuine conflict

One problem is to differentiate between the two processes through the contact rebuses that the client employs. If destructive demonstrativeness is part of a motivational process, it means that a positive change is underway and the client will become more motivated if the motivational work continues. If, however, the client acts out in a demotivational process, it means that the client is still in a downward trend and has not entered a positive process of change. In practice, it is of little consequence to the motivational worker which type of contact rebus it is, as the method will be basically the same.

In both cases, the contact rebus is destructively demonstrative with a puzzle that must be solved. It can, however, be good for the motivational worker to know if the process is one of motivation or demotivation – provided that he does not delve so emotionally deeply into a confirmed demotivational process that he loses hope. If his positive attitude is not affected, the feedback from the rebound can give him valuable information for his continued motivational efforts.

The following reasoning applies on condition that a programme of motivational work has already begun. The destructive behaviour that succeeds the motivational work can be a sign that a positive change is happening (motivational process) or that the client is continuing on his downward life-cycle (demotivational process).

If the motivational worker establishes that the client’s destructive behaviour is not a rebound to the motivational work but is actually an even more desperate appeal for help, this gives him some important information, as it confirms that the attitude towards his client that he has so far adopted has not hit home fully. He must thus modify his approach, evaluate his work and think about how to continue.

If, on the other hand, the motivational worker has it confirmed that the client’s destructive behaviour is a rebound to the motivational work and that a motivational process is underway, he also receives feedback on his efforts. He has managed to reach the client emotionally enough to set in motion a process of change. He thus receives confirmation that he is on the right path.

A similar issue faces the motivational worker when it comes to distinguishing between superficial compliance and constructive behaviour. When the client’s conduct is more constructive, part of it can be genuine and a reaction to the motivational work. The alternative is that the client is continuing on his demotivational process, which means that the positive contact rebus is even more transmuted and destructive.

Both processes embody the same challenge: not to end up in a prestige and performance mindset. The motivational worker can do no more than his best, and sometimes a motivational process will commence, sometimes not. We have already looked at this way of thinking in connection with the humanistic approach and the primary responsibilities of the motivational worker.

If the client continues on a demotivational process, it does not, however, mean that the motivational worker has not affected his client. He might have transferred enough life energy to the client to make the demotivational process gradient shallower. From the client’s perspective, this can mean a major change and the difference between life and death. So even if a motivational worker does not set a motivational process in motion, he has still saved a life and enabled the motivational work to continue.

Case Study

Moses, 53, has been using drugs since his early thirties. For ten years his problem was alcohol but then he started to take pills. For the past decade he has been out of work and on different kinds of benefit, which he can only receive by paying regular visits to the social welfare office. Usually, he’s cooperative and in a good mood. Sometimes he turns up drunk and is aggressive, even threatening, towards to desk staff.

However, he is always cooperative and compliant with the social workers he meets. However, he refuses to look at different therapeutic alternatives. On one occasion he smashes up the reception. Moses has been married and still has contact with his ex-wife. With her too, he can shift between compliance and aggression. He’s never assaulted her, but has, for instance, smashed a window when she didn’t open the door to him.

Discussion

This client’s motivational process has not changed much in 20 years. The only deterioration was the abuse of pills; otherwise, the degree of destruction in his negative and positive rebounds has remained effectively the same. In the negative rebound he takes drugs, is aggressive and demolishes inanimate objects. In his positive rebounds, he is in a good mood and cooperative. He clearly obtains enough life energy from the social welfare office and his ex-wife to greatly reduce the pace of the demotivational process.

Blog 54. Symptom Tolerance

The theory of the temporal contact rebus raises the issue of symptom tolerance. What can we accept of the client’s antisocial or hostile contact rebus in both inpatient and outpatient care? One conclusion we can draw from the theory is that we should avoid breaking contact with the client in the negative rebound and honour the contact contract that was entered into at the start. If we discontinue our motivational efforts simply because we are unable to cope with the testing, it will confirm for the client, yet again, that no one cares about him, and leave him feeling betrayed and abandoned.

The client will not receive enough life energy to enable him to continue the motivational process, and the demotivational process will recommence. Since this will also give the client a non-contact rebus, this demotivational process will be maximal. On the other hand, if we can find a way to continue motivating him, it is important to do so as it will keep the client supplied with the life energy he needs to pursue the motivational process (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 536 – 548).

Insight into the demotivational and motivational processes gives the motivational worker a positive attitude towards his client’s destructiveness, which creates an opportunity for contact and thus confirms that the client’s motivation has become stronger. If the client is then to change, the motivational process must be able to accommodate the rebound polarity shifts. Similarly, scope must be allowed for the rebounds of the demotivational process in order to keep opportunities open for connecting with the client.

The clients who, behaviourally, display no polarity shifts in their rebounds but who seem to change increasingly positively in the absence of negative rebounds (i.e. appear capable of looking after themselves) are a problem for the motivational worker. Such a client is using compliance tests in a prolonged positive rebound and has “put a lid on” his conflict-related emotions. The negative emotions thus mount up until they threaten to burst forth in a powerful explosion of hostility.

Case Study

Nils, 35, books himself into a treatment centre to get help with his drinking problems. Nils stays at the centre for the full nine months of the treatment and gradually improves. He raises his emotional problems during group therapy, where he is also helped to deal with his social problems. After a while, someone questions the authenticity of his addiction as he never seems to ‘crave’ a drink. Shortly afterwards he relapses and talks about how hard he has found it to resist his ‘craving’. When the nine months are up, he takes his leave of the other clients and the staff, who wish him luck in their belief that he has been an unusually ‘successful case’.

During his stint in the centre, he attended an evening course, and this has given him a job to go to directly after his discharge. He has also met a woman, to whom he is engaged to be married. She is expecting their baby, and they soon, after some trials and tribulations, get a flat to move into.

Nils has also been working on his relationship with his mother, and they now get on much better. Now, a year after his discharge, he is sitting in his old local. He has started to drink more than he used to, has lost his job, his wife and his home, and his relationship with his mother has deteriorated. Not only that, but he may only meet his son for brief supervised periods as the social services consider him unsuitable as a father.

Discussion

After his treatment, the client ends up back at square one. His change has been linear and devoid of rebounds, and in retrospect we could say that he only superficially adapted to the centre’s regimen with a positive rebound that remained unsolved.

The pressure within him gradually builds up until he finds himself unable to resist, and he feels compelled to ‘abuse away’ his concern. Nils does not receive enough life force from the staff and clients to enter a motivational process, and remains in his demotivational process throughout his stay. Outwardly, he loses everything; inwardly, he has gained peace of mind and has eradicated his anxiety.

Nils tests the staff with his positive ‘compliant’ rebound. People only see the surface of the contact rebus and enable the demotivational process to continue. However, the commitment of the staff imbues him with extra life force, although only enough to retard, not reverse, the demotivational process.

The above case description is an example of how a superficial linear positive change leads to an accumulation of emotions and anxiety, which must eventually be discharged. The client is still in his demotivational process and passes from the positive to the negative rebound. This is an example of self-destructiveness that, in the end, only harms the client himself.

Blog 55. The Couple Contact Rebus

shutterstock_363525575 — Failure of the surrounding persons to give back positive energy

The survival mechanism and plea for help existing in the couple contact rebus of the latently motivated may be difficult for outsiders to understand. As previously mentioned, these relationships are characterized by the aggressor-victim role couplet, a constellation which in turn transmits a couple contact rebus. Since the latently motivated are in greater need of life force, they invite others into their relationship in a different way to the manifestly motivated (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 549 – 561).

