WRITING YOUR WAY HOME

THEME: HOME
I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself. ~ Maya Angelou

By day, it was a typical conference room with moveable tables and stackable chairs. By night, or at least this night, it became a salon, a home away from home. The tables made a cozy U-shape, so everyone could see and be seen. Table cloths covered each, and antique-style lamps shed soft light. Plates of sweets and coffee took up the table near the door. Wordless music played quietly in the background.  The words would come from the dozen women who filed in, late because there was childcare trouble – too many kids with too many needs, more than had been expected. The chaos of resistance and misplaced toys and unfamiliar places took its usual toll on both mothers and kids. New childcare recruits were summoned to help, and we could begin.

These women looked tired. They had all experienced domestic violence and were finding their way out, either through shelter or education and counseling or groups for moms and kids. They had children to care for, jobs to find, homes to make. Homes that would be safe.

Each one seemed to exhale as she entered the room and looked around. Some wandered to the other end of the room to see the art exhibit that had been produced a couple of years before by another group of women, and their children. Others went straight for the tables and a few minutes of solitude. A frisson of anxiety hung in the air. Each had volunteered to be here, and we, the organizers, had implied certain promises: Come, write, tell your story. It will do you some good; and if you choose to share, what you write will help others understand.

Karen called us to order, offering words of welcome and assurances of confidentiality. She introduced John the facilitator, a writer himself and teacher of writing. He first went around the circle and asked each woman to share her past experiences with writing, which varied from lifelong journaling, to nothing since middle school, to college creative writing classes, to songwriting. He listened, asked questions, used their names. His message: No matter what you have or haven’t done about it lately, you are a writer who deserves a place at the table.

Meanwhile, the rest of us organizers sat in an outside circle, checking our watches and tapping our feet. We started late, Childcare ends at nine, Let’s get them started our brains chattered. It turned out that John was getting them started.

He played a video that his high school students had prepared for the occasion. A succession of students read poems they had written in his class. Each line began with “I remember…” (a prompt that was originated by artist and writer Joe Brainard in 1975 and is often used in writing circles.) Some of the poems were lighthearted, some painful to hear. The students modeled honesty and courage.            Meanwhile, through his conversation, John was busy establishing himself as a safe and peaceful man who had respect and appreciation for his wife. More exhaling.

We’d given each of them a nice journal, but when it was time to write, most requested the copy paper we had stacked in the corner. More space? Easier to crumple and discard? Anyway, they wrote in silence, right away, I remember…. The music clicked off in the middle. No one noticed.

John called time about 25 minutes in.

“Now, who would like to share?” he asked.

There was an immediate volunteer who read her recollections of childhood summertime, her grandmother, and fireflies.  Another followed with remembrances of high school, another on the births of her children. The reminder was clear – these women were far more than domestic violence survivors. They had lives beyond trauma.  

As each read, the rest listened intently. They laughed together. As each finished, she received a thank you from John. As time passed, the volunteers came more slowly. The tone changed. Imbedded between the fond memories started to appear darker and deeper things. The poems began to speak of red and swollen eyes, and wishing to turn back time, and feeling like an outsider even at home. Vivid details appeared, the kind that people focus on to escape the intolerable, a red flower pot, rainbows of light on the rug.

The room transformed again, from writing salon to sacred space, where the truth could be told in safety.

When John brought the evening to a close we asked everyone to evaluate the experience to guide us for the future. They wanted more writing, more participants, more chances. They wanted us to share the project with colleges, museums, radio audiences, Facebook, schools, libraries, and online.

We asked everyone who would be willing to share her words to let us make a copy to keep. Some did, others almost did but held back at the end. Some wanted to expand their piece and turn it in later. Now a box sits in the office labeled Our Story Project, locked for privacy but open for submissions anytime day or night.

They left to pick up their children with goodbyes and thanks. The organizers stayed to deconstruct the salon and turn it back into a meeting room so it could host a breakfast for donors in the morning. We didn’t need to deconstruct the evening. It was a success and there would be more.

We were just about done with the cleanup – the leftover cookies were packed for the next day, the lamps and cloths and power strips set aside for pickup by the volunteers who had supplied them, and the tables were rearranged into a breakfast-friendly layout.

One of the organizers came back in with a message from the child care staff.

“I don’t know what you did to those women in there,” she’d said, “but do more of it. They were completely different people when they came back to get the kids. They were smiling and calm. It was like they’d all had massages.”

 Another transformation. We had invented the first writing spa. Come. Make yourself at home. Think of only yourself for a couple of hours. Express yourself. Find out you are not alone. Be heard.

I’ll let you know when and where you can read their words.

CBH - 12/11 

WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN DO

THEME: REMEMBRANCE
She glances at the photo, and the pilot light of memory flickers in her eyes. ~ Frank Deford

My father is 14 or 15 in the photo, posing with the big band he helped organize in high school. He wears two-tone saddle shoes, neatly tied. They look new. The photo has been hanging on my family picture wall for 15 years waiting for me to really look at it. I finally did.

In any old picture, the first thing I notice is the shoes. They hint at normal life, intimate suggestions of routine and circumstance. As I study his picture, I imagine him tying them on that morning, and wonder what was going on in those minutes: was he bickering with his sisters; what breakfast smells wafted upstairs; what was on his mind?

His eager and confident face hitches my heart. He has no idea that he is almost halfway through his life already, or that he will find a great love and have a child. Or that he will die suddenly and not be able to finish what he started.

It was around 1930 then. The Depression was two years old. Across the world in Germany, where his family originally came from, Adolf Hitler was winding up ten years of speech-making, positioning himself to head the Nazi party. My father doesn’t know about that either, sitting there holding his saxophone.

