Category Archives: mental health

Shakespeare’s Advise to the Wounded Soul

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Shakespeare offered wisdom for all dimensions of the human experience.  For example, here he offered insight into maladies of the soul still relevant to modern times:

MACBETH   Cure her of that. 
                Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
                Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, 
                Raze out the written troubles of the brain 
                And with some sweet oblivious antidote 
                Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff 
                Which weighs upon the heart?

PHYSICIAN  Therein must the patient minister unto herself.

Shakespeare was one of the greatest spiritual teachers we have ever had.  He certainly realized the value of “the healer’s art” I’m sure but he knew that ultimately each individual is alone, left with the responsibility of “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.”  Others may assist us, and should, but ultimately we have to muster up the courage to confront the demons that haunt us in our inner most depths.

In religion and in the mental health profession, the quick cure is always fashionable.  These two enterprises often proffer only fads and fashions designed only as a band-aid that can only temporarily cover an existential crisis that needs to be “lived” through.  As someone put it, matters have the heart cannot be resolved by “thinking” through them but only by “feeling” through them.

Here I include a modern translation of the above Shakespearean quote:

In a modern translation, this part of the scene would say “Cure her of that. Can’t you treat a diseased mind? Take away her memory of sorrow? Use some drug to erase the troubling thoughts from her brain and ease her heart?” This is describing how Macbeth is pleading for his wife’s health. He feels compelled to treat her and is saddened when he hears from the doctor that one cannot mend the emotionally ill. This leads Macbeth into a rant that almost accuses the doctor of not being a doctor at all because he’s not able to cure someone emotionally sick. Macbeth is needing the doctor to be able to do something, use some drug that can help her in any way

 

Emily Dickinson & “Internal Difference”

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In one of my favorite Dickinson poems, quoted a few days ago, she describes a descent into the interiority of one’s soul where is found “internal difference where the meanings are.” In modern terms this descent is an openness to one’s unconscious which is given us if we start paying attention to the whims and fancies that pass through our mind…including those that are unsavory…as well as to dreams.  It also involves enough “self” awareness to begin to ask, “Why does this always happen to me” as we recognize repeated patterns of behavior in our life and find the courage to tolerate the suspicion that it is not necessarily someone else’s fault. But focus on this subterranean dimension of life is dangerous to those who have spent their life on the surface, busying themselves with the baubles that life tosses their way, “like kittens given their own tails to tease.” (Goethe)

This adventure was described by Dante at the beginning of The Inferno as a journey into “the deep forest” for in the forest conveys a childhood fear of getting lost; and, on this journey one pretty well has to “get lost” at sometime.  Here is an excerpt from a W. H. Auden poem which describes this risk:

Heroic charity is rare;
Without it, what except despair
Can shape the hero who will dare
The desperate catabasis
Into the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie.

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ADDENDUM–I am about to diversify with this literary effort of mine.  In this blog I plan to focus more on poetry and prose.  Below you will see two other blogs of mine relevant to spirituality and politics which have lain dormant for most of the past five years.  I hope some of you will check them out.  However, the boundaries will not be clear as my focus is very broad and my view of life is very eclectic/inclusive/broad-based.  Yes, at times too much so!

https://wordpress.com/posts/anerrantbaptistpreacher.wordpress.com

https://wordpress.com/posts/theonlytruthinpolitics.wordpress.com

 

Systemic Trauma in our Culture

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When living in England briefly after the turn of the century, I had the honor of hearing a distinguished psychoanalyst,  Dr. Juliet Mitchell, speak in London on the subject of trauma.   One point she made etched itself deeply in my heart and mind— that a victim of trauma has suffered “the perforation of a membrane around their soul” which then allows a cascade of old brain fears and anxieties to cascade forth.  And with some trauma, such as sexual abuse, the real psychic pain is spiritual as down in the depths of the child’s heart, he/she is realizing that the person who purported to love him/her is stating with action, “I don’t give a shit about you.  I want what I want and I’m gonna get it regardless of how much damage it does to you.”  This trauma tells the child that he/she has no value to the perpetrator as a person.  And trauma never goes away.  The clinical task in my past life was to facilitate the grieving process and teaching adaptive responses to the anguish which would always lurk in the depths of the client’s heart.

