Citizen Cartwright

Responding to difficult times

Over the years, I’ve mentioned various Buddhist resources for living this human experience, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned Tara Brach. I’ve been listening to Brach's podcasts for about ten years. She tells corny jokes, but I’ve found her very helpful.

Brach is a PhD clinical psychologist, and I’ve seen her on webinars training psychotherapists. She founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C. And she’s the author of four books: "Radical Acceptance," "True Refuge," "Radical Compassion" and "Trusting the Gold." Her website says her podcast is downloaded more than 2.5 million times each month.  

In what I think is one of her best podcasts, she explores:

— The roots of tyranny and fear: ways unprocessed fear fuels aggression, domination and the rise of authoritarianism

— The power of belonging: how remembering our interconnectedness can empower resistance against oppression

— Inner freedom as a path to outer change: ways mindfulness and heart-centered practices dismantle fear and awaken courage

— The role of the "spiritual warrior": cultivating presence, compassion, and truth to stand against inner and outer oppression

— Taking action from love, not fear: ways small, heartfelt acts contribute to collective healing and justice

Lindsay Gibson’s tools for people with emotionally immature parents

In case you find the label “emotionally immature” to be pejorative, I do, too. But as a therapist mentioned to me, probably everyone in the past was emotionally immature. Parents whose own emotional needs hadn’t been met were unable to meet the needs of their children.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine ran an interview with therapist Lindsay Gibson. The article begins:

“We live in a culture permeated by therapy, one in which people are eager to apply psychotherapeutic concepts to themselves and their closest relationships. That includes, naturally, the relationship with our parents. But the desire to understand the hows and whys of our parents’ emotional influence is hardly new. Indeed, a classic poem by Philip Larkin, “This Be the Verse,” was buzzing around my mind as I prepared for this interview with the clinical psychologist Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, author of the book “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.” Larkin’s poem begins like this: “They mess you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do./They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.” (Poetry aficionados will notice I swapped in a clean word for a foul one. Forgive me, Philip.)

“But what do we do with the age-old knowledge that parents can bend us in damaging ways? That’s where Gibson comes in. Her book has become a slow-burning best seller since it was published in 2015 and has earned a devoted following on social media, where videos of people talking about it have been seen by millions. In the book, Gibson argues that a key to understanding harmful parental behaviors is, as her title suggests, the notion of emotional immaturity. Furthermore, that parental immaturity has negative ripple effects for children that last into adulthood. But thankfully, she says, it’s possible to get out from under the weight of those emotionally immature parents. Even if that means, in drastic cases, breaking off the relationship entirely.”

I’ve read all of Gibson’s books and have found them helpful in understanding my own life.

Since the Times article requires a subscription, here is a transcript of an interview with Gibson from an online webinar with trauma experts.

Universal good news

It seems that Fix the News is giving everyone access to this week’s 50 examples of good news. So I hope you’ll have time to at least scroll through the abundance of good that’s occurring on our little planet.

But I’d like to focus on one item that's simultaneously making me smile and bringing tears to my eyes.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope has captured images of 26 million galaxies, covering 10 billion years of cosmic history, The Guardian reports.

The most popular theory of the universe suggests that just 5 percent is made from ordinary matter, The Guardian says. Dark matter, an invisible substance that forms what's called the cosmic web, is said to account for 25 percent. The bulk, about 70 percent, is said to be dark energy, a “mysterious” force that's accelerating the expansion of the universe.

Adam Amara, the UK Space Agency’s chief scientist and one of the researchers who first proposed the mission 20 years ago, says, “I’m now convinced that we have the image quality in the resolution that in six years’ time, there’ll be new categories of objects discovered by Euclid.”

Sages and scientists tell us that a skill for emotional well-being is to broaden our perspective. Here are some examples, from Psychology Today.

And there couldn't be a much wider perspective than we get from the Euclid space telescope. 

Just how important is my personal to-do list or our national or international to-do list amid the 1.5 billion galaxies the Euclid space telescope is expected to document?

Good, reasonable people

“How could my family members, who are on the other side of the political divide from me, be so unmoving, so unthinking, so stubborn? And on the other hand, I know that they’re not stupid people, and they’re not bad people. These are people I love.”

 

These thoughts led Keith Payne, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to research identity and political division. He explains his findings in his book “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide,” which was published in October.

 

“The key idea behind what’s called social identity theory is that we derive a lot of our sense of self-esteem from the groups that we belong to, the groups that are most important to us, whether that’s groups like race, ethnic groups, or groups like national groups or religious groups. We all want to believe that we’re good and reasonable people, and that we’re good and reasonable members of our groups, and that the people who belong to those groups are good people, too,” Payne says in an interview in UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine. 

 
“And that’s sort of what I call the psychological bottom line, that whatever new argument or piece of information we’re presented with, we process it in a way that has to add up to maintain the belief that I’m good and my groups are good, too,” he says.

