TheMAN
Honoring My Heroes
August is typically the month we honor one or two of the remarkable men who make our community a better place to live, work and play in our annual "Man Issue." We usually plan our editorial calendar a year in advance, and last year, I asked Dr. Fred Richards if we could feature him as a cancer survivor in this year's "Man Issue." For two years, I watched Fred battle bladder cancer, and he did his very best to remain positive and always grateful. I think he's probably the only person in this world to have said he was thankful for the experience, so he could grow more as a person. I was truly amazed by his positivity, and I knew our readers would be inspired by his story of strength and perseverence. He was a bit self-conscious about it, and it took some convincing, but he finally agreed to allow me to feature him.
Sadly, that wasn't to be, as Fred passed away March 27, 2024. I felt one of the ways I could honor him would be to feature him posthumously in the August issue with a compilation of all the articles he wrote for West Georgia Woman over the last nine years. We've also included one article Fred co-wrote with his wife of 54 years, Dr. Anne C. Richards, and one in which she assisted Fred.
It was important to Fred to share his knowledge and wisdom with the community after being a licensed professional counselor and life coach for 45 years. You know that commercial that says, "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two?" Well, that was Fred. He was so wise, and I know his articles in this issue will serve as not only a valuable resource, but also as a source of inspiration for thousands of people who are going through various challenges in their lives. I encourage you to read all of Fred's articles, as they are helpful and encouraging for both men and women.
I miss him so very much. Every day has been a challenge without him. A celebration of Fred's life is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 14 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Carrollton. All are welcome to attend this special service.
I'd like to mention another man I love and respect who is a hero in his own right – a veteran of the Vietnam War and the "Papa" of our family, my stepdad, Walt D'Ambrosio. When Walt married my mom two years ago, I wasn't really sure how to feel. It took me a while to warm up to him – through no fault of his own, because he's a really wonderful man. He likes to say he "grew on me like a fungus," and it's true that he grew on me! He's been a wonderful husband to my mom, a fantastic grandfather and great-grandfather to my children and grandchildren and a supportive father figure to me. He's always telling businesses he frequents about advertising in West Georgia Woman, and calls our community advertising partners first when he has a need for their services – which is so appreciated. From the moment we met him, he welcomed us completely as his family. We love him!
Papa has been very ill for a large part of this year and can't seem to catch a break lately with various health issues cropping up. He is a fighter, though! He is a strong and determined Italian who isn't going to give up on working toward getting better. If you have a moment, please send up some good vibes, prayers and healing thoughts for Walt as he continues on his path to becoming healthy and well.
We all love you Papa, and we need you. Get better soon so we can torment you again with our hour-long southern goodbyes, our loud family gatherings and various other things we do that annoy you, haha. XOXO
To our readers, thank you so much for reading West Georgia Woman magazine and for doing business with our community advertising partners. We are so thankful that you allow us to be a part of your lives each month.
See you next time,
Papa, playing "peek-a-boo" with my granddaughter, Chelsie.
Finding our voice. Knowing our value.
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The Wounded Healer
Fred
Richards-Daishi, Ph.D.
– A Compilation of Article
Living The Caring Life
By Fred Richards-Daishi, Ph.D.
Most of us have come to realize that a life without caring is an empty, shallow life. Therefore, it is essential that we take on the challenge of learning how to become a caring human being. We realize, too, that we can care in ways that nourish and nurture ourselves and others, or we can care in ways that are toxic, that poison and diminish our capacity, and the capacity of others, to be really alive.
I call these two ways caring for and caring about, and believe that caring for others without caring about them is destructive. It can stunt our growth and the growth of others, and make us ill. It is a way of controlling others rather than helping them to be and become who they most are. Caring about, on the other hand, always includes the desire and effort to care for others. It is a way of responding to the needs of others while, at the same time, supporting their desire to live and grow in terms of what matters to them.
When caring for without caring about, I believe or pretend that I rather than you are the one most capable of knowing what is right and best for you. I provide for or look after you, but make little or no effort to get to know you. Caring for you, you are the object of my concern. I often feel most needed when you are the most in need, even incapacitated or helpless. I may try to convince you that I alone know who you need to be. I may resent your success and growing self-confidence. If you grow beyond me, I will call you back and may even "go to pieces" to keep us "together." I may play the victim and remind you of the great "sacrifices" I've made to
help you get a life. I may be resentful, and consider you selfish if you're now in therapy and decide you want to become a new person. "How can you do this to me?" I may ask.
When caring about, I am willing to be open and self-disclosing as an invitation to others to disclose who they are. If I care about you, I desire to get to know you as the singular, unique, never-to-be-repeated person you are. You and your experience matter in my world. I don't insist you are the person I think you are or should be. I now and then pause and look at you as if I'm meeting you for the first time. I know I diminish my humanity if I fail to open up to the fullness of your own. Caring about you, I want to be there for you when you need me, but not be resentful when you need me less. I am loving enough to cheer you on, even when fearful and afraid that you're growing beyond me. I am joyful
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This article originally published August 1, 2016.
rather than resentful when you are most passionate, creative, and alive.
When caring for, I will overtly or covertly try to convince you to stay just as you are, or to "grow" or change according to my own expectations and needs. I can better predict and control how you think and behave if you conform to my needs and demands. Often, I'll convince myself you can't function without my guidance and direction. And if you're not the person I need you to be, I'll feel threatened and angry. Most likely, I'll shame or blame you to get you back to being the person I want you to be. If you change in ways I do not value, I will act as if I'm the person violated and betrayed and seek to convince you that you are responsible for my unhappiness! Often, I may insist that what I do for you is for your own good, and sometimes a sacrifice on my part. "After all I've done for you ...." I may think and say to your face. And if you resist living in accordance with my plan for your life, I'll suggest that you are the guilty one. Feeling guilty, you may be more easily manipulated and controlled. Caring for while not caring about is trying to save, mold, help or "love" others while not validating their experience or inviting them to be and become who they are. At its core, it's an act of violence, a betrayal of the human longing and capacity to grow and be free.
When caring about, I celebrate our individual differences. I confirm your desire to be your own
person, to experiment with new ways of being and expressions of who you are. I encourage you to be courageous enough to remove your masks and disguises, and I find the courage to do likewise. I risk letting others see who I am and invite them to appear and be present in a relationship with me. Both of us take the risk of not hiding from one another, not concealing who we are.
Becoming a person able to care about while also caring for is a difficult and rewarding task. Though difficult, it is necessary to undertake the task, even if we find ourselves falling short again and again. The caring life is the gateway to becoming truly alive rather than one of the walking dead, to living a life worth living rather than one of quiet desperation. WGW
This article originally published August 1, 2017.
Commenting on the fact that men die sooner than women, Sidney Jourard wrote back in 1960: "In principle, there must be ways of behaving among people which prolong a man's life and insure his fuller functioning, and ways of behaving which speed a man's progress toward death."
While it's true that the images of what it means to be a man – and a woman as well – have changed and evolved, our ideas about what a "real man" is have not changed enough. We keep killing ourselves and others, writes psychiatrist Frank Pittman, as a consequence of blind loyalty to a concept of manhood that made sense ages ago when we were fighting saber-toothed tigers.
Pittman suggests that the prevailing idea of "masculinity has become a problem." He goes on to say that masculinity itself is not the problem, that there are healthy, creative, rewarding ways to be masculine. The problem is the "masculine mystique" – the lethal, toxic, unrealistic image of masculinity that many males are pressured and persuaded to embody from childhood on.
Many of us, long before our first shave, get the message that we are supposed to grow up to be tough warriors, to dominate women or rescue and protect them, to be the boss of the household and take care of "the weaker sex." Some men "grow up" to want a woman but don't really learn to like them as people. They are not encouraged to view women as equals and in some ways as more capable than they are. Others, hoping to find a woman to take care of them, feel it necessary to conceal their neediness behind a facade of fake self-sufficiency.
Novelists, poets, dramatists, psychologists tell us it is evident, writes Jourard, that men experience a range of feelings as deep and varied as women do. No matter what one's gender identification, we are aware that humans possess the potential for experiencing countless emotions, thoughts and fantasies. Many men, however, when conforming to a rigid male role promoted by others (parents, teachers, preachers and others) shut down and hide much of their inner life from others and even themselves.
