The Developmentalist
A Space for Everyday Developmental DilemmasDear Reader:
I’m a developmentalist. I support people to develop themselves and their communities. By develop, I mean create new responses to existing situations. These new responses can be feelings, ways of thinking and understanding, ways of seeing and talking and doing your relationships. Ways of responding to the scariness of the world. Ways of navigating uncertainty and unknowability. Ways of living. Ways of creating new forms of life.
The world—the earth, the sky, the animals, the children, the elders, the families, the villages, the towns, the cities—needs to develop. Without creating escape routes, we remain trapped. Without creating new things out of existing things, we continue to kill.
Developing (creating the new) isn’t easy. The great majority of the world’s people aren’t even aware that development is possible after childhood— much less that people actually create it together, rather than it being something that happens to us individually. And on top of that, the idea of doing something new can be pretty daunting. It’s so much easier to stay with what we know, even if it’s not working.
I’m convinced that most of the times we’re feeling stuck in our day to day lives, we’re actually deep in what I call a developmental dilemma. How we frame the situation and understand the moves we can make, how we talk about the problem to ourselves and with others are limited and limiting. We really need a way to make something new with what we’ve got, especially when what we’ve got isn’t so hot.
For me and many, many others, writing down what’s bothering you can be extremely helpful. Which is why I started this column—The Developmentalist — to invite you to articulate in the written word what’s going on and ask for my help. (If you just do that, “Bravo!” You’ll already have done something new with what you have.) Then send me your letter. I’ll respond. I’ll suggest some ways to see and think and relate that you may not have tried. I’ll give you some performance direction. I’ll advise you developmentally.
I hope you take me up on my offer to share your story and allow me to see it through the eyes of a developmentalist.
Write to me at LHolzman@EastSideInstitute.org, and in the subject line, put “The
Developmentalist.”
Be well,
Lois
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Letters—
Will I Ever Have a “Relationship”?
I’m a conflicted romantic!
Dear Developmentalist,
Ever since I was a little girl, I have loved the idea of romantic love that I learned from TV and from relationships around me. I am in now in my 20s and have never had a relationship of my own, but I crave it and really want to experience that kind of love. I have had crushes, but I always received clear signals that the other person was not interested. Throughout the years, I’ve just let life “happen”: school, work, family, other commitments. And, I know that relationships take hard work.
At this point in life, I am not sure what to do. Part of me wants to just forget the idea of a romantic relationship and just keep going through life, and if it happens, it happens. Another part of me is holding onto the romance idea and thinking about how I could make it happen.
It doesn’t help that I have always been on the heavier side. I know it’s a reason for men not to see me as attractive (people have made unsolicited comments about my weight). Recently, I started a weight loss journey, purely for health reasons. That said, I do not want someone to be with me just because I am attractive; I want to be liked for who I am, the way I am.
Thank you,
A somewhat hopeless, yet hopeful, romantic
Dear Romantic,
Thanks for writing to share your worries (and other feelings) about romantic relationships. You are not alone in wanting one! Nor in worrying someone might like you for the wrong reasons. Nor in worrying that you’re not the right weight to be considered attractive. Surely these are in the top five of worries women in their twenties (and thirties, forties, and so on) have! That’s a sad and very painful characteristic of our current world. Judging from popular culture, though, I do think that this is changing for the better, but very slowly.
What I think I might be able to help you with is how you understand and, therefore, relate to your situation. Maybe my wonderings will offer other ways to see who you are and the situation you’re in and suggest some new possibilities for what to do and how to be.
Let’s begin with “letting life just happen”. You mention aspects of your life—school, work, family, and other commitments—in this way. It’s a common experience for us to feel that we ‘ve had no role in creating our lives, even though we’ve been active participants in going to school, getting a job, relating to our families, and so on. We may not be happy with what we’ve created, but that doesn’t negate the fact that we did it. So, when it comes to a romantic relationship, you’ve set it up as either seeing if it happens or making it happen. That’s the kind of dilemma that can keep you stuck.
What if, instead, you decide to live your life developmentally, which means entering spaces that are new to you and trying out performances that are new for you. The key thing, in my experience, is being open to building relationships with all kinds of people, with as little judgement of yourself and others as possible. When new things emerge, you have more possibilities to create something with them.
Moving on, you want to be liked for you who are. Let’s play with that concept. Who are you? From my developmentalist point of view, you are not simply who you are now, but also who you’re becoming. That’s unknown, of course, until you become! But I’m certain that in the becoming process you don’t lose who you are— you keep becoming you.
Finally, you describe yourself as a somewhat hopeless yet hopeful romantic. I invite you to try this on: Keep the romantic but drop the hopeless and hopeful. Instead, create hope. It’s not only possible—it’s essential for romance!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Trying to Be Perfect Is Exhausting!
My crazy brain won’t let me be….
Dear Developmentalist,
I work in a mentally stressful line of work; my mind is always working and churning, even outside work hours. I am good at managing this stress, but at times, it can become so much that my brain won’t function.
And, I am a perfectionist. I’ve learned to tone it down a bit over the years, but I have a fear of failing or messing up, particularly if the task is new to me. I will spend extra time working on it but hesitate before submitting it to my supervisor. Sometimes, I find it hard to get started with a task, but once I start, things do move forward.
On good days, I can get a lot done; but even then — and even though I acknowledge what I have achieved — I always think I could have gotten more done or be more consistent or productive.
I cannot change my line of work or change jobs, at least for now. (I do actually like my job and colleagues.) So, how do I get my brain to cooperate with me? How can I control it, overcome my fear, be able to start working and send my work to my supervisor without re-editing it ten times and stretching the deadline to its limits?
Thank you,
A tired perfectionist
Dear Tired Perfectionist,
Being a perfectionist sounds exhausting! And so, I welcome your letter and a chance to help you explore how it might be helping and getting in the way of you creating the life you want. I can’t tell from your letter whether you want to develop into less of a perfectionist or not. You say you’ve toned it down a bit, and maybe that’s enough for you. If so, maybe the developmental step for you now is to create new ways to relate to your perfectionism.
But you’re asking for help with your brain. You say it doesn’t function or cooperate with you and you want to control it. How did you come to blame your brain? (I believe there’s nothing—and nobody—to blame.) It sounds like you believe your brain is not only the source but also the solution to your fear of messing up or your hard time getting started on a task.
Our brains are involved in everything we do so, of course, they are playing a role here. But to relate to our brains in this way is, as far as I can tell, not very productive. Because we are so much more and far, far more complex than that! Your brain, after all, is in an environment that includes your body, the spaces in which you live your life, your society, culture, and history, and more. Your brain “works” with all of that, so separating it out in isolation greatly narrows what you have at your disposal to work on and play with to become less of a perfectionist—or at least to become less stressed by being one.
You say— but almost in passing— that you like your job and your colleagues. This is a great place to begin; it’s something positive that could have an impact on the way that you carry out your job. So, I suggest that you spend a little more time thinking about it. I wonder what liking your job and colleagues looks and feels like for you. What kind of relationships do you have with colleagues? How do they see you? Have you spoken with them about your stress and perfectionism? How do they and your supervisor see this playing out in the job you do and in their relationships with you? Maybe you can begin to get to know yourself and them in new ways by creating possibilities to bring these kinds of questions into your conversations. After all, it is through others that we become ourselves.
Your job sounds demanding, but not nearly as demanding as you seem to be on yourself. I would think that it’s your own demands that are making you tired. I hope that you can start making use of what you like and enjoy about your job and colleagues, for I think that might give you more energy.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I’m Playing the Role of “The Villain Professor”
But I still can’t reach my students! Help!
Dear Lois,
I am in my “villain era” with my students. I thought it was just what I needed to feel empowered as a professor! I have been committed to developing as an educator who believes in collaborative learning and the power of creating environments for all kinds of knowing. However, I’ve come to realize that some students have such an adverse reaction to a different teaching pedagogy, that it has created a crisis.
I have strong reasons to say that being a “proper” woman in academia comes with lots of expectations: You must be caring, but not too caring. You have to accommodate — but if you don’t — you are regarded as “difficult.” And the list goes on. So, in response to being evaluated in a less-than-kind manner by students who adopted a consumer style approach as their way of relating to my teaching, I decided to become a villain. I cut my hair short (you know what I mean, right?) No more long-hair princess fairy tales. I am refuting the patriarchy.
Now as I get ready to go teach, I say to myself: This is me! I can access different ways of performing my work; I can make decisions; and I can still embody the principles of a collaborative pedagogy.
But that didn’t solve the crisis. It feels that with one cohort of students I work with, there is nothing I can do to engage them. It is uncomfortable to be in their presence, as I can only describe their interactions with me as bullying. I’ve tried several approaches to overcome this pattern. I present ideas, have them engage in exercises, ask them questions, and all I get back is crickets, crickets, (nothing!) and looks of discontent.
I know racism and sexism can be strongly present in interactions with students toward faculty, but I am hoping I am not right. What could I possibly do to enhance my superpowers in my “villain era” and not be affected by anybody’s kryptonite? How?
In uncertainty,
D
Dear D,
I wonder if you will be reading this in your “villain era.” I hope otherwise!
I appreciate you sharing your frustration. Our educational system—from the earliest years through higher education—breeds frustration, discontent and anger. And while most educators may well feel these emotions are righteous, my bet is that most feel, like you, that they don’t do you, your students or anybody any good.
So, what can you do? A few things. But overriding anything you wind up doing is—don’t do it alone! Talk to your students!
Did you tell your students in the frustrating cohort about your new performance (the “villain”) or ask them what they thought of it? Have your spoken with them about how you’re feeling powerless and asked them if they feel the same way? And have you told them that you can’t solve this, but that only together can they and you come up with a different way to be together. (It helps to remind them that you are struck with each other for this many hours each week and do they really want to spend that time being miserable, or mad, or bored, or…?)
Listen to what they say and invite them to ask the “how” question: How can we go on together, given who and where we are?
Break a leg!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I’m Triggered by Trigger Talk
When people say, ‘I’m triggered,’ I hear it as a cop-out….
Dear Lois,
The word “trigger” triggers me into a being a person with little compassion for those among us who will not, or who are unable, to own their issues. To me, to say one is “triggered” by one thing or another seems to be a shirking of personal responsibility. Why point the blame and make everything about how you were “triggered” when something is not going the way you want?
For example, a friend says to me: “I am triggered by my mother’s critical comments about how I live my life. I cannot converse with my mom, because she triggers me.” I want to say to them: “Hey, you know your mother’s criticisms of you are endless. So when you talk to her — if you talk to her — stay away from discussing your life and your life decisions that are going to draw fire. Talk to her about the weather! But stop looking for approval. Own your life; own your decisions.”
Help me figure out what to do with my lack of compassion when I hear the words, “that triggers me.”
Wondering in Massachusetts
Dear Wondering,
I welcome your letter, as I always appreciate those who take the time to write to me. Sharing your “issue”—being triggered by those who say they are triggered—allows me to invite you to go in many directions with me. One obvious one is how come you chose to describe yourself as triggered? A joke, perhaps? Even so, it does put you in the category of people you have no compassion for! Perhaps worth exploring.
Another direction to go is what people mean when they say they are being triggered. Does everyone mean the same thing? Your interpretation is that such people are shirking responsibility for their lives. All of them? Really?
“Trigger” used to simply mean “catalyst.” Then, it entered the psychological field in relation to what’s now called PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), to refer to a situation when a sound or smell or other stimulus acts like a sensory reminder of something traumatic (like fireworks might for someone who was in combat) and a “re-lived memory” and/or inappropriate reaction to what’s happening now.
And then, around the turn of this century, people greatly broadened the meaning of “trigger” to all kinds of situations where they are upset, disgusted, or angry. And it’s now one of those buzz words, like “addicted” or “traumatized”—that some people (like you) find terribly annoying, and others find extremely helpful. I suggest you not assume or interpret but engage in conversation with those who say they are triggered. How else might they characterize feeling upset, scared, morally outraged? What do other people in their lives say when they feel these ways? What would you say if you didn’t say triggered?
Develop your curiosity muscles! Both about people and about buzz words.
And then there’s compassion and its lack. You want help to figure out what to do with your lack of compassion for people who say they’re triggered. That one’s easy! Forget about it! It’s not a problem.
You don’t need compassion to be curious. In fact, creating a conversation in which everyone is being curious with and about each other might produce some collective compassion. And what a beautiful thing that could be!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Help, I’m a Workaholic!
What do I do when it’s not “crunch-time?”
Dear Lois:
I’m coming out of an intense period at work. It’s that time of year when there’s a huge crunch! Then it lets up. For the past 3 months, my focus has been on crossing the finish line. All went well with the project, but it always impacts on my emotionality. Somehow life becomes smaller during such times. I am not organizing what I need as much as I would do in other times.
The reason I’m writing is that when I come out of a period of intense work, I’m not quite sure how to go back to living at a regular pace and what to do with my extra time. Can you help?
Thanks.
Nose to Grindstone
Dear Nose to Grindstone,
First, congratulations on crossing the finish line!
Second, thank you for writing and asking for help. I imagine many readers will recognize your situation of feeling a bit at sea after an intense period of work. I hope that this response helps them too.
I felt a bit sad reading your letter because you sound alone with this. My feeling sad comes more from what you didn’t say than from what you did. I imagine that you feel satisfaction and pride at coming through the crunch, but since you didn’t mention it, I wonder what you “do with” satisfaction. Do you share it with others (or even with yourself)? Do you let it linger awhile and even savor it? Are you the only one that’s been in this crunch or is there a team? Does the team share its satisfaction at crossing the finish line? Maybe it’s worth talking with friends and co-workers and seeing what you discover together.
You say that these crunch times always impact on your emotionality. No doubt they do. Could it be that how they impact has a lot to do with how you understand and relate to them? You say it’s “that time of the year.” To you, these periods are exceptions to what you experience as living at a regular pace. But if they happen year upon year, aren’t they part of your regular pace rather than exceptions to it?
Your life consists of moving at different paces depending on work responsibilities of course, but also the seasons and time of year (and don’t underestimate the holiday season and its impact on your emotionality!) your history, and the overall social-cultural context in which you are living. It’s making the crunch times special and everything else “regular” that has you in this bifurcated world of yours, at a loss of how to use your “extra time.” How limiting a life of crunches and lulls must be!
But it doesn’t have to be yours. Because your life is a continuous process that includes crunch times and lulls and rain and blue skies and so much more. Really living it that way can be a developmental challenge of the best kind.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
How embarrassing! I talk too much!
Will I disappear if I talk less?
Dear Developmentalist:
I have recently taken a new job trying to find my way onto a work team that is small, friendly, caring, smart and restrained. Small talk comes in the form of sports talk. I’m not a sports fan, so I can be silent during chit-chat unless I’m directly asked about myself. Also of note, I come from an ethnic background and family who are highly verbal.
Lately, I’ve done some “over-talking” in meetings. I thought I was sharing something interesting, but later felt I have rambled and that it’s a problem. (It’s actually not just a feeling — I have received feedback from the team. I’m sure they have discussed this privately.) I think of other times I have over-talked and feel embarrassed and humiliated. Leaning more into the shame, I sometimes feel I have nothing worthwhile to add anyway, that I lack expertise. I think of the song “Idiot Wind” by Bob Dylan (who can be so nasty, as I can be).
Overall, people at this job are being very kind and patient, and I really do appreciate the candid feedback. I understand that there is limited time in meetings and that we want to use the time efficiently and to develop the other team members who are younger and were hired for their (educational) pedigrees. They have all studied business/finance. I have not.
I’ve considered bowing out of meetings to simplify this sore spot, but that feels like it may result in my isolation. And, it seems important to keep learning more from them about business and finance.
I’d like to be more circumspect and hold my tongue. If I can become more deferential and listen more, it will also help in other areas of my life, where it seems to me that people (myself included) compete for time to speak. I think it’s a worthy challenge!
