There is a certain humbling and awakening moment when, as an adult, one comes in contact with one’s childhood list of wants and dreams. I had this very moment when I saw a handwritten list of what Christmas presents I would like as a 9 year old boy. All of them were painfully idealistic. All of them were about what I thought was best.

This list, this very mirror into my childhood, led me to think about the idea of helping and how the identity of the person that helps is shaped and shapes the way that one helps. That’s my abstraction of this experience, for in actuality, it reminded me of my own journey into understanding how to help others. For now, I won’t write in the abstract, even though I thought more about the impersonal dimensions of identity and helping. I would like to share what I saw when I looked at that mirror.

As a child I remember being told to ask for help, and that little boys should always ask of others if they need help. A part of me knew early on that helping, for a boy, wasn’t assumed; helping was what people asked for. This idea became gendered, and it was what I thought all little boys did. I didn’t question it at the time, because good boys shouldn’t question adults; I wanted to be a good boy. Then when I left my parent’s home, I began my collegiate studies in psychology, and I realized I used the word “good” to describe most everything in my life and by using the word “good” as my descriptive clutch, I described nothing at all.

I built a new working vocabulary in my collegiate studies and in my quest to help others. I learned that describing how to help others requires an acknowledgment of problems, a naming of symptoms, and following the arc of another’s life. I began to use more careful words for how the mind does the best that it can—for how the heart can break. I studied the mechanisms of loneliness, the ubiquity of self-medication, the delicate nature of beliefs, and the weight of words. I found authors, poets, theorists, and dusty quotes that reflected back to me experiences and truths that I didn’t have the words for; good boys don’t talk about messy things like other peoples feelings because they just help. I had to let go of being good so I could be more honest with myself, so that I could find happiness for myself, and so that I could actually help people. Then, after a continuous 23 years of formal studies in psychology and 6 years as a practicing psychotherapist, I returned to an image of my own childhood curiosity about the problems in the world and how we as fellow humans can help fix those problems. I saw those aspirations of a good boy, written with perfectionistic cursive, and I felt compassion for how much he would grow and how difficult that growth would be—how much he wanted happiness for himself and for others and how little he knew of it.

As a child I was in love with the idea of helping, but becoming an adult was my own process of unraveling this idea of helping.

As a child I was told to ask others if they needed my help. As an adult I now know otherwise. Now, I know better than to assume that other people have the clarity and wherewithal to fully explain and fix all of their problems; for when we are in pain we often lose our voices. I also know better than to rush in and tell people what their problems are or what would make them happy. This silences. This injures.

I know better than to perpetuate this idea of blaming the one who suffers, of blaming the victim, of focusing on something other that the pain and hurt of another person. This further wounds, distances, and shames another person for their experience.

I know better than to be a good boy. If I am to help another person, if I am ever to make a real difference, I cannot offer some generic or good advice. I have to connect to another person to really help, and in connecting to another person I cannot let my own thoughts, feelings, or identity go unexamined. If I am to help others I can’t reinforce notions of good and bad, as if I am some arbiter livelihood. As if I know how to live your life better than you do.

Wanting to help others, I have learned, is different than helping others. For in wanting to help others we unintentionally limit others and limit ourselves; if I know how to help you before I know you, then I don’t really know you and I don’t really know how to help you. I had to become an adult, and abandon notions of prescribed helping so that I could develop my sense of security, a confidence, and the skills necessary to help others. I had to learn how to be with myself, so that I can be with others.

I look at this list through an analyst’s gaze. I see cognitive dimensions, identity formation, relational sensitivity, foundational schemas, interpersonal concerns, age related stressors, and I see a little blond boy wanting to be good. A fearful little boy that will learn to admit his wrongs. A defiant little boy that gives answers too quickly. A curious little boy one that will learn to sit with questions longer. A hopeful little boy that is not good, but is free to be happy.

-Brady

Monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “Success isn’t a matter of talent alone. There are many elements that contribute to success. Even if you’re the most talented person, even if you have real insight, if the right time has not come, you won’t be successful. So you just do your best, and if conditions are sufficient you’ll have success. You can never be sure that you’ll be successful. That’s the reality.” (p. 134)

This week I have been thinking about this quote and the way we think of ourselves doing things that we want, when we want to do them. Determination, ambition, drive, will, agency; these are the internal shapes of action. The external shapes and measures, those beyond our control, are what we try to control, as much as we try to control our own actions. These two things, and how we “make” time and our determination, are interesting parallel thoughts.

The first thought is supported by the second thought. The underlying division and assumption is that although these two are separate, they must be controlled. That we must somehow control ourselves and the external world to accomplish our solitary goals. This thought, that we can make and shape those internal and external forces to achieve what we decide, is a comforting one. I think we would have a broader definition of success if we loosened our ideas of determination and time.

What if we changed our thoughts on the external world and were more allowing than controlling? Not that we made time, or that we fixed our determination, but that we allowed time, ungraspable, to move accordingly. Perhaps our determination would then be to not control, but to be with whatever happens.

I set aside a day to write this blog. My first draft took 20 minutes. I sat with it, reread it a few times in passing while listening to the rain, and 5 hours later decided to publish it. I liked my time with this post, and I consider that, more than this post itself, a success.

After spending a week thinking about and studying for my psychotherapy exams, I realize that I have spent a lot of time thinking about violence as a personal experience while the nation thinks about violence as a display of patriotism; our veterans have sacrificed their lives and taken other lives for the idea of us as a country.

Violence occurs in many dimensions, and in many ways, and oftentimes it is done with simple notions of right and wrong. I realize that pacifism, to many people, is simply the antithesis of patriotic. I realize, too, that pacifism and the opposition to war can be seen as weak, and disrespectful to those that served in the military.

As a therapist, and as a pacifist, I have been called disrespectful and unpatriotic because I oppose war and violence. As a therapist, but also as a person, I strive to understand and humanize those that commit violent actions, which, I have noticed, war supporters do not do so in kind.

Whether a person is a pacifist or pro-war, I think it is important and necessary to think about war and violence in our own lives and the value that is placed on it. Sanitized notions of war as “defending democracy” deny the experience of war, for people are killed and people are killing each other. We like to think of those people that murder, that rape, that torture others as somehow monstrous, evil, and not really human. We also like to think of veterans and service members as heroic, honorable, and valued.

It is difficult, and deeply challenging, to remember that all of us, especially the angry and violent among us, are still human. We are still human when we commit violent acts out of personal pain, or out of patriotism, but it is violent.

Voltaire offered, “Every violent action destroys those small alterations in the features, which sometimes disclose the sentiments of the heart.” (1774, p. 64)

Perhaps it is true, that in wanting to destroy something else, we show our humanity as we deny others of theirs. Those small sentiments of the heart remain, even as we reduce others to victims, to monsters, to others.

-Brady

[reposted blog entry from my prior website]