The Irreverent Psychologist

The Heart of the Story Part I: Yoda Meets Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

2012-01-22T11:49:00.000-05:00

My mother recently sent me a rather long e-mail. That's not a particularly uncommon experience. Answering it here on my blog, however, is very unusual.

You talk a lot about life as the stories we tell ourselves. I've been thinking about that a lot lately. Do you have a good resource for me to read about this? Have you written anything about it on your blog that you could perhaps share with me?

Actually, I don't think I have written much here on my blog about stories--and how those stories are the way in which I've come to see as the way we create our own humanity. Since she asked, and since I've been looking for a good topic to write about, why not have you all join in on my response to my mother?

I just finished a book entitled, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know. It's a true story about a woman who came from a chaotic, dysfunctional family, as in her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic & her father, a cross dressing alcoholic who was also crazy. She had been face blind all of her life, but didn't really realize it until she was in her early 40's... I took some rather extensive notes citing the more interesting parts.

For those of you who wonder how the Irreverent Psychologist got to be the Irreverent Psychologist: you might find some clues in the above paragraph. The Mother of the Irreverent Psychologist (MIP) notes that she has taken "extensive notes citing the more interesting parts" of the book. As regular followers on Twitter may have noticed, a small portion of the voluminous notes I take while reading appear on my Tumblr page.

The nut doesn't fall far from the tree.

...but I digress. The MIP started her email with a question about stories but manage to ask two questions. The first question--about stories--will come a little later. First I'll tackle the MIP's question about cognitive behavioral therapy.

The person in the book visited a cognitive behavioral therapist to treatment of claustrophobia. It seems that the individual in question had a panic attack while having an MRI. MIP wanted to know what I thought of the intervention.

"Are you ready to kill the monster?" There was no reason to be afraid. This fear was just an old remnant signal from the brain stem. The brain is very dumb! the therapist said. We can learn to override it. There is no fear, only fear of fear. There is no such thing as claustrophobia.

I personally don't see much utility in telling someone they aren't experiencing what they are experiencing. If someone is having a hallucination it does not good to tell someone they aren't having a hallucination. While you and I might not see, hear, or smell what the other person is hallucinating, they are. The better response is to validate the experience of the other while also validating my own. For example, "It must be so scary to be smelling burning flesh. That however, is not my experience of what I smell in the room right now."

Yoda

And there is no fear, only fear of fear? Who is this guy, Yoda? Fear is a physiological response in our body. We are, of course, capable of interpreting it in a variety of different ways. Nonetheless, fear is still fear. It is certainly true that most anxiety disorders become less about the fear response and more about fearing frighting situations. At the heart of most anxiety disorders is avoidance--we begin to limit our life because we avoid situations that we fear might cause fear. Perhaps this is what Yoda--I mean the therapist--means.

He asked me what I was afraid of in the MRI tube and I told him: suffocating, not being able to get out.

He said I could get out. No, I said. I have to squeeze the ball and wait for the technician. But would happen to you while you wait? he asked. What is the danger you fear?

I wanted to go to bed. I didn't want to get in the tube again. I didn't need to cure my claustrophobia; it was the least of my problems. "Well, I'm afraid I'll die. I feel like--"

The therapist replied, "It is a feeling state. You see? You won't really die. You can't. There's no deadly spiders or deadly toxins...nothing in the tube is really dangerous. You just want to get out. You don't need to though. Nothing bad can happen in the tube. You just lie there. Right? In a tube. It's a tube." he said.

Well yes, Yoda/Therapist is right in correcting a cognitive distortion. It isn't likely that a person would die from deadly toxins, spider bites, or anything else while having an MRI. However is this person hallucinating? Are they actively seeing, feeling, hearing, or smelling things that other people do not? I would argue that the experience of the hallucination first needs to be validated before correcting a the cognitive distortion. Poisonous spiders that both you and I see can kill you. Poisonous spiders that only you see, that are a product of a hallucination, are not lethal.

The more he talked, waving his hands, pleading, the better it sounded. When we were babies, ten thousand years ago, we were afraid if we were in a small space, in a crevice, and with reason: if a baby was wedged in a tight space, it was dependent on someone else to get it out. Our heart rate went up. Our fear response increased our chance of survival. Not anymore. Not for a long time. But the limbic brain, the oldest part of the brain still thinks all tight spaces are equally dangerous.

I think Yoda/Therapist is being a little simplistic here. Not everyone dislikes tight spaces and panics when they get into such predicaments. It is likely very true that our physiological system has evolved in such a way that when we perceive we are in danger our bodies become flush with "fight or flight" hormones. However small a component it might be, we do have some agency in this process. We first have to decide that the information we are taking in through our senses represent a physical threat. While we might only have a split second to make the decision, there is nonetheless a split second in which we made a decision about whether we are in danger or if we are safe. Folks with anxiety disorders often move so fast into fight or flight that they aren't even aware of that moment in which a choice can be made.

That is the whole point of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety disorders--to teach people the awareness of that moment in time when a decision can be made and equip them with skills needed to properly evaluate their perceptions.

"It's a monster in your brain. We kill him!" he announced, grinning like a kid. He motioned to me to sand.. He put his fists in a fighting position. "Right now?" I said. I thought we were just having a talk. He was nodding, waiting, smiling, rocking on his toes. "We give it a try."

We walked toward the room. At the threshold, he hit the front of his forehead with his palm. "We must use this." he said, and smacked the back of his head with the same hand, "to overcome this." In the room he said, "Well, what is scary to you in here, this room? What would be really scary?" I walked across the room and stood by the small closet. "I would go in here." He said to go in. I did an he closed the door. "What will freak you out now?" he said through the closed door.

I could hear and feel his body leaning against the door. And the monster leaped. I couldn't believe I was sitting in the dark in a closet with a man leaning on the door. I had never been further from who I was, and at the same time I suspected somehow I was becoming myself in there. This I realized was the gap. It was funny and fascinating. He jangled the doorknob. "Do you see the monster? Is he near?""Yes," I said. "He is here." I was smiling. It was like the monster was on the screen in the MRI tube, and I was clicking at him. I was scared, but not in the way I thought I would be. It was so goofy. I was outside the scare, having it--it wasn't having me. Maybe for the first time in my life.

"Are you laughing at him? That is good! See!" He banged on the door, hard. I shook, startled, and then I was still. It was quiet. The monster grew. I kept watching him. He didn't take over. There was a gap. I was able to see the monster. I could see just what he was talking about .

I heard him leave the room. He came back, running, threw himself against the door, rattling the knob, pounding. Again and again and again. He screamed. Kick the door. I sat there and stared at the monster, and he was right. Each time he pounced, the monster grew bigger, but never as big as before. Whenever I jumped or startled, I turned up the volume on watching, and each time I did this, the fear got smaller, always much smaller than the time before. Until it was just really hot in that closet, and extremely boring. I came out of the closet. "I am cured," I said.

This all sounds like very creative systematic desensitization to me. It's best, of course, to actually first teach people skills at lowering their physiological arousal before stuffing them in the closet and scaring them.

This has gotten so long that we'll have to continue the answer to the question that the MIP really asked later. Check back in the coming days for part two of this post.

From the Mother of the Irreverent Psychologist

2012-01-21T15:51:00.000-05:00

The mother of the Irreverent Psychologist sent in this humorous clip this morning. She thought it was appropriate seeing that we are getting our first major snow of the year in New England.

Can America Still Shine?

2012-01-20T18:56:00.000-05:00

I came across Newt Gingrich's dissertation and tweeted a few select quotes. Watch what happens within my own little global community.

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

"Some specialists argue that American society will be warped and disfigured by this growing disparity in living standard."@newtgingrich

DivineParty RT

@jaypsyd @newtgingrich Yeah Interesting Quote , Caught my attention :) !

17 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

DivineParty RT

@jaypsyd @newtgingrich Well , I hope his political views really supports Justice and Welfare of others , We have been disappointed a lot :(

9 minutes ago

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

@DivineParty They most certainly do not support justice and welfare of others.

9 minutes ago Favorite Reply Delete

Retweeted by DivineParty

DivineParty RT

@jaypsyd I dream everytime there's a new president 4 the most powerful country of the world

7 minutes ago Favorite Undo Retweet Reply

DivineParty RT

@jaypsyd that he wud use this power to make the world a better place

7 minutes ago Favorite Undo Retweet Reply

My twitter friend from Egypt took my breath away.

I dream every time there's a new president for the most powerful country of the world that he would use this power to make the world a better place.

Such a simple wish. Such an embodied example of what American values are. Such a challenge for each of us to rise up and be more. When we watch these petty politicians on television debate, do you see any of them living up to this simple wish? Do you see any of them being able to stand up tall and wield their power--our power that we grant to our elected president--to make the world a better place?

Shame on them for being so small.

Shame on each of us that don't vote. Shame on each of us that continues to allow a politic of fear overshadow a politic of dreams.

DivineParty RT

@jaypsyd Does Power spoil people that much ? why don't people treat it like a responsibility not a privilege !?

12 minutes ago Favorite Undo Retweet Reply

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

@DivineParty I think many use power to support their own self interested/not our shared global community.

12 minutes ago Favorite Reply Delete

DivineParty RT

@jaypsyd In the endless fight between The Good & The Evil , How do you see it End !?

10 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

@DivineParty That's implying there is both a beginning and and end. It's what we do with what we have the concerns me the most.

8 minutes ago Favorite Reply Delete

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

@DivineParty It's how we each confront issues of power, violence, and domination that unlocks our potentials, or dooms us to failure.

8 minutes ago Favorite Reply Delete

I hope we find our way--and soon.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cites frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I light my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus, 1883

From: Ellis Island: Early Notions of a Multi-Cultural Society

The Map is not the Territory: On Scientology, Intelligence, and Critical Thinking

2012-01-20T17:12:00.001-05:00

Regular readers of my random ramblings no doubt note that I'm a lover of diversity. I also strive to be respectful of a variety of beliefs. There are limits. I've apparently found one of mine.

"Everything in moderation including moderation" --Oscar Wilde

My clinical psychology practice is in the heart of Harvard Square in Cambridge Massachusetts. It's hard to spin around on Massachusetts Avenue without knocking over another psychologist. There are a lot of us concentrated along red brick sidewalks. This dense grouping of psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists apparently makes the square a good place for the occasional protest by anti-psychiatry and anti-psychology forces within Scientology.

I've been working in Cambridge for the better part of eight years now. From time to time the folks from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights New England canvass the streets and put leaflets on the windshields of the cars lining the streets. I recently got this flyer pictured on the left when I was parked in front of a senior citizen housing complex.