But trauma can also be institutional and cultural.  This systemic traumatization is even more challenging as it teaches its victims on some level, “This is the norm.  Get used to it…and possibly learn to like it.”  Dr. Bruce Perry, the chief of psychiatry at the Texas Children’s Institute in Houston, has spent his career working with trauma victims and in the current edition of the literary journal, The Sun, he is interviewed and shares about the neurological wounds that take place, particularly when the victim is too young to even begin to process what is happening/has happened in “rational” terms.  He also explained how the systemic trauma inflicted upon the lower socio-economic classes is very real and creates a core identity of deprivation, giving them problems like addiction, learned helplessness, and aggressive behavior.

Trauma usually comes at the hands of those in power who are always tempted to be seduced with the prerogatives of their power and the tyranny of their assumptions.  For example, in some families I worked with in my clinical practice, the sexual abuse was multi-generational, in some sense a “family tradition” and men, when but young boys, learned that women were property, “things”, and that by virtue of their masculinity they were entitled to use “things” as desired, even if they were your own children.  And this does not mean these men have no redeeming human values but their sense of prerogative and entitlement is so pervasive that when sexual desire is on the table it over rides little niceties like “the teachings of Jesus” which they are “devoted” to most of the time.  The real issues in life, individually and collectively, are always unconscious.

Entitlement is a core issue in any tribe.  Those who have climbed to the top of the heap, i.e. the “patriarchy” in contemporary vernacular, see the world through the template of their own unexamined values and wishes and feel perfectly comfortable manipulating individuals, and even the whole tribe, to accomplish their end.  And, once again, I’m not going to say these power mongers are necessarily “bad” people but they are unconscious and have a built-in resistance to even considering the phenomena of an unconscious.  It would be too troubling.  And out of the unacknowledged dark recesses of our heart always flows “bad.”

Perry’s observations accentuated for me the importance of the economic divide that is egregiously apparent in my country today.  The wealthy “One per cent” are so trapped in their own narcissism that they cannot see the harm they are doing to the whole country, even to themselves, by not giving due attention to the middle and lower socio economic classes.  And now my country has a president elect who could be the poster boy for Narcissists Anonymous as his disregard for “otherness” and the attending “self-reflectiveness” is sorely lacking.  The trauma has already been inflicted on the dispossessed classes but now an administration is being set up which appears to be designed to further their alienation and hidden despair, leaving them with nothing to do but “cling to their guns and religion.”

So often Bible verses come to my mind at this pivotal time in history.  “Where there is no vision, the people perish” just flashed on my radar.  When I approached life literally, I never really understood the meaning of this though, of course, I thought I did!  The lack of “vision” that the Psalmist had in mind is the dilemma of the narcissist as he/she cannot see beyond the end of his/her nose.  They see things only in terms of their own immediate interests and have no understanding about the long term effects of what they are doing.  And I don’t think Trump has any interest or capacity to ever venture into the “dark” when he is so comfortable in the glorious light of his own narcissistic splendor.  Nor do his devotees.

( Link to Dr. Perry’s interview in The Sun—http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/491/the_long_shadow)

 

 

Danger of “Thinking Outside of the Box”

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As one who “thinks outside of the box,” I must admit that it is not necessarily a virtue.  I’ve had that aptitude since early youth and since my late teens I’ve been exploring its riches.  So, in a way, it is my “comfy zone” and at times I demonstrate my obnoxiousness and arrogance, those very qualities which I see residing in “box dwellers.”  As one dares to venture “outside of the box,” it is always very tempting to ensconce oneself in still another “box’ and there demonstrate the same arrogance that one is deriding with great contempt from his/her “comfy zone” outside of the box.

For, “the box” that I’m referring to is not merely a conceptual formulation but it is the gut-level orientation to take one’s view of the world as primary to the exclusion of others.  And those of us with “enlightened” and “noble” ideas are often the ones who pose the greatest challenges for civilization, witness The Crusades and Isis.  In each of these instances, they are whole-heartedly intoxicated with their world view and are willing to bring to those who disagree with them great displeasure, even death.  That is because those who are “intoxicated” with this delectable nectar of the gods (even though they are dark gods) cannot see beyond their limited perspective.  They have taken an “idea” and run it into the ground even to the point where they are willing to kill for it and to die for it themselves.  When you have reached this point, you are approaching the dark, demonic depths of being an “ideologue” regardless of how noble your idea might appear to be.

