Trauma & Art

What I’ve been up to…..                                                Edited February 21st

“In every human existence, we are telling the history of a people.” Natalie Goldberg

“What space and freedom, a chance to let go and not be frozen in history. This was immense, compassionate, and simple.”  Natalie Goldberg

“For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role— their own peers….” Gordon Neufeld, PhD & Gabor Maté, MD

“I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing” From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

At the beginning of the year I formed the intention to complete most of the books I had not quite finished reading last year before purchasing any new ones. The reason I had not completed many of the books was time and necessity, and also, the fact that I was simultaneously reading relevant articles and things online. I had read parts relevant to what I was writing about in posts or related to topics otherwise salient for me at the time.  However, my reading has been somewhat slow these last two months because I have been engaging with art (long hours on end). You can see eleven new pictures at the Artwork 4 – Ink and pen drawings section of my site.

So I’ve kind of organized everything around my art activities. But I have managed to do some reading. I’ve returned to Eliza Reid’s book, Secrets of the Sprakkar. As I was reading her book I couldn’t help myself from making comparisons. In Greece there are things that the state provides like some level of free health care, free education, pensions (paying for these services throughout one’s working life is obligatory for all employees and employers in Greece), and there are now laws in place related to parental leaves for both parents for those working in the public and private sector, but not for freelancers even though they too pay contributions and taxes. Τhere is definitely room for many more quantitative and qualitative changes, especially if you consider that the population decline in Greece is one of the most severe in the world (2017). Greece’s demographic woes are getting worse every year as it shrinks, ages, and migrates. On the contrary, Iceland’s fertility rate is one of the highest in Europe.

Early on in the book Reid writes she has had the privilege of enjoying what it’s like to be a woman living in arguably the world’s most gender-equal country. A considerable part of the book is related to family, parenthood and motherhood in Iceland. She writes: “Families are the basis for a functional, prosperous society. To make it all work, we all need help. Free, regular, midwife-led prenatal care, generous paid parental leave for everyone, and subsidized, high-quality, accessible child care all provide a societal skeleton for what families work through together and level the playing field so people of all backgrounds and circumstances have more equal opportunities….. Finland’s day care is free from the age of eight months. Swedish day care facilities are open for at least twelve hours on weekdays and in some cases are available twenty-four hours a day…… The freedom of not letting finances be the primary driver for whether to have more children. The confidence in knowing that from womb through to childhood and beyond, a supportive healthcare system is in place.”

In relation to parental leave Reid describes her personal experience; ‘My husband and I each took several months of parental leave, during which we received payments from the government. When we returned to work full-time, our children were first cared for by a licensed child minder and then at a preschool a five-minute walk from our house, both of which were heavily subsidized by the city of Reykjavík. With these supportive systems in place, we didn’t need to prioritize financial considerations when deciding the size of our family.” Another factor she highlights is the importance of a caring community: “Each community is strong and supportive as its own unique neighborhood, yet like Russian dolls, each also belongs inside a larger region where it equally has a place. At every level, these communities form part of the web of familial support, but it’s often the smallest, closest knit one that a mother may expect her child to return to…… Regular extended family gatherings are woven into the fabric of Icelandic society.”

I also reflected back on my own experience as a working mom decades ago. One memory that kind of reflects or summarizes the pressures and dilemmas of my own experience as a working mother, first as an employee and then as an entrepreneur, is the following incident. It was during the early years of my running my own school and working long hours as a language teacher. My husband was on a work related trip and I had left my young son at home with a babysitter. And then I received a phone call that made my heart skip a beat or two. She phoned to tell me that they were at the local hospital because he had fallen and cut his chin badly, and that he was okay and was having his wound stitched, and whether I would be able to go to the hospital. My heart sank. I could neither leave young kids unattended nor send them home before their parents picked them up, and there were more on their way – some on their own, which I could not contact. I could not risk putting them at risk. It was not a shop I could just shut and leave. On the other hand, every fiber of my being was screaming at me to be with my child, understand what had happed. I had classes till late in the evening. I was composed and efficient on the outside and feeling my little son’s stitches as my own on the inside. When I finally got home it was late, past his bedtime. I found him waiting for me with his baby sitter and her husband. He was very brave and told me the stitches didn’t hurt. By the time I put myself to bed my body felt stressed and exhausted from overwork, worry and all the conflicting feelings I had to grapple with throughout the day.

