Conscious Choice: Emotional Healing

January 2001 | Choice Books

Emotional Healing

by Mark Harris

"He drew a circle to shut me out.
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took him in."

The other day I was reading one of the Chicago newspapers when an item in a personals column jumped out at me. A woman who described herself as overweight wrote to tell of her recent experience at a singles dance. As she related, she had gone to the dance with a positive attitude, determined to make an effort to meet some new guys. Then she overheard one man whisper to another, "That fat thing doesn’t belong here." Later, she approached another guy and asked him to dance. He turned her down. As she walked away, he muttered to a friend, "Get a load of what just asked me to dance."

Reading this I felt kind of down. I found myself pondering the cruelty in the world, how unfeeling some people can be. I thought about times I had felt rejected, albeit not with such hostility. At least the columnist had expressed sympathy, remarking that the letter writer had far more going for her than these men with their false sense of superiority. But still I felt kind of gloomy. As I sat at my kitchen table, I was in a pensive mood. Lost in thought, I found myself drifting back to a time now long past.

I am in the first grade in the Los Angeles suburb of Whittier, and it is afternoon recess. Out on the playground, I come upon a small circle of classmates teasing a new boy. This boy is different. He has only one arm and wears a prosthesis, which earns him mocking taunts of "Captain Hook, Captain Hook" from a few children. The boy looks upset, as if he doesn’t know what to do. I just stare. Then I bolt. I’m off running to the other side of the playground where two teachers are standing. I beg the teachers to stop the taunts. Tears stream down my cheeks.

The teachers do not seem very upset by what I am reporting, at least by the measure of my six-year-old emotions. I expect some sort of dramatic rescue but instead get what to me seems only muted concern. I’m told not to worry and to stop crying as the teachers resume their conversation. In my mind an eternity seems to pass before one of the teachers walks over to the one-armed boy.

Now, so many years later, I am struck by how clear the memory remains. How unsatisfying a feeling I associate with the memory. The thought occurs to me that I absorbed something in that moment. Something lasting. Something about the reality of suffering in the world, injustice. As I got older, I also saw that through denial many otherwise good people learn to tolerate many wrongs. They choose at some level of their awareness not to see that which appears too painful, not only in the larger society but in their own personal lives.

I suspect I’ve been metaphorically trying to save that boy all my life, identifying with those who are somehow "different," outside the mainstream. The defeated and the undone. All those living on the margins — without voice or justice.

Yes, I learned something on that day: What is normal in our society is not always, or even usually, very healthy.

The Psychology of Scarcity

I was reflecting on all this as I read Bowen White’s new book, Why Normal Isn’t Healthy: How to Find Meaning, Passion, & Humor on the Road Most Traveled (Hazelden, 2000), a welcome and witty rumination on living with health and humor in a stressful world. White is a kind of Patch Adams of the plains, a Kansas City, Missouri-based physician and agent provocateur for healthful misbehavior. His own misbehavior consists of infiltrating common assumptions and then blowing them apart with his unique brand of philosophical TNT.

To the casual observer looking for a book on stress management, White appears to be all over the map. He touches on everything from platelet coupling and codependency to high blood pressure, evolutionary theory, and the poetry of Rumi and Emerson. Yet the viewpoint here is all of a whole, offering readers a distinctly integrated perspective on health and healing.

What perhaps most resonates in White’s exposition is his focus on breaking through the limits of negative mental conditioning. As an expert in preventive medicine, White is sensitive to the effects patterns of psychological stress can have on our health and spirit. He is also aware that repressed or unresolved feelings from negative childhood experiences can often manifest themselves years later in chronic health problems, addictions, depression and anxiety, or other neurotic and self-defeating behavior.

Personally, I think it’s evident that much of what constitutes "normal" child-rearing in this culture is actually deficient, in terms of the real developmental needs of growing children. Even the ranks of the allegedly well-adjusted are filled with those who have only more effectively repressed their early emotional wounds. Of course, the consequences of such "normal" upbringings is often evident in the dysfunction and despair and shadowy dramas of the unconscious otherwise mature adults play out in their lives and intimate relationships.

