The Ceiling in my Drink

Reflections on therapeutic issues

I just read a definition of shame as suggested by Georg Hegel which is that shame is anger about that which ought not to be.

I read an example in Commons, Demick and Goldberg's (1996) treatement of adult development. Here's the gist. As a parent we get angry at our children for endangering their lives and punish them when they get hurt (e.g. falling out of a tree we might speak harshly and say "Didn't I tell you not to climb in that tree!?"), and so the parent's anger and the child's guilt are the recipe for the emergence of shame. From the parent's perspective there is a shame about failing to protect his or her child. Rather than deal with these feelings of failure (or more potently: vulnerability), the parent lashes out at the child. The parent blames the child for the parent's uncomfortable (or unconscious) feelings. Anger keeps the parent out of touch with feelings of vulnerability (which the child probably feels after having fallen from the tree) and in the move from helplessness to blame the parent finds it difficult to respond empathetically with care & concern.

Challenge of Parenting in Community

I think that there is an enormous tension between parenting and communities. Parents need communities and the interpersonal or financial resources that they represent (ECFE, church, civic groups, school programs, support group, etc.), but at the same time it is extremely difficult to join communities that understand and want to commit to you and your kids. Communities have to have some kind of vested interest otherwise their interest will seem superficial and agenda-driven. Something along the lines of, "I'm interested in helping out with [some parental support function] because I want to learn about how to help kids to grow and develop" is a set up for failure. The reason is that this kind of idealism does not consider the challenges of whatever support has been offered, instead this kind of support is a tentative commitment which seems to involve meeting the need of the supporter in learning about a process. It could be with your kid or a kid in a textbook, either way the supporter may not be prepared to make the kinds of sacrifices required to REALLY support the parenting process. A vested community knows that commitment to kids and their parents involves challenging and exhausting interactions. Every experience with kids look different. A simple trip to the grocery store is a now the journey of Odysseus! A conversation at a party now becomes one part genuine interest in what the other adult wants to talk about and one part keeping-an-eye-on-the-kid. Parties are no longer exciting and refreshing, because they leave parents frustrated socially and disillusioned from trying to do too much at once.

I think the only way that communities can offer the kinds of support and resources that parents really need is to think like a parent and to have nearly the level of commitment that a parent has.

Pick 'n Choose

I was in a focus group this week of other fathers in our family social science PhD program and a theme emerged that I think is irresistably bloggable! There is a supreme irony of being in a top-notch graduate program which is both galling and thrilling: there are unlimited opportunities and yet time is extraordinarily finite. Extraordinarily, because any graduate project (i.e. paper, course assignment, assistantship, teaching opportunity) takes far more time than any previous level of academic pursuit AND FURTHERMORE there is a built-in tug-o-war that privileges family over optional academic pursuits. Of course, it is these "optional" pursuits that will end up defining our scholarly voice and area of research interest and expertise. Yet, there is a ever present tug between these pursuits and nurturing one's family life and relationships. And hell, this is a graduate program aimed directly at examining the dynamics of family life that are so central to this tug-o-war.

I suppose we could chalk it all up to a grand lesson in 'putting first things first' and learning how to prioritize. We could even reframe it as an opportunity to experience the kind of extraordinary growth that ONLY occurs when the pressure is intense and one's commitments and sense of integrity are challenged. I think there is a deeper issue at work in the lives of graduate students who experience this tumultuous inner conflict: grief and loss. We live in a culture that advocates 'doing whatever it takes' to climb to the top of the ladder and achieve excellence, however, this makes it difficult to live with the grief of knowing that ideal opportunities will be relinquished in favor of "higher" priorities. The reality is that sometimes these lost opportunities center around academics or clinical work (as in the MFT program) and sometimes these losses center around family. There are losses in every realm. Losses like this are probably experienced, to some degree, on a weekly basis.