                                                                 *****

I climbed down off the bus into a busy parking lot lined with busses. Leaves crunched underfoot. It was a cloudy October day toward the end of our tour of Central and Eastern Europe. We waited behind a group of children chattering as they trailed their teachers though the gate.  They quieted as they put on the hearing devices their docent handed out, and filed out the back door, leaving room for us. Auschwitz was a busy place.

Our docent was Magda, a compact blonde woman with a lined face and matter-of-fact manner. She must have been a child in the era she would tell us about, if she’d been born at all. She led us under a gate with a sign proclaiming, “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates “Work sets you free” or “Work brings freedom.” This cruel and ironic legend was used at the entrances of all the Nazi camps except one. It seemed to promise the Poles, Jews, gypsies, handicapped and others who the Nazis determined to eliminate that there would be a way out.

                                                                        *****

The next picture on my wall shows some of my husband’s ancestors, captured in a formal family tableau, wife seated, husband beside her, adult children and their offspring lined up stiffly on either side.

The seated woman is Seraphina Studer Ruder, whom my daughter discovered when she did a family history project in middle school. Next to her is Fridolin, her husband. The names that bring smiles to our lips didn’t seem to cheer them up any. They both look pretty grim.

They’d left Germany in 1855, missing Hitler by 34 years, to settle in a German Catholic enclave in the middle of Illinois, and set themselves to farming.  They posed for this picture about the time Hitler was denied entrance into art school in Vienna, for the third time.  Had they stayed, would their children and grandchildren have been drawn into Hitler’s plans? If he’d been accepted into art school, would there have been any plans?

Hints about their lives jump at me. Their chairs rest on a rumpled shag rug. Her shoes, partly hidden by the nap, are petite and worn. His are dress shoes, well-used and scuffed. That morning for the picture, I imagine they put on the best they had, knowing they were laying down a record for those of us who would follow. It must have been a hard life with little leisure, in flat farmland that must have compared poorly to the hills and mountains of their youth. 

                                                                        *****

Magda led us to a long row of tidy red brick barracks, with a guard tower at the end of the road. Barbed wire ringed the area. She explained that the barracks had been built several years before the war for the Polish military, but turned out to be tailor-made for the Nazis’ purposes. Some buildings housed small numbers of SS troops, others crammed in hundreds of prisoners. We entered the first building, noting the terrazzo steps worn down in the middle by thousands of feet.

Large black and white photos hung on the walls, illustrating Magda’s talk. They captured the arrival of families, who stood together in ragged lines, children clinging to their parents’ knees. Their clothes are mussed, their shoes dusty, their faces grimy. None of them knows what is ahead, that soon they would be separated, men from women, children from mothers. Their faces are stunned and unknowing; exhausted people who couldn’t imagine the unimaginable.

We are told that the photos were taken in secret by two SS officers.  Their motivation is unknown. I prefer to think that they were moved to preserve proof of what they couldn’t stop. Their action allows the 1.3 million people who visit each year to better take in what happened here. Without the photos, it would be impossible to believe.

We climbed the steps to the second floor of the barracks. Magda explained how prisoners were herded from here to the basement and told that finally they would have a shower. They were told to leave their suitcases and remove their glasses, clothing, and shoes to retrieve after they’d bathed.

Once the “shower room” door was locked, primitive gas canisters were dropped through chutes in the ceiling and minutes later, all were dead. Their bodies were transported to the end of the row of barracks to the new crematorium, by Jewish prisoners who were spared in order to carry out this duty. Back in the barracks, belongings were gathered up and stockpiled.

She led us to a series of large rooms. Lights were low. On each side was a huge glassed-in case, floor to ceiling. The first was filled with suitcases carefully labeled with name and address as if they would be needed again.  Thousands of wire-rimmed glasses filled another.

Behind the glass in the next room sat an enormous pile of shoes, everyday necessities turned into horrific trophies. No one spoke in the room.

We came next to the children’s window that held toys and baby blankets, and a mountain of kids’ shoes, turned every which way as if scattered at the front door after school. To look at one pair was to imagine its owner, so we looked away. We filed by, eyes brimming.

The last pictures were of the liberation of Auschwitz in March 1945. Many Nazis had fled by then, marching hundreds of prisoners into the countryside. Soviet liberators ushered emaciated survivors in striped uniforms down the path we had just walked on. Some prisoners looked directly at the camera. Had they dared to expect this?

                                                            *****

On my wall, the post-war pictures begin. In a four-generation snapshot, my toddler husband sits on the lap of Fridolin and Seraphina’s son, his Buster Browns dangling. Parallel pictures from our two families stand side by side, showing two ex-soldiers, glad to be back to normal life, neither knowing what is to come.  

My husbands’ parents laugh, barefoot at a well pump, holding him high. Sixty-some years later, they still laugh together. Mine lean into each other, dressed for a night on the town. My mom wears a sophisticated career girl ensemble and high heels, my dad a business suit, all shine and polish. I would be along in a year or two, and he would be gone a couple of years after that.  

Whether caught up in waves of history, or in private tragedies, it is just as well that we can’t tell what is coming. But it is a gift when we have pictures to hold the moments still where we can visit them, for remembering or trying to understand.

CBH 11/11

A Happy Story about Borders?

THEME: WHAT A CHARACTER
Who you are speaks so loudly I can’t hear what you’re saying. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It seemed like a nightmare. Borders on Michigan Avenue was closing? Where would I go to have a tea and look down on the Water Tower park at throngs of shoppers? What would I do when I could no longer browse the crazy assortment of off-brand books in the basement, or look through the ironic Christmas cards on sale in January, looking for the perfect ones for next year?  Where would I find another store with such character? If this iconic location could fail, what did that portend?

Soon there was an announcement. False alarm. It wouldn’t close after all. Phew! That was close. But the fear had been planted.

