If science were a man, I would marry him, even though I’d know of his imperfections. While science needs to be met with awareness and wisdom to prevent harm, science has brought us unprecedented progress. Modern psychology is unthinkable without scientific study; all licensed therapists are obliged to be informed by it. While science is far from delivering all the answers, I am personally committed to abstain from stating anything blatantly incompatible with science.

However, any professional mental and physical healthcare provider knows from experience that some interventions, some of the time, work like magic. Sometimes, we must admit, we do not even know what exact intervention brought about a big change. People take quantum leaps when we least expect it without us being able to put our finger on it.

Right timing seems to be partially responsible for breakthroughs and spontaneous recoveries – just as in magic tricks. Some of us in the healing professions are more intuitive than others regarding these moments. A word or glance can touch the mind of another so profoundly that it grows exponentially. An empathic, kind relationship can open the door to a hidden resource that heals what seemed broken beyond repair. Other times, a thought, belief, story, movie scene, song or poem can move a person beyond expectations. It may all be explainable, but this doesn’t make the leap any less wondrous and wonderful. I humbly acknowledge that psychological change is often due to or enhanced by an unplanned, not yet identified or taught action or interaction. I humbly acknowledge that I welcome a little bit of magic that unfolds in the “in-between” of client-therapist, patient-doctor, writer-reader and friend-friend.

The placebo effect is an example of such magic. As of now, nearly all people have heard about this psychological mechanism that is sometimes used to help people self-heal. We often test a new medication or psychological approach by comparing it to a placebo, which may be a medication-free pill or a holding group that does not get subjected to defined interventions. We know that people often change for the better when they believe they are being treated with a special remedy, a new scientifically proven technique or when they are given special attention from a so-perceived authority.

What boggles my mind is that placebos can also work when they are exposed as such. They are called “open label” placebos. I have just learned about it -- my mind is still spinning. A professor in creative writing, Robert Anthony Siegel, suffered from writer’s block and anxiety.¹ He asked his friend to develop a placebo pill for his condition. They determined to design a yellow sugar capsule, packaged in an orange plastic container that comes with instructions and a high cost, that is more than $400,-. The idea was that it should resemble a very special, scientific treatment that causes high expectations. Even though Siegel knew that his capsule was not “for real,” he improved markedly and overcame his writer’s block. Belief in the placebo was therefore not of the essence. What?

His own explanation was that nature has made us not only beings of reason, but beings of imagination. What we imagine and want to imagine changes us profoundly and naturally all the time.

While I have living proof of this – I had only imagined that this placebo effect works and had my mind spinning -- I don’t believe that this explanation suffices. Siegel knew how to write before he took his “medication.” He not only had this skill, but also the expressed desire to overcome something he had clearly identified as problematic and quite the determination to do something about it. I think that we can imagine ourselves to lower anxiety and treat many symptoms, but that our magical change occurs in a context. We ought not to put all our eggs in one basket and believe in “The Secret” of attracting what we want. Instead, I think we ought to use all our potential: improve our skills, work on our will and determination, and soften our rigid minds within the context of caring relationships, with other people and with the All to which we belong.

The world is full of those who make empty promises about health and happiness. But really, “simplicity does not apply when it comes to happiness…Happiness is a complex path that becomes easy only as we walk it.”²

We all need a little miracle to leap forward. But only when we do our part and put the time, hard work and determination in as it relates to our imagined outcome, should we expect one. I imagine this is good news.

Sources:

1. https://misfortuneofknowing.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/writers-block-theres-a-pill-for-that/
2. A Unified Theory of Happiness, p. 24.

NOTE: If this post in any way “spoke” to you, and you believe in might to others also, please consider sending them its link. Moreover, if you you’d like to read other articles I’ve written for Psychology Today, click here.

© 2017 Andrea F. Polard, PsyD. All Rights Reserved.

----I invite readers to join me on Facebook and to follow my miscellaneous psychological and philosophical musings on Twitter.

Source: Mocha, CC-BY

Here is the latest of my short-short stories that are composites of real-life events with psychological or practical implications

.Harper was tired of Jack ignoring her.

When she wanted to discuss their sex life or lack thereof, he’d, at best, passively listen.

When Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, Harper was distraught. Jack shrugged his shoulders.

Most painful of all, when Harper showed him her latest artwork, a typical response would be, “That’s nice.” And he’d change the topic.

Slowly, the pressure in Harper’s balloon grew. Its dénouement was triggered by the conspiring of two events. She had finished what she believed was her best and most important painting ever—a chiaroscuro of Donald Trump that made him appear preternaturally evil. Yet Jack’s response was a mere, “Seems similar to something I saw before. I made a little progress today on my gene-edited cancer antigen.” That brought Harper's feeling ignored to critical mass and was pushed into fission by her having drunk too much champagne in celebrating her having completed the painting.

Harper retrieved the pistol she kept under her bed in case of an intruder and with unexpected calm, shot Jack in the face. He immediately collapsed, dead. Equally unexpected, unlike in the movies, Harper was not horrified by her act but rather merely felt relief, like what we feel when clicking “send’ to file our income tax return.

Harper coolly turned her attention to disposing of the body. Not having planned to kill him, she merely thought of what’s immediately expedient. She surveyed her house and decided to cut Jack up using his reciprocal saw and shove the parts down the garbage disposal.

She then called the police “worried” about where her husband was. The police scoured her house but Harper had been careful to destroy the evidence, down to flushing the disposal three times with vinegar and baking soda.

Of course, soon, friends, relatives, and colleagues frantically inquired if she had any news about Jack, and she tearfully said no.

While Harper had occasional flashes of remorse, her dominant feelings were of vindication and freedom. She pursued her painting as never before and even before Election Day, she had completed six paintings, each using chiaroscuro to portray Donald Trump in the worst light and Hillary Clinton in the best.

Harper then asked a friend who owned an art gallery if she could show her collection there. She called it “Hillary and 45” in honor of U.S. Representative Maxine Waters who refuses to call Donald Trump by his name let alone, “President Trump," but only “45.”

Harper's friend readily agreed. The showing was a hit and boosted Harper's art career as well as impressed her friends. “Remarkable that you were able to channel your grief into something so positive. Jack would have been so proud of you."

And all was fine until a few days later. At the junction between Harper’s house pipe and the sewer main, there was a backup. The city's sewer worker saw the source of the clog: a thick bone fragment had gotten caught in the sewer line and crud got attached to it, blocking the line. The worker thought, “That’s too large for a beef bone. Hey, could this be some kind of ancient animal?” So he took it to a museum where he was informed that it was recent human bone. He then showed it to the police, which reopened the investigation and led to Harper’s arrest.

The takeaway

If you were the judge at Harper's trial, are you inclined to find her not guilty by reason of insanity? Guilty? If the latter, what do you think a fair sentence would be?

Do you feel ignored by someone important? Is there anything constructive you should do about it? (No, don’t kill the person, please!)

Are you ignoring someone you should pay more attention to?

The 2nd edition of The Best of Marty Nemko is now available. You can reach career and personal coach Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net.

Daniele Mempin Meñez, a senior at the University of Washington and the first Filipina and Pacific Islander President of Associated Students of the University of Washington (ASUW), reflects on her experiences as Student Body President during a year of tremendous political, cultural, and societal turmoil.

Source: Daniele Mempin Menez. Taken by John Robyn Buenavista

“She only got elected because she’s a brown girl, right?"

“A diversity commission director becoming President? That just doesn’t happen. It shouldn’t. She won’t know what she’s doing. She hasn’t been on the Board of Directors before. She’s not even from this continent.”

“Those activists don’t know how to get anything done. That’s all they’re good for, yelling and screaming outside. Watch her take office and see what happens.”

“She’s not a real activist. She’s not one of us. She’s Filipino - she’s a model minority.”

The story below is a raw, honest account of my experience as Student Body President for the University of Washington in a year of tremendous political, cultural, and societal turmoil.

One of the first Western norms I discovered when I moved to continental America for college was the “How are you doing?” conversation starter followed by the automatic “I’m good, how are you?” After a while, it was ingrained in me too. I’m good. Even when I felt like I was deteriorating inside, I was good.

But in the last few months, I stopped saying it. Because I wasn’t good. I was so far from it. In May of 2016, I had just survived a traumatic experience: the most competitive ASUW elections cycle in history, filled with public scrutiny, forums & debates, hours of tabling, campaigning, UW policy research, and more. When I was elected, I was ecstatic. But as the first Filipina and Pacific Islander in this role, I also felt the weight of what was at stake. I was about to manage a $1.2 million nonprofit and represent 45,000 people. And I was so scared.

Because it was such a competitive and publicized election, I knew that all eyes would be on me as I took on this role. And some of them wanted to see me fail. As someone whose background was in activism and social justice, I didn’t fit the traditional “ASUW President” mold. I felt an especially strong pull to prove those people wrong, and to show the people who elected me that they didn’t make a mistake in doing so. Most importantly, I wanted to leave this office in a year knowing that I had given everything humanly possible to this work.

But a huge part of me was also naive. I had traveled 6,000 miles and moved here from a tiny island village in Guam & from rural rice fields in the Philippines. I spent 15 years in an extremist religious cult that oppressed women & taught me to stay silent. I was financially independent, working 2 jobs at a time to put myself through college, only seeing my family once a year. I had survived those things. So my pride thought that this ASUW thing couldn’t be that bad, right? I was so wrong.

“So what do you even do? Do you even do anything?”

For some reason, I thought that I could take 21 credits a quarter while working 30-40 hours a week.

I look at my Google Calendar for the week and I am overwhelmed. There are questions that go through my head like clockwork every hour, the only way I can keep myself in check.