I want to learn to pick my moments and my words more consciously. But here’s the rub: I wonder if in doing so, I may disappear — become mousy and passive. Even with a fear of vanishing, I work to reign in the urge to speak, often failing and finding myself rambling. I go to self-diagnosis and wonder if this is toxic narcissism to want so urgently speak my mind? What is that craving for attention? Maybe competition is the issue here?
I want a new way to perform, not mousy but quiet; not fake, but conforming. And at times, I find myself puzzling over whether this is an environment of growth and development for me, and how I can show up.
Signed,
Rambling
Dear Rambling,
Oh dear, what a muddle you are in! I’m so glad you shared it because even though your situation is specific the muddle isn’t.
We humans have this marvelous capacity to be and to do—all the while observing ourselves and reflecting on our beings and doings. What a gift and what a curse!
It allows us to see ourselves and others and make use of what we see to discover and create all kinds of new things. It allows us to grow and to transform the world. That’s the gift, without which you wouldn’t be writing to me, much less thinking and feeling all that you are sharing.
I’m afraid you’re experiencing the curse! You’re overthinking, overanalyzing, and overinterpreting. It sounds like all the energy you’re putting into trying to figure out if you’re talking too much and what it might mean if you try talking less is paralyzing you. It’s keeping you from making use of the very gift of observing and reflecting in its most simple and immediate way—try talking less and see what happens! You can’t know what will happen til it happens!
Let your team in on it. They seem quite supportive, having already given you constructive feedback. Tell them how much you appreciate it. Share with them that you’ll be trying out some new ways to participate in meetings and invite them to tell you how you’re doing, what’s working, what’s not. I think that you might discover that listening is not holding your tongue or being deferential or circumspect. Far from it. Listening is another gift we use to create relationships and belonging.
If you do this, you’ll be creatively imitating your nine-month-old self. You didn’t worry then that you might become mousy or vanish if you developed other ways than screaming and crying your eyes out to tell people you’re unhappy, hungry or in pain, or want attention. By trying out new performances of yourself with the support of those around you, you blossomed, got “bigger” and contributed to your own becomingness and the creating of your family.
You can still do that, Rambling!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
How do I protect my kids, now that they’re no longer “kids?”
I don’t want them to get hurt…
Dear Lois:
I have two kids in their teens. They’re very mature in some ways — and I think actually good and responsible kids — but sometimes they do stupid or potentially dangerous things that make me want to lay down the law. I feel that I have a responsibility as their mother to not let them get hurt — either physically or emotionally — so when they hang out with friends who seem too rough or too mean or maybe into drugs or alcohol, I feel my antenna go up. I want to protect them from getting influenced or being led into situations where they could get really hurt. But at the same time, I want to keep building a trusting relationship with them where they can feel free to come to me to talk about what’s going on in their lives. I could use some help with this conundrum of constantly fighting the pull to relate to them as children (i.e., “my babies”) when I honestly don’t want to. This can’t be good for any of us, but I can’t seem to stop.
M.D., Chicago
Dear M.D.,
Thanks so much for your letter. The specific issue you want help with points to one of the great challenges of parenting. As I see it, that challenge is to create environments for the ongoing growth of trusting and positive relationships even as you and your children are continuously changing! It’s hard to focus on creating the relationship when you hardly recognize who your eight-year-old has become by age sixteen.
Perhaps a way out of your conundrum is to relate to it—you guessed it! — relationally. Not as a pull you have to fight against, not as an either-or choice you have to make to protect your children or build a trusting relationship with them. Not as a problem that you have to solve. But as a time in your life as a family when you have the opportunity to create how you will go on together.
I want you to mull that over for a while—how you will go on together. It’s such a different question from “What should I do?” More than a different question, it’s a different kind of question. It’s a developmental question. A social question. A relational question. A creative question. A how question.
We don’t pay enough attention to how we do things. We get caught in the what. Like you asking yourself, Should I keep quiet when I have a bad feeling about someone they’re hanging out with? Should I set ground rules on what they can do and not do? Should I protect them or not? Am I building a trusting relationship or not?
The decision is not to do one or the other. The issue is how do you do both.
And, MD, you’ve done this before. You have experience doing both. When your kids were little and they crawled to electrical outlets, touched the stove, pulled the cat’s tail, hit or bit another child, cried when their brother was mean, you covered the outlets, said no, scolded, talked to and comforted them. You didn’t “lay down the law” but you did what you felt you needed to do to protect them from being harmed and harming others, both physically and emotionally. And you did these things without qualms or worries that you weren’t building a trusting relationship with them. You were protecting them and building a loving, trusting relationship!
How to do this now that they’re teenagers is not something you can discover on your own. You have to open up the conversation you’re having with yourself. You have to include your kids in it. To help you, here’s some things I’m curious about. I invite you to be curious about them too. Even better, inviting your kids to be curious with you will be invaluable for creating how you will go on together.
How do they feel your relationships are going? Do they tell you when they feel you’re treating them like babies and when you’re not? I bet the difference is in how you do it, not what you do. Have you talked with them about this conundrum of yours? What do they think of it? How do they experience it? Do they have any ideas of what you can do or what together you can do? Do you ask them to tell you about their friends, what they like about them and being with them? Are they aware you won’t approve all the time? How do they handle that?
Maybe you can relate to them as neither your babies nor as little children but as members of a family unit, each with different histories, skills, interests and responsibilities. They will forever be your children and you will always be their mother. Accepting that might free you all up to play with these roles as part of taking on the developmental challenge of continuing to build together a trusting relationship, a continuous family dance of difference.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I Don’t Conform to the Cultural Norms!
The ways I learned to think about myself aren’t how others see me…
Dear Developmentalist:
I’m in a social therapeutic coaching group where part of our work has been to explore who we are in the world, our racial, ethnic/cultural backgrounds, socioeconomic status, the privilege that comes with all of that, and how we can break out of these identities and stereotypes. I’ve shared my history as a Japanese National, living in the US, building my career, and the hardness of all that at this moment.
I recently talked to the group about how I felt I’d lost my passion and zest for life, how I was feeling a bit flat – not quite like “myself.” My career is in transition, I’m working to establish myself as an independent artist after having worked for another artist for years. I’ve waited years on pins and needles for an unconditional green card that would allow me to stay and work in the US. I hadn’t been able to go home to Japan to visit my family during the pandemic because of travel restrictions. And I was frightened and angered by the rise in Asian/American hate crime all around us. I had been standing on extremely unstable ground for so long. It was really hard. This spring, I was finally able to visit Japan with my husband – my unconditional green card in hand! And while I felt a weight and darkness slowly lifting, much of the heaviness and hardness remains. I’m still hypervigilant each time I leave my apartment. And I still feel alarmed by COVID.
As I opened this up with my group, one of my group members said that she still feels and sees my fire. Those words brought tears to my eyes, since I haven’t felt that fire for so long. The group also shared their experience of me as a leader in our group. They talked about how loving I was of them– a love that looks a lot of ways, including sometimes like anger. Hearing them tell me about my “leadership” felt hard. A “Japanese woman in her thirties” like me is not the “right” kind of person to be a “leader.” Someone who’s searching for a career path shouldn’t be regarded as a person who “leads.” But in considering other ways we talked about what it means to be a leader (e.g., being responsible, being accountable, taking our relationships seriously) and what it means to love, I felt it was freeing. And yet, it’s still hard to let how they see me land.
How can I get better at being open to and receiving what the group is giving me? What do I do with the conflict I’m feeling being related to as a leader?
Sincerely,
MS, San Francisco Bay Area
Dear MS,
First of all, thank you for this honest and open letter. As I read it, I feel—like your group does—that I am in the presence of a loving person. It sounds like your letter is continuing the group’s exploration of the complexity not only of who you all are (and are becoming) but also what this group activity produces, developmentally speaking.
It sounds to me like it’s produced some surprises for you. “You see my fire and passion?” “Me, a leader?” I am curious, and I hope you are too, to explore the disconnect between your view of you and the group’s view of you. For example, one of the ways you see yourself is as “a Japanese woman in her thirties.” I wonder if the group even sees you that way and, if they do, I’m sure that description doesn’t have the heavy cultural meaning that it does for you,
Culture shapes us, gives us identities and norms and expectations, and sanctions only certain ways to understand and experience and respond to our discontent with how “our” world is. If we don’t conform to how we’re told to feel given our identity, then we are not “really” Japanese, a woman, an artist, a leader, and so on.
The wonder of humans is that we can reshape all that. Countless times in history, culture—in the broad sense of how people live—has been transformed into a new cultural (political-economic-intellectual-ethical- psychological)—norm. Masses of people can do that together. Families can do that together. Groups of all sizes and shapes can do that together. And it’s always a struggle, not only with others but with ourselves.
To me, what’s profoundly important to realize about this social process of creating something new culturally is that the old “stuff” doesn’t go away. It lingers. It co-exists with the new. I don’t believe that we can ever completely “break out” of identities and stereotypes and the emotions that they produce. What we can do is create new emotions, new ways to feel about being who we’re told we are, even as we become other. The Japanese woman in her thirties who is not a leader will still be there. She just has to move over to make room for some new emotional and relational ways for you to be you.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
My Private Fear (Am I getting dementia?)
If I tell anyone, they will be looking for signs….
Dear Lois,
My mother and sister both died from dementia. My sister passed just a few months ago, and while the pain of that lingers, I’m also thinking about myself. Am I now going to get dementia?
A few years back, I was diagnosed with epilepsy, because of a couple of unusual incidents (sleepwalking, etc.) Since then, I take medication and seem to be OK, but I’m often questioning myself: If I forget this or that, is it common/normal or an indication of something more serious? I get angry easily, nervous about traveling, write myself a lot of notes, etc. etc.
I don’t want to verbalize these concerns to friends, because then I think they’ll be watching me, checking me for indications, etc.
I have a neurologist and don’t even want to raise these concerns with her, because that’ll “go on my record.”
This questioning myself, second-guessing, etc., is driving me crazy. Can you help?
Margaret (Michigan)
Dear Margaret from Michigan,
Thank you for sharing your fears and asking me for some help. Since you tell us that you’re afraid to tell your friends or your doctor, I think it was a huge step to write and send your letter! I wonder, was it scary to do? How are you feeling having done it?
I ask, because your responses might help you with both your fears and your second guessing yourself.
So many people are in your boat (or a boat like yours). Dementia is in our face—the growing world-wide epidemic of the diseases that comprise this catch-all phrase, the narrative of tragedy and heartache, the medical news (and non-news), the search for causes and cures and, of course, our personal experiences.
We are all questioning ourselves, not only about whether forgetting someone’s name or losing your keys means you’re getting dementia, but about all sorts of things. The issue, developmentally speaking, is what we do with that questioning.
It seems that what you do with it is believe that it is driving you crazy. I don’t think it is. I think your obsession, your pain, your “craziness” are the biproducts of intense privacy.
Let’s take a look at that privacy. Maybe the most obvious— and most detrimental—aspect of keeping what’s bothering you to yourself is that you then have only you to talk to! The categories you make, what you put in them, and the meaning (with a capital M) you give to them gets fossilized. But who isn’t nervous about traveling these days? 99% of people get angry easily. Many people write themselves notes. You’ve lumped these behaviors together with forgetting things and they add up to “Dementia.” You get the picture?
The more you talk to yourself and no one else, the more you get stuck in doing your ways of talking and thinking and feeling over and over and over. That’s deprivation! (And it could become boring.)
It’s likely to do you good to speak to your friends and doctor. But even if you decide not to, there is something you can do relative to them. Ask yourself, “Would they tell me if they sensed some changes in how I am? Do we have a strong enough relationship?” If you can let them tell you how you are, you might be able to spend less time in your head and more in the life you’re creating with others.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I Have No Home – How Do I Deal with the Misperceptions?
The stigma of homelessness is overwhelming in a blame-and-shame world
Dear Lois:
The stigma of homelessness is intractable. The press helps spread negative ideas on those experiencing homelessness, making a remedy more difficult. Consequently, the poor, including working poor, have strained relationships, personal and otherwise, thanks to misperceptions. Solving problems is more difficult with those around you who want to avoid you. There is even the threat and danger of violence.
What does a developmentalist say about stigma, public psychosis and social isolation?
Philip
Dear Philip,
Thank you for your letter. You have raised questions about topics I too care deeply about—stigma, public psychosis and social isolation. I do need to add homelessness itself, however, as I believe it is one of the cruelest manifestations of the increasing disregard of human life in our times.
What can be done? As a reader of my column, you won’t be surprised that I believe that development is the cure for homelessness and the other sicknesses you mention. As we humans are currently organized, and I mean that in every way—into seeing us vs them, into a pathetically limited range of “accepted” emotions, into adaptation to ever more deranged normalcy, into blame and shame, into mass hopelessness—there is next to no chance of transforming how we live together. Stigma against those who have no home is “othering” of the worst sort. I would say it is form of public psychosis. The resulting social isolation is fed by the blame and shame world view, another form of public psychosis.
In such a cultural and economic environment, it is not easy to embrace the fact that we all live together on this planet. While there is a small proportion of the world’s people who benefit greatly from how we are currently organized to live together, I have no doubt that the vast majority are desperately unhappy with the arrangement. But their (our) development—our capacity to collectively create hope and perform new possibilities, to transform how we see and think and feel—is being stopped by so many institutions in so many ways.
As I mean it, development is the activity of transforming our emotionality, our morality and our cognitive capacities, of creating qualitatively new and different ways of living together on this planet. How do we do that collectively, as a mass movement?
Way back in 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. showed us the way. Turning the psychological notion of maladjustment on its head, he called upon the world’s people to form a new organization, the International Society for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. “And through such creative maladjustment,” King said, “we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”
House or unhoused, it is the creatively maladjusted among us (like you, Philip) who must create possibilities.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I have endless judgements about a clueless, annoying friend…
How can I stop being so judgmental?
Dear Developmentalist:
I am in a place in my life (at age 55 and the daughter of Chinese immigrants, coming back to the workforce after 16 years as a stay-/work-from-home mother) where I am working my ass-off to grow, to have more — to see my partner as a whole person, and to see myself as a whole person.
Last weekend, I went to a spa with my girlfriends, one of whom put together the outing and invited someone my other girlfriends didn’t like. When they heard she was coming, two of them cancelled. While I sympathized, I was disappointed that they pulled out, after all my hard work to create the group.
The next day, my friend told me that I had been ‘kind of negative,’ ‘tough’ and ‘judgmental’ with the (difficult) woman. She was right. I see this person as superficial, unselfconscious and anti-developmental. Her cluelessness is to the point where she questioned outright how come it was important to be self-aware. For me, self-awareness is key to everything.
I had asked her if she was happy, and she said she was “sooo happy,” and described all the ways she was “living the best life,” all while using (I thought) superficial metrics.
“I’m sooo happy with my career!…I’m having the best time. I love myself and no longer want a (romantic) relationship.” When I asked, “Don’t you want love?” she said, “Men are meh; I use them to service my sexual needs, but after sex I tell them to leave.”
She’s telling herself who she is in the world and is pretty smug about how great her life is. But what about how her friends see her? Doesn’t the group see you in ways that you can’t? Yet, she doesn’t seem interested in listening to us telling her who she is.
Although I was trying to be present at the spa and focus on building the group, I was also indulging my judgements of this annoying woman — keeping my distance — and looking for reasons not to like her. But when my friend told me she could see me being judgmental, I felt like a hypocrite. I had stopped looking for opportunities to grow. How can I create development out of this situation?
CS, Manhattan
Dear CS,
Thanks so much for asking me directly for help with what you shared about being judgmental. It sounds like you’ve done a lot of work on this in your struggles to see and relate to “the whole person.” I think that’s wonderful! From what you tell us about your conversation with your friend the day after the spa visit, you also take to heart how others see you. That, too, is wonderful!