Case Study

He Wants to See Her

Twenty-five-year-old Axelina, who started using amphetamines, hash, and other drugs in her teens, has been a resident at a drugs rehab center for two weeks now. Her ex-boyfriend, 30-year-old Linus, used to beat her up, but she never reported him. Having just served his second year in jail for a drug-related crime, he is now a free man and has found out that Axelina is staying at the rehab center. He contacts her by telephone and says he wants to see her.

A Cry for Help

At a meeting for the whole group of residents and staff, Axelina reveals how scared she is that Linus will try to find her. She tells the group that he has now threatened her and talks about his former assaults. The staff and clients are upset by Linus’s past and present actions and express a wish to protect Axelina from him. They organize a night watch in which staff and clients patrol the institution grounds to prevent Linus from entering, and agree that Axelina should never leave the center unaccompanied.

Grateful

Axelina appears sincerely grateful for this help and support, and for the first two weeks, everyone is very committed to the task of protecting her. At each morning meeting, the previous night’s watch reports any sightings of Linus, but as yet, he has not shown up.

The Deceit

On the fifteenth day, one of the clients turns up at the morning meeting in a very agitated state, witnessing how Axelina has secretly let Linus into her room. This confuses everyone until one of the staff asks Axelina if it is true. She admits to the deceit. After further questioning, it comes to light that the day after their decision to patrol the grounds, Axelina called Linus in secret and has sneaked out to meet him every night since.

A Farewell

This is a great disappointment to all of those who tried to protect her, and before the group continues their discussion, it is decided that Linus must leave the institution immediately. When the staff and clients go to inform Linus, Axelina goes with them. Linus refuses to leave, with Axelina’s support – and he starts making veiled threats. This all culminates in a police call-out. When they arrive to take Linus away, Axelina goes with them and says she is checking out of rehab.

Discussion

Invitation to Intervene

The couple’s contact rebus of the latently motivated clearly makes an invitation to others to interfere in the relationship. Axelina adopts the role of the victim and asks for protection. Through her actions, she tests whether or not the institution will take over emotional and proactive responsibility for her having been assaulted. The treatment center’s response is to emotionally take on Axelina’s anxiety.

The Couple’s Contact Rebus

In terms of the couple contact rebus, while Axelina employs a compliance contact rebus, Linus employs an aggressive one and adopts the role of aggressor. The treatment center is thus tested as to whether it emotionally sides with one party. The couple will feel they can trust the recipient who does not side emotionally with one while condemning the actual assault.

Axelina and Linus’s couple contact rebus does not only involve compliance-aggression contact rebuses but also an untruth contact rebus. Superficially, Axelina cooperates with the measures being taken to protect her, but she is not completely honest about the situation.

Failure of Solving the Aggressor-Victim Contact Rebus

The treatment center fails to solve the couple’s contact rebus and Axelina and Linus enter a demotivational process. Had Axelina not discharged herself, the center would have probably discharged her anyway, since most of the clients and staff felt deceived and betrayed.

The couple receives life force through their actions but not as much as they would have had the couple contact rebus been detransmuted, in which case neither Axelina’s nor Linus’s respective victim and aggressor roles would have been accepted. The institution would have been skeptical towards Axelina’s behavior, questioning her role of victim and not taking emotional responsibility away from the couple in terms of their relationship.

The Couple’s Contact Rebus Wants Help

The fact that Linus comes to the treatment center demonstrates that both he and Axelina desire help with their relationship and with themselves. Most importantly, they want the assault and drug abuse to end. Their actions indirectly indicate a sense of mutual confidence between them that is difficult to abandon.

They know what they have but they don’t know what will happen if they change their relationship with one another. Axelina’s contact rebus clearly shows that she gains intimacy from the relationship but she is also scared of Linus. By employing a couple contact rebus in addition to her individual one, her testing becomes more complex.

Increasing the Pressure

The interaction between Axelina and Linus increases the pressure in the gambit and can thus be seen as the third element in this respect; Axelina’s and Linus’s individual contact rebuses coexist with their mutual couple contact rebus. The active nature of the couple’s contact rebus also increases the pressure within it. A show is put on for all to witness, the communicative power of which is much greater than mere words. The life force generated in the couple’s contact rebus is also greater, as two individuals are involved instead of one.

Blog 56. The Group Contact Rebus

The couple contact rebus (blog no. 54) is only one example of how a combined effect of interpersonal contact rebuses may occur and how they jointly build a new composite contact rebus targeted at several individuals at the same time. Another example of contact rebus collaboration is the mutual group contact rebus of group members (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 561 – 587).

Case Study

Twenty-five-year-old Asta is visiting her social worker Karolina, who takes care of her finances. Karolina is a new member of staff and it is the first time she is meeting her client. Asta has her social worker with her – Iris, from a substance abuse team. Asta tells Karolina how displeased she is with Iris, saying she doesn’t get any help and that, anyway, she doesn’t have much of a drug problem. Iris is angry with her client because she feels the criticism is unjustified.

Asta uses heroin, and Iris and her colleagues have together succeeded in preventing her from being completely consumed by her drug abuse. Nevertheless, Iris is stressed out by the fact that her supervisor has emphasized how important it is to have a good relationship with the social workers who take care of their client’s finances. Now that Asta is so critical, Karolina might feel that Iris is not doing a good job, thus making cooperation between the two social workers more difficult.

Still, she cannot display her anger and defend herself since Karolina would then have a negative impression of her. Asta is, however, very cooperative towards Karolina and willing to discuss her finances. She is friendly and tells Karolina that it is wonderful to talk to someone who is really helping her. She particularly appreciates receiving such clear confirmation.

Karolina feels she has succeeded in developing a trusting relationship with her client, but she is critical of Iris, who she feels has a negative attitude, is lacking in sympathy, and does not listen enough. The finance team of which Karolina is a part has, in fact, been expressly critical of the activities conducted by the substance abuse team, and are of the opinion that very little positive change is induced in their clients. On the other hand, the substance abuse team feels that the finance team can be a little too formalistic and bureaucratic.

Discussion

Here the client is testing the cooperation between the substance abuse team and the finance team. This she does by criticizing the abuse team and praising Karolina from the finance team for displaying precisely the same qualities that she denounces in the abuse team. She then praises Karolina for being formal, a quality which the abuse team dislikes in the finance team.

In reality, Asta does not want Iris to feel offended and she does not want Karolina to let herself be flattered. Asta will also receive negative feedback if Karolina feels she has further evidence that the criticism of the abuse team is merited. Karolina is invited to enter into a conflict between the two teams instead of recognizing the client’s compliance contact rebus and the group contact rebus. Asta will similarly receive negative feedback if Iris has the negative image of the finance team confirmed to her.

By behaving differently towards the different members of staff the client tests whether she will receive positive affirmation from the collective group contact rebus of the finance and abuse teams. It is very common for clients to test the group contact rebus with an aggressive contact rebus directed at one member of staff and a compliance contact rebus at another, thus investigating whether their cooperation can withstand the strain.

If the staff members are loyal to one another and maintain a professional approach, they will endure the one receiving very negative feedback, and the other very positive affirmation. The client is testing the transmuted and untransmuted inner group contact rebus of both staff teams. Their unity and loyalty put the staff members’ transmuted contact rebuses in focus, as they reflect the members’ equal emotional needs in relation to one another. However, having a professional approach to one another is linked to each member’s ascribed untransmuted contact rebus towards the client, which in turn affects the inter-collegial relationship.

If the staff members pass the client’s test of the group contact rebus, they will not be drained of life force, meaning that they will continue to have a good working relationship with each other. However, if one of them does not solve the client’s contact rebus, he will start to become drained. In that case, the other might switch to having an ascribed untransmuted contact rebus towards his colleague. This is the alternative method of addressing his colleague’s reactions.

