Category Archives: Social Science

To Have Insight

Intuition can be described as a glimpse of knowledge that one has stored within oneself, that comes at a time when it is needed. It is a disclosure of one’s own spirit that unveils all things. It is by seeing the cause of every fault in oneself that one is able to have insight into human nature.

–Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
From: A Meditation Theme for Each Day
Selected and arranged by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

Liberation

Sometimes we cherish items so much but years later, they lose their value to us. Write about an item or several items like that. What do you think changed their worth?

I once had a ten-year letter friendship with someone. Early on in the relationship, I not only began to meticulously store his letters, but I also began photocopying mine, keeping them in three-ring binders. I would often sit and re-read previous correspondence. It was a means of connection, of creating substance by absorbing the symbols into my being. I was very attached to this person.

As he couldn’t store my original letters, he returned them to me, so I had a good deal of paper to lug around. When I moved to Austin, I shipped them here. Each box weighed about 75 pounds, and there were four of them. At some point during my first year, I decided to destroy these. I came to understand that my attachment to these letters was an obstacle to pursuing my new life. I also wanted to free myself from the burden of worry, to protect myself from the loss I would feel if these were ever removed from my possession — be it from fire, flood, or thievery. Lastly, I recognized that there were aspects of myself and of this friend that I would not want shared with anyone else, and that the truth of the experience resided in me, and not in the papers. I did not need to keep the letters in order for the relationship, and all that I had learned, to be real.

There have been occasions that I pause and feel a twinge of regret for obliterating them. Words are precious to me, and these letters were a form of journal, and significant evidence of my journey. (After all, I take care to back up my blog entries in several places. Though on a practical level, it’s easier to store data this way.) A part of me hoped that after I died, someone would be fascinated with the Inner Workings Of Me (stubbornly clinging to the fantasy of being a Famous Writer or Person Of Significance.) Then I realized that this would likely never happen. At first it depressed me. I didn’t enjoy being so inconsequential to the world. Then I began to put it in perspective, considering the billions of humans of whose existence I am unaware. I am not alone. This revelation released me. I do not need to be remembered to find satisfaction and meaning in existence.

Values, Passions, and Work

Marrying our values and our passions to the energy we invest in work… increases the significance of each moment. Consider your budget of time in terms of how much you are willing to allocate to acquiring things versus how much you are willing to devote to people, relationships, family, health, personal growth, and the other essential components of a high-quality life. Rather than working to the exclusion of everything else in order to flood our bank accounts in the hope that we can eventually buy back what we have missed along the way, we need to live life fully now with a sense of its fragility. If money ultimately cannot buy much of life’s total package anyway, why waste precious time earning more for its own sake?

Don’t be mistaken. Following your passion is not the same as following your bliss. While passion is a font of expressive, creative energy, it won’t necessarily deliver pleasure and contentment at every moment. Success, even on your own terms, entails sacrifice and periods of very hard work. Following your passion will not necessarily make you rich, but then again, it won’t hurt your chances either, since most people are far more successful working at things they love. You have to engage passion realistically, with an eye toward what is achievable given your circumstances.

I am reminded that finding meaning and fulfillment in one’s work should not be an elitist notion.

–Randy Komisar, The Monk and the Riddle

What’s a Voter to Do?

While I avoid taking a polemic stance in this blog, I do support the dissemination of information that will help people make decisions. Therefore, I’m including a link to OnTheIssues.org. This site appears to be politically neutral and covers an array of topics with links to recent quotes, an issue grid, a debate archive, senate races, presidential candidates, a FAQ, and much, much more.

Adler and Birth Order

An email from the Alfred Adler Institutes of San Francisco and Northwestern Washington announced the release of a video titled Birth Order: Sense and Nonsense, An Adlerian View. It is a 60-minute interview of Henry T. Stein, Ph.D. conducted by the BBC. Parts of that interview were included in the BBC program, Me First: Does Birth Order Matter? broadcast on The Learning Channel in the United States. The video provides Dr. Stein’s candid perspective on the value, application, and limits of birth order theory. To order a copy, or for more information, go to this site.

Environmental Depression

There’s a new mental health-oriented memoir coming out. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times article, The Prisoner of West 21st Street:

All my life I struggled to understand the connection between my mother’s moods and the place where she lived. If depression is an organic condition best treated by drugs, did it make sense to claim that her depression was caused by the deterioration of New York? Even if it’s now acceptable to attribute depression to a cataclysmic event like Sept. 11, no single watershed moment could be blamed for my mother’s blues. It’s not as if Son of Sam or the city’s near bankruptcy had put her over the edge.