And ideologue always seeks to escape his own emptiness by glomming onto some “idea” which he naively thinks is “the answer.”  Been there, done that.  Now I realize that this obsession, even with an idea as noble as Jesus Christ, was just an escape from reality and an escape from my own spiritual depths just to hang on desperately to my illusion of reality and my illusion of myself.  As Jesus, and many other spiritually enlightened men and women have tried to teach us, there is a “spiritual” dimension to life which lies beyond the grasp of our finite, conscious mind.  But that “finite, conscious mind,” being an ego contrivance, resists this awareness and insists that we hang onto the world of appearance, the shadow world of Plato’s famous cave analogy.  And Jesus provided us a vivid example of just how gut-wrenchingly painful it is to give up this world of illusions and “climb the rugged cross of the moment and let our illusions die.” (Leonard Cohen)

Freedom and Determinism

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“Freedom and determinism” was one of the first “big thoughts” that I encountered in college and I have wrestled with the notion ever since.  One image that helped me along the way came from psychologist Rollo May, I think, when he likened freedom without limits to being like a river without banks; for, a river without banks would be useless and also possibly destructive.  One of the best ways of summing up my clinical practice was that I frequently assisting clients who had too much freedom in their hearts and were “acting out.”  The clinical term was, “impulse control disorders.”

I want to share some of the thoughts of May, gleaned from his book, “Psychology and the Human Dilemma”:

The inseparable relation of self and world also implies responsibility.  The term means “responding,” “response to.”  I cannot, in other words, become a self except as I am engaged continuously in responding to the world of which I am a part.

What is interesting here is that the patient moves toward freedom and responsibility in his living as he becomes more conscious of the deterministic experiences in his life. That is, as explores how he was rejected or over protected or how he was hated as a child, how his repressed bodily needs drive him, how his personal history as a member of a minority group, let us say, conditions his development, and even as he becomes conscious of his of being a member of Western culture at a particular traumatic moment in the historical evolution of that society, he finds his margin of freedom likewise enlarged.  As he becomes more conscious of the infinite deterministic forces in his life, he becomes more free.

Freedom is, thus, not the opposite to determinism.  Freedom is the capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it might be on the side of one particular response among several other possible ones.

We are prone to see ourselves as “above” history and to fail to see that our psychology, and even modern science itself, are historical products like any other aspect of culture.

May’s book brings to my mind the word contingency, making me aware of just our contingent our very existence is.  We cannot truthfully declare, as did one poet, “I am the captain of my fate, the master of my soul.” But we do have that power presented above as “awareness” of our contingent, finite, and mysterious world…and of the “contingent, finite, and mysterious” nature of our very own personal existence.

Wisdom from Walt Whitman

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This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…

This is stunningly insightful, sounding like something straight out of the Old Testament…perhaps the Book of Psalms. And I really was grabbed by the advice to “argue not concerning God” as I see so clearly now the foolishness of such argumentation. His point is relevant to an observation I read recently on an evangelical blog in which the pastor noted he had given up apologetics, realizing that the primary point had always been to prove that he was right and the other fellow was wrong! The need to convert or to win someone to our way of thinking runs the risk of amounting to nothing more than an effort to satisfy our ego’s desire to have the entire world see the world just as we do.

I really liked Whitman’s admonishment, “argue not concerning God.”  Now, I ask, “Why bother to argue?”  I now have firm, faith-based, confidence in God and have no need to argue for His existence.  In fact, arguing for God’s existence has a predicate of profound doubt of His existence; for, otherwise, why would you need to argue?  From my experience, the need to “prove” that God exists springs from a deep-seated existential doubt of my own existence.  It is almost as if I’m saying, “Hey, I am so insecure about my own existence that I must believe in a God who is “out there” and as I long as I can do so I will know that I exist.  The need to argue for His existence was always to prove that I was “right” and in compete disregard for the “Rightness” that was given me in the person of Christ.  But, argumentation always kept the matter within the realm of my ego, that dimension of the human heart which is what Jesus had in mind for us to escape with…and I paraphrase…his admonishment, “Get over yourself!”

Oh, sure, I understand the “transcendent” and “immanent” dimensions of deity…so, yes He is “out there” and “in here” but why sweat the issue if you really believe that?  I believe the message of Jesus was, “Chill out.  I gotcha covered.  Don’t sweat it.”  But that is not enough for guilt-ridden Christians who are still enslaved by the law that Jesus said he had fulfilled.

Waging the War we Are

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“We wage the war we are.”

I probably use this quote from W. H. Auden more than any other, in this venue and also in my day to day life.  And, yes, it is very telling for my life is, and always has been a war zone most of these sixty-three years.  Of course, I carefully contained this warfare inside my canned-Christian veneer.  Yeah, I kinda identify with Ben Carson!!!