What’s not so wonderful, however, is indulging your judgements, although it’s wonderful you’re aware you did that and feel bad about it.
I wonder what happened to “seeing the whole person” when it came to this “difficult” woman. It might be worth exploring why you chose not to do so with her. Was there something about the environment, the spa, your friends, this woman, how the visit was organized, why you wanted to go and what you were looking forward to?
What’s developmental when it comes to judgements is not to try to get rid of them. We all have them—thousands of them hundreds of times a day. Judging is part of being human. The issue is not that we have them but what we do with them. I suspect that, like most people, you think that when we have judgements about people, those judgements have to color how we interact with them, and that we have to get rid of the judgements in order to be caring, responsive, curious, etc. with that person.
But we don’t. At least that’s my experience. When I find myself vulnerable to acting out judgmentally toward someone, I make a choice to perform instead. To do a different performance with that person, something other than all the negativity I feel. And sometime later, I perform being judgmental; I play with my judgements. What does that look like? Well, sometimes I make up a song or poem about how annoying that person is and sing or say it to myself. Sometimes I go on a rant, passionately sharing with someone all the things that bother me—not unlike how you’ve written to me about this woman!
Ranting is a healthy thing to do— IF you do it intentionally, performatorially (and away from the person you’re ranting about)!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Do I Stay or Do I Go?
It may be time to step-away from the company I founded…
Dear Lois,
I am now 70 and getting ready to retire (sooner than later). I run my own company and will be turning it over to my partner. She has asked me to stay on for one more year, which I’m thinking about doing. That said, while I enjoy the work, I am getting tired and eager to do some new things. My concern is that if I stay another year, I’d like to do it differently (less stress, less hours, more time away), and I’m not sure how to do that. I’d like to give more of the work and responsibility to my team and support them to make decisions without having to run them by me. And, I’m a bit leery that I won’t be able to keep my hands off and let them make the moves they feel need to be made. I don’t want them to feel second-guessed by me but empowered – so not sure how to both support them and not be overly involved.
I can use some help on this.
Many thanks,
SF, New Jersey
Dear SF,
Thanks for writing and asking me for help. You’re a lucky man—having a choice about when to retire is not something everyone has. Plus, you have the luxury of whether to make a clean break or ease out of your job over a year’s time. (I hope you notice that I have a different take on the situation you’re in from what you actually said—and that’s the beginning of my help!)
From what you say, you see your situation as one in which you “retire now” or “stay on another year.” You can do this, OR you can do that. What you may be overlooking is that this and that aren’t just WHAT you do—they’re equally HOW. (There’s never been a WHAT without a HOW!)
How many ways are there to retire? Who knows? No one does, until those ways are created. And how many ways are there to “stay on another year”? You don’t know. I don’t know. No one knows, until you and your team create it.
You want to do new things and do “old” things differently. How wonderful! Relating to yourself, your company and its people is clearly at the top of your list. Wonderful again!
As I see it, supporting your team to take on more work and responsibility doesn’t depend on you staying on. Maybe the best way is to leave and be a coach or advisor. Or maybe you stay, and you get coaching on how to be more hands-off. Or maybe… There are endless possibilities when you embrace the creativity that lives in HOW.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Love and Loss
Biking was my happy place, and now that’s gone.
Dear Lois,
I’m in my late 60s, in good health and actively fit. But I’m older — I feel the heat and
humidity: I get tired; I’m creaky — less “get-up-and-go.”
I used to LOVE to ride my bike — it’s how I spent most of my free time. I loved to feel
the breeze on my skin. I loved to cruise down a tree lined path. It was my happy place
and my happy activity.
And it was kind of obsessive too — pushing, pushing, pushing to complete the miles.
Sometimes very painful. Slogging to the finish line. Sometimes I’d ride an extra loop
around the parking lot just to get the odometer to hit my goal.
And it was kind of isolating and lonely, too — days I’d spend 6 or 7 or 8 hours alone on a
bike tooling through the countryside or in the suburbs.
My group of friends who used to bike together have all moved on — to other cities, other
activities.
But now, even contemplating the joy I use to find on the bike (almost crying in remorse!)
I can’t make myself go out and do it. It’s too hot. It’s too humid. It’s too scary. The
trucks are too big. The scooters too fast. (A woman on a scooter drove head on into me a
few months ago. We both went down.) I’m even more scared now — of aggressive head-
on collisions. The social environment has changed since the pandemic — more motors,
faster, more super aggressive.
When I think of getting on a train or renting a car to get out of the city to bike, I give up,
contemplating how tired I’ll be just carrying my bike up the steps to the train platform.
Wow. This is a big problem. My great source of joy is no longer. I’m exercising other
ways — swimming, Pilates, dancing, aqua aerobics, elliptical. But nowhere is the joy I
found in biking. This is very sad to me.
I’m in a completely confused muddle. Hope you can help.
Cycler in the City
Dear Cycler in the City,
I wish everyone would write me when they’re in the maze of confusion. It really does
help. Even if you never send the letter! Write down what’s confusing you and read it out
loud a few times. You’ll experience something changing in relation to your confusion.
Maybe the fog will begin to lift a bit.
Now to your muddle.
You have a complex set of emotions in relation to biking, both in the past and now. It
used to be a great joy, you loved it, it was lonely, it was isolating, you were obsessive.
Today, you no longer want to bike, it’s too scary, people are too aggressive, and just
thinking about is exhausting. I suspect that’s part of your confusion—loving and hating,
wanting and not wanting, feeling so alive and feeling so alone.
We humans so often feel more than one thing at a time—about what we’re doing, about
ourselves, about others, about the world… And why wouldn’t we? We are indeed
complicated! The confusion, I think, is not in the messiness of emotions but in our belief
in and need for them to be neat and tidy.
The psychological culture that shapes our beliefs and needs is, I suspect, producing your
muddle in another way as well. You write that biking, your great source of joy “is no
longer.” I ask you, Cycler, how can that be? Are you saying that because you no longer
bike that the joy you and it created for so many years has disappeared? That who you are
and are becoming now doesn’t include that joy? If it didn’t, then how can it be that you
miss it?
Just because you’re not biking now, are you not a biker? Here, again, you’re confused.
After all, you did sign your letter, “Cycler in the City” even though, you tell us, you no
longer cycle in the city! Maybe you’re a biker—better yet, a joyful biker—who’s not
biking.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I’m Scared of Dying
Can you help me be less morbid about death?
Dear Lois,
I want to speak with you about death and dying. For many years I was scared out of my mind; thinking of not being around, the transition into dying; seeing my parents up- close and personal with their bodies and health breaking down and eventually not being able to speak; wondering if they were experiencing pain. I have also seen friends of mine organize their death — organize how they want to die — and still live their lives as their health fails. I would like to have more of a philosophical (dare I say, positive) approach to death and dying, and I’m hoping you can help.
Thank you.
EBM
Dear EBM,
Thanks, EBM. This is a tough one! Death and dying are both universal AND particular. They’re both inevitable AND indeterminate. It’s not easy to relate to processes and events like these. We know we’re going to die, but when? How? Why? And even though we all die, how we’re socialized to understand and deal with it is culturally specific.
Everyone experiences death and dying. And everyone also experiences one or more of the feelings you describe. Some people, like you, think about it a lot. Others hardly at all (the experts will tell you that’s denial). There are many different religious and different cultures’ understandings and customs surrounding death. There’s voluminous medical and scientific research being done. And, of course, there’s no shortage of psychological explanations for death anxiety. Each of us, depending on “where” we are and came from, are influenced, shaped and, in many cases, overdetermined by these kinds of institutional rituals and knowledge.
For the most part, religion, psychology, art and science tell and show us that death and dying are part of the life cycle. There’s tons of advice out there about coping, accepting and even embracing what is platitudinously referred to as “a natural and normal part of life.”
I say, “So what?” How is that supposed to help you or your dying parents feel better? (What’s normal these days makes most of us more anxious, not less anxious!) How did it come to be that identifying something as natural or as normal is assumed to comfort us? Does it comfort you, EBM?
I think not. Perhaps that’s why you’re seeking a more “positive” approach. As you do so, it’s important to see death and dying for what they really are—not simply moments in the life cycle or states of being, but activities people DO, social-cultural processes we engage in with others. And wherever we are, no matter our culture and history, we carry out these activities of death and dying (and worrying and mourning and grieving) through specific institutions, including those of religion, health care, the law, economics and psychology. The ways they have organized us to act and feel have come to seem natural and normal, while they are anything but.
You’re not the only one, by far, wanting to do death differently. To help you in your journey, I suggest you spend time at The Order of the Good Death. It’s a content-rich source of educational, practical and inspirational material on transforming death, both personally and for humanity.
I’ll end with some commonsense advice from Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party in the US, who faced constant threats of assassination from the police and FBI in the 1960s: “You can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.”
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I Take Things in My Life for Granted (Until I lose them!)
How can I appreciate what I have?
Dear Lois,
I’ve noticed that in many areas of life, I can ‘know’ I’m in a good situation but have trouble fully appreciating it emotionally. How can I get better at appreciating the things without having to lose them first, in order to know what I have? A great example is my current job with a tech and design company. If I lost this job, I’d feel intensely how lucky I had been to have it. But without actually losing it, I can’t connect emotionally to that. It’s all theoretical.
Growing up, I would have done anything to be able to do art and design professionally. I didn’t have any idea how to get into the game and never thought it would be a reality. But it happened. When I started at this company, I remember thinking that I’d happily sweep the floors all day to simply be there. I feel quite sure it is the best place I will ever work. It’s pretty amazing. I like the work I do and the people I work with: they prioritize family and give lots of flexibility and time off. There are few artificial obstacles to growth, they encourage proactivity and independence, and they even encourage you to use some of your workday on personal art projects (which is practically unheard of in this industry). It’s more than I think anyone could expect from a job!
But after many years, while I honestly feel happy there, I take lots of things for granted. I worry about the petty things–like who is in what position relative to my own. My position at the company is ideal. I have a lot of independence and leadership responsibilities. And I have the flexibility to make the role what I want it to be. There are a few positions senior to me, but they are WAY more stressful and wouldn’t allow me to lean into my strengths as much as I can now. But the competitive part in me wants to “move up” even though I’m almost certain it would be a reduction in quality of life.
Lois, I notice this in other areas of my life too (not just the job), and I want to find a way to more deeply appreciate what I have without having to learn the lesson the hard way through loss.
All the best,
B.A., Michigan
Dear B.A.,
Thank you for writing me and sharing some of your worries. You say you want to appreciate more deeply what you have in your life, and that got me thinking about appreciation. Maybe if I share some of my musings with you it might help you make some discoveries about your own relationship to appreciation and to your life, including your emotional life.
I think lots of people will relate to what you’re describing—feeling overjoyed by some things in your life and then, after some time passes, taking those very things for granted. I think the reason this is so common is that we become distant from our lives. We forget that we created the circumstance that elated us (and also the elation). In your case, you never thought it could happen that you could be a professional designer. “But it happened,” you say. Well, BA, I don’t think so! It’s just not that simple. Whatever the process was and however long it took, you played a role in creating your professional life as an artist and designer.
I think you’ve forgotten that. Or maybe you were never aware of it during the process of getting your dream job. Not knowing/experiencing/”having” one’s own involvement means we’re alienated from ourselves as creators of our lives. Without this particular “sense of self”, we stop continuously creating our life’s circumstances.
I suspect that’s what’s happening with you, B.A., and that’s how come you’re taking the job for granted, feeling guilty about that, worrying about losing the great gig you have, being petty and berating yourself for that, and so on. When you begin to feel that things happen TO you, rather than you being part of making them happen, you stop appreciating what you have. And you stop appreciating yourself.
My advice? As a veteran artist and designer, it’s time you appreciate the art and design that goes into creating your life. What a great project!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Coach or Critic?
I must drive results with a newbie team – but I’m not their manager….
Dear Developmentalist,
I am a data scientist at a large financial institution that works with multiple technology vendors. I’ve faced challenges working with the people these companies provide.
One of the things that makes me tense-up the most in meetings is discovering: (1) that a situation is in a state more primitive than I had anticipated (lacking hygiene with respect to professional norms that directly impact the ability to achieve results of sufficient quality, and resulting in tangible and reputational loss for the business); and (2) that the supervisor in question has left it to me to coach and develop the team of young professionals, but without being their manager in any official capacity. My ability to set intent, provide critical reviews–to drive results–is attenuated in an environment where more is expected faster with less.
I sense the attitude among young professionals today is not inquisitive enough. They’ve adopted a more reclining posture, and their interim work products (if you could call them that), are whatever happens to come to their minds (e.g., critical self-assessment, peer review prior to submission to the client?), or (hope you like blank stares!) silence on the other side of the Zoom screen.
No one could credibly disagree with any number of theories: rote ‘learning’ and standardized testing; “the climate crisis so what’s the point-ism;” and easy capital, kombucha on tap; or “I can just get another job in 18 months, so whatever-ism” — to name a few.
That last part of the situation is cracking, thankfully, but in the meantime I’ve come to accept that my role is more coach than critic. I actually do get a small sense of accomplishment performing as a coach, but it’s not sustainable given work timelines that have yet to acknowledge the mindset of early career professionals.
There’s an element of managing up, too — I tell younger folks, “your ideas are bad, and that’s good!” And I need to learn how to tell senior leaders, “your ideas are bad, and that’s bad!”
What do you think?
Sincerely,
A.A., Manhattan
Dear A.A.,
Dear A. A.,
Thanks for reaching out. I am particularly pleased that you‘ve written to me at a time when you’ve begun some productive reflection on your environment, job and position. Seems like you’re already in a process in which developing yourself and your relationships is potential. I wonder if you experience this. Maybe me pointing it out is helpful!
To me, it’s significant that you’ve transformed how you understand your role at work from critic to coach AND that you’re getting some sense of accomplishment performing as a coach.
My advice is to fully own that. Use it to build your relationships. Instead of being critical (of both the senior leaders and the younger folks), perform more curiously to better understand their strengths and their limitations. It will make you a better coach, for sure!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Help Me Reinvent Myself!
I want to grow professionally…but is that practical?
Dear Lois,
I’m trying to reinvent myself professionally in my late 50s, and it feels like a challenge. I have worked for years in a position that has been just fine but has never made me shine. I haven’t felt the true passion for my work that I imagine is possible. I have several obligations including a child and a mortgage making me feel very conservative in the options I consider. I have dreams and ideas about creating something entrepreneurial in a creative market. There are so many vectors of help that I can ask about here, but to give focus, how do I approach this in a way that unites practicality with growth choices, and how do I (developmentally) live with my anxieties about any level of risk?
Signed,
Anxiously Wanting to Be an Entrepreneur
Dear Anxiously Wanting,
Thanks for writing me. I appreciate you wanting to take on this challenge developmentally. Over the years, I have coached dozens of people who were changing jobs and/or careers, and most of them had no idea that this often grueling activity could be growthful So, you’re beginning with a leg up!
That said, I think some of how you’re approaching this might get in your own way. So let’s explore!
The very first thing you said gave me pause—that you’re trying to reinvent yourself professionally. It’s a popular notion these days. Curious, I did a quick Google search and the first thing to come up was, “5 steps to reinvent yourself.” I clicked on it. I kept going—clicking on “4 steps…,” “10 steps...,” and, my favorite, “How to reinvent yourself: 11 ways to become a new person.” As I read on, I was pleasantly surprised to find that many steps offered some basic good (if obvious) advice, like assess what’s positive about your life, look at your skills, and network. NONE, however, had anything to do with becoming a new person.
That’s because you can’t. You can keep developing. You can continue to learn. You can try out new performances of you. But you can’t become a new person. You can’t reinvent yourself.
My question is, “Why would you want to?” Approaching a job change or career move developmentally is a reshaping—not at erasing—of who you are and have been. It’s a process of playing around with the being/becoming-ness of you.