Then about two years ago, as I was doing research for a book about my mother’s life, an aunt in Maine and a family friend down South sent me a cache of letters that my mother had written over the years. In her own words, these letters explained more clearly than I ever could how strongly she linked her personal burdens with conditions in her adopted city.

–Beth J. Harpaz

The book, Finding Annie Farrell, will be published this month by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.

Reality Check

We are mortal. If we are lucky, we manage to live a few decades before confronting what this really means. In the past year both I and my partner have received news that a parent has cancer. Mine had a good prognosis. His does not. We just received the news of his parent’s illness today.

We take turns in our relationship. When my mother was ill, I cried, was scared and sad. I felt plagued by regret and doubt (have I been a good enough daughter?). Then I had my own health scare, a reminder that I too could develop cancer. Suddenly life felt more tenuous to me. I’m almost 41; it’s time to accept the inevitable. Now that my partner has learned of his father’s illness, I feel detached and numb. Is there something wrong with me, I wonder? But I think it’s a coping response. One of us needs to remain steady, and he did that for me.

We have also had some employment concerns that raise the possibility of relocation due to his imminent layoff. With this recent news, I feel as though the ground has disintegrated beneath us.

So what does a person do when life is thrown into chaos?

The answer: the best one can.

Someone asked me how I’m feeling, and I replied I was okay, though I feel a little insane around the edges.

So here is what I will do. I will focus on whatever tasks present themselves to me. Routine gives structure: meals need to be cooked, dishes washed, workouts done, showers taken, beds made, laundry folded. The bills continue to arrive and need to be paid. Cats want to be petted and fed.

Here is what else I will do. I will give my partner what he needs, whether it is a hug, a listening ear, or quiet time. I will seek the support I need from my friends and family, who are many in number and generous in heart. I will put my own agenda aside for awhile. (You know, the “what’s in it for me and where is our relationship going?” one.)

Living in the present means experiencing. So I will savor the earthy flavor of my morning coffee. I will read my books, being grateful that I have an alert mind and live in a country that does not restrict my choices. I will remember to breathe, to feel my body fill upon inhaling and empty with exhaling. I will marvel at the changes in my friend’s one year old son. I will take pleasure in the weather and notice the change of seasons. I will move, stretch, and feel the power of my own body, and enjoy that. I will cherish these small moments of awareness and, each time, recommit to life.

I may not be able to live mindfully every moment. That’s not my goal; in fact, it’s akin to an obese smoker with high blood pressure suddenly attempting the decathlon. Assessing mindfulness from a perfectionist stance misses the point. It’s not about accruing X minutes of awareness. It’s about simply being present as much as possible — it’s the journey, not the destination.

Support Sundari

Nicolae Ceausescu was the tyrant who ruled Romania for 15 years; he was ousted when his army defected to support demonstrators resisting him in 1989. His secret police and economic policies left Romania in a state of near-starvation, both physically and literally.

In 1993, a small group of people located in Pitesti (northwest of Bucharest) founded a cultural association called Sundari. Sundari means flower of consciousness; she is also called The Most Beautiful who manifests divine knowledge and love. This group has created a library with a specific focus — to provide access to works on oriental philosophy and religion, such as yoga, buddhism, martial arts, zen, hinduism, taoism, which are mostly unique to Romania.

The library is small but growing. They receive ten visitors a day and say everyone is welcome. The only requirement is a fluency in English, since most of the holdings are in that language. Their website lists all the current holdings and provides contact information for snail mail, email, and telephone.

It can be expensive to ship books overseas. The person who notified me of this library said that he mailed his books from the U.S. post office using an “M bag.” This is a specific way to ship books at a rate of $1 per pound, and it takes four to six months. Here’s how it works:

At the post office you receive a giant white bag with an “M” Bag tag and a mailing slip. You must pack the books in sturdy boxes and place the box(es) in the bag. Each box must be labeled clearly with the address of the recipient and the sender. You can send as many bags as you wish, but the most economical is to send a minimum of ten pounds at once. It will cost $11 for a weight between one and ten pounds, so you might as well send ten pounds. Anything from ten to seventy pounds will cost $1 per pound extra.

If you happen to have books of that genre that you would like to send, I’m sure they would be immensely grateful to receive them. It is a thrill to open the doors of ignorance and flood a room with the light of knowledge. These people are eager to see. Please help them.

Blame It On the Rain

It’s a soupy day, with the forecast calling for a 100 percent chance of rain. The rainfall produces varying beats and tempos as it meets the roof, is shaken from tree boughs, rolls off from the flashing with a splat onto the porch. It is a day for reading. Or napping.

