The Stress Doc Letter
Cybernotes from the Online Psychohumorist ™
APR 2009, No. I, Sec. I
Fight when you can
Take flight when you must
Flow like a dream
In the Phoenix we trust!
Table of Contents
Section I
Shrink Rap I: Meditations and Mantras, Sayings and Slogans
Shrink Rap II: "Still Crazy and Evolving after All these Years" or Generating
"Four 'C'-ing Evolution"
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Section II
Main Essay: The Stress Doc's Conception of Ritual and the Spiral: Four "R"
"Spiral-Ritual" Gives Birth to the "Spiritual."
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Overview:
1) Shrink Rap I: Meditations and Mantras, Sayings and Slogans. Popular
Stress Doc words of wit and wisdom.
2) Shrink Rap II: "Still Crazy and Evolving after All these Years" or
Generating "Four 'C'-ing Evolution": Discovering and Designing Interconnection
among "Creativity, Change, Conflict and (Mostly Good) Crazy." Drawing on the
wisdom of pioneers in the field of science, theatre and education -- including
Jonas Salk, Charles Darwin, George Bernard Shaw and John Dewey -- the Doc
sketches a path of "Four 'C'-ing Evolution." An ability to grapple with loss
and risk letting go, along with a yin-yang predisposition for being deliberate
and deviant are foundational qualities. And a personal example that hits close
to home brings the concepts to life.
3) Main Essay: The Stress Doc's Conception of Ritual and the Spiral:
Four "R" "Spiral-Ritual" Gives Birth to the "Spiritual." Having both a schedule
or established procedure and a willingness to shake up the mindset and skillset
routine based on new data or hunches, yet continuing to practice day-after-day
so that memory and mastery muscles develop, is a formula for exploring,
experimenting, risk-taking and learning.
Shrink
Rap I:
Meditations
and Mantras, Sayings and Slogans
[The following are found in the article below, "Still Crazy and Evolving after
All these Years"]
1) On Leadership and Team Building
a) "With 'T 'n T' you're dynamite, sister; but 'Tough 'n Tender' and a 'Thinker'
now you're a dynamic leader!"
This saying captures my belief in developing a bi-hemispheric perspective --
being expressive emotionally, whether tough or tender -- and being cool and
reflective cognitively. An ability to grapple with contradiction and
complexity, yields a powerful edge: According to esteemed novelist, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, "The test of a first rate intellect is the capacity to hold two
opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to
function."
b) "There's no 'I' in team but there are two 'I's in winning."
This aphorism challenges the notion that team members must totally subvert their
individual talents and perspective. First, it recognizes that for a winning
team, each person needs ("two eyes") to be observant internally (looking inside
for self-awareness) and observing the greater environment (soft scanning) while
keeping both "eyes on the prize" (focused perspective on vital outcomes). And
second, successful teams need two "I"s -- "Individuals" with "Integrity" -- who
communicate openly and honestly. And, of course, this two-way flow is
especially critical between the leader and team members.
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2) On Risk-Taking, Ritual and Rites
a) "Confronting Your Intimate FOE: Fear of Exposure"
This phrase simply underscores my belief that we often are afraid to move out of
a comfort zone because our perceived inadequacies will be exposed. But more
often than not it's our own internalized critical voice rather than feedback
from the external world that holds us back.
b) "I'm a Learner Not a Loser."
The perfect antidote for discovering the opportunity in errors and for disarming
your "Intimate FOE."
c) From Ritual to Radical Practice -- The Four "R"s of Rites of Passage: "A
Ritual that's Repetitive, Responsive, Risk-selective and Reflective forges
radical performance and the rite of passage."
[Radical. Middle English, of a root, from Late Latin rdclis, having roots, from
Latin rdx, rdc-, root; see wrd- in Indo-European roots.]
1. Arising from or going to a root or source; basic: proposed a radical solution
to the problem.
2. Departing markedly from the usual or customary; extreme: radical opinions on
education.