It’s playing around with your obligations and your dreams, with your anxiety and your entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe you’ll be inspired to find your way into the creative market outside of the job that pays your bills.
You ask how to unite practicality with growth choices? That’s an easy one! Stop seeing them as separate opposites. Choosing to grow is exceedingly practical!
Good luck in your adventure!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
My Job Is Killing Me!
How can I be my old playful self in such a hostile work environment?
Dear Lois,
I am living in China and work for more than 12 hours a day. When I was younger, this level of intensity
was not a big deal, but now that I am older, it is really hard for me to handle. Working in a government
agency has also been a big challenge. I find it difficult to play at this job – to be my old playful self — and
feel like maybe I’ve lost my playfulness altogether.
The workplace is a bad political environment, and often makes me hostile. When we work with
government employees, they may say YES to my face, but in reality, many of them resist direction. Civil
servants are all locals with local connections (even the driver has connections) and the government
employees are intertwined with local politics too. I am the only outsider. It’s like a spider web: They
watch and wait for me to make a mistake.
How can I be playful in such a hostile environment? How can I welcome failure/mistakes in a situation
where if I fumble, I will pay a high price? I am still working hard to try to find potential friends. I am still
performing as being open to everyone I work with.
I hope I will have more hope/faith soon. Please share your thoughts.
PL, China
Dear PL,
Thank you for writing me at a time when you’re facing so many challenges. If I am reading you right,
where you are living in China is new for you, and you have yet to develop friendships or a community
that can nourish you. This new location and situation itself must be so very hard! I assume that working
in a government agency is also new for you—another big challenge! Not to mention that you experience
it as a hostile environment. I have to wonder how you wound up in this situation and how come you
don’t leave. Do you have to stay? Or can you embrace that you made a mistake and reorganize your life?
Whether or not you can leave, I do think there’s some growing you can do. I offer no promises that
you’ll “find” your playfulness again, but that might turn out to be OK. Maybe you can recreate it instead.
Maybe your playfulness needs to look a different way in this new environment. Maybe the way you’re
used to playing doesn’t work here. Maybe you need to “play around” with your performance of
playfulness and create some new relationships to it and to the environment you’re now in.
Since we usually think of relationships in terms of people in our lives—“I’m in a new relationship now;”
“I have a good relationship with my father”—the notion that you have a relationship to your playfulness
might seem odd or farfetched. But stay with me for a while.
So while we’re in relationships with other people, we humans are always relational—with everything!
We’re in relationships with parts of ourselves, like our imagination, our hands and feet, our sadness, our
fear. (Lots of people don’t have a good relationship with their bodies, for example.) And then there’s our
environments—we have relationships with them too, like our home, our nation, our neighborhood, our
job.
As soon as we step into a new environment, we’re in a relationship with it. And it sounds like the one
you’re in with this governmental agency is pretty bad. Can you make it better? And what about your
relationship to your playfulness? In this new environment, you feel you can’t be “your old playful self.”
And you’re probably right. But you can create a new relationship to your playfulness. You can learn to
draw on it in different ways than in the past.
Get to know better the culture of the agency and who your workmates are. How do they play? What
might they be open to from you? Your playfulness is as capable of becoming and growing and changing
as “you” are. It needs to play!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I’m Frustrated by My Students’ Passivity!
“What can I do to help them go beyond the clichés & buzz words?”
Dear Developmentalist:
I teach academic writing to a diverse group of college students in New York City. Two of my classes had an assignment to research, write and present on a topic of their choice, and about 25% of them chose: “the negative mental health implications of social media.”
Their class presentations focused heavily on how social media can become addictive and contribute to depression, anxiety, loneliness and isolation. Most of what they reported echoed / rehashed the “conventional wisdom” reported in academic journals and the news media. Literally every student agreed with these points and voiced similar experiences and concerns. Some used psychiatric buzz words to describe the negative impact of social media activity. It was unanimous.
As their teacher, I am struck by (concerned about and frustrated by) the passivity and maybe even victimization of their responses — i.e., seeing Big Tech as the Actor/Creator; while the rest of us are merely users/consumers at their mercy. And I am worried that my responses could be off-base, trite and maybe irrelevant given the mammoth presence of Big Tech and social media in our lives.
I would like to support them to create a new way of relating to this technology/activity — beyond the status quo – that’s more active and creative. Perhaps that could include creating new conversations among students and staff. Are there any questions or offers I could make to my students that could take us somewhere new?
Thank you,
Too Late to Make a Difference? / NY, NY
Dear Too Late,
Thank you for writing to me and sharing your upset and despair. I’d like to help with that. Maybe if we do a little “unpacking” of your and your students’ relationship (and its relationship to the content of the class, i.e., academic writing), we might discover something that could transform how it’s going for all of you.
You seem dissatisfied with your role in the classroom conversation stemming from many of the students’ research and writing about the negative mental health implications of social media. How I wish I had been a fly on the wall! For while you describe what the students said, you haven’t said how you responded to them. What did you say? How did the conversation go?
Did you share with them any of what you’re sharing now with me and our readers? If not, then that is one offer you can make that could possibly take you and your students somewhere new. The things you write in your letter—what you’re struck by and concerned about (what you view as their passivity, for example)—these seem to me to be legitimate topics that could potentially make the conversations developmental intellectually and emotionally.
Introduce a Becoming Curious Challenge. Offer them a Performing Philosophy Challenge. For example, share your reaction to the “buzz words” and how come you call them that. Ask them if they ever thought about them it that way, or at all? Are they curious as to how come the buzz words upset you?
Invite them to play with psychological language and discover if and how it’s different from other language (How is “I have anxiety,” like “I have black hair”?). You might even invite them to ponder this: the negative mental health implications they identify with social media can be—and have been—said about most everything people do when we’re not on social media! What do we make of that?
These are just a few suggestions off the top of my head, as they say. They’re meant to re-activate your creativity in the face of what sounds, in your letter, like some painful moments of your own passivity.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
In this hybrid, downsized world, I’m a leader without a team!
How do I show up as a leader, when it’s only me and my outsourced vendors?
Dear Developmentalist,
In my role at work, I am a leader without a team. I used to be one — but in the name of efficiency, my teams’ roles and responsibilities were outsourced across several vendors, and I’ve lost that connection with working with folks, day-in and day-out.
Now I am struggling a bit with how to show up as a leader. What I think of as leadership is having a team I see everyday, people I know — who I could help to grow and who helped me to grow. It made what we did as a team “seeable” to our clients in support of their work. Now this new “team” of vendor support is still held to the same standards as my former staff, and it is my responsibility to ensure we meet those standards.
I think this requires a new form of leadership, one I am trying to build as I go, even as the concept of work is evolving for everyone. The human element is less visible. After a few years of everyone being remote, clients are returning in mixed remote and in-person environments which is new for them, and new for us. Our clients need to grow in this new scene, and we, as a new team, need to grow with them.
I really want to show up as a new kind of leader, one who is not leading a team but creating one, and I want to do this with our clients and with our vendors, not as a transactional relationship, but as a group who’s building something new.
Andrew, Brooklyn, NY
Dear Andrew,
Thanks for writing me about your challenging situation at work. As I understand you, you had a team of people at your company that you led and now you are needing to lead a group of outsourced vendors and to do that primarily virtually. I’m happy to hear that you recognize that the team doesn’t exist yet—you have to create it. Actually, not you alone, but you and the vendors and clients.
My guess is that this issue of how to lead was the big unknown for organizations and their people during the COVID lockdown and remains so post-lockdown. I deliberately call it ‘unknown.’ After all, how could they or anyone know how to lead in a changed world? In a virtual space? When all aspects of work became dependent on technology? But hardly anyone chose to admit not knowing what to do and to seize the opportunity to create it together. Now, that would have been leadership appropriate to the transformed situation!
Instead, some tried to simply take their leadership style online, others proclaimed this or that existing leadership style was what was needed, and still others invented new styles (complete with books, blog posts and TEDx talks).
Tell your people you don’t know how to lead them (especially since they don’t directly work for you), and that this is not a personal failure but rather a collective opportunity. Tell them you couldn’t know, because you don’t yet know them nor they each other, and that it’s a new situation. Tell them, “Together we will discover how to create our team.” Talk to them. Find out what they want and what they need. Discover together what their strengths are and if they want to do this with you and each other.
Just as virtual and hybrid work environments are new physical spaces, they are also new relational spaces. I think we fail to appreciate their potential when we see them comparatively, as less than what was, as deficient in “the human element” as you put it. The human element is vastly more complex and creative than the parts of it we experience when we are in the same room. Let’s exercise our relationality, our smarts, our productivity in new ways. With your strong desire for group building and creating together, I think one developmental step you could take is to let your people in on who you are and are becoming. My guess is they’ll appreciate that kind of leadership.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I’m an emotional mess in a tragically messed-up world!
I can’t stop getting myself riled-up…
Dear Developmentalist,
Lately I’ve been going through a bit of a shift in thinking about how and who I want to be in the world. Or perhaps I’ve been settling into who I have become. Whatever this is, it’s making me uneasy, and I’m emotionally all over the place!
I am so glad to live my life in community. I love the work I do as an activist. And yet, I want more. Even when things are “going great,” I’m vulnerable to self-diagnosing and self-blaming; I have so many harsh judgments about myself. I think this stunts my growth and ability to embrace and give all that I have.
I recently came across this quote from Epictetus: “He is a wise man who does not grieve for things which he has not but rejoices for those which he has.” I want to rejoice and relax. But I find that close to impossible.
I see how much I rile myself up. I get so angry, fearful, and upset about the state of the world: the war in the Ukraine, earthquakes in Turkey and Syria to name a few. It’s all so very heartbreaking. I send money but that doesn’t seem like enough. The mental health crisis, violence, poverty, corruption, the erosion of democracy, the persistence of racism and antisemitism, all impact me greatly. I know I am not alone in this!
I’d love some guidance on how I might allow myself to be in the world without so much strife. I don’t know how to have all of what I feel living in our world without judging and diagnosing myself. And at the same time, I am quite aware that I’m responding to the world. What would it be like to allow myself to feel what I feel without the harsh voice that insists that “something must be wrong with me?”
With gratitude,
Marni
Dear Marni,
Thank you for writing—you sure got me riled up! And, I suspect, many of our readers too.
Let’s begin at the end of your letter, where you say that you want to rid yourself of “the harsh voice that insists that ‘something must be wrong with me.’ Again, I suspect many of our readers would like nothing more than to silence that voice. My advice? Don’t. Don’t try. It just increases your pain and alienation.
How could there not be anything wrong with you? Since we are (all of us—no matter our politics, aspirations, and stress levels) in and of this world. We can’t not respond to it. There’s so much terribly wrong with the world, how could there not be anything wrong with you? Or me? Or anyone?
Martin Luther King, Jr. urged us to never adjust to injustice and “man’s inhumanity to man” (sic)—and to be proud to be maladjusted. It sounds like you are—that you embrace being maladjusted to the ills of the world and how you work as an activist to do away with or at least lessen them. Perhaps you’re morally, intellectually, and societally committed to being maladjusted, but you hedge on your embrace of being emotionally maladjusted.
You say, Marni, that you have a lot in your life, but you “want more.” I suspect you really want “other”—specifically, to be other. Isn’t that what self-diagnosing and self-blaming are all about? (“I hate the way I am!”)
My advice? Embrace your emotional maladjustment and grow from there. You might develop into someone who can rile herself up and rest at the same time!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
How Do I Share My Grief?
A mother struggles with her child’s rapid, progressive illness
Dear Lois,
Four years ago my child was diagnosed with a condition that has resulted in rapid progressive disability. We have been fortunate that the auto-immune part of this condition has not yet materialized, but we have to constantly be on the watch for cancers and lung related illnesses. In one year, he went from being a child who could run, was learning to write, etc., to someone who is completely immobile, unable to write or draw, needing to be fed by others, etc.
As parents, we ensure our family lives a full creative life, and find contexts for all our children to thrive. This child is no exception and is happy and thriving. Yet – there is the ongoing grief that goes with supporting a child with this kind of condition, and the various battles with health institutions, educational institutions etc. My dilemma is this – although this is not our or his ‘tragedy’ (alone) and that it should be shared with our family and close friends. But our support base is very minimal. I have friends who never ask or touch base. We have close family members who act as if there are no issues or stresses with his condition – even when told that he needs to have medical tests, or be taken to the hospital, or must have an operation. My work colleagues have never engaged with me at all about him or me or us, even after I have told them about the situation.
I also know that we need to live each day and create each day. However, I get really anxious about the future – and how to navigate it. How do we navigate the ongoing sense of loss that this kind of condition confronts us with daily, whilst living a full life, and whilst psychologically preparing for the next ‘thing’ on the horizon? How do I find ways to share this with friends and family, and the energy to ask for help when often I do not know what I need, but know that everyday grief is hard?
A., South Africa
Dear A.,
Thank you so much for writing me about your son’s condition and its impact on him, you, and the rest of the family. The care he needs, the constant vigilance and worry of further deterioration, the feeling of loss, and the sadness of even greater loss to come…all of this colors and shapes your lives-as-lived now. My heart reaches out to you.
You also tell us that this transformation hasn’t destroyed or replaced how you all had been doing family before his illness—creating contexts and activities for your children to thrive and for all of you to live fully and creatively. That seems so important to me. Here’s why. It sounds to me like your son’s illness isn’t all-consuming in taking over and not allowing for doing and feeling and thinking about anything else. It sounds more like you all are doing your best at being and becoming—that it’s not all-consuming, but is all-encompassing. I don’t know if this is helpful or comforting to you, but your letter and your situation move me to say it.
You describe your ‘dilemma’ as understanding that “this is not our or his ‘tragedy’ (alone) and that it should be shared with our family and close friends,” and yet having a minimal support base. That must make such a difficult and demanding situation so much harder. It is a big move to ask (me) for help with this.
You write about “friends who never ask or touch base. close family members who act as if there are no issues or stresses with his condition, and work colleagues who have never engaged at all about him or me or us, even after I have told them about the situation.” You want to bring them closer. You want to share with them what it’s like, and you want to ask for help even when “I do not know what I need but know that everyday grief is hard?”
I wonder what your conversations with these friends and family members and co-workers are like. Do you tell them how you feel when they are distant? Do you invite them to share with you how they feel when you tell them both bad news and good news? Do you ask them what they need to be closer to you? And do you ask them for help even when you don’t know what you need—inviting them to help you discover what you need?
I think it will take courage to create these kinds of conversations. You will be vulnerable. Some people might be rejecting. Some others will thank you. And perhaps the energy you are seeking will come from making your support group a little (or a lot) bigger.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
What if I Can’t Just Forgive and Forget?
How do we move on after being badly hurt?
Dear Lois,
I love The Developmentalist. The letters give me new ways to think/do/perform. I’d love to hear your thoughts on forgiveness, compassion and letting go of hurts.
My sister and brother were hurtful and attacking during a period (2.5 years ago) when my mother was dying. On one hand, I understand this came out of their own pain and that I should be compassionate. On the other hand, it was very hurtful and malicious.
While I have told my sister that I’m not interested in a relationship with her, I go to major family events (weddings, bar mitzvahs) about once a year.
I have made progress over the past two years, but I haven’t been able to forgive. And, I find it challenging to let it go fully. I can’t decide if the best thing would be to just completely stop relating to all of them. Can you give me performance tips? …a new way to see?
Sue, New Jersey
Dear Sue,
Thank you so much for your enthusiasm for The Developmentalist! I’m so happy that it gives you new ways to be/become.
And thank you for inviting me to respond to the topic you offer, and to what in your life is prompting your own thinking about this. I think it will resonate with readers, as most of us have been hurt by family members and those we’re close to at some time in our lives.
What do we do now? How do we deal with and relate to what has happened?