Auden was an astute observer of the human heart as are all great poets.  He made this poetic observation in recognition of his own conflicted heart and his poetry revealed recognition of the turmoil that rages inside the heart of all human beings.  Yes, “most men live lives of quiet desperation” but Auden knew that beneath the surface of this “quiet desperation” warfare was simmering, mercifully kept under control beneath the social veneer.  Well, most of the time anyway!

Why?  Where does this conflict come from?  Simply stated, we are spiritual beings temporarily confined within a mortal body.  And, a spiritual being is infinite by definition and does not really fit inside what the philosophers call the world of “form.  To illustrate, I am now so very aware of just how I want everything! I don’t want to deal with privation and on some level it even angers me!  Why should I have to want anything? Who dares to get in my path at Wal Mart, or cut me off in traffic, or fail to laugh at my jokes, or scoff at my literary acumen?  How dare them?  On some level I have the narcissitic illusion that the world is my oyster and though I cover it up with this carefully contrived social veneer, I often catch gut-level, reptilian brain, unmitigated hunger surging in my heart.  I want it all!

Though this is a literary exaggeration, it is an honest reflection of “waging the war” that I am.   For, I do have these frustrations and fears and now realize I’ve had them all my life but have kept them carefully pent up, knowing that to do otherwise would not be prudent.  And this “prudence” is what makes us human as without social sensitivities we would all be at war with each other literally. But at some point in our life, it is imperative that we find private venues where we can air these “grievances” about life and hopefully discover that an individual, or group of individuals, can assure us that they are fighting the same battle.  I have been blessed with these venues.

The current terrorist crisis in France is an illustration of what happens when we cannot recognize our own internal warfare.  Until we can own this internal conflagration, we will always see it “out there” and seek to obliterate it.  “We wage the war we are” often by battling that vast category we call “them,” a convenient category comprised of those qualities of our own that we do not wish to own up to.  Yes, this is true for Daesh but also for “us.”

 

 

 

 

Thoughts About Identity

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Identity has always been a fascinating subject for me because, I now realize, I had such a hard time constructing one in my youth and maintaining a sense of identity through the course of my life. But I’ve always been blessed with some core sense of who I am, some basic center, which has allowed me to function well though often with self-doubt and insecurity.

A Spokane, Washington woman has just made the news with her parents exposing her duplicity of passing herself off as a black woman for years even though she is white. With her dark complexion and hair style, she has adopted “black-ness” for decades and achieved some prominence in the Afro-American community. (http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/rachel-dolezal-tried-really-hard-be-black-why?sc=fb)

This is just a fascinating story and I’m so curious about what motivated her to perpetuate this ruse when there was so much she could have done for the Afro-American cause as the intelligent Caucasian woman that she is. But she had some deep-seated need to be “black” and that this ruse has been exposed, I’m concerned for her. All of our identities are a pose in some sense and to have them suddenly torn from us, to be exposed, is to open us up to the nakedness that underlies our persona.

W. H. Auden had the following to say regarding the illusionary dimension of identity. In this poem a father is speaking to his young son:

I wish you first a sense of theater.
Only those who know illusion
And love it will go far.
Otherwise, we spend our lives in confusion
Of what to say and do with who we really are.

AFTER THOUGHT—A new development in this story answers all questions about this matter.  The family now reports that Rachel had four adopted Afro-American siblings while growing up.  

My Life in a Mega-Church

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I spent two years as a member of a mega-church in the early eighties, a Baptist Church in Springdale, Arkansas. I was so proud of myself, so pleased to be a member of a church that was so “up-and-coming” and growing larger and larger and larger. And the pastor was very good. And I mean very, very good; even today I appreciate memories of his skill as an expositor of scripture.

And I was single at the time and didn’t “smoke, drink, or chew…or screw”…though I will admit I faltered on that latter point from time to time. And, yes, God forgave me. I knew he would. He had to. But I hated relying on that “duty” of His and so didn’t “imbibe” as much as I wanted to. But, nevertheless, I did not “smoke, drink, or chew!!!” But, I continued to flirt with darkness in the fall of 1981 when, after hearing the pastor lament the passing of Arkansas’s “Blue Laws” I stopped by after service and reveled in a luxurious Wal-mart for a while and bought a lot of “stuff.”   (The “Blue Laws” disallowed most stores to open on Sunday) I do remember to this day the guilt of that offense, hoping that no other church members saw me!)

