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Mind Matters: Interbeing

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, defines our connectedness to self, to other, to the earth, as interbeing. Interbeing does not dismiss the I or the self but does reframe it in such a way that we see how connected we are to everyone and everything.

Recently, a client reflected on his life and world events and how the two intersect. He pondered what effect he has as one person in the vast array of the moment’s tragedies—what is the relationship between his banking job and the fact that millions of bats are dying in the US of a fungus disease? Meanwhile a gunman has killed twelve people in Washington, DC. Of course, human life is priceless but he reflects if bats—and bees too—are goners, are we far behind? After all, one bat eats thousands of insects a night and bees pollinate crops. Both are a farmer’s friends—hence, everyone’s life support system. Without their work, we perish.

At first sight what we consider trivial may have dire consequences. We wake up to gunmen killing people—and we care, at least momentarily. Yet, we hardly “bat” an eyelash at news about creatures we may believe to be useless or disdainful. That tragedy is not so visible. However, without awareness of “interbeing,” we do violence to ourselves and each other. So there is a connection between human behavior and nature! Consider that there is a continuum of violence: the acts of killing innocent victims are most horrendous, but the spectre/spectrum of violence does not stop there. Blatant disregard of vanishing species, the pollution of the air and water is collectively abusive also.

Ah, but here is where the “I” comes into play. Rather than despair, “What’s a person to do?” the rallying cry can be what can “I” do in my own way to care for the “interbeing-ness” of the world. Heroic acts aside, baby steps are wondrous!

Instead of putting discarded, yet still usable, objects of affluence in the trash, fill the SUV or minivan and take them to Habitat for Humanity’s Re-Store, or whatever charity suits you. Landscape with native plants to invite the birds and bees! Recycle, yes, but beyond that, note the words of violence many of us use towards the anonymous drivers that surround us. Breathe and be aware—we are not ego-centric islands but interbeings walking not just on but with the earth. Or, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Walk as if you are kissing the earth with your feet.”

And drive as though your mother or your son is in front of you.

* Kayta Curzie Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private practice in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments at MindMatters@DrGajdos.com or (610)388-2888. Past columns are posted to www.drgajdos.com.

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Mind Matters: Re-Creation vs. Recreation

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“… Morning has broken like the first morning, Black bird has spoken like the first bird. … Praise with elation, praise every morning, God’s re-creation of the new day. …”

Although this old hymn’s lyrics (by Eleanor Farjeon) may print the word recreation without the hyphen, I placed it here to emphasize not only how the word is pronounced in the song but also how we need to consider what recreation means in our lives.

We use words without thought of their radical meaning — in the sense that the word radical is derived from radix, or root. Consider then the roots of re-creation. The word is derived from the Latin also: re meaning “again” and creare meaning “to bring forth” or “to beget.” So our recreation is our own re-creation — a renewal, a way to have new life.

Re-creation can take on many forms. Children are naturals at play and recreation, yet adults may sometimes interfere with their developmental process. For example, when we remove school recesses, or consider art and music as superfluous to the academic curriculum, we deny the need for re-creation. Re-creation gives balance to both children’s studies and adults’ work. What research finds is that recreation actually enhances both academic and job performance.

This is not about being of the leisure class or its opposite, an incessant laborer. Re-creation is about finding balance in life between work and the play that helps us re-create and renew.

Now that it is August, many of us are almost at the end of re-creation vacation times and headed toward Labor Day. Ironically, Labor Day, in a way marks the need for re-creation, not the end of it.

Labor Day was most likely established in 1882 by Matthew Maguire, a machinist and secretary of the Central Labor Union. Following the deaths of workers at the hands of United States marshals and the military during the Pullman strike, the United States Congress legislated Labor Day as a national holiday. This was to be a day of “recreation and amusement” for workers and their families. Now, many employees who work in retail, rather than celebrating, are working themselves — for all the “Labor Day Sales.”

Perhaps this is just one indication of how Americans work longer hours and have less time for recreation than workers in just about every other developed nation. Reporting in a Harvard University policy brief, Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt note, “average annual working hours are substantially shorter in European countries and elsewhere … than they are in the United States. … [U.S.] workers are less likely to receive paid annual leave and paid public holidays … those … that do receive paid time off generally receive far less than their counterparts in comparable economies.”