I'm all for having full throated and complex discussions about all sorts of different ideas. The neighborhood around my office is populated by communists, cults, political protesters (the Falun Gong folks have put on some amazing street performances/protests), and of course there is the endless supply of people wanting me to save the whales, children, environment, etc.

Most of what is presented in Harvard Square is one sided. The information from the Citizens Commission on Human Rights is no different. I actually enjoy encountering this sort of material--and enjoy when a young (or old) client brings it with them into an appointment. Almost every autumn, for example, a teen comes into my office with their latest discovery from the LaRouche youth movement. Together we look at the information with a critical eye. We think of ways to get different viewpoints. We think of ways to fact check. I create a space where the teen can come to their own opinion, in their own way, in their own time.

This sort of dialogue has had transformative and far reaching effects. A young person (or any person, really) starts looking at their own life with a critical eye: they explore, fact check, try out different viewpoints, and eventually find a more expansive understanding of their inner (and outer) lives.

Sometimes however, the one sided nature of the debate turns nasty. Sometimes it's even dangerous.

There are important issues to consider with the over use of psychiatric medications (look here to check out Robert Whitaker's blog Mad in America and here to check out Daniel Carlat's blog for two excellent places to start your own research). The "Whistleblowers of Elderly Psychiatric Abuse", however, really got me frosted the other morning.

What frosted me about the flyers left in front of the senior housing is that it preys on fear and peddles that fear on a vulnerable population. The claims made in the flyer, in some ways, are not outlandish. There are serious concerns that patients and doctors need to sort out together about the use of psychiatric medications. Likewise, there are also serious concerns to consider when a patient is contemplating electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

To explore ECT more, click here to check out the Mayo Clinic's information page about the procedure, here to read another overview, or here.

Leaving propaganda on cars surrounding a senior housing complex is just too much. Of course many senior citizens are perfectly capable of doing their own critical thinking. Some however, are not. Some just get scared, aren't equipped to have a good dialogue with their physician, and are left to suffer needlessly.

Rather than leave the propaganda behind anonymously, why not really engage people in a multi-sided dialogue about psychiatry, medication, mental health treatment, and health care decision making?

On a lightly related issue, the folks leaving the anti-psychiatry propaganda also left behind a coupon to visit the local Scientology church. To have your IQ, personality, and aptitude testing.

I have to admit, I'm curious about this one. Much ink has been spilled about what constitutes "intelligence." No one really has an answer for it. The best we have is our performance on specific tasks that are statistically compared to the performance of large populations of people who take the same test.

"The map is not the territory" -- Alfred Korzybski

I wonder how long this is going to take us all to figure out? In the end, I think that's what this somewhat rambling blog post brings me. Whether we are talking about psychiatry, anti-psychiatry, religion, or intelligence, we collectively seem intent on thinking one group or another has direct access to a final statement of what reality is. In the end the best any of us can ever do is have access to our own perceptions to a set of beliefs or ideas.

Madness. Religion. Intelligence. We've created many different abstractions to understand these phenomena. They are all just that: abstractions or reactions we derive from our perceptions. None of them, on their own, are representative of reality.

I think this makes our world so much more interesting and exciting. It also makes it possible for us to all look together at one thing and marvel and all the different ways we experience and understand the phenomena around us.

Critical Thinking Meets a Big Mac Attack

2012-01-20T15:41:00.000-05:00

So on my Facebook page today I noticed a McDonald's advertisement. I clicked on it and saw this clip:

As a disclaimer, I'm a vegetarian and can count the number of times in the last 20 years I've been inside a McDonald's franchise on one hand. With that said, how many times have you ordered something from McDonald's and gotten something with a crisp piece of tasty romaine lettuce (like that pictured here in this clip). Don't they serve up the shredded, wilted, and flavorless iceberg variety?

Someone to watch over me: Etta James (1939-2012)

2012-01-20T11:59:00.000-05:00

We lost a great voice today. Remember when music moved your emotions, rather than moved you to buy something?

Don't Let Anybody Make You a Nobody: In Honor of MLK

2012-01-16T14:09:00.000-05:00

What a treat I just discovered. I hope you all take the time to listen to this speech. It is especially nice to listen to it after my previous blog post Shit Homophobic People Say. Which one calls you to be a bigger person? Which one inspires you to be more?

An art teacher in Cleveland, Jayne Sylvester, discovered some dusty old tape s hidden away is a pile discarded junk in a high school library. What did she discover? A little known speech that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on April 26, 1967.

What a great find. If you listen to it--and I hope you do--I hope you share your thoughts as you reflect on Dr King's message.

"I would like to suggest some of the things you must do, and some of the things all of us must do, in order to be truely free. now the first thing we must do is to develop within ourselves a deep sense of somebody-ness. Don't let anybody make you feel you are nobody."

Shit Homophobic People Say

2012-01-14T18:53:00.000-05:00

Sometimes people say the darnedest things. Here are a few stellar examples. How does any of this make anyone feel good, or elevate anyone to be more, or move our society forward toward a place of peace, compassion, and justice?

Really now. People say the darnedest things.

On Honor Killings, veracity of facts, and people in glass houses

2012-01-14T01:25:00.000-05:00

So this evening I came across the following tweet:

stacyhyatt Stacy Hyatt

3000 Women Have Been Killed LAST YEAR, in Great Britain Alone, as #Muslim.Honor Killings : youtu.be/vOqAVTZY1Ok #Sharia #Islam

39 minutes ago Favorite Retweet Reply

Honor kills are a horrible. I have no room in my life for violence against women (or men) in any form. I've sat in my office with Muslim women who escaped terrible violence (or are enduring terrible violence) as well as with Muslim women who have never known violence.

My attention, of course, was drawn to the exaggerated spewing of hate from the 700 Club that you can find in the link shared by Stacy Hyatt. The xenophobic-baiting gets me every time.

I did a little fact checking. Interestingly, the Guardian reports that the murder rate in England and Wales was 619 in 2010. Seems like someone has their facts wrong. I listened to the 700 Club clip--what was actually reported is that there were 3,000 honor attacks in Britain. Honor attacks are not quite murder, though both are pretty horrible things. I dug a little deeper and discovered that the actual number of honor attacks, as reported by the BBC, is 2,823.

Okay. So they aren't murders, they are attacks. There aren't 3,000 of them, there are 2,823. Some of you might say I'm quibbling about details. I think accuracy matters. Careful attention to details like this helps me judge whether or not anything else someone is saying has any veracity.

Why do I care? I care because I see our media covering the extreme and ignorming the mainstream. I'm also tired that 37.8 percent of our population who voted in the 2010 election speak for the other 62.2 percent (this doesn't really belong here, but I'm annoyed about it and just had to say it).

Back to our regularly scheduled program.

From all reports, violence against women in Muslim countries is pretty horrific. However not every Muslim women is abused. Those interested in domestic violence in Muslim countries might check out the website Women's Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality.

This really isn't the point. It's not about who is experiencing violence and who is not. It isn't about what kind of violence is worse. What really got my goat about this whole kerfuffle was two fold: inaccurate information being shared and an emphasis on 2,823 dramatic crimes with no attention paid to the millions of other women (in the United States and the world, many of whom are not Muslim) who suffer violence.

Our own country has abysmal statistics about violence against women. Before the folks from the 700 Club and the Stacy Hyatts of the world run to the street corners casing aspersions against the entire Muslim civilization, they need to look inside their own house.

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Let's look at our glass house, also known as the statistics about domestic violence in the United States. Click here for the full report

On average more than three women a day are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends in the United States.
In 2005 1,181 women were murdered by an intimate partner.
In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and prevention published data collected in 2005 that finds that women experience two million injuries from intimate partner violence each year.
There were 248,300 rapes/sexual assaults in the United States in 2007, more than 500 per day, up from 190,600 in 2005.

None of this is okay. We all need to own the violence perpetrated in our communities. We all need to be part of the solution to this violence.

UPDATE: January 14, 2012

Someone on Twitter, Abdul-Azim Ahmed, sent me this reference to crime statistics in the United Kingdom. To put the honor attacks in perspective in terms the general crime rate, click here.

Born This Way: A Note on Liberation

2012-01-13T11:11:00.001-05:00

Some time ago I wrote a blog post called "On Orientations, Preferences, and Mother Monster." I had an interesting conversation with someone who asked me if gay people are "born this way" as Lady Gaga and large parts of the gay and lesbian community suggest. The answer is complicated. Look at my original blog post for some food for thought (and a little Lady Gaga).

This morning I read a news story from Brasil. It is a good reminder to look outside of ourselves and outside of our own country from time to time. Here is someone from Brasil conceptualizing sexuality as an option--a choice--and not being afraid to make that choice (despite the gay bashing).

"These comments are nothing more than proof of what we're trying to say. We are assaulted by our sexual option ", says Fernando.

The way identity is constructed and thought of here in the United States is not the way the same phenomena is thought about elsewhere in the world. The way we think about ourselves is bound up in our culture and our national dialogue about identity. We forget that too easily. In forgetting that, we lose some of potential offered by the liberatory social movements of the 60s and 70s where people started making choices about who they were.

I'm Married and I Know It

2012-01-13T09:44:00.001-05:00

Here is another amusing parody video, complete with cutting social commentary, that recently came my way. You can find out more about the maker of this video at Sean Chapin's Facebook page.

How to Stand Up for American Values

2012-01-12T13:16:00.001-05:00

One year while I was in graduate school I happened to spend the New Year holiday in Washington D.C. I visited several different museums--most notably I got to see the Deceleration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

I spent a lot of time that afternoon squinting and reading the very faint handwriting. They are in cases made of titanium and filled with argon gas to protect the delicate fibers and pigments on which our society is built. It wasn't the first time I read these documents. It hasn't been the last. It was, however, the most important of my encounters with these documents. I found it deeply moving to be so close to these documents. These fragile pieces of paper hold a contract that we all have with each other--the basis for our society and our civilization.

I don't know about you, but a lot of what I see parading around during this political season has absolutely nothing to do with what I think of as American values. The hate spewed around the country has absolutly nothing to do with the ideals held in these documents. Check them out for yourself. Maybe you'll agree that there is no reason for extremists to claim ownership to these documents for their perverted views of freedom.

This really is just a preamble for a video I came across this morning. As regular readers know, I live in an undisclosed location in the Merrimack Valley Region of Massachusetts. An Iraqi restaurant near my home recently was vandalized: a yet to be identified individual threw a brick and broke out the establishments windows.

