Citizen Cartwright

Thinking differently about our triggers

A new video on the Big Think website is titled “The case against trigger warnings: How America became a fragile nation — and how it can get its resilience back,” by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. 

 

I’ve written previously about Haidt’s efforts to help liberals and conservatives understand each other "so that policies can be made based on something more than misguided fear of what the other side is up to.”

 

On triggers, Haidt says "always trust your feelings" is a "great untruth."

 

He cites Shakespeare: "There's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Marcus Aurelius: "The whole world is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.” Buddha: "Our thoughts are the creations of our minds; with our minds we make of the world.”

 

He suggests that high school and college students be taught cognitive behavioral therapy techniques to reframe their thoughts.

Another option when thinking about an ‘enemy’

On our calendars this month are an election and Thanksgiving dinner — both potentially involving people whose views are the opposite of ours.

 

So what can help us digest whatever happens?

 

I appreciate the Dalai Lama’s approach:

 

"Realizing that the other person is also just like me is the basis on which we can develop compassion, not only toward those around us but also toward our enemy. Normally, when we think about our enemy, we think about harming him. Instead, try to remember that the enemy is also a human being, just like you.”

 

Here are suggested thoughts, from spiritual teachers Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush in their book “Walking Each Other Home”:

 

"This person has a body and a mind, just like me.
This person has feelings, emotions, and thoughts, just like me.
This person has experienced physical and emotional pain and suffering, just like me.
This person has at some time been sad, disappointed, angry, or hurt, just like me.
This person has felt unworthy or inadequate, just like me.
This person worries and is frightened sometimes, just like me.
This person will die, just like me.
This person has longed for friendship, just like me.
This person is learning about life, just like me.
This person wants to be caring and kind to others, just like me.
This person wants to be content with what life has given them, just like me.
This person wishes to be free from pain and suffering, just like me.
This person wishes to be safe and healthy, just like me.
This person wishes to be happy, just like me.
This person wishes to be loved, just like me.

Now, allow wishes for well-being to arise:
I wish this person to have the strength, resources, and social support they need to navigate the difficulties in life with ease.
I wish this person to be free from pain and suffering.
I wish this person to be peaceful and happy.
I wish this person to be loved . . . because this person is a fellow human being, just like me."

Developing our personal resilience in challenging times

In my own effort to look at what’s happening in our world in a balanced way, I’ve found some free online webinars to be helpful.

 

And one of them is coming up next month. From Sept. 13 to 18, 2022, you can watch online presentations by 36 top authors, scientists, mindfulness and compassion teachers, trauma experts, habit-change specialists, mindset and performance coaches, and self-care experts in health, well-being, and relationships. The presentations are produced by the Heart Mind Institute and Wisdom for Life.

 

Here are more information and the free sign-up.

'If you probe people’s stories, it’s harder to hate'

David Axelrod lives by the journalistic maxim that “if you probe people’s stories, it’s harder to hate,” he says in a New York Times interview.

 

The long-time reporter, Democratic political consultant and Obama administration official now is celebrating the 500th episode of his podcast, "The Axe Files,” interviews of “key figures in the political world,” according to its website.

 

"Sometimes you talk to people who you think you don’t admire, right?” he says. “And then, there are elements of them that you learn that you do.”

 

Often, he finds ways to connect across the political divide, as when he discovered that he and Karl Rove, a Republican political consultant and George W. Bush administration official, shared a common tragedy. They both had a parent who died by suicide.

 

"When people have struggles like that, I try to talk [with] them about it, in part because if people are listening who are having those struggles, or have lost someone, they understand that they’re not alone,” Axelrod says. "Karl has a very hard bark and a reputation for that. But I see him differently. Because of that, we actually have gone on and done things together on suicide prevention.”

 

Axelrod interviewed Kellyanne Conway, a Republican political consultant and Trump administration official, on “The Axe Files.”

 

“The father abandoned the family when she was three. Turns out he had another family, and he moved in with that other family and had a child just about the same age. So he leaves her and her mother and moves in with another woman and another kid who is a contemporary of hers and lives two towns down. She doesn’t see him again until she’s 12.