By having an ascribed untransmuted contact rebus, the staff has the opportunity to receive life energy from one another. The colleague who is being drained of life force can then receive some from his partner without draining him, the latter actually receiving life force in return.

The ascribed untransmuted contact rebus may thus be utilized by colleagues when they cannot establish contact with each other through the transmuted contact rebus. However, the ‘price’ for employing the untransmuted contact rebus is that staff members can no longer have their similar emotional needs satisfied within the team and the relationship ceases to be equal.

Blog 57. The Family Contact Rebus

We can see the family as a type of group, the collective contact rebus of which exists as a family contact rebus. In addition to the collective contact rebus, there exist contact rebuses for the various relationship patterns within the family, as well as the remaining individual contact rebuses of each family member. The parents form an important couple contact rebus and also separately employ their own ascribed untransmuted contact rebuses with their child.

Both of these untransmuted contact rebuses then form an ascribed untransmuted parental contact rebus, which is the pattern of the parents’ joint approach to their child. In turn, the child starts off with an unequal more less transmuted contact rebus directed at each of his parents and their parental contact rebus. Equal, more or less transmuted contact rebuses exist between siblings as can the ascribed untransmuted and unequal transmuted contact rebus interaction, particularly if there is a large age difference.

One commonly occurring contact rebus in latently motivated families is the parents’ invitation to the motivational worker to assume their parental responsibility. The parent transmits a helplessness contact rebus and acts as if he or she is not very capable. If the motivational worker then assumes this responsibility both emotionally and officially, he will be giving the parent negative feedback (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 587 – 598).

Case Study

Thirteen-year-old Klemet has just been involved in a childcare investigation due to his aggressive behavior towards other children and teachers at school. The investigation team has decided that Klemet requires support from his school in the form of extra tuition. It is also important that his home situation improves. One social worker, Frigga, has been assigned the task of supporting the family.

On her first home visit, the parents tell her that they have trouble setting boundaries for their son. He withdraws into solitude and spends several hours a day in front of the computer. Klemet’s parents do not know how they are going to get him to stop this and socialize with the family more. This concerns the social worker and she has a private word with Klemet. He doesn’t talk much and mainly responds to questions by saying he doesn’t know. When Frigga raises the issue of his computer habit, he becomes completely silent.

After her visit, Frigga is all the more concerned and feels helpless. The parents don’t know how to help their son and she hasn’t succeeded in establishing contact with him either. Frigga talks about her dilemma in a supervisory session and learns that she is emotionally and actively assuming the responsibility of the parents instead of giving it back to them.

On her next home visit, she tells the parents that she doesn’t know how to handle Klemet’s computer habit, and stresses that the parents are his custodians and therefore have the sole responsibility of helping their son. Then Frigga questions them as to what measures they are actually taking to handle the situation. It turns out that Klemet’s parents object a few times when he is sitting in front of the computer but otherwise do nothing in particular. Frigga begins to question them about their reasoning behind doing so, and the parents say they don’t want to object more to avoid his getting angry with them.

When the social worker enquires as to why they are worried about their son becoming aggressive, Klemet’s parents say that they do not know. Frigga is also interested to know why they let their son decide for himself when he wants to be at the computer. She discusses the fact that the computer is placed in Klemet’s room and not in a communal area, such as the hallway. His parents would be better able to control his use of the computer if it was conspicuously positioned.

Afterward, Frigga no longer feels helpless and feels that the parents have reassumed responsibility for their son. She also feels she is helping the family more than if she had actively and emotionally taken responsibility for Klemet’s behavior herself. Frigga pays another home visit.

The situation with Klemet is the same but his parents’ attitude has changed and they seem more engaged in their son than before. On Frigga’s fourth home visit, Klemet’s parents have succeeded in limiting their son’s computer usage by setting up a timetable. They feel happier with their efforts and receive praise from the social worker. For her part, she feels positively affirmed for her position of not taking responsibility away from the parents, but also recognizes that their actions are a positive rebound and that they need more motivational work.

Discussion

These parents’ helplessness is a contact rebus. Indirectly, they are asking the social worker what she thinks of their abilities as parents. The more she assumes emotional and active responsibility for their son, the more they will receive negative feedback. However, she herself becomes increasingly burdened, as she is the person with the least power to change Klemet’s situation given that she has neither parental responsibility nor much of a relationship with him.

His parents receive positive affirmation when Frigga returns responsibility. Their self-confidence increases and they allow themselves to set boundaries for their son. Since the social worker sets boundaries for the parents and makes demands on them, they are in turn able to set boundaries for their son.

The family contact rebus is harder to solve because children are often the ones to enter the role of scapegoat. Since children and youths are looking for genuine parental figures, their contact rebuses have a different emotional power to that of adults. Moreover, a child cannot take responsibility for his situation and needs to be protected and cared for.

When a child is a scapegoat, the motivational worker experiences many emotions. The family contact rebus tests whether he will side with the child so much that he adopts a negative attitude to the adults. If this happens, he will not have passed the test and risks assuming their parental responsibility both emotionally and actively.

Blog 58. The Organisational Contact Rebus

While we do not always meet the family contact rebus in motivational work, we do have ongoing contact with the organizational contact rebus. This is because the staff teams who encounter latently motivated clients are often part of the official, bureaucratic organizations in sectors such as healthcare, criminal justice, and social services. Whether these organizations are large or small, they all consist of different groups, often organized in a hierarchy (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 599 – 625).

Several levels of contact rebus occur in an organization, in terms of both individual and group contact rebuses. A number of teams may be merged into one large unit, and thus comprise several group contact rebuses. Since the organization as a whole is characterized by a pattern of contact rebuses, we can maintain that an organizational contact rebus also exists.

Like the group contact rebus, the organizational contact rebus contains an internal and external component and is represented in the contact rebus of each member of the organization.

The organizational contact rebus contains an inner ascribed untransmuted contact rebus targeted at its members which is chiefly conveyed by the management staff within the hierarchical structure. Like other contact rebuses, it consists of two components: one untransmuted constructive and one transmuted destructively. The ambition of the untransmuted constructive component is for the organization to carry out its task as well as possible. This endeavor includes giving positive affirmation to staff when they have done a good job and generally taking care of the people within the organization.

The destructive component of the ascribed untransmuted organizational contact rebus consists of the needs of the organization, regardless of its mission. The needs of an authoritarian, hierarchical organization are that it survives and that its internal structure of power remains intact, as this constitutes its very foundation. Should the hierarchy of power collapse, the organization will find it difficult to survive, so the destructive component of the ascribed untransmuted organizational contact rebus contains a message to any individual member wishing to undermine the power structure of the organization.

The organization wants staff to be loyal to this very hierarchy and to see this loyalty as their own primary aim. This component of the ascribed untransmuted organizational contact rebus is based on a sense of insecurity among the organization’s members: they are not confident that everyone wants the best for the organization. If the members cannot detransmute this destructive component of the organizational contact rebus, an increasingly destructive interaction will be initiated in which the aggressor-victim role duo will be all the more evident.

Case Study

Two social services offices handle family cases. One of them is managed by the ambitious Styrbjoern, who sticks rigidly to his budget, and has his own ideas as to how to develop operations. His staff has been evaluated and proved to perform well. The other office is managed by Ernst, who is frequently outrunning his own antiques business, perhaps doing his company book-keeping or ringing clients during work hours. Rumors soon spread through social services until everyone, including the directors of the organization, know about their boss’s moonlighting.

The evaluation made of Ernst’s office shows its performance to be much poorer than Styrbjoern’s, yet Styrbjoern is often met with skepticism at conferences and is actively resisted by the directors of the organization: they frequently do not grant him funds for the various projects he suggests. He has on several occasions received harshly-worded correspondence warning him not to make his own decisions.

Styrbjoern can nevertheless detransmute these reactions and does not take them personally, seeing his interaction with the directors as an exciting power play. In contrast, Ernst is favorably received by the organization’s directors and often receives praise for his work. He is never questioned as to why his office has such a high food allowance, although everyone knows that the staff eats the clients’ food without paying. The poor performance of his office is not an issue either. Ernst cannot detransmute the organizational contact rebus and believes what the directors tell him.

Discussion

The manager who fails to take responsibility and performs poorly receives positive affirmation, as he is loyal to the organization from the point of view of its directors. His moonlighting during work hours only means they can control him; if he became too independent they would have a valid reason to be rid of him – besides he has no foundation to stand on in terms of good performance.

While Ernst cannot detransmute the controlling actions of the organization, Styrbjoern can. His situation is the complete opposite in that he experiences active resistance, and, although his team has been shown to be doing really well, he receives no credit for this at all.

His ‘problem’ is that he is too independent in relation to the organization and they have nothing to pin on him. As Styrbjoern’s team performs well and he is exemplary himself, he poses an even greater threat. However, Styrbjoern can detransmute his superiors’ reactions and does not enter a demotivational process. Instead, he receives life force from the organization and does not let himself be lead into a destructive interaction with its directors.

He would be much easier to control if he had felt wronged and disparaged, as his emotional reaction would have caused him to let go of his tactical thinking and increase the risk of his making a formal mistake. However, the directors and organization do receive life force from Styrbjoern and enter a motivational process with him, as seen in the negative rebound which he receives in response to his actions.

Blog 59. Appraising Level of Motivation 1

To be able to apply the methodology derived from the contact rebus theory, a motivational worker must be convinced that his client is latently motivated and has a destructive, concealed contact rebus, and thus has a different, cloaked message behind what he appears to be communicating to others. This distinguishes him from the manifestly motivated client, who does not hide in the same way despite using transmuted contact rebuses. The latently motivated person’s destructiveness gives him an even higher degree of transmutation, and recognizing his latent motivation is the most important aspect of the motivational worker’s work, as it decides his whole approach to his client (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 626 -669).

Appraising a client’s degree of motivation is done on the basis of the following characteristics:

* The destructive degree of transmutation of the client’s emotional experiences

* The destructive degree of transmutation of the client’s cognitions

* The destructive degree of transmutation of the client’s actions

* The destructive degree of transmutation of the client’s temporal contact rebus

* The degree of congruence between emotions, cognitions, actions and life situation.

Case Study

Sigfrid, 40, is homeless and a frequent visitor to a shelter, which is open for all during the day and offers beds for the night. Sigfrid attends daytime activities and sometimes stays the night. His health is failing since he has diabetes and has twice been operated on for cancer. On several occasions, Sigfrid has been banned from the shelter’s activities after having threatened and even attacked other clients and members of staff.

He has formerly done time for assault and attempted murder. He is a drug user, but not as much as he used to be owing to his diabetes. The shelter offers the homeless a chance to see a doctor once a week. At one such time, Sigfrid attacks another homeless person and is banned from the doctor’s surgery for a month. Despite this, he turns up a week later wishing to talk about his being banned.

The female deputy manager of the day center agrees to see him, and he explains to her that he hit the other homeless person because he had said that people like him shouldn’t get to see a doctor. As Sigfrid talks, he struggles with his tears and rushes out from the room, returning red-eyed a short while later. He says that he is a fool and that he’s done wrong and he deserved to be hit. In the end, he gives the deputy manager a hug.

She is given the impression of someone who is being genuinely honest and who has made a confession. She reverses the decision to ban him there and then and he gets a chance to see the doctor straight away. Afterward, she feels as if she has witnessed something big and has connected in a very intimate way with a fellow human being.

Discussion

As a positive rebound, the patient has a compliance contact rebus, and as a negative rebound physical violence. As mentioned above, one difficulty with the compliance contact rebus is that it makes the motivational worker experience in the here-and-now that his client is being emotionally open and confiding, and genuinely means what he says. However, there is an inherent incongruence: how can Sigfrid be so well-integrated and open and yet so destructively demonstrative? There are also signs in the transmutation of the compliance contact rebus, which shows that his emotions are transmuted.

His reaction is simplistic: Sigfrid is devastated and considers himself the sole source of blame, yet he is not troubled by the fact that he cannot control himself and can become so violent, and therefore feels he needs no help preventing it from reoccurring. He should, however, be worried about it after all his previous assaults; instead, he acts so as to erase the event and the responsibility he has for it. Another sign is the rapid switch between assault and compliance (i.e. a high degree of transmutation of the temporal contact rebus).

It is not reasonable for such a destructively demonstrative person to have worked through his situation and changed his ways so quickly. On the other hand, this does fit into the picture of the assailant’s positive rebound, in which they take all the blame and apparently want to put everything right. Only his destructive physical violence is actually enough to establish that he is latently motivated.

Unfortunately, the staff is unable to solve the contact rebus. This can be because it contains a combination of flattery and intimidation, which is a difficult transmutation to deal with. In one way, he is saying to the deputy manager that it is thanks to her skillful actions that he confesses.

At the same time, she knows how uncontrollably destructive Sigfrid can be and therefore does not want to see the transmutation, since the situation could then become threatening. To summarize, in the appraisal of Sigfrid’s motivation, we can say that the truth lies more in his actions than in his words.

Blog 60. Appraising Level of Motivation 2

The dilemma for the motivational worker is that the approach towards the latently motivated is very much the opposite of that he should take towards the manifestly motivated. If one treats a latently motivated as if he were manifestly motivated, his highly transmuted contact rebus will remain unsolved and he will receive negative feedback. Conversely, if we see the manifestly motivated client as latently motivated, he can end up receiving negative feedback, which, at worst, can be tantamount to abuse. Judging whether the client is latently motivated or manifestly motivated is part of the conscious detransmutation that the motivational worker performs and the first stage of this process (Motivational Work: Values and Theory, Part 1, pages 629 – 669).

Case Study

Daniel, 45, has been abusing drugs for many years and has been in sporadic contact with the social welfare office’s drug group. Two months ago, he had his flat totally decontaminated as it was in such a filthy state. The toilet was broken and the client was using the bathtub instead, while he had simply thrown his household waste into a corner of his sitting room. Once his flat has been cleaned up, he fails to contact the drug group; so a social worker, Annette, pays him a visit and finds him lying on his mattress totally drunk. He has a cut on his leg, which seems badly infected, and his flat is in just as bad a state as before.

Annette believes that Daniel might have advanced blood poisoning and calls a doctor, who soon arrives at the flat. Daniel refuses to be examined, and the doctor says he is unable to do anything as Daniel does not want to receive any help. After a brief discussion, the doctor leaves. Annette is very concerned about Daniel and feels that she cannot leave him on his own, so she calls him an ambulance.

When it arrives, however, he refuses to be taken to the hospital and just begs them to buy him some beers. The paramedics call the hospital, which dispatches a doctor. This doctor establishes that Daniel is in a serious state and requires immediate medical help. At the same time, he judges that Daniel is in no condition to look after himself and arranges for him to be removed to hospital in accordance with the law (as regards enforced hospitalization due to mental illness). In the end, Daniel departs willingly for the hospital.

