Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Counseling - Mental Illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Counseling - Mental Illness. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Ring Theory of Kvetching: "Practical Advice on How to Say the Right Thing to the Right People"



Illustration by Wes Bausmith
 
 
It works in all kinds of crises – medical, legal, even existential.
It's the 'Ring Theory' of kvetching.
 
The first rule is comfort in, dump out.
 
by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman
April 7, 2013
 
When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you."
 
"It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?"
 
The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie's husband, Pat. "I wasn't prepared for this," she told him. "I don't know if I can handle it."
 
This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan's colleague's remark was wrong.
 
Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. She calls it the Ring Theory.
 
Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie's aneurysm, that's Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie's aneurysm, that was Katie's husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. One of Susan's patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator.
 
Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, "Life is unfair" and "Why me?" That's the one payoff for being in the center ring.
 
Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.
 
When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you're going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn't, don't say it.
 
Don't, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don't need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, "I'm sorry" or "This must really be hard for you" or "Can I bring you a pot roast?" Don't say, "You should hear what happened to me" or "Here's what I would do if I were you." And don't say, "This is really bringing me down."
 
If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that's fine. It's a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.
 
Comfort IN, dump OUT.
 
There was nothing wrong with Katie's friend saying she was not prepared for how horrible Katie looked, or even that she didn't think she could handle it. The mistake was that she said those things to Pat. She dumped IN.
 
Complaining to someone in a smaller ring than yours doesn't do either of you any good. On the other hand, being supportive to her principal caregiver may be the best thing you can do for the patient.
 
Most of us know this. Almost nobody would complain to the patient about how rotten she looks. Almost no one would say that looking at her makes them think of the fragility of life and their own closeness to death. In other words, we know enough not to dump into the center ring. Ring Theory merely expands that intuition and makes it more concrete: Don't just avoid dumping into the center ring, avoid dumping into any ring smaller than your own.
 
Remember, you can say whatever you want if you just wait until you're talking to someone in a larger ring than yours.
 
And don't worry. You'll get your turn in the center ring. You can count on that.
 
Susan Silk is a clinical psychologist. Barry Goldman is an arbitrator and mediator and the author of "The Science of Settlement: Ideas for Negotiators."
 
 
 

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Tips on How to Sympathize


 
 How not to say the wrong thing
 
Susan Silk and Barry Goldman*
April 7, 2013
 
It works in all kinds of crises – medical, legal, even existential.
It's the 'Ring Theory' of kvetching. The first rule is comfort in, dump out.
 
 
When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan's colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but Susan didn't feel like having visitors, and she said so. Her colleague's response? "This isn't just about you."
 
"It's not?" Susan wondered. "My breast cancer is not about me? It's about you?"
 
The same theme came up again when our friend Katie had a brain aneurysm. She was in intensive care for a long time and finally got out and into a step-down unit. She was no longer covered with tubes and lines and monitors, but she was still in rough shape. A friend came and saw her and then stepped into the hall with Katie's husband, Pat. "I wasn't prepared for this," she told him. "I don't know if I can handle it."
 
This woman loves Katie, and she said what she did because the sight of Katie in this condition moved her so deeply. But it was the wrong thing to say. And it was wrong in the same way Susan's colleague's remark was wrong.
 
Susan has since developed a simple technique to help people avoid this mistake. It works for all kinds of crises: medical, legal, financial, romantic, even existential. She calls it the Ring Theory.
 

Illustration by Wes Bausmith

 
Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. For Katie's aneurysm, that's Katie. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. In the case of Katie's aneurysm, that was Katie's husband, Pat. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones. When you are done you have a Kvetching Order. One of Susan's patients found it useful to tape it to her refrigerator.
 
Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can kvetch and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, "Life is unfair" and "Why me?" That's the one payoff for being in the center ring.
 
Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.
 
When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking. But if you're going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn't, don't say it. Don't, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don't need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, "I'm sorry" or "This must really be hard for you" or "Can I bring you a pot roast?" Don't say, "You should hear what happened to me" or "Here's what I would do if I were you." And don't say, "This is really bringing me down."
 
If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to you lately, that's fine. It's a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.
 
Comfort IN, dump OUT.
 
There was nothing wrong with Katie's friend saying she was not prepared for how horrible Katie looked, or even that she didn't think she could handle it. The mistake was that she said those things to Pat. She dumped IN.
 
Complaining to someone in a smaller ring than yours doesn't do either of you any good.
On the other hand, being supportive to her principal caregiver may be the best thing
you can do for the patient.
 