Talking about stress I will return to Dana Becker’s book, which as I mentioned in the previous post explores the current “stress” discourse”.  She suggests that the discourse of stress (women’s in particular) attempts to address things by locating the problems within a medical and psychological context rather than in the sociopolitical domain. She claims that “professionalization of social problems rendered them more readily isolable and controllable, placing all domains of living under the professional’s authority and helping to maintain the societal status quo. The culture of professionalism also reinforced individualism by deracinating social causes from social problems in the interest of science; the social system could not be held responsible for life’s vicissitudes, nor could it be blamed for people’s “nerves.”

In the next post I might continue this thread bearing in mind some of the ideas in  the book that Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate have co-authored, Hold on to Your Children, another book I intend to finish reading, in which they discuss how society is out of touch with its parenting instincts, the negative impact on our children of peer orientation, the flat lining of culture and how as parents and teachers we can reassume our nature-appointed roles as the mentors and nurturers of our young, as the models and leaders to whom they look for guidance. They write that we need to give our children the freedom to be themselves in the context of loving acceptance— an acceptance that immature peers are unable to offer but one that we adults can and must provide.

They are informed by realities in Canada and America, but a lot of their arguments are true to one degree or another for most of the so called Western societies and even globally. They write about a global peer culture. They begin by clarifying that “Parents haven’t changed— they haven’t become less competent or less devoted. The fundamental nature of children has also not changed— they haven’t become less dependent or more resistant. What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society. Even parent-child relationships that at the beginning are powerful and fully nurturing can become undermined as our children move out into a world that no longer appreciates or reinforces the attachment bond….. It is not a lack of love or of parenting know-how but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective.”

One more book I will refer to today is Natalie Goldberg’s memoir The Great Failure (2009), which is deeply informed by her identity as a writer, an American Jew and a Zen practitioner and teacher. In this narrative we witness her journey of integrating disappointments, hurt and pains with all the goodness and the loving. She touches upon many experiences across time and by the end of the book we have through her narrative also witnessed her reckoning with her family and the deaths of significant people in her life like her biological father and her Zen mentor. a well known spiritual figure. Her writing and meditation practice support her on this journey. She writes: Zen is about plunging oneself into the hot center of life and death. Nothing hidden, nothing not revealed. When there is a secret, the dharma can’t grow direct from the root. It has to twist itself looking for sun…….. I spent my thirties sitting still. At the age when others were investing their energy in building careers, a vast opportunity was presented to me— to meet my own mind and “to have kind consideration for all sentient beings every moment forever.” That was a big job Zen and Roshi proposed, probably an impossible one, but it offered me an enormous vision of human life, so different from the one I was brought up with.”

Psychological maturation involves understanding that human experience and humans themselves cannot be understood in purely black and white terms, which eventually allows for growth, healing and forgiveness to take place. Through her practice and facing the truths of life she seems to have reached a place of more understanding of the underlying causes of people’s actions, responses to situations and ways of being in the world, the social and historical circumstances that formed them, the impact of World War II and the intergenerational transmission of traumas. We read about the hard and painful work required on her part to integrate seemingly contradictory experiences and to overcome viewing herself and others through dichotomous black and white lens. She writes: “I’d felt as if I’d taken on the whole institution of fatherdom. Everything had been set in concrete, and I wanted to budge it…… I was learning something true and mean about the world. Rabbis, priests, parents, siblings, cousins, teachers— this was oppression, close up and personal. And insidious— it quietly ruled and ruined lives.”