For some of us, the incident and the hurt become the defining feature of the relationship we have had. It seems from what you say that this is the case for you and your siblings. Some people stop speaking to each other. Others try to mend the rift. Some succeed and some fail.
While you have stopped speaking to your sister, it’s hard to tell where you are on this. I wonder if you have tried to mend the rift but failed. Have you told your sister and brother how you feel and what you want? Was their attack on you out of character for them? I also wonder how other family members and friends think about the situation and how they relate to how you are with your sister. If your answers are “No” and “I don’t know” you should consider asking them.
As for “forgiveness, compassion and letting go of hurts” — are they connected for you? If they are, it’s worth exploring how that connection might impact how you’re feeling and dealing with the painful situation you’re in. However else they might be connected (and I do hope you explore this), they sound an awful lot to me like “shoulds”—ways you think you should feel and act. It must be a burden to carry these around all the time.
But why should you? Seriously. Do you have to forgive (what does that even mean?) your sister and brother in order to see them as human beings in your life, as two people you grew up with, who loved your mother?
I don’t believe you have to forgive people in order to “go on” with them. More than once, I have felt wronged and attacked and hurt. I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven the people for WHAT THEY DID, but that hasn’t overdetermined how I feel toward or relate to them. Your sister was your sister before she and your brother were hurtful and attacking 2.5 years ago—and she still is. Forgiveness isn’t a condition for an active, even an intimate, relationship. If it was, nobody would talk to anyone!
My thoughts on “letting go of hurt” are similar. You don’t have to. What would be helpful and growtfhul is for you to make the hurt “the size” it deserves to be in your whole life—who you are and are becoming. It’s not the totality of YOU.
You asked me for performance tips. Sue, I have just one: Lay down your burden.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
The Goddess of Competition
How do I navigate a no-win way of life?
Dear Lois,
Competition has been a major part of my life, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. Particularly in America, it’s everywhere! We live in a world organized by winners and losers.
We cheer a winning goal, watch contestants voted-off islands and trivia teams strike gold. Comparisons and superlatives are irresistible. We’re captured by a “look at me” life!
Personally, I experienced competition from early in life, growing up with a brilliant and talented older sister. She easily commanded the lion’s share of dinner time conversation, responding quickly to my father’s questions on history, current events and philosophy. Later, my father insisted that I had the benefit of becoming scrappy and a fighter, and more capable by having had to fight for attention (i.e., self-improvement through competition!)
I like competitive games, and I like to play to win. I scope out the rules and success criteria for most anything I do — not only games — but in many aspects of life. I like to strategize and improve my approach to get better and win.
Still, I find the domination of this form of human activity exhausting even as it is thrilling and addictive. I’m getting tired of comparing myself and of being viewed and judged and compared to others. It feels demeaning, boring and non-developmental. Some of my relationships seem to be trapped in an endless and pointless competition / comparison game. The stuck-ness is frustrating.
Finally- I’m a parent and I don’t want to pass along this one-track competition emotional roller coaster to my child, who already has internalized competition by way of school sports, grades and via social media.
Is there a developmental way to play with competition and to function differently in this world riveted on winners and losers?
Signed,
Free Your Time
Dear Free Your Time,
Is there anyone who doesn’t have a love/hate relationship with competition? I doubt it. So, if it’s any consolation, you’re in good company! You’re probably rare, though, in wondering if there’s anything developmental we can do with competition. I imagine most people reading this don’t know they can ask such a question but will be so glad that you did, because your question invites us all to look at competition in a new way.
So when you ask, “Is there a developmental way to play with competition and to function differently in this world riveted on winners and losers?” I think you’re already on a developmental path. As I see and experience it, developing is a transforming of what is in such a way that it becomes what it “is” AND something else.
Becoming a “languager” (a speaker, a signer perhaps, a writer, a reader, and a maker of meaning) of a second language, for example, both adds something new AND transforms your language-ing in your first language—both of which qualitatively transform your relationship with others, with language and with yourself.
I agree that “we live in a world organized by winners and losers.” And yet, I invite you to take another look at the world we live in, for that is not all there is. Visit a park. Watch some kids build a snowman. Eavesdrop on two strangers making small talk. What ELSE do you see? (Make a list.)
Yes, competition seems to be everywhere, but being everywhere doesn’t have to mean it’s all-consuming and smothering (not your word, but mine for how you seem to feel). To use a theatre image, competition may well be the name of the play that, like it or not, we’re all characters in—but it’s not the only show in town. You are (can be) a character in another play and another and another and another. Living is like that. We often feel trapped by what we see and feel and how we move through the world, as if we were cast in a play we didn’t audition for and don’t want to be in.
I say, work on developing your character in the competition play! Maybe you’re the one who wildly cheers for everyone else or conducts everyone in a “Congratulations!” orchestra. Or maybe you’re the Goddess of Competition and give an acceptance speech to an adoring crowd. No matter what they are, your interventions are bound to put some unexpected plot twists into the competition play.
At the same time, Free, work on continuing to create and perform in all the other plays of your life – those not organized into winners and losers. (Make a list of them.) You’ll probably still have a love/hate relationship to competition. But performing this relationship with intention will be transformative. You won’t be free, but I do believe it might “free your time.”
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
‘You Can’t Go Home Again’
Moving on emotionally means letting one’s present transform the past….
Dear Lois,
I am hoping you can help clear the mental mist. I am handicapped by the relationship to “my past.”
Background: I’m listening to A Gentleman in Moscow, a story about a Russian aristocrat who’s living under house arrest at the grand Hotel Metropol. He shares observations about the sweeping changes in the life of post-revolutionary Russia, along with vivid memories from across his life. The gentleman does not appear to be handicapped by his emotions and so is able to wring rich, detailed memory from every inch of his life. He HAS his entire life (even under confinement).
That’s in such contrast to the POVERTY of how I relate to a lot of my (painful) life history.
I’ve been visiting my “hometown” in the south where my father and his relatives are from. My family went on summer vacations here when I was a girl, and I went to college here. Even though it’s decades later, my visit is shrouded with the emotionality of yesteryear – an emotional memory/uneasiness that colors the NOW. It’s like hearing an old song and being “transported” to that time in your life—as if you’re there again. It’s pretty child-like – all about me – transported back in time in this anxious fog.
Lois, I would like to be able to play, have, narrate, build with, give my past – and not be stuck in an aversion to reliving it, emotionally speaking.
If you can help with this, I would be very grateful.
You Can’t Go Home Again
NY
Dear Can’t,
Thanks so much for you letter asking for some help with your relationship to your past. I’m eager to explore (and maybe help to clear) your mental mist—a condition so pervasive among humans that sometimes I think it might be a universal condition.
This might take a while, so bear with me.
You sign your letter “You Can’t Go Home Again”—the title of a novel by the American writer Thomas Wolfe that’s become a well-known saying in English. I wonder what that means to you? Who is the “you” that can’t go home again? What is the “home” you cannot go to again? Whatever home is to you, it’s not there anymore. Because home is, as you of course know, is not a physical-geographical space. And who are you? You are an adult who, upon visiting a city of your childhood, is “shrouded with the emotionality of yesteryear…hearing an old song and being ‘transported’ to that time in your life, as if you’re there again.”
That’s not the you of yesteryear, and it’s not the emotionality of yesteryear either. It’s the you of now, who has a past. And that past includes not only “what happened” but, equally impactfully, your experiences and understandings, interpretations and re-interpretations, and tellings and retellings (even if only to yourself) stories of what happened. And it includes the emotionality that comes along with all that.
You say that, unlike the gentleman from Moscow who “has his entire life,” you are “handicapped by your emotions” and feel there’s a poverty in how you relate to a lot of your (painful) personal history. Hmmm. Again, I wonder. Because you seem to me to have a rather rich emotional life related to that history. Perhaps too rich. I couldn’t say. But, for better or worse, it’s what you have created! I invite you to try that on and see how you feel.
The widely accepted notion of being handicapped by our emotions usually comes along with the need to get rid of them. I don’t think that’s a good idea, for you or anyone. First of all, I’m pretty sure it can’t be done. But what if we created many more emotions? They would then also be part of our lives and live “side by side” with the ones we believe are handicapping us. And then you could “play, have, narrate, build with, give”—not your past, but all of you, including the “old” and
new emotionality.
That would be developmental! That would be the way it is in our earliest years, when what we do with others in the present transforms our past.
My advice is to practice being childlike as a developmentalist (in this case, helping yourself develop). Your development just might include you no longer trying either to relive your childhood or avoid reliving your childhood. Or at least doing it less. There are so many more creative ways to live your life! I would very much like for you to have that.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
What Can I Do When I Just Want to Say ‘No’?
Others assume I could say ‘yes’ when I can’t
Dear Lois,
Good Morning! Thanks a lot for sharing all this concerning development, which I find very interesting.
I have a question for you: Why is it sometimes very hard to say, “I hear you asking for something from me, but I don’t have what you are asking for. I don’t have it to give you.”
To me, that response is different from simply saying “no,” which implies that I could give you what you’re asking for, but I don’t want to and refuse to.
Sometimes people assume you could say yes to their requests — that you have the means or resources. But by making this assumption, they are behaving like kids thinking that others (like their parents) have all the power.
Would be interested to hear your thoughts.
Very best,
H. H.
Niamey, Niger
Dear Harouna,
I am so appreciative that you follow this column and find what I have to say as the developmentalist interesting—so thank you!
Responding to people asking us for something is very common and very complicated. You’re certainly not alone in finding it challenging, and so it’s great that you brought it up here.
As you point out: it’s not so easy to say no! It seems that for you, it’s the hardest to say no when you don’t have it to give. For others, saying no when you have it to give (but don’t want to) might well be harder.
I’m very glad that in your letter you brought up assumptions. Everyone has them a million times a day. We can’t stop making assumptions. But we can make use of the ones we and others make!
To make developmental use of our and others’ assumptions, I think we first have to recognize them in our interactions – we have to appreciate how interpretive they are and how distancing they can be. After all, assumptions come from and rely upon particular interpretations we make, or particular meaning we give, to what someone does.
So, for example, you say, “Sometimes people assume that you could say yes—that you have the means or resources to do so. But by making this assumption, they are behaving like kids thinking that others (like their parents) have all the power.”
Can you see that you are interpreting their behavior and giving some underlying meaning to their ask of you? And, just as important, do you recognize your own assumptions in doing so?
My advice is to begin to practice recognizing assumptions—your own first and foremost. And then, explore them, preferably socially. In the case of being asked for something, challenge your assumptions—about what you’re being asked for, about the relationship you have with the person who is asking, and about how you feel being asked by this particular person.
Keep going! Do you know each other? Like each other? What is your relationship? Are you flattered by the request? Are you annoyed? Are you ashamed?
Can you imagine a conversation in which you both share some assumptions and play around with these questions? If you can, then try it! It could turn out to be developmental for both of you and, of course, for your relationship.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I Get Annoyed by Everyone!
In a trigger culture, it’s time to explore causal emotionality
Dear Developmentalist:
I’m writing to ask for help to develop around Getting Annoyed!
I am easily, intensely and very often annoyed by the actions, words or seeming inabilities of others — and really often it’s by people I most care for! I am noticing increasing annoyance and want to do something else. I hope you can help!
I can’t believe how annoyed I get — all the time! I must think I know it all better! It’s not giving or friendly. I’m unhappy, bored and burdened with getting annoyed by my friends and loved ones, not to mention people I work with. I mean, I MUST annoy them, too. I’ve got to think that I’m pushing people away.
Telling myself not to get annoyed isn’t working at all, by the way. Looking forward to your thoughts, and your development guidance!
Regards,
Emilie in New Jersey
Dear Emilie,
What is it to be annoyed? Let’s investigate!
I thank you for the invitation because it’s not only you who gets annoyed. We all do. And my guess is that 99% of us wish we did it a lot less. I think it might help us get there—or at least closer—if we had a sense of what we’re doing when we “get annoyed.”
Like most people, you probably think that your annoyance is caused by the actions of others, that what they do or don’t do, or how they do it or don’t do it, causes you to “get annoyed.” I’ll challenge that causal connection in a little bit, but for now, let’s unpack what “getting annoyed” feels like for you.
When they annoy you, do your friends and loved ones irritate you? Upset you? Disappoint you? Frustrate you? Shock you? Anger you? Do you feel sad? Afraid? Stuck? I wonder about that and invite you to join me. Because our emotionality is very complex and messy and smushed together—we rarely (if ever) are feeling only one thing at a time. I invite you to explore the messiness of your emotionality, especially when you “get annoyed.” You might surprise yourself and discover that “annoyance” is the least of it!
My invitation to ponder these questions in relation to how you are living your life, emotionally-socially speaking, comes from how you opened your letter, when you wrote: “I am easily, intensely and very often annoyed by the actions, words or seeming inabilities of others and really often by people I most care for.” It’s the “by” in that sentence that’s troublesome, not abstractly, but in living our lives. For, there must be a cause of the annoyance, right? There I am, happily cooking dinner, engrossed in a good book, walking to work, having a glass of wine with friends, and such and such happens, and suddenly I am so annoyed! Something must have caused it, and it feels like the cause of my annoyance is what just happened, what so-and-so did or didn’t say or do. This seems natural, given that we’re told so often that we can be “triggered,” and that someone “made me feel or do something” that seeing it that way feels “right” to us.
But what if it’s that connection, that causal relation, that feeling that it must be the case, that makes it so hard for you to “do something else”? What if “getting annoyed” is not an inner state that you either “let out” or try to stifle? You say that isn’t working, and I’m not surprised.
Such a complex human activity as annoyance (both getting annoyed and being annoying) deserves a lot more work. Like investigating. And playing with. And trying out new performances of. And creating meaning with. Most importantly, all this is best done with the people who annoy you!
Let me know how it goes!
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Should We Lay Down the Law on Our Kids’ Use of Social Media?
Parents want to protect their children but give them responsibility too….
Dear Developmentalist:
We do a lot of social therapy with families and kids. A big issue coming up in our groups are the growing conflicts and tensions around kids being online (on social media, making videos, playing games, hanging out in chat rooms, etc.) and parents becoming concerned, fearful, protective and laying down the law to limit their kids’ access and/or monitor their activity. There are real fears: predators, bullies, scams, phishing, etc. It is the Wild West.
Parents also are concerned that their kids are “running away from their families”—staying glued to their phones and leaving parents feeling ignored at the dinner table.
On the other hand, there is a lot of what kids love about playing online that seems very positive to us: meeting other kids ‘across borders,’ making connections beyond their families and neighborhoods, and learning about the world. TikTokers are truly creative with their funny, playful videos and photos. Social media offers plenty of opportunity to be creative. And for kids in the LBGTQ community, it can be a lifeline to exploring sexuality in a healthy way.
We’d like to encourage families to approach the virtual world and new media as developmentalists — and so we’re coming to you to ask you for your thoughts. We know that “laying down the law” — being punitive, fearful or performing as Luddites by trying to turn back the clock — is a recipe for fights and resentment. So how do we encourage all to engage and approach and use this technology to ENHANCE THEIR SOCIALITY — form new relationships — be MORE OF THE WORLD — rather than zoom out into a private metaverse that leaves everyone alone, disconnected, alienated, depressed and worse?
Looking forward to your feedback,
Miguel Cortes / Ciudad Juarez
Barbara Silverman / NY
Dear Miguel and Barbara,
I’m so glad you took the time to write to me! The issue you describe is pervasive and will resonate strongly with parents and therapists and counselors who work with families, children and teens.
My responses to what you have shared are taking me in so many directions, I may not get to all of them in one response!
I wonder how online time became an “issue” (and a “big” one, at that) and a source of “growing conflicts and tensions.” I don’t mean only for the families you work with, but as a cultural phenomenon across much of the globe. So that’s one area that I think is important to explore.