As much as I would like to pursue those options, first I will make a foray into the sogginess to meet a friend for coffee at a bookstore cafe. I will likely manage to depart the store without having purchased reading material because I have newly arrived books from Amazon to read:

Every Day Gets a Little Closer: a Twice-Told Therapy by Irvin Yalom. Yalom and one of his patients collaborated on this. She agreed to keep a journal of her experience of the sessions, and so did he. This book presents both of their perspectives. I’m looking forward to seeing these juxtaposed.

The Marquis de Sade: A Life by Neil Schaeffer. An unusual choice, I realize, to mention on a blog that focuses on well-being, mindfulness, and spiritual matters. However, this is a blog that also focuses on mental health. I am fascinated by the circumstances surrounding the life of Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, wanting to learn what factors in his life influenced him. He left an irrefutable mark on society, and this book — the result of a decade of research and well-reviewed — looks to provide more than a sensationalized peek at a complex man who, despite his self-destructiveness, pushed against the limitations of authority for the right of free expression, however perverse.

All I need now is a pot of tea and I’m set. But first, the friend and the bookstore.

The Fate of Community Mental Health

David Markham articulates his experience and perspective on the issue of whether publicly funded mental health centers worked. Having worked several years for Austin Travis County MHMR, I have firsthand experience with the situation Markham presents.

My experience in working in three CMHCS in the 70s, and 80s, is that they worked spendidly. People got excellent care. What killed them was the withdrawal of federal dollars, and the advent of HMOs who significantly restricted the reimbursement for mental health services causing CMHCs to loose money and have to lay off staff and close down programs. This loss of revenue was occuring at the same time that State Hospitals were “deinstitutionalizing” the “Severely and Persistantly Mentally Ill” (SPMI) and putting them into community based settings allowing State legislatures to close State Hospitals. Without resources to treat the disorders these patients struggled with, CMHCs floundered and stumbled. Without adequate treatment many of these SPMI patients were arrested, caught up in the criminal justice system, contributing to the expansion of our prison populations to record numbers.

The sad thing for me, personally, is to have experienced first hand the success of the CMHC system. As Dr. Applebaum and other psychiatrists quoted in the article say, CMHCs did work, and they worked well. The mess we have in this country today in providing services for mental illness and substance abuse is not because we do not know how to do it well, we simply do not have good financing mechanisms to pay for appropriate and effective services. The irony is that the taxpayers will pay one way or the other either in financing mental health services or by default, criminal justice services.

One reason I departed the agency was that federal funding had been slashed; scrabbling for billable hours seemed to eclipse the provision of good services. Also because, at some point, it is incredibly depressing to provide services to the destitute in such a meagerly funded capacity. A person gets tired and a bit shell-shocked.

I dearly wish this country — public and private funding sources — would embrace the need to provide support for the treatment of mental illness. The toll on us culturally, spiritually, and economically is huge.

Supermom

This is dedicated to my mother, whose career was to raise four children; my artist friend with the one-year-old son; my blogging friend whose job supports a family while she also pursues her own interests and develops a business; and to any woman faced with the challenge of being a mother and an individual:

She was a homemaker, but the home she made was filled not only with love, but with her constant forays into politics, books, board games, decoupage, etc. She loved her family, but she had an inner life, a tough mind, and when things got too kid-crazy around her ankles, she had a tendency to say, “One of these days I’m gonna walk out on all of you.”

That sort of declaration–and the fact that she never followed through on it–sticks in a kid’s mind, and not necessarily in an unhealthy way. What it said to us was that our mom was more than our mom, that there was more to life than us and dinner and dishes, and that, despite her yearnings for more, she was going to fight to fuse her selves into a whole.

–Jim Walsh, City Pages: Why Sylvia? Why Now?

I admire you all more than you will ever know.

Orkut It Out!

I was recently invited to join a new social network similar to Friendster. It’s called orkut. Odd name, no? It’s actually the first name of the engineer who created it, Orkut Buyukkokte.

I had joined Friendster but then dropped out, because I found it time-consuming without the rewards that connecting via blogging provides. I also was being contacted by some fairly odd folk. Now, I’ve nothing against eccentricity or even serious weirdness, but I wasn’t connecting with people I felt shared a common interest. (However, I recently received an invitation to join again and may give it a second go.)

Then I was invited to try orkut. I have to say, I like it so far, particularly because one can join a number of communities. For instance, I belong to communities of orkut members who share an interest in books, dealing with depression, libraries, Macs, self-employment, the INFJ personality type, meditation, Taoism, psychology, cats, marriage equality, feminism, Austin, Good Eats (the food show), and freelance writing.