 

“So, if I’m presented with a piece of information that suggests that my group is wrong or has done something bad, there are a thousand ways that we can counter, argue, or change the subject, or switch attention, or move the goalposts rather than engaging with the facts,” Payne says. “We go around and around in these patterns of thinking to find some way to justify that I am right, my groups are right, and we’re good people. Both sides are doing this. There is a competition of mental gymnastics in which we use facts or figures or evidence as tools, or even as weapons, to just defend my sense that I’m a good person.”

 

“If you get really deep into the human psychology of social identity, there’s a way of short-circuiting a lot of the defensiveness that we see, because the whole game that we’re playing is trying to defend and justify yourself as a good, reasonable person. So if you walk into the conversation saying, look, I know you’re a good person, I know you’re reasonable, it cuts right to the heart of the matter, and then you can have a more productive conversation,” Payne says.

 

Here is a review of Payne’s book by The New York Times.

Tools for stressful times: Deep, slow breathing

As we’ve noted many times before, we humans aren’t comfortable with uncertainty and change.

 

And here we are, facing this week’s high-stakes, toss-up 2024 election. It’s impossible to know who will be president or which party will be in the House and Senate majority, enacting or eviscerating the president’s agenda.

 

What helps me most in times like these is deep, slow breathing. I heard a top U.S. therapist say in a webinar a few years ago that this works because it tricks the body into thinking it can’t be anxious, or it would be breathing faster.

 

So I put one hand on my belly, to feel it expand as I breathe, and the other on my heart, in compassion for myself and for our human family.

 

And then I follow this 4-7-8 breathing technique that I’m seeing suggested pretty much everywhere these days:

 

— Inhale through your nose while counting slowly to four

— Hold your breath while counting to seven

— Exhale through your mouth while counting to eight (the slow exhale is the key)

 

Here is more on this technique from the Cleveland Clinic.

 

I like to think of our human family as a pile of puppies, cozy even as we gnaw each other's ears. I’m grateful to be in the pile of puppies with you, dear readers.

Efforts to heal partisanship

“The nation’s poisonous divisions, exacerbated by politicians, cable news and social media, and collectively known as the outrage industrial complex, have been much lamented. Less noticed is the counterweight, a constellation of nonprofits and other organizations like the Kentucky Rural Urban Exchange devoted to bridging divides — urban and rural, Black and white, LGBTQ and straight, left and right. Call it the kumbaya industrial complex,” says The New York Times.

 

“We have to be focused on what we call the exhausted majority — that’s 65 percent of Americans,” says Stephen Heintz, president and chief executive of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a major financial backer of the proliferating groups trying to promote common ground. “It’s just not an efficient use of time to convince true ideologues to compromise.”

 

On Monday, with the backing of Rockefeller Brothers, the MacArthur Foundation, the Emerson Collective and others, a new group, Trust for Civic Life, awarded its first $8 million to 20 civic groups considered the most promising in their efforts to rebuild community and reinforce democratic values.

 

The first trust grants, chosen from more than 60 organizations, were announced in Boulder, Colo., at a Democracy Funders Strategy Summit on combating authoritarianism — “more evidence that bridge-building has become the hot new concept in a country looking for hope,” the Times says. 

 

Another $2 million will come later this year to meet the trust’s pledge of $10 million a year for community-level democracy efforts, says the Times. In this case, “democracy” is with a small “d” — emphasizing efforts to shore up the values needed to promote democratic pluralism, without explicit mentions of Republicans or Democrats.

 

In Minnesota, a Rural-Urban Exchange modeled on Kentucky’s is taking root. Braver Angels, a national organization, explicitly seeks to develop dialogue and respect across the political divide. 

 

The Lyceum Movement, hearkening back to early 19th-century efforts to forge communities in a new nation, is convening meetings and lectures in towns large and small in Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota, “trying to stand in for local institutions like churches, newspapers and service societies that have atrophied, replaced by a national tribalism,” according to the Times.

 

Lyceums began in the early 19th century to bring the brightest minds to small towns and rural lecture halls in the hope of bringing all the citizens of the fledgling American democracy into the communal conversation. By the outbreak of the Civil War, there were about 3,000 lyceums in the United States, says the Times.

 

NewGround is expanding from its Los Angeles base to train facilitators who foster dialogue between Muslims and Jews at one of the most difficult moments in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And at colleges and universities, BridgeUSA has established 65 chapters, hoping to make those who embrace dialogue the real campus radicals, not those who fall in line with the left or right, says Manu Meel, the organization’s chief executive.

 

“If you’re a student, you need to feel that the way you earn credibility is to be a bridge builder, not a conflict entrepreneur,” Meel says.

Tools for stressful times: The goodness beneath the behavior

Amid the threats of political violence following the Trump verdict, thank goodness for the countervailing, inspirational work of people like Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle, with gang members in Los Angeles.