Robert Mills of the Lowell Sun writes:

LOWELL -- An area veterans group pledged to fill every seat in Babylon, a downtown Iraqi restaurant where owners feared hatred drove a man to throw a 20-pound rock through a window last Wednesday.

Instead, those veterans filled every seat twice.

Lowell police said they identified the man who threw the stone, and that he confessed. He will be charged in Lowell District Court, though police say his motive was not hatred.

"Unless this gentleman is lying to us -- and I don't believe that he is -- he didn't even know this restaurant was affiliated with people from Iraq," said Lowell police Superintendent Kenneth Lavallee. [People engaged in criminal acts never lie, right Superintendent Lavalee? --JEM]

The suspect, a New Hampshire man who will not be identified until he is arraigned, will be summonsed to court to face a charge of breaking glass in a building, a misdemeanor.

Patrick Scanlon, a Vietnam veteran and coordinator of Veterans for Peace who organized the show of support, voiced skepticism that hate wasn't involved, but said it was nonetheless important to show support for the family that had been hit hard by fear.

Scanlon was joined at 25 Merrimack St. by veterans of the Iraq war, such as former Army Sgt. Rachel McNeill, of Allston, who served from 2002 to 2010 and spent a year in Iraq serving on a gun truck that escorted convoys, and Chris Borden, of Chelmsford, who continues to serve in the Army Reserves after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Scanlon was also joined by veterans like Paul Brailsford, 96, of Ipswich, a former captain in the Merchant Marines who served in the Pacific hauling weapons and supplies to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's troops during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The veterans, joined by the likes of Lowell Mayor Patrick Murphy, held flags and signs in front of the restaurant as they took turns sitting down inside to eat meals.

Owner Leyla Al-Zubaydi and her father Ahmed Al-Zubaidi said their family was terrified the vandalism was fueled by hate. Ahmed Al-Zubaidi said the incident drove his wife to tears, and prompted her to question whether the family should close the restaurant. The show of support from veterans and the community drove her to tears of joy last night, he said. "This solidarity gives us the courage to stand," said Al-Zubaidi. "There is no more fear in my heart because there are such nice people behind us."

Scanlon had pledged to fill every seat of the restaurant, but by 8 p.m., Leyla Al-Zubaydi said more than 100 people had eaten in the restaurant, which seats about 50.

Lavallee said the man who threw the stone will be arraigned at a date to be determined.

I think the people from Veterans for Peace that filled the restaurant with support are a symbol of what true American values are. Don't you? I'm so very proud of them.

The Safe Emergency of Therapeutic Situations: Fritz Perls and Gloria (and me)

2012-01-09T01:43:00.000-05:00

Recently I wrote about Carl Rogers. While putting together that blog post, I rediscovered the "Gloria" tapes that every psychotherapist-in-training has likely had some exposure. The tapes were therapy demonstrations filmed in 1965. "Gloria," a young recently divorced women, volunteered to meet with Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, and Albert Ellis.

I haven't watched this tapes in years--the last time was perhaps sometime in the late 1990s. They are fun for me to watch. It is also interesting to see a lot of myself--both my history and my current practice--embedded within the words of these three men.

Let's start off with Fritz Perls. Along with his wife Lara, he founded the school of Gestalt psychotherapy. It's not a theory I think a lot about anymore--that's probably because the theory itself sits deep in my bones and works behind everything I have learned. In the early 90s I started hanging out at the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, took several workshops, worked individually with a gestalt therapist for several years, and later participated in a gestalt therapy group for several additional years.

I'm indebted to this early teachers--Jody Telfair, Barbara Fields, Karen Fleming, Mary Ward, and Jackie Lowe Stevenson. There have been many teachers since then but none so central as these.

On to the show. Here is part one of the Gloria tape with Fritz Perls.

A friendly sort, eh? Before judgement sets it, put Perls in his time. This was 1965. It was a time of great social change and liberatory movements. Confrontation was in, as was, apparently, smoking.

I'll share my reactions about the clip here. I hope you do, too. I'm curious what you think.

I found myself with a bit smile on my face at the 4:20 mark. I remember my first day in my gestalt group. One of the members confronted me about my smile nearly as soon as I sat down. "I get confused when you talk about sad things and you smile," she said. "It makes it hard for me to connect." This woman was much kinder that Perls, and I learned a lot about myself. I'm wondering if the smile intervention is some sort of standard thing.

Roll the tape forward to the 7:10 mark and you'll hear Perls saying "what are you doing with your feet there?" Forward again to 9:15 and Fritz imitates Gloria's hand gestures and says "what does this mean? Can you develop this meaning?"

Gloria, looking a little vexed, expressed that she is worried that Perls is going to notice everything she does. I've seen that same look in my office. While I'm not nearly as aggressive or confrontational as Perls, the importance of observing the ever changing tableau of the moment is part of what settled into my bones from my early gestalt training.

Gestalt therapy, beyond anything else, is about learning to pay attention to what is figural--that is, what part of the environment (and what parts of my clients' experience) is reaching out, grabbing at me, and wanting to make connection. The mild look of shock that Gloria gives--it's really not so bad to experience. When I'm paying attention and something jumps out at me and grabs my attention--and I fully notice it and share my experience noticing it--the magic of therapy happens. What was unknown becomes known. The hidden becomes viewed. The shame melts in the light.

A non-gestalt teacher of mine, Glenda Russell, talked a lot about the velvet glove. Paraphrasing her:

"You have to learn how to lovingly hold clients with one hand and gently spank them with the other. Without this balance, you can't do anything."

I don't think Perls understood this balance. Rather than a velvet glove he used something that felt more like nails. I think he was a little too enamoured with the showmanship aspects of therapy. He seemed to be unable to deeply hold a client while sharing his confrontations and observations from a connected place of love and respect.

My favorite part, where I actually laughed out loud, was at 13:52 Fritz says "ahh, you don't have enough courage to come out by yourself. You need someone to pull the little damsel in distress out of her corner."

I wasn't laughing out of a sense of schadenfreude. Okay, maybe just a little. Mostly, though, I was laughing because I was immediately transported back to a moment of my training that is etched deep into my memory. In many ways I was acting like a little damsel in distress. I was a young 20 something taking an intensive gestalt weekend workshop. One of the participants in the group was walking around shaking at his finger at each of us demanding that we all offer him some sort of help.

I was annoyed beyond measure and filled with all kinds of righteous indignation. Who was this guy, anyway? What was up with the group leaders? Why weren't they doing something? I was paying a lot of money to have some strange guy shake his finger at me.

Karen Fleming, one of the leaders, asked me what I was experiencing.

"Nothing," I said. I was good midwestern boy. I didn't get angry. I was always nice. I held the door open for people too (I still do, in fact). Karen said, "that's strange. Every time [the finger pointing group member] speaks your face and neck turn purple."

Oh crap. Busted!

"I'm a little bothered, that's all. I don't think it's my job to take care of him. I'm wondering why you are letting him shake his finger and yell 'shame' at each of us?"

At this point Mary Ward pipes up saying "ooohhhhh, you poor baby. You think it's my job to take care of you?" I think my face turned so purple it nearly exploded right off my skull.

I learned a lot about anger that day.What it signals to me, how to know when I am getting the signal, and how to express it. I also learned that sometimes confrontation is good in therapy. Mary said the right thing, the right way, at the right time. She landed on just the spot that she needed to to propel me forward. I still think, however, she could have been a little nicer.

Some of the Gestalt types too close to Perls missed a few lessons on kindness, compassion, and a gentle touch. That's okay though. We can learn from them too. And therapy doesn't always have to tickle, right?

Let's look at part two. There is a lot more smoking that needs to be done.

Fritz is showing a lot of Gestalt theory here about connection and the cycle of experience.

When we get to the 8:55 Gloria and Fritz are in the middle of a piece of work which is really flowering. They are talking about closeness and navigating just what that means. I found myself transported back to the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland. I was maybe 27 or 28 years old at the time.

Months before, during what I thought would be a normal psychotherapy appointment, my therapist said "I'd like to talk to you about my summer schedule." I remember she mentioned something about a vacation coming up, so I figured she was going to tell me about that.

What she ended up telling me was that at the end of the summer she was moving away. I was pretty shocked. In fact, I'm fairly sure that (a) I stopped breathing and (b) she noticed it an mentioned that it might be helpful if I continue to respirate.

I remember our last few appointments vividly. In one of them, she had asked if I minded if she ate an apple. She was hungry and felt she wouldn't be able to focus her attention on me without a little food

Feeling a little sad, I thought about the different ways I could look away from the experience. I could blame my therapist for leaving. It wasn't her fault, though. People move. I knew that. I also knew that she would know I was looking away and she would gently show me that I was. Okay. Blame wouldn't work. Maybe pity? Why didn't she seem upset? Maybe she should be. Right? No. Not really. I already knew she cared. We worked that out before. I knew this was my emotional experience. It was mine to have. It was also mine not to have. I knew I had that choice. I knew if I took that choice she would be there, observing me looking away. She would also be there just the same if I walked into my sadness. She would notice it and me. There would be no expectations other than I show up and be fully present in my experience (avoiding or not).

No where to go. I could see no good reason to avoid where I was. I gave into the moment--and my feelings-- and spent the better part of the hour sobbing in despair. I was filled with so much sadness that day I could barely remain upright. It was about nothing in particular. No romantic upset was happening. No squabbles with friends or family. I was sad at the end of my therapeutic relationship but it really wasn't the cause of my unrelenting loneliness.

I was making contact with the void--the end of the cycle of experience--a tiny death. It's a scary place to hang out. It's a place that most of us avoid at all costs. I distinctly remembering doing nothing to avoid the void. I looked right into it with all its dark despair. I looked and Jody and cried and cried and cried. She looked back silently, eating her apple, fully present as always.

Jody didn't really need to speak. Our prior work and built tightly woven cocoon around us. I knew she paid attention to me--all off me. It was unnerving at times. She noticed my breath and taught me to understand its own unique language. My body language also told her things I didn't know I said. I learned how I spoke through my physical body. I also knew she would always be there in the room--fully and completely.

We created a place that was safe enough for a therapeutic emergency. While I didn't plan on having one on our last session, it ended up being the perfect occasion for me to create one. Having found a safe enough cocoon to be in, I was able to push (and be pushed) into looking at experiences I would have rather avoided. I looked into that scary dark void of nothingness.

