message to young people

Hi again. Even if you don't hear from me for a while you are never far from my thoughts.

I want to share with you a worry that I have. This is particularly for those of you who are adolescents, teenagers, and young adults (in other words, the younger half of my "young people who are thirty and under" definition ;-)

I am worried that you have been exposed to far too much of the problems that adults must really be tasked with resolving. I am worried that far too many of you have been burdened by adult problems and concerns since you were very young children, and that this trend continues to worsen each day.

Let me assure you that I am not being condescending at all; I am actually being very practical and protective, both at the same time!

Those who know me well know that I feel that a reversal in priorities has taken place. Those adult things that I DO feel you should be involved in, young people, I feel you have been denied participation in and in fact have been placed in enforced infantalization. However, those things that I DO NOT feel you should be burdened with, you have had it forced upon you, while adults should be handling those matters.

I've written before about adult areas that I think you should have more participation in, and I probably will share more about those again sometime, so let's put them aside now so we can focus on the areas I think you should not be burdened with, and more important, WHY I feel that way.

There are several reasons why I wish that you, young people, were not burdened with things that adults, older adults, should deal with on their own. Let me list some of those reasons for you so you can see where I am coming from.

1) Childhood is the only time that you have for genuine, joyous, innocent play, agenda free learning/exploring and other activities. You will never have those chances again once you are either an adult or exposed to adult world and pressures. You can buy toys when you are an adult and you can goof off, but you can never have what you should have had as a genuine child.

2) If you have not experienced childhood the way that you are supposed to, as I describe above, you cannot really be an advocate and protector of the right of your own children or other people's children to have that ideal pattern of childhood in return. For one, you don't miss what you never really had (you miss something, there is a void, but you are not sure what). Secondly you are sucked into the "what was normal for me is probably normal for everyone else" assumption. So you will not really be a defender of other children's right to hassle free and agenda free joy and innocence, without stress, if you have not had that yourself.

3) When the brain is formed, with both its intellect and its emotions, if you do not lay down tracks, so to speak, that are based on childhood joy, freedom from stress (as much as possible), and certainly free of adult concerns and problems, then you do not have access to the strength and serenity that comes from those brain pathways as an adult. As far as the brain is concerned (both intellectually and emotionally), a childhood that is rooted as much as possible in joyous and innocent pursuits and environments is a treasure that sustains you during adulthood, one that can be referenced if not relived. Having a joyous and innocent childhood free of adult pressures leaves a person with more serenity, fortitude, perspective and positive aspirations. A boot camp type of childhood oddly enough does the opposite of what many think because rather than increasing resilience, fortitude and ambition, it erodes at the fundamental spirit that is the basis for all of those desirable attributes.

4) A joyous and innocent childhood based on freedom from adult agenda actually stimulates the economy and lifestyle in the home, schools and community in additional directions than simply where adults focus their attention. The problem with children being younger and younger consumers of adult priorities and products is that the economy and the spiritual priorities become narrowed as emotional and financial investment is made more and more in adult priorities.

Let me give a simple example. This may not be an actually factual example since only God knows what "could have been." But let us speculate together so you can best understand it. Years ago the neighborhood playground was "the" place for children. It was fun, safe and a regular routine for visiting. One could safely assume that as the years go on and more and more children are born that more and more playgrounds would be built (maybe even one every few street blocks throughout the land!) and enjoyed. But we see that has not happened for several reasons. Put aside for the moment the obvious problems of many children not being born due to abortion and broken families/less marriages and so forth, and of crime and blight, including child predators making playgrounds unsafe and thus unused. Focus just on the economics and the community landscape. If more and more children are in the home exposed to and participating only in adult activities, limitations, worries and concerns, fewer and fewer children need and desire playgrounds and so fewer are provided as they are a low priority. That is simple supply and demand economics.

Do you see what I mean? There is both a mindset and a practical penalty for children being hemmed in by adult priorities. Children forget or are never exposed to the joy of a genuine, safe, regular playground (mindset) and as a result, that experience is given to fewer and fewer (the practical penalty). Instead of more and more playgrounds being built, USED, and kept safe, we have adult activities (video games, for example) pushed further and further down the age groups. There is less variety in both a child's experience and also in the resulting environment and economy as a whole.

5) Burnout. Quite simply if you are having to clad yourself in armor to fight adult problems, you will get burned out, depressed, bummed out and plain old tired, way, way, WAY too soon.

6) Anxiety. There are few things more frustrating than worrying about things that you genuinely cannot change as of yet, if ever. This is one of the things that irates and inflames me the most, especially when you look at bogus concerns thrust on children such as "climate change." What the hell are kids supposed to do about that (bogus as it is) but worry and be sad and anxious? Trust me, adults don't even know what to do, but they point children in one false direction after the other and cause them great anxiety, while they sit on their fat asses and do nothing about genuine environmental problems, such as sanitation and pollution, and also the wise provision of natural spaces for species to adapt to any climate change or whatever that might genuinely come along.

7) Ego trips and inflation. When adults feed you the constant line that "you are special" and that "you can make a difference" and you "can change the world," that is simply a lie and it gives you a fat head for no reason. Children cannot change the world, "for the better" or for otherwise. I am not being pessimistic or denying your impact. Children, your impact is to become human beings, to grow up as loved and normal children, to discover your own likes and dislikes, and then, as adults, to start to learn "the ways of the world." When children are hocked to collect dimes for a cause so they can "make a difference," you are letting adults off the hook for solving the problem. Look at Haiti. Their situation has sucked big wind for decades and all adults do is leave a big fat mess and then when something like the earthquake hits, they put guilt trips and inflation of ego on children and make them collect dimes to buy someone poor a shirt in Haiti, rather than getting their fat or bony asses around a desk to actually solve the problems of that country. And meanwhile you children grow up with a false idea of how much you personally can change the world, while not being made known of how you can contribute in the right way and the right time when you have more knowledge, resources and control.

Sigh.....................................................

Let me leave this with you to think about. It's tough to become aware of a problem without an easy solution, as I'm not really giving you "action items" in this blogging, something you can do, except for one thing to start. I suggest you work on craving adult things far less, and nurturing the classic activities, play, joy and serenity of childhood as much as you can. Reject being drafted into adult concerns as much as you can.

I realize that is difficult to do as many of you are stuck in very tough adult situations. I'm extending a hand of comfort to you (both hands actually) with this blogging (and ranting a bit too, I admit, heh). Do not have "grown up" and "adult" agenda thrust upon you without you at least thinking about it in your mind, and resist the guilt trip as much as you can. If your caregivers and teachers try to raise your anxiety levels about world problems (or crap going on in your own house), try to counterbalance it by 1) realizing it has always been a tough world and those problems will still be there when you are older, so what is the hurry for you as yet a child and 2) deliberately increase your time and attention investment in classic play or other joyous/exploring/learning activities appropriate to your age.

I hope you have found this helpful and be assured of my constant affection and concern for you.

Case study: Fort Hood shooting

I'm going to call this a morality case study, even though the Fort Hood shooting is obviously mostly a criminal and a psychological matter. This is because I want to help my readers, especially the young people (Hi again!) to use powers of faith and reason to understand current events and also to discern the best path to accuracy and justice.

My first point is that human nature likes, yes I would say even craves, simplicity. They will naturally want one and only one reason and cause for why the Fort Hood shooting happened. You hear this on the talk shows where certain hosts gravitate immediately to the Muslim connection, while others gravitate to the stress of exposure (even second hand) to war and post traumatic stress. Yet you must understand that this event, like so many others, are the culmination of several factors all at once. This is why I want to do this as a case study for you.

We have not yet heard from the defendant, and I'm not going to put words in his mouth, second guess him, or try to predict what decisions he will make about culpability. I'm going to teach you how to look at the facts and put yourself in the optimal frame of mind for then processing new developments and information as they occur.

Fact one: The defendant is a psychiatrist, one who is focused on treating and also being among the most grievously war wounded. Thus his contact with the military arena is not firsthand, in that he was not in combat himself (yet). Any soldier will tell you that no one understands combat until he or she is actually in it. So one cannot accurately ascribe a combat mentality to the defendant based on experience, but only his second hand information and his imagination of what it will be like when he is deployed. Think about that last point. He is on the receiving end of those who have returned from combat mentally and physically wounded. He's not treating people who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan but are OK. So he is not part of those who greet the returning veterans and active military who are OK and going home. He is treating those who are severely injured and when not treating them, he is immersed in that environment nonetheless. Thus he gets a "sampling" of combat only from those who are the most injured by combat, and that sampling is the totality of his "experience." He then deduces and imagines what combat is like based on that environment of treating and being among the most wounded and injured of the combatants.

This fact, then, is not "the" cause, but "one" cause. Why is it not "the" cause? Because we can imagine that if other things were different that he might have had more perspective and more comfort in dealing with the one sided view he was receiving of combat. I'm not saying that combat is ever great, but here is my point.

