Blog

She was the only woman I know who dressed in drag.

The programs in which I teach people how to write poetry to ease emotional trauma all seem to share something in common. When the participants write their own poem, they often confess a deep and lasting sadness: about being betrayed, about suffering childhood abuse, about spousal disrespect. They seem to be mourners, muddling through life the best they can. But not very happy about it. In one of the weekend retreats I guide, a woman returned from a writing period excited to share the poem she had drafted. She read to the circle of twenty other participants a moving poem about how her husband of thirty-two years had betrayed her. You could have heard a pin drop in the room until another woman’s hand shot up and she exclaimed, “I could have written that.” And then a second woman raised her hand and said, “I could have written that.” Their’s is a kind of bereavement that isn't recognized or acknowledged as grief by the victim or by our society as a whole. Have you ever, for example, sent a sympathy card to a friend who’s in a marriage where she isn’t respected, or to a friend who’s been deprived of a happy childhood because of abuse? Likely not, because these emotional traumas aren’t considered a loss to be grieved – as a death is. Instead, such a loss is treated as – for all intents and purposes – insignificant. At most, we express sympathy and urge the victim to move on. This leaves the victim isolated and doubting the legitimacy of their own pain. As author Freya Bromley writes, “I don’t believe there is such a thing as moving on. We only move through and carry it with us.” I agree. The truth is, when a loved one dies, when a spouse betrays, when a family member refuses to have anything to do with us, we are forever changed. Nora Ephron , who wrote " Sleepless in Seattle" and "When Harry Met Sally," writes this in her book, Heartburn , about her husband’s adultery: “A whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was. It becomes impossible to look back at anything that’s happened without wondering what was really going on.” Most people have never considered the emotional trauma they're carrying as grief. But they are, in fact, mourners. Simply naming such an experience as grief is itself an intervention that can deliver emotional or psychological relief. Betrayal by someone we trusted most, suffering the traumatic memories of childhood abuse, unceasing spousal disrespect – they put us in a state of bereavement over the loss of our wholeness as a human being worthy of respect. The word "bereavement" comes from Old English, which translates to being “robbed or violently stripped of something valuable." The word captures the abrupt and unwanted nature of grief, reflecting how a significant loss can feel like a sudden denial of a foundational part of our life. Torn apart. Simply hearing this language can go a long way toward reducing the self-blame these mourners often attach to their feeling. As Henri Nouwen told us in his 1972 book, The Wounded Healer , healing our emotional wounds doesn't demand we share dramatic personal pain. But we should be willing to see our suffering as percolating up from the depth of the human condition that all people share. (Photo by Alina Chernovolova)

There is a certain consolation to being a person of faith. Such people live in the certainty – or at least the hope – that they are created and sustained by a greater power. I count myself among them. So my question is, why do we strive so heartily for mere material things? One famous modern mystic wrote this: "There is nothing further to look for except the deepening of this life we already possess. Be content. Be content.” This is ancient wisdom. And a wisdom not necessarily the exclusive domain of the religiously minded. Roman philosopher Seneca wrote: "It is not the one who has too little, but the one who craves more that is poor." And Saint Paul notes in his letter to the early church at Philippi: “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, to be content." There is science behind the mysticism. One study linked high religiosity or spirituality with greater life satisfaction, meaning, and psychological well-being, and lower depression and fear of death. Another study essentially said if you're secure in being "created and sustained by the divine," you need less “stuff” to steady you against death. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not preaching passivity. “Contentment acts. Complacency watches,” author Carla Gasser tells us. “Contentment chooses. Complacency ignores." Like so many other facets of our day-to-day actions, contentment itself is a choice. It’s basically a matter of accepting the reality of situations we cannot change – without complaint or resentment. This is what Seneca was driving at: that wealth is never the measure — the craving is. Contentment isn't the absence of want; it's no longer being ruled by it. And Paul? He “learned” it. Contentment isn't a state of sloth. It's a skill acquired through hardship (he'd just spoken of his hunger, need, and abasement). This is about as far from lackadaisical as we can get. Paul explained how he learned to be content when he wrote his letter to the church at Corinth. In answer to his prayer for relief from the "thorn" that was tormenting him, Paul heard the divine reply: “My grace is sufficient for you.” Seneca also fleshed out his aphorism in a way that would probably not sit too well with today’s billionaire class: "Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and second, to have what is enough." Let me resolve my own opening question of why we strive so heartily for mere material things by quoting C.S. Lewis: “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you will get neither."