She said a handful of words to me that day. The only ones I remember were her first, about being hungry and eating the apple, and her final words, about my experience. They were all I needed to hear. they were the right words, at the right time, said in the right way:

"Thank you for sharing this with me and choosing to be so present. We have to end now."

I fully inhabited one moment in time, connected with another, with no agenda and little distortion. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to avoid.

Beginning, middle, and end. The cycle of experience.

That is the gift of Gestalt (with or without the velvet gloves).

...and you know what, that void isn't so bad after all. Something always comes next. We just don't always know what it is.

A Pause of Thought

2012-01-08T10:33:00.001-05:00

A commentator on Twitter viewed the clip "Journey Into Self" and shared that the clip reminded her of this poem. I liked it so much I thought I'd share it.

A Pause of Thought

I looked for that which is not, nor can be,
And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth:
But years must pass before a hope of youth
Is resigned utterly.

I watched and waited with a steadfast will:
And though the object seemed to flee away
That I so longed for, ever day by day
I watched and waited still.

Sometimes I said: This thing shall be no more;
My expectation wearies and shall cease;
I will resign it now and be at peace:
Yet never gave it o'er.

Sometimes I said: It is an empty name
I long for; to a name why should I give
The peace of all the days I have to live?—
Yet gave it all the same.

Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit
For healthy joy and salutary pain:
Thou knowest the chase useless, and again
Turnest to follow it.

Christina Georgina Rossetti

Journey Into Self

2012-01-07T23:54:00.000-05:00

"The question they examine is, what is it like to be oneself? What are other people like when they are themselves? All of us are pretty good at carrying the secret of our own loneliness. Now these people will try to discover the secret of being together."

This clip, the documentary called Journey Into Self, is a fascinating view showing us the brilliance that was Carl Rogers as well as the transformative power of group psychotherapy. Get some popcorn and enjoy.

For more about Carl Rogers, check out my blog post here.

Shit White Girls Say (To Black Girls)

2012-01-06T09:46:00.000-05:00

As evidenced by my blog and twitter stream, I apparently have been thinking a lot about discrimination in general and racism in particular. What's somewhat sad to me is that each time I write about these issues I shed a certain number of online followers. Some say good riddance -- people who aren't interested in what I'm writing about are leaving. I find that it really bothers me because one of the reasons I do this is that I'm wanting to create forums for people to think about difficult things that they don't have opportunities to think about. I'm sad when I miss out on an opportunity to engage someone in dialogue.

This morning I was catching up on some of the blogs I read frequently. I came across this smart video on en | gender. Some of the comments on YouTube show just how ugly racism can be.

Slave Narratives: Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

2012-01-05T09:00:00.000-05:00

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves

It looks like I'm going to be a regular visitor to the digital archives at the Library of Congress. Did you know they have a collection of oral histories taken in the 1930s by people employed by the WPA (Works Progress Administration)? They make for riveting, harrowing, and enlightening reading.

Personal narratives like this are like opening a little tiny window in the fabric of time. Through that window I get to glance back and see an unvarnished, unprocessed, and unadorned view of life at it was. These windows are irresistible--when I find it I need to open it and look through it. Whether it be historical narratives likes these, or more contemporary narratives like the ones told by patients in my office, I'm transfixed. Each window opened gives me another perspective to understand the complex fabric of our shared experience.

Sarah Frances Shaw Graves was born sometime around 1850 somewhere near Louisville. She told her story to a WPA interviewer in 1937. The nameless interviewer wrote this of Sarah:

"Her life story is one of contrasts; contrasts of thought; contrasts of culture, beneficial inventions and suffrage. Not far from her home the glistening streamlined Zephyr speeds on twin rails beside the Missouri River, near the route of the slow-moving, creaking wagons on the ox-road of the 1850s."

Let's open up one of those tiny little windows in the fabric of time and let Sarah speak.

"My name is Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, or Aunt Sally as everybody calls me. Yes'm that's a lot of name an' I come by it like this, My husband was owned by a man named Graves, and I was owned by a man named Shaw, so when we were freed we took the surnames of our masters. I was born march 23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere near Louisville. I am goin' on 88 years right now. I was brought to Missouri when I was six months old, along with my mama, who was a slave owned by a man named Shaw, who had alloted her to a man named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily Graves Crowdes. I always lived with Emily Crowdes."

"Yes'm. Allotted? Yes'm. i'm goin' to explain that," she replied. "you see there was slave traders in those days, jes' like you got horse and mule an' auto traders now. They bought and sold slaves and hired 'em out. Ye'm, rented 'em out. Allotted means somthin' like hired out. But the slave never got no wages. That all went to the master. The man they was allotted to paid the master."

"I was never sold. My mama was sold only once, but she was hired out many times. yes'm when a slave was allotted, somebody made a down payment and gave a mortgage for the rest. A chattel mortgage."

A down payment!!

"Times don't change, just the merchandise."

I am amazed at how connected I feel to Sarah. Despite having been born more than seventy years before I was, and having died on July 3, 1943, when my grandparents were in their early 20s and neither of my parents were born, I can feel her presence here in my living room as I sit on my couch writing this in an undisclosed location in the Merrimack River Valley. That's the power of a personal narrative.

Sarah gives us a glimpse into the life of a person in slavery that we don't read about in history text books. Her personal story gives contour, shape, and texture to the disembodied facts our teachers lecture about. Sarah also offers us so much more. She was a simple woman. She worked hard and struggled to survive through an era of history that was not kind to people of color. She received no formal education, won no prizes, and left no inventions, books, or other intellectual products behind.

Yet reading her narrative, I'm incredibly moved the the gifts I have received. Sarah mattered not for what she left behind. She mattered because she was here. Her story illuminates her humanity that, in the end, is all we ever really have.

Barack the Magic Negro: Puff the Magic Dragon (Dreaming a Better Dream)

2012-01-04T11:57:00.002-05:00

Yesterday my Twitter feed was peppered with a few references to the parody "Barack the Magic Negro." This apparently made the rounds through the media during the last presidential campaign. Somehow I managed to miss it.

The racism embedded within this little ditty is appalling. Many others have spoken articulately about this. Interested? Here or over here are two places you might start looking.

My point is less about racism and more about what kind of world do you want to live in? Does anything about this "political satire" video make you feel better about the world? Does anything about it encourage us to be more than we currently are? Does it teach us to care for each other? Work toward a common good?

I certainly don't see any of those loft goals held inside this video. I see a whole lot of racist, small minded ignorance. I see people with small dreams and small ideas constricting the collective possibility of what we can be.

Also, if I'm being totally honest, my point is that I'm also irritated that a classic song from my childhood as perverted into racism. It's a melancholy song about loss of innocence--and for me a reminder to remain open and curious.

Listen to the original. How does it inspire you to live your life?

Which inspiration do you prefer?

A Squirrel May be More Relevant than a Dying Child

2012-01-04T08:05:00.000-05:00

"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." -- Mark Zuckerberg

Living in a bubble, and dealing with them, is nothing new. This TED speaker seems to think that algorithms are in danger of keeping us from other opinions. We've done this for years. Universities and business refer to this peril as being in a silo--being sheltered from other aspects of the school or business and only knowing about the concerns your department or section is concerned about. Politics certainty does this--when is the last time Republicans have listened to someone other than other Republican ideas (unless it is to deride those ideas)? Same for the other side of the aisle. When is the last time Democrats have listened to something other than Democrats (unless, of course, it is to make fun of Republican ideas)?

The problem isn't algorithms. They are just reflecting what we humans do. The problem is humans. We tend to look for information that supports our opinions and ignore the rest. We tend to seek entertainment that is comfortable and familiar rather than look for for something that is challenging and different.

The question here for me is is two fold: (a) do you know the bubbles you are living in and (b) do you spend some time working to look outside your bubble. While the problem for me isn't an algorithm, one solution very well may be. Algorithms that support exposing us to the new, different, and novel can break us out of our bubbles. New businesses that curate ideas and products--and expose us to them in ways that help us discover new things are also an avenue of change.

What do you think?

What Even Happened to Liberal Arts?

2012-01-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

Reference

Regular readers of my blog might remember an earlier post that I wrote upon discovering the Library of Congress digital archives. I recently went back for another visit to the archives and pulled up a treasure trove of interesting things.

To the left is one of the images I collected. What caught my eye is the government offering free adult education classes in the liberal arts. Can you imagine that happening now?

Back in 1937 it did happen. Under the auspices of the WPA (Works Projects Administration), interested adults in Chicago would sign up and learn all sorts of interesting things . Stop for a moment and think about that: adults signing up to learn more about the world around them. Art appreciation, perhaps. How about a new language? A painting class? Child development? All were likely possibilities in addition to basic reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I'd like to imagine it was a time where people had the opportunity to be both thoroughly grounded in basic skills (reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking) and be exposed to a diversity of thoughts to indulge curiosity and wonder. This is at least my romanticized version of history.

What are things like now? Less curiosity and wonder. That's for sure.

If you have some extra time, and are curious, check out this Frontline episode about some of the perils of for-profit higher education institutions. You might also be interested in this New York Times article that details the fraud charges the Department of Justice filed against one for profit higher education institution.

Watch College Inc. on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

Dream giant golden Buddha-sized dreams -- Ryunosuke Satoro

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

2011-12-31T22:55:00.000-05:00

A haunting and important reminder of the importance of fully inhabiting each moment. The film clip below, from a documentary called The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, uses a disaster to remind us all of "the ephemeral nature of life and the healing power of Japan's most beloved flower."

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom Trailer from Tsunami Blossom on Vimeo.

"Even when the flower falls, we love it. That's the heart of the Japanese person. Flowers dying is not a sad thing."

The View From Here: Mirror Mirror Edition

2011-12-27T11:32:00.000-05:00

The side streets of Cambridge were unusually quiet this morning while Maggie and I were walking into the office. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something that seemed out of place. Upon closer examination we discovered this very large bird (a hawk?) contemplating it's own reflection.

Roadside Wisdom

2011-12-22T13:18:00.001-05:00

Light Show Spectacular

2011-12-18T21:22:00.000-05:00

This one came to me by my friend at Fang Shui Canines. The 3D light show was projected on the Kharkiv Regional Administration building during the Ukrainian Independence Day celebration on August 24th.

Enjoy--it's pretty amazing!

Whip It: A Flow Chart

2011-12-15T09:10:00.000-05:00

Rape, Injustice "Facts," and a Call to Better Scholarship

2011-12-14T12:27:00.001-05:00

Those of you who regularly pay attention to me on Twitter know that I go a little crazy over items presented as "facts" that are either not referenced or not verifiable. I've seen way too many examples of blatant misinformation spread as well as generally smart people who become misinformed vectors spreading about even more misinformation.