Fact two: He was a lonely and isolated individual. The defendant was never married, had no children, and was not part of a tight knit cultural local community. There are two components to this. The first is reality of military life, which is you go where you are ordered. People from strong local ethnic cultures (Native Americans, for example) often have to leave their intimate support network and be very singular when going to college, joining the military, etc. So there is a cultural isolation that is inherent in that profession. The second and more urgent point is, however, that he was not married. Again and again I have warned that not marrying, the breakdown of the family, and "sexual liberation" will only lead to isolation and ruin. Don't believe me?

Genesis 2:18, 22, 24
Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man is alone; I will make him a helper like himself." And the rib which the Lord God took from the man, he made into a woman, and brought her to him. For this reason a man leaves his father and mother, and clings to his wife, and the two become one flesh.

Let's be all grown up here. People are meant to be together, to be married, to be intimate, to have a life partner and to have sex. Society is falling apart and individuals are going crazy because this freak show society has demonized traditional families and created generations of frustrated lone wolfs. Duh. So my point is that even though fact one regarding his combat imaginings and deductions are true, we don't know that he would have had difficulty with that or indeed snapped if he also had been in a traditional loving intimate and, yes, sexual marriage. This is what I mean when I say that these events are rarely "one cause." Do you see what I mean?

Fact three: He is a Muslim and relationships with Muslims can be, but are not required to be, more complex since the reality of September 11, 2001. Further, Muslim attitudes toward themselves and others can be, but are not required to be, more complex since the reality of September 11, 2001. It is a fact that the defendant joined the military and became a psychiatrist before September 11, 2001. The terrorism of September 11, 2001 is also a fact. Thus one must recognize, without excusing, the significance of timing. Suppose he were a younger man and was not ready to either go to college or enlist until 9/11/2001 had happened. Someone of a more timid character might well have decided, "Hey, I'm a Muslim and I'm not sure I can handle entering the military with all the limelight and pressure on any Muslim, so I'm going to go to school or whatever and not enlist." Those Muslim Americans who felt the patriotic call to the Armed Services went ahead and enlisted, during and post 9/11/2001. This guy, had he been younger, might have recognized that he was not cut out to be in the pressure cooker of belonging to the broad "category" of "Muslim" at the height of justifiable suspicion AND draw further attention to one's self by enlisting where one is going to get pressure, either intentional or unintentional. I'm not saying I believe he was harassed. I'm saying that when one is Muslim, or any other minority, one stands out and one must have a certain strength of character to function accordingly and appropriately. So my third point is the significance of timing of global events and the way people's character is tested by the luck of the draw regarding where they were and what decisions they made, and then subsequent events.

Fact four: Isolated and troubled people easily gravitate to increasingly extreme views, in both politics and their faith. When I say "troubled" I do not mean mentally or emotionally disturbed, in this case study. I mean that they are uneasy about something. As a psychiatrist the defendant would have heard disturbing events and feelings expressed by and experienced by his wounded warrior patients, and the others around him, even if he was not actually treating them. This creates an inherent tension that some can handle, while some cannot. Here's an exercise to help you to imagine the situation I am describing.

Suppose that you are a female counselor and all your patients have had violent encounters with females and here I don't mean battering. What if every one of your patients returned from combat where their injuries were inflicted by women soldiers on the other side? Suppose that you are a gay man who is a counselor. Suppose that every one of your patients had issues because they had been beaten up by gay men, and in return had sometimes done some very bad things?

Do you see what I mean? Some people, particularly those who are isolated (as described above) find themselves identifying more and more with a category of people rather than humanity as a whole when they have to deal with repeated examples of unsuccessful outcomes with their "category." In other words, the defendant would feel more and more "Muslim" and less and less "Army officer," less and less "counselor," less and less "American," less and less "humanitarian." The female counselor in my example above would likewise feel more and more "female" and less and less "officer" or "humanitarian" or "American." Also a well adjusted gay guy who is a regular ordinary counselor might start feeling more and more as being "gay" because patient after patient is describing combat or trauma with or at the hands of gays. Again, this is not an excuse at all. I am explaining why members of all groups find themselves more and more isolated and more and more radical if they are exposed to "bad outcomes" in relationships with their "category" of person.

This is different from the phenomenon that many discuss, and I allude to in fact one, where counselors who counsel certain cases of trauma over and over pick up, like second hand smoking, some of that trauma themselves. I don't think that we can conclude that about the defendant based on the facts, beyond what I said in fact one, which is that lacking first hand combat experience, his entire set of information and opinion is based on the trauma of his patients. So what I am saying is that I am skeptical that he is receiving second hand trauma in the classic way that let's say domestic violence counselors often start to pick up residue of trauma from repeated treatment of domestic violence victims. I am saying that based on the facts that 1) he was not in combat himself and 2) all of what he heard was based on wounded and traumatic experience we can deduce that he had a "sampling" of what combat in predominately Muslim countries was like, rather than first hand experience.

Thus when one is isolated (not married, no children, not in a strong local community network) and one receives troubling information about a category of person (in this case, his faith) that one belongs to, one often has the problem of becoming less, instead of more, integrated with humanity as a whole, and often more radicalized in one's perception of one's own category, with potential for feeling part of a one-sided situation with no neutral ground.

We know that some of the most troubling radicalization of Muslim children occurs when they are in dire poverty and the radical groups feed them, clothe them and send them to school, becoming their caregivers and family. This is what I mean that those who are isolated (without family) and/or troubled (in this example, suffering from poverty) are often quite naturally radicalized as they feel either 1) more isolated due to their "category" and 2) "rescued" by zealotry and "belonging."

I could continue with this but I want to wrap up this blogging here because my purpose is a case study, not an analysis with conclusions, since we simply do not know yet, and may never really know all the facts and perspectives. Again, this is by no means a defense of him but, rather, I am taking advantage of a situation to teach you, especially young people, how to understand the combinations of facts and opportunities/situations that mixed together result in a person's actions or an event.

Our society has become so overwhelmingly complex and false that people have "complexity fatigue" and yearn, unrealistically, for "one cause" and "one reason" factors and that simply is not the case for most events. It is usually a progression and a combination that results in such events and they must be understood as such if they are to be reduced or somehow "fixed."

Here is another fact, published in the New York Times. There are just over four hundred psychiatrists to treat a military of over 500,000 men and women. Whether the pressure of such shockingly few counselors for so many military (particularly during several hot wars) is part of the "cause" or not of the Fort Hood incident, I do not have to psychically channel the genius Albert Einstein to tell you that is far from being enough resources, period.

Further, I cannot believe the foolishness of an incredibly sexualized society that while promoting and pushing sex in all ways and forms except long term marriage allows the isolation of so many single frustrated males and females while they are under pressures of career, combat, and whatever. This is why arranged marriages took place in many societies so that people didn't "demand their rights" to "choose their own partner" and then instead drink, do drugs and end up going to bed alone or with "hook ups," all the while being saturated by the media about how "hot" and alluring one should be.

God ordained marriage as a coping mechanism. Life is a miserable drag (and I don't mean cross dressing, ha, no hate mail please) without the majority of people being married. Again, I don't need to channel Einstein to tell you that. People need stable and intimate spousal relationships and access to expression of their normal sexual needs.

Yes, I can hear some of you think, "Yeah, but what about those losers who nearly every day shoot their own wife and children and then commit suicide? If marriage is so great why do these people kill what they have?" This is what I mean by the complexity of real situations. There is rarely "one cause." Often there is a "trigger" or to use the old expression "The last straw" (referring to loading straw on a camel until the final straw added makes the whole load too heavy and breaks the camel's back). When we hear about events such as murder-suicides and the Fort Hood shooting, there is usually a final "trigger" event but that is rarely the "cause." The "cause" is usually an amalgamation of several fundamental facts.

Any good counselor can tell you that there is usually a combination of these factors: isolation, lack of consistent intimacy (love and sex), trauma (first hand or second hand), stress (workload and/or economic), violence (first or second hand, including media exposure) and addictions. What is the tipping point where one "snaps?" It is usually despair.

See, this is why it is so important to have a stable, normal, marriage and children based society. It is the ultimate and only bulwark against despair. Despair can be fleeting, just a moment of pure desperation, in which case if the person is able to be supported through that moment it passes. Or despair can be accumulating and grinding when the person is in a position of having "their back against a wall," such as we see with people who slowly slide into poverty due to years of economic collapse and ruin. An example of that is the many farmers in India who have been committing suicide in despair as they are ruined. So despair can be either "a moment" or "a long grinding path."

It is not enough to have economic governmental "safety nets." The problem is that the safety net against despair has been nearly totally ruined by this freak show modern society. The safety net of neighborhood, community, family, children and committed intimacy (sex is not a commodity to be obtained but part of the overall spousal intimacy) has been almost totally unraveled.