Discussion

Here, the social worker decides that the client’s refusal to accept treatment is a contact rebus, and that really he wants help. Legally, however, she is required to respect his wishes, just like the first doctor. Yet she is unable to leave him to his fate. The contact rebus with which she has to deal is a very difficult one, for she is made to feel a certain responsibility for Daniel’s life. If instead, she interpreted his wishes as genuine, she would have been leaving him to die. Because she understands that, deep down, he wants help, he ends up agreeing to go to hospital while still concealing his positive desire behind the threat of enforced treatment.

Summary

The client can have varying degrees of latent motivation. Knowledge of these stages improves the motivational worker’s ability not only to recognize latent motivation but also to see changes as his work progresses.

The latently motivated can be likened to a drowning man. In his desperation, he shouts for help, but can only do so in an indirect way. The more he risks sinking, the louder and more obscurely he calls, as his attempts to communicate become more transmuted and destructive. The client is in a demotivational process that he is unable to stop, and as he loses life energy, the danger of his drowning grows ever more real.

Blog 61. Summary of Part 1: Commitment and Protection Suit

The active element of motivational work is the dynamic between the motivational worker and his client. It is vital that the motivational worker does not hide behind a mask or a role, for the more he is himself, the more he can take advantage of the opportunities the therapeutic situation presents. The personal inventory that he takes to the meeting with his client includes his values and opinions, and it is this aspect of his work that we have been exploring (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 679 680).

Commitment and Protection Suit

From the perspective of motivational work, most will be gained from the encounter if the motivational worker has with him the following values and opinions, which also form part of his constructive ascribed untransmuted contact rebus. In that way the list is also the motivational worker’s protection suit, which makes it possible to stay committed and to not be burnt out:

* All clients have potential: there are no hopeless cases.

* All situations have potential: there are no hopeless situations.

* The motivational worker has the primary responsibility for the motivational work.

* The motivational worker must be fully conversant with the signs of latent motivation.

* The latently motivated client always appeals for help via his contact rebuses (the theory of contact rebuses).

* Emotional change always involves two steps forwards and one step back (the theory of life-energy processes).

* The client changes through encounters in the here-and-now and through the relationship.

Blog 62. The Six Emotional Attitudes

Motivation tangibly manifests itself in the individual through certain emotional attitudes which describe the emotional content of the positive core. The purest expression of motivation is in the untransmuted component of the ascribed untransmuted constructive contact rebus. Motivation also exists in transmuted contact rebuses, but in these the emotional attitudes are partially concealed by transmutation (Motivational Work, Part 2: Motivational Relationship, pages 3 – 7).

Genuine Emotions

The most important quality of the emotional attitudes is that they must be genuine, meaning they are untransmuted and arise from the motivational worker himself. He cannot manipulate them into existence.

Charging a Car Battery

The motivational worker conveys to his client emotional attitudes that he is generally lacking and needs to receive externally. The function of these attitudes is most simply explained by way of illustration: If you were trying to start your car and discovered that the battery was dead, you would hopefully receive help from outside. A neighbor, for example, might assist by using jump leads from his car to start yours, thus transferring power to the dead battery so that the engine can start.

We can view the motivational relationship in a similar way. Motivational workers impart life energy to their clients so that their motivation increases and their engines can start. What separates motivational workers from other providers of life energy is that the latently motivated client has a huge need of life force. There is thus an enormous imbalance in the direct exchange of life energy.

The Client’s Rejection

The client will not outwardly show genuine gratitude for what the motivational worker does, instead reacting through his contact rebuses such as aggression, withdrawal or compliance. It can be likened to happily and willingly going to pat a dog despite being alternately licked and bitten time after time. A motivational worker can also be seen as someone who, just as hopefully each time, asks someone to dance despite being rejected every other time and despite never receiving an honest response from his dance partner.

Finding Positive Confirmations

By detransmuting the client’s transmuted contact rebus, the motivational worker receives positive affirmation in the same way as with other ascribed untransmuted contact rebuses. By way of his values and theoretical knowledge, he thus facilitates a maximization of the indirect life energy he can receive from the latently motivated client.

Six Emotional Attitudes

There are six different emotional attitudes contained in the motivational relationship, something the author has come to understand through the personal experience of motivating clients and supervising other motivational workers. The six attitudes are as follows: commitment, hope, faith, respect, understanding, and honesty. We can see these six attitudes either as separate entities or as the components of one multi-faceted, composite emotion.

Blog 63. Committment

For the commitment of a motivational worker to be convincing, his actions must demonstrate that he cares. It requires more life energy to act than to merely convey the emotion, and acting can transmit more life energy (Motivational Work, Part 2: Motivational Relationship, pages 23).

Case Study

25-year old Anneli is a drug abuser. Some days after being forced into rehabilitation, her mother dies. The funeral takes place a week later. Two members of staff, Kristoffer and Nanna, accompany Anneli to the funeral to watch over her and provide support. During the funeral, Nanna, the female carer, notices how bad her client is feeling and is concerned for her. After the ceremony, Anneli tries to escape by running for a bus.

Feeling that she can’t leave her client to her own devices, Nanna rushes after Anneli but is too late. Shouting and waving she tries in vain to get the bus to stop. Refusing to give up, Nanna continues to run after the bus, which is moving slowly in the heavy traffic. She catches up with the bus and manages to make eye contact with Anneli, but then has to give up when the bus increases its speed. Anneli goes to her flat, intending to kill herself. However, she changes her mind and rings the institution, asking them to come and fetch her. After a while, two members of staff turn up in a car and drive her back to rehab.

Discussion

Intuitively, Nanna feels that it is vital to prevent Anneli from absconding. Through her emotional commitment and actions, she demonstrates that her client has value as a person. The positive affirmation of Nanna’s actions entail provide Anneli with life force and strengthen the bond between her and Nanna and the rest of the staff.

In this way, Anneli is provided with a counterweight to her own destructiveness. The injection of life energy is present when she is sitting alone in her flat and it prevents her from committing suicide. Evidence of Anneli having bonded further with the institution is that she calls them on her own initiative to ask to be taken back into enforced care.

Blog 64. Hope

The expressions, ‘the darkest hour is just before dawn’ and ‘there’s light at the end of the tunnel’ demonstrate the content of this emotional attitude. Circumstances in life can be such that nothing in our external reality appears to confirm that opportunities exist. Hope is based on a belief in there being potential in all types of life situation. Hope provides a future perspective on the here-and-now situation, giving us the energy to deal with it and look ahead (Motivational Work, Part 2: Motivational Relationship, pages 23 – 30).

Case Study

30-year old Goeta has contact with Sylvia, a social worker dealing with substance abusers. Sylvia tries to keep in regular contact with her client, visiting her at home or at a café, as Goeta refuses to come to the social services office. Goeta frequently fails to turn up for the meetings they arrange, and when this happens, Sylvia tries to reach her by writing a letter or visiting her home. When Goeta doesn’t open the door, Sylvia leaves a note. Goeta has previously had a relationship with a man who beat her, and she abuses alcohol from time to time. She has acted destructively in other ways too, such as by starving to death her pet rabbit.

Goeta stays away from other people and mostly sits around in her flat. She hasn’t had any electricity for several months now because she hasn’t paid her bills. Each time Goeta meets Sylvia, she says she has no reason to live. Sylvia finds it hard to make Goeta look on the bright side, but tries to convey hope to her. After two years of contact with Sylvia, Goeta meets a new man, one who abuses neither her nor drugs. However, Goeta terminates the relationship after only a short time and then resumes her drink habit. However, in her contact with her social worker, Goeta now has the courage to go to see Sylvia at her office.

Discussion

The client expresses a strong sense of hopelessness in both emotion and deed, something her social worker tries to confront with hope in both emotion and deed. The fact that she seeks out her client time after time and does not abandon her must be of great significance; it seems that the social worker eventually manages to impart enough life force to her client through their contact so that she chooses a less destructive partner than before and comes to the social services office (positive rebound). A negative rebound ensues in the form of her alcohol abuse. At best, the social worker has started a motivational process in the client, in which the message of hope has been an important part.