Well, despite how we may have less re-creation time, we can savor re-creation moments each day wherever we find them. The re-creation of the new day may be listening to hear the blackbird speak.

* Kayta Curzie Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private practice in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments at MindMatters@DrGajdos.com or 610-388-2888. Past columns are posted to www.drgajdos.com.

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Mind Matters: From family therapy to epigenetics

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In my early years as a psychologist and family therapist, I had the good fortune to meet and learn from many pioneers of family therapy. Perhaps the grandfather of family therapy, Murray Bowen, and his theories captivated me the most. He did not just consider the individual, couple, or family in the session; he was interested in the inter-generational patterns in the family tree. He wanted to know who the great-grandparents, the grandparents, the parents were, both who was born and who died when and where. He derived emotional patterns in the facts of the family as they cascaded down the generations. Bowen intuited that there was a biological foundation in how the grief, stresses and traumas of one generation informed succeeding generations

Now, with the burgeoning field of epigenetics, Bowen’s theories prove true. Epigenetics is the study of the influence of the environment upon the genome —the individual’s DNA identity. No. Your DNA doesn’t change, but the environment does “tag” the various expressions of your genes, so that parts of your genome don’t get expressed. Geneticists, such as Randy Jirtle (see the July 24, 2007, PBS Nova program regarding Epigenetics, Ghost in Your Genes.) use this analogy: consider the genome (the particular DNA) of an individual to be like a computer, and the epigenome would be like the software.

So you can say, “OK, big deal, I eat junk food or smoke cigarettes and debilitate my body. It’s my body, so what?” Well, the problem is what you do to your body that changes the biochemical expression of a gene gets passed down the generations. What our grandparents did does affect us. But, it is not only what we, or our grandparents, did themselves. It is also what has been done to them or us that is especially profound psychologically. If our grandparents suffered traumas—wars, violence or poverty—the emotional effects are transmitted not just behaviorally, but in the expression of genetics.

That is the downside. The upside is that this epigenetic effect on the genome can be changed. This is where choice and awareness come in. We actually can heal the past—at least the DNA expression of our history—through psychotherapy, learning about our family mythology and transcending its constrictions, learning how to emotionally regulate and defuse our emotional reactivity. Turns out our bodies are more than ourselves. We truly are connected to the past and we can change the future generations by changing ourselves now.

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Mind Matters: Remembering Rumpelstiltskin

Health

Bet you thought it was a far-fetched fairy tale of little consequence. Just as Rorshachs have meaning beyond being “just” inkblots, so too can fairy tales have a deeper psychological significance.

I remember Rumpelstiltskin, or at least I recall the epiphany I had about him when I heard James Hillman, a great Jungian psychologist, reframe the story.

Quick refresher: Rumpelstiltskin is the tiny guy who helps the miller’s daughter spin straw into gold. She needs to do this or else the king will kill her. Rumpelstiltskin will help her if she gives him her first born. She agrees, assuming that will never happen. She strikes a devil’s bargain.

The third time she spins the straw into gold, the king decides she is worth marrying. Within a year, she has a baby. Enter Rumpelstiltskin, demanding this new life.

The queen pleads with him and he gives her a reprieve of three days in which time she must discover his name or he will take the child. Rumpelstiltskin believes it is impossible for her to do this. Note that the name Rumpelstiltskin is related to a German name meaning Rattling Ghost.

The queen did discover his name in time, with the aid of her messenger. When she informs Rumpelstiltskin of his true name, he angrily disappears into the earth.

The psychological point of this? That indeed we all have shadows of our family past that haunt us. It may be the unnamed ghosts of physical abuse, sexual abuse, addictions, you “name it”! When we face these rattling ghosts and do name them, they lose their powerful grip on the psyche. Furthermore, that means new life is not stolen from us, but can be cherished and can grow.