Again, I'm not excusing by any means or condoning any of the tragic and criminal events that we hear about these days. What I am trying to do is finally get your attention that this is a crisis beyond anyone's full comprehension. I come from a heavy World War II generation and I know what I'm talking about: the change from then to now regarding the "despair" safety net is almost indescribably vast.

I don't, however, want to further dilute the case study by going into my general rant about how these "do your own thing" generations have instead of being liberating have enslaved themselves to modern idolatry, isolation and despair. I concluded with those observations so that one can understand the fact finding that I have demonstrated in this case study about the tragic and criminal Fort Hood shooting against the panoply of so many of these "events" that seem to defy having a simple one source "cause" or "reason." Life and human needs and health are remarkably simple; it is the way that humans are tempted to self destruct and self delude that are astonishingly complex. I hope that this has helped some in regaining some reality based comprehension of what is going on.

More about understanding God

So here are some thoughts as helpful follow up to what you read previously about understanding and explaining God's All Knowingness.

If you really understood the imagery regarding God's All Knowingness that I used in order to describe God, and really work with the comprehension and illumination it provides, you should have two simultaneous reactions. One is to be completely boggled by the awesomeness and completeness of God. When you understand that he simultaneously and at all times knows all that there is to know, including the history through eternity of even the smallest quantity of vacuum, nothingness, in the universe, and all that could ever befall it, you have to be totally boggled by the immensity, perfection and completion of God. However, you should also have a simultaneous feeling of "click," of a light bulb lighting, of dawning understanding, a relief that you finally "get" what God is really all about. At the same time that God is revealed as truly all that ever can be or will be, to a level of detail and completion that no angel or human can understand, you should also feel that at last you DO understand a very important part of God, and thus he is, in an almost paradoxical way, more approachable to you personally.

By chipping off this individual insight about God, really understanding his All Knowingness, you receive cascading benefits of illumination and comprehension about him. For one, you lose that mindless, amorphous, fuzzy wuzzy temptation to believe that he's a name, a personification, given to some "universal force." That, you now understand, is total rubbish, because God is the creator and outside of the universe itself, and so the universe's matter and "energy forces" cannot at all be compared to him, and also you realize that any "energy forces" that do exist, and are not bogus human imaginings, fall under God's creative actions and his control anyway. Secondly, you realize that God is indeed a "person" and not some goopy syrup of "vibes" or "energy." God is not a name given to forces that just kind of churn around in a mosh pit of "energy" and "vibrations"... God is a personage, someone who is totally mindful and in control of all that was and ever will be.

By understanding the extraordinary and indescribable scope of God's All Knowingness, you also understand that God can be described as having three basic "activities," very broadly speaking. Again, I'm trying to help by putting them in human context. One is that God creates and then lets creation (and subsequent maintenance and ongoingness of his creation) proceed according to natural laws he has put into place, such as gravity, biology, geology, etc all reveal. So God creates and when he creates he also creates the natural laws that then are the ongoing mechanisms put into place. An obvious example is reproduction, where after creating life, the natural laws and processes that God has put into place allows plant and animal species to reproduce on their own: God does not have to intervene.

The second "activity" that God "spends time doing" is, thus, intervention. God rarely intervenes in the way that most of you think about, such as miracles, smiting evil doers, and/or temporarily suspending natural laws. However, God is constantly intervening in two ways. God is constantly available to have a relationship with any individual person and will respond to prayers, though not always in a way that one expects or can perceive. God is also constantly working on the heart and soul of every person, even those who hate him, through the presence and invitation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is always there, moving among even the most arid and hateful of people and communities, and even among the worse sinners, trying to reach them and bring them back to genuine humanity, charity, self respect, and relationship with God. This is why you cannot really claim a faith or religion is either "unfair" or "the only way" because its believers believe that only through their rites etc will they be saved by God or whatever. In many ways it is a moot point because God does seek individual relationship and the Holy Spirit does indeed move even in Communist atheist countries, as we have seen in history. However, one must always, as I've boggled before, seek the truth, not the "right" or "best" "faith." If you seek the truth you find it, because God is the truth. False religions and faith put a checkered flag in front of you too soon, so that you think you have found the "right" or "best" "faith," before you have really completed (or even sincerely started) the search and discernment of the truth about God.

For example, it became an anti-establishment fad in the 1960's and continuing today to rebel against the "irrelevant" and "boring" and "hypocritical" faith of one's parents. Now, I'm speaking of the mainstream monotheistic faiths, primarily Judaism and Christianity. Islam has thus far not suffered from the throwing away of the parents' faith by the children just because the children want to sin and feel all grown up and rebel "against the machine" of religion. But for forty years Jewish kids and Christian kids grew up to be denomination switching, converting, God denying, or pagan faith pursuing rebels who think they are smarter than their boring and sheep like parents. Ooops. Why is that an ooops? This is where God's All Knowingness is so important to understand.

How can any one person decide to rebel or religion "shop" if they really understood God's All Knowingness first? One really has to come to know God within one's own family mainstream and orthodox faith FIRST before becoming any sort of religion critic. This is because all the mainstream, orthodox Monotheistic faiths are founded on truths of communication between the one true God and his people, which is why they are described as the offsprings of Abraham. Here's a modern analogy. Suppose you really want to get to know all about a celebrity who you admire. But you decide to throw away thousands of years of dialogue that your ancestors have had with this celebrity, because you want to find the place where you supposedly can really get to know him. I mean, think about it, that's so absurd. But that is what two to three generations of rebellious religion "shoppers" have done, and are still doing.

So when you understand God's All Knowingness and perfection of totality and completeness, and you understand both his creation/let it be role and his role of personal intervention, you realize that the Bible, the Qur'an, and the writings of many orthodox rabbis throughout history is actual records of that "celebrity" that you want to know: and your parents' mainstream faith records their share of understanding the actual God. You should fully respect and immerse yourself in your mainstream orthodox Jewish, Christian and Muslim faith first before seeking "additional" information and most certainly before diving into the rites of other faiths. I mean, if you don't understand the full purpose and relationship of your own faith first, how do you recognize, supposedly, a "better" faith? Duh. :-)

And finally, by understanding God's All Knowingness, you understand the third activity that God engages in which is to be in fellowship with the angels, the humans, and all creation. I don't mean this in the fuzzy wuzzy "they are all one in the ether" kind of creepy New Age thinking. I mean God, as a personage, "hangs out" with the angels, with humans, and with the living things, and the inorganic things, of the universe. It's one of the first things humans learn about God, what God is "like," in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, that God would walk in the Garden of Eden, with Adam and Eve, in the coolness of the evening. [God doesn't get too "hot" or "cold" so one is supposed to understand that God is hanging out with Adam and Eve at the time of day they would most enjoy, doing what many humans do, which is to walk around the yard, or the garden, or sit on the porch, at the end of day.] This is how we know, in addition to other scriptural references, that God spends much of his "time" just being in companionship with the beings he created, and the places that he created.

Just to wrap up this segment of posting about understanding God's All Knowingness, here is another insight that such analogies and knowledge about God should be giving you. Now you understand how even non-believers and people who do some pretty bad things can feel "blessed" and have what they think are "good lives," because while they are alive, they are swept along on the tide of goodness that God has set into motion for everyone. In other words, the rats benefit from being on the good ship. But when the ship goes aground, as it must someday do, either on an individual basis, or a culture or a nation, or totally, at the End of Time, or at a person's death and individual judgment, they realize they were riding the coattails of God's overall blessings and providence, but were doing so as rats rather than good stewards and believers. When one understands God's All Knowingness, you better understand why it seems that bad people get away with a lot, and even have "good lives," but they do not, as God knows the actions of every particle or vacuum that ever was or could be. Their judgment will be full and complete, when it is their time.

However, in this blogging I want to keep you focused on the joyful search for understanding the true God as he has already repeatedly revealed himself as he alone chooses to, so I don't want to close with just that warning above. Those of you who believe in God, or who were deprived of faith, or given false examples to follow, will benefit greatly by taking the first step of understanding that God is truly All Knowing and in control, in the ways that I've described above, as explained in Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy scripture. When an auto accident happens, God is in control because he established the laws of physics where energy and matter react, and humans decide if their use is for goodness or for not so good. Also, humans are flawed vessels, through both their physical limitations and their ignorance or vanity, so they cannot expect to live within a universe of natural laws but act like they are superhuman beings. Every child figures that out when he or she first decides he or she is like superman and then jumps off their garage (a childhood friend of mine did that and got the expected broken leg). Adults need to understand that God is in control through the natural laws he established in his creation, but that adults should not be puffed up about their role. Where they should feel pride is as St. Paul described, pride in Jesus Christ, pride in being brought to God within Jesus Christ, not through their own works or their imagined superhuman powers.