Summary

Hope is a mood: it feels makes life and existence feel positive. It is something to lean on as a counterbalance to a reality in which nothing confirms the existence of opportunities.

Blog 65. Faith

Introduction

This emotional attitude involves faith in the client’s own resources – the power he has within him which he does not exploit or fully appreciate. On an experiential level, this attitude is equivalent to self-worth or self-confidence. Although no one knows what the future will bring, there is a difference when a person has a sense of his own abilities or a sense of hopelessness and lack of confidence in himself. Faith means a person can rely on himself and trust himself to cope with situations. This does not imply megalomania, rather it entails the view that we do have limitations and we can ask for help if required. Having a sense of self-worth does not mean a person is in ‘splendid isolation’ and able to do everything himself (Motivational Work, Part 2: Motivational Relationship, pages 30 – 36).

Self-Confidence by Doing

An important factor in building the client’s self-confidence is getting him to do things he will be successful at. In this context, such actions have a similar role to play as in the context of commitment; the client is tangibly being shown he can actually accomplish something. This is more powerful than just having discussions about self-confidence.

Case Study

At an institution for delinquents, the youths are given the opportunity to practice American football with the local team, and this means joining in with their regular practice sessions. A number of the male staff at the institution are ordinary members of the A-team. When a youth is judged to be sufficiently skilled, he is allowed to play for the B team.

Discussion

Here we see the boys from the institution being given the chance to practice with the football team and then go on to play matches. The staff demonstrates faith in two ways, in that they feel the boys can cope with both the practical and social aspects of being on a football team.

Blog 67. Respect

This emotional attitude involves the motivational worker conveying to the client that he has value as a human being; the client is shown respect regardless of who he is or what he has done. It is a feeling which corresponds to the democratic value of equal worth (Motivational Work, Part 2, Motivational Relationship, pages 36 – 44).

Being respected is the experience of belonging, of not being excluded from the community. The client feels that whatever might happen to him or whatever he does, he will be accepted as an individual. This gives him a sense of security. However dark things around him seem, he will never be completely alone; he will always be part of a human community.

Trust in God is a feeling that is close to that of esteem and respect – God will not abandon a person, whatever he has done.

The latently motivated client often feels he stands outside of society and the human community. However, the distance that is created between himself and others is often self-facilitated through his own behavior in the form of contact rebuses.

Many might recognize this emotional reference to respect: an individual tells someone about something he has thought or done which he finds difficult to accept. The listener shows respect by still holding the individual in esteem despite what he has told him.

This emotion involves the motivational worker being able to differentiate between the individual and his acts. Regardless of what the client has done, he has the right to be respected and valued as a human. Separating the two can be difficult as it is all too easy to equate the person with his deeds. The client may have done things that make it difficult for the motivational worker to maintain respect for him.

No one can have respect for everyone; if he did, he would no longer be human with his own faults and shortcomings, but something of a god-like figure above everyone else. God can accept all human beings, but we do not have that ability. For us, there is a distinction between the clients we feel respect for and those we do not.

For some motivational workers, clients who have committed sexual crimes such as incest, child molestation and rape are impossible to respect. For others, the same may be true of clients who have committed violent acts such as GBH and murder. For such motivational workers, the client’s deeds wreck any feeling of respect they could have had for him.

Even if the client has done something which the motivational worker rejects on the basis of his values, the actual emotional meeting may nevertheless allow him to convey the emotional attitude of respect. If the motivational worker can see the suffering human behind the objectionable facade, it may allow him to be less influenced by his values.

27-year old Gudmar has been sectioned for serious violent abuse. Unprovoked, he knocked down a 14-year old boy and jumped repeatedly on his head, giving the boy permanent brain damage. Joel, Gudmar’s contact on the psychiatric ward, finds it difficult to sympathize with his client at first, as his crime prevents him from having a positive feeling towards him.

Joel feels that what Gudmar has done is so repugnant, he is losing the desire to help him. However, they embark on a number of discussions together. On the surface, Gudmar is compliant and behaves as Joel would expect. Joel recognizes the compliance contact rebus but also senses that, behind the facade, his client feels very lonely and in despair about his life situation. Being able to see this side of suffering allows Joel to start having positive feelings for Gudmar.

By looking beyond the contact rebus and meeting the suffering person, Joel gets past his negative feelings. He is no longer focusing on the aggressor but is discovering new sides to his patient.

Blog 68. Understanding

For the motivational worker, understanding means emotionally conveying to the client that he understands his experiential world. This is not an intellectual process, but an empathetic appreciation of the client’s emotional make-up that places the motivational worker so deeply in his client’s situation that part of him shares the same feelings and experiences as his client. Understanding is thus synonymous with empathy (Motivational Work, Part 2, Motivational Relationship, pages 45 – 52).

Through emotional transmutation, the latently motivated client is more alone with his pain in regard to both himself and in relationships to other people. Feeling understood is therefore a much more powerful experience for him than for a manifestly motivated client because it induces a dual sentiment – that of having his feelings shared and that of loneliness. Moreover, the client gets more in touch with the pain that the motivational worker understands, inducing powerful experiences, both positive and painful.

40-year old Fredrik lives in a hostel and has on several occasions threatened to hit the staff. Most of the staff and clients are scared of him. One evening, Fredrik has an aggressive outburst and starts smashing the furniture in the day room. The staff on duty call the hostel manager, who is on call.

Fifteen minutes later, he arrives at the institution and sees Fredrik continuing his demolition job, which the manager interprets as an expression of something Fredrik is upset about. Soon, Fredrik has smashed everything in the room, at which point, the manager goes up to him, puts his arm around his shoulder, and asks how he is. Fredrik starts to cry and then talks to him for some time. It should be noted that the manager is a large man.

We see here how the manager’s words are not what matters, but the feeling he conveys. He conveys all the emotional attitudes of the motivational relationship. He demonstrates a commitment by having the courage to go up to the client and lay his arm around him, something which is both endearing and prevents continued aggression, and his way of talking to Fredrik demonstrates that he understands that he is upset and is in pain.

When the manager demonstrates the motivational relationship, Fredrik switches to his positive rebound, but with a lower degree of transmutation than the previous negative one. Fredrik has now received a boost of life energy from the manager.

Blog 69. Honesty

The emotional attitude of honesty (Motivational Work, Part 2, Motivational Relationship, pages 52 – 70) is really a crystallization of the quality of the other five emotional attitudes, which must be honest and genuine, and therefore untransmuted; in other words, the motivational worker must not be in disguise in the meeting with the client, but truly and unambiguously himself. The greater the transmuted component of the untransmuted contact rebus, the less life energy can be transferred. The demand for genuine feeling applies to all the emotional reactions the motivational worker has towards the client.

The latently motivated need a different kind of help than the manifestly motivated. The difference between them is that the manifestly motivated have such strong motivation within themselves that they have their own energy to constructively and actively participate in their treatment. The latently motivated do not yet possess this strength and need their positive cores boosted by the motivational worker because they primarily find themselves in a demotivational process.

An important way of transmitting life energy is through the emotions that the motivational worker has towards the client. By definition, the feelings which the latently motivated person receives must be genuine, otherwise, he will not receive maximum life force. The motivational worker strives to transfer as much life force as possible via his ascribed untransmuted contact rebus.

25-year old Frej is in contact with a social worker who works with drug abusers, something he has to do in order to receive financial aid from social services. He has been meeting his social worker every week for a year now. In his discussions with her, he says he finds it very difficult to quit drugs because withdrawal is tough; he feels like he is their victim – once you’ve started you can’t stop yourself.