From 8am to 2am, a million thoughts and emotions run through me as I run from meeting to class to meeting to class to event to meeting. In class, I fidget as I just now begin to process the intensive policies & issues I discussed 3 meetings ago. I can’t pay attention to the lesson plan we’re talking about. Am I doing enough? Am I letting this position get to my head? 10 new emails. My head is dizzy, scrambling to learn about billions of dollars in budgets and read 20-page reports on issues that will affect tens of thousands of people. Keep it together, Daniele. In minutes, I have to go into a room full of executives and speak on an issue I know next to nothing about, while they’ve spent careers working on it. “I don’t understand why the students are protesting this. You need to explain this to them.” 20 new emails. I walk back to my office and am bombarded by issues that came up in the hours I was gone. I forgot that while I was out in meetings, I left behind 65 employees and 23 entities. Keep it together, Daniele. “Why haven’t you replied to my email yet? Administration isn’t doing anything. Can’t you make them understand what students are feeling? You need to fight for us.”

30 new emails. Am I staying humble? Am I staying true to myself? 2 calls. One from a community member who’s furious I didn’t reply to their email yet. Another from a student who had a personal emergency come up. I missed both of their calls. Am I losing touch with students? Am I making sure they’re at the center of everything I do? In another meeting, I struggle to focus on the policy we’re discussing because I’m holding in tears. Tears that are trying to come out after a previous meeting with a student who told me that they were in an emotionally abusive relationship. “This is what I’m going through. Heck, call administration and tell them this isn’t okay. UW isn’t doing enough for me. This place is a living hell. I need you to do something about this, please.”

I finally get back to my office and close the door for 10 minutes. I just need to cry. I just need to let it all out. Don’t forget who you are, Daniele. Don’t forget what you ran on and why you ran. This is not about you. Suck it up, suck it up. So many students need you. I wipe the tears away, take a deep breath, and open the door. There are 3 students who’ve been waiting outside to talk to me.

The day is finally over. I’m exhausted. I feel like 10 years have gone by. I walk home and scroll through Instagram, feeling like I’ve missed the world turning while I’ve been at work. I see pictures from my dad’s birthday, which I missed. Another family event I can’t be there for. I wish I could hug my parents right now. Guam and the Philippines seem so far. I’m so tired. I don’t think I can do the homework that’s due tomorrow. I don’t want to reply to the 60 new emails that I got today, each with a different request and issue. But this is not about me. It is about students. The incredible peers I have the honor of serving. I can’t let them down. Everything is heavy. But it’s okay, Daniele. You can do this. Your community is relying on you. You’re good. You’re good. If anyone asks, you’re fine.

“How could you let Milo come here? It’s your fault that someone got shot.”

Source: Daniele Mempin Menez.

Being ASUW President has been one of the most isolating experiences of my life. In one space, I’m with administrators, often the only student in the room as I fight to uplift the voices of 45,000 of my peers. In another space, I’m with students, representing the “administrator” side because I’m the student who knows what’s going on behind the scenes. In every space, I always seem like the outsider.

I will never forget the summer before my term when my advisor told me to prepare for the unexpected. She recounted stories of Student Body Presidents who had detailed plans for the year, only to be hit sideways by realities like 9/11 and controversial presidential elections. I laughed and told her that we had nothing to worry about. I ended up serving as Student Body President in one of the most politically tumultuous, difficult years that UW has seen in decades.

I still remember the exact moment I found out that Donald Trump would be our next President. Or the day that Milo came to campus. Both took place later in the night after I got home from work. I got so many calls. Each from students who demanded that I step up and do something about this. “What are you going to do now that Trump is elected? Students don’t feel safe. You need to do something. You have to step up. If something bad happens, it’s all your fault.”

I cried for hours those nights. Not just because of Trump. But because it was in those moments that I realized that to so many people, I wasn’t Daniele. I was just the ASUW President. I didn’t feel safe, either. Did they forget that I too was a young woman of color in America? I haven’t processed this in my own mind yet, how could I possibly do something for 45,000 other people? I was doing all I could, but it never seemed like enough. I lost count of how many times I heard, “You don’t have the right to feel that anymore, you’re Student Body President. Stop complaining.”

It was as if this position had erased the fact that at my core - at the very essence of my being, I was just a 21 year-old Filipina struggling to survive in white spaces. I was just a college girl who wanted to go home and see her family, speak Tagalog again, and forget the rest of the world existed. Being a woman of color facing sexism, racism, and discrimination was exhausting. Trying to navigate through spaces that weren’t created for me.

The best part of this job has also been the hardest - talking to students.

Hearing their most intimate, personal stories as they recount their experiences: Getting denied from their major yet again. Failing a class they need to graduate. Facing the risk of being homeless tomorrow night. Not having enough money to eat. Sitting there as they cry in my office, ending the conversation with the same question, all the time. “What can you do about this? Please, do something about this. You’re the student who needs to fight for me.”

I’d get nightmares at night, almost as if I relived the stories I’d heard. The pain, anger, confusion, and fear. Even when I closed my eyes, I’d see it. I’d remember all of it. I didn’t know if it would ever go away. It hurt so much. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in cold sweat & tears, remembering deeply traumatic experiences that students shared with me hours before.

Whether I’m awake or asleep, the wheels are perpetually turning in my head. How can we save students money in this area? How can we make them feel safer here? If I advocate for this, will that end this problem? Is there another solution? Will this work? Will this help? I stay in my office until the early hours of the morning, studying issue after process after policy after story after.......only to open the door and realize that most students will never see it. The pain, work, and tears that it took to change this one policy or create this initiative, all for them. I get it, it’s okay. They don’t know. When something’s working, you never really see it. It’s only when it breaks down that you notice. It’s not their fault. It’s not like I didn’t say the same things about past student leaders.

But sometimes, it really does hurt. I’m fighting for them. Uplifting their voices in spaces where half of the people look at me like I’m a little kid. Or like I’m just the brown girl who got elected only because I am brown. And then going back out to the student body after 6 hours of meetings & hearing the very people you’re fighting for saying things like You’re not doing anything. Why hasn’t this changed yet? Yeah it’s great that you did this, but that’s not enough. I want this now. You’re not moving quickly enough. Trying to explain to my immigrant family, from 6,000 miles away, why I’ve lost so much weight. Why I’m so tired, why I’m working all the time. And hearing, “What is ASUW again? Is this even worth it? Will it get you a job after graduation? You should be a doctor or a lawyer.”

I needed help.

Source: Daniele Mempin Menez. Taken by John Robyn Buenavista

Throughout all of fall & winter quarter, I told myself that I was the strong, empowered woman who didn’t need help. I’m above seeing a professional. Here I was advocating for mental health access and awareness while neglecting my own in the process. Once I started being honest about how I was feeling, it helped me so much. I sought professional help and stopped acting like everything was okay. My external responsibilities & environment may not have changed, but internally, I was doing so much better.

Breaking down out of nowhere was no longer the norm. Now, all it takes is a conversation with a student to revitalize me, not stress me out. I realize, in a positive way, that this role is so much bigger than me. No one will ever truly understand or see all the work that I or other student leaders are doing. With each person I interact with, they’ll only see the tip of the iceberg. And that’s okay.

As my term winds down, I know that I have given everything I have, and everything that I am, to this role. 30 years from now, I will look back at this time in my life and still recognize it as one of the greatest years. I don’t know what my future will look like, but I know without a doubt that this experience has helped me grow enormously. This role has exposed every vulnerable part of me, poked at every possible insecurity, and unveiled every weakness. The past year has molded me into the type of leader I always wanted to be: self-aware and authentic. I have come into my own so much thanks to you, ASUW. And for that, I am forever grateful.

Somewhere out there, my successor is reading this. I am here for you. Always. When it’s 2 am in the morning and you’re alone in the office, you’ll feel like you’re drowning and like no one cares about you. I am here. I get it. It’s okay, it’s okay. Cry. Scream. Let it out. Seek professional help. You are valid, what you feel is valid - just because you are a young person in this enormous leadership role, it doesn’t mean that you aren’t allowed to feel and get hurt.

You are enough. Embrace who you are - the flaws, the insecurities, all of it. Once I did, I came into my own. It’s like I woke up and found “the leadership type” I was always looking for. It was me. The resilience, the courage, embedded and passed down from the community I had come from, the places I had lived in, the immigrant parents who had raised me. My “brown-ness” was not what was hindering me from succeeding in these white spaces. It was what saved me and helped me thrive. I did not need to suppress it. I needed to show it.

Being you - that in itself is resilience. Centuries of oppressors have tried to extinguish us. Let’s not do that to ourselves or to the others around us. Don't get caught up in activist or achievement Olympics. Let's celebrate each other first before we celebrate each other's resume & accomplishments. Stop with the “500+ LinkedIn connections” goal, the Fortune 500, the Harvard path. It’s okay if you’re on it, and it’s okay if you’re not. Just don’t let whether you’re on it or not define you.

I wrote this because I believe that is crucial for those in leadership - especially people of color - to be honest with their communities about what they’re going through. I’m not the “exceptional person of color” who can do it all, and I’m so tired of feeling like I should strive to be. Before I could be an effective changemaker, I needed to come to terms with who I was physically, mentally, emotionally. Once I recognized that I needed help - and sought that help - it redefined my year.

In a few weeks, my term will end and I’ll write another post detailing all of the positives - the amazing experiences that this role has given me. Thank you, UW. For electing me. For giving me this experience. For showing me, above all, how important it is to love myself, and people, for all that they are and aren’t.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Did you know that #1in4Huskies have been diagnosed with a mental illness? Let’s talk about how to take care of yourself, how to support a friend, and how to challenge the stigma surrounding mental illness. #1in4Huskies #StopTheStigma

DANIELE MEMPIN MEÑEZ, a senior at the University of Washington, is president of Associated Students of the University of Washington (ASUW). Meñez has a multicultural family background. She was born in Saipan, one of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, and lived in the Philippines until she was 4 years old before her family settled in Guam where she grew up.