Rather, one needs to have comfort and consolation and understanding that even as God Knows All, he still desires and puts forth the Holy Spirit to help in this, fellowship and parenthood of all humans, bringing them, those that are worthy and just, into the companionship where God is all the time, which are the angels in heaven. God wants to walk with each human in what remains of the Garden on earth, but he will only do so if you truly seek him, not a fraud. God knows every particle and every non-particle that ever was and ever could be... if you understand that and come to accept that knowledge joyfully, that becomes a key part of your foundation of faith and trust in God. I've observed that humans find it difficult to trust God and have faith in him in large part because they continue to not understand the full dimensions of his All Knowingness, and the categories of his involvement, as I've described here. Evangelicals often leap too quickly into telling people to trust God without helping their followers to understand the fullness of God's "dimensions" and thus his trustworthiness. That is why the prophets before Jesus, and then culminating in Jesus himself, performed awesome miracles, as through observation of those powers that could only be God given, people mutually trusted the prophets but also grew in their trust of God, knowing intuitively how only the All Knowing can do those miraculous things that they saw.

I hope you have found this helpful and a special hello, as always, to the young people out there.

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

It has been a while since I blogged regarding PTSD and other mental or emotion distresses. By the way, I prefer the term “distress” instead of “disorder” or “mental illness.” Many mental conditions are perfectly natural responses by the body and the mind to terrible circumstances, and thus I prefer that people do not think of them as “wrong wiring” or “mental imbalance.” PTSD, for those victims of trauma who suffer from it, are the body and the mind’s efforts to deal with something so radical and scarring that a painful set of symptoms occur, but that is not the same as being mentally disordered or biologically or mentally flawed.

I want to address myself to all PTSD sufferers but most especially to those in the military or law enforcement. I am thinking most especially of the Vietnam War veterans who suffer to this day, and now the Afghanistan and Iraq War veterans who must also deal with PTSD in such great numbers. I want to give you two tools to help you when you read this. One is a way to explain PTSD in a way that I believe is much more accurate an analogy or images than you’ve probably heard before. Military people can relate that you must “know the enemy before you can defeat him.” I think this analogy will help you to better understand exactly what PTSD is and how I recommend one can alleviate much of the distress, while never being, of course, able to deny or erase what happened, nor should you. The second tool I want to give to you is a way to work on the PTSD dreams and nightmares that I have found very helpful when I have given sufferers direction in these matters.

The best way to think of PTSD is that you are in the jaws of an alligator or a crocodile. Let’s say crocodile since it’s a global animal that everyone is familiar with. When one has PTSD one can think of one’s self as being firmly in the mouth grip of a crocodile, and each of the croc’s teeth has a hold on you. The crocodile represents the source of the PTSD (such as trauma during war service). In other words, there was nothing wrong with you before you had the trauma. Then something very real happened, where you are bitten by the croc and held in its mouth so you cannot pull free, and the teeth represent the types and severity of the psychological and emotional wounds you have received and the ongoing symptoms.

Now, this is how you can understand the prescription medications that you receive that may or may not help you. The prescription medications do not free you from the croc’s jaws; they only dull the pain so that you can function more gracefully and comfortably as if you were not feeling the pain of the bite. But of course despite what doctors say, the medications cannot erase the cause of the trauma as if it never happened, nor can it restore you to what you were before. This is where the analogy is helpful because each tooth mark leaves a scar, even if one was, using our analogy, completely free of the jaw’s grip.

When one “self medicates” through addictive substances, such as alcohol and drugs, or other addictive behaviors such as risky behavior, compulsive behavior, or other means of “escapism,” one is trying to do the same thing the doctors who prescribe do, which is dull the pain of being bitten by the traumatic event or events. But like the prescribed medications, self medication only attempts to dull the pain of being continually bitten.

So how do I recommend that a PTSD sufferer deal with PTSD, using this analogy? First of all, yes, be sure, of course, to stay on any medication that the doctor prescribes because you cannot work on any sort of remedy or cure if you are in pain and engaging in risky behavior due to the PTSD. Everyone knows that it is harder to heal something like a broken arm if you are in continual pain. So yes, if you have one or more prescriptions that ease your pain and symptoms, be sure to continue to faithfully take what a reputable and conscientious doctor prescribes.

However, I invite you to think about how one actually tackles the PTSD itself. Think of your status as being in the grip of the croc’s jaws and all its teeth. You cannot pull yourself out of the grip, so you are stuck. But are you? What if you had a set of pliers and pulled out the teeth one at a time?

Suppose one of your symptoms is having recurrent traumatic dreams and nightmares. Those dreams represent one of the teeth of the croc. In other words, if you are able to work on alleviating the stress of the dreams, and even reducing their occurrences, that would be as if you pulled out that tooth from the croc. This also helps you to understand why some in distress of PTSD have the bad dreams while others do not. That particular symptom of “tooth” just is not biting down as hard on some folks as it is on others. That is part of how each individual is unique, as is each trauma. You might be someone who was bitten and held by a small croc, with a trauma that, while painful and real, has a smaller “bite mark,” a smaller less severe pattern of symptoms. On the other hand, those who served in the Vietnam War, for example, I have noticed have all been bitten by a huge croc with many deep biting teeth. This is because Vietnam was “not just another war.” It was a shattering experience on so many levels and had few mitigating circumstances of comfort and many simultaneous types of trauma.

Just for one example, the United States had previously fought only open conflicts, never a guerilla war. So while there were vets traumatized by World War II and Korea, Vietnam was a warfare tactic that neither the military institution nor the individuals serving had any experience or preparation for. So being in a guerilla war is, again using that analogy, one tooth of the bite and holding of PTSD that those in other wars did not so much experience (except, for example, those who fought on the ground against dug in Japanese in World War II).

So the individual teeth of the croc are made up of two ways of looking at it: the symptoms that you feel and the reasons that trauma was received. An example of a “symptom tooth” is the bad dreams. An example of the “cause tooth” is being totally unprepared for a guerilla style of warfare.

Military folks who suffer from PTSD tend to be able to list their symptoms, so the “symptom teeth” will probably not be too difficult for you to recognize (though often people do not see how much they have changed until they are home and have difficulties). You’ve probably all had to list the symptoms in the doctor appointments and endless paperwork. But here is what I am suggesting. I have had some very good success at turning it a bit on its head, where instead of the one block being “PTSD” and all the symptoms hanging off of it, to be treated as a whole, try breaking the symptoms down into individual components that you might address one or two at a time. PTSD, like most mental distresses, is not something that one can tend to treat as a whole and people in the profession have become a bit too charmed with that idea, and then are disappointed when they cannot “cure” or alleviate PTSD. It’s not like getting rid of a cold or the flu. But that is a useful comparison so let’s explore it for a minute.

If you have a cold or the flu you have one cause (bacteria or a virus) and many possible symptoms (sneezing, sore throat, fever, runny nose, coughing, sore chest, body aches, nausea, fatigue, etc.) In general when one is dealing with physical illnesses, when the illness passes or is “cured,” all the symptoms go away, obviously, since you are no longer sick with that illness. People for a variety of reasons think of mental and emotional distress the same way: if you treat the overall “type of distress,” such as PTSD, then the symptoms should all together gradually improve. It’s perfectly natural that everyone tends to think of mental illnesses as being just like physical illnesses, except of the mind and nervous system instead of the body. Medical schools, scholars and insurance and medical reimburerses all tend to think that way. We fill out your form with your “diagnosis,” PTSD, list your symptoms as “proof” that you are indeed suffering from PTSD so you can be treated and the provider is reimbursed, and then the “treatment plan” for PTSD is developed, which is usually prescription medications with some group therapy. That is fine and that is the way the system is established, but I believe that it leads to slower, and often nil, results. I believe that in addition to the overall treatment of the overall condition of PTSD that each symptom should be separately addressed using non-prescription drug techniques of counseling, therapy and self help.

The way the medical system is established there is little access, and none of it reimbursable, to what I am suggesting. When I was an intern I was able to treat a number of patients via counseling only because since I was a “free body” (student interns are not paid). Thus while I was there during my nearly nine month internship I was able to provide “talking” treatment to patients who would not have otherwise received it. This is one reason I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about ways that those in distress, such as those with PTSD, and their families and friends, and church groups and others who donate services, can listen to some of my suggestions and try them in addition to their regular treatment. This is why I blog on these types of subjects and would like to be able to help through some future venue.

Suppose that you are a PTSD sufferer with a number of symptoms and you were able to eliminate or control one of those symptoms? I think that would be a relief if, for example, you are troubled by the symptom of bad dreams and you were able to mitigate that one symptom, even if the others remain. It tends to have a mutually beneficial and cascading effect anyways; if you improve one thing you become more at ease and more comforted and when you feel better in that one area you can deal with the other symptoms better, and perhaps address them too, one at a time. So I’m suggesting that while you, of course, continue your medical course of treatment, you draw up an action plan for addressing one of the symptoms as a targeted effort on it and it alone.

