Facing the Facebook Scenario

Recently someone I haven’t seen in almost forty years requested that I “friend” him. We were quite close as teenagers, especially in our last year of school, then I lost track of him. He stayed in my hometown. I went to college and grew my hair. I lost track of many people in the five or six years after high school, and, to tell you the truth, Facebook has been a boon for me in terms of reconnecting with folks I haven’t seen in decades. Friends and lovers and then the friends of friends of friends of lovers from all over the world busy on their computers finding out what happened. What happened to you? Where have you been? What are you doing now? What do you think?

Decades.

Wow. The fact that I’m old enough to think in terms of multiple groupings of ten-year spans is a little overwhelming. There’s a great gift in this, right? Suddenly this episodic life full of moves and different groupings of friends has found a place, even if it’s “virtual”, that gifts me with the presence of representatives of every one of those episodes.  People from my college years are writing short blurbs and blats to people who are inseparable from my identity as an artist. How does this happen? Mostly they get along. Mostly. But back to the scenario:

It starts out okay. We greet each other enthusiastically. We reminisce. He is a terrible speller, but then, so am I at times when I don’t check and recheck (and even then, I miss embarrassing words. Its and It’s anyone? sheesh!). Then comes the bomb. 

Now, I have Facebook friends who have views that are diametrically opposed to mine.  I am not the kind of guy who automatically de-friends or blocks someone who finds their way on to my friends list and is, say, vehemently anti-abortion. My mother had an illegal abortion in the years before she married my father. She told me this story tearfully. One of the only times I ever saw her cry. How could I be anything BUT pro-choice? Then there are those whose Christian ejaculations on Facebook are rather frequent. I am a committed and radical agnostic. But, especially recently, I have made a commitment to keep as wide a range of Facebook friends as possible. I can scroll past anything that is not to my liking. Easy. Or I can engage in a little debate if I wish. Debate can be good for my own thinking, and for my writing. Why not? If we can start and end respectfully, don’t call names or let the sarcasm get too completely out of hand, we can go on and find areas, even surprisingly, where we agree and can celebrate that agreement.

That’s not to say I haven’t blocked or de-friended. When I first started on Facebook I was almost immediately appalled at what people posted and what they would say to one another. I quickly, out of the excitement for the new medium, gathered a bunch of people to my list, friends of friends and acquaintances that I didn’t know well. But I had different expectations. I offended many of them by speaking my mind. I had this idea that people there would automatically agree with my passions and my politics. Boy was I surprised!

This has been a recurring theme in my life. I remember attending my first poetry workshop. I was a callow twenty year old writing my first poems and presenting them for the first time to people in a rather large group of academics (my first creative writing teacher encouraged me to come) mixed with Sylvia Plath wanna-bes and post beatnik beatniks. I was appalled then too. There were, alas, a fare share of assholes. Can I use that word? But I had expected a great loving gathering of writers interested in inner and outer peace. Instead we were to quibble about rhyme and the use of repetition, with passive-aggressive snubs being the most commonly employed tool for conflict resolution. Like I said, I had unrealistic expectations. Which begs the question: who was really the asshole? Still, I went, again and again. Which brings me back to my first try at Facebook: within a month or two I decided to de-friend and block almost everyone who had been drawn magnetically, magically, to my friend list and started, quite slowly, all over again. I think I got the hang of it after that.

I have, however, encouraged people to de-friend me. I remember one situation in which a person sought me out for “friending”. We had been childhood classmates, never what I would call friends. We graduated from the same school. Our initial greetings on Facebook were enthusiastic. After a few weeks she posted a plea under a rather mainstream news article I had posted to “PLEASE STOP PUTTING POLITICS ON MY (her) PAGE!!!!!!”  I was nonplussed. I had to do little about this incident however. My son and his wife leapt upon her overly capitalized post with all the vehemence and snarling of mama bears (I wasn’t aware of how closely my bodyguards travel to me) and all I had to do was politely encourage her to de-friend me if she wanted no news of the world aside from saccharine pictures of soon-to-be extinct animals in completely anthropomorphized photographs. She did. De-friend me. I am sure we are both happier for it.