Perhaps, Barbara and Miguel, you might begin with your own histories and if and how new technologies became a source of conflict in your families when you were growing up. I’m thinking of the big deal television was when it became affordable for households. Then came cable with hundreds of channels, many of which were labeled and/or thought of as unsuitable for children and teens. The invention of the Walkman and the iPod made it possible for people to listen to music and other audio privately. Did your parents try to control the amount and type of material you watched and listened to? Can you recall how you felt and how the family dealt with the flood of content available to you?
Parents have always had a dilemma, it seems to me. They want to protect their children and keep them safe AND they want to give them opportunities to learn to take responsibility and think things through to their possible consequences. The issue today, as you describe it, is that navigating their way through this dilemma has become harder and harder.
You say you want to encourage families to approach the virtual world and new media as developmentalists—great! And yet, the gist of your letter is geared toward the parents and from the adult point of view. I suspect you have a vision of what a developmentalist approach might look like for the adults. For the young people, I am not so sure. Maybe you can put that on your therapeutic agenda. It sounds like the social media activity is already treated special and off limits to parents. How did that get produced? This could be a place to start.
Perhaps the developmental dilemma for parents and for you stems from treating the young people’s phones, iPads, video games, and whatever else, as theirs, rather than as something the family has and uses (that, like most things, can be wonderful and also at times not so great). When they are little, kids have one relationship to stuffed animals and toys, and adults have a different relationship to them. But these things belong to the family and household, nevertheless.
Another area for you to explore is family talk. Do the parents talk with each other about their day and how they are creating their lives? If they’re people who generally ask, “How was school today? How was practice? How was work? What did you do at your friend’s house?” do they also ask,” Who did you meet online today, anyone new? How’d you do in Minecraft (or whatever game they like)? Did you discover anything today?”
Do the parents ask to learn their kids’ games, see what they liked on social media? And do they themselves share what they (the parents) are doing online and what they’re discovering and who they’re talking with on social media? Can they organize time to play together (parents and kids) finding something new online every day?
I hope that you will play with my wonderings and questions. I am sure that you can be of great help in furthering family talk. Creating new kinds of conversations is powerfully development for all.
And take a look at this site and decide if it’s useful to you—Children and Screens.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Doctor, Make Me Better!
My patients expect me to be a miracle worker, but I’m not…
Hi Lois,
I am a doctor, and I have many elderly patients with dementia. I have found the Institute’s Joy of Dementia programs to be very helpful for building ensembles and working with patients and their families. However, some patients for various reasons are not able to participate in such activities, and even if they are, like most things in life, it can still be very challenging. I would like to ask for your help with regard to my role as a doctor. I am supposed to be able to help the patient, when in fact the patient is deteriorating and medications are not going to cure the problems. I do not have answers for the patient and their family, but often they are expecting me to take care of the situation, but I cannot.
Thank you,
Doctor, NYC
Dear Doctor,
Thanks for writing. I’ve always thought that the challenges of doctoring are enormous due to the bureaucratic and institutional constraints placed upon the profession and, equally, due to the conflicted ways we are socialized to relate as doctors and patients. You are expected to know everything about illnesses and bodies and to be a miracle worker capable of fixing anything. I have great appreciation and respect for you and other physicians and appreciate the especially difficult situation you are experiencing when caring for elderly patients with dementia.
From how you describe things, I wonder if maybe you have bought in too much to the help = cure equation. It’s the scientists and researchers, isn’t it, who are working on finding cures (If, indeed, there are any) for dementia? Not clinicians like you—your job is to give care. You say you have no answers for the patients and their families, but that “they are expecting me to take care of the situation, but I cannot.” What situation? That there is no cure? That the patient will not get better? That’s not your fault! That they and their family don’t know how to go on under these circumstances? That they are angry and sad and feel helpless? That’s not your fault either, but maybe you can help them with this.
I’m urging that you not equate having answers with taking care of the situation. As a caring and experienced physician, you know all too well that their situation is more than their illness. It includes how they relate to and understand their illness and how they feel it as a family. Are there things they can build on in their history as a family? Who among them has which strengths and which weaknesses? What can you build on in your history with these patients? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Finding ways to talk with them about these things will help everyone break the equations.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Where's My Path to Empowerment?
Does personal growth make a difference to the world?
Dear Lois,
I’m interested in what you think about what personal development has to do with empowerment, as my background from childhood and some of my adulthood has been less than empowering.
I have trained in Transcendental Meditation, studied Zen, Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism as growth practices. They help me connect with my inner self. Creative visualization, meditation, and other methodologies common to pop culture are helpful too. These practices of “turning inward” seem directly relevant to my development. And yet, I’m wondering if and how such practices can also be empowering? What tools do we have (or do we need) in this political climate to empower ourselves?
I believe that solutions can be created by small activist groups to help address broad government failures. And that action is important. Together we can imagine a better world. But community practices, and my personal growth, are just one small piece in a world of wild geopolitics and oppression. Does my/our empowerment matter?
Thank you so much for your input!
Sincerely,
KBD / US
Dear KBD,
Dear KBD,
Your letter catches me at a perfect time, as I’ve been thinking about empowerment the last couple of weeks myself. So, thanks for inviting me to explore this with you.
Your questions center around empowerment—ways to create it and ways to counter efforts to disempower. You wonder what role “personal development” can play in empowering ourselves and others and how “methodologies common to pop culture” might be useful in this effort.
Big issues. Timely issues. All the more reason to discover what we and others mean by empowerment!
I don’t like the term empowerment and for years I avoided using it. But it’s such an everyday word now that it’s just about impossible to avoid, and so you will occasionally hear me or read me using it.
My problem with empowerment? This may sound paradoxical, but I think that empowerment has little to do with power. And I’m fiercely concerned with power!
To empower or to be empowered is to be given or granted something (some say power, but I think they really mean authority or legitimacy) by others. These others are typically those in authority who have a measure of control over you, like parents (as you hinted was part of your own history) and bosses and teachers and officials and lawmakers. As I understand power, it’s something that people themselves generate, create and use. No one can give it to you. It’s just not that kind of thing.
And this leads me to point out another paradoxical feature of our current times. This might be oversimplifying, but doesn’t it seem like the more empowerment is becoming a “good” thing that’s something people want, the more power is becoming a “bad” thing that’s something people want to avoid? All kinds of identity groups, not to mention citizens in general, strive for empowerment and, in the same breath, want to avoid power (which has come to mean “those IN power”).
With these paradoxes in mind, KBD, let’s return to your questions. You ask about development and empowerment. I think the relationship can go both ways—individuals and groups can develop themselves politically and emotionally so as to be able to make use of being empowered by others; and those who have been empowered by others can invest that in further and continuous development. It won’t always happen that way, but we need to move “being empowered” in that direction. And that direction is the exercising of power for the ongoing and continuous creating of development.
As for visualizations, meditations, and so many more wonderful human activities that are now commodified and packaged as empowerment tools, well, enough said! By all means, do them if you want! But not instrumentally. Not for empowerment. More in the spirit of the spiritual master of meditation a friend recently told me about, who said that meditation is good for nothing. He meant it as the highest compliment.
Finally, imagining together a better world? Within a developmental frame, imagining has to be in a constant dance with the material making of the better world.
Happy meditating, happy imagining, happy creating, KBD!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I Keep Myself Distant with My Big-City Judgements
How can I be a better neighbor?
Dear Dr. Holzman:
I live in a small, quaint village on the outskirts of Philadelphia — not Center-City, and not the suburbs. It’s a little pocket of a town where many families have lived proudly for generations. Most are freely friendly and, well, neighborly. We say hello on dog walks, welcome new neighbors and say goodbye to those leaving. We talk with each other on our porches, make casseroles for one another during the trials and tribulations of life, and take in each other’s mail.
However, if there were a ‘neighborliness grade,’ I would probably get a ‘C,’ at best. For example, I sometimes skip the ‘Hi theres’ when walking the dogs; I don’t join the block parties; and I don’t make any effort to remember names. It’s not that I don’t also say ‘Hi’ sometimes and make the periodic casserole, but I am certainly not fully in the mix. At a neighborhood gathering recently, several people asked me what it’s like to be new in town. (Whoops, I have lived here for 20 years!)
You see, there is also something quite conformist and ‘frozen-in-time’ about this town that makes me want to keep my distance. There are Halloween rituals, for example, dating back 100 years that everyone seems to know about but me. Young parents raising their kids also grew up in this town, as did their parents. There is something insular about the politics and culture. So I cast myself in the role of being different, not from here and a dedicated non-conformist.
You can see perhaps my dilemma for which I ask your advice Dr. Holzman. I keep myself separate from the community with my judgments, assumptions and labels. In my holding back in neighborliness, I think things like: I am radical & unconventional in how I live politically (passionately independent) and personally (in a multiple partner-with-no kids lifestyle), don’t fit the mold of ‘these conventional people.’ I’m thinking, they don’t want to know me, nor I them. For years I hid behind being busy and an introvert as a quick explanation for my stand-offishness. But more honestly, there is a part of me that likes to keep my distancing assumptions about the town and who lives here. After all, it might be unsafe to be closer, who knows? At the same time, I would like to be more open, curious, less guarded and, well, more neighborly. Help!
JB
Dear JB,
Thanks, JB, for your letter describing your developmental dilemma. We’ve all been there, more times than we can imagine! By “there” I mean in a role and an identity that doesn’t work for us the way it used to. But at the same time, it isn’t so constricting or painful that we’re desperate to give it up. So, we stay in it and make up justifications for doing so. At some point, these justifications, too, become unsatisfying. I think you’re at that place now, and so I appreciate you reaching out to me.
My first thought on reading your letter was that you sound alone in your dilemma. Which strikes me as odd, given that you live with other people with whom you share a “radical and unconventional” lifestyle. I wonder where they are in your dilemma. How do they participate in the community? Do they share your discomfort and trepidation and what sounds like arrogance? Do they, too, “hold back in neighborliness?” Is that how they experience you? Do they share your “distancing assumptions about the town”? If you all don’t talk together about all this, you’re missing an opportunity to continue to create your lives together and with your neighbors, in whatever ways you choose to do so.
You say that you “would like to be more open, curious, less guarded and, well, more neighborly.” I don’t want to read too much into your words, but you didn’t say that you “should be…” If this is really something you want, rather than something you feel obligated to do, then the choice is yours to change your character. After so many years of playing the same role on this community stage, it sounds like you’re tired of it and want to try something new. Go for it (and be sure to ask your unconventional family to support you)!
You might begin by picking someone whose way of being open, curious, neighborly, etc. appeals to you and creatively imitate that person. See how that new performance feels, how it impacts your assumptions, what the response is (including your own), and what new possibilities it creates. Who knows? You might become a “new neighbor!”
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Do Not Disturb: I’m processing!
Settling on the Story of What Happened…
Dear Developmentalist,
My close friend and I talk regularly and talk about most everything. Recently she has started telling me that she wants to “process” events of her day/week/life before we talk about them.
It seems like this word “process” is being used everywhere and refers to someone’s internal metabolizing of events affecting them, happening to them so that they can settle on a story of what happened.
Now, when my friend and I speak, she describes her processing to me—what she thinks really happened, what caused what to happen. Honestly, I find it distancing. Where is our old back and forth where we could say anything to each other, change our minds on what was happening, and trust that the other was accepting and present of the conversation we ended it?
Is there some loving way to challenge what I take to be the point of processing—which is to develop a certainty within oneself of “what happened” before speaking with anyone about it? Or am I processing processing incorrectly??
Thank you!
Meghan
New Mexico
Dear Meghan in New Mexico,
I haven’t come across what you’re describing in terms of “processing,” although the desire to settle on a story of what happened is certainly familiar. The need to make sense of events in our lives can be overwhelming, and people can go to great lengths to convince themselves and others that they know what happened. I suspect that some of what’s behind this need is the belief that we can’t go forward without it.
You say that the change in the conversations you have with your close friend are due to her wanting to process events before she talks with you about them. Now, when you two speak, she describes her processing to you. You imply that you used to do this together, and you miss the freedom and trust of the back and forth of how your conversations used to be. You feel distant.
Meghan, I think distance is the key here, and it’s good you identified it. But you might well be on the wrong track in assuming that it’s your friend’s “processing” that’s distancing. (Is that a bit of “your processing,” I wonder?)
I suspect that it’s you not telling her that you miss how you two used to talk that’s distancing. You ask, “Is there some loving way to challenge what I take to be the point of processing.” I wonder why you would want to put this challenge to your friend (even if you could do so lovingly). I would think that it would increase rather than decrease the distance between you. Telling her what you love about your friendship with her, I suspect, would be more loving!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
What Is Emotional Development?
It’s not the easiest conversation starter…
Hi Lois!
Lately I’ve found myself in conversations where I’m being asked to tell people what emotional development is. I may have mentioned to them that I am a therapist, or I may have invited them to a class or a workshop. When I get this question, I say things like it’s “creating new emotional responses, relating to people in new ways, learning how to have conversations, co-creating possibilities in your life, etc.”
But the reality is, I am not good with examples. I know you’ve been talking about emotional development for years and would like to hear what your answer is!
Much Love,
Majo in Mexico
Dear Majo in Mexico…,
I greatly appreciate your question and the circumstances in which it comes up for you. “Emotional development” is not the easiest conversation starter, that’s for sure! First off, development isn’t something people typically think about. And even when it does enter consciousness or conversation, people’s connection to development invariably has to do with babies and little kids. And what of emotions? Aren’t they a basic grouping of feelings inside us (like anger, love, jealousy, fear, and so on)? How could it be that emotions develop? Don’t we just need to manage them?
This is some of what you’re up against. It’s no surprise, then, that you’re likely to get a blank stare, a glazed-over look or— in the best cases—a sincere, “What does that mean?”
You’re right that I’ve been talking about emotional development for years! And you know what? Every time it’s different! I try never to tell people what emotional development is. (I actually try not to tell people anything beyond what time it is or how to get to Times Square.) Telling can be a real conversation stopper.
It sounds like you might be equating “telling” with “talking.” But talking is vastly broader than telling! There are so many things we can do when we talk, so many things we can create with how others hear and don’t hear us and how we hear and don’t hear them, with how we and they look and move our eyes and mouths and hands and bodies. But if we are focusing on telling it (in the “right” way), we can miss all of that. We can forget that we’re creating a conversation with someone.
A conversation is a relationship builder—the relationship between you, who you’re speaking with, and whatever your topic is. A developmental conversation is almost always improvisational, requiring you to at least entertain the possibility that you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about until the conversation is created. That’s where the meaning is.
With this in mind, let’s return to emotional development. Looking at the things you say you say (in your “telling”)—”creating new emotional responses, relating to people in new ways, learning how to have conversations, co-creating possibilities in your life, etc.”—what do you see? Better yet, say them aloud. What do you hear? Whatever you hear, you can be sure it’s not what others will hear. That’s the beauty and challenge and paradox of making meaning! Engaging in this beauty and challenge and paradox together can be developmental—emotionally and otherwise.
My advice? Create conversations with others. Focus on the relationship, listen to and for offers, explore concepts and opinions and experiences together. This will make your problem of “not being good with examples” vanish.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
I've been traumatized ... So has everybody else!
In a culture obsessed with ‘trauma,’ what are we losing?
Dear Developmentalist,
I’ve been thinking about trauma, grief and healing, especially after the latest
mass shootings in the US. I believe that trauma is an ordinary part of human life
– it’s everywhere — beginning with the trauma of birth.
I am also intrigued by the etymology of the word trauma: “physical wound”; a
Latin medical term, from the Greek trauma “a wound, a hurt; a defeat.” And I
also see how we live in a culture that has become obsessed with trauma.
I had traumatic experiences as a child, having been exposed to sexual matters at
way too young an age. My parents were neglectful, and then there were the
ordinary kinds of abuse most women experience, some more traumatic than
others. I have been doing therapeutic work to “heal these wounds.”