So here’s what you do. Make a list of your croc’s teeth. These are both “symptom” teeth and “cause” teeth. The idea of the “cause teeth” may be new to you, but it’s easy to understand once you start thinking about it that way. What made Vietnam so particularly unique and scarring? I gave one example, which is that it was a guerilla war rather than conventional conflict, which the military command and training gave no preparation for, and which shocked the combatants mightily. So while your symptom teeth list what you are suffering from now, your cause teeth list each thing that contributed to the shock, damage and scarring, and many of them will be cultural. I can speak with some experience and authority because I am only a few years younger than many Vietnam veterans, since I was a teenager during the height of the war. Further, my family had extensive World War II experience, in all the theaters, so I observed the differences as they were happening. So let me give you some help in thinking about what some of the “cause teeth” might be in your particular list.

O Being drafted for a war whose purpose was difficult to understand, as the USA was not being invaded, nor was there a clear cut enemy such as Japan (who had bombed Pearl Harbor) or Germany (with Nazi global domination clearly an objective).
O Culture shock, where Vietnam seemed very alien and uncomfortable compared to your upbringing, whereas Europe or even Japan (shipboard) in World War II was less jarring a transition.
O Exposure to vices, such as drugs and prostitution.
O Lack of training and preparation for guerilla warfare, which included devices of terror as booby traps.
O Hostility toward the military, including service men and women, by fellow citizens at home.
O Having a close buddy killed, particularly in a brutal way.
O Witnessing atrocities from either side.
O Inexperienced commanders and chains of command that resulted in errors and losses.
O Tactics and strategies that resulted in battles for which there seemed no point or overall plan.
O Being captured.

I could list more but I think you see my point. So let’s look at two examples of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. I’m just making these two up as examples so you can see that while everyone “shares” the PTSD experience, it is indeed unique to each person and must be treated accordingly.

Example One: Symptom teeth: bad dreams, startles easily, distressed by loud and sudden noises, emotionally withdrawn from loved ones. Cause teeth: many “close calls” in the battlefield, witnessed bad orders causing unnecessary loss of life, close buddy captured, and “social scene” that one was too young to handle.

Example Two: Symptom teeth: bad dreams, addictions (list each one), drawn to conflict and violence, suicidal thoughts. Cause teeth: lack of support from home, found gun was only response to guerilla and cultural violence, forced to give bad orders.

See, these are just with a few words two people that while they share the “PTSD Vietnam vet” label are obviously two very different people with very different experiences. Medicine, like all aspects of our sad culture and society today, try to lump people together into cookie cutter categories and treat them accordingly. PTSD, however, is if anything the example of how individual PTSD distress really is and how customized and unique to the individual that treatment must be.

What I would do if I was counseling one or a group of Vietnam vets with PTSD to apply the technique I’ve introduced them to today is to (and remember, this is in addition to all conventional medical treatment):
1. Draw up your list of symptom and cause teeth. Help each other out in thinking of items to put on the list, but only put them on the list if they really affect you individually.
2. Select one symptom tooth and one cause tooth that you want to specifically gain treatment for.
3. For the symptom tooth, your approach is to work on that one symptom as if it were an illness. For example, when one has a cold one might sneeze or have sore throat. Select “sneeze” or “sore throat” and act as if that is an individual standalone illness. You are going to cure yourself of “sneeze,” to use that example, rather than wait for the sneeze to go away when the cold goes away. Therefore you might select to stop or at least ease the “bad dreams” as if it were a standalone illness, rather than wait for them to go away, if ever, if the PTSD “goes away,” which it rarely does.
4. For the cause tooth you use a different approach, but with the same objective of wanting to cure or at least ease the one “illness” represented by the cause tooth.

Before I explain how to approach 4 in specific detail, let me make a broad point. Vietnam vets, understandably, tend to do one of two things. They either withdraw from talking about their experience, for all the obvious reasons, or they tend to read material or have conversations that validate and revalidate their own experiences. For example, they tend to view movies, read books, or have conversations that parallel and validate their own experiences. That is understandable and seems intuitive to do (as part of “you are not alone” therapy), but it often, as logically as it seems, hinders a cure to one or more symptoms. It tends to reinforce the “what’s done is done” and “it happened to all of us” and it “can’t be changed” mindset. Catharsis and validation of one’s own experience have actually been proven to be among the least effective of techniques used in self or professional therapy. All patients, and the society as a whole, loves “let it all out” and “catharsis,” for example, feeling it is “healthy,” but the literature in group therapy shows that while it gives temporary emotional satisfaction to the client or patient, catharsis is the least helpful of the dozen or so techniques used in therapy. I’m not saying to bottle it up, but I am saying to be more skeptical of one’s own human nature tendency to want to hear one’s own story told time after time, either by one’s self or others, without there being a targeted, curative purpose and technique behind its telling.

So suppose that the “cause symptom” that you select to address is the “lack of support from home.” Suppose that your own family had mixed feelings about your service, that you had few friends or buddies back home who could write and support you (younger readers: remember there was no cheap phone calls and this was way before the Internet and email, so traditional letter writing and spotty delivery was one’s only real contact with home, just like in World War II and Korea). And suppose that you were one of those service people who was actually spit on and protested against when you returned home. What if that was a “cause tooth” that aches you still today and contributes to your symptom teeth? How would you address it?

Well, like I said, a lot of people think that is water over the dam and can’t be fixed or undone. And it is true that we cannot go back in time and pretend things went otherwise. But there is an amazing amount of resilience and desire to heal in the human heart and brain, and there is “reprogramming” that one can do to fill in that deficit that was originally created by the lack of support for your service. For example, rather than revisiting through your own memories or the media how bad it was during those times, avoid reinforcement of the feelings of betrayal and abandonment. So do not indulge in “walks down memory lane” of the pain of that “cause tooth.” Here is what you do instead.

You create a “new history” for your brain and your heart in the here and now. For example, you could get a recommendation from someone about a current service member, say in Afghanistan or Iraq, who may not have any family or friends and you become his or her pen pal. In other words, you give today to someone that which you were deprived of. While it does not change time or events, you’ll be surprised at how as far as your brain and heart impulses are concerned, what happens today starts to converge back in time with what had happened to you in the past. In a way it is like you are the new service person today that you start to correspond with. By giving him or her in their need what you did not have, you actually start to put in your heart and memory “bank” what was empty before. Your brain, your heart, and eventually your symptoms will lessen being fueled by what had happened to you, with the lack of support and even hostility that you have received, and instead, the email that you write and receive today with a current service member will be like the support you yourself lacked and that you are now receiving.

It does not have to be, nor can it be, an “exact match.” These are different times where, thankfully, our service people are not being protested against and spat on by anti-war demonstrators. But being lonely and lacking support is universal in all times, and those feelings are the same everywhere. If you find that you can locate a service person who had little or no family or friends, you can make the difference both for him and her and, more importantly for pulling that cause tooth, yourself.

Here’s another idea. Become a self taught “loneliness expert” by reading literature about that condition and studying ways to alleviate it in others, whether military or not. There are two benefits of this kind of approach. One is to learn more about your own condition as you read about it, not in the Vietnam context, but as a general social condition. Rather than reinforcing what you and others experienced in Vietnam, you learn more about why it hurt and scarred by studying the general condition in all aspects of life. That is a lead in to the second benefit which is that it un-bottles the inwardness of the existing PTSD condition and redirects it outward in a productive way. Instead of recycling what has happened to you in your mind, you are now gathering new material in new contexts and could even go so far as to shift from that cause tooth being a scar of Vietnam to a new proactive activity, such as writing articles and blogging about abandonment, loneliness, lack of support, betrayal and ways to cope with them in general. Again, it is not denying what happened to you, but it is a mighty ability to rechannel what was a painful memory into a potentially pleasurable and rewarding here and now activity.

I could give more examples of how to address that particular “cause tooth,” but want to keep this article as an introduction to a technique to get you thinking in these new directions. Now let us discuss my ideas regarding the specific symptom tooth, “bad dreams.”

Remember how I said that humans and societies tend to want to lump things together into one cookie cutter category? Well, people tend to do it to themselves without realizing it. Suppose a Vietnam vet with PTSD is plagued by a particular dream about a specific trauma that he or she endured. They have these dreams “over and over” or at least regularly or, if not too severe, an occasional eruption of that dream. The reaction is, of course, to think “not again” and “it’s that bad dream again.” It is discouraging and thought of as being a repeat of a repeat.

That is an example of the distressed dreamer, quite understandably, tending to lump all of the occurrences of the dream into the same category, which is a repeat of an unpleasant phenomenon, a bad repeating bad dream. But no dream is exactly the same, even if you think that it is; there is always a subtle difference. So the first thing to do is, even though it is painful to have the dream, as soon as you awake think about one thing different about the dream than the last time that you had it and write it down. Keep a pad of paper and pen by your bed if necessary and as soon as you wake, train yourself to think, before pushing the bad dream from your mind, is there something different about this dream? Look for even subtle differences: longer or shorter in duration? Are there any differences in the setting of the dream, the characters in the dream, and the action of the dream, no matter how small?