The only concern I have is about the potential for unwieldiness. As my friend Dave wrote in an email to me, “The system almost has to limit options just to keep the noise level down, or it’d fast become like an overworked mailing list or, gods forbid, like Usenet. It is fascinating stuff, however.”

I agree. I haven’t figured out what practical benefit it has for me, as I’ll not be using it for finding a mate. However, I’m always interested in seeing how networks form and communication flows.

Monster (The Movie)

This afternoon I met a friend to watch Monster. Oy, was that one heavy trip of a movie. I’ve read a number of reviews, some praising it to the hills, others contending it portrayed the real-life Lee Wuornos as a cariciature or a heroine. Wuornos apparently contradicted her story many times and made preposterous comments; for example, she claimed to have had sex with 250,000 men — such a feat would require relations with 35 men daily for two decades.

On the other hand, just looking at photos one can see the obviously difficut life she had. Wuornos was born in 1956; her father was a child molester and sociopath who later committed suicide. Her mother divorced him just before Wuornos was born and later left her and brother Keith with the grandparents, who adopted them (but did not reveal their true relationship until Lee was 12, and she subsequently rebelled against them); they were strict and physically abusive. Keith died of cancer at age 21. The grandmother, an alcoholic, committed suicide. By age 14 Wuornos had given birth (the child was put up for adoption); she quit school, began living on the streets, and turned tricks before she was old enough to drive a car.

If all this sounds too horrific to be real, think again. I’ve counseled numerous people who experienced abuses that stretch one’s capacity to comprehend. How can humans be so evil to others? What causes some to react violently? The movie did an admirable job portraying the desperate resignation permeating Wuornos’s worldview. In Monster, after she began murdering men, when her lesbian lover found out, Wuornos talked about how people are killed every day, that it’s all just fighting to survive or to the death. She claimed she was trying to protect Selby (in real life Tyria Moore) — to provide for and take care of her so Selby could retain her hopeful perspective about life. Wuornos’s raw bravado and macho stance as the breadwinner is painful to watch. After the first murder, she made an attempt to quit hooking and find a regular job. However, she was clueless about the type of effort needed to achieve her grand (or grandiose) goals. Having no skills and a felony record, everywhere Wuornos turned she was rejected, and not gently. Her response to that was an escalation of ever-present belligerance, desperation, and rage.

The movie didn’t, in my view, glorify her motives. Nor did it ask the viewer to excuse or forgive Wuornos because on her nightmarish origins. She was not likable, even in the moments she was portrayed as happy with Selby. She was a woman degraded and dehumanized by circumstances and who responded in kind.

So what’s the attraction of such a movie? Well, in part it’s the docudrama aspect of it. In fact, a documentary was released in 1992 about her life. Because female serial killers are rare, such a person garners a lot of curiosity and attention. It was a sad movie to watch, a testament to the millions of people who have traversed a similar path, all because of having the bad luck to be born into terrible circumstances — though most do not respond accordingly. I suppose the movie serves as a reality check for many people, to remind us that there but for Grace go we.

Aileen Wuornos was executed in October 2002. You can read more about her life here.

Speak

A friend enthusiastically recommended a young adult book, Speak, describing how the novel was a catalyst in her decision to enter therapy and try the “talking cure.” She urged me to read it, in part probably to help me get to know her better; readers love to share the transformative experience with others. So I did as she requested. I began it just before bed and was up until 4 a.m. to finish it.

It’s a story about trauma, being outcast by peers, withdrawal into self, and then resurgence and expression. Fourteen year-old Melinda is starting high school. A few weeks before school begins, she sneaks behind her parents’ back to attend a party hosted by seniors — rare behavior for her. Something terrible happens to her. She calls 911; the cops come and bust everyone. The other kids turn on her for calling the police, thinking she did it to just turn them in, and she is ostracized. However, Melinda didn’t even get help for the reason she called the police. The crowd’s hostility and her shock drive her off the scene.

Melinda then begins her high school career — bereft of all friends, the focus of hostile expressions. She tells no one about the situation because she doesn’t think she’ll be believed. Her family life is very disconnected, with unhappily married parents and no siblings. Over the school year she copes as best she can, but she slowly chokes on unexpressed pain and rage; she must find a way to express her need for help. One means of coping is through art — sculpting, drawing, and painting — until she summons the courage to speak and fights on her own behalf.

The author has a good grasp on high school culture and the chaos of adolescence. The story is engaging and the topic relevant. I would definitely recommend it for a young adult’s library.