I’ll also share a poem by the American poet of Chinese and German origin, Kimiko Hahn, which was written during the Covid period, Things That Are Changed—March, 2020:

A bandana. A cardinal. An apple  /   No. 2 lead pencil—the mechanical pencil, now empty—appears more vivid

A box of toothpicks—now that I’m baking bran muffin

Rubber gloves: that Playtex commercial “so flexible you can pick up a dime.” I tried once and it’s true. Thankfully, I have yellow rubber gloves—like those Mother wore. We never had a dishwasher. No, that was her, the dishwasher. Not even this gloomy daughter was assigned the chore. Though I did learn in Home Ec. to fill a basin with warm water and soap; wash glasses before the greasy dishes then silverware and finally pots and pans. Rinse. Air dry (“it’s more sanitary”). And I do.

Scissors: I cut up dish clothes to use as napkins. When I try sewing on the ancient Singer (1930?), the knee-lever doesn’t work so I abandon the hemming. Then hand stitch while listening to the news. I am grateful for a full spool of white thread.

Scissors: where once I used these to cut paper, now I use them for everything. Including hair. Father always directed us to use the right kind of scissors for the task—paper, cloth, hair. Had he lasted into his nineties, how would he have dealt with sequestering? With belligerence, no doubt.

Empty jar: I think to grow bean sprouts and look into ordering seeds. Back ordered until May 1.

Egg shells: should I start a mulch pile? Mother had a large empty milk carton by the sink where she’d add stuff to mulch. And now TV reports that because they are making every meal, Our mulch pile is so alive.

Sleeping Beauty, yes, that cocoon—

Moby Dick, The Tale of Genji, Anna Karenina—I left Emily Dickinson – Selected Poems edited by Helen Vendler in my office

Notebook: March 20, 2020

A student in Elmhurst cannot sleep for the constant ambulance sirens. She keeps her blinds drawn but sees on tv what is taking place a block away—bodies in body bags loaded onto an enormous truck. The governor calls this The Apex. And late last night, R called—”helicopters are hovering over the building!” She remembers the thrumming over our brownstone in Park Slope on 9/11. And just now I learn that religious people just blocks from her were amassing by the hundreds, refusing social distance. And I am full of rage. Some communities have begun to use drones to disperse people. The president states he has “complete power.” And I am filled with rage.

Binoculars: a cardinal     /    102.7°F       /     Puzzling

A neighbor goes out to pick up my prescription. I leave daffodils on the porch for him. I picked them with gloves on.

Finally, I will end with a podcast you might like to listen to by Sounds True with Dr. Melody T. McCloud, an obstetrician gynecologist and advocator within the medical field for Black women’s health. She talks about existing disparities, discrimination, who and what inspired her to become a doctor and what prejudices she faced on the way.

A couple of points made during the podcast:

“I think in the medical field, physicians even need to be more aware of these disparities. And it’s been reported across the board. When Blacks report to an emergency room, let’s say they’re having chest pain, their pain is not taken as seriously as other people. They may not be offered the same recommendation for lab tests or procedures to be done. And that’s been talked about a lot within the medical community…

So, when I was in a little debutantes ball, I didn’t put physician, I actually put that I wanted to be an obstetrician gynecologist. And that was a big step because my history teacher, I remember very clearly, and again, talking about things that people say that could leave an impact on your mind, I remember my history teacher—Joan Stacks was her name. She was the history teacher and the vice principal of my Catholic high school. I remember at the end of a PTA meeting that I was standing right there with my mother. She told my mother, “Make sure she takes typing because Black people don’t become doctors……

And then there’s the crab barrel syndrome….. I got to keep you down because I got to get up. I can’t have you go up because no, I’m going to crawl over you crabs in a barrel. And that can happen in any demographic, truly.”