For example, suppose that your dream normally involves someone, a buddy for example, being killed. The dream tends to reenact the actual event plus some pattern that your dream takes over and over. But suppose in the actual event your buddy was wearing a helmet, and most dreams show him that way, but one night you dream the same dream except that one time he is not wearing a helmet. Or suppose that it was a daytime attack and you accordingly dream of a daytime attack time each time, but one night you dream that it was nighttime. Or you may even have a shorter or longer version of the dream, or a really subtle difference such as the number of people standing around. Don’t rewrite the whole dream on your pad of paper but make a note each time you have “that dream” to identify just one thing about it that was different from the last time, even if you dreamed it while napping instead of while during your overnight sleep. But trust me, once you get used to observing you will notice at least one subtle, or even large, difference in the dream from one time to the next, even if you’ve automatically thought of it as that “repeat dream.”

Again, it’s beyond the scope of this article to right now to do dream interpretation and explain why the dream changes in even that small way. But it is almost not important to know a full out dream interpretation of the “meaning” of that change as it is to train yourself just to notice it and just to write it down. Here is why.

Dreams are, among other things, a self healing mechanism. Just as when you have a scratch or a cut and the body naturally knits together the skin and heals the injury, dreams, even very bad dreams, are trying to “fix you where it hurts.” That memory hurts you and rather than punishing you, your body is trying to “fix it” and its doctor’s office is your dream. That is why I made the point earlier that bad dreams are not something ‘broken’ or ‘flawed.’ Bad dreams are your body trying to fix what is hurting it, in that case, a specific memory of an experience that you had. I know it seems illogical at first, where you think, how does it fix me to revisit it over and over? But your mind is not trying to revisit it over and over; it is repeating an invitation over and over to go into the doctor’s office about this event. That is why responsible dream interpretation by credible and conservative therapists is a hugely powerful therapeutic tool, because dream interpretation “accepts” the invitation offered by your mind to heal the event that caused the PTSD pattern of dreaming.

Lacking any other input your subconscious mind offers up the invitation, through another reoccurrence of the bad dream, and while the dream looks the same at first glance each time, your subconscious mind is trying a different “dab of medicine” through the subtle change I’ve explained to you to watch for. The subconscious mind is enormously powerful and attempts to be helpful, even when it seems otherwise. But it is limited in how helpful it can be unless you make what it does to be recognized and thought about by you and therefore no longer unconscious but conscious. This is why you can gain benefit even by not knowing, since you have no dream interpreter available perhaps, the meaning of a particular change. Just by noticing the change and thinking about it for a minute or two and writing it down you have moved that unconscious dream “dab of medicine” from the unconscious to the conscious.

You know what it is like? Have you ever gone a long time without having a glass of orange juice or a fruit and then you have a craving? You don’t need to know “why,” which is that your body is alerting you to a vitamin C deficit. You just have the fruit or the glass of orange juice. Likewise you don’t really need to know why your dream always involved the buddy having a helmet on, but one time the dream occurs without the helmet. You just have to notice and record on your notepad that you noticed that this dream differed from previous versions because instead of having his helmet on this time he did not.

Now, I could interpret why your unconscious might try that “dab of medicine,” but if I start writing about the specifics and examples of dream interpretation this will be a long diversion from the point of this article. If readers are interested I’ll of course write more and explain how a responsible and conservative dream interpreter would recognize the healing attempt and meaning of the helmet motif changing, for example. But there is a lot of new information to absorb here and I’d like to keep it manageable. I sincerely hope that you have found this article useful and that this and further work will bring some real relief to those with PTSD and other distresses.

Case study: creative artists/viewers: victims

We all know someone who has experienced great abuse in their lives. For example, nearly everyone knows a woman who has been abused and battered by a man. Many people who read this blog are themselves victims. This is, needless to say, a situation that is getting worse and not better, for a number of reasons, and is outrageous and needs to be addressed.

Having said that, I need to gently question an assumption that has crept into the mindset of those who produce creative work, and those who view it, when the producer of the creative work is him or herself a victim of abuse. This mindset is that it is not only inevitable but desirable that the abuse or traumatic event inform not only one or two of their works, but all of their works. In other words, the assumption is that the person's art or creative expression is now irrevocably changed and fueled by the victimizing event.

This is actually a modern affectation, not a historic one by any stretch of the imagination. People who have gone through dreadful times in their lives have not necessarily revealed any of its effects in their creative output. In fact, what I want to help you to see in this case study is that there used to be a heritage and tradition of creative output where most (not all) but most who produce creative works extol the goodness of life and a positive outlook, never referencing their own victimization, as their reaction to having suffered.

The obvious classic example is an author who has been imprisoned. Often the author will not dwell on the imprisonment experience but, rather, experiences the familiar feeling of "the air is much sweeter than he or she had remembered," "the sun is brighter," and "the flowers are more beautiful" after their release. So in classic times creative artists who have suffered have often left no trace of their suffering in their works and, rather, have had a more finely honed sensitivity and appreciation of those parts of life that are not part of the suffering experienced.

In fact, especially you young people, I know that creative classes even promote and dig for the pain, teaching a "cathartic," "raising public awareness," and "source of dramatic material" set of roles for any victimizing experience you have had. While that is true if you are planning to write about that experience, I want you to question whether one should let one or more victimizing experiences inform ALL of your creative output. I would argue that is neither healthy and healing nor is it particularly of good intention for your creative art audience.

Here is an analogy to help you to discern this problem better and to resist the modern affectation that your victim experiences must be reflected throughout all of your creative output. As you sit at the computer doing your creative work, or at the easel, or using old fashioned paper and pencils you are using both of your hands with five fingers each (unless you are disabled, so please bear with me the limitation of the analogy). So under normal circumstances you have ten fingers that you can use to wield the technology tools or hold a paint brush. Think of your victimization as a sixth finger for one hand. If you are writing about your victimization, or creating art about those feelings, sure, you "put on" that sixth finger for those works. But would you leave it on forever?

When mentors and educators and those who promote your creative works push for constant reference in your entire ongoing body of works of your victimization (often disguised as the supposedly positive "you are showing how you have 'overcome' that dreadful experience") they are basically telling you to strap that "victim sixth finger" on one of your hands and never take it off. If you were suddenly given a sixth finger, a real one, you'd find it does not add to your talent or dexterity and would, in fact, hinder it. Likewise, strapping on the victim sixth finger and using it for all of your creative output is a great limitation to your creativity and a disservice to not only you yourself but also to your fans and hoped for audience.

Here is why. Someone who is able to compartmentalize their victim experience to only those works that directly address it, but then let go of it for other works can reach farther and in more directions as a result. Think of it this way. When you increase the contrast in a photograph, dark areas are darker and light areas are lighter and there is much more gradation in between, allowing finer detail to be seen (I have to use this processing a lot in my photographs, although not the ones I have displayed here on my blog, but the less talented ones, LOL). Now, as I said, the point of increasing contrast is to bring out more detail; the point of the contrast is not to make the darker parts darker and then stare only at the darkened parts. If that is the effect that you want with one photograph, then that is what you do. But you do not use the contrast feature exclusively to make the dark parts darker and minimize the rest of the photograph. Likewise, truly mature creative artists throughout human history have had more sensitivity and nuance for the normal parts of life, that is, the non victim event part of life because the darkness of their victim event has brought out the beauty of detail in the rest of the photograph through contrast, not through occultation.

Most mature victims of war, or abuse, crime, fire, or what have you, fervently wish that "no one should ever have to go through what I have." Thus they may write something about their experience to, yes, raise awareness, and to have some catharsis. Many victims join or found movements to remediate those who suffer from the same or similar victimization. However, these worthy reactions have diminished the talent and reach of many creative artists who continually "mine" their trauma rather than do the requisite amount of reference and then use the trauma's reverse shadowing to better illuminate the rest of life so, indeed, their fans and audience "don't have to go through what they have gone through."

Victim informed art is, to use another analogy, as damaging as second hand smoke. When the creative artist continually mines their victimization for material they are doing the same as blowing second hand trauma smoke on their fans and audience. This is a well known phenomenon among psychologists and counselors. Counselors who see patients with one form of trauma over and over start to show symptoms themselves of that trauma as if they themselves have suffered the actual same victimization. I saw this where I interned first hand and it is part of the warning for self monitoring and time outs that is explained to new counselors as their training. Continually revisited trauma is unhelpful for the sufferer and also operates as a contagion, a "second hand smoke" to those who consume creative product that is developed by those who are constantly referencing and "digging in the mines" of their own trauma.

So here is my case study exercise. Imagine that you have been falsely imprisoned for seven years. You have been released. Now, write a short story, or just an outline, extolling the wonderfulness of something that you missed while in prison and enjoy even more now that you have been released. Refuse to dwell on the unjustness of your imprisonment and deny yourself even a sentence of "poor me" or "but wow, am I 'strong' and I have 'overcome'" in this exercise, since that is the point. Pretend that your readers will not even know that you were in prison; your readers will think that the purpose of your writing is to extol the wonderfulness of some ordinary part of life. They will have no idea why you have such sensitivity and fervor for the item you select.

