Healing Society

In addition to working with individuals and trying to help them, healers also learn about characteristics that people have in common, and try to draw conclusions that will help everyone.  In the fifty or so years since Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiment, it has been widely discussed and conclusions have been drawn about ways in which the dangers of blindly following authority can be avoided.  The Psychology textbook I used in college, written about five years after the experiment, focused on the pressure from the peer group (even though the pressure seems to have come from one person) as a factor in causing subjects to (as far as they knew?) inflict an electric shock on another person. About a decade later, Milgram's book (including further experiments) was out, and a textbook from that era focused on the factors that reduced the obedience to authority (proximity of the victim, status of the victim, etc,).  In 1991, Thomas Blass wrote a paper discussing personality factors and their interaction with situations in determining level of obedience.  The early 2000's saw Blass's book about Stanley Milgram and a book by Lauren Slater detailing her investigations about several famous psychology experiments.  She interviewed two of the subjects in the original study.  One stopped shocking the "learner" fairly early and the other did not.  Given the circumstances of their lives, it would have seemed like they would have done the opposite of what they had done.  Slater focused on the effects that the study may have had on the participants.  I'll mention two recent developments.  Jerry Burger did a partial replication the original study and produced similar results.  Within the past month, Sam Sommers cited the study as an indication that starting off with a small lapse can lead progressively to larger and larger ones.  Stanley Milgram lived about fifty years; fifty years after his death, people are still trying to use what he learned to help others.

A Healer's Story

I picked up The Man With the Beautiful Voice, along with Foucault's The Order of Things, at the dump Swap Shop this morning (no kidding; in this UNH student and professor bedroom town we have a very cultured dump).  In TMWTBV, Lillian B. Rubin gives a good picture of how she works as a therapist.  For her, the relationship is most important.  She talks about being responsive to your own feelings, as well as those of the person with whom you are working.  She talks about teaching skills for self-awareness and managing ourselves and our world more effectively.  She gives examples from the therapy experiences of herself, her brother, and several people with whom she has worked.  For her, a diagnosis only tells part of the story.  There are good discussions of forgiveness, insight, and the limits of what therapy can be expected to do.  If you see people for therapy, you should read this, even if you can't find it for free at your local dump.

A New Way of Healing

I've just finished reading Connectome by Sebastian Seung.  The basic idea is that we need to map the connections between the neurons in the brain, in the same manner that the Genome was mapped, to gain a full understanding of what it is to be us.  The problems of technology and method are rather awesome.  The author does provide ideas about how they could be overcome.  He has a good way of dividing a problem or process into parts.  The ways in which neurons might change to produce new learning and understanding are to reweight, reconnect, rewire and regenerate.  The tasks we need to accomplish to decode the connectome are to carve, codebreak, compare, and change.  In terms of healing, the hope is to provide means to prevent connections between brain cells that cause problems, or means to change the connections when they have already been made.  The suggestions for living forever are interesting; the discussion of death is interesting in terms of the way in which it is taken for granted.  I hadn't ever considered having my body frozen or pickled before the precious connections in my brain degenerated. Here are some other people studying the connectome.  All in all, a beneficial read.

Healers' Magazine

Actually, it's the Psychotherapy Networker. here is the web site I just read the current issue and got two CE credits by taking a test on it.  You can read it on line, and if you can stand the sound that they use to make you think you are actually turning pages (it didn't fool me) it gets you the information pretty efficiently.  It is also useful to be able to go to other web sites while you are reading it.  Here are a dozen healers who figure in the issue and an idea from each:
Terry Real - we should help men more with their depression and other issues
David Flohr - groups in which parents support each other are useful
Jonathan Baylin - parents' neuro-biological reactions influence how they parent
Stephen Porges - the polyvagal theory is important (he proposed it)
George Engel - psychosomatic reactions are important (he was early in the study of this)
Dan Hughes - attachment and trauma need to be taken into account in helping children
Michael Ungar - resilience is an important  idea in helping children
Etienne Wenger-Trayner - people learn best from each other while working on what they do
Ron Taffel - you can improve your relationships in your family
Jeffrey Kluger - a journalist actually, but wrote a book about the importance of siblings
Claire Berman - when a sibling dies, it is very important for us
Andrew Weil - the medical model may be hurting us
Google any of these people and you can access more of what they have to say about being a helper.

Healers' Schools

I think that to try to make some progress in writing the Healers and Feelings book that I'm writing, I'll map out the chapters.  Each chapter will have some information about a person in one of the mental health healing fields and a condition that is in DSM-IV, or thereabouts.  I'll send them out from the Thinkers and Thinking Facebook page, and they will go to Twitter, also.  William James will be first (depression is the condition) along with the University of Geneva.  Apparently he attended a school briefly, which was related to that institution.  His first person account of his depression related experiences, and also his father's account of his "vastation" and his sister's account of her mood problems, in her diary, are all amazing accounts of psychological experiences.  If there are combinations of therapist types and treated conditions that you think would be good for me to investigate, leave a comment please.  

Healers Named Green(...)

I've been researching healers for Healers and Feelings.  My strategy is to print out a web page for people who are involved in the helping professions and/or who are doing research in this area.  It has helped me to sort out who is whom; there are a lot of us.  Here is a list of people whose last name is or starts with Green.  There are nearly fifty on the list, with links to information about them on the web.  There are some heavyweights.  Ross Greene and Joshua Greene are well known young researchers/practitioners.  Joanne Greenberg wrote a classic in the field.  Stanley Greenspan and Ralph Greenson were well known, during their time.  There is an intuitive counselor (Beth Green), a person who uses about ten descriptors for herself (Faith Green), a heavy duty schizophrenia researcher (Michael Green), and someone heavy into Positive Psychology (Suzy Green).  A few more corners of the fields represented are rapid resolution therapy (Tim Green), someone who directed the Minuchin Center (David Greenan), an object relations guy (Jan Greenberg), an Educational Psychologist (Jeffrey Greene), somebody at the University of Miami (Daryl Greenfield), and a school counselor (Felicsha Green).  It turns out to be a pretty good representation of the work being done.  Are you eligible for the list, or do you know of anyone who is?  If so, let me know.

Counselors/Therapists/Life Coaches

I've been tweeting the web page of a "randomly" selected counselor/therapist/life coach most days. A (the?) reader of my tweets responded with the idea that there are important differences between these types of people. So there are.  Here are some observations about that.  I'm rounding up information about people like these to decide who to include in my book which will be called Healers and Feelings.  Not all of the people who are counselors or therapists or life coaches would like being called healers.  There are plenty of healers who are not in any of those categories.  There is the category of helpers (as in Helping Professions), but I suppose most everyone wants to be thought of as a helper.  When I started out, everyone knew what a therapist was, but "counselor" and particularly "life coach" were less well known terms.  What we used to mean by, "you need therapy" is almost always said as. "you need counseling", now.  The issue of the difference between psychologist, psychiatrist, and social worker is also relevant, but somewhat dated.  I'd say that one important difference is the position of a helper on the dimension that has medical point of view on one end and a more varied end that includes humanistic, behavioral, pastoral, and cognitive points of view.  Another important difference is the amount of training and experience that the helper has, ranging from little training and a month of experience to an advanced degree and fifty years of experience.  Maybe you are best off in the middle of that bell shaped curve.  Beyond that, finding an interaction that will move you towards your goals is a function of your ability to judge the person you are interacting with, and probably some good luck.