People Dangerous to Your Health
I found a terrific blog with the title “Warning: Bores and buffoons may endanger your health.”
Our ability to self-regulate is a limited resource that fluctuates markedly, depending on our prior use of willpower, tiredness, stress and our personal resilience.
A new study by a team lead by Professor Eli Finkel of Northwestern University has shown that poor social coordination impairs self-regulation. What does this mean? If you are forced to work or interact with difficult individuals you may be left mentally exhausted and far less able to do anything useful for a significant period of time. In other words, draining social dynamics, in which an individual is trying so hard to regulate his or her behavior, can impair success on subsequent unrelated tasks.
In the research, volunteers were asked to work in pairs to maneuver an icon around a computer maze, with one volunteer giving the instructions, the other moving the joystick. Those operating the joysticks were actors, primed to respond to instructions in slow, stupid, inefficient and generally irritating ways. What was interesting was that the effects were not mediated through participants’ conscious processes: they were almost entirely going on below the level of conscious awareness.
There is extensive literature on the consequences of social conflict. But until now, very little research has been conducted on the effects of ineffective social coordination. That has been a big gap in the research literature, particularly given the fact that most of the higher systems in our brains are dedicated to social functions, and since the earliest days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, tasks requiring social coordination have been the norm. In our day-to-day activities we have to cooperate with other people. Ineffective social coordination consumes a great deal of mental resources and has high costs for subsequent self-regulation. This is so important, because self-regulation is essential to living life well. It is also essential to the existence of a well functioning society.
What to do with this new information?
Identify people who drain you. If you need to work with them, do it in short bursts, and give yourself plenty of time outs.
And continue to build your resilience.
There’s also one other piece, that we’ll look at another time. Some people may also drain your energy directly. You may have come across "energy" or "psychic vampires." They really do exist, though there is nothing supernatural about them, and they don’t have fangs or an aversion to garlic. In another post I’ll show you some techniques for dealing with those people as well.
The researchers have done us a great service by putting the entire paper on the departmental website. Access is free.
A Gene for Infidelity?
Last January I wrote about the link between creativity and promiscuity.
I’ve just picked up this month’s copy of the Mensa Magazine, published by British Mensa and there’s an interesting article by Dr. Desmond Morris entitled “Why brilliant men betray their wives.” Desmond is a national institution in Britain. A zoologist, ethnologist and surrealist painter, he always used to be on television and gained considerable notoriety for his book The Naked Ape that tried to explain human behavior by analogy with apes.
In his latest article Desmond follows some of the same reasoning that I did in my article: many intensely creative people also enjoy risk taking. He just talks about males, but I think that the same principles apply equally to many intensely creative and successful women, who also enjoy taking extreme risks.
Every act of creation demands that we see, feel or think differently about something. Desmond says that every piece of innovation or creativity is an act of rebellion. I only half agree with that: the truly creative person is busily establishing a new level of order. The creative rebel is a stereotype that’s not born out by experimental work on genius and creativity. The creative or innovative act is one of making new connections and in a sense it is also a moment of risk-taking, for the new technique, formula or invention may fail. We recently discussed the way in which resilience is a key to creativity: to keep going in the face of failure or adversity. Even the most highly creative are not every single day: I have known many Nobel Prize winners and award winning artists, and they all have their off days.
Desmond’s article highlights the multiple extra-marital affairs of Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Charlie Chaplin and Bertrand Russell.
He argues that it is the innate compulsion to take risks that leads both to creative brilliance and an inability to remain with just one partner. He pursues the idea that our distant hunting ancestors required a new personality trait: bravery. The successful needed to take risks and be courageous. Desmond then again excludes women from his equation, saying that their reproductive contributions to the tribe made them too important to risk on the hunt. He now fast-forwards to the present, saying that the offspring of the adventurous males could either engage in physical risk-taking or explore new ideas. And that their curiosity leads them to explore not just ideas but novel sexual experiences. Once a “conquest” has been made, the risk-taking adventurer moves on to a new target.
It is certainly true that men are far more likely to die in accidents than are women, but it’s a bit of a stretch to attribute all of that to risk-taking. What about the male difficulties with multi-tasking and to resist peer pressure, to say nothing of much higher rates of substance abuse?