On the same day as my partner tested positive for Covid, I found out that a friend
I’ve known all my life committed suicide. Four days later, I came down with a
wicked case of Covid. I spent 24 hours sobbing off-and-on, feeling sick and filled
with anger and grief: I was in pain! I had an intense and horrible dream about my
rage towards my mother. I obsessed over negative thoughts until I felt despair. I
was enraged at myself for getting sick and at the world for being so violent and
unjust. Clearly, I was dealing with the grief of losing a dear friend to suicide. I was
spinning out of control emotionally, as if I had become the little girl who couldn’t
be loved, cared for and comforted. Even with vaccines, my Covid seemed worse
than everyone else’s. It was as if the virus were moving some of the emotional
trauma out of my body. Was I working out something that needed to get
resolved? I want to say it has been a bit…traumatic!
I read your posts about language games, and I’m intrigued by the
trauma/healing/grief language game. Is it developmental to use the same
language to talk about healing from physical wounds and sickness as it is to heal
from emotional wounds? Is there a developmental way to understand trauma?
Sincerely,
Confused and Traumatized
Dear Confused and Traumatized…,
I am so sorry that you’ve been having such a hard time with so much going one
that’s both physically and emotionally painful. It sounds truly awful. It also sounds
like you’ve gone through this painful period and are now reflecting on how we
speak about and understand such experiences. I’m glad you’re “intrigued by the
trauma/healing/grief language game”— exploring it can be a very emotionally
developmental activity!
You mention that our culture has become obsessed with trauma, and I agree.
Lots of people agree, and some are talking about it, like the writer at Vox. for
whom it’s become the “word of the decade” or the NYTimes op-ed writer, who
wonders, “If everything is trauma, is anything?” I, too, wonder.
When a culture becomes obsessed in this way, that is, by the expansion of
particular words and concepts—which have been created in particular and
relatively narrow contexts—into an ever-widening swath of everyday
experiences, we lose so much. We lose ourselves in the swarm of buzz words.
We lose what was our ordinary language. We lose our imagination to create our
own new expressions. We lose our wholeness. We lose the political, social and
cultural world.
But so many people are helped by the language of trauma that I would be remiss
if I just left you with all this loss! People say that trauma gives them a new
understanding of themselves, clarity, closure, healing, and much more. I certainly
acknowledge that, and I’m very glad for their relief.
The losses, it seems to me, stem from how today’s trauma has come to frame
human experience. Trauma is used so broadly and widely—sometimes as an
event, sometimes as its aftermath, sometimes as an explanation—that it can feel
at times that trauma is all there is and all that we are. (In a park near my house
there is a stone wall with these words from Gertrude Stein etched in it: “I am,
because my little dog loves me.” Taking great, non-poetic, license with Gertrude,
our culture increasingly pressures us to say, “I am, because I’ve been
traumatized.”)
Can we be in pain without having been traumatized? Can we suffer without
trauma? I have been known to ponder such questions. You seem ready,
Confused and Traumatized, to join me. I hope so.
Another thing about today’s trauma is that it’s seen as living inside an individual
person, physically and psychologically, which makes a lot of human atrocity hard
to see and deal with socially, culturally and politically. Murder is an act of
violence. Rape is an act of violence. Are they more or less so by virtue of being
identified as traumatic? The poverty of the world is indefensible cruelty, whether
or not anyone—or everyone—is traumatized by it. I don’t want the horrific things
human beings do to one another to take a back seat to trauma. They are horrific
enough.
As to your questions, here’s my thinking. “Is it developmental to use the same
language to talk about healing from physical wounds as it is to heal from
emotional wounds?” Developmental or not, people do do it—a lot! The
developmental question is: What is that way of speaking doing with, to and for
us? You then ask, “Is there a developmental way to understand trauma?” If it’s
done exploratorily, like the conversation you and I are having here, then I think it
just might be. (By the way, I think you would have answered the same way I just
did.)
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
CASTE, CLASS & GODS: HOW DO WE GO ON WITH THESE DIVISIONS?
We used to be childhood friends, but now we’re worlds apart…
Dear Lois,
We hear the constant admonitions: “The poor deserve their poverty! “To the victor goes the spoils.” “There’s only one God — mine — and for the non-believers — cheat them, maim them…anything goes!” “The people elect the government they deserve!” And so on. Most of my conversations seem to end in damnation of the of the other (the enemy).
My personal story: Abdul, David and I went to the same middle school. Abdul and David lived in hutments (a hut encampment) that contained our school and living quarters. Neither of them made it to high school. Both of them were god-fearing, had faith, saw life as a test. They went from one menial job to another, and ultimately rose to a comfortable position and income, all thanks to the rising prosperity in India. Abdul and David’s journeys are exemplary success stories. And yet now as a highly educated engineer who has spent 20-some years studying and working abroad, the only reason, I am still able to have any conversation with them is because we enjoy reminiscing about “good” experiences: sharing lunch, playing games, helping each other to study.
The historical (Indian) story: India’s cultural underpinnings — its religious intertwining of Islam, Christianity and Hinduism — creates a bewildering story. Christianity came with Capitalism and Colonialism. Left-leaning, secular intellectuals are primarily anti-Hindu, and proclaim their secular ideals as progressive. The endemic corruption of state and local governments, their posture of appeasement, has ushered in a new variety of neo-colonialism.
Abdul, David and I, and millions of others in India, are witness to crimes and excesses of those who are rich and/or in power. Just today, a juvenile was arrested after she tweeted against an elected official. She won’t be able to access public education, resources or even get a job in India. We accommodate injustice and corruption and the actions of a Hindu-reigning political class by leaning on our religious “faith” and the “Golden Rule.”
Mere mention of Abdul or David (who are not Hindu and not from well-to-do, middle-class families) to my other Hindu friends can drive them nuts. Any conversations about the many fault lines in modern India (it’s unsafe to speak across religious lines in social media!) produces a lot of name-calling, heartache and retreat into our inner “escape spaces.”
Lois, I want to hear your thoughts on how we — citizens of this modern India — can talk more honestly about our fears, our community’s expectations and what kind of a world we want to live in?
Regards,
Mahesh
Dear Mahesh…,
Thank you for writing and sharing the anguish you feel about some of the divisions that get in the way of you and your fellow “citizens of modern India” discovering and creating the kind of world you want to live in. While “caste, class and gods” are, as you say, major identities dividing India’s people, this same kind of anguish goes beyond political-cultural histories and national borders. Indeed, identity politics and its destruction of human life and spirit is a global condition. And so, your question—”How can we go on with these divisions?”—could be asked by every one of us, no matter where we are.
But let’s begin with your story — actually, your two stories—one of which you identify as your “personal story” and the other as “the historical (Indian) story.” That is so interesting to me!! Maybe if we explore the two stories and their relationship to each other we can discover ways to go on.
Your (personal) story includes David and Abdul, friends from middle school who you are still occasionally in touch with. Because of the deep political, cultural and religious divisions in India that also divide the three of you, you write that “the only reason, I am still able to have any conversation with them is because we enjoy reminiscing about ‘good’ experiences: sharing lunch, playing games, helping each other to study.” I understand you to be saying that this shared history is how come you three can talk with each other. If that’s the case, then your conversations could be so much richer and more varied. Because you three share so much more!
Everything you write in your historical (India) story is part of your, David and Abdul’s shared history – as is all that came before and continues in this extended moment of “a new variety of neo-colonialism”—including religious wars, British rule, partition, independence, corruption and, of course the CO-VID pandemic. Recognizing that your personal story includes the history of India and its people (that is, it’s something else the three of you share), gives you three a lot more to talk about than your good experiences together in middle school. I’m sure you could speak for hours on the experience and impact on each of you, in the past and today, of so many moments in and aspects of Indian history and culture. That’s one way to “go on with these divisions.”
Now it’s time to return to that initial question. I think there’s a more active, or activistic, question than how can we go on. And YOU already asked it! Right at the end of your letter, you ask, “…how can we — citizens of this modern India — talk more honestly about our fears, our community’s expectations and what kind of a world we want to live in?”
When I look at your two questions side by side, I think you must be saying something like this: “These divisions exist, and so we have no choice but to go on with them.” But we do have some choice in HOW we do that. Can we go on with more honesty? Can we talk more openly of our hopes and fears and dreams? I love this question and the challenge of HOW to make it happen. Because it’s not pretending the divisions don’t exist or even trying to eliminate them. Rather, it’s “building with what we have” (the very basis of development and growth) and making something new out of it. If what you have is deep divisions, then what you have to build with has to include them. And that goes for you, David and Abdul, all of India, and all of humanity.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Thanks for Your Advice…But It’s Just Not Me
I need help to change my life, but my friend’s suggestions are pushing things too far…
Dear Lois,
I think this is a developmentalist question…. See what you think. I have a close friend who’s helping me make some major changes in my life. I’m 62 and about to transition out of my full-time job, and I asked her for help on how to get the ball rolling as I “recreate” myself.
I’m very appreciative of her assistance, but there are some things she wants me to do that I’d rather not — including talking about and promoting myself in ways that I don’t feel totally comfortable with (and that includes writing to you for advice). It’s not me. Do I tell her that I’d rather not take her direction (I’m concerned about being hurtful or disappointing)? Or should I just go ahead and do what she says (even though I really don’t want to)?
Thanks.
Uncomfortable / Washington, DC
Dear Uncomfortable…,
Thanks for your question. As The Developmentalist (self-named), I can assure you that it is, indeed, a “developmentalist question!”. Before we go there, let me just say how fortunate you are to have someone to talk through things at a time when you’re making what sound like big moves in your life. So many people do this alone.
What interests me most in your letter is you saying, “It’s not me.” I invite you to explore this assertion with me. I think it might help you with your dilemma over how to respond to your friend. What is that feeling? You say that you’re not comfortable with some of the things your friend wants you to do. I get that. But how does feeling uncomfortable become “not you?” And how is doing something you wouldn’t ordinarily do (or wouldn’t do “on your own”) not you? What does that mean?
You might mean that you’re not the kind of person who does that type of thing. But isn’t that your friend’s very point, especially now when you are making some “major changes in your life?” Maybe this is one of those major changes!
Developmentalists like me believe that being/doing/performing “other than who we are” (“not me”) is how we develop and learn and see ourselves and others in new ways. All this to mean that, to me, if it feels “it’s not me” there’s a good chance it will be developmental for you to try it.
This is not to say you should follow your friend’s advice. The way you pose the question— “Should I just go ahead and do what she says (even though I really don’t want to)” suggests to me that you’d not only be doing something you don’t want to do (perhaps that’s an old rather than a new “major change” performance?), but that you weren’t taking your friend’s suggestion as an offer to build with but merely an instruction to follow. No matter how the suggestion was made to you, you can and should relate to it like an offer—one that you can choose to create with (rather than “follow”), or not. That should also take care of your worry of hurting or disappointing your friend if you don’t take her direction. Because there’s all kinds of ways to respond to her offer that don’t involve you doing what she says.
My advice? Become more of, and other than, who you are. That’s a great way to “recreate” yourself. One more thing. There’s more to life than, “Should I do this OR that.” Create more choices—avoid the “either-or” bind.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
That Explains It! My Ex-Boyfriend is "becoming unhinged!"
After her bad break-up, maybe finding an explanation helps with the pain….
Hi Lois,
Recently I stumbled upon an email, mistakenly sent to a larger group of friends and saw a conversation about one of our friends who was “becoming unhinged” in the course of a painful break-up. There was a link to a government website describing the official diagnosis and tips for living with someone who has his “condition,” lending further authority to the diagnostic label. Applying a diagnosis in these situation, one friend offered, was a way to make it hurt less, for all of us.
There were no trained professionals on this email chain, yet I was astounded by the confidence with which they seemed to share in applying a psychological diagnosis. I was reminded how ingrained the language of psychology is in our world, and how psychology is used to help deal with life’s bitter blows – in this case, to help a friend understand and create distance from the ex-boyfriend, to boost her self-esteem, and speed recovery.
I was saddened at how invoking a psychological diagnosis (behind the boyfriend’s back) became a wedge and a wielding of psychology to establish superiority, a moral high ground, and so maybe hurt less. It seems that people use diagnoses — both applied to others and to themselves — to help them feel better when things are awkward, painful or when life doesn’t go as they wanted it to go.
My question has to do with wondering how it is that people find diagnosis helpful? Is there room for “diagnosis light,” (pop-psychology style), that explain in shorthand how the situation is not unique to you —without engaging the indelible and often damning effects of an MD’s or PhD’s diagnosis?
Signed,
Eavesdropping on a drama
Dear Eavesdropping…,
Thanks for your question and its backstory. I find it a juicy one! It invites us to perform philosophically for a little while—to explore assumptions underlying diagnosis as a “knowing” activity, and to play a bit with varieties of diagnostic languaging.
Your story illustrates one of the many ways that people can find a diagnosis of a mental disorder helpful, regardless of the harm it might do to themselves and/or others. In your story, it’s not the person diagnosed who feels better; it’s his former girlfriend whose use of a psychological diagnosis was “a wedge and a wielding of psychology to establish superiority, a moral high ground, and so maybe hurt less.”
Psychiatric diagnoses claim to identify a cause and give an explanation: “What a relief! Now I know WHY (this happened, he did this, I feel this way, etc.)” We’ve been socialized to believe in causes, not just for apples falling from trees, but for every kind of human feeling, thought, action and interaction. So, better to live with the false belief that now you know what’s wrong—there’s an explanation for your or someone else’s actions and/or personality; there’s a cause for the pain you’re experiencing and causing others to experience—than to deal with all the messiness of what it means to live and love.
I’m a passionate advocate for exploring all our assumptions, and exploring causality is way up there at the top of the list. It can be eye-opening and transformative to see how obsessed we are with cause in everyday life and how that can limit possibilities. If we’re more concerned to identify the cause of something—say, why a friend snubbed you, or why you yelled at your teenage son—than with ways to move on with your relationships and your life, we cut ourselves off from creating with whatever emotions we might be experiencing; we cut ourselves off from developing.
You ask, “Is there room for psychological diagnosis light, pop-psychology style.” My response is yes, yes, yes—if it’s done in a play room. A play room can be anywhere; it’s not a special place, but an environment people create together. To play the diagnosis game in such a play room is to play with words and concepts and conversations and thoughts and feelings—how have we come to speak /write/think this way; is “your way” the same as “my way”; what if we make a “new way”? And, then do that over and over and over again. Unless we approach diagnoses as things to play with, they can, and too often do, become “truths”—that explain and constrain and control our lives.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Roe v. Wade: How do we develop in a culture war?
It’s a battlefield across this country, so how do I NOT see you as the enemy?
Dear Lois,
Is it the end of Roe v. Wade? What does it mean? On my social media feed, it looks like this: Our god is bigger! (The crowd cheers in front of a big phallic statue.) Boohoo! I’m so angry! 69 % of Americans want to keep Row v. Wade! Yaaay! Human life prevails! This is the opportunity for women to help that embryonic life become a productive human being! Fuck you Jean, you pro-lifer! I’m for Jane, I’m for Becky, I’m for Annie! Fuck you, you pro-choicers! Women’s role is to re-produce! So how do we build with this crap?
Since yesterday, I have been speechless, sad and conflicted. I am a woman and can’t understand how abortion could not be considered a “liberty.” As a French woman, I have a hard time understanding the US Constitution and the particular rules of the laws of the land. As a daughter of a doctor, as a mother of a daughter, I am thinking of our women’s history.
You might say: what does understanding have to do with anything? I don’t know. I have a hard time. I am angry. I see the crazy, noisy pro/against game that is organized and presented to us and that produces anger, anger, and more anger and division. And I’m angry that we are fighting with each other.
I am tired of the pro-against game, not because I don’t have a very big opinion (Oh, Liberté, Cherie!), not because I don’t believe that my values are right (we are organized that way), but because I come to think that the game does not work. We are bad at this game.