That being said the other reasons I have blocked, temporarily or permanently, members of my disparate and global little circle of friends, have been the following: 1) Constant name calling in political discussions 2.) Overly enthusiastic and numerous political campaign stances for any side. 3) Obvious and constant unchecked insanity. Other than that I am willing to be entertained by almost anything anyone wants to post. It’s better than TV, which I haven’t watched in decades. It’s a relatively free world. Mindfully speaking. I like knowing where other people stand on it. And on Facebook, as in the world, everyone has a different idea about what is meaningful enough to talk about, to represent and to be passionate enough to share.

But back to my old friend, and our original scenario: I could not continue to argue with him. His spelling and rationale and rants were so close to those of the people I work with in my work as a psychiatric social worker I could only wonder what happened to him. What went wrong? How did you end up where you are from where you started? You were bright and laughed often and valued friendship and connection regardless of, or perhaps because of, differences. I could not block. I just wanted to know what happened.

So I asked. What happened to you?

He hasn’t answered yet. Maybe I’ve been blocked.


This article originally appeared in the spring 2013 issue of "The Compass, A Mental Health Magazine"

On the Question of Abstinence During Engagement: The Nature of Powerlessness in the Treatment and Coaching of those with Addiction Disorders

While I see strengths in both the arguments for and against strict abstinence during treatment for addiction, what I have witnessed over my nearly thirty years in the mental health field, and would prefer not to duplicate as a coach, is the exclusion of people who are actively displaying the symptoms of the disorder with which they need help.

In addition there is the often failed presumption that a substance abuse professional is able to, or should, be able to detect when someone is under the influence... either with their own assessment skills or by forcing medical procedures on people to determine their level of use before they can be treated for that use.

As an example of how much more powerful these addictions are than the skills of even the best professional, I want to relate an experience I recently had. A doctor had developed a long-term relationship with a patient who came to him regularly at various stages in her struggle with her addiction. He was convinced he could tell if she was inebriated or not. She claimed short-term sobriety.  Ultimately his treatment plan depended upon whether or not she was under the influence. I was called into the emergency room to do a mental health assessment, which I was required to do only after her blood alcohol level was under the allowable level, .08. The doctor told me he was convinced she had not been drinking, but due to her history was agreeable to proceeding with a blood alcohol level.  It turned out to be over .400. 

I think a rigid insistence that someone only come to sessions when they are free of substances may invite the kind of dishonest engagement in treatment and/or coaching that is a large part of the kind of negative counter-transference about addicts that turns what is more and more understood as a brain disease into a moral and/or character flaw. While we encourage addicts to admit to their powerlessness over their addiction, we demand that they exercise power over it before we will listen to them or help them.  Perhaps we should reconsider this rigid, even un-verifiable, standard and replace it with a more flexible one that only requires that the client or consumer of our services be made the responsible party and be able to tell us that he or she is “sober enough” to be able to engage.

It is important to me to remember that as much as we know it is self-destructive to do so, many addicts use in order TO function. By the time they are compelled to seek our assistance their brains and their bodies do not know how to function without the substance to which they are addicted.  While a certain level of mental sobriety may be necessary to constructively engage in order to make progress, it is unrealistic to demand absolute sobriety from people who may, in fact, NEVER truly be free of the addictive substances of choice at least during the stage of the disease prior to active engagement and change.

At a certain point this becomes more a topic about treatment for addictions than one about coaching. A coach probably would do best to consider his or her own proficiency and confidence level in dealing with an intractable, difficult-to-tame, illness of the brain and body chemistry.  Addiction can generally NOT be seen as, or treated as, the much simpler matter of a choice, or a moral failure to choose. Much current brain science indicates that in many addicts the urges, those powerful inner voices that make compelling but irrational excuses for to use again, are in fact nearly identical to what are called command hallucinations in people with Schizophrenic disorders. In a related fact, the statistics show that about 80% of those with addiction problems also have significant and serious co-occurring mental health issues.

I would encourage coaches to enter into this territory willingly; because I believe a coaching approach can be tremendously effective, but also cautiously and never alone. Make sure you have and make good use of a team of doctors, substance abuse professionals and resources, as well as those who are active in the recovery movement and groups like AA.