And yes, fame, power and wealth can be powerful aphrodisiacs. But to reduce immoral, dangerous and disrespectful behavior to a risk-taking gene from our distant ancestors seems to me to a wild extrapolation based on a very selective use of a small amount of information.
Because infidelity surely has many more strands to it that just a genetic “itch.” Many highly successful people are enormously narcissistic and so fail to take into account the damage that their infidelity might do to their spouse and children.
Seeing sex as no more than a branch of gymnastics is also off the mark. Even a casual encounter will likely contain emotional, subtle and even spiritual components. If a relationship is failing because those are all missing, it is no surprise if a spouse investigates divorce and other options. But that is not risk taking: it is fulfilling a need that is not being met by the current partner.
Clarity of Communication
One of the major reasons for the failure of relationships or of businesses is a failure to communicate clearly. There are also powerful reasons for thinking that much ill health is rooted in “blockages:” inadequate communication between your body, your mind, your emotions, subtle systems and spirituality.
Any communication consists of ten essential components:
- The integrity and mental state of the sender
- The intent of the sender
- The expectation of the sender
- The information
- The medium
- The context
- The receiver
- The mental state of the receiver
- The reaction or response of the receiver
- The meta-text and meta-communication of the exchange
Naturally, in a healthy communication, everyone involved takes turns being the sender and the receiver, and this interaction between you creates the overall message. I must be very clear that I’m not just talking about verbal communication, but also physical and intimate interactions, business and family discourses.
I’d also like to take the whole notion of communication a step further: meaningful communication needs for us to be consciously aware of the interaction, and we should see it not just as an exchange of information, but of energy. A charismatic individual may communicate a lot more than mere words and his or her impact may last long after the words have been forgotten. On the other hand, there is actually a technical term – phatic communion – for empty language that is purely used for social lubrication: “How are you?” “You’re welcome,” “Have a nice day.”
It really is important to be aware of all of these components of communication. A problem in any one of them can make a mess of any attempt for people to connect. Too often I see people think only of the sender, the message and the recipient, without realizing that it is the other aspects of communication that are the keys to success or failure. This is often very important in therapy: people may ruminate on something said to them, when they should be considering the context of whatever was said.
Meta-text and meta-communication refer to the whole spectrum of other components of our interactions that stretch beyond the message itself. These include the types of language that we use as well as prosodic cues. And if people are in close proximity, body language and gesture. You may well know that it is possible to tell a great deal about someone’s intentions by studying changes in the tone of their facial muscles, changes in the color of their skin and the directions I which they move their eyes when speaking. How we use certain words to fill in our communication can be as important as the main body of a communication. Something that we do all the time is to try to understand the underlying meaning or meta-text, that is often quite different form the actual words being spoken.
Whether dealing with an individual in therapy or a business that wants to perform better, there is a series of critical questions that will uncover communication problems:
- Do you have any communication problems?
- Who is responsible for it?
- Is there a disconnection between the mental state of any message sender and the message itself?
- Does the sender have a clear purpose in communicating?
- Are people able to understand the sender? (T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia fame) was said to have one of the largest vocabularies at the University of Oxford. So large that many people didn’t have a clue what he was talking about!)
- Is information being communicated appropriately?
- Is the environment conducive to communication?
- What is interfering with communication?
- How long has this been a problem?
- Why has the problem not been solved?
If there is a communication problem, consider starting from scratch:
- Any communication contains information and energy: are they both clear and pure?
- Is there congruence between what is being communicated and the intent of the communicator?
- Is there a culture of integrity in communications?
- Are people striving for the greater good or personal aggrandizement?
- What people, policies or procedures are interfering with communication?
- How are communications becoming degraded?
- What and who’s emotions are interfering with the informatyion and the energy of any communications?
- What might lead to the misunderstanding of a message?
- What systems are in place to ensure that communications are being received and understood correctly?
- What system of questioning is in place?
Once we understand each of the phases of communication, and that it is a dynamic exchange of energy and not just information transfer. And that ANY message or communication is subject to degradation, and that there are ways to check for and correct it, you are well on your way to abolishing many of the problems that can wreck relationships, capsize companies and ruin a therapeutic alliance.
“Once a human being has arrived on this earth, communication is the largest single factor determining what kinds of relationships he makes with others and what happens to him in the world about him.”