Most of us know this. Almost nobody would complain to the patient about how rotten she looks. Almost no one would say that looking at her makes them think of the fragility of life and their own closeness to death. In other words, we know enough not to dump into the center ring. Ring Theory merely expands that intuition and makes it more concrete: Don't just avoid dumping into the center ring, avoid dumping into any ring smaller than your own.
 
Remember, you can say whatever you want if you just wait until you're talking to someone in a larger ring than yours.
 
And don't worry. You'll get your turn in the center ring. You can count on that.
 
*Susan Silk is a clinical psychologist. Barry Goldman is an arbitrator and mediator and the author of
"The Science of Settlement: Ideas for Negotiators."
 
 
 

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Sylvia Plath: The Stigma of Writing and Mental Illness

February 11, 2013
You’ll Love Her! She’s Crazy!
Posted by

h_3.00027557-465.jpg
I’m told that one of my grandmothers suffered from what must have been postpartum depression. She was prescribed Miltowns in the forties, and hid an opiate addiction for more than fifty years. On the same branch of my family tree is an aunt who ended her life. Everyone who would know the details of either story is dead.
Many somber words have been intoned about the taboo surrounding mental illness, recently and notably by former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy this past January, soon after the shootings in Newtown. “If we’re going to get rid of the stigma—one of the great civil-rights challenges of our time—we need more discussion in the real world, and less shame by those suffering with mental illness, or the loved ones around them,” he wrote, in an essay published by The Daily Beast.
Until recently in human history, mental illness was indeed a stigma, discussed in whispers with the vocabulary of shame. To varying degrees, however, these whispers have always been accompanied confidently by the vocabulary of pride.
In her 1978 essay “Illness As Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote about the received ideas that surrounded tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, and cancer in the twentieth. The tubercular character was vaunted as “sensitive, creative, a being apart.” She added, “In the twentieth century, the repellent, harrowing disease that is made the index of a superior sensitivity, the vehicle of ‘spiritual’ feelings and ‘critical’ discontent, is insanity.”
Indeed, wherever I go in the twenty-first century, people are proudly mentally ill, and conversations about mental illness invoke the idea of specialness and the stereotypical mad genius. Contemporary scripted TV advertises the benefits of disordered thought, perception, and behavior, from the associative manias of the bipolar C.I.A. officer Carrie Mathison on “Homeland” to the precise memory of the phobic, obsessive-compulsive private detective on the eponymous “Monk.” Unusual brains are shown to correlate with creative intelligence and exceptional cognitive sensitivity. Stereotypes of shameful weakness come far behind, if at all.
Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems. The short lives of Shelley and Byron comprised several suicidal lovers and a half-dozen unfortunate children, all adopted or dead by age five. Deaf, miserable Beethoven; van Gogh and his severed ear; Hemingway and his shotgun; Poe in his gutter; Woolf in her heavy raincoat. The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.
* * *
Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, attended my high school, Gamaliel Bradford Senior High, in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1950, and when I graduated in 1992 she was still the most famous person ever to have gone there. Her long shadow remained, decades after her death, and the writing prize was named for her.
She’d sat in the back right-hand corner of Room 200, the room where Wilbury Crockett had taught his English courses. We all knew it. I often ate lunch by myself, in Sylvia’s seat, when the room was empty—not because it was her seat but because it was the seat furthest from the door. I never read her poems. I didn’t like the idea of poetry. I liked the idea of long books that were impossible to understand, and I read Pynchon’s novels laboriously, consulting multiple reference books as I inched down the dense pages. Plath had been dead longer than I’d been alive, but we didn’t count the years. She was ageless and occupied all history.
Mr. Crockett, a legendary teacher whose written comments on Plath’s poems allegedly first encouraged her to become a poet, retired when I was in kindergarten, but when he was seventy-eight he visited my eleventh-grade English class. Our English teacher had prepared us to receive his great wisdom. Most important of all, she reminded us that he had been the teacher of Sylvia Plath.
What never seemed strange to me until much later is that Plath’s poems weren’t taught to us in high school; only her suicide was taught to us. A lady, who had lived on Elmwood Road, across the street from my elementary school, had become a poet and become inconsolable and stuck her head in an oven. The books we were assigned to read for our English classes were tedious novels about boarding school and dated plays about the American Dream. Our frowsy English teacher who had invited Crockett to speak assigned each of us to read a different Dylan Thomas poem, and we each presented our poem to the class, and that was it for our education in poetry.