I’m reading his 2021 book, “The Whole Language: The Power of Extravagant Tenderness.” 

I mentioned his work in this blog in 2018 after reading his first book, “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.”

At that time, I quoted his approach: "You stand [in compassion and kinship] with the belligerent, the surly, and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

Among the stories Boyle tells in “Whole Language”: Saul was horrifically abused (I’ll leave out the details) by his stepfather and other family members. At 13, he killed his stepfather. He spent thirteen years in Youth Authority and then graduated to prison for another ten years.

Boyle says: "Saul’s history was a life-denying landscape filled with shame, a sense of unworthiness and self-hatred. He now opens to life without his previous armoring.”

Saul eventually said, "I’ve decided to grow up to be somebody I always needed as a child.”

He went on to show tenderness to emotionally wounded young men, treating them like his sons and helping them to recover.

Examples like this enable me to practice living in our common, healing humanity rather than in fear of the behavior of the wounded.

Tools for stressful times

People at every point in history probably felt they lived in stressful times. The good news right now is that we have so many tools to calm ourselves.

As you know, in this blog, I’m trying to provide a balanced view of what’s going on.

Recently I asked John Dineen — who’s spent his career as an insider in government and media — to help separate the news we informed citizens need from the news that media need to run to get clicks for their own financial survival.

Now I’d like to do more to share tools I’ve come across that help me and the people I work with as a coach/tutor to handle difficult situations and difficult feelings.

I’m creating a new category in this blog called "Tools for stressful times," where I’ve put items I’ve run in the past and will put items in the future. I’m also going to run a Tools for stressful times item that will stay at the top of this blog every day to remind us of key tools.

For today:

The 12-step programs say we can be serene no matter what. This, of course, takes practice. 

While I’m not religious, when I first heard, as a teenager or young adult, the Serenity Prayer used by the 12-step programs, I thought it was so wise.

So here’s a tool that's being used right now by millions of people, in and outside 12-step programs, around the world.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., said in the run up to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent effort to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson:

“The Serenity Prayer is insightful here. There is nothing that realistically can be done to guarantee that that weapon is disarmed. Frankly, how freeing, because now every single one of us whose taken the oath of office to serve in the House understands that we just have to do our job in the best possible way, and let the chips fall where they will.” 

Private equity’s increasing role in caring for our most vulnerable

We’ve already talked about the role of private equity in assisted living facilities, nursing homes, hospices, hospitals (you may recall the series of articles in 2022 by KHN, since renamed KFF Health News). 

 

Now, each of the top five for-profit child care chains — KinderCare, Learning Care Group, the Goddard School, Primrose Schools and Bright Horizons — is controlled by private-equity funds, and private-equity-backed centers have 10 to 12 percent of the market, says The Atlantic.

 

I recently discovered that private equity also is in psychotherapy.

 

And physical therapy.

 

And the care of children with autism.

 

The Atlantic article reminds us of some of the problems of the private equity business model, according to the book "Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America,” by Brendan Ballou, former special counsel for private equity at the Justice Department:

 

— Private equity buys a business with the intention of flipping it for a profit, not long-term sustainability, meaning it's trying to maximize value in the short term and is less likely to invest in staff or facilities. 

 

— It tends to load businesses with debt and a lot of fees. 

 

— Its business structure insulates private equity firms from liability.

 

I’m always grateful when someone who points out a problem also recommends solutions, as Ballou does in his book. I’ve been meaning to summarize them here.

This Valentine’s Day, a tip to feel calm, cozy

As you know, I work as an academic tutor and coach for children and teens. Much of my work is helping them deal with anxiety.

 

In a class I take that trains therapists and coaches, I recently learned about the book "Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster,” by Linda Graham, a marriage and family therapist.

 

The book contains more than 130 exercises to help people survive and thrive, no matter what.

 

So for this Valentine’s Day, in these anxious times, here is a very simple tool Graham describes as “portable equilibrium,” that’s powerful enough to calm a panic attack in less than a minute:

 

— Put your hand on your heart and breathe in a sense of safety or goodness.

 

— Remember one moment when you felt safe or loved by another human or a pet.

 

— Feel those feelings for 20 to 30 seconds.

 

— Repeat this practice many times a day at first, “to strengthen the neural circuitry that remembers this pattern.”

 

"Remembering a moment of feeling safe, loved, and cherished by another person or pet activates the social vagus, reassuring you that indeed you are safe, you belong, and you are welcomed,” Graham says. "Your blood pressure decreases, and your heart rate stabilizes. You return to the sense of safety that comes from a feeling of connection and belonging with safe others, even when you are alone.”

 

She suggests practicing this exercise whenever you feel the first sign of an upset. With practice, it will enable you to avert a difficult emotional reaction before it hijacks you. 

 

At a minimum, she suggests practicing it five times a day for a week to train your brain in this new response to any difficult moment.