— Virginia Satir (American Family Therapist, 1916-1988)
“Skill in the art of communication is crucial to a leader’s success. He can accomplish nothing unless he can communicate effectively.”
— Norman Allen (American Playwright, Recipient of a Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play)
“A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive shortwave facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals.”
–Robert M. Hutchins (American Educator, and, from 1929-1945, President of the University of Chicago, 1899-1977)
Friendship and Psychological Distress
“To lose a friend is the greatest of all losses.”
Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer, 1st Century B.C.E.)
Severe and persistent mental illnesses are one thing, but there are many, many more people who are miserable and unhappy, without that unhappiness necessarily getting to the level of an “illness.” The offices of primary care physicians and therapists are full of people in genuine distress for all kinds of reasons.
I first began to think about this many years ago when a woman came to see me and promptly announced, “I’ve come for psychotherapy. I’ve been in therapy for seventeen years, and I want some more.” I wasn’t being in the slightest bit flippant when I responded by asking her if, after seventeen years, she really felt that it had offered her anything? She looked at me blankly, and it soon became very clear that what she needed was not more therapy, but a friend to talk to.
There has been another puzzle: why is it that women are more likely to develop depression than men? The most profound gender difference in mood disorders begins to emerge after puberty, so it would be easy to attribute it all to hormones. But that would be a mistake.
I recently pointed out that there are some fundamental differences in the ways in which men and women interact: women tending to be more relational and men tending to be more transactional. The female sense of self tends to be more entangled with her relationships, while a man’s self-worth and sense of self is more often associated with his achievements. Most of these differences begin to emerge in early puberty: when girls talk to their friends, their conversation tends to be more emotional and to be concerned primarily with relationships, while boys tend to be more reserved and to discuss facts, statistics and achievements. There is some evidence from research in different cultures that these different styles seem to be the norm throughout the world. Yes, there are of course plenty of people of both genders who behave differently, and so it is more accurate to relate these differences to the male and female factor or essence, rather than getting it confused with anatomical differences.
Emotional language tends to put more strain on a relationship, and it is well-recognized that girls’ relationships turn over much more rapidly than boys’ ones. An interesting hypothesis proposed some years ago by Professor Sir David Goldberg, is that this high turnover in relationships may lead girls to experience more disappointing experiences in their social networks, and it is this string of disappointments that predisposes young women to depression.
A happy, healthy, dynamic network of friends is a cornerstone of developing and maintaining psychological resilience. Without them you become progressively more vulnerable to the reversals that affect all of us from time to time.
“A friend might well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Poet and Essayist, 1803-1882)
“To know how to live in a brotherly way with those around us is to be rich, for each of us, with our face, eyes, voice and thoughts, contributes something alive, something warm, which nourishes everyone.”
Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (Bulgarian Spiritual Master, 1900-1986)
Resilience, Misfortune, and Mortality
Much of the development of the ideas of Integrated Medicine has been driven by the idea that a truly effective holistic medicine does not simply integrate different modalities to achieve health and wellness, but is also aimed at integrating all the different aspects of a person into a coherent whole. That was the real reason for choosing the term “Integrated” medicine in the United Kingdom, though “Integrative” and “Integral” medicine are ultimately all aiming for the same thing.
This is quite different from simply adding some acupuncture, an herb or some relaxation therapy to a conventional medical program. Its aim is not so much getting someone better, as to give the whole person – physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual – what he or she needs to be able to get themselves back on an even keel, so as to be able to deal with future challenges as they arise. And not just deal with them, but to use challenges as springboards to growth and development.
The whole idea of this system of medicine included an extra dimension that had often been left out: the interaction between the person in trouble and the practitioner. We are social animals, but even more than that it looks as if we are highly interconnected from cell to soul. We have to take into account the impact of a therapeutic interaction on the clinician, as well as the influence of the clinician’s psychological, subtle and spiritual makeup on the individual.
The development of this system of medicine had many parents. One was the American-born Israeli sociologist Professor Aaron Antonovsky who first generated the idea of salutogenesis: the study of the factors that support human health and wellness. He was one of the first to show that people who were relatively unstressed were far more likely to be able to resist illness, compared with stressed people. His interest was not just in what causes disease, but what are the roots of health.