The process of shaping boys – to become "real
men" with little knowledge of their emotional life or how to share what they do experience – begins early. Growing up male, adolescents feel pressured to appear unsentimental, emotionally cool, tough and aggressive. If a young man drops his guard and exposes himself as vulnerable, sensitive or tenderhearted, others may view him as weak and unmanly. About 20 years ago, I talked with a man concerned about his son. "I'm worried about him," he said. "He's not manly. Too sensitive. And he writes poetry and reads a lot. I was taught boys are like horses. You have to break them. You have to break them to make them men. He's the youngest, but nothing I do breaks his will." I was silent. Sad. I finally said, "You've got the wrong guy. I'm not into breaking the spirit and will of young men." We ended our conversation, and that was the last time I saw him.
A huge problem, writes Pittman, "is our society's bizarre attempt to raise sons without fathers or at least someone to serve as grown-up models for growing boys." We often blame only the mothers for rearing boys who become men uncomfortable or insecure when relating to women. Mothers are assumed to be responsible for sons who grow up attributing too much power to women, who believe
that how a woman responds to them determines whether or not they are adequate. Pittman concludes that a major cause of a boy's difficulty becoming a mature man is the boy's inadequate relationship with a father. "It is outrageous," he writes, "to blame mothers for not teaching boys how to be men ... Mothers, no matter how wise and wonderful, can only point boys in certain directions, but boys need fathers to show them how far they should go."
Psychotherapist Terrance O'Connor, perceiving how isolated his male clients were from other men, concluded that their emotional isolation made them more emotionally dependent on women. Experiencing women as possessing power over them, men might feel compelled to hide their neediness and fear behind aggressive behavior or be passive and nonassertive. Women might be subjected to a pattern of being verbally abused and then ignored, being harshly criticized and then punished by the man's withdrawal or abandonment.
It's believed boys need the presence of a father or some mature and available male who understands and respects the fact that males may be fearful of female anger or are uncertain how to relate to women who evolve and change, who are or become self-confident, willful and emotionally strong. Pittman insists that "Every boy must have a man who is rooting for his masculinity."
I myself am one of those men who never shared a hug with their father. Some men report they never got to hug their father until he was dying. Grown men have also shared with me sadness and shame kept secret for decades, shame and helplessness experienced when as children they were unable to protect a mother or sibling being attacked or abused. But what can a boy do when confronted with domestic violence, which even trained officers find challenging to address?
We know there are ways of being a man that can damage a man's emotional life and limit his capacity
for intimacy. Boys once not allowed or too frightened to express themselves when confronted by an insecure, controlling, dominating father or other adult may, when grown, have difficulty finding their own voice. They may, if they deny their own hurt and pain, treat their own children or others as they were treated. Others who are able to feel their feelings may "stuff them." They may pretend they are not the person they know themselves to be. Others, still hurting from past or present rejection and neglect may withdraw or explode in anger, in each case failing to connect with others and compounding their loneliness.
We know there are ways of being a man that can damage a man's emotional life and limit his capacity for intimacy.
whatever flaws or shortcomings they have. What is a life if we fail to meet people who see in us value we have difficulty seeing in ourselves? I married my wife, Anne, when I was 30. I was in my early 50s when, breaking down sobbing, the "kid" inside me realized he was loved and wouldn't be cast aside because of my imperfections and inadequacies. One reason I sobbed is because I had the heartbreaking thought that if I had died when I was 45, I would never have known deeply what it means to both love and be loved.
Psychological research and knowledge acquired in psychotherapy confirm what most of us already know: men are less self-disclosing than women. It is known that men are more fearful of appearing weak or vulnerable. They "armor" themselves and, as a result, suffer chronic stress and tension – and may be unaware of their condition until some medical problem puts them in the hospital. It is known that excessive stress, feeling under attack or threat and being estranged from self and others can undermine one's emotional and physical health. Jourard concludes that these factors point to "potentially lethal aspects of the male role." Most of us would agree that living one's life is at times hard and challenging; life is surely more difficult when being unhappily trapped in a male role that leaves one feeling isolated, unknown and unloved.
All of us have been at one time or another fearful of not being loved or fearful of losing someone we do love. People damaged by earlier experiences may take years to uncover and heal their woundedness. They find it hard to trust that others might actually find them lovable. They find it hard to believe that others would not discard them for
Scott Peck in "The Road Less Traveled" reminds us that life is difficult – and growing up and learning how to love is equally difficult. He tells us love is not a feeling; it is a relationship characterized by caring, openness, sharing, and being committed to the welfare, self-realization and happiness of another person.
Loving demands courage to let go of lethal, unhealthy ways of being, to encourage others to be free to be who they are, to risk being seen and known, to balance being separate and together –and much more. It's accepting the fact that none of us is an expert in loving. We love imperfectly. We all have a lot to learn. We are only capable of knowing and loving another to the degree we are willing to know and love ourselves. We are not roles to play; we are souls here to love.
Finally, I recall some words by author James Baldwin: "We are given only one life to live. If you don't live this one, you won't be given another." Hopefully, our understanding of what it means to be "a real man/person" will continue to evolve, liberating us to even more fully love ourselves and others, right here in this one life we are given to live.
WGW
LIVING LESSONS LEARNED
By Fred Richards-Daishi, Ph.D.
This article originally published August 1, 2018.
West Georgia Woman has invited me to share some of what I've learned about being a man and a human being in my almost 80 years of living. Now in the latter years of the story of my life, mortality is no abstract idea or far distant reality. I feel the urge to share some lessons learned with my fellow men (and women, too), particularly those discouraged by failure, who may fear they are too damaged or wounded or disheartened to chart their way through this challenging life.
Given the great difficulties I faced as a young
man, I'm grateful and amazed my life has turned out to be better than I once imagined it might be. While I worked to apply lessons learned from earlier experiences, equally important was my marrying Anne Cohen Richards 49 years ago as she was someone who accepted me for who I was, including the scared, sensitive boy dwelling within the tough, hard-living, really smart man I was back in 1969.
Confronting Mortality
At the start of my sophomore year in high school, I left home to live with my grandparents in St. Cloud, Fla. The family I fled followed me there months later. I avoided home by becoming very active in school, spending more time with a loving, Christian family and, having held parttime jobs since I was 12, worked a couple of jobs while leaving time to play football and baseball. One of my jobs was working at a local funeral home. It also had the only ambulance in town and a Mr. Mosher, the driver, and I picked up the dead. It was the 50s and, though a teenager, I helped to embalm and prepare the bodies for viewing and burial.
On one occasion, the deceased was a young champion swimmer visiting the town. He was almost my double in height, weight and age. The young man had gone swimming in a local lake and became entangled and trapped in construction material
dumped in the lake years earlier.
I spent a lot of time in the presence of the dead and the grieving survivors as well. Attending to the corpse of the young athlete was my first really powerful confrontation with the reality of death – and the reality of my own mortality.
Many decades later, while driving my truck on Rome Street in Carrollton, I had an intensely real sense of Death sitting in the passenger seat. In a brief conversation, I asked Death how much time I had left. I "heard" him reply, "You'll have just enough time to do what you need to do." A good reason to think of projects that need to be done.
Lesson 1: Death is one of our greatest teachers. We are born dying. It is a fact of life. Death tells us that everything, including ourselves, is impermanent. He laughs at us when we cling desperately to our possessions, reputation and even to those we love. We are here a brief time and we leave. Death says, "Don't waste a day." Each person, each moment, is precious. Live and love fully, generously, here and now! Be grateful for the givenness of things, for the life you've been given. Say yes, yes, yes to the life you have!
Thank God for Booger Angels
Death is one of our greatest teachers.
When I was small and not quite old enough to go to school, I was invited (for the first time) to a birthday party in my neighborhood. My family moved constantly, and friendships were found and lost continually. (I later attended three different schools in the second grade ... and failed!).
Trapped in a family caught in a cycle of fear and neglect as well as physical and sexual abuse, I was understandably shy, fearful and depressed. Along with other traumatic events, my younger sister and I had already been chased through the house by an older sister waving a pair of large scissors and
screaming she was going to kill us.