So, how do we produce development? How can we organize cultural develop-ment with all the pain that goes with it?
Thank you for your thoughts and for this space, Lois!
AH, Brooklyn, New York
Dear AH,
I appreciate you reaching out and sharing your pain and anger and sadness with me and our readers. I think it might be better to do so here than on social media platforms. As you say, they are perpetuators of “the crazy, noisy pro/against game”—and that game produces more anger and pain and sadness.
I can feel your passionate concern with the lives of women and girls and your desire that not just they— but all people—have the opportunity to develop. And that developing will, you and I hope, create something other than the pro/against game.
I am wondering, and invite you to wonder along with me, what you mean by “we are bad at this game.” I wonder who the ”we” is. I wonder what being bad at it looks like to you. I wonder what it would look like to you if we were good at it.
I wonder about these things because, to me, it’s the game that’s bad— regardless of how well or badly we (and here I mean everyone) plays it. Perhaps this is what you mean also. (I venture to guess that most of the players are as angry as you are.) If so, then it’s the game, not the players, that needs changing.
And who’s to do the changing? The players! “Oh no,” you lament! “These people (on both sides) who spew insults, who demean and demonize each other—they’re who we have to count on to change the game?” Aurelie, I believe so. I think that’s what’s so hard, so painful, and so scary about attempts to dismantle Roe v. Wade and all the horrors in the world. They will stop if people create something other than horror.
The current game is indeed horrible. It is horribly distortive; it makes human sociality, human creativity, human compassion and human humility exceedingly hard to see. But they are still there. How do we make them manifest? How do we create great performances? We cannot know. We might not even be able to imagine its possibility. No matter. We can, so far as we are able, create its possibility.
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
Help! I’m a Know-It-All
I will likely be the smartest person in the room, and that would be a drag…
Dear Lois,
Recently I signed up for a drawing class at the Rhode Island School of Design. Though I currently make drawings when I need to, I do not have a drawing practice where I am drawing every day and developing my skills. Now that I have a minute – I thought – “Hey, take a drawing class! That will get you going!” I am sure that there is a lot of potential for this class to set me on a course to be drawing daily. The only trouble is – I know myself, I am the consummate “know it all”. Knowing really gets in my way of discovering what is possible and learning new things.
My main goal for this class is not to be a “know it all.” I know you know a lot about knowing and not knowing, and I thought you could give me some performance coaching on how to actually execute my plan of “not knowing” when every fiber of my being says: “Hey – I already know that.”
Thanks, Lois
JD, Rhode Island
Dear JD,
Congratulations on taking this step! There’s nothing like doing something socially, with others—whether or not you already know how to do it—to get you going! Taking the drawing class can open-up all kinds of possibilities for developing your discipline, your skill and your talent.
First off, doing what you already know how to do, but in a new context, isn’t doing the same thing. It’s doing a different thing. Drawing in a drawing class will be a new drawing practice for you, if you let it.
Think of it as relational, not solitary. You and the instructor (and other students if it is a group class) are doing drawing together. Try to see and experience that—the social-cultural activity, if you will—rather than seeing and experiencing yourself doing some specific things with pencil that you already know how to do.
If you let the newness of the activity and relationality of this situation drive your performance, the “know-it-all you” might be relegated to a minor role in the scenes you’re creating (on-paper and off).
And remember, JD, have fun!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
How Do I Make Room for My Friends’ Pain, When I’m in Pain Myself?
How can we be there for each other when we’re both having a really hard time?
Dear Lois,
As do a lot of us, I’m experiencing the world as becoming more crazy every day. In many ways it’s an emotional roller coaster. I am a developmentalist, too: I work in my life to be fully present and responsive to others. My question to you is how can you make room for someone else’s pain when it’s so hard to deal with your own? And how can I share my fear and sadness in a way that makes space for others to hear it? With many of my friends, we have grown closer since the pandemic began, sharing ups and downs and moments of pain and stress over these last 2 years.
But sometimes it feels that others have a “full tank” when I want to talk to them about what I am going through. I don’t want to overwhelm friends with my concerns when I can see they are also struggling. How do we go through all of what we’re confronting together? How do you keep building spaces to grow with people close in your life when maybe both/all are overwhelmed?
RS / Brooklyn, NY
Dear RS:
Thanks so much for your question, which must resonate with our readers. Whether or not the world is more crazy today (this year, this decade, this century) than it was yesterday (last year, last decade, last century), you’re not alone in experiencing that it is. I’m not into comparison, though, and I don’t think you are either. (Comparing too often becomes a constraint on creativity.)
You say that as a developmentalist, you work to be fully present and responsive to others, and you describe when and how that feels hard for you. In my experience, it’s always helpful and potentially developmental to play around with what we mean, so I invite you to explore with me “fully present.” Usually it means “in the here and now” —that is, in the present. And, by implication, not in any other time or place, that is, not in history. For me, being present means being historically present, which is a different kind of here and now than the present moment.
What this could look like for you is that you and your friends might transform your conversations in such a way that you’re all better able to handle feeling overwhelmed and continue to give to and support each other. For example, you might explore together how you understand being overwhelmed, how you understand pain, how you understand the relationship between them, and—how come you talk about them so much! I don’t mean to sound harsh, but it’s worth exploring when and how pain became so dominant in our conversations, both public conversations and ones with people we have close relationships with. In creating these new conversations, you and your friends and loved ones might come to realize that our experiences of being overwhelmed and of pain are continuously shaped and reshaped culturally. and that in our culture we’re socialized to see, feel and respond to pain as individual and private—“This is my pain and that’s yours.”
Hmmm… Aren’t they both ours?
In addition to the assumption that pain is private, I wonder if your wonderings are related to the idea that we each have a “pain threshold” and “pain container”—as when you ask, “How can you make room for someone else’s pain when it’s so hard to deal with your own? And how can I share my fear and sadness in a way that makes space for others to hear it?” It might be a relief to imagine that there’s no container, space or room in which we keep or put pain. Pain is, developmentally speaking, much better understood as an activity rather than a private mental state.
You ask a great question: “How do we go through all of what we’re confronting together?” And the answer is right there in your question! Do it together. Socially, relationally, together—discover how you can do this together. That’s the developmental way.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
What’s “Belief” Got to Do with It? Part 2
Wait, what are you saying about “belief” as contextual? I don’t get it….
Dear Lois,
I have read the question and response regarding belief and believing and something in your response puzzles me. Perhaps this concerns the “correspondence theory of language,” which I feel hesitant to speak about as distant as I am from such study. In any case, I hear your statements about “water” quite differently than those about “belief.” Whether “water” is used in a plea from a dying person or as a request to water the lawn, there is something we call water that has a physical existence in the world and takes the same form whether watering a lawn or hydrating a dying person. It feels and looks and tastes the same in both language games if those are language games.
Belief, however, is an idea and therefore does seem to fit what Wittgenstein says about meaning depending on the language game that the word, in this case an idea, is part of. In other words, I cannot see how the meaning of water varies in the way that the meaning of belief varies depending on the language game each word appears in.
Yes, “water” means something different to a homeowner and to a dying person but isn’t the water in both cases the same? But belief has no existence outside of language and so necessarily will vary depending upon the language game it appears in. So I feel puzzled when I read your response because “water” and “belief” seem to be spoken of as comparable examples of meaning changing with the language game.
D.D / Atlanta, Georgia
Dear DD:
Thanks for your follow up question to my response to KS. I’ll try to help you with your puzzlement. As I read your letter, you think of “water” and “belief” as materially different from each other and therefore are puzzled by the way I seem to imply that they are comparable in deriving their meaning from when and how these words are used. You concede that the meaning of “water” and the meaning of “belief” can vary according to context, circumstance, language games, etc. But since, according to you, water has a physical existence in the world and belief doesn’t exist outside of language, there’s a problem with me comparing them.
Don’t take offense, Diane, at what might seem like me quibbling, but I didn’t present them as comparable examples of meaning changing with the language game. No comparison meant at all. Just trying to help Kim appreciate that it’s we human beings who create meaning by our activity, that creating meaning is a cultural practice, and that words do not have meaning independent of the activity of speaking/writing/singing, and so on. And that goes for “water” (if, indeed, “water is water,” as you say—and which I doubt: think, for example, of the water in Flint, Michigan faucets and Rocky Mountain streams) or any other word or term that mistakenly is thought to correspond to a material entity. And it holds equally for “belief” or any other word or term that mistakenly is thought to correspond to a mental state.
As I see it, the developmental challenge (for us all) is not a decision to accept or not accept the correspondence theory, but the willingness to practice and perform seeing and speaking and listening in ways that don’t depend on it.
I BELIEVE that you can, and I hope that you will!
Developmentally yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
What’s belief got to do with it?
My diet app says I gotta believe if I want to lose weight….
Dear Lois,
Let me present this question from a couple of sides. First, the most straight-on way. People say all the time, “I believe” or “I don’t believe.” I believe in good. I believe in evil. I believe in empathy. I don’t believe in empathy. I believe in God. I don’t believe in God. And lately I realize that those belief statements don’t make me more curious about God or good or evil or empathy. They make me curious about BELIEVING. What’s believing got to do with development? Coming to the question from another angle – for the last 6-8 months I have been participating in a program called NOOM. I would describe it as a cognitive behavioral program to help people learn new eating habits – you could call it a weight loss program. And it’s been helpful for me. There are some things that you do every day in NOOM – you weigh yourself; you record your food … and (I just reviewed the very first lessons you get with NOOM and I realized) … you believe! Every day, you get a little lesson/reading on food, sleep, stress, the body, the brain – some of it annoying, some interesting. But in the VERY FIRST NOOM lessons, there is that statement, “I believe (I can do it)!”And so the question – What’s belief got to do with it? What’s “I believe” or “I don’t believe” got to do with it? I could say more, but I don’t want to fall into some silly psychological wormhole – I think this is a good start. This question does interest me.
Sincerely,
KS / New York
Dear KS:
Thanks for writing. What a juicy offer you’ve made! I don’t know about keeping you from falling into a wormhole—that’s out of human control. But a rabbit hole? I’ll do my best.
My advice is to continue philosophizing. I agree you’ve made a good start by “being curious about BELIEVING.” What does it have to do with development, you ask. Or (on a more mundane level) with following the NOOM regimen.
To help you in your philosophical performance, I call upon one of my heroes, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He wasn’t merely curious about such things as belief; he was rather obsessed. (A collection of notes he wrote at the end of his life, exploring certainty, doubt, truth and knowledge was published years later with the title On Certainty.) As far as Wittgenstein was concerned, all propositions, including those concerning certainty, belief, and so on, have no meaning in and of themselves, but only in context—they make sense in certain language-games, that is, in relation to what is going on, to what people are doing when that speak with each other, etc. In one language game, “water” might be a desperate plea for a drink, and in another it might be an instruction to someone who’s house sitting your plants.
So, one suggestion I have is that you look and listen in a new way. Try to see and hear the language-games that are giving rise to your curiosity. I think you’ll discover that “I don’t believe in evil” and NOOM’s “I believe (I can do it)” are “moves” in two very different language-games. Look at what’s happening when someone, says “I don’t believe in evil.” Are people arguing? Rationalizing? Persuading? What else?And with NOOM, saying/thinking “I believe (I can do it)” is part of the losing weight activity. And it doesn’t depend on how you feel! It’s part of the performance of becoming a person who can successfully lose weight. And it works, right?
You’re interest in believing calls for a little more philosophizing. Such as, “Hmm, if “I believe/don’t believe” doesn’t always mean the same thing, then maybe it doesn’t have anything it corresponds to at all! And if that does occur to you, Bravo! You’re performing Wittgenstein (which is surely developmental!). Because one of Wittgenstein’s great contributions was demolishing what’s known as the correspondence theory of language—that there is something “in the world” that words refer to. Instead, he saw language as “an activity, a form of life.”
Wittgenstein said, “You can fight, hope and even believe without believing scientifically.” My friendly amendment, in keeping with language as activity, is “You can fight, hope and even believe without believing correspondent-ly.”
And so, What’s believing got to do with development? I have no idea, but I suspect “everything” and “nothing” depending… What I do believe, though, is that performing philosophically—as you are—has everything to do with development.
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
The Shrink Next Door
Was the patient in this TV drama a victim of his psychiatrist, or something worse?
Dear Lois,
I recently watched a popular miniseries, The Shrink Next Door with Paul Rudd, playing NY psychiatrist Ike Herschkopff, and Will Ferrell playing his patient, Marty Markowitz, and based on a true New York story. Just last year, the NY State Dept. of Health revoked Herschkopf’s medical license after Markowitz brought complaints of abuse. The hearing committee cited “professional lapses…including gross negligence, incompetence, exercising undue influence, fraudulent practice and moral unfitness.” I was conflicted and upset by the series. It’s a worst-case saga of therapy gone bad and trust being broken. The show reinforces the “picture” that patients are fundamentally vulnerable and that we need protection from predators like Dr. Ike. There’s no room for reflection….on therapy and friendship — on abuse — on vulnerability — on the role of the state. It’s black and white. Marty is portrayed as indecisive, approval-seeking, lonely and socially awkward. He lets Ike take over the family business, embezzle his fortune, and move into his summer home in South Hampton. Marty only makes a move to end therapy and their friendship (after 27 years) when Ike leaves him alone after a frightening surgery, and lets his beloved goldfish die while Marty’s laid up in the hospital. Critics (Bloomberg, TIME, The NY Times) were in agreement that Dr. Ike deserved his punishment after crossing the proper professional boundaries: doing his sessions while taking walks outdoors; mingling with patients at pool parties; setting up a charitable foundation to siphon-off Marty’s life savings; and stepping in to control the Markowitz family’s multi-million dollar business. Ike was not a good guy, to say the least. He hurt and abused Marty. But at the same time, in my work as a social therapy client for many years and as a developmentalist, I also believe that clients should not be cast as victims, whom the state needs to protect. I’m writing to you, because you have publicly challenged the APA on their authoritarian rules about “professional boundaries” in psychotherapy. And with these questions on my mind, I’m writing to you to see if we can further explore.
Sincerely,
JW / New York
Dear JW:
Wow! There’s already enough bad psychology and psychotherapy in film and on TV without a series devoted to it. To be fair, I haven’t seen The Shrink Next Door so I can’t comment on the quality or value of the therapy.
You ask for my thoughts as someone who has challenged the American Psychological Association (APA) for its rules on professional ethics—in particular, the standards it has set for what constitutes a violation of professional boundaries. (Note that in addition to the APA, associations of social work, counseling, psychotherapy, etc. have similar guidelines.) These standards purportedly protect the client from harm. From your account of what transpired in the TV series, Marty was clearly harmed by Ike taking advantage of him in many ways. Also from your account, I would agree that Marty was portrayed as a victim. More to the point, however, is that he is understood to be a victim of a particular kind. No longer just a regular guy capable of being charmed and manipulated, as most of us are, he is now specifically and especially vulnerable by virtue of being in therapy. It’s this identity that I object to most strongly. Because along with whatever DSM diagnosis clients get from therapists, they both now have this added identity to deal with. Part of what reinforces the victimized vulnerable identity is being treated as an isolated individual with an individual “problem,” which is the basis and unit of mainstream psychology and psychotherapy and psychiatry.
With that our of the way, let’s get to some other matters. Like relationships and development. Did Marty have friends? Family? Did he talk with them? Did he have a life? And Ike? Did he have colleagues or a supervisor he spoke with about his clients? Was Marty and Ike’s relationship developmental for either of them at any point? Did Marty grow emotionally/socially in it?
And finally, we do have to ask, did Ike do anything illegal? If so, he should be subject to the laws of the legal system.
Developmentally Yours,
Lois
Want more of The Developmentalist?
All Power to the Developing! (Podcast)
Why Ask Why? Sometimes we just need to move on. (Psychology Today)
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