And So This is Christmas: an Unbeliever's Guide to Believing

And So This is Christmas: an Unbeliever’s Guide to Believing

It’s hard to write anything original about Christmas. Holiday self-help advice gets about as original and moving as the countless bad renditions of any number of holiday songs playing non-stop from the first of November until the New Year.

So why am I compelled to offer it?

People try. It’s charming really, the effort made by everyone from the smallest tot to those most advanced in the art of grand and great-grand parenting, to observe the weeks called “The Holidays” with glee and hope for renewal and connection. Why?

Who really knows?  But it goes deep, even deeper than how many of the world’s spiritual traditions invest those weeks around the North’s winter solstice with significance, doesn’t it?

In reality the holidays aren’t easy.

Often they aren’t nearly as fun as they are made out to be. Many years we are left with the feeling that we have failed at the true test of the holidays, failed at being “happy”.

The Holidays as they are promoted are like a giant pressure cooker: the pressure to be happy, to spend what one may not have enough of… money, time, love, friends, family…  the pressure of the idiotic idea that material gifts can buy or even symbolize the complicated and multifaceted nature of connection and love.

The fact is, however, that at a more deeply felt level there can also be the pressure to put aside what may be the more realistic innate and symbolic structure of the time of the year, the passing of precious time, the losses, the introduction of the New.  This passage will happen even if we aren’t ready for it and may not, at any conceivable level, be able to “afford” it, “afford” to be somewhere New when what is Old seems to be slipping away or being taken from us, even stolen.

We count what passes. People, homes, friendships, age, health. What else? This is something that seems unavoidable as the world spins and tilts us away from the light, and we get ready for the long stretch into longer days, the growing season, the hope… the hope FOR hope.

We measure change. It is in our DNA; packaged in these things we call holidays. And sometimes I think they have been almost completely co-opted by a materialist perspective that tries ever so diligently to rob us of our connection to the deeper meanings in the season, the sobriety of it, the losses, the potential and its tentative hold on what we wish the newness will grant us. The fact that the holiday’s truest visions have been so powerfully denied only accentuates their power over us. In that propagandized denial of the full range of the nature and meaning of the turning of the darkest darkness to the gradual rebirth of the light, we are forced to deny our own inner revolutions… the necessary changes of living.

Even if we are fearful about what is ahead; even if we read in the dreams of the turning of the world the coming of storms and droughts, the potential for poor harvest. 

It is easy to be led away from the truest observations of the season through the propaganda of a hoarding mentality that gets reflected in a make-believe over-abundance, a release of endorphins through a compulsive purchase that shields us from very real trepidations that we are required to feel to be fully human.

How do we rescue THAT? How do we rescue that when THAT is the reason for the season, that teeter-totter balance between what we love the most and what we fear losing the most or may have already lost? The yin-yang of what is new and why it must come and that which must be left behind?

We may cut a tree down. We may take out the heirloom ornaments and lights. We may contemplate each sparkling story as we hang it from the tree. We may laugh with others, we may walk quickly into another room to shed deep tears, we may hold on to whom ever stands near and feel the real warmth of how we could not go forward into an unsure future without that kindred heart beating… beating, beating….

All this empty buying! What does it signify actually? What does it mean?

This season I think I will vote to suspend my disbelief in the sacredness of the turning of the year and how this time of the year is the most appropriate for that deep observation.

I think I will give in to all the tribal and even pre-tribal wells of genetically imprinted deep knowledge that these darkest days have always held for me and for my predecessors, the so-called primitive ancestry that could not know that the great dragons and Manitous that lived in the blustery winter sky were even more frightening than they could imagine, more frightening in the reality of their random emergence and arrival; that they could just as easily snuff out me and my entire world suddenly and too quickly for that blinding flash to be seen by me or anyone like me.

I will believe in the season’s magic as if I had never used a wheel or made a loaf of bread.

I resolve to reject happiness and joyfulness uninterrupted or undefined by great sorrows and fears as anything honorable to be achieved, as anything healthy, normal or human.