He returned to and discussed, developed and applied an idea that had been around since the work of Sigmund Freud and Roberto Assagioli: that was that our experience of well-being constitutes a Sense of Coherence (SOC). He defined the sense of coherence like this:
“A global orientation that expresses the extent to which one has a pervasive, enduring though dynamic feeling of confidence that one’s internal and external environments are predictable and that there is a high probability that things will work out as well as can reasonably be expected.“
Two recent studies seem to indicate that this concept of coherence is fundamentally correct.
Researchers in Cambridge in the United Kingdom have reported a population-based cohort of 20,921 men and women completed a postal assessment of their lifetime experience of specific adverse events and a measure of their sense of coherence. Those with a weak SOC reported significantly slower adaptation to the adverse effects of life experiences, compared with those with a string SOC, and were more likely to die prematurely. Although the size of the effect was not large, the results suggest that SOC is a potential marker of an individual’s adaptive capacity to deal with social stress, which is predictive of mortality
The second study was a systematic review from Finland. I like the way in which the study was done, and it came to this conclusion:
“SOC seems to be a health promoting resource, which strengthens resilience and develops a positive subjective state of health. Salutogenesis is a valuable approach for health promotion.”
So what does this mean for you?
Developing a sense of coherence is a most critical factor in creating and maintaining robust health and ability to adapt to change, be it in health, stress, your relationship or at work.
How do you do that? Healing, Meaning and Purpose spends over a hundred pages or several CDs explaining the most up to date ways of doing exactly that using a process known as Creative Self-Integration.
I do hope that you take the opportunity to sample some of the techniques for yourself.
Exploring the Web of Life
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
–John Muir (Scottish-born American Naturalist, Writer, Founder of the Sierra Club, and “The Father of the National Park System,” 1838-1914)
One of the most significant discoveries during my lifetime has been the gradual understanding that at the most basic levels we are all inextricably interlinked. Long thought to be nothing more than an occasional curiosity concerning the behavior of elementary particles, there is more and more evidence that this interconnectedness is constantly present in our lives.
The work of people like the late David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, Dean Radin, Ervin Laszlo and many others has gradually begun to put these essential ideas on a much firmer footing. That’s not to say that every scientist in the world accepts these concepts: they certainly do not. But science grows by slow steps. Each observation adding to the one before, like grains of sand being heaped onto a giant ant heap. Sometimes things turn out to be wrong, and then it’s back to the drawing board. Or the ant heap gets re-arranged.
But rather than argue about the theory, I would like to suggest that you try an experiment. It is particularly effective if you are in a close relationship with another person.
If you are at work or away from the other person for some other reason, spend every free moment during the day thinking kind, loving thoughts about the other person. Feel a sense of gratitude that they are in your life. Do nothing else. Don’t specially call, email or IM them. Just do the thinking and feeling about them. And when next you see them, have a look at their initial reaction toward you. It’s extraordinary how often people find that when they next meet up, the person who’s been thought about in this way is particularly warm and loving.
I don’t recommend doing the converse, and thinking mean thoughts about someone and waiting for the fallout. But if the other person is tired, dispirited or distant when you meet, it’s a good idea to see if your thoughts about them may be factored into the equation.
Clearly there are a hundred things that will determine how people react toward each other. Is it a new relationship or a mature one? Are people tired or distracted by work or children? Has there been an argument, illness or trouble with relatives or neighbors? The list is almost endless.
But I would suggest that you try this experiment for yourself and see what you come up with. If you send them, I’ll publish any interesting observations, with the usual guarantee of anonymity.
And by the way, there are some rigorous scientific experiments being conducted right now to test this phenomenon.
“Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality–not as we expect it to be but as it is–is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.”
— Frederick Buechner (American Presbyterian Minister and Writer, 1926-)
Sex Drive and Relationships
The BBC is reporting on an article published in the journal Human Nature.
According to the report – and I haven’t yet seen a copy of the original research – investigators from the Hamburg-Eppendorf University in Germany found that the sex drive of many women begins to plummet once they are in a secure relationship. They found that four years into a relationship, less than half of 30-year-old women wanted regular sex.
Conversely, they found that a man’s libido remained the same regardless of how long he had been in a relationship. The researchers interviewed 530 men and women about their relationships.