3. Favoring or effecting fundamental or revolutionary changes in current
practices, conditions, or institutions
4. Linguistics Of or being a root: a radical form.
5. Slang Excellent; wonderful.
Once again a yin/yang nature is revealed. Having both a schedule or established
procedure and a willingness to shake up the mindset and skillset routine based
on new data or hunches, yet continuing to practice day-after-day so that memory
and mastery muscles develop, is a formula for exploring, experimenting,
risk-taking and learning. And this process will enable you to engage new role
challenges, broaden and deepen aptitudes and achieve unanticipated levels of
error, opportunity and success.
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3) Growing through Loss
a) "Whether the loss is a key person, a desired position or a powerful illusion,
each deserves the respect of a mourning. The pit in the stomach, the clenched
fists and quivering jaw, the anguished sobs prove catalytic in time. In
mystical fashion, like spring upon winter, the seeds of dissolution bear
fruitful renewal."
While no one can predict with absolute certainty the needed time or the way of
meandering (in mind-body-spirit) through a grief process for a particular
individual, engaging with grief's painful emotions will sow their own courage
building as well as healing and restorative seeds. (See b.)
b) "For the Phoenix to rise from the ashes,
One must know the pain...
To transform the fire to burning desire."
Remember, the "s"-word for Passion is not "sex" but "suffering" (as in the
"Passion Play").
c) "There's real difference between feeling sorry for yourself and feeling your
sorrow. When you are feeling sorry for yourself you tend to blame others. When
you are feeling your sorrow you have the courage to face your pain. And we all,
at times, need to feel our sorrow."
An adage to help people not beat themselves up too badly in the face of human
frailty and foible.
Shrink Rap
II:
Using the popular title of a recent speaking program, the Stress Doc" explores
the basis for "Still Crazy and Evolving after All These Years." Drawing on the
wisdom of pioneers in the field of science, theatre and education -- including
Jonas Salk, Charles Darwin, George Bernard Shaw and John Dewey -- the Doc
sketches a path of "Four 'C'-ing Evolution." An ability to grapple with loss
and risk letting go, along with a yin-yang predisposition for being deliberate
and deviant are foundational qualities. And a personal example that hits close
to home brings the concepts to life.
"Still Crazy and Evolving after All these Years" or Generating "Four 'C'-ing
Evolution": Discovering and Designing Interconnection among "Creativity,
Change, Conflict and (Mostly Good) Crazy"
"Still Crazy and Evolving after All these Years." It's the title of a recent
speaking program for seniors, mostly retirees. The program was a big hit!
(Here's the blurb; see testimonial below.)
Program Blurb: "The Stress Doc, Mark Gorkin, will encourage us to explore a new
self-discovery. We most often think of the senior years as cruising to the
end. Can we really set new sights and adventures at any age? Gorkin believes
all those trials and tribulations, flaws and foibles allow us to explore new
landscapes and mindscapes. In addition to being inspired, you will laugh!"
The enthusiastic response has motivated me to: a) develop a program for an
array of ages, professions, organizations, etc.; see the end of the essay for an
outline on "Still Crazy and Evolving after All these Years (and Despite these
Out-RAGE-ous Times)" and b) flesh out the foundation for being "good
crazy" and for having a capacity for personal and/or professional resilience and
evolution. I must say, most people love the title. Why is that? Perhaps the
title is embraced because it suggests that a person can still retain his or her
uniqueness and spirit despite life on the "burnout battlefront" with its
exhausting crises, disturbing losses or numbing demands and hassles: "Try as
you will, you can't squeeze or pound me into a listless mass or a robotic mind."
And even if knocked temporarily on a derriere or when having dropped the ball,
this individual is not overwhelmed or paralyzed "Confronting the Intimate FOE:
Fear of Exposure." The judgmental ego is muted while error is acknowledged, and
the affirming personal mantra is -- "I'm a Learner Not a Loser." And when laid
low by loss, a basic Stress Doc saying helps negotiate the painful valleys and
voids: "There's a real difference between feeling sorry for yourself and
feeling your sorrow. When feeling sorry for yourself you tend to blame others.