We are a species of connection at the same time that we are a race of lonely seekers. We live in a space of simultaneous opposites as a premier fact of our phenomenology of being and always have. We are different enough from one another that we require some ongoing and concrete recognition of our hard won similarities in order to succeed as an organism on a similarly interwoven galaxy of a planet full of other organic and inorganic forms that must live in some kind of harmony, even through destruction by one of the other… the shit of fear ripening and fertilizing the birth and sustenance the other’s hope.

We hold the spear of terror as we approach one another; we grope for signals that we belong with one another, walking into the New Year together. With food. With a drink of cool water.

Now, right now, we are woven tightly, ever more tightly, into the drama of our miraculous planetary configurations. It was always so, but as the ice unleashes astonishingly beautiful and terrible torrents of waters due to the melting of our polar caps, as our most intricate and life-infused population centers are threatened with inundation by the by-product of that great melt, we cannot ignore how we are woven into this great miracle of chaos and order, all at once interpretable, documented and at the same time completely misunderstood, far out of our concrete grasp of understanding. Just as we have only begun to understand our own brain’s workings, our planet and its cradle in the slurry of space is only starting to be fathomed while it is simultaneously moving into an era of the unfathomable.

And so this is Christmas. And what have you done?

I promise to make a study of remembering during this solstice. To remember and work to allow tears and gratitude. To relax the automatic tightening of the well of my throat that keeps the sobs from rising up.

I want to miss those who I have loved who are no longer here. I want to hold on to the visages of those who walk with me still...  as they are and as they have been and may be.

I want my gifts to always be in hand, those things that leap from the soul to the soul and still know these metaphors do exist, these metaphors for the hot liquid core of why we remain a treasure. They exist even when we are so completely inconsequential to the order of things as it moves on, as it covers us in darkness, blinds us in dawn, as it grows incredible Sequoias and fills the hot vents at the bottom of the sea with the soup of our ancestors.

And I want to laugh. It would good if you could join me. Because no matter what lies before us, we are here now, and it is good.

5 Things to Remember for Those Starting Coaching (and 5 more for Coaches)

5 Things to Remember for Those Starting Coaching, Therapy or Counseling (and 5 More For Coaches, Counselors and Therapists)

For Clients:

1) Have some instructions for how best a coach or counselor should work with you. Write them down and take them with you for your first session. Know your learning style. Have examples/anecdotes ready to illustrate this.

2) Ask about professional credentials, experience and client references.

Ask questions about them when you get them.

3) If the coach/counselor insists on doing it his or her own way, find someone else. Give a professional at least two sessions if you think it may be workable in spite of misgivings and only three if you continue to have serious doubts. Let them know you are doing this.

4) Regardless of the feeling content, much of your first session will be concerned with creating a kind of business contract. Your job is to make sure your prospective counselor/coach can fulfill their end of the contract. Have a time period in mind or how many sessions you think will be necessary to accomplish your goals. Avoid those who seem unable to make at least a preliminary plan for how long you will be seeing them. You can always reset the goals and time at a later date.

5) Never let your fear of hurting someone's feelings prevent you from asking questions about the direction of your work together, the purpose of time used on something that seems peripheral, or how anecdotes from their own life relate to the work you are doing.

For Coaches, Counselors and Therapists:

1) Listen first, listen long, listen by asking for more and clearer information. Reflect reflect reflect.

2) Use silence as a friend to revelation and mindfulness. Listen to it.

3) Moving into problem solving or advice-giving too soon does not work. In fact, I would say advice-giving is rarely advisable and most effectively used only when sought (even then, eliciting reflection about why advice is being sought may be more effective) and rarely. If you are moved to give it without it being sought, ask for permission first.

4) Be aware of cultural norms and ways of communicating. Ask questions about cultural norms before evaluating speech patterns and nonverbal communications according to your own norms. It might be good to have a routine set of queries about cultural norms as a part of your intake interview/s. Remember that your own norms, regardless of how familiar you are with them, can remain so prevalent that they are invisible to you. Differences in cultural communication norms are innumerable and vary from family to family, neighborhood to neighborhood.

5) Be patient and wait for indications of an entrance into spontaneous problem solving initiated by the client. Amplify and build on that.