But it was so nice to be part of a church that was really special and powerful and becoming more so. The Word of God was being preached and souls were being won to Jesus and even though the world was lost in sin, we were doing our part to win the world to Jesus. And I was a small part of this enterprise. It felt nice to belong.  Now looking back on it, the “pride” is kind of awkward, for it is the pride that Emily Dickinson had in mind when she described, “a mind too near itself to see itself distinctly.”  Or, to put it in the words of a recent Face Book discussion group re Paul Tillich, a mind “embedded in itself.”

Looking back on it, I was merely an “actor” in my life and my faith and so I’m tacitly accusing this church of the same. But, I have some guilt over accusing them. For, they were very, very good people and are so today. And, so was I! And they will not be reading this account and if so they must take it as it is, a revelation more about myself much more than an account of them. Yes, those people were “limited” but who is not and there was none of them more limited than was I. Dealing with my “limitations” has taken me a different direction than most of them but I’m sure most of them are not in the same place as they were back then. We are all “actors” in some sense and God takes our “strutting and fretting” during our “hour upon the stage” and weaves them into this beautiful tapestry that we call the human experience.

“You Spot It, You Got It”

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Conservative Christians in my country are currently beset by a rash of “sexual indiscretion” scandals, personally or with their close associates. In some instances their response is to minimize the “sin” with the pious platitude, “God has forgiven me” but what they fail to address is how that often their lives have been characterized by ardent stances on moral issues and quick judgment of others on sexual matters. Yes, I firmly believe God has forgiven them and he will forgive them of a more serious sin that is present if they would deign to acknowledge it.

This “unacknowledged sin” I can address because of personal experience, past and present, demonstrating once again the wisdom of a psychologist, “You spot it, you got it.” I knew one of the notable figures alluded to above and helped educate him in the practice of being what I now call a Christianoid. I was in the position to do so for at that time in my life I was a Christianoid and each day could have said, “Wind me up and watch me be Christian.” My Christian faith was a “thing” that I had acquired from my culture and it provided the core of my persona. Without it I would have been a “no-thing” and would have had to deal with the intense existential anxiety that comes when you begin to realize, cognitively and emotionally, that one is “no” thing.

One could use the term hypocrite to describe me at that time in my life for the word means simply “actor” and I was merely an “actor” in the whole of my life, including my faith. I didn’t know anything else. And I was not a “bad” person nor was I a “hypocrite” in the usual sense of the word. I just was very immature and had not enrolled yet in the “school of hard knocks” which always facilitates an identity crisis. And I lived in a culture and practiced my faith with people plagued with similar immaturity.

One thing that Christians need to learn from this current “mess” that they are in is that the God who they believe in so fiercely…the same one that I do…is trying to tell them something about sexuality. Basically, He is saying, “Hey, I made you sexual beings. I did it deliberately and it is a good thing. But trying to deny, avoid, or repress it will get you or your children into trouble.” And it is very apparent that those who have the gravest concern about the sexual behavior of other people and want to control it have the gravest issues with their own sexual impulses. “You spot it, you got it.”

The sexuality issues of Christians is part of a more fundamental error they are making which is a denial of their very body. And this is very personally relevant for myself as I took this to an extreme and have spent my whole life denying my body, placing too much emphasis on cognition rather than emotion. A misplaced emphasis like this will always turn one into an ideologue in which the “idea” is valued more than the “thing” which the idea refers to. Thus I had to discover that the “Jesus” that I purported to worship was only an idea and that I was actually, in some subtle sense, only worshipping myself.

Let me emphasize that I believe firmly in moral codes and in self-restraint, or, as the Greeks said, “measurement in all things.” But when the external boundaries become too strong, when they are emphasized excessively, the spirit within is squelched, and “acting out” will occur often in the form of “sexual indiscretion.” It is almost as if the gods are saying, “Hey, you think you are in control and a bastion of virtue? Just watch this!” And then they send a vixen our way, we imbibe readily, and are taught that we are not what we were pretending to be. We must not fail to learn the lesson that we are always “actors” in some sense and that “none is good, no, not one,”; or as Shakespeare put it, “Give every man his just desert, and who would escape a whipping?”

Hiding behind “God’s forgiveness” is not enough. Sure, it is there and will always be there. But our indiscretions always reveal issues in the depths of our heart and in those depths is where the work needs to be done. But with Christianity that I used to teach others there was no awareness of those depths and barriers actually in place to avoid discovering them. This is the “bad faith” that John Paul Sartre wrote about.