Take for example the Twitter entity known as InjusticeFacts. They describe themselves as "an open, circulating database of facts that deal with the injustices which plague our world." In general, I think the idea is great. There are copious amounts of horrible injustices that happen in the world. Many of us have no idea that they are occurring. Consciousness raising is an important tool of social change, and I'm glad Injustice Facts is doing some of that work.

My complaint is that Injustice Facts offers up sloppy scholarship. People can provide them "facts" through their website. The organizers of the website then disseminate those facts. Are the facts vetted? Are there references that are made available so we know that the fact is true?

No. At lest Injustice Facts does not explicitly say they do fact checking. The organization also doesn't not respond to Tweets asking if they fact check.

Arguably, good scholarship involves checking out the veracity of information. Not everyone does that. I think an organization or person who presents things as facts has some responsibility to actually verify whether facts are facts -- or if they are propaganda. We've become too trusting, and have rapidly lost our ability to critically think about the world around us.

Yesterday, someone who I follow on Twitter re-tweeted this:

InjusticeFacts Injustice Facts

29 women out of every 100,000 are raped in the U.S. each year, 1.6 women out of every 100,000 are raped in Canada each year.

13 hours ago Favorite Retweet Reply

My (somewhat snarky) response :

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

.@InjusticeFacts @amandamcneil I usually like my facts with a side of references.

13 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

My twitter follower's response, which has since been deleted by the follower, was "Questioning rape facts. Classy." I of course wasn't questioning rape. Violence is a despicable thing, and a good deal of my work as a psychologist is with women and men who have endured sexual violence. My complaint was about a disembodied fact--without reference, context, or verification--being represented as truth.

The snark probably obscured my message a bit.

I continued (I edited a few auto correct errors from my original tweets):

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

I question our collective lack of critical thinking about information that is presented without reference @amandamcneil @injusticefacts

12 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

jaypsyd Jason Mihalko

Why should I believe stats that aren't verified? That is not questioning rape. Its demanding good scholarship @amandamcneil@injusticefacts

12 hours ago Favorite Reply Delete

My twitter follower elected to unfollow me and ignore my responses. A shame, really, as she and I probably agree more than we disagree. I also think, by the way, that it's important to regularly be exposed to people who think differently than me. It makes my world bigger, richer and more diverse.

I've taken it upon myself to do a little fact checking. The UN's statistics for forcible rape in the United States for 2009 was 28.6 per 100,000 people. The count for Canada? 1.5 per 100,000 people. Ms. Magazine has put together a helpful table to demonstrate how difficult it is to get accurate statistics on rape. Scary, sad, and heartbreaking reading.

In this case Injustice Facts were accurate facts (there was a little rounding that happened). To be a more worthwhile source of information, and a trustworthy source of information, a simple addition of a reference would change everything.

It really isn't good enough to say something is true "because I said so." It's poor scholarship, breeds misinformation, and has the potential for great harm.

We need to be critical thinkers. We need to question what we read. We need to search out references to know that the facts we see are accurate and not propaganda. We need to be better scholars.

That is my point. I'm sad my Twitter follower didn't stick around long enough to hear me out.

A Moment of Racism Frozen in Time

2011-12-13T11:20:00.000-05:00

I came across this image some time ago and have been thinking a lot about it. I don't know the particulars of the image (perhaps a reader will?). What stands out to me is the horror of the image as well as a reminder of the racism that is inherent in how our criminal justice system metes out "punishment."

What do you think? More importantly, what do you see?

The View From Here: Global Climate Change Edition

2011-12-12T10:48:00.001-05:00

Tree Flowering on 12/12/2011

When a spade is not a shovel

2011-12-11T10:10:00.000-05:00

from the 11th Hour

My first dissertation chair, Glenda Russell, had a thing about words. She loved them. That was for sure. She also was very interested in the imagery and meanings that were embedded deep within the words. A casual mention once about "black ice" brought us into a long conversation about how many things in our culture that are considered negative or bad utilize dark or black as descriptive words--and how deeply that is often intertwined with overt (or covert) racism. Another time, when I suggested we don't skirt around an issue, a conversation was launched about my un-examined sexism.

Sometimes, it was a bit much. Most of the time, however, it helped me think very deeply about how my choice of language can sometimes reinforce imagery, ideas, and ideologies that I'm not interested in reinforcing.

I found myself channeling Glenda this week. A friend of mine tweeted that we have more serious problems in this world when we can't call a spade a spade. I said we have more serious problems in this world when we forget that a spade isn't always a shovel. Unless of course you actually are referring to a shovel.

What is a spade? There is the common meaning of the word spade--a shovel one uses to dig. It is also a suit found in a deck of playing cards. Then there is the other meaning of spade--a derogatory name for a person who is black. I learned early on--likely from one of my parents--that the phrase "let's call a spade a spade" is a racist phrase I shouldn't use. I really haven't thought much about the term until I came across it on Twitter.

How did this phrase come to have racist meanings? First a word about where the phrase actually came from.

Apparently this phrase harkens back to ancient Greece. It didn't have racist undertones then. The phrase started out in Aristophanes' play "The Clouds." In that play was the line "to call a fig a fig, a trough a trough." The suggestion here was to speak plainly and frankly. As the ancient Greek has been translated from one language to another there was some confusion in the meaning of the words. Trough was eventually translated into spade (meaning a shovel).

Credit

So to call a spade a spade really has nothing at all to do with an ethnic slur.

What about the word spade. Can it be racist?

Apparently it can. The word got its racist meaning in United States. It seems that in the 1920s the spade on a playing card (which also has nothing to do with people) became a term for Black people in the United States. The term stuck. It's unclear to me exactly how and why that happened. It did however. Take a peek at the following two images found with a simple Google search.

Race Card

Race Card II

So these two images, are they making reference to a card game, a kind of shovel, or something else? The racism is obvious to me, as is the play on the racist meaning of the word spade. There are reasons that the image of our president, Barack Obama, is on these two cards--both spades: it draws upon deeply held racist imagery.

In writing this, I came across a blog that had a wonderful post about how we often obfuscate our racism by calling it "just a joke." Read the post: it's worth it. The images in the post are great examples of how various imagery of racism is used to deliver multiple points (sometimes while held under the guise of a "joke"). I debated for awhile whether I wanted to include the images from the blog post here. In the end, I decided that I want to. They are important to see and think about.

So back to the phrase "let's call a spade a spade." The phrase itself isn't racist. At least, when taken at face value, with full knowledge about where the phrase comes from, and where other meanings of the word spade come from, the idiom isn't racist. But is it?

Words an phrases grow and evolve. Here in the United States the racist meanings of the word spade have become intertwined with the idiom "let's call a spade a spade." While the phrase isn't likely to be commonly used with racist intentions, I don't think we can escape the other racist meanings of the word spade. The imagery of the word can quickly telegraph intentional (or unintentional) racist beliefs.

It's not worth it for me. Words matter to me. Within the imagery and complicated meanings of words, we find our self of identity. Within and through the words, we create our understandings of the world. I choose hard to pick words and phrases that don't replicate racism.

I hope you choose to do the same.

Boston Museum of Fine Arts: Art Can Be...

2011-12-10T18:34:00.001-05:00

Did someone say something about a beaded curtain?

Compassion Round Up: Trains, Columbine, Inner Gardens, and More...

2011-12-07T10:00:00.000-05:00

Compassion on the 10:40 Train

My heart smiled at this simple act of kindness. I'm still not sure why I was so surprised. Maybe I've just had skeptics around me for too long...you know, the people who assume that every homeless person is just a lazy drug addict with no desire to ever get a job and contribute to society like the rest of us hard-working Americans. Whatever the reason may be, I was thankful to have witnessed it.

'Rachel's Challenge' brings a message of compassion

Following the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, the father of 17-year-old Rachel Scott, the first student killed in the massacre, began an organization called Rachel's Challenge, which tours the country promoting an anti-bullying message of kindness and compassion for others.

Finding love and compassion in our inner garden

Readers will find much to reflect on, especially on the subject of the inner garden. After all, this seems the only place to find understanding and compassion. While we'd all like to do a walking meditation in the woods, pick wildflowers along the way as well as bamboo branches for flower arrangements, the majority of us cannot afford the time to enjoy that environment. So it is incumbent on each of us to find our own gardens, and appreciate the peace and miracle of where we are.

The art of compassion

Perhaps the best advice is to aim high but start small. For it seems to me that compassion is really aimed at something big and difficult--nothing less than a transformation of your life and yourself. A good question to ask is whether you really want that to happen.

Was victim of earliest known human-on-human attack saved by compassion?

New research suggests that human beings have been fighting since the dawn of time. About 126,000 years ago, what may be the earliest known case of interpersonal aggression left one man with a nasty dent in his skull... Luckily, the injured party's friends and family helped him survive the attack by caring for him during his recuperation...

Happy Birthday, Ryan

2011-12-06T08:22:00.000-05:00

Happy birthday, Ryan White. Today would have been your 40th birthday.

I recently came across a BBC story about Ryan's life. It dawned on me that most people under 40 have probably have never heard of Ryan. If you have, you probably know his name as part of the federal government's Ryan White CARE Act. You probably don't remember the raw hate that was directed toward this little boy.

I remember hearing about him on the periphery. He and I are of the same generation. As he was using his life to "stand in solidarity with thousands of HIV-positive women and men," I was just starting to emerge from my own self-centered adolescence and waking up to the world around me. It really wasn't until two years after Ryan died that I understood what HIV/AIDS was.

I didn't learn about HIV/AIDS from a comprehensive sex education program in my high school. Things like that weren't discussed in my public school. How did I learn? I literally tripped over it. Just barely 20 years old, I was living in a tiny one room apartment on 44th and Broadway in New York City. In order to go grocery shopping, I walked down 44th across Broadway over toward Hell's Kitchen.

On July 14, 1992 I literally tripped over one of the largest AIDS protests of the time. United for AIDS Action and ACT-UP timed a massive gathering to bring awareness to the needs of people with HIV and AIDS to coincide with the Democratic National Convention held in Manhattan that week. The protest brought, depending on the estimate, between 10,000 and 50,000 people.

I never got to the grocery store that day. When I tried to cross Times Square a sea of people had gone down on the ground to stage a die-in. I looked for some images but couldn't find any. It was an amazing sight. These were in the days before digital photography and cell phone cameras.