White explores some of these themes in his discussion of the "psychology of scarcity" in our culture. This is the psychology that teaches early on the elusive nature of love, that there’s only so much to go around, that being its beneficiary depends on what you do, not who you are. It’s a message taught to children in a thousand do’s and don’ts about what it means to be "good," and in punishing consequences of misbehavior that include being shamed, belittled, hit, and neglected.

Thinking back to those guys at the dance, I suspect underlying their smug behavior were not only unfeeling hearts but wounded hearts. Could it really be otherwise? A child who grows up in an essentially loving environment, who feels safe, acknowledged, and encouraged, is a child who has been given one of life’s greatest gifts: the chance to mature into an adult whose presence and energy in life is all about respect and empathy for others. It doesn’t mean that person will be perfect, only healthy. That they were loved.

Unconditionally.

The Hurts that Haunt Us

As children, our minds are wonderfully absorbent. White reminds us that learning is largely about focusing, filtering out stimulus and information as we adjust the lens of our awareness to the task at hand. All this learning is also done in relationships with parents, siblings, teachers, and others.

The emotional legacy of our childhood resonates in the melody of a thousand small incidents and moments. They echo through our lives like a faint soundtrack set to the drama of the adults we have become. These moments can have amazingly positive influences on our lives. Once asked by a reporter how he became the person he is today, recent presidential candidate Ralph Nader responded that he had never forgotten the day as a young boy when his father had asked him, "So, did you learn what to believe today, or did you learn how to think?" A fleeting comment from a father became a pivotal moment in a boy’s life, and shaped the destiny of a man who has learned a thing or two about thinking for himself.

But then there are the other not-so-great moments, the stuff that we’re supposed to get over but that instead makes us insecure and fearful.

I once heard a veteran minister say that in his many years of counseling, the overwhelming majority of people who came to him for help with personal problems suffered from low self-esteem. They were afraid of something in themselves, afraid of their feelings.

Of course, society’s inherent competitiveness, the focus on money and material success, may have something to do with much of the personal discontent. But perhaps it has more to do with the ways in which so many people at a deep emotional level claim ownership, so to speak, of whatever traumas or negative conditioning were heaped upon them. Picture a dad who is an alcoholic, a man who spews the venom of his frustration onto his children, blaming them for the hurts from his childhood that still haunt him. Somewhere deep within their psyches that man’s now-adult children still hear that voice, the voice of a dad’s authority, and they believe he must have been right all along.

There is this idea in therapeutic circles, and I don’t think White would disagree, that there is no way around traumatic feelings except through them. Reawakening old, blocked feelings of helplessness or unhappiness, reexperiencing the early sense of powerlessness associated with those feelings, offers a lighthouse signal directing us to the shores of our own healing. In these newly awakened feelings, as well as in related physical symptoms, we can discover clues to the enigmas of childhood stories and find in them some emotional truth.

Consequently, as we become more attuned to the truth of our own stories, with all their subtle emotional contours, we open the door to a growing capacity to integrate old, stuck feelings into our present adult lives and consciousness in new, therapeutic ways. Doing so, we acquire a capacity for greater clarity about what our needs actually are in any given situation or relationship, something we might not have been able to discern before. And so we become better at taking care of ourselves.

Loving, in the Turmoil of Living

Of course, life also has a way of teaching these lessons, even without a therapist’s help. In Tuesdays With Morrie, the bestseller by Mitch Albom, the infirmity of ALS, a crippling neurological disorder, delivers a sociology professor who once loved to dance to a higher realm of appreciation and acceptance of himself and for the love that surrounds him even in the turmoil and difficulty of his living. Neither does the retired professor wish to trade his newfound spiritual peace for a chance at his earlier vitality, as he comes to learn during the course of his illness.

White shares a similar story in that of Evy McDonald, a dedicated intensive care nurse who ended up in intensive care herself. In 1980, following months of troubling but unexplainable symptoms, McDonald was also diagnosed with ALS. With the diagnosis came not only an explanation but a death sentence — six months to live.