The Ancient Remedy for Today’s Emotional Trauma

I used to think these words chiseled into the Temple of Apollo in ancient Delphi are simplistic. Of course I know myself. I’ve been living with me my whole life. But it’s made me ask myself: do I believe in an image of myself that I’ve unconsciously created in the minds of others out of fear of rejection? And if I let go of this image, who’s left? I was shaped by others. All of us are. My father, who never thought enough of me to make me an intimate part of his life, was one. My Catholic upbringing and its traditions ground the lens of my worldview. A career in the corporate world broke my free-wheeling creativity the way you do a bucking young stallion. Today I’m still clay in the hands of movies, op-ed pieces, social media influencers, advertisers, chance comments by people whose approval I crave. So who am I? That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m not alone in this quandary. Discovering you’re a stranger to your "real self" has been a persistent theme in literature, philosophy, and spirituality. Monk and mystic Thomas Merton packed his journals with his struggle to free himself of social masks, ego, self-doubt – even as he passed his days enveloped in the silence and solitude of the cloister. Long before Merton, Augustine of Hippo was a pioneer of the introspective autobiography. We can say his entire spiritual journey was a search for his true identity in relation to the transcendent. Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish writer who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, wrote in her diary: "The ultimate and highest aspiration is to strip oneself of everything petty and superficial and to become a completely transparent instrument." Carl Jung made the "real self" his life's work – to integrate the hidden parts of the psyche and discover his true self rather than the persona society invited. Søren Kierkegaard argued that most people live in a state of despair. They either refuse to be themselves, with all their inborn motives, vanities, and wants, or actively try to be someone else. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised us to “live the questions” instead of the packaged answers, trusting that the authentic self will emerge. Thoreau's little adventure at Walden Pond cut away cultural clutter to find the essential, aiming to meet his soul face-to-face without the interference of societal convention. Shall I go on? It’s a comfort to know I am not alone in this journey to the self. But it’s also daunting to realize the painful work ahead that awaits me. Now I know how Frodo felt taking his first, Hobbit-sized step toward the vast, dark realm of Mordor.

"Hovering as I snorkel is a metaphor for what makes the rest of life work."

Many years ago, when I worked on the Drama Desk of the New York Daily News , I attended a Broadway play titled “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” As a young man beginning his career, I didn’t understand what that title meant. Now I do. It’s a bot call Klara at my eye doctor’s practice that has me ready to jump ship. It “answered” the phone last week when I called to schedule an appointment. My first instinct when it asked how it could help me was to ask to speak to a human. But I knew that would only serve to solidify my developing identity as a crotchety old man. So I dealt with it until I got what I wanted, then hung up on him in mid-sentence. One isn’t compelled to be polite to a robot. Psychologists tell us our small daily interactions with, say, clerks, salespeople, and Uber drivers are healthy for our mental well-being. Now we are being stripped of even this inconsequential but healthful nicety. We are being unclothed every day from our dignity as a caring people. A war we didn’t ask for. Wholesale disruption of people’s lives from mass firings by political hacks. The elimination of a Medicare/Medicaid subsidy that next year will result in steeper out-of-pocket cost increases for seniors like me. This announced last week by a government appointee who has some eighteen real estate assets, with ten residential structures on them. “The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” an itinerant preacher named Jesus once said. I don’t know what to do about it. Even my vote in November isn’t going to stop the creeping dissolution of our social fabric. Thomas Keating, the Trappist monastic abbot who developed the practice of Centering Prayer , advises us to stop resisting life’s foibles. If you’re sick and one physician after another can’t figure out what’s wrong with you, just accept the fact that you’re sick, he says. His suggestion strikes me as defeatist. Even un-American. But I’m not smart enough to devise a course of action better than simply putting it all in God’s hands. It’s either that or accept that we’re now living in Bizzarro World . "Warning" by British author Jenny Joseph is a poem famous for its tongue-in-cheek take on growing older: When I am an old woman I shall wear purple With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me, And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves And satin chairs, and say we've no money for butter. I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells And run my stick along the public railings And make up for the sobriety of my youth . . . . It’s not exactly a prayer, and my youth was less than sober. But it just might serve as a sop to bring me down to earth after my next mind-numbing phone call with “Klara.” In the meantime, I’m going to Uber to the train station later so I can chat with the driver before he’s rendered obsolete by a driverless Tesla – owned by a trillionaire who delights in taking a chain saw to other people’s livelihoods. (Image thanks to The Front Porch by James Milson.)