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Mind Matters: More gleanings from psychological research

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Sometimes common sense is quite inaccurate and sometimes it’s spot on. What I enjoy about rigorous research is that while it can sometimes support common sense perceptions, it often does not. For eons, remember the common sense view was that sunrises and sunsets proved that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun revolved around it. When this “obvious” notion was displaced by the proof that the sun was the center of our solar system and the earth was its satellite, humans had a rude awakening. We were no longer the center of the universe. So it goes when we learn that there are larger truths than the fabrications we live by.

So check out the following research briefs and see if you think your common sense views are being challenged or not.

• What about those one-sided cell phone calls? A University of San Diego study notes that research subjects were far more distracted when they overheard only one side of a phone conversation as opposed to a conversation between two people in a room with them. In addition to being more distracting, the single-sided cell phone conversation was remembered and recalled better.

• And sound in sleep? At the University of Tübinger in Germany, researchers found that certain sounds can enhance memory. Light rhythmic noise during sleep that was in sync with the brain’s electrical readings appeared to boost retention of what was learned the previous night.

• And what about sounds babies hear in their sleep? According to a University of Oregon study, infants may be adversely affected by high conflict home environments even while asleep. Researchers observed the fMRI scans of sleeping infants while a male spoke “gibberish” with various emotional tones. The babies from high conflict homes had a higher response to the angry voice in the stress/emotional regulation brain areas than did babies from low conflict homes.

• Is there prejudice against those who are obese? What about physicians? And their patients? In a study at Johns Hopkins University, it was found that patients questioned the credibility of the advice of an obese physician. Meanwhile, another Johns Hopkins study reported findings that physicians were prejudiced against obese patients as well. While physicians may have asked the same questions and given similar medical advice to both normal weight and obese patients, they were not likely to be as empathetic or understanding with the obese patients as they were with normal weight patients.

So where did the research converge with common sense for you? For more research stories you can go to www.apa.org/monitor/digital/in-brief-june-2013.aspx. See also APA Monitor, June 2013, In Brief by Amy Novotney.

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Mind Matters: Time, time, time

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Summertime is coming, and the livin’ is easy—or not. But let’s just consider the word “time” for a moment. Many of us seem to languish under time constraints: not enough time for one thing or another; not wanting to “take time” or “waste time.”

Writer Marney K. Makridakis decided she would “create” time since she found herself unable to “manage” or “save” it. In her book, “ Time: Using Creativity to Reinvent the Clock and Reclaim Your Life,” she describes new ways to imagine, view, and experience time. Makridakis notes how we have the illusion that we are always in linear sequential time yet we know by experience that the perception of time is influenced by emotions, values, assumptions, expectations, relationships, values.

Who has not been amazed at how time “flew” while fully participating in an event or how time “slowed to a crawl” when we have been in pain — or even bored. We want to be present to the present, yet the present itself is impermanent.

We can thank Leonardo da Vinci for saying, “The water you touch in a river is the last of that which has passed, and the first of that which is coming. Thus it is with time present.”

However, Makridakis believes that the more aware we become of the present moment, the less overwhelming and focal time becomes. Instead of perceiving a “lack of time,” we perceive the “gift of time.”

Who hasn’t felt a lack of time when looking at the to-do list of the day, or week, or month? Makridakis suggests we augment our linear view of time that relies on clock numbers and calendar squares by moving from quantitative measurements to the qualitative. What if we asked ourselves, not “How long did this take?” but “What did I learn from this?” or “How relaxed am I doing this?”

The Greeks had words for the subjective experiences of time! Makridakis explains the difference between kronos versus kairos. Kronos time — from which the word chronology is derived — refers to our everyday linear relationship to the time of schedules, clocks, and calendars. It is quantifiable and measured.

Rather than linear, kairos time is circular. Where kronos may be the relentless march of time, imagine kairos as a flowing spiral dance. We have all experienced kairos time: when we are so savoring the moment that clocks melt. Whenever we play, allow ourselves to wonder, or to be curious, I think we may be in kairos time. Kairos is not reserved for fun escapes, however. We can experience kairos in our work, when we find ourselves so engaged that kronos time is forgotten.

Perhaps the difference is in being engaged and in relationship to the process we are in or the person we are with.