It was a strange time. Fear was abundant as well as an ample amount of hate and ignorance. Death permeated that air, too. Not a day went by without a news report of the death of a famous person from AIDS.

It's worth taking the time to listen to the ten minute BBC program if you haven't heard of Ryan White. If you do remember him, it's worth listening to again.

In 1984, the year Ryan White was diagnosed with AIDS, I was in an American history class. While Ryan was living a life that would become all of our shared history, I learned an important lesson (yes, there are a few important lessons from junior high history!). Dorothea Krenz, my teacher, walked around shaking each of our hands. She rattled off various important figures from history. Most of them, I believe, were notable figures from World War II. The details have faded over the past 27 years, but the point of the exercise has stuck with me. History is personal. It connects and links us together across space and time.

History serves as a good reminder about where we were, where we are, and where we might still yet go.

The View From Here: Day Into Night Edition

2011-12-04T18:52:00.001-05:00

Middle School is Rough

2011-12-04T09:27:00.001-05:00

This morning I came across this clip of Jonah Mowry. In disembodied academic conversations about bullying, or in the disassociated way politicians often speak about it, we forget about the very real impact bullying has on real people. It's worth watching.

Here, by the way, is just one example of how politicians obscure the personal dimension of the impact of bullying to further a particular agenda.

Happiness, Revealed

2011-12-03T12:03:00.000-05:00

If you watch anything today, make it this.

"And so I wish you will open your heart to all these blessings, and let them flow through you. Then everyone who you meet on this day will be blessed by you. Just by your eyes, by your smile, by your touch. Just by your presence. Let the gratefulness overflow into blessing all around you. And then, it will really be, a good day."

Learning to Live on World AIDS Day

2011-12-01T19:02:00.001-05:00

Unknown Source

Today I've been thinking about my very first patients. I had worked for nearly a decade in a variety of human service agencies. However, it wasn't until 1997 that I sat down in my very first office with my very first patients. I remember that first time very clearly. My first patient said:

"I just have three questions for you. Are you gay, are you HIV positive, and if you aren't, who the hell do you think you are trying to talk to me."

With those words, I started my work at The Free Medical Clinic of Greater Cleveland. It was a tumultuous two years. The man who hired me quit the day I started, constant organizational upheaval nearly unraveled me, and I was impaired by bad fashion sense and thought it was a good idea to sponge paint my office in shades of pink. Most of my patients were always on the brink of death, or actually died, and a large number of them sprang back to life as newer medicines changed the face of HIV treatment.

Most importantly, I spent two years trying to answer that patient's question: who the hell did I think I was trying to talk to people. I found my answer those two years working at the Free Clinic. My experiences there helped me weave together things that I had been thinking about and experiencing for the previous nine years. My experiences became the foundation of what I've built my entire clinical practice on.

I learned that most people don't know themselves, are afraid of themselves, or have otherwise become so traumatized by life that they have disengaged from the world. Not feeling, not living, I found that the people I worked with were neither here nor there. They were somewhere in between. They were, as I affectionately called them, the walking dead. Zombies.

One man, in particular, has filled my thoughts today on World AIDS Day. He really was the walking dead. Infected with HIV before HIV even had a name, he had suffered through every opportunistic infection there was. He rattled off stories of countless hospital says and harrowing near death experiences. Somehow, he lived.

On bad days he was use a walker to get into my office. On good days we would walk across the street together and sit in the beautifully manicured Lake View Cemetery. We had this conversation on the day I was leaving the clinic to move to New England and start my doctoral work:

"Jason, I think of you as more than a therapist. This will sound strange, but I think of you as my funeral director. In you letting me talk so much about death, and keeping me focused so I didn't look away, you taught me how to live. You did that. You taught me to be alive before I die."

Years later I heard through the grapevine that he had died. After being one of the first patients diagnosed with AIDS and having had a trial of nearly every medication, his body had finally failed and he died.

When he said goodbye to me I wished I would have known myself well enough to tell him this:

By sitting with you as you looked at death, I too found how to live.

So on this World AIDS day I'm filled with many warm cherished memories of this patient--and all the other men (and one woman) who came into my office every week as we stared down death every day only to discover how to live.

Each of you live on with me in my office every day. Thank you.

Family, Iowa Style

2011-12-01T08:11:00.001-05:00

Stories, up close and personal, have the power to change the world. Here is one such story.

I hope there are a lot more young people like Zach Wahls out there who are learning to use their voices and their stories to be agents of powerful change.

"The sense of family comes from the commitment we make to each other. To work through the hard times so we can enjoy the good ones. It comes from the love that binds us. That's what makes a family."

Radical Acceptance Meets the Longfellow Bridge

2011-11-29T10:59:00.001-05:00

Photo courtesy: Mark Parkinson

The number of trucks meeting their demise under the bridges spanning over Memorial Drive and Storrow Drive are a source of constant amusement. The entrance ramps are well marked. As you see in these images, even the bridges themselves are well marked.

Still, every year there are endless backups caused by trucks getting stuck under the bridges. These stories generally happen over Labor Day weekend. It's one of the largest moving days in the Boston area: it seems that up to the third of the denizens of the metropolitan area take to the road to move someplace new.

The story usually goes something like this: an out of town family is moving their young adult into a college dorm and aren't aware of how high their moving truck/how low the bridge clearance is. Mayhem ensues and I'm likely to find myself in a traffic jam that stretches all the way to the New Hampshire border (no joke, years ago I was in a traffic jam that spanned from Wellesley MA all the way into Nashua NH).

As you can see from the above picture, it happened again. This was the scene from this morning.

A reminder about Radical Acceptance seems to be a useful at this point. In DBT (dialectical behavior therapy) we teach the importance of letting go of fighting reality. We teach the importance of accepting our situations for what they are. The bridges are clearly marked, they have a certain specific height, and vehicles have a certain specific height.

I can hear the conversations in the trucks. "Do you think we can fit? I think we can. Let's try it." The results, as you can see, often involve a terrible accident or the roof of a truck shaved off.

A too tall truck is never going to fit underneath a too short bridge. It'll get stuck every time. Our nature, of course, is to think that we are different, we are special, or somehow the laws of physics don't apply.

Radical acceptance demands we accept that trucks are never going to fit.

What's my point? There is more to radical acceptance. In the rush of pop psychology to co-opt ancient traditions of mindfulness and acceptance, many have missed the point. I see a many therapists, especially those new to DBT, get this wrong: they focus on just one part of accepting reality. A too tall truck will get stuck under a too short bridge. A Chinese restaurant will never serve you Italian food. Don't bother asking. It's never going to happen. Radical acceptance.

It's an error that popular psychology (and many who purport to provide DBT) is replete with. Here is how we fail. We forget that it is part of our human nature to be ridiculous. We forget that we will be irrational and demand that a Chinese restaurant serve us Italian food. We become indignant when our moving trucks get the top of them shaved off by a bridge.

We forget that radical acceptance includes accepting the parts of us that are ridiculous. That is what can set us free.

We might laugh at images like this truck with a shaved top. I often do. We might think we are better than the thoughtless drivers. I frequently do. We aren't (and I'm not), and until we can accept our own ridiculousness, we'll remain trapped.

It's Time: Marriage Matters (and so does equality)

2011-11-27T11:48:00.000-05:00

The road to equality is long and its obstacles can seem insurmountable. Not today. "It's time", 1,225,000 views and counting....

From GetUP! Action for Australia

The View From Here: Fort Hill Park

2011-11-26T14:51:00.001-05:00

Fort Hill Park c. 1907

It was unseasonably warm yesterday afternoon. With the temperature hovering in the mid 60s it seemed to be an ideal day to take Maggie the Therapy Dog for a little impromptu therapy dog visit outside the grocery store. Maggie gets some great opportunities to have short interactions with a variety of people in a novel situation, she gets a lot of attention, and a lot of people smile. As those of you who are regular followers of the therapy dog, she is super outgoing--and she also has a few strange phobias left over from some negative interactions with a vet. The more exposure she gets to men with beards, the less concerned she is about men with beards. A win-win situation, don't you think?

On the way home we took a detour to Fort Hill Park, which is on the outskirts of Lowell Massachusetts. I tweeted a picture from the top of the hill and a follower on Twitter commented that the tops of both trees had fallen off. I got to wondering how that happened, and how it happened that there was a park at all. I thought I'd spend a little time doing some research about the origins of the public space.

Fort Hill Park, Lowell Massachusetts

The Friends of Rogers Fort Hill Park provided the following helpful timeline. I've taken it upon myself to link the timeline with some helpful resources.

A thoughtful reader will note that the land was given to Margaret Winthrop (daughter of Governor John Winthrop) in 1649. No mention was made of the people who lived here before that. We hear about them indirectly in this timeline. The first mention of the native peoples living in the Merrimack Valley was in 1653, when John Eliot asked the general court to set aside the land for "christian" or "praying" natives. The time line takes us to 1669, a full 20 years after this land was given way to Margaret, and we finally get a direct mention of the original owners of the land, the Pawtucket Indians. They created a fort on the top of the hill to protect themselves from attacks by the Mohawk tribe.

Hidden here is a story of the displacement of the native people of America. A sad story worth remembering. It's also sad how little information I could find (at least easily find) about these first people.