PART TWO

The importance of context, situating knowledge and the bigger picture

“It was regarded as almost outside the proper interest of an analyst to give systematic attention to a person’s real experiences.” John Bowlby

“Until you are willing to be confused about what you already know, what you know will never grow bigger, better, or more useful.” Milton Erickson

“According to Foucault: The examination as the fixing, at once ritual and “scientific,” of individual differences, as the pinning down of each individual in his own particularity … clearly indicates the appearance of a new modality of power in which each individual receives as his status his own individuality, and in which he is linked by his status to the features, the measurements, the gaps, the “marks” that characterize him and make him a “case.” From The Myth of Empowerment by Dana Becker

My posts often reflect what I’ve been engaging with. Over these recent weeks I’ve managed to do some painting and drawing, and have also completed Dana Becker’s book, which I referred to in the previous post. So, in this post I thought I’d include some new drawings and continue the thread from the previous post in relation to the importance of contextualizing our own and others’ experience both in space and in time. I think Becker’s discussion is useful in increasing our discernment of social dynamics and discourse and the purposes they may serve. It’s not a long book but it’s packed with information, and I think that to some extent it contributes to making visible a bigger picture, and to clarifying the purpose that particular social discourse serves. As a result I intend to briefly present only some of the many salient points discussed in the book, as food for thought for anyone (myself included) interested. I’m also sharing a link to a talk by Rick Hanson that seems relevant to these topics.

As I’ve also been listening to audio story books and recordings by influential figures in psychology recently it has become salient how stories and discourse, research findings, theories, claims and ideas often reflect particular contexts and eras.  Some claims are universal and timeless in some sense, but other arguments and narratives might need to be updated, revised, expanded or critically re-evaluated. For instance, I had a look at an essay, a genogram and an accompanying narrative that I had written and constructed in 2011 as part of a Family Therapy Course and I realized how much I would do differently if I were to do the activities now, eleven plus years later.  My essays were situated, context and limitations taken into account, and probably well written because they had got me an A+ but since 2011, I have acquired some new knowledge and understanding, I have done a short genealogy course, have interacted with registry offices, have accumulated more experiences for better or worse, have meditated, have eroded some old conditioning, have grown older, and generally, more information has come my way.

In this sense, not all, but aspects of our narratives and written work needs to be situated in time and revised when required. These particular papers were basically informed by Murray Bowen’s theory [psychiatrist, and pioneering researcher of Family Systems Theory /1913-1990], whose systems approach and ideas I had found and still find valuable. However, to come back to the importance of situating human experience, theories included, family systems theory, for instance, has been critiqued for its assumption of universality and for not taking socio-economic conditions and cultural differences into account. Developmental theories for all their great contributions have also been critiqued. Becker writes: “the criticism that Jean Baker Miller, Carol Gilligan, and others have justifiably leveled at theories such as Erik Erikson’s that do not emphasize caring and interdependence as goals for human development throughout the life span…..” Theories are useful and can be of value over time, but as British psychologist, child psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, John Bowlby (1907-1990) notable for his interest in child development and his pioneering work in attachment theory, wrote: “All knowledge is conjectural and … science progresses through new theories coming to replace older ones when it becomes clear that a new theory is able to make sense of a greater circle of phenomena than are comprehended and explained by the older one and is able to predict new phenomena more accurately.”

In this post today I can only selectively refer to some of the points Becker makes because as I mentioned above the book is packed with concepts, historical facts, references and arguments. The central thread in the book, as the title connotes, is the empowerment of women or maybe not. Becker writes that what empowerment promises women is control over their lives; however, she explains when applied to women, it usually connotes nothing more than self-knowledge or self-improvement. She argues that power is not an increase in self-esteem, relational skills, or an improved ability to cope with or adapt to familial, social and societal expectations, although these, may be some of the aims of the therapeutic culture.  She further argues that personal change in the service of achieving personal goals, cannot furnish women, either collectively or individually, with power. She also critiques the wildly held beliefs of women’s strengths as being primarily relational and their needs as primarily personal.

She claims that the therapeutic culture could help to create a different awareness of ourselves and the world, an awareness that might promote social change. However, she writes: “although the therapeutic culture does create its subjects, it is not generally creating subjects who are directed toward changing the status quo.” In fact she says what the therapeutic culture offers women, is merely a type of compensatory power that supports and reproduces the existing societal power and gender arrangements by obviating the need for social action to change things, as women continue to perform the “emotion work” of society. Becker writes that history tells us that women’s interiority and their claim to moral and emotional influence, their “domestic individualism,” have always been championed by men, because privileging the inner world will be less likely to foment trouble outside it. She describes how since the nineteenth century, individualistic psychological and medical discourses have been the vehicles through which women have been defined, and which have masked the need for structural changes— social, political, economic— in the gendered arrangements that have dictated women’s roles and have, in many cases, reduced women’s struggles to purely personal problems.