Of course, we need kronos time. I am aware of my deadlines for writing this, for example. Yet I see kronos to be in the service of kairos. Kronos time gives us the structure in which kairos can flourish.

I recall observing my children when they were toddlers, playing and dancing before getting into the car. They were, as children are often, in kairos time. I was kronos mother, wishing I could be poet of the present moment but knowing that I was the keeper of schedules and my job was to gently gather these kids into the car for some mundane appointment or other. It was a poignant moment for me to see the difference between kronos and kairos. Of course, there were other times when I could let go of kronos and join the kairos of their experience. Children can be a wonderful entry into kairos time.

Makridakis describes ways that kronos time can be the structure, the container for the creativity of kairos to flourish. Even for adults.

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Mind Matters: The hidden hunger in America

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Recently I attended a county mental health advisory board meeting. I did not like what I heard: that there is a rising population of the homeless hidden among the affluent. A school administrator reported on how he encounters children every day in his suburban school district who are in need of food and shelter.

When we hear the word “homeless,” we, unfortunately, need to expand our images from the lonely man, chronically mentally ill, who has been discharged from the state hospital ten years ago.

Include now working families living out of their cars or hoping from acquaintance to friend for shower and bed. These are real cases in our community. We used to have strong safety nets, but with the tenor of the times those safety nets are being ripped asunder.

After the meeting, as I drive back to my office, I turn on NPR. Synchronistically, I hear an interview of two documentarians, Lori Silverbush and Kristy Jacobson, discussing hunger in America. They have just directed their film, “A Place at the Table,” which airs in March, 2013. They noted that 80 percent of the families receiving food stamps (the SNAP program) are working full time. In other words, many hard working Americans are not earning a living wage. These researchers also report that there are children in the schools who can’t concentrate for lack of nutrition. Our brains do funny things to us when we are hungry, actually starving for the nutrients we lack even if we appear “well-fed.” One little girl in the film says she is told to focus but when she looks at her teacher she imagines her to be a banana. She is malnourished. Silverbush and Jacobson cite the term “food insecurity” because the hunger may be invisible, hidden in the bodies of those who are obese due to lack of proper diet and nutrition. Cheap and filling food is not usually healthy food.

Meanwhile the expectation is that churches will do it all. I am a Red Cross volunteer and I know how difficult it is to recruit volunteers. Volunteerism can be inconsistent and spotty, and we are all busy. So we expect the homeless and hungry to be cared for with stopgap emergency measures in the basement of the non-profits. Yes, these are great assets to a community but they depend on volunteers and cannot serve everyone. Moreover, the fact that we need them in the first place is scandalous.

That the need for food banks and shelters is on the rise is a disgrace in an affluent, developed country — the greatest nation in the world, we are wont to say.

We may think, what, whoa, not in my neighborhood. Yet, although I live in a prosperous county of Pennsylvania, on my drive from that mental health meeting, the story of homelessness and hunger was being played out before me. I noticed in the coffee shop I visited, there was a woman sleeping in the corner, big bags at her feet. I thought, hmm, this might be her safe place of refuge for a few hours. Not 15 minutes later, I noticed a man with a burlap sack on his back, other scruffy bags in hand, walking along the road. My guess is that he is holed up somewhere in the woods between the Mc-mansion housing developments.

Perhaps for starters we can all view this new movie “A Place at the Table” and then take action in America that supports the common good. As abstract as the term “common good” is, in fact, it is about real people, the children and families of our communities.

* Kayta Curzie Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private practice in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments at MindMatters@DrGajdos.com or 610-388-2888. Past columns are posted to www.drgajdos.com.

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Mind Matters: What neuroscience teaches us about sex

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Wondering what topic I might choose to write about this week, I perused several books on my shelf. I could have chosen one of the easier reads, but, no, I elected to choose the most complex of the lot. “The Archeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions,” by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven, is a page turner—all 500 of them—that looks at mammalian neuroscientific research to give us an understanding of the human brain and behavior.