1649 The General Court of England granted 300 acres of land to Margaret Winthrop, which was bounded on the west by the Concord River and on the north by the Merrimack River; Fort hill was part of the territory.
1653 John Eliot petitioned the General Court to set aside land for the exclusive use of the “Christian” or “Praying” Indians.
1669 Wannalancit, son of Passaconaway and chief of the Pawtucket Indians had his people build a fort and palisade atop Fort Hill for protection against potential Mohawk attacks.
1714 John Boland purchased 250 acres of land, which included Fort Hill. The Pawtucket Indians are left with only hunting and fishing rights on the land.
1805 Zadock Rogers bought 247 acres of land for $5,200. He was 31 years old [he apparently died the same year he bought the land].
1826 On March 1, Lowell is incorporated as a town.
1837 The Rogers house is built facing the future entrance to the park.
1881 The sisters Emily and Elizabeth Rogers offered their land opposite the house to the city for use as a public park.
1883 A syndicate of businessmen – F.B. Shedd, E.W. Hoyt, E.A. Smith, and T.P. Garrity -- bought the land, put it in a trust and made $30,000 toward improvements on the property.
1885 Ernest Bowditch of Boston [he got around, having done the landscaping in a historic park in my hometown of Cleveland - Rockerfeller Park], a “competent landscape gardener” began design of the park. He removed boulders, laid out walks and carriage roads, and planted trees and shrubs.
1886 The deed for Rogers Fort Hill Park was transferred to the City of Lowell.
1894 The city purchased 4 acres of land between High Street and Hanks Street. This “lower portion” was added to the park.
1900-1904 Correspondence began between the Olmsted firm and the City Engineer. The Lowell Parks Commission was established.
1904-1908 Major work in the “lower park.” A drinking fountain was put in the spring house, a fountain was placed in the lily pond, a maintenance building was built, trees and shrubs were planted, and walks were laid out according to the Olmsted plans.
1910-1925 Work continued in the park; a nursery was added on the north side of Fort Hill, and a small zoo and deer paddock were added on its south west side. Attendance was high. First winter carnival was held in 1923.
1925-1950 The city stopped publication of annual report books; little was heard or written about the park.
1960-1980 City budgets were drastically cut. Maintenance was all but eliminated. Park slipped into a period of decline.
1989-1990 Fort Hill Park Betterment Association organized to address crime and safety issues. Police patrols were increased, security gates were installed and boulders were placed around the base of Fort Hill to deter vehicle access.
1995-2000 The Belvidere Neighborhood Association’s Beautification Committee adopted the park as a project and made plans for the park’s management, restoration, and fundraising. The Lowell Historic Board gained the park and surrounding neighborhood designation as the Rogers Fort Hill Park Historic District.
2000-2005 With state matching landscape preservation grants, the City installed new trees, gardens, walkways, curbs, benches, and the fountain. In 2001 the Friends of Rogers Fort Hill park formed to maintain these new features and to plan for future improvements at the park.
2005-present The Friends of Rogers Fort Hill Park incorporated as an all-volunteer, tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Today their volunteers provide maintenance, educational programming, and advance improvements at the park.

Trees at Forth Hill Park by Meredith Fife Day

The park is now part of the Concord River Greenway Park, which is an area being built as a multi-use pedestrian/bike path designed to transform the Concord River into a shared natural resource that unites neighborhoods and connects them to regional resources. Check out this EPA document for how this plan has been developed. We don't often hear stories of our government doing useful things: it's nice to see examples like this where the government is investing in building better communities.

Click here to be taken to a Picassa gallery of some historic postcard images of Fort Hill Park that I collected from around the internet. Super curious and want to do some deep research? Check out page 27 of the June 30, 1936 edition of the Lowell Centennial for an article about the city parks. Check out page 7 of Anne Ohlsen's oral history to learn about the bears that were kept in cages on Forth Hill Park. Special thanks to University of Massachusetts Lowell for making their Center for Lowell History available online.

That's right. Bears. Who knew?

Fort Hill Park, Lowell Massachusetts

Cambridge Turkeys, Part II

2011-11-26T13:00:00.000-05:00

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Maggie and I discovered a small family of Turkeys wandering around Cambridge. An intrepid reader of my blog spotted this picture on Foursquare and sent it to me.

The turkeys last known whereabouts were outside Corporal Burns Playground (more info here) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you have any information as to their current location, please contact us. Magnolia the therapy dog is offering a reward.

Vibrator Miscellanea

2011-11-26T00:55:00.000-05:00

My post-doc director of training frequently reminded us that 20 years from now we'll look back at the kind of therapy we practiced and be unable to believe we practiced that way. Our ways of understanding will become more complex, new types of therapy will develop and evolve, and things that were once popular will fade into obscurity.

Let's take hysteria as an example. During a large portion of the 19th century hysteria was all the rage. Women's sexually, however, has been deemed pathological and diagnosed long before that. In her book The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, Rachel P. Maines quotes a medical text from 1653:

When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted women can be aroused to the paroxym. This kind of stimulation with the finger is recommended by Galen and Avicenna, among others, most especially for widows, those who live chaste lives, and female religious, as Gradus [Ferrari da Gradi] proposes; it is less often recommended for very young women, public women, or married women, for whom it is a better remedy to engage in intercourse with their spouses.

We have the ancient Greeks to thank for the notion of hysteria. Plato thought the uterus was a living creature that wanders around a women's body. At times it can wander to the wrong area which would cause "blocking passages, obstructing breathing and causing disease." Those pesky uteri.

What are the symptoms of hysteria? They include faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and as Maines aptly writes, "a tendency to cause trouble." Ladies, if you have any of these symptoms you might need treatment.

Charcot demonstrates a case of 'hysteria' c. 1885

Thankfully, treatment options expanded quickly in the 19th century. Physicians, interested in increasing their income, looked for ways to improve tedious manual treatments. It could take hours to manually induce a hysterical paroxysm. This seriously cut into billable hours. Also, for those of you who think physicians enjoyed this--they didn't. There is no evidence that physicians of the time found this an enjoyable task. To the contrary, they found it tedious and uninteresting work. It probably would have been considered unimportant work had it not made a significant amount of income.

How is this for an interesting fact: electric vibrators were first used in medicine in 1878 and were made available as a consumer product by 1900. The first appliances (in order) electrified: sewing machine, fan, teakettle, toaster, and electric vibrator. It took another ten years until the electric vacuum, iron, and frying pan were consumer products that were available for purchase. This tells you a little something about what made money at that time (businesses will develop products most likely to sell) and thus, what people considered important. Hysteria was big business.

Vibrators were so widely available they could be purchased for home treatment (medical use only, please!) from the Sears catalog:

We also have an advertisement from a 1913 edition of the New York Times:

Curious for even more images? Check out the vibrator museum. There is a collector for everything, isn't there? I wonder how many accidental electrocutions there were from these contraptions.

Cabinet Card Gallery

Curious why a fainting couch appears here on this post? It appears that these Victorian ladies, reclining on their fainting couches experiencing "the vapors," were actually having a personal physician apply the appropriate treatment for hysteria. Who knew? I certainly never did.

Back to Maines book one last time:

Hysterical women represented a large and lucrative market for physicians. These patients neither recovered nor died of their condition but continued to require regular treatment. Russell Thacher Trall and John Butler, in the late nineteenth century, estimated that as many as three-quarters of the female population were "out of health," and that this group constituted America's single largest market for therapeutic services. Furthermore, orgasmic treatment could have done few patients any harm, whether they were sick or well, thus contrasting favorably with such "heroic" nineteenth-century therapies as clitoridectomy to prevent masturbation. It is certainly not necessary to perceive the recipients of orgasmic therapy as victims: some of them almost certainly must have known what was really going on.

And now back to my point. We forget in our current modernity that we all all one day be obsolete. While we might not be applying "vibration" to heal the wounds and maladies of our day, our current notions of sanity and insanity are as tightly wound with the Zeitgeist of 2011 as they were in 1900.

The vibrating doctors meant well--at least most of them probably did. We mean well, too. We do the best we can with the knowledge and understanding of the world that is currently available to us. Too bad only a few of us have figured out that some certain portion of what we call therapy now will sound ridiculous in another 100 years.

(Not to mention the aspects of therapy that already sound ridiculous but clung to to by a some ardent believers of different kinds of historical therapies).

By the way, apparently Maggie Gyllenhall is staring in the upcoming movie "Hysteria" that was recently screened at the Toronto Film Festival

Great American Smokeout

2011-11-24T13:44:00.001-05:00

I've been meaning to write about clinical hypnosis for a number of months now. My intention was to write this to correspond with the The Great American Smokeout. That was on November 17th. So while I'm a bit belated, I wanted to recognize the day. Since the first Smokeout on November 16th 1977, the American Cancer Society has worked toward helping American's quit smoking for good.

I'll do my part to help. Will you do your's?

Why am I interested in helping people stop smoking?

Inhaled cigarette smoke is made up of 4,000 chemicals, including cyanide, benzene, ammonia and carbon monoxide.
Second-hand smoke causes almost 50,000 deaths in adult nonsmokers in the United States each year, including approximately 3,400 from lung cancer and as many as 69,000 from heart disease.
44.3 percent of all cigarettes in American are consumed by individuals who live with mental illness and/or substance abuse disorders.
Smoking skills about 200,000 people who live with mental illness.

Here are the facts:

Tobacco use remains the single largest preventable cause of disease and premature death in the US, yet more than 45 million Americans still smoke cigarettes. However, more than half of these smokers have attempted to quit for at least one day in the past year. As of 2010, there were also 5.2 million cigar smokers in the US, and 2.2 million who smoke tobacco in pipes.

So for those of you who fall into the 22,500,000 Americans who have tried quitting for at least one day in the past year, I'd like to offer you a little help. Clinical hypnosis is a psychotherapeutic tool that can be used to activate under used resources, aptitudes, and skills in the service of accomplishing a particular goal. Hypnosis elicits the relaxation response. Additionally, this practice assists in turning the mind away from habitual patterns of response toward new and creative ways of problem solving. It is a state associated with selective wakefulness, controlled dissociation, diminished capacity for self-criticism, and increased suggestibility. Hypnosis ins not associated with giving up control, being controlled, or giving away control.

Can hypnosis help you stop smoking? It's important to understand that as with all types of therapies, hypnosis is a highly effective tool for some patients with some problems. However, like all types of therapies, it also fails some patients with some problems.

Here are some facts.

A study published in Nicotine & Tobacco Research showed hypnotherapy to be as effective as standard behavioral counseling when combined with nicotine patches in helping smokers to quit and stay off cigarettes for one year.
Hypnosis, health education, and behaior modification are each effective programs for changing cigarette smoking and each is equally effective in this regard.
The single-session hypnosis group smoked significantly less cigarettes and were significantly more abstinent than a placebo control group.

Interested in using clinical hypnosis to stop smoking? Reach out to me. We can schedule an appointment (I meet with people three times over approximately six weeks for smoking cessation). If you'd like to schedule an appointment with someone else, I can help you with that, too.

Should Parents Allow Teens to Have Sex in the Home?

2011-11-24T09:13:00.001-05:00

In a recent Daily Dose piece in the Boston Globe, Deborah Kotz poses the question "Should parents allow their teens to have sex in their house?"

It's an unwritten rule in America that teens don't discuss their sex lives with their parents--except, perhaps, to obtain contraception--and that they don't invite their boyfriends or girlfriends to sleep over in their rooms, at least when mom and dad are at home. yet in Holland, two-thirds of dutch teenagers ages 15 to 17 in committed relationships reported in a national survey that their parents allow their significant other to spend the night in their bedrooms, and girls were just as likely as boys to gain this permission.

NEWSFLASH -- your teens are likely already having sex. They are probably having it in your house and you don't even know it.