If you find that difficult and even more telling, if you are resentful that you are writing about something wonderful without your reader knowing that "you got that knowledge through unjust suffering," that is exactly the programming that I am trying to get you to recognize and challenge. It should not be the "new normal" that someone should extol let's say for example the smell of the hot pretzel carts in New York City (since that is what you missed and now appreciate) only if you can at the same time whine and bum out the reader about why you missed the smell of hot pretzels so much.

Someone who reads a very cool and interesting piece about how great the hot pretzels smell when you walk by will be inspired. Someone who reads the same piece but it is punctuated and bracketed by your story of suffering an unjust imprisonment is robbed of much of the new territory that your creative work would have opened for him or her because now his or her focus is in part on the sadness and futility of your false imprisonment and not on your creative virtuosity of bringing to life the mundane hot pretzel smells.

It is like if you are playing the violin in the orchestra and someone is hammering nails in the background and you claim that your violin playing is "even better" because you "overcame the distracting loud hammering sounds." Um, I guess, but is it really? And is that the CD that anyone would want to listen to, your overcoming the nailing sounds in the background versus your virtuosity at the violin in and of itself? Look, I guess another analogy just crept in, ha.

So do that exercise and I guarantee it will be a great self examination tool and helpful for expanding your creative expression.

I hope that you have found this thought provoking, interesting and helpful.

An exercise to help traumatized keep God in their lives

You tend to see three kinds of people with three different reactions to a horrible trauma or loss in their lives. The traumas I am speaking of are things like losing a loved one in an accident, a fire, to illness, or being the victim of a crime or some other form of deeply traumatizing abuse.

The first group are those who have a deep faith in God, and that is not shaken even after the trauma. They may, of course, question why this happened, and the larger meaning within the body of their faith, but they do not diminish their connection to God. Many, actually, feel a stronger attachment to God.

The second group are those who have faith in God, which they may have felt was deep prior to the event, or it may have been a moderate or nominal background belief. Individuals in this group feel anger at God that is beyond the normal "getting back one's bearings" after the trauma and often deny God, blame God and as they often say "no longer believe in God" or have "lost their faith."

The third group are those who are mostly secular in orientation. Thus when they have a trauma they tend to interpret the trauma and their reactions using a philosophical and logical attitude, which may or may not help. For the many that it does help this is because they retain their focus on the facts, which is that a fellow human, or a factual circumstance (mechanics, illness, accident) caused the trauma. For those who find they cannot fully feel better and heal by focusing on personal philosophy and facts, some feel a calling to God (a second chance at life after surviving their trauma), while a small number harden their stance that there must not be a God because a "good" God would not allow these things to happen anyway.

Just in the past week we have seen in the news examples of all three.

Now, this is the point that I wish to make. I want to address those from group two and group three who feel even farther from God after a trauma than before. I have here an analogy, an exercise, to help you to understand that this is not only a matter of faith, but that such a reaction, carried to an extreme, is not rational.

1. Suppose that you have been kidnapped and abused by a gang. Would it be a logical response to no longer believe in the existence of police?

2. Suppose that you have been injured in a car smash and are lying, wounded, in your car, or on the side of the road. Would it be a logical response to no longer believe in the existence of ambulance crews? And if, when the ambulance crew shows up, would you say that your wounds are their fault?

3. Suppose that you are trapped in a building that is on fire. Would you lock the door on the firemen who come to rescue you, saying that you no longer believe in them? Would you say, "Well, you obviously must think that fires are a good thing or you would not have chosen to be firemen in your career?"

4. Suppose that you or a loved one has been sexually abused. If God came to comfort you, would you say to God, "Go away... I'd rather stay here with my living abuser." Rather than accompany God and abandon either the continuing reality or the living memory of the abuse, would you cling even tighter to the ongoing endless loop of the abuse, and refuse to go with God and thus start to leave the abuse reality or the grip of its memory on you?

5. Suppose you saw terrible things done by humans to fellow humans in times of war. Seeing just what humans do to other humans, would you continue to then "cast your lot" with humans alone and remain in their value structure, at their fickle mercies? Why is it a logical decision when repelled and abused by what you witness in a war to remain even firmer in that milieu, and refuse to find refuge in the values of God, which are far, of course, from the evil that humans do to each other?

It is important to be sympathetic to reasonable faith being reasonably shaken in horrible circumstances.

However, it is not helpful to enable illogical thinking. If one is horrified by what humans do to fellow humans, why would you reject being more of the values of God and less of humans as a result? By any measure that does not make sense, and that does not promote healing.

This is why I have developed this exercise for you to think about when you experience a trauma, or have already done so, or read about one in the papers, or hear about it on the news. Think of the trauma and the factual human/mechanics/biological cause (taking a leaf from the wise people of group three). Then think about how for every trauma there are fellow humans who try to prevent it, even if their numbers are few and their voices not heard. This helps you to recall that trauma is a human/human situation.

Then contemplate how illogical it would be for the trauma sufferer to further "endorse" the existing situation by rejecting the only alternative to human failures, which is God's realm, where there is no death, or suffering, or betrayal by loved ones. Why would you draw strength by only believing in the half of life where there was such a dismal failure or tragedy?

I do understand the pain and I hope that this helps.

The link between mindset and your decorations

I’m going to write a bit about art, home decorating and mental health! As usual I have a special interest in addressing young people with fondness, hoping to advise them in ways that they just are not hearing enough of today.

I’ll start by making my overall pitch to you, rather than build gradually up to my point, and then I’ll explain it and give examples. Societal values have changed for the worse, where art and home design have been redefined from what they traditionally have been, and thus have had a very bad effect on mood and mental serenity. Now, I am not talking about being trashy and that being a problem per se. I’m explaining that even “good taste” and “edgy art” have been propagandized in a way that they have been cultivated to have negative responses on the human rather than positive benefits. So here is what I mean in greater detail and with examples.
The most dramatic change in the way that people have viewed art and home decoration is that it has gone from being “what pleases you” to “making a statement.” Societal propaganda and brainwashing have convinced several generations that “making a statement” is the same as feeling good, but it is not, most assuredly it is not. Here is the easiest example to understand. Children, teenagers and young people are encouraged to take what may be a momentary feeling of alienation, depression, anger or existential angst and to “express” that feeling through your room’s decoration. So a phase you may be going through is now codified into a negative poster that you buy or art that you make that now becomes your continual companion. It was not always that way. In fact, if someone, child or adult, had started exhibiting sad or negative art that would have been viewed as a cry for help for a declining mental condition and there would have been a prompt intervention. So if a teenager was going through a bad patch with turmoil at home or inner angst and anger, and he bought and exhibited a poster with skull on it, you better believe that parents would have put an end to that and gotten the child to the doctor or a school counselor, or a sympathetic and wise family member, like a grandfather. See, I’m not being an “authenticity” suppressor here; I’m being “a doctor.”
Generations of humans understood that their home surroundings should not be filled with materials that weaken them and make them feel bad or sad. That does not mean that people were not thoughtful or even edgy, but it was unheard of, and a view as a very serious cry for help, to put in an enduring decorative fashion something that is angry, depressive or negative. Art that one selects that matches one’s worst moods and imaginings is like having a bad cold and then deliberately spreading the cold germs all over your room so you never get over it. No one in their right mind ought to display anything in their room or their home that does not elicit an “Ah,” when you look at it, rather than remind you of the worst of your feelings. It is a fact that people cannot heal from what wounds them if they surround themselves with reinforcements of those feelings and anxieties. It is quite literally like continuing to spread those cold germs so that you never get over your cold, while with time (and maybe interventions) you would have. So I remember the days before the phrase “making a statement” even entered into the mentality of either young people or adults. No one decorated their room or their home to “make a statement,” and certainly not if the statement was of your unhappiness or turmoil of mind. People used to seek relief from the terrible things they have experienced. Let me give you some examples.

Men who came back from war often brought back a souvenir. For example, I have a German iron cross that my German grandfather took from the body of a dead comrade so that it would not be left on the battlefield. So here I am talking about the World War I generation, and believe me, they saw horrible things in the trench and gas warfare of the time. Yet if you looked around my grandfather’s home in Berlin, it’s not like you could spot even a single item reflective of war or sad times. He had pictures of Dutch windmills, of birds and rabbits, of angels, of “Hummel” children. It would never have occurred to my grandfather to plaster some poster of bloodshed or war to “make a statement about what he had seen and ‘gone through.’” Men who went through the worse wars came back with trauma (not him, he was happy go lucky by nature) but they wanted joy and normalcy; they certainly would not even dream of surrounding themselves with depressive objects or art. The iron cross was in a drawer somewhere, rarely even encountered or remembered, and then given to his daughter, my mom, along with other little things that a poor family collected from their history (old coins and bank bills, pretty wine labels, postcards, etc.) Not only would someone like my grandfather never even dream of making himself sad through decorations from the war, who would he be “making a statement” to, since everyone had gone through the same horrible thing? When a war is fought, blood soaking your land and your neighbor’s, no one is looking to “make a statement” about their angst, since it was a shared experience where everyone if probed would have a worse story than the one before. So they returned, even those strong men with traumas, with joy back to life with calendars of cute Hummel children and bunnies with Easter eggs.