“She was resistant to delving too deeply into it. But finally, she said, ‘You know, I do remember coming home from school one day crying hysterically because I was one of only two kids in school who didn’t have a father.’ The other person’s father was lost in Vietnam.”

Tools to relieve anxiety, other issues

Awhile back, I came across a resource I’ve found very helpful: webinars by top U.S. therapists that are designed to train other therapists but are open to the rest of us.

 

It was in one of these webinars that I first heard about a technique now being widely recommended. To calm anxious feelings, inhale for five seconds, hold the breath for three seconds, exhale for five seconds or longer (the long exhale is key), repeat until you feel calmer. As the therapist explained, this tricks the brain into thinking, “I can’t be anxious, or I’d be breathing faster.”

 

In addition to anxiety, the webinars and other resources focus on trauma, depression, compassion, mindfulness, neurobiology and more. They’re provided by the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine.

 

Here is an infographic on overcoming anxiety, based on the work of Kelly McGonigal, author of books including "The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You and How to Get Good at It.”

The bipartisan Senate agreement on guns

The deal announced on Sunday is "a noteworthy but limited breakthrough offering modest gun curbs and stepped-up efforts to improve school safety and mental health programs," says The Associated Press.

 

The deal is "far from what Democrats would have preferred in the aftermath of the racist gun massacre in Buffalo and the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, but it is considerably more than they hoped for initially," says Carl Hulse in a New York Times analysis.

 

Multiple Senate Democrats have made clear they're ready to accept almost anything the bipartisan talks could produce, rather than engage in another standoff on the Senate floor and end up with nothing, says the Times.

 

Ten Republicans joined 10 Democrats in a statement calling for passage of the measure, providing — unless new obstacles appear — the votes to avoid a filibuster.

 

The deal would make the juvenile records of gun buyers under age 21 available when they undergo background checks. The suspects who killed 10 African Americans at a grocery store in Buffalo and 19 students and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, were both 18, and many perpetrators of recent years’ mass shootings have been young.

The agreement would offer money to states to enact and put in place “red flag” laws to make it easier to temporarily take guns from people considered potentially violent, plus funding to bolster school safety and mental health programs.

Some people who informally sell guns for profit would be required to get federal dealers’ licenses, which means they would have to conduct background checks on buyers. Convicted domestic abusers who don't live with a former partner, such as estranged ex-boyfriends, would be barred from buying firearms, and it would be a crime for a person to legally purchase a weapon for someone who wouldn't qualify for ownership.

Congressional aides have told AP that billions of dollars would be spent expanding the number of community mental health centers and suicide prevention programs. But they say some spending decisions are unresolved, as are the final wording on juvenile records and other gun provisions that might be contentious.

 

Yet underscoring election-year pressures from Buffalo and Uvalde, the parties’ shared desire to demonstrate a response to those shootings suggests that momentum toward enactment is strong, AP says.

 

Even this proposal only could be achieved because the potential political backlash for the Republicans directly involved is limited, says the Times. Four of the 10 Republicans who back the proposal — Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri, Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania — are retiring. None of the other six Republicans who signed on to the compromise is up for re-election in November.

 

Here is the full list of the 20 Democratic and Republican senators who signed on to the proposal, from CBS News.

Identifying and treating people before they become mass shooters

My thanks to the reader who alerted me to a Politico Magazine interview with the authors of the 2021 book "The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.”

 

Funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department, Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University, compiled detailed life histories on 180 shooters, speaking to their spouses, parents, siblings, childhood friends, work colleagues and teachers. 

 

Most gunmen don’t survive their carnage, but five who did talked to Peterson and Densely from prison, where they were serving life sentences. The researchers also found several people who'd planned a mass shooting but changed their mind.

 

Their findings show commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest that a data-backed, mental health-based approach could identify and address the next mass shooter before they pull the trigger — if politicians find and fund targeted solutions, says Politico.

 

“We really need resources at institutions like schools," says Peterson. "We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services. The problem is that in a lot of places, those services are not there. There’s no community mental health and no school-based mental health. Schools are the ideal setting because it doesn’t require a parent to take you there. A lot of perpetrators are from families where the parents are not particularly proactive about mental health appointments.”