Being invited to a party was a huge deal. Recalling the experience, I see I am sitting on the floor with several children gathered around a low table. A young woman with dark hair is bringing out a large cake with lit candles and placing it on the table. She is a teenager of perhaps 14 or 15.
There I am, excited about, yet perplexed at, having been invited to a party. I'm looking wideeyed at the cake when, suddenly, I have to sneeze. And when I do, a lump of snot, in my eyes as large as a baseball, is moving in slow motion out of my
nose, through space, and onto the cake. I stop breathing and disappear. My body remains but most of me is fleeing the room. Surely, I believe, my social life is over.
But the young woman takes a napkin, and with a sleight-of-hand equal to Houdini, removes the giant booger and begins singing "Happy Birthday." She smiles at me. No shame. No blame. No humiliation. No punishment. Just a bunch of kids joyfully singing "Happy Birthday."
I love her still. I do not know her name. I call her my Booger Angel. Seventy-five years later, I feel her presence, my compassionate caretaker, back then most likely not much older than a child herself.
Lesson 2: We all know suffering is a fact of life. Even in the best of families, children don't get out of childhood without some wounds. We human beings are capable of great acts of kindness and terrible acts of cruelty as well. I learned early that the world is both wonderful and terrifying. I've seen a lot. I've known people who, broken by abuse and unforeseen catastrophes and losses, do not find their way back to life and are defeated and destroyed. I also know we are fragile and resilient, that many are wounded but do not go down in defeat. Some become Booger Angels, and we are called to become Booger Angels as well. We are called to practice loving kindness and strive to be the kind of adult we wish we had known when we were a child.
The Healing Presence of A Good Man
My freshman year at Stetson University in Deland, Fla., I joined a large group of male students making their way through my dorm on their way to carrying out the first ever panty raid at the school. The administration randomly picked several students to be punished. I was not initially among them. At that time, being a licensed Southern Baptist preacher and someone hiding my lost, confused self behind a facade of idealistic self assurance, I marched into the Dean's office to confess my involvement, insisting it was the Christian thing to do. As a result of my doing this, however, I lost my scholarship, a semester's work went down the tubes, and, briefly, I had some satisfaction being celebrated by the student body as a Christian martyred for telling the truth.
Afterwards, I fell into a hole of sadness and depression. I reluctantly headed north to Columbia,
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Penn., where my family had bought a row house about to be condemned by the city. I found several jobs and set out, while my Merchant Seaman father was at sea, to restore the front of the house by removing a crumbling front porch. I was miserable and angry.
He was the kind of person I wanted for a father.
One morning when I was attacking the front porch with my body, a Lutheran minister came by wearing a black suit and a white clerical collar. The whole works. A Southern Baptist boy, I dismissed his invitation to visit his church.
Several days later, while I was in the basement patching a hole in a coal-burning furnace and removing ashes, Reverend Bradley Thomas Gaver returned, carrying two baked chickens. Enquiring about the young man he had spoken with previously, he came down the outside basement steps and, without saying more than a "good morning," removed his coat, rolled up his sleeves, grabbed a short-handled shovel and began filling a bucket with ashes.
We worked side by side in silence for some time.
Serving the West Georgia Community for 96 Years
I was confused by his behavior: no preaching, no advice, no criticism or pressure to attend his church. Just a man willing to pitch in and give me a hand.
Within a couple of weeks I visited his church, soon acquired a job as its janitor, wore clothes donated by members, and occasionally worked a day on his family farm in Gettysburg.
He was the kind of person I wanted for a father. He and his wife had a daughter, and I became for him the son he didn't have. He was the kind of caring, manly, wise man I wanted to be but didn't yet believe I could become. The possible person he saw inside of me I could not yet see.
Lesson 3: Treating others with kindness lets them know they matter. The wounded of the world, which I believe includes all of us, can often be healed by acts of kindness rather than mere words and well-intentioned advice. What invites us to believe we can change is not what people tell us as much as how we feel in their presence, who we come to believe we might be or become if some real, genuine, caring human being treats us with respect and lets us know we matter. Human beings like Rev. Gaver remind us that, as flawed and unfinished as we are, we can help to set people free to live lives worth living.
Choosing To Live
Later in the summer of 1958, I saved enough money to travel by train to Key West and for $28 fly to Cuba to visit a student friend, Thomas E. Besosa, and his family. In Cuba at that time, Fidel Castro and his guerillas were fighting to overthrow the oppressive and brutal rule of Batista.
I found myself being joyful and alive among the Cuban people. Thus, when it was time to leave, I prayed that Castro would bomb the Havana airport so I wouldn't be able to return. (I learned years later Castro had no planes.) Returning to my family home was more threatening to me than being in a war zone.
Back in the states, I became seriously depressed and, when Stetson University invited me to return to school and help me financially, I prepared to leave. My mother, who had looked to me to take care of her and be her confidant since I was very young, wept, begged me not to return to college and insisted she "could not go on" if I left.
The morning the taxi arrived to take me to the train station, I heard my sister screaming as I was getting in the cab. I ran into the house and found my mother collapsed on the floor, bleeding profusely from a cut on her forehead. She and my sister were
crying and begging me to stay, yelling "You say you're a caring person but you're not. You don't care about anyone!" I was speechless and then I heard myself saying, "I'm sorry. If I stay here I'm going to die. If I don't leave I will never have a life." And I returned to Stetson.
I felt guilty for years, even ashamed, while also knowing that speaking the words rising up from somewhere deep inside me, I had chosen to live and seek out a larger world and a larger self.
Lesson 4: Having to say goodbye to live. Caring about others is not about sacrificing the life you've been given to take care of others who want you to stay in a life that is no life at all. It's a fact that we cannot make others change in order for them to wake up and live. It's been said that the most morally reprehensible act is to make others responsible for how we are living our life, for our having decided to not live our life at all. I loved my mother and sister and carry some guilt still that I was not able to rescue them or even see them actually happy behind the face they presented to the public. Walking away from people we love when knowing that staying will mean betraying our soul's longing to live is one of the most painful things you do or
may feel compelled to do. Mary Oliver (2017) in "The Journey," speaks to that moment when you realize what you have to do to live while all around you others cry out, "Mend my life!" Taking your journey, you hear a voice which you recognize as your own, going with you as you go "into the world,/ determined to do/the only thing you could do – / determined to save/the only life you could save."
Trauma Revisited
My wife, Anne, and I moved to Carrollton in 1975 to take a shared teaching position in the Department of Psychology at what was then West Georgia College.
The wild and crazy and turbulent 60s arrived in Carrollton in the 70s. My hard-drinking lifestyle and tendency to run or dance naked when intoxicated shocked some but amused others, since during those times of streaking and communal living, I was viewed as something of a free spirit. But my exuberance and passion for life belied my effort to avoid confronting the pain of my past trauma.
Dancing naked at a Halloween party I experienced flashbacks of having witnessed, when just short of turning 3, my father – more a stranger coming home on leave during the Second World War – sexually abusing two of my siblings from my mother's previous marriage. Contacting my younger sister, who was only 2 and holding my hand when we witnessed the horror, I was astounded she could recall at all the experience.
She shared with me also what others had told her. (It took one of the sisters, who was 8 when she was abused, over 70 years to finally share with me everything that happened to her, including the damage it caused later in her life and in her relationships.) I learned also that my younger sister was later sexually abused by our father and was raped by our half brother.
I, myself, had no recollection of being sexually abused, but the terror of watching my siblings being abused and hearing them cry and scream was, I know, equally traumatic for two children not yet 3 years old. For half my life, I would display all the symptoms – a desire to be perfect, alcohol and sexual addiction, life-risking behaviors, periods of depression. After re-experiencing the trauma that Halloween, my acting out in public while naked ended.
Nonetheless, I was offered a non-tenured teaching position at the university, and I declined the offer. In time, I was asked to volunteer at the local
mental health clinic that lacked funds to fill needed positions. I worked a year full-time without pay. Clients wanted to work with me. I realized it didn't matter if I was probably more lost and troubled than some of them; what mattered was that I cared, I listened, I was genuinely present, and they felt respected, seen and heard in my presence. We were healing one another.