Months later, the worst came true. They would all close, even the suburban one I had been going to since my kids were small and I was brand new to the area.

I visited the wake for my dying Borders three times. The first time, facing only 20% reductions and abundant piles of gift items I couldn’t relate to, I tried but couldn’t find a fitting remembrance.

The second time, I bought a travel book for an upcoming trip to Europe and was out the door without even trying to find the perfect goodbye. A prickle of guilt followed me. As book prices climbed in recent years, even though Borders remained my psychological home, in reality I had often defected to the local used book store, and of course, amazon.com where I could buy new or used whenever I had the whim.

The third time, the discounts were up to 60 to 80%. The pile of unrelated-to-reading items had grown. The lap robes, tote bags and stuffed animals posed the question: Did the store go down the tubes because they lost focus and invested in items that no one would buy? Or because of defection by people like me? Or was it that they didn’t jump on the e-book bandwagon fast enough? Or all of them?

In the Psychology and Self Help sections I found some gems – Altered Egos, The Brain that Changes Itself, The Power of Story. Finally, something worthy to remember Borders by.

The checkout clerk was unreasonably cheerful – she was losing her job and I was the one who was sad?

On my way out, I passed a large sign, a letter from the store manager. She thanked customers for 20 years of loyalty, and reviewed some of the good times we’d had over the years. She apologized to the author scheduled for a book signing in October after the store would be closed. She asked customers not to worry about the employees, who were stocked with happy memories and would surely land on their feet.

Below the sign sat a stack of cards. “Please leave us a message. What did this store mean to you?”

I scribbled something about my kids growing up there, and me too. And good luck. And I’d miss them. And I was sad.

As I drove away. I wondered how the supposedly evil big conglomerate that was going to mean the death of the small independent book store – remember the plot of You’ve Got Mail? –  morphed into a refuge, with cozy reading corners and coffee, not to mention play space for kids, that felt like home?

I talked with friends from other places who’d said their own goodbyes to Borders with similar regret. Until I talked to my friends Linda and Van.  Every Sunday they have a ritual – they trek to the Borders in the Quad Cities, listen to music, enjoy their coffee, browse newspapers, pick up a book or two,  rain or shine.

They figured their fate would be the same as the rest of us, until their creative store manager Kit Whan heard about Books-A-Million, the third largest bookselling chain, expressing an interest in acquiring some Borders sites. She decided it should be hers and started a campaign. 29,000 letters and emails later, Books-A-Million brass stopped in to see what all the fuss was about. They signed on and offered employment to any interested Borders employees.

So they will live happily ever after, with any luck, although I am sure there will be a certain adjustment period. Instead of a nightmare for them, it became a dream; as if the lover who just spurned you fixes you up with a new guy, not as handsome or familiar, but definitely promising. I hope it works out.

A happy postscript: Books-A-Million is taking over 13 other Borders locations, bringing happiness to other lucky duck communities. The rest of us will just have to grieve for a while. Then we’ll have a big decision to make: are we going to take up with that Barnes and Noble guy, the buttoned-up corporate one who lacks the warmth and personality we’re used to, the guy we wouldn’t give a glance to before? A tough decision that.
CBH - 10/11

MY DREAM, MY BOOK

 THEME: DREAM ON

Dreams are illustrations. . .from the book your soul is writing about you. ~ Marsha Norman

Here was my dream. I would write a book that would change the world. It would be about personal narrative, the story that each of us tells about our own life. For a while there, the working title was If Your Life Was a Movie, Would You Go to See It?

“No, too trivial,” said the writing teacher. “This is an important topic.”

Second working title: What’s Your Story? How the Story You Tell about Yourself Makes All the Difference.

“No,” said the writing teacher, “Wordy and repetitive.”

Time for a new writing teacher.

Back to my dream: the book would trace the various inborn traits and early experiences that we use to invent our sense of self and the story that comes out of it.  Everyone who read it would create a coherent version of their life story. They would make connections between where they came from, what experiences life threw at them and how they survived, or didn’t. It would be a selfhelp book that actually helped.

The book would be the capstone of my therapy career. For all those years I sat in a chair in a room, helping my clients wrestle meaning out of the crises of their lives. I had to have learned something and this was the way to offer it to a much wider audience than the one at a time one I was used to.

The point is not mere navel-gazing. Once you know your story you can change it, which is what therapy is all about. Researcher James Pennebaker has demonstrated that writing about trauma bolsters both physical and mental well-being. So I asked my clients to journal in between sessions. I would sometimes receive a thoughtful and cogent account of how the current stresses fit in with the flow of life.

More often I would get pages that rambled through raw emotion, blame, self-help slogans, and self-recrimination. I’d hand it back and ask for a second step: highlight the 5 most important sentences, bracket any wild and irrational statements so we could set them aside, and start to figure out what this episode means in your life. Then we would work on answering some questions: Does this remind you of anything? On your best day, how would you prefer to handle this? What stops you from doing that? Whose voice do you hear in your head giving you counsel, and is that voice to be trusted?

It was to be a simple book, a tool for the reader to use on his or her own messy life, kind of a California Closets for the mind and heart. Surely people would jump at the chance to sort through their own life stories and put them in order.

But then my own messy life intervened and I never finished writing the thing, though I do have three successive richly imagined formats filed in a drawer where they can help no one. They heckle me from there, shouting muffled accusations of “slacker!” If they were in charge, they’d give me an Incomplete on my career, and one more term to finish what I started.

Maybe I need to open that drawer. I think in the absence of my approach the world has gone a bit mad. We now have a spew of completely unprocessed minutiae spraying at us every time we turn on the computer or the smart phone or the iPad. The me, me, and more me enthusiasts inflict their me-ness on each other and all bystanders on a daily (or minutely) basis through Facebook, (which knows more about you and your buying habits than you do), Foursquare (which lets you log every single place you went today), and Farmville (that reveals that people you previously thought well of are living pretend lives as farmers instead of reading serious biographies or playing tennis like you thought they were). 