The social worker tires at hearing this repeated victim contact rebus. At first, she is doubtful about expressing her feelings but senses that this perception comes from a positive commitment to Frej, so she confesses to feeling tired. Frej is quiet for a while, but then resumes his talk about being a victim in relation to drugs.

Honesty is required for all emotions on the condition that a basic positive feeling exists for the client. In this case, the motivational worker trusts in this and receives a response from the client in the form of silence.

An important feature of honesty in relation to congruent actions is the provision of factual, concrete information. It is also a way of showing respect. One may question the motivational worker’s commitment and respect if he does not talk about things the client has a right to know; his emotions and deeds are not congruent. The motivational worker’s discomfort about disclosing the information is put before the client’s right to receive information. In this case, the client continually has confirmed that he cannot trust anyone and that he will always be disappointed.

21-year old Engelbrekt’s mother calls Marina, a social worker, about her son. Apparently, he had a psychotic episode a year ago and was sectioned. Engelbrekt has begun to isolate himself again and has paranoid thoughts. His mother asks the social worker to visit her son at home, but Marina wonders why she hasn’t got in touch with the psychiatric clinic. Engelbrekt’s mother doesn’t want to because her previous experience of compulsory care was bad.

Marina promises not to tell Engelbrekt about her conversation with his mother, but therein lies a dilemma: she has promised her that she will visit him but cannot tell him why she is doing so. Eventually, she decides to visit Engelbrekt, who lives alone. He opens the door but won’t let the social worker in, telling her she can come back next week. Afterward, Marina feels bad about not having told Engelbrekt the reason for her visit.

Marina cannot solve the family contact rebus and adopts paranoid behavior, which probably makes Engelbrekt suspicious that his mother is the instigator of her visit. Marina has not detransmuted the contact rebus of the mother, who will rely more on someone who does not agree with her hush-hush tactics. Marina’s actions cause her to enter a demotivational process and feel deceitful. Had she adopted the emotional attitude of honesty, she may have prevented this from happening.

Blog 70. The Rock in The Storm

The motivational worker and the client encounter each other through their contact rebuses, and if a complete motivational relationship is to form, there has to be mutual bonding between them. It is, in effect, a relationship between a contracting party (the motivational worker), with a well-developed capacity for bonding to other people, and the client, whose abilities in this respect are dysfunctional (Motivational Work, Part 2, The Motivational Relationship, pages 72 – 87).

As mentioned earlier, the client is looking for someone who can affirm him and whom he can trust. Although he desires help, he is suspicious and bears a degree of psychological pain. At the same time, he hopes that the motivational worker will have the energy to deal with his anguish and not abandon him.

In practical terms, this means that the client wants nothing more than to feel the motivational relationship from the motivational worker as a response to his contact rebus. He wants to experience being given commitment, hope, faith, regard, understanding, and honesty in response to his contact rebus.

The six emotional attitudes are, as mentioned earlier, the concrete expression of the life force that the client needs. All his contact rebuses are designed to extract life energy from other people. Each time the client tests with a contact rebus and receives the motivational relationship in return, his life force is strengthened.

The response of the motivational worker to the client in the form of the motivational relationship effects an inner mental change in the client, whose positive core gains an injection of life energy. There occurs, at the same time, a degree of bonding between the two. The client is emboldened to take a step closer and as the motivational worker moves closer too, their relationship is deepened and strengthened.

Case Study

There is thus always a point in creating a relationship with a client even if it is impossible to complete a course of motivational work. The increase in life energy that the motivational worker gives the client makes him a shade less destructive, while the boost to his positive core will render the next contact rebus that he transmits to another motivational worker slightly less transmuted and destructive. This will make it easier for the next motivational worker to detransmute the client’s contact rebus and return the motivational relationship.

Henry, 40, is an inmate of a treatment center for alcoholics. After four months there he starts to drink again, and he is thrown out for breaking the rules. The center helps him to register at a larger shelter, which also has a detox unit, where he will stay until he is clean enough to return.

At the shelter, Henry starts to drink with abandon, leaving each morning to go into town only to return each evening heavily intoxicated. The staff tries to stop him from leaving in the mornings and to convince him to undergo detox, but he refuses to listen.

It’s hard for the staff to see him destroy himself day after day with his alcohol abuse, although he has been in the same situation during previous residencies there and always ended up accepting treatment. The staff firmly believe that the same will happen this time too, and realize that they can use the time with him to strengthen his motivation whenever he is in a negative rebound and is destructively demonstrative, and whenever he comes to the detox unit.

The staff hopes that his motivation will increase so much that he will be able, at best, to take even more advantage of the treatment offered by the center. They also plan to invite personnel in from there to mitigate the negative feedback that being discharged entailed.

When Henry is in his negative rebound, he gets himself thrown out of the treatment center and enters a shelter, which is able to take care of him while he is in this phase. They see a purpose to his visit, even though it reminds them of previous occasions.

Yet again they have an opportunity to strengthen his motivation so that he can benefit even more than before from the treatment the center has to offer. They see a meaning in their motivational work, despite not being able to follow it through. The motivational process has a chance of becoming even stronger for when the client next turns up at the shelter and when he returns to the treatment center.

Blog 71. Demotivational Relationship – Passive Detransmutation

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 and 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, pages 105 – 127).

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

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 towards him, Staffan decides to enter a program of motivational work with him. They meet at Staffan’s office once a week, but after a month Hugo starts not turning up. 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 starts aggressively accusing Staffan of not helping him.

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. He eventually calms down and walks out of the office, leaving Staffan shaken. He refuses to see any more of 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 can see no meaning in Staffan bearing Hugo’s pain.

Discussion

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 is unable to detransmute his client’s contact rebus and receive life energy back from him, and 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.

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 the avoidance of his client.

In that the motivational worker is unable to 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. What this means is that the motivational worker receives his client’s destructive contact rebus without any detransmutation at all, leaving the client’s contact rebus to run riot in the motivational worker’s psyche.

Blog 72. Demotivational Relationship – Snow White

A typical reaction that the motivational worker can have in his demotivational process is to withdraw from the client completely. He feels so bad about the relationship that his only way to escape his disquietude and stop the depletion of life energy is to break off contact (Motivational Work, Part 2, Motivational Relationship, pages 105 – 127).

If he continues to meet the client, his suffering will continue. The motivational worker feels unable to stop his demotivational process himself and consequently no longer has any control over the relationships. Instead, he lets the client’s demotivation have power over him and effectively places himself in his client’s hands, allowing the latter to rule over his emotions.

Snow White

This sense of powerlessness is illustrated in our fairy tales when someone is put under a spell; in our terms, this gives the motivational worker the sense that his emotions, even his life, are being controlled by an external force.

In the classic Brothers Grimm tale, Snow White flees from her wicked stepmother and hides away with seven dwarves in the forest. The stepmother manages to find her and sets off dressed as a kind old woman, taking with her a poisoned apple that she intends to give to the girl. Snow White is taken in by the disguise and eats the apple. She immediately falls into a deep sleep from which the dwarves are unable to wake her. Finally, she is found by a young handsome prince, who wakes her with a kiss on the lips. He declares his love for her and a wedding is planned – and they live happily ever after.

Snow White fails to see through her stepmother’s disguise (= destructive contact rebus) and enters a very strong demotivational process that seriously depletes her life energy. Her only hope of rescue is a sudden and liberal injection of life energy from someone who can see her tests (a prince for example).