Meanwhile, I had been completing a master's in counseling and in time, fearfully and anxiously, started a counseling practice. I had found my calling, or my calling found me.
Lesson 5: Become a wounded healer.
Religious and spiritual traditions teach that we have to descend into the darkness to reach the light, that getting to a heaven calls for us realizing we're in a hell. A favorite hymn of many of us says that when facing our wretchedness, God's amazing grace arrives to save us. Though lost, we are found. Though blind, we learn to see. We men are all wounded, particularly those of us who refuse to admit we are. We struggle within with things invisible to others – and often to ourselves. We need to be kind to one another, less judgmental. We need to share our stories, share what we've learned. The past is present. We are often haunted and sometimes tormented by the ghosts of experiences too painful to fully recall. What we deny or ignore, what we are afraid to befriend within us and share, shows up again and again in our troubled
relationships and self-defeating behaviors. An old bumper sticker of mine read: "What we run from runs our lives; what we face frees us to live."I have come to know that everything we have experienced – good or bad – is an opportunity for soul-making, is an opportunity to learn more about our humanity and become more deeply connected to one another. Recalling painful experiences can become a blessing, a revelation of the suffering we human beings share. We may be able to become what psychologist C.G. Jung (1963) and Henri Nouven (1979) called "the wounded healer." We can learn to tend to our wounds with one hand so the other is free to heal the wounds of others. We can come to know and perhaps embody the joy found in living the life of compassion, a compassion, writes Wayne Miller (1992), we offer to others in mutual recognition of our shared suffering. WGW
What we run from runs our lives; What we face frees us to live.
Holding on to Hope and One Another in a Wounded World
By Fred Richards-Daishi, Ph.D.
This article originally published June 1, 2020.
Here's the scene. It is 1916. The German army is launching a gas attack against the Russian defenses. A moving wall of yellow fog envelopes the Russian troops. The German infantry advances, breaks through the barbed wire barriers and then disappears.
The winds shift and both armies are engulfed in the deadly cloud. Birds drop from the sky. Flowers, trees, grass, bees turn black, decompose. German soldiers, many naked, crazed and blind, flee the carnage, carrying Russian soldiers to safety. Imagine dying soldiers, some barely older than boys, lying together in trenches, desperately clinging to one another. Germans and Russians, boys and men at war, reaching out in the dark, wanting to be held as they die.
I write this sitting in my small study at home, sheltering in place, on my desk a mask and gloves I will wear when I venture outside. The soulwrenching account of men at war is found in Lazarus by André Malraux, written as he struggled with a serious illness and the specter of his own death.
I have, for many years, sat quietly, closed my eyes, and meditated on my own decline and death, and the deaths of those I love. Realistically, it's a kind of preparation, a way of rehearsing for the inevitable losses and finalities that are part of living. I want to do as well as I can when I say goodbye, to my life and to others. The death meditation I do has, it appears, helped me to prepare for the pandemic now moving across the world. Some believe my practice of death meditation is morbid, but it is not. When I open my eyes, I'm struck by how beautiful the world is, despite all the heartbreak, loss, cruelty, violence and despair that is part of the human condition. An object previously unnoticed seems to shine. I know how amazing it is to be alive. I want to jump up and tell others I love them, maybe even cry while saying it. I feel the urge to hug a lot of people, even people I barely know, or say to them something crazy like: "Do you realize we're all going to die? Celebrate being here now. Don't wallow in your misery. Take hold of those you love and let them know how much you love them, how glad you are they're in the world." I want to ask, with the words of Mary Oliver: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?"
Some of the people I encounter in the dark times may understandably experience my joy as naïve and even inappropriate. They may not realize my enthusiasm is actually a self-controlled version of what I feel. I have had passing moments when I felt my heart was big enough to take in the suffering of
the world and pour out love in return.
Novelist and poet Carolyn Houghton, writes that "we skate on hot blades over thin ice." Sometimes the ice breaks and we fall through; we confront the pain and suffering that is often concealed underneath the surface of everyday life.
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When I open my eyes, I'm struck by how beautiful the world is, despite all the heartbreak, loss, cruelty, violence and despair that is part of the human condition. An object previously unnoticed seems to shine. I know how amazing it is to be alive. I want to jump up and tell others I love them, maybe even cry while saying it.
Therapist and author Mark Epstein wants to free us to live, so he keeps reminding us it is necessary to face the trauma that is simply a fact of life. Trauma "does not go away. It continues to reassert itself as life unfolds." Right now, this revelation is probably not "breaking news" for any
“
of us. Epstein further tells us that traumatic events do not have to destroy us. They can help us to discover resilience and strength we did not know we had. They can awaken in us, while we are still here, the realization that life calls us to choose to be among the truly alive rather than the walking dead. Facing the trauma of everyday life, particularly when living in the midst of a pandemic, we can discover more deeply who we are, what truly matters, what we value the most.
No One Walks Alone
Suicide Prevention Awareness Event
Hosted by: Pathways Center & AnotherWay Foundation
Saturday, September 7 9am-12pm
Joan Halifax in her book, The Fruitful Darkness, reminds us that "our personal suffering is also the world's suffering." The truth is this: we are not really alone in the trenches of life. Everyone who suffers is here with us. We are not just an "I." "I" and "You" are actually a "We." Sharing our suffering, Halifax writes, brings forth "the fruit of compassion, the fruit of joy." And yes, the fruit of hope as well. She sees catastrophic events as potentially "sacred" or "holy failures," capable of helping us to see that we are a part of everyone, everything. In the trenches of life, despair can morph into hope when we reach out and hold on to one another while we are still here, still alive! In Joy, Inspiration, and Hope, author Verena Kast writes: we are capable of being creatures of joy and not defeated victims living "our lives in tragic resignation" during the darkest times. Healthy, responsible joy gives birth to hope and hope allows "us to find shelter in life," and trust "in the future in spite of knowing better." To be a bringer of hope is to "turn toward a light that does not yet exist, though we have the impression that it must."
One of my favorite poems is "A Ritual to Read to One Another" by William Stafford. In this circus we call life, it is crucial we hold on to one another so we don't lose our place in the human community. The poem depicts a chain of circus elephants parading through town. Each elephant is holding another
working for those who perish on the shadowy side of life? ... How can we laugh and rejoice when there are still so many tears to be wiped away and when new tears are being added every day?" Is it really compassionate and life-affirming to say yes to life in the presence of all this suffering, when the life we took for granted has disappeared and the future is uncertain and unknown?
elephant's tail because "if one wanders, the circus won't reach the park." In many ways, the park represents where we all want to go to be. It's the place where we get to play and be happy, connect and communicate, and be with and for one another. Stafford cautions us to slow down, wake up, pay attention and see what's happening. He tells us to hold on to one another so our "mutual life" is not "lost in the dark" because he warns: "[t]he darkness around us is deep." His poem is one to read to each other as we huddle together in the trenches of the global pandemic.
I am painfully aware of the unimaginable suffering persons are experiencing around the world and in my own community. My intention is not to minimize this suffering in any way. I also consider the possibility that some persons may be troubled or offended by my encouraging them to earnestly try to bring joy and hope to others overwhelmed by death, loss, heartbreak and fear. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann in The Theology of Play, also struggles with how it is possible to laugh, be joyful and rejoice when all of us, some more than others, are weighted down with worry and depression, when so many are traumatized and tortured by the dark state of the world. "Is it right," he asks, "to laugh, to play, and to dance without at the same time crying out and
In my best moments, I answer the latter question with a heartfelt YES. I shout, even when I myself am sad and fearful, amor fati! (love one's fate), strive and affirm the gift of life, even in, perhaps especially in, the dark times that can wound us the most. All the spiritual traditions I'm acquainted with proclaim it is possible to live life without being dominated by the fear that just comes with being human. They tell me we can become persons capable of bringing authentic hope to even what appear to be hopeless times. We can bring joy and hope in times of despair. They teach that practicing justice, again and again, is a way to become a just person. Practicing kindness, again and again, is how we become kind persons. In the words of psychologist and author, I. David Welch: "Every time we act we increase the chances of doing the same thing again ... We are as likely to act ourselves into a new way of thinking as to think ourselves into a new way of acting." Every one of us, no matter who we are, can choose to make it our ultimate concern to strive to do no harm, to be a healing, hopeful presence in our own unique, imperfect way. I say imperfect, because those of us who seek to heal ourselves and others, are also the wounded. Those of us who seek to be whole are broken as well.