Is no one interested in stopping for a moment to tease out meaning from all that? Anyone?

Apparently Facebook is. Their new Timeline approach builds a history of what you have ever posted and what can be learned from any of the 7 million sites and the apps you use. It’s certainly nice that they care, but all that data isn’t going to help you when it comes to deciding how to make the best life. Like those undigested journal pages, it just churns out an overwhelming volume of raw data, all equally important.

There is a reason why you have a prefrontal cortex and Facebook doesn’t. Your cortex allows you to prioritize, weigh in your values, perfect your unique vision, and stake out your little patch of territory that no one else can stand on. It helps you recognize you.

If I got serious and started up again today on the book, I figure I could finish in nine months or so, you know, like gestating a baby without the morning sickness.

Just think, I could advertise my new baby on Facebook, and if only a fraction of the 800 million Facebook members gave it a try, I would be in the pink, speaking to an audience far bigger than I could dream. Now that I think of it, there would be something bewitchingly subversive about using their methods to meet my goals. 

Stand back. I’m going to open the drawer and see what flies out. Just send in my meals. I’ll be busy making my dream come true. It’s who I am. 

CBH - 09/11

MY THREE DAYS AS A CUBAN

THEME: HEAR NO, SEE NO, SPEAK NO, YOU KNOW
"Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering." ~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

          The email fairly screamed: Please take it down. You could be placing people at risk. Give us time to look at it first.

            Uh oh.  All I’d done is set up an online chronicle of my trip to Cuba.* I had to do something with the barrage of images and stories that woke me up every morning, to the Afro-Cuban beat of the music that followed us everywhere and then followed me home.

            As a courtesy, or maybe nagged by a vestige of the paranoia that hovers in the Cuban air, the first thing I did was send the link to my two tour leaders. And received this alarming reply.

            I had plenty of stories to tell. We arrived the day after the 50^th anniversary of the Revolution. Banners with Fidel’s likeness proclaimed its success. Our bus ride through Havana suggested otherwise. Dilapidated buildings, streams of vintage U.S. cars, and stacks of post-Revolution fortress-like apartment buildings lined our path to the Parque Central Hotel. We passed Revolution Square where officials once corralled tens of thousands of Cubans, some accounts say upwards of a million, to stand in the Caribbean sun to hear El Lider’s six-hour speeches.

            It sat empty today, a vast parking lot of a space. A tower, 358 feet of revolutionary fervor, rose in the center.  A tan office building that bordered the space on the right was decorated with a five story high metal sculpture of Che Guevara’s head. It seemed a high honor for an itinerant revolutionary who left Cuba after only six years for greener pastures in Bolivia, where he was executed after that revolution failed.  Still, his image is everywhere.

            We checked into our hotel, a replica of an older European hotel, with mahogany furniture and heavy draperies. We drew them open and gasped. We call it a slum; they call it normal.  Welcome to Cuba, the land of the-emperor-has-no-clothes.

            Before our departure from Miami, our tour leaders had given us just two pieces of advice:

1) Do not use the word “humanitarian” in front of the Cuban airport officials. They officially don’t need any help, and it might complicate our entry into the country to suggest that they do.

2) Watch the tour bus driver. Even though he claims to speak no English, he could easily be fluent and spying on our official tour guide Celia, an engaging single mom. If so, he would be ready to turn her in if she spouted any anti-regime opinions.

            Other than that, they were circumspect. Listen, they told us, talk to Cubans, observe, explore, and draw our own conclusions. At the end of the trip, they would be curious to hear our impressions.

I closed the email and reached for the phone. My tech person took down the site, and I waited for the verdict. In the few hours the site was up, who might have read it? Travelers and ordinary Cubans did not have access to the Internet, but such a state must have people monitoring chatter like mine.  I worried. I couldn’t sleep. What if something I said was turned against Celia? I felt watched. And controlled. And afraid. I comforted myself that I had taken care to change her name, and never identified the tour or leaders. Could they track them down anyway? What had I done?

            My worry took me back to what I’d learned about Fidel and his death grip on the country. He started out with the pure-sounding intention to overthrow the cruel and corrupt dictator Batista in order to create a fair society after centuries of exploitive rule. Once in power though, he leaped in another direction and announced that he was a Marxist. He took over private property and threw out foreign businesses. Affluent Cubans couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Cuba became the place where everybody gets the same and nobody gets much.

            To convince the rest of the populace to go along with the plan, he instituted public executions by firing squad, on TV for easy viewing, of people who disagreed. Here was a new incarnation of the powerful and bloody oppression they were used to, only this time it was of their own. Which brought me to my central – and very American - question:  how could this last after 50 years of disappointment?  Where was the protest?

            The answer was in the brilliance of that death grip. Each block has an official to monitor the compliance of the citizens. Children earn kerchiefs for learning devotion to the State, which helps get them into the best schools. The best jobs – like those in the tourist industry – go to favored loyalists. The lively black market is a back door operation that most participate in, but does not openly challenge the status quo. The whole structure of Cuban society was tilted, so that the balance of power stayed unbalanced.

            Finally, I got the call. Both of them were on the line. They liked the site. They were glad the trip made such an impression. They’d never had anyone go to such lengths to document a trip. And they were grateful for my willingness to alter it if need be.

            Their greatest concern, they explained, was for Celia. If one of her tourists left with a poor impression of Cuba, she would be blamed. I removed a few details, renamed a few other characters we’d met to make her more difficult to identify. The site went back up, and I exhaled, free again from censorship and worry.