Source: Patricia Prijatel

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress: The President's First Economic Report, January 8, 1947

In the land of Google, fear trumps kindness by a count of 465 million. That is, “kindness” pulls 145 million results on a Google search while “fear” is at 610 million. “Hatred” rates a meager 72 million. "Fear" is popular, rating in the top ten percent of words searched on Merriam-Webster.

The top results under “fear” primarily explain the word as an emotion; a transitive (expect with alarm) and intransitive (to be afraid or apprehensive) verb; and as a feeling that’s also called disambiguation. As in, “the United debacles have exacerbated my disambiguation of flying.” 

Google helps us translate the word into other languages, demonstrating that the Welsh must spend a lot of time looking over their shoulders because they have 86 variations of the verb form alone. The Russians have five nouns and four verbs for it. Make of that what you will.

Bible quotes on fear include verses found in many Christian religions including, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let you hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (John 14:27) To which I want to say, “Nice, God. But how do you DO that?” The one that matches my current mood is, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34)  Thanks for letting me off the hook about that tomorrow thing. Phew. Maybe I can sleep again.

As an acronym. FEAR can stand for 27 random things, including Forget Everything and Remember, an intriguing song by Ian Brown that never quite explains itself.

A compendium of Psychology Today blog posts about fear explain, among other things, how we’re defined by who we hate and how poetry can combat fear. And there's a movie called Fear, starring Mark Wahlberg and Reece Witherspoon. Mark's character has a dark side, and Reece's love of him turns into fear, the premise of roughly 2,568 movies.

In “Why We’re Living In An Age of Fear,” Rolling Stone writer Neil Strauss talks about the rush of anxiety from group polarization—if our friends are disambiguated, so are we.  And Marilynne Robinson, in an article succinctly titled, “Fear,” in the New York Review of Books, looks at the intersection of fear, Christianity, guns, and the Constitution:

When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. As Christians they risk the kind of harm to themselves to which the Bible applies adjectives like “everlasting.”

After that, we have 609.99 million more hits on the things we fear, including debt, heights, death, nitrates, China, long words, God, and one another. Discussions of fear, as well as its pull on us, as Robinson notes, are everlasting.

Source: Big Stock Images

"I'm so stressed out right now." We hear this often and may say it, too. A big meeting at work coming up, a dip in your bank account, and tension with your significant other can trigger feelings of nervousness. But sometimes this nervousness crosses over into anxiety, and sometimes anxiety crosses over into a full-blown disorder that hinders your life. Here are 5 things you need to know about anxiety.

1. Your body knows you're anxious, even if your brain doesn't

Sometimes we're not aware we have anxiety at all. But, even if your conscious mind doesn't recognize that you're anxious, your body does. Some physical symptoms of anxiety include muscle tension and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). If you feel muscle aches and frequently find yourself balling your fists and clenching and unclenching your jaw, or your stomach aches and you suffer from constipation or diarrhea, these may be signs of anxiety. A psychotherapist who specializes in mind-body work can help you bring your brain and body in sync and uncover what's causing your anxiety.

2. Anxiety can be a cover for anger

Anxiety is more acceptable in our culture than anger is. People fear anger but feel sympathetic toward those with anxiety. So sometimes people substitute anxiety for anger. The anxiety acts as a defense against admitting you're upset. You may fear that expressing your anger toward a parent or partner could lead to abandonment, so you hold it in. You're jumpy, your thoughts race, you're always worried and in constant motion. To figure out if your anxiety is a cover for anger, the next time you feel anxious, sit by yourself in a quiet place and explore your nervous feelings. Breathe and let your emotions rise and evolve. See if your worrying turns to anger. I discuss this technique in depth in my book, Mindful Anger.

3. Anxious around other people? It could be social anxiety

At home, your anxiety subsides. But when you're around other people or there's an event coming up where you'll have to interact with others or speak publically, your anxiety goes into overdrive. If you spend the week before a party thinking about every little thing that may happen, you avoid going at all or afterward you dwell on everything you said or did, you may have social anxiety. Symptoms of social anxiety include stomachaches, muscle aches, a sped up heart rate, and the feeling that everyone is watching and judging you. If you think you might have social anxiety, try meditating before you go out. Spend a few minutes breathing calmly and center yourself. Picture everything going perfectly. Whenever your mind drifts to worst-case scenarios, bring it back to an image of everything going well.

4. If your anxiousness never subsides, you may have Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Everyone feels anxious from time to time. It's typically in response to life events, and the unease goes away when the stressor does. But if you feel anxious all of the time in combination with symptoms like restlessness, difficulty concentrating, and insomnia for six months or more, you may have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. If your anxiety gets in the way of you living your life and makes you suffer, you should seek out a therapist or psychiatrist. In my work as a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, I work with many patients with anxiety issues that impede on their work and relationships.

5. Anxiety can turn into obsessive-compulsive disorder

Are you always dwelling on questions without clear answers? Should I stay with him or leave him? Should I take this job offer or keep the one I have? The answers to these questions are rarely black and white. If you can't handle uncertainty and your worrying seems to control you, you may not be just anxious; you may be obsessive. Obsessiveness becomes obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) when you turn to rituals to calm your mind. If you need to check the locks exactly five times before you leave the house and the checking makes you late for work, you may have OCD. Unwanted thoughts are another symptom. No matter how hard you try not to, your mind turns to distressing images. You can't stop picturing someone attacking you as you walk at night, so you spend a significant portion of your income on taxi or Uber rides everywhere, even when you don't have far to travel.

Nervousness can be perfectly normal and healthy, although unpleasant. But nervousness can also turn into a much bigger problem that affects your mind, your body, and your life. We can expect some anxiety in our lives, but when anxiety takes over, it's time to talk to a doctor or psychotherapist.

To learn more about anxiety and stress, please visit my website, sign up for my newsletter, and follow me on Facebook.

"But I was just one point away from an A!"

Source: The Collegefix

In this first post in a series on University life-hacks for professors and students, I address the question of the grade-grubbing email. 

I teach at a large, research intensive university.  Students in my undergraduate classes number in the hundreds. Each year as the fall and winter semesters draw to a close, I receive a flood of emails of the ‘grade-negotiating’ variety. 

"Hello Professor, 

I noticed that I am sitting at an 84 for my final grade, and wondered if you could look at my final exam again to see if I could earn an extra point to bring me up to an A, etc..." 

The volume of such emails, like those demanding special accommodations during the semester, has grown so large over the years as to become unmanageable. More than a time management problem, however, I am always faced with a tough ethical dilemma in knowing what to tell students, or in knowing how to say 'no'.  
 
Over the years (this is my eleventh year teaching university), I have come to adjust my teaching philosophy. Where I initially sought to cater to all possible learning needs, I now think it is equally important to invite students to discover different learning experiences.  Here is how I respond to the grade-grubbing email now, in a message addressed to the whole class: 

Dear students, 
 
In a large class like this one, I cannot do justice to each accommodation-seeking email. I would also like to explain to all of you why I do not want to do justice to each student’s request for accommodation, but rather work hard to ensure that learning is taking place for all of you. 
 
It’s always inspiring to see that students care about their success.  It gives me no pleasure to point out that it is not reasonable to write to your professor to ask for extra points or an alternative evaluation method after grades have been submitted.  In these cases, I try to put myself in the perspective of the many students (the vast majority in fact) who do not write to ask for extra points, even when they wish they had earned a higher grade. I wonder how these students think of their needs in relation to the needs of others, and I find myself feeling strong admiration and respect for these silent members of the class,
 
We talk a lot about perspective-taking, empathy, and compassion in my classes. Now I invite all of you to consider the perspectives and needs of all the students who do not ask for personal accommodations. I also encourage you to consider the perspective of those (like the TAs and myself) who have to design and manage a large learning environment and do their best to ensure fairness for all.
 
What I invite you all to consider most of all is that there is a difference between fairness for all and fairness for each.
 
It isn’t that long since I was a student myself, and I can remember the pressure and occasional frustration, but also the excitement and the many valuable lessons learned in and outside the classroom.   One of the important lessons it took me a very long time to learn is precisely that I had come to university to learn – that is to say, to be challenged, to be evaluated against the best standards, and not to simply to have my worldview and all my personal needs accommodated, or to be given a pass whenever I wanted one.  A lot is said these days on the need to reform the ‘impersonal’ nature of university classrooms.  On this, too, I have learned lessons that did not seem immediately obvious to me.  
 
Soon, some of you will find yourselves in upper-level seminars or graduate school mentoring environments where evaluation will be personalized and flexible, where you will get to know your professors better, and will get to choose what to learn based on your intrinsic motivation.  These are fantastic environments to be in, but I would like to suggest that one has to earn one’s way into these opportunities. This is why upper-level, smaller, more personalized university learning feels so amazing:  because we feel we have worked hard to get there.  There are many small liberal arts universities where personalized environments of this kind are available to students right away. These are great schools to go to, but large, research-intensive universities have something different to offer.
 
In choosing to come study here, and in earning the privilege to do so, students who take 200 and 300 level classes will not get personalized care.  What they will get instead is a vibrant community of international peers who came out of the world’s best schools, and professors who are leading experts in their field of research.
 
What I invite you to consider is that cultivating the virtues of empathy, compassion, and civility (but also resilience, flexibility, anti-fragility, openness, perseverance, and transcendence) requires, at some stage in one’s life, learning to function in large groups without putting our needs above those of others. Note that it is the learning of these virtues that must happen at some stage. These virtues are not limited to the classroom, and will require ongoing cultivation from moment to moment and context to context. There are many cultures in which the virtues of resilience, openness, and knowing one's place are encouraged from an early age.  I question the extent to which *our current school and university culture invites the cultivation of other-regarding and character-strengthening virtues (by *our, I mean a recent kind of individualist western culture that many of our students do not come from – these 'non-western' students, to venture a generalization, rarely if ever ask for accommodations).
 