When feeling your sorrow you have the courage to face your pain." We all at
times need to face our sorrow. And by courageously engaging that "dark night of
the soul" (sometimes alone, sometimes with a guide) you often discover a
double-edged quality of loss and sorrow.
Good Grief: Growing through Loss
Grappling with the stages of grief and ultimately letting go in the external
or day-to-day world (while allowing the loved one's spirit to live lightly and
enlighteningly inside) allows you to conceive fresh possibilities if not help
formulate a new vision or mission. As the Algerian-French Nobel-Prize winning
author and existential philosopher, Albert Camus, noted: "Once we have accepted
the fact of loss we understand that the loved one [or loved position] obstructed
a whole corner of the possible, pure now as a sky washed by rain." Camus'
description of natural grief as a cleansing and mind-opening force provides a
conceptual bridge linking my own mind-body to spiritual-like musings:
Whether the loss is a key person, a desired position or a powerful illusion,
each deserves the respect of a mourning. The pit in the stomach, the clenched
fist and quivering jaw, the anguished sobs prove catalytic in time. In mystical
fashion, like spring upon winter, the seeds of dissolution bear fruitful
renewal.
As alluded to above, a key driving agent is often a higher power and harnessed
aggression that helps transform pain into passion, purpose, persistence and
possibility: "For the Phoenix to rise from the ashes one must know the pain…to
transform the fire to burning desire." Or maybe an outcome of a grief process
is simply a defiant and deviant stance that morphs into the classic line from
the movie "Network": "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."
Actually, a madness that goes beyond defiance or mere destruction and morphs
into "divine madness" (what was once thought to drive the artistic mind) and
mutation speaks to the other implicit message in the title: with some crazy if
not creative juice, I can keep changing (and influencing my surroundings) and
continue to grow. I believe it was acclaimed 19th century playwright, George
Bernard Shaw, who in effect observed: "The reasonable man adapts to the world.
The unreasonable man makes the world adapt to him. Therefore, all progress
depends on the unreasonable man."
Perhaps one way of conceiving "good crazy" is the notion of eccentricity,
especially when as noted by the enlightenment philosopher, John Stuart Mill, an
"evolutionary eccentricity" (my phrase) is "fired by genius, mental vigor, and
moral courage." As Adam Gopnik observed in his new book, Angels and Ages: A
Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life (Alfred A Knopf: NY,
2009), "odd sorts and variations were to be valued for the sake of progress,
that bizarre variation was the key to the growth of knowledge."
"Four 'C'-ing Evolution"
Perhaps the evolutionary link between "eccentricity" and deviance and change
is captured in the psycho-semantic transmutation from "going crazy" (i.e.,
feeling and being out of control) to "growing crazy" (i.e., some paradoxical mix
of controlled or designed chaos) with creatively managing or harnessing conflict
the transitional bridge. (Email stressdoc@aol.com for my article on "Creative
Risk-Taking": The Art of Designing Disorder.") Hmm, I'm sensing "Four 'C'-ing
Evolution": a complexly stimulating interconnection among "Creativity, Change,
Conflict and (Mostly Good) Crazy." For starters, when it comes to the term
"evolution," my immediate name association is not Charles Darwin but Jonas
Salk. The renowned pioneer of a polio vaccine, Salk noted that, "Evolution is
about getting up one more time than you fall down; being courageous one more
time than you are fearful; trusting just one more time than you are anxious."
Clearly, evolution involves risk and experimentation more than it does
perfection. In fact, just the opposite condition prevails. Chaos theory
reveals that a system having just enough structure (to negate anarchy) while
also possessing a capacity for engaging with a high degree of environmental and
operational uncertainty and fluidity is a system most capable of meaningful
transformation and evolving complexity. For example, a crystalline structure is
so perfectly and tightly aligned, there is no evolutionary play. It is
figuratively, literarily (and chemically) set in its ways! (Of course,
individuals and systems must be able to tolerate if not feed off of growing
pains anxiety while using consequential input and environmental feedback to
evolve and mutate purposefully.)