            This final episode of my Cuba experience ended with a three-day taste of life as Cubans live it every day.  Now I watch with interest through the eyes of Cuban bloggers, and news reports of recent reforms.  Cubans can now have some types of small businesses, a million people are being removed from the State’s payroll. Cubans are promised the opportunity to travel. For our part, American travel restrictions are lifting, with brand new licenses being granted to tour companies for more than just humanitarian trips.

            It is change in its infancy, but maybe this time real change can come without a revolution and all its promises, but with gradual evolution of freedoms that allow more for more, instead of less for everyone. And eventually, the freedom to say what you see.            

*www.cubacurious.com

CBH – 08/11

POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND ME

THEME: WELL, DUH
To spell out the obvious is often to call it in question. ~Eric Hoffer

I rented the office, then scoured used furniture stores and garage sales to furnish and decorate it. I even splurged on a painting of a rainy Paris street from TJ Maxx. I was ready. I was in private practice.

My very first client showed up on a Tuesday. I handed him the client questionnaire I had crafted, on a tasteful Lucite clip board. After the demographic info, I hit him with the big question: What do you hope to gain from counseling? I left three lines for the reply, but he only needed one.

He wrote: Peace of mind, and introduced me to the answer I would see far more than any other in the next 20-plus years of my practice.  It wasn’t happiness, or get my spouse off my back, or make my depression go away. It was a much bigger order, peace of mind.

At the same time, at the University of Pennsylvania, a rising star named Martin Seligman, Ph.D., who would become the guru of Positive Psychology later on, was setting up shop too. A research psychologist, he began seeing what he could learn from rats. He tells it all in his new book Flourish (2011).

You don’t get to be guru of anything without an outsized ego, and Seligman doesn’t try to hide his. He details his turning points from rat researcher to human researcher, and later from pathology-seeker to happiness-promoter.

In a rare burst of humility, he acknowledges that his earlier concentration on happiness research (reported in Authentic Happiness, 2004) was lightweight and misguided. In this new book, he sees the light – he has decided to move far beyond mere happiness.

In describing how he came to this recent turning point, he criticizes two common approaches used by his colleagues in the real world of therapy and life change: psychotropic medication and talk therapy. Why? Because, he says, they only target symptom relief, and then the effect wears off.  If that was the case, I wasted my time with that questionnaire and the considerable work that followed. But I have a question. What became of the research (not his) that shows that both approaches are effective for many people, giving the long-term edge to talk therapy?

While he made friends with his rats, I dug in at my office, pursuing one of those useless pursuits, trying to help my real clients find their peace of mind. We explored all the areas of life that I asked about in my questionnaire: their health, upbringing, daily stressors, family issues, spirituality, and others. We tried to bring all that together, locate their obstacles and strengths, and weave it together into a new life story. Quite often we succeeded.

Seligman tested me with this book. For instance, he and his editors might reconsider the section on his stint as a residence hall-based professor who found his students’ needs – over such matters as date rapes and suicide attempts – to be intolerable “hassles” for him. Don’t we want our gurus to be a bit more compassionate than that?

I also stuck with him through his reports of his grouchy, snarky, resistant, sometimes brittle and resentful behavior, even though we might hope for more positivity from our positivity gurus.

I was not an early adopter of Positive Psychology. I was exposed to an earlier generation of it when I worked in a project to provide job readiness training and support to “displaced homemakers.” I was committed to help these abandoned women step outside the narrow “housewife” role into career paths that would build their independence. It became clear early on that the director of the program and I differed on how to accomplish that.

She had run the first round of the six-week program before I came on board, and I was to follow her protocol. At the first session, each participant was to choose an adjective to serve as her nickname in class. It seemed lame but I led the group through the exercise.  The first client chose “Hard-working.” The next, “Feisty.” “Hopeful,” the next.

Wait a minute, I thought. I’d already worked in community mental health for several years and had known numerous women in this circumstance. Where was “Pissed off,” or “Depressed” or “Scared to death,” or “Exhausted”?

The answer was right before me. The clients had heard the line in the directions that I had missed even as I read it to them.

“Be sure you pick a positive word.” Oh. They were so compliant that they were willing to pretend positiveness.

Finally though, one of them came through.

“Hostile,” she said. The other members looked at me in alarm. She’d broken a rule.

“Okay,” I said, “Hostile it is. By the end of the class, let’s see if we can move that to – what would you like?”

“Able to sleep,” she said.

“Good then,” I said, “That’s a deal.”

I was called on the carpet as soon as the women were out the door.

“You allowed one of them to describe herself in a negative way,” said the director.

“But it reflects where she is,” I countered.

“We have to model positivity,” she said.

“But that would be false,” I said. I caught the this-is-only-going-to-get-worse look in her eye.

“You’ll have to help her choose a new word tomorrow,” she declared.

“Are you sure we don’t want to meet them where they really are?” I asked, pushing beyond the intelligent stopping point.

She was sure. The next day we settled on something like “Determined.”  By the end of it, she was sleeping better, but she and I both knew it would have been better to get there the honest way.

I was similarly unimpressed with the next waves of positiveness that washed through the therapy world: affirmations, self-esteem-building, and Seligman’s pursuit of happiness. I figured from the start of my career that the only realistic goal would include a balance between happiness and sorrow, and the resources to survive both. I just kept pursuing that peace of mind I’d been hearing about from my clients. I felt sure that concentrating only on happiness would deny the part of life that has the most to teach us.

As is often the case, science eventually catches up and proves what we already know. Now in Seligman’s new frontier he’s decided to shoot for well-being instead of happiness.  He says that it rests on positive emotions (including happiness), as long as other factors are present, things like engagement, relationship, meaning, and accomplishment. Sounds a little familiar to me  – an ambitious goal beyond symptom relief, created by weaving together a variety of elements. Well, duh, Doc, if only we’d been able to have this conversation years ago, maybe I could have been your guru.

In the end, I have to hand it to him. He’s gone far beyond the scope of what I accomplished at my little office. He’s now helping institute his principles in schools here and in Australia, and more recently in the Army to address the needs of returning war vets. And he has maneuvered his new passion for building resilience over treating pathology to the center of his profession.

When I got to the end of the book, my doubts evaporated. This touchy, self-aggrandizing researcher talks not about the pathology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but about the strength and wisdom that comes from Post-Traumatic Growth.

            So we agree. For the best life, go ahead and assemble those positive emotions all you want, but add engagement, throw in some relationships and accomplishments, and wrap it up with meaning. When things really go wrong and life gets as bad as it can, look for strengths to emerge.  Yes. After all our problems, Dr. Seligman and I have ended up on the same team.

CBH 07/15

GYM SHOES SPEAK

THEME: SAYING TOO MUCH
If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it. 
~Earl Wilson

My friend Carol and I walked home from school down 111^th Street. We made it almost to the bus stop a block from my place. It was a Friday because I carried my white Keds home for their bi-weekly cleaning, as required by the gym teacher. My name was neatly printed along the side, and I had them tied together by the laces because they looker cooler that way.

I know I was in fifth grade because I remember the cocktail of growing freedom that fall  – I could take unapproved routes home, pick up candy at the school store with my babysitting money, climb on the giant boulders where the vicious dog lived – without anyone telling me I was too little. Life was already good, and getting better.

As usual, Carol was preoccupied with the fact that she was adopted. She was bewilderingly resentful of the gentle older couple who revolved around her wonderingly. My favorite thing at her house was the Christmas table display that included a mirror posing as an ice skating pond, complete with motorized skaters. I could watch it for hours. This girl had no reason to complain. Her kind dad even made overtures to me, offering a little fathering.

For my part, I was preoccupied with the fact that I was fatherless. If  I couldn’t have my own father, I certainly wouldn’t consider siphoning off someone else’s, so I declined his offer, politely.

As Carol and I walked along kicking acorns and rehashing the day, the subject of my father’s absence, something I rarely discussed, came up.  He died before I could remember in a plane crash, blameless in my view, and permanently heartbroken that he couldn’t see me grow up.

Carol wanted to explain something to me that she’d been thinking about ever  since Sunday school the week before.

“Your father,” she opined, “must have done something really bad.”

I stopped. Nobody had ever said anything bad about my father.

“Because God had to punish him by making him die,” she explained.

I sputtered in outrage. Words fled. How could mere words ever bridge the gulf that opened between us, anyway?

She stopped too, waiting for my reply, wise in her own mind, satisfied that she had enlightened me.

I let my gym shoes speak for me. I took aim at her smug certainty. The right one connected with her cheek, bounced off , and headed for the ground, the left one hurrying to keep up. They landed behind her so that I had to step closer to retrieve them. She flinched.

“That’s not true,” I managed over my shoulder as I took off.

I wasn’t known for acts of physical violence, in fact this was my first one. As I ran home to lay all of this at my mother’s feet, I felt a frisson of satisfaction that I had taken such radical action against Carol’s slur. I hadn’t had many opportunities to stick up for my father.

In subsequent years, I haven’t pursued the violence, but I am still on the run from platitudes that issue forth in response to a loss. Since that fifth grade day, I have sat witness to my own grief, that of friends and loved ones, and of many counseling clients. I know we can do better.

Our society has trouble with grief.  We can’t stand pain, and we want the bereaved to get over theirs before it upsets us. The few standard responses that people offer to the bereaved prove it. In fact, they aren’t much better than Carol’s childhood attempt. And the bereaved are usually too stricken, or too polite, or without their gym shoes, to respond as they’d like. Allow me to stand in for them.

He’s in a better place, the probably well-meaning comforter says. 

What the bereaved would like to say: Oh yeah?  His place is here by me. Spare me your easy version of heaven. And spare me the suggestion that I should feel guilty for my own pain. I have a big job to do – to come up with my own understanding of where he went and how I’m supposed to live without him here. And you’re not helping.

Another frequent attempt is: It’s God’s plan which you can’t yet understand.

To which the griever would like to answer: Since you seem to have a

 straight line to God’s inner workings, can’t you do better than this flimsy attempt to make my tragedy palatable? My question is not how you explain this theologically. It is how I am going to make it through tonight.

Another common one: He wouldn’t want to see you suffer like this.

The unvoiced response from the bereaved: Don’t try to shame me into shoving my feelings underground. She didn’t want to die, and of course she wouldn’t want me to suffer, but she did and I am. Try to understand how connected I was to her and therefore how deep my feelings run.

The next is an imperative: You have to let go.

The griever’s response: Never. My job is to create a new relationship with her, now that she is no longer physically present. She will always be emotionally present for me. It is how she lives on. Don’t take that away from either one of us.

I have a suggestion for those who wish to offer comfort.  Take up Frank McCourt. His book Angela’s Ashes recounts the endless suffering and tragedy of his poor Irish mother and her large brood. The words he remembers hearing beat the feeble lines above hands down:

I’m sorry for your troubles, the women say to each other with each new loss. Acknowledgement and caring. As simple as that. No pat explanations, no rush to judgment, no hurry.

           If I had the chance to talk to the Carol of today, I would thank her for the nudge she gave me toward my life’s work. Chances are she would not even remember the incident, as it couldn’t have had the emotional punch for her that it did for me. But I wouldn’t apologize for the gym shoes. They taught me that even when words fail, I can still have my say.

