Tag Archives: Psychology

“Where There is no Vision…”

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The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men (and women) who dream of things that never were.

I ran across this quotation from John F. Kennedy last week in a classroom and was stunned by its wisdom. Kennedy knew that “obvious reality” would not resolve the difficult situations that faced the world in his day, that resolution of those problems would only come through those who dared to dream, or envision. I immediately thought of the verse from Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The “obvious reality” that we face each day is a necessary evil. We must have this ego-contrived structure to keep this dog-and-pony show afloat. But, there is another reality…i.e. “Reality…that we need to draw upon to address the problems in our world, a world of dreams and visions. Venturing into that world is a spiritual adventure, a journey into realms where it feels as if “no man has gone before.” But if we cling only to the “obvious’ we will continue to stew in our own juices, never able to “get over ourselves.” I discovered relevant wisdom from the East from an unknown source this morning, “Known is a drop, Unknown is an ocean.”

This obsessive slavery to the known “obvious reality” is apparent in our current Congress. The God that Congress currently worships is “Getting Re-elected” and not the Judeo-Christian deity that most of them purport to worship. And, to them, it is quite “obvious” that they must get re-elected as that only will allow them to pursue their agenda. But, there are more important things than the “obvious” and one’s own “agenda”. If a legislator is enslaved by the desire to maintain his/her office, he/she inevitably prostitutes him/herself to an electorate just to maintain electoral viability. And when that happens, “there is no vision and the people perish.”

Now it must be noted, we can’t lay all of the blame on Congress. We elected them and they reflect the values of our culture. We too are enslaved by the “obvious” and balk at venturing into the Unknown where true value is found, where our spiritual roots can be explored.

 

“Unpacking my Heart with Words”

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When I started blogging I shared that I was doing so as a spiritual enterprise. I shared a quote from Job, that my “heart was like a taut wine-skin, full of words, about to burst” and noted that, borrowing a line from Shakepeare, I was going to “unpack my heart with words.”

And this endeavor has been very rewarding. I have learned so much about myself in part because I have made some very interesting friends from around the world who offer encouragement and gracious criticism. When we are dealing with matters of the heart we need feedback and that feedback does not need to come from an echo chamber.

“Unpacking my heart with words” brings to my mind a belief I used to have when I first began to explore the world of psychology and clinical practice. At that point I had the idea that therapy was merely a matter of exploring one’s heart, learning what one’s issues were, reaching an “aha” moment, and then going merrily along one’s way having been, for want of a better term, “enlightened”. But now I see how naïve that view was for therapy, or spiritual practice, is a life long process and that one never “arrives”, one never “gets there” has the luxury of taking solace in ensconcing oneself in spiritual bliss. It is always a process and is always underway. It makes me think of the New Testament admonishment to “Be filled with the Spirit of God” which a pastor of old explained that in the Greek it actually means, “Be ye ‘being filled’ with the Spirit.” In other words, one should always be “being filled: with the Spirit of God.

Re “unpacking my heart with words”, I used to think that at some point the task would be complete and the heart would be unpacked. Well, yes, at some point it gets unpacked of the burdens that are weighing on the heart at that moment. BUT, guess what? Immediately there are more that surface! For the “heart” is not a concrete phenomena, it does not dwell in time and space, it is an infinite domain, it is that part of our life in which our infinite nature, the God who is within, intersects with the finite world. We will spend the rest of our life exploring that infinite world, that part of our life which Jesus called the “belly out of which shall flow rivers of living water.”

We must beware of obsessing with the quest though. We must pay attention to what surfaces from the heart, give it due attention, discuss it with spiritual mentors and close friends, pray about it, and then drop it for the time and turn out attention to the day-to-day responsibilities of life, the infinitely important mundane tasking of “chopping wood, carrying water.” If we don’t have this balance, our spiritual endeavors will evolve into merely a narcissistic endeavor, a function of the ego designed to make us ostentatiously holy which is exactly what the the Pharisees did.

Boundary problems and early intervention

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In my clinical work and with some people I have met socially I have seen how that only incarceration could provide the boundaries necessary for purposeful behavior. I know one man who is now in his late thirties who has functioned very well during numerous imprisonments, at times proving himself to have real artistic skills. But whenever he has been released, he always goes back to drugs, alcohol, and criminal mischief. I had a young male client one time who was court-ordered to a military-style youth ranch due to persistent incorrigible behavior. I will never forget how proud he was upon his return that he had excelled in that highly-structured environment and had won numerous awards. And I saw many clients benefit immensely from the structured therapeutic environment of residential treatment. These young men and women had not internalized a boundary structure so that they could function in the world and had to have it imposed from the outside. And some were so damaged that they will never function without some “external ego” such as a parole officer or a life-sentence.

I often got the feeling with some of these young clients that with their behavior they were basically screaming for someone to set the boundaries their parents had not been able to provide. It is as if they were echoing the comic smirk of Jim Carrey, “Somebody stop me!!!!!” Too many times in our self-indulgent modern world no one will stop them and they are enabled repeatedly, basically rewarded for behavior that can only create severe problems for them in their adult life.

Maladaptive behavior reflects emotional needs that have not been met. As long as the maladaptive behavior is permitted to continue, the “emotional needs” cannot be felt and change cannot be effected. The behavior must be stopped, then the anguish can be experienced, and then new behavior patterns can be taught. But when the intervention is not applied early enough, the behavior patterns become too deep-seated, they become “hard-wired” neurologically, and change is very difficult if not impossible.

Review of novel, Middlesex

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Jeffrey Euginides book, Middlesex, is about the integration of an extended family of immigrants into American culture in the 20th century, from the perspective of an hermaphrodite.  The fictional narrative of the social and political upheavals of the 20th century is fascinating in itself.  But the most powerful punch of the book is about the narrator’s sexuality and his/her struggles in adjusting to the cultural mandates re gender and sexuality.

Euginedes makes the reader vividly aware of how tenuous our sexual identities are and how intense the social pressure is to conform to the prevailing mandates on this issue.  He delves into the biology of sexuality and gender and its powerful influence on what it means to become male, female, or some combination thereof.

By tackling sexual/gender identity, he assails one of the lynch-pins of what I like to describe as “the way things are.”  This palpable entity is a template through which we see the world in our day to day life.  It consists of myriads of basic assumptions that we subscribe to, and to which we must subscribe, if we are to become human.  And sexuality and gender identity are two of the most basic of these “basic assumptions.”  Common sense tell us what it is to me a man or a woman.  But, Euginedes makes us very aware of just how specious and culturally determined “common sense” is.

One reason that hyper-conservatives are so virulently opposed to the gay-rights issue is because in the depths of their heart it addresses the issue of what is real and what is un-real.  To let go of this lynch-pin (sexuality and gender identity) is to accept that real and unreal are very nebulous terms  It would entail accepting what the sociologists describe as The Social Construction of Reality.  ( book by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman)

Note:  Forgive me for not delving into the difference between gender identity and sexuality!