The problem with unwritten rules is that they are generally stupid. They are also generally based on misinformation, prejudice, and otherwise unexamined beliefs.

We here in the United States have been busy teaching (or at least complaining we should be teaching) abstinence only sex education. This form of "education" teaches that the only appropriate choice for unmarried teens (and presumably adults) is complete abstinence from sex. Also notable is what abstinence only sex education doesn't teach: it excludes information about sexual and reproductive health education including birth control and safer sex.

Since it is illegal in most of the United States for gay and lesbian people to be married, I suppose this means that gay and lesbian people are presumably never supposed to have sex.

Check out the trash that the state of Florida puts out under the guise of sex education. The "It's Great to Wait" website points out that one study of one high school show that 50 percent of teenagers dont' have sex. Do you suppose the other 50 percent of teens that are having sex will get the information they need to develops safe, healthy, and loving relationships from this website?

Let me be unequivocally clear about this: the evidence simply does not support the use of abstinence only sex education. Tell kids to wait doesn't decrease unplanned pregnancy, it actually increases it. Conservative Republicans who have demanded we teach abstinence only sex education in Africa as a requirement for HIV funding has failed as well--abstinence only sex education has increased rates of HIV infection.

Here is one great article that reviews the research. There are many other research reports out there demonstrating that the "Abstinence-only was an experiment it failed."

This, however, is not really my point today. Back to the article from the Boston Globe:

And there’s no worry that young teens in passionate love will leap into early marriages before they’re ready -- a notion that propels American parents to urge their teens not to have serious relationships in high school and college. “Very few Dutch parents think that teens will marry the first person they fall in love with,” she said.They’re comfortable with the idea that their kids may be ready to have sex but not start a family. As a result, they make sure their teens adequately protect themselves from pregnancy.

This nudges me a little closer to my point. How do teens learn how to have healthy loving relationships?

They practice. They watch. The model.

Our earliest opportunities to practice is with our first relationships. Our parents give us our original model for how to have relationships. What do some parents teach their children about relationships? In 2010 more than 5 children were killed every day by child abuse. We teach that relationships kill. Every 10 seconds in the United States a case of child abuse is reported. That's over 6,000,000 children every year. That's just what's reported. We teach that relationships hurt.

Here a real parent, also a family court judge, is teaching a child about relationships. It's graphic, awful, and difficult to watch. Many argue that this child is being spanked and it is an appropriate form of discipline. What do you think? What do you think she was taught about the world and how to relate?

How children feeling about spanking: Their own words and images

17.6 percent of women in the US have survived a completed or attempted rape. Of those, 21.6 percent were younger than 12 when they were first raped, and 32.4 percent were between the ages of 12 and 17. We teach that relationships are about violence.

It is a twisty path I've just taken you on. Sex education, to child abuse, to rape, and now back to sex education. It's important, and it's related. We can't pretend that we can naturally figure out how to have healthy, peaceful, and loving relationships. We learn now to do them within the context of the relationships we form through our lives. We can't pretend that telling kids to wait and not providing them with skills at saying no and saying yes to sex will actually help anything. It only hurts.

Back to the Globe article:

Dutch parents have been educating their teens on these concepts since the sexual revolution, according to Schalet, though they emphasize that sex should only spring from committed, loving relationships -- not hookups. “It’s never just pure sex, but sex within a relationship.”

This isn't to say that some Dutch don't abuse their children. It isn't to say that some Dutch don't experience sexual violence. I'm sure they do. They are, however, having a dialogue about something important. The Dutch are onto something. They teach about sex. They teach about relationships. They show kids the way, the kids can find that way, and everyone is just a little bit better.

We have to talk openly with our kids. Their lives depend on it.

Everything is Coming Up Turkeys

2011-11-23T11:45:00.001-05:00

It's nearly Thanksgiving and all is growing quiet in Cambridge. On the way into work I didn't have to dodge the regular tableau of people standing in the middle of Central Square talking on their cell phones and bicyclists failing to obey the rules of the road.

Sadly, my favorite neighborhood turkeys were no where to be found. Maggie the therapy dog and I have been on the look out for said avian creatures since first spotting them. In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday we packed a small bag of bird seed today and were going to feed them.

They've gone missing: I hope a Cantabrigian did not lay eyes on them and decide they were a holiday dinner.

Who are these turkeys? Information is sparse. I have heard from reliable sources on Twitter that these plump creatures live in the Riverside area of Cambridge. I showed a line up of photos to some residents. They were positively identified as part of a rafter of turkeys who live at an undisclosed Riverside location under a blue kayak.

I won't disclose more. If they haven't found their way to a dinner table I'd like to make sure they remain free to wander about town. They are, I think, the only creatures who wander around with constant use of smart phones.

It being almost Thanksgiving, you might be interested in some turkey trivia. Turkeys belong to the genus Meleagris. The wild turkeys we generally see, including our local rafter of birds living in Cambridge, are Meleagris gallopavo. Fossil records (and please, readers, tell me you believe in fossil records) indicate that this critters have been pecking around North America since the early miocene period.

That's a long time.

If you didn't already know (and really, this is important stuff, why don't you know this?), the wattle is the fleshy blob hanging from the top of the beak. Males are called toms (or gobblers) and females are called hens.

I'm unsure if the birds pictured here are gobblers or hens. I figured it was rude to look.

So there you have it. Your obligatory pre-Thanksgiving turkey post. If you see this rafter of turkeys please don't eat them. Let them know I have some bird seed from them.

Further, if you spot them, please capture a picture. I'd like to know their whereabouts. Maggie the therapy dog is offering a reward: unlimited therapeutic dog kisses.

Essentially a Food? Then Eat It.

2011-11-22T11:15:00.001-05:00

Fox News "journalist" Megyn Kelly calls pepper spray "essentially a food product." First and foremost, it's a lie. Megyn Kelly is a liar. Here is a helpful post from Deborah Blum talking about the science of pepper spray. It's not a benign chemical agent.

Secondly, if it really is "essentially a food product" then Megyn should volunteer to either be sprayed by pepper spray or, put it on her food and eat it.

We need to expect our journalists in this country, and people representing "the truth" to be accountable.

Feeling a little hateful lately?

2011-11-21T23:09:00.001-05:00

I don't know about you, but I've been feeling a little hateful over the past few days. In some ways, it's ironic. I just wrote a blog post complaining about a celebrity psychiatrist's hateful response to a campaign against hate. In other ways, my hateful response over the past couple of days is very human.

Brian Nguyen

I watched with horror as I saw images of UC Davis students being sprayed with chemical weapons. The sounds of the crowd shrieking combined with the very powerful and now iconic imagery of young students (children, really) being overpowered by a single swaggering police officer shaking a can full of chemical weapons.

Looking at the chemical wielding police officer I become filled with rage. He does not appear scared, threatened, or otherwise in harms way. He appears to want to be in control. He appears to want to exert power over the young men and women. Maybe he wants to feel good. Maybe, in the energized thrill of the moment, the thin line of civility some of us cultivate disappeared. Maybe his own personal rage, hate, and sadism came unglued.

I look at him and I'm angry. I look at him and I want to see him punished. I want to see him punished because I want to know there is justice in the world. I want to know that we live in a civil society, where inconvenient protests happen, and people without power can use the transformative tactics of non-violent protest to push an overlooked viewpoint into the minds and hearts of the public.

I want to believe. I want to believe I am not like him.

I don't want to believe is the murderous rage that wells up within me. While I might like to ignore what I'm feeling inside, I can't. I'm transported, right now, back in time to an interview I had with the director of training for what was to become my post-doctoral fellowship. He asked me many difficult, challenging, frustrating questions. Two provocative ones come to mind. Both were questions that asked the same thing of me.

"You elected not to wear a tie to your interview with me today. I'm wondering what you think that says to me about you, and what you had hoped that it would say to me about you. I'm going to tell you this now, Jason. If you don't have an answer for that question we'll end the interview right here. If you don't have an answer to that question there is no place for you in this postdoc."

I survived that question. Then he came up with this one.

"Tell me about a time you experienced murderous rage toward a patient."

Joe asked these two questions for two very specific reasons. What's germane here is his second reason. After working closely with him for my post-doc, I learned that one of the most important things to him was that his post-docs know themselves. He wanted to know that I could look at myself. He wanted to know that I could look deep, not turn away, and openly take in the totality of my experience. Even open up to the dark, twisty, and scary places.

So I take in my experience. I don't look away. I watch the video and I allow the rage to pass through me. I sit without movement and experience what is that I am experiencing.

I am moved. Are you? Where are you moved to?

Megan Garber at the Nieman Journalism Lab wrote a smart article called Image as Interest: How the Pepper Spray Cop Could Change the Trajectory of Occupy Wall Street. Megan reminds us that Susan Sontag argues that photographs are

"invitations--to deduction, speculation, fantasy." They invite empathy, and, with it, investment.

Take a few moments to look at some iconic, moving, and difficult images. Think of them as an invitation.

What do you see? It is easy for me to have great compassion and empathy for aspects of each of this pictures. Thich Quang Duc self-immolated himself on June 11, 1963 to protest the brutal repression of Buddhists by Catholics. "Tank Man" standing alone before the repressive regime of Communist China. Kim Phuc, running down a road after a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack. General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executing the Viet Cong soldier Nguyễn Văn Lém. Dorli Rainey, 81 years old, pepper sprayed by police in the United States. Two nameless boys (one 18, one under 18) executed for engaging in gay sex in Iran.

And then there is Lt. John Pike. His swagger. His pepper spray. I can have compassion for the young men and women being assaulted with a chemical spray. Can I have compassion for the police officer?

Many see this image and are invited to anger and hate. I am, too. Compassion? Why would I want to do that?

Compassion and nonviolence help us to see the enemy's point of view,to hear their questions, to know their assessment of ourselves.
For from their point of view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses
of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit
from the wisdom of the brothers and sisters who are called the opposition.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think Dr. King was inviting us to look at our own shadow. Our own dark places. The places we find unbearable. When we look closely, we can protect ourselves from the darkness. We can stop our own slide into sadism. We can be transformed. We can be more.

Do it for yourself. Look deep and find your own shadow. Choose love. Choose compassion.

Toys from another country

2011-11-20T23:35:00.002-05:00

There is something to be said to seeing the world through another set of eyes. What's more amusing that watching commercials from another country? Here are a few that keep me laughing. If you look carefully you'll gather some glimpses in how children are socialized into adult behaviors in other parts of the world.

Have any fun examples of your own to share?