My wife, Anne, and I have a friend who, with an IQ of 52, is described as intellectually challenged. When asked what he could do at work to make customers feel appreciated, he answered: "Smile, wish them a nice day, ask them how they are doing or feeling, be nice, and ask them if they need help." We are, of course, all challenged in one way or another. I continue to believe that most people, perhaps close to everyone, have the capacity to learn and know the difference between being kind and unkind, between harming others or seeking to do them no harm.
We don't need more advice, more information to know what to do and be in order to hold on to hope and one another.
To live, for ourselves and others, a more meaningful, fulfilling life we must earnestly strive to bring what offerings of hope, love and joy we can, for "[t]he darkness around us is deep." WGW
Confronting Together the Mental Health Crisis of Our Time
By Fred Richards-Daishi, Ph.D. (assisted by Anne C. Richards)
In past decades, many mainstream psychologists and mental health workers viewed psychological health as the capacity to conform or adjust to the status quo values and expectations of society. As Anne Richards and I have written recently in the Foreword to A Curious Mind, The Life and Legacy of Sidney Jourard by Marty Jourard: "A new breed of psychologists, however, began to raise questions about this view and fashioned a different image of the person as they focused upon the healthy personality and sought to promote the optimal growth of human beings." Treating persons suffering from mental illness, they took seriously the possibility that mental suffering could be a response to toxic situations and a call to change and grow. While not denying the reality of mental illness, they studied its existence as possibly part of a process
of self-transformation or self-realization leading to a person becoming more alive and whole.
In Greek mythology, the god Procrustes welcomed travelers on their way to Athens and placed them in a bed designed to accommodate the "average person" (read "normal" here). If travelers didn't fit in his perfect bed as he thought they should, Procrustes would either stretch the shorter travelers or saw the legs off the taller ones. One wonders why other travelers, hearing the screams, didn't turn around and run in another direction. Abraham Maslow, commenting on persons' unsuccessful attempts to adjust to or cope with a violent, dehumanizing, threatening world, described their behavior as "the screams of the tortured at the crushing of their psychological bones."
Sarah Nettleton, in The Metapsychology of Christopher Bollas, discusses Bollas' concept of "normotic pathology." Bollas warns that being concerned only about behaving normally can be dangerous for our mental health, because individuals stuck in a life of blind conformity to social demands and expectations fail to develop an interior life. They are dead within, "empty" and seeking to avoid feeling what they are feeling. They may seem to be "ideal team players," or leaders, but they are persons incapable of dialogue who seek a semblance of selfhood by acquiring power and control. They appear to be here, but they have already left. "They are basically," writes psychotherapist Kimberly Korobov, "trading life for death." Their preoccupation with only adjusting to external reality and its demands is an ill-fated attempt to escape the pain, insecurity, and uncertainty that is part of everyday living. It's an escape as well from the task of becoming a real, alive, loving, and aware person. In short, it's crazy-making to be "perfectly normal."
Gene Ruyle, Episcopalian priest and psychotherapist, challenges us to live large and declare: We "will not join the hoards and herds of the half-alive." We will seek out and join those who refuse "to finish with life before life finishes with them." Similarly, radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, writes in The Politics of Experience, that many of
This article originally published May 1, 2021.
us are too often raised to shut down rather than expand our capacity to live a fuller, mentally healthy life. Instead, we would do well to heed the words of Jungian psychologist James Hollis in Creating a Life: "As individuals, we are, each of us, meant to be different. A proper course of therapy doesn't make us better adjusted; it makes us more eccentric, a unique individual who serves a larger project than that of the ego or collective norm."
Clinical Psychologist Dr. Janet Cox, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, warns that long after we have gone beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, we will continue to experience a global mental health epidemic. Mental health/medical professionals believe that each of us, to some degree, is traumatized as a result of the pandemic and the prevalence of other catastrophic events. In Dr. Cox's words: "Most, if not all Americans, have been grappling with changes to their mental health over the last year. The impact of fear, anxiety, loneliness, grief and loss, and an ongoing sense of uncertainty, have affected everyone's emotional well-being, resulting in chronic stress and various mental health conditions."
healing ourselves as we seek to help others to heal themselves. Compassion, "to suffer with" is not something we possess and give to others. As Wayne Muller has put it, our compassion is shared "through a mutual recognition of our common suffering."
Our woundedness, our vulnerability, our brokenness calls us to practice healing ourselves as we seek to help others to heal themselves. “ “
Bryan Stevenson, in Just Mercy, conveys powerfully what I'm attempting to say: "We are all broken by something ... our brokenness is ... the source of our common humanity, the basis of our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfections nurture and sustain our capacity for compassion ... We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness and forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity ... I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears ... Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized."
How is it possible to remain open-hearted and passionately alive when, in a little more than a year, deaths from an invisible virus are approaching 3 million and rising worldwide? This in addition to persons dying from drug addiction, alcoholism, mass killings, domestic terrorism, war, air and water pollution, the consequences of poverty, social inequality, racial discrimination and more. As a discouraged client said, "I feel like I'm living in a graveyard!" Presently looking around at the precarity of everyday life, we recall Dorothy's words in the Wizard of Oz: "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
I identify with the image and calling of the "wounded healer," a term first coined by C.G. Jung and explored in a religious/spiritual context by Henri Nouwen in The Wounded Healer. Nouwen images the healer as a person tending to his or her own wounds, one hand at a time, in order to free the other hand to heal the wounds of others. Wounded healers are called to make conscious their own suffering as a foundational part of their service to others. Nouwen reminds us that we heal ourselves and others from our wounds. Our woundedness, our vulnerability, our brokenness calls us to practice
I have briefly shared in earlier issues of West Georgia Woman my history of woundedness, its impact on my life, and how it led me to become a psychotherapist: Twenty years of self-medicating with alcohol to avoid feeling and facing childhood trauma and years of seeking success and then sabotaging the success achieved; years of wanting to live passionately and, I realized years later, also wanting "to die" to escape the challenge of facing reality and making the best of it; years of searching for love and choosing relationships destined to fail, and, when finally finding someone able to love me more than I loved myself, being confused and afraid.
Elvin Semrod, therapist and teacher, describes individual psychotherapy as "an encounter between a big mess and a bigger mess" and told his students that the client is not necessarily the bigger mess! I myself have said on a few occasions, when told by a client who believed he or she was a hopeless disaster and beyond repair: "Well, I don't know whether or not this will comfort or reassure you, but it's likely I've been a bigger mess than you believe yourself to be."
M.D. Sussman, in A Curious Calling, Uncommon Motivations for Practicing Psychotherapy, reports that studies show there are significant rates of
emotional suffering among psychotherapists and concludes: "The presence of significant emotional conflict in individuals choosing to become psychotherapists raises the ironic possibility this may be a necessary prerequisite for succeeding in the field." The research he presents also suggests that the psychological suffering experienced by mental health therapists can, when accessed and processed, contribute to the desire to enter the profession and enhance one's capacity to help others. As Alice Miller, author of The Drama of the Gifted Child, notes, most psychotherapists have likely experienced as a child some injury or disturbance to the developing self and considers it doubtful that anyone without a painful developmental history would choose to spend life sitting for years with troubled souls who bring so much pain and suffering.
When entering into dialogue with persons who seek me out for therapy, I am most helpful when I experience my clients as fellow sufferers rather than a list of symptoms lifted from some diagnostic manual. The persons I meet in therapy and out in the world are my spiritual teachers; they mirror back to me parts of myself that I may recognize or may not know at all. I agree with Maurice Friedman, that by genuinely dialoguing with what is real for
persons suffering mental disorders, we can enrich, expand and deepen our relationship to reality and to unknown dimensions of our own humanity. In the spirit of my mentor Sidney Jourard, my focus in therapy is not dwelling on the roots of "pathology" in those who seek relief. I join with them to intuit and imagine how we might, together, find and explore the wounded, injured selves that to some degree dwell in all of us. Together we seek to befriend, heal and change the inner and outer obstacles presently in the way of our both becoming more mentally healthy and more real and whole.
