The more often we sacrifice our integrity for the sake of cooperation, the more pain we incur. We can become so good at repressing the pain that neither we ourselves nor those around us notice it. Inevitably, however, we emit a verbal or non-verbal signal that something is wrong. If we and those closest to us take the signal seriously, then understand its significance and change the way we react, the conflict is solved and the pain eases or ceases. If none of these things happens, the signal increases or changes (becomes a physical act instead of a statement). Eventually, an actual symptom will reveal itself. The first signal is fatigue. The ultimate ones are murder or suicide. JESPER JUUL I noticed that many people react to this quote in a very surprised way, after which they tend to say something like "I think this is exaggerated". They have difficulties understanding how can we not notice that, especially as adults, that we often sacrifice our own integrity. We live in a world which tends to spin faster and faster, where renewal of objects, trends and behaviors is happening at an intolérable pace. The economy, based on permanent move and change, dictates that the faster you "adapt", the more likely it is to be "successful". The result is life as a vertigo, where pause, slowness, contemplation, are ignored or disdained, deemed "unproductive". It is a way of living in which SIGNS of objects have become more important than the objects themselves: if the first (noticeable) layer looks good, that means that the object or the person behind that superficial layer is good. Not only that people do not have time to look behind the appearances. But there are now entire generations of individuals who are not aware and cannot understand that the world is made out of layers, that it has also depth, not only surface. If an apple is big, red, shiny and flawless, it doesn't mean at all that it is healthy to eat, since there is good numbers of unhealthy chemicals that have been used to create the SIGN of a "perfect" apple. It is extremely easy, in a fast spinning world that projects a reality formed by signs of objects and persons, to not notice how often we sacrifice our own and our children's integrity? In bigger social systems (countries, states) politicians change laws and constitutions so that they can validate torture and bribery. In smaller social systems, like families and couples, we have created rules which legitimize and promote the sacrifice of the integrity, in the name of cooperation, in the name of becoming "good". Therefore, it is only normal that ANGER and AGGRESSION have become such prevalent symptoms in both poor and rich nations. It is precisely this repeated violation of one's integrity that creates individuals for whom destructive behavior, whether directed towards others or self, becomes a way of living. The first and most common self-aggressive behavior that comes to my mind is the abuse of substances. As a professional I do not endorse abstinence as a way to prevent excesses, unless it seems to be the best solution to put an end to a long process of self-inflicted aggression. But it is still surprising to realize the extent to which the abusive consumption of illegal and prescribed drugs has been normalized. By creating a specific standard of "happiness", sacrificing integrity and individuality in order to appear to have achieved that standard, has become the norm. Showing sings of "happiness" or of "being positive", regardless of how sad or angry we feel, is a prerequisite for being "successful". It is precisely this one of the most important sources of aggression: the forceful cooperation, the submission, the clash between reality and the forceful acceptance of signs of reality. An acceptance that can be possible only if we repeatedly ignore our intuition and sacrifice our integrity.
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"CHILDREN COMPETENTLY EXPRESS, BOTH VERBALLY AND NON-VERBALLY, THE NATURE OF THE EMOTIONAL AND EXTERNAL DILEMMAS THAT THEIR PARENTS ARE EXPERIENCING." (Jesper Juul, Danish family therapist, www.family-lab.com) Jesper Juul does not reinvent the wheel. But he made a vehicle that is truly efficient, albeit uncomfortable to drive. Juul is very different than the average family therapist in quite a few ways:
1. Brilliant Observer: he is willing to notice the adult-child interactions in bus-stops, restaurants, parties, supermarkets. 2. Honesty: he has the courage to formulate the issues as they are, without coating them in order to appeal to as many parents as possible. In other words, he is not selling a product, but he is sharing his ideas, knowledge and experience as a professional and parent. He has the courage and ability to go beyond the norms, including: - the extreme rigidity of parenting cultures like the ones that can be found in Romania, where tight control of the child's behavior is exercised full force and upfront; - the extreme flexibility of parenting in California (and other states of the US), where children are let to develop "freely", which often is just another way of giving up parental responsibility, making room for TV and internet to step in and educate the consumer (=individual) they would like to have. - the insidious "togetherness" from Latin American and Latin European families, which traps children in a vicious circle where the emergence of individuality is seen and sanctioned as a threat to the unity (togetherness) of the family. 3. Systemic Thinking: Juul is able to look at the couple/family/community/nation/etc. as SOCIAL SYSTEMS, which influence one another. For this reason I have the feeling he is probably not liked in many countries. Especially those which value one of the extreme approaches to social interaction: the individualistic approach, or the family/togetherness approach (where the individual disappears within the Family Ego Mass, to use a Bowen term). For similar reasons systemic thinkers like Salvador Minuchin, Murray Bowen, Gregory Bateson are not very well regarded, since understanding and accepting their concepts requires honesty and full awareness of how one's personal reactions and actions influence the social systems he/she is part of. So, here are my 2 cents: the way an individual deals with frustration, anger and aggression is closely related to how much his or her dignity has been chipped away throughout life. And not only by parents, but also by teachers, friends, media, pharmaceuticals and politicians. I know, thousands of people said this. But very few are willing to look at anger from this systemic point of view. The large majority wants to find out about The 5 Easy Steps Toward an Anger Free Life. And since it sells, it is also offered in insane quantities. To be continued. For quite a few years now I find myself more and more interested in writing. For this purpose I created a dedicated business, HERMES' WRITINGS. Well, today is the big day: the first Hermes' Writings book is out on Amazon's Kindle! The surprising thing, even for me, is that it is a children's book! And moreover, ALELUKI LOVES NOT TAKING A NAP is part of a series of children books, which describe a toddler's interaction with his parents and the world from the attachment theory perspective. The concepts of attachment and separation have been interested me for a long time now and I wrote about them in essays and fiction. It is fascinating for me to notice (as a therapist, coach, parent, friend, etc.) the extent to which the way we view life and the way we interact socially is influenced by our patterns of attaching and separating from people, places and things. Social symptoms like: - anger, agressive and addictive behavior, - anxiety, phobias and agitation, - unhappiness, low self-esteem, chronic lack of trust, - overeating and starving oneself, can all be traced to insecure attachment and inability to separate from people and objects. The social implication of insecure attachment is extremely vast, leading to the creation of huge businesses, which in turn reinforce these behaviors -- I can mention here just the pharmaceutical industry, or the advertising industry, which promotes objects and services as solutions to (real or perceived) ABSENCES in one's life. Therefore, my intention is to create children's books that are fun, funny and informative. Books that inspire parents and caregivers to notice how specific emotions, patterns of thought and behavior, are shaped as part of a toddlers' individuality, as a result of their everyday interaction with the world around them. I created ALELUKI together with illustrator and artist Hana Breitenhoffer, as a series of books addressing common issues that many 21st Century families are dealing with very active children: the afternoon nap, TV watching, going to bed, making friends, living in a multicultural environment. Our next book will tell the story of ALELUKI IN SEARCH OF HIS FEARS. We look forward to hearing your opinions. Visit http://www.hermes-writings.cosmingheorghe.net/children.html and send a message to Active Aleluki! The blog posts grouped under JOURNAL OF A THERAPIST are inspired by the HBO series In Treatment (starring Gabriel Byrne as psychotherapist Paul Weston). Each post will be a commentary to a situation presented in one of the Season 3 In Treatment episodes, which then will be applied and developed so that it is helpful for as many people as possible. Please feel free to share your thoughts and emotions in the comments section after each post (you do not need to reveal your identity). Your opinion is extremely important, as it stimulates a creative dialog. I look forward to hearing from you. There are ten years since I ask myself, under different circumstances and with different words, what is the nature of the therapeutic/counseling relationship? Of course, the easy way to answer is to refer to the theoretical orientation of the therapist. There are two poles and a huge range of options in between. On one hand there is the pure Freudian psychoanalyst, who tends to a have distant, almost indifferent, relationship with the patient, whom they benevolently supervise from somewhere above. On the other hand there are some of the humanistic therapists who do exactly the opposite: they tend to make themselves small, as they put the client on a statuesque pedestal, creating a relationship where they rarely challenge the client, since they are convinced they need to cater to every single need of their clients. In my opinion, both these polarized approaches to counseling and coaching have as a result an actual lack of genuine relationship. Behaving as a cold expert or as an over-concerned friend is not in the best interest of the client. One of the clients of Dr. Paul West is Sunil, a 56 years old male from Calcutta. His wife has died and he was brought to Brooklyn to live with his son and daughter in law. There are two issues I would like to point out here. 1. Cultural Sensitivity and Cultural Appropriateness. Sunil experiences an intense cultural clash. He sees counseling suited just for mentally ill people and Dr. Weston decides to join with him at a different level than he does with the majority of his patients: he allows Sunil to smoke during his session, since he says that this is the only pleasure he has left. And he prepares Indian tea to share during their sessions. These gestures of the therapist are probably seen by most therapists as inappropriate, a crossing of the client-therapist boundary. Are they?.. How can we determine what is culturally appropriate in the counseling relationship? Is it ok to offer tea and cigarettes to a man arrived from a culture where these activities are a prerequisite almost to social relationship, a man who has great difficulties adapting to the extremely abstract social interactions from New York, USA? The blog posts grouped under JOURNAL OF A THERAPIST are inspired by the HBO series In Treatment (starring Gabriel Byrne as psychotherapist Paul Weston). Each post will be a commentary to a situation presented in one of the Season 3 In Treatment episodes, which then will be applied and developed so that it is helpful for as many people as possible. Please feel free to share your thoughts and emotions in the comments section after each post (you do not need to reveal your identity). Your opinion is extremely important, as it stimulates a creative dialog. I look forward to hearing from you. "Adele-Week 4" is one of the episodes in which the therapist himself goes to therapy. It is what I call a "breakthrough session", in which Paul, the therapist become patient, has a cathartic moment. During most part of the episode Paul talks about feeling that everybody in his life, everybody but him, including his patients, have a passion, have something to believe in. He describes the lack of meaning in his life and then the discussion goes on about how he often is "holding himself back".
It is this "holding-back" that I am interested in. Why are people holding themselves back? What makes people fearful of pursuing their passion, finding instead refuge into the safety, the security of jobs or relationships which often are meaningless? It is precisely here that I see one of the main sources for anger, manifested either as a chronic, lifetime frustration, or a temporary problem. This is what Adele tells Paul: "It was miserable [for a 12 year old boy to be the caregiver of a sick mother], but it was also safe an familiar. And it kept you from having to find any real connections elsewhere. From risking yourself in the other side of the world. And it also had the convenience of allowing you to blame it all on your father. And it is really not so different than what you do to this day, isn't it? [...] You accept a growing paralysis rather than taking the risk of finding where or towards whom your real passion lies. Is it any wonder you haven't found what drives you yet?.." (Anya Epstein & Dan Futterman, In Treatment, Season 3, "Adele-Week 4", directed by Paris Barclay). There are a few issues that I see here. FAMILIARITY: Stimulating and Limiting One's Personal Growth. Familiarity, comfortable surroundings, are essential for developing a sense of self and healthy Attachement-Separation behavior. But it is precisely this need for familiarity that sometimes ends up "imprisoning" us within what we perceive as a comfortable environment. It is the fear of unknown and the fear of change which sometimes enslave us. The result is a sense of powerlessness, which periodically erupts in anger and frustration directed at "the other": spouse, partner, friend, institution, job, etc. It is a vicious circle, since the fear and anxiety push one to make choices that might be "safe", or have the least risks, but which one knows that are not his/her passion. ANXIETY: The Need to Be Seen. When a 12 year old boy "chooses" ( but how realistic can be the choice of a 12 year old?..) to take care of a chronically ill mother rather than living his life, to what extent can he be a child? It is his mother's anxiety that he internalizes, it is her illness that created the boy's view of the world as a dangerous place, and avoidance seems to be a comfortable way to deal with a dangerous, scary world. And it is the absence of a father who is also much more preoccupied to gratify himself with his work and affairs than to look at his child. Mother's illness and father's absence are the issues that attract all the attention and the resources, during a time when the child needed to be seen, looked at, and watched. "You see me!", says Paul the patient to Adele the therapist, and as his story unravels we see how his life has become, has been reduced to, a desperate attempt to be seen, just the way he was. It is the reflection of ourselves as care-free children in the eyes of our caregivers that helps us develop a sense of Self, an understanding of our own individuality. When the mirroring in those eyes is constantly missing, chances are we will look for it for the rest of our lives. Chances are that the search for that look, for the missed gaze, will dictate many of our life choices: working hard to prove ourselves; anger towards (or fear of) spouse, partners and authority figures; anger towards our children when they try to assert their own individuality. "You are 57 year old, Paul", says Adele the therapist. "At a certain point you have to move past the stories you've assigned to your life, these steadfast explanations you've settled on years ago. You have to look at yourself for real answers. You have to take that risk." |