Shaken, this dedicated nurse found herself plunged into a soul-searching maelstrom, her thoughts roaming over a lifetime of experiences. As a child battling polio, she was told by her third-grade teacher to forget about studying because she was only destined for the special school for the disabled anyway. She had rebelled against that teacher, winning the spelling bee and the oratory contest and becoming the very best student in her class. She went on to become high school valedictorian, eventually earning a master’s degree in nursing, and then embarking on a long, successful career.

Now, with death lurking nearby, McDonald reflected on how deeply she had defined her life through service to others. Still, there was dissatisfaction. So much of her service had been driven by desires for reward or recognition, or out of a sense of obligation or duty. Accordingly, this nurse who had given so much of herself had also suffered from a history of depression. Once in high school, she even drove her car off the road, hoping to hit a tree and die. McDonald had proved uncharacteristically incompetent at killing herself, missing the tree. Choosing to die, she instead had lived.

Now, dying, she would choose to live.

If nothing else, McDonald declared to herself that her last six months would be lived on her terms, devoted to a different kind of service. Forget the reward or recognition or sense of duty. Enough! Yes, she would continue to serve others — but only from a place of first loving and accepting herself. Yet this was a problematic undertaking because it meant Evy McDonald would have to learn to accept herself, truly to love herself, in all the raw and resplendent and even wounded beauty her soul was capable of wrenching into expression.

As White tells the story, McDonald was forced, time and again, to go to the well of her own self-love, in the ways that she worked to relate and give to others. Facing death, she tuned into an awareness of living that that took nothing for granted.

McDonald had a great six months. Actually, she had a lot of great six months. In fact, Evy McDonald is still living, considered one of the few people in the world ever to be cured of ALS.

At some energetic level, McDonald’s inner spiritual awakening found expression in a transformed physiology and the miracle of her reborn health. White notes that the change began when she committed herself not to improving her health per se, but to accepting it, accepting not only her disease but her life, as flawed and imperfect as she felt it to be. Paradoxically, only then did her life and health and even her self-esteem begin to improve.

The Song of Children

A few weeks ago, I happened to watch a group of third and fourth graders perform a recital of songs before a packed gymnasium of parents. On stage all the children sang and waved their arms, moving in unison to the music. I knew only one of them, my friend Lillian, who is nine years old now, a big fourth grader. Yet somehow I felt a sense of connection with all the children. Their innocent, energetic way spoke to me, in a language I needed to hear, the language of love and acceptance.

As they sang, I found myself scanning their small faces, wondering what their lives were like, what their stories were. One little girl had a slight facial deformity. I wondered if she felt okay about her appearance, and if the other children accepted her. A child at the far end of the stage looked smaller, less developed than her classmates. As the soloists sang she kept singing, perhaps not realizing this was not her part. I wondered what her life was like, if she was loved. I hoped so.

I thought then about that other little boy, so many years ago, wanting as I imagined only to fit in, to be considered normal, despite disability. As I stood at the back of the auditorium, amused at the army of dads with their camcorders, I thought also about myself and my dad. How old I felt at age nine. How much I perceived was expected of me back then. How hard my dad could sometimes be — on me as well as himself. I wondered what secrets from his story drove him so; they are secrets I have yet to uncover. And then I thought about my parents’ loving hearts.

"I was hoping you would write to me a message in the stars, as if the stars themselves were not enough," sings the Christian songwriter Carolyn Arends in her beautiful song, "There You Are." The stars are enough, I think. So were those sweet, beautiful children, warming my heart as they did on a brisk fall evening. In my best moments, I am enough, too, I think, even if I fail at being "normal."

Yes, we are all enough.

Even if we also have some issues to work on.

Why Normal Isn’t Healthy: How to Find Meaning, Passion, & Humor on the Road Most Traveled, by Bowen F. White, M.D. (Hazelden, 2000), softcover, 197 pages, $16.95.

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

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