They found 60% of 30-year-old women wanted sex "often" at the beginning of a relationship, but that within four years of the relationship this figure fell to under 50%, and after 20 years it dropped to about 20%.
And here’s a shock: The study also revealed tenderness was important for women in a relationship. About 90% of women wanted tenderness, regardless of how long they had been in a relationship, but only 25% of men who had been in a relationship for 10 years said they were still seeking tenderness from their partner.
The researchers then start talking about the evolutionary implications of all this: that women evolved to have a high sex drive when they are initially in a relationship in order to form a "pair bond" with their partner.
That is all quite plausible, but it is a usually a mistake to try and reduce human behavior to hormones, neurotransmitters and evolutionary drives.
Most men and most women may well have different sex drives, and the duration of a relationship may play a part. But it is just as likely that we are seeing the effects of having children who need lots of a couple’s attention and a natural reaction to one or both partners focusing more on their careers and outside activities rather than on the relationship.
In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I talk about the best solution to tired relationships: it’s not a matter of trying every variation in the Kama Sutra. The most valuable thing to ensure the viability of intimate relationships is not so much to try to learn lots of different techniques, but instead to make the time together really count. There is nothing quite as attractive as an intimate occasion marked by complete focus on and awareness of the other person. Feeling the dance of the duality, focusing on all your senses, and, if you can, feeling the subtle systems of the other person.
Simple things that have rescued countless relationships. And a lot cheaper than hours of therapy.
Gender, Culture and Communication
Regular readers will know that I’m very interested in gender differences. More and more evidence is confirming what most of us have always known: men and women tend to think and behave differently. Some of the differences are clearly neurological and some social. It is sometimes difficult to sort out which is more important: some research findings on gender differences have produced mixed results because of some of the assumptions of male investigators!
But notice that I emphasize the word “tend” to think differently. We are always dealing with statistical differences. My Y-chromosome should enable me to navigate from A to B without difficulty. In fact, I am seriously directionally challenged: I should probably have a GPS system with me when I go down to the shops!
I have spoken about my admiration for the work of Deborah Tannen, and I have also written about Christina Robb’s marvelous book, in which she charts the development of new insights into gender differences in psychology.
This weekend I was at the annual meeting of the National Speakers Association in Orlando, and I learned something very interesting that fits in with all of our previous discussions. I learned it from one of the speakers, named Julia Hubbel. I already knew that women tend to be more relational in their interactions and men are more transactional. Most women tend to spend a lot more time on the maintenance and development of relationships and most men are more interested in the bottom line: What is the solution? What’s the deal going to be? What I did not know is that there is some data to indicate that non-White males tend also to emphasize relationships over transaction. As soon as I heard that, I was sure that it was right: I have had a lot of dealings with people from the Indian subcontinent, and most would consider it very rude to get straight down to business before we had taken tea or eaten something while discussing family and other personal matters. Julia teaches networking skills that integrate gender and ethnic considerations.
As she was explaining her insights and methods, I was reminded of the work of the anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher Edward T. Hall, who wrote a series of excellent books on cultural factors and thought.
Gender and cultural differences in communication are of such importance that I plan to return to the topic in the near future. In the meantime, you might be interested in a book by Richard Nisbett, entitled The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why. After multiple trips to Japan, during which I learned a lot about cultural differences, I gave a copy to a friend who is a Canadian in a senior management position in the Japanese affiliate of a US-based company. He told me that he was astonished by the accuracy of the insights.
Some of the political misunderstandings that you see on the news every morning are often a consequence of different thinking styles. Learning how men and women and people in different cultures think and operate is not just interesting.
It is essential.
“Skill in the art of communication is crucial to a leader’s success. He can accomplish nothing unless he can communicate effectively.”
— Norman Allen (American Playwright, Recipient of a Charles MacArthur Award for Outstanding New Play)
Technorati tags: Communication Gender differences Deborah Tannen Cross-cultural communication
Stress, Depression and Resilience
“Patience in calamity, mercy in greatness, fortitude in adversity; these are the self-attained perfections of great saints.”
–The Hitopodesa (Sanskrit fable from the Panchatantra, the “Five Chapters,” Translated as the “Good Advice” c.1100 A.D.)
We are all different in the way that we respond to emotional and physical stress. It is not enough to focus on one single reason why one person handles it and another does not. I have often made the point that we need to consider the physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual contributions to any illness or challenge.