She adds that it is important to understand the history and the legacy of the past because it is this heritage that shapes our own and therapists’ understanding of the “self” and its meanings. It is necessary to examine the notions about personhood— the self—that culture espouses and the forms of individualism in which ideas of the self are grounded. This she explains is important because understanding “the vision of the self that is endorsed by a particular culture opens the door, as perhaps no other knowledge does, to that system of meanings, because “as cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their bearers.” She cites Nikolas Rose who supports that “the self….. [results from] the social expectations targeted upon it, the social duties accorded it, the norms according to which it is judged, the pleasures and pains that entice and coerce it, the forms of self-inspection inculcated in it, the languages according to which it is spoken about and about which it learns to account for itself in thought and speech.

Becker reminds us how both women and men construct specific representations of themselves from the discourses that are available to them and are shaped by time, place, and gender. Gender she says is a way of structuring human experience socially, politically, economically, intellectually, and psychologically and women’s consciousness, like that of men, results to a great extent from their historical experience, the roles society has assigned to them, their relations with men, and  to prevailing socio-cultural discourses with which they have been invited to identify.

She also discusses how there is ample historical evidence that wrestling with the problems of the self is quite a modern preoccupation and that the emergence of consciousness of the self has much to do with what made the world modern and that centuries ago there was no distinction made between an internal and an external self, nor was the self understood, as it is now, as something abstract and also hidden. The self of the individual was viewed as the sum of their behaviors and public commitments, not, as today, the cause of these same phenomena and separate from them. She writes that it is not every culture that makes of self a noun, and the fact that our culture began to do so represented a historical change in the understanding of the self, which originated in the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly with Descartes, who believed that the individual had a unique, protected entrée into his own inner world and that for all the resistance to Descartes’ ideas from empiricist quarters, his perspective has continued to prevail in modern times. An important question to ask she writes is….for what purpose the distinction between inner and outer have permeated the culture?

Another discussion thread in the book is modern individualism, which she states has come to mean many things. She also clarifies that her critical stance in relation to individualism throughout this book is by no means suggesting either that the effects of individualism are altogether adverse or that individualism is monolithic. She writes:  “its power lies precisely in its ambiguity and plasticity,” in the ways its meanings can be put to quite different and even contradictory uses ….Individualism and collectivism, often assumed to oppose each other absolutely, actually have a dialectical relationship…… people in everyday life will go on, trying … to accommodate these two and imperfectly to reconcile the indispensable values which are inherent in them both.” She also talks about utilitarian individualism as embodied in the institution of a competitive, capitalist economy and how this is reflected in the therapeutic culture, and  expressive individualism, which emphasizes that emotions and self-expression, endorses autonomy, and which defines success in terms of the triumph of individual self-expression over societal repression, and is represented in such psychotherapy concepts as self-fulfillment and self-realization, and others,  in the tradition of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman.

She writes individualism was forged in response to the rule of monarchy and an oppressive class system, but there seem to be concerns that if left unchecked, a condition could arise with over emphasis on fulfillment through retreat into a private world apart from society, where people might imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands and the vital connections between public and private life are undermined. Becker writes; “…the private life of Americans provides little preparation for engagement in a public, political life that is essential for supporting democracy.” In relation to women what they have had to fear from individualism is an over-focus on the personal at the expense of the political; a search for the sources of their problems in the psyche that obscures their view of the social forces that frequently define those problems and prescribe their solutions. Power then need not be exercised from without because it is already being exercised by the individual on her (or himself), In the parts of the book devoted to “self-esteem” she writes self-esteem is only one among an array of technologies of selfhood…. a “state of esteem” is not arrived at through public acts and public talk; its foundation is an interior dialogue “between self and self.” From this perspective, Becker claims “freedom entails “slow, painstaking, and detailed work on our own subjective and personal realities, guided by an expert knowledge of the psyche.”