In case this statistic slipped by you in our federal government’s firehose of facts and falsities, the feds value a human life at $ 10 million to $15 million. This is based on the Value of a Statistical Life ( VSL), which measures how much society is willing to pay to reduce the risk of a fatality. For example, if 100,000 people are each willing to pay $100 to eliminate a 1-in-100,000 chance of death, the collective VSL is $10 million. Federal agencies use VSL to perform cost-benefit analyses on safety, environmental, and transportation regulations. I looked up this information yesterday because tomorrow would have been my father’s birthday and, well, I was just curious about the many ways to ponder the value of his life and its impact on my own. My father’s ambition when he was graduated from Perth Amboy High School was to be an attorney, but he came of age in the wake of the Great Depression and he had to enter the workplace instead, as a laborer. By the time I came along, he had established his credentials. He could: · Drive a truck for the U.S. Army engineering corps · Hang wallpaper · Paint a house · Repair cars · Build furniture · Sew slipcovers for sofas and chairs, and curtains for windows · Build a doghouse · Put up a fence · Work as an ironworker in constructing whole buildings · Pass Civil Service exams to become a cop and then a sergeant · Tend bar · Dispatch anything from squad cars to taxicabs They used to call guys like him a “Jack of All Trades.” Today we call it lifelong learning. The National Center for Health Statistics tells us that men who reach 65 have an average 19.5 to 19.8 more years ahead of them (20.8 to 21 years for women). What are we going to do with all this newfound time? If you’re a lifelong learner – plenty, because you understand that learning is not a place, but a process whose endpoint is never-ending. Learning as we used to understand it occurred in institutions designed to deliver education. The informal learning that is lifelong is most often pursued outside those walls. A lot has been written about the benefits of lifelong learning: personal development, employment and earnings, economics, sense of wellbeing – even as a defense against dementia. Governments are promoting lifelong learning as a way to nurture competitiveness, innovation, and growth. Some governments see lifelong learning as contributing to social cohesion. But what about the value of a life? Does lifelong learning heighten the value of our lives? My father was deft at adding value to his life by using his hands to shape the physical environment around him. Lacking his manual aptitude, I’ve brought value to my life through my writing. I’ve tried to add to its value through continued learning. In my sixties, for example, I learned to swim, to snorkel, to sail, to operate two well-regarded bed-and-breakfasts. I’ve taught myself to cook well enough to serve paying guests. I published five books and some three dozen poems. I guide cancer patients in writing poems to ease the stress of their disease. I conduct day-long and weekend retreats and a bi-weekly Zoom workshop in writing healing poetry. Next month I join hospice to bring comforting poems to patients and their families. Mary Ann Evans, the acclaimed English novelist of the Victorian era who wrote under the pen name George Eliot, said it well: "It's never too late to be what you might have been."

An intense experience of the exceptional