This is why an optimal level of conflict along with the challenge of generating
new and effective behavioral responses is often essential to prevent a hardening
of the cognitive arteries and an atrophying of the emotional muscles. As the
pragmatic philosopher and "Father of American Public Education," John Dewy
noted: "Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and
memory. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity. It instigates to invention
and sets us at noting and contriving. Conflict is the sine qua non of
reflection and ingenuity." Conflict is a dynamic element influencing creative
problem solving and adaptive complexity.
Though opening with the words of Salk and Dewey, of course, when it comes to the
concept of evolution Mr. Darwin remains front and center. However, for my
purposes, even more critical than the popular notion of survival of the fittest
is the significant role of deviation and mutation. That is, small changes that
allow for productively engaging with an environment, over a prolonged period
just may culminate in significant alterations or metamorphosis. When this
evolving complexity leads to enhanced goodness of fit, the result may be
adaptive advantage, both in the present and for subsequent generations (or,
given sufficient time, changes and conflicts and creative adaptations yield a
new evolutionary frontrunner). As Adam Gopnik observed, "Repetition is the
habit of nature but variation is the rule of life."
One Man's Evolutionary, If Not Shocking, Journey
And I believe a synthesis of Salk and Darwin/Gopnik is possible. Of course,
it's all relative, as our time frame and the capacity for change and mutation is
on a human scale, that is one individual's (or family's) lifelong growth
process, not the evolution of a species over eons and eons. However, using a
personal-human lens, consider the possibility for change, enhanced performance
and strengthened family functioning spurred by my father's mid-life "sturm und
drang." When I was a sophomore in college my parents separated for four
months. Decades of emotional issues had piled up, especially issues from my
father's past that had never been honestly examined. Actually, it was during
this period that I learned that my father had been going for shock therapy for
many years in response to lurking depression and a "mental breakdown" (when I
was eighteen months old). His mother too suffered from clinical depression.
Regarding my father's twice annual treatment regimen, my parents were dutifully
following medical-cultural norms and the doctor's orders. However, my father
finally broke out of his box and went for psychotherapy (following the
suggestion of a woman with whom he was having a brief affair. Once again life
reveals that questionable actions nonetheless may instigate positive results).
And once committed to both individual and group psychotherapy he never again
needed shock treatment. No longer shocking away his emotions, my father was
more openly expressing himself, including his anger. No longer was his energy
and aggression primarily being channeled as a hard-driving salesman; alcohol was
being used less as an anger lubricant. Naturally, his new behavior patterns
generated a challenging environment from which my mother, brother and I had to
adapt. While confusing, scary and frustrating at times this conflict enabled
each of us to begin breaking away from the many chronic defensive and
self-defeating coping patterns used for personal and family "survival." (For
example, three years after my father, I began my own individual and group
therapy journey. It took another three years for me to have the courage to ask
my father about his shock therapy experience! That's another evolutionary
story.)
My father also made two other life-changing decisions during this mid-life
passage, in addition to generating upheaval in hearth and home. One day while
descending the New York City Subway steps he reflexively began to light up a
cigarette. No surprise here; he had been a two-pack a day smoker for over
twenty years. But then, he paused, and in a glaring, self-reflecting moment he
threw away the cigarette, crushed the pack…and never smoked again. What
disrupted the reflexive-addictive behavior? First was the realization that he
was in therapy trying to remake his life. Second, he also experienced specific
cognitive dissonance: he had recently started taking tennis lessons and,
obviously, smoking was antagonistic with a desire for stamina and court
endurance. Now, blessedly, there was another arena for his Type A aggression
and ambition. (Actually, stepping onto the court for my father was a deviant
act, definitely reflecting Salk's evolutionary battle between fear and courage.
As a child, my father had shunned competitive sports because his older brother
was a star athlete. Taking up tennis was sure to stir old psychic and
competitive demons.)
Perhaps we can discern both lessons for subverting "bad crazy" behavior and for
embarking upon deviant or dramatically different, i.e., "good crazy," coping.