In these challenging, threatening, but still promising times, each of us, including therapists, finds it difficult and perhaps even impossible at times to be right here in life as it is. We all fall somewhere along a continuum, with severe mental illness at one end and the fully-functioning, healthy personality at the other. It is imperative we support organizations and programs confronting the mental health crisis of our time. It is also important that each of us not look to professionals alone to address the crisis but find the will to give to ourselves and others – and all living things – the loving kindness and compassion needed to continue healing our brokenness and achieve a greater measure of health, wholeness and well-being. WGW
Daily Fare
Chef Rose With
Chef Rose Isaacs is a native of Carroll County and lives in Carrollton with her husband, Shawn and their son, Sebastian. She graduated from West Georgia Technical College in 2013 with a degree in Culinary Arts.
She is a personal chef who offers cooking lessons, baby food prep, date night dinners for two and more. Learn more about Chef Rose at www.chefrosecooks.com.
Chef Rose photos by Zachary Dailey, Dailey Life Photography, daileylifephotography@gmail.com
Recipe photos by Andrew Agresta, Agresta Photography, www.agrestaphotography.com
Seeded Crackers
Ingredients
3/4 cup flaxseeds (whole or whole ground)
3 tablespoons chia seeds
1 cup water
1/3 cup sunflower seeds
1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
Salt
Preparation
Preheat the oven to 350°F
Stir together the flaxseeds, chia seeds and water, and set aside for 5 minutes or until the mixture becomes a thick gel.
Add the rest of the seeds, a big pinch of salt (and other seasonings if desired), and stir until combined.
Line a baking tray with parchment paper, and brush with olive oil.
Spread the seed mixture onto the tray in a thin, even layer. Brush the top with more olive oil.
Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until golden all over.
After cooling slightly, break into pieces. Serves 6.
“Makes an excellent dipping cracker for hummus. Add in your favorite herbs or seasonings, such as cumin or chili powder, for an added punch of flavor.”
Broccoli and Cheese Pinwheels
“These pinwheels are great to pack in school lunches or to enjoy as an after school snack ”
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups broccoli florets
3/4 cup cream cheese
1/2 cup sharp cheddar cheese
1 sheet premade puff pastry, thawed
Preparation
Preheat oven to 400°F.
Prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper, and set aside.
Steam broccoli florets over boiling water in a vegetable steamer basket until soft.
Unroll the puff pastry, and evenly spread the cream cheese across the pastry.
Sprinkle the broccoli florets and grated cheddar cheese on top of the puff pastry.
Roll the pastry into a spiral, and use a sharp knife to slice into 1/2-inch thick slices.
Place each piece on prepared baking tray, and bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until puffed, crisp and golden.
Remove from the oven, and allow to cool slightly before serving.
Serves 8. WGW
Befriending the Ghosts that Haunt Us
By Fred Richards-Daishi, Ph.D.
halloween is typically a time when we are visited by ghosts of all sizes. They are often accompanied by vampires, little mermaids, pirates and 3-foot-tall superheroes, all willing, once handed a candy treat or two, to move on.
There are, however, "ghosts" that refuse to leave. They dwell in our souls. They "haunt" us, their visitations telling us we are not alone, that the past is not past, but present, and the self we currently are is a false or limited version of the human being we're capable of becoming.
In the early 1960s and 40 feet up in the air on the roof of a massive block-long warehouse in Miami, Fla., other laborers and I were working through the night, removing and replacing skylights mangled
and destroyed by a hurricane. Taking a break and walking far beyond the area lighted by floodlights, I stopped when hearing an unfamiliar, friendly voice calling my name. There was no one there when I stopped and turned. Turning to walk on, I looked down and froze. I was standing at the edge of the roof. Who or what was my invisible benefactor? Who or what saved me from falling to my death? What was the nature of the spectral presence that called out my name?
My experience is neither rare nor unique. Countless persons report having been warned, comforted, transformed and moved to re-examine their beliefs about self, life and reality after experiencing compelling dreams, night visitations and things that "go bump in the night." An exercise buddy tells me about his beloved grandmother appearing to him days after her funeral. Sleeping on a couch in her home, he wakes up to see his grandmother up in the air and looking down at him. "Were you frightened?" I asked? "Oh, no. I always felt loved in her presence. I was comforted. I knew then and
still do that she is watching over me."
My sister, the late Joan Armpriester, was a psychic reader who, between 1979-1981, consulted with the Atlanta Police Department investigating the murder of numerous children in the city. Persons from around the country called her night and day, wanting her to respond to events and experiences they suspected or believed involved benevolent or hostile forces, energies or spirits of the deceased trying to contact them.
I was intrigued by the stories and surprised back then at the number of calls she received. A police chief called her, troubled by the ghostly appearance of a female figure repeatedly appearing in family
This article originally published October 1, 2021.
photos. A depressed college student contacted her. Alone at night in his dorm room, he is comforted by a hand gently resting on his shoulder, a hand he believed to be the hand of Christ. A mother, awakened by a loud sound at 3 am., learned at dawn that her only son was seriously injured at the same time in a car crash in a neighboring state.
The Untold Stories That Haunt Us
One of my favorite writers is Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis, author of Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives, a book he felt called by a dream to write.
Hauntings, he explains, "is not a book about ghosts in the usual sense of that term," but about the past that lives on in the present, the persisting symptoms and behavior that prevent us from being real persons and fully alive.1 Hollis advises us to not dismiss or ignore what "haunts" us but, instead, to listen to the messages arriving from within and calling upon us to wake up and to truly live.
We are possessed by all kinds of "spirits," and "ghosts": childhood fears that continue to control our lives, unhealed pain from past failed relationships and betrayals, and so on. The ghosts we fail to befriend – unfelt feelings, repressed emotional injuries, and wounds to the developing self – live on in our lives in the form of addiction to drugs and alcohol and self-defeating behavior.
The suppressed stories of past neglect, abuse and abandonment disturb our dreams, show up as debilitating anxiety and depression and continue to inhabit our bodies and the bodies of our children.2
It's important we ask ourselves why we keep repeating choices and actions that always keep wounding us. Why do we keep pretending we are someone different than who we experience ourselves to be?
Failing to retrieve and befriend the hidden stories still weaving their way in and through our life, the past continues to repeat itself.
Our negative self concepts and felt deficits express themselves in self-sabotaging behavior and over-compensating efforts to convince ourselves and others how spectacular we are. To avoid facing, for example, early traumas, we repeat again and again the very suffering we would rather avoid.3
Hollis believes that:
It is not only the things that we've inherited from our fathers and mothers that live on in us, but all sorts of old ideas and old dead beliefs ... They're not actually alive in us, but they're rooted there all the
same, and we can't rid ourselves of them.4
Feelings of shame, sadness and anxiety often sweep over us for no apparent reason. They arrive like invasive forces taking control of our state of mind. These unwanted feelings and untold stories and family secrets resurface in addictive, dissociated, and dysfunctional behaviors that also have the potential to get our attention; they prompt us to discover where we've come from, who and where we are, and where we might choose to go with our lives.
Hollis calls on us to reflect on what kind of life we'd be living, what kind of person we'd be, if we were "unfettered by the claims of the past"?5 To not question, to not seek to uncover the stories that hold us in their tight grip is, writes psychoanalyst, Michael Eigen, a choice to avoid expanding our awareness of our inner world. It is a choice to live a ghostly life.6
Healthy Privacy and Toxic Secrets
All families have secrets. Some members keep personal secrets to maintain a sense of privacy, of being separate while connected to others. Privacy helps us establish healthy boundaries, protecting us "from unwanted access by others."7
Family secrets, on the other hand, are toxic when rooted in shame. A family's intentional concealment of significant and impactful parts of our life story understandably harms us and prevents us from knowing who we really are.
Toxic secrecy compels family members to even conceal their suffering. Concealment leads to isolation, more emotional suffering, lack of dialogue and an inability to share and solve problems. Sadly, tragically, persons suffering from alcoholism, eating disorders, mental illness, drug addictions, sexual abuse and suicidal thoughts fail to reach out to get desperately needed support and help.8
Such family systems consciously or unconsciously "invite" members to not feel, to be invisible and in some cases, even die. Therapists are often the first persons and sometimes the only persons with whom clients feel safe enough to disclose personal and family secrets that have haunted them for decades.