The same holds in politics. In democratic societies, we all have the privilege and responsibility to be involved in public matters.  This does not – indeed cannot – mean that we have the right to full accommodation for whatever we deem important, whenever we want it.  If everyone calls their representative or MP everyday and expects an instant response and full personalized accommodation for their every need, the democratic system as it stands cannot work.   Having a broader-reaching input in public decisions can be achieved by taking the time to serve on public committees and working one's way up the ladder. It must also begin by convincing others that one is worthy of these higher responsibilities to begin with – what it takes, once more, is earning one’s way into spaces where broader-reaching decisions can be entrusted to those with specialized expertise and exceptional strengths of character.   If everyone speaks at the same time, no one is heard, and nothing is accomplished.
 
Now further consider what it takes to ensure high, but fair standards for validating and recognizing growth and learning in spaces that must invite students to learn how not be the center of attention.
 
The typical grade distribution in a 200-level class looks like this   The stakes to break into the 80 to 85% A- range are high, and they are even higher to break through that ceiling.  If all students who earn an 84 write to get their grade bumped up to an 85 (as many do), and if their request is granted each time, then the ceiling to earn an A will be lowered to 84.  At that point, students with an 83 will write to ask for a bump-up, and the ceiling will lower to 83, then 82, etc.  Once we get there, the evaluation system will not only be unmanageable, but also entirely meaningless. 
 
I do not welcome, and do not personally answer grade negotiation emails.
 
I do welcome, and do my best to answer emails and comments that speak to the questions on ethics, civility, and virtue I raise here.

Sincerely, 

Your professor. 
 
Montreal, May 1st, 2017.

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting a remarkable woman named Cherrie Adams at a retreat center in Queensland, Australia, called Welcome to the BIG House. Beautiful, effervescent, and warmhearted, Cherrie is a counselor and writer who lost her 26-year-old son, Christopher, to a malignant brain tumor in 2015, and shared her experience with such eloquence and courage that the rest of the class found ourselves speechless. When I asked participants to write about a transitional moment that had changed their lives, Cherrie -- a "loved wife and blessed mother to three sons" -- penned the following piece, which moved me so much that I wanted to share it, along with Cherrie's introduction to Christopher.  

"Affectionately as "Critter," our son Christopher was a fit, active, healthy 25- year-old when the source of his headaches and nausea was diagnosed as a malignant brain tumor. He was told he might expect to live years not decades; three to five years was the prognosis. He had surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, as well as taking steroids to reduce brain swelling and anti-seizure medication. He endured four brain surgeries, continued to work, travelled to Hong Kong, and went to the gym at least four times a week. 
During his illness he adopted the mantra, STRONG ENOUGH TO LIVE ("You are strong enough to live the life you were given"), and began fundraising for brain cancer research here in our native Adelaide (work we continue now that he's gone).  In the end, Christopher lived for only eleven months post-diagnosis; he was 26 and two months when he passed." 

This piece is a testament to a mother's love. I hope you enjoy it. 

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When Grief Came To Town

When grief first introduced herself to me, I was surprised. I didn't expect a personal visit at this stage of my life. In my naivete I had thought I would be older, more prepared, ready. I was not. She came in one calendar year, one I will never forget.

It felt like a day when you decide not to shower, or change out of your p j's, not brush your hair, or maybe even your teeth. Instead, you make coffee and toast and balance them on a tray back to bed. The curtains remain drawn and the radio is chattering away about, well you don't know what, because it's just white noise to fill in the gap between slumber and wakefulness.

On that day, you drop crumbs on the new doona cover, chat to a friend on the phone, check Facebook, pay some bills online and just laze around in your slothfulness; happily, blissfully unaware.

That is, of course, until the doorbell rings.

Frozen in your bed at 11 a.m., dishevilled and unwashed, you hold your breath, imagining whomever it is on the other side of the front door (five rooms way!), can hear you breathing.

Again, the doorbell calls to be attended, to be relieved of its single purpose in its static life, to announce that there is indeed, someone at the door. You remain still, a mannequin in a department store window, advertising designer bedding. Albeit, somewhat worse for wear.

Silence.

You manage a small breath to stop you from fainting. More silence. Phew! It's okay. Whoever it was has gone. Perhaps they have hastily written a note on the back of a shopping docket, or the torn off corner of an envelope and stuffed it under the door, or wedged it in the slats of the screen door. You are okay. Not found out to be lazy and unproductive.

Then you hear the unmistakable click of the side gate, the sound of sandals on the pavers and as the dog howls a welcome, you know categorically, that a "H-U-L-L-O are you there Cherrie?" will ring out at any minute.

Busted!

Unprepared and now naked, reaching for a towel as a prop for the shower you pretend you are about to enter.

That's the tableau that unfolded the year grief came to town.

She ambushed my life and chose to invade the days, weeks, months and years of unabashed ignorance. Sauntering into my comfortable life, she tweaked every perception I had of how grief and life were supposed to be. So began the methodical hacking and hijacking of my average life.

Grief came for twelve months and this is what she delivered to me:

I am standing next to my 90-year-old mother in a nursing home. She has Parkinson's and advanced dementia. I wipe off the spittle that has landed on my cheek as she hurls abuse and bodily fluids at me. She thinks I am here to hurt her. "NO," she screams, "you are NOT my daughter, I had sons, you are someone here to hurt me." I have become, in her confused and tortured mind, her tormentor. She bites and curses me. I am in shock. Where is my beautiful mumma? Where is the woman who loved me and gave me permission to get things wrong, and not judge me? What lies before me is her disease. It has hijacked the mother I knew and loved, and now is going to take her away from me, soon, very soon.

Before me is a doctor I have never met and who only met my 89-year-old dad three days ago. I see his mouth moving as he tells me my dad is dying. Lung cancer he says, caused by being exposed to asbestos 75 years earlier. The mouth of the doctor is animated, making complex shapes to form the words that are horror to my ears. His eyes, however, are fixed, focussed on something on the far wall, avoiding making eye contact with me.

"He's got maybe four months if he's lucky."

Lucky?

I know he is old and he is just another old bugger on a one way ticket to you, but he's my dad I want to scream!

Grief, however, is not done with me.

She is standing in the wings, patiently waiting to deliver her harshest blow.

"Your son may have three to five years at most"

These are the words that tumbled hesitantly, apologetically, from the beautiful mouth of my youngest son's neurosurgeon.

He got eleven months.

In that moment, and with those words, Grief stepped fully out from the shadows and into my bathrobe-clad life. I am not a crumb-dropping, coffee-spilling, hair-knotting person anymore. I have morphed. Daily I live with the remnants of my life before and after grief came to town. 

Today my world looks and feels different. I notice more.

I see my son in his father. I see the chiseled jaw of my dad; his build is reminiscent of my side of the family, strong and muscular; his oldest brother and he had the same one eye squint and dimples, and he and his other brother shared an energy and spirit that at times made them inseparable. When I look in the mirror, nestled between my laughter lines and the redness of my tears, I see his eyes smiling at me. We were alike. We are alike.

Grief lives with us now. It's okay. She has become someone we expect to share our lives with. Sometimes she is harder to bear than others.  Mostly  though, she just waits for us to feel her presence and then she slips back into the shadows, leaving us to imagine what might have been, but challenging us to live the life we have, fully, passionately and with love and gusto.

Our son Christopher " Critter" lived to this manta: 'You were given this Life because you are strong enough to live it."'

Yes we are.

Source: MarkThomas/Pixabay

A recent study done by Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law looked at the frequency with which United States Supreme Court Justices interrupted one another during oral arguments and how gender, political ideology and seniority factored in. Overall, the study concluded, regardless of ideology or seniority, female justices were interrupted about three times more often than their male counterparts.

An in-depth analysis of court proceedings transcripts from the 1990, 2002, and 2015 terms uncovered the disproportionate rate at which the women were interrupted or spoken over. To put things into perspective, during the 2015 term, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was interrupted by her male counterparts a total of 60 times, while Justice Antonin Scalia was interrupted only 19 times. This was one of many such examples.

Also interesting to note was that women on the Supreme Court spoke less than men during oral arguments but were still interrupted at markedly higher rates.

A 1975 study done at the University of California, Santa Barbara analyzed same-sex and cross-sex conversations within a college community, yielding similar results to the recent Northwestern study. Authors, Don Zimmerman and Candace West explained that micro-level interactions between the genders are microcosms for a much larger issue—society’s apparent gender-based hierarchy. “Just as male dominance is exhibited through male control of macro institutions in society, it is also exhibited through control of at least a part of one micro-institution.” They also noticed a resemblance of the male-female dynamic to that of the adult-child conversation, in which the dominant adult, who is clearly in power, speaks over the subservient child.

What’s sad is that the Zimmerman and West study was conducted over 40 years ago and, based on the Northwestern study, it appears not much has changed since—even in our nation’s highest courts.  

“In general, people interrupt people they see as inferior or having less power or prestige than they claim,” says Anne Wilson Schaef, PhD, DHL, New York Times best-selling author of Women’s Reality: An Emerging Female System in a White Male Society.“Many white men still believe it is their right and prerogative to define and control every aspect of the system, and that people who do not realize that are either stupid or worthless. It is not just a personal issue; it is a systems issue.”

Manterrupting, as it has been coined, wasn’t the only gender-based offense the Northwestern researchers highlighted. In 2002, they wrote, Justice Kennedy interrupted Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and “proceeded to ‘mansplain’ to a lawyer by explaining a question O’Connor had asked perfectly clearly.” The study describes several instances in which male justices interrupted female justices to mansplain, or “unnecessarily explain something to a female justice, or explain to a third party what a woman was ‘trying to say."

Source: GordonJohnson/Pixabay

Writer Liz Cookman attributes these behaviors to a deeply ingrained assumption that women are “too ignorant—their pretty little heads too full of boys and makeup, no doubt—to understand.” 

Since we know we can’t change systems without first changing ourselves, below are some suggestions offered by experts for how women can respond to manterrupting, mansplaining and other patronizing behaviors.

1. Prepare

Licensed psychologist and career coach Dr. Pei-Han Cheng specializes in helping women who experience “gender-based microaggressions” develop skills to effectively advocate for themselves. Cheng suggests keeping some useful responses in your back pocket. “Developing and practicing what you would like to say in advance can help you handle manterruption more effectively.” This can also be applied to mansplaining and other annoying gender-based behaviors.

2. Deflect

Psychologist Elizabeth Haines says women themselves need to be part of the deflection strategy. “Women need to learn how to deflect an interruption with phrases like ‘I’m not done’ or ‘Please let me finish’ instead of just yielding to the interrupter—which is too often the outcome. This is hard to do and takes practice, she says, but with time does become easier.

3. Assert and express

“DEAR MAN it!” suggests Cheng, referring to a skill taken from Dialectical Behavior Therapy. DEAR MAN is the acronym for:

D= Describe the facts
E= Express feelings
A= Assert your needs
R= Reinforce
M= Stay mindful
A= Appear confident
N= Negotiate

This technique helps people get their point across while asking for what they need in an effective and non-confrontational way. A woman taking this approach might say for example, “I notice you tend to interrupt me when I speak. I felt frustrated when you cut me off. I would like it if you could be more mindful and listen to me. I think the team would really benefit from the great ideas I share.”  The authors of the Northwestern study suggest, “Men need to recognize that this occurs in order to change their behaviors.”

4. Inquire

Eileen Scully, founder of The Rising Tides, an organization advocating for women in the workplace, suggests approaching the offender(s) privately and in a non-threatening way and asking for their help in solving the problem, saying, for example: “I’ve noticed that frequently you find it necessary to restate my point in meetings or talk over my statements. I’d like to understand why that happens, and what you think I can do to make myself heard in those situations so that doesn’t happen. Why do you think that happens to me and other women in our department/office/etc.?” This approach informs the offender that you are aware of the behavior and you are interested in solving it, as, she says, “many of them do not realize they are guilty because they are so accustomed to doing it and hearing others do it also.”

5.  Humor them

“Smart women understand men’s tendency toward aggression, accept it, and work with it,” says behavioral expert and author, Robert Weiss, LCSW, CSAT-S “Sometimes they let impatient and ‘important’ men (in the man’s mind) go first, giving themselves time to contemplate and strategize their moves. In this respect, letting the man have his say can be a power move—more so than fighting to be the first one heard.”

6. Apply the Golden Rule

In an interview with CBS, Heidi Moore, editor-in-chief of digital magazine Ladders, suggests that all women can learn from those on the court. “The female justices just keep talking instead of saying ‘Excuse me’ or ‘This is my time now’ or ‘I’m making a point.’ They just keep talking until they steamroll the interrupter.” In other words, treat the interrupters as they treat you. “A golden rule of sorts,” Moore says, “applied to balance the scales of a workplace conversation.”

“With time, female justices learn to stop using the female register,” noted the authors of the Northwestern study, “in particular by using framing words such as ‘May I ask,’ which primarily operates to give men an opportunity to interrupt.”

7. Find your allies

Cheng suggests finding your allies. “It’s important for women to establish their support network with people who can understand and validate their experiences of being manterrupted. Having a good ally means you have someone who can be a good bystander for you and say, ‘Hey, let her finish’, when you get interrupted. Or someone who comes to you to tell you, ‘It really sucks that you are treated that way. Is there anything I can do to help?’”

Haines suggests phrases that bystanders can direct at conversational hijackers, like “Hey, I want to hear what Michelle is saying; Michelle, please continue,” or “Wait a second, Michelle isn’t done speaking. Let her continue.”

“This strategy,” Haines says, “also helps reduce ‘bropropriation’ or a man’s repackaging a woman’s ideas or suggestions that were mentioned previously within the meeting. A bystander can call out bropropriation with phrases like, ‘Hey, Steve, your ideas are very similar to what Julie said.’ Calling out one person’s conversational missteps can make others less likely to interrupt as it creates a small social sanction—via vicarious social learning.”

8. Refuse to be a doormat

Weiss advises, “No matter what, women should not let themselves be intimidated by a man’s energy, forcefulness, or dynamism, no matter how much of those qualities he possesses. Women do not have be doormats, letting a man walk on them and their ideas just because the man is more aggressive.”

As long as we keep naming them, drawing attention to them, and challenging them, maybe these persistent attitudes will silently fall away. Until then, as Weiss suggests, “Pick your battles, be prepared, and keep your power.”

​This might sound like nothing new if you’ve kept up with the replication crisis, but I’m referring to a completely different issue – one that is all too often overlooked.

Let me introduce the problem with an example. In a recent article from The Conversation, researchers from the University of Queensland describe a study in which they observed families during hospital visits and measured the anxiety and distress of both parents and children. Measures of children’s anxiety and pain were positively associated with parents’ distress levels. The researchers interpret the role of the parents’ distress during the visit as causal, arguing that parents who are more anxious and distressed are less able to support their child during the procedure. This seems like a rather sensible and intuitive conclusion to draw; however, the researchers should have absolutely no confidence in doing so.

Anxiety sensitivity (i.e. how susceptible an individual is to feeling anxious, ranging from completely normal to pathologically desensitise/hypersensitive) is substantially genetic. In fact, nearly half of the variation (i.e. the differences between people in the population) in anxiety sensitivity is likely to be genetic. The researchers therefore have no way to distinguish whether the children are responding to their parents’ distress or simply share their anxious disposition for genetic reasons, or more likely some combination of the two.

In another instance, the New York Times published an article titled, ‘Yes, It’s Your Parents’ Fault’ in which they quote research from the last 50 years to argue that if you have intimacy problems then your parents are to blame because of their attachment behaviour. They’re right, just for the wrong reasons. Attachment styles are genetically conferred from parent to child meaning it’s just as likely the genes you have inherited from your parents as their behaviour that make you insecure as an adult. Consequently, genes confound any study correlating parents’ behaviour with their child’s attachment, even in adulthood, making this data essentially useless in understanding how parenting affects our development.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Sure, genes are important, but the environment is too and you’re not wrong. The problem is that without measuring the impact of genes first, it’s impossible to say how important the environment is, or even which bits of it are responsible (e.g. parents, school, diet, learning). This is because the genes that influence our parents’ behaviour, and therefore our environment, can be passed to us. We can inherit the same genes that make our parents aggressive, rash, or impulsive and the influence of these genes can be easily confused with the environment that we’re reared in. Without taking genes into account, it is impossible to determine if the environment is doing anything at all.

This is quite simply a problem of correlation being mistaken with causation.

For example, it was long thought that the absence of a father could cause daughters to become sexually promiscuous at an earlier age. However, using a genetically informative sample, researchers have now shown that the same genes that influence fathers’ tendency to leave the home also predispose their daughters’ to early promiscuity, perhaps via a trait like novelty seeking. Conversely, the influence of the family environment is far less important than previously thought.

Researchers are able to disentangle the relative contributions of genes and environment because of the natural experiment provided by identical and non-identical twin pairs. By comparing similarity between identical twins who share all the same genes and non-identical twins who only share on average 50% of their genes, scientists can model how important genes are for any given trait. If identical twins are more alike than non-identical twins, then genes may be important and researchers can use complex statistics to generate an estimate of the relative importance of genes and the environment.

Unfortunately this body of literature has been ignored by a lot of psychologists, particularly those favouring environmental explanations for behaviour, and consequently the history of the field is replete with examples of scientists erroneously attributing a causal role to parents’ behaviour.

One particularly damaging case comes from the 1940’s when Leo Kanner undertook a case study of 11 children with autism and noted that“one other fact stands out prominently. In the whole group, there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers.”  The frosty nature of the parents was later forwarded as a cause for their children’s disorder, a position that was furthered in several later papers from Kanner, and became widely accepted within the medical community. As a result, the phrase ‘refrigerator mother’ was coined as a label for parents of autistic children who suffered enormous stigma and were held responsible for their child’s disordered behaviour.

Similarly, the households of schizophrenics have been found to have higher expressed emotion and for a long time were presumed to have contributed to the formation of the disease.

Moreover, the behaviour of the parents of obese children is frequently claimed to cause the child’s weight gain.

Yet, autism spectrum disorder is highly heritable. Schizophrenia is highly heritable. Obesity is highly heritable. In fact, most traits ever studied are heritable to some degree, from intelligence to how religious you are. In all of these instances, genes need to be considered when making causal claims about correlated variables such parenting and children’s’ behaviour.

Now, none of this is to say that parenting doesn’t matter and you can mistreat children and they’ll turn out okay - far from it. The damaging effects of parental neglect and abuse are all too well established. 

The problem is that when it comes to human behaviour, scientists are studying the cumulative effects of genes and environment: neglecting one source of influence means that it’s impossible to quantify the impact of either. This produces results that are uninterpretable. It is as simple as that. This is bad science, and bad science is at best useless, and at worst dangerous, not to mention expensive. Moreover, any interventions that are developed off the back of such research are unfounded and likely to be unhelpful, if not harmful.

Perhaps the reluctance to acknowledge this position comes from a sense of resignation that the involvement of genes invokes. When people hear that genes have a causal role in establishing our character they assume this is shorthand for unchangeable or immutable. With the exception of a few rare and particularly cruel diseases this is not the case. We are not automatons programmed from birth by a few small molecules. The journey from genes to tissue is complex enough to have defied our understanding despite rigorous inquiry for hundreds of years – let alone the marvellously sophisticated transition from physiology to thoughts, words, and actions. Genes are not the codex by which the rich tapestry of human achievement can be demystified – they are but one constituent. Genes may be more important than other influences in establishing some traits, and less important for others, but at almost all levels they provide some guiding principle of organisation, small hands nudging here and there in confluence with the miasma of our lived experience. To assign them total responsibility and throw our hands in the air in defeat would be as futile an approach to understanding our history, and indeed our future, as denying them any role at all. The truth, as it is often want to, lies somewhere between the two. To the extent that we obfuscate this with wishful thinking or outright denial, we hamstring our potential to uncover the truth of the world around us.

There has been a great deal of discussion of the Republican promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare).  One of the sticking points in trying to replace it is how to handle pre-existing conditions. Most pre-existing conditions are chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, arthritis or diabetes or chronic mental disorders such as bipolar disorder. The Center for Disease Control reports that in 2012, almost half of all Americans suffered from at least one chronic disease and 26% of Americans 18 years or over suffered from a diagnosable mental disorder. That means more than half of all American families have a member who may either lose coverage or have their rates skyrocket if the Affordable Health Plan is replaced with a plan that does not guarantee coverage of pre-existing conditions at affordable premiums.

Source: Kamesh Vedula/unsplash.com

Offering insurance coverage to people with pre-existing conditions is very expensive for insurance companies—that’s why they don’t want to offer it. One of the most important features of the Affordable Care Act is that people with pre-existing conditions are guaranteed coverage and, to offset the cost, everyone else must buy insurance or pay a penalty. It is that pool of healthy people who offset the cost of insuring people with pre-existing conditions.

President Trump promises to take the federal government out of health care. But he also promises to keep premiums low for everyone, drop the requirement for people to buy insurance or pay a penalty AND cover people with pre-existing conditions at affordable rates. These things cannot be done together. If the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is dropped, insurance companies cannot afford to insure people with pre-existing conditions unless the government subsidizes it. If states are given a choice about subsidizing this high risk pool, many states will refuse.

Ironically, the people who voted for President Trump are the group most likely to suffer the consequences of any replacement of the Affordable Health Care Act that does not insure pre-existing conditions at affordable prices. Why? The burden of chronic disease is not shared equally. Although racial/ethnic disparities are well known, the combined influence of geographic and economic status is less well studied. (See:“Chronic Disease Disparities by County Economic Status and Metropolitan Classification, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, 2013,” Kate M. Shaw, PhD, Kristina A. Theis, PhD, Shannon Self-Brown, PhD, Douglas W. Roblin, PhD, and Lawrence Barker, PhD Prev Chronic Dis. 2016; 13: E119. Published online 2016 Sep 1).

President Trump’s strongest support is from nonmetropolitan, non-Hispanic whites, with less than a college education, and a household income of under $75,000. Shaw, et. al. found respondents in nonmetropolitan counties were significantly more likely to report chronic diseases and risk factors than were those in metropolitan counties. Differences between the most affluent and the poorest counties also varied by metropolitan classification. The largest percentage-point differences between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties were found for hypertension, arthritis, current smoking and body mass index classified as overweight or obese. Similarly, they found a strong association between county economic status and prevalence of chronic disease and associated risk factors. The prevalence of hypertension, arthritis, and poor health was lower as county economics improved.

Sadly, many of the people who screamed their approval when candidate Trump promised to "Repeal and Replace" Obamacare, did not realize the implications of that idea for their own lives. Many of them abhorred being mandated to buy health insurance, but did not understand that covering pre-existing conditions was inextricably linked to that mandate. They did not understand that covering a high-risk pool of people with pre-existing conditions necessitates offsetting them with low-risk people and forcing the latter group to buy health insurance despite being relatively healthy.

Source: Robert Goor

You introduce yourself to me, the solitary stranger in the cafeteria. You're just being friendly. In the course of conversation, you ask, "How many children do you have?" And you are slightly disconcerted when I hesitate. Don't I know how many children I have?

The answer, when it comes, is a shock. "I have three children, two living and one deceased." And now, what do you say? This is your unspoken question; I hear it in your uncomfortable shifting in your seat and the disappearance of your smile.

My 8-year-old son, Andrew, was hit by an SUV and killed in May of 1988. And the not-so-subtle message from our society to those of us who are grieving is, "Just get over it. It doesn't do any good to dwell on the past. I wish you could live in the present."

But we are changed forever by those we love in life and equally by their passing. And so, it has not, in fact, been a long time since Andrew died. The experience of that day 29 years ago lives timelessly in my heart. From then on, I was left to try to make sense of what defied reason, to accept what was unacceptable. Part of me knew that Andrew was gone, and yet another part reeled in disbelief — and still does. I often feel that I stand with one foot in each of two worlds, this living reality and the unknown beyond, mourning for two: Andrew and myself.

To avoid total emotional isolation, I sought companionship from trusted friends and group support from others who suffered losses. I learned that shared tears are far less salty than solitary ones and that open expression lessens the pain of grief. In telling our stories, we learned that we have more in common than we have differences. And, perhaps, most of all, we learned that we are not alone. I listened to others' stories, and I learned to care again — to allow someone new a place in my still fearful heart.

And I learned what truly endures in this uncertain existence: "It is a glimpse of play out an open window, a knowing smile at bedtime, a sleepy head resting on a shoulder, a sigh of contentment, a cheerful wave hello. It is a moment of warmth, a secret shared breathlessly, a casual glance that says nothing in particular, but says all. It is a quick impression, a flash of pride, a stolen hug, a silent tear. It is a thousand, thousand such moments, each of them a heartbeat, all of them a lifetime. It is what we were to each other. It is what we are to each other. It is all that happened. It is all that didn't."

I wrote those words to my son in one of many letters meant to keep our relationship alive and to help find myself again. Those letters have now been published as a book, called Dear Andrew.

Over the years, I have evolved so that my grief is no longer as raw as it once was. Rather, it has settled like a fluid in every cell in my body, and seeks balance with my every thought and movement.

"I'm all right now," I wrote to Andrew. Perhaps this is what it means to heal.

Still, your cafeteria question is not simple. Grief is not simple. And grievers are not living in the past, but in an eternal paradox where their loved one is both present and absent. It is a bittersweet state.

What can you say to me? This one phrase is safe and effective "Oh, I am so, so sorry." That's all, no more.

And, gratefully, I will say, "Thank you."

I would like to know, have you had similar experiences?  Does your sorrow feel welcome among the company you keep?

In the future, I will write about grief, but also about other topics – about living, learning and teaching, for example.  I look forward to our interactions.

[Bella’s intro: I think that Joan DelFattore is one of the most important new voices of single life. Her insights and wisdom have already been shared with “Living Single” readers in her guest post, “Why I’m single, then and now.” She has also written guest posts for me elsewhere, “In a hospital, friends are not people” and “It is time for singles to stop subsidizing couples.” This article she wrote for another site is also brilliant and so very important. Today, Joan shares with us her experiences talking to college students over the past several years. Thank-you, Joan!]

Confronting Singlism in the Psychology Classroom

By Joan DelFattore

"Did you always not want to get married?" The question, earnest if intriguingly convoluted, came from a tall young man at the back of the classroom. Not "Did you always want to live single?" but "Did you always not want to get married?"

For the last few years, I've been giving a guest lecture each semester in a health psychology course at the University of Delaware. At first, I focused on my experiences and feelings as a cancer patient, serving as an interactive case study for the students to practice on. Little by little, though, I started introducing problems specific to being a never-married woman with no children. I've written about some of those issues before -- like the time my friends couldn't find out how I was doing during an operation, although I'd signed the hospital's consent form authorizing the release of information to them, because they weren't immediate family. And then there was the oncolo­­gist at a prestigious cancer center who proposed to give me less than the optimal chemotherapy, assuming that without a husband and children, I couldn't possibly have the support necessary to handle strong drugs. As the semesters passed, and I learned more about singlism in medical care, I began telling the students about research documenting the breadth of the problem.

In its own small way, being encouraged to incorporate singles issues into a university psychology course is evidence of a gradual, but nonetheless noticeable, change in the field. Traditionally, psychological literature hasn't had much to say about single life, except to pathologize it by assuming that normal adulthood requires the presence of a romantic partner -- just as homosexuality was once defined as a disorder to be "cured." More recently, though, Bella DePaulo was not only invited to give a plenary address on single life at the 2016 American Psychological Association convention, but drew a standing-room-only crowd.

The psychology majors to whom I spoke, some of whom will probably go on to become practicing psychologists, were far more accepting of single life than earlier generations have been. Tales of discriminatory treatment aroused their indignation, and heads nodded vigorously as I referred to individual differences in the need for solitude and autonomy.

And yet. When that student asked his question, he didn't say, "Did you always want . . . ." but rather, "Did you always not want . . . ," implying that marriage is an affirmative state, a norm, whereas single life is merely its absence. The other students didn't appear to notice, as they presumably would have reacted to a similarly inverted description of race, gender, or sexual orientation. And you know what? I didn't notice, either. With my attention focused on teaching, I felt a fleeting ping of discomfort that made the question stick in my mind, but the significance of its phrasing didn't strike me until later. Even I, a singles advocate, am so used to hearing my lifestyle described as an absence -- as not-marriage -- that it took me a while to process what I'd heard.

That experience reminded me, yet again, that attitudes toward single life are not as simple as either/or: either judgmental or accepting, prejudiced or enlightened. Rather, they're a moving target reflecting an ongoing process of transition. Nonjudgmental as those psychology students may try to be, they -- like the rest of us -- can't help being influenced by the singlism that lingers in the culture as a whole, as evidenced by the unconscious use of language. But asked at their next class meeting for feedback on my talk, they declared it "inspiring" and described me, in the nicest possible way, as a "badass." Not so very long ago, a defense of single life would have been considered pathetic, with phrases like "attachment disorder" and "denial" freely tossed around. But "badass"? Now, that's what I call progress. 

Source: photo provided by Joan DelFattore

About the Author

Joan DelFattore is a professor emerita of English and legal studies at the University of Delaware. Her publications include three books with Yale University Press as well as dozens of articles, mostly about freedom of speech and religion.  Her current project is a memoir about being a lifelong single-by-choice, including dealing with singlism in medical care.

Metropolis: Rotwang creates a Machine Woman

Source: Coconut Cove/Flickr

In the future, robots may serve in a variety of support roles, such as home assistance, office support, nursing, childcare, education, and elder care. When we reach that point, people may share their personal lives with robots, which, in turn, may create long-term personal relationships in the mind of humans. Home robots, for example, could help humans with house chores; they could entertain them, teach them new skills, or encourage them to exercise. Robots may assist people with hobbies, such as carpentry or jewelry making, or help children with their homework and music lessons. In any of these roles, robots may be required to monitor the humans they interact with, and engage in supportive interactions.

For example, a robot serving in a care facility might provide support by listening to the experiences and memories of elderly people. The way a robot responds to the human's communication in such scenarios may have a profound effect on various personal and relationship outcomes, including the human's perception of the robot, the human's sense of support and security, the human's willingness to continue to interact with the robot, and the human’s overall well-being.

We know from Social Psychology research that perceiving another person as responsive to one's needs is inherent to the formation of emotional bonds. The partner’s perceived responsiveness, meaning their support and validation of one’s own emotional needs, benefits personal and relationship well-being because it signifies the belief that the other person can be counted on to reliably support us.¹ Unfortunately, the social skills displayed by many caregiving robots are not sufficiently effective in evoking the appropriate sense of responsiveness that is characteristic of human disclosure and well-being.² 

In a newly published research study,³ we explored whether implementing responsiveness cues in a robot would be compelling enough for these keys to human bonding to be also evident when interacting with an inanimate object. Specifically, we examined whether humans would be receptive to responsive support from a robot, using the robot as a safe haven in times of need and as a base for becoming more confident in a subsequent stressful interaction.

Travis, the robot used in the experiments

Source: Dr. Guy Hoffman

In two studies, participants told a personal event to a small desktop robot. For half the participants, the robot responded responsively, using gestures (maintaining a forward focus towards the participants, gently swaying back and forth to display animacy, and nodding affirmatively in response to human speech) and on-screen text using positively responsive speech acts (e.g., "You must have gone through a very difficult time"). The other half were interacting with an unresponsive robot, who looked “alive and listening” but did not respond with body language, and used very generic text to acknowledge that it was listening (“Please go on to the next part of your story”).

We found that people who interacted with a responsive robot (a) felt more positive about the robot; (b) had more desire to use the robot as a companion in stressful situations (e.g., visiting the dentist); and (c) their body language exhibited more approach behaviors towards the robot (e.g., leaning, smiling, and eye contact). We see this as signaling warmth and interest in close contact. Moreover, when participants had to undergo a stress-generating task (in our case: introducing oneself to potential romantic partners) after interacting with the robot, the participants who interacted with the responsive robot had improved self-perception. That is, a responsive robot made participants feel better about themselves, resulting in an enhanced perception of their value as potential mates in a subsequent self-presentation task.

Hence, people seem to find the “responsive” robot compelling and respond to it in ways in which they typically respond to social partners, for example, seeking the robot’s psychological proximity through their body language. In addition, people can leverage responsive social interactions with a robot to become more confident and appealing romantic partners. Overall, our study indicates that a responsive robot could be reassuring and compelling enough to build a sense of security that then leads to better functioning under threatening circumstances.

This post originally appeared on ScienceOfRelationships.com.

A few weeks ago, Idaho became the fifth state to authorize clinical psychologists to prescribe medications. As it stands today, New Mexico, Louisiana, Illinois, and Iowa also permit certain psychologists to prescribe medications to their patients. The prescriptive authority for psychologists is popularly referred to as "RxP."

Should psychologists be allowed to prescribe medications? On one hand, allowing psychologists to prescribe medications for mental disorders will improve access to a wide range of mental health services, particularly in poorly-served or rural areas, where psychiatrists are scarce. As American Psychological Association (APA) President Antonio Puente explains, "The need for prescribing psychologists in Idaho is clear. Wait times to see a psychiatrist in northern Idaho can be as long as a year, and are often two to three months in the Boise area, according to reports collected by the Idaho Psychological Association. What’s more, the suicide rate in Idaho is consistently among the highest in the country.” Furthermore, RxP legislation may decrease the cost to the patient because rather than seeking treatment from multiple providers (e.g. a psychologist for therapy and a psychiatrist or primary care provider for prescriptions), the patient will be able to consolidate to a single provider for their mental health needs. In addition, the Department of Defense Psychopharmacology Demonstration Project (PDP) successfully trained psychologists to prescribe psychotropic medications in military health situations with positive outcomes. 

On the other hand, psychologists may lack the medical training necessary to prescribe medications. Some argue that the medical knowledge and training attained in medical school and residency is essential to prescribing medications and effectively predicting potentially negative outcomes or complexities. While proponents of the RxP legislation respond by pointing to other prescribing non-physicians, such as podiatrists, dentists and nurse practitioners, all of these specialists have undergraduate and graduate degrees that concentrate in courses relevant to a medical background, whereas a majority of psychologists do not. Furthermore, the training required by the RxP legislation (typically, a master's degree) is significantly shorter than that required for a physician or a PDP.

While RxP states are still undoubtedly in the minority today, there appears to be an emerging trend in favor of the legislation. In addition to the five states that have passed RxP legislation, three states (Oregon, Hawaii, and Texas) have RxP legislation currently pending. 

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and not for the purpose of providing legal advice. You should contact your attorney to obtain advice with respect to any particular issue or problem. Use of and access to this blog or any of the e-mail links contained within the site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the author and the user or browser. The opinions expressed at or through this site are the opinions of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of any law firm, corporation, or Psychology Today.

One of the most difficult things I have ever had to do was to tell my mother that we were moving her to a nursing home. For my entire life, my mother had made it very clear to me that she never wanted to “end up” in a nursing home. I promised her that I would not let that happen and that she could stay with us until she died. In my mother’s 95th year, she fell, was hospitalized and declined rapidly. We sat vigil on several occasions when the doctors told us her death was imminent. When nothing more could be done, we brought her home to die. After several months, things progressively got worse and the nurses felt that her physical needs could best be addressed by transferring her to a nursing home. I immediately broke into tears and the guilt set in. I knew it was the right thing to do but how could I do that to my mother? It took me days to get up enough courage to tell her. At that point, my mother was in such a state of decline that I am really not sure how much she was aware of what was going on around her; but that did not diminish my guilt.

Source: Les Anderson/StockSnap

My story is not unusual, nor is the guilt that I felt. Unfortunately, guilt is a part of caregiving, particularly when you have to make a decision that you know is against the wishes of your loved one. Once in a nursing home, our pain is often escalated by our loved ones begging and pleading to be taken home. Each visit can become a nightmare of pain and suffering for you both.

Taking care of someone who is dying can be a Herculean task. Being a caregiver to an elderly parent, working full time, and raising a family are almost impossible tasks to juggle. Even if you do not work outside the home, it is still a daunting challenge to meet all the demands placed on you. Hiring caregivers to help ease the situation can also be fraught with its own set of problems that can be more stressful than doing it yourself. Additionally, there is also the expense involved that many cannot afford.

Recognizing the enormity of the tasks in front of us, all we can do is to try our best. We cannot possibly do it all, even though we may try. We feel over-responsible, out of control, and helpless at the same time. The result is experiencing caregiver burnout and resentment. Even if we could do it all, we would still find something to feel guilty about. It just goes with the territory. We all make promises with the best of intentions, but events and situations change and we cannot keep our word. We feel we have failed. We berate and blame ourselves for being human and for all those things we “should have” or “could have" done.

For the majority of us, the guilt we feel is unjustified. We have to remember that even though we feel guilty does not mean that we are. We are faced with decisions that we do not like or want to make but we have to do something that if in the best interest of all involved. In addition to guilt, there are a myriad of other emotions we live with at this time: angst, worry, sadness, anger, frustration, and resentment to name a few. We cry a lot and become short tempered. We experience all these feelings even before our loved one has died. What are we to do? Below are some suggestions you might find helpful:

• Acknowledge that you feel guilty and accept that feeling guilt is a normal part of the dying process for caregivers.

• Recognize that you are only human and not some superhero who can do it all.

• Be careful what you promise your loved one.

• Be nicer to yourself. Meet some of your own needs for a change. Take the time to nourish and replenish yourself.

• Write down your thoughts and feelings.

• Talk to friends, family, or other caregivers.

• Talk to your loved one as if they are sitting across from you in a room. Tell them about your struggle with guilt and imagine what they would say. Most of our parents/spouses would not want us to be in so much pain and distress.

• If problems continue, seek out a mental health professional. Carrying guilt around can have negative consequences for your physical and emotional health.

• Consider this: Often it is easier to blame ourselves rather than be angry with others or the situation. It somehow makes us feel more in control. Maybe there is anger underlying your guilt?

• Forgive yourself. You are doing the best you can.

Earlier today, I got a call from an “allergy mom” as she referred to herself. Her 9 year-old son, Charlie, was sad over the weekend because he couldn’t eat all the cookies at a birthday party. Many children have mild allergies or sensitivities, but Charlie’s isn’t that --- he’s extremely allergic to eggs, nuts, and food coloring. If he eats them, he’ll break out in a full body of hives, start getting sick and even have trouble breathing. So his mom asked two questions: What can I say to Charlie? And how can Charlie talk to others about his serious food allergies?

First Question:What to Say to Charlie?

Annie, Charlie’s mom, had these questions because of an exchange she had with her son. She told Charlie that he “shouldn’t be upset, there’s so many good things going on in his life” and Charlie got angrier. He said, “Mom, it’s okay for me to be sad about my allergies” and well, Charlie was correct. What I know to be true is that every child has a right to their feelings, and there are no bad feelings. Of course, it’s what your son or daughter does with their feelings that matter. Some suggestions I had for Annie were:

• Name the Feeling– Helping Charlie name his feelings whether its sadness or frustration separates him from the feeling. He isn’t sad. He’s feeling sad, and now can learn how to express it constructively. The goal is to help him feel his feelings, and then move through them versus stay stuck in sadness, anger, or frustration. For example, Charlie lets off steam by shooting hoops in the backyard, and I’d encourage him to do so when he’s ready.  
• Focus on What You Can Do– After Charlie has “bounced back” from feeling down in the dumps, help him focus on what he can do. For example, he can learn with mom’s help to make yummy recipes he can eat, and next time he can introduce party-goers to those cookies! He can read up about how the body works, and how important it is to feel good, which for him includes skipping certain foods. Another suggestion is to help Charlie make a friend who has similar food allergies so he has a "food buddy" and can find solace in a friend.
• Reframe– At the root of Charlie’s “woo is me” attitude is his thinking that not having those cookies is the worst ever. The good news is Charlie doesn’t know what a real catastrophe is, thankfully. Helping him gain a wider perspective, and learn how to move into gratitude for living in a time when someone with food allergies can live a long and healthy life is helpful! It wasn’t that long ago that many food allergies would often be fatal. Or learning about what children in other countries are challenged with can change Charlie’s perspective and help him “see” that despite the allergies, things are actually going well.   

Second Question:What Charlie Can Say to Others?

Giving Charlie scripts on how to explain his serious food allergies will help him feel confident and capable to handle any situation. Of course, he’s also equipped with a medical bracelet and epi-pen, but he needs the words to tell adults (some of them less aware than others) and his friends that some of his food allergies are serious. I suggested he use this language:

• My body has a food allergy and it’s serious. I can’t eat eggs, nuts or food dye.
• Are you 100% sure there are no eggs in this? I can get very sick and might need the hospital if there are eggs in there.
• I love eating food, but I need to be sure it’s good for my body. My body has some allergies and I need to be good to it, so it’s good to me.

Of course, my language doesn’t need to be Charlie’s or your child’s but it’s a starting point. Using scripts, role-playing, packing the right foods beforehand, anticipating “triggers” for upset regarding potential food-related situations and helping educate other parents as to the seriousness of your child’s allergy is an essential part of helping him or her stay healthy and happier. The more I work with highly sensitive children, the more I’m convinced that emotional sensitivity goes hand-and-hand with physical sensitivity and food allergies is a big part of that puzzle.

Maureen Healy is an award-winning author, popular speaker and leader in the field of children’s emotional health. Her popular mentoring program has helped thousands of highly sensitive children and their parents globally. Learn more: www.growinghappykids.com or @mdhealy

Sidenote

Today, 1 in 13 children has a food allergy, which is up 100% from fifteen years ago per Kids with Food Allergies. At any time nearly 1 or 2 children in a group may have a mild to severe allergy, which suggests the more you as a parent or professional are equipped to handle such a situation, the more likely the outcome is positive. In 2013, Congress passed the “School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act” giving incentives to schools who stock this life-saving device. Of course, the biggest challenge is that many times we don’t know a child is allergic to something until they have a reaction so it benefits all of us to adhere by the old Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared.”

Source: Piotr Bizior/FreeImages

It's been said that the journey is at least as important as reaching the goal. In a new memoir, Star Map: A Journey of Faith, Doubt, and Meaning (Freethought House) by Lewis Vaughn, it's true.

Vaughn, author of many books and textbooks, describes in his memoir  how he slowly, painfully stopped believing what everyone around him  believed. Fundamentalist Christians, they were all certain that questioning the Bible as literal truth was tantamount to sending your soul to hell.

Readers learn how Vaughn finally, in college, finds answers—of a sort—to the questions he's been wondering about his whole life. Not casually wondering about, but being driven half-mad by the lack of good answers to his most urgent questions about faith, God, and meaning. And from there his life took a remarkably different turn. Here's my interview with him.

Q&A with Lewis Vaughn

Q: Lewis, you write beautifully, using novelistic techniques to keep us turning pages. In your Author's Note, you admit to using your imagination almost as much as your memory to reconstruct events and conversations from long ago. Can you add something to that?

When I began to write this memoir, I found that my memories had been dimmed not just by the years, but by my relentless attempts to suppress painful recollections. But I mined what I could and discovered that, although many of my retrieved memories came back pale and indistinct, the meaning of those memories was clear. My memory’s factual record was incomplete, but its underlying truths seemed to shine.

So with imagination, reflection, and shards of memory, I reconstructed some events and scenes, and the result, I think, is a story that tells more truth about me and my collision with religion than any bare account of the remembered facts could.

Q: For me, the value of Star Map is offering readers an in-depth look at how a particular kind of childhood in a particular kind of community has the power to inculcate even very smart young people, people whose native skepticism might have been able to overcome early religious indoctrination if only they'd been born elsewhere. One's philosophy and ethics, then, have a lot to do with one's exposure to diverse ways of thinking. Thus, your life story taught me something about those who believe what you used to believe. Comments?

Undoing religious indoctrination of any kind is extremely difficult, mainly because faith and dogma inoculate strong beliefs against reasonable skepticism and commonsense realism. Faith and dogma, by definition, are not supposed to be responsive to evidence and argument. Yet like me, for a variety of reasons, many true believers do manage to break their chains and see the world from a different perspective.

This transformation can begin in many ways (as the formerly religious can attest), but one common element is a moment of skeptical questioning—the very thing that religions warn against. For many believers, their best hope of breaking free is found in allowing that seed of skepticism to grow.

Source: Book cover used with permission of the publisher.

Q: Do you think that others who were raised like you were might be able to learn some healthy skepticism from knowing your story?  

I do think my story and many others like it can teach commonsense skepticism. Like most deeply religious people, I didn’t respond to external criticism—anti-religion critiques coming from philosophers, scientists, and bible scholars. What initially turned my head around was internal criticism—implicit critiques that arose from the contradictions and inconsistencies within my own web of religious beliefs.

In the central scene of the book, I am convinced that I can sometimes infallibly know God’s will, and when I put that belief to the test, it turns out to be false, and I am devastated. It’s experiences like this—when religious beliefs themselves lead to rational doubt—that can be most instructive and powerful for the deeply devout.

Q: Is this the first time you've used your own early life in a book, or as the subject of a book? I notice you've written many books on philosophy, ethics, and religion. Was it a special challenge for you to open up about your own past life?

This is the first time I’ve explored my past in a book, although I’ve written a few personal essays that served the same purpose. Years ago I swore that I would never write about my era of religiosity—the task seemed much too painful. But I soon realized that I would never fully understand my religious past unless I put it all down in writing.

And there was indeed pain. It came from three sources—from dredging up distressing memories, from having to reveal both the good and the bad about myself (as any honest memoir must do), and from doubts about my ability to write a good book-length story, something I had never done before.

Q: I got the feeling that, at the end of the book, your explanations about living with neither God nor despair had been worked out over a long period. Was that, in actuality, a process that took longer than you made it seem? I mean, did you continue to have doubts about your doubt after college?

The philosophical issues that I wrestle with in the last few chapters were inherent in my history from the beginning. But toward the end of the book, I try to view those issues retrospectively, compressing the timeline to incorporate insights from later in my life.

Yes, my search for answers to the big questions continued long after college and to this day, although now I am, I hope, a much better thinker and philosopher. Doubt is an important part of the search. Doubt, I now know—as philosophers, scientists, and searchers everywhere know—is a signpost to wisdom.

Q: Any other projects on the horizon?

I seem to always have a new textbook or a new edition of a textbook about to be published. My publishers—mainly Oxford University Press, W.W. Norton, and McGraw-Hill—keep me busy. I’m now thinking about how I might continue the philosophical explorations of Star Map in another book, a trade book for a general audience. And now that I’ve written a nonfiction narrative, writing a novel no longer sounds like madness.

BIO: Lewis Vaughn is a writer specializing in philosophy, ethics, critical thinking, and religion. He is the author or coauthor of over 20 books, including the textbooks Living Philosophy (2015), Philosophy Here and Now (2016, 2nd ed.), Doing Ethics (2016, 4th ed.), The Power of Critical Thinking (2016, 5th ed.), Anthology of World Religions (2016), Bioethics (2016, 3rd ed.), and The Case for Humanism (2003, with Austin Dacey). He is also the former executive editor of Free Inquiry magazine and the co-founder and former editor of Philo, a philosophy journal.

Copyright (c) 2017 by Susan K. Perry, author of Kylie's Heel

Source: Wikimedia, CC 2.0

Here is the latest of my short-short stories that are composites of real-life events with psychological or practical implications.

“From cell to sequoia:

the greatest show on earth.”

Emily's given name was Dakota but to channel her favorite poet, she changed it to Emily. That was but one of many things she did to amplify the muse and her identity as a poet.

Emily even poured herself into the artist’s bane—marketing. Not only did she read her work at every poetry slam and open mic she could, and posted her work on poetry websites, she xeroxed and later self-published collections of her poems and read them on a "portable stage:" an upside-down 5-gallon soy sauce bucket. She set up her stage mainly on Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley but also on any street studded with progressive literary foot traffic. And she kept producing, poem after poem, collection after collection.

On her deathbed, Emily felt it was all for naught. Sure, a few hundred, maybe even 1,000 people had read or heard her work. But had any remembered any of it, let alone been changed by it? And after she died and could no longer flog her work, her impact would certainly go from almost zero to zero.

Except it didn’t quite. You see, when Brigid was 12, her mother accepted a Xerox copy of Emily’s poems.handed down from the soy sauce bucket. Now, 20 years later, a decade after Emily died, Brigid was torturing herself about whether to have a baby when Emily’s poem, "From seed to sequoia: the greatest show on earth.” popped into her head. She then called an international adoption agency.

The takeaway

Alas, most people’s work withers but we can be motivated even by the thought that we've planted seed. Have you planted any seeds you're proud of? Not proud of? Any you'd like to create and sow?

The 2nd edition of the Best of Marty Nemko is now available. You can reach career and personal coach Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net.