THAT'S MEN:You'd be surprised how hard it is to answer
WE WERE sitting in a quiet hotel bar in Sunderland late one night last week when a young, well-dressed woman ran in the door and asked the barman to call the police.
She was distressed and somewhat incoherent, but repeated her entreaties to him to get the police.
The barman reached for the phone and she sat down at a table, shaking. A woman who had been at the other end of the room sat beside her and handed her a paper handkerchief.
This woman seemed to have some experience of handling such situations. She waited for a time before she spoke to the other person in a gentle and non-intrusive manner.
A young man came in, agitated, looked at them and went out again. The barman poured a glass of water and began to bring it to the young woman. The young man walked in again and sat opposite the young woman and started shouting at her.
The gist of his complaint was that she had hit him several times over the head, that this was not the first time she had done it and that he was taking no more of it.
It was no wonder, he said, that the children wanted nothing to do with her. She stayed silent as he showed his wounds to the other woman.
The other woman, with the air of someone who has sized up a situation, stood and walked away. The barman had stopped in his tracks to figure out what to do next.
The matter would, no doubt, be dealt with by the arrival of the police a few minutes later. We left – I get enough of people shouting at each other on the street when I’m trying to get a night’s sleep.
The episode did, nonetheless, point to the difficulty of assessing situations like this. At the start, everybody’s sympathies were with the young woman.
Later, sympathies shifted towards the young man. He was not coming across well, but he was the one who was wounded.
In a world in which the worst domestic violence is perpetrated, so far as we know, by men I wonder what sort of hearing he got from the police when they arrived?
Here’s a tricky question: what do you want? No, seriously, the question is at the heart of a counselling and educational approach called Reality Therapy or, more nicely, Choice Theory. You’d be surprised how hard it can be to answer.
We all go around in a sort of mist of vague wants, but when asked to answer the question we are stumped by it as often as not.
Reality Therapy revolves around these four questions: What do you want? What are you doing to get what you want? Is it working? If not, what are you going to do about it?
Answering the questions honestly can help you see that you are in a futile loop and that you need to change your ways.
For instance, suppose you want your spouse to drink less. What you do is nag her when she is drunk or hungover. This doesn’t work. Actually, it never works.
What you can do about it is talk to her when she’s sober and in a receptive mood, quit covering up for her and so on.
But an awful lot of us spend an awful lot of time stuck in the futile loop of endlessly doing the thing that doesn’t work (nagging the spouse, grumbling about the boss, complaining about the unfairness of life and so on) instead of trying something different.
This probably has something to do with fear of the unfamiliar and with wanting to be the centre of your own world, which you are when you are complaining about the rest of the word.
The Irish Reality Therapy people are holding their annual convention at the Osprey Hotel in Naas, Co Kildare, on October 16th and 17th on the theme Getting along Better with Yourself and the Important People in your Life. People interested in attending should e-mail info@wgii.ie.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail