suffering – Inspiring Change LLC

Serious Hope : it’s for Adults

Hope is a powerful mental perspective, best experienced by adults.

During one of the longer dark nights this winter while watching television, I came across an interview with a well-known criminal defense attorney. It caught my attention, as I recognized her name from one or two famous trials that made news over the years. I listened as familiar questions got familiar answers until one question sparked a pointed response I won’t soon forget.

“What gives you hope for the justice system,” the reporter asked the seasoned, serious attorney. Nothing, said the lawyer. Hope is for children.

I have thought often of that comment as we have been struggling with this continuing pandemic. So much of our common focus has been on the future: what to expect with this virus next, how to plan for changing work expectations, what to make of an interrupted school year, whether to schedule a surgery or vacation. We have things that must be done today to best manage tomorrow. Many of these plans have had to be scrapped as the virus spreads beyond our control, even with helpful vaccines, killing 5.6 million people worldwide since 2020.

Is it a childish thing to be optimistic about the future in a natural world like this?

Even before experiencing this pandemic, some found it helpful to expect regular trouble in life. Bad things happen and continue to happen, despite our best efforts of avoidance or preparation, they say. The best way to get through this life is to expect less so that when the rare positive outcome arrives, we are pleasantly surprised.

While this mental frame may seem like a reasonable concession to experience, it’s a short path to emotional stress and depression. Few really live this way; human minds are not patterned to expect suffering with every breath. When all that ahead is darkness, we experience it as a slow death.

What is your natural frame of mind when it comes to considering suffering and expectations of the future? Are you naturally pessimistic, viewing the world as a place of struggle, pain and the occasional sunny day? Or are you more apt to put such ideas aside, trusting that some unreachable power determines our every move anyway?

Serious hope is for adults. I believe that a hopeful view of the future is a mature perspective, adopted by those who observe that within the randomness and chaos of the material world, there is also an observable return to center, to balance, to growth and healing that occurs in daily human life. While we may be swept away by sudden illness, or political turmoil, or personal violence, even these terrors aren’t a permanent state of being.

Everything changes, and as it changes, life has a global orientation that returns it to a new developing state.

As a Christian, I see this life orientation toward renewal a mark of God’s grace and presence in the living world. It’s because I have seen that both joy and suffering are not permanent experiences in this life, that the natural world, us included, is always working to restore and heal itself. I trust that within and underneath this life is an energy far larger than we, the life force that birthed the universe and is still creating it.

Perhaps this time of worldwide suffering has birthed a new life perspective for you. Along with fear, exhaustion and distrust, may you find an optimism that moves you toward hope and renewal. Without it, we are unprepared to embrace the life that awaits us, whatever it looks like, in communities worth living in.

Is a Vaccine at Odds with the Christian Faith?

The Christian faith is all about loving God and neighbor. Get immune, save and love your neighbor and their children. Get the Covid vaccine.

Perhaps it’s never been possible to have agreement on the definition of a faith tradition; ideas about what it means to follow a religion have always been fluid and contentious. I read a news article this week that a settlement was reached in an employment religious discrimination lawsuit, granting a Minnesota man $65,000 in back pay and damages from his former employer over his refusal to be fingerprinted for a required background check. He said it was against his Christian faith to do so.

Henry Harrington claimed that his employer, Ascension Point Recovery Services (APRS), a debt collection company, had failed to make the required accommodation for his belief and fired him. A similar employment case was filed four years ago in Pennsylvania, when a local school bus driver refused fingerprinting as part of her background check, claiming that the process would leave the “mark of the devil” on her, preventing her future entrance to heaven. That’s news to me.

Many more of these religious objection cases have been filed across the country in recent years as social and legal changes have pressed up against long held personal beliefs about social responsibility, employment requirements, privacy rights and our own physical autonomy.

Can a life insurance company, considering you for a new policy, require you to release to them your full physical and mental health record, disclose your family medical history, take your blood pressure and a sample of your blood? Might they also review the public filing of your divorce decree from 10 years back? They have been doing such things legally for decades. Can a federal employer take your photo, driver’s license number, Passport information as well fingerprints to screen you for a job? Will it search for any records of arrest or legal charges brought against you in national data bases? Most certainly it will.

As more information about our individual lives is collected and shared, many of us are pushing back. Where does my right to security of person and property end and legal or social demands begin? And when we must make arguments for protecting those intuitive, personal boundaries, it’s no wonder that issues of faith, meaning and core values come front and center.

These same issues, it seems to me, are at the center of the debate around Covid vaccine mandates. For most of 2020, we prayed and hoped for the miracle of a safe and effective vaccine to be created by our nation’s research scientists, folks who have been steadily working on similar virus strains of influenza, bird flu, and SARS for decades. Because of the previous research, the vaccines came quickly, tentatively released after multiple trials with eager volunteers, giving us hope that it would snuff out the pandemic and its possible mutations with our majority immunity.

The vaccine is free for all. Now anyone over 12 can get immunized! And even after weeks and months of pleading and even cash incentives, 20% of eligible Americans have refused this life-saving medicine.

I have come to understand this refusal by so many as the result of all the loss of privacy many of us feel over the last two generations mentioned earlier. Some people, claiming conflicts with the vaccine and their faith practices, have received exemptions from vaccination in the past few months, risking their own health and the life and wellbeing of those around them. Even when such exemptions don’t seem to be wise or practical, current law does allow such freedom when it comes to boundaries set by a person’s sincere religious practice.

But people are still dying, children are still not protected, and our medical personnel are traumatized by the continuing demands on their health and stamina. As new mandates are announced, reluctant employees are claiming a religious exemption, requesting letters of support from their Christian clergy. I want to go on the record with this admonition: Don’t ask your pastor for such a letter. Your pastor can’t make a coherent faith argument against receiving an approved vaccination that will save your life and the life of those around you.

Why? Because, quite simply, the Christian faith is centered on the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. And if there is a central theme to his life and teaching, it is love of God and love of neighbor. In this, Jesus taught, is all the Law and the Prophets. It’s not about creating a cover for your distrust of government, or resentment that you are expected to take medicine because someone else says so. It is not so you can live your life exactly on your own terms, shouting “freedom” until you are hoarse. Every day of his life, Jesus spoke and demonstrated his gospel, that as God loves us, so we are called to that same love of one another. To take proven medicine when you can, to save your own life as well as the life of the weak, young or vulnerable, is discipleship work. There is no religious excuse that makes any sense to me. Love Jesus? Love your neighbor. And get your shots.

(Written for The Savage Pacer, Spiritual Reflection column; Published Saturday, 9/18/21)

A Divided House

Perhaps like you, I have been thinking continuously of how we have failed to overcome our national crisis of pandemic while other countries, such as New Zealand and Canada have had such different progressions of disease. There is a reason the pandemic continues in our country: we haven’t found a way to come together and fight this virus as one people.

Over the last 5 months our nation’s leadership seems split in two camps, one urging attention to strict social mitigation strategies, and the other minimizing the severity of the danger and ignoring the direction of our nation’s public health and infectious disease scientists. A portion of the population protests wearing cotton masks in public while others in their communities die. So, this is how we are going into a new school year: attempting to get back to in person learning, while trying to be safe, generally assuming that teachers, staff and families may all, at various times, come down with Covid19.

I have run out of words to describe my feelings about the sorry state of our national attitude toward science, public health, the vulnerable, the poor, and necessary sacrifice for the common good. I am so sorry that you and I are kept from friends, from grandchildren, from vacations, graduations, weddings and normal on-campus college classes. But it’s not just our summer we have lost. Service and medical workers are exhausted and getting sick. Seniors are suffering from isolation and deep loneliness in nursing homes. Indigenous people on far flung reservations are falling ill without adequate fresh water sources or health services. Young adults are frozen in their job searches, businesses declare bankruptcy and millions have lost their jobs and benefits. And just this past week, current efforts to re-size the Postal Service come just as millions of Americans plan to vote by mail, threatening to impact the outcome of our November presidential election.

The days are long past that people of faith can say politics is not appropriate in church. White clergy have kept silent long enough. Many in our country seem intent on returning our nation to some kind of nostalgic vision of its past self, where we can pretend that black lives don’t matter, that individualism cloaked as “freedom” is the highest good, that we can build walls to keep out anyone who isn’t here already, and that white wealthy business owners know what is best for every American. If that is what Christianity looks like to you, you have only come in contact with a kind of white cultural American Christianity, one that worked hard to insulate itself from the actual life of Jesus Christ.

The God I believe created the world is the same God who, in Jesus, sought out the powerless, healed the sick, blessed the forgotten and challenged the way some accumulated wealth, privilege and power at the expense of the weak. He spoke of God’s kingdom as the power to free us from selfishness and fear and turn toward healing the world. This kingdom talk so threatened the men in power in Israel 2000 years ago that he was whipped and publicly crucified in order to silence him.

I believe many Christians are so offended by Jesus they don’t want to hear how his priorities judge human politics. The values and policies we vote for and fund are exactly the way that we live our faith in our hometowns and states. Jesus called us to recognize the dark powers of sin that exist in us all, to turn from their illusions and be sent to live courageously in community with one another. What that means to me is that I’m called to be consistently for my neighbor and not against her.

In a few weeks’ time, voters will again get a chance to choose a direction for our nation at the highest levels. No set of candidates is perfect because perfection isn’t humanly possible. But I urge you to reflect on how your faith intersects with politics, because if we claim to be Jesus followers, his kingdom critiques how we live together, how we solve problems, set laws and create vision for our nation. May we find a renewed commitment to become one people from many, as we seek to recover from such a difficult year.

Do You Have Enough Friends?

Do you have all the friends you need? Chances are that you are among the majority of American adults who recognize that they are struggling with fewer close friendships than they want. As emotional beings, all of us are biologically designed to connect to others in and outside our families of origin. While we may be surrounded by others at work, or sporting events, in our neighborhoods or churches, few of us feel that we have a core group of steady, supportive, mutually caring same gender friendships. We are friend hungry. And we don’t know how to fix it.

This emotional scarcity can come on quite slowly. While we are progressing through school, the constant shifts from playgrounds to classrooms to new schools provide us with an ever-replenishing sea of faces from whom we may find sympathetic chums. But just as quickly as those people move into our lives, they can move out, as new environments and opportunities sweep our time and attention elsewhere. Our friends and we may marry. And right before our eyes, our emotional circle becomes instantly smaller and more fixed.

It becomes harder and harder to stay in regular, meaningful touch with people. Phone calls help but don’t completely replace in-person conversation. Getting together can take enormous scheduling and financial efforts not everyone is able to sustain. When was the last time you hand-wrote a distant friend a letter? Many of us have tried to find less isolation in the connections we make on social media. They soothe us with easy digital connections to people across the globe. But unless those relationships are mutual and sustained, they won’t fill the emotional gap that face-to-face time with people provides.

This scarcity of friendships seems to hit American men even harder than it does women. We have a culture that still assumes men need to be independent, stoic and in competition with one another. Generations of this gender ethic have led to families that raise boys to dismiss healthy emotional dependency and under-value one another, even within the same family. This places men in emotionally vulnerable positions, overly dependent upon their romantic partners for support. Women shoulder this by becoming the emotional centers of their families and becoming adept at managing everyone’s interpersonal relationships. It leaves men empty and women exhausted. While many of us reject these old models, they still shape the way we live. What are we to do?

I don’t think we should give up on being and having good friends. The emotional cost of loneliness is a true mental health crisis for many, and there are no quick and lasting solutions. Over a lifetime, we need many real friends with whom we can share common interests, new experiences, shared struggles and spontaneous laughter.

One of the most helpful resources I have found that helps to describe how we make good, close friendships is the 2016 book, “Frientimacy” by Shasta Nelson. Nelson has created an online community around friendships, speaks around the country to groups and corporations about her research, and was a featured speaker at TEDx in 2017. What she has to teach us about the qualities of good friendships is inspiring to me as a relationship therapist and someone who wants to be and have close friendships throughout my entire lifespan.

The core qualities we must cultivate within ourselves and our key intimate relationships are Positivity, Consistency and Vulnerability. In other words, our key friendships should feel good, be mutually maintained, and let us be our real selves. These are high standards, and they take time, good boundaries and mutual intention to develop. Not every friendship can or will experience all three qualities. There are all kinds of people in our lives who may be able to sustain one aspect, like positivity, but can’t meet other aspects like consistency or real-life sharing. Or we may be more interested in someone as a friend than they are in us, and the relationship never grows. I’ll point you to Nelson’s book for more details about these key aspects, but you get the point. Real friendships take work and commitment to one another. When they work, they make us feel fully human.

No matter who we are, we need good friendships. Perhaps the last good friend you had was someone you knew years ago but with whom you have fallen out of touch. What did that friendship teach you about how to recreate that small, essential, positive human community of two close friends? Perhaps it’s time to discover more about how you can be a friend and welcome new friendship in return.

(Written for/published 5/28/2019 The Savage Pacer)

Biblical Literalism is the Disaster

September came hard as massive hurricanes slammed into our nation’s Gulf coast. Like many, I found myself completely distracted and immersed in the round-the-clock news coverage of the damage. When it comes to bearing witness to destruction, we seem unable to look away. While the information does soothe our need to know and connect with important people and places in our lives, too much information can damage our emotional balance. We must turn and turn again to the present of our own life, and help as we can with donated blood, money and specific resources to relief agencies. This is how communities recover; this is how we can help.

Yet we are meaning-making beings. We naturally tell stories of what happens in the world so we might order and understand what can feel like chaotic circumstances. Some of those stories involve theology, or talking about God. Preachers pounding out prayers, sermons, articles and social media comments, as they do. Believers repeating them. And some of these God stories make me sad and upset.

Despite centuries of passionate and careful study of the Biblical texts by both Jewish and Christian scholars, research that helps readers understand how this big library of old stories, poems, hymns, histories, letters and Jesus narratives is put together into a single volume, there are still those who read the Bible as if it were dictated word for word by Jesus himself to a single scribe somewhere. They pull verses and stories out of their original context, ignore the subtleties of language, form, history, and culture and proclaim the words as current truths about God.

This literalism has led one strain of popular theology to declare that hurricanes, earthquakes and destruction of land and people as evidence God’s wrath. This way of reading scripture has harmed untold numbers of people who have sought comfort, direction and help from God in times of disaster. This perspective takes as a starting point the way that the people of Israel, over 3,500 years ago, made sense of their own suffering.

The Jewish people are descendants of a tribe of people who believed they were God’s chosen nation. The only way those ancient people could reconcile that closeness to God and their suffering was to tell the story that both good and evil come from God. That included natural disasters, physical and mental disease, and war with neighboring tribes. Suffering? That must be God’s punishment. It made sense three millennia ago. It makes no sense now.

Jesus came fifteen centuries later and challenged that older way of thinking. If you read through the different versions of his story in the New Testament, you will read how he frequently challenged that theology. In several healing stories, people wanted Jesus to tell them who was to blame for someone’s suffering: a tower fell and killed several men; a child was born blind; a man was lame from birth. Part of his healing ritual was to tell the suffering that not only were their sins forgiven – the old way of thinking – but to “get up and walk.” There are dozens of these stories of Jesus’ compassion and healing, most of whom he heals without a judgmental word; just a command, and a touch.

Christians can disagree about much, but to continue to use meaning making from 3,500 years ago to talk about contemporary disasters and suffering is irresponsible and useless. Historic storms? They are a result of our complex dynamic atmosphere, now threatened by human environmental pollution and ocean warming. Earthquakes? Science has long ago discovered the massive pressures of our earth’s crust’s plates moving over time. These are scientific stories of meaning we can trust.

Is God our creator? Oh yes. But to assume that God’s action in the world is toward destruction is to fail to look at Jesus. Jesus’ life and death was a song of praise to a God of love and mercy, of healing and hope, of struggle for the sake of this difficult human family. If you’re hearing anything else from your church or religious media in these difficult days of natural disasters, wars and rumors of war, you’re not hearing the Good News.

(Published first in the Savage PACER 9.16.2017)

When Severe Mental Illness Strikes a Loved One

Book Review: “I Am Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help” by Xavier Amador, PhD. (Vida Press, 2012)

For the last 20 or so years, brain research has helped doctors and therapists understand that the serious mental illnesses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are diseases of brain function. During the century before the “Decade of the Brain (the 1990’s)”, these rare and frightening mental diseases were blamed on bad or inadequate mothering (the “schizophrenogenic mother”), thanks to the early theories of Freud and subsequent generations of psychology, puzzling over the cause and treatments of such life-altering and permanent mental illnesses.

In his wonderfully personal and helpful book “I Am Not Sick,” Dr. Amador explains that the primary feature of these severe mental illnesses is the core belief that the sufferer is “not sick.” In medical terms, this disbelief in their illness is called “anosognosia” (ã-nõ’sog-nõ’sê-ã). Sufferers may be homeless, talking to voices in their head, unable to sleep or put together a clear sentence, believing that aliens have made inroads to their cells, but to these ill brains, the beliefs and thoughts are as real as sunlight and gravity.

If you have ever been in a relationship with a loved one who has become mentally ill and whose illness has this feature of anosognosia, you know that trying to convince them to get to the hospital for treatment or to take their medication is a futile, frustrating, and relationship damaging exercise. But this is how almost everyone attempts to get their loved one’s the help they need to be safe and recover.

In his best-selling book, Amador explains the model of engagement that he has developed over 30 years of living with his older brother, who was a schizophrenic, and working as a professional forensic psychologist and therapist. He walks the reader through this counter-intuitive but effective model that listens, understands and collaborates with the sufferer, who, in the end, must participate in their care in order to get better.

He calls this program “LEAP,” which stands for Listen, Empathize, Agree and Partner. Utilizing the tools familiar to therapists of Client-Centered/Active Listening, Cognitive-Behavioral, and Motivational Interviewing models, Dr. Amador provides tools, examples, and scripts as examples of learning to use this strategy with loved ones who need help.

I read this book as a way to help one of my clients, whose loved one is beginning to demonstrate marked personality changes, delusions and strange behaviors. As we talked about how to be helpful short of calling 911, this book has become a welcome addition to my library and therapeutic models. If you have someone in your life you are seriously worried about and wonder how to help. I urge you to get this book or log onto his website, LeapInstitute.org.

13 Reasons Why NOT

13 Reasons Why is a video series available on Netflix. If you’ve been told you NEED to watch this drama in order to understand teens now, I want to argue the opposite. I don’t believe that watching this series is necessary in order to understand teen cultures. Many viewers make this series sound as if it is presented as a documentary; it is not. It is a sensationalized, emotionally wrought fictional presentation of hours and hours of teen suffering and feels voyeuristic in its brutal and graphic portrayal of suicide. I managed to watch about 15 seconds of that scene and was so repulsed I turned it off.

Fictional, video streaming accounts of high school are not the way that our youth their own experience their lives. Parts of it, yes. Intense, highly edited with a powerful sound track? No. What this series does, I’m afraid, is double down on the visual trauma our youth are exposed to regularly. And we wonder why they are anxious, depressed, afraid and suicidal in greater and greater numbers?

If parents or counselors are curious, then watch a half hour or so. You won’t need any more exposure than that. I suggest it is completely unsuited for anyone, never mind teens. Watchers of any age are participating in reinforcing trauma. As a pastoral counselor and family therapist, I see the effects of too much trauma exposure daily. It’s very difficult to heal.

