Demons of Sixth Grade: Red Circles of Incineration

Image from National Geographic

I grew up fearing a demon. I wasn't alone. Many of us learned, whether in school or through the news, that this demon was out to get us. The demon was different than us. They didn't believe the same as we did. They wanted to hurt us, hurt us so much that they had these horrible weapons pointed in our direction. The demon was called the United Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

A specter of nuclear war hovered right outside my young mind. I didn't know why the USSR was the demon. No one ever took the time to actually teach me anything at all about the USSR. I just knew I was supposed to be scared. I also knew that I wasn't supposed to like "those" people.

My knowledge of the USSR? Minimal. Really none. My eighth grade history teacher, known for coming to class in a Elizabethan period outfit, skipped the lesson on the Soviet Union to "punish" us. He was mad, for some reason now faded from my memory, and refused to teach us. "This will be important stuff to you some day," the teacher said. "You'll be sorry you didn't get the lesson. We'll sit here in silence today."

Yeah. My public school wasn't the most progressive experience. I've come a long way from Center Junior High School. Hopefully they too have come a long way.

We have new demons to fear now. The process, however, is still the same. The xenophobia and ignorance is still the same. Children raised in the world since the World Trade Center came down have been taught by fearful adults to enact xenophobic fears toward people in Muslim countries--and people of the Muslim faith who are our neighbors in our own country.

The cycle continues. Someday a new demon will rise and replace our fear of Muslim people. When we turn our eyes away from the Muslim world they too, might turn their eyes away from us. They'll grow fearful of another demon as shall we. 

We seem to be unable to find our way out of this cycle of fearing that which is different. 

You can find this same xenophobia in the movie Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie. Narrated by William Shatner, Trinity offers up stunning visual imagery of the destructiveness of the weaponry. It provides an engrossing and terrifying spectacle of destruction. The movie fails to question why the bomb was really developed. Maybe the horror is enough. The demon unleashed from the atom speaks for itself.

I wish the documentary moved beyond "othering" those outside of the United States. The same tired old xenophobia is laced through the movie. The bomb was developed, as suggested in the movie, to end a terrible war with Japan. It also makes allusions to needed to protect ourselves against the danger of another more ominous other, the Soviet Union. The most haunting image of all was at the end of the documentary. Horses raced onto a mock battle field, faces and eyes covered with gas masks. Riding the horses were similarly masked human soldiers. When the mask was removed we saw the rise of a new other--the Chinese tested their own nuclear bomb.

The horrifying cycle continues. German. Japanese. Soviet. Chinese. Muslim. We can't seem to find a way to see the other as part of ourselves. 

Click here to watch the movie. 

We hardly ever talk about nuclear war now. Now we fear terrorist acts. Dirty bombs, suitcase sized nuclear destruction, or biological warfare. Destruction can come in an envelope loaded with anthrax, or as demonstrated yesterday in Aurora Colorado, can come while sitting in a movie theater. These are the new staples of fearful living.

When I was in sixth grade people were afraid of nuclear war. People were terrified. I was terrified. I remembered that terror last night when I watched the documentary

Man would unleash the destructive power of the demon locked within the very fabric of matter and plunge the world into the atomic age.

My sixth grade teacher Mr. Joe Smith, taught me about this demon within the walls of my classroom at Zellers Elementary School. He'd just come back from a workshop on teaching children about nuclear war. He put a map up on the board. Our school was ground zero. He drew circles around the school. The first circle represented the area that would be totally incinerated. Another circle represented total destruction. Some rubble might remain but every living thing would perish. The circles continued. Everything I knew was destroyed. Incinerated. Burned. Dead from radiation.

I had a vague notion about the people who had these terrible weapons pointed at my school. I didn't know why. Mr. Smith hadn't been taught to teach us about that. The cycle of fearing the other was passed on to me. No reason to know anything about the other (as then, of course, they would no longer be the other).

I was terrified. Maybe for the first time in my life.

I did something when I got home. I went home and sent away for a list of addresses of potential pen pals. I wanted to learn about those people who had weapons pointed at my school. I also sent away for information from organizations like SANE and FREEZE. I was far too young to actually volunteer to do anything, but I felt like I needed to do something. These bombs were pointed at my school and going to burn me up. They were going to burn  my family up, and everyone else, too.

I did not fully understand why I took these steps. I hadn't really thought about any of this until today. Looking back, it was the beginning of my superpower as a psychologist--a superpower that I wouldn't fully understand until decades later when I was working on my doctoral degree.

It was all there when I was sitting in my sixth grade classroom. With a red circle of incineration drawn over my head, I was launched on a path toward learning about connection. There under the fear of nuclear incineration, I found the need to make the other part of me, and to let the other make me part of them.

Can you make yourself vulnerable enough to find yourself in the other?

A Call to Action/Shine Brightly

This  morning I came across a video produced by the Family Research Counsel. I found it to be a particularly repugnant piece of propaganda and live tweeted my responses to the video. I felt that in good conscious, I couldn't let out-right falsehoods go unchallenged. I strongly encourage you to watch the video for yourself.

Interested in encouraging these folks to move from hate toward compassion? Consider an e-mail, tweet, phone call, or letter. Share with them the importance of love, compassion, and acceptance of all of our humanity. Tony Perkins, near the 26:50 mark, says that it is important to be "letting your light shine before men in such a way that they can see your good works." Show them all your good lights. Shine bright. Our futures--your futures--depend on it.

Rev. John Rankin
Theological Educational Institute
P.O. Box 297
West Simsbury, CT 06092
tei@teii.org
860-408-1599

Jeff Buchanan (or here)
Executive Vice President
Exodus International
1-888-264-0877

Joe Dallas
email here
17632 Irvine Blvd.
Suite #220
Tustin, California 92780
714-508-6953

Tony Perkins
Peter Sprigg
Chris Gacek
(email here)
Family Research Counsel
801 G Street, NW
Washington, D.C., 20001
203-393-2100 (p)
202-393-2134 (f)

Redeemed Lives
Rev. Mario Bergner
(email here)
P.O Box 451
Ipswich, MA 01938
978-356-0404

Massachusetts Family Institute
(email)
(web)
781-569-0400

Liberty Legal Foundation
Kelly Shackelford
9040 Executive Park Drive
Suite 200
Knoxville, TN 37923
324-208-9953
(web)
(email)

Carol M. Swain
Vanderbilt University Law School
131-21St Avenue South
Nashville, TN 37203
615-322-1001 (o)
615-310-8617 (c)
615-322-6631 (f)
(web)
(email)

Rep Vicky Hartzler
(web)
(email)
1023 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20515
202-225-2876 (o)
202-225-0148 (f)

Alliance Defense Fund
Austin R. Nimocks
15100 N. 90th Street
Scottsdale, AZ 85260
1-800-835-5233
(web)

Mass Resistance
P.O. Box 1612
Waltham, MA 02454
781-890-6001
(web)

Julie Harren Hamilton, Ph.D., LMFT
P.O. Box 1382
West Palm Beach, FL 33402
561-312-7041
(email)
(web)

(read my letter to Dr. Hamilton here)

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

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

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.

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

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. 

Happy Birthday, Ryan

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.