We don't grow up learning how to grow and heal through these kinds of losses. Our culture doesn't dwell on this phenomenon. That is why this pressure that students experience is so extraordinary. There is no template for how to cope with this kind of grief. It's a kind of ambiguous loss, I think, and I bet it takes a measurable toll on the quality of work students submit, as well as the type of relationships that are nurtured interpersonally.

My reflection on this makes me think that we spend too little time naming this kind of loss in our academic circles. The pressure is front and center and always a part of the family conversations and self-talk that help us navigate the process, but the sense of loss and associated grief is outside the conscious periphery. I don't have any solutions, but I imagine that community is one way of helping to process these experiences. When students and families come together to describe their experience and process there is a sense of solidarity and support that tends to emerge. Even when this kind of community is informal or transient. Community not only offers normalizing support for students, but it offers spouses or partners or family members a chance to see their connection to a wider network of pressured fathers/students just trying to navigate their way through a time of enormous potential. Community.

Academia's Culture of Criticism: Vicarious Relationship Impact

** How to balance the developing need to think critically about research and what others' have researched with an active affirming viewpoint that as equally discipline to identify "helpful intuitions" that research has contributed.

** The power of affective attunement to the person of the researcher as opposed to focusing primarily on the paper of the researcher. This is a postmodern sensibility that doesn't pretend to adopt a perspective of objectivity; instead, this heightens the awareness that one's critique always involve a personal researcher who has a context and background that should be considered in appropriate ways.

** How to integrate the person of the therapist into research academic environments and interpersonal relationships.

** Therapists have a parallel delimma in developing the skill of being "emotionally present" for clients, but then not transporting those same capacities of affective attunement into personal relationships. Is there an ethical mandate behind the onus to integrate one's emotional "skills" with one's interpersonal relationships?

A Serious Work - Life Issue

Self-Torture Pockets

It shouldn't surprise me, but every time I'm in a hurry and I have to dig into my pockets to get my keys I refuse to take my gloves off. Somehow I repeatedly convince myself that I can retrieve my keys without removing my glove. This happens every time. I'm loathe to expose my hand to the bitter chill, so I leave my gloves on and stubbornly dig a finger or two into my pocket in hopes of excavating the loot, but it never works. Oh, I get a finger or two to touch the keys, but that's just a finger tease. As soon as I attempt to plunge my entire gloved hand in for the job I am met with an unwelcoming pocket opening. I think maybe once I accomplished this maddening feat and so I subconsciously feel compelled to repeat that past success. But it hasn't happened in a long, long time and I keep trying.
Am I just a thoughtless creature of stubborn habits? Am I overly optimistic? Am I painfully scared of a little cold air?
Sometimes I am just mind-boggling to myself.

General College Diversity

Just a few incomplete thoughts about the General College issue. What I don't understand is how diversity can possibly be sustained if the GC is assimilated into other colleges. Just as a person of color both is distinctively different and yet shares commonalities, so too the GC is distinctive in its approach to usher in a class of students who might otherwise miss out on education at the U and yet the GC shares many of the same educational objectives as other colleges. In fact, it has developed an expertise, as I understand it, in helping nurture the kind of learning that more elite students--masters of the white linear educational system--are a step up on. If we take a "Wholes approach" (see Hanson, B.G., 1995) to diversity at the U, we have to consider the entire education system.

]]> Our whole current education system is biased in favor of those abstract, linear-thinking, time-controlled & regimented, English-based, performance-oriented, and Euro/Western-based (foundationally) personalities. In a word: the privileged whites. School systems aside, Edina high school kids will fare better than Roosevelt High students in general because they're oriented & trained to succeed in that kind of system. Roosevelt students come from ethically diverse backgrounds and from lower to middle class families. As a group they are disadvantaged. Consider the environmental impact of trying to study in a neighborhood with frequent crimes or bullying. Not to mention a billion other obstacles that Edina students--in general--are protected from. Now picture those Roosevelt students excelling in the mainstream of the U!

My beef is that disadvantaged students need a leg up to help level the playing field. They have a steeper learning curve to be able to think or perform in a way that the mainstream curriculum demands. Now, this isn't to say that they should be coddled or given a Cliff Notes education. Intrinsically they are often just as bright as other privileged students, but they have hurdles that they need to surmont first. Some students of color, for instance, may devalue individual ambition or achievement in favor of maintaing their relationship and loyalty to the group. That kind of personality is not "wired" for a solo performance on a test covering abstract concepts that have never been experienced. How do you teach students to value an test that determines if you know anything? Or other students might need to learn how to manage their time in a way that conforms to the framework of higher education. Well, no one's going to help them "learn" this in the mainstream, but the GC profs integrate this kind of 'process learning' along with the 'content learning.' In my opinion that is helping those students to learn how to learn, so that they will be better equipped to compete in the mainstream. Often, they take courses both at the GC and at another college...that's not educating in isolation--it's systemic integration of both process and content.

Disadvantaged students don't need the "chance" to prove they can learn & succeed, they need the tools in order to gradually seize that "chance."

That's where I'm at right now on this.

trinitarian metaphor of Husband-Wife-and the new "Boss"

I wanted to show the contrast between my son, my wife and I a few days ago. Of course, we are all human becomings and so I know that someday (probably too soon) this photo will seem like a distant memory. xx xx

Gavyn Elliot is a most welcome addition to our family, and I'm sure he'll be the source of much self-differentiation in the years to come! xx x x

trinitarian metaphor for God-world relationship

Theistic proponents of evolution have developed many ways to conceive of how God and the world can be compatible in a dynamic processual relationship. Panentheism is the idea that the world/universe is contained in God, but--unlike pantheism where the two are equally correlated--God is more expansive than the world. This is consistent with the scriptural principle that all things exist in God and through the power of God (from Acts 17:28) and yet this is consistent with the continuous emergence of life from patterns of complexity which the natural sciences have helped identify. Seems contradictory, I know...

]]> But the solution really falls within a more traditional model of the Trinity. Harold Morowitz describes the trinity is naturalistic terms. He says that for evolution to occur there must be "immanence, emergence and transcendence" which translates into the "origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of mind" (Clayton & Peacocke, 2004, p. 217).

Joseph Bracken thinks this naturalistic trinity can be described in terms of divine persons. To start, God the Father may be equivocated with the transcendent cosmic process of evolution. In Buber's terms, God the Father is the "I" in the I-Thou dialogical relationship within the Trinity. Bracken describes the Father "as the initiator both of the divine life within the Trinity and of the world of creation, in that the Father supplies divine initial aims to all created actual occasions to guide them in their individual acts of self-constitution and to group them into 'societies' according to a pregiven pattern or common element of form" (Clayton & Peacocke, 2004, p. 218). The role of the Son is one of responding to the Father's initiative, both in the divine life and in the union (or immanence) we have with the incarnate (or cosmic) Son. This frames the I-Thou relationship, while the Holy Spirit is the mediator between the Father and Son as "the one who effects the unity of the divine community" (p. 218). So, in the sense the complexity emerges in "new and higher unities among lower-level systems or societies of individual entities" (a reference to Whitehead's terminology), so the Holy Spirit sustains and promotes higher and evolving unities within creation and between the divine persons.

It would seem natural that a divine process like this would result in the sharing of the community of shared unities between subjects. Those subjects would evolve to higher levels of unity which would allow emergence to bring about life in all its complexity. This does help make sense of the distinction but interrelatedness of things such as living things (life) and living things which possess consciousness (mind). Otherwise, how do we explain the emergence of the high order function of self-reflexivity of humans within a 'natural' evolution of processes? I can subscribe to an interrelatedness, but there is an orderliness that draws boundaries between things, as well. So, just as two electrons on opposite sides of the universe impact--even alter--each other in some way (if we think in truly systemic ways), then the evolution of human consciousness is related to all emergent processes, but is not the equivalent of them; there is distinctiveness.

All of this is an attempt to get me started thinking in terms of how evolution and divine processes can be correlated...even in ways that are consistent with scriptural assertions. This seems a bit impossible at the moment, but I'm going to keep unraveling these disparate threads.

iTunes to blame for musical boredom?

It seems wholly insance, but true-iTunes breeds boredom. I'm not sure I can prove this, but I can slurp up a mouthful of anecdotes that meet the criteria, I think. I'll start with my own observation mere moments ago. While at my computer, I stole a look at several pile of CD's, perched in precarious Jenga-like mounds around my room. The CD's are still recovering from a volcanic surge of ripping that occurred once Tena and I had our first child. I had some extra time (note: I made some extra time) so that I could finally achieve the iTunes dream and have my entire CD collection stashed away on my computer and, subsequently, to my iPod. Well, I still have fully 1/4 of my collection to go, but I still have 9 days, 6 hours, 41 minutes and 37 seconds worth of musical deelight....And yet...

]]> when I scan the titles of my discarded CD's leftovers, I am surprised that nothing seems inviting. Nothing. How bizarre...especially since I've been wanting the ability to play a CD without the hassle of lifting a finger (I at least have a 5 CD changer), but with iTunes I barely have to lift a finger and I can play any guitar riff of any song of any CD that I own...it's (almost) all there, just waiting for me. And yet, there is something stunningly boring about having that which I have always desired...

Rather than wonder about this lack of contentment, the strange thing is that my brain's response to this absurdity is to suggest a solution. Guess what kind of long-term, second-order permanent solution my brain conjured. Yup, you guessed it...buy more CD's. Well, that's about as much evidence as I need to see my 'greening' capitalist spirit within.

Contentment with life has got a chance...although IF I had that plasma TV I always wanted....

What's with the BLOGGIN' title?

One day I was sitting at my desk in Student Services and I heard a loud clump above my head. I was a little irritated, but otherwise I chalked it up as another temptation to simmer in distraction. After a few seconds another thud sounded, this time reverberating the ceiling enough that there was the ubiquitious noise of a shower of falling particles....

I quickly covered my head in fear that the world was truly at its midnight hour and I didn't want any more ceiling dandruff in my scalp. I deduced that some klutz on the second floor was trying to hopelessly carry something large in a manner that shook all creation! One final stomp above me and I noticed that the placid surface of my coffee suddenly quivered. "THAT IS IT," I cursed, "I'm not putting up with this any longer!" My co-worker chortled as I carried my coffee away to be mercifully disposed of (it wasn't really the kind of coffee that deserves a burial...I think CHE was trying to cut the budget when they hired this coffee service)! Anyway, when I returned with a piping new brew, I placed a contraption of two interlocking post-it notes, taped together, and form fitting to a circular circumference, over the top of my newly filled coffee mug. NO CEILING WAS GOING TO SPOIL MY DRINK!

And I must admit that my entire assistantship life has no revolved around maintain a proper covering for any drink that I entertain myself with.

It occurred to me, the other day, that there is a lovely metaphor hidden in this experience somewhere. For, in my crusade to prevent the ceiling in my drink, I had discovered that my drink is directly linked to the ceiling. The reason, isn't the physical proximity or the falling rubbish, it's me. I connect the two disparate things. It is I who give meaning to their connection...as my co-worker can readily attest...it is I who make a big freakin' deal of it!

This is how it is with epistemology and ontology. It is the meaning given to the relationship that goes between those things that is significant. This is the jist of AN idea behind an article written by James W. Maddock in Family Social Science [paraphrase & coffee mine]. There is a "relationship of meaning" correlated between "the act of knowing and the structures of reality" (Maddock, 1993, p. 139). This isn't exactly the example he uses, since epistemology deals with human knowing and ontology deals with that which is knowable about reality (or the process of reality), but the ceiling in my drink reminds me of the meaning I create every time I hear a THUD above my head.