A minute into Crockett’s presentation, a straight-A student made a sound. Did he mutter something? Whatever Crockett thought he’d heard, it lit a fuse. We sat silent while the great man raged. In our shame we knew Crockett had chosen the wrong boy to castigate—he was humorless and inoffensive. That the boy would have insulted an honored visitor is unimaginable. Crockett screamed that we had rejected a great gift, and that we were worthless. Worthless! He strode out of the room. Two years later, he died, and our sparse little school library was named in his honor.
* * *
Despite having begun college determined to become a physician, I failed Chem 10 and, after a cascade of results, went to writing school instead. My first poetry collection was published modestly by a small press when I was twenty-seven. A few poems found their way into anthologies. I worked part-time as a copy editor and ate a lot of oatmeal.
After my book came out, my former college boyfriend said, “At least you can go nuts, now that you’ve become a real writer.” Like every recent college graduate I knew, bringing up the rear of Generation X, he yearned to check out and waste some serious time. Despite his classics degree he’d become a management consultant, though, and, as such, he simply couldn’t find his way into the seemingly exclusive and glamorous milieu of mental illness. Was he depressed? Perhaps, but he couldn’t conceive of it as a possibility—not because of the taboo but because he didn’t believe he’d fulfilled the prerequisites. Management consultants drank. They didn’t take antidepressants. They weren’t interesting enough to go nuts. Going nuts was a point of pride. You had to train for it.
One of my graduate-school colleagues used to boast about his antidepressant prescription. “I’m crazy!” he’d squeak at parties. A little depression? It probably was the most interesting thing about him. Fifteen years later, he publishes workmanlike best-sellers. Several of the poets with whom I went to school, clinging to modest functional abilities, are too mentally ill even to know they could be boasting about being mentally ill. You will never hear of them.
Shortly after I earned my degree, caught in a constellation of simultaneous disappointments, I found myself in a locked psychiatric ward. One of the social workers spoke excitedly about the therapist he wanted me to see after I was released: “You’ll love her! She’s crazy, just absolutely crazy!”
I remember responding to the social worker as coolly as I could while pushing down hard on a weeping rage: “I’m not sure we share the same tastes.” “What do you mean?” he asked in his best therapist’s voice, his little eyes open wide to indicate he cared. I tried to explain why standing around in a circle holding hands and talking about my feelings made me want to hang myself. Squinting, as if calling out from a high pulpit, he said, “Standing around in a circle holding hands is my favorite thing to do.”
Treating mental illness is an economic, and therefore practical, problem. But more fundamentally it is a problem of rhetoric and therefore also an abstract one. Before we can address it, we must speak about it, and the vocabulary we use is highly polarized. On one hand, the sufferer is responsible for getting over the shameful condition; on the other, the sufferer is a mad genius whose quirks and foibles demand respect. Seldom is mental illness just illness.
In order to develop workable policy serving those functionally impaired by mental illness, we need to learn to talk about it without recourse to the broad brushes of its existing metaphors. What if we could imagine a mentally ill person as neither a potentially violent simpleton nor a mad genius but simply a person with an illness that might be diagnosed, treated, even cured?
I expect that history might solve the problem all by itself, now that the very condition of illness has moved from a strictly medical milieu to a capitalist one. As far as the drug companies care, mental illnesses provide just another opportunity to sell pills to impressionable consumers. When I visit my psychiatrist, more often than not there sits a smartly suited young person with a full briefcase. Sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman, but the suit is always navy blue. The person does not look tempted to sit upon the lap of the enormous stuffed bear I call Flat-Bear, who sits in the corner, against the wall, his lap increasingly grubby and compressed. The person enters and leaves the doctor’s office briskly, in a few minutes. On my bad days, I am sure I would buy whatever he is selling, and that psychotropic medications will become the twenty-first century’s bottled shampoo.
That the medical establishment is in league with the pharmaceutical companies seems inevitable and in fact has been widely observed. It seems dubious that the language of commerce could be a positive influence, but brisk business feels like progress beyond the language of myth.
And, even without the help of commerce, time wears away at myth and everything else. Plath’s suicide at thirty, after publishing just one volume of poems, invited the stereotype of the mad poetess, the wife betrayed; it was impossible to read the posthumous publications without considering the biography. But in the fifty years since her death the myth has dimmed; the work endures.
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment.
Though the facts of her life won’t soon fade from historical memory, Plath is now, at least, more poet than suicide.
Sarah Manguso is the author of five books, most recently “The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend,” which will be published in paperback next month.
Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.