We can be wounded and influenced by painful memories we "know" but do not know we know. It's not unusual for persons to have an experience that triggers the recollection and re-experiencing of an unremembered past event, most often traumatic.
These hauntings, forgotten or intentionally concealed include "such intimate and profound areas of individual and family life as birth, adoption, parentage, infertility, abortion, physical and mental illness, sexual orientation and sexuality, incest, rape, violence, addictions, religion, violence, intermarriage, terrorism and wartime behavior, divorce, immigration status and death."9
I know from personal experience and my practice as a mental health counselor that facing the untold stories and toxic secrets that haunt us can also initiate a process of healing. Acknowledging our suffering, befriending it, can become the beginning of a process by which we come to discover we have the courage and strength to move forward in our lives. We can restore our capacity to live compassionate, inspirited lives, to even be joyful and empowered in the midst of the dark reality of the human condition.
What Scares Us May Also Save Us
Jungian counselor Helen Luke differentiates between real suffering and neurotic depression. Consciously accepting or taking upon oneself the fact of human suffering is required for us to begin the process of self-realization and to free ourselves of our bondage to past suffering. Neurotic depression is, on the other hand, a consequence
of our refusal or inability to face the suffering that threatens the ego's insistence it is quite together and in control. "The worst agonies of neurotic misery are endured by the ego rather than a moment of consent to the death of even a small part of its demands or its sense of importance."10
We choose to defiantly cling to our isolated, fearbased life rather than acknowledge our misery and flaws and, possibly, be transformed.
Such is the case of Ebenezer Scrooge, the narcissistic, miserly old man in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, who, despite his resistance, is saved from his miserable life by the arrival of four ghosts or spirits. The play ends with Scrooge becoming a new person, a joyful and generous benefactor of others.
Scrooge is visited by four ghosts. The tortured spirit of his deceased business partner warns Scrooge of the terrible fate awaiting him if he fails to change his ways and ignores the three spirits to come. The three spirits are dramatic representations of the inner process going on in Scrooge's psyche or soul, a process he fears and is reluctant to face.
A spirit arrives to help him revisit his childhood loss of companionship and love, and his greed or love of money. The Spirit of Christmas Present shows him the good cheer as well as the poverty and
suffering present at Christmas. Scrooge is told Tiny Tim, the son of his assistant, is fated to die. Scrooge is also chastised for his indifference to the poverty and suffering of children.
Visited by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Scrooge is reduced to tears realizing that no one will mourn his passing and that Tiny Tim will die. Sobbing, he falls before a neglected grave and a tombstone bearing his own name.
Facing the stories of the past, feeling the misery of his shallow, loveless life and the suffering of others, and broken-hearted over the vision of Tiny Tim's death and his own demise, Scrooge is transformed. Christmas morning, everyone is greeted by a Scrooge who is now a joyful, generous embodiment of the Christmas Spirit. He becomes a father figure to Tiny Tim. Once Scrooge was "dead," but now he lives!
Ebenezer Scrooge, as is true for many of us, is rescued from his spiritually dead life by befriending, revisiting, and welcoming into his conscious life the past wounds, untold stories, and painful realities that heretofore kept him stuck in the past.
Here are several things we can do to free ourselves from our bondage to past suffering:
1. Learn more about your family history. Reach out to members who come across as open and honest and more alive than dead, more present than absent.
2. Pay attention – to your dreams and day dreaming, your emotional ups and downs, what you project onto others that you don't want to see in yourself, and what's going on in your body. Our bodies carry our history and what's been passed on by our family and ancestors (and what we're passing on to others).
3. Be childlike, playful, and curious. Pause and just be in the moment. Let go of what you know and keep stepping into the unknown. Look at a friend or partner as if you are looking at him/her for the first time.
4. Stop whining and wallowing in your suffering. Do something. See a therapist. Try going through town bringing to others some joy, love, and gratitude for life – if when, especially when, the rumor in town is the world is coming to an end!
5. Breathe. You don't have to sit for hours in front of a blank wall. Sit down once in awhile, close your eyes, and listen to your breathing.
6. Pray. You don't have to be elegant. Just say thanks! Be right here, rooted to the ground you're standing on, but imagine the dirt under your feet is sacred; it's part of a vast, incomprehensible, mysterious reality that is alive in you, others and most likely everything.
7. Listen to what you're saying and what others are saying. Practice being real. Imagine what the other person speaking the words may actually be experiencing or feeling.
8. Serve and help others, but don't be a martyr; take care of your self and your needs as well.
Practice doing the above and other things you might want to do – and do them imperfectly. Fortunately, we'll never become as together, special and spectacular as our egos aspire to be. People who are not haunted by something, who "have it all together," are a bore.
We need to keep telling ourselves what the Master said to the Monk striving for perfection: "You're kind of perfect in your own imperfect way, but you still have a lot of work to do." WGW
Beauty and the Beast
BEFRIENDING WHAT WE FEAR
By Fred Richards and Anne C. Richards
The fairy tales that entertained and sometimes frightened us during childhood dealt with conflicts and characters offering insight into the promise and peril of growing up and becoming an adult. The multiplicity of characters – the dwarf, the trickster, the witch, the prince and princess, the healer and warrior, the innocent child and the crone – live within us. “We know them instinctively,” writes Jon Kabat-Zinn, “as aspects of our own psyche ... groping toward fulfillment.” They exist in us as dynamic energies we must befriend and work with “to grow and develop our true potential as full human beings, whether men or women.”
We’ve chosen the fairy tale “Beauty and the
Beast” (the original version, not the movie version) as one way of understanding the transformation of a selfsacrificing, self-effacing young woman into a risk-taking, confident, passionately alive adult. Beauty undergoes the passage into womanhood when finding the courage to integrate the opposites in her personality. She discovers and develops the capacity to remain open and accepting when confronting the painful, fearful, darker realities of life. She leaves home, finds her voice, learns to love without sacrificing her true self, and awakens more fully to the sensual, instinctual parts of her being. Beauty’s growing acceptance of life as it is, is not a matter of passive approval or resignation. Acceptance is attentive openness, choosing more and more to be present, to acknowledge, take in, receive what issues from without and within.
Beauty is the most beautiful, sweet child in her family. Unlike her self-indulgent and vain sisters, she is innocent and humble. Devoted to her father who has fallen on hard times, Beauty has no interest in leaving home and discovering a larger world. It’s fair to say, she’s reclusive and isolated, still a fragment of the woman she has the potential to become. When her father decides to shop for gifts for the children, Beauty wants only a single rose.
Searching for gifts, the father, lost and cold, seeks shelter and falls asleep in a grand house. Waking up, he discovers someone has replaced his torn garments with fine, new clothes. When he enters the home’s garden and picks roses for Beauty, he’s confronted by Beast who tells him he will soon die unless he agrees to bring one of his daughters to
This article originally published December 1, 2023.
take his place. Though frightening and ugly, Beast kindly gives the father money to buy gifts for his family.
Beauty, learning of her father’s predicament, is willing to go to the Beast and, if necessary, sacrifice herself to save her father. At this point, she’s a young woman for whom loving means sacrificing her life to take care of or rescue a man, a tragic omen of the relationships she may gravitate to in the future. Living with Beast, Beauty begins to look upon him as not just ugly, but also kind. Eventually, Beast proposes marriage, but Beauty declines. Having grown more fond of him and looking forward to his company, she also, missing her family, wants to visit her home. Beast is supportive, but tells her he knows he will die from sadness if she doesn’t return.
Returning to be with the Beast, Beauty finds him in the garden near death. She cries out that she loves him, and he, rising to his feet, is transformed into a tall, handsome prince. “Where is the Beast I learned to accept and love?” Beauty asks. “I am he,” Beast replies, telling her he was turned into an ugly Beast by a wicked witch who forbade him to reveal his true identity until a beautiful lady would love and agree to marry him. Unconditionally accepting Beast’s ugliness and seeing into his heart, Beauty breaks the witch’s spell and sets him free to be himself.