Drawing on my father's experience, four critical components of confronting and
challenging addictive behavior emerge, actions that also have affinity with the
dynamics of Salk's "just good enough" concept of evolution: 1) having a vision
of yourself that contradicts or is incompatible with being an addict, 2) having
just enough courage to stand up to the fear of letting go of those habitual
chains, 3) having a personal coach/support group to share screw ups and
successes, and 4) having a specific activity (e.g., a hobby like tennis) for
channeling aggressive energy and/or ambitious drives and that also encourages
dedicated if not ritualistic practice while yielding tangible progress. (How
about this slogan: In "good crazy" mode, "Ritual practice designs the path for
predictable risk and unpredictable rites of passage"?)
Deviant and Deliberate Evolution
Pulling together various conceptual threads while embracing a yin/yang
spirit, let us note that deviation and "deliberate practice" are both vital
dynamics of human evolution. Do you recall Gopnik's adage about repetition
being nature's habit while variation is the rule of life? Passionate and
purposeful practice (including obsessive noodling) involves: a) discovering a
skillset and an activity in which you want to excel or be uncommonly good (and
having at least a little talent from the cultural heritage or gene pool never
hurts), b) seeking a sufficiently knowledgeable counselor, coach or mentor, c)
designing and repeatedly engaging targeted learning sessions -- "deliberate
practice" to develop a variety of skills and "cognitive-emotional muscles"
central to your desired area of expertise, d) being open to feedback throughout
the trial and error process, and especially e) not being afraid of failing, in
fact, learning to design for error and opportunity, while f) being ready to make
rapid mid-course corrections, and g) a willingness to repeat over and over this
learning process…Here's where potential for performance growth meets the ongoing
path of evolution and mastery. (My choice of these steps are influenced by
Geoff Colvin's book, Talent Is Overrated: What "Really" Separates World
Class Performers from Everybody Else, Penguin Group, 2005).
In closing, this article has fleshed out the concept of "Still Crazy and
Evolving after All These years." Key components have included: a) individual
uniqueness and a resilient spirit, b) "Confronting the Intimate FOE: Fear of
Exposure,", c) "Being a Learner Not a Loser," d) growing through grief and loss,
e) transforming pain into purpose and passion, i.e., having "going crazy" mutate
into "growing crazy," f) deviancy and deliberate practice as evolutionary keys,
g) the concept of "Four 'C'-ing Evolution" -- "Creativity, Change, Conflict and
(Mostly Good) Crazy," h) aphoristic-like wisdom from Jonas Salk and John Dewey,
and i) an example of risk-taking and rite of passage on a human scale.
Hopefully, these words will both inspire some "good craziness" and help you…Practice
Safe Stress!
Mark Gorkin, MSW, LICSW, "The Stress Doc" ™, a Licensed Clinical Social
Worker, is an acclaimed keynote and kickoff speaker and "Motivational Humorist"
known for his interactive, inspiring and FUN speaking and workshop programs. In
addition, the "Doc" is a team building and organizational development consultant
for a variety of govt. agencies, corporations and non-profits and is AOL's
"Online Psychohumorist" ™. Mark is an Adjunct Professor, No. VA (NOVA)
Community College and currently he is leading "Stress, Team Building and Humor"
programs for the 1st Cavalry and 4th Infantry Divisions, Ft. Hood, Texas. A
former Stress and Conflict Consultant for the US Postal Service, the Stress Doc
is the author of Practice Safe Stress and of The Four Faces of Anger. See his
award-winning, USA Today Online "HotSite" -- www.stressdoc.com -- called a
"workplace resource" by National Public Radio (NPR). For more info on the Doc's
"Practice Safe Stress" programs or to receive his free e-newsletter, email
stressdoc@aol.com or call 301-946-0865. And to view web video highlights of a
Stress Doc Keynote, go to http://www.stressdoc.com/media_downloads.htm .
(c) Mark Gorkin 2009
Shrink Rap™ Productions