Healing Traumatic Memory

If only life was one long, beautiful, inspirational journey. But it’s not. Some of us know that life can include experiences of such fear, helplessness and pain that we wonder how we survived. Over time, and with support, most of us get back to what we would call our normal. Yet others of us discover no matter what, we just can’t.

We call these experiences psychological trauma, the kind of experiences that steal our mental equilibrium. Many traumas have their origin in childhood; our bodies and minds are dependent, small, developing and vulnerable. The younger we are when they occur, the more impact they may have on the way we learn to relate, think, feel and trust the world around us.

Traumatic memories happen within the brain when we survive a life-threatening event and experience overwhelming shock, loss, fear, horror and helplessness. The words we have for what we experienced are just not enough to explain it to others. Motor vehicle accidents, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, parental neglect and addiction, domestic violence, plane crashes, witnessing homicide, military combat, escaping house fires: these are among the experiences that can overwhelm our emotions and capacity to bear what we have seen and known. The memory of the experience is stored in a kind of jumble in the brain, never blending into what we would call our normal sense of self, our everyday explicit memory.

Neurologists, psychologists and other researchers have made wonderful strides in the last 30 years in understanding how trauma effects the brain. And as the science of trauma becomes clearer, so has the clinical work of seeking effective treatments: treatments for the post-trauma effects that are expressed in our bodies in the form of chronic pain, sudden panic attacks, visual and auditory flashbacks, depression, anxiety, relationship and work problems, addictions and patterns of emotional dissociation.

First generation psychological care for traumatic memory was talk therapy; some relief was attained by patients helped to fully describe their experience in a private, compassionate therapeutic environment. Second generation care added strong prescription medications to calm the nervous system, limit emotional affectivity or target psychotic symptoms. What the most recent research has shown is that both methods are insufficient; talking uses the cognitive portions of the brain without adequately engaging the emotional and survival systems, systems that were in charge during a trauma, and dulling trauma memories or disengaging them temporarily with psychotropic drugs won’t heal the damaged and chronically misfiring memory patterns.

What does work is helping the sufferer to carefully, artfully, and in a controlled and focused way to re-experience the memories, feel the experience again in the body while expressing the energy, body movements, sounds, sights and postures that were suppressed at the moments of helplessness, dissociation and physical restriction. To think the thoughts that seem too terrible to think, and to help the mind link up the original memory to the fuller, day to day explicit or narrative memory that we live and work in every day.

This is what the work of Francine Shapiro’s EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing (SE), Albert Pesso’s Psychomotor Therapy and Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Approach all seek in their similar models: to have the sufferer become integrated with their physical bodies, those same bodies that have experienced the trauma, to feel, tolerate, express, observe and rewrite their story in the present sense of the self.

All this is to say: there has never been a time in human history where more can be done to help the trauma sufferer than now. If you are besieged by physical and mental echoes of a terrible event in your past, please seek out care from a psychotherapist trained in the newer trauma resolution techniques. Many of us have found peace where there was no peace, and wish the same health and healing for you.

Helplessness & Haiti

It’s been over two weeks since the earthquake devastated the people of Haiti.

Tens of thousands have died, including people you may know. And along with a desire to help, and a deepening sense of helplessness as we watch that impoverish nation respond, I am struck by a familiar conflict, or perhaps it is an observation about human life.

I continue to wonder how my life can go on in its normal way while massive, untold despair, suffering and death occurs around me. It’s the same experience those who suffer grief describe: how does the world continue on its way while my life seems to have stopped?

I struggle with a low-grade angst; not a guilt exactly, but close to it. As if I have witnessed a massive car crash from the safety of my own vehicle and go careening by, with just a glance in my rear view mirror. I continue on, glad it wasn’t me in that car, confident someone more capable is responding.

I believe this soft anguish reflects this existential truth: we are single human beings. We are separate from one another at birth, and will die that way. In between, we live daily life as multiple connections. When connections are broken, by suffering we cannot solve, or death we cannot stop, we are brought up short by the truth of our singleness of self.

What is grief but the crashing in of this solitude, and the choice to risk connecting again?

Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy.