Book Review-The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging

Robert Bogue December 25, 2023 No Comments

The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging is more like a sketch of where to go than the kinds of GPS-enabled maps that we’re used to today, but that’s not a criticism. Community and belonging are necessarily context dependent, and as a result, there’s no one map that can lead us to the places of belonging that we long for. Robert Putnam’s work in Bowling Alone more than 20 years ago made it clear that the foundations of our social capital are eroding. He revisits these dynamics in Our Kids, explaining how we’ve become more insular in the way that we raise our kids – and less community-based.

Putnam is not alone. Sherry Turkle in Alone Together shares her perspectives on how technology is exaggerating the problem. The Great Evangelical Recession explains the loss of connection from a church perspective. In short, the problem is everywhere. The Art of Community is designed to give people a map they can use to navigate back to places of community even if that means having to take a greater responsibility in creating them.

Loneliness

Loneliness can be a powerful if not overwhelming experience that far too many people encounter during their lives. Persistent loneliness can have substantial negative health effects more than smoking or alcohol consumption. (See the book Loneliness for more.) The move away from relationships, social capital, and community means more loneliness and that the loneliness will last longer.

Communities and Tribes

Seth Godin’s book, Tribes, suggests that we need to find our group – and lead them. While tribes are sometimes used synonymously with communities, there’s an essential difference. In communities, members care about other members because they’re a member of the community. We’ve always had mechanisms where we cared about others and would make sacrifices for them. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explains a kinship mechanism that makes this work, despite the fact no one is making a statistical analysis of the probability of matching genes when deciding to rush into a burning building to save a person – family or not. While many question the kinship hypothesis put forth by Dawkins, there is no question that we’ve evolved with a degree of concern and even self-sacrifice.

The primary problem with communities is the concern for those who would take advantage of the community by not doing their share. Adam Grant in Give and Take speaks of the takers who take more than they give. SuperCooperators and Does Altruism Exist? express a similar sentiment but back it up with mechanisms that keep it in balance. Collaboration and The Evolution of Cooperation call it “social loafing,” but it is the same thing. Cooperation leverages the best outcome for everyone over the best output for one person – the Nash equilibrium instead of the von Neumann-Morgenstern equilibrium. (See The Outward Mindset for more.)

We can see the influences today by playing the ultimatum game as explained in Drive. The short version is that we’ll punish another party if they’re not being fair – even if it has a cost to us.

Four Features, Three Questions, and Seven Principles

The core of the book is understanding how there are four features that you must be able to understand and articulate to drive the community. There are three questions that the community must help the members answer. And there are seven principles to creating community.

The four features are:

Shared values
Membership identity
Moral proscriptions
Insider understanding

The three questions that the community must help the members answer are:

Who am I?
How should I act?
What do I believe?

Finally, the seven principles are:

Boundary: The line between members and outsiders.
Initiation: The activities that mark a new member.
Rituals: The things we do that have meaning.
Temple: A place set aside to find our community.
Stories: What we share that allows others and ourselves to know our values.
Symbols: The things that represent ideas that are important to us.
Inner Rings: A path to growth as we participate.

Boundaries

Boundaries aren’t about keeping others out. They’re about creating safe spaces for the members. In The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch lays out a pattern for how to structure cities with six components: maps and signs (directions), landmarks (ever-present reference points), paths (channels of movement), edges (barriers), districts (major areas), and nodes (intersections). Boundaries align with the edges that keep people in their lanes.

In Collaborative Intelligence, Richard Hackman explains the importance of boundaries – and the ease of crossing into and out of the group. He describes over- and under-bounded groups and their problems. In the case of community, we often have gatekeepers. These people are designed to help people move into and out of the group. Gatekeepers are those who welcome people in – and sometimes move people outside the group.

Initiation

An aspect from Influence that didn’t make my review is that the more we put into becoming a part of a group, the more we’ll defend that group. In the rationale of justifying our decision to subject ourselves to a difficult initiation process, we necessarily increase the value of membership. The greater the cost of the initiation that we’ve gone through, the greater the value of the group. (See The Deep Water of Affinity Groups for more about association with groups.)

The balance to be struck is to make it easy enough that people will want to become a part of the community while simultaneously making it hard enough to drive further commitment to the group.

Rituals

Rituals have been burned into our culture since the very beginning. As van Gennep notes in The Rites of Passage, rituals are an important part of signaling transitions between different phases of life and of community. Robert Lewis in Raising a Modern-Day Knight encourages parents to develop their own ritual for the transition to manhood for boys.

Rituals are particularly powerful when they involve rhythm and synchronization across the group of people. The combination of synchronicity and rhythm seem to have been a part of our evolution and hold a strong primal power over us. (See Pre-Suasion, Team Genius, and Split-Second Persuasion.)

Temple

Sometimes the place that members come together are easy. If you’re a member of any of the dozens of Disney-focused groups, there are two temples in the form of Disney Land in Anaheim, CA and Disney World in Orlando, FL. Walt Disney (and his brother Roy) made sure that the experience inside the gates was a consistent story that people could walk into and ignore the outside world. (See The Wisdom of Walt and Beyond the Wisdom of Walt.)

For most of us, the place that our community meets will be less specific. Whether it’s online or it’s a gathering at a local community space, we need to consider how we create that sense of space. (See Digital Habitats for creating online spaces.)

If you’re in physical spaces, The Art of Community suggests that special places can be created by:

Boundary: Something indicates the space boundary.
Invitation: People important to the ritual are specifically invited into the space.
Clothing: Participants wear special clothes to the space when it’s sacred.
Lighting: The lighting is shaped for the ritual.
Sound: The sound is different when the space is sacred.
Height: Objects important for the ceremony are raised up, including people.

Stories

Since the time before written language, we’ve been telling stories. Cave paintings and oral tradition predate our writing of stories. These stories truly define us. The stories that we share and the stories that we believe bind us together and define our values. (See The Power of Myth, Story Genius, and Wired for Story for more.) The question for every community is what are the stories that every member should know? What stories should we tell to new members? Is the formation story necessary and relevant today? Is there a reawakening story that shares the new vision and values for the organization?

Symbols

There’s a tradition in the military of challenge coins. These coins are given to signify that you were a part of something – or that you were respected by someone of rank. The original story goes that if you were in a bar and said you were a part of something, someone could challenge you. If you couldn’t produce the coin as proof, you’d buy them a drink. If you did produce the coin, they’d buy you one. Since those beginnings, they’ve become a thing of pride for many military members and other groups.

Many communities have symbols. Some, like Alcoholics Anonymous, use coins as well, but your symbol can be anything that the members find value in. In Green Bay, WI, it might even be a foam, cheese-shaped wedge to wear on your head.

Inner Rings

Once a group grows to a larger size, there must be a division that separates the “inner rings” from the outer rings. That is, those who are the most committed to the community and those who are less committed. It can be an official designation. It can be an invitation to participate in a group that is helping to shape or design some aspects of the community. It’s an invitation to participate more deeply that signifies that people have made it.

Convening

Throughout my reading of The Art of Community, I was struck about how this was the temporal and relational extension of the work in The Art of Gathering. Beyond simply the similarity in names, the art of gathering – or convening – precedes the creation of community. We bring people together to allow them to form relationships and then to develop concern for one another. If you’re building community, the art of bringing people together is a prerequisite.

Binding the Group Together

Binding people together can have negative connotations. The idea that people would be prevented from leaving is quite obviously not appropriate. As we move to more restrictive forms of binding to the group, we move closer and closer to being a cult. (See Terror, Love, and Brainwashing.) However, we also need to create a sense of belonging, togetherness, and concern that binds folks so that they’ll be committed to one another to work through tough problems.

Disagreements occur in every community. Building the commitment to one another to work through hard problems and disagreements is a important part of building The Art of Community.

Article: Communicating Effectively Through Repetition and Channels

Robert Bogue December 19, 2023 No Comments

Two simple changes can help reduce the complaints about poor communication—from you and the rest of the organization. By identifying the breakdowns of communications and better choosing channels, communications can be received more frequently—and without painful misunderstandings.

From the ATD blog. Read the full article here: https://www.td.org/atd-blog/communicating-effectively-through-repetition-and-channels

Book Review-Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, and Restoring Sanity

Robert Bogue December 18, 2023 No Comments

Margaret Wheatley’s work was a recommendation from a friend. In a chance part of our conversations, he shared his reverence for her and her work. That’s why I picked up Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, and Restoring Sanity. There’s the slightest hint of fatalism in how the world will disintegrate and our societies will crumble. However, through it all, there’s a sense that we have the capacity to grow and learn as a living system.

The Fate of Empires

Wheatley explains that her work builds on the works of Joseph Tainter from The Collapse of Complex Societies and Sir John Glubb in The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. She directly shares Glubb’s ages:

Pioneers – In the age of pioneers, fearless, courageous people form the new empire.
Conquest – In the age of conquest, they take control of others, organizing their might for the good of the empire.
Commerce – In the age of commerce, with borders secured, they turn towards material wealth and comfort.
Affluence – In the age of affluence, service ethics begin to wane and are replaced with a new degree of selfishness.
Intellect – In the age of intellect, intelligence increases and spends endless time debating rather than acting while the empire declines around them.
Decadence – The end age of decadence worships the idols of celebrity and descends into behaviors including narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fanaticism, and high levels of frivolity.

Living Systems

Wheatley calls it the “arrow of time.” It’s the tendency towards entropy. It’s chaos ultimately unwinding the clock of creation. However, she explains that this is only one view of things. Another view is of living systems that continue to move in the direction of order and of converting information through an energy process.

Living systems is a way of viewing the universe. Images of Organization invited us to view organizations as organisms – living organisms. Wheatley suggests that we apply this thinking to everything. There’s reason to believe that this is a reasonable approach. When we went to revisit Darwin’s survival of the fittest through Dawkin’s Selfish Gene, we discovered Robert Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation and stumbled upon SuperCooperators putting an end to the question of Does Altruism Exist?. We discovered that the only way for cooperation and altruism to have evolved is for higher-and-higher levels of organization to generate them.

Even inside living systems, there are higher levels of systems that evolve to create structures where there were none. While there is this natural tendency to greater organization, we cannot ignore the challenges that we’re creating in the world. We can’t blindly believe that we’ll find a new technology or approach that will undo all the damage that has been done. Ronald Wright labeled this “The Progress Trap,” and Wheatley asserts that this is a major factor in accelerating decline.

Change to Preserve

People, organizations, and societies resist change. In fact, organizations and societies are designed to resist change. Given this, how is it that changes ever happen? The answer seems to be that the motivators line up such that the organism or society – or person – perceives they have no choice. Thomas Gilovich explains in How We Know What Isn’t So how we’ll deny what we don’t have to accept. However, at some point, we must accept that what we believe or what we’re doing is no longer working. It’s at that point that the system will accept changes – begrudgingly.

When Facts are Fiction

Perhaps the most concerning observation that Wheatley shares is the one that there comes a time when we’re no longer concerned with facts but are instead more focused on personal beliefs. Going to Extremes begins exposing the process by which this can start to happen; however, there aren’t complete answers.

There’s a group of people who believe the Earth is flat. The Flat Earth Society is a real association with members around the globe. (I couldn’t help it.) They’ve steadfastly refused to believe other scientists, pictures, and any other evidence that the world was not, in fact, flat. In the documentary, Behind the Curve, they decided to set up their own experiment. The short version was to fire a beam of light parallel to the Earth along water, so they knew there wasn’t a change in elevation. The documentary ends with them proving the Earth is not flat. And yet, the Flat Earth Society still exists. They have, themselves, disproven their premise, and they continue. How and why? It’s one thing to distrust others and to believe that they’ve got ulterior motives, but what’s it like to discount your own members?

The problem isn’t one group of fringe people at one point in time. The problem is this same pattern repeats over and over again. We see it in cults and their failures. Koresh’s Branch Davidians in Waco, TX, Heaven’s Gate in California, and Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple are all examples of cult followers who died because of their beliefs in the leaders of these cults.

How would I know for sure that this is true? What’s true-ish? We see distortion in the media and the messaging from politicians, and we don’t know what to believe. (See Why We’re Polarized for more.) We have a greater capacity now than at any time in history to verify facts – and we’re less likely to try. The internet brings us unimaginable opportunities for verification of information – and an overwhelming amount of false information. (See The Information Diet and The Organized Mind for more about the overwhelming amount of information we face.)

The simple fact of the matter is that we have no capacity left to verify the amount of information confronting us. We’re constantly taking shortcuts – we must if we want to pretend to keep up. This is a frequent concern of psychology, neurology, and marketing – The Hidden Brain, The Signal and the Noise, How We Know What Isn’t So, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), and many other books speak of rules of thumb. Rules of thumb are the positive spin on these shortcuts. The negative path uses stereotypes, which is also a popular topic: White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, The Mind Club, No Two Alike, On Dialogue, and particularly A Class Divided speak of stereotypes. It’s not that we occasionally take a cognitive processing shortcut, it’s the way we think.

More problematic is that we’re too exhausted to test to see when the rules of thumb and stereotypes that we’ve created are wrong. The Wason selection task was designed to see how much people would seek to disprove their theories instead of confirm them. The problem is that we’re generally bad when we must disprove our own theories. (See The Righteous Mind and The Black Swan for more.)

No Longer Hate Crimes

“Don’t feed the trolls.” It was a warning sign shared with people in the early days of the internet. In the archaic equivalent of social media channels in the form of Internet Relay Chat and America Online (AOL), people intentionally tried to get a rise out of someone by making outrageous comments. Moderators were taught that if the “trolls,” as they were called, were not responded to, they’d stop talking. They would be deprived of what they’re looking for. The trickiest trolls would post anonymously. They’d be too ashamed to make their comments with their name attached. However, by 2015, it was no longer socially unacceptable to say hateful things with your name attached.

No longer were people concerned about whether people knew who they were – even someone’s real name versus a username. We’d lost our concern for how people would react to us if we connected ourselves to hateful speech. The trolls are easier to find – but they’re also harder to remove.

Weaponized Information

We live in the information age, where information can make the difference between success and failure. The old cliché that the “pen is mightier than the sword” is truer now than at any time in history. Of course, it’s the phone or the computer not the pen – but the point is the same. Virtually anyone can create information – true or not – that is seen across the globe by millions (and billions) of people.

Information can bring down regimes, like we saw in Arab Spring. Information can shape perception, including misperception. False claims about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin caused countless people to use these drugs incorrectly – and resulted in untold deaths.

Information can now be clipped out of context and applied to situations which it was never intended to be used for. Clipping out the part of the fight where the defender is hitting back can – and does – create the wrong impression.

Clear Theory of Action

Public health professionals are well intended. They want to make the world a better place through better public health. If they didn’t believe this, they wouldn’t have chosen public health as their profession. It’s not glamorous, nor does it come with huge salaries. It is a profession that you have to want to love – or you won’t even get started. That being said, too many public health professionals are in the copycat business. They look for a pattern that has claimed to work in another locale and they apply it to their population. The problem is they don’t look for or evaluate the theory of action that led to its success.

A theory of action is a narrative about why the activity gets the results. It starts with “We think…” and it ends with a causal chain from the action to the result. The chain doesn’t have to be intuitively obvious. It needs only to be a reasonably plausible pathway.

Too many public health professionals don’t stop to question how an intervention leads to results – or to verify the previous efficacy claims. Take the Gun Shop Project. It introduces the task of assessing mental health – and relative degree of suicide risk – to gun shop employees. Given that even mental health professionals fail to identify people who are suicidal at rates much better than chance, it’s hard to believe that an employee of a gun shop with minimal training could possibly accurately predict the suicidal intent of a patron. (See Assessment and Prediction of Suicide for more on our ability to predict suicide.)

The argument from public health professionals is “At least it’s something.” The problem is while this makes us feel better – it doesn’t necessarily result in better outcomes. (See Change for the problems with bias towards action.) The real problem with this thinking is that it can block other, more effective strategies. Even if it doesn’t directly block a different approach, the lack of efficacy leads to greater change resistance. Effective programs make it easier to do more programs; ineffective programs block progress.

One Good Conversation

Relationships are at the heart of being human. We are social creatures. (See Loneliness for more.) How does one build a relationship? It all starts with one good conversation. One good conversation is all it takes to reintroduce us to what it feels like to be in a satisfying human relationship. One good conversation allows us to be known – and to know someone else. Sometimes, it can feel like the people we want to be are in some far off and elusive state. We forget, however, that we can take steps to be the people we want to be in small and immediate ways.

Knowing Ourselves to Help Others

Brene Brown explains that some of the most wholehearted people she knows are good at boundaries. Behind this is a great deal of work on themselves. They know who they are – and who they are not. People who are in helping professions frequently focus on others and solving their needs – after all, they’re so much larger than theirs. However, the problem is that you cannot give what you do not have. You can’t give peace if you don’t feel it yourself. You can’t help people feel safe if you don’t feel safe yourself.

It’s hard work to choose to work on yourself. Facing other demons isn’t the same as facing your own. It’s easier to tell others to be strong than to stand in the face of the oppressive weight. When we learn more about who we are, what we believe, and how we will behave, we’re preparing to be able to give gifts to others.

Making Meaning

“Humans cannot live without meaning. The greater the uncertainty, the more our desperate grasp for a handhold, a shred of meaning.” As we struggle to predict the future to protect ourselves, we seek to find meaning in everything that we do. However, it’s more than that. Many of us have to find a way to positively impact humanity. We need to find that way that we’ll leave our small mark in the sands of time.

Being a leader who bends the arc of humanity in a positive direction is a good meaning. It’s this thirst for meaning that has us asking and hopefully answering the question, Who Do We Choose to Be?

Book Review-The Way of Zen

Robert Bogue December 11, 2023 No Comments

Did you hear the one about the Zen Buddhist who ordered from a hot dog vendor? He said, “Make me one with everything.” All (bad) jokes aside, Zen is something that many people have heard about but few understand. The Way of Zen is a classic book (1957) that brought awareness of Zen to the Western world. I first noticed it through a reference in Happier?, but it’s come up numerous times. As I was reading it, I was constantly reflecting on a more contemporary version in the form of Trying Not to Try.

Religion, Philosophy, or Other

In A Force for Good, the Dalai Lama explains that he isn’t concerned whether Buddhism is a religion or a philosophy. Watts, in The Way of Zen, describes Zen as neither religion nor philosophy. It’s neither psychology nor science. Zen, he proposes, sits outside the bounds that the Western world tries to put around it.

Describing something that can’t be placed easily into a category isn’t easy. This is particularly the case when the thing is about the present moment – and its fleeting nature. Often, the responses of masters to students are non sequitur on purpose. The approach is that Zen can’t be taught but rather caught or discovered on one’s own. To obtain the nirvana that one seeks, one must not seek it. (See Happiness for an example in the Hindu goddess of wealth.)

Wu-Wei

The reference to Trying Not to Try comes from the focus on the language at the heart of it. Wu-wei is described by Watts as “not-making.” It’s clearly the same concept. It’s the same pull between different poles of a continuum. Attributed to Tao, one of the roots from which Zen springs, Watts explains that there’s a sort of natural evolution or growth that’s implied in a way that the Judeo-Christian God doesn’t align with in the mechanical creation beliefs.

Reincarnation All the Time

What if the thoughts of reincarnation didn’t focus on the evolution of life and death in the sense of a human’s life, but rather referred to the death of each moment and the rebirth in the next? It’s an interesting twist on the belief in reincarnation that makes sense in terms of advancing – or retracting – one’s status. The more you invest and create positive energy around the current moment, the more the next moment will be better.

Nirvana

Thought of as the escape from the cycle of reincarnation (and suffering), Nirvana is a state that can reportedly only be accessed unintentionally, and spontaneously after the self-grasping has been accepted. Self-grasping is our desire to know ourselves – and understand ourselves. We’ve got to find peace and calm there before moving on to accept the nature of the universe.

It requires acceptance of quiet contemplation as action. A willingness to be quiet and to use that quiet to consider how to best help is an important activity in and of itself.

Reality as a Projection

One view of reality is that it doesn’t exist at all – that it is instead a projection of our mind. There may be something to that from the perspective of neuroscience. Incognito thoroughly exposes how we fill in missing details in ways that we perceive as real but are verifiably not. Most of us accept that reality is as we perceive it, but the more that we learn about the world, the less certain we can be that anything we perceive is “really real.” Consider our perception of the solid ground on which we stand or sit or lay. We know that there are, in fact, a number of spaces between the molecules and atoms that make up whatever it is that we believe we’re standing on.

Ultimately, Zen is about the effortless acceptance of moment-to-moment, realizing that nothing is permanent and nothing is as it seems – that is The Way of Zen.

Book Review-Why We’re Polarized

Robert Bogue December 4, 2023 No Comments

In America, we’ve become more divisive and more polarized in our politics, but why? In Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein seeks to explain the progression of polarization and the factors that drive it. Short on solutions, Klein is content to describe a problem of polarization and its causes with the hope that others will be able to help in the identification of solutions.

While Klein’s focus is squarely on politics and how we’ve changed the way that we view political parties over the decades, other researchers have been looking more broadly at how we end up in extreme positions. Cass Sunstein examines polarization in Going to Extremes. Alexandra Stein in Terror, Love, and Brainwashing explains how cults create alternate realities and separate people from the rest of society. Buster Benson for his contribution seeks to help us find ways to bridge the gap and have productive disagreements in Why Are We Yelling? In Resolving Conflicts at Work, Kenneth Coke and Joan Goldsmith provide tips targeted at resolving conflict at work but end up with a useful framework of ideas for any kind of conflict.

The Pull of Polarization

There’s no doubt that we’re more polarized. It’s not just the news or noticing – there’s a measurable pull towards polarization that’s driven by the forces of the two-party political system. For a candidate to be viable, they must be the most extreme version of the ideals that the party holds. It’s like what draws us to art – it’s the extreme form that we find most interesting. (See The Tell-Tale Brain for more.) Candidates become leaders, and leaders’ positions pull us to more extreme positions. This isn’t unlike what Cass Sunstein observed in Going to Extremes.

Bedrock Identities

We all have multiple identities. We’re husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, professionals and more. Our identities are generally fluid and work together to form a coherent self-image. However, some identities are more powerful than others. When two identities are in conflict, we’ll lean towards one that seems more important. These are bedrock identities – the ones that we’ll go back to in times of crisis and concern. There’s been an evolution with our bedrock identities. No longer do we consider religion a bedrock identity. (See Spiritual Evolution.) We no longer identify with the groups we belong to – because we don’t really belong to any groups. (See Bowling Alone.)

In the absence of these historical, powerful bedrock identities, we’ve substituted our political affiliations, and we protect them with the same veracity. We feel as if people who have different perspectives than those held by our core identities are wrong, misguided, or evil. Bedrock identities aren’t bad – but our need to protect them (because if they’re not right, then somehow we’re not right) is bad. It separates us from others with different views, prevents us from learning, and leaves us even more polarized.

Shortcuts

The challenge with bedrock identities defined by political parties is that these identities are too amorphous and changing. What the party stands for may appear to be consistent, but it’s clear that not everyone in the party holds the same view. A review of positions over time shows that the parties do change their positions at a much faster rate than the change in religious groups. In short, we’ve defined a shortcut – but the shortcut keeps changing.

We need shortcuts to live. Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow explains how we need to make simple decisions where we can, because we need to conserve glucose. The Rise of Superman affirms that our brains are glucose hungry. In fact, they’ve got more need for glucose than our bodies can steadily supply. The Organized Mind makes the same point differently – we’re in an era of information overload, and we’re filtering information to cope. We malign stereotypes – which have their faults – but we need them. The Signal and the Noise explains that “rules of thumb” are both error-ridden and necessary. Kahneman and colleagues revisit the problem in Noise. We need shortcuts to cope – but we need to minimize the damage caused by using those shortcuts inappropriately.

We can’t mitigate the damage of shortcuts when the shortcuts are changing underneath us.

Negative Partisanship

However, the problem is more complicated than just the shortcuts that we use to identify ourselves. The research finds that we don’t vote for people as much as we vote against the other guy. The other party, the other views, and the other people are so repugnant to us that we’ll take anyone with our own party just to avoid them. There’s no secret to our negative bias. (See The Resilience Factor and Hardwiring Happiness for more.) There’s an evolutionary reason for this bias.

It’s sort of the opposite of Pascal’s wager, which argues that the wins and losses for not believing in God are far worse than the wins and losses of believing in God. (See The Mind Club for more.) If we err on the side of believing that a threat isn’t a threat – but it is – we may wind up dead. We can either be unnecessarily concerned about a lion in the grass – or we ignore the lion and we’re dead.

Policy Views

Those who don’t follow politics are more likely to view political decisions in terms of their own best interest, while those who do follow politics are more inclined to view political decisions from the lens of their identity. For those of us who are only peripherally interested because we neither have a professional reason nor consider it a hobby or area of expertise, we make the decisions because they seem to be best suited for positive outcomes. However, as people focus more attention on politics, they start to believe that the meaning behind the decisions – rather than the actual outcomes – are more important.

The truth is that most of the public won’t – and can’t – have a strong position on a policy issue or a political appointment. Most people don’t have the time or capacity to process the issue that deeply.

Agrees with Me

The definition of expert seems to be “a credentialed person who agrees with me.” Like many things in politics, everything stops mattering except if they’re “for me or against me.” Thomas Gilovich explained in How We Know What Isn’t So how we believe things until we can’t any longer. We seek confirming evidence while eschewing evidence that doesn’t agree with us.

If you provide the actual evidence on gun control efficacy to those that believe strongly in gun control and ask them to do the math, they’ll suddenly be bad at math. Similarly, if you ask gun advocates why people “need” their guns, they’re likely to make slightly – or completely – illogical arguments. We are more compelled to protect our beliefs – and, more importantly, our identities – than we are to seek the truth. Amy Edmondson in Right Kind of Wrong explains that we don’t like being wrong – and we’ll resist it.

The Fiction that We All Believe

There’s an idealized image of colleges and universities that they are places of unrestricted thought. People can explore any line of thinking that is important to them. They’re places of debate and civil disagreements. However, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff explain in The Coddling of the American Mind, this is no longer the case. Instructors now must warn students that what they’re about to be exposed to may be offensive, shocking, or triggering to them. Klein questions whether this concern for decorum is any different than in previous generations.

The answer is probably both. Certainly, speech and thought are freer inside the relative safety of a university – but those walls have always been permeable, and people needed to consider what others might think. But our polarization leads us to find even less safety in universities. The idea that we can explore ideas inside of a university is likely fiction today – and it may always have been. Yet most people would say that universities are full of free thinkers.

Interests and Identities

Marketers figured it out a long time ago. They figured out that they had to find the identities of people to craft messages that resonate. They weren’t looking for the person who was interested in a dog. They were speaking to the dog owner who viewed that dog as a part of their identity. They were looking for the person who wanted to feel happy – and that’s why advertisements almost universally feature people who are smiling.

What we believe are the interests of others are aspects of their identity – and those aspects, when activated, have the power to unite or divide. When stated generally, “cat people” aren’t activated by conversations about dogs. Similarly, “dog people” aren’t activated by conversations about cats. However, frame the conversations about the relative benefits of a canine or a feline, and the fur will fly. Positioned as a competition or as a single “right” answer, our identities have us arguing that we’re right.

Politicians realized, too, that they needed not to just get people to support them but rather get activated people, people who will campaign and canvas for them if they’re going to win elections – and that means getting people angry. It means engaging the emotion. (See The Happiness Hypothesis for more about engaging emotion.)

Our polarization is a natural result of the forces that reinforce extreme positions – yet we still ask Why We’re Polarized.

Book Review-Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal

Robert Bogue December 1, 2023 No Comments

Trauma survivors aren’t heroes in the same sense that a first responder is. We see the first responder at the scene of an accident, like a house fire, and see how their actions are protecting all of us. We don’t get to see the hard work that trauma survivors do, because their work is internal. That’s why the title Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal makes so much sense. The work is invisible on the outside – until the trauma victim reemerges transformed by the trauma. (See Transformed by Trauma for examples.)

Predictable Pacification

Too frequently after a trauma, a person blames themselves. They think that they somehow – often magically – should have avoided the situation. Of course, in many cases, there is no way to see or avoid the situation. It’s one of the random things that happen in life. Even in those cases where we could have made different choices – and likely will in the future – there’s little reason to ruminate over the choices that were made.

This need for a sense of control – innate to all humans – drives us to take too much accountability for the things that have happened and how we might have made things turn out differently if only we had done something differently. We fail to accept that we may not have done anything wrong or incorrectly. We believe we had to have done something wrong, so that we can maintain our belief that the world isn’t random and that we’re able to predict it.

The degree to which we believe we can predict the situation influences the degree to which we feel peaceful.

Unworthy

One of the challenges with the unnecessary attribution of blame to ourselves from the randomness of life is that we can take on ourselves a sense of unworthiness. That is, we believe that not only did we make a mistake (guilt) but that we’re unable to do the right things (shame). We start with shame, but eventually we start self-punishing and self-isolating, perhaps progressing even to a place where we believe we’re irredeemable. There’s nothing that can happen to make us worthy of interacting with other mortals.

Sometimes, this thinking style becomes so pervasive because of continued trauma and abuse that the idea of returning to what others would consider normal is uncomfortable. It can feel weird and uncomfortable for people to treat you as a fellow human instead of someone beneath them.

The truth is that no one is irredeemable. Everyone deserves to be treated as a human – even if that’s not their norm.

Demarcation

Substantial traumas often create a division in a person’s lifeline. There’s a time before the trauma and a time after the trauma. Often, traumas cause a major change of course. One of the ways you can recognize that someone acknowledges their experience was one of trauma is that they’re able to acknowledge their life is different – in more than a tactical and mechanical kind of way.

With smaller traumas, or traumas that persist over a longer time, it’s harder to see this demarcation point, but it’s rare that trauma doesn’t cause us to change in some way or another.

Something that Happened to Me

With time, in the post-trauma space, it’s possible to recount the trauma without reexperiencing it. Until we can establish an explicit memory of the trauma and come to some terms with what it does – and does not – mean, many victims reexperience the event while retelling the story. With new traumas, it’s important to not push them to recount the events, because doing so may accidentally amplify and anchor the trauma in their mind. Rather, we should let people share at the speed, detail, and level that they’re able to. If we can create a safe space for them to process the trauma, they can move it to something that happened in the past.

It is even better when we can recognize that one trauma or even multiple traumas don’t define us. Yes, there is that demarcation line where things changed, but it’s not the entirety of who we are.

Work is Hard and Necessary

I’ve never found anyone who would dare to say that overcoming and moving past trauma is easy. Even those who are grateful for where they are today would neither recommend their trauma nor relish the work they had to get to their place of healing. Victor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning explains his time at a concentration camp. While he exposes some of the things that helped him and others survive, he doesn’t recommend it.

There’s a delicate balance of experiencing the event while replaying it at a level that’s safe enough but vulnerable and raw enough that it’s possible to make sense of the event. Sometimes, the only sense of control you can get in a trauma is the extent to which you allow yourself to experience it and your insistence that it won’t define you.

Mastering the Waves

Trauma survivors will tell you that you’ll always experience triggers that connect you to the traumatic experience, but they change. It can be likened to riding an emotional wave on a surfboard. You are still moved by it, and you’ll likely end up in the water at some point. In the meantime, you can stay above it, using the energy to propel you forward. Surfers, even professional surfers, fall off their board, but until they do, they’re able to do some amazing things.

One way to make trauma better is to learn the skills that allow you to spend more time above the wave and less time being pummeled by it.

Internal Perception of Danger

One step is recognizing that, often, the danger and fear associated with the event are in the past. It’s quite likely that the fear of that moment doesn’t continue into the current moment – or shouldn’t. What we come to realize is that it’s our internal perception of danger that matters more than the objective measure of risk.

We can use a set of well-known techniques to shift our perception away from momentary and current danger to a sense of relative safety. Some of those techniques are below.

Play Acting a Different Ending

It’s magical thinking. It’s the domain of the two-year-old – but it works. For Victor Frankl, it was imagining his wife. He knew she might be dead, but hearing her speak to him transcended that actuality. He was able to create a scene in his mind that he knew to be reassuring but also false.

One way that we can reduce the suffering associated with trauma is to replay the event in our mind with different endings. We can know they’re not real but at the same time be comforted with alternate endings.

An Army of Heroes

One alternate ending that can be valuable is to call in for a hero you can trust – real or imaginary. These heroes can stand with us in our mind’s eye of the moment. For some, they have a single hero who can stand with them. For others, it’s a cadre of heroes, each with their own special skills and protections to offer.

This stands in the fantasy land of the child and at the same time offers us healing. The real heroes aren’t the Invisible Heroes of our imagination but are those who fight their way out of the wake of trauma.

Book Review-Reducing Secondary Traumatic Stress: Skills for Sustaining a Career in the Helping Professions

Robert Bogue November 30, 2023 No Comments

When you think about it, there are dozens of professions that are focused on improving society. We think of first responders in terms of firefighters, law enforcement, emergency medical personnel, and 911 dispatchers. However, we forget about our mental health professionals, teachers, child protective services, and dozens of other professions that are exposed to the traumas others are coping with. Reducing Secondary Traumatic Stress: Skills for Sustaining a Career in the Helping Professions is designed to serve those who serve others by helping them learn to address the hardest parts of their jobs.

Burnout

Early on, Miller speaks about burnout harking back to Freudenberger’s Burn-Out. He incorrectly associates Maslach’s work with Freudenberger’s, perhaps because that’s the narrative that has been spun. (I should say that Freudenberger’s book isn’t the oldest book on burnout: that distinction belongs to Professional Burn-Out.)

Miller, however, correctly identifies the key to burnout as feelings of inefficacy. He challenges the notion that you’re burned out at the end of a long career and explains that burnout happens more frequently at the beginning of a career – not the end. Of course, this is consistent with the research we did when building Extinguish Burnout.

Compassion Fatigue

Miller similarly pushes back against compassion fatigue. He argues that it’s not that you’ve expressed too much compassion, but rather that you’ve closed yourself off to all feelings and empathy with the result of failing to express compassion for those you’re there to serve. In Is It Compassion Fatigue or Burnout?, we speak about it from the perspective that professionals have failed to do their self-care. The result is the same: you shut down, and it’s this shutdown that’s perceived as compassion fatigue.

Systemic Stress

Too many mental wellness programs are little more than herbal tea, soft lighting, and a once-a-month yoga session. While these practices have some value, they’re often crushed by the onslaught of 50-minute sessions, crisis calls, and complex cases. The physician that can’t find time for a bathroom break between 15-minute patient appointments won’t find what they need at the bottom of a teacup. The paramedic whose sleep was just interrupted to respond to an accident doesn’t need soft lighting.

We can’t assume that we can put a band-aid on a gaping wound, and it will all be okay. We have to match the care that we give to the need.

Feel or No Feel – There Is No Try

My apologies to Yoda. You can’t selectively let in some feelings and dampen others. You can’t decide to let joy through but block depression. When we numb – either naturally or with pharmaceutical assistance – we block both the good and the bad. This is part of Miller’s point: when we try to block out the struggles of empathy, we necessarily prevent the development of compassion. We can either choose to open ourselves to experiences and live, or we can wall ourselves off from the world and from others. If we choose that option, we disconnect ourselves from the broader community and their support for when we’re feeling low.

No Feeling is Final

What we know about feelings is that they change. Even moods change over the longer course of time. (See Emotion and Adaptation.) It is hard to remember in the moment that the feeling will pass. (See Capture.) However, the only thing constant about feelings is that they do change.

There is something to be said for actively shaping your thoughts while accepting them. One can work to hardwire happiness without preventing acceptance of other emotions. (See Hardwiring Happiness.) Too many people believe that feelings happen to you – and it can certainly feel that way. However, we know that you can consciously influence your feelings by focusing attention on the emotions that you want to have. Caution is appropriate here so that we don’t over emphasize what can be done, as Bright-sided and Happier? Are concerned about.

Removing Rumination

Rumination is the opposite. It’s focusing on the same situation and the challenges associated with it without finding ways to resolve the problem. Instead of problem solving, rumination catches us in a net of repetition. (See Capture.) If we want to break free from rumination, we must either seek to solve the problem, or we must learn to let go.

Miller proposes an ACES (Action, Concrete, Experiential, and Specific) model for problem solving. You know it’s not rumination when you’re coming up with specific, concrete actions that are doable. Problem solving doesn’t mean that you must solve the end problem yourself. Even identifying the specific set of actions you’re going to do to ask for help is enough to allow your mind to let go of it.

It used to be that I’d be caught in a loop of trying to not forget something that I needed to do in the morning. Now, I grab my phone, send myself a quick one-line email, and go back to sleep. Knowing that I’ll see it in the morning allows me to let it go and move on to the important need for sleep.

Letting go of something is the other option. It’s easier when you’re deferring it, but for some things that we ruminate on, we need to accept that we have no control of. We can’t prevent something from happening or cause it to happen. No amount of rumination will change the outcome. As uncomfortable as it can be, sometimes we just must let the cards play out the way they’re going to play.

Energy Management

The narratives around burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress are collectively focused on a false dichotomy. They generally believe that your energy is drained or consumed at work and refilled at home. The expectation is that work grinds you down, and your home life is fulfilling and life-giving. However, for many people, this isn’t the case.

At work, they feel effective and fulfilled in their role. They know what to do and how to get good results. At home, they’re in a constant struggle with their spouse. Their teenage kids don’t listen to them and are downright hostile. They don’t know what they did wrong or what it will take to fix it – but they know they don’t like it.

More often, it’s in the middle, where some things at work build and renew a person – but there are times of exposure to trauma and tragedy. At home, they find both love and challenge. It’s not about the place but rather about the moment-to-moment environment that defines whether someone is receiving more energy than they’re giving.

Driving with the Brakes On

If you’ve ever had the experience of having a car brake caliper freeze up, you quickly have discovered what it’s like to drive with the brakes on. (Hint: it doesn’t end well.) A less eventful situation might be what happens when you forget and leave a parking brake on. Unfortunately, that’s what happens with too many people. Their sympathetic and parasympathetic systems get locked into a fight, and they get stuck or oscillate. If we want better results, we’ll find a way to either have the brakes on or put our foot on the accelerator.

Generally, when the parasympathetic system (brakes) is engaged, the sympathetic system shuts down – but not always immediately. With patience and practice, it becomes easier to downregulate and recover more quickly when we do become triggered.

Blessin’ or Lesson

Miller quotes a Southern saying that “everyone you meet is a blessin’ or a lesson.” In other words, they’ll either attempt to bring you good or bad. Either way, you must learn to work with them. Knowing ahead of time which one they are is one step towards Reducing Secondary Trauma Stress.

Book Review-Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal from It

Robert Bogue November 29, 2023 No Comments

When Paul Conti’s brother, Jonathan, killed himself with the handgun that his father had been issued in the Korean War, his life changed. It wasn’t simply that he experienced the loss of his brother, but it also caused his desire to focus on understanding trauma and why he couldn’t see the struggles his brother was facing. In Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic: How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It, Conti tries to expose the internals of how we process trauma so that we can learn to see it and process it.

For Generations

One of the often overlooked aspects of trauma is that it has a ripple effect that expresses itself across generations. In Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Robert Sapolsky shares not only the research from the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) study but also the work on fetal onset of adult disease (FOAD). To clarify, the stress of the mother can have a negative impact on the health of the fetus. More broadly, we’ve begun to learn that it’s more than genetics that leads to health outcomes, it’s epigenetics.

That is, our genes are activated and deactivated by our environments. While two identical twins start out with an identical set of genes and gene expression, through different experiences, they can end up with different gene expressions – and therefore different outcomes.

The implications of this are that a traumatic event or set of traumatic events can send ripples across time into future generations.

Marshmallows of the Future

In the person themselves, trauma changes things. It makes the world a bit less stable. It causes us to believe that our dreams and aspirations aren’t possible. They’re not real. Irrespective of the facts, we insist on staying in the here and now so that we aren’t disappointed when the future disappears. This has a negative impact on our ability to hope. (See The Psychology of Hope.)

When Walter Mischel tested preschoolers to see how they could handle delayed gratification, he didn’t realize what he was measuring. (See The Marshmallow Test for a full explanation.) Ultimately, the test was about whether children would sit with a sweet in front of them for a short time without eating it, with the promise of more if they did wait. (It wasn’t always a marshmallow that Mischel used.) Retrospectively, it seemed that those who could delay longer did better in life. However, what’s more interesting are the strategies that the preschoolers used. Some could clearly see the value despite the future, discounting what Daniel Kahneman explains in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Other research, including Paul Tough’s in The Years that Matter Most, leads us to understand that those who have the most trauma have the hardest time trusting in future gains.

More tragically, trauma can leave us questioning our self-worth and our gifts. We begin to consider life in terms of some sort of grand karma. If we’re really good and worthy, then trauma wouldn’t happen to us. Of course, that’s not fair, but it doesn’t stop the evaluation. As The Halo Effect explains, life is probabilistic, not deterministic. Bad things do, in fact, happen to good people. While Thomas Gilovich explains in How We Know What Isn’t So that we have a bias towards believing better of ourselves than we should, trauma can reverse that wiring, so we believe we’re not as good as we are.

Presumed Control

If you speak with an abused child before they’re removed from the abusive situation, you’ll often hear that they believe the abuse they receive is their fault. They believe that if they’re just a better child, their mommy or daddy won’t hurt them. This illogical conclusion is the one that their minds are forced into, because the alternative is more painful and tragic than believing that they can, with their behavior, prevent the abuse.

If the abuse has nothing to do with how good or bad they are (or their behavior at all), then it’s unpredictable and unstoppable. They must believe that the abuse and pain will continue forever – and that’s not something they’re prepared to do.

We all do this throughout our lives, not just in childhood. We try to take control of the situation, so that we don’t have to fear it. (See Compelled to Control for more.)

Inciting Illness

One way that we see this same dynamic in adults is when they believe that the trauma they experienced is their fault. From the automobile accident that they blame themselves for to the cancer that couldn’t have been prevented, people believe that it’s their fault. The result is shame – “I am bad” – driving the sense that they need to punish themselves. Somehow in the punishment, they’ll equal out the scales of justice. There are two key problems with this. First, the sources of the traumas are almost universally external to the person. Second, no amount of self-flagellation will even the scales.

Inadequacy

Brene Brown calls it “enough.” (See I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t).) It is the feeling that we’re not “good enough.” We’re not “doing enough.” We’re not worthy of what we have or even of being on the planet. It’s the less extreme form of impostor syndrome that too many people routinely feel. While inadequacy can be a powerful drive to cause people to strive to do more and be more, it comes at a cost. The cost is both the happiness of the person and, sometimes, their life. In Perfectionism, we learned the psychic toll that perfectionism – or inadequacy – brings. When we believe we’re not enough, we can never get a break from ourselves.

The Costs of Survival

We celebrate the survivors of trauma of all kinds. We admire their strength and their courage. However, we never ask ourselves what it took to get there. We celebrate the war hero who walked his team out of the firefight, and we don’t ask what he had to do. We don’t want to know about the prisoner or little kid he had to kill to survive. We don’t want to know how deep that trauma goes. We fail to notice when we try to celebrate them, and they squirm away. It’s more than being shy. It’s a deep sense that if people knew what they had to do, they wouldn’t celebrate their return home in the same way.

Computers and Chainsaws

Both computers and chainsaws are tools with immense positive potential. They’re also tools through which someone can inflict suffering. With both, if we learn how to operate them safely, we can prevent trauma. The unfortunate reality is that anonymous forums lead to mob-like or gang-like behavior where people become worse than they’d be on their own. (See Going to Extremes and Delinquent Boys for more.)

Protecting people from unsafe spaces is, in part, requiring that individuals be held accountable for their comments – or, at the very least, having their name attached to them.

Not Mine

Whenever there’s a negative outcome, it’s appropriate to ask to what degree your behaviors influenced the outcome. What could you have done differently? What should you do next time? These are healthy questions that can take an unhealthy turn we if decide that we need to not only own our own dysfunction in the situation but the dysfunction of others as well. A wise friend once explained that “that’s not my shit.” She explained that sometimes you’re not responsible for the negative outcome – or certainly not responsible for all of it.

It’s important to take responsibility for your part – but equally important that you not take responsibility that’s not yours.

Facts and Fallout

The law is concerned (ostensibly) with the facts. They want to assign guilt and blame. They are not equipped to help trauma victims cope with the fallout. The penalties that are assigned to criminals are used as a deterrent to prevent their own and others perpetrating the crime in the future. There as some crimes – like murder – for which there is no compensation. Criminal trials aren’t concerned with that. Civil trials are, but only a small fraction of trauma-inflicting events are the subject of a civil suit.

Criminal trials are themselves sometimes more trauma-inflicting than healing. It can be hard to confront the person who injured you and hard to defend yourself against the questions and implications of their attorney.

Pre- and Post-Trauma

When people have a single, defining trauma, there seems to be a bright line between the before and the after. The trauma created a change in the person (that may still be evolving). That change can be seen in the pre- and post-worlds. Sometimes, people speak of recovering or returning to the place before the trauma, but the place no longer exists. We must build a new place with new awareness – and that isn’t always easy.

Given that it’s estimated that 90% of us will experience trauma in our lives, it makes Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic.

Book Review-Fighting Fires: How Emotional Trauma Sparks an Inferno

Robert Bogue November 28, 2023 No Comments

For many first responders, firefighters included, the idea of mental health is for the other guy. It’s a tough job and you’ve got to “man up” and be tough. However, at the same time, the things that first responders see, hear, do, and not do, are unforgettable. They’re confronted with the worst that humanity has to offer. It’s the most suffering, the most cruelty. It’s also times of greatest compassion. Fighting Fires: How Emotional Trauma Sparks an Inferno is David Lewis’ journey through trauma that he experienced outside of the job, inside the job, and through life. No question he experienced trauma through his work as a firefighter, but that wasn’t the only trauma he experienced in his life.

Fire and Smoke

Lewis describes mental health as the pillar upon which life is built. It’s a sound argument, since the life we experience is the one that we create. Incognito shows us just how much of our lives and what we think is reality is made up. Life is really what we make of it – and it can be filled with fire and smoke, or it can be fresh air.

Lewis uses the analogy that fire is the traumatic events that you see, hear, do, or experience. Smoke is the problems as a result of that fire. He properly places the focus on the fire portion, recognizing that smoke is a result of fire.

The Charlatans

Early on in Lewis’ attempts to get better, he describes running across an “internet guru” that claimed to have the elixir that Lewis needed to be “fixed.” All it would take is a credit card. The free materials seemed good, so Lewis parted with hard-earned money only to realize that the content behind the pay wall wasn’t really worth it.

The real problem is it’s easy to make things look like they’re good when it’s shallow; it’s hard to make sense of it when it’s deep and it matters. I cannot count the number of burnout books that I’ve read where the authors had no breadth or depth in what they’re saying. They saw the opportunity to make a buck selling some books and consulting, and they dropped right in. (Even Maslach’s latest book, The Burnout Challenge, is woefully under-researched.)

Even professional mental health providers rarely read research or use evidence-based techniques. Too frequently, they just do what they think works, leading to Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology and The Cult of Personality Testing. Even in an area where the public is supposed to be protected through licensure, we’re confronted with the need to carefully screen people, as Lewis points out later in the book.

Coloring in unicorns may be fine for an eight year old, but it’s not appropriate for a professional firefighter – or most other adults, for that matter.

Buffalos and Cows

For the most part, cows and buffalo seem like similar animals. They’re both mammals. The buffalo burger is leaner but is similar in taste to a hamburger. (Why “hamburgers” come from cows not pigs is a mystery.) However, they have some different behaviors. One is how they cope with the stress of a storm. They react like people react. Buffalo charge into the storm, while cows walk away from it – even when they’re in the midst of the storm.

The subtle change of moving into or away from the storm has a profound effect on how long the animal is in the storm. The buffalo will spend much less time in the storm than the cow, because the storm passes over quicker.

As humans, we often turn away from our challenges expecting that we can escape them – but rarely is that effective. Sometimes, the right answer is to face the storm and walk into it.

Blocking

When the mental anguish becomes so strong that you’re fighting intrusive thoughts, there are many strategies that one may employ in an attempt to retain balance. Unconsciously, there may develop a tendency towards obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), including ritualized approaches to common activities. We can deceive ourselves into believing that these activities protect ourselves and our families, when in reality they deprive us of the resources that we need to heal.

A more common and more socially acceptable approach is to become a workaholic. (See The Globalization of Addiction for more.) After all, being a workaholic means that you’re providing for your family. However, the dark side is that work becomes all-encompassing, leaving little of the person for themselves or their families. It’s common to believe that if you just work harder, you can block out the feelings and memories. However, doing so deprives you of the very resources you need to live – and to recover from the pain and trauma.

Control

As Compelled to Control clearly points out, we all love the illusion of control. The illusion protects us in a random and ultimately unpredictable world. It calms our consciousness as we confront the challenges of the world. If we’re in control, then we don’t need to fear the world. We can feel safe.

Some would say that we can control ourselves but not others. However, in some ways, we’re so influenced by our environment, and we respond so instinctively at times, that it’s hard to convincingly say we’re even in complete control of our own reactions. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow for more about how we lie to ourselves.)

Defined by Our Responses

It’s not the tragedies and struggles we’ve faced that define us. What defines us is how we respond to them. Problems, struggles, and challenges are the substance of life. We can’t escape life without problems. In fact, sometimes when we believe we’re helping animals, we’re dooming them, because they need the struggle. (See Beyond the Wisdom of Walt for more.)

There’s no shame in being injured – if we can heal. If we need help to be able to heal, then we should ask for it.

Worst Case Scenario

Sometimes, we’re so afraid of playing the worst-case scenario game that we won’t play it at all. Other times, we won’t play the game fairly. In a bit from a comedian friend, he speaks how his mother moves from how he isn’t overly responsible through owning dogs to having a child that dies of neglect. This wholly illogical chain of thinking is the way that too many people think about worst-case scenario.

Instead of looking to the things that can happen and reasonably evaluating their probability and impact, we focus on the case where the Earth is impacted by an asteroid – something that’s both always a possibility and something that we have no ability to prevent or mitigate.

By avoiding the game, we trap ourselves into a set of beliefs about a threat or stressor that aren’t realistic. Like a large shadow from a small person or animal, we magnify the size of the problem, because we refuse to look at it directly.

The Balance of Life

In a state of suicidal crisis, it’s possible to lose all sense of scale. Lewis explains how buying a toy for his son and dying by suicide seemed to be of the same magnitude. Somehow, he thought that the scales of justice would be even. Reflecting on it, Lewis can see how “jacked up” his thinking was – but in the moment, the evaluation of the balance of life was such that it had no special meaning.

The research and reflections seem to validate Lewis’ experience that life and the possibility of hope aren’t given their due significance.

Focus Forward

Trauma, whether acute or chronic, is a tragedy. It’s something that each of us must learn to process, to come to terms with. We can’t run from our challenges, and we can’t pretend they don’t exist. Eventually, they’ll add up to a point where they compel us to address them – and by that time, they’ve grown fearsome. If we get the choice, we should want to pick smaller fires when we’re Fighting Fires.

Book Review-Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice: Neuroscience, Gestalt, and the Body

Robert Bogue November 27, 2023 No Comments

A common experience in trauma is dissociation. One of the clinical therapies most focused on grounding and being present – the opposite of dissociation – is Gestalt. The intersection of these two opposites is an interesting space for healing. Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice: Neuroscience, Gestalt, and the Body walks in the middle of the experiences and shows how one might connect the two.

If you need a definition of psychological trauma, please see Trauma and Recovery.

Living in an Uncertain World

The heart of the problem with trauma is some event that shatters our beliefs about the world. Psychological trauma is an event – something you’ve experienced or done – which cannot be integrated into your beliefs. Too often, the belief that’s called into question is the one about the world being predictable.

Many people see the universe as a big clock with gears spinning and whirring. Everything has the mechanical precision of cause and effect. There’s no room for chaos theory or Lorenz’ tornado-causing butterfly. (See Facilitating Organization Change.) It is this predictable world that we live in, because it’s a place of safety. If we believe the world is probabilistic, then we’ve got to accept that bad things can happen to good people, and that’s not okay.

Still, we know that probabilities exist. We watch batters swing and miss at the baseball plate. We play the lottery and expect to win – knowing that the probability is very small. We spin the wheel and roll the dice but keep for ourselves a separate thought about the safety of our world.

The first thing to accept about our world is that it’s random and impermanent.

The Disconnect

Central to Gestalt is being in contact with oneself. This is a conscious, and non-judgmental, assessment of the body and mind. This includes feeling our breathing, our heartbeat, the state of our muscles, and so on. It also includes an assessment of our emotions and whether they appear to be influencing bodily processes.

In some cases, trauma victims believe that exploring these sensations is dangerous, because it will bring back the traumatic event or that, once experienced fully, they’ll not be able to contain them.

Expanded Choices

A sign of trauma is constricted thinking. Some things are, quite literally, unthinkable. So, one sign that someone is recovering from – or healing from – traumas is the capacity to consider other options. Capture explains how thoughts can sometimes enter downward spirals. In Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice, the statement is about the barriers to escaping those cycles.

The reality is that we always have choices. Instead of the tightly coupled idea that someone or something “made you” do something, the more accurate statement is that you reacted to their action. Emotion and Adaptation explains there’s a gap between stimulus and response, and that gap allows us to respond rather than react. We can, in fact, choose our responses, if we decide we want to and we practice it.

Regulated Arousal

Much of the work on psychological trauma resolution is on increasing our capacity to process the event. This can mean increasing our resources or decreasing the impact of the event. Much of that is finding ways to regulate our arousal as we consider the event. If we can reduce the emotional responses, including fear, to a more manageable level, we can better process the event.

On the surface, it sounds simple, but it requires a set of techniques like desensitization, building safety, and the core work of Gestalt, grounding. These tools and others allow traumas to be processed and thereby stop their intrusive nature. (See Trauma and Memory for more.)

Between Too Ordered and Too Disordered

Live is about making decisions. It’s selecting the right choice or option for us at the current moment. Much has been written about how we make decisions – and the consensus seems to be that there’s an optimal range for people to operate. (See Decision Making and Sources of Power for more on how we make decisions.)

Gestalt views this from the lens of being too ordered – or too disordered. You wouldn’t expect that even creativity is helped by some bounds, but that’s what Creative Confidence says about how to be creative. So, despite getting a bad reputation, constraints can be helpful. Simultaneously, they can be too restrictive and can choke off both creativity and joy.

Sometimes the traumatized person has added constraints to their world (by themselves). It’s important for them to determine whether those constraints are too much – or if they need to add some healthy boundaries and limits.

Hovering at the Thresholds of Tolerance

Flow is a highly productive state that lives in the narrow band between challenge and capability. (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman for more.) In this gap, research finds 5x performance gains and real growth. It’s not hard to imagine how hovering around the edge of our tolerance might be a powerful way to learn to process trauma. In fact, this is the core of desensitization: keeping people safe while moving them progressively closer to something that triggers them.

By hovering at the edge of tolerance, at the edge of safety and our capacity, we expand that capacity and make it more likely that we can process trauma at some point. It’s critical here to celebrate the progress, because it can seem painfully slow when you want a solution now.

They Can’t Hurt Me, I’m Not There

Dissociation is a natural response to an overwhelming event. When the event is very close to the threshold for processing, it may be that it’s only compartmentalized. That is, we’re aware of it, and we can’t process it, but we’re still present and connected. At the other end of the continuum, there’s severe, clinical dissociation. Dissociation is a process of distancing ourselves from an event to protect ourselves from it and its impacts.

Obviously, if there’s physical trauma, dissociation doesn’t prevent that physical trauma from happening. It does, however, separate the processing of physical trauma. For instance, someone in an accident may see the scene from outside (and often above) their body. They don’t feel the pain associated with physical trauma, because their consciousness is separate from their body. It’s this dissociation that led more than one trauma victim to say, “They can’t hurt me, I’m not there.”

A technique recommended in the book when speaking with people who may be dissociating is to ask them what percent “in the room” they are. It’s a continuum between wholly present and not present at all. Often, the person you are speaking with – when prompted – can judge the degree to which they are currently dissociated, providing clues about whether it’s time to add more safety to the conversation or whether it’s safe to press on.

Relationships for Healing

Healing happens in relationships. When you look at the factors that most impact outcomes in psychological care, the number one answer is called the “therapeutic alliance.” (See The Heart and Soul of Change for more.) It is the relationship between the therapist and the patient. It’s much more important than the actual techniques in use.

In difficult work with substance use disorder (SUD) patients, Motivational Interviewing starts with engaging the patient, because without a relationship – even a professional relationship – nothing else matters.

While this book is focused on clinical applications, we know that we are most likely to influence the people with whom we have a relationship. In fact, Everett Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations believes that it’s the only thing that can change someone’s attitude – and ultimately their behaviors.

Disorganized Attachments, Trauma, and Cults

Perhaps the most disturbing thought from Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice is the way that trauma creates a disordered attachment style where none existed before. Terror, Love, and Brainwashing explains that it’s disordered attachment that makes cults possible. Often, the cult leader induces the trauma – but it’s also possible that a recent trauma could make people more susceptible to cult leaders, because they’re already partially or completely in a disordered attachment style.

I don’t believe you need to be a clinician to find ways to help people who have experienced trauma reconnect, and Trauma Therapy and Clinical Practice may have the tips to make that easier and faster.

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