Another thread in the book is the “stress” discourse”, She suggests that the discourse of stress (women’s in particular) attempts to address things by locating the problems within a medical and psychological context rather than in the sociopolitical domain. She further claims that “professionalization of social problems such as poverty rendered them more readily isolable and controllable, placing all domains of living under the professional’s authority and helping to maintain the societal status quo. The culture of professionalism also reinforced individualism by deracinating social causes from social problems in the interest of science; the social system could not be held responsible for life’s vicissitudes, nor could it be blamed for people’s “nerves.””

She traces the evolution of this way of thinking to past movements and ideas. For instance, Mind Cure was helping people believe that the world outside themselves was not responsible for their miseries, but only how they viewed that world that had significance – their problems were in their minds. Becker writes: “today we might say that what mattered was how they “internalized” perceptions of the world.” She provides examples like the Alcoholics Anonymous, certain “human potential” movements and New Age philosophies, which she explains are the not-so-distant cousins of New Thought; the popular philosophy that emphasized the individual’s ability to fully control his or her own destiny, espoused on certain TV shows today and the rhetoric of codependency, and which to a great extent eschew altogether the virtues of interdependence— community, cooperation, compassion for others, delay of gratification. She writes about the mental hygiene movement in the 1920s and 1930s and suggests that from this perspective, personality was also shaped by the environment, but “environment” was now narrowly defined as the home, with a particular emphasis on the emotional climate in which childrearing took place.

Becker also critiques the idea of infinite possibilities and limitless opportunity that at least part of the self help and therapeutic industry are promising. She writes: “… the American love affair with infinite opportunity cloaks “an equally happy acceptance of normative social control….. For possibility and contentment may be sworn enemies. Pure potential and its despair combine to create the ideal late-capitalist perpetual-motion engine, with self-realization powering the drive train…… [For after all] if you don’t become all that you pretty much want, you’ve only your own indolence to blame.”

Topics like the feminist movement with it contradictions and differences, PTSD and women, caring and caretaking within the context of an individualistic culture, the reasons the practice of psychotherapy has been feminized, as women have become psychotherapy’s chief professional purveyors, the psychologization and medicaization of every day experiences and difficulties, “self-esteem” and the concept of “normal”, and how “hierarchical surveillance and normalizing judgment” became a means of exercising control and authority, and more, are discussed in the book. However, this post is already quite lengthy, so I will end here, and maybe I will return to a particular topic in some future post.

Meanwhile, I’d like to share a link: https://www.rickhanson.net/meditation-talk-privilege-what-we-dont-take-into-account-and-should/ for Rick Hanson’s talk on January 19^th, which I think relates to the above. The central theme is privilege, which he defines as not having to take something into account. Privilege he says is the result of three sources of status, standing and resources: luck for better or worse (e.g. to be born in an advantaged or disadvantaged situation, gene lottery, events and opportunities in life, e.g. being hit by a car at a green light or meeting someone who might open a door for you, which might be slammed shut for someone else, etc); virtuous effort (e.g. work, effort to learn, taking on of responsibility, perseverance, etc), and socio-economic structures that advantage some while disadvantaging others. He comments that privilege that accrues may disadvantage others, and also, that the societal field is tilted to advantage some by disadvantaging others. He provides several examples. For instance, he refers to the different responses people often encounter in medical settings. Some may be disrespected, patronized, their concerns dismissed, or they may not receive the deserved attention and help, and then there is also the fact that inequality plays a huge role in the agency and means that people have in relation to taking care of their health. He also provides examples of attribution error. More about this bias in my 6-3-2021 post: The Broken Ladder

He poses the following questions for reflection:

What are the systems of advantage and disadvantage that people have to take into account?

What do we need to take into account that others don’t, and what do others need to take into account that we don’t?