 

"Post-Columbine there’s been this real focus on hardening schools — metal detectors, armed officers, teaching our kids to run and hide,” Peterson says. "The shift I’m starting to see, at least here in Minnesota, is that people are realizing hardening doesn’t work. Over 90 percent of the time, school shooters target their own school. These are insiders, not outsiders.”

In challenging times, expanding our perspective

We humans behaving humanly can lead to some distressing news headlines.

 

But let’s put our experience in a broader context.

 

"We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star,” Stephen Hawking said.

 

Maria Popova, writer of the blog Marginalia (formerly Brain Pickings), said at her Universe in Verse 2022 event:

"The reason I love thinking about the evolutionary time scale is it reminds us that we’re actually a very young species in the scheme of things. We’re barely reaching our adolescence. 

"So suddenly there’s a way of shifting the self-blame and kind of self-flagellation with which we regard ourselves for the damage we’ve done to our house. 

"Shifting it from not being a malevolent grownup villain but just a kind of young creature, not knowing its strength, not knowing its limits, moving through its environment trying to make sense [of it]. 

"And that means there’s a realistic hope that as a young creature matures, so our species could mature to be a more conscious and conscientious inhabitant of home.”

 

Here are some pictures that put our planetary home in a universal context, from Big Think.

Maintaining perspective in difficult times

My guess is that every human thinks the times they live are difficult. 

 

That said, here is one of my favorite poems, by Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet:

 

​The Guest House

​This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

​A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

​Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

​The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

​Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Taken from SELECTED POEMS by Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks (Penguin Classics, 2004)

As new climate report is released, what’s the most positive approach we can take?

For the most balanced and accurate summary I can find on what’s in the report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I’m relying on the press release from the IPCC itself.

 

Here are the first three paragraphs:

 

"In 2010-2019 average annual global greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest levels in human history, but the rate of growth has slowed. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5°C is beyond reach. However, there is increasing evidence of climate action, said scientists in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today.

"Since 2010, there have been sustained decreases of up to 85% in the costs of solar and wind energy, and batteries. An increasing range of policies and laws have enhanced energy efficiency, reduced rates of deforestation and accelerated the deployment of renewable energy.

 

“We are at a crossroads. The decisions we make now can secure a liveable future. We have the tools and know-how required to limit warming,” said IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee. “I am encouraged by climate action being taken in many countries. There are policies, regulations and market instruments that are proving effective. If these are scaled up and applied more widely and equitably, they can support deep emissions reductions and stimulate innovation.”

 

So there’s a lot on humans’ to-do list. And it’s doable, if we humans decide to do it.

 

Climate “doomism” is a topic of articles by The New York Times and The Associated Press.

 

U.N. Environment Program Director Inger Andersen says with reports like these, officials are walking a tightrope. They're trying to spur the world to action without sending people spiraling into paralysis.

 

“We are not doomed, but rapid action is absolutely essential,” Andersen says. “With every month or year that we delay action, climate change becomes more complex, expensive and difficult to overcome.”

 

“The big message we’ve got (is that) human activities got us into this problem and human agency can actually get us out of it again,” says James Skea, co-chair of Monday’s report. “It’s not all lost. We really have the chance to do something.”

 

“It’s not that they’re saying you are condemned to a future of destruction and increasing misery,” says Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate secretary who helped forge the 2015 Paris climate agreement and now runs an organization called Global Optimism. “What they’re saying is ’the business-as-usual path ... is an atlas of misery ’ or a future of increasing destruction. But we don’t have to choose that. And that’s the piece, the second piece, that sort of always gets dropped out of the conversation.”

“Underneath doomerism and hopeium is the question of ‘Are we going to win?’” says Mary Annaïse Heglar, a climate essayist and co-host of the “Hot Take” podcast and newsletter. “That’s premature at this point. We need to ask ourselves if we’re going to try. We don’t know till we try if we’re going to win. Whether or not we do, it will still have been worth it.”