New research is shedding light on the interaction between two of these: genes and environment. A multinational research effort assessed the impact of stressor on mood in 275 pairs of female twins. 170 sets of twins were identical: they have exactly the same genetic makeup.
The research indicates that only 12% of individual differences in reactions to stress can be attributed to genetic influences. This is stunning, and should have been reported far more widely: 88% of the differences in the way a person reacts to stress are not genetic, but personal and environmental. This is of great importance in problems such as depression. If genetic factors play such a small role, then paying attention to the development of personal resilience – as well as dealing with social factors – is more likely to be effective than anything else. And, as has been discussed elsewhere one of the ways in which some medicines help people with depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia is probably by increasing their resilience.
I have already started showing you some of the techniques for improving psychological resilience and in a future publication we are also going to start work on physical, subtle and spiritual resilience and how to develop more resilient and dynamic relationships.
“Never allow anyone to rain on your parade and thus cast a pall of gloom and defeat on the entire day. Remember that no talent, no self-denial, no brains, no character, are required to set up in the faultfinding business. Nothing external can have any power over you unless you permit it. Your time is too precious to be sacrificed in wasted days combating the menial forces of hate, jealously, and envy. Guard your fragile life carefully. Only God can shape a flower, but any foolish child can pull it to pieces.”
–Og Mandino (American Motivational Speaker and Author, 1923-1996)
Technorati tags: Resilience Depression Stress Environment Genetics
Convergence
One of the many things differentiating complementary and alternative medicine from the more conventional type, is that complementary practitioners are not much interested in a pathological diagnosis, and instead focus far more on the whole person. There are more than 500 types of complementary and alternative medicine, and virtually all work on the principle that they want to stimulate the body to heal itself.
It is not so well-known that in recent years some of the most cutting edge academic research in medicine has been breaking down artificial organs-based barriers, and focusing instead on the whole person, and look at research in a more holistic way. So a cardiologist and liver expert may be working together on the same problem.
Someone was asking me why this blog has so many categories? The reasons is that artificial barriers between illnesses, health, wellness, consciousness and spirituality are breaking down, and this blog reflects that. I was asked, “So are you interested in self-help or health and wellness?” the answer to that one is “Yes.” All of these are inextricably linked.
A second conceptual change, that is not much known outside of research centers, is that much of the current thrust in pharmacology is based on modulating the body’s responses, rather than simply blocking diseases processes.
Despite this apparent convergence, there are still some enormous differences in approach:
1. The medical research enterprise remains profoundly reductionist, and so it tends to ignore some key aspects of what it is to be human: we are a great deal more than sets of biochemical reactions.
2. Dismissing the social and psychological aspects of health and illness remains an Achilles’ heel of most academic research. When I was working in academia, a distinguished colleague came over form the England to give a lecture. An expert in brain imaging, he spoke a lot about consciousness and free will. As one of my American friends said afterward: he sound just like you in our research meetings!
3. Complementary, alterative and now integrated medicine remains firmly focused on relationships as a key to healing. Not just the relationship of a client and their family, but the relationship between client and therapist. And there is a third arm to this. When, in the mind-1980s, we first started putting together the principles of this new Information Medicine known as Integrated Medicine in the United Kingdom or Integrative or Integral Medicine in the United States, a key component of it was the insistence that the therapeutic encounter would require the therapist to do more than just show up and do something technical. But that the therapist would also be aware of the impact of the encounter on them, and the importance for the therapist to be involved in growth work themselves. There was a time when psychotherapists would remain in therapy throughout their careers. That may not now be feasible. But it is entirely feasible for a therapist to take a bit of time each day to calm themselves; to reflect on what is going on inside them and in the subtle currents of the interactions between them, the person who has come to them for help and guidance, and all the other people involved in the situation. This is the way in which medicine is going to develop in the future.
The extraordinary advances of biomedical research can be an incredible boon to humanity, but they need to be leavened by an understanding of the context within which they are developing.
“A physicist who rejects the testimony of saints and mystics is no better than a tone-deaf man deriding the power of music.”
–Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Indian Philosopher and, from 1962-67 President of India, 1888-1975)
Technorati tags: Alternative medicine Complementary medicine Integrated medicine