Psychologist Sheldon Kopp writes that Beauty’s acceptance of the Beast’s “ugly animal nature brings her beyond her own too-good-to-be-true, virginal ever-readiness to sacrifice her own longings.
Coming to terms with the primitive, untamed being of the Beast is equivalent to Beauty’s coming to terms with the powerful instinctual forces within herself. The result is she emerges as a flesh-andblood woman ....” Beauty is no longer just Daddy’s innocent “sweet, little girl.” She is becoming a woman empowered to take her place in the adult world. Her ability to face and love what she first found to be frightening and painful – embracing
Beast and the stirrings of her passion and sexuality –transforms both of them.
Kopp suggests Beast represents the denied “dark side” of Beauty, aspects of the personality her candy-sweet, goody-goodness exiles to the “not-me-self,” the threatening parts the ego experiences as too painful to bring into the light. These dark, repressed sides of us, Kopp insists, are not essentially bad or evil; what makes them beneficial or destructive is a consequence of the ego’s relationship to them. In other words, we’re more likely to become our authentic selves when we turn toward the experiences that cause us pain, when we face the truth that we are not as good or right or honest or as bad or wrong or fake as we may believe we are.
Everything, however, has its shadow – every tree, every stone, every one of us. Even Jesus, it is written, goes into the wilderness to encounter his own Shadow prior to beginning his ministry. The emergence of our true self begins when we meet our shadow self. We encounter the shadow when our conscious self is disrupted, thrown off balance by great confusion, doubt, loss, illness, failure, and all forms of dis-ease. Beauty works to find the ego strength to uncover and harness the healing energies in the unconscious. Those who seek to save their own life (think the defended, contracted ego), will lose it (Matthew 16:35). Clinging to our smallminded, small-hearted self, we lose the greater self we can become.
John Wellwood’s thoughts on “the healing power of unconditional presence” focus on how our addiction to avoiding the experiences that cause us pain, arrest our development and trap us in the amber of dis-ease and fear. Unconditional presence “means being present to what is, facing it as it is, without relying on any view or concept about it.” We betray our natural capacity to move toward wholeness and a fuller life by avoiding what scares us: our anger, grief, desire for love, vulnerability,
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sexuality, and so on. Learning in an abusive childhood that “love” is abandonment, betrayal, neglect or injury, we fear the intimacy we lack and long for. We contract and shut down to avoid the pain we were unable to heal when young.
Consequently, Wellwood writes, we establish an identity based on our learned desire to avoid much of life. We identify primarily with what makes us feel comfortable, safe and secure, with what validates the small, defended reality we live in. Like Beauty who feels no desire to leave the safety of home, we become a fraction of the person we have the potential to become. Most of who we are is stuffed out of sight in the long black bag poet Robert Bly encourages us to open.
Bly uses “the long bag we drag behind us“ as a metaphor for parts of our personality we learned early to exile to the unconscious. We arrive in the world a radiant globe of energy; by the time we’re 20, we are a mere slice of the persons we once were. Two persons, each fragments of a whole self, fall in love and together they don’t make one complete person! If most of who we are remains in the bag, we become a diminished version of who we have the potential to be; we begin to come alive when we open the bag and recover the lost aspects of ourselves. “We spend our life,” writes Bly, “until we’re 20 deciding what parts of ourself to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again.” Beauty, having encountered the Beast, is challenged to open the long bag she drags behind and retrieve the missing parts of who she is and can become. Once determined to run away from the world she feared, she is set free to run toward love and the fullness of life.
Wellwood’s good news is that our willingness to experience our pain, our psychological discomfort and dis-ease, means we are not entirely locked up in our fear-driven identity. “Thus,” says Wellwood, “in our pain is our healing.” Young women (and the rest of us as well), can’t think the way to wholeness, to feeling truly real and alive. They must wake up to what’s right here within and around them, befriend the aspects of themselves they are inclined to fear, love the “Beast” or wild, liberated woman within.
In “The Guest House” (translated by Coleman Barks), Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi tells us that we are “a guest house.” Every morning, every moment,
unexpected visitors arrive: a sorrow, a joy, a desire, a terror, a depression. Put out the welcome mat. Invite them in. Entertain them all! Even if pain and sorrow sweep your home empty, “treat each guest honorably.” He or she may be opening you up for some new insight, “some new delight.” Whoever arrives – the pain, the shame, the malice, the meanness, the fear – greet them laughing. They are guides arriving to help us become more human, more whole, more alive. As poet and psychologist Mark Kunkel tells us, “we cannot be anything until we are everything.” We are, it appears, saved by what is Other, by welcoming, as vital aspects of who we are, what we are inclined to reject and ignore.
Afraid of the world she imagines lies beyond the walls of her childhood home, beyond the fearbased identity she clings to, Beauty, like the Beast, is herself “cursed.” She’s cursed by her addiction to her thinking, by the fear confining her to a life of child-like innocence and powerlessness. What saves her for the living of a full life is, paradoxically, her neurosis; it is Beauty’s unhealthy willingness to sacrifice her present unlived life to save her father that actually propels her to leave home. Psychologist C.G. Jung brilliantly observed that, to become whole or well, we cannot bypass or go around our suffering. The path to our psychological wholeness leads in and through our neurosis, our struggle with the opposites in our psyche or soul.
Such is the paradox at the heart of our lives. It is the mysterious truth out of which fairy tales arise. It is the deep, natural urge toward self-realization or wholeness at the center of our human nature, what some theologians and mystics for centuries have experienced as the divine energy, the unconditional, inclusive love that uses our brokenness, our own fear and despair, to lead us toward what psychology calls wholeness and what religion calls holiness.
Young women, and all of us, would do well to look to Beauty to see what we need to access and nurture in ourselves: the courage, vulnerability and humility to accept who we are, to welcome into consciousness the multiplicity of selves and energies that dwell within us, to go in search of the Self, to wake up and discover that the love and true self we long to discover is who we’ve always had the potential to be. WGW
Kids Korner
Sassy School Bus
Materials
Paper plate
Black construction paper
School glue
Yellow marker or colored pencil
Scissors
By Jordan Dailey
Instructions
Cut a paper plate in half, and color it yellow. If using a marker, allow to dry.
Cut two large, round circles out of the black construction paper for the wheels.
Glue the two bus wheels to the cut end (bottom) of the paper plate.
Cut a strip from the black construction paper as long as the paper plate is horizontally.
Glue the strip in place as shown in photo.
Cut squares and triangles out of the black construction paper for the windows.
Glue bus windows to the paper plate.
Craft photos by Zachary Dailey
Perfect Pencil Holder
Materials
Toilet tissue rolls (7)
Scissors
Construction paper, various colors
Permanent marker
Googly eyes
Hot glue gun and glue sticks or school glue
Instructions
Cut about one to two inches off the top of three of the toilet tissue rolls.
Wrap the rolls in various colors of construction paper, and glue in place. Glue each of the rolls together as shown in the photo.
Cut seven feet for the caterpillar and glue in place.
Cut a face and antennae out of the construction paper and decorate as desired with the permanent marker.
Glue the googly eyes to the face.
Glue the face to the first toilet tissue roll.
Add pencils. WGW
Back-to-School Word Search
Word Bank
Educator
School Bus
Reading
Friends
Assignment
Playground
Workbooks
Study
Scissors
Recess
Math
Teaching
Football
Pencils
Exam
Desks
Kid-friendly. Parent-approved.
Tanner Urgent Care for Kids is now open! We’re designed just for kids, with all the Tanner services you know and trust — and the Tanner Health pediatricians you love, too.
So come see us. We’re here to help make your child’s injury or illness all better.
Even better: Skip the waiting room and save your child’s place in line. Just log into your child’s Tanner MyChart and tell us you’re On My Way.
Tanner Urgent Care for Kids is a full-service clinic. We’re convenient too, with:
• X-rays and splinting in clinic for broken bones
• Prescriptions available on-site, with the in-house dispensary or at Tanner Retail Pharmacy so you don’t have to make an extra stop
• In-house catheterization for UTIs or other concerns
• Treatment for everything from burns and scrapes to viral illnesses and upset stomach, along with sports physicals