This is, incidentally, something that a USA Civil War veteran, if they still lived, would also be able to explain to you. I love arts and crafts, both historic and modern, so I know much about the Civil War era’s decorative and crafting styles. Big strong men coming home with terrible wounds of war did not want their wives to hang skeletons and skulls as a “statement” of what they “went through.” They craved being out of the mud and the horror and seeing the gentle handicrafts of women decorating their home. Rich or poor men wanted to see colorful quilts, religious art, peaceful landscapes done with paint or needlework by their wives or daughters, and touches of “wealth” and being a good provider, such as lace curtains. No man in his right mind wanted morbid war-reminding “decorations.” Part of their healing (in those pre “post traumatic stress disorder” diagnosed times) was a peaceful haven of normal surroundings with “a woman’s touch.” Men craved that in the settling of the west too. They didn’t want bloody carcasses of animals hanging on hooks off of rafters as “a statement of their authentic experience,” they wanted women to bring colorful fabrics and the simple arts of crafts of the time, such as needlework samplers and personal portraits made with outlines of the loved one’s head or hands, or lockets with a lock of hair. Part of the fun was grumbling about women “domesticating” them but men craved goodness and sweetness of decoration provided by “a woman’s touch.”

As the USA, and the world in general, became more prosperous in the mid-1900’s, such as after World War II (after war time rationing was over), another generation o f men sought homes that were normal and decorated in family oriented and traditional ways, not to “make a statement” or to keep examining the navel of their “angst.” So the 1950’s became kind of the golden age of home decorations about sports (and not “memorabilia” but from home town teams), the positive sides of the popular culture, combined with women who began to “style” their homes in modern ways. But it was still a “feel good” way of styling. No one wanted to relax in their home at the end of a tough day in the factory, or taking care of a large family, and then gaze at “art” that memorialized the worst of their feelings. That wasn’t denial; that was being normal and balanced. People knew from generations of common sense experience that you wanted your place to “look nice” and “feel nice,” even if you have experienced some not very nice things in your life. “It looks nice” was very high praise from a man and was sincere and being “touchy feely” in the context of their times. Men, women, teenagers and children wanted their home or room “to be their castle” where it “looked nice.”

For example, I could describe for you in great detail my brother’s room and its “decorations” from the 1950’s. He had bookshelves filled with books, bracketed by model jet planes. He was a three sport “letter man” (basketball, baseball and football) so he displayed his letters. He had (and still does) a shoebox full of baseball cards. “Posters” did not exist back then. What one chose for one’s walls in one’s room came from the family’s collection of traditional things, so he would have landscapes that he liked in there. He had a little statue of a fawn that I now have and prize. His “edginess” was a very cool rare beer can (I forget the brand but I have it somewhere; it has like jaguar spots on it) that he used as his pencil cup. Now, my brother was born in Germany during World War II, his father was killed the week after he was born, and he was a war refugee, surviving being bombed while running to the bomb shelters. It would never occur to him or anyone else of that generation to “make a statement” about “what he had gone through” by creating or displaying depressive “art” that would remind him of those times (which he barely remembered anyway since kids have a healthy ability to move on and thrive if giving half a chance). Oh, and his prize possession: his transistor radio! He was not a phonograph record playing type; his generation loved the radio.

So I think you see what I am getting at. A really creepy cultural shift started in the later 1960’s and has become progressively worse through the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s and now the 2000’s, which is to “adorn” your room, apartment or home with decorations that reinforce and remind you of the worst parts of your life and mindset. Eventually a near total flip has taken place where even children are expected to have “edgy” and “action oriented” surroundings, promoting “adventure” and “fantasy,” and those who stick with the pleasant real life homemaking types of decorations are viewed as being “inauthentic,” “suppressed,” “stuck in the past,” and corny. Isn’t it odd how those who were not stuck in the past, who left war in the battlefield and who looked forward with joy to a “nice house” are now called the ones “stuck in the past?” While any boy or girl who has angst or anger who reinforces it over and over through their surroundings and their music are viewed as “not being stuck in the past?” That shows you the “big lie.” Hitler is famous for that expression. The theory is that the bigger the lie, the better it will stick, and it is often true. Somehow the idea that depressive, gothic and violent art is “good for you” because it “expresses how you feel” has become “the truth” and mindlessly accepted by two generations in a row.

I went to college in the autumn of 1971. I went to an Ivy League university filled with rich kids but rich or poor we both shared a common set of values, which was being very low key and “nice” in our decorations. We were kind of the last bastion before the depressives really took over. Here’s how it worked. You shared a dorm room (and later an apartment) with a roommate. Space was small and everyone was poor (or thrifty) so each person would buy one poster to display in the room, and the poster had to be one that was pleasing also to the roommate. People selected posters and art that you could look up from studying and go “Ah” when you rested your eyes on it. People didn’t want “art” that commemorated your alcoholic parents, or the time you were molested, or heads being blown off in Vietnam (even though that was the era of the actual war). My roommate got one of those “hang in there baby” LOL cat posters, which were brand new and funny back then! I got a poster of the LA Rams quarterback Roman Gabriel cranking up about to make a pass and looking very fine. By fine I mean athletic with great lines, not sexy in the way that celebrity posters are now. We admired kids who could afford lava lamps. The most subversive thing you might see is a poster of Janis Joplin in feathers and pearls, or Jimi Hendrix. We listened to Black Sabbath but no one would ever dream of decorating their dorms in some goth depressive way. The boundaries were still clear; it had not gotten so blurry where the harshest and most depressive artistes were now “speaking for you” and thus you “put on their uniform” of decorations, behavior imitation and self reinforcing lowness. And remember, ours was the generation of Kent State and the ending years of the Vietnam conflict, so people had a lot to feel crappy about. However, the last thing that would occur to anyone would be to wallow in it.

So I’m not going to start bashing individual contemporary expressions because I’m not at all being judgmental, even though it may sound like it. What I am doing instead is trying to free you from the chains of the mindset that so many young people (but especially their slightly older peers) have, which is this whole violent, sad, occult, gothic and desperately “New Age” type of room or home adornment. Again, I’m not some old f*** who does not appreciate edgy art. For example, I loved two vases that I used to have that were shaped like angular volcanoes that flow gold paint lava. But I have to admit, even them I decided were “stylish” rather than positively oriented. I’d look at them and think, “What a cool design,” but they were disquieting to look at. Why have something as “art” or “decoration” that is disquieting? I’m a very firm weeder in that regard, where I will pull like weeds anything within my line of sight that is anything but “nice” feeling. As an artist I’m no ninny using only granny pastels, but I will only use those bright tones of colors to make positive and good feeling works of art. I want to go “Ah” when I look at anything that is decorating my abode (such as it is) and I strongly urge others to do the same. Again, you don’t have to be dull to do that; all I am saying is that your decorations should be uplifting, stabilizing and satisfactory to look at, even if it is edgy. For example, I made a painting/collage of a volcano about to erupt watching on CNN the progress of Hurricane Hugo. That is edgy but it also is in an interesting way fun AND soothing to look at, while still being stimulating in an edgy artistic sense. (It’s in storage; I don’t have it here in my apartment). But it’s one of the best examples I can provide to you out of my portfolio of how I am careful to craft only art that is stimulating in a good way to look at, not stimulating in a bad, anger making or depressive way.

Anyway, do resist the constant propaganda to surround yourself with “art” reminds of your weakest, saddest or most angry experiences because that is truly not “authentic.” Being authentic is surrounding yourself, like those Civil War veterans, with what feels like home and what you want to reach for, not be pulled away from through chains of negativity. I hope this is helpful and that you know what I mean. Take care and be good to yourselves in the ways that you and only you can. I don’t care how “fine” the art is, how expensive, how edgy, how “authentic,” or how “one of a kind,” if you feel angry or deflated whenever your eyes pass over it, get the heck rid of it. Sheesh. Don’t we all have enough to feel bad about without that kind of depressive agenda? Here is an example. I have (in storage) a pewter plate that was recovered from a wreck of a ship. I love the age and looks of the plate and that is all that I think of it when I used to have it on display in my home. But if I knew that some moron member of my family was gazing at it and thinking about “drowned souls” I would have gotten rid of it in a New York minute. You should not have a single thing in your home (except of course things from deceased loved ones) that prompts what I call “optional” thoughts of sadness, anger or depression. That’s REAL Feng Shui by the way. There’s no way that you can have “balance” and “personal power” if you have stuff that creeps or bums you out (or your family or friends when they visit). Get rid of it and don’t buy or make any more of it!!!