CBH 06/11

THE FINE ART OF EAVESDROPPING

THEME: AUTHORITY
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak. 
 ~Michel de Montaigne

Ask any writer where their material comes from and the honest ones will tell you it’s from a lifetime of eavesdropping. Sitting in a coffee shop you can land like a paratrooper in the middle of the life of a stranger and find out more than you know about your best friend. Whatever you hear yourself, you have on good authority, I figure.

Sometimes you get only hints and have to construct the story yourself. Like the time I sat near an apparently former priest and an older woman breakfasting together. I got an earful about “that business” that caused him so much trouble in recent years in the church. I pegged her as a former parishioner, based on the delicate balance between devotion and flirtatiousness that ran between them.

Would that I’d had the opportunity to spy on the formerly up and coming Miami priest Fr. Alberto Cutie instead.  He was seen making out on the beach with a comely parishioner. He apologized, resigned, and soon married his love. He just missed his calling the first time around, apparently. He has fleshed out the story in his new talk show and book called Dilemma, so there’s little mystery left there.  

Back in the coffee shop, I had no such help. She was the listener and he was the talker, and they conversed carefully, as if in code, using vague references and generalities. Since they weren’t providing the specifics I craved, I had to run through a series of “what-ifs” until I came up with my own.

Was he a pedophile priest? No, too obvious. Maybe he’d covered up for another one and got caught in the crossfire. Maybe he had seen this companion through a crisis, and her loyalty caused her to give the bishop a piece of her mind in his defense. Maybe he refused to be sent away for reprogramming. And she defied the authorities and kept up contact with him. How’s that?

Thanks to eavesdropping, I do know for sure what it’s like to get a job in Hollywood. Last year I spent a Happy Hour at an upscale L.A. restaurant. While Dr. Drew of TV therapy fame sat at the bar head-swiveling to see or be seen, I concentrated on the group of three behind me. My husband kindly switched seats so I could zero in. Two name-dropping producers (“Harvey”, “the Network”) chatted with a young woman in a simple dress and heels, no hose.  It all sounded like platitudinous cocktail talk, and I was drifting and about to actually talk to my husband when I heard The Ask. “”If you think you’d like to work on the project, we’d like to see it work out.”

What project? They’d been talking about how hard it is to stay in the good graces of former coworkers. It must have been code again.  

“Yes, let’s have your people work it out with my lawyer,” she said. And she stood, shook hands, and was out the door. No gushing, no thank you for the opportunity, no money demand, no air kisses.

In my extension of her story, she jumps in her car, drives around the corner, stops under a palm tree and dials her boyfriend or her mom or bff and screams, “I got it. They want me. Omigod!” 

Yesterday at the airport I had to work harder than that. I sat within range of a casually dressed middle-aged couple – shorts and a Hawaiian shirt for him, modest sundress for her – who chatted amiably about hometown stuff. They were on their way to Washington D.C.

A stocky man strode up and stood too close, right between them. He was dressed to kill in a blue blazer, yellow tie and lapel pin the size of a dime. Try as I might, I couldn’t read it, but you could tell it was saying something significant about him.

Right away he took a phone call and talked for five minutes at a volume just loud enough for passengers three banks of seats away to look up.

“Are you telling me that law enforcement officers failed to pursue their investigation?” he yelled into the phone.  Pause. “You need to run this down for me.” Pause.

His ruddy cheeks glowed, a fine contrast with the yellow of his sideburns and moustache (think Yosemite Sam) and his tie.

“If the officers are going to be charged with any impropriety, I need to know it.”

Now that’s an episode of Law & Order right there.

But he was only beginning. Off the phone and still hovering over the couple, he addressed them in turn. It emerged that they were going to the same place for the same event, and that Mr. Important was in charge.  He pointed his finger in her direction.

“Now Louise, you are just going to have to be satisfied on your own. It may not look like it when we’re at the bar at 11 at night having our beers, but we are Doing Business.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Bob,” she said, seeming to bask in his attention. “I haven’t been to D.C. in 15 years. I have a lot to explore.”

Her husband and his Hawaiian shirt were shrinking by the minute in the face of this windbag, and his wife’s engagement with him.

“And you, Jim,” Bob said, leaning even closer, “You will see just how hard we work at these things. It’s not a vacation, that’s for sure.”

Bob’s jaw tightened as he shot a glance at his wife, who continued to smile adoringly at guess who.

Damn. Boarding started, which allowed me only a moment to spot a crocheted cross dangling from Windbag’s roller bag. If only I’d had another ten minutes, I might have learned enough to put it in context .

After the flight, I witnessed the three of them walking through the terminal. Bob, still talking, strode along in between the couple, and took Louise’s elbow. Jim looked straight ahead. Questions presented themselves.

Would Louise secretly slip into Bob’s room while her husband was laboring at the bar? Would Jim finally punch his boss in the nose for his various humiliations? What was their business in D.C.? And why was he so LOUD? I was tired, so I settled for my best guess, that it was a plain old business trip and the nice couple doted on the overbearing boss to stay in his good graces. Not everything has to be a drama.

My final example is the most cringe-inducing. I waited in an upscale coffee shop for a writer friend for our monthly meeting when I heard one of those shrill voices you can’t ignore. It belonged to a woman I almost knew, who was married to an acquaintance of mine. Theirs was one of those matches that makes you wonder – the modest bookish man and the tight skirt-wearing, attention-seeking athletic woman.

I quickly gave up trying not to listen, as it immediately became clear that this was one intimate conversation, with her sister. There were many complaints – not enough time to train, being neglected while he was out of town, a lack of understanding of her needs. Her sister, probably working from a lifetime of listening to such, said little. I felt humiliation on his behalf, and sadness that he had to live with this resentment every day. And of course, a small recognition that she might know her marriage better than I did.

If it had been an episode of ABC’s What Would You Do? with John Quinones, I would have been expected to stride over and denounce her for inflicting the details of her marital dissatisfaction on a roomful of strangers. Luckily, my friend showed up and I switched my attention to my own business. By the time I left, the complainer was gone, her table cleared and waiting for the next occupant.  

I know the outcome of this one. I heard several months later that the couple was divorcing, which maybe was a relief for all concerned. Easy for me to say, but I know now that better days followed for both. Was it a thrill to be inside this story as it unfolded? Decidedly not. I definitely prefer the ones I make up myself.

I don’t know how much actual knowledge I gain from my listening, but it is fun to practice attentiveness and give my imagination a workout. The next time you are offered an eavesdropping opportunity, I say seize it and let your inner storyteller out. It beats playing Angry Birds.

 CBH 05/11

HITTING MY POLITICAL BOTTOM

THEME: CHEAP THRILLS
The only thrill worthwhile is the one that comes from making something out of yourself. ~ William Feather

Hello. My name is Carolyn and I am a recovering political arguer. To qualify as recovering, I had to prepare a searching and fearless inventory of my p.a. past. Let me share the highlights:

At age 8, I canvassed the neighborhood with my mother for the Republican candidate for mayor of Chicago. His name was Bob Merriam. He was an author and reformer, a war veteran with a Bronze Star. The Democratic candidate, slated for the first time, was Richard J. Daley the Original. It is said that Merriam actually had a chance. Imagine what Chicago might be like by now if he had won. That day, people were either polite or not at home, and I got ice cream on the way back. I rather enjoyed it.

In college, I would entertain myself at parties poking at the politics of certain boyfriends of certain friends. But only if they started it. It was funny, mostly, a parlor game. It was a cheap thrill to have the power to get someone else so worked up. I was, of course, right. 

Also in college, early in my budding relationship with my eventual husband, I was invited to dinner at the home of his aunt and his uncle, a WW II Marine. I’m not sure who started it, but by the time he had set me straight, I was in tears over the stroganoff. Lesson learned: politics can hurt.

In early adulthood, I was busy. We were no longer at war, nobody was getting drafted. Who had time to dither over politics?

Then came the Clinton administration, which put me through a lot. By the end of it I was of several minds. I was indignant that Hillary had been so pilloried.  And disgusted with the weasely baseness of Bill’s sexual conduct with a girl close to the age of his own daughter for pity’s sake, and with his refusal to own up. At the same time I was impressed that he managed to dismantle some of the dependence-inducing welfare system without stripping the entire safety net, and that he pulled off a balanced budget on his way out.

To some people he was a disappointment. To others, he was the worst creature to ever walk the earth. It was then I noticed that people were suddenly delivering their opinions at the top of their lungs.

The Bush years only magnified the tension, and that polarizing trend really took off. There were only good guys and bad guys, and you were one or the other. I noticed that I didn’t like the attitude of the people I mainly agreed with any better than the ones I didn’t. Everybody was nasty.

Then the TV pundits came into their own, and built their little kingdoms of the air by attacking anyone who they could catch on tape, whether office-holder, candidate, spouse, minister, hanger-on, whoever. Then the pundits started in on each other, convincing journalists that what they said was news.

By the way, do you know what those pundits make per year from their fear-mongering and hate speech? Why, it’s an…..

No wait. I’m in recovery. I really am.  Hold on. Deep breath….Another…Okay,  I’m better now.

As I was saying, the byproduct of the ascendance of the pundits was that once we had watched them go at it for a time, we started in on each other. But this was no parlor game. This was for blood.

That’s when I began to retreat in earnest. I was sick to death of having to defend my beliefs, as if I’d somehow volunteered for the debate team and every day was a meet.

And now, I have retreated entirely. Because now I see clearly that in this climate, once anybody gets started, they can’t stop. Their positions migrate to the far ends of the spectrum, and the gulf opens even wider. Once the name-calling starts, I want to be in the car, speeding off.

When the political phone calls started up again this week – I got three in one day – to herald the opening of our upcoming 18-month descent into another presidential campaign, I decided to opt out from each one.

“Please take me off your calling list,” I say.

“But why?” they sputter, as if it’s a surprise that one of their targets has had enough. “I’m not going to change my mind,” I answer.

 They hesitate, deciding whether to try to lure me back or move on. Before they can, I wish them well and hang up. It’s very liberating.

But I must be rigorously honest in my recovery, and must admit there is more to it than that. I also don’t want to participate in these exchanges because I don’t have to. We’re supposed to be free to disagree.

Don’t misunderstand. I vote. I care. I’m not shirking my civic responsibilities. I’m just abstaining from the conversation. I have never seen a political argument result in new learning or a changed position anyway. Ever.

I voted this week in a minor local election. Afterwards, I was chased to the parking lot by a middle-aged woman whose accent told me that she’d come here from halfway around the world.

“Can you help me?” she said. “I can’t tell which of the candidates are from which party.”

I told her it was a local school board election, and candidates didn’t run on a party ticket.

By that time, her husband joined us. He declared their party affiliation, and said, “So you see, we don’t want to vote for the enemy.”

Here they’d gone to all the trouble of finding a new country and becoming citizens of it, and they couldn’t vote without suspecting that their enemy was lurking. Did we instill that in them, or was that a vestige of what they’d left behind in their old country?

I kept to my pledge. “There are no parties for this,” I repeated.

“Who did you vote for?” she demanded.

“That’s private,” I said. “Besides, no one is supposed to try to influence someone else’s vote this close to the polling place. It’s a law.”

They backed away, exasperated, looking for someone else to ask. They were disappointed in me. But I wasn’t. I did have a preference in that election, but there’s a reason why voting booths have curtains.

I’m sure I’ll encounter temptation in the next 18 months, but I plan to maintain my silence. One day at a time. 

  

 CBH - 04/11