Case Study

Josef, 14, lives with his parents and little sister (11). Josef has threatened to kill himself by jumping from a balcony, and so his parents contact the social office, which sends a social worker, Mathilda, 35, to meet him. They want him placed in care as they no longer have the energy to look after him. Josef has to move to an emergency family home as he undergoes an examination at the child psychology clinic. Mathilda finds out from Josef’s mother that he sometimes touches her breasts, and that although she finds this disagreeable she finds it hard to prevent him.

When Josef has been away for a month, the mother contacts Mathilda again. She informs her that her daughter has now accused Josef of sexually abusing her. The home at which Josef is staying has also said that they cannot keep him anymore, as the mother finds him so emotionally assertive. He is relocated to a youth institution, and at first, Mathilda feels sorry for him, and it seems as if he has taken a liking to her too.

After a while, however, she starts to feel a strong sense of malaise even on hearing his name. Mathilda’s reaction fills her with a sense of hopelessness and vulnerability, and she feels not only that she is powerless to do anything about it but also that she is actually being controlled by Josef. She decides to pull out of the case and refuses to have the slightest contact with her former client.

Discussion

The social worker initially has a motivational relationship with her client and is keen to build up a relationship between them. However, this positive feeling for her client is soon replaced by a negative one, which even becomes physical, and she enters the same demotivational process as the mother of the emergency family home.

Mathilda’s passive detransmutation gives her a picture of how Josef and the family perceive their situation. Her malaise can, for example, suggest that there really is sexual abuse in the family; what is clear is that at no point does Mathilda see her client’s contact rebus, and this sets off her demotivational relationship.

Blog 73. The Non-Relationship

There is a third kind of client relationship to add to the motivational relationship and the demotivational relationship. This third relationship is based on the non-contact rebus and means that the motivational worker has the converse of a relationship, and thus no feelings at all for the client (Motivational Work, Part 2, Motivational Relationship, pages 135 – 148).

We can thus say that the motivational relationship has two kinds of opposites, one in which the content of the relationship is its reverse (i.e. the demotivational relationship) and one in which there are no feelings at all (the non-relationship).

The non-relationship is the negation of a relationship in the same way as the non-contact rebus is in relationship to the contact rebus. This means that the non-relationship as a concept is prerequisite to a relationship existing in the first place.

On an emotional level, the non-relationship is a negation of the experiences of both the motivational relationship and the demotivational relationship, as is made clear if we juxtapose the three relationships thus:

The motivational relationship

The demotivational relationship

The non-relationship

Commitment

Hope

Trust

Regard

Understanding

Honesty

Hate, indifference

Hopelessness

Distrust

Disregard

Non-understanding

Dishonesty

No commitment, hate or indifference

No hope, no hopelessness

No trust, no distrust

No regard, no disregard

No understanding, no non-understanding

No honesty, no dishonesty

In the non-relationship, there is no exchange of life energy, and the client’s positive core receives no life force at all. The non-relationship is thus the antithesis of the motivational relationship and the demotivational relationship, and its consequence for the client is that the demotivational process, with nothing to hinder it, continues unabated. The non-relationship enables the greatest possible destructive development in the client; in this case, the demotivational relationship is a more positive relationship, as the client receives life energy (albeit less than in the motivational relationship).

The non-relationship is the most powerful negative feedback that a client can receive, and conveys to him the message that he is without worth. At least in the demotivational relationship, there is negative commitment. This means that an aggressor can give his victim weaker negative affirmations than someone who does not even see this victim. What the motivational worker can hope is that someone else enters a motivational relationship or a demotivational relationship with the clients with whom he has a non-relationship.

Case Study

Annika, 15, has been in compulsory care for the past two months after having been sexually abused by her father. Her mother has known about the abuse but has done nothing to intervene, and the father was reported by an elder sister of 19 after she left home. However, the police investigation has been dropped owing to a lack of evidence. During her first years at the institution, Annika runs away about once a month back to her parents, upon which the staff normally come and collect her.

When they see her seductive behavior towards her father, they are convinced that sexual abuse has not stopped. They discuss how to deal with the situation and decide not to inform the authorities of their suspicions, as they are worried that they would no longer have charge of Annika and would lose a client. Nor do they make an effort to stop her from escaping. At conferences, the staff usually state that they seem unable to form a relationship with Annika and that she presumably does not want to be at the institution.

Discussion

Although Annika must understand that she will be subjected to fresh abuse each time she goes back home, she still receives more life energy from her abusive father than from the staff of the institution. This is because there is at least some kind of relationship between them, albeit a highly destructive one. None of the staff has a relationship with her, and so, from them, she receives a non-contact rebus.

At the same time, her escapes are a destructive contact rebus that involves placing the staff in the role of her mother. What do they do when she indirectly shows them that she is the victim of abuse? Nothing, despite their concerns. In reacting thus, they adopt the same kind of role as Annika’s mother.

Blog 74. Client Selection

May 15, 2016 by Per Leave a Comment | Edit

The fundamental importance of the emotional relationship with the client to motivational work has certain consequences. In short, the motivational worker can only work with the clients with whom he feels a motivational relationship, and from this follows several corollaries.

It influences the selection of clients. The most efficient motivational work occurs with the clients with whom the motivational worker is already positively engaged.

The Characteristics of a Latently Motivated Client

The characteristic of a latently motivated client is that he quickly arouses powerful emotions in others. If the motivational worker is open to his own reactions, he will soon understand his client’s attitude. The client transmits his destructivity and his appeal for help to the motivational worker through his contact rebuses, both of which are charged with a great deal of energy.

As we have seen, being latently motivated means being in a desperate and helpless situation; such a client’s contact rebuses push the motivational worker up against the wall and compel him to adopt a particular attitude towards the client.

Everyone working with latently motivated clients faces a decision-making process, but it is often intuitive and unconscious. The motivational worker puts ‘more of himself into his work with clients for whom he feels more engagement (Motivational Work, Part 2, Motivational Relationship, pages 149 -154).

Case Study One

Fritiof works as a social worker at an office that deals especially with homeless clients. He has 50 clients, most of whom are drug users or alcoholics; with many, his contact is sporadic. They sometimes temporarily disappear or get sent away for detox, put in prison, or admitted to a mental hospital. Fritiof finds himself becoming particularly engaged in seven of his clients, but he has no special method to turn to. The rest of his clients he has less commitment to, and this sometimes makes him feel guilty.

Case Study Two

Hemming works at the same social welfare office and is training to be a motivational worker. He also has 50 clients. However, unlike Fritiof, Hemming has made a conscious choice to pursue a program of motivational work with three clients in whom he feels particularly engaged.

He is prepared to put a great deal of time into maintaining contact with them, which sometimes entails traveling long distances to meet them in prison or hospital. Also, Hemming realizes that he has also deselected other clients and has more formal contact with them.

This pains him, yet imposing boundaries on his motivational work comes as a relief, as it means there are no expectations on him to help everyone equally. He hopes eventually to extend his list of clients with whom he can pursue courses of motivational work simultaneously.

Discussion

Fritiof works intuitively, which means that he spontaneously commits himself to particular clients. However, he is not entirely focused since he also uses a certain amount of life energy with other clients and applies no special methodology in his work. He, therefore, has to rely on the intuitive detransmutation of his clients’ contact rebuses, given the absence of any theory to fall back on.

If Fritiof can intuitively detransmute a client’s contact rebus, he can start a course of motivational work, but he is in danger of becoming burnt out as he might end up taking on more clients than he can cope with. He also risks entering a demotivational process if he fails to detransmute a client’s contact rebus.

On the other hand, Hemming consciously selects and deselects clients and does not, therefore, risk-taking on too many. As a result, he can allow himself to focus more on the clients to whom he has chosen to commit, and his use of methodology increases his ability to detransmute their contact rebuses.