Needless to say, my little column here will not summarize all their findings. However, one of the areas of research I found fascinating was about gender differences of what Panksepp and Biven call the “BrainMind” (and “MindBrain” at times for other reasons). Rather than continue the illusion of duality between thought and neurobiology, Panksepp and Biven hope to connote a unity of both with the term “BrainMind.”

Panksepp and Biven are not the first to discuss how the male and female brain systems are different. They note that, while cognitively similar, male and female brains are different on an affective, emotional level. Simply put, the oxytocin hormonal system of females contributes to care and nurture; the vasopressin hormones in males give rise to aggression and competition.

This may sound like science just giving foundation to the old stereotypical notions of male and female. But there is far more to the research that is counterintuitive. That is, there are biological determinants that precipitate a male brain being in a female body and vice versa.

Why? Because the sexual development of the brain and the body of the fetus do not occur along the same hormonal pathways. How does this occur? Possibly by stress experienced by mothers during pregnancy. Stressors might include exposure to environmental pollutants, emotional duress, or hormonal medical treatments. These stressors could interfere with the usual hormonal processes that set gender in the brain. And it is the brain that determines sexual identity. So indeed an individual who physically appears male may identify as female, and vice versa.

A person who feels like a woman in the body of a male, and a person who feels like a man in a woman’s body is the scientific definition of being transgendered, and it usually refers to the setting of sexual identity in the brain “in utero.”

Panksepp and Biven take the findings of science to inform society. They hope that their work can help convince others to accept human differences beyond hatred and prejudice. They give us the facts of nature: most babies will be born typically male or female, brain identities the same as the physical bodies. Yet it is also a fact of nature that some babies are born with female emotional minds and male bodies, and male emotional minds with female bodies.

May scientific research such as Panksepp’s and Biven’s help society to be more open and tolerant by accepting the facts of nature—that sexual identity has many variables and variations.

* Kayta Curzie Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private practice in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments atMindMatters@DrGajdos.com or 610-388-2888. Past columns are posted towww.drgajdos.com.

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Mind Matters: Why we cry

Health

Have you ever wanted to cry and couldn’t? Or didn’t know what “to do” when a loved one bursts into tears? Why do we cry anyway?

Jay Efran and Mitchell Greene, both with doctorate degrees, have some answers. They note that tears are a manifestation of an individual’s physiological system shifting rapidly from sympathetic to parasympathetic activity. That is, the person swiftly goes “from a state of high tension to a period of recalibration and recovery.” The transition from arousal to recovery is usually initiated by a “psychologically meaningful event.”

It is not in the crisis that we cry; it is actually when we feel safe enough “to go off duty.” For example, a child generally doesn’t cry when temporarily lost and separated from the parent. He or she instead goes into search mode—hyper-vigilance—first. Then, when the child spots the parent, or someone deemed as a safe helper, the tears flow. Efran and Greene explain that tears occur in the second phase of a two-stage biological cycle. First is the high tension followed by the recovery.

What is necessary is being able to move into the second stage to recalibrate our physiology and for that—our crying—we need safety. Ever notice how both children and adults may respond to a friendly face or sympathetic gesture with tears? Hardly ever do we cry, assert Efran and Greene, in the middle of a crisis, in the presence of enemies, or in bouts of unremitting sadness.

But we may also feel safe enough to cry when we surrender to some unsolvable situation. Perhaps there is something in our life that we just can’t change and we open up to our tears. Often this gets dubbed a “breakdown.” Efran and Greene nicely reframe this, instead, as a breakthrough. Or, as Carl Jung, would say, “We don’t solve our problems, we outgrow them.” Here tears become a sign of growth.

Because crying is natural and adaptive, we need to let ourselves and others experience them. Tears are nothing to fear. In fact, they are outward signs of a physiological shift from arousal to recovery. And they are neutral: sometimes we cry when we are happy; sometimes when we are sad. Context defines them. Yet, in either case, the physiology is about a movement from transition to recalibration.

Most importantly, we need to allow our tears and the tears of our loved ones to flow. Tears signal safety: nothing to solve, or stop, or fix. Just be.

* Kayta Curzie Gajdos holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and is in private practice in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments at MindMatters@DrGajdos.com or 610-388-2888